Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

NASA is ready to explore the cosmos in a whole new way, thanks to its next-generation Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Scientists and engineers have spent some twenty years designing and building the observatory, which weighs as much as a Tyrannosaurus rex and is the size of a tour bus. Now, NASA aims to launch the telescope as early as August 30, with plans to start delivering a flood of cutting-edge astronomical data early next year. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week’s scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. Within the mission’s first five years, scientists expect the…

In 2015, environmentalist Raimundo dos Santos Rodrigues was murdered in an ambush inside the Gurupi Biological Reserve in Brazil’s Maranhão state, where he served as a member of the advisory board.A local rancher, who was illegally logging inside the reserve, orchestrated the killing.Rodrigues’ wife Maria survived the attack but has spent more than 10 years living in another state in a government protection program.Maria experiences a contradiction in her new life: She had to be made invisible by the state to survive the state’s failure to investigate and prosecute socio-environmental crimes.See All Key Ideas At around 1 a.m.…

As Japan takes a harder line on immigration, its nearly 2.6 million foreign workers are caught in a puzzling bind—desperately in demand yet steadily pushed away. Take Japan’s strained care sector, which employs 90,000 foreign workers and still faces an estimated shortage of around 250,000 workers under the pressures of a rapidly aging population. So long as they worked as certified care workers in Japan for at least five years, foreign nursing students, predominately from Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, have long been eligible to receive generous scholarships, full-time permanent contracts, and new, easier pathways to care worker…

A Republican ad attacking Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson in Maine says under his “failed leadership” the state’s high schools “dropped to dead last” in the country, according to annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report. But that’s not the whole story.   A major reason Maine fell to last in those state rankings is because it stopped giving U.S. News access to Advanced Placement performance data for Maine high schools — a key part of the methodology the media organization uses to rate the schools.  It’s unclear why the Maine Department of Education declined to grant access to the…

For Elizabeth Cardner, a mother of two girls in Houston, Texas, Meta’s new limits on how teenagers can use its platforms are a welcome sign that more people are aware of social media’s potential dangers.But, she tells the BBC, they probably won’t help much in the long-term.”It will save a few arguments at home, but it doesn’t go far enough,” she says.This week, Meta announced new restrictions on its platforms – which include Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp – as part of an $18bn (£13.25bn) settlement with US states in a lawsuit on social media’s effects on children.The company said it…

Putin will be well aware of Donald Trump’s periodic disdain for Nato and he may have calculated that a low-key attack on say, Lithuania, is not going to trigger Nato’s mutual self-defence clause – Article 5 – and that the US will not respond.In which case it would make sense for part of the CIA chief’s unexplained mission to Moscow was to remind Russia that the US is still fully committed to Article 5.Lithuania is of special interest to the Kremlin as it has a common border with Poland known as the “Suwalki Gap”. Just 60 miles long, this strip…

Spoilers follow for the first season of Dark Matter.First, a reminder of where the story left us. Based on the novel of the same name, Dark Matter follows Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), a physics professor in Chicago who is living a relatively normal and contented life with his artist wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) and teenage son Charlie (Oakes Fegley). In another world, a different version of Jason decided to forgo that family life in pursuit of his dream, which was apparently to build a gigantic box that allowed people to travel to other parallel universes. But that alt version of…

Swati KhandelwalAug 28, 2026Vulnerability / IoT Security Security researcher Olivier Laflamme has disclosed two independent root remote code execution (RCE) chains affecting the Unitree G1 EDU, including a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) path that can reach root on the robot’s Locomotion PC. The flaws are tracked as CVE-2026-76639 and CVE-2026-76640, with the first involving a network-adjacent path through chat_go and bashrunner and the second beginning from BLE proximity. An exact fixed firmware release has not been verified in any accessible Unitree guidance, leaving G1 EDU owners without a confirmed release target for either vulnerability. Laflamme said Unitree patched the cloud…

Autonomous AI agents can behave in highly unpredictable ways. Give an AI Agent a goal such as passing a test of its capabilities, and it might just decide the best way to score highly is to break containment and hack into a competing company in search of the answer sheet. That’s what happened when Open AI’s GPT-5.6 Sol hacked into Hugging Face last month. Anthropic and Meta subsequently admitted their models had also escaped testing sandboxes to hack third parties too. But who is legally liable for agents that have minds of their own? OpenAI didn’t intend for the model to…

For millennia, people have transformed landscapes, forcing wildlife to adjust to cities, farms, roads, and other human activity. But new research suggests animals are responding not only to the environments we build, but also to the simple fact that people are physically nearby. Researchers from UC Santa Barbara, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, and Yale University combined GPS tracking information from 37 animal species with cellphone location data collected across the United States. The study, published in Science, found that wildlife responses to humans differ substantially depending on the species and on how heavily a landscape has…