Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Should fund managers dealing in Bitcoin be worried about the threat of quantum computing?  The short answer is yes — but there’s time to prepare and solutions are already being found. One of them? Post-quantum Bitcoin transactions on the mainnet. And the first one happened this week thanks to the Starknet Foundation.  JUST IN: The first post-quantum resistant Bitcoin transaction was mined today.”It required no soft forks. It required no hard forks. It required no core protocol upgrades. And it’s live today.” pic.twitter.com/YyZbHhm8HI— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 27, 2026 Speaking at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong on Thursday, Damian Chen,…

From the first hint of cold winter mornings, supermarkets and pharmacies begin heavy marketing to coax us to stock up on vitamin C to get through the cold and flu season. But where did that idea come from? As we’ll see, it’s a story including a Nobel Prize winner, a book and some claims that don’t quite stack up.Nobel Prize winner writes a bookLinus Pauling was a chemist from the United States who won two Nobel Prizes. One was in 1954 for chemistry, for his research into chemical bonds. The other was in 1962 for peace, for his activism against…

Coral reefs, medieval coastal castles and mangrove forests on UNESCO’s World Heritage list now share something in common: Precise digital boundaries.A new dataset maps 386 coastal World Heritage Sites, offering the clearest picture yet of what stands to be lost as the world’s climate changes.Covering 235 million hectares (~581 million acres) of coastline, the new high-resolution, open-access dataset can be used by researchers and local managers to study flooding, erosion and other climate risks faced by heritage sites.The tool is a critical first step to understand climate risks, but not a substitute for the local knowledge needed to help…

Rare earths help make the world cleaner, smarter, and more connected. But in Myanmar, their extraction leaves behind poisoned rivers, scarred hillsides, dispossessed communities, and rising health risks. Supply chains centered around China are pulling heavy rare earths from Myanmar’s conflict zones, revealing a larger shift: Extraction of strategic resources no longer necessarily depends on stable governments or consolidated state authority. In some places, supply chains can adapt to the fragmented political order that war produces. The Kachin Independence Army, one of many groups fighting Myanmar’s central government, seized Pangwa, the hub of Kachin state’s rare-earth industry, in 2024. But…

Claim: Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong Un paid tribute to the late country music star Dolly Parton at the summit of Mount Paektu in August 2026. Rating: A rumor that Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong Un paid tribute to the country music star Dolly Parton at the summit of Mount Paektu spread after Parton’s death in August 2026. For example, the X account @DPRK_News posted (archived) an image of Kim standing on a snowy mountaintop and wrote, “Fond memories of dear friend Dolly Parton immortalized from summit of Mt Paektu.” Fond memories of dear friend Dolly…

Claim: In August 2026, Costco removed Callaway golf products from its inventory online and in stores because of backlash over advertisement released by Callaway partner Good Good Golf that featured a man shoving a woman to the ground. Rating: What’s True Google searches for Callaway products on Costco’s website resulted in dead links, and searching Costco’s website directly also displayed no Callaway products, suggesting that the products had been unlisted. What’s Undetermined Snopes was unable to confirm whether Callaway products were also taken off the shelves at Costco warehouses. Furthermore, there was no public information available from Costco explaining why…

Refugee number intervention reflects government ‘not acting on any core principle’, Greens sayBack to the Greens’ David Shoebridge, who said earlier the Albanese government’s reported intervention on the annual refugee intake reflected a lack of principles.Reports this week said the government was preparing to cut the number of refugee arrivals from 20,000 to 13,750 in 2027-28. But that news was met with anger from Labor MPs and refugee advocates. Albanese later said the change would not take place.Shoebridge told RN this morning: double quotation markMinister Burke wouldn’t have presented those savage cuts unless he’d been through a process. And then…

President Trump is not planning to attend a ceremony in Manhattan for the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in part because he wanted to deliver a speech and the annual event no longer allows them, according to four people with knowledge of the events.Mr. Trump’s team had conducted advance visits at the site and had initially signaled to officials in New York and in Washington that the president intended to visit the memorial space known as ground zero, two of the people with knowledge of the events said.The president’s interest in speaking on Sept.…

Americans hadn’t seen President Trump in a few days, not since he diverted from an education policy event on Monday to give reporters a tour of the new helipad he is building on the South Lawn of the White House.A curious citizen may wonder: What has Mr. Trump been up to in the days since we last saw our wartime president? What are his priorities?We all got an answer on Thursday, when Mr. Trump decided to take a private event, previously billed as a “Signing Time” session on his daily schedule, and make it public. He beckoned reporters into the…

The robot pizza-making business has, it’s true, been littered with sorry tales of overcooked promises and melting fortunes. Besides Picnic, other companies that have come and gone include Zume, external and Pazzi, which used, external robot arms to assemble pizzas, as well as Basil Street, external, a purveyor of pizza vending machines.Although so-called fast food might seem an easy target for automation, it’s proved harder than many expected. Plus, bringing robots into pizza restaurants could take away entry-level jobs in the hospitality sector. Is the future really filled with robotic pizza?”We haven’t yet seen any of the success stories materialise…