Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Scientists have long debated where the raw material that formed Earth originally came from. Although our planet sits in the inner Solar System, many researchers have proposed that 6-40 percent of its building material arrived from the outer Solar System, beyond Jupiter. That idea has been especially important for explaining how Earth acquired volatile substances such as water. If those materials came from farther out, then matter must have moved between the outer and inner regions of the Solar System while Earth was forming. New research now challenges that picture. “We were truly astonished” Planetary scientists Paolo Sossi and Dan…

In late 2025, extreme rainfall associated with Cyclone Senyar wiped out swaths of North Sumatra’s Batang Toru ecosystem, home to the largest known population of Tapanuli orangutans.Nearly a year later, there are is still no coordinated recovery strategy for the critically endangered ape, and its habitat faces multiple threats.Satellite footage from June this year shows new ground disturbances in the area; plans to expand a gold mine are proceeding even as an environmental audit of the mine is underway; and meteorologists warn that Indonesia faces an unusually severe fire season.See All Key Ideas JAKARTA — Nearly a year…

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at Sweden’s shift to the left, evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iran, and Canada’s response to possibly joining the European Union. An Election Upset What was supposed to be an easy parliamentary win for Sweden’s ruling right-wing coalition instead resulted in a bitter defeat and the formal resignation of Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson on Thursday. Although the center left now faces a tough road to form a government, progressive leaders are hailing the result as a significant blow to the far right, whose influence over Europe has only grown in recent…

France’s prime minister promised Thursday that the government will reduce the country’s deficit next year by cutting public spending by €54 billion ($62 billion) in 2027. But Sébastien Lecornu insisted his plans did not amount to austerity, as high fuel prices cause renewed social tensions just months before the presidential election. Read moreFrench candidates race to claim the cost-of-living issue ahead of 2027 vote In an interview with the Le Figaro business newspaper, he said the cuts will bring the public deficit down to 4.8 percent of gross domestic product excluding defence spending, and five percent including military spending. The…

This “crisis of disbelief”, as Michta put it, is not evenly spread. The further east you go, the closer you get to the Russian border, the more alert a nation’s people are to the threat, and the more psychologically prepared.Sweden hasn’t had a war in 200 years. It has pursued a policy of neutrality for centuries. But after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it abandoned that and has made itself, in a very short space of time, one of the most psychologically prepared countries in Europe.”Russia is self-evidently dangerous”, Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Christersson told The Economist magazine…

Interview with Boris Vujčić, Vice-President of the ECB, conducted by Francesco Canepa on 16 September 202618 September 2026We are speaking less than a week after the ECB’s latest projections were published, and energy prices have already moved well above the baseline. How does this affect your outlook for inflation and growth?Energy prices have continued to increase, and that was already evident during the Governing Council meeting compared with the cut-off date for the projections. This is also reflected in financial markets: the pricing of the interest rate path is being driven mainly by rising energy prices. In the absence of…

Data center developer Crusoe said Thursday it raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round that pushes its valuation to $30.9 billion. The massive round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners. Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures, and TPG also participated, according to Crusoe. Crusoe also announced three new board members, including Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert; Bill Stein, partner and CIO at Primary Digital Infrastructure; and Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel, who also sits on Tesla’s board. Straubel already has ties to Crusoe; he personally invested in the company…

Ravie LakshmananSep 18, 2026Mobile Security / Malware Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new Android malware called RatHat that’s assessed to be operated by China-based threat actors and features an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered system to navigate and control compromised devices. “Distributed primarily via targeted smishing (SMS/text phishing) and malvertising campaigns leading to deceptive third-party download portals, RatHat uses an automated multi-stage infection pipeline,” Zimperium researchers Gianluca Braga, Vishnu Pratapagiri, and Fernando Ortega said. “Once deployed, it pairs Accessibility abuse with autonomous local ADB (Android Debug Bridge) self-pairing to break out of the standard Android application sandbox, staging independent native daemons that…

Fortitude Mining has appointed former Hut 8 CEO Jaime Leverton as chief executive as the Zcash-focused miner prepares to go public through a proposed merger with HeartSciences. Leverton will succeed Andrea Childs as CEO on Sept. 21, with Childs moving to chief operating officer.Fortitude mined 72,696 ZEC in the first half of 2026, accounting for about 28% of the network’s total production during the period. The company reported revenue of $20.9 million for the second quarter.It operates more than 60 megawatts of power capacity across seven sites in South Dakota, Nebraska, Texas and New York, and in July agreed to purchase 9,000…

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified previously unknown lymph node-like immune structures in the skull bone marrow of mice. The findings suggest these nearby immune hubs can respond rapidly to brain cancer, becoming active before more distant lymph nodes even receive signals that something is wrong. The team also found evidence of similar immune cells in human skull bone marrow, suggesting that this local defense system may not be limited to mice. Scientists once believed that the brain was largely isolated from the immune system. That view has changed dramatically in recent years. The…