Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Onton, a San Francisco-based search and discovery company, has released Ontology 1, a neurosymbolic model for complex, conversational, multimodal product search. On a 90-query benchmark scored by three independent LLM judges, Ontology 1 reached a mean precision@10 of 0.630, against 0.543 for Google Shopping and 0.469 for Amazon. It did this while indexing roughly 1% of their catalogs. Is it deployable Yes, but not as weights you download. Ontology 1 is live for end users at Onton.com, and Onton says partner access is granted case by case for teams building on the agentic web. There is no public API, pricing…

In brief Texans reported $56.8 million in crypto kiosk losses in 2025, more than any other state, across 1,179 FBI complaints. National losses rose 58% to $389 million from 13,460 complaints. Indiana, Tennessee and Minnesota have banned Bitcoin ATMs outright. Texans lost $56.8 million to cryptocurrency kiosks last year, more than any other state, according to FBI figures put before a legislative committee on Thursday. The state accounted for 1,179 of the 13,460 complaints the bureau logged nationally in 2025, a year in which reported losses to the machines rose 58% to $389 million.The kiosks take cash and convert it…

Astronomers led by the University of Warwick have uncovered what they describe as a kind of cosmic digestive system around a black hole. Their observations show that even when a black hole appears faint, it may still be actively expelling large amounts of matter rather than simply swallowing everything nearby. Black holes are often pictured as unstoppable cosmic gluttons. However, new observations of a dramatic outburst led by Warwick Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Noel Castro Segura reveal a far more complicated feeding process. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the team tracked the recently discovered black hole system…

Claim: U.S. President Donald Trump once suggested that people should inject bleach or other disinfectants into their bodies to treat COVID-19. Rating: What’s True During an April 2020 media briefing, Trump did ask members of the government’s coronavirus task force to look into whether disinfectants could be injected inside people to treat COVID-19. But when a reporter asked in a follow-up question whether cleaning products like bleach and isopropyl alcohol would be injected into a person, Trump said those products would be used for sterilizing an area, not for injections. What’s False At no point did he explicitly tell people…

The Sudanese army on Sunday struck a traditional court in western Darfur with drones, killing 35 people and wounding others, a rights group said. The Emergency Lawyers, which has documented abuses by both the army and its rival paramilitaries throughout the three-year conflict, said the strike hit the court in the village of Garra al-Zawaya in North Darfur state at around 1:00 pm local time (1100 GMT), as civilians had “gathered to attend hearings on local cases and disputes”. The village is under the control of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which have been locked in a brutal conflict with the army since…

President Trump headed into the weekend having vowed that U.S. forces would unleash a furious new round of attacks against Iran, saying that the military would be “hitting them very hard.” By Saturday night, Mr. Trump said that the military was still “locked and loaded” to carry out the strikes, but that he had decided to call them off.“I was asked to by Saudi Arabia, by U.A.E., by Qatar and by Iran,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday evening aboard Air Force One on his way back to Washington from his golf club in New Jersey. “We were all set…

ZeroStack, whose digital-asset treasury is overwhelmingly composed of the AI-focused 0G token, said it expects to fund operations mainly by selling staking rewards. Management, however, could not conclude that its plans would alleviate substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.The company’s Form 10-Q, filed July 31 for the quarter ended June 30, reported $2.6 million in cash, negative working capital of $600,000, a $339.1 million accumulated deficit and a $61.3 million net loss for the first half of 2026. It also recorded an $82.5 million loss from remeasuring digital assets at fair value. That markdown…

An international research team has experimentally produced the first all-optical photonic time crystal (PTC), a material designed to change its optical behavior rapidly and repeatedly over time. The researchers came from École Polytechnique, Collège de France, and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR). Reported in Nature, the achievement was made possible by HZDR’s powerful TELBE superradiant terahertz source. The system allowed the scientists to explore a previously inaccessible form of light-matter interaction in the terahertz range. In the future, the approach could contribute to ultrafast optical computers, advanced telecommunications, and entirely new terahertz lasers. Controlling how light behaves inside materials has already led…

President Donald Trump on Sunday confirmed that the United States had intervened to support the Japanese yen, calling the move a “signal of friendship” that would financially benefit the US and world economy. The Financial Times reported on Friday that the US Treasury had jointly intervened with Japan to prop up the yen for the first time in nearly three decades. Asked aboard Air Force One why the US was moving to support Japan’s currency, Trump said: “Because we have a good relationship with Japan.” The US will see “financial benefit” from the move and “it’s also good for the…

Apps are back, or maybe they never left in the first place. While some people debate whether people will shift away from apps as AI agents make accessing online services more efficient, we’ve found the App Store to be alive and well, with a recent explosion of fun, creative, and innovative tools, experiences, and other indie efforts. Some of the more recent launches may be attributed to the rise of AI coding, which has enabled people to ship software more quickly, and allowed novices to participate in the app ecosystem. According to one report, new app launches have soared in…