Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Ontology suspended mainnet block production to investigate a potential security concern, pausing the network while its technical team and validators reviewed the issue.A public-node snapshot showed a gap of about five hours and six minutes since the chain’s last recorded block.The project announced the pause at 09:09 UTC on Aug. 31. Ontology called it a preventive measure and said it had not confirmed a security incident or found any indication that user assets had been lost or compromised. Based on the project’s assessment at the time, its ONT and ONG crypto assets, along with other on-chain assets, remained unaffected.Public node…

Most people decide if it’s safe to eat an old tub of yogurt in the fridge or canned tuna in the back of the cupboard by checking its sell-by date. But no label indicates that pesticides, phthalates, PFAS or other hazardous chemicals could be seeping from those containers into your food. Of more than 15,000 chemicals that come in contact with food, a new peer-reviewed study found, 1,222 pose serious health risks such as cancer and reproductive harm. And the vast majority—87 percent, or more than 13,200—lack enough accessible information to even estimate their risks. The fact that there’s not…

A “massive” Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv and its surrounding areas killed at least four people and wounded more than a dozen others, Ukrainian officials said Tuesday. The strikes came as children were set to return to school after the summer holidays, and as officials tightened security measures during fears of further Russian strikes. “Kyiv region came under a massive attack by Russian missiles and strike drones tonight,” Kyiv regional military administration chief Tymur Tkachenko said on Telegram. AFP journalists in the capital heard around a dozen loud explosions and saw flashes in sky early Tuesday moments after…

John Healey has asked junior Treasury staff – including IT workers and apprentices – to send him ideas for his October budget, saying he will listen to all suggestions regardless of grade or profession.The chancellor’s unorthodox approach comes as he faces a tricky autumn with expected inflation rises, sluggish growth and potential cuts from other departments to fund extra defence spending.Healey, who was Andy Burnham’s surprise choice for chancellor, is understood to have written to staff at the Treasury campuses in London, Norwich, Leeds and Darlington asking them to send him ideas.He said he did not only want to hear…

I had been leery of prepared meal delivery services. They gave me flashbacks to those delivery diet plans sold on late night television in the 1990s. And so Tempo Meals, a spin-off prepared meal brand from meal kit service Home Chef, came as a pleasant surprise even after testing dozens of meal kits.Tempo meals look like TV dinners, but they’ve never been frozen, thanks to advances in packaging technology. The beef barbacoa and sous-vide chicken I tried actually retained moisture and tenderness. Green beans were still vibrantly green, with a little bit of snap. They’re cooked in a commissary kitchen,…

Voice agents fail on exactly the parts of a call that matter most: the order number, the callback digits, the email address the caller has to write down. Gradium AI has released a new text-to-speech model and made it the default across its API and Studio. The company reports an 81.0% human-rated pass rate on a 500-sentence hard-case set spanning five languages, ahead of Cartesia Sonic 3.6 at 75.1% and ElevenLabs v3 Conversational at 65.4%. Time to first audio is 216 ms at P50 on Coval, 170 ms faster than the model it replaces. Is it deployable? Yes, today, with…

Strive, a publicly traded asset manager and Bitcoin treasury company, added 1,800 Bitcoin to its holdings last week, accelerating an accumulation strategy that has propelled it into the ranks of the world’s five biggest publicly traded corporate Bitcoin holders.The company purchased the Bitcoin (BTC) for approximately $143 million between Aug. 24 and Aug. 28, paying an average price of $79,431 per BTC, including fees and expenses. CEO Matt Cole confirmed the acquisition on Monday.The purchase brought Strive’s total holdings to 23,156 Bitcoin, up from 21,356 BTC a week earlier. As Cointelegraph reported, the company had purchased 1,110 BTC the previous…

Future quantum computers may depend on the ability to connect widely separated modules through distributed entanglement. Until now, creating this kind of connection has generally required active control and repeated measurements. Physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have now demonstrated a fully autonomous alternative based on a “quantum bath” made from correlated particles of light. Published in Physical Review X, the experiment provides the first demonstration of a prediction proposed more than 20 years ago. The approach could eventually offer a new foundation for practical quantum technologies. Connecting Distant Quantum Bits Entanglement is one of the…

A three-decade study of Australia’s beloved superb fairywren revealed a substantial decline in what was previously considered a common species in the capital, Canberra. This population could disappear within decades.Researchers say this is part of a worrying trend of declining woodland birds and insects in Australia and across the globe, mainly driven by loss of habitat, pesticides and changing climate.The study highlighted the “catastrophic cumulative effect” that multiple small impacts from climate change can have on wildlife.Through collaborative efforts between ornithologists, entomologists and local communities, Australia could reshape its urban environments and better monitor the health of its birds:…

Members of more than 200 unions and other organizations marched the 2025 New York City Labor Day parade. (Selcuk Acar/Anadol/Getty Images) Americans will mark Labor Day on Sept. 7. But organized labor’s political impact is felt every day in Washington. OpenSecrets data shows that organized labor set a record for lobbying expenditures last year – spending $58 million trying to influence the federal government – after doling out $288 million in election-related spending in 2023-24. “It’s expensive to play in American politics right now, and if you want to be at that table, you’re going to have to put out…