Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

You’ve got to hand it to Andy Burnham. He left nothing out on the pitch. It would have been so easy to play it safe. To deliver a traditional leader’s speech to a home crowd. One we’ve been seeing from leaders of all parties for more than 15 years. Something warm, a feelgood vibes word salad with the odd minor spending announcement thrown in. Hell, the Labour conference would have probably settled for it. They already had all the hope that they had come for. The hope that they were back in with a fighting chance of winning the next…

Tech executives have long touted the potential for their AI models to accelerate the pace of biology discoveries. Last week, they announced one. In a September 23 announcement, Anthropic claimed that its large language model Claude had identified an enzyme system with properties “reminiscent of Crispr,” the Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing tool.According to Anthropic, about 950 Claude agents running simultaneously found the interesting genetic sequences in 21.5 hours. “I sincerely compliment Anthropic for telling the world about their discovery,” says Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing expert at the University of California, Berkeley and director for therapeutic R&D at its Innovative Genomics Institute.…

Liquid AI has released d1, a decision model built for structured choices instead of text generation. You give it context and a set of typed questions. It returns calibrated probabilities across a fixed set of outcomes in a single call, with zero generated tokens. The target is the work many teams still send to general LLMs: classification, ticket routing, scoring, moderation, reranking and LLM-as-judge checks. Is it deployable? Yes, today, as a hosted API. d1 runs on the Liquid API under the model name d1:free. Liquid’s model library lists it as API only and not trainable, so there are no…

Ravie LakshmananSep 29, 2026Vulnerability / Hardware Security A group of academics from VUSec and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna have disclosed details of a new Spectre CPU vulnerability variant that affects Just-In-Time (JIT) engines present in web browsers, language runtimes, and the operating system kernel, across multiple CPU vendors. The new Spectre-v2 variant has been codenamed Branch Target Reuse (BTR). “The key insight is that, while modern CPUs restore architectural code coherence after self-modification, they do not necessarily invalidate stale indirect branch prediction entries (i.e., branch targets),” researchers Sander Wiebing, Yuhui Zhu, Alessandro Biondi, and Cristiano Giuffrida said in an accompanying paper.…

US job openings cooled modestly in August, but September households grew more worried about inflation and interest rates. That split left Bitcoin investors with only part of the case for easier financial conditions after Sept. 29 releases.Bitcoin registered an intraday low of $82,775.94 on Tuesday, and a reclaim of the $84,000 support level depends more on the path of yields and new demand than on a single vacancies report.The labor and consumer surveys describe different pressures, and neither establishes the cause of Bitcoin’s price.Job openings ease as rate worries riseAccording to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, August job openings were…

New research reveals that pastoralist communities are turning to wild plants to cope with food shortages in northern Uganda.As in Uganda, experts reckon that edible wild plants can be a boon to countries like Nigeria, where roughly 15% of the population faces serious hunger.The study’s findings raise a broader question: Will communities with less richer botanical diversity be less capable of coping with food crises?See All Key Ideas For decades, the global outlook for food and agriculture has brought heightened concerns  as climate patterns create a mix of droughts and floods across the world. Consequently, fears of diminishing…

In her article, Polly Toynbee mentions the rise of racism globally, citing Donald Trump and the usual suspects (There is a racism and cohesion crisis in Britain, and someone needs to lead us out of it. His name is Andy Burnham, 22 September). She fails to mention that the Labour party has also indulged in overt and dog-whistle racist rhetoric.Keir Starmer spoke about Britain becoming “an island of strangers”. He later retracted it, but the message was out there. Wes Streeting, when health secretary, agreed with Katie Lam on the problem of foreign doctors (rather than the real problem of disastrous NHS…

France indicated Tuesday it plans to borrow a record amount on the bond market next year, even as worries about the government’s spending has seen borrowing rates hit levels unseen since the global financial crisis. The AFT agency that manages the government’s borrowing on debt markets said it plans to borrow 340 billion euros ($385 billion) in 2027, some 28 billion euros more than this year, to help finance government spending and repay debt coming due. AFT, in its announcement two days ahead of the presentation of the government’s 2027 budget, said it plans to issue a mixture of medium-…

Burnham did not set out details of who would lead his proposed commission, or when it would begin its work.Any move to change the voting system would be supported by the Liberal Democrats, who had previously urged Burnham to introduce proportional representation before the next election, which must be held by 2029.However, any move away from first-past-the-post is likely to be resisted by the Conservatives. Reform UK backed introducing PR at the last election, but there has been speculation that its enthusiasm for the move may have since cooled.Speaking to broadcasters after Burnham’s speech, Reform leader Nigel Farage said he…

The focus of OpenAI’s Dev Day on Tuesday may have been on its agentic assistants known as Dots, or its new AI models, but combined, the AI company’s announcements pointed towards a bigger plan: a disruption of the traditional app store model. Taken together, today’s announcements turn ChatGPT itself into the place where software can be discovered, launched, and used by people and agents alike. In addition, OpenAI introduced a way for people to bring their ChatGPT identity with them, while also allowing them to use their existing AI allowance in third-party apps. This isn’t the first time OpenAI has…