Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Circle has scheduled the public launch of Arc for Sept. 16, giving USDC a network where the same dollar balance can fund both payments and transaction fees. That could remove a common obstacle to using stablecoins, giving Circle a possible way to attract additional USDC demand as it competes with Tether.The public-mainnet rollout follows a private network that Circle said had more than 100 ecosystem and institutional builders in August.Arc’s public testnet opened on Oct. 28, 2025. Today’s scheduled milestone is the move to a public production network, where its design can face a broader commercial test.One balance for payments…

Scientists have puzzled for years over why Venus, despite being similar to Earth in size, mass, and overall structure, has no moon. New research from UC Riverside suggests a striking possibility: Venus may once have had a moon, only to eventually pull it back into the planet. Previous explanations generally focused on two possibilities. One suggested that Venus once had a moon that was later destroyed by a massive impact. Another proposed that Venus simply never experienced the kind of collision that could have created a moon in the first place. A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal offers…

The unfinished expansion of Gross Reservoir near Denver can proceed after three judges ruled Tuesday in favor of the federal government and a water utility’s challenge to a lower court opinion halting construction. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Denver Water defended the dam expansion before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals against a challenge from the environmental group Save The Colorado. The organization sued the agency in part on the grounds that the Corps did not fully account for the dam’s impacts on the Colorado River system that is already stressed by climate change.  “It’s nonsensical to be…

Re the Thirlwall report on the Lucy Letby case (Thirlwall report: what did it say about Lucy Letby case and what does it recommend?, 15 September), babies in neonatal intensive care units are saved by having consultant neonatologists (ie paediatricians who have undergone subspecialist training in neonatal medicine) doing rounds twice daily (in addition to being immediately available), trained neonatal nurses and appropriately resourced units – not by installing cameras on cots and insulin fridges.Dr Chris FitzpatrickRetired consultant obstetrician; former CEO of Coombe hospital, Dublin, Ireland Following the introduction of a competitive element in the nominative determinism debate (Letters, 15 September),…

The claim that six images circulating online showed Iranian damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East is still under investigation. According to CBS News, the outlet that first shared the images, they came from active service members who shared them on condition of anonymity “because of rigid media restrictions within the military.” Snopes does not rely on anonymous sources. We could not independently verify the authenticity of the photographs because we could not speak to the people who took them and verify their metadata (information about where and when a photo is taken). As such, we leave claims…

The boss of Snapchat says the firm would be “willing to implement” time limits for teens, following a call from Meta for it to take action.Evan Spiegel told the BBC in an interview at the company’s California headquarters that he believed setting a maximum amount of time that young users could spend on the app could be “an important step forward for the industry.” His comments came as the firm revealed a slew of new features for its upcoming Specs glasses, which it said could connect to Apple iPhone and Mac devices.Meta has been pressuring other social media companies to…

North Rhine-Westphalia’s Minister-President Hendrik Wüst (CDU) is frequently mentioned, but he has elections in his populous home state coming up in April — so the timing isn’t great for him. An alternative would be Markus Söder of the Christian-Social Union, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, but he isn’t short of critics. Other, less probable potential candidates are Hesse’s Minister President Boris Rhein (CDU) and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU). However, should the elections Sunday be a total disaster for Merz’ conservatives — the party could even miss the 5% hurdle to enter parliament in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, for the first time…

Lance Whitney/ZDNET ZDNET’s key takeaways Microsoft’s new update patches a nasty audio problem. The update also fixes other recent glitches. Some bugs came with the Sept. Patch Tuesday update. Microsoft has released an out-of-band patch to squash an annoying audio bug in Windows 11. Also: The latest Windows 11 update may mess with your device’s audio – here’s the workaround The patch launched on Monday for Windows 11 26H2, 25H2, and 24H2, and resolves a glitch that prevented audio from playing on certain headsets, speakers, and other USB-connected devices. Specifically, the problem impacted USB Audio Class 1.0 devices, which use…

Nunchux AI has released VC-Attention, a training-free low-bit attention kernel built for video Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). It targets 2 problems at once: value quantization error and a slow softmax stage. Why Attention is the Video Bottleneck Video DiTs flatten a clip into 1 sequence of spatiotemporal tokens and run full self-attention at every layer. A 5-second 720p Wan2.2-14B clip spans about 70K tokens. On the RTX 5090, attention takes more than 64% of generation time. The research team states that attention is about two thirds of every MiniMax-H3 denoising step on a single B200. Low-bit Tensor Cores speed up the…

The rapid emergence of AI has radically changed a host of professions, with software engineering and development perhaps the most transformed of all pursuits. The usual “solitary ritual” of a developer writing code for hours is giving way to collaboration with an army of chatbots. In its 2025 report on the State of AI-Assisted Software Development, Google Cloud researchers found that even then, LLM usage was almost universal among coders, with 90% of developer respondents using AI as part of their work, and 80% believing it has increased their productivity. An earlier Microsoft study documented the effects AI had on…