Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The world’s seas were hotter last month than in any July on record, scientists have said, as devastating heat struck western Europe.Sea surface temperatures hit record highs for July on the Atlantic coast and western Mediterranean, the EU’s Copernicus climate change service found, with severe marine heatwaves roiling Europe’s seas. Globally, the average sea surface temperature outside the cold polar regions was the highest on record for the month, beating the previous July record set in 2023.Surface air temperatures around the world in July 2026 were marginally cooler than July 2024 – by just 0.01C – leading scientists to consider…

President Trump announced on Sunday that Will Scharf, his staff secretary and a deeply conservative lawyer, would replace David Warrington as White House counsel, one of the few major changes in West Wing personnel since Mr. Trump returned to Washington.Mr. Scharf has embraced some of the most extreme elements of the president’s agenda. But he has also thrown up flares at times over matters that, according to his colleagues, he believed could imperil the presidency. Those included when Mr. Trump and his top policy adviser, Stephen Miller, weighed suspending due process rights for undocumented immigrants early last year.Mr. Trump announced…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, the role AI is playing in it. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! In just a few days, Amazon-owned Zoox will start charging for robotaxi rides. This might not seem like a big deal; the company’s custom-built robotaxis are already giving rides to passengers in Las Vegas and San Francisco, after all. And it’s opening up an early rider program in Miami and Austin too.  None of this matters — in a business…

Crypto is finally shaking off the “get rich quick” reputation that has defined the industry for more than a decade according to Nansen founder and CEO Alex Svanevik — and it’s not just because nobody’s getting rich right now.“Crypto assets have kind of been like the ‘toy world’ era of blockchains. And now we’re moving into the real-world era, where you see tokenized stocks, you see people trading indices like the S&P 500 and Hyperliquid,” Svanevik tells Magazine on the Trade Secrets show.“I think the interesting spot that blockchains are in right now is that they are basically giving a…

A man long sought by the authorities in Ireland on suspicion of links to organized crime appeared in a Dublin criminal court on Sunday following his extradition from the United Arab Emirates.The defendant, Daniel Kinahan, has been accused of running a crime ring known as the Kinahan Cartel, which was founded by his father, Christy Kinahan, a convicted drug trafficker.His extradition “sends a clear message that suspected perpetrators of serious and organized crime will find no safe haven from justice, ” Ireland’s justice minister, Jim O’Callaghan, said on social media.Mr. Kinahan was flown from the U.A.E. on Sunday on an…

During the meeting, you can watch the transcription take place nearly in real time if you want, or minimize the window and focus on your meeting. When the meeting is done, you can click the stop button, at which point you will see a transcription. From here, you can ask for an AI summary. You can even provide instructions about which points to focus on.Now, as with all AI tools, there are caveats. These systems aren’t perfect, and they may not have the same priorities as you. I intend to write my own meeting minutes using the transcript as a…

NVIDIA has released NemotronLabs VoiceChat 11B, an open 11B end-to-end speech-to-speech model for real-time, full-duplex conversation. Instead of chaining ASR, an LLM, and TTS, it performs streaming speech understanding and speech generation in one unified network. That removes the multi-model orchestration and API handoffs a cascaded stack requires, and cuts end-to-end latency: measured smooth turn-taking latency is 448 ms on Full-Duplex-Bench 1.0. The model listens while it speaks, so a user can barge in mid-turn and the agent yields, with a take-over rate of 1.00 at 480 ms. It is also first open full-duplex model to support tool calling while…

Bitcoin ‘anti-spam’ BIP goes nowhere fastSupporters of the BIP-110 soft fork hoped to eradicate spam from the blockchain, but after a lengthy and heated debate the proposal has been pronounced Dead On Arrival. After securing just 2.5% support ahead of entering mandatory signaling on Saturday, it split off into a minority chain that mined just two blocks in eight hours before stalling.This is probably no surprise given it’s just as difficult and expensive to mine on the new chain as it is on Bitcoin — but without any hope of being able to sell the block reward to recoup the…

Heavy alcohol use has consistently been tied to poorer health, no matter what type of alcohol a person drinks. At lower levels of consumption, however, the health effects may differ depending on the beverage, according to research presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session (ACC.26). The findings, based on data from more than 340,000 adults in Britain, support earlier evidence suggesting that lower alcohol consumption is generally better for health. They also offer a closer look at how low and moderate drinking may be associated with different outcomes depending on whether people consume wine, beer, cider or…

Mariano Cenamo spent more than two decades trying to make standing forests economically competitive with cattle ranching and other activities driving Amazon deforestation, helping establish Idesam and later backing a new generation of sustainable businesses.His work evolved from early efforts on forest carbon and REDD+ to agroforestry, bioeconomy ventures, investment, and entrepreneurship, always centered on creating practical sources of income for people living in the Amazon.Drawing on Cenamo’s own writings and interviews, as well as Vanessa Adachi’s posthumous portrait in Reset, this obituary explores the ideas, motivations, and personal style behind one of the Amazon’s most influential environmental entrepreneurs.Cenamo…