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Cryptocurrencies are dying
Cryptocurrencies are dying as joke coins and pump and dump schemes burn out.
With that in mind, a recent report from CoinGecko (via CoinDesk) says the crypto reaper has been unusually busy lately. Looking at its own records from as far back as 2021, CoinGecko found that 20.2 million tokens had been placed on the market, and that the majority—53.2%—have ceased active trading. They’re dead.
What’s more, 11.6 million of the token failures recorded by CoinGecko—86.3%—happened last year. In other words, 2025 was a mass die-off.
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Spray-On Powder That Seals Life-Threatening Wounds
Pretty cool, a powder that stops bleeding:
KAIST scientists have created a fast-acting, stable powder hemostat that stops bleeding in one second and could significantly improve survival in combat and emergency medicine.
Severe blood loss remains the primary cause of death from combat injuries. To address this challenge, a research team at KAIST that included an active duty Army Major set out to develop a faster and more reliable way to stop bleeding.
Their work led to a next-generation powder-type hemostatic agent that can halt bleeding within one second when sprayed directly onto a wound, offering a potential breakthrough for saving lives on the battlefield.
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John Mellencamp’s exclusive Indiana Stadium box
John Mellencamp supported Indiana football long before their recent championship rise, donating funds during “the down years.” In return, the school built an exclusive shack on top of the stadium just for him.
Not that Mellencamp always minded. What he got in exchange for his support was not a championship run but a curious sort of VIP treatment. He had started going to Hoosiers games as a kid, when he lived in Bloomington and his brother was enrolled at the university, and in the years since had come to appreciate a perk of the sparsely populated contests: He was able to indulge his cigarette habit in the mostly empty stands.
In recent years, the school gifted the Rock and Roll Hall-of-Famer a wooden shack affixed to the top of the stadium. There, Mellencamp—a self-described “anti-social guy”—could take in a game exactly the way he wanted to.
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Intrusive, needy software
With the ubiquity of Internet connections and cheap storage and data costs, software applications have become intrusive, almost needy in how they interact with users.
So the problem isn’t that software ever teaches, asks, or informs. The problem is that once a company builds the machinery to do it, that machinery becomes cheap to reuse, and the incentives gradually pull it away from “help the user succeed” toward “move the metric.”
What starts as an occasional heads-up becomes a permanent layer of UI exhaust. What starts as support becomes a funnel. What starts as a reminder becomes a habit-forming system.
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The scale of Minnesota resistance
Half the street corners around here have people–from every walk of life, including republicans–standing guard to watch for suspicious vehicles, which are reported to a robust and entirely decentralized network that tracks ICE vehicles and mobilizes responders.
I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what’s happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.
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David Erlich’s 2025 movies supercut
Every year, David Erlich creates a music video supercut of his top 25 movies. Superbly edited, it celebrates movies with wit and verve.
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African solarpunk
Africa is leading the way implementing solar energy based solutions for everyday life.
This is the unlock. This is the thing that makes everything else possible.
Here’s the model:
- A company (Sun King, SunCulture) installs a solar system in your home
- You pay ~$100 down
- Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months
- The system has a GSM chip that calls home
- No payment = remotely shut off
- Keep paying = keep power
- After 30 months = you own it, free power forever
The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system. You’re replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene) that’s cheaper AND gives you better light, phone charging, radio, and no respiratory disease.
The default rate? 90%+ of customers repay on time.
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Claw machine competitions
Operating a claw machine is becoming a competitive sport.
…the competitive claw machine community has grown. Aspiring clawmasters share tips and tricks online. Clawcades host tournaments for local players. The cost to play depends on location and prizes, but on average is still between a quarter and $2 per play. They’re especially popular in Japan, where a woman named Yuka Nakajima holds the Guinness World Record for most claw-machine wins at 3.5k.
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2026 breakthrough technologies
MIT Technology Review published their annual list of breakthrough technologies. Lots of AI and clean energy related picks.
Next-gen nuclear
Nuclear power already provides steady electricity to grids around the world, without producing any greenhouse-gas emissions. New designs rely on alternative fuels and cooling systems or take up less space, which could get more reactors online faster.
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SMS login attacks
All those SMS login links may not be a good idea.
A paper published last week has found more than 700 endpoints delivering such texts on behalf of more than 175 services that put user security and privacy at risk. One practice that jeopardizes users is the use of links that are easily enumerated, meaning scammers can guess them by simply modifying the security token, which usually appears at the right of a URL. By incrementing the token—for instance, by first changing 123 to 124 or ABC to ABD and so on—the researchers were able to access accounts belonging to other users. From there, the researchers could view personal details, such as partially completed insurance applications.
In other cases, the researchers could have transacted sensitive business while masquerading as the other user. Other links used so few possible token combinations that they were easy to brute force. Other examples of shoddy practices were links that allowed attackers who gained unauthorized access to access or modify user data with no other authentication other than clicking on a link sent by SMS. Many of the links provide account access days or even months after they were sent, further raising the risk of unauthorized access.
