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The Don Quixote that Orson Welles never finished will finally take shape. Four film libraries have had to agree to achieve this

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It took Welles almost thirty years to finish Don Quixote. It took Terry Gilliam another thirty and he got it, but the process was a nightmare that deserved its own documentary. Adapting Don Quixote has given us several minor classics and some other milestones (the historic Spanish animated series, without going any further) and now, four European film libraries are about to demonstrate that there is a third way, through the recovery and restoration of one of the most famous non-films in history. International collaboration. Four film institutions have decided to finish, to the extent that something like that can be finished, the work that Orson Welles left unfinished after his death. During the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, the Spanish Film Archive, the Cinémathèque Française, the Italian Cineteca Nazionale and the Filmmuseum in Munich They confirmed the beginning of the reconstruction of their ‘Don Quixote’. The project is coordinated by Esteve Riambau, historian, filmmaker and former director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya. The objective, as explained by Riambau himselfis to have the reconstruction ready in 2028. An infinite shoot. In 1957, Welles’ friend Frank Sinatra invested $25,000 in the project. The original idea It was to function as a complement to the singer’s own television show, in the form of a short special for CBS. At that time it was scheduled to star Charlton Heston, but it couldn’t be due to scheduling issues. Filming took place in Mexico, Spain and Italy and lasted, with interruptions and returns, over almost three decades. The agreement with CBS ended up falling apart and Welles decided to turn the television special into the feature film that would never be finished and that would evolve bathed in pure chaos: in Mexico, for example, Welles worked without a finished script, filming improvised sequences in the street, and he himself was in charge of keeping track of the filming with obsessive detail. Neither the death in 1969 of the actor who played Don Quixote, Francisco Reiguera, nor that of the actor who played Sancho Panza, Akim Tamiroff, in 1972, stopped Welles, who also continued filming in color. In 1982, three years before he died, he was still making changes to a film he affectionately called My baby. A curse that spreads. Don Quixote has a reputation for devouring races. Terry Gilliam needed eight failed filming attempts and a lawsuit from his own producer to carry out ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’, a project that started in 1998 and finally premiered in 2018. The disaster of the first attempt, in 2000, with Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp, was portrayed in the documentary ‘Lost in La Mancha’. Before them, Peter O’Toole, John Lithgow and Rafael Rivelles had already given life to the gentleman in much more conventional versions. What material do we have? A huge and dispersed amount. The Cinémathèque Française preserves about 80 minutes in 35 mm positives that were exhibited at the 1986 Cannes Festival. The Spanish Film Archive bought 16 and 35 mm rolls in 1991, totaling 50,000 meters of film, in addition to the cultural exploitation rights, and is the researcher of the entire legacy. The partially unpublished block is in Rome: between 40,000 and 50,000 meters of negatives that the editor Mauro Bonanni kept in Cinecittà and that Oja Kodar, Welles’s last collaborator, recovered in 2017 after settling a dispute with the editor. What’s coming Riambau affirms that all these materials “no one has seen yet.” Added to that are more than 2,000 pages of script that Welles wrote over decades, although some of the material has been lost. Riambau will order a script that does not yet have a clear structure and in 2027 it will be compared with the images to census all the available material. There may be surprises on the thousands of meters coming from Cinecittà: this Quixote can still cause more headaches. In Xataka | 124 years later, the Lumière brothers’ 1896 classic is scaled to 4K 60fps using artificial intelligence

Experts agree that opening windows at night and closing them during the day is no longer the best strategy against heat.

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For decades, long before air conditioners and the fans will take Every corner of its geography, Spain knew how to handle the heat: during the day, everything was closed tight; at night, everything open and ventilate. It sounds rudimentary, but in 2026 that is still the strategy we recommends the Ministry of Health. And yet, there is a problem. The Spain of the blinds game did not sleep in cities at 26 degrees at four in the morning. Not 26, not 28, not more than 30, as has been happening these days in Almería. The arrival of the ‘hellish nights’ challenges everything we thought we knew about domestic heat management. Therefore, we have asked ourselves… and now what? What we were doing until now. That popular knowledge I was talking about goes viral every time the heat makes an appearance. And, like I say, it makes sense. In a world where it cools down at night, the winning strategy is night cooling and daytime insulation. What he says Health Plan against high temperatures. The central issue here is that that world has ceased to exist. Because the key is not the time, it is the thermometer. In reality, what we are looking for is to open when it is cool and close when it is hot. It’s usually cool at night, but… What if he stops doing it? Summer has stretched on for five weeks and Spain is about two degrees warmer than at the beginning of the eighties. The torrid nights (with minimums of 25 degrees or more) have multiplied by ten since 1984 in the ten most populated capitals and, according to AEMET data, this affects about nine million people. Even the tropical ones (minimums of 20 or more) today add a dozen more a year than decades ago. We can’t sleep… although researchers have not agreed on the ideal temperature for sleeping (some point which is about 18.3ºC, but there is no consensus), they have done so on a fundamental idea: sleeping in the heat is objectively a bad idea. For whatever reason, it is true that our temperature changes between wakefulness and sleep. In fact, “thermal regulation is a significant factor” in sleep control, explained the teacher Cameron Van Den Heuvelfrom the University of Adelaide. “About an hour to thirty minutes before sleep, the body begins to lose body heat. This increases feelings of tiredness in normal healthy adults.” People with insomnia, without going any further, “show that they have a higher basal temperature just before sleeping than people who do not have sleep problems.” Ambient heat does not help this thermal reduction and it seems to be proven that when the temperature is very high, it is more difficult to fall asleep and, when it is achieved, it is of very poor quality. And then what do we do? In the interior of the peninsula, as the thermal amplitude remains high, opening at dawn works. There is nothing to change. The problem is for those who live on the coast or in the big city. When the night exceeds 20 degrees, the strategy is reversed. Ventilating at night is no longer the main technique and the battle is won during the day: you have to seal the house as soon as the street heats up, squeeze out the thermal inertia and use the air conditioning wisely. However, as the nights get warmer the household tricks come to an end. If the trend is confirmed, we will have to assume that the housing stock must be transformed: sun protection, rehabilitation and climate shelters will be the buzzwords in a few years. Image | Fernando Rosado In Xataka | ENT doctors agree: “Sleeping with air conditioning forces the nose to work excessively”

Experts agree that “the quality of rest depends on whether you go to bed at the time when your body is ready to sleep”

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When you read the question “what time should you go to bed?” He usually waits for a number, a specific time, a recurring pattern to do as the day ends. Bad news. What research has discovered is that the ‘perfect time’ for going to bed is with parents. That is, genetics (chronotype) and a handful of other things. That’s why it’s time to see what the experts say. The time to go to sleep. These days, there are some statements from dr. Celia García Maloneurologist specializing in Sleep Medicine and co-director of the Madrid Clinic CISNe in which she explains that the quality of rest does not depend only on the number of hours. On the contrary, it often depends on sleeping at a time when the body is biologically ready for it. This is interesting because it shows a paradigm shift in global sleep science. That moment matters, yes (but not that much). In 2021, Nikbakhtian and his team reviewed sleep routines of more than 100,000 adults. The interesting thing about this study is that they did not use self-reported responses, but rather what a week of wrist accelerometer data said. Their conclusions were clear: going to bed between 10:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. was associated with a lower cardiovascular incidence. It was bad news for Spain, the European country that takes the longest to go to bed. However, the details are important: it was not a question of ‘the earlier you go to bed the better’ (because going to bed before 10pm was also a problem); It was about finding the appropriate moment for each society, country or culture. And that’s where the surprises begin. Because what we are discovering is that regularity is the key. In this case, the Windred team reviewed data from six years of life of about 60,000 people. Their conclusions were that the most regular quartiles showed between 20% and 48% less mortality from all causes compared to the most irregular ones. This is because, we now believe, genetic variants are associated more with schedule than with duration and quality of the dream. The researchers’ thesis is that when we find a stable time to go to bed, the rest of the pieces begin to organize themselves. What does all this mean? For us mortals who just want to sleep, there are a handful of consequences: There is no magic hour. What we have to do is look for a stable window: if we find a time to go to bed, the rest of the system tends to adapt. However, chronotypes exist. It’s a good idea to find out which one is ours and “negotiate with it.” Take care of your dream. Although we sometimes insist on sleeping at a certain time, we often forget that sleep hygiene (and, above all, light) is one of the most important things to sleep well. Image | Annie Spratt In Xataka | You take some melatonin and fall asleep. It seems like a harmless practice for your health but it is not so.

Pediatricians agree on new food fads for children: “It can cause nutritional deficiencies”

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There are many diets that we find on social networks in recent years that advocate be really restrictive with certain foods and nutrients that demonize. The problem is that these restrictive diets designed for adults with the aim of making them look healthier are causing nutritional deficiencies in children, as pediatricians themselves already point out. The alert. The Spanish Association of Primary Care Pediatrics (AEPap) has been clear in its latest report pointing out that ‘nutritional fads’ have made a strong impact on children’s nutrition and can cause “nutritional deficiencies.” And the culprit is the adoption of restrictive diets such as prolonged fasting or the exclusion of gluten without receiving advice from specialists. But these diets are not limited to adults who want to lose weight or improve their health, but are generally applied to all members of the household. And this is explained by Dr. Marta Castell, pediatrician at the Campanar Health Center in Valencia, who point to the following: More and more families come to consultation with a proactive interest in the healthiest eating pattern, but also with great confusion between scientific evidence and fads such as 2-exclusion diets or ‘superfoods’ without clinical evidence. The enormous amount of information they receive becomes massive and often contradictory. The problem of extrapolating it. Restricting food groups without clinical justification has a very high physiological cost during the growth stages that the little ones in the house are experiencing. This is why pediatricians warn that the withdrawal of essential nutrients without a prior diagnosis of intolerance such as lactose or celiac disease is dangerous. And this practice can interrupt the caloric intake and essential micronutrients for the child’s body and especially for correct physical and brain development. The recommendations. Here the medical institutions they point because one should avoid diagnosing alleged eating pathologies at home, and apply a restriction without the advice of a specialist doctor. But in addition, one should avoid applying nutritional advice aimed at adults to minors that is disseminated by content creators without scientific endorsement on social networks. One of the clearest pieces of advice that the Vithas Medimar Hospital points to in its web is that “the best prevention against obesity and malnutrition is to recover a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, legumes, fish, nuts and seeds, and free of ultra-processed foods.” Veganism. The scientific debate does not criminalize dietary choices such as veganism, but requires absolute rigor in its pediatric approach. Something important to highlight is that a child can be perfectly healthy following a diet without animal consumption, but this “does not consist only of raw fruits and vegetables,” explains pediatrician and neonatologist Miriam Martínez Biarge, who describes poorly planned diets as “reckless.” From the clinical point of view, the Spanish Society of Out-of-hospital Pediatrics and Primary Care warns that in the vegan population there is a high risk of vitamin B12 deficiency. This deficit can have “serious neurological consequences,” being a particularly critical risk in infants breastfed by mothers who do not take supplementation. For this reason, clinical guidelines recommend the possible supplementation of vitamin B12 in the event that foods fortified with it are not consumed. Images | Helena Lopes In Xataka | Being vegan makes you biologically younger, but not for the reason you think: the hidden key to calorie restriction

They have asked 1,600 experts how the Universe works. They don’t agree on almost anything

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We continually read news about new findings that they defy the known physics of the Universe. This may lead us to ask ourselves something: do we know so little about the Universe that absolutely everything challenges it? To answer this question it is important to give a little context. Yes, a lot is known about astrophysics, but when we talk about something as immense as the Universe, even that “a lot” can fall short. Furthermore, much of this information is based on hypotheses that have been accepted as consensus, but not on absolute truths. Therefore, it is not strange that in the largest survey ever conducted It has been proven to astrophysicists and astrophysics fans that there is a lot of disagreement on almost everything related to the cosmos. The largest survey. In 2024, during an astrophysics conference in Copenhagen, a survey was carried out in which 85 experts participated. All of them had to answer a series of questions about some of the best-known theories in astrophysics. With this survey it was seen that there is a lot of disagreement, even in those theories in which there is supposed to be a great consensus. In order to check whether these disagreements were a result of the sample size, a new survey was carried out in 2025, this time with 1,600 people who had to answer 11 questions. Some participants were experts from the American Astrophysical Society. Others were amateur readers of Physics Magazine. With a larger sample, the results were very similar. There is very little consensus. From hypotheses to certainties. Science in general, and astrophysics in particular, is built on hypotheses that evolve as scientific advances are made. For this reason, it is often more full of probabilities than certainties. It is important to differentiate different branches of science. In health sciences, there are certainties. For example, we know that antibiotics attack bacteria and are not useful against viruses, no matter how many people insist on taking them for the flu. We also know that their abuse can be very harmful, since it contributes to the development of resistance in bacteria. Those are certainties, although logically there is also information that evolves over time. In astrophysics, hypotheses accepted by consensus often outnumber certainties. There are very clear certainties, such as that the Earth is not flat or that it revolves around the Sun. But also some hypotheses with which not even experts agree. Cosmic inflation wins. The issue on which there was the greatest consensus in the 2025 survey, the results of which were recently published, was cosmic inflation. That is, the hypothesis that points to an exponential expansion of the Universe which began in its first moments, after the Big Bang. 51% of respondents agreed that this theory explains many problems in cosmology at once and therefore has a high probability of being true. Talking about the Big Bang. The existence of the Big Bang was another of the theories with the greatest consensus in the survey, although the truth is that the figure is nothing to write home about either. 25% of the participants agreed that this event gave rise to the Universe 13.8 billion years ago. On the other hand, there were 68% of people who indicated that the Universe was born at a time when there was a large increase in temperature and density, but they did not indicate when that occurred. Disagreements with dark matter. Gravitational behaviors that do not respond to the observed mass have been observed in the Universe. That is, it seems as if there are massive objects exerting a gravitational attraction on others, but these objects are not detected, not even large accumulations of atoms. There is nothing. 27% of those surveyed consider that this can be explained by the existence of dark matter. However, there are 12% who believe that all this may be due to changes in the behavior of gravity on cosmic scales. That is to say, when we talk about the immensity of the Universe, the gravity exerted by objects is not the same. On the other hand, there are 5% of people who consider that the key is in primordial black holes. Although here we must emphasize that one of the hypotheses about the origin of dark matter is that it is formed in part by primordial black holes, so they would not be denying its existence. String theory to solve incompatibilities. The theory of general relativity was proposed on large, cosmic scales. On the other hand, quantum mechanics talks about the behavior of matter on a subatomic scale. Both questions seem incompatible, but to understand the Universe we need to work at both scales. Therefore, for a long time there has been thought about a theory that helps unify both issues. This, for 19% of those surveyed, is string theory. In it, subatomic particles, instead of being treated as points, are considered vibrational states of a more basic extended object, called a string. Normally, when we try to calculate the energy of a particle by considering it a mathematical point, without extension, we get closer to it eternally. We can do a kind of infinite zoom. On the other hand, when the points are replaced by strings with a minimum length, a result must necessarily be obtained. It does not tend to infinity. On the other hand, in string theory gravity, which not normally considered on a quantum scalearises naturally. Another hypothesis. The point is that, in the survey we are talking about, there are 12% of people who consider that string theory does not solve the problem, but that another theory does: that of loop quantum gravity. This, basically, acts in a completely opposite way. String theory emerges with quantum mechanics as a starting point and tries to find ways to make gravity make sense. On the other hand, the theory of loop quantum gravity starts from the General Theory of Relativity and attempts to quantize it in a way that … Read more

All experts agree that introducing bison into Spain is a bad idea. And yet we’re doing it

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Nine European bison have been grazing for four months in the Guadalajara municipality of El Recuenco, in the heart of the Alto Tajo. And the only really relevant question is why. I mean, we know why. They are there because the Rewilding Spain foundation and the town council itself have placed them in what has become the first case of bison in public forests in Spain. In fact, as long as we pay attention to what its promoters say, it is not only a renaturalization initiative, it is “a tool against forest fires.” The thing is, none of that explains why anyone thinks any of this makes sense. There have never (as far as we know) been European bison in Spain. Yes, yes. I know that one of the most iconic Spanish images is that of the painted bison of Altamira, but that animal was not a Bison bonasuswas a Bison priscus. A species that became extinct 9,000 years ago just when the habitat (the mammoth steppe) that welcomed it did. There is no conclusive paleontological evidence to say that there was ever a European bison on the peninsula. In fact, in 2020, MITECO commissioned a report that unanimously denied that this animal could be defined as an “extinct species in Spain”. Does that mean that it is proven that there was not? No, one thing does not imply the other. At any time we can find remote proof that there were. In fact, in February 2026 was announced that a skeleton about 4,000 years old had been found in Navarra that could be from a Bison bonasus. It is a matter of time before a genetic test confirms it (or not). Be that as it may, no one seems to care: the nine bison are in Guadalajara. And there are up to two doctoral theses that will examine fecal samples, stress levels and diet to study the adaptability of these animals and their effect on vegetation. The latter is interesting because, as I said, the second objective of all this has to do with vegetation. With its control and management. There it is, despite the skepticism of many expertswhere there may be a future. But it is not a simple future. To begin with, because the species cannot be the subject of an official reintroduction program. The nine specimens from El Recuenco (and the other 160 in the country) are not protected wildlife, but are classified as livestock or zoological nucleus. This requires them to be controlled, geolocated and monitored. But, above all, that forces us to ask ourselves many things and “do we have any capacity to control our country?” It is perhaps the most important. For years, people have been releasing beavers into the main Spanish rivers without anything happening. What’s more, in Spain have been detected more than 200 invasive species. The debate is not ‘bison yes or bison no’. Above all, because it is not a strictly Spanish debate. The United Kingdom reintroduced bison to Kent, the Netherlands did it decades ago… European rewilding is being done, to a large extent, outside the usual channels of conservation. And El Recuenco is just the local version of a deeper debate: that of what nature we want to exist in the future. Image | Oskar Jablonski In Xataka | We are reforesting Europe with trees that will not survive by 2100. If pests don’t kill them, climate change will.

The problem is that no one can agree on what they are.

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He James Webb Space Telescope It has been targeting the most remote regions of the universe for years and, with each new observation, it has revealed something that doesn’t quite fit. In his images, small, tiny, bright red dots appear, which repeat with a frequency that is difficult to ignore. They are not a specific anomaly or an observation failure: they are objects that astronomers have been studying for some time without having yet achieved a convincing explanation of their nature. The novelty. A recently published study in The Astrophysical Journal, led by Devesh Nandal and Avi Loeb, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, opens an alternative to the most widespread interpretation. Specifically, it suggests that some of these red dots might not be systems dominated by active black holes, but rather supermassive stars formed in the early universe. Speaking to Live ScienceNandal argues that this type of star can explain key features of these objects without depending on the presence of growing black holes. Before this turn, the so-called “little red dots” had already been on astronomy’s radar for some time. The term began to be consolidated in studies published in 2024, when several teams began to analyze them systematically after the first Webb observations. We are not talking about a recent discovery, but rather an accumulated enigma: At Xataka we already address it as a phenomenon that is difficult to fit into current modelswith very compact, extremely luminous objects present in the early universe. The dominant hypothesis. During the first years of analysis, the explanation that gained the most traction was that these red dots were driven by growing black holes. In the first phase, some of the researchers attributed its red color to dust in the environment, although later work has shifted part of that focus to hydrogen gas. What is starting to not fit. With the passage of time, some observations have complicated this initial interpretation. Several of these objects do not show clear X-ray emissions, one of the most common signs of active black holes, and their spectra lack strong metallic lines beyond hydrogen and helium. Added to this is “The Cliff”, one of the objects analyzed by the RUBIES program, which does not fit either as a conventional galaxy or as a system dominated by dust. The proposal of the new study fits into this context, which proposes a different reading for at least part of these objects. Instead of active black holes, some small red dots could be supermassive stars formed from primordial gas, composed almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, and observed just before collapsing. According to the model developed by the team, this scenario reproduces both its extreme brightness and specific features of its spectra, without having to assume the presence of a growing black hole. The new study does not close the debate, rather it expands it. The researchers themselves acknowledge that directly demonstrating what lies behind these objects remains extremely difficult, and other voices in the scientific community insist that none of the hypotheses can yet be ruled out. The presence of black holes in these systems remains to be demonstrated directly and, for now, is inferred mainly from their brightness and how abundant they are. Images | NASA/ESA/CSA (1, 2) In Xataka | The Zoo Hypothesis: Why Aliens Likely Know About Us and Don’t Want to Contact Us

The “shitification” of the internet is everywhere and seems inexorable and inevitable. Norway does not agree

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When we say that any time in the past was better, perhaps we are erring on the side of idealizing the past, but when it comes to the Internet the phrase becomes more relevant. We have normalized online experiences to degrade with fewer features, more ads, new subscriptions… The only thing missing was the AI ​​garbage to finish finishing it off. It seems like nothing can stop the shittification of the internet. Nothing less Norway. A day in the life of a “shitter”. This is how it is titled the video that the Norwegian Consumer Council has published to report a situation. It shows a man who makes holes in his socks, saws the leg of the table so that it is limp, dries some markers with a hairdryer… He defines himself as a shitter: “What I do is take things that are perfectly fine and make them worse,” he says. The video is very funny and is part of a campaign against a not so funny problem: the degradation of digital services. The organization has developed a complete report in which they describe the problem and propose a plan to address it. Shitification. It is a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow and declared word of the year by Macquarie Dictionary in 2024. The definition is as follows: The progressive deterioration of a service or product caused by a decrease in the quality of the service provided, especially in the case of an online platform, and as a consequence of the search for profits We are not talking about natural degradation, but something deliberate that responds to an economic objective. A clear case has been that of Netflix, which not only chased shared accountsbut eliminated functions such as the possibility of casting from the mobile phone to the television. Not to mention the ads on payment planssomething that has spread to practically all streaming services. Theard everywhere at once. But this phenomenon reaches all types of services, not just streaming. We see it in the form of more ads on apps like Instagram (many of them of scamsby the way), It happened to me with the security camera app I had at home and there are even those who bought a connected refrigerator for thousands of euros so that they could start ads appear on the screen. Of course, companies offer you a solution to remove annoying ads: ✨pay a subscription✨. The phases of shitification. It is not something that happens overnight, but first they attract you with an attractive service, that works well and offers advantages. Once they have a solid user base – when they have caught us – the party begins. A good example was Uber, which in its beginnings offered very low prices to present itself as a more attractive alternative to taxis and now it’s more expensive. Generative AI makes it worse. According to the Norwegian report, far from solving the problem, AI is making it even worse. He junk content made with AI It is the most visible face, but they cite many more examples, such as Google AI Summarieswhich are often inaccurate and weaken the information ecosystem. There are also the AI-based advertising algorithms that make more ads reach us, platforms that are forcefully integrating AI everywhere, sometimes taking advantage of it to raise prices. Norway’s proposal. The use of this type of practices is widespread and its advance seems unstoppable, but Norway proposes three lines of action to reverse it: Give power back to users: that we can decide which operating system to install on our devices, that interoperability is mandatory, protect “de-shit” tools such as ad blockers and alternative recommendation algorithms. Stop depending on big technology: force them to “open the doors” and use open standards, finance and promote free software, using public administration as a lever. Apply the law: Norway proposes raising sanctions even further and tightening controls. The European Digital Markets Act has already taken steps in this direction, such as USB-C on iPhone or the sideloading on iOS. However, managing to end this degradation completely seems like a titanic task. Norway has sent letters to fourteen countries, including the United States, asking them to take action. Image | YouTube In Xataka | Thanks to AI we can now stop reading and writing as much as we used to. According to science, it is the worst for Alzheimer’s

We have been hearing for years that plastic is safer than wood. Jordi Cruz does not agree (and it seems he is right)

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Science has spent decades studying what happens with E.colithe Salmonella and company when they touch the wooden, plastic or metal boards that we use in the kitchen. It is an old (and we thought unsolvable) fight, but the famous chef Jordi Cruz has spoken. He said it on TikTokbut since the ways of distributing content on the Internet are capricious, he has also said so in tens of websites. The question is whether what he said makes sense. What does Jordi Cruz defend? In essence, Cruz has commented your prints on three cutting board materials (plastic, metal and wood). Furthermore, it has gotten wet: for him, the best option is wood. As explainedwhile plastic is filled with grooves where bacteria accumulate and metal destroys the edge of the knife, wood has “natural antibacterial and antimicrobial” properties, where bacteria “get between the fibers and end up dying.” The controversy has been enormous, of course. A curious debate. That “clear” comes from the fact that for years it has been said that wood is the material that “accumulates the most bacteria”, in contrast to “non-porous” plastics that can be put in the dishwasher (and can be cleaned more easily). It is logical that seeing a famous chef say that wood is the best has made many put your hands on your head. However, Cruz is not as off track as we might think. What the evidence says. From the very beginning (the pioneering studies by Dean Cliver at the University of Wisconsin in the 90s), research they have been giving us back the same image: There is no evidence that plastic is inherently safer than wood. Appropriate (hard and closed-pore) and well-preserved wood creates a hostile environment for many bacteria. The problem is that. Wooden boards are not only more expensive, but require maintenance. And if we are not going to give it to them, plastic with all its problems is safer. Although not totally sure, of course. That is to say: the most dangerous boards are the old, scratched and poorly washed ones. The material does not matter, what is important is its state of conservation. And then? Some time ago, food safety experts stopped focusing on the material and began to look for strategies that would try to reduce the main risk derived from the tables: cross contamination. A good example of this are the recommendations of the North American USDA. For the Agency, both wood and other “non-porous” surfaces are acceptable for things like meat and chicken. Their main recommendation is another: use a table for raw meats and a different one for ready-to-eat foods (in addition to always cleaning them with hot water and soap; and subjecting them to periodic disinfection). In Europe the recommendation is similar and, in fact, he adds that although there may be more or less appropriate materials depending on the use, “in domestic kitchens the priority is hygiene and not the specific material.” What do the chefs say? What Jordi Cruz says (that a wooden board is best as a “main board”) is a general consensus between chefs and gastronomic influencers. However, it is common to restrict them to chopping cooked vegetables, fruit, bread and produce. On the other hand, also it is common to use plastic with meat and raw fish. Or what is the same, for “dirty uses.” Sometimes we get stuck in absurd debates. And this is a good example: the public debate has dedicated a lot of effort to establishing the idea of ​​”bad wood/good plastic”, when the important thing is to use several boards, assign them fixed uses and clean (and replace them) when necessary. Image | Garden House | The Anthill In Xataka | To the question of whether ultra-processed foods are as bad as we have been told, science still has no clear answer

8 kilometers of ice have been lost in two months and researchers only agree on one thing: it is something to worry about

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Predict their future the antarctic glaciers It is undoubtedly a great challenge for science, but the most important thing above all is to know How will it affect global sea level?. The worst of all is that the latest news we have at our disposal is not at all positive, since the Hektoria glacier It has retreated 8 km in just two months, which is an unprecedented speed in the modern era. Where we start from. Normally, the retreat of glaciers It is measured in hundreds of meters per year. It is one of the clearest metrics we have to be able to ‘measure’ global warming, and that is why now what a team from the University of Colorado Boulder has just recorded on the Hektoria glacier, on the eastern peninsula of Antarctica, plays in a completely different league. The measurement. In just two months during 2023, the Hektoria lost almost half of its mass. In total, 8 kilometers of ice disappeared. A speed of collapse that has never been seen in modern history and that, according to the authors of the study, is more typical of the end of the last ice age. Something that doesn’t add up in this case. Hektoria is relatively small by Antarctic standards (about 300 km², less than the city of Malaga), but its collapse was so sudden that it left researchers stunned. A coincidence. Ironically, the research team wasn’t even studying Hektoria. They were analyzing satellite and remote sensing data for another project when Ochwat realized that the glacier had essentially disappeared from the images. The measurements. This is where technology comes into play. The team had to combine data from multiple satellites to understand what had happened and, above all, how quickly he did it. “If we only had one image every three months, we couldn’t say that the glacier lost two and a half kilometers in two days,” explains Ochwat. In this case, by combining images from different satellites you can fill in the time gaps and confirm with evidence in hand how quickly the ice has been melting. But the key was not only in the images. They also used seismic instruments that have the ability to detect a series of “glacial earthquakes” that occurred exactly during the period of rapid melting. And these earthquakes are not measured for the sake of it, but to confirm something crucial: the glacier was anchored to the bedrock (and not floating) just before breaking. This is fundamental both for science and for the entire planet, since ice that is floating (such as an ice shelf) does not raise sea level when it melts, any more than an ice cube does in a glass of water. But ice that rests on land (or anchored to a seabed) and falls into the sea does contribute to the global rise in sea level by increasing its volume. Your Achilles heel. The collapse was not due to simple superficial melting. The cause was topographic, since many Antarctic glaciers rest on deep canyons or underwater mountains. The Hektoria, however, had the misfortune of resting on an “ice plain”: an area of ​​bedrock that was exceptionally flat and below sea level. This flat topography caused a gigantic section of the glacier to begin floating all at once, rather than gradually. The moment the glacier lost its anchorage to the ground (its “line of support”), it was exposed to the forces of the ocean, and therefore everything began to advance very quickly. The process was brutal, since it all began with the warmest ocean water that seeped underneath and began to open cracks from the bottom of the glacier upwards. At the same time, the glacier already had cracks on the surface. Eventually, the lower and upper cracks met and the glacier literally disintegrated. A warning for future glaciers. The Hektoria case is a first-rate warning. Scientists know that there are numerous glaciers in Antarctica that also rest on these types of ice plains. Until now, it was thought that their collapses would be centuries-long processes. Hektoria shows that they can be months, which should set us off due to the implications it would have on sea level. And while the collapse of a small glacier like Hektoria won’t dramatically change global sea level, it alone does demonstrate that a rapid collapse mechanism, until now theoretical or believed to be typical of past geological eras, is perfectly possible today. If this same mechanism is activated in much larger glaciers, sea level rise could accelerate very considerably and much sooner than expected. Images | Cassie Matias In Xataka | When glaciers melt, bodies appear: archaeologists are recovering them in a time trial

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