February 2026 - Page 24 of 87

A new “solar system” has just been discovered. There’s just one problem: it shouldn’t exist.

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

Observations from NASA and the European Space Agency telescopes have made possible the discovery of a new exoplanetary system 116 light years from Earth. According to research by an international team led by the University of Warwick published in the journal Sciencethis new “solar system” has a peculiarity: its architecture contradicts the standard model of planetary formation. In short, based on the astrophysics we know, it should not exist. We do not know if it will force us to rewrite current theories, but we do know that we will urgently review them. The discovery. The LHS 1903 system is made up of four planets orbiting a red dwarf, the most common and longest-lived type of star in the universe. The question is how they are arranged: the innermost planet is rocky, the next two are gaseous and surprisingly, the outermost planet (LHS 1903 e) is also rocky. That planet shouldn’t be there. LHS 1903 e It is a large super-Earth (it has 1.7 times the radius of the Earth and 5.79 Earth masses, thus achieving a similar density) located on the periphery, but of course, it should not be in that position, according to current models. It is not a minor anomaly: it breaks the paradigm from the foundations. This provision contradicts the usual pattern that we see in all known planetary systems: the rocky planets (refractory materials) are in the hot zone and the gas giants in the outer cold zone, beyond the “snow line“, where ice makes it possible to grow large nuclei that capture hydrogen. The canonical example is our solar system: the rocky Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars orbit closer and the gaseous Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune orbit further away. Why is it important. According to theory, a planet as large as LHS 1903 e in that cold zone should have devoured gas until it became a giant like Jupiter. But there is another reading: that the formation model fails and is not the only recipe that explains how exoplanetary systems form. But as we mentioned above, red dwarfs are the most abundant stars in the galaxy and if the model fails in this system, it is plausible that it will not hit the mark in much of the cosmos either. There may be other “inverted” systems pending interpretation or that we have misinterpreted. A possible explanation. What the research team proposes is the gas-poor formation mechanism hypothesis. In short, the important thing is not so much where but when. Thus, the planets were formed one after another in the opposite order to our solar system, starting first with the innermost one and going outwards from there. When planets form, they consume the gas available in the disk that surrounds the star. LHS 1903 was formed last, when there was no more gas left, so it could no longer become the gas giant that might have been expected. As explains Lead researcher and University of Warwick professor Thomas Wilson: “It means that the outermost planet formed millions of years after the innermost one. And because it formed later, there really wasn’t enough gas and dust left in the disk to build this planet.” The research method. The data analyzed by the international team comes from the collaboration of NASA’s TESS telescopes and ESA’s CHEOPS exoplanet characterization satellite: the first detects planets with the in-transit method and the second studies them in depth, which allows it to obtain information such as size, mass and, from there, density. Among the alternative hypotheses considered is its birth from impacts between planets or the loss of its gaseous envelope, which they ended up discarding. Astrophysics has pending subjects. Beyond finding a clear mechanism, what seems evident is that observing this system of exoplanets opens up a range of possibilities about how planets form around stars that will last for years. Néstor Espinoza, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who was not involved in the study, explains it for CNN: “This system provides a very interesting piece of information that planetary formation models will try to explain for years, and I am sure that we will learn something new about the planetary formation process once they are compared to each other.” In Xataka | How the solar system was formed: for the Earth to be born, a star had to die first In Xataka | We have been deceived by the distances of the Solar System: the closest neighbor to Neptune is Mercury Cover | NASA Hubble Space Telescope

We have been searching for radioactive “monsters” for decades. What we have found is a rapid evolution

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

When we think about animals and radiation, our minds may imagine a three-eyed fish from The Simpsons or gigantic beasts from science fiction movies. But the reality is that those areas of the planet that have suffered a radioactive disasterpresent a much more complex and often more fascinating reality from an evolutionary point of view. The data. Decades after the accidents Chernobyl in 1986, Fukushima in 2011 and the historic disasters in Mayak, science has begun to collect enough data to understand what occurs when the fauna returns “exclusion zones” that have been abandoned by humans. The most recent studies tell us that there are no monsters, but there are accelerated genetic changes, forced adaptations and physiological scars. The Chernobyl case. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has become an involuntary nature reserve, since, without humans, fauna has proliferated, but genetic studies tell a story of invisible stress. One of the most classic and revealing studies focuses on the barn swallow, Since far from being immune, these birds have acted as bioindicators of the disaster. Research has documented an unusually high frequency of partial albinism in its plumagean external sign of genetic instability. In this case, an increase in the germline mutation rate of between 2 and 10 times has been recorded compared to control areas in Italy or uncontaminated rural Ukraine. As a consequence, between 1991 and 2006, were documented high frequencies of physical abnormalities in adults, suggesting that radiation continues to exert a constant selective pressure. The case of the dogs. In Chernobyl, perhaps the most surprising discovery in recent years comes from the descendants of pets that were abandoned during the evacuation. A genomic analysis A recent study of feral dogs living near the nuclear power plant shows a different genetic structure from dogs living in the city of Chernobyl, just a few kilometers away. In this case, scientists have identified changes in candidate genes such as XRCC4, essential for DNA repair. This suggests a multigenerational selection where the dogs with the best mechanisms to repair cellular damage caused by radiation are those that have managed to survive and reproduce. In this case, a meta-analysis covering 45 studies and 30 species confirms that the effect on mutation rates is large and persistent, being curiously stronger in plants than in animals. The case of Fukushima. If we go to Japan, it is where we find one of the most recent nuclear disasters and it is where we have been allowed to observe the immediate impact and the medium-term adaptation of nature. One of the most notable points is found in a new study published in January of this same year, which tells how thousands of domestic pigs escaped from their abandoned farms and began to mate with wild boars in the forest. Here it is pointed out that this encounter not only produced hybrids between pigs and wild boars, but also has accelerated the biology of these animals. And we are not facing “radioactive mutants” like the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons, but rather something biologically more interesting: a accelerated play machine that has managed to dilute its domestic genes in record time. How it looked. The researchers analyzed the mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from the mother, and also the nuclear DNA of 191 wild boars and 10 pigs in the area between 2015 and 2018. The results suggested that, although the hybrids look like wild boars, many hide a secret in their maternal lineage. The key to this is the biological difference between both species, since, although the wild boar has a strict annual breeding season, domestic pigs have a continuous reproductive cycle to breed all year round. From here, it has been seen that hybrids that descend from a mother pig They inherit this rapid reproductive cycle, which has caused a rapid generational rotation, detecting more than five generations of hybrids in just a few years after the disaster. In short, wild boars have seen their reproduction accelerate when a few years ago it was much slower. A genetic paradox. Here comes the most curious part of the study, since if these animals reproduce so much, why don’t we see pigs everywhere in Fukushima? The answer is in the massive backcrossing in the field genetic. And the population of wild boars in the area is immensely higher than that of pigs escaped from farms, so hybrids almost always end up mating with pure wild boars. In this way, if hybrid mothers have many offspring thanks to their domestic “engine” and those offspring are crossed again with wild boars, the result is that the pig’s nuclear DNA, which defines appearance and most traits, is quickly diluted. An evolutionary improvement. With this dilution, the study indicates that, although the mitochondrial DNA reveals the domestic origin of these new wild boars, the nuclear genome and its appearance are almost indistinguishable from that of a wild boar. This is why they are, for all practical purposes, reproductively “improved” wild boars that have erased their visual domestic pig trace. The case of the butterfly. If we continue in Fukushima, we find ourselves another interesting case in the butterfly pale grass blue which was monitored between 2011 and 2013. In this case, a reduction in the size of the butterfly’s wings and a delay in growth was observed, which was combined with the appearance of deformities in the eyes and wings. After the initial spike of anomalies, the population appeared to stabilize, but this suggests a “purge” process: the most sensitive individuals died quickly, leaving a more resilient surviving population, an example of accelerated evolutionary adaptation. The Mayak disaster. Although few people know it, before Chernobyl there was this disaster that received very little media attention and which had protagonist to the Techa River in the Urals (Russia). Here, between 1949 and 1952, waste was dumped, creating a historical laboratory for chronic exposure. Technical reports and dose modeling in aquatic organisms such as fish in the Obi-Techa river system remind us … Read more

also its own ending, which in reality was not the end of anything

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

The current showrunner from the oldest series on television, Matt Selman, has made it clear: the series will never end. Or at least, it won’t end with a typical episode, like all series. In fact, ‘The Simpsons’ also predicted the ending, as they do with so many things, and about a year and a half ago they advanced their own series finalecertifying that when the series ends, it will end and that’s it. Although at the moment he has no intentions. All endings. On September 29, 2024, Fox aired what appeared to be the final episode of ‘The Simpsons’. However, it was the premiere of season 36, the 769th episode of the series, and it was an exquisite joke. It had been conceived by showrunner Matt Selman shortly after the writers’ strike ended from the WGA in September 2023, and in it he tried to answer the eternal question of: when and how will ‘The Simpsons’ end? The narrative mechanism chosen was HackGPT, a ChatGPT parody AI that had analyzed all the episodes of the series and all the endings in television history to generate the perfect closure. and it was a string of commonplaces: Mr. Burns died, Moe closed the bar, Krusty canceled his show, Milhouse moved to Atlanta, Skinner retired, and to top it off, Maggie finally spoke. All the clichés of the final episode trope condensed, with Conan O’Brien (former series writer) as master of ceremonies and a cast of guest stars that included Tom Hanks, Seth Rogen and John Cena. The antifinal as a declaration of intentions. In a recent interview, Selman confirmed that what he was looking for was to reboot, in a sense, the series: “we put all the possible concepts of a series finale in a single episode, to say in some way that we are never going to do a series finale.” In addition, there was a background: the Hollywood writers’ strike had just ended and one of its workhorses had been the use of AI. This episode satirized what a contrived screenwriter would do in a final episode: a melee of meaningless clichés. The satire worked because the episode became one of the best rated by viewers on IMDB in years. Timeline. None of this matters, really, because ‘The Simpsons’ has no canon: Selman claims that a show that has been on the air for 37 years with characters that do not age cannot, structurally, maintain a fixed canon. The series works with what is known as floating timeline o floating timeline: the year of birth of the characters is updated every time the plot requires it, so that the adults are always in their forties regardless of the historical moment in which the action takes place. In your own words: “It seems to me that story and character should come first, and the rules of the cinematic universe of a show that has no rules should come a distant second.” Valid satire. The anti-AI satire of the fake final episode of ‘The Simpsons’ is increasingly pertinent: although legislation on the use of AI tools in environments such as writers’ rooms is being refined, the adoption of tools such as Sudowrite or ChatGPT does not stop. An analysis July 2025 documents that tools of this type are already used to generate everything from first drafts to commercial viability analyses. But its use in professional production series under agreements such as the one signed after the WGA strike continues to be conditioned by the restrictions of each contract. Still, there are professionals like John August, screenwriter and co-host of the ‘Scriptnotes’ podcast, who have mixed positions: August, for example, considers that AI is useful for summarizing or doing auxiliary work, but not for replacing the writing process. Dilemmas that point to the future. Maybe by the time ‘The Simpsons’ turns a thousand episodes? In Xataka | The day ‘The Simpsons’ rubbed shoulders with ‘Toy Story’: the legendary episode that changed the history of television

also its own ending, which in reality was not the end of anything

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

China is clear about who should lead the advances of its best AI and robotics companies: Generation Z

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

Those who now enter the labor market find themselves with a rival that is difficult to beat: they have no agreement or need for rest or fulfillment. In addition, it does the tasks of junior profiles quite well: artificial intelligence is limiting the landing of Generation Z in the offices. in the United States, we have seen it in the UK and also in the Big Four that make up the Madrid skyline. Replacing those who start working with AI has been revealed as the West’s formula to boost productivity… from the point of view of the bosses. If you have to fight with her and validate her, not so much anymore. But it is by no means the only way, nor does it happen to everyone. In fact, China is betting just the opposite: it is turning Generation Z and millennials into heads of areas as strategic as robotics or artificial intelligence itself. They are not just any young people: they are true galacticos, their best assets. Give me someone young. As collect TechAsiaa trend is emerging in China: that of hiring millennials and young people from generation Z for positions with high-level technical profiles in large AI and robotics companies. The best example is Vinces Yao Shunyu: at 28 years old he has already been at OpenAI. A couple of months ago he returned to his native China to become the chief scientist of Tencent. He now reports directly to the CEO. Shunyu’s is just the tip of the iceberg of this new organizational strategy of Chinese companies. There are other cases, such as that of Luo Jianlan, formerly of Google since a year the chief scientist of AgiBot. Or of Dong Haochief scientist at PrimeBot after earning his PhD at Imperial College. By the way, OpenAI and Meta have copied the recipe: the first with Polish Jakub Pachocki and the second, with the Chinese Zhao Shengjia. They are scientists, but they could just as well be professional footballers: none of them are over 35 years old. Why is it important. When thinking about a boss within a modern business structure of a certain size, it is inevitable that team management, meetings and bureaucracy come to mind. However, this strategy of Chinese big tech is deliberately different from what we have in the West and is based on three reasons that SMCP explains: Institutional separation of research vs. product. A chief scientist looks to the future, he does not manage human teams or budgets. Competitive advantage in a saturated market, allowing you to build your own technologies without depending on third parties. If you have the best at home, you don’t have to ask for permission or sign abroad. The top youth asset. AI is evolving by leaps and bounds and with this movement, China is ensuring that it has those who have been at ground zero of the great milestones of recent years: elite universities or laboratories of renowned institutions such as OpenAI, Google or Princeton. China is a world source of engineers. That China is a country of engineers is no secret: it is a plan that has been underway for 4o years. In fact, now he has opted to go one step further and accelerate doctorates. The Chinese labor market is already showing signs of some saturationwhich has also brought diversification, changing routes to avoid even setting foot in the university in its new bet on FP. In any case, having an army of almost six million engineering professionals gives you an advantage with AI. And it has more than enough: it has engineers to export. Without going any further, the vast majority of signings of the Meta superintelligence team from last year they are Chinese. But young engineers who stay at home have an opportunity beyond joining a leading company in the sector: leading it. Disclaimer: a chief scientist is not a CTO. It is worth remembering a difference between positions that are often confused: a chief scientist is not the director of technology. While the first profile investigates, explores and plans in the medium and long term without touching products or marketing, the second manages teams, designs architecture and meets business objectives. Confuse both profiles or mix them, as the SMCP remembers what Alibaba or Baidu did, ends up subordinating science to the urgency of the market. In any case, it is a fragile position in a company that is not clear why it is needed. In Xataka | China looks at VET: why more and more generation Z students prefer trades over university degrees In Xataka | If Spain wants to imitate China and be a “country of engineers”, this map reveals the extent to which it has a problem Cover | and Hyundai Motor Group and cottonbro studio

For years we blamed testosterone for men living shorter lives. Now we know that the culprit is a chromosome

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

For decades, biology has observed an incontestable demographic fact: women live longer than men. It has often been blamed lifestyleto testosterone or to the greater male propensity for risky activities. However, science has found a much more subtle and genetic culprit that we carry in all our cells and that literally we start to lose as we get older. A genetics class. In a very general way, we must remember that all our genetic information is collected in 46 chromosomes which are found within the nuclei of our cells in pairs. But there is a part of all these chromosomes that define us as men or women: The presence of two X chromosomes defines women and the presence of one X chromosome with one Y defines men. Although there is great genetic complexity behind something as redundant as a pair of chromosomes, what interests us in this case is that science has seen a effect called mLOYwhich is literally the loss of Y chromosome mosaic in men. And different scientific articles suggest that it is not a simple side effect of getting older, but rather it is a “silent killer” that explains much of the longevity gap between the sexes. The runaway chromosome. For a long time, the Y chromosome was considered the “little brother” of the genome. Small, with few genes and almost exclusively responsible for determining the male sex with no other known functions, almost all of which fall on the X chromosome of considerable size. But the truth is that we were wrong, and the Y chromosome has great importance in the adult life of men. The mLOY phenomenon. This occurs when the cells that are in charge of manufacturing the blood elementslike erythrocytes, platelets, or lymphocytes, suffer errors when dividing and lose the Y chromosome. Something that generates a “mosaic” in our body, that is, some white blood cells have the Y chromosome while others do not. But what is disturbing is the frequency with which it occurs, since, according to the data reviewed, this is something that has been detected in 40% of men at age 60 and in 70% of men at age 90. There is damage. Until recently, it was believed that losing this chromosome was benign and normal, a simple “genetic gray hair.” But the evidence accumulated between 2022 and 2025, including massive UK Biobank studies and the recent German studio LURIChas set off alarm bells: losing the Y chromosome is not harmless and has important side effects. The heart. One of these side effects is precisely heart failure, which is a very prevalent disease in the elderly. Here science has been able to see that, by eliminating the Y chromosome in mice, the animals rapidly developed cardiac fibrosis. That is, their hearts were filled with scar tissue, becoming rigid and, therefore, having great difficulty pumping blood. But it is not the only disease that occurs, since in the United Kingdom Biobank, men with mLOY in more than 40% of their white blood cells had a 31% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular causes. And even the LURIC study published last year, carried out on 1,700 men, found that the mLOY effect increased the risk of fatal heart attack by almost 50%. More diseases. Beyond the heart, the impact of losing the Y chromosome also affects our body’s defense system to be able to combat different threats. Among them we have cancer, since the immune system needs the Y chromosome to effectively monitor the tumor cells that arise. Its loss is associated with a worse prognosis in bladder cancer and other solid tumors, since it is as if our body’s security guards had gone partially blind. In addition to cancer, the frequency of mLOY has also been seen to be up to 10 times higher in patients who have Alzheimer’swith studies showing an almost 3 times higher risk of developing the disease. The COVID. During the pandemic we saw that older men died much more than women without fully understanding why. We now know that the loss of the Y chromosome increases 54% risk of fatality for being infected with COVID in the elderly, finally offering a biological explanation for this bias. Is there a solution? It may seem depressing to know that a part of our DNA decides to abandon us and cause us so many problems, but in reality, it is a hopeful finding. And it is hopeful, since, seeing that the loss of the Y chromosome is a direct cause of a disease, therapeutic doors open. In experiments with mice, it has been seen that treatment with an antifibrotic drug was able to reverse the cardiac damage caused by the loss of the chromosome. This means that the mLOY effect can be used as a marker in a blood test, as happens with cholesterol, to predict a patient’s cardiac risk and to be able to give preventive treatments to delay it and improve the patient’s quality of life. Images | nrd Miroslaw Miras In Xataka | The X chromosome has new clues about aging: why women tend to live longer than men

There is a paradise island that you only enter armed. And the United Kingdom wants to “liberate” it from the United States

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

Prima facie, chagos It’s just a handful of perfect islands lost in the middle of the Indian Ocean, too small and remote to matter to anyone. But precisely that distance, that silence and that almost total absence of glances, have turned the archipelago into one of the most uncomfortable places of the map, one where paradise and power have been coexisting for decades without giving explanations. A paradise taken by force. part of history we tell it a few months ago. In the middle of the Indian Ocean, the Chagos Archipelago was for centuries a forgotten place, inhabited by a community that developed your own culture far from the great powers, until in the middle of the Cold War the United Kingdom decided to turn it into a global strategic piece. To make this possible, London separated the islands of Mauritius and, in agreement with the United Statessystematically expelled the entire local population between the late 1960s and early 1970s, emptying Diego Garcia to build a joint military base that has since operated outside of public scrutiny. We are talking about a territory where civil life disappeared completely. No one enters here without a weapon. For more than half a century, Diego Garcia is a geopolitical anomaly: a tropical island with perfect beaches and intact reefs that cannot be accessed without military authorization and where the armed presence it’s the norm. Officially administered by the United Kingdom and rented to the United States, the base has been key in operations in the Middle East and Central Asiaand has been surrounded by persistent accusations about secret flights, clandestine detentions and activities that have never been fully clarified. What happens inside remains, to a large extent, a state secret shared. Diego Garcia Island Invisible expelled. As the base grew, the Chagossians were trapped in exile, many of them scattered between Mauritius and Seychellesdeprived of their land, of adequate compensation and for decades even of the right to return. Their towns were swallowed up by the jungle, abandoned churches and cemeteries, and their history was minimized by official documents that described them as temporary workers, not as a community with deep roots. To this day, many continue to die without having seen the place where they were born, while decisions about their future are made. systematically without them. The transfer in small print. Thus, after years of international pressure and a strong opinion of the International Court of Justice, a few days ago London announced its intention to return sovereignty from Chagos to Mauritius, a gesture presented as the closing of a colonial wound with an important “but” in the background. It happens that the agreement includes a key condition: the Diego García base would remain operational for decades (99 years), thus shielding Anglo-American military interests. For many Chagossians, devolution without the island of Diego García is not a real liberation, but a repetition of the same pattern under another name. The clash between allies. The latest twist has come when the United States stopped the processwary of any change that could affect one of its most sensitive military installations, and provoking open tensions with the United Kingdom while returning the negotiations to the starting box in the already closed offices. Thus, Chagos it is again the scene of a dispute where the discourse of international law and decolonization collides with the logic of global security, confirming the central idea that has run through its entire history: on this paradisiacal island, neither the landscape nor its former inhabitants rule, but rather an armed silence of which, still todayyou can’t really know what the hell is going on inside. Image | Anne Sheppard, POT In Xataka | A Finnish couple found an uninhabited island on Google Maps. Today they rent it for 2,400 euros per night In Xataka | One of the most remote islands was taken 60 years ago by the United Kingdom and the United States. Since then, what happens there has been a secret.

China’s brutal dominance in rare earth production in the last 30 years, in a revealing graph

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

There are few strategic natural resources as important as gas, gold or oil, but there is one that is less known and that is decisive in practically any industry and therefore, also in geopolitics: the rare earthwhich are neither earths nor rare (in fact, they are a list of 17 metals). The state that has enough rare earths in its territory and the capacity to extract them will have much to gain to become a power. Well, if you can cough China, the absolute leader in rare earths so much in reserves as in production. A picture is worth a thousand words. But today the power of China is discussed is one thing and another if the Asian giant started by winning the game. Spoiler: no. The United States Geological Survey It has a very complete database where to visualize production by country from 1994 to the present (among other information), but more than a table, it is better seen with images. Thus, at a glance you can see its beastly hegemony in this chart from Visual Capitalist from 1994 to 2024. 30 years of rare earth production. Visual Capitalist An animation still counts more. The Visual Capitalist illustration shows Chinese superiority, but the evolution of rare earth production by country is better seen with an animation showing its meteoric rise because yes, the global rare earth industry has been profoundly transformed in the last 30 years. In just three decades, China has gone from having a 47% quota to almost 70% of the 400,000 metric tons produced today (by the end of 2024). Or what is the same, going from manufacturing 31,000 metric tons to 270,000 metric tons, something that can be seen in this animation by Global Times and Valiant Panda: Tap to see the animation. Production by country of rare earths from 1994 to 2024, Global Times How America Lost Control. It’s worth stopping the animation at the beginning, because in the 90s the United States was the world’s largest producer of rare earths and Mountain Pass was its main plant for obtaining them. Its average extraction was around 20,000 – 22,000 tons. And then, in 1997, came the Mountain Pass environmental disaster: a burst pipe in the eponymous mine that contaminated the Movaje Desert with toxic radioactive waste. Between the disaster and the subsequent lawsuits, production suddenly fell to 5,000 tons between 1998 and 2002. It would then fall to 0 in the 2000s. It would be in the 2010s when it began to recover: now the United States is around 46,000 metric tons. As Rocío Jurado sang, now it’s too late, lady: it was also in the 90s when China went into steamroller mode. The unstoppable rise of China. That China has come to dominate world production hides several keys. The first, the ability of its suppliers to offer lower prices Thanks to state aid, laxer environmental standards and cheaper labor made possible costs that the West could not cope with. China had the resources, but its victory came because it was able to build an entire industry while the rest of the world watched. Producing the raw mineral is only the first step, then it must be separated to achieve a high degree of purity (between 95 and 99%, depending on the application) in a complex, expensive hydrometallurgical process that, as we have seen, leaves radioactive waste along the way. Where it still dominates more: refining. Because although China has a share of almost 70% of world production, its dominance is even more overwhelming in refining: it produces around 90% of world refining. In fact, other countries such as Australia or the United States extract minerals, they turn to China for refining. If there is no refining industry at the level of extraction, there is no sovereignty. Other faces. Trump wants to step on the accelerator of national mining and expedite permits, the EU also seeks its strategic sovereignty with laws such as the Critical Raw Materials law and its application in places like Per Geijer’s Swedish megamine. We have already talked about Australia, which at least until this year It will depend on China for refining those 16,000 metric tons that have been around in recent years, but there are other countries that have joined the race. But while the Global Times animation focuses on great powers, the Visual Capitalist graph reveals new players in the industry such as Myanmar, Thailand or Nigeria, especially focused on more scarce and valuable elements. However, their supply chains are unstable and have their own regulatory and geopolitical risks. In Xataka | The world’s rare earth reserves, laid out in this graph showing the brutal dominance of a single country In Xataka | Europe seeks its sovereignty in rare earths and knows how to achieve it the fast way: with a supermine in Sweden

The problem is not that your favorite influencer sells you the motorcycle. The problem is that maybe it doesn’t even exist.

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

What text-to-image and image-to-video generation will be able to achieve in the coming years is only easy to imagine if you’re in the business. I have been closely following advances in AI as a method to replace humans doing things. And I can assure you based on my experience that 2026 will be a before and after in a daily practice: consuming content on TikTok or Instagram. It’s happening now. We have been talking about influencers created with AI since 2023. The most famous case is that of Aitana Lopeza model created with AI that surpassed the barrier of 100,000 followers on Instagram. The case remained more anecdote than normal, but in 2025 we began to hear from relevant capital firms in Silicon Valley investing in start-ups created as synthetic influencer agencies. The factory. The girl you see above does not exist. She is an influencer that I created in less than two minutes and for free. If you want to make a minimal investment, you could improve the texture of your skin with Nano Banana Pro 4K or render additional details with Topaz AI. All within the same tool. Higgsfield AI is the largest AI content creation platform, and has had the “AI influencer” function for some time now. With the arrival of models like Banana Pro, the results are indistinguishable from reality. Skin enhancer in Higgsfield. Model created with AI. Maybe it exists… and it’s AI. Until now, we have only talked about creating influencers in a 100% artificial way but… what if I told you that you are already watching videos on social networks of people who exist, but who are not real at the moment you are watching the video? Spanish influencers, such as Janmolinerare starting to use AI to clone themselves and post videos in which they appear, but using an AI avatar that replaces them. This opens the doors to: Much higher content creation volume. Cost savings. What we hate with all our might: more ads created with AI. Indistinguishable. I have been training in this type of tools for some time, my eye is trained to try to detect when it is AI and when it is not, and since the arrival of the latest models I have one thing clear: it is currently indistinguishable from reality, and it will improve even more in the coming years. Big Tech. Microsoft, Google, Meta and Anthropic They are paying real money to content creators to promote their AI, with agreements reaching up to $600,000. The big question is whether, in the medium term, it will continue to make sense for companies to have humans advertise their products… or to have an AI announcing another AI. Image | Higgsfield AI In Xataka | I bought a spell online to make my cat an influencer. Now I have two euros less and even more afraid of AI

why the next great revolution against cancer is to make it chronic

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

If we ask someone what the goal of cancer medicine is, the answer is almost automatic: cure itmake it disappear or win the war against this devastating disease. However, in molecular biology laboratories and advanced oncology consultations, the verb is changing, since we no longer speak of “eradicating” at all costs, but to contain. An idea that may be quite shocking, but which is proposed as the future of medicine. The idea. Douglas Hanahan, one of the most influential figures in modern biology and one of the great responsible of the hallmarks of cancerwhich are the hallmarks that define a tumor, has put this idea on the table. In this case, it points to a concept that clashes with our intuition, but fits with scientific data: cancer without disease. The idea is provocative, since it suggests that histologically malignant tumors are possible living off of us without killing us or affecting our quality of life. The objective is no longer the total elimination of the enemy and becomes something more pragmatic: keeping it under biological and clinical control so that the patient dies with the cancer, but not from the cancer. There is no cure. In a recent interview and in your updates of the Hallmarks of Cancer 2022, Hanahan insists that the complexity of cancer makes a universal cure unlikely. Instead, it proposes to understand what specific capacities sustain the tumor, such as evasion of the immune system, inflammation, replicative immortality… to selectively block them. In this way, it is not about destroying the entire tissue, but about converting a lethal process into an indolent one. This is what Hanahan calls “adaptive resistance”, since we assume that the tumor will try to look for new escape routes, and we will change the therapeutic strategy to block them, maintaining the tumor ecosystem within safety margins. It already happens. All of this is not a futuristic theory, but rather it is already happening on two very different fronts: the tumors that we decide not to touch and the aggressive tumors that we have learned to stop. Not trying is sometimes the best. The most literal example of “cancer without disease” is found in the prostate and thyroid. Here, diagnostic technology has advanced so much that we detect tumors that, biologically, would never have caused problems. In the case of prostate canceralmost half of low-risk tumors now enter active surveillance protocols. In this way, instead of operating or radiating (with the risk of impotence and incontinence that entails), doctors begin to monitor the mass. And the data, after 20 years of follow-up in large groups of people, are quite clear: cancer-specific mortality in these well-selected groups is less than 1%. In the clinic. With all this, the idea is that it is better to live with a controlled cancer than to pay the physical price of curing it, although logically, if it goes too far out of containment, the most correct thing is to try to eradicate it with the tools we have. In the case of papillary thyroid cancer We also have this same situation, since overdiagnosis has led to stopping aggressive surgery in favor of observing tumors that the body keeps at bay on its own. The new chronicity. Where the paradigm changes most dramatically is in advanced or metastatic cancer. Twenty years ago, a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer or metastatic melanoma was almost invariably a short-term terminal sentence. Today, thanks to immunotherapy and targeted therapies, a new category of patient has been born: the “treatable but not curable.” With this strategy there are already different organizations, like the British NCRIwhich describe growing cohorts of patients living for years with the disease. In this case they have metastases, but they live a normal life with their jobs and trips while receiving chronic or intermittent treatments to contain the disease. But without staying on the road. Changing the rules. This new paradigm within oncology has forced changing the rules of the game in clinical trialssince the aim is no longer just for the tumor to disappear, but for prolonged stabilization. With regard to toxicity, the logic of “maximum tolerated dose” in chemotherapy (give medication until the patient can tolerate it) does not work if you are going to treat the patient for five years, since their quality of life with very aggressive chemotherapy will decrease each time. Right now, quality of life and low toxicity are prioritized with ‘milder’ medications to allow long-term treatment without major side effects. This is why cancer is beginning to resemble, in its management, diabetes or HIV: a chronic condition that requires lifelong medication, but that does not necessarily dictate the date of your death. Psychological problems. Logically, this model of ‘chronic cancer’ has its shadows. Medical literature warns, for example, that living with “dormant” or controlled cancer places an enormous mental burden on patients. Studies on active surveillance show that, for some patients, the anxiety of having a “ticking time bomb” inside worsens their quality of life more than the surgery itself. And each review consultation can mean a world to know if it has gone more or less. And more problems. In addition to this, you must know that not all of these diseases can become chronic, such as glioblastoma or pancreatic cancer, which continue to have an aggressive biology that, today, escapes this lazy control. But also, turning cancer into chronic is great news for the patient, but a titanic challenge for public health, since it implies treating more people, for more years, with very high-cost biological drugs. The summary. Hanahan’s “cancer without disease” is not giving up. It is accepting that, if we cannot eliminate the enemy, victory lies in keeping it at bay long enough for life to continue its course and even allow science to continue advancing. As mortality statistics suggest: more and more people are dying with cancer, but fewer people of cancer. And in that nuance lies an entire medical revolution. Images | National Cancer … Read more

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