Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A human, an octopus, and a coral may appear to have almost nothing in common, but their chromosomes still contain recognizable fragments inherited from an animal ancestor that lived more than 600 million years ago. Researchers at the University of Vienna have now traced how those ancient genomic pieces were reorganized as animal life diversified. The study, published in Science Advances, suggests that animal genomes do not evolve through an unlimited number of possible routes. Instead, chromosome changes tend to move along a restricted set of irreversible pathways that the researchers describe as “evolutionary highways.” The findings may also provide…

Shortly after taking office last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth polled the nation’s top commanders about cutting a program designed to protect civilians during U.S. military operations. Hegseth had bet senior officers would endorse his view that focusing on civilian security was “woke” and out of step with “maximum lethality,” current and former defense officials told ProPublica. Instead, every commander rebuffed the idea. The poll from early 2025, which has not been previously reported, cemented top-level military support for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a relatively new program adopted after years of heavy civilian tolls in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.…

Three moves in the last week have exposed the limits of Donald Trump’s economic bullying. The US slapped 50% tariffs on another $20bn of Canadian goods – then threatened the same rate on the cars, trucks, parts and steel that America Inc depends on. On Monday, the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, menaced Iran’s trading partners with exclusion from the US financial network, hoping that coercion can deliver what months of war have not. And as the costs of war, tariffs and pro-billionaire tax cuts helped send US bond yields higher, the Treasury stepped in to tame long-term rates. These are…

The White House has provided no federal data to support President Donald Trump’s claims that because of his “no tax on tips” policy, “440,000 tipped workers” in Nevada “saved an average of $10,000 on their taxes,” and “130,000 tipped workers” in Georgia “saved an average of more than $7,000 on their taxes.” Instead of actual tax savings, the president may have been referring to the average amount some workers in those states were able to deduct from their federal taxable income in 2025. The actual savings would be a fraction of that, depending on a person’s tax rate. The president…

President Trump has yet to comment on the latest Canadian countermeasures.Still, in a series of Tuesday posts on Truth Social, Trump accused Canada of “ripping off” the US for decades and of charging American farmers steep tariffs. “I deal with many countries, and Canada is easily the most difficult and unreasonable,” Trump wrote. “They feel entitled, but they are not a State, and will be entitled no longer!”He also suggested that he will change the name of Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes on the US-Canada border, to Lake America, writing: “We don’t expect to doing much business with…

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that those responsible for drone attacks and other hostile acts against Germany, including a recent case at Leipzig Airport, would “pay a price”.Merz said the incident showed Germany was “facing a very real threat” and was increasingly becoming a target.On 4 August, a drone carrying an explosive device was discovered at Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany, close to Ukrainian cargo planes. However, it failed to explode as the detonator was apparently faulty.Police defused the explosives and believe a second drone may have collided with a cargo aircraft nearby. Security experts have speculated that Russia…

A special primary runoff that will test the power of President Trump’s endorsement and determine the political fate of a newly elevated senator is playing out on Tuesday in South Carolina, where early morning turnout appeared to be unusually strong for a runoff.The election could bring a quick end to the congressional career of Senator Darline Graham, who filled the seat of her brother, Lindsey Graham, after his death last month. Ms. Graham, a political novice backed by Mr. Trump, is now running for a full term in the Senate and is trying to fend off Representative Ralph Norman, a…

With the new design of Nothing OS 5.0, app icons and widgets can use adaptive color to get color tints pulled from your wallpaper, which update whenever your wallpaper changes. Alongside Android’s built-in Dynamic Colors, the company says it allows you to have specific elements change to match your wallpaper “while Nothing’s predominantly monochrome character stays underneath.”While I like Nothing’s simplified, monochrome app icons, it’s nice to get an option for adding some limited areas of color to the homescreen. Nothing’s launching it as “an additional theme,” so you can keep using the old design if you like.The Android 17-based…

Training and serving frontier models is now a networking problem as much as a compute problem. Collective operations like all-reduce and all-to-all synchronize thousands of accelerators during training, and the slowest transfer sets the pace for the entire job. Even small amounts of network friction directly strand significant compute capacity. This week, Meta introduced MetaRoCE. It is described as a clean-sheet RDMA transport protocol purpose-built for AI workloads on commodity Ethernet. The design breaks with standard RoCE on its central assumption. Standard RoCE expects the network to deliver every frame in order, leveraging PFC and discouraging the packet spraying that…

AI trust, safety, and security company Alice announced on Tuesday that it raised $140 million in a funding round to secure AI systems against emerging vulnerabilities and adversarial attacks. The latest capital injection brings the firm’s total funding to $280 million, which will be used to further advance its AI platform, expand the team behind its proprietary intelligence dataset, and scale its go-to-market efforts. The funding round was led by the Apax Digital Funds, with participation from MoreTech, Phoenix Financial, Resolute Ventures, Grove Ventures, CRV, Highland Europe, Vintage Investments, Norwest, NFX, and Claltech. The company partners with AI developers to…