Ilya Lichtenstein, who pled guilty to money laundering charges tied to his role in the massive hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex, has apparently been released early from prison.
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Following a rejected governance vote, Stani Kulechov laid out a plan to expand beyond DeFi lending and reshape how tokenholders capture value.
The largest crypto exchange by trading volume announced two moves related to the FLOW token following the project’s foundation updating users on a $3.9 million exploit.
Being able to strategically raise capital by having shares ready to issue was one of the secondary reasons Lee gave for the proposal.
India’s IT ministry has given X 72 hours to submit an action-taken report.
Read more From home security systems and smart smoke detectors to a sunrise alarm gently that wakes you up, here are the must-have gadgets for living in your first apartment.
Read more Tesla annual sales have fallen for the second year in a row, a drop fueled by the removal of the federal tax credit in the U.S. and competition from Chinese automakers.
Read more The most amazing drummer on the internet
My daughter introduced me to El Estepario Siberiano’s YouTube channel a few months back, and I have been obsessed ever since. The Spanish drummer (real name: Jorge Garrido) posts videos of himself playing supercharged cover versions of popular tracks, hitting his drums with such jaw-dropping speed and technique that he makes other pro drummers shake their heads in disbelief. The dozens of reaction videos posted by other musicians are a joy in themselves.
EL ESTEPARIO SIBERIANO VIA YOUTUBE
Garrido is up-front about the countless hours that it took to get this good. He says he sat behind his kit almost all day, every day for years. At a time when machines appear to do it all, there’s a kind of defiance in that level of human effort. It’s why my favorites are Garrido’s covers of electronic music, where he out-drums the drum machine. Check out his version of Skrillex and Missy Elliot’s “Ra Ta Ta” and tell me it doesn’t put happiness in your heart.
Finding signs of life in the uncanny valley
Watching Sora videos of Michael Jackson stealing a box of chicken nuggets or Sam Altman biting into the pink meat of a flame-grilled Pikachu has given me flashbacks to an Ed Atkins exhibition at Tate Britain I saw a few months ago. Atkins is one of the most influential and unsettling British artists of his generation. He is best known for hyper-detailed CG animations of himself (pore-perfect skin, janky movement) that play with the virtual representation of human emotions.
COURTESY: THE ARTIST, CABINET GALLERY, LONDON, DÉPENDANCE, BRUSSELS, GLADSTONE GALLERY
In The Worm we see a CGI Atkins make a long-distance call to his mother during a covid lockdown. The audio is from a recording of an actual conversation. Are we watching Atkins cry or his avatar? Our attention flickers between two realities. “When an actor breaks character during a scene, it’s known as corpsing,” Atkins has said. “I want everything I make to corpse.” Next to Atkins’s work, generative videos look like cardboard cutouts: lifelike but not alive.
A dark and dirty book about a talking dingo
What’s it like to be a pet? Australian author Laura Jean McKay’s debut novel, The Animals in That Country, will make you wish you’d never asked. A flu-like pandemic leaves people with the ability to hear what animals are saying. If that sounds too Dr. Dolittle for your tastes, rest assured: These animals are weird and nasty. A lot of the time they don’t even make any sense.
SCRIBE
With everybody now talking to their computers, McKay’s book resets the anthropomorphic trap we’ve all fallen into. It’s a brilliant evocation of what a nonhuman mind might contain—and a meditation on the hard limits of communication.
The Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero has been preparing for a surgery that might never happen. His idea? Swap a sick person’s head—or perhaps just the brain—onto a younger, healthier body.
Canavero caused a stir in 2017 when he announced that a team he advised in China had exchanged heads between two corpses. But he never convinced skeptics that his technique could succeed—or to believe his claim that a procedure on a live person was imminent. The Chicago Tribune labeled him the “P.T. Barnum of transplantation.”
Canavero withdrew from the spotlight. But the idea of head transplants isn’t going away. Instead, he says, the concept has recently been getting a fresh look from life-extension enthusiasts and stealth Silicon Valley startups.
Career path
It’s been rocky. After he began publishing his surgical ideas a decade ago, Canavero says, he got his “pink slip” from the Molinette Hospital in Turin, where he’d spent 22 years on staff. “I’m an out-of-the-establishment guy. So that has made things harder, I have to say,” he says.
Why he persists
No other solution to aging is on the horizon. “It’s become absolutely clear over the past years that the idea of some incredible tech to rejuvenate elderly people—happening in some secret lab, like Google—is really going nowhere,” he says. “You have to go for the whole shebang.”
The whole shebang?
He means getting a new body, not just one new organ. Canavero has an easy mastery of English idioms and an unexpected Southern twang. He says that’s due to a fascination with American comics as a child. “For me, learning the language of my heroes was paramount,” he says. “So I can shoot the breeze.”
Cloned bodies
Canavero is now an independent investigator and has advised entrepreneurs who want to create brainless human clones as a source of DNA-matched organs that wouldn’t get rejected by a recipient’s immune system. “I can tell you there are guys from top universities involved,” he says.
What’s next
Combining the necessary technologies, like reliably precise surgical robots and artificial wombs to grow the clones, is going to be complex and very, very expensive. Canavero lacks the funds to take his plans further, but he believes “the money is out there” for a commercial moonshot project: “What I say to the billionaires is ‘Come together.’ You will all have your own share, plus make yourselves immortal.”
Polymarket traders are holding back their optimism back for Bitcoin this year, despite many analysts tipping the price to hit $150,000 and above.