Mafftopia SciTech News @mafftopia

Chippy Coin is one of those rare phenomena - a crypto memecoin with genuine utility, a growing community, and a mission - to serve free Fish & Chips every Friday! You can swap Solana for chippy coins on any Solana Dex, then you're basically good to go. @FishnChipsSOL @Web3SammyT

FishnChips - $CHIPPY 🔥👀 @FishnChipsSOL

14 hours ago

🚨🍟 ITS #FREECHIPPYFRIDAY!!!🍟🚨 Every Friday 🌍 Join in & claim your free meal: ✅ Buy a meal from a Chippy, restaurant, or pub (no homecooked meals) 📸 Take a photo of your meal with: • A timestamp (screenshot of chart, date or receipt in the pic) 💰 Must hold 1.2M

7 5 12 481 3

@ToTheMoon_Au @SaveWithCrypto @Everyone "Fixed that for you" :)

Non Farm Payroll Data TODAY - Expect Volatility!!! x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Caltech has quadrupled the resolution of a light microscope using entangled photons. But they're having a little trouble explaining why it works. Lihong Wang's team published the breakthrough in Science Advances just yesterday. The trick is what happens to one half of an entangled pair. Ordinarily both photons pass through the microscope's optics once. Here the signal photon does that, but its entangled partner gets sent back through the same lens pair three times, steered by magnetic fields and polarisation-controlling beam splitters. Measured on standard USAF resolution targets, the lab's earlier two-pass design gave about 1.8 times classical resolution. Three passes gives about four times. Wang, on where that leaves them: "Now we have entered a new physical regime... we've gone beyond that. This is the most exciting aspect of our new paper." The team is still developing a theoretical model explaining why the technique enhances resolution at all. They have a reproducible effect, no settled account of the mechanism, and they published rather than waiting for one. It builds on the same lab's 2023 work, #quantum microscopy by coincidence, which doubled resolution. What makes it useful rather than merely elegant is the light budget. Because entangled pairs carry the resolution gain, you get it at lower intensity, which is the constraint that bites when the sample is a living retina or a semiconductor wafer you'd rather not cook. Two limits. This was measured on resolution targets, not biological tissue. And Wang's suggestion that 10 times or even 100 times might follow is a projection about where the method could go, not a result anyone has. #Microscopy #Photonics Source: phys.org/news/2026-08-q…

Non-Farm Payrolls live coverage How will the announcement affect #Bitcoin's price? What about the wider economy, gold, and S&P 500? We'll cover this and more, live right here at 1pm (UK/UTC) today

Save With Crypto @SaveWithCrypto

15 hours ago

@Everyone see you all at 1pm UK (NFP Date at 1:30pm) / 12:00 UTC It's NFP DAY!!! with @mafftopia and probably @ToTheMoon_Au talking $BTC $GBB $SOL $SPCX $SNDK and more. Video Link in the first comment below...

2 1 2 199 0

beincrypto.com/coldcard-bitco… @mafftopia @SaveWithCrypto it’s a good read!

Forget About Crypto, Can We Make BIG Money With Traditional Stocks? x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

youtube.com/watch?v=8HutJ9…

@ValerieAnne1970 Anyone wondering, Organipeel (and its equivalent for non-organic produce Edipeel - gads, these names) aren't used on apples in the UK or EU. The Soil Association prohibits the use of mono- and diglycerides (E471) on organic produce.

What separates this from the offshore tokenised-equity products is the registration behind it. Dinari is an SEC-registered transfer agent, and its broker-dealer subsidiary is registered with the SEC and belongs to both FINRA and SIPC. The dShares are backed one-for-one by stock held in regulated custody, with dividends paid in USDC. That's also the reason it can take US investors at all, which most tokenised stock products still can't.

One black sea cucumber puts about 38 grams of sediment through itself a day, which is hard to see at timelapse speed. Macquarie University counted more than 3 million of them on the reef flats at Heron Island alone. That works out at roughly 64,000 tonnes of sediment turned over there every year!

A single chemical produced by one animal keeps an entire colony of mammals infertile. Naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are one of the very few eusocial mammals. One queen breeds and every other female stays sterile for as long as she's alive. Apparently we've known that for decades, but we didn't know how she was doing it - until now. And the correct answer is: Isopropyl myristate - a long-chain ester with a C17 backbone, about 270 g/mol, barely volatile. It's also a common ingredient in cosmetics. While the Queens are loaded with it, non-breeders have almost none. Gary Lewin's group at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin, with Nigel Bennett at Pretoria, published this finding in Nature on 15 July. The nose is the key (in a manner of speaking). Olfactory neurons pick the compound up, prolactin rises in non-breeders, and the prolactin desensitises the pituitary to GnRH - which is what makes them infertile. It's the same pathway that keeps nursing mothers infertile across mammals, but borrowed by the mole rats for social control. Two experiments confirmed the team's hypothesis: They pulled non-breeding pairs out of colonies and watched them for 18 weeks. * On blank bedding, 5 of 6 females gave birth. * On bedding dosed daily with 500 µl of the compound, roughly 425 mg, ZERO. None of them got pregnant; there weren't signs of mating. Then they removed a queen and kept dosing the colony. Twelve weeks went by with no aggression and no dominance contests, prolactin high and progesterone low, which is what an intact colony looks like. When they stopped, prolactin fell within a month. At week 16 the high-ranking females began fighting and one was killed. By week 19 a dominant female had gained weight, become pregnant, and given birth. The results also clear up an old contradiction. Earlier work found that transferring soiled bedding and urine from a colony didn't keep isolated animals suppressed, which had argued against any chemical signal. Isopropyl myristate is nearly absent from urine and barely travels through air, so it wouldn't have been in the material being moved. #Neuroscience #AnimalBehaviour #Biology

I've just posted an update: x.com/mafftopia/stat…

Mafftopia SciTech News @mafftopia

4 days ago

The Coldcard Bitcoin hardware wallet hack is actually still happening - while the fallout is steadily snowballing. This story isn't over by a long way. Here's what's developed in just the last few days: *** FEE AUCTION *** Four waves in, the ongoing theft has turned into a

0 0 1 246 0

#Bitcoin hardware wallet hack A hacker exploited a 2021 "bug" in Coldcard firmware to drain 1,082.65 BTC - without touching a single device. Hardware wallets are meant to be safe, right? They're offline, cold storage. The March 2021 code change quietly routed Coldcard's seed generation to a software pseudo-random number generator, seeded from predictable device-unique values, instead of the hardware RNG meant to do the job. Seeds made without supplemental entropy ended up with about 40 bits of effective randomness rather than the intended 128. 40 bits is guessable. So the attacker regenerated the likely keys offline, with no rate limit and nothing to alert anyone, then swept the results in one pass. The irony is that the "bug" in question was virtually: // TODO We know this is incredibly lame and dangerous but we'll fix it later The ACTUAL comment from the committed code was: // A pseudo-RNG is not really ideal but we go with it for now Galaxy Research counts 1,196 addresses drained between 01:10:20 and 01:51:26 UTC on 30 July. $70.2 million filched in 41 minutes. Obviously that's quite a heist, but it's beyond crushing for the individuals whose life savings have been stolen. Speaking of - if you have an affected Coldcard wallet, IMMEDIATELY migrate your Bitcoin to a newly generated wallet on a secure device. And never reuse the compromised seed phrase, obvs. Affected: Mk3 on firmware 4.0.1 or later, Mk4 and Mk5 before 5.6.0, and Q before 1.5.0Q. Mk2 running 4.x is in the same position as Mk3. Seeds created with 50 or more dice rolls (I mean real, physical dice) are fine, because the dice supplied the entropy the generator didn't. So are seeds protected by a strong passphrase. BUT - Any address ever generated on a vulnerable device is exposed, whether or not it fits the pattern used in this sweep. The bug shipped in March 2021 and was exploited on 30 July 2026. Five years is a long time for 40 bits to sit there looking like 128 - or for a critical //TODO to not to be //DONE. #Cryptography #InfoSec

The Coldcard Bitcoin hardware wallet hack is actually still happening - while the fallout is steadily snowballing. This story isn't over by a long way. Here's what's developed in just the last few days: *** FEE AUCTION *** Four waves in, the ongoing theft has turned into a fee auction between the thief and the people being robbed. Galaxy Research flagged a fourth sweep on Monday - a SWEEP being a transaction that empties an address entirely. Galaxy's Alex Thorn counted 218 transactions across blocks 960,778 to 960,792, running at about 13.8 sweeps per block against 0.3 in a pre-incident control window. Roughly 45 times the normal rate. Thorn's first count was 388.9 BTC from 462 addresses. After stripping out multisig false positives and addresses that were already moving before the incident, it settled at 448.73 BTC from 709. That puts the running total at 1,815.75 BTC across 5,294 addresses, about $114 million. This wave's transactions opt into REPLACE-BY-FEE (RBF). Until a sweep confirms, a victim who spots their own address sitting in the mempool can broadcast a conflicting transaction spending the same coins, pay a higher fee, and get there first. "You may be able to RBF your way out of this," Thorn wrote. But they'll have to be quick off the mark, the window each times is just minutes. *** PATTERNS ARE CHANGING *** Where the stolen Satoshis sit has changed too. Through the first three waves the take stayed unspent in attacker-controlled addresses, which Galaxy read two ways - either: * the operator is waiting for attention to move on; or * there's no realistic way to launder a stack this visible. But Wave Four broke this pattern. Rather than one collection wallet, most transfers are now going to a fresh destination for each victim - and some have already moved to second-hop addresses. *** SHADY VENDORS ARE SELLING *** The stolen addresses are also collecting OP_RETURN messages advertising laundering and KYC-bypass schemes. Yes, vendors are pitching their money laundering services to a thief, on-chain, in public! *** LAWYERS ARE SNIFFING *** #Coinkite shipped firmware 4.2.0 on 31 July and CEO Rodolfo Novak said the company takes "full accountability for the firmware bug". The patch fixes new key generation but can do nothing for a seed already created. (But "full accountability" meaning what, exactly??) Some lawyers have an idea what it should mean. Thomas Braziel of 117 Partners is gathering victims internationally for a product-liability claim and possibly a class action. Lawyers disagree on where that goes though. Cris Carrascosa of ATH21 says Coinkite had "zero regulatory responsibility over the funds of the users of its products," and that any case "will have to be proven that Cold Card could have foreseen the hack." Ana Ojeda at Blend sees "serious arguments for defect and negligence." The clean-up has also broken Bitcoin's on-chain metrics. CryptoQuant's JA Maartunn counts 77,402 BTC moved out of older UTXO age bands since disclosure, and 39,600 #BTC of sub-1-BTC outputs moving on 31 July alone, the biggest day for that cohort since FTX collapsed in November 2022. Daily active addresses went from about 645,000 to nearly a million. Long-term holder supply change, coin days destroyed and spent output age bands now read like distribution, when what's happening is people rescuing their savings. If your #Coldcard seed came from affected firmware, 50 or more private dice rolls or a strong passphrase means you were never exposed. Anything else needs a fresh seed on patched firmware and a migration. #SelfCustody

Mafftopia SciTech News @mafftopia

7 days ago

#Bitcoin hardware wallet hack A hacker exploited a 2021 "bug" in Coldcard firmware to drain 1,082.65 BTC - without touching a single device. Hardware wallets are meant to be safe, right? They're offline, cold storage. The March 2021 code change quietly routed Coldcard's seed

4 2 16 4K 4

Could The Markets Bounce TODAY? Or Will The BEARS WIN??? x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

@dwavequantum @Nasdaq It'll be interesting to see which platform the PoC lands on. D-Wave is the only vendor running both annealing now with the first gate-model system due to market this year.

@SciTechera Perhaps the most shocking example in their write-up is a sandbox escape that let a compromised renderer trick the browser into reading local files. It had been sitting in the codebase for over 13 years.

It's true. Don't drink from fizzy drinks cans!! (AKA soda cans) An epoxy lacquer is spray-painted to the inside of the can, then the can gets baked in an oven at about 200°C. It only looks like a bag because dissolving the aluminium leaves the film standing on its own. The lacquer runs about 5 to 10 microns against a can wall of 90 to 100, so there's ten to twenty times more aluminium than liner. Without it the acid in the drink corrodes the wall and you taste the metal. But BPAs are banned, right?? The situation on the banning of BPAs is getting so complex and patchy it's kind of ludicrous. In the US: Federally, #BPA in can liners has never been banned. The FDA's own page still rests on its 2014 four-year review of more than 300 studies, which "has not found any information... to prompt a revision of FDA's safety assessment of BPA in food packaging." The only federal prohibitions are focused on baby bottles and sippy cups (2012), infant formula packaging (2013). Both were abandonment decisions rather than safety findings: the industry had already stopped using BPA for those uses, so the #FDA removed the authorisations as obsolete. NRDC's 2008 petition asking for an actual ban across food packaging was DENIED on 30 March 2012. The live one is stalled. A 2022 food-additive petition from EDF and allies asks the FDA to revoke BPA authorisations specifically for adhesives and can coatings. FDA's page still says it is "currently reviewing" and will publish in the Federal Register "once we have completed our review". EDF wrote in January that it had been 1,320 days against a 180-day statutory deadline. No state bans BPA in ordinary drinks cans either. The state laws are all children's products and reusable containers: California AB-1319 (bottles and cups for under-3s, above 0.1 ppb), Maine LD 412 (reusable containers, infant formula and baby food packaging), plus Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and others. The two bisphenol measures landing in 2026 are California banning all bisphenols in children's feeding products and Washington banning them in receipt paper. Neither one covers food or beverage packaging. So how about the EU and UK? The EU: The EU's ban on BPA in food contact materials hit its main deadline on 20 July, a fortnight ago, though some categories run to 2029. The UK: Proposed the same date as the EU, then postponed, so there's no enforcement in the UK until the domestic legislation lands. So there's still no guarantee that the fizzy drinks can you open is BPA-free, virtually anywhere. #microplastics

Massimo @Rainmaker1973

6 days ago

When you think you're drinking from a can, you're not drinking from a can. You're drinking from a plastic bag that's inside of a can.

127 653 3K 335K 1K

If anything, it's worse than that - it's sprayed in, not inserted. A nozzle coats the inside with epoxy lacquer, then the can goes through an oven at about 200°C. It only looks like a bag because dissolving the aluminium leaves the film standing on its own. The lacquer runs about 5 to 10 microns against a can wall of 90 to 100, so there's ten to twenty times more aluminium than liner. Without it the acid in the drink corrodes the wall and you taste the metal. The EU's ban on BPA in food contact materials hit its main deadline on 20 July, a fortnight ago, though some categories run to 2029. The UK proposed the same date, then postponed, so there's no enforcement in the UK until the domestic legislation lands.

Science Slop? Top researcher predicts that LLMs - combined with a broken incentive structure - will compel scientists to churn out more papers at a lower quality. Source: nature.com/articles/d4158…

With AI, scientists are empowered to do more - worse. A model of how research gets done predicts that language models will make scientists produce more papers, but at a lower quality. Carl Bergstrom at the University of Washington and colleagues split the research process into stages and asked which ones an LLM speeds up. There's a DISCOVERY STAGE where you generate hypotheses and run enough preliminary work to judge whether a project is worth pursuing. Then a DEVELOPMENT STAGE in two halves: * required work - the figures and the drafting you can't publish without; and * discretionary work - the follow-up experiments and the polishing In coding terms, the discretionary work is the testing and bug-fixing before a release. LLMs accelerate discovery and required work - but they don't touch the discretionary half, because that half is defined by not being required. Multi-agentic feedback loops or not, the discretionary half is typically the "human in the loop" part - lots of "oh hang on, what's it even doing??" reality sandwiches. So the time saved goes into starting the next paper rather than improving the current one, and the prediction falls out of that: more output, a smaller fraction of it good. Bergstrom's point is about incentives: scientists are assessed on volume - so a tool that raises volume gets used to raise volume. His suggested fix is to judge researchers on their best work instead of counting papers and citations. (Note: Bergstrom's paper went up on arXiv on 19 July and hasn't yet been peer reviewed) #ScienceOfScience #AI #Research