Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Fred Vasseur has reflected on Ferrari's strategy during the Dutch Grand Prix after Lewis Hamilton criticised the team's decisions over the radio.
Gunmen attacked worshippers in Dekara village on Friday taking women, children and older people
An armed group has posted a video showing what residents said were about 600 women, children and older people abducted in an attack on a mosque in Nigeria’s north-central Niger State last week.
The video, posted on Facebook and WhatsApp, showed large groups of people seated in a forested area surrounded by armed men. Several children could be heard crying in the background.
Continue reading...The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world
Continue reading...Richard Plugge criticises UCI for its lack of action
‘Riders must be certain they can race on a safe course’
Richard Plugge, the manager of the former Tour de France winner, Jonas Vingegaard, has criticised cycling’s governing body, the UCI, for a lack of action following the death of Fin Tarling 10 days ago and said that cycling’s leading teams should take responsibility for ensuring safety in races.
“Neither UCI president David Lappartient, nor anyone else, stands up and says: ‘Wait a minute, we really need to think about how we are going to prevent this from happening in the future,’” said Plugge, manager of the Visma Lease a bike team.
Continue reading...Five-day trial at high court in Glasgow heard Dott subjected a girl and a boy to multiple incidents of abuse
The former world snooker champion Graeme Dott has been found guilty of sexually abusing two primary school age children. The 49-year-old subjected a girl and a boy to multiple incidents of abuse, with the girl targeted between 1993-96 and the boy between 2006-10.
A five-day trial at the high court in Glasgow heard Dott exposed himself in front of both children, touched them inappropriately, and kissed them. On Monday, he was found guilty of two counts of lewd, indecent and libidinous behaviour towards them. In both cases the abuse happened in the Glasgow area.
Continue reading...PSG flexed their muscles, bringing Ferran Torres off the bench to save the day, but only because Rennes made them
On the scale of expressions of prowess and power, Paris Saint-Germain bringing almost €150m worth of attacking talent off the bench – including the man who scored the winning goal in the World Cup final last month – ranks only a couple of rungs below the level of the extravagant aggression of a military parade. Imposing, dominating, re-asserting, this wasn’t about expression but necessity as the reigning European champions initially floundered against a Rennes team that lived up to their billing as the best of the rest in Ligue 1.
PSG were forced into rolling out their new attacking arsenal early. For 45 minutes, Rennes’ incessant pressing and fluidity in transition had Luis Enrique’s side under duress. Sebastien Szymanski opened the scoring with a sliced effort from outside the box that clipped in off the inside of a post.
Continue reading...
Gluons are the quantum 'Gorilla Glue' involved in binding quarks together, ScienceAlert reminds us. But for nearly 50 years, physicists have hunted for "glueballs", exotic particles predicted by this theory of the strong interaction — the only type of particle in nature composed entirely of force mediators:
Now, a collaboration working at a collider in Beijing says it has the clearest evidence yet that a known particle called X(2370) is dominated by one of these elusive states... Physicists sifted through the wreckage of high-energy particle collisions to find strong evidence of this glueball, made predominantly of gluons — massless force carriers of the strong interaction between quarks... The new evidence for this exotic, unstable glueball's ephemeral existence comes from a recent preprint on arXiv, presented at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Brazil... This collaboration uses the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II, a particle accelerator and collider that smashes electrons into their antimatter counterparts, called positrons, to probe perplexing particle physics.
The resultant glueball is an "unprecedented form of matter," says Jin Shan, a particle physicist at Nanjing University and one of the research team's leaders. "It not only enables the theory describing strong interactions to pass its most rigorous test, but also vastly expands the boundaries of our understanding of the physical world," he told Fan Chen at South China Morning Post... Previously, in a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters in 2024, the researchers analyzed 10 billion meson decay events. They measured the X(2370) particle's mass and spin parity — a property that dictates its interactions and almost-instantaneous decay — for the first time, finding complete agreement between their experimental values and predictions. Now, they've identified its additional decay modes and determined its flavor-singlet nature, "the most important characteristic of a glueball...."
The authors describe their work as the clearest experimental result to emerge from nearly 50 years of glueball searches, supporting the long-standing theoretical prediction that gluons can bind together into a new form of matter.
The discovery ""highlights advances in technology and analytical techniques that have recently revealed another decades-in-the-making physics mystery," the article points out.
"More experiments are needed to further confirm and constrain the prototypes of the highly esoteric glueball; in other words, more particle smashing."
Now, a collaboration working at a collider in Beijing says it has the clearest evidence yet that a known particle called X(2370) is dominated by one of these elusive states... Physicists sifted through the wreckage of high-energy particle collisions to find strong evidence of this glueball, made predominantly of gluons — massless force carriers of the strong interaction between quarks... The new evidence for this exotic, unstable glueball's ephemeral existence comes from a recent preprint on arXiv, presented at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Brazil... This collaboration uses the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II, a particle accelerator and collider that smashes electrons into their antimatter counterparts, called positrons, to probe perplexing particle physics.
The resultant glueball is an "unprecedented form of matter," says Jin Shan, a particle physicist at Nanjing University and one of the research team's leaders. "It not only enables the theory describing strong interactions to pass its most rigorous test, but also vastly expands the boundaries of our understanding of the physical world," he told Fan Chen at South China Morning Post... Previously, in a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters in 2024, the researchers analyzed 10 billion meson decay events. They measured the X(2370) particle's mass and spin parity — a property that dictates its interactions and almost-instantaneous decay — for the first time, finding complete agreement between their experimental values and predictions. Now, they've identified its additional decay modes and determined its flavor-singlet nature, "the most important characteristic of a glueball...."
The authors describe their work as the clearest experimental result to emerge from nearly 50 years of glueball searches, supporting the long-standing theoretical prediction that gluons can bind together into a new form of matter.
The discovery ""highlights advances in technology and analytical techniques that have recently revealed another decades-in-the-making physics mystery," the article points out.
"More experiments are needed to further confirm and constrain the prototypes of the highly esoteric glueball; in other words, more particle smashing."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ShinyHunters has claimed another cybersecurity scalp, but ReliaQuest says the crew's social engineering attack only got as far as one employee identity before its defenses slammed the door. The ransomware baddies listed US-based infosec biz ReliaQuest on its leak site on August 23, claiming the corporation as its latest victim. The listing, seen by The Register, links to screenshots the gang claims show access to ReliaQuest's Okta dashboard. It did not publish any stolen customer data, however, and SOCRadar said it had found no validated data samples, ransom demand, or evidence of customer impact. There had already been some public needle between the two sides. Days earlier, ReliaQuest researchers posted about ShinyHunters registering company-name “.claims” domains as part of its social engineering campaigns. An account associated with the crew responded with screenshots and the question: "Who's hunting who?" ReliaQuest has now responded to the crew’s claim, confirming an attack took place on August 22 but disputing the suggestion that ShinyHunters compromised its systems. "On August 22, 2026, ReliaQuest was the target of a social engineering attack. It was unsuccessful beyond temporarily exposing one identity," a ReliaQuest spokesperson told The Register. "The extent of the access was view only. No ReliaQuest applications or systems were accessed, and no customer data was ever touched." The company said it would make no further comment beyond the statement and a technical account of the incident published on its website. According to that account, the attackers set up a fake ReliaQuest single sign-on page and called several employees while pretending to be members of the company's security team. One employee entered their password and approved an MFA push, giving the attacker temporary access to their identity session. ReliaQuest says that was as far as ShinyHunters got. Device-trust controls prevented the attacker from using the session to reach company applications or systems, while the security team killed the session, expired the employee's password, and reset their authentication factors. ShinyHunters, unsurprisingly, has a different take. "This time the post is about you, not us. Let Mandiant report and advise on us accurately, go away," reads a post on the gang's leak site, For all the posturing, the two sides aren't actually arguing over whether ShinyHunters got a foot in the door. ReliaQuest acknowledges that an employee was successfully phished and an identity session briefly exposed. The fight is over what happened next: ShinyHunters is presenting ReliaQuest as its latest victim, while ReliaQuest says its controls stopped the attacker before they could turn that foothold into access to anything that mattered. ®
