2,000 years ago the Romans sold perfumes in glass doves that could only be opened by breaking their necks.

by

Despite their great efforts, the cities of the Roman Empire they didn’t smell good and well, it makes sense: they lived in conditions of high fecal contamination and also they used feces as medicine. Of course, to Caesar what belongs to Caesar: they had bottles to store their ointments and oils that, like the best current perfumes, promised a lot. Without going any further, the two bottles you see above these lines date from the 1st century AD, are from the Roman Empire and belong to the MET collection. Because from then on they knew that the (good) smell, coming from anointing oneself after bathing in hot springs, from incense from temples or from burials, was something more: it could be a language of status, identity and power. So for those smells they needed a container at their height that would turn the task of perfuming themselves into almost a ritual. For example, a dove. Dove-shaped jars. The ointments of the Romans were, in a nutshell, something like today’s ampoules: small ceramic or glass containers where they stored oils, commercial products or substances for funeral practices. blown glass arrive In the 1st century BC and 200 years later, the Romans were true virtuosos of glass manufacturing both in quality and quantity: according to the Penn Museummanufactured up to 100 million containers a year. These curious zoomorphic specimens in the shape of a bird and the size of which fit in the palm of the hand became so popular that they constitute a subcategory in themselves within their unguentary and it is common to find it in deposits. The method of use was practically identical to a vial: you have to break that small neck to access the contents inside. In this case, literally breaking the bird’s neck. In addition to its aesthetic value, they met their goal when storing valuable ointments: it protected the contents from excessive exposure to oxygen and helped to dose the amount poured. Why is it important. Converting ointment bottles into something more sophisticated in the shape of a bird constitutes one of the first and most striking cases of packaging and user experience (imagine that unboxing of an influencer of the time). Have a glass jar and also with this type of shapes It was a status indicator.as witnessed by the art of that period, where we see men and women perfumed after a visit to the hot springs. On the other hand and leaving aside the shape, these jars are the vestiges of the imperial commercial network: spices from India, resins from Arabia and locally grown flowers were used to make perfumes and ointments. If they also go to the laboratory, they constitute a valuable source of chemical data on Roman civilization and its customs. Without going any further, a laboratory analysis allowed identify a primal patchouli in an exhibition in Carmona (Seville). Context. Among these zoomorphic glasses the dove was the star: archaeological evidence suggests that the dove was one of the first birds domesticated by humans, so people learned its habits and characteristics and used it for messaging. On the spiritual level, they introduced it into their religious rituals and mythology. Thus, the dove was the sacred animal of Venus and she was often represented in statues with a dove perched on her hand or on her head. However, this relationship is much older: already in the Bronze Age, in Sumerian Mesopotamia, consists the association between doves and the mother goddess. Storing perfume in a container in the shape of your sacred animal is a fully conscious and coherent act. Yes, but. Many of these readings of the dove-shaped glass jars are hypotheses based on what we know about the Romans, but we don’t know for sure: these perfumes could well be for everyday use or for funeral rituals. Likewise, they were not exclusive objects of the wealthiest classes: the simplest ointments were within the reach of the popular classes and their shapes were refined over time. In short, the dove could have different meanings depending on who had it and what for. In Xataka | The fall of the Roman Empire has obsessed us for centuries: some economists believe they have the answer in 400,000 coins In Xataka | Almost 2,000 years ago a Celtiberian soldier visited the most remote frontier of the Roman Empire. Then he returned to Soria with a souvenir Cover | MET

60 years ago they sank a thousand-year-old church in a reservoir in Barcelona. Only the drought has brought it back to the surface

by

He Sau swampin the Osona region (Barcelona), has a surprise: when the drought hits, lowering the level of the reservoir enough, it reveals a superb stone bell tower that has been submerged since 1962. The tower belongs to Sant Romà de Sau, a Romanesque church from the 11th century that the Franco regime sank (normally up to 23 meters deep) to supply water to Barcelona In fact, during the pressing crisis of 2023, the drought left it completely grounded, as NASA photographed from spaceThe fact that it is more than a thousand years old and still standing even though it lives submerged is commendable, but it is also the oldest church in the world that is still standing in water. according to the Official World Record. Once upon a church (and a town) submerged in a swamp. More specifically, the church of Sant Romà de Sau is in the Lombard Romanesque style and was consecrated in the year 1061. It was originally built with a single nave oriented from east to west and with a square bell tower three-story semi-detachedprecisely the one that can be seen when there is drought. The church that It is normally submerged at a depth of 23 meters It is not exactly the original: it has been accumulating interventions, such as a reform and expansion after the damage of an earthquake or a remodeling in the 19th century, when the apse was demolished and the orientation of the temple was changed. The bell tower is the vestige of what was once there: the church of a town that was also submerged. The settlement of Sant Romà data 917. Before the water level rose and flooded everything, there they lived 300 inhabitants in the middle of the 20th century who were dedicated to agriculture, livestock and forestry. That of Sant Romà is another story of towns submerged after the execution of the hydraulic project, which led to the expropriation of homes and agricultural farms, its inhabitants had to leave their home without taking part in the matter or receiving compensation. Context. The water that reaches the Catalan capital comes mainly from the Ter and Llobregat rivers through a network of reservoirs. In the case of the Ter, specifically the reservoirs of Sau and those of Susqueda and Pastry. The metropolitan area of ​​Barcelona suffered significant demographic growth during Franco’s development, so the infrastructure was no longer adequate. The construction of the reservoir falls precisely within those years, although the original project goes back to 1931 and the works did not begin until 1942. As the professor and director of the Department of History at the University of Santiago de Compostela Daniel Lanero explains to Newtral.es, what the Franco regime did was “give continuity to the hydraulic policy that had been put into practice since the end of the 19th century.” Beatriz García, professor of contemporary history at the University of León, explains the two bases of this water resources management policy: general plan of irrigation canals and swamps of 1902 and the national hydraulic works plan approved in the Second Republic. Why is it important. That this church breaks conservation records in such complicated conditions does not mean that it is eternal: in 1999 it was already had to be restored after decades under water due to the weakness of its structure. In any case, the church of Sant Romà de Sau is a clear example of the “submerged heritage“, a category in which archeology and cultural law have been trying to regulate for decades. without much success. The sinking of Sant Romà and its church is not an isolated case but a common practice of the Franco regime: the construction of reservoirs during the dictatorship led to the displacement of tens of thousands of people from their towns in a traumatic process of forced displacement of rooted places for its population. In the Spanish state alone there are about 500 towns that were swallowed up by the water due to the construction of dams and reservoirs. In Xataka | In World War II, a town in Lithuania buried its bell to protect it from the Nazis. They did not find it until 2024 In Xataka | For 60 years, a farmer with no idea about architecture built a cathedral from scratch in Madrid. The bureaucracy has closed it Cover | joan ggk and Quico Llach

Russia shielded its logistics routes against drones. Ukraine has responded by attacking something much more vulnerable: asphalt

by

In the spring of 1945, the United States launched a campaign called Operation Starvation. Instead of concentrating on destroying Japanese ships one by one, he began laying mines in the straits and sea routes through which they had to pass. The result It was so effective that dozens of convoy routes had to be abandoned and Japanese maritime traffic plummeted, making logistics as valuable a target as the vehicles themselves. From trucks to roads. The logistics war between Russia and Ukraine is entering in a new phase. For months, Ukraine concentrated its efforts in destroying trucksconvoys, fuel depots and other targets that kept the Russian army supplied. Moscow responded by strengthening the protection of its supply routes, deploying anti-aircraft defenses, adapting its movements and building corridors that were increasingly protected against drones. Now kyiv appears to have identified a vulnerability that is more difficult to fix: the infrastructure itself on which those supplies circulate. Instead of only pursuing specific vehicles, Ukrainian drones are beginning to lay mines on the roads that connect Crimea with the occupied territories, transforming essential routes for Russian logistics into spaces where any movement can become a risk. The strategy of the logistical blockade. Ukrainian authorities describe this campaign as an attempt to impose a “logistical blockade” on the Russian military. The goal is not necessarily to completely cut off communications or destroy every vehicle that passes through them. The key is slow down movement of supplies, increase uncertainty and force the enemy to dedicate increasing resources to protection and cleanup tasks. If a convoy must constantly stop to inspect the road, if each journey requires additional escorts, or if a route remains closed for hours after the appearance of a mine, the cumulative effect can be as damaging as the direct destruction of vehicles. Modern warfare depends on both the speed and the volume of supplies, and any reduction in the pace of movement has a direct impact on units deployed on the front. Roads to Crimea under pressure. Information from Russian sources they point because the campaign is focusing especially on the land corridor that connects Russia with Crimea through the occupied territories of southern Ukraine. Roads such as the M-14 between Mariupol, Melitopol and Chongar or the R-280 Novorossiya have suffered partial closures, traffic restrictions and damage caused by mines dropped from drones. In one of the most notable incidentsa Kamaz truck was reportedly destroyed and several vehicles damaged after mines fell on a road near the border between the occupied regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. These episodes also occur after a series of attacks against tankers and convoys that had already forced Russian authorities to modify routes and temporarily limit heavy traffic. Drones that turn asphalt into a trap. The novelty does not lie in the use of mines, a practice that has been present for decades in any conflict, but in the way they are deployed. According to various analystsUkraine is using drones to distribute 3D printed light mines equipped with motion sensors or magnetic systems. These charges do not need to completely destroy a vehicle to be effective. Enough with immobilizing a truck in the middle of a road to create traffic jams, disrupt traffic and create a concentration of targets vulnerable to subsequent air attacks. A single mine can stop a whole column. Several mines spread periodically along a route can paralyze traffic for hours while inspections and clearance operations are carried out. The creation of interdiction zones. The tactic is part of a broader concept that seeks to turn Russian logistics routes into true layered interdiction zones. Drivers traveling these roads must already face ambush FPV dronesautonomous drones assisted by artificial intelligence and attacks directed against the anti-aircraft defenses that protect the logistics corridors. The incorporation of air-dropped mines adds a permanent threat under the wheels of every vehicle. The result is a combination of risks that multiplies the psychological and operational pressure on any movement of supplies, forcing Russia to simultaneously monitor the sky, the roadsides and the asphalt surface itself. The Russian adaptation. The Russian response is already beginning to be seen in some sectors of the front. Ukrainian sources claim to have destroyed Tor-M2 anti-aircraft systems that were being moved to reinforce the protection of these vulnerable routes. At the same time, some analysts believe that Moscow could try extend to roads further from the front the anti-drone network and tunnel structures that it already uses in closer combat zones. However, they remembered in Forbes that protecting hundreds of kilometers of open roads represents a logistical and economic challenge much greater than that of shielding some sections close to the battle lines. Precisely therein lies the logic of the Ukrainian strategy: the more extensive the infrastructure that must be protected, the more difficult it will be to guarantee its security. Crimea as an indirect objective. The pressure on the roads also has a strategic dimension related to Crimea. Ukraine has been attacking anti-aircraft systems, radars, missile launchers and other assets that protect the peninsula for months. If land routes supplying the region become slower and more dangerous, Russia could be forced to rely even more from the Kerch bridgeone of the few high-capacity logistics arteries that continue to directly connect Crimea with Russian territory. This would increase the importance of an infrastructure that has already been a priority objective of kyiv on repeated occasions. Keep a road open to make it useless. In short, the great innovation of this campaign is that it does not necessarily seek to permanently cut a route. Ukraine seems to be pursuing something more subtle: keeping the roads technically open while progressively reducing its usefulness. If each convoy requires more time, if each inspection causes delays and if each stop increases exposure to new attacks, the logistics flow is degraded without the need to destroy the infrastructure. Russia has dedicated enormous efforts to protecting its convoys and supply corridors from drones. The Ukrainian response now consists of moving the … Read more

“I think it’s the most valid criticism of AI right now, there is a lot of expense”

by

The artificial intelligence race is causing large technology companies to squander enormous sums of money to have the best AI, the one that the most people use and, above all, the one that generates the most money (three concepts that are far from the same thing and, rather, let them tell Google). According to Goldman Sachs databig tech and their infrastructure providers have on their roadmap to spend more than a trillion dollars on chips, data centers and software. The million dollar question is: is there a return after that investment? The CEO of OpenAI, one of the companies in the fight and certainly one of the most interested (it does not have the muscle of veterans like Google, Meta or Microsoft), has already recognized it in an interview for CNBC: It is absolutely normal to worry about that spending on AI due to the waste and the uncertainty of when they will get their reward (if it ever arrives). Sam Altman’s statements. Asked about the doubts generated by AI, he responded bluntly that it is “the fairest criticism that can be made of AI at this moment.” And he added: “I know big things are happening, but I know there is a lot of waste.” He also put on the table the two questions that companies that adopt AI in their processes ask: how long do they have to wait for this change to be noticed in their income and how long for costs to be under control. Spoiler: taking into account the latest movements from Uber and Microsofttwo completely successful companies, things are looking bad. The most interesting thing about this display of honesty is where they come from. Altman is the person who has raised the most money for fund OpenAIone of the leading companies in the AI ​​sector but also one of the newcomers, a baby compared to mythical companies that have been dominating the technology for decades. That Altman talks about waste is a before and after in the industry’s discourse. Why is it important. Until now, the ROI of AI has been a concept on the lips of skeptical analysts, economists and people who disbelieve this boom who point directly to a bubble about to burst. But Altman has integrated it into his corporate discourse and that represents a paradigm shift: it is no longer a critical position from outside the sector, it is that the most influential company verbalizes it to users and investors. As we mentioned in the intro, Goldman Sachs already considered this same question back in 2024 with its “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”. Economist and 2024 Nobel Prize winner Daron Acemoglu of MIT published a study called “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI” where he estimated that the real impact of AI on economic productivity in the next decade would be a paltry (especially if we take into account the speeches and investments) of just 0.5%. Context. That in this phase of expansion and training of AI It is not profitable it is no secretbut this is both an economic and a technical problem. With data in hand, there are reasons to worry. This recent Cast AI report It includes the analysis of 23,000 computing clusters, revealing that the average utilization of GPUs is only 5%. That is, 95% of the most expensive and advanced hardware on the market (those highly sought-after NVIDIA graphics cards) is operating well below its capacity. Part of the explanation lies in FOMO: explains Venture Beat that there are many companies acquiring AI chips not because they need them right now, but out of fear of running out of them in the future. The phenomenon is not new, we already saw it during the pandemic with semiconductors (and on a domestic scale, with toilet paper). There is someone who wins. In this story of companies investing to win the AI ​​race and other companies adopting it to modernize, there is someone who is winning from the first minute: NVIDIA bills the same whether its chips work at 5% or 100%. And he is breaking all his records. In 2024 record revenues of $60.9 billion (126% more than the previous year) thanks to this excessive demand for data centers. The large cloud providers, the holy trinity composed of Amazon, Microsoft and Google (the three occupy 70% of the market, according to Synergy data) bill the same regardless of whether the client is achieving results. According to Synergy Research Groupthe global cloud infrastructure market will exceed $330 billion in 2024. The underlying problem is incentives: those who have the most weight in the pace of investment in AI are precisely those who lose the least, hence no one is taking measures against waste. Yes, but. Making a catastrophic reading of Altman’s statements would be a mistake and in fact, the CEO of OpenAI himself expressed his confidence “the industry will solve it quickly.” After all, in that initial phase it is normal to incur losses and if not, tell Netflix with streaming. Current waste may simply be the cost of setting up infrastructure whose value will be realized later. Even the Goldman Sachs report acknowledges that bubbles take time to burst, meaning there is room for AI to deliver on its promises. Of course, a good part of the current artificial intelligence expenditure is linked to GPUs with specific architectures that could become obsolete in the face of more efficient models or specific architectures. In Xataka | The problem is not spending a lot of tokens, it’s that most of them are being wasted In Xataka | Anthropic has moved ahead of OpenAI in its race to go public. This is very bad news for Sam Altman Cover | TechCrunch (CC BY 2.0) and Giorgio Trovato

the battle to explain gravity that Einstein won thanks to an eclipse in 1919

by

This summer, many people have organized their holidays around the eclipse that will be seen in Spain on August 12. Without a doubt, many see it as a spectacle that perhaps they can only see once. or very few times in life. However, we must not forget that it is still a phenomenon with very interesting scientific implications. For example, something very curious is that in 1919 It was used to prove Einstein right. Einstein vs Newton. In 1915, Einstein enunciated his Theory of General Relativity. In it, broadly speaking, he pointed out that the attraction of gravity is due to a space-time curvature caused by the effect of objects with mass and energy. Before him, the most accepted theory about gravity was the one launched by Newton. In it, it was pointed out that the gravitational attraction was due only to the mass of the objects. Energy had nothing to do with it, and of course I had no idea that time and space could be intertwined. Einstein’s hypothesis was received as interesting, but many physicists of the time were not willing to abandon Newton’s theory. If Einstein wanted to be believed, he would have to prove that he was right. An eclipse ultimately turned out to be the ideal experiment for his demonstration, although it was carried out not by him, but by a British astronomer named Arthur Eddington. Light issue. Newton considered that light was composed of corpuscles with mass. Therefore, these could also be attracted to massive objects. If the Sun drew light from the stars around it, for example, it would do so with an arc of 0.84 seconds. Einstein, on the other hand, made different calculations. For him, light is not attracted like a magnet attracts metal or anything like that. What happens, according to his theory, is that massive objects curve space-time, like a ball falling on top of an elastic fabric. The light, to pass through there, must take the easiest path, which is passing through the edges of that groove that the massive object has generated in space-time. In short, it also deviates, but much more so. According to Einstein’s calculations, we would be looking at an arc of 1.74 seconds. Massive objects warp spacetime The trick. To know who was right, it would be enough to observe the effects of the Sun on a nearby star cluster. But of course, during the day those stars are not seen. Therefore, the ideal would be to take advantage of an eclipse that blocks the light of the Sun and allows you to see the stars when they are very close to it. A very useful excursion. To try to prove Einstein right, Arthur Eddington traveled to Africa in May 1919. On the 29th of that month a very interesting eclipse would occur, since at that time the Sun would be very close to the Hyades, a large star cluster. He went to Príncipe Island and made the calculations of the position in which the stars should be when they appeared when the Sun set. I only had 7 minutes to try to take photographs and the weather did not make it easy for him, but he managed to take advantage of a cloudless moment and take the snapshots that would prove the German physicist right. As he already sensed, the stars in the cluster were deviated from where they should be if the Sun did not exert any gravity on them. Specifically, with an arc of 1.7 seconds. Nowadays. Eclipses have not been used for a long time to confirm theories that the scientific scene takes with suspicion, but they are still very useful for science. They expose the solar corona, that superficial layer of the sun in which solar storms brew that can affect terrestrial communications so much. Nowadays there are coronagraphs that create a kind of false eclipse so that the corona can be studied. However, eclipses offer a very interesting natural opportunity to see it in all its splendor. That’s also very exciting. Image | Wikimedia Commons/Luc Viatour |ESA In Xataka | A third of Spain will be completely dark for a minute or two. The astronomical event of the century is approaching

Aragon has the cure for the abandoned lands of the Pyrenees: cultivate medicinal herbs

by

If he rural abandonment In Spain it is a reality that has existed for decades, in high mountain areas even more so: if it is already difficult to live in a small town, when it is in the middle of nowhere and to get there there is only one road full of curves, staying there means spending your life in difficult mode. Leaving means abandoning everything, including those lands that were once more or less productive and that now become pasture for bushes, soil degradation and fires. The Aragonese Pyrenees has extensions of abandoned cultivated land and a solution to give way to that wasted land: cultivate aromatic and medicinal plants. Goodbye to the wastelands. This initiative of the Aragon Agri-Food Research and Technology Center is part of the project Pyrenees4Climate. The pilot plot is in Espierre (Biescas, Huesca), it has been abandoned for 60 years and is located between 1,250 and 1,600 meters of altitude. The crop for these first tests is fine lavender, which is used to obtain essential oils for the pharmaceutical and perfumery industries. Why choose such inhospitable terrain to plant lavender? Precisely because the altitude and type of soil, unfavorable for other plants, are ideal for lavender, according to two decades of CITA research. But growing crops in high mountain terrain is not an easy task: as explains researcher Juliana Navarrothe conditioning of these farms has posed a technical and logistical challenge: steep slope, deep-rooted weeds, intensive stone clearing and even old stone walls for retaining land on plots that had never been mechanized. Why is it important. Because rural areas have been losing population and agricultural activity for decades and this project wants to recover vacant lands with crops that have a real market. This project seeks to regenerate high-value products, establish a young population in rural areas, preserve traditional knowledge about local plants and improve biodiversity, since aromatic plants attract bees and other pollinators. On the other hand, and as we mentioned previously, lavender and lavender are plants that are especially resistant to cold and drought, which makes them ideal for a Pyrenees that increasingly has drier summers and more irregular winters. Context. If the rural exodus in Spain has been a reality since the mid-20th century, in the case of high mountain areas the phenomenon is even more intense and documented: The abandonment of farmland in the Central Pyrenees has accelerated especially since the 1960s. The forest area has gained ground at the expense of traditional agricultural and livestock uses, which offers ambivalent results: there is more vegetation coverbut also increased risk of fire and loss of biodiversity associated with grasslands and open habitats. The LIFE program is the main financial instrument of the European Union for the environment and climate action since its inception in 1992. European funds provide 60% of the financing of the total budget, which guarantees its materialization and monitoring. Aragon is the territory where they will run more pilot tests: 14 of the 33 designed for the next seven years. How are they going to do it?. The operation model combines CITA’s institutional research with local entrepreneurs such as Ignacio Guallart Balet, promoter of the project and businessman from Zaragoza, originally from the Tena Valley and with experience in ecological mobility and circular economy. This point is important because it solves one of the great problems of agricultural research: the application of its research. The project also includes the development of a manual of good practices for mountain crops adapted to climate change and has a European scope: the Alps or the Carpathians are potential candidates for its application. Yes, but. While it is true that these medicinal plants can be sold dry, for the distillation of essential oils or for cosmetics, the reality is that the European market already has consolidated producers. in the south of France and the center of europe. Without a seal indicating protected origin or organic certification, competing in the market will be an arduous task. Bottom line: the profitability of the project is unclear. On the other hand, growing lavender also has its difficulties: it is true that it tolerates drought well, but in its first years it needs irrigation and the Pyrenees are already experiencing worrying changes in their rainfall regime. And there is another actor to take into account: wildlife, whose pressure on crops in high mountains can be significant. In Xataka | There is a corner of Spain where global warming is wreaking havoc: the Pyrenees are becoming “Mediterraneanized” In Xataka | If we want to know how climate change will affect the Pyrenees, we do not have to look at the heat or the snow. You have to study the caves Cover | Dina Spencer and Luise and Nic

It’s a very bad idea

by

It’s sad, but we have normalized receiving scam attempts everywhere. An SMS from the Post Office tells you that it has not been able to deliver a package to you, on Instagram they tell you that you have won an iPhoneyour email spam box is saturated and now scams even arrive in the home mailbox. You may have been tempted to respond and troll the scammer a little, but it’s best not to. Why it is not a good idea to respond. It doesn’t matter if it’s just to make fun of you, answering sends a very clear message to whoever is on the other end: this phone number is active and its owner wants to talk. This means that more similar messages continue to reach you and also that your data continues to circulate on the dark web. Furthermore, security experts cited by the Wall Street Journal They warn that, if you have a very long conversation, you may end up giving out some details without realizing it, such as the country and city where you live, your age or details about your family. Scambaiting. It is what is known as the practice of intentionally interacting with scammers, generally pretending to be a naive victim to waste their time and give you a laugh. There are entire subreddits dedicated to this type of anecdotes, with users who maintain conversations for several weeks and share them with the community. There are even creators whose content focuses exclusively on the scambaitinglike the Scammer Payback YouTube channelin which the protagonist invents elaborate characters and the craziest situations. He has even collaborated with the authorities to dismantle scam networks. What should be done. The best is not participate in any way With these types of messages, do not even respond to ask them to stop contacting you. Rosario Fuentes, cybersecurity expert at TrendLife, says in WSJ that her golden rule is “ignore, block and report.” Of course, it goes without saying that you should never click on any link, even if it appears to be from your bank or a courier service. We have already seen too many times how the sender can be falsified, it is what is known as SMS spoofing and it also happens on phone calls. Tempting, but risky. It can be very tempting to make fun of someone who is trying to steal from you, but it is no joke. Whoever is on the other end has your contact information and can use it against you. have been given telephone harassment cases intense and even death threats. The scambaiters professionals warn It is not a good idea to do it if you do not have experience, and if you do it you have to take many precautions. The first thing is to create a false identity and, if you are going to make calls, use an alternative phone number or ideally VoIP services. If you are speaking from a computer, they recommend using a virtual machine to prevent them from accessing your system and of course a VPN. Don’t do it on social networks either. Finally, a personal anecdote. One day I received a message on Instagram from a man who claimed to be interested in being my sugar daddy All he asked me was to send him photos of my feet and he would pay me a fortune (I don’t remember how much, but it was a lot). It occurred to me to humor him, not for long, but just enough to laugh a little and share a couple of screenshots in my stories. Well, the scammer reported me to Instagram and they ended up penalizing me for “offering sexual services.” I tried to appeal to Meta, but it was of no use. Image | Xataka with Gemini In Xataka | Spain is still not able to eliminate spam calls. So the Government has a new plan: flog them

You also get the VAT on a coupon

by

Making the leap to large diagonal screens is no longer an exclusive luxury of projectors. If you have plenty of space in the living room and are looking for a truly immersive experience, Carrefour now has this “Save the VAT” campaign available. TCL 85P8La giant television that you can take with you 1,355 euros and a coupon of almost 285 euros for future purchases. In addition, shipping is free and you can finance it in 10 installments if you have the Carrefour Pass card. Tv Qd-mini Led 85” Tcl 85p8l 4k Uhd Smart Tv The price could vary. We earn commission from these links A TV with cinema contrast thanks to MiniLED and Artificial Intelligence The great attraction of this model, beyond its impressive 215 centimeters of diagonal, is the use of a panel MiniLED. By using light diodes much smaller than those of a conventional LED television, it offers a zone lighting control extremely precise. This results in very deep blacks, good contrast and almost complete elimination of the halo effect around bright objects in dark scenes. To manage such a panel, TCL integrates a processor with Artificial Intelligence that analyzes content in real time. This engine is responsible for improving sharpness, optimizing color and efficiently rescaling content that is not in native 4K (such as DTT or old streaming platforms), making everything look sharp despite the enormous size of the screen. Additionally, it supports all major dynamic range standards, including Dolby Vision and HDR10+. This TV is not designed only for watching movies. If you are a player PS5, Xbox Series X or PC you will find, in this model, a giant high-performance monitor thanks to its 144 Hz refresh rate. This figure guarantees absolute fluidity in fast-action games, reducing latency to a minimum. The sound section is signed by Onkyo and its speakers come standard with compatibility with Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, to create a surround sound atmosphere in the living room. Finally, it can be noted that it comes with Google TV as an operating system, one of the most fluid on the market. ⚡ IN SUMMARY: TCL 85P8L smart tv ✅ THE BEST Absolute cinematic immersion: There is nothing that compares to watching 85-inch cinema with MiniLED technology. By having thousands of light control zones, you get a depth of blacks that is very close to OLED, but with a much more powerful brightness. A beast for gaming: having native 144hz in this size is crazy. If you connect a powerful PC or a latest generation console, the fluidity is total. Plus, it includes full HDMI 2.1 ports to take advantage of all the modern features. ❌ THE WORST Size is a double-edged sword… You need a huge piece of furniture or an ultra-strong wall mount (and a brick wall, no thin plasterboard). Additionally, if you sit less than three meters away, you may begin to notice eye strain if you are not used to it. Image processing… Although TCL’s AI is good, the rescaling of low-quality content (such as old DTT channels) is not as fine as that of Sony or LG processors. At 85 inches, any image imperfections are much more noticeable. 💡 BUY IT IF… You are one of those who turns off the lights and wants to feel like you are at the cinema every night. With Dolby Vision and this size, the cinema experience is guaranteed. ⛔ DON’T BUY IT IF… 80% of the time on TV is to watch the news or old channels, you are going to see a lot of pixels and artifacts. Such a large screen demands high-quality content. Some sound bars that may interest you for this TV TCL Q65H Sound Bar 3.1.2, 340W The price could vary. We earn commission from these links TCL Q85H Sound Bar 7.1.4, 860W The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Webedia and TCL In Xataka | Best televisions in quality price. Which one to buy and seven recommended 4K smart TVs In Xataka | Best sound bars in quality price. Which one to buy and seven recommended models from 140 euros

We fill the field with solar panels to stop climate change. We have unintentionally saved 122 species of bees

by

There’s a hum under Minnesota solar panels that engineers didn’t put in the plans. It is a biological, dense, ancient hum. Beneath the photovoltaic panels that convert sunlight into electricity, 122 species of native bees have found something that has been disappearing from the fields of half the world for decades: flowers. It’s not a coincidence. It is the result of a management decision that costs money, requires planning and that, according to the latest science, is producing results that no one expected when the first solar panel was installed in a meadow. The bees are disappearing. A study published in Nature Ecology & Evolutionwith data from 681 agricultural fields on three continents and more than 19,500 specimens of 910 species of wild bees, reached an uncomfortable conclusion: pesticides and habitat loss are reducing bee populations in an additive, independent way, without one factor compensating for the other. That is, having more natural habitat around a field does not neutralize the damage from pesticides. And reducing pesticides is not enough if the habitat has disappeared. They are two different problems that require two different solutions. The work, led by Anina Knauer and researchers from Agroscope among other institutions, found that pesticides not only reduce the number of bees: they also reduce their functional and phylogenetic diversity. Communities not only become smaller, they become simpler, less resilient, less able to cope with future shocks. A desert with seasonal flowers. In Iowa, in the heart of the American Corn Belt, 72% of the territory is covered in corn and soybean monocultures. Less than 0.01% of the original prairie remains standing. This is what researchers at Iowa State University publish in BioScience described as “an extreme example of landscape simplification”. Bees literally have very little to go to. And when the soybeans stop flowering at the end of summer, there is nothing. The colonies enter what science calls the feast-famine dynamic: the festival of flowering followed by famine that kills hives before winter. This is the background scenario. An agricultural world that urgently needs more pollinator habitat, free of pesticides or with minimal exposure. And in that desert, solar panels are doing something no one expected. 14 floors. 122 species. And an unexpected star. A team of researchers led by Bethanne Bruninga-Socolar of Western EcoSystems Technology and James McCall of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory asked a very specific question: Of all the plants that can be grown under and around solar panels, which ones actually establish? And how many bees can they hold? The work, published in Environmental Research Communicationstested 101 plant species in eight different seed mixtures at three solar farms in the tallgrass prairie region of Minnesota. After three years of monitoring, 14 species of flowering herbaceous plants had successfully established themselves. With those 14 species as a starting point, the researchers cross-referenced the data with an exhaustive catalog of plant-bee interactions from the same region. The result is that those 14 plants can support 122 unique species of native bees, 24% of all bee diversity in the state of Minnesota, which has 508 documented species. The star of the system is Zizia aureathe golden Alexander, a yellow flowering plant that blooms early in the season. Alone, it supports 67 species of bees. And 36 of those species—30% of the total study—only visited Zizia aurea among all the plants studied. If it is not in the seed mix of the solar park, those 36 species have nothing. Not all flowers are worth the same. The study also documents an important nuance: bumblebees, the group of pollinators with the most species in decline—three of the eleven species of Bombus of the study are classified as vulnerable by the IUCN: B. pensylvanicus, B. terrestrial and B. fervidus—they don’t get along with Zizia aurea. Only one species of bumblebee visited that plant. Bumblebees prefer Monarda fistulosathe wild bergamot, visited by nine of the eleven species of Bombus of the study. The practical lesson: there is no universal mix. The design of what is planted must respond to what is to be conserved. And what if there are pesticides in the surrounding fields? He study by Toth and colleagues in BioSciencewith more than a decade of data on strips of native prairie embedded in corn and soybean fields in Iowa, systematically reviewed chemical contamination in that type of habitat. Pesticides arrive—neonicotinoids, pyrethroids, fungicides—but in concentrations that, for the best studied species, are below the damage thresholds. And most importantly: the concentrations are no higher than in the rest of the surrounding agricultural landscape. They are not an ecological trap; They are an island of resources in a sea of ​​fields that already have pesticides on them anyway. In addition, a diet rich in quality pollen—exactly what these plants provide—makes bees better tolerate chemical exposure. Nutrition acts as a shield. The authors of that work themselves explicitly point out that their conclusions are applicable to “other types of landscape improvements for pollinators such as hedgerows, pollinator gardens, solar installations with pollinator habitat.” It is not a journalistic extrapolation. It’s in the text of the paper. If there are flowers inside there are bumblebees. If field studies answer the “does it work now?” published in Global Change Biology by Hollie Blaydes and colleagues at Lancaster University answers “will it still work in 2050?” The team modeled the 1,042 operational solar farms in Britain under three socio-economic scenarios for mid-century: a sustainability scenario, an intermediate scenario and a fossil development scenario with maximum agricultural intensification. The main finding is compelling: the management of the solar park is the main determining factor of bumblebee density within the park, above land use changes in the surrounding landscape. Solar parks last between 25 and 40 years. That means decades of stable habitat in landscapes that are going to change and possibly get worse for pollinators. And there is an economic angle that is not minor either. Colonies located near diverse native vegetation avoid feast-famine dynamic which in monocultures weakens … Read more

Millions of teenagers have turned AI into their go-to psychologist. It is an unprecedented challenge for medicine

by

In society there is a fairly well-established debate about how affect social networks to the mental health of the youngest and there is even debate about the possible consequences they have, going so far as to propose very clear limits to access them. However, while the focus was on the recommendation algorithms of TikTok or Instagram, a new trend has been quietly growing on the screens of millions of teenagers: the use of generative AI as a therapist. New therapies. Here, research led by the RAND Corporation has put on the table the magnitude of this phenomenon when analyzing a sample of 1,058 young people between 12 and 21 years old. And the figures paint a quite revealing picture by pointing out that 13.1% of adolescents and young adults use generative artificial intelligence to obtain advice about their mental health. But the most worrying thing is that this percentage shoots up to 22.2% if we look exclusively at the oldest age group, that is, those between 18 and 21 years old. And although it can be defended as something specific, the reality is that 65.5 of these users turn to AI on a monthly or even greater frequency. Works? The most striking thing we have learned from this study is not only that young people consider AI as a psychologist, but that those who attend leave quite happy, since 92.7% of users stated that they found the advice provided by the AI ​​useful. And among the reasons they give for their satisfaction, what stands out above all is the possibility of resorting to their ‘services’ at any time, the absence of economic barriers and, above all, the feeling of privacy and lack of human judgment. All of this together is turning large AI models into the first line of emotional support for Generation Z. The other side of the coin. Just because a tool is perceived as useful by the user does not mean that it is clinically safe, because the intersection between generative technology and psychiatry is a minefield, and major medical institutions are already raising their hands. In summer 2025, the American Psychological Association issued an official warning about the risks of relying on AI for the diagnosis or treatment of mental disorders. Among the reasons they give, it stands out that language models are designed to predict the most likely next word and sound empathetic and convincing, but they lack real understanding, clinical context and the ability to manage severe crises. The security. Added to this warning is the devastating context contributed by researchers from Stanford University, who also in 2025 evaluated the responses of several chatbots to mental health queries. Their conclusion was worrying as they saw that in 1 in 5 cases, the artificial intelligence provided advice that was unsafe or inappropriate for the user’s situation. A real challenge. Right now we are at an inflection point where AI is filling a huge gap in a mental health system that, globally, is collapsed and inaccessible for a large part of the young population. And furthermore, prohibiting or blocking access to these tools does not seem like a realistic solution in the face of millions of users who have already integrated them into their emotional well-being routine. That is why the real challenge for technology companies and health agencies is twofold: on the one hand, improving the security barriers of the models so that they refer users to human emergency services when necessary. Images | Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 In Xataka | There is a weapon of mass destruction against our ability to remember things: stress

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.