Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

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…

Neither the U.S. nor China are part of the new declaration. But Finnish President Alexander Stubb, one of the main organizers of the document, told POLITICO that he hopes to create “momentum” and get more actors on board: “I think it will be in the interest of both China and the United States to have some kind of guardrails. And our message here is that we need human intervention, so humans need to be in charge,” he said in an interview. Referring to the recent cyberattack by rogue AI agents on the Hugging Face platform, the declaration urges to “address…

The State of Play inquiry, which is run by the UK House of Commons’ digital, culture, media and sport select committee, recently announced the five areas on which it will focus in 2026-27. One of these is: why are our Eurovision entries so bad? The word used by the chair, Dame Caroline Dinenage, was “dismal”, which is parliamentary speak for “shit”.The evidence is all around. With the exceptions of Sam Ryder (second in 2022) and Jade Ewen (fifth in 2009), the UK has bumped along the bottom of the table in recent years, coming last in 2021 and 2026, second…

Ports remain the same. Two forward-facing USB-C 3 ports (up to 10 gigabytes per second), as well as a headphone jack and a power indicator light. On the back, there are three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, an Ethernet jack, and the power adapter port. Using the available USB-C ports and HDMI on the back, you can connect up to two 5K 120-Hz external displays (such as the Studio Display XDR or BenQ 5K MA270S) or three 4K displays.One controversial design is that the power button is still hidden underneath the back left corner of the computer. If you know…

Multi-agent AI systems are taking over supply chain execution as enterprise networks face diminishing returns from static dashboards, pushing logistics directors towards autonomous execution.Predictive demand models display recommendations, yet human planners still clear every action. Multi-agent systems replace that approval stage across targeted operational boundaries.Instead of waiting for weekly scheduling runs, independent software models ingest real-time telemetry from carrier ETAs, yard cameras, and warehouse management system events. The agents execute freight re-routing, safety stock rebalancing, and dock allocations directly inside enterprise resource software.Lenovo reported this operational transition on its global iChain infrastructure across 180 markets, more than 30 factories, and…

Ravie LakshmananSep 21, 2026Endpoint Security / Malware Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign dubbed TASK#STOMP that delivers a PowerShell backdoor designed to harvest sensitive data from compromised hosts. The backdoor “automatically harvests and exfiltrates business documents, watches the filesystem for new files in real time, steals Wi-Fi passwords and clipboard contents, takes screenshots, and accepts arbitrary remote commands through two redundant, token-authenticated C2 servers,” Securonix researchers Akshay Gaikwad and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The starting point of the infection chain is the use of “wscript.exe” to execute an encoded Visual…

Russia’s crypto industry may have all it needs to start legally functioning by year-end, according to reports.  The deputy governor of the country’s central bank, Vladimir Chistyukhin, said that regulations were moving ahead as scheduled, Interfax reported on Monday.  Russia this year has pressed ahead with crypto legislation. President Vladimir Putin in August signed a law to set in stone the regulation of digital currencies and digital rights in the country — although using bitcoin for payments is still banned.  “Right now we are talking about creating subordinate regulation; it is very large and significant,” Chistyukhin was quoted saying, adding…