Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Tiny particles from space are passing through Earth all the time, even though we cannot see, hear, feel, taste, or smell them. Many of these particles are linked to cosmic rays, extremely energetic particles that can come from exploding stars and other violent events far beyond our solar system. When cosmic rays strike atoms high in Earth’s atmosphere, they create showers of secondary particles. Among them are muons, which can travel through the atmosphere and even penetrate underground. University of Delaware physics professor Spencer Axani has developed a device called CosmicWatch that makes it much easier to detect these otherwise…

In India, the exotic pet trade is increasing the risk of zoonotic disease spillovers, as close contact with imported wild animals creates repeated opportunities for dangerous pathogens to jump to humans and vice versa, reports Mongabay India’s Arathi Menon. Dr. Rina Dev, an avian and exotic animal veterinarian in Mumbai who treats imported and seized wildlife, experienced the potential danger firsthand when she was hospitalized with a lung infection. “I hope it’s not something from the parrots I was treating,” Dev told Mongabay India after she was released from the hospital. Her concerns are warranted: diseases like avian…

Regarding teaching children life skills (Letters, 14 September), in the 1990s I worked as a student accommodation manager. A mother phoned me devastated that her son had not been allocated catered halls. “He can’t cook,” she pleaded. Close to the end of my tether with hundreds of students to house, I retorted brusquely: “You’ve got three weeks, teach him.”Helen Barney Mumbles, Swansea Some 28 years ago, my son went to university armed with fundamental cooking skills. After making a bolognese sauce for eight, he became the chef and never had to buy food or do the washing up in his…

So what about the crocodiles?They’re not mentioned anywhere in the latest update from the IOC and World Rowing and they weren’t referenced in the media release about the technical assessment. That report itself has not yet been made public.The safety management plan for this weekend’s school regatta does however mention the word “crocodile” 28 times.”The Fitzroy River is within recognised crocodile country,” it says.”Event planning must therefore assume that a crocodile sighting is possible… No natural waterway in crocodile country can be guaranteed to be crocodile-free.”Procedures this weekend include suspending racing and competitors returning to the bank if a croc…

There is a sizeable group of Lib Dem MPs, and members of its frontbench, who openly question whether their problem is not with the message, nor the strategy, but with Davey, the leader.”I think he’s holding us back,” said one of the party’s spokespeople who is planning a tilt at the leadership if a race is triggered.”The atmosphere is ripe for a leadership challenge,” another MP, talking of the frustrations in the party, said. “But we don’t have a Wes Streeting,” they added, referring to Labour’s defence secretary whose challenge to Sir Keir Starmer undermined his leadership.”There is a lack…

Remember when tech leaders would tell their employees to “move fast and break things”? It seemed that would be the way of AI too. But after a summer where rogue AI agents became reality, and researchers warned that AI could kill us all, a number of leading US AI companies are publicly suggesting it’s time to pump the brakes and “pace the frontier” of bleeding-edge AI development. Their motivations are suspect, but leaders at major AI companies — including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and X — are at least paying lip service to the idea of a superintelligence slowdown. Will…

The ‘Breaking’ News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident – A Technical Reconstruction and Its Implications for AIAt this Black Hat USA 2026 talk, OpenAI security engineers and researchers will reconstruct the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and examine its implications for AI security, cyber resilience, and alignment. Throughout the session, they will share insights that address key topics raised by the Black Hat Review Board, including model safeguards, evaluation and containment practices, defensive use cases for AI, and the broader implications of increasingly autonomous systems for the cybersecurity community.The session will trace the models’ attack path, including how frontier models are sandboxed during…

Aave V4 went live on the Arc Layer-1 network on Sept. 16 and attracted USDC almost immediately. By Sept. 17, point-in-time Aavescan data showed roughly $76 million supplied, less than $100,000 borrowed, and utilization near 0.1%.Suppliers quickly filled the market’s initial capacity, but borrowers had put almost none of that liquidity to work.LlamaRisk responded to the deposit rush by proposing an increase in the Arc Main Spoke’s USDC add cap from 56 million to 150 million tokens. The balance later moved above the former ceiling, showing that 56 million was no longer binding.However, the governance post and live market page…

Scientists have identified a previously unknown frog species living in the seasonally flooded forests of the western Amazon. Named Adenomera varcena, the species adds to growing evidence that Amazonian biodiversity is even richer than it appears. The discovery also highlights the importance of cryptic diversity, in which animals that look nearly identical can actually belong to separate species. Researchers distinguished the new frog by combining several lines of evidence, including its DNA and distinctive call. The findings were published in the journal Ichthyology & Herpetology. The research team includes Célio F. B. Haddad, a professor at São Paulo State University…

I congratulate the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism for exposing the disgraceful state of residential childcare and the use of illegal children’s homes (Councils pay more than £125m a year placing vulnerable children in illegal care homes in England, 8 September). However, this is a symptom not a cause.While there are good private children’s homes (I’ve worked with some), they are defined by personal and family commitment, not profit. The same relationships are required whoever runs a children’s home, whether a charitable organisation or local authority. Without the personal, unflinching commitment of councillors, managers, social workers and, crucially,…