Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Chemists depend on sophisticated molecules to develop life-saving drugs, produce advanced high-tech materials, and recreate processes found in living systems. One of the most useful tools for building these complicated structures is single-electron transfer, a technique that can activate molecules that would otherwise resist reacting and allow them to join together. For decades, however, chemists have faced a basic limitation in how electron transfer works. When two molecules are competing to receive an electron, the electron typically goes to the molecule that is easier to reduce. That natural preference can prevent researchers from directing reactions toward other potentially useful pathways.…

It is not clear whether Natalie Morris’s labour began spontaneously or was induced (By day five of my labour, I didn’t want an ‘ideal birth’. I only wanted to survive, 6 August). Nevertheless, what is described is not a debate about “ideal birth”, but an account of undiagnosed labour dystocia.By day four she had contractions but no cervical dilatation, was exhausted, unable to sit down, and knew instinctively she needed help. These are features of pathophysiology that should have prompted reassessment. That failure was not ideology. It was a lack of education and training among both midwives and doctors in…

Ahmed al-Jubouri and a close associate were arrested on charges of misusing contract funds in Saladin province.Published On 9 Aug 20269 Aug 2026The former governor of Iraq’s Saladin province, Ahmed al-Jubouri, also known as Abu Mazen, has been arrested on corruption charges, Iraqi media say.Al-Jubouri was arrested in Baghdad on Saturday after allegedly embezzling funds from Saladin province contracts, a senior government source told the Iraqi News Agency said. The news was widely confirmed by other Iraqi media.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listThe politician served as governor of Saladin from 2013 to 2014, followed by a tenure as…

Why WIRED recommends: The compression and vibrating pairing is therapeutic, to say the least; it consistently left my legs feeling less stiff after workouts. Everything is controlled from an LCD screen built into the lead boot, so there’s no separate controller to keep track of. You can tailor every session to your preference, with durations ranging from 10 to 60 minutes in five-minute increments and manual controls to adjust both pressure—measured in millimeters of mercury (mmHg)—and vibration intensity. You can also choose from four compression modes and eight preset routines.The trade-offs: Therabody doesn’t publish key specs about the LEDs, and…

LLM applications fail in ways traditional software does not. The same prompt can produce different outputs. A retrieval step can return the wrong document while every HTTP status reads 200. An agent can loop through fourteen tool calls, burn thousands of tokens, and deliver a confidently wrong answer. Standard application performance monitoring (APM) alone does not capture this semantic behavior — prompt and output quality, retrieval relevance, or agent-level reasoning traces. This is the gap LLM observability and evaluation platforms fill. They record every span of an LLM pipeline — prompts, completions, retrievals, tool calls,…

In brief Supporters of BIP-110 split off into a minority Bitcoin chain on Saturday at block 961,632, but it mined only two blocks in about eight hours before stalling, falling dozens of blocks behind the main network. The fork inherited Bitcoin’s difficulty setting with barely any hashpower—about 2.53% of recent blocks signaled support, far below the 55% activation threshold, BIP-110 sought to temporarily block non-financial data like Ordinals inscriptions from transactions, a move critics including Michael Saylor call a dangerous precedent. The long-simmering fight over a controversial Bitcoin network proposal finally produced a chain split over the weekend, but the…

Uranium, a radioactive heavy metal, is typically locked inside minerals in soil. However, mining and other environmental processes can change uranium into forms that dissolve in water. Once it becomes mobile in this way, it can spread through the environment and create problems because of its toxicity. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), working with Wismut GmbH and scientists from the University of Granada, have now shown for the first time that bacteria can transform uranium dissolved in water into a stable chemical compound when glycerol is available as a food source. During this process, the uranium enters a chemical…

Tehran, Iran – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have expanded their mutual defence pact to add Turkiye, raising questions about the emergence of a new security architecture at a time when the United States and Iran have yet to reach a final deal to end their war.Under the agreement signed in Mecca on Friday, any external armed attack on either of the three countries will now be considered an attack on all.The trilateral pact was announced more than five months after the US and Israel launched a bombing campaign against Iran, triggering a conflict that quickly spread to the Gulf and disrupted…

The UK will move faster and be more ambitious on achieving closer ties with Europe under Andy Burnham’s government, his new chief post-Brexit negotiator has said.Hamish Falconer, the new cabinet minister in charge of the EU reset talks, said there was “room to be ambitious” within Labour’s red lines on Europe, which exclude reopening discussions on the single market and customs union, and he would look at the “art of the possible”.He said greater cooperation on services – which might include visa-free travel for British people working in the EU, or mutual recognition of qualifications – was the next big…

When Hamish Falconer left his career as a Foreign Office diplomat for the hostile environment of a Labour party selection process, one of his last acts was a negotiation to free six hostages from the Taliban.When he won the key marginal seat of Lincoln in the 2024 general election, he did not expect to be back in those offices on King Charles Street quite so quickly – he was appointed Middle East minister just two weeks later.Two years on, he is one among the first three of his generation of MPs to reach the cabinet, and he is back around…