Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Twenty-five or so Reform members of the Senedd were lined up against a wall. Almost as if they were in a police identification parade. Reform’s need to find a new leader in Wales is becoming habit-forming.First, Nathan Gill was banged up for 10 and a half years on eight counts of taking £40K in bribes to make statements in support of Russia. Easily done. Who among us hasn’t been tempted by the Kremlin? And then last week, Dan Thomas chose to stand down after being arrested on suspicion of assault and coercive behaviour, leaving the Welsh leadership spot open once…

“We have identified a single component issue affecting a small number of early batches,” Thomas says. “We have isolated those batches and are supporting affected customers.”Thomas confirmed that Dyson would not answer questions on where—if anywhere—the Dyson CameraJet was still on sale worldwide. Nor would Dyson confirm when it stopped shipments of the product. Thomas also confirmed that Dyson refuses to detail what the faulty “single component” is, what problem it’s causing for the CameraJet, or how many units have been affected globally. Dyson also refused to comment on why it had not issued a formal recall of these faulty…

Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. As outlined recently by Sam Altman and Jakub Pachocki, we prioritize our work towards this mission with three main goals:Navigate the next period of AI progress, by building an automated AI researcher, iterating with it on the alignment problem, and finding ways for people to remain part of the self-improvement loop.Deliver the benefits of scientific progress and economic growth that very intelligent machines enable.Empower everyone individually with a personal AGI.AI is advancing across many companies and countries, and progress across the field changes the opportunities and challenges…

Google has been fined 403 million euros ($463 million) for breaching the European Union’s strict privacy rules because it mishandled users’ location data, the bloc’s data privacy watchdog said Monday. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said its investigation found Google did not lawfully or fairly process location data in users’ Web & App Activity, a Google setting that tracks browsing and search history, and in their Location History, a service that maps places they’ve been with their mobile phones. Regulators also found the company failed to be lawful, fair and transparent when it processed personal data in its Location Accuracy feature…

In brief FutureBit’s HashFly uses 2,914 simulated neural traces to perform simplified Bitcoin hashing. The browser experiment runs on conventional hardware and is not competitive with an ASIC miner. A separate project, FlyMiner, uses simulated neural activity to decide when a standard hashing engine runs. As Bitcoin miners turn to increasingly specialized chips for greater speed and energy efficiency, hardware maker FutureBit says it has tested a different approach: using a simulated fruit fly brain to perform mining calculations in a web browser.The HashFly demonstration simulates activity across 2,914 neural pathways taken from MaleCNS v1.0, a digital wiring diagram of…

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new way to transform polyethylene, one of the world’s most common plastics, into gasoline- and diesel-like fuels. Polyethylene is widely used in products such as shopping bags and white plastic cutting boards, and large amounts of it ultimately end up as waste. The ORNL team’s method combines the plastic with molten salts containing aluminum chloride. These salts perform two jobs at once, acting as both the reaction medium and the catalyst that drives the chemical conversion. The researchers have applied for a patent for the technology, and…

Sperm whales are the only whales known to rest vertically, floating steadily just below the ocean’s surface. Scientists have hypothesized that the whales release air bubbles to help them stay neutrally buoyant but the mechanism for how they do so has not previously been demonstrated — until now. “We already knew that sperm whales rest in a stereotypical vertical position and that they had been observed releasing bubbles during these resting periods,” lead author of a new study Noémie Freymond, a researcher at the Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland, told Mongabay by email. “It had been hypothesized that…

WIND, a Dutch subsea cable logistics, cable recovery, and related services company, has acquired a stake in a UK-based firm providing cable testing and termination, fault-finding and repair, among other things, for the offshore wind, power and wider energy sectors.WIND Yard Amsterdam. Source: WIND WIND reported earlier this month that it had acquired a “significant” stake in UK-based Tricore Technical Services, further expanding its capabilities and strengthening its position across the entire cable lifecycle. “By combining our expertise and services with the broader capabilities within the WIND Group, we are bringing together specialist knowledge, experience and innovation. This will allow…

Europe’s strategic predicament is ever clearer, and ever darker. The continent is at war, which is being fought militarily in Ukraine, but is escalating rapidly across Europe through hybrid attacks. Germany’s disclosure that it blames Russia for the explosion at Leipzig airport; a Russian drone strike on a train near the Ukraine-Poland border; an Italian jet shooting down a Russian drone over Lithuania; flares fired from a Russian warship at a Danish helicopter – all within the space of a couple of weeks – tell a coherent story. Whether because Russia is bogged down and unable to advance in Ukraine,…

Two women have been charged in South Africa in connection with the murder of a woman in an area east of Johannesburg – the last of nine recent cases in that region that have reignited the debate about the levels of gender-based violence in the country.Under pressure to solve the spate of murders which has involved victims’ bodies being dumped on a roadside, police have described the arrests of the two as a “breakthrough”.Referring to all nine cases, acting police chief Lt Gen Puleng Dimpane said her officers were “working tirelessly to bring those responsible to justice”.The two women have…