Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Bitcoin’s end-of-September options expiry holds 130,670 BTC of open interest, compared with 79,003 BTC for August, a headline gap large enough to look like traders are loading up before the Federal Reserve’s Sept. 16 decision.DWF Labs market insights lead Martin Lee said in a note that most of that gap has nothing to do with the Fed. September and December are the two quarterly expiries in Bitcoin options, and together they hold 59.3% of all open interest, since traders often roll positions into them.The story sits in how the market has quietly repriced its own risk.The September book is mostly…

Galaxies are like cosmic gems, each with characteristics including size and shape that make them distinct. A new gallery released today from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes displays a collection of galactic images that showcase this variety. Astronomers put galaxies into three main categories: spirals like our own Milky Way with arms emanating from their cores, ellipticals that are older and likely the results of mergers, and irregulars that can encompass a wide range of galactic phenomena. See full gallery Just as gems reveal the history of Earth through how they were forged over billions of years, these…

Growing up with dirty air harms kids’ health. But reducing pollution can help reverse the damage.  In London, an effort to combat traffic emissions led to measured improvements in kids whose lung growth was previously stunted compared to their peers outside the city. In New York City, policies that lowered prenatal exposure to air pollution helped kids perform better on cognitive tests than previous cohorts.  These findings from two new studies add to a robust body of research emphasizing the health benefits of clean air, particularly for children, who are more vulnerable than adults to its hazards. They also provide…

Norway’s oil and gas company Aker BP has kicked off production from three fields in the Norwegian Sea, bringing the developments on stream a year ahead of schedule and adding around 120 million barrels of recoverable oil equivalent to the resource base on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). FPSO Skarv; Source: Aker BP Aker BP has begun production one year ahead of the original schedule from the Skarv Satellite project (SSP), which comprises the Alve Nord, Idun Nord, and Ørn fields located near the Skarv field in the northern part of the Norwegian Sea. The fields have been developed as…

Now is the twilight of Donald Trump’s supremacy. The US is still the richest and most heavily armed nation on Earth. That status is secure. The current president, contemptuous of law and indulged in lawlessness by a supine Congress, enjoys even greater power than the constitution allows.With those advantages it takes a special talent for incompetence to look as thwarted and impotent as Trump does with more than two years of his second term still to run.History will record the war against Iran as a turning point in the fortunes of the current US administration and a grievous wound to…

The US has dubbed its latest sanctions “Operation Economic Outcast” and described them as an “economic D-Day” against Iran.It comes almost six months after the start of the Iran war.The conflict has since led to hikes in oil prices worldwide, with Tehran effectively blocking exports through the Strait of Hormuz – a waterway vital to the global economy. The US has also slowed traffic via its own naval blockade.Recent attempts to end the conflict via diplomacy have failed, and a 60-day ceasefire formally expired last week with no sign of a settlement.With the announcement of new sanctions, the US treasury…

Everton Blair Jr., a former chair of the Gwinnett County School Board in Georgia, won a special election runoff on Tuesday to serve the remainder of Representative David Scott’s term after his death in April, according to The Associated Press.Mr. Blair and Aisha Wahab, a California state senator who won a special election last week to fill former Representative Eric Swalwell’s seat, are set to cut Republicans’ majority in the House down to just four members. Currently, Republicans have a thin edge of 218 seats to 212 for Democrats.Mr. Blair defeated Marcye Scott, the congressman’s daughter, in a runoff that…

While the PS5 itself doesn’t go on sale very often, that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways of saving big in the Sony PlayStation ecosystem. Using the PlayStation discount codes below can save you money on some of the best PS5 games, our favorite cozy games, mobile gaming controllers, and gaming headsets, which is significant given how expensive modern games are. There are other ways to save money too, such as by earning cash back using a PlayStation Visa Credit Card, using a Playstation gift card, or by signing up for a PlayStation Plus membership. Here are all the best PlayStation…

Nigeria took the initial concrete steps this month toward creating its own sovereign data centers and cloud services, as more African nations accelerate the digitalization of their economies with an eye toward cybersecurity.Last week, the western African nation established the Joint Technical Committee of the National Sovereign Cloud Initiative (JTC-NSCI), an effort to expatriate data back within its borders and to break its reliance on foreign data storage and cloud providers. The sovereign cloud initiative is also designed to boost national security and help Nigeria create a deep expertise, Kashifu Inuwa, director general of NITDA and co-chairman of the JTC-NSCI,…

In brief Multiverse Computing’s team published a method called Quantization-Aware Healing on the Hugging Face blog on August 25. They shrank OpenAI’s open GPT-OSS model from 120 billion parameters to 60 billion and compressed its memory to 4-bit—and the small version beat the full-quality model it was copied from on 7 of 9 tests. The trick: teach the shrunken model from the original smart version, not the weak halfway copy. >>>> gd2md-html alert: inline image link in generated source and store images to your server. NOTE: Images in exported zip file from Google Docs may not appear in the same…