Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

New findings from the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are challenging a familiar picture of what gives protons one of their defining quantum properties. The results suggest that gluons, the particles that act as the glue holding quarks together, may play a key role in carrying and conserving baryon number. The evidence comes from high-energy particle collisions at RHIC, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research that operated at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory from 2000 to early 2026. According to the new study, published in Science, baryon number…

Incidents of sharks biting humans are incredibly rare, but at least three influencers have been bitten by the animals in less than a year. Scientists say they’re increasingly concerned about the rise in social media videos showing people swimming too close to sharks, touching or even riding them.”I’m seeing these videos every single week now and it’s way more than it ever used to be,” says shark scientist Kristian Parton, who also hosts the ‘Shark Bytes’ YouTube channel. “We’re going to see people ending up in really serious incidents with sharks.”In July, a fishing influencer almost lost his leg after…

Reading Time: 9 minutes As TV monitors at a primary night watch party showed state Rep. Francesca Hong leading the Democratic race for governor in Dane County, the crowd erupted in cheers. But this wasn’t Hong’s event in Madison. It was the party for Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany at the Rustic Manor wedding barn in Hartland. Attendees saw a Hong victory as a path to take back the governor’s office, where Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has blocked conservative bills for nearly eight years. In recent weeks, Tiffany and fellow Republicans attacked Hong over past social media posts, including calls…

A teenager has been arrested after five people were shot at Virginia State University (VSU) in the early hours of Saturday morning. Camron Harris, a 19-year-old from Henrico in Virginia, was found hiding in a closet on campus after the incident, police told US media. He is not a student at the university.Only one of the five victims was studying at VSU, and all were taken to local hospitals with gunshot wounds.A 21-year-old man remains in a critical condition. The other four, whose ages range from 17 to 23, suffered non-life threatening injuries according to police.Local officers initially told the…

Four Renaissance paintings of “extraordinary value” have been stolen from a museum in Sicily, Italy’s culture minister has said.Alessandro Giuli confirmed that three panels of the Polyptych of San Gregorio and a double-sided panel of the Madonna with Child and Christ in Pietà, all attributed to Antonello da Messina, were taken Regional Interdisciplinary Museum of Messina on Saturday night.Police are now probing how the thieves were able to enter the museum without triggering its alarms and who may have been responsible.The incident is the latest in a string of museum heists across Europe that have led to a growing number…

The keen new chancellor, John Healey, responded to last week’s better-than-expected economic news by claiming the government was “bringing hope back”. Growth did not plunge as feared after Donald Trump unleashed war on Iran – with GDP expanding at a pretty decent 0.4% in the second quarter.But what if we should have held on to a bit more hope all along? A new assessment of the UK’s recent productivity suggests this critical measure of the country’s economic strength may have been systematically underestimated.Instead of stagnation, it points to a “meaningful pickup” in productivity since mid-2024, with annual growth of about…

Green Party leader Zack Polanski, and Labour MPs Bell Ribiero-Addy, Clive Lewis and Nadia Whittome are among the politicians to have signed the statement, alongside former England footballer Eni Aluko, National Education Union general secretary Daniel Kebede, and broadcaster Carol Vorderman.It calls for an “immediate public inquiry into how to ensure a responsible press”.Arday, 41, was found dead at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon. He had resigned as a Cambridge professor of sociology of education on 5 August after allegations of plagiarism and questions about some of his achievements. He had denied the claims.Liverpool John Moores…

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.It all started in July, when one of OpenAI’s autonomous AI agents went rogue during a cybersecurity test. The agent escaped its isolated testing environment, accessed the internet, and hacked another company, Hugging Face. A few years ago, that might have sounded like science fiction. But, broadly speaking, that’s exactly what happened, and the incident kicked off a wave of concern…

A new information-stealing malware called AmnesiaStealer, which targets macOS users via ClickFix attacks, includes a streaming module that allows the attacker to interactively control the victim’s web browser. A notable capability is copying the victim’s Chromium profile, including its authentication state, and loading it into a hidden, headless browser on the infected system. This allows the hacker to access victims’ authenticated sessions while preserving the identifiers associated with the browser, host, and network. AmnesiaStealer can collect data in 16 Chromium-based web browsers as well as other sensitive information, such as passwords, cryptocurrency wallets, Apple Notes and documents, and keychain data.…

In brief SB 903 would prohibit companion chatbots from offering psychotherapy. AI could assist clinicians but could not make independent therapeutic decisions. The bill cleared the Assembly Appropriations Committee 13-0 on August 13. California is one step closer to barring AI chatbots from posing as therapists and making mental health decisions without human oversight.Introduced on January 21, Senate Bill 903 cleared the Assembly Appropriations Committee in a 13-0 vote on Thursday and was ordered to a third reading. No date has been announced for the Assembly vote.Myriad: When will OpenAI release GPT-6? Click to make your prediction.“AI algorithms are not…