There are more and more people who accumulate and accumulate dogs and cats in their homes

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It happened in Madrid, end of 2024. The authorities entered the apartment of a woman from the Chamartín district who lived with 74 cats in such unsanitary conditions that, after the rescue and despite the shelter’s efforts, several of the cats died shortly after. Although that number (74) is shocking, Madrid is just one of the many (many) cases of ‘Noah syndrome’ that the police register every year, both in Spain and in other countries. The issue makes headlines only when events as bloody as the one in Chamartín are uncovered, but the truth is that every time there are more studies which suggest that animal hoarding is a serious problem and (the key) growing. What is Noah syndrome? a disorder similar to Diogenes syndrome (sometimes both overlap) which consists of the compulsive and disproportionate accumulation of animals, which in turn results in risk situations both for the latter and for those who suffer from the disorder and their immediate environment, especially if they live in a community. In general, beyond this hoarding, it is considered that the syndrome is accompanied by two other interrelated traits. The first is that those who suffer from the syndrome end up being unable to keep their animals in good condition. It is not just about living with a disproportionate number of dogs and cats in more or less small spaces. People with ‘Noe syndrome’ are unable to attend to their most basic needs. The second characteristic is that they also do not see the problem. Although sometimes they themselves ask for help (It happened in Chamartín) usually deny their disorder, minimize it or are suspicious of those who try to help them. @rspca_official Last week, we shared a photo on social media from a recent rescue with @Dogs Trust involving over 250 poodle-cross dogs… The scale was so shocking that it led to countless allegations of the image being AI-generated💔 For the teams who worked tirelessly on this rescue and those currently providing 24/7 care for these dogs, seeing the authenticity of their hard work questioned has been deeply upsetting. We don’t need to use AI, as we have thousands of real stories about helping animals in desperate need, just like this. Sadly, this is very much real, as much as we wish it wasn’t. This is the heartbreaking reality that our frontline teams are facing more and more, having seen a massive rise in multi-animal reports involving 10, 50, or even 100+ animals at a single address. You can be a vital part of a rescue animal’s journey, please adopt ❤️‍🩹 #AnimalRescue #AI #Dogs #Rescue #Poodle ♬ Moment Of Reflection – Jhonatan Rodrigues & Piano Sky & Dee Piano Why is it a problem? For many reasons. To begin with, because often behind each case of Noah’s syndrome there is a drama. Those who hoard animals usually start doing so out of “good intentions,” such as recognizes PETA. Over time, however, its purpose is diverted and its disorder ends up leading to the opposite: “Criminal behavior with horrible consequences for animals, their families and communities.” Cats and dogs end up living cramped, surrounded by feces, and malnourished, a situation that worsens as the colony increases. And that is not difficult if their owner does not take care of castrating them. A clear example of this dynamic was recorded not long ago in England, where 250 poodles that were living cramped in the same house were rescued. When it reported the case, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) published a photo in which you can see a room full of dirty and shaggy dogs. The image is so shocking that the RSPCA began to receive criticism from people convinced that it had been generated with AI. Those responsible had to come out to deny it categorically: “The image, shocking, reflects reality.” How many people does the syndrome affect? In the statement which launched to vindicate the authenticity of the photo, the RSPCA not only insists on the drama of cases of Noah syndrome. It also leaves behind a worrying idea: its staff encounters “more and more frequently” cases of abuse in which multiple animals are involved at the same time: 10, 20 or up to a hundred. Why is it important? Because it gives us a clue about the incidence (and evolution) of the episodes that may fit into Noah’s syndrome. To be precise, since 2021 RSPCA has confirmed a 70% increase in “multi-animal incidents” in England and Wales. Not everyone can relate to the syndrome, but the data is still eloquent. “Instances where large numbers of animals are kept in one home may be linked to mental health issues, the cost of living crisis or breeders operating with inappropriate practices,” precise the organization, which warns: “Even people who initially had good intentions often see the situation get out of hand.” Is there more data? Yes. The RSPCA assures that last year alone responded to 4,200 alerts related to cases of abuse involving (at least) a dozen animals, always in the same address. And that’s just in England and Wales. The organization warns of the impact of the rising cost of living, poor breeding practices and the increase in abandonments. Beyond the public health problem that they represent, cases like this directly affect the dogs and cats involved. Even if they are rescued, they often suffer consequences that make it difficult for them to find a new home. For example, they suffer stress when they are left alone, they have a hard time adjusting, or they urinate and defecate where they shouldn’t. And beyond England? There are not many statistical or incidence studies on episodes of animal accumulation, but there are clues that indicate that the United Kingdom is not an exceptional case. In April 2025 Korea Times pointed out that the problem seems to be increasing in South Korea as well and not long ago NBC pointed in the same direction talking about the US. The … Read more

It has 12 sides and is 351 meters high

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Although in recent times Asia and the Middle East have emerged as the new locations for skyscrapers (in fact, China is the place in the world where there are the most buildings that caress the sky), the place par excellence for skyscrapers has always been North America. Cities like New York or Chicago and legendary buildings like the Empire State, One World Trade Center or the Central Park Tower set the pace of a competition that once seemed reserved for American cities. But North America is not just the United States and the constructions of Torres Obispado in Monterrey or the imminent Tower Rise They show that their neighbors also know how to build skyscrapers very well. In this context comes the Pinnacle SkyTower in Toronto, a skyscraper that, although it is not the tallest in meters nor does it have the most spectacular silhouette, is going to mark a milestone: be the residential building with the most floors in all of North America, as well as the tallest skyscraper in Canada. The skyscraper with 12 faces. The Pinnacle SkyTower that is being built in Toronto reaches a total height of 351.85 meters in its 106 floors. It will house 958 luxury homes, the new Le Méridien Toronto hotel, some 7,400 square meters of common areas and crowning it all, a restaurant with panoramic views on the top floor, such as explains the design studio Hariri Pontarini Architects. The forecast suggests that future residents They will be able to move in starting in autumn 2026, although the complete delivery of the set will be in 2027. One of the aspects that attracts the most attention is its dodecagon shape. As Jodi Buck, partner of the architecture studio, details, this geometry seeks a balance between architecture and functionality, that is, it allows the construction of a more slender structure, opens views in various directions and something essential in buildings of this size: it better distributes the wind load on the façade. The upper floors progressively reduce until the tower ends in a striking pointed crown, which makes the SkyTower an unmistakable silhouette on the Toronto skyline. Why it is important. To begin with, because The SkyTower breaks records: it will be the building with the highest number of floors in a residential building in North America. But there is a trick: it is not the tallest in meters, that title is still held by the Central Park Tower in New York, but it is the one with the most floors. This implies a design decision: favor the construction of more homes in a commitment to greater residential density per meter built. At the urban level, with this building Canada is put on the map as a country capable of competing in this segment of super-high-rise skyscrapers, historically dominated by American and Asian cities. In fact and how points out New Atlasis one of the first Canadian skyscrapers to exceed 300 meters in actual building height. Curiously, setting the record was not initially in the project: with construction already underway, Pinnacle International made it possible because submitted an application to increase the height of the ceilings on some floors and convert mechanical space into habitable space. Projection of the new and exclusive urban development of Toronto. One Yonge Toronto Context. The SkyTower is the jewel in the crown of the Pinnacle One Yongea mixed-use development plan that is transforming the grounds of the former Toronto Star building into one of the city’s largest urban complexes, connecting the tower to a future public park next to Lake Ontario and the financial district. The complete set is formed by six towers of between 22 and 106 floors that will house 2,500 homes, 93,000 square meters of offices, 7,400 square meters of shops, a community center of 4,600 square meters with a swimming pool and gym and a one-hectare public park. The first tower in the complex was the Prestige: it has 65 floors and was completed in 2022. The Pinnacle SkyTower is another example of the trend of super-tall towers that combine homes with hotels, a model widespread in Asia that North America is adopting in response to the housing need and the scarcity of land in central areas. Without going any further, Toronto has several similar projects under construction. Yes, but. As we mentioned above, SkyTower does not win in meters but in floors: the Central Park Tower in New York surpasses it in absolute height thanks to its higher internal ceilings and we have the antenna, the First Canadian Place in Toronto equals it (although it is true that this does not count in official rankings). On the other hand, and although it obviously increases the housing available in the Canadian city, we are talking about a building with 958 luxury homes with prices from 800,000 Canadian dollars and a five-star hotel. With that budget, it is difficult to resolve the problem of access to housing for its citizens. It is new housing, yes, but with prices within the reach of few. In Xataka | Mexico touches the sky with a new and elegant skyscraper of 484 meters and 99 floors: it will be the tallest in all of Latin America In Xataka | If the question is whether a skyscraper can be erased without demolishing it, Paris has the answer: yes, in exchange for a fortune Cover | Dillan Payne and JK Liu

a plane, a ship and a missile launcher in one machine

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In the middle of the Cold War, American spy satellites detected a Soviet machine in the Caspian Sea so enormous and strange that CIA analysts thought for months that it could be a photographic error. That experimental creature, named after as “Caspian Sea Monster”ended up becoming one of the military projects most disconcerting never seen on the water. The return of the monster. For decades, Soviet ekranoplanes seemed like a technological extravagance impossible to repeat: gigantic machines that they mixed concepts of plane, ship and missile platform in an absurd hybrid even by Cold War standards. They flew skimming the sea at enormous speed, partially escaping radar and taking advantage of the so-called “ground effect” to move as if they were suspended over the water. The most famous, as we said, was the Caspian Sea Monstera military creature born in the sixties that seemed straight out of a Soviet science fiction novel and that ended up becoming one of the strangest military experiments ever built. Now China is resurrecting that idea with the call “Bohai Sea Monster”an aircraft that combines features of a seaplane, amphibious vehicle, military transport and possible missile launcher, recovering a concept that seemed buried near the end of the USSR. China and an obsession. The new images of the Bohai Sea Monster show that Beijing is not working on a simple experimental or maritime rescue device. Supports appear under the wings compatible with weaponspossibly torpedoes or anti-ship missiles, while the configuration of the device confirms that it is a vehicle specifically designed to operate at very low altitudes above the water. The detail is important because it completely changes the initial perception of the project: it stops looking like a strange seaplane and becomes a potential offensive platform. In essence, China is trying to unite several capabilities into a single machine: the mobility of an aircraft, the maritime persistence of a ship, and the strike capability of a military aircraft. The result is exactly the type hybrid concept that fascinated Soviets and Americans for decades and that now re-emerges in the 21st century. Designed for the Pacific. Chinese interest in this type of vehicle makes a lot of sense within a hypothetical conflict in the Pacific. Ekranoplanes can scroll quickly between archipelagos, forward bases and coasts without relying on traditional landing strips, something especially useful in the South China Sea or in a scenario around Taiwan. When flying just a few meters above the water, there are partially hidden below the radar horizon and are much more difficult to detect than a conventional aircraft. Additionally, they can transport cargo, troops, sensors or weapons while operating in areas where a ship would be slow and vulnerable and where an aircraft would need infrastructure. China appears to be exploring precisely that space in between: a machine capable of resupplying artificial islands, supporting amphibious landings, launching drones or attacking enemy ships without behaving entirely like a ship or a conventional aircraft. Mon Class The Soviet shadow. The entire program inevitably reminds us of the large soviet ekranoplanes of the Cold War, especially to Mon-classwhich carried anti-ship missiles on the fuselage and was conceived as an ultra-fast naval attack platform. The USSR dedicated enormous resources to these vehicles because they offered very specific advantages over NATO: speed greater than that of ships, lower radar visibility and ability to operate over enormous maritime distances. The problem was that they were also complex devices, vulnerable to bad weather and difficult to maintain. After the Soviet collapse, almost all of these projects disappeared and the concept was reduced to a historical curiosity. However, China seems to have concluded that current technology (better sensors, materials, digital navigation and drones) can turn that old idea into a reality. something much more viable than it was half a century ago. Much more than a simple prototype. Another of the keys to the Bohai Sea Monster is that it probably not the definitive modelbut a smaller technological “demo” intended to validate the concept before building much larger versions. The pictures show a relatively compact device, but several analysts believe that the ultimate goal could be a platform for much larger sizepossibly equipped with more powerful engines, greater autonomy and a considerable military load. That would fit with China’s usual strategy of revealing ambiguous prototypes that appear experimental until, years later, they end up becoming fully operational systems. The fact that the project appears precisely when the United States canceled the Liberty Lifter of DARPA is also revealing: while Washington abandoned its modern attempt to create a logistical ekranoplane, Beijing seems determined to explore exactly that path. The new military logic. The Bohai Sea Monster also fits into a transformation much broader of the Chinese armed forces. Beijing has been developing platforms for years that mix traditional categories and break the classic divisions between ship, plane, missile and drone. Their new military doctrines seek saturate the Pacific with systems that are cheap, fast, difficult to detect and capable of operating from multiple domains at the same time. In that context, an armed ekranoplane stops seeming like an oddity and begins to make sense as a piece of a broader strategy based on extreme mobility, distributed warfare and control of disputed maritime spaces. The fascinating thing is that China is not only recovering a technology forgotten of the cold war: It is trying to adapt it to a scenario where sensors, missiles and drones have completely changed the way of fighting at sea. Image | x, Vyacheslav Bukharov In Xataka | China has been designing the future of its hypersonic fighters and missiles for 30 years: an engine for all speeds In Xataka | China created the C919 to stand up to Airbus and Boeing. And we already have data to know if it is being successful

2,000 years ago, a lame and bald slave began speaking in the taverns of Rome. His “two-handle theory” has marked modern psychology

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We are in the first third of the second century after Christ and what we see is a boy from Nicomedia obsessively writing down everything that a weak, bald and half-lame old man says. Arrian does not know it, but those notes that will see the light in 135, will never be forgotten. Some call it “perennial wisdom” and, in fact, much of its ideas helped generate, 2,000 years later, things like modern psychotherapy. It’s still surprising, really. After all, in many parts of the Enchiridion, they spend their time talking about vessels. Vessels? For example. In section 43, you can read that “Everything has two handles, one by which it can be carried and one by which it cannot be carried. If your brother acts unjustly, do not take the matter by the handle of injustice (because by that it cannot be carried), but by the other: which is your brother, who were raised together.” A philosophy always on the verge of ridicule. I speak of Epictetus’s vessel, because, in these times of ‘pop stoicism’, most of the times when the theory of the two handles is cited it is done wrong. The core of Epictetus’ ideathe old and lame philosopher at the beginning of the article, is not resigning, it is not denying injustice, nor shrugging one’s shoulders in the face of it. The essential thing is to ‘reframe the relationship with her’ in order to manage it. Epictetus demonstrates the old saying that there is nothing more practical than a good theory and what he is telling us is that “if the handle we use doesn’t work, why do we insist on continuing to use it?” What is stoicism? In principle, Stoicism is intellectual archaeology. It is true that the Stoic school was a tremendously fertile current of thought in three areas: ethics, logic and physics (that is, in natural science). But it is also true that Stoic physics has been surpassed by modern science and its advanced logical ideas (after being ignored for a long time) are fully integrated into modern propositional logic. The only “rescuable” thing is his ethics. That is, a practical philosophy that tries to transform the emotions, impulses and passions of the human being and turn them into a tool to find inner calm. And it has been tried, but things went wrong. For the Stoics, human flourishing (‘eudaimonia’, the good life) consisted of achieve that ‘apatheia’that peace of mind. Its main tool is a basic distinction: the things we can control, on the one hand, and those we cannot, on the other. The Stoic interest, as Epictetus points out in his theory of the two handles, is in the first ones, those that can be controlled. Then came to ‘broicism’ (the hijacking of stoicism by an “ultra-processed pseudo-philosophy full of patterns of aggression, self-isolation and self-improvement). But there are always things to learn… In the 1950s, American psychologists such as Albert Ellis led the development of cognitive therapies following some very similar ideas to the Stoics. And, in recent years, the role of Hellenic philosophies has been explored as “preventive psychological medicines”. That is, as a set of ideas that would help to have a healthy psychological life, all of this makes sense. Epictetus shows it. …especially in this world. A few years ago, the Complutense professor Ignacio Pajón Leyra held that the Hellenistic era in which Stoicism developed is very similar to our own. They are similar in social instability, in major political changes; They are similar in that traditional religion began to decline and the first great globalization occurred; They are similar in that community projects began to lose strength and the individual gained more and more social and political weight. As we said thenit is possible that Pajón Leyra is right and human beings use philosophies, beliefs and doctrines as a way to make sense of the world. And, in that sense, “similar worlds” require “similar philosophies.” But then, what’s really interesting about this boom in Stoicism is what it’s saying about us. Image | Xataka In Xataka | What is Stoicism, the Greek philosophy from 2,000 years ago that has become fashionable again today

The nuclear explosion that changed the world also created a material that exists nowhere else in the known universe

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On July 16, 1945, the first detonation of an atomic bomb—known as the trinity test— changed the course of history and left an indelible mark on the New Mexico desert. The explosion of the plutonium device released energy equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT, enough to vaporize the 30-meter test tower, the kilometers of copper cables connecting the recording instruments, and the desert sand itself. All this material, carried by the immense fireball, rained down in the form of molten glassy fragments, creating a unique form of matter known today as trinite. The vast majority of this trinite is a classic green color, but there is a much rarer variant called “red trinite,” whose color is attributed to the presence of copper oxide formed when transmission lines vaporized in the explosion. It is precisely inside this rare variant where scientists have discovered unprecedented crystalline structures. The violent conditions of the detonation subjected the materials to temperatures of around 1,500 °C and extreme pressures of 5 to 8 gigapascals. The matter vaporized, mixed, and cooled so extremely quickly—in a matter of seconds—that the atoms did not have time to organize themselves into stable structures, forging forms of matter that had never existed on our planet. An unprecedented find. Almost 80 years after that first nuclear explosion, an international research team led by Luca Bindi, a geologist at the University of Florence, has managed to identify a new material hidden in these samples. As the research explainsit is a “clathrate”: a cage-shaped chemical network that traps other atoms inside. This new crystal is built with 12- and 14-sided silicon cages that enclose atoms of calcium, copper, and small amounts of iron. It represents the first time that the presence of a clathrate among the solid products of a nuclear explosion has been crystallographically confirmed. That this discovery comes now, in 2026, is no coincidence. Samples of red trinitite are extremely rare and difficult to obtain, and only recent advances in mining techniques x-ray diffraction At a nanoscopic scale, they have made it possible to identify such tiny structures within metallic microdroplets embedded in glass. The technology simply was not up to par with the material before. The quasicrystal that arrived first. The story becomes even more fascinating because this discovery joins another monumental find made by the same team in 2021: the identification of a quasicrystal in the same little red trinity. Unlike ordinary crystals—such as salt or quartz, which have a precisely repeating atomic pattern—quasicrystals break the rules of classical crystallography. Its atoms are ordered, but without periodically repeating themselves, which generates symmetries that are prohibited in a conventional crystal. The one found at Trinity exhibits five-fold icosahedral symmetry and is composed of silicon, copper, calcium and iron. It is not only the quasicrystal created by the oldest known human being: has the incredible property that its exact moment of creation was indelibly recorded in historical records. The decisive role of copper. The most elegant thing about the new study is the mechanism that explains why two such different structures were formed in the same explosion. The key was the concentration of copper available during cooling. In the microzones where copper levels were low —about 10 to 11%— conditions allowed the clathrate cage structure to stabilize. Where there was more copper, that same structure collapsed and the atoms rearranged themselves in the forbidden geometry of the quasicrystal. Two radically different destinies, separated by a microscopic difference in chemical composition, at the same time and in the same place. The power of natural laboratories. Discovering these architectures on a microscopic scale is revolutionary because, as Terry C. Wallace explainsdirector emeritus of Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of the quasicrystal research, these structures require extreme environments that rarely exist on Earth: colossal shocks, temperatures and pressures, comparable only to the hypervelocity impacts of meteorites or nuclear detonations themselves. Destructive events that, paradoxically, act as laboratories capable of producing what no conventional laboratory can replicate. A tool for global security. Beyond materials science, this type of research has direct applications in the field of nuclear nonproliferation. Understanding the design of other countries’ nuclear weapons programs is an enormous forensic challenge. Scientists often track radioactive gases and waste in test areas, but those signatures inevitably decay over time. The crystals formed at the site of the explosion, on the other hand, are practically eternal. The red trinitite samples still preserve radioactive isotopes that allow variables such as the exact distance to the hypocenter of the explosion to be calculated with great precision. Wallace sums it up clearly: If science can establish a precise thermodynamic explanation for how these crystals form, a complete picture of the bomb and the materials used could be obtained, giving the world a new tool to monitor illicit nuclear explosions. A timestamp that cannot be falsified or deleted. The paradoxical legacy of Trinity. The study of trinitite demonstrates how matter is capable of reorganizing itself in astonishing ways under unimaginably hostile conditions. It is an almost poetic paradox that an event designed for destruction has left, 80 years later, a hidden legacy of microscopic geometric perfection that is useful today for the human future. This discovery is not only a window into the creation of cutting-edge energy materials and technologies, but it functions as a compass for future research. As the experts conclude in his academic publicationexamine the remains of other extreme and fleeting natural phenomena, such as fulgurites forged by lightning strikes or rocks subjected to meteorite craters, could continue to reveal unusual configurations of matter. Even today, hidden beneath the scars of destruction, structures await that continue to challenge our fundamental understanding of the universe. Image | PNAS and Unsplash Xataka | Europe throws away 16 billion a year in electronic waste. Spain has just turned on the first oven in Europe to recover them

AI is already winning literary awards, and the only thing we can do to prove that we are human is to write badly

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On May 18, several X users They made their suspicions public about the last Commonwealth Prize winner of short stories: the winning story in the Caribbean category, published in ‘Granta’ (a very prestigious British magazine that for decades has been the thermometer of the Anglophone literary canon), reeked of ChatGPT. The author’s photo, in fact, did not seem real either. And when the magazine responded to the scandal, it did so in a way that ended up confusing everything: They asked Claude if the text was from AIand Claude said no. How it is detected. Recognizing the prose of a language model is not as simple as it seems, but it is not as difficult once the eye has been trained for some time. Language models do not write looking for the right word– They generate the statistically most probable token, taking into account the context, and it is a process that can be identified. For example, the famous “it’s not X, it’s Y” structure, used as the Rosetta Stone of text AI identification. But there is more: accumulation of metaphors without clear referents, verbs like “go deeper into”… annotators hired to fit the models using RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback) reward that kind of bureaucratic clarity, which also makes everything more obvious. What does the story have? In ‘Granta’s story things are said like “the humming noon” or the “sweet air with the smell of cane and oblivion.” Some authors, such as Benjamin Breen in this excellent analysis have detailed, many of these turns speak of a special attraction for ambient sounds and vague emotional states (nostalgia, sadness, oblivion), which seem to want to touch upon a materiality that the model does not have and, of course, does not understand. The accumulation of sensory stimuli is a creative writing textbook instruction that models apply mechanically and without discrimination. It’s easy to see once you’ve learned to identify it. Why detectors don’t work (yet). The problem is that recognizing that writing intuitively is one thing, and demonstrating it objectively is another. The first generation of automatic detectors (GPTZero, Originality.ai, Turnitin AI) They have a long history of errors. OpenAI, for example, retired its AI Text Classifier in July 2023 after acknowledging that it only correctly identified 26% of AI-generated text and marked almost 9% of human text as artificial. The only exception to this trend documented so far is Pangram. His technique, called mirror datatrains the classifier with pairs of stylistically identical texts but with different origins. The result, according to the first benchmark independent In September 2025, false positives are close to zero and false negatives are between 2% and 4% in medium and long passages; competitors are scoring around 10-40%. However, again, it is not so easy to trust a tool that sells a “humanizer” along with its text reports about the presence of AI, sometimes with outrageously high percentages. The educational part. In the world of books we are facing a specific scandal, that of ‘Granta’, but in American universities we are seeing a permanent escalation of hostilities. In this extensive reportfor example, we are presented with ten students and teachers trapped in a spiral with no way out: the teachers pass the assignments through AI detectors, the detectors generate false positives on students who have not touched any chatbot, and those students resort to humanizers (or directly to writing worse) to avoid accusations. Joseph Thibault, founder of Cursive, has tracked 43 humanizers with a combined audience of 33.9 million views. Grammarly has developedFor example, Authorship, a tool that records the writing session so that students can prove that they wrote the work: according to the company itself, five million reports of this type were generated in the last year. A teacher states in the article: “The better you write, the more the AI ​​believes you are AI. I put my own articles in the detectors just to understand how they work, and it marks me at 98% every time, without having used AI at any time.” Below are the essays. The ‘Granta’ scandal occurs while the publishing market registers another symptom of the same problem. According to data from the Wall Street Journal that is also collected by Res Obscura, the best-selling non-fiction book of April in the United States (‘London Falling’, by Patrick Radden Keefe) placed 13,468 copies in its first week; the first novel was close to 105,000. The president of Harper Group attributes it to podcasts: according to a recent survey, 62% of men and 54% of women listened to one last month, compared to 46% and 39% in 2023. The reason is the same that led to YouTube before: they promise to satisfy in forty minutes what it takes a book to satisfy three weeks. AI is the next step: it does not compete with books or podcasts, but rather replaces them with a summary generated in ten seconds that answers questions without anyone having to write, edit or read anything. The problem, as Breen points out, is that this model aims for immediate responses and eliminates precisely what makes the nonfiction book valuable: the need for attention, permanence over time and all the reflective nuances that this implies. When the AI ​​copies a specific author. The writer Vauhini Vara went further. As he told on Voxcommissioned researcher Tuhin Chakrabarty to train a model on his three published books and several journalistic articles to generate passages from, theoretically, his next novel. He then mixed them with his own fragments and sent them to his closest friends. No one knew how to distinguish them. What’s more: another conclusion they drew from the experiment is that readers tend to prefer AI text over imitations written by humans when they don’t know the origin. When the source is revealed to them, the text ceases to interest them. Vara draws a conclusion from this: what matters to readers is not whether the text sounds human, but knowing that there is someone real on the … Read more

The waiting list for a liver transplant can be eternal, so they have created a solution: inject yourself with a miniature one

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The National Transplant Organization of Spain makes it clear: The liver is one of the most requested organs on the transplant list, only behind the kidney. Only in the Spanish state in 2025 there were 310 people waiting and that Spain It is a world power in transplants. There are not enough donated and compatible organs to arrive in time for all those people who need them. This historical gap that no country has managed to close is a double tragedy: for the sick person, who waits without guarantees, and for the health system, which cannot offer them another way out. Liver transplant remains the only cure for certain conditions, and the path to it is full of obstacles: surgical complexity, compatibility problems, the exclusion of patients too fragile for surgery or lifelong immunosuppression. Even when an organ arrives on time, not everyone can receive it. Until now, there was no alternative. That could be about to change. The invention. An MIT research team led by Sangeeta Bhatia has developed “satellite livers”, a type of mini-livers capable of assuming the functions of the diseased liver without having to remove it. One is inside, its cells form a stable structure, connect to the person’s blood vessels and begin to produce proteins that the damaged liver can no longer make. They do not replace the entire organ, but they relieve it of its functions. They are actually small grafts of functional liver tissue that are administered via a syringe guided by ultrasound, that is, without surgery: minimal invasibility. Why is it important. Because it addresses the two big problems for those who need a liver: the shortage of available organs and those who cannot face a transplant operation. If you can have surgery, they act as a bridge until they find a suitable organ. And if you can’t, these mini livers cover the liver functions that your liver can’t do. In this way, satellite livers increase the spectrum of treatable patients. From a more general point of view, this invention is a milestone in liver tissue engineering: science has been trying to replicate the nearly 500 functions performed by the human liver for more than a decade. And if implemented in the different health systems, its impact is direct: according to the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD)chronic liver disease is the 12th leading cause of death in the United States and rising. Context. Although the liver is an organ with a remarkable regenerative capacity, it does not work miracles: when it exceeds a certain threshold of damage, regeneration is not enough and only the transplant remains. Since the 90s, medical science has been trying to transplant isolated hepatocytes, but the results were poor. Bhatia is not new to this either: has been there for more than 25 years investigating bioartificial liver models, which has served as a basis for understanding what conditions hepatocytes need to remain functional outside the liver. This MIT work is precisely the practical application of all this knowledge. How it works. The research team developed the idea of ​​turning these cells into an injectable along with hydrogel microspheres and fibroblasts. The spheres are intended to enable this route of administration by ensuring uniformity. Fibroblasts act as a support, helping hepatocytes survive and promoting the growth of new vessels into the tissue. Without blood supply, those cells would have their hours numbered. In the team’s experiments in mice, new vessels formed next to hepatocytes, allowing them to receive nutrients and function normally. In these rodents, the cells remained viable and secreting proteins during the eight weeks of the study. Yes, but. Although the results are tremendously promising, it is a preclinical study done in mice and the leap to humans is enormous. The human liver contains between 100,000 and 130,000 million hepatocytes and replicating a sufficient functional mass with injected cells is a challenge that this study has not yet addressed. Even assuming that we extrapolate this finding as is to humans, immunosuppressants would still need to be used. And it is not a minor problem: the fact that the immune system attacks weakened patients increases the risk of infections, tumors and kidney damage. In Xataka | The “silent” liver epidemic: we have a problem that escapes analysis and that science is already seeking to stop In Xataka | Fatty liver advances silently, but science has found unexpected allies: coffee and green tea Cover | Elen Sher and Magnificent

We have small and giant black holes, but the intermediate ones do not appear. Now some scientists have designed a method to search for them and they already have two candidates

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Today astrophysicists have a lot of information about black holes. They have even been photographed. However, there are only two types of black holes for which a multitude of evidence has been found: supermassive black holes, which are colossal in size, and stellar black holes, which are formed by the collapse of a star when it runs out of fuel. Supermassive ones usually have masses between 100,000 and 10,000 million solar masses. The stellar ones are much smaller, with approximately a mass equivalent to that of 3 to 100 suns. So what happens in the intermediate range? Don’t black holes of intermediate mass exist, between 100 and 100,000 solar masses? This is a question astronomers have been asking for a long time. Theoretically, they could exist, but no evidence has been detected. Now, a team of scientists from Yangtze University in China, has devised a method which could be useful to find them once and for all. Gravitational microlensing of fast radio bursts. These scientists have used a method that is based on searching for fast radio bursts that have experienced a gravitational microlensing deformation. These deformations are caused by massive objects that stand between the path of the blast and the Earth. By studying the effects of these disturbances, its mass can be calculated. For this reason, these scientists have analyzed a catalog of these bursts, looking for those that may have been distorted by gravitational microlensing and have been left with two candidates whose mass would correspond to an intermediate black hole. The best? They also fit with primordial black holes, so they could even serve to better understand dark matter. Clarifying concepts. Now let it be understood. Fast radio bursts are short bursts of radio waves, which come from far away, beyond the Milky Way. There is no consensus on its origin, but many have been detected, it even seems that there are a large number in a single day. For their part, gravitational microlensing are formed when a very massive object comes between a light source and the Earth. It is so massive that, due to the action of gravity, it doubles space-time and, with it, the path of light that reaches Earth. As a result, multiple and/or magnified images may form. The point is that fast radio bursts themselves can be altered by gravitational microlensing when a very massive object crosses their path. Gravitational microlensing Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). This is a Canadian radio telescope initially designed to map the presence of hydrogen in large fractions of the observable universe. Thanks to its large collecting area and field of vision and its bandwidth, over time it was seen that It was also very useful to detect fast radio bursts. They are very fast, but when observing so much sky at once they do not go unnoticed. For all this, the authors of the study that has just been published have analyzed the CHIME catalogwith special attention to bursts that at some point have suffered a disturbance by gravitational microlensing. Two candidates. Of all the distorted bursts they found, there were two whose size matched possible black holes of intermediate size. One had between 539 and 609 solar masses and the other between 1,544 and 2,571 solar masses. Curiously, there were no galaxies or galactic clusters around it. When black holes form through physically well-known collapse processes, they are usually in the centers of galaxies. However, when they are isolated, as is this case, what is expected is that they are primordial black holes. That is, black holes that formed in the early stages of the Big Bang, before there were even stars that could collapse. something unexpected. These scientists expected to find intermediate black holes, but they may also have found evidence of the origin of dark matter. One of the hypotheses about this mysterious matter that makes up most of the Universe is that it is partly composed of primordial black holes. The problem is that the existence of primordial black holes has not been proven. With this new study, two birds could have been killed with one stone: demonstrating that intermediate mass black holes and also primordial black holes exist, in turn helping to unravel the dark matter mystery. Without a doubt, it is a cosmic carom that is worth continuing to investigate. Image | THAT | POT In Xataka | Stephen Hawking made a prediction about black holes in 1971. A new signal has proven him overwhelmingly right

These are the ones who support it in 2026

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We all want our devices (whether a mobile phone, TV or PC) to have the fastest possible Internet connection, especially through WiFi. Beyond what we have contracted, the key to this is in the technology that the device uses. He Wi-Fi 6 and WiFi 6E They have already been consolidated, and little by little we are seeing how they are doing it WiFi 7. There is already several operators that offer compatible routersbut, Is it any use if our devices can’t take full advantage of them? The bottleneck has nothing to do with the router, but with the device that connects to it. It is necessary that it has a chip that can manage the new technologies introduced by WiFi 7. In simpler terms: if we have a premium mobile phone and it is not compatible with WiFi 7, We are not going to take advantage of this. For this reason, to clear your doubts, we bring you a list of all the mobile phones that are compatible with WiFi 7. OPPO Find The price could vary. We earn commission from these links What improvements does WiFi 7 bring compared to previous generations? WiFi 7, whose technical name is IEEE 802.11beit is not only a simple improvement in the maximum connection speed (although, of course, it does that too). Really, the main advantage of this new standard is how it manages bandwidth and traffic. It does this thanks to two new technologies: the so-called Multi-Link Operation (MLO) and the use of 320 MHz channels. The first of these allows a device connect to multiple frequencies simultaneously (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz) and use the one that is most optimal for each moment or even combine several of them. In this way, your mobile phone, for example, will be able to use two different “roads” at the same time, which allows the stability of the connection to be improved and download data faster. The 320 MHz channels, which are twice the size of WiFi 6E, offer much more space to transmit data. Theoretically, these are capable of offering orMaximum speed up to 46 Gbpsfigures that until not too long ago were unthinkable for a home WiFi network. List of mobile phones with WiFi 7 The vast majority of phones sold in stores usually rely on WiFi 6 (802.11ax) or, with luck, WiFi 6E. As we have said above, mobile phones need new modems and connectivity chips to be compatible with WiFi 7 and, currently, these are mostly present in high-end mobile phones with Qualcomm, MediaTek or Samsung processors. If you invest in a router with WiFi 7, it is ideal that you have devices that can take full advantage of this standard. For this reason, if you have one of them at home and are considering a new mobile, Ideally, you should invest in one that is compatible. Although this is something that you can check in the list of mobile specifications, we leave you below the list of mobile phones that have WiFi 7 and that are sold in Spain: Apple Apple iPhone Air 256 GB: The Thinnest iPhone Ever Created, 6.5 Inch Screen with Promotion up to 120 Hz, A19 Pro Chip, Center Stage Frontal Camera, Whole Day Autonomy; White Cloud The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Google Google Pixel 10 Pro XL – Free Android Smartphone with Gemini, Triple Rear Camera, Battery Life of More Than 24 Hours and 6.8″ Super Current Screen – Obsidian, 256GB The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Honor Honor Magic8 Pro (16GB + 1TB) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Huawei HUAWEI Pura 80 Ultra Mobile Smartphone 16 GB + 512 GB, Interchangeable Dual Telephoto Camera, 1 Inch Ultra-Light HDR Camera, AI Noise Cancellation, 5170 mAh, Black The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Motorola Motorola rarz 60 Ultra, 32GB (16GB+16GB RAM Boost)/512GB Scarab, 50MP camera system with Moto ai, 4500 mAh battery, 68W fast charge, Snapdragon 8 Elite, + Moto Tag The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Nothing Nothing Phone (3) – Mobile phone with 50 MP triple camera, 24-hour silicon carbon battery, 6.67-inch AMOLED display, 120 Hz, glyph matrix, 12 GB + 256 GB, black The price could vary. We earn commission from these links OnePlus OnePlus 15R 12GB RAM + 256GB Storage, Smartphone with AI Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, 6.83″ 165Hz AMOLED Screen, 7400mAh Battery, 50MP Triple Camera, Mint Breeze The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Oppo OPPO Find The price could vary. We earn commission from these links realme realme GT 8 Pro 5G Smartphone, 16+512 GB, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Processor, 6.79″ Screen, 2K QHD+ AMOLED 144Hz, 200 MP Camera, 7000 mAh, Mobile Phone with 120W Charger (EU Version) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Samsung Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra 5G 256GB Cobalt Violet Dynamic AMOLED Screen 2X 12GB RAM Snapdragon Processor The price could vary. We earn commission from these links sony Sony The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Vivo vivo The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Xiaomi Xiaomi 14 (579 euros) Xiaomi 14T Pro (472.42 euros) Xiaomi 15 (659 euros) Xiaomi 15 Ultra (1,199.99 euros) Xiaomi 15T Pro (549.98 euros) Xiaomi 17 (770.29 euros) Xiaomi 17 Pro Xiaomi 17 Pro Max Xiaomi 17T Pro (899.99 euros) Bit F7 (296.99 euros) Poco F7 Pro (353.35 euros) Poco F7 Ultra (419.36 euros) Poco F8 Pro (408.84 euros) Poco F8 Ultra (565.69 euros) Poco X8 Pro Max (359.10 euros) Redmi K90 Redmi K90 Pro Max Redmi Turbo 4 Pro XIAOMI 17, Smartphone 12+256 GB, Leica Summilux optical lens, 6330 mAh battery (Type), HyperAI, Black, Manufacturer’s warranty 2 years + 1 Extra year, Charger not included The price could vary. We earn commission from these links ZTE (nubia) Nubia Z80 Ultra 5G 16GB/512GB The price could vary. We earn commission from … Read more

In atomized times, the Spanish generation Z is finding a strange refuge in ‘Los Serrano’ and ‘No one here lives’

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“I’m looking forward to the long weekend and finishing the season. The Serranos“A 15-year-old student I recently taught recognized me. Yes, 15 years. Possibly the combination of that phrase and that idea gives us a short circuit: we are talking about a series that ended in 2008; when she hadn’t even started kindergarten. I couldn’t contain myself and as someone who did grow up with Diego Serrano, the brush and the boom for Fran Perea, I had to ask him where that passion had come from. It came through clips on TikTok. That content of a few minutes and loose decontextualized fragments were not enough, and they turned something that began as a simple curiosity into a true marathon to know in detail what happened to Eva and Marcos, the most famous stepbrothers on TV in the 2000s. A fiction as iconic as that, but for generation millennialhad found its new primary audience in Generation Z. I was surprised, of course, but the idea stayed in the back of my head, like a specific issue to which I should not give more importance. Like when your friend tells you that she is pregnant and suddenly you start noticing people on the street and you discover something that we could almost classify as a baby epidemic; Shortly after, another teenage student, whom we will call Victoria, shows me her pending homework on her tablet. Between irregular verbs and vocabulary to learn, I look at the wallpaper: nothing less than ‘Santa Justa Klan‘, the fictional (and not so fictional) group that was formed in ‘Los Serrano’. At this point, I was already ‘mode’Queen’s Gambit‘, projecting theories on the ceiling about something so strange to understand and that he was also seeing everywhere. Just a few weeks ago, at the next table in a restaurant, a group of university girls revealed in their talk that this is not just about ‘The Serranos‘. To a certain extent, declaring yourself a fan of ‘There is no one who lives here‘It is understandable with the common thread that it has with an already veteran series, but still in broadcast, like ‘The one that is coming‘. The thing is that they start quoting ‘The boarding school’, ‘Physics or Chemistry‘, ‘The ship’ or ‘Paco’s men‘, debating passionately about how the revival Prime Video of the first one does not have one bit of the quality of the original. Once again, I could not contain myself, and I assailed them with my doubts about how they had arrived at these fictions so typical of my generation and not so much of theirs. The same pattern: discovery on social networks, the possibility of watching all seasons on platforms or even through those fragments, and the echo chamber that is created in classes and groups of friends. That week-by-week phenomenon effect that we’ve barely seen since ‘Game of Thrones‘, is being achieved organically in the middle classes of Spain. Some actors are still relevant today, and although it is difficult to think that all the youth have come to ‘El Barco’ by looking at the IMDb of Mario Casas or ‘El Internado’ doing the same with Ana de Armascould make sense in certain cases. None of that: it is the series itself is what hooks you so many years later. This is how Catalina, one of these girls, recognizes it: “I’m finishing The Boarding School; When I do it I plan to tell my little sister to start it.” The generational contrast is more than evident, and the lapidary phrase that unsettles an entire generation millennial who, like me, has grown up with ‘Three meters above the sky‘ and ‘SMS without fear of dreaming‘ is pronounced by Sara, to whom her friends were highly recommending ‘El Barco’: “Ah, but Mario Casas went out there? I had no idea.” From meme to marathon The furor over the story of Lucas and Sara from ‘Paco’s Men’ or the crazy theories that ‘El Internado’ sparked now do not begin on television, waiting week after week for a new chapter. Rather the opposite occurs; Like almost everything in recent years, it all starts with the mobile. If before you watched a series and then it was when the meme festival began on the networks, now the journey is the other way around, from the meme it goes to television. And whoever says meme says fancams or fragments of interviews that awaken interest in those fictions dosmileras. “I started watching the story of Teté and Guille in parts on TikTok and I couldn’t stop,” one of my students reminded me. So, the clip opens the door and the series does the rest, becoming almost an involuntary trailer. And, really, this fragmented and instant format is very much in line with the current consumption model. Everything has to be quick, that captures your attention in the first seconds and encourages you to consume something, of whatever nature. So it is no coincidence that the algorithm works as a perfect cultural programmer for generation Z, a tool that prioritizes the high emotional or humorous charge it has in the love drama of Lucas and Sara or in the phrases from Bethlehem to his greatest ally. This resurgence poses a very curious paradox: in the era of rapid consumption, these young people return to long, choral series designed to be watched without any rush. We are also talking about fictions that achieved audience figures that were unthinkable on current television (‘There is no one who lives here‘ either’ The Serranos‘ reached 7,000,000 spectators), so all the merit of their revival It cannot fall on social networks or on the virality of certain clips. In a sea of ​​platforms and on-demand content, available at any time, something unique and special must have that 2000s television imagery. One of the keys is probably the ID with the characters. Even today, many university students from Generation Z find in Belén or Emilio from ‘No one lives here’ that reflection of work … Read more

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