Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Giant tropical trees in Malaysian Borneo pump water to their highest branches just as easily as to their lower-most branches, a new study says. Researchers say this suggests tall trees are not more vulnerable to drought than shorter trees, as was previously believed. For decades, scientists have hypothesized that as trees become taller, the effects of gravity and the longer paths that water needs to travel hinder their growth. In this latest study, researchers examined 38 trees of five species from the Dipterocarpaceae family in Malaysia’s Kabili-Sepilok Forest Reserve in northeastern Borneo. The trees, including keruing putih (Dipterocarpus…

It’s been exactly one week since Ben Carroll became Victorian premier, promising to differentiate himself from his predecessors Jacinta Allan and Daniel Andrews. With his new cabinet sworn in at Government House on Tuesday morning, Victorians are beginning to see what that actually looks like.This was far more than tinkering at the edges. Four months out from an election, Carroll has made cuts and completely overhauled portfolios, and in turn, the priorities of his government.“This is a strong, focused, united team that is taking our government in a new direction. A government that will fight every day for working people.…

“They better cut the retail price, the consumer price,” Trump said. “I’ll say it loud and clear. I’m not happy about it.”But Trump’s ability to jawbone the markets may be diminishing at a critical time, three months before the midterm elections when control of Congress is hanging in the balance and his approval is sinking to new lows amid voter anger over cost of living concerns. It comes as global crude oil supplies are running low, the war threatens more energy flows, refiners are running out of spare capacity and the administration has few tools to keep gas prices low.“Labor…

Senator Darline Graham sought to introduce herself to Republican voters in South Carolina on Monday, in the first debate of a condensed special primary election to succeed her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham, who died last month.In the whirlwind few weeks since Mr. Graham died of an aortic tear, Ms. Graham was picked to serve the remainder of his term — and then made the surprise decision to run for the seat, with President Trump’s support.In all, nine Republicans qualified for the ballot; five of them, including Ms. Graham, faced off in Monday night’s debate. The others were Representatives Ralph Norman…

Iana Kunitsa / Moment via Getty ImagesFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways 86% of commerce leaders say AI is raising expectations. Agentic AI use in shopping grew 200% year over year. Only 27% of companies have fully unified customer data.The use of agentic AI search as the first step in shopping online grew by 200% in the last 12 months, according to Salesforce’s State of Commerce report, a survey of 3,450 commerce professionals and 4,690 consumers, plus behavioral data from more than 1.5 billion global shoppers. AI is raising the bar for customer expectations,…

Y Combinator team has open-sourced QM (quartermaster), the multi-agent harness it uses internally. QM is described as a multiplayer agent harness for work, running in Slack and on the web. YC team runs QM across accounting, legal, events, and engineering, including building QM itself. The whole project ships under the MIT license. YC frames the release as an experiment that is early and has bugs. Is QM Deployable Yes. QM is deployable today, but it is org software, not a desktop app. Deployment assumes a cloud account, Postgres, and someone comfortable with infrastructure. The best fit is a startup or…

N-able recently disclosed that a threat actor targeted its N-central product through a patch bypass vulnerability and used the flaw to gain access to customer environments.The company, which sells security and IT management tools to managed service providers (MSPs) and internal IT teams, disclosed active exploitation over the weekend through its status update page and on an Aug. 2 blog post. N-central is N-able’s remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform, used to remotely monitor customer systems and do things like deploy software, scripts, and patches as needed. RMM can also be used to remotely access customer endpoints through the “Take…

The market that dragged bitcoin off $65,000 this week didn’t sell it hard. It just stopped showing up.Bitcoin closed the week near $62,600 after failing to reclaim $65,000, and Yusuf Fakhro, a partner at Bahrain-based ARP Digital, reads that through the market’s plumbing rather than the Fed headline that nudged it lower. The ETF bid that powered July’s recovery has stalled, flipping to net outflows of nearly 4,000 BTC on the week after a run of steady inflows.The rest of the tape has gone quiet to the point of dormancy. July logged the lowest average daily spot volume since November…

For decades, we’ve been told that weight loss is a matter of willpower: eat less, move more. But modern science has proven this isn’t actually the case. More on that in a moment. But first, let’s go back a few hundred thousand years to examine our early human ancestors. Because we can blame a lot of the difficulty we have with weight loss today on our predecessors of the past – maybe the ultimate case of blame the parents. For our early ancestors, body fat was a lifeline: too little could mean starvation, too much could slow you down. Over…

More than eight years after Boeing organized the maiden flight of the 737 MAX 7, US authorities announced Monday that they certified the aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced certification of the smallest version of the single-aisle MAX plane, a process that had been significantly prolonged by new requirements under federal legislation following two fatal MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019. The action, which Boeing and regulators had telegraphed in recent weeks, sent Boeing shares sharply higher. The MAX 7 is Boeing’s first new aircraft to be cleared since the crashes and other problems sent the company into a…