Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Only two complete dodo skulls are known anywhere in the world. One is housed at the Natural History Museum Denmark, while the other belongs to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The Copenhagen specimen has remained in the museum’s collections for centuries, and it has now played a key role in an international investigation led by researchers at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. Their goal was to explore a long-standing mystery: how did the dodo perceive and interact with the world around it? Using digital reconstructions of the space that once held the bird’s brain, scientists were able…

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. The best-known wildlife recoveries in the U.S. are often associated with the West. Yet some important gains have occurred east of the Mississippi, among cities, roads, farms, and landscapes altered over several centuries. Andrew Moore’s new book, Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America’s Eastern Wilderness, examines the decline and partial return of animals that once occupied the region in abundance. Before European settlement and large-scale land conversion, eastern habitats supported bison, elk, moose, woodland caribou, cranes, black…

The biggest sales of poetry since records began are expected this year. The reason? The movies, of course. UK print sales of The Odyssey increased by 1,400% in the four weeks to 25 July compared with the same period last year. In the US, year-to-date sales of The Odyssey are up 76% so far. Christopher Nolan is doing miracles for Homer – whatever problems one might have with the movie (and Emily Wilson, who made the most popular recent translation, has a few).Strip out the Odyssey factor, though, and poetry is still doing exceptionally well, driven by writers whose work…

When Mathipa was assigned to the case a month later, he issued a subpoena to special forces to force them to hand over full details of this alleged training exercise and all the personnel involved.When access to these documents was finally promised, three months later, Mathipa had a premonition that he would be murdered – according to Brig Paulina Sekgobela, his commanding officer.”When [Mathipa] left my office he said: ‘Brigadier, you know, these people – they are going to kill me. I’m going to die’,” she told the BBC.On the day Mathipa was killed, he was phoned by a man…

Bill Swearingen has spent the past year running largely the same test, over and over again. The goal was to produce a computer-generated pattern that could block the surveillance cameras lining America’s streets from detecting it. Some 31 million tests later, Swearingen says he can now produce patterns on-demand that, when applied to clothing and objects, prevent some of the most commonly deployed license plate readers and surveillance cameras from detecting whatever the pattern covers, from people to vehicles. His project, which he calls noRecognition, allows people to escape the automatic detection and algorithmic surveillance used across the U.S. and…

OpenAI has announced that it’s pausing some “internal activities” involving its upcoming artificial intelligence (AI) model Astra after an internal evaluation found it had made significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity. In response to the discovery, the AI upstart said it’s implementing security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities, such as isolated testing environments, restricted network and tool access, enhanced model weight protections and encryption, additional monitoring and detection capabilities, and sandboxed execution. “We are pausing internal activities involving Astra that do not yet meet these strengthened security control requirements,” it said in a statement. “We have implemented…

AI Financial Corp. has swapped ALT5 Sigma Canada for a secured note and restricted shares. As a result, only $1 million of note principal is due in the near term, while a separate, conditional WLFI transferability window approaches.On Aug. 3, the company sold its indirect, wholly owned subsidiary to Prime Delta. Under the terms disclosed Aug. 7, AI Financial received a $12 million secured promissory note and 11,551,750 restricted Prime Delta shares. Prime Delta must pay the first $1 million of note principal on Aug. 11.Prime Delta must pay the remaining $11 million from 20% of its post-closing equity financings.…

The stress hormone cortisol can interfere with the brain system that helps people navigate and stay oriented. Researchers from Ruhr University Bochum in Germany found that cortisol weakens the activity of grid cells, specialized nerve cells that are essential for spatial navigation. The finding comes from an imaging study involving 40 participants who completed a virtual navigation task while researchers monitored their brain activity with MRI. When participants were given cortisol before the experiment, they had more difficulty finding their way, and the normally precise activity patterns produced by grid cells became much less distinct. The findings were published in…

A Liberal figure under investigation for allegedly accepting illegal donations has told the corruption watchdog that it does not have a “shred of evidence” that he was part of a conservative factional group, saying he told members “not to keep going” after it became “toxic”.Consultant and lobbyist, Jeremy Greenwood, 37, who is named in two of the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s (Icac) allegations as part of Operation Rosny, gave evidence on Monday.Greenwood, who earlier told the inquiry he had “a lot going on at home at the moment”, revealed on Monday afternoon his wife was having contractions during his evidence.Icac…

Over the past few months, AI agents undergoing cybersecurity evaluations have escaped their boundaries, accessed the internet, and, in some cases, hacked into real-world systems. The incidents have involved models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and most recently, Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, with testing conducted by several different organizations including a cyber evaluation startup called Irregular.  The episodes expose a growing problem for the AI industry: As autonomous agents become more capable, the environments designed to safely test their limits are failing to contain them.  “The number of these incidents that have taken place make clear that sandboxing and testing…