Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

AI-powered calorie tracking apps can estimate a meal’s nutritional content from a single photograph. The technology offers a fast and convenient alternative to manually entering every food and portion, but new research suggests the results may be considerably lower than what is actually on the plate. In a test of four photo-based apps, researchers found that calorie and fat estimates were about one-third too low on average. How AI Estimates Calories From Food Photos Photo-based calorie tracking relies on AI image recognition to identify the foods shown in a picture and estimate the size of each portion. The app then…

The federal opposition leader has been named as a potential donor to a conservative Liberal group now being investigated by the New South Wales corruption watchdog. Angus Taylor himself is not accused of wrongdoing.The Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) on Tuesday held its second day of Operation Rosny hearings into allegations of corruption against people associated with the NSW Liberal party.In her opening statement on Monday, counsel assisting Peggy Dwyer SC said evidence would show how a group of young Liberal power brokers known as the “Reformers” allegedly “solicited or accepted” donations, including from prohibited donors, in amounts which were…

The largest wildfire in Spanish history risks becoming a political liability for the center-right People’s Party ahead of a pivotal election next year. Over the past five days, more than 100,000 people have been forced to flee their homes as massive blazes have torn across the regions of Madrid, Ávila, Toledo and Castellón. With temperatures set to push toward almost 40 degrees Celsius, the prognosis for even greater devastation later this week is grim. While the central government has stepped in to oversee this national crisis, regional authorities have legal responsibility for many of the front-line sectors at the heart…

This is the danger zone. The period when one prime minister leaves office and the next takes over can inspire either dread or delight: a few days in which the country forms a gut reaction to the new government.One week on, Andy Burnham has well and truly ditched the slow fatalism that marked Keir Starmer’s early days in power, in favour of the message that help is on the way: from cost of living support to a pledge to end rough sleeping and Monday’s commitment to fix the social care system.But listen closely, and what’s striking about Labour 2.0 isn’t…

Ever so slowly, the crackdown on harmful sexual deepfakes is taking hold. Over the past few months, US law enforcement officials have seized deepfake hosting websites, while the EU and UK have drawn up plans to ban “nudify” apps by the end of the year. Despite this, large tech companies are still pushing millions in the direction of software that can digitally undress people without their consent.The open-source AI platform Hugging Face—a repository of AI models and datasets, which has been valued in the billions—has a widespread problem with nonconsensual deepfakes, according to a new report published Tuesday by the…

NVIDIA and 36 other organizations have formed the Open Secure AI Alliance to develop and share open technologies, techniques, and tools for securing software and artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The 37-member group spans cloud, security, enterprise software, and AI companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Hugging Face, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, and the Linux Foundation. Its stated scope covers the full agent stack, including identity, permissions, isolation, guardrails, logs, model formats, multi-model scanning, and secure coding workflows. The pitch is that cyber defenders need AI models they can read, change, and run on their own hardware, not only…

In brief Elon Musk predicts AI will surpass the combined intelligence of humanity within about five years. He says humans are unlikely to remain in control of AI within the next decade, even as the technology creates unprecedented abundance. Musk wants leading AI developers to regularly review each other’s frontier models for safety risks before release. Artificial intelligence could surpass the combined intelligence of humanity within about five years, and humans are unlikely to remain in control of the technology within a decade, according to Elon Musk.Speaking with The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes on Thursday, the xAI founder said…

Two devastating wildfires that swept through California’s Sierra Nevada in 2020 and 2021 killed thousands of giant sequoias. A new University of California, Davis study suggests the losses would have been far worse without prescribed burns. Published in Nature Communications, the research found that giant sequoias exposed to prescribed fire during the previous 10 years were nearly four times more likely to survive the 2020 Castle Fire and the 2021 KNP Complex Fire than nearby untreated trees. “Prescribed burns are effective at reducing giant sequoia mortality, even for today’s extreme wildfires,” said lead author Dan Dixon, who was a UC…

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has offered to pay as much as $5.5bn (£4.14bn) to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits in the US alleging that its baby powder and other products containing talcum cause ovarian cancer.The proposed landmark settlement aims to close a long-running legal battle that has weighed on the New Jersey-based healthcare giant for years.J&J has denied that its talc-based products caused cancer and has changed the formula of its widely used baby powder.Erik Haas, the firm’s vice president of litigation said on Monday, external that the allegations are “meritless” and that J&J was willing to settle in…

A week before Michigan’s primary contest for Senate, the two Democrats seeking the nomination spent much of their final debate hitting out at each other over campaign finance and who would focus more on helping their state.Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official, repeatedly accused Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate, of being a tool of corporate interests. She declared that he would use the Senate as a steppingstone to political celebrity and would not put the needs of their state first.Their ideological and stylistic divide, starkly illuminated in the debate on Monday and in the final weeks of…