News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
XRP, Solana (SOL), Hyperliquid (HYPE) and Bitcoin (BTC) Price Analysis for September 7: Unconventional Market Picture - U.Today
Following its explosive August breakout, XRP is trying to create a stable bullish structure. Although the asset is currently trading comfortably above the major moving averages at $1.42, price action since the initial surge indicates that buyers are still having difficulty resuming the advance. Support range for XRP Right now, the 200-day moving average is around $1.35, which is the most crucial level. Since late August, XRP has conducted numerous tests in this area without yielding a conclusive breakdown. Thus, $1.35-$1.36 is the main support range. This area is further strengthened by the 20-day moving average, which is also coming in from below at roughly $1.32. $1.45 is the initial resistance on the upside. Another attempt at $1.50-$1.55, where XRP previously encountered significant selling, could be opened by a clean daily close above it. The price spent very little time at the extreme wick toward $1.70, so it should not yet be considered established resistance. The momentum is still in favor. The RSI is currently at about 62, significantly lower than the overbought readings produced during the August breakout. As a result, XRP can continue to grow without becoming technically overheated. Bulls currently benefit from consolidation above $1.35. The recovery would be significantly weakened if that level were lost, and $1.32 and then $1.23 would come into focus. Solana stays above After gaining more than 3% during the current session, Solana has maintained one of the cleaner recovery structures on the chart, trading at about $106.50. SOL is currently trading above all of the major moving averages displayed, having recovered significantly from its June lows. The $108-$110 range is the current obstacle. Before going into consolidation, SOL hit about $110 during the late-August rally, and buyers have not yet been able to break that high. There would not be much technical resistance in the vicinity if the price continued to rise through $110. Support has emerged between $100 and $102, where buyers have been drawn in by a number of recent pullbacks. The next significant dynamic support is the rising 20-day moving average around $95.30 below that. Another significant structural level is the 200-day average of about $91. Although there is still plenty of momentum, caution is advised. The RSI is close to 68, and the signal average is above 72. As a result, even though SOL has cooled since the initial breakout, it is once again approaching overbought conditions. The overall setup continues to favor buyers as long as SOL stays above $100. While losing $100 could lead to a deeper retracement toward $95 and possibly $91, breaking $110 would reinforce the bullish continuation scenario. Hyperliquid near $100 With HYPE rising to about $89 after gaining more than 4% during the current session, Hyperliquid is still outperforming the overall market. The recent action continues the robust surge that started on August 18, when the value of the token was less than $60. The technical structure remains overwhelmingly bullish. The price is currently far above all significant moving averages, and HYPE has continuously produced higher highs and higher lows. The longer averages are still centered around $64-$66, but the 20-day moving average has increased to about $76.91. At $56.47, the 200-day moving average is significantly lower. The psychologically significant $90 area is now being tested by HYPE. The token would enter price discovery if there were a strong breakout above this level, with $92-$95 emerging as the next natural zone to watch. However, the gap between the price and its moving averages also reveals the extent of the rally. Right now, the RSI is at 68.5, which is slightly below the conventional overbought level. It is worth noting that momentum has somewhat decreased even as HYPE hits new highs, which increases the likelihood of consolidation but also leaves the door open to further upside. The first significant support is located between $84 and $85. The rising 20-day average around $77-$80 would become significant below that. HYPE's overall bullish structure does not change unless it loses these levels. Bitcoin stands under pressure After a strong breakout from about $63,000 in August, Bitcoin is still consolidating around $80,000. Although buyers have repeatedly failed to create a sustained move above $81,000, Bitcoin is currently trading close to $79,960. Instead of a proven reversal, the current structure is more akin to high-level consolidation. Demand for Bitcoin has consistently been found between $77,000 and $78,000; the most recent surge briefly pushed the price above $81,000 before being rejected once more. $81,000-$82,000 is now the most immediate resistance range. Additionally, Bitcoin maintains a significant distance from its main moving averages. While the 200-day moving average is close to $72,638, the 20-day average has increased to about $75,124. Additional averages between $69,400 and $70,000 further support the overall improvement in market structure following the August breakout. Momentum is still high. After previously entering overbought territory, the RSI is currently close to 67. Although another strong move toward $82,000 might quickly push momentum back into overheated conditions, this gives Bitcoin some additional room to grow. The strongest indication that the rally is resuming would be a daily breakout above $82,000, which could open up the $84,000-$85,000 area. The first crucial level of defense on the downside remains $77,000.
Srha Asghar longs for 'unconventional' drama roles
Pakistani actor Srha Asghar wants to see more variety in the roles offered to women on television, and says she is particularly interested in playing a character that is sporty, active and driven by something beyond the usual domestic conflicts. Speaking to The Express Tribune, Asghar, who will appear as Zoya in the Upcoming Express Entertainment drama Ikhtiyar, said she does not have a fixed formula for choosing projects. Instead, she believes that interesting characters often find their way to her. "I think roles choose me," she said. "A character comes and it is very different, and I really like it. Then I do it. Of course, sometimes you like a character but your dates do not match, so that happens too." In Ikhtiyar, Asghar plays Zoya, a bubbly and carefree woman who approaches life with excitement and seemingly little anxiety. Describing her character, she said Zoya is "here and there and everywhere" and has a solution for almost every situation. Despite the character's cheerful personality, Asghar admits that she does not completely resemble Zoya. "I am jolly, but I panic in situations," she said. "Zoya does not panic at all. She has a solution for everything." While Asghar has already taken on challenging roles during her career, she says she would like to explore characters that demand even more from her as an actor. For her, a strong character should not simply be defined by whether it is a protagonist or antagonist. It should have an identity and a life of its own. "I would like more challenging characters to come," she said. "There should be something in his or her life. There should be a hobby too, not just a story of a room." That desire for variety is also behind her interest in playing a sporty character something she has not yet explored on screen. "I haven't done anything sporty," Asghar said. "So this is for them. If there is any sporty character, i will do it." Her comments point towards a larger challenge faced by actors working in television, where female characters are frequently written around family disputes, relationships and domestic struggles. Asghar appears keen to move beyond that familiar territory and explore characters whose personalities are defined by interests, ambitions and activities outside the central storyline. Away from the screen, Asghar has also developed a strong social media presence. She frequently shares light-hearted videos, including content featuring her husband. However, she says there is no elaborate strategy behind the couple's online presence. "When I am at home from the shoot, I am very free, so we make videos," she said.
Graphene research reveals evidence of unconventional superconductivity
In a discovery that could reshape one of the most vigorous debates in modern condensed matter physics, researchers at the National Graphene Institute at the University of Manchester have shown that superconductivity in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene can be completely switched off by screening the interactions between electrons. The finding, published in Physical Review X, delivers some of the strongest experimental evidence to date that the superconductivity in this celebrated material is driven not by lattice vibrations, as in conventional superconductors, but by the electrons themselves -- a hallmark of what physicists call unconventional superconductivity. Magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene has captivated the scientific community ever since its superconducting properties were first revealed. The material is fabricated by taking two atomically thin sheets of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice and stacking them with a precise rotational twist of approximately 1.1 degrees. At this seemingly arbitrary angle, the electronic bands of the two layers flatten dramatically, electrons slow to a crawl, and interactions between them become overwhelmingly important. The result is a system that superconducts at temperatures only a few kelvin above absolute zero, yet behaves in ways that evoke the great unsolved mysteries of high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates and other exotic materials. For nearly a decade, however, theorists have been split over what actually glues the electrons into the pairs that flow without resistance. Some propose that the pairing arises purely from collective electronic behavior -- fluctuations and correlations among the electrons themselves. Others argue for a more mundane, conventional origin: phonons, the quantized vibrations of the atomic lattice, mediating the attractive interaction, much as they do in ordinary superconductors such as lead or niobium. Distinguishing between these scenarios experimentally has proven extraordinarily difficult, and a series of earlier screening experiments produced ambiguous, weaker results that left the debate simmering. The Manchester-led team, which included collaborators from the Henry Royce Institute, Washington University in St Louis, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Antwerp, Japan's National Institute for Materials Science and the National University of Singapore, found a way to break the deadlock. Dr Julien Barrier, the lead author of the study, describes the two critical hurdles that had to be overcome. "To make a difference, we had to solve two issues," he explained. "First, to build a device in which the screening layer sits extremely close, a fraction of a nanometre, to the superconducting graphene while remaining electronically separate. Second, we had to make that screening layer tuneable. To this effect, we used a twisted graphene bilayer in atomic contact to the magic-angle graphene." The device architecture is a masterpiece of nanoscale engineering. It consists of two twisted graphene bilayers separated by less than a nanometre -- a gap so small that it approaches the scale of individual atomic bonds -- yet the two systems remain electronically decoupled. This means electrons cannot hop between the layers, but the electric fields they generate can. By adjusting the carrier density in the adjacent screening layer, the researchers could continuously tune the strength of the Coulomb interaction -- the repulsive electrostatic force between electrons -- experienced by the superconducting layer. The closer proximity and the tunability of the screening layer allowed modifications of Coulomb interactions over distances as short as 0.3 nanometres, an unprecedented level of control in such experiments. What happened next surprised even the team. "When we switched on the screening, we were surprised to find that superconductivity was completely suppressed," said Professor Alexey Berdyugin of the National University of Singapore, a corresponding author of the study. "This provides clear experimental evidence that superconductivity in this system originates from strong electron-electron interactions. This behaviour offers a new opportunity to better understand the mechanisms underlying superconductivity in other materials with strong electronic interactions, including high-temperature superconductors." The results were unambiguous and strikingly dose-dependent. As the researchers progressively increased the carrier density in the neighbouring graphene bilayer, the superconductivity in the adjacent magic-angle layer weakened steadily. At sufficiently high carrier densities, superconductivity vanished entirely. Moreover, the superconducting critical temperature -- the temperature below which the material loses all electrical resistance -- could be reduced by more than an order of magnitude through screening alone. Alongside the suppression of superconductivity, the team observed that correlated insulating states, another enigmatic signature of magic-angle graphene in which the interacting electrons lock themselves into an insulating arrangement, disappeared under the same conditions. The parallel fates of superconductivity and the correlated insulating states reinforce the picture that both phenomena spring from the same source: strong electronic correlations. The theoretical implications are profound. If phonons -- lattice vibrations -- were the glue binding electron pairs, screening the Coulomb interaction would be expected to leave superconductivity largely unchanged or even to enhance it slightly, since screening suppresses the repulsive Coulomb interaction that normally opposes conventional pairing. The Manchester team observed precisely the opposite: screening destroyed the superconducting state. According to the researchers, this inverted response rules out conventional phonon-mediated pairing as an explanation for superconductivity in this class of materials. The enhanced magnitude of the effect, far stronger than in earlier screening experiments, is attributed to the exceptionally small separation between the superconducting and screening layers, which allowed the Coulomb interaction to be modified far more effectively than ever before. Importantly, the authors are careful about what the study does and does not claim. While the work does not identify a single definitive pairing mechanism, several unconventional theories remain consistent with the results, including those based on collective electronic interactions, such as fluctuation-driven pairing channels. What the experiment does accomplish is to place much tighter constraints on any future theory that hopes to explain superconductivity in magic-angle graphene. Any candidate mechanism must now survive a brutal test: it must predict that superconductivity collapses when Coulomb interactions are screened at the nanometre scale. Theories relying primarily on conventional phonon glue no longer pass. Professor Sir Andre Geim, the Nobel laureate who first isolated graphene and a corresponding author of the new work, frames the achievement in the context of physics' grandest prize: superconductivity at room temperature. "Personally, I am interested only in high-temperature superconductivity -- preferably at room temperature or above," he said. "This study was done at temperatures so low that even helium turns liquid. But unless we understand what makes superconductivity work, we are unlikely ever to reach room-temperature superconductivity, let alone make this remarkable phenomenon commercially useful. Our study takes only a tiny step -- but still a step -- in that direction, helping to nail down the mechanism of exotic superconductivity in graphene. Rome was not built in a day." Geim's caution is well-founded. Room-temperature superconductivity remains the holy grail of materials science, promising lossless power transmission, ultra-efficient magnets and transformational electronics. But the path there runs directly through the problem that this study addresses: understanding the mechanism of pairing in strongly correlated electron systems. Because magic-angle graphene is tunable, clean and theoretically tractable in ways that cuprates are not, it has become a Rosetta Stone of sorts for the physics of unconventional superconductors. Each experimental advance in decoding it reverberates through the broader effort to understand and eventually engineer higher-temperature superconductors. Beyond superconductivity itself, the technique developed by the team may have far-reaching applications. "In this study, we introduced a method for screening electron-electron interactions over scales as short as 0.3 nm, which turned out to be crucial for controlling superconductivity in magic-angle graphene," Professor Berdyugin concluded. "We anticipate that this unprecedented level of short-range screening could also help clarify many other debated phenomena." Strongly correlated materials are riddled with contested phenomena -- strange metals, nematicity, competing orders, quantum criticality -- and a controllable, short-range knob for dialling electron interactions up and down could prove decisive in disentangling them. The study stands as a vivid demonstration of how atomically engineered van der Waals heterostructures -- stacks of two-dimensional materials assembled layer by layer with atomic precision -- can answer questions that bulk crystals cannot. By placing a tuneable electronic screen within a fraction of a nanometre of a superconducting sheet without contaminating it, the Manchester-led collaboration has effectively performed a controlled experiment on the fundamental interaction behind one of nature's most subtle collective states. The superconductivity in magic-angle graphene, the evidence now says, belongs to the electrons themselves. The next chapter -- identifying exactly how they conspire to pair -- is still to be written, but the rules of the game have just been redrawn.
Inside Bamboo Numérik, Benin's Unconventional Cultural Hub
Bamboo Numérik has evolved into one of Cotonou's most distinctive cultural spaces, combining a library, café, restaurant, artist residency program, performance venues, and accommodation. Founded by Beninese artist and slam poet Kamal Radji, the project began in 2011, driven by the conviction that countries seeking cultural development must build spaces where creativity can flourish. Beginning with shipping-container bookshelves, the project grew into a hub for artist residencies, concerts, exhibitions, and community gatherings, all designed around an open, communal layout inspired by African architectural traditions. This adaptable design encourages creatives, entrepreneurs, and community members to interact. Radji now hopes to expand the concept into a network of cultural spaces across Benin, connecting emerging artists with established African and international creatives.
