Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

An explosion Saturday at a Moscow restaurant that killed three people and wounded 21 others was a bombing, Russia’s national anti-terrorism committee said, the Tass state news agency reported. “A homemade explosive device blew up at a restaurant in Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow, killing three people,” said the committee, quoted by the Tass state news agency. An unidentified woman who attempted to carry the explosive device into the restaurant died in the blast as did a security guard and a patron, the news agency said. Ria Novosti reported the woman attempted to smuggle the bomb into the establishment but the…

Screen-time apps aren’t effective for many people because, in the end, they depend on your willpower. They remind you to stop scrolling or let you set timers, but such notifications can be easy to ignore.  Autonomous Key takes a different approach to this issue simply by being a physical device. It’s an NFC key that pairs with a companion app to let you lock away distracting apps. So instead of tapping a button to bypass the block, you have to physically scan the key with your phone to regain access to your locked apps. Each unlock session can last for…

In this tutorial, we build an advanced end-to-end time-series forecasting workflow with TimesFM 2.5. We begin by configuring the runtime, installing the required dependencies, detecting available hardware, and generating a realistic multi-store retail dataset with trend, seasonality, pricing, promotions, holidays, temperature effects, and random variation. We then load and compile the TimesFM 2.5 model, examine its forecast configuration, and use it for zero-shot point and probabilistic forecasting. As we progress, we evaluate forecast quality with metrics such as MAE, RMSE, sMAPE, MASE, pinball loss, and prediction-interval coverage, while also testing batched inference, rolling-origin backtesting, context-length sensitivity, covariate integration through XReg,…

Over a thousand bitcoins are believed to have been stolen so far in a hack that started to be discussed on social media in the afternoon of July 30th. Coinkite, one of the most reputable hardware wallet manufacturers, was revealed to have a critical bug in the way it generated secure private keys for its Bitcoin hardware wallets. Industry experts believe AI was used in the breach. Coldcard MK3 devices with firmware version 4.0.1 (March 2021) through 4.1.9 are the worst affected. 12- or 24-word seeds generated by the device that did not include user-generated dice rolls or a BIP 39…

The Queensland government has released new concept images for a parkland precinct to surround the 2032 Olympic stadium, as it seeks to quell concern at the loss of Brisbane’s largest inner-city parkland.But opponents of the plans – now entering the early construction phase – to build a stadium at Brisbane’s Victoria Park say the concept images are a “fantasy vision” with no detail, and which overlook the likely need for carparks, roads, transport links and plazas to accommodate large crowds.The government says its plan will retain two-thirds of Victoria Park as green space, after the construction of an oval-shaped 63,000-seat…

Fenix Flexin is best known as a member of Shoreline Mafia, a rap duo from Los Angeles. But he’s recently found solo success with the track “Rubberz,” which has climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100. Almost immediately, though, questions were raised about the song’s origins, with many speculating that it was largely, if not entirely, generated by AI. Fenix has denied those accusations, but done little to dispel them.Part of the suspicion is certainly due to the fact that the song is a dramatic left turn. Fenix has primarily trafficked in trap-influenced West Coast rap. “Rubberz,” on…

Agentic reinforcement learning research is constant algorithm modification. New estimators, new pipeline stages, new rollout schemes. In mainstream frameworks each change threads through layers of trainer, distributed backend, and rollout glue. That cost lands on the researcher at every iteration. Molt, from NVIDIA’s NeMo team, targets that cost directly. Its a PyTorch-native agentic RL framework with an unusual design target. The codebase should be compact enough for a researcher to hold in their head, and for an AI coding assistant to read and reason about in its entirety. The stated footprint is roughly 8.6K lines of RL code, measured by…

Japan’s central bank held interest rates steady at 1.0% on Friday after a reported major intervention in the yen.Key points:Japan holds interest rates at 1.0%, following market expectations.Both Japan and South Korea’s central banks reportedly engage in currency interventions, as the JPY briefly gains 3.5% overnight.Bank of Japan warns of incoming CPI inflation headwinds in the second half of the year.Yen rises up to 3.5% as Korea joins interventionIn its latest statement, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) revealed broad consensus among officials for holding rates at current levels — an outcome that markets had anticipated in advance.“The Bank will encourage the…

Long-term tracking of chronic blood cancers has revealed major genetic differences between patients whose conditions remain stable and those whose diseases eventually become more severe. The findings suggest that DNA changes may help doctors improve diagnoses, monitor patients more accurately, assess how treatments are working, and identify signs of progression years before symptoms become obvious. Published in Cancer Discovery, the study was led by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators. The team combined genetic analysis with detailed clinical records to investigate how chronic blood cancers can develop over several decades. The findings were also presented at the…

Beavers, often described as “ecosystem engineers”, were once widespread in Britain but were hunted to extinction about 400 years ago.In 2015, the semi-aquatic mammals were reintroduced to the wild in the River Otter, Devon, and in February this year four pairs were released to Par and Fowey rivers in Cornwall.Puttock said: “One of the biggest modifications beavers do is build dams… that creates these really complex wetlands, which for beavers provides them with safety from predators and ability to move around in the landscape.”Increasingly, our research has shown this provides benefits to us as people and society, building a more…