AI-based fincrime startup Tangos raises $20 million
Tangos AI, a financial crime prevention platform, raised $20 million in seed funding led by Red Dot Capital Partners. The round included participation from Leaders Fund, Clarim Ventures, VentureIsrael, Signal Fire, Clutch Capital, and Selah Ventures, plus a strategic investment from Bright Data.
A win-win, animal crossings make roads safer for wildlife and people
Wildlife crossings like underpasses and overpasses with roadside fencing reduce animal deaths and habitat fragmentation caused by roads. These structures allow animals to safely cross divided landscapes while improving safety for drivers and vehicles.
Banks to pilot live transactions on Swift's blockchain-based shared ledger
Seventeen banks from six countries will pilot live transactions on Swift's blockchain-based shared ledger using tokenized deposits. The pilot enables 24/7 payment availability and improved liquidity efficiency across participating institutions.
Four nuclear reactors hit a big milestone in the US
Three US microreactors achieved criticality, a technical milestone showing they can sustain nuclear chain reactions. The Trump administration set this goal last year, with the achievement occurring around July 4th of this year.
One interface isn't enough for enterprise AI
Organizations will adopt enterprise AI through multiple interfaces tailored to different business functions rather than a single unified system. Finance teams requiring strict controls, analytics groups exploring data, and customer service focusing on response times will each implement AI differently based on their distinct operational constraints.
Trees keep absorbing carbon long after they stop growing
Trees continue absorbing carbon dioxide after their growth stops, indicating that photosynthesis and wood production operate independently. This discovery may require revisions to predictions about carbon storage capacity in forests under future climate conditions.
A vitamin A discovery is changing what scientists know about vision
Blue cone cells transform into red and green cones during fetal development under vitamin A-related signals and thyroid hormones, rather than migrating away from the retina's center. This discovery could improve lab-grown retinal tissue development and support future cell therapies for age-related vision loss.
Harvard scientists turn a silicon chip into a DNA writing machine
A silicon chip can now write dozens of DNA sequences at once using electricity and water-based enzymes. The technology offers a cleaner alternative to conventional DNA manufacturing methods and could eventually enable portable DNA-writing devices and massive DNA data storage applications.
Tiny silica particles wiped out aggressive prostate cancer in mice
Engineered silica nanoparticles triggered tumor cell death and immune system activation in mice with aggressive prostate cancer. When combined with immunotherapy, the treatment achieved complete remissions in multiple mice.
Robbyant Releases LingBot-VLA 2.0: An Open-Source 6B Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Model for Cross-Embodiment Robot Manipulation
A 6-billion-parameter vision-language-action model trained on 60,000 hours of data across 20 robot configurations enables cross-embodiment robot manipulation. The model maps all robot types into a unified 55-dimensional canonical action space and uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture without load-balancing loss for scaling capacity.
Nium Acquires Cypher to Bridge Fiat and Crypto
Nium acquired Cypher to combine cross-border payments infrastructure with crypto-native non-custodial wallet and issuing capabilities. This merger creates infrastructure for compliant money movement between fiat and digital assets.
Heidelberg physicists just united two opposing quantum theories
Physicists unified two competing quantum theories explaining how impurities behave in many-particle systems, solving a decades-old problem. The breakthrough applies to research on ultracold atoms, semiconductors, and exotic quantum matter systems.
Crypto Advocates Push Senate to Pass CLARITY Act Before August Deadline
The CLARITY Act faces an August 7 deadline for Senate passage to establish federal cryptocurrency standards instead of fragmented state regulations. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig stated on July 8 that passage is critical and described the effort as near completion.
SpaceXAI Releases Grok 4.5, a Cursor-Trained Model for Coding, Agentic Tasks, and Knowledge Work at $2/M Input
Grok 4.5, a model trained for coding and agentic tasks, processes at 80 tokens per second with input costs of $2 per million tokens. The model ranks first on Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark.
Rare goblin shark filmed alive for the first time in the deep sea
Researchers filmed a living goblin shark in its natural deep-sea habitat for the first time, documenting this 125-million-year-old species in the ocean depths. The footage expanded the known range and depth distribution of this elusive predator.
NATO is building an AI ‘Kill Web’ to stop a Russian attack before it starts
NATO is constructing an AI network along its eastern border to detect and respond rapidly to potential Russian attacks through the Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative. The system aims to identify threats early and enable quick counterstrikes before an attack fully materializes.
Satellites are transforming biodiversity monitoring for global nature targets, but major gaps remain
Satellites and remote sensing technologies are enabling large-scale monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystem health for countries reporting under international nature targets. However, the review identifies significant limitations in current satellite capabilities for comprehensive biodiversity assessment.
Scientists used AI to crack one of water's biggest mysteries
Researchers at the University of Osaka used an AI model trained on computer simulations to evaluate 16 different structural descriptors of supercooled water. The system identified the most effective ways to distinguish between water's two competing liquid states.
‘We cannot choose to become idiots’: a Brown professor’s proof of mass AI cheating
A Brown University economics professor observed his take-home midterm average drop from 96 to 48 when he switched the final exam from take-home to in-person format, suggesting widespread AI use during the unsupervised test. The professor publicly shared these results as evidence that most students in his class likely used artificial intelligence to complete the take-home assignment.
NHTSA demands autonomous vehicle companies fix first responder interference by end of July
Autonomous vehicles have driven into emergency scenes, blocked ambulances and firefighters, and failed to recognize flashing lights and other first responder signals. NHTSA ordered developers to submit solutions for this interference issue by the end of July.
SpaceX's Grok 4.5 launches at half the price of rivals — here's why that could rattle Anthropic and OpenAI
Elon Musk's SpaceX released Grok 4.5, trained specifically for coding and autonomous agents using its $60 billion Cursor acquisition, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. The model uses half as many tokens per task as comparable models and costs less than half as much as rival premium offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI.
AI money watch: five funding rounds that matter today
A quantum computing company raised $300 million while an AI-agent startup achieved a billion-dollar valuation. European startups focused on energy also received funding within a 24-hour period.
Irish drone delivery startup Manna is building a 1,000-person US factory in Tulsa to take on Zipline and Wing
Manna Aero is building a manufacturing facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma that will employ approximately 1,000 people, with production starting in about one year. The Irish drone delivery company raised $50 million in venture capital to fund this US expansion.
Scientists finally crack nature's secret for building better cancer drugs
Researchers discovered how bacteria naturally produce multiple versions of potent anti-cancer drugs. This finding could simplify engineering new cancer treatments and creating improved variants of existing medicines.
Google’s SynthID watermark just debunked its first high-profile deepfake: a hoax image of Mitch McConnell
Google's SynthID watermarking system identified an AI-generated image of Senator Mitch McConnell circulating on Reddit and X as fake, marking its first high-profile real-world application. Snopes used the technology to debunk the viral image, which depicted McConnell in a hospital bed.
Students Connect NASA Science With Indigenous Knowledge to Study Coastal Erosion
Students at Pleasant Point Passamaquoddy Reservation are combining NASA science with Indigenous knowledge to study coastal erosion affecting their community in Downeast Maine. The shoreline is eroding at an accelerating rate, threatening land with significant historical importance to the Passamaquoddy people.
Investors haven’t been this bullish on the dollar in a decade. How the buck can keep climbing.
Investors are making their largest bullish bets on the U.S. dollar in ten years, with the strength depending partly on whether recent oil price increases sustain amid Middle East tensions. The dollar's continued climb relies on whether inflation concerns from higher oil prices convince the Federal Reserve to maintain tight monetary policy.
Netflix AI Team Cuts Wide-Partition Read Latency from Seconds to Milliseconds by Splitting Cassandra Partitions Per ID
Netflix engineers reduced Apache Cassandra wide-partition read latency from seconds to low double-digit milliseconds using dynamic partitioning that splits oversized partitions per TimeSeries ID on the read path. The system detects partitions via byte counting, validates splits with checksums, and routes reads to parallel child partitions using Bloom filters while maintaining availability for 500MB+ partitions.
With EU backing, QuantumDiamonds aims to speed up chip manufacturing
QuantumDiamonds, a German startup, received EU backing to develop chip inspection technology using a novel approach. The company operates within the European Chips Act framework, which provides state subsidies to strengthen the semiconductor industry.
HubSpot tried to feed its AI with customer data. The revolt took four days
HubSpot reversed a policy change that would have used customer data for AI lead-finding features after four days of backlash. The company had automatically opted customers into data pooling on July 1 before scrapping the plan.