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The giant jugs of Laos have long baffled science. A “death jar” has solved the riddle

May 24, 2026 by usatoday24

The heart of Southeast Asia and scattered throughout the mountains of Xieng Khouang province in Laos, rest thousands of monumental stone vessels. Some of these reach three meters in height and weigh several tons, and that is why this place received the name ‘Plain of Jars’. However, this landscape has been a great mystery for all the experts because it is not known who carved them, nor how they moved them nor what they were for. Resolving. Now, a new archaeological study seems to have finally found the key piece of the puzzle, revealing a mortuary tradition much more complex and macabre than previously thought. The discovery of a huge “death jar” has confirmed that these stone colossi were not isolated monuments, but the protagonists of a sophisticated multigenerational funerary ritual. A secret. The key to this puzzle is based precisely on the analysis of a single, gigantic vessel that hid inside no more and no less than the bone remains of at least 37 different people. But the most interesting thing of all is that this “overcrowding” is not the product of a hasty mass grave or a sudden catastrophe, since the study shows that we are dealing with a practice known as secondary burial. How they did it. This practice, the truth is, is very far from our current customs, since instead of burying the deceased directly, the ancient culture that inhabited the area allowed the bodies to decompose first. Once cleaned of meat, the bones were transferred and deposited inside these monumental jars, being a process quite similar to the one that continues with Spanish royalty in the Royal Pantheon of Escorial. But the presence of the remains of so many people in a single jar suggests that these were reopened and reused over several generations, functioning as authentic family or community pantheons. Ritual recycling. This article does not come out of nowhere, but already in 2023 investigations at “site 1” of the plain had found signs of secondary burials around the stones, but this new discovery consolidates the hypothesis that the jars themselves were main containers of this mortuary tradition. The most fascinating thing about this research is the time lag that the dating has revealed since scientists have discovered that the history of the Plain of Jars is made up of overlapping layers. This shows that the human remains analyzed date from between the 9th and 13th centuries, but the gigantic stone jars are, according to geological and archaeological estimates, much older. What does it mean? Basically, the landscape was the subject of a profound “ritual recycling.” The medieval inhabitants of Laos did not carve the jugs; They came across a pre-existing, mysterious and monumental megalithic landscape, and decided to appropriate it for their own funerary rituals. In other words, the site was not built for a single function or at a single moment, but rather had an unusually long lifespan, being resignified by different cultures over the centuries. Images | Wikipedia In Xataka | We still don’t know where Tartessos was, but we do know where we are going to solve the enigma: in Badajoz

The problem is that anyone could look

May 24, 2026 by usatoday24

Many homes with small children have installed surveillance cameras or baby monitors. They allow you to monitor the child while it sleeps and, if it cries, you can go to see what is happening in an instant. All advantages, except when the camera in question has a security flaw that gives access to anyone who can look. what has happened. Security expert and independent researcher Sammy Azdoufal discovered that Meari brand cameras (including electronic peepholes and baby monitors) were completely unprotected. By simply analyzing the Android app, Azdoufal was able to extract a unique key that gave him access to more than a million cameras spread across 118 countries. All your research is detailed in its GitHub repository. What is Meari?. Surely the brand Meari Technologies does not sound familiar to you, it is normal because it is a white label manufacturer, that is, it manufactures for other brands. As explained in The VergeMeari cameras are sold on Amazon under various brands, such as Arenti, Anran, Boifun, ieGeek, Wyze, Petcube, COCOCAM, PetTec, SV3C, Joystek, Luvion and Vimar. Doing a search on Amazon Spain we found cameras from many of these brands, some of them with thousands of positive reviews. Non-existent security. The problem was not in a specific model, but in the entire architecture; Many of these brands shared servers and sometimes even credentials, so the system did not have any type of isolation: any of these brands could access the cameras of another. Additionally, the MQTT system (a machine-to-machine messaging protocol that ran on the EMQX IoT platform) did not have adequate protections, allowing real-time viewing of what was happening in thousands of homes. He also discovered that many cameras were still using default passwords such as “admin” or “public” and what is even worse, the alert images that these cameras save (for example when they detect movement) were stored on Alibaba servers without any type of protection, accessible simply through a URL. And this was not all, he also found an unprotected internal server where he found passwords for Meari and the list of 678 employees, including their emails and telephone numbers. He didn’t need to hack anything, just know where he had to look. The answer. According to Azdoufal, they did not take him seriously until they saw that their own employees’ data was being leaked, then they began to respond to his emails and solved the main failure, cutting off access to their cameras. In a statement sent to The Verge, the company admits that “Under certain technical conditions, attackers can intercept all messages transmitted through the EMQX IoT platform without user authorization.” However, it did not answer key questions such as how many camera models were affected, whether different brands have warned users or whether the vulnerability had been previously exploited. Tensions. Azdoufal was paid more than $24,000 for finding the bugs, but it was after several weeks of negotiation in which Meari did some pretty shady things. According to the researcher, the company sent him messages with veiled threats such as that the access he had made to their servers was illegal, that they were ready to “protect his interests” and that they knew his address. The company also tried to pretend that they knew about the bugs before, publishing security bulletins with altered dates. What to do if you have a Meari camera. According to the researcher, Meari manufactures for more than 300 brands and on the official website we have not found any official list, so it is difficult to know which brands are affected. If you suspect that your camera is one of these, Azdoufal recommends unplugging it whenever you are not using it, because the problem is in the cloud and is not something you can fix yourself. Also, please note that some images may still be accessible, and if you live in the EU you can lodge a complaint with your data protection authority. Image | Xataka with Gemini In Xataka | NASA has had its space systems exposed to hackers for three years: an AI discovered it in four days

secret training for war in Ukraine

May 24, 2026 by usatoday24

The scene took place a few months ago. Ukrainian soldiers surprised British instructors when they discovered that many NATO armies still They did not use anti-drone networks on a regular basis. After several years of war, Ukraine was beginning to teach the West how to survive on a front dominated by drones. Much more than drones. For much of the Ukraine war, the relationship between China and Russia has been interpreted primarily in terms economic and technological. Beijing bought Russian oil and gas while Chinese companies appeared linked to the supply of electronic components, drones and machinery useful for the Russian military industry. However, the revelations he has had access Reuters on the secret training of Russian military in Chinese facilities point to something much deeper: China would not be limiting itself to indirectly supporting the Russian war economy, but rather participating in the tactical and doctrinal training of soldiers who then return directly to the Ukrainian front. This enormously changes the dimension of the relationship between both countries. War as a military classroom. According to the documents and sources European intelligence agencies, some 200 Russian soldiers were trained discreetly in China at the end of 2025 under an agreement signed between senior commanders of both countries. He program included training in FPV drones, electronic warfare, army aviation, mechanized infantry and demining. Some sessions took place in military centers in Beijing, Nanjing, Zhengzhou or Shijiazhuang. What is important is not only the relatively small number of soldiers, but the profile of many of them: instructors and commanders capable of relaying that knowledge to whole units once back in Ukraine. In other words, China would not simply be sending technology, but helping to perfect the way Russia fights modern war. China learns while Russia fights. It just so happens that the relationship also greatly benefits Beijing. The People’s Liberation Army has not fought a major war in decades and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has become the largest military laboratory real of the planet. Russia brings direct combat experience in drones, trenches, electronic warfare and mass attrition. China provides industrial capacity, advanced simulators, technological production and training methods increasingly sophisticated. The exchange is extremely valuable for both. Moscow gains access to technology and training difficult to obtain under Western sanctions, while Beijing can observe how modern weapons, tactics and doctrines really work without being officially involved in the conflict. Silent revolution. The heart of all this cooperation revolves around drones. Ukraine has completely transformed the way it fights using cheap FPV capable of destroying armored vehicles, fortified positions and even helicopters. Russia had to quickly adapt to that reality and now appears to be turning to China to further professionalize part of that ecosystem. The documents describe simulator training flight, coordinated use of drones with mortars, electronic warfare against enemy drones and physical interception systems through networks. All of this reflects the extent to which modern warfare is ceasing to depend exclusively on large traditional platforms to increasingly focus on cheap, massive and very difficult to neutralize systems. Europe’s concern. For the European agencies, what is truly disturbing is that part of those soldiers trained in China already they would have participated later in combat operations in occupied Crimea and Zaporizhzhia. This means that the knowledge acquired in Chinese facilities ends up being applied directly on the European battlefield. Beijing, for its part, continues to publicly defend a neutral position and continues to present itself as a possible peace mediator, but this type of cooperation seriously erodes that image. In the eyes of many Western governments, China would be entering a much more sensitive gray area: not officially sending its own troops or weapons, but contributing to improving Russian operational capacity in an active war against Ukraine. Increasingly military alliance. The revelation It also confirms the extent to which the “limitless” partnership announced by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin before the 2022 invasion has evolved far beyond simple joint exercises or diplomatic statements. China and Russia no longer seem to limit themselves to coordinating political positions vis-à-vis the West, they are beginning to share knowledge combat practices, training and doctrine. The most significant detail may be precisely the secrecy of the agreements: prohibition of media coverage, restrictions on information to third parties and programs developed discreetly away from the international spotlight. All this suggests that both countries perfectly understand the political sensitivity of a cooperation that, although still indirect, gets closer and closer to China to the real workings of the war in Ukraine. Image | Vitaly V. Kuzmin In Xataka | The closure of the Strait of Hormuz chokes the Chinese economy. Its only energy solution is a historic pact with Putin In Xataka | While everyone was looking at Hormuz, Russia has found a much more important route to supply drones to Iran

There is a medieval city in Germany built in a meteorite crater. Its walls hide 72,000 tons of diamonds

May 24, 2026 by usatoday24

If you’ve seen Shingeki no Kyojin (if you haven’t, I’m envious), the comparison with Shiganshina is inevitable: the image on the left of the montage on the cover corresponds to the Nördlingen market square and the one on the right is the city seen from above, completely fortified with a wall that surrounds it. However and although it is fan pilgrimage destination of the series, there is officially no relationship between the two. At first glance, the architecture of Nördlingen makes it just another fairytale Bavarian village, but this German city in the Donau-Ries district (in Swabia) is anything but just another one. In 1215, Emperor Frederick II promoted it to an imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire and a century later they began to build the wall. The municipality is integrated within the crater that left a meteorite when it fell. However, we know this now: until the 1960s, geologists themselves thought that the depression was an inactive volcano. Nördlingen is in a crater. He Nördlinger Ries It is a depression 24 kilometers wide and up to 150 meters caused by the impact of a meteorite approximately one kilometer in diameter in the Miocene, which pierced a primary crater of 11 kilometers. As deepens the International Union of Geological Sciencesthat hole grew due to the uplift of the crater floor and marginal collapse, until it reached what it is now. The Ries asteroid impacted with a speed of at least 70,000 km/h, causing an explosion of heat and energy that lasted approximately 10 minutes: the shock wave traveled through the area, setting everything on fire up to 100 kilometers away, which ended life in that radius. Afterwards, a lake was formed where diverse flora and fauna settled. The findings in the nearby Ofnet caves They confirm that the site of today’s Nördlingen was already inhabited in the late Paleolithic. The wall outlines the diameter of the meteorite. When in 1327 Louis the Bavarian ordered build the wall of Nördlingen, no one knew that he was tracing the exact outline of the meteorite that had hit there 15 million years earlier, as notes NASA. The medieval historic center fits almost perfectly within the kilometer diameter of the primary crater: a geological coincidence that would not be discovered until the 20th century. With a perimeter of 2.7 kilometers, it is one of the three medieval walls of Germany preserved almost intact and the only one that can be visited in its entirety: five gates, twelve towers and two bastions make up this circuit that, seen from the top of the Daniel tower, reveals its perfectly circular shape: the underlying trace of the Miocene catastrophe. And a small detail: it is made with stones that house small diamonds. The wall of Nördlingen. Wolkenkratzer, via Wikimedia Walls made of diamonds. Cities usually have their stone quarry, but Nördlingen had diamonds: the meteorite impact generated an estimated 72,000 tons of them when it hit a local graphite deposit, so its stone buildings contain millions of small diamonds. The stone is not just any one either: it is the sueviteextremely rare and marbled with small greenish crystals. It is found in other locations on the planet where there were similar impacts, but the concentration of gems in Nördlingen is unique. Those who built those buildings did not know that they were working with diamonds: they discovered it after the visit of Eugene Shoemaker and Edward Chaothe two American geologists who in 1960 demonstrated the origin by impact by finding shock quartz in the walls of St. George’s Church. St. George’s Church. Tkx via Wikimedia The “luxurious” church of St. George. Normally jewelry in churches is reserved for the altarpieces, but in San Jorge they are also on the walls. In fact, it was the construction that revealed the use of suevite extracted from the Ries basin. St. George’s is one of the largest late Gothic hall churches in southern Germany and was built between 1427 and 1505, when Nördlingen was Imperial. The church tower is known as “Daniel” and is 90 meters high: after climbing 350 steps you can reach the viewpoint (70 meters away), where you can observe the perfectly circular shape of the city and the crater that surrounds it. The tower also preserves one of the most unusual traditions of modern Europe: a night watchman who has been shouting before midnight since the Middle Ages to warn that everything is fine. Nördlingen, space training ground. Since impact craters also occur on the Moon and Mars, Nördlinger Ries has been used for decades as a training ground to teach astronauts to recognize the rocks and minerals created by impacts. the astronauts from Apollo 14 and NASA’s Apollo 17 studied the geology of the crater in 1970. But It is not something exclusive of the North American space agency: it is one of the three destinations of the program PANGAEA of the European Space Agency, along with the Italian Dolomites and Lanzarote. JAXA has also carried out training there. In Xataka | That Christian Friedrich von Kahlbut died in 1702 is nothing exceptional. That his corpse has not decomposed, yes In Xataka | A treasure hunter looted a shipwreck, did not reveal where he had kept the treasure and spent 10 years in prison. Now you are free to get it back Cover | Tilman2007 and Bayerische Vermessungsverwaltung

If you wake up tired on a regular basis, your rest is fragmented. The good news is that science knows how to fix it

May 24, 2026 by usatoday24

When the alarm clock rings in the morning, many of us ask to stay five more minutes between the sheets. But sometimes these five minutes are not for convenience, but for necessity, since there are people who wake up as if you haven’t slept at all. And this is a problem, since waking up tired on a regular basis is not normal. The myth of hours. Sleeping eight hours seems the standard that we must follow to be able to rest well, as occurs with the mantra of take 10,000 steps a day to have good cardiovascular health. The problem is that there are many people who can sleep eight or more hours and feel in the morning as if they had not slept at all, and here science suggests that real rest is given to us sleep phases and how time is distributed in each of them, not in the global calculation. The distribution. Sleep is not a linear state, although it may seem that way to us. The reality is that while we are with our eyes closed, we are going through a complex cycle of fragile architecture that passes through light phasesdeep stages and the well-known REM phase where dreams occur. But here what interests us most is deep sleep, which is responsible for physical restoration and the immune system, so when this cycle is broken repeatedly during the night, which is what It is known as fragmented sleep.the direct impact the next day is a decrease in cognition and an increase in fatigue, regardless of the hours we have spent lying down. Sleep or fatigue. For some they may be similar terms, but the truth is that they are quite different, since, while drowsiness is the biological and overwhelming need to sleep, fatigue, on the other hand, is a lack of physical energy or mental motivation. If what you feel when you wake up is fatigue, the origin may transcend the pillow and there may be a medical cause such as anemia, hypothyroidism, depression, chronic stress or the side effects of certain drugs that may be behind this lack of vital energy. Two culprits. Among the medical conditions, there are two that stand out above the others. The first of them is the sleep apneawhich is undoubtedly the great invisible saboteur, since it causes breathing to stop and restart repeatedly throughout the night. These drops in oxygen cause micro-awakenings that the brain uses to survive and breathe again, which we are not aware of. The problem is that these shocks prevent deep sleep from being achieved and result in extreme fatigue. The other culprit is sustained insomnia, since, beyond the difficulty in falling asleep, insomnia also manifests itself with early awakenings or constant interruptions, greatly reducing the restorative nature of rest. It can be corrected. Once medical causes are ruled out, there are several tips that can be followed to have a better quality of sleep. The first of them is to stay away from screens before going to sleep, since if we are already close to falling asleep and our body is preparing for it, exposure to blue light and stimulating content can cause it to take longer to fall asleep. Another very important tip is for dinner, which should ideally be as light as possible so as not to feel very heavy all night and also keep it as far away from bedtime as possible. This is where British time has a clear advantage over ours, as it means you don’t go to sleep with dinner food still in your stomach. The environment matters. In addition to removing any television from the room where you are going to sleep, the comfort you have is also important. This involves having a suitable mattress and ensuring that the temperature of the room is not uncomfortable, since this will cause awakenings that will cause you to not finish resting. This is also added to the need to have as little noise as possible. What is done during the day It matters a lot to sleep, and here exercising several hours before bed can make you sleep much better. But in the diet you also have to be very methodical, since you have to limit caffeine in the afternoon or at night, and limit alcohol consumption which, although it seems to put us into a very deep sleep, the reality is that it makes it not at all restorative. Images | jcomp in Magnific In Xataka | There are people who sleep four hours a day and are still functional. It’s the closest thing we have to genetic “superheroes”

NASA has looked at Torrevieja from space and has seen a huge mass of pink water essential to finding life on Mars

May 24, 2026 by usatoday24

From space everything looks different. In fact, distance allows us to distinguish strange shapes, such as the Great Dam of Zimbabwe or the eye of the saharabut also colors that go more unnoticed at ground level. Thus, on June 7, 2021, an Expedition 65 astronaut aboard the International Space Station pointed his camera toward the southeast of Spain and took a photograph that looks like a watercolor: Mediterranean blue, a muted green and an intense pink reminiscent of quartz. The color palette is finished off by the white reflection of the sun. The three colors correspond to bodies of water a few kilometers from each other, in Alicante: the Mediterranean, and the saline lagoons of La Mata and Torrevieja. What seems like an aesthetic coincidence is actually chemistry visible from orbit. Each tone reveals something: the degree of salinity, which microorganisms dominate the water, and in what fragile balance they coexist. The lagoons of La Mata and Torrevieja. The Torrevieja lagoon has been used as a salt mine since the 13th century and today are the largest salt producer in Europe, with an average of 650,000 tons per year, a figure that varies depending on solar radiation, wind and precipitation. It does not function as a natural lagoon, but as an industrial system where water moves according to production needs. The La Mata lagoon acts as a prior concentration chamber: receive sea water through artificial channels and runoff from intermittent streams of the Sierra de San Miguel de Salinas. From there, the water is pumped to the Torrevieja salt mine, where brine from the Pinoso salt diapir through a 55 kilometer pipeline. The result is that the concentration of salt in the Torrevieja lagoon can overcome 260 grams of salt per liter, much more than the 38.5 g/liter Mediterranean that bathes its coast. Two adjacent lagoons but with completely different chemical worlds. Why do they have such different colors?. Each time water of different composition is pumped to produce salt, the chemistry of the system is altered, which determines What organisms can live and in what quantity. Two lagoons a kilometer apart, two different microbial communities and two opposite colors. The pink color of the Torrevieja lagoon is produced by microorganisms. More specifically, in conditions of high salinity and intense solar radiation, the microalgae Dunaliella salina accumulates β-carotene as protection against light. The halophilic archaea that share the lake reinforce that tone: they have red pigments distributed throughout their cell membrane, which makes them visually more decisive in the final color of the water. In La Mata, the lower concentration of salt favors a different microbiota where chlorophyll predominates over carotenoids: that explains the green color. Context. The salinity gradient between both lagoons goes beyond chemistry: it is what allows a different and exceptional biodiversity. The wetland houses up to 400 taxaten species of threatened birds and one of the most important Audouin’s gull breeding colonies in the Mediterranean. Without that difference in salinity, many of those ecological niches would disappear. The NASA image is also more than a photograph: it portrays the fragile balance between industry, microbiology and conservation that climate change is already testing as temperatures rise and salinity fluctuations alter the living conditions of Dunaliella salinaor what is the same, that that striking pink color seen from space could disappear. Why is it important. Dunaliella salina is the organism that supports the base of the food chain in hypersaline lakes around the world. Since 1966 it has been grown commercially to produce β-carotene, which has applications in pharmacology and cosmetics. But it is also an organism that NASA has on the radar because it constitutes a form of life in extreme conditions. It should be remembered that the data from the Perseverance rover indicates that there were hypersaline waters in the Jezero crater of Mars. Studying life in these types of lakes helps understand the potential in these old Martian lakes. What makes Torrevieja pink is the best laboratory we have to know what to look for on another planet. In Xataka | 60 years ago, NASA took a look at the Sahara from space and found a very strange “perfect eye” In Xataka | Europe has been watching Colombia for a decade from space and what it has seen is a tragedy: the death of a glacier Cover | POT

Influencers have made it fashionable to give yourself cramps in your vagus nerve to cure stress. Science has bad news

May 24, 2026 by usatoday24

After a marathon day, what if the report doesn’t arrive, feed the kids, walk the dog, go to that Pilates class… And your brain refuses to turn off. You open TikTok or Instagram looking for a distraction and, between dances and recipes, a influencer. Wear a minimalist design device around your neck or clipped to your ear. It promises that with the push of a button and a few small electrical pulses, your anxiety will disappear, you’ll sleep like a baby, and your “brain fog” will lift. they call it “the great reset of the nervous system”. For centuries, the vagus nerve has functioned in complete anatomical obscurity, but today it has achieved an almost mythical status in the wellness ecosystem. According to The New York Timesthere are billions of social media impressions about this nerve. Celebrities like Kelly Ripa and podcasters like Andrew Huberman They praise their virtues. “A lot of this is being driven by influencers saying, ‘Just do this to stimulate your vagus nerve, and all the problems in your life will be solved,’” explains Dr. Kevin Tracey, a neurosurgeon and president of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. It sounds like science fiction, but forecasts suggest that the stimulation of this nerve will generate a billion-dollar industry by 2030. The inevitable question that arises is: can we really “hack” our stress with neck cramps, or are we facing the umpteenth expensive internet placebo? To understand the phenomenon, you must first understand the biology. As explained by the Cleveland Clinicthe vagus nerve (whose name comes from the Latin “wanderer”) is the tenth of the twelve cranial nerves and the longest of all. It arises in the brain stem and winds through the neck, chest, and abdomen, connecting the brain to the heart, lungs, and digestive system. It is the main highway of our parasympathetic nervous system, the one in charge of the “rest and digest” function. Basically, it is the body’s handbrake. When we get stressed, the sympathetic system (the “fight or flight” response) is activated; When the danger passes, the vagus nerve should come into action to calm the pulse and relax the body. But why are people obsessed with electrocuting him? According to the magazine Women’s Healthwe live in an epidemic of chronic stress. The flood of emails, traffic jams and daily pressures cause what is known as “vagal dysfunction.” Our body gets stuck in survival mode and loses the ability to calm down.. The promise of a quick fix has led to the emergence of commercial devices. When faced with the idea of using home electricity, it is normal to wonder if this is dangerous. Generally, the physical answer is no. According to Dr. Michael Kilgard, director of the Texas Biomedical Device Center, interviewed by The New York Timesthe batteries in these commercial devices are too small to burn the skin. The most you feel is tingling. However, the real danger is psychological and medical. “The strangeness of the sensations is annoying enough that people feel like the devices are doing something,” Kilgard warns. In most cases, these gadgets are “probably little more than a placebo disguised as neuroscience“. The risk lies in false hope: patients who spend hundreds of euros on devices that do nothing, delaying medical treatments that have been proven to be effective. To understand the true impact of this false hope, it is vital to separate the wheat from the chaff and define where scientific rigor ends. The line between medicine and marketing wellness The science of Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) is real, fascinating and very complex, but it is light years away from what the marketers sell. influencers. There are real medical devices, but as a comprehensive review article published highlights in the scientific journal Comprehensive Physiologyinvasive stimulation (iVNS) “remains the gold standard with well-documented efficacy.” That is, we are talking about small devices similar to pacemakers that are surgically implanted under the skin of the chest, with cables threaded directly to the nerve. According to Cleveland Clinicthe FDA (the US drug agency) has approved these severe implants to treat cases of resistant epilepsy and severe clinical depression. Medical research continues to advance. A pivotal clinical trial published recently in Nature Medicine (the RESET-RA trial), demonstrated that an implanted neuromodulator system targeting the vagus nerve significantly reduced inflammation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis who were unresponsive to conventional medications. On the other hand, as a review points out from the magazine Exploratory Research and Hypothesis in Medicinethe use of non-invasive stimulators (in the ear or neck) is being intensively studied in clinical settings for rehabilitation after stroke or to slow cognitive decline. But what about the devices that anyone can buy online to “de-stress”? The experts are blunt. Dr. Kristl Vonck, neurologist at Ghent University, warns that consumer devices They are “lightly regulated and do not have to prove to the FDA that they actually work.” Many companies hide behind vague claims about “wellness” to avoid medical controls and use the language of real clinical trials as a mere marketing tactic. Furthermore, as a clinical researcher explains in The Conversationmanipulating the vagus nerve is not a panacea and does not work the same for everyone. Some people in clinical trials experience headaches, worsening migraines, or even a drop in mood when receiving stimulation. “Most diseases involve multiple biological and psychological factors, and no single nerve explains or solves all of them,” he says. Misinformation is not limited to devices; It also covers home diagnostics. The magazine Bustle recently echoed a viral trend on TikTok: the “three drinks” test. Content creators claimed that if you are unable to swallow saliva three times in a row and quickly, your vagus nerve is seriously deregulated due to chronic stress. The therapists had to intervene. Chloë Bean, an expert somatic trauma therapist, clarified that swallowing does involve this nerve, but not being able to do it three times in a row “does not automatically mean that your vagus nerve is stuck.” It … Read more

In 1967, Canada built futuristic homes like Lego pieces. Half a century later they still don’t know how to repair them

May 24, 2026 by usatoday24

When Moshe Safdie designed Habitat 67 As an architecture student, he had a revolutionary idea: he used thousands of Lego pieces to test how housing modules could fit together in three dimensions. Decades later, the architect himself I kept remembering who even emptied entire Lego stores in Montreal to build the models. And maybe that was the problem. Reinvent the home like Lego. In the early 1960s, Western cities were trapped between two models that seemed inevitable: huge blocks of impersonal apartments or endless car-dependent suburbs. A young architecture student named Moshe Safdie He believed that there was a third way. His idea was apparently simple and radical at the same time: build prefabricated homes by stacking concrete modules as if they were giant lego piecesso that each family could have light, a terrace, vegetation and the feeling of an individual house within a large urban structure. The project ended up becoming Habitat 67, the great futuristic icon of the Montreal Expo. What Canada presented to the world as the definitive future of cities ended up being one of the most fascinating and problematic works of architecture of the 20th century. Habitat 67 was a utopia. The image of the building continues to look futuristic even today: 354 huge concrete modules prefabricated, each weighing about 90 tons, stacked in irregular shapes on an artificial peninsula facing the St. Lawrence River. Safdie was obsessed with solving a problem he considered central to the urban future: how to maintain density from the city without sacrificing privacy, nature and the feeling of home. His motto was “For everyone a garden”. Each apartment had to have its own garden, cross ventilation, open views and elevated pedestrian streets instead of closed corridors. Inspiration came from both the Pueblo homes of the American Southwest and the japanese metabolism that we talked about a few days ago, an architectural movement that imagined buildings made up of modular cells capable of growing and reorganizing like living organisms. The big problem: making it cheap. The paradox of Habitat 67 is that it was born precisely to make urban housing cheaper… and ended costing a lot more than expected. Safdie imagined that industrial prefabrication would allow apartments to be manufactured in a chain quickly and efficiently, but the reality It was very different. The complex required an extremely sophisticated assembly system, a factory installed within the work itself, gigantic cranes and very complex technical connections between modules. Each box had to leave the factory practically finished, with windows, wiring, bathrooms and kitchens incorporated before being lifted into its final position. The reduction of the original project (from 1,200 planned homes to just 158) shot even more the costs. The experiment designed to democratize the city ended up becoming a too expensive complex even for the middle class it sought to attract. Leaks and mold appear. As time went by, the other great enemy of Habitat 67 appeared: the water. The stepped structure full of terraces, gardens and joints between modules generated a waterproofing nightmare. The concrete began to leak constantly in Montreal’s extreme climate and water ended up penetrating walls and ventilation systems. Some residents reported serious problems moisture and mold for years. The repairs they were never simple because the building does not function like a conventional block: each module is a structural part of an extremely complex three-dimensional framework. Half a century later, restorations are still almost surgical. In the major rehabilitation carried out for the 50th anniversary, it was necessary to remove outer layersre-insulate huge surfaces and redesign entire systems to protect the structure from Canadian winters. From social dream to elite symbol. Another of the most striking ironies of Habitat 67 It is its social evolution. What was born as a manifesto for accessible urban housing ended up becoming one of the directions Montreal’s most exclusive. The original rents were already prohibitive in the 60s and subsequent privatization converted the apartments in luxury properties. Today some units reach millionaire prices and the monthly maintenance costs are very high. The “city for all” ended up being an enclave for cultural elites, businessmen and architecture lovers. Yet even its critics admit that the building accomplished something extraordinary: demonstrating that dense housing could be emotionally distinct from the repetitive blocks that dominated modern urbanism. He never completely died. The most fascinating thing is that, despite all its problems, Habitat 67 continues to exert a gigantic influence on architects and urban planners. decades later keep inspiring modular projects, terraced complexes and new ideas on how to combine urban density and quality of life. Even today’s digital tools have resurrected the original never-built project. In recent years, Safdie Architects and Epic Games they virtually recreated the gigantic “Project Hillside” which the Canadian government cut due to lack of money in the 60s. Thanks to Unreal Engine, drones and hyper-realistic models, the architect was able to tour for the first time the complete version of the modular city that he had imagined as a young man. There is something deeply symbolic in that image: Habitat 67 was so ambitious that not even the technology of its time could do it. fully viable. Maybe that’s why it continues to fascinate today. Because it seems like a relic of the past… but also a vision of an urban future that we still don’t know how to build without collapsing due to leaks, crazy costs and eternal repairs. Image | Parcours riverain – Ville de Montréal, Thomas Ledl, Vassgergely In Xataka | In 1970 Japan built homes of the future where each capsule would be replaceable. Half a century later he discovered that no one knew how to repair them In Xataka | The incredible story of the tallest building on the planet that ended up becoming the largest swimming pool in the Soviet Union

We have spent decades ignoring an organ because we believed it was useless. Now they have seen that it is crucial in our longevity

May 24, 2026 by usatoday24

In the center of the chest, just behind the breastbone, hides a small gland that has been systematically ignored by medicine when it comes to adult health: the thymus. Textbooks have long taught that this organ is vital in childhood to develop the immune system, but that It subsequently atrophies and turns into fat when we grow. But its role in the long run It’s not as irrelevant as we thought.. A turnaround. The paradigm that we were all taught at school has taken a big turn through a publication in Nature that has shown that the health of the thymus in adulthood not only matters, but is a determining factor in predicting how long we will live, the state of our cardiovascular health and also how we will respond to cancer. How it has been seen. The premise of this interesting study lies in a simple observation about people who did not have a thymus because it had been removed and the increase in mortality from all causes compared to those who have a healthy thymus. From here, a research team wanted to understand the true impact of a “sleeping” organ through different CT scans to calculate the thymic health of different people. The system analyzed the images of numerous people, including data from the National Lung Screening Trialwhich had more than 25,000 patients. By crossing the status of the thymus with the medical history and longevity of each individual, the results were so overwhelming that the researchers themselves they confessed It was the first time they had seen such spectacular results, since no one expected such a small organ to have such a clinical impact. Reduces mortality. This study has intensively analyzed the function of this gland in large groups of adults to discover that maintaining good thymic health is directly associated with lower overall mortality. But surprisingly, the study links having a healthy thymus with a lower incidence of cardiovascular mortality In oncology. This is where the finding takes on a revolutionary clinical dimension, since the data show a clear correlation between a healthy thymus and a lower incidence of lung cancer. But we can go further by pointing out that patients who undergo immunotherapy and have a healthy thymus respond greatly to the treatment, and even have a lower risk of suffering from cancer again. Preventive medicine. With this evidence, “thymic health” is positioned to become a very important parameter in the field of personalized medicine to gain insight into how a patient may accept a treatment. But in addition, monitoring its degradation could allow medicine to anticipate autoimmune diseases in those people who already have a higher risk. Images | kjpargeter in Magnific In Xataka | There are people who are 100 years old, but have an immune system of 30: a new study reveals how they manage to avoid cancer

Europe’s first autonomous taxi is in Zagreb and has Chinese brains

May 23, 2026 by usatoday24

One of the “attractions” if you travel to the United States or China is to take a ride in a robotaxi because until now Europe was a mere spectator. And although Madrid plans to start testing At the end of the years, a Balkan country has advanced in the old continent and it is not Germany (the Teutonic giant It is the engine of Europe in automobile industry): it is Croatia. Zagreb has become in the first European city to have a commercial robotaxis service that anyone can use, because although they are in an initial phase, it is not experimental or a closed test. Zagreb’s new robotaxis. The milestone is led by Verne, a Croatian startup that emerged from the Rimac Group ecosystem and that for this adventure has teamed up with the Chinese autonomous driving company Pony.ai and Uber. The service opera with 10 Arcfox Alpha T5 electric vehicles from the Chinese manufacturer BAIC equipped with Pony.ai’s seventh-generation autonomous driving system. Each unit incorporates 34 sensors, including 14 cameras, nine LiDARs and four radars, a combo that allows them to detect objects in a radius of up to 650 meters and adapt in real time to urban traffic. The idea is the following: you request the trip from the Verne app, which manages the reservation, payment and tracking (later it will also be implemented in the Uber app). The vehicle arrives autonomously and you unlock the door from your phone, get in and arrive at your destination without a human driver at the wheel. The autonomous fleet covers the center of Zagreb, the Novi Zagreb neighborhood and the airport, from 07:00 to 21:00, although the idea is to expand coverage to the entire city. Why is it important. This launch breaks a barrier that Europe has had to cross for years. While the United States has Waymo operating in several cities and China operates fleets of hundreds of robotaxis in Shanghai and Guangzhou, the old continent was entangled in fragmented regulatory frameworks, heterogeneous infrastructures and a conservative regulatory position towards autonomous cars. Zagreb just changed it. That Zagreb goes down in history as the first European city is symbolic and is also just the beginning: Verne is immersed in talks and permits with 11 cities in the EU, the United Kingdom and the Middle East and has another 30 locations under study on the table. If the service proves to be secure and scalable in Zagreb, it will likely become the regulatory and operational benchmark for the rest of the continent. Of course, there is something that should be taken into account: the core of the technology is Chinese. Context. Autonomous driving has been in the development and deployment phase for more than a decade, although the rates are very different depending on the location. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is the most advanced benchmark with operations in several American cities and expansion plans to London by the end of 2026. In Europe there have been several lukewarm initiatives, such as autonomous buses WeRide in Leuven (Belgium), taxis Volkswagen MOIA Level 4 in Berlin or more recently, Norway has dared to withdraw your supervisor in his autonomous bus. Croatia has gone further: it has dared to take the step with a taxi open to the general public. Verne was born in 2019 within Rimac Group with the aim of developing an urban mobility ecosystem based on autonomous electric taxis. After receive almost 180 million euros through Croatia’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan and years of work with the authorities to create a favorable regulatory framework, the project is now a reality. How have they done it. The operating model It is built on three pillars: Pony.ai provides autonomous technology, one of the most mature systems in the world, with thousands of kilometers tested in Asia. Verne operates and manages the fleet as a local player with direct knowledge of the Croatian regulatory environment. Uber provides distribution and customer access from day one. Simply put, everyone focuses on what they do best. In parallel, Verne is building its own factory in Lučko, near Zagreb, where it will produce its own autonomous two-seater vehicle designed specifically for driverless urban transport, so it will have no steering wheel or pedals. This move has strategic implications for both Verne and Europe since it would mean eventually stopping depending on Chinese hardware to have its own technology and production process. Yes, but. Zagreb may be the first city with robotaxis in Europe open for commercial use and Verne may be Croatian, but the technology is Chinese and that means relying on an external player: Pony.ai supplies the driving system and BAIC manufactures the vehicles. In its favor, this pattern is not exclusive to Verne: other initiatives from the old continent follow the same trend with the exception of Wayve (Cambridge) or Mobileye (owned by Intel, born in Israel). But as the saying goes: evil of many… The second point of friction is regulation. In this initial phase of the deployment, the cars circulate with a safety operator on board who does not touch the steering wheel: his role is not to drive, but to intervene only if the system fails. The elimination of the driver depends on the European authorities giving the green light, for which there are no defined deadlines. Verne has declared that he will do it “as soon as possible.” In Xataka | Autonomous cars are beginning to change a paradigm: we no longer need four seats in a taxi In Xataka | No more greeting the driver: Norway launches the first bus where there is not a single human in control Cover | Verne

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