Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Al Gore has spent more than two decades as one of the most recognizable voices in the climate movement, so when he talks about AI, it’s worth paying attention to what he considers truly scary. And it isn’t what has people protesting data centers in the streets. In an interview with TechCrunch this week alongside Lila Preston, head of growth equity at their investment firm Generation Investment Management, Gore said emissions from AI data centers aren’t what should keep people up at night, despite the mounting opposition over their environmental impacts. What should concern people more, in his view, are…

Peter Schiff says the bond market didn’t break recently, it broke in 2020, and everything since has been a slow unwind. Across this conversation with Grace Remington and Sean Hagan, he connects rising Treasury yields, the Fed’s expected rate decision, the dollar’s loss of purchasing power, and the central bank rush into gold. He argues that a stock selloff driven by higher rates would be deeply bearish for Bitcoin and the broader crypto market, and that political capital in Washington has already turned against it. The episode ends with Schiff and the hosts going head to head on whether anything…

Eating four to six servings of whole grains each day may improve several major risk factors for cardiovascular disease, according to new research published September 15 in the European Heart Journal. The findings come from a systematic review and meta-analysis that combined evidence from 87 clinical trials examining how whole grain consumption affects cardiovascular risk factors. Across the studies, diets higher in whole grains were associated with improvements in body weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood glucose. Together, these changes could help lower the long term risk of heart disease. How Much Whole Grain Is Enough? The research was led…

BRUSSELS (AP) — A scorching summer that dried up rivers and killed tens of thousands across the European Union from Portugal to Hungary has shown that the bloc needs to develop new tools to meet a worsening climate, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday. She said that this instability led her to propose a new European Heatwave Plan as well as a future European firefighting fleet of airplanes. Currently, the EU operates a small fleet itself but coordinates a network of aircraft, water trucks and volunteers that move across the 27-nation bloc as fires ignite.…

Adrian Chiles (Driverless cars are taking us on a road to nowhere, 10 September) wants to know who asked for driverless cars. I did. I have an eye condition called nystagmus and will never be able to drive unless a “tech-bro willy-waver”, or anyone else, finds a cure. Fortunately, not every driver is as reckless as the ones Chiles despairs of, and the most careful of all may not even be human.Waymo, Google’s sister company, says its cars have far fewer crashes causing injuries than human drivers. In July, the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that its cars…

People with child support debts to be banned from leaving AustraliaTanya Plibersek says the new child support legislation (which my colleague Tom McIlroy brought you a moment ago) will enforce travel bans of child support dodgers – meaning they won’t be able to fly overseas.Plibersek says there is more than $2bn of unpaid child support in Australia.She says the system can be used as an “insidious form of domestic violence where you can continue to harass or intimidate your ex”.She says the new rules will help recover “some” of the outstanding debts. double quotation markIf people move from the private…

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldOn a Monday night in late August, Ryan Morrow joined 120 other members of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem to take solace in song and transcend a country filled with political discord.“We all may sing a different voice part within the hymn but we still sing one hymn, right?” he says.Morrow, a 40-year-old music teacher, can trace his family roots back to the early Moravian settlers who founded Bethlehem in 1741 after fleeing what is now part of Germany and…

Microsoft’s head of AI has warned Anthropic’s approach to training its AI model Claude could have a “disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity”.Mustafa Suleyman said his rival risked creating something “impossible” to control by treating it like a human – including by telling it it “may be conscious” and was “deserving of independent agency”.”We must not sleepwalk our way into a decision we later come to bitterly regret,” he wrote.The comments are the latest in a series of stark warnings from the AI industry on the possible dangers of the technology. The BBC has contacted Anthropic for comment.”AIs are…

Computational papers ship code that readers must clone, install, configure and debug. That cost keeps useful methods locked inside PDFs. A Stanford team led by Jiacheng Miao and James Zou proposes a fix. Paper2Agent was published in Nature on 16 September 2026. It converts a paper and its codebase into a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Any MCP-compatible agent, such as Claude Code, can then run the paper’s methods through natural language. The authors describe the result as a virtual corresponding author. Is it deployable? Yes. The code is MIT-licensed and installs as a skill…

Dark Reading’s Becky Bracken: Hello and welcome to Dark Reading Confidential. It’s a podcast from the editors of Dark Reading, bringing you real-world stories straight from the cyber trenches. I’m Becky Bracken, senior editor and your host. Today, I have taken a little editorial liberty and invited somebody I very much wanted to hear from right now: Hal Pomeranz. Hello, Hal.Hal Pomeranz: Hey, Becky, how are you?DR’s Becky Bracken: I’m OK. I’m hanging in, I think like a lot of people.Hal, you’re a longtime expert — your resume is distinguished. You’ve been at the SANS Institute, and you are now…