The world鈥檚 largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance has been hit with the biggest ever cryptocurrency heist, in which billions of dollars of reserves were drained in just 20 minutes.

From 8:05pm on 29 October, $6.36 billion in cryptocurrencies were shifted from wallets in a coordinated attack from a North Korean-linked hacking unit called TraderTraitor. This group was of the Bybit crypto exchange in February 2025.

The US Treasury has that such stolen funds are used to finance North Korea鈥檚 nuclear missile programme.

Despite cryptocurrency鈥檚 founding idea of decentralisation, meaning no one has singular control over the money flowing through the network, there are some large single points of failure. It is thought one of these was the cause of the Binance hack, which gave access to a system the exchange uses to authorise transfers out of customers鈥� accounts.

In , Binance said its early investigations indicate the security incident may stem from a compromised laptop belonging to an engineer. TRM Labs, a cybersecurity firm, suggests that preparations for the attack may have begun several days ago.

Binance claims it has found no evidence that the private cryptographic keys used to authorise transactions were stolen. Instead, the attackers appear to have gained access to the software that requests withdrawals, potentially allowing them to instruct Binance鈥檚 own systems to approve the transfers. However, the investigation is continuing and the firm has said in there may have been 鈥渁dditional points of breach鈥�.

鈥淚t shouldn鈥檛 be possible for a single [developer] PC to be compromised and somehow for that to allow the entire exchange to be compromised,鈥� says at the University of Surrey, UK. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 understand how that can happen.鈥�

If that is the case, it highlights how precarious major financial hubs in the crypto world can be to single points of failure.

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鈥淵ou can build a vault with mathematical firewalls, but if the individual holding the keys can be duped, the vault is opened,鈥� says at FARx, a cybersecurity company. 鈥淢ost crypto platforms are as centralised as any bank, with a small number of privileged individuals controlling billions. The difference is that once crypto is transferred, it鈥檚 gone.鈥�

That centralisation can be a blessing as well as a curse, though: cryptocurrencies Tether and Circle have been able to freeze billions of dollars of stolen coins, stymying the hackers in attempts to transfer about half the stolen funds any further.

Woodward says the Binance incident potentially strikes a distinction between crypto security and more traditional finance. 鈥淵ou would hope there鈥檇 be things like two-man rules [where two separate people have to approve a change] or things that banks have for changing critical systems, but it doesn鈥檛 look like those were in place.鈥�

Some people are convinced that fruit and vegetable skin is particularly nutritious, and now scientists have confirmed the idea. They have discovered that these parts of fruits and vegetables often contain far more fibre than the flesh we normally consume.

The finding suggests cooks are unwittingly discarding fibre-rich food by chucking out the seeds, skins and stems of fruits and vegetables when preparing a meal.

Home cooks and caterers should adopt 鈥渞oot to tip鈥� eating and start cooking with squash peel, watermelon rind and pepper stalks to improve the public鈥檚 intake of dietary fibre, the team says.

鈥淲e鈥檝e really got to shift our purchasing habits to buy whole fruits and vegetables, and then use all of the fruits and vegetables in dishes,鈥� says at King鈥檚 College London.

Gibson and her colleagues tested the fibre content of 12 fruits and vegetables, including butternut squash, kiwi fruit, watermelon, broccoli and bell pepper. The team measured the fibre content both in the parts typically consumed and the parts that usually go to waste.

They found that, in 10 of the 12 produce types, the normally wasted components contain more fibre than the commonly consumed parts. Butternut squash seeds and skin, for example, contained 9.25 grams of fibre per 100 grams, compared with 2 g of fibre per 100 g of squash flesh. Meanwhile, the skin and core of a pineapple core contains 450 per cent more fibre than the flesh. These skin and core components are often tough to chew, but the researchers say they can be blended, grated or roasted to make them more palatable.

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Just 4 per cent of British adults meet the recommended minimum daily intake of 30 g of dietary fibre, with the average adult consuming around half that per day.

Gibson suggests caterers could use the findings to design fibre-rich meals using more produce that would otherwise go to waste. This could reduce food waste and cut costs for commercial kitchens, as well as increasing dietary fibre intake, she says.

King鈥檚 College London鈥檚 canteen piloted a 鈥渞oot to tip鈥� menu in May 2025. Meals included a West African peanut stew made with all of a butternut squash, kale stalks and leek tops, and a watermelon salad featuring pickled watermelon rind.

Simple menu tweak can nudge people into choosing climate-friendly food

Rejigging the meal choices on offer in a canteen can prompt people to make healthier, climate-friendlier decisions

Eating a larger proportion of harvested fruit and vegetables will also improve the resilience of the food system in the face of climate shocks, says Gibson. 鈥淓verything we pull out of the ground that we can eat, we should be eating.鈥�

at City St George鈥檚 University of London says the research is an 鈥渆xciting investigation鈥�. But he points out that the most carbon-intensive food waste is meat and dairy products. Reducing fruit and vegetable waste is therefore 鈥減art of the solution, but it鈥檚 not the only thing we need to do鈥�, he says.

You don鈥檛 need a jet plane to get jet lag 鈥� even feathers will do. At least one species of bird gets jet lag, in the sense that its body clock can diverge from local time by more than an hour on fast flights across the Atlantic, as revealed by navigational errors.

鈥淲e鈥檝e slightly shied away from using the term jet lag itself, because people associate that with the health impacts of that clock shift, rather than the clock shift itself. But it鈥檚 exactly the same process that causes jet lag in people,鈥� says at the University of Oxford. 鈥淚t鈥檚 having these physiological and behavioural effects, where the birds are mistiming their behaviours.鈥�

It is likely that other long-distance fliers, possibly including some insects and bats as well as birds, also get jet lag in the clock-shift sense, says Lewin.

Manx shearwaters are small seabirds that fly vast distances, using a technique called to exploit wind gradients near the sea surface. 鈥淭hey鈥檝e evolved this niche of being really amazing long-distance travellers,鈥� says Lewin.

They breed on islands around the UK and Ireland. While parents are raising a chick, they may fly more than 1000 kilometres westwards to reach rich fishing grounds in the mid-Atlantic. Once they have food, they fly back in a fairly straight line, diverting only to skirt around landmasses such as Ireland.

How do they achieve these navigational feats? While some birds can sense Earth鈥檚 magnetic field, Manx shearwaters don鈥檛 appear to. Lewin鈥檚 team has confirmed this by attaching small magnets to the birds that should disrupt geomagnetic navigation. They .

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Instead, it appears that shearwaters rely on a sun compass 鈥� if you know what time it is, you can maintain a course by adjusting your orientation relative to the sun. Many animals, from insects and fish to turtles and birds, have been shown to do this. If their internal clocks are reset using artificial light and darkness, they head in the wrong direction.

鈥淲e realised that there might be a kind of natural experiment where the birds were manipulating their own clocks,鈥� says Lewin.

For instance, at 6am, a Manx shearwater wanting to fly eastwards back to its nest needs to head sunwards. At noon, it needs to fly at right angles to the sun, which will be due south. But if a shearwater travels 15掳 of longitude eastwards, the local time will be 1pm, while its internal clock will still register the time as noon, so the sun will no longer be due south. This means birds flying rapidly east should veer slightly off course in a clockwise direction over the course of day, in the absence of other cues.

Other researchers have been attaching GPS trackers to Manx shearwaters for decades, so the paths taken on nearly 4000 foraging trips are known. Sure enough, when Lewin and his colleagues analysed these flight tracks, they found birds on rapid return flights tended to deviate clockwise when out of sight of land.

The team considered other potential explanations, from the Coriolis effect to winds. 鈥淭he one thing that best predicted the observed changes in shearwaters鈥� orientation was always this sun compass effect,鈥� says Lewin.

The effect is small. After a 1000 km flight, a bird would have to fly only an extra 5 km to reach its colony, which, for such efficient long-distance fliers, is probably negligible, Lewin says. This might explain why Manx shearwaters haven鈥檛 evolved some mechanism for avoiding jet lag, he says.

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鈥淲hat is good about the study is that they analyse a lot of tracks, making for robust data to test different models,鈥� says at Macquarie University in Sydney.

While other species may get this form of jet lag, too, long-distance flights by birds are typically done during migrations, and migrations usually involve mainly north-south travel, says Cheng, so jet lag won鈥檛 be much of a problem.

However, near the poles, the travel distance required to cross 15掳 or more of longitude becomes so short that many animals might be affected, says Lewin, perhaps even including polar bears or Arctic foxes travelling on sea ice.

鈥淣ear-polar species may be quite strongly affected,鈥� he says. 鈥淣ow, it all gets a bit complicated because you have 24-hour daylight and 24-hour darkness in parts of the year, so circadian rhythms break down generally in some species.鈥�

The virologist said that 鈥渉ope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality鈥�. Salk was certainly daring 鈥� he risked paralysing himself, his wife and their children while testing his polio vaccine. Thankfully, it paid off. None of them experienced any ill effects and his work is credited with .

Risks have to be taken for medicine to advance, and someone is always the first to receive a treatment. But there are risks, and then there are risks.

Salk tested his vaccine on cells, monkeys and children who had already had polio before turning his unexposed family into guinea pigs. His approach is far from standard protocol today, but he did a lot to reduce the risk of something going wrong.

There is less evidence to justify an operation that took place this month in Russia. Details are scant, but the procedure involved cutting out a section of spinal cord from someone with a complete spinal cord injury and gluing in a replacement piece from a donor. The transplant was a world first, but there is little evidence to believe it will have worked or that now was the time to try it.

The transplant was a world first, but there is little evidence to believe it will have worked

History tells us that acting ahead of medical evidence can have catastrophic results. Take the first synthetic organ transplants, which replaced tracheas with plastic tubes. The surgeon who fitted them admitted they hadn鈥檛 been tested on large animals because they 鈥渄idn鈥檛 have the time鈥�. .

With new medical procedures, the gold standard is randomised controlled trials, which are costly and take time, but they aren鈥檛 the only route. When someone is critically ill, there are compassionate-use protocols that make interventions available before they are fully tested. Pig kidney transplants are currently being trialled this way, for example.

The dream of spinal cord transplants will surely become a reality one day, but only if the science underpinning them is built first. Courage, dreams and imagination are of course good, yet with experimental surgeries, evidence is better.

The world鈥檚 largest sand sea, the Empty Quarter in the Arabian peninsula, was once dotted with freshwater lakes and lush oases 鈥� but prehistoric humans appear to have avoided settling around them.

Today, scientists have found out why: the early inhabitants chose to live near useful deposits of rock instead. After gathering data during a 1500-kilometre expedition across the vast desert and using computer modelling to understand the evidence, researchers have concluded that even plentiful fresh water wasn鈥檛 enough to attract early humans if they couldn鈥檛 also find exposed formations of suitable tool-making stone like flint and quartz.

鈥淧eople who live by stone tools never stray far from good stone,鈥� says at the University of Algarve in Portugal, who was involved in the analysis. 鈥淵ou just really don鈥檛 see Stone Age sites unless you鈥檙e within a few kilometres of an outcrop.鈥�

The Sahara is the world鈥檚 largest hot desert, with landscapes ranging from rocky highlands to vast gravel plains. But the Rub鈥� al-Khali 鈥� the Arabic name for the Empty Quarter 鈥� is the world鈥檚 largest continuous expanse of wind-swept dunes, known as a sand sea. It covers 650,000 square kilometres of the southern Arabian peninsula.

Today, the region is overwhelmingly dry, other than for a few permanent lakes in its interior that are fed by groundwater. But over the past century, scientists have uncovered evidence of numerous ancient lakes that formed during wetter periods, when stronger Indian Ocean monsoons helped .

Researchers have long suspected that these greener periods opened routes for early humans spreading out of Africa and across the Arabian peninsula 鈥� an idea supported by the . However, all these sites line the desert鈥檚 margins, whereas its vast interior is still largely unexplored by researchers.

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In 2023, Rose鈥檚 colleague at the University of Vienna and his team spent 35 days crossing the Empty Quarter鈥檚 dunes, examining 125 locations for traces of ancient lakes. They focused on lakes that were present between about 122,000 and 67,000 years ago, when early humans were spreading into Arabia.

The team found evidence of ancient lakes at 55 of the locations. This evidence included freshwater snail and clam shells, ostrich eggshell fragments and traces of animals that once burrowed into the muddy lake beds. But despite these signs of a once-thriving environment, they found no stone tools or other evidence that prehistoric humans had settled by any of the 55 lakes.

鈥淚f we could spot a snail shell the size of a fingernail, we would have spotted a stone tool,鈥� says Dellmour. 鈥淏ut there were none.鈥�

To test whether the shortage of suitable stone could explain the lack of human settlements, Rose and Dellmour and their colleagues turned to computer modelling. They mapped ancient water sources and the geology of the Arabian peninsula, then compared the results with the distribution of hundreds of archaeological sites found across the region in earlier research.

The analyses revealed that 57 per cent of the peninsula鈥檚 terrain within reach of water lacked suitable stone for making tools 鈥� and that prehistoric human settlements were concentrated in places offering both resources.

That could be partly due to ancient tool-making being extremely 鈥渨asteful鈥�, requiring abundant access to raw material, says Rose. 鈥淭hey weren鈥檛 thinking about efficiency,鈥� he says. 鈥淪o, you鈥檇 have a pile of garbage produced for one spear point.鈥�

Neanderthal Europe was as much a wooden age as a stone age

When Neanderthals dominated Europe, it was likely that wood was at least as important to them as stone for working into tools

Groundwater-fed lakes in the Empty Quarter wouldn鈥檛 have brought flint, chert, obsidian or quartz into the sand sea like rivers could have, says Rose. And while people could have carried tools into resource-poor areas, this would probably have supported only small groups for short periods.

The findings show that geology was potentially just as important as climate in shaping prehistoric human migrations, says Rose.

The study sheds important light on a long-standing debate among archaeologists about the importance of raw stone in ancient human sites, especially in harsh environments like the desert, says at the University of T眉bingen in Germany. 鈥淧robably what鈥檚 most surprising to me is the lack of archaeological stone tools in otherwise perfectly fine circumstances, and close access to fresh water,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t really shows that early humans were picky with where they went and that they did not settle for just any spot.鈥�