Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

People who have both atrial fibrillation and Alzheimer’s disease may experience slower cognitive decline when treated with newer NOAC blood thinners, according to research from Karolinska Institutet published in the European Heart Journal. Atrial fibrillation is a common heart rhythm condition in older adults and also affects many people living with Alzheimer’s disease. Doctors often prescribe blood thinners to these patients to reduce the chance of blood clots and stroke. Earlier research has suggested that anticoagulant treatment may lower the risk of developing dementia, but far less is known about whether these drugs influence cognitive decline after Alzheimer’s disease has…

Sometimes, where I live in Kyiv, I hear people say: “This feels pre-war.” It refers to situations that remind us of what life was like before. You could call it a “sense of normalcy”.For example, it refers to being able to walk around at night, travel abroad or plan your life at least six months in advance. Simple, everyday things have become a lost luxury.Sometimes people say this phrase simply because they feel that the war isn’t completely occupying their entire mental space: while attending a play at the theatre, for example, or reading arguments about Eurovision. But this ability…

First there was a moment of stunned silence. Then, in the Sala Grande, the main screening hall of the Venice film festival within the Palazzo del Cinema, the audience stood almost as one and turned to applaud the film-makers for 25 minutes.The film the audience had watched for 80 harrowing minutes was the Gaza documentary NAZA, which has been produced by the Guardian.The film’s title comes from an Israeli military acronym used euphemistically to refer to the civilians expected to be killed in a military attack.Unfolding against the background of Tel Aviv at night, the participants – intelligence officers and…

As the tech sector sounds alarms about AI’s potential to destroy humanity, entertainment labor groups are urging the public to stay focused on what’s already happening. The Verge reached out to Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Lionsgate, and other studios who have started using AI, as well film startups focused on bringing generative AI into the mainstream to ask for their reaction to the recent warnings surrounding the technology. None have responded to our request for comment. The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) did, however.The AI tools used…

First, separate 2 ideas: containers vs. quantization methods Most confusion comes from mixing 2 layers. A container defines how tensors are stored on disk. A quantization method defines how weights are squeezed into fewer bits. Containers: safetensors, GGUF, PyTorch pickle (.bin / .pt). Methods: GPTQ, AWQ, bitsandbytes NF4, llama.cpp K-quants and I-quants. Both at once: EXL2 and EXL3 are a method plus a storage layout tied to one inference library. A quick memory rule of thumb Weight memory ≈ parameters × bits-per-weight ÷ 8. Model16-bit~4.5 bits per weight8B~16 GB~4.5 GB70B~140 GB~39 GB This is arithmetic, not a vendor benchmark. It…

A flaw in four widely used AI coding agents lets someone who controls a plugin’s code repository swap the plugin an agent installs for a malicious one, even when the agent locked that plugin to a specific reviewed version, security firm Air Security said on Thursday. The firm said Anthropic has patched the flaw in Claude Code 2.1.179 and OpenAI in Codex 0.146.0, that GitHub Copilot has no fix, and that Google will not patch the Gemini CLI, which it is retiring. The agents install add-ons called plugins from online marketplaces. To stay safe, a marketplace locks each plugin to…

Public blockchains create a privacy problem. Paying from a visible address can expose its balance, previous transactions and links to other addresses. A shielded Zcash payment hides the sender, recipient and amount from the public record, allowing a customer to pay without handing the merchant or anyone watching the blockchain a searchable trail into their finances.Zcash block timesBlocks are batches of transactions that miners add to a blockchain, and a payment receives its first confirmation when it appears in one. Cutting Zcash’s target block time would let an exchange or bridge that waits for a fixed number of confirmations release…

Is there a scholar better at promoting a book launch than Emily Wilson? Almost a decade ago she revolutionized the promotion of literary translation after the release of her first Odyssey translation. While literary media outlets were breathlessly heralding the arrival of the first-ever translation of the Odyssey into English by a woman, Wilson took to Twitter and showed everyone in granular detail how a translator works, with lengthy threads (still available here, even though Wilson has since deleted her Twitter account) detailing how the choices she’d made differed from earlier renditions. The threads combined transparency, accessibility, and humor, and…

More than 1.1 million low-income families in rented homes face a “cost of housing” crunch without action from John Healey in next month’s budget, the Resolution Foundation thinktank has warned.Local housing allowance (LHA) has been frozen in cash terms since autumn 2024.In a new report, Saving Private Renters, the thinktank found that rising rents since then have led to a widening gap between what families claiming LHA can afford, and the realities of the market.It said a low-income family renting a typical two-bedroom flat now faces an average shortfall of £158 a week. That rises to more than £300 a…

“With the Left party, above all, what you get is new socialism,” Kristin Brinker, the AfD’s lead candidate in Berlin, told Welt TV. “We know — if we look back — that Berlin has already experienced socialism, and given the state of the real estate market at that time, that’s something many people don’t want.” Legal hurdles The AfD has no chance of taking real political power in Berlin, as all other parties have ruled out working with the far right. But a potential left-wing coalition would still need to overcome many hurdles. Although an expert commission concluded in 2023…