Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

On 8 September, OpenAI claimed that its AI agents had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the most famous and difficult challenges in mathematics. Had a human solved it, they would have collected both prize money and plaudits from their fellows. The announcement instead ignited what some mathematicians have called an “existential crisis” in their field over the power of AI, and accusations that OpenAI misused human work.The maths behind Navier-Stokes is difficult to understand, but the critiques levelled by mathematicians will be familiar to artists, office workers, or anyone else concerned about AI. OpenAI’s results, like any arising from…

The sister of Pakistan’s imprisoned former prime minister, Imran Khan, has been arrested ahead of next week’s protests held in his support, his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has said.Aleema Khanum was detained in the eastern city of Lahore on Sunday afternoon, PTI officials said, calling it an “illegal detention”. Her son is demanding her return.The order for Khanum’s arrest, which came from Lahore’s deputy commissioner, alleged that she was mobilising Imran Khan’s supporters “through social media and public meetings”. It added that she will be detained for 30 days.Khanum is a vocal critic of her brother’s detention, regularly speaking to…

No international relationship has more power to determine the success of Andy Burnham’s premiership. So you might imagine the stakes for the prime minister’s first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump on Tuesday would be high.Yet Burnham may prove to be a lucky general. The balance of risk has shifted. Trump is unpopular at home, where inflation remains high, and is mired in an intractable conflict in Iran that has the potential to sink his midterm dreams.When Keir Starmer first visited Trump in February 2025, the situation could not have been more different. The notoriously unpredictable president had just won the…

We’re seeing a big debate over AI safety and a potential slowdown, as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently published a plan to “pace the frontier,” while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has publicly echoed President Donald Trump’s claims that the AI backlash is a hoax and regulation is unnecessary. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed whether executives like Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are serious about wanting to slow down. While I was surprised at how many industry leaders seemed to throw their support behind Amodei’s plan, Sean noted that the…

Solana validator coordination now operates on a 250-millisecond target slot time. A slot is the network’s target interval for a validator to produce a block, so the change gives users more frequent opportunities for transactions to land while giving validators less time to pass production from one leader to the next.The change became effective at epoch 1037 on Sept. 18, according to the Solana engineering changelog and a Solana Compass report that placed the transition at about 05:06 UTC. One early Sept. 20 sample covering 60 one-minute windows observed about 266ms per produced slot. Epoch 1037 skipped about 0.05% of…

For 10 years, physicist Stephan Schlamminger had been chasing one of the most stubborn numbers in science. Now, after a decade of experiments, corrections, and painstaking analysis, the answer was sitting inside a sealed envelope. He was not entirely sure he wanted to open it. Schlamminger, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), had spent much of the previous decade trying to measure the universal gravitational constant. Known to physicists as big G, this fundamental number determines the strength of gravitational attraction throughout the universe. The number hidden in the envelope was the key that would…

Lebogang Ramafoko, an advocate for gender and social justice, said the levels of violence against women in the country were symptomatic of a much bigger problem – a lack of regard for humanity.”The bodies of black women have been treated as disposable in this country for time immemorial, passed down from colonisation through to apartheid,” she tells the BBC, referring to the legalised system of racism that was in place until 1994.”What we see happening to women is testimony to legacies of violence from those systems whose traumas were never addressed.”This is not to say black men are inherently violent,…

Climbing the party-branded stairs of the Brighton Centre with a Liberal Britain tote bag over his shoulder, Cody Butler looks quite at home at the Liberal Democrats’ annual jamboree.But asked how he is finding it, the 21-year-old replied: “Odd.” The former Tory activist resigned as chair of the One Nation Conservative Network and left his old party in July, arguing that centrists, remainers and members worried about the climate crisis and conservation were no longer welcome in the party. A week ago, he joined the Lib Dems.“There is no easy way to describe joining a new political party, because it’s…

Before recent high-profile hacks raised the specter of AI possibly “killing all humans,” our energy systems were already disturbingly vulnerable to cyberattack — and the risk is growing.“We were always prey. We were just kind of surviving at the appetite of our predators,” Joshua Corman, executive in residence for public safety and resilience at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), told me last year. At the time, I was preoccupied with a Department of Homeland Security warning that Iranian actors and sympathizers could target the US with cyberattacks.Last week, I called Corman up to chat about recent incidents of…

Bitcoin’s market cap sits roughly where it did at the last cycle’s peak, but according to Miller Value Partners chairman and CEO Bill Miller IV, the global fiscal situation has gotten much, much worse, which means the gap between price and fair value is wider than ever. Miller explains his capital governance thesis, why he views Bitcoin as a denominator for capital rather than an asset to be valued, and how he frames fair value against a US deficit roughly the size of Bitcoin’s entire market cap. He also addresses gold’s outperformance, the AI trade rotation and global liquidity flows…