Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

More than 40% of the population in Japan suffers from hay fever, or kafunsho, an annual affliction.The majority of Japan’s hay fever sufferers are allergic to the pollen of two trees — sugi and hinoki. Both trees were widely planted in the years following World War II as a much-needed source of timber.In 2023, the Japanese government announced a solution: Fell 750,000 hectares of sugi and hinoki trees in a bid to cut the problem off at the root.After decades of work, researchers have developed more than 30 strains of low-pollen and no-pollen sugi trees, which will replace some…

U.S.-headquartered technology player SLB has been hired to help move a large-scale CO2 storage project in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea toward a final investment decision (FID), taking on technology and engineering work spanning the concept and front-end engineering and design (FEED) phases, as Europe continues to build out its carbon capture and storage (CCS) network. Illustration of a FSIU receiving cargo from an LCO2 carrier; Courtesy of Yinson Production SLB has been selected as strategic reservoir partner for the Havstjerne large-scale offshore carbon storage project in the Norwegian North Sea, providing technology and engineering services for the…

Key takeaways Iowa’s Beginning Farmer Tax Credit increased farmland leasing, but researchers found little evidence that it created more farms or lowered the average age of emerging farmers. Researchers found limits to what the tax credit has accomplished, while state officials say challenges, such as farm consolidation and an aging farm population, extend beyond any single program. New farmers struggle to make a living from farming, often relying on off-farm jobs even when they have access to land. As a boy growing up in Spencer, Iowa, Trent Walker spent summers helping on his grandfather’s farm, picturing that he someday would…

Three months ago, at 42, I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Unlike many adults prior to receiving a diagnosis, I had not spent years wondering whether I had ADHD. In fact, I was oblivious until quite recently, when I strongly identified with several things a colleague said about their own experience of ADHD. The more I learned, the more I found myself thinking: “Wow, that’s me.”My forgetfulness, distractibility, messiness, chronic need for organisation and memory strategies, constant lateness, tendency to lose things daily, persistent perfectionism and habit of going, tyres screeching, right up to the last minute of…

A viral fake letter claiming to be from Bexley Council about asylum seekers moving into nearby properties advises people to keep their daughters inside, rehome pets “if possible” and lock away property.Bexley Council has confirmed with Full Fact, and in a statement on its website, that it didn’t send the letter. It has referred the matter to the police. Images of the letter and videos of someone reading it have been widely shared across Facebook, Instagram and X.Pictures of the fake letter spreading online appear to claim that “a number of properties” in the area will be occupied by asylum…

Meta has agreed to pay $17 billion and add child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms to end a landmark trial over teen social media addiction and settle claims filed by 47 states, state attorneys general announced Wednesday. California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were among 29 states that sued the tech giant in 2023, but the deal cuts short the trial, which was expected to see CEO Mark Zuckerberg take the stand before a jury in federal court in California. The agreement is worth $353 million in Virginia alone and is one of the biggest in state consumer…

Cela n’a pas échappé à Eurofer, le lobby européen de la sidérurgie, qui a salué l’engagement pris dans la proposition de créer un marché pilote pour l’acier vert, mais estime que la Commission n’est pas allée assez loin. “L’IAA va dans le bon sens, mais la proposition actuelle n’est pas assez ambitieuse pour créer un signal par la demande en faveur de l’acier bas carbone fabriqué dans l’UE”, a déclaré le lobby dans un communiqué. “Sans exigences strictes sur l’origine UE, liées à l’acier initialement fondu et coulé au sein de l’UE, les marchés publics et les programmes de soutien…

Households are unlikely to receive further energy bills support before the October price cap, though more targeted measures could be looked at if there is a further shock in January, government sources said.Gas and electricity prices will rise by 4% from October under the new cap. The government has already removed VAT from domestic electricity bills to save average households £45 a year, in a move announced in Andy Burnham’s first week in office.Prices had previously climbed by 13% at the start of July to take account of global energy market price rises caused by the US war on Iran…

Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma says the gaming giant needs to be “thinking about” affordability for its next-generation console, amid a “crisis” in computing prices.In an interview with the BBC, she said rising hardware costs partly driven by AI spending mean firms need to find ways to make gaming affordable.She also revealed gamers will soon be able to get digital versions of many of the physical games they currently own, potentially meaning their old games can be played on future Xbox consoles without having to put a disc in a drive.”I know players love physical media, and I know there’s…

Alibaba’s Qwen team has released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an open-weight multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model built for cost per token. The checkpoint pairs a 125B backbone with a 51B N-gram embedding table and a 4B multi-token prediction module. Only 6B parameters activate per token. The team positions it as an early preview of the architecture that will underpin Qwen4, the same role Qwen3-Next played for Qwen3.5. Four changes carry the release: a Gated DeltaNet and Qwen Sparse Attention hybrid, Gated Residual, N-gram Embedding, and the Muon optimizer. Qwen team reports training cost at roughly one-ninth that of Qwen3.7-Plus. Is it deployable? Yes but not…