Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 21, 2026 After Curiosity’s 14 years on the surface, Mars continues to surprise. Both of our workspaces this week contained features unlike quite anything we have seen in the past — broad, shallow pits (like the one in the image above) dotted across the bedrock. Pits are not uncommon — when resistant nodules or pebbles weather out of their host rock, they leave behind a void. But the pits of this week were much broader and shallower than past features and were not accompanied by obvious objects…

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from challenging California’s longstanding authority to set vehicle pollution stan tdadards stricter than federal requirements. The legal dispute stems from a decision announced in June by EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who said the agency had determined that four of California’s Clean Air Act preemption waivers were actually “rules” subject to congressional approval under the Congressional Review Act. For decades, the waivers have allowed the state to adopt its own vehicle emissions standards and attack its smog problem—with ripple effects across the country. The EPA has granted California more than 100…

Norway’s energy company Equinor has awarded Proserv with a contract for the deployment of cable monitoring technology at the 402 MW Dudgeon offshore wind farm in the UK.Source: Dudgeon Offshore Wind Limited Proserv’s ECG Business Unit will deploy its advanced monitoring technology to provide continuous visibility of cable and termination health at the project located 32 kilometers off the north Norfolk coast, with deployment scheduled to begin in 2027. The deal will also see the deployment of Proserv’s Distributed Electrical Sensing (DES) technology, which uses existing fiber infrastructure and passive sensing technology and provides high-fidelity current and voltage measurements across the network,…

Early last month, Nigeria’s government announced the largest single-day hostage rescue in its history, with the freeing of 300 people who had been taken in raids in two north central states. Celebrations were short-lived. Barely a fortnight later, gunmen abducted up to 600 worshippers from a mosque in Niger state. Nigerians paid kidnappers nearly $6m in ransoms in the year to June, according to a new report from the Lagos-based consultancy SBM Intelligence – more than triple the total in the previous 12-month period. More than 7,800 people were abducted, a two-thirds increase, and more than 1,100 killed, including almost…

Nader Boulos Tannous, a Syrian Christian who was shot and killed on August 15, 2026 in the city of Homs, has been turned into a symbol for the country’s Christian community by advocates. Tannous, who had lived for years in Sweden, moved back to Syria recently and opened a women’s beauty salon.  In the days following his murder, a number of countries released statements denouncing what they called an anti-Christian act. One of the first reactions came from the Israeli government: Tannous’s death “raised serious concerns”, according to a post dated August 18 on the official English-language X account of…

Sabalenka’s pace and power was too much for world number 160 Iatcenko, who managed just three winners compared to the 24 put away by the top seed. Iatcenko looked a bundle of nerves in the biggest match of her career, but composed herself to get on the scoreboard for 5-1 and immediately broke out into a relieved smile.It was merely respite as Sabalenka held to love in fewer than 90 seconds to clinch the opening set.Despite only being on court for 24 minutes, Iatchenko decided she wanted a bathroom break to change her kit – but more likely for a…

Jenrick is due to give a major speech to the conference on Saturday but speaking at a fringe event with journalist Allister Heath, he sought to reassure voters that Reform’s policies would be affordable. He said it was important to “learn the lessons of [former Prime Minister] Liz Truss” who he said “basically went into a sweetie shop, took everything off the shelves and stuck it into a budget”.”Quite rightly the markets reacted very negatively to that.”Jenrick was a health minister in 2022 when Truss’s plan to deliver large energy bill subsidies and £45bn of tax cuts shook market confidence…

A car tax conviction against the mayor of London has been withdrawn after it transpired that he was targeted by a “scam” that led to him being fined for failing to tax a car that was not his.Sadiq Khan was found guilty last month under what has been described as a system of “conveyor-belt justice”, in which magistrates decide on hundreds of cases a day, sometimes spending less than a minute on each.City Hall officials say the 24-year-old Nissan Micra did not belong to Khan or Transport for London.The case was formally reopened at a magistrates court hearing at Hereford…

OpenAI’s next big model is here: GPT-6 Astra. The company calls it a “generational leap in capability” for areas like cybersecurity, professional work, software engineering, science, and computer use. As OpenAI announced earlier this week, it’s also the first model designated as meeting OpenAI’s “critical cybersecurity capability threshold” — but the company promises that won’t lead to a repeat of its models hacking a rival company’s internal systems.“If we fast-forward a couple of years, and we look back and say, ‘When was it, really, that AGI was created?’ I think it’s going to be about this time, and I think…

This week, Meta Superintelligence Labs released Muse Spark 1.3. It is the fourth Muse Spark release in five months, and the target is long-horizon agentic and coding work rather than single-turn generation. The framing in Meta’s post is usability: sustaining a long thread, collaborating with the user, and knowing when it is stuck. Is it deployable? Yes, but with two limits. Muse Spark 1.3 ships today in Muse Code and the Meta Model API, so you can call it in production now. You cannot self-host it, because the weights are closed, and the max reasoning mode is still gated behind…