💎 Quantum sensors made from diamond defects to let US scientists probe the universe

Researchers in the US have launched a USD 1 million project to develop quantum sensors by using the tiny defects in diamonds, to measure electromagnetic fields with extraordinary sensitivity. The effort is part of a new three-year project carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) in Illinois.

The researchers will create compact sensors that can precisely map electromagnetic fields. The devices could additionally be integrated into particle accelerators and other experiments. Understanding how electromagnetic forces affect particles is crucial for particle physics.

“This is another front for the likely quantum revolution. Five or 10 years ago, this was kind of science fiction,” — Nazar Delegan, PhD, a researcher at ANL and project co-lead, highlighted.

If successful, the project could enable more precise measurements and new ways to study the universe using quantum defects in diamonds, with support from the DOE’s Quantum Information Science program. 🚀

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🔥 Cash App's crypto support expands beyond bitcoin and USDC via MoonPay

Cash App’s cryptocurrency service is extending beyond BTC and stablecoin USDC for the first time by being added to crypto payments platform MoonPay.

❗️This means eligible U.S. Cash App users will be able to use their balances to purchase a host of other digital assets offered by MoonPay, including ether ETH , SOL, XRP and USDT.

Users will also be able to fund wallets on MoonPay through their Cash App balances, including Ledger, BitPay, Trust Wallet, MetaMask and Uniswap, among others.

Cash App, the mobile payment service developed by Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block (XYZ), is one of the premier mainstream gateways into cryptocurrency, given its customer base of over 50 million users. 🚀

“While bitcoin remains at the core of our digital asset strategy, we want to give customers choice and flexibility however they choose to pay,” — Morgan Kuntze, Block’s global partnerships lead, said.

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🧠 Mysterious waves sweeping across your brain may help turn sensory chaos into what you see

Your brain and the ocean share an unexpected feature: waves. Electrical activity can move across the brain's surface in patterns known as traveling brain waves or neural traveling waves. Salk Institute researchers suggest these waves act as a computational engine in the visual cortex, helping the brain process visual information.

The researchers concentrated on the visual cortex and proposed 4 major functions for neural traveling waves. The waves may adjust perception from moment to moment, transform recent sensory information into an internal representation, produce short-term predictions about the surrounding world, and preserve and replay patterns associated with memories of events that unfold over time.

The connections responsible for generating the waves do more than transmit signals. They can alter their physiology ("synaptic weights") in ways that reflect information learned from the outside world.

The review was published in Neuron on July 21, 2026.

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🤑 Introducing the Stellar x CV Labs Accelerator cohort

The Stellar x CV Labs Accelerator is built for startups ready to scale rapidly, focusing on technical execution, GTM support, and investor readiness. Designed for teams building solutions within DeFi, payments, and RWA.

❗️ The outlined program combines hands-on support for builders who are currently building on Stellar or plan to build on Stellar within or for EMEA. Eligible startups will receive personalized guidance every step of the way from a truly global team.

⬇️10 teams building payments, remittance, and financial infrastructure for emerging markets, all building on Stellar. Here's who's in:

1. Remi connects traditional financial infrastructure with digital assets, enabling faster, lower-cost financial services and greater economic inclusion in emerging markets.🔣Live across the UAE, Egypt, Morocco, and Canada.

2. Yolat is the stablecoin neobank for emerging markets, letting people and businesses hold dollars, spend on cards, and send money across borders in minutes.🔣Corridors include Nigeria, Canada, the UK, the EU, South Africa, and Kenya.

3. JoonaPay is payment infrastructure for Francophone Africa, helping businesses collect, reconcile, and move money across mobile money, bank, and stablecoin rails.

4. DeFa provides settlement liquidity to licensed cross-border payment operators, prefunding remittance volumes against verified receivables that settle in 1-7 days.

5. Sorted is a non-custodial digital wallet built to make digital dollars simple and accessible for people in Africa and South Asia.🔣500,000+ downloads across 160 countries.

6. Crebit Pay is building the rate locking layer for stablecoin foreign exchange, making it usable for millions of businesses.🔣Built by former Stanford and MIT students, moving money through local rails like PIX in Brazil and SPEI in Mexico.

7. Kutana is making B2B trade safe, easy, and cost-effective for SMEs across Africa, combining fast payments, digital escrow, and AI-driven credit scoring in one platform.

8. Janus is financial infrastructure for global trade, built for the freight forwarders who move goods, money, and information across borders.

9. Saleem is a stablecoin wallet on any SIM. No smartphone, no bank. Starting in Syria and the Levant, addressing 500M+ SIMs and 280M unbanked adults across MENA and South Asia.

10. Sly is unlocking the agentic economy for fintechs through identity, governance, and payments, giving AI agents a way to discover, transact, and settle across every protocol and border.

10 teams. One accelerator. Building on Stellar. 🚀

#Stellar

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🧪How Claude is accelerating protein design and analytical chemistry

Anthropic has published new experiments showing Claude can handle parts of protein design and analytical chemistry that normally require specialized scientists and significant amounts of time.

🔜 In the first experiment, Claude Mythos Preview and Opus 4.8 were asked to design new protein binders from scratch. Claude successfully produced binders for 14 of 15 tested targets. Between 22% and 35% of its individual designs bound successfully, depending on the setup, compared to the 10-15% that is typical in protein design campaigns today.

🔜 The second experiment tested Claude Opus 5 on analytical chemistry. Researchers gave Claude raw NMR and LC-MS files — the data chemists use to determine what a compound is and how pure it is. Its purity measurement came out at 96.4%, compared with 96.33% from the contract laboratory, and its hydrogen counts closely matched the lab's results.

❗️Anthropic isn't claiming Claude can develop a drug end-to-end:

Importantly, protein binders are not drugs. Designing a high-affinity binder is just the first step in the process of developing a drug-like molecule.

Still, this feels like another important shift in AI-assisted science. 👏

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🇨🇳🚀China successfully launched the reusable Zhuque-3 on August 19, achieving its first successful land recovery of the rocket’s first stage. The milestone marks a major step forward for China’s reusable-rocket technology.

#BRICS

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🤑 Ripple Prime Closes $275 Million Senior Notes Offering

Ripple announced the successful closing of an upsized $275 million private placement of senior unsecured notes issued by Ripple Prime, its non-bank prime brokerage, to support its ongoing and expanding U.S. business.

The notes offering attracted a diverse base of institutional investors in key financial markets. Proceeds from the offering will be used for working capital and general corporate purposes within a regulated entity, amid strong client demand for modern, multi-asset clearing, prime brokerage, and financing services.

“ With the completion of this offering, we have an additional source of capital to invest in our team and technology as we execute on our ambitious growth roadmap and bolster our position as one of the largest non-bank prime brokers globally,” — Noel Kimmel, President of Ripple Prime, said. 🚀

The unsecured notes offering received an investment grade rating (BBB) from global credit rating agency KBRA. KBRA previously assigned an investment grade issuer rating (BBB) to Ripple Prime.

#Stellar

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🤖 Anthropic-Tied Data Center Inks $1.3 Billion Private Credit Loan

Eagle Point Credit Management LLC is providing a roughly $1.3 billion private credit loan for a sprawling AI data center in Texas tied to Anthropic PBC.

The debt is part of a larger $16 billion project-finance package for developer Nexus Data Centers, which will use the funds to complete construction of a 2,900-acre facility in Hubbard, a city in the Lone Star State. The campus will have its own gas-fired power plant, and Anthropic will be the primary tenant.

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🏦 HSBC, Standard Chartered execute first live banking transaction on Swift’s 24/7 ledger

HSBC and Standard Chartered completed the first live interbank transaction on Swift’s new blockchain-based ledger, using tokenized deposits for real-time cross-border settlement.

The pilot, involving 17 banks across six continents, aims to cut costs and speed up payments by using a shared ledger that nets and settles obligations while preserving existing regulatory oversight. Bank executives say tokenized deposits and stablecoins will coexist, with Swift’s vast network positioning it to drive adoption of blockchain-based settlement.

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🇻🇪 Venezuela Is Ready to Sign Oil Deals, Minister Tells Houston Investors

Venezuela is keen to sign production-sharing contracts and ramp up output from the world’s biggest crude reserves, Oil Minister Paula Henao told investors in Houston. There are 916 areas in Venezuela available for exploration and production. The country is known for its heavy oil but there are also opportunities in light and medium crudes as well as natural gas.

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🧠 Brain organoids, kept alive more than five years, matured like human brains

In a new study published in Nature, researchers sustained brain organoids in the lab for years, dramatically extending the organoids’ longevity and opening new opportunities to investigate neural development and disease.

These organoids do not have the shape of a real brain, but they reproduce the brain’s cell types, gene expression and some stages of its organization, and are an essential tool for studying it. The breakthrough extends the period over which brain development can be observed through organoids and shows that time passes at the same rate for cells in the model as it does in humans.

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⚔️ India Startup Aims to Compete With OpenAI in Crowded Voice Arena

A Bangalore-based startup has entered the crowded race to build artificial voices that sound human, with an AI model that garners high scores versus systems from OpenAI and ElevenLabs Inc.

Murf AI’s text-to-speech Falcon 2, publicly available from Aug. 20, ranked higher than some platforms from better-funded players such as OpenAI’s Realtime API in benchmarks on Artificial Analysis, the independent platform that tracks AI performance.

#BRICS

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⚡️🇺🇸 Trump Asks Congress to Pass Crypto Bill Alongside Executives

President Donald Trump pressed Congress to pass digital asset market structure legislation that is a top priority for the industry, as he hosted cryptocurrency executives at the White House on Wednesday.

Trump cast the so-called Clarity Act as critical to keeping the US edge in emerging technologies and was joined at the event by executives including Coinbase Global Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong; Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss of Gemini Space Station Inc.; Arjun Sethi, the co-CEO of Payward Inc. which operates the Kraken exchange; and Robinhood Markets Inc. CEO Vlad Tenev.

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🤖 Gates-Backed TerraPower to Announce Second Nuclear Plant This Year

TerraPower LLC, the only company building a utility-scale nuclear power plant in the US, expects to announce its next project this year — one intended for a data center. That would put the Bill Gates-backed company on track to break ground on its second project in 2027.

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👮‍♂️ Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police

Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an AI tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone. The software, originally called Nightshift and more recently renamed OS Investigate, ships with 69 prewritten prompts that officers can select, review, or edit, and then submit to the AI.

An officer no longer needs a plate, a name, or a crime to begin. They supply a place, a stretch of time, and a pattern of behavior, and the system is designed to hand back the people who fit. Privacy and legal experts say Flock’s tools already raise serious constitutional concerns by giving police broad, often warrantless access to a vast record of people's movement.

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💊 Regeneron drug for disease that causes dangerous bone growth earns FDA approval

A medicine from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals for an ultra-rare disease that causes bone to grow where it shouldn’t won approval on Wednesday, the capstone of a three decade-long effort.

The hope is that the new medicine, called Pasatru, can help patients with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or FOP, maintain their mobility and perhaps even live longer. Typically, people with FOP rely on wheelchairs by age 25 as the bone accumulation locks up their limbs, and only some live into their 50s.

“You’re almost completely stopping the new [bone] forming, and therefore their condition will not deteriorate,” — said Richard Keen of London’s Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, who was the primary investigator in the medicine’s pivotal trial.

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🤖 IBM Connects Its First Modular Cryogenic Systems in Milestone Toward Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

IBM has successfully joined and cooled down two cryogenic modules into a single environment. The new architecture is designed to scale into the modular, shared, and ultra-cold system required to link hundreds of quantum chips into a more powerful quantum computer capable of solving large problems.

Its deployment is a milestone on IBM's path to delivering IBM Quantum Starling in 2029, which is expected to be the world's first fault-tolerant quantum computer and will integrate advances across error correction, processor design, decoding, and systems engineering. 🚀

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🚀 Reminder: Our Next Q&A + Meet & Greet Call Is Happening Today!

Don’t miss your chance to join our next call — this is a great opportunity to learn, engage, and be part of the conversation completely free of charge.

Be active, get involved, and make the most of this experience! 💫

🔘Thursday, August 20 @ 12pm CDT / 7pm CEST / 3am AEST ❤️

See you very soon in Zoom! 💙

#Stellar

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