Breaking Bitcoin, Bottled Black Holes, and Rapamycin for Crickets

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Cold open

0:24Host 1Welcome to the Hastrup Review of Science — where artificial intelligence reads real science, so you don't have to pretend you understood the paper. This week, a team showed that a trapped-ion quantum computer with twenty thousand qubits could crack Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography in twenty-six days.

0:42Host 2That means the timeline for quantum threats to public-key infrastructure just went from a vague someday to a concrete engineering target, and it is closer than most people expected.

0:52Host 1Five papers this week spanning quantum computing, analogue black hole physics, battery electrochemistry, longevity pharmacology, and resistance training methods. We also have a lab-built black hole bomb in superfluid helium and some surprising rapamycin data from crickets.

Cracking Bitcoin in twenty-six days

1:09Host 1Häner and colleagues at Quantinuum published a full resource estimate for solving the two hundred fifty-six bit elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem using Shor's algorithm. This is the specific curve, secp two five six k one, that secures Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most blockchain infrastructure.

1:27Host 2They compiled the entire quantum circuit onto their Walking Cat trapped-ion architecture. The optimized circuit uses about fourteen hundred fifty logical qubits and forty million Toffoli gates. A key innovation was a fast magic-state factory and depth-one injection protocol that cuts execution time for certain critical gates by a factor of thirty-one.

1:48Host 1And the headline number?

1:50Host 2Nineteen thousand three hundred ninety-seven physical qubits, twenty-six days of continuous runtime, sixty-three percent success probability. Nobody has built this machine, and this is a preprint. But the qubit count is roughly an order of magnitude below prior estimates for the same problem.

2:08Host 1What does that mean practically?

2:10Host 2It means quantum-safe migration is not a decades-away concern — twenty thousand qubits is within the published roadmaps of several hardware vendors. The cryptographic community already recommends post-quantum algorithms, but this paper makes the urgency concrete. The full story is in this paper's deep dive, out this week in the feed.

A lab-built black hole bomb

2:31Host 1Švančara and colleagues at the University of Nottingham built a laboratory black hole bomb using a draining vortex in superfluid helium.

2:39Host 2Rotating black holes can amplify waves through a process called superradiance. Confine those waves in a cavity and you get repeated amplification, the so-called black-hole bomb instability, whose nonlinear end state has been debated for decades. They reproduced this inside a cylindrical chamber where surface waves on superfluid helium experience an effective rotating spacetime.

3:01Host 1What did they actually observe?

3:03Host 2Exponential growth of a low-frequency resonant mode, exactly as linear theory predicts, but then the growth arrested. Nonlinear three-wave and four-wave interactions redistributed energy across modes and saturated the amplification into a stable, long-lived non-equilibrium steady state.

3:19Host 1So the bomb does not actually explode?

3:22Host 2Not in this system — the nonlinear dynamics quench the runaway before it becomes catastrophic. This matters for astrophysics because ultralight boson fields around rotating black holes would trigger the same instability, and if this saturation mechanism transfers, those clouds would stabilize rather than drain the black hole completely. This is a preprint, but the experimental platform is genuinely new, and the full story is in this paper's deep dive, out this week in the feed.

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Battery voltage is mechanical

4:37Host 1Giudici and colleagues at Oxford and the University of Trento published a result showing that battery open-circuit voltage is not a purely chemical property.

4:46Host 2The textbook says that open-circuit voltage is intrinsic to the electrode material's chemistry. Using finite-element simulations and asymptotic analysis, they show that particle swelling during lithium insertion creates Hertzian contact stresses between electrode particles. Those stresses shift the inserted-ion chemical potential and change the measured voltage.

5:07Host 1So the same material gives different voltage curves depending on how it is packed?

5:12Host 2Exactly. Identical chemistry, different microstructure, different voltage. And in a full cell, the cathode and anode are mechanically coupled through the shared stack pressure, so the cell voltage becomes a chemo-mechanical property of the entire battery architecture, not the electrode materials alone.

5:30Host 1What are the practical implications?

5:32Host 2Every battery management system uses the voltage curve to estimate state of charge, and if that curve drifts with mechanical aging, compression, or even temperature cycling, your charge estimates drift with it. This is a preprint and they have not yet measured the correction experimentally, but the theory is clean. The full story is in this paper's deep dive, out this week in the feed.

Rapamycin works in crickets

5:55Host 1Liao and colleagues at the University of Washington tested intermittent dosing of three known geroprotective drugs in house crickets.

6:03Host 2Two hundred seventy-four sex-matched Acheta domesticus received two-week courses of rapamycin, acarbose, or phenylbutyrate starting at mid-age, which is eight weeks for a cricket. They then underwent behavioral testing at the geriatric stage at ten weeks using Y-maze olfactory discrimination, open-field exploration, and treadmill endurance.

6:23Host 1And the results?

6:25Host 2Rapamycin-treated males matched or exceeded juvenile locomotor activity, and treadmill endurance improved with effect sizes above two, which is large. Olfactory cognition was preserved across all three drugs. Rapamycin cut the post-treatment hazard ratio to zero point four two, meaning it more than halved the death rate.

6:44Host 1Any downsides?

6:45Host 2Acarbose actually harmed female survival, pushing the hazard ratio near three, which is a new finding that needs mechanistic follow-up. This is peer-reviewed in Scientific Reports with n of two hundred seventy-four, and the cricket results track closely with mouse longevity studies — that cross-species convergence is what makes this interesting. The full story is in this paper's deep dive, out this week in the feed.

Slow eccentrics versus conventional lifting

7:11Host 1Nemati and colleagues published a randomized controlled trial comparing eccentric quasi-isometric training to conventional dynamic resistance training over six weeks.

7:21Host 2Thirty untrained men, ages eighteen to twenty-six, randomized three ways: full-body eccentric quasi-isometrics, dynamic resistance training, or no-training control at three sessions per week. Both training groups improved significantly over controls in muscle size, strength, power, and endurance. No statistically significant between-group differences were found.

7:42Host 1So the slow eccentric holds genuinely match conventional lifting?

7:46Host 2For these outcomes in untrained men, yes. Eccentric quasi-isometrics showed a small advantage in upper-body strength, endurance, and hormonal markers like growth hormone and follistatin, with effect sizes around zero point three five to zero point seven. Dynamic training edged ahead in lower-body strength, muscle hypertrophy, and jump power at similar effect sizes.

8:08Host 1What should listeners take from this?

8:11Host 2If you cannot load a barbell due to injury, travel, or limited equipment, eccentric quasi-isometrics appear to produce comparable early-phase adaptations. The caveat is that this is peer-reviewed in Scientific Reports but n of ten per group is small and the subjects were untrained, so transfer to experienced lifters is uncertain. The full story is in this paper's deep dive, out this week in the feed.

Sign-off

8:35Host 1That is your Hastrup Review of Science for week thirty-six.

8:38Host 2Five deep dives drop in the feed this week. We will see you next time.