Author: Geek Planet

Bitcoin mining pool Braiins has reached a major milestone by processing over 1,000 daily payouts on the Lightning Network. This achievement demonstrates the potential for Lightning to enable instant, low-cost transactions at scale for the mining sector. Since first introducing Lightning payouts in February 2024 through a partnership with payments platform Voltage, Braiins has experienced consistent double-digit monthly growth in Lightning transactions. Miners now have access to immediate payouts of their earnings rather than relying on slower, expensive on-chain settlement. According to Braiins CEO Eli Nagar, “Lightning payouts have completely changed the way miners receive their earnings. Rather than waiting…

It’s likely to come up around 3:00 a.m.— six beers or cups of bad coffee later — in a long discussion among frosh: Our universe is a simulation. Controlled by intelligent aliens no doubt… Yeah, just like in the Terminator series. Skynet, you know… Yeah, Skynet… Image Credit: Pixels Hunter – Adobe Stock Go to bed. At ScienceDaily, the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) reports that new research suggests that the idea that the universe is a simulation is mathematically impossible. By applying advanced mathematical principles, including Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, they proved that any consistent and complete model of existence…

Yesterday, Andrew McDiarmid’s recent interview with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor dropped at Discovery Science. Dr. Egnor is the author, along with , of The Immortal Mind: A neurosurgeon’s case for the existence of the soul (2025): “Does the Human Soul Really Exist? Neurosurgeon Explains the Evidence,” Nov 15, 2025 [27:41 min]Here’s an excerpt from midway through the podcast [12:38 and following]: Michael Egnor: Near-death experiences are surprisingly common. There’s no question there. There’s been probably tens of millions of people over over human history who have had things like this. And there tends to be patterns to them that occur across…

Reflecting the United States’ growing embrace of Bitcoin, investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald has announced partnerships with Anchorage Digital and Copper.co to support its expanding global Bitcoin financing business. Anchorage Digital and Copper.co will serve as collateral managers and custodians for Cantor Fitzgerald, providing leverage to institutional investors holding Bitcoin. Anchorage Digital and Copper will use their industry-leading security solutions to custody and safeguard client assets. “We are thrilled to partner with Anchorage Digital and Copper, whose industry-leading security solutions will help us deliver best-in-class digital asset custody services to our clients,” said Michael Cunningham, Head of Bitcoin Financing at Cantor…

This article is republished with the permission of Doug Smith from his blog That Doug Smith (November 10, 2025) A leader at a large Christian ministry heard my debate with Jay Owen on Preston Sprinkle’s podcast a few months ago and invited me to be on that podcast as well. I was excited because I’m a big fan of the ministry. Jay Owens vs. Doug Smith  (May 5, 2025)But in our email dialog, he made this extra request about what he’d like me to say: Given that AI is already being used at school, among friends, family, in churches, etc., how can…

Lenovo’s next lineup of Windows-on-ARM laptops has started to leak in full ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026, and the early details paint a picture of thin, light, and highly efficient machines powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 series chips. According to Windows Latest, Lenovo will showcase multiple devices, from premium clamshells to mainstream convertibles, built around the next generation of ARM silicon. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 family was announced in late 2025 with promises of significant performance and efficiency gains over its predecessors, bringing improved CPU and GPU capabilities along with a beefier NPU for on-device AI tasks.…

This article is republished from National Review with the permission of the author. Editors of many of the world’s top scientific and medical journals are destroying or — better stated, perhaps — have destroyed the public’s trust in scientific and medical leadership because these journals can no longer be deemed objective purveyors of truth. Image Credit: Itsaraporn – Adobe Stock Nature and its associated science journals (Nature Portfolio), supposedly the most elite of the lot, are among the worst offenders. For example, in 2024 Nature endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president in part because of her support for abortion. Nature also endorsed Biden in 2020. To say the least, blatantly engaging…

Gifted nerds can often find logical solutions to gnarly problems using abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation). With this in mind, here’s this week’s Micro Softy. Four men with faces covered drive up to a mansion in a large truck. They hurriedly exit the truck. Two of the men forcibly break the front door down and go into the house. They come out, restraining a terrified screaming girl. The girl is handed to and restrained by one of the men outside. A second older woman approaches, sees the situation, and hysterically runs towards the house. She is tackled and,…

Today at the Bitcoin Policy Institute’s “Bitcoin for America” summit in Washington DC, U.S. Senator from Wyoming Cynthia Lummis announced that she is going to reintroduce her strategic Bitcoin reserve legislation in the Senate today. “I am so pleased to announce that today I will be reintroducing The Bitcoin Act,” Senator Lummis stated. “And I’ll be joined here shortly by Senator Justice of West Virginia, who is one of the cosponsors. And we have several other additional cosponsors. And a lot of it is a result of the excitement that’s been building.” “So far cosponsors are [Tommy] Tubberville, [Marsha] Blackburn,…

OpenAI and other AI software startups are at the economic center of the generative AI economy. End users pay OpenAI for the use of its software and OpenAI pays the AI cloud providers to process those models. In turn, those cloud providers pay Nvidia and other semiconductor companies for their chips, particularly graphical process units (GPUs). Image Credit: Nadiyah – Adobe Stock These cloud providers are now building so many data centers that electricity has become the biggest bottleneck in the overall AI value chain according to some sources, including the Financial Times. But the Financial Times says that this…