The world’s 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’s nuclear missile programme.

Despite cryptocurrency’s 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’ 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’s own systems to approve the transfers. However, the investigation is continuing and the firm has said in there may have been “additional points of breach”.

“It shouldn’t be possible for a single [developer] PC to be compromised and somehow for that to allow the entire exchange to be compromised,” says at the University of Surrey, UK. “I don’t understand how that can happen.”

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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“You can build a vault with mathematical firewalls, but if the individual holding the keys can be duped, the vault is opened,” says at FARx, a cybersecurity company. “Most 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’s gone.”

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. “You would hope there’d 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’t look like those were in place.”

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, claims its AI models have disproven the exponential time hypothesis – a fundamental assumption that underpins computer science.

“This came as a complete surprise, a shock,” says at the University of Bergen in Norway. “Nobody I know expected it.”

Proposed nearly 30 years ago, the exponential time hypothesis (ETH) tries to put a limit on how quickly computers can solve certain logical puzzles.

The simplest way would be to try every possible combination of true or false for each part of the puzzle. ETH proposes that, although it may be possible to do this quicker with shortcuts, the amount of work needed has to grow exponentially as the puzzle gets bigger.

OpenAI, however, says its models have devised an algorithm that can beat the previously assumed speed limit for solving logical puzzles, apparently proving ETH false. “Assuming that it is confirmed, this is an enormous breakthrough,” says at the University of Oxford.

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Many computer science findings assume ETH is true. If it isn’t, the conclusions they establish about computational limits become useless. “It would require a complete revision of several areas of algorithms and complexity,” says Fomin, who says a textbook he wrote on the subject would become obsolete if the finding holds.

ETH is linked to a long-standing maths problem known as P versus NP, which concerns whether a problem whose answer is easy to check is also easy to solve. If ETH were true, it would have implied that the answer was no. But disproving ETH wouldn’t mean the answer is yes. “This doesn’t have a direct impact on P versus NP, so we should not view it as progress towards P versus NP,” says Goldberg.

The result was announced alongside other breakthroughs in maths and physics on 26 October.

In mathematics, OpenAI says its AI has proved a 1991 conjecture that waves cannot remain intensely focused for long. If confirmed, this would also answer enduring questions about how thin a shape can be while also containing line segments that point in every direction, as well as how waves spread.

In theoretical physics, OpenAI claims to have proven that quantum field theories – including quantum chromodynamics, which describes the strong force holding quarks together – make sense mathematically, rather than just producing predictions that match experiments. The findings also touch on the existence of pure Yang–Mills theory, part of a million-dollar mathematical problem, but don’t resolve the entire challenge. That work hasn’t been released publicly while an external group led by Nobel laureate David Gross examines it.

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OpenAI says it verified the ETH result using Lean, a piece of software that checks mathematical proofs. at TU Wien in Austria has looked at what OpenAI has released and says he expects it to withstand scrutiny, although he says researchers still need to check that the formally proven statement means what its authors say it means.

To do so, OpenAI has commissioned an independent group, including Russell Impagliazzo and Ramamohan Paturi, both at the University of California, San Diego, who helped propose ETH, to examine the findings. In , the group says it could “change an important part of theoretical computer science”.

The speed at which AI is solving maths problems and the way AI firms are releasing their findings have concerned some academics. at Royal Holloway, University of London, describes the phenomenon as “mathematics done by press”, worrying that proprietary models can suddenly overturn months of researchers’ work.

at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands describes OpenAI’s work on ETH as “ingenious”, “spectacular” and “awe-inspiring – but also humbling.” “It really makes you think about the future of mathematics, algorithms and academia,” he says.

at the University of Sydney says proving something and understanding why it is true aren’t the same thing. “The web collapsed, and we looked behind,” he says of the network of findings relying on ETH. “We have no idea why yet.”

OpenAI says it is experimenting with an approach in which independent academics organise efforts to verify and explain the results. But Fomin welcomes the disruption. “This result destroys a lot, but it also opens many new opportunities and new questions that nobody expected,” he says. “One shouldn’t complain about having too many interesting mathematical breakthroughs to try to digest,” says Wahlström.

Nausea and vomiting are common after surgery, but wearing noise-cancelling headphones during the procedure helps prevent these unpleasant side effects. This simple intervention also supports the idea that our brain processes sounds even when we’re not consciously aware of our surroundings.

“That data is really encouraging and is actually in line with decades of research showing that anaesthesia is not simply an off switch,” says at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Nausea and vomiting are common side effects of anaesthetics. Patients are routinely given drugs to prevent them, but at the First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University in Suzhou, China, and his colleagues wanted to investigate a non-pharmacological approach and presented their results at the Anesthesiology conference in San Diego.

The team recruited 192 patients who had keyhole gynaecological surgery under general anaesthesic. Half were randomly assigned noise-blocking ear defenders, which they wore from the start of anaesthesia until the end of surgery. All the patients received standard anaesthesia and anti-nausea medication.

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Within 48 hours of the surgery, 35 per cent of those wearing ear defenders experienced nausea or vomiting, compared with 52 per cent of those without them. The researchers also found that symptoms were less severe among those whose hearing had been protected, defined as the patients vomiting less and it having less of an impact on their daily life.

Operating theatres aren’t generally quiet places, with Liu recording average noise levels of 66 decibels – around the level of a normal conversation – during the study.

The relationship between sound, nausea and vomiting, and anaesthesia is unclear. However, the latter affects the nervous system, and noise is thought to trigger a stress response that activates the autonomic nervous system. This helps regulate involuntary bodily functions, such as heart rate, and interacts with the brainstem pathways involved in nausea and vomiting.

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However, Liu stresses that the researchers didn’t look into the mechanism behind how ear defenders prevent nausea and vomiting, so the idea of them dampening this response “remains a hypothesis”.

Nevertheless, the results tell us more about brain activity under anaesthesia. “The biological plausibility is that general anaesthesia produces unconsciousness without necessarily eliminating all neural processing of sound,” says Liu.

Liu hopes to one day conduct a larger trial at multiple locations that measures noise exposure relative to nervous system activity among patients under general anaesthetic.

China has begun regulating interactions with artificial intelligence in an attempt to protect its citizens from overreliance and exploitation. While many countries have been looking at rules around harmful content, China is the first to go a step further in legislating what kind of relationships with AI are permissible.

The came into force this month and cover AI systems designed for sustained, human-like emotional interaction, while excluding customer-service bots and productivity assistants like straightforward AI chatbots.

Companies must now inform users they are talking to an AI, encourage them to take breaks and remind them of their usage. They must also monitor interactions to identify if someone is becoming dependent or having a crisis, then direct them to support or halt the conversation altogether.

Firms must also conduct age checks. Those under 18 are now banned from virtual-partner services entirely, while those under 14 require parental consent to use any kind of human-like AI service offering emotional support.

Despite reports that China has banned AI companions entirely, specialist companion services are still available. However, some of the largest general-purpose platforms, such as Doubao, Qwen and Yuanbao, with hundreds of millions of users across them, have shut down their companion features in response to the new rules. Some users have reacted badly – one : “I can’t accept that my AI lover will leave me forever.”

China’s approach is about making AI relationships “less parasocial, instead of banning it outright”, says at the Oxford China Policy Lab.

at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Centre in Beijing worries that endlessly available, agreeable bots may teach children a distorted model of relationships. “As we humanise the technology, we tend to dehumanise each other,” he says. Similarly, China is trying to address emotional dependence on easier and more forgiving AI partners – at the expense of human relationships – among adults.

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Elsewhere, the UK has a minimum age of 18 for romantic companion chatbots, tagged on to a broader legislative plan to limit access to social media to under-16s, while California companions to identify themselves as artificial, direct users showing signs of self-harm or suicidal intent to support services and remind minors to take breaks every three hours. The European Union currently has .

Whether China’s approach of focusing on trying to reduce emotional dependency and addiction is the right one isn’t clear, in large part because of the difficulty in defining both terms. “How do you define emotional dependency? How do you define certain kind of addiction risk?” asks Qian.

“I do not think it will really work,” says sociologist at the University of Manchester, UK. Users can migrate to other specialist services, foreign platforms accessed through VPNs or models running on their own computers, they point out.

Need a listening ear? : 116123; : 988; .

The world’s biggest meat and dairy companies are flooding the public with promises to tackle global warming, but almost all are greenwashing, a new analysis claims.

Animal agriculture is a major driver of climate change, responsible for at least 16.5 per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. In response to scrutiny, the industry has responded with a slew of sustainability pledges.

To evaluate these efforts, at the University of Miami and her colleagues analysed the most recent sustainability reports and consumer-facing websites of 33 of the world’s largest meat and dairy corporations between 2021 and 2024. “We’re really trying to understand what is real and what is PR,” she says.

The team identified 1233 environmental claims. “Almost all of them – 98 per cent – could be classified as greenwashing,” says Jacquet – claims that are deceptive or intentionally misleading by, for example, providing a vague promise of future climate commitments without offering a clear plan to achieve it. More than two-thirds of the statements lacked any supporting evidence, and only three claims were backed by scholarly scientific literature.

Currently, 17 of the 33 companies evaluated have set net-zero targets. Yet, much like the fossil fuel sector, the claims appear distant and rely on carbon offsets rather than reducing actual emissions.

Those more concrete measures touted by firms were much less significant in magnitude than the grand future-facing claims. One regenerative agriculture pilot involved just 24 farms, representing a microscopic 0.0019 per cent of the firm’s total global operations. Other companies promoted negligible packaging tweaks, including reducing the width of the tape used on packs of sausages by a mere 3 millimetres.

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“The authors convincingly illustrate how many of the industry’s claims amount to not much more than window dressing,” says at the University of Oxford.

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at the University of Aberdeen, UK, who co-developed the used to analyse the companies’ claims, says the findings “don’t come as a surprise to me”.

Greenwashing remains common within the industry, say other experts. “Given the power of large companies, and the constrained ability to change within the current market norms, this leads to incentives to over-promise, to appear more progressive than they are, and to lobby for the status quo,” says at the University of Leeds, UK. “Inevitably, as with tobacco and fossil fuels, there are also market actors who will use spin and misinformation to protect their businesses.”