bears

Someone has paid 2.4 million for a check for 500. It bears the signatures of Steve Jobs and Wozniak

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Turning $500 into $2.4 million could be anyone’s wet dream cryptobro, but the story at hand It has nothing to do with investment. The protagonist is a small piece of paper, and not just any one, but one that was key in the creation of one of the most important technology companies of our era: Apple. lto auction. It occurred a few days ago via RR Auction. The object auctioned was the $500 check that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak signed in March 1976 and its final price was $2,409,886, 4,800 times its original value. The check is encapsulated in a plastic casing and its authenticity and quality is certified with a “MINT 9” note, which indicates that it is in a perfect state of conservation. The first check. Throughout their time together, the Apple founders signed many checks, but this one is special because it is the first of all. Furthermore, getting the money was not easy. At that time neither of the two steves He was rich, so Jobs had to sell his van and Wozniak his HP 65 calculator. At the time of his signature, there were still 16 days left before the official birth of the company, so we can affirm that he was a key player in the birth of Apple. The assignment. We already know who the senders were, but who was the receiver? The check is made out to Howard Cantin, who at the time was designing printed circuit boards at Atari. The commission for which he received this amount was to create the plaque that would carry the Apple Ithe company’s first computer that went on sale a few months later. When it was time to get paid, Steve Jobs offered Cantin shares in Apple, but Cantin preferred money. Little did he know that the company would be worth $4 billion. It was not the only thing that was auctioned. The check was the star object of the Apple 50th anniversary auctionbut there were many others such as the opening document for Apple’s first bank account, which sold for $828,569. The Apple poster that Jobs had hanging in his living room was also sold for $659,900 and the most expensive: the prototype of the Apple I board, which reached $2,750,000. In total, the auction has raised more than $8 million. In Xataka | Einstein’s first violin had passed unnoticed. Until an auction house put it up for sale. Image | Wikipedia

We believed that polar bears were doomed to disappear. In Norway they are getting fatter and healthier

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For decades, the polar bear has become in the indisputable symbol of the climate crisis that we are living. The equation seemed quite simple and devastating: if there is less sea ice, they will be able to hunt less and, therefore, the bears will be more malnourished and may disappear. But what we are seeing has broken this logic, at least in one specific region of the Arctic. The paradigm shift. Against all odds, the polar bears of the Savalbard Archipelago, Norwayhave presented a better body condition than 25 years agoeven though their habitat is melting at a fast pace. And this has generated many questions. In order to answer this, the study led by Jon Aars of the Norwegian Polar Institutehas provided conclusive data after decades of monitoring these animals. all this thanks to 770 polar bears that have been in the focus of the study during the years 1995 and 2019 in the Barents region. They are getting fat. After analyzing all the measurement results, it was found that an ecological paradox existed: although the ice-free season in the area has lengthened significantly, these bears are increasing their weight significantly since 2005. The big question here is… How possible? The answer. The key to this unexpected resilience seems to lie in the unique biological productivity of the Barents Sea and in the adaptation capacity of these predators. According to the study, several simultaneous factors have occurred, such as prey density. This means that the loss of ice has concentrated these bears’ prey in smaller, coastal areas, paradoxically making them more accessible at certain times. But it does not stop there, since an increase in the number of seals has also been seen, and especially in bearded seals which is a much larger prey and rich in fat. A change of diet. This is where the flexibility of the predator comes in, since Svalbard’s eyes have begun to supplement their diet with terrestrial resources, including reindeer and bird eggstaking advantage of what the land offers when the sea fails. In short, Svalbard’s bears live in a “bubble” of ecological abundance that has cushioned, for now, the physical impact of ice loss due to global warming. There is no need to celebrate it. It is easy to fall into the temptation of using this study to minimize the impact of climate change because the fact that ice is becoming less and less has not affected the species. But the authors of the study point out that this is an anomaly that occurs in this specific area of ​​the Arctic but is not a global trend. In this way, while the bears of Svalbard enjoy this temporary respite, their relatives in Hudson Bay (Canada) and other regions of the Arctic show severe signs of malnutrition and above all a decrease in the number of animals. And the difference is that not all Arctic ecosystems are as rich as the Barents Sea. A mirage. This is what the study warns that we may have in front of us, since now the bear has been able to adapt to the situation, but the sea ice continues to retreat, we do not know what will happen. What is expected is that a tipping point may be reached where not even the richness of prey or reindeer eggs will be enough to sustain the current population, starting a new ecological crisis here. Images | Hans-Jurgen Mager In Xataka | They’re not kissing, they’re scanning: the complex science behind nose-to-nose contact in the animal kingdom

It’s not that there are hungry bears, it’s who is left to face them

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In 1976, the Government of Japan registered 500,000 licenses first level hunting. By 2012, the licenses did not arrive at 100.00. These data did not have much importance in the nation’s newspapers until someone noticed. The bears have taken over “rural Japan”, they are hungry and have no resources to contain them. In the background, a national demographic crisis, and another at an international level that have turned the animal into the number one danger. First they were emergency huntsnow it is directly the army. A sinlife. Japan is experiencing the biggest rebound of bear attacks recorded since data exists, with more than a hundred injured and at least twelve people dead since the spring, along with more than 20,000 sightings reported in the first half of the fiscal year alone. The meetings already are not restricted to mountainous areas: the animals appear in gardens, stations, schools, supermarkets and thermal complexes, which has generated a feeling of constant danger in regions that traditionally associated autumn with hiking, local festivals and enjoying the autumn landscape. Bears everywhere. The density of sightings is concentrated in the north, especially in Akita and Iwatebut cases have also been confirmed nearby from Tokyo and Osakaa clear indicator of the loss of ecological boundaries that separated the forest from the urban. The result is that a season that used to symbolize serenity, hiking and foliage viewing has become a period continuous alertwith cancellations of marathons, school walks and tourist events, and with hikers changing destinations, traveling in groups and equipping themselves with bells, radios and repellent sprays. Depopulation, aging and warming. He increase in attacks It is not a casual or strictly natural phenomenon: it is the accumulated consequence of decades of rural depopulation, aging community and environmental alterations. In large areas of the north, entire towns and neighborhoods have disappeared emptying and agingdrastically reducing the human presence that previously deterred bears from approaching. The figure of the local hunter, key to managing fauna, is has become scarcewith hunting associations composed mainly by elderly men that they can no longer intervene quickly enough. At the same time, the reduction of acorn and beechnut cropslinked to climate change, has decreased the food available in the woods, driving bears into abandoned fields and home orchards, where they find unguarded persimmons, chestnuts, and apple trees. Extra ball. In many villages, the ancient satoyama landscapes (the buffer strips between forest and crops) have been abandoned, erasing gradients that previously marked clear boundaries between the wild and the human. This spatial and ecological convergence has made the encounter with bears stop being a contingency and become an something statistically probable in certain areas. The army warms up. The seriousness of the situation has forced the central government to intervene, deploying troops in Akita to support local authorities who admit they are overwhelmed. However, the military They do not have authorization to kill animals: their role is restricted to installing traps, transporting authorized hunters and helping to remove carcasses, while the lethal component falls on a network of hunters whose capacity is already insufficient. This model highlights a growing contradiction: Self-defense forces, already limited in personnel, must address a prolonged civil emergency in parallel to their defense mission. As we countthe government has started preparing emergency measures that include relax the rules hunting in urban areas, hire new shooters, reinforce monitoring and use drones with deterrent sounds, but these actions require time, interprefectural coordination and specialized training. The feeling of citizen vulnerability persists because the problem does not depend only on individual captures, but on the restoration of a territorial balance that has been eroded for decades. Social and psychological impact. Plus: the increase in attacks has modified the daily routines in affected regions. Parents accompany their children to school, residents avoid going out after dark, farmers work in fear, and hikers reconsider activities that were previously seen as an essential part of seasonal well-being. Surveys show that more than 75% of hikers now feel anxious about the possibility of encounters with bears, and more than half have changed or canceled plans. The feeling of insecurity has even crossed cultural identity Japanese autumnassociated with contemplation, gastronomy and a slow pace. This emotional transition from enjoyment to caution reflects that the problem is not only one of fauna, but of social structure: when the territories they lose populationservices, surveillance and organized community, also lose their capacity to absorb and manage natural risks. Crisis and bears. The crisis of bear attacks in Japan it is not an exceptional episode but the visible manifestation of a deep dynamic where depopulation, aging, ecological transformation and weakening of rural management converge on a new vulnerability. While bears search for food and territory, humans they withdraw from spaces who previously maintained a controlled cohabitation relationship. The answer cannot limit yourself to hunting more or install more traps: It will require rethinking the revitalization of rural environments, restoring satoyama barriers, training new cohorts of managers and strengthening community capacity. The immediate future will bring a temporary truce with hibernation, but the trend indicates that spring and next fall they will stress again this border. Seen this way, the question that arises is not only how to protect the population, but how to reconstruct a territorial balance that allows the human and the wild to continue coexisting without fear replacing daily life. Image | Animals, US Department of Defense Current Photos, jasohill In Xataka | Faced with the largest flood of wild bears in memory, Japan has taken a measure: emergency hunts In Xataka | Wolf hunting throughout Spain depended on a red button that changes its status. And Europe has decided to press it

Japan is so desperate for its bears that it will allow hunters to shoot them in cities. Problem: you run out of hunters

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Tuesday was not an easy day Numatain Gunma prefecture, north of Tokyo. Around seven thirty in the afternoon the police received the notice that a 1.4 meter bear He had sneaked into a supermarket with several dozen customers and destroyed the fish and sushi sections. He also injured two people, one in the parking lot and another inside the store. It is not an isolated case. Not anything exclusive to Numata. Japan has a serious problem of encounters with bears. To solve it, the authorities have decided to use their most experienced hunters, but they won’t make it easy either. There are less and less. What has happened? That Japan has a problem with encounters between bears and humans, episodes that in most cases result in scares or injuries, but that sometimes end with the worst outcomes. It’s not something newbut statistics show that the problem is far from being solved. CNS News assures that between April and September 108 people suffered injuries caused by bears, reflecting a similar rate to the year between March 2023 and 2024, when the Government recorded a record of 219 attacks. Is it that serious? Many of the encounters end in scares or injuries, but the Japanese media also talk about an all-time high number of deaths: seven, the highest number since records began in 2006. The people who have suffered attacks also include both locals and tourists from other countries. In fact, just a few days ago a Spaniard received the blow in the village of Shirakawa-goWorld Heritage Site. In Shiretokoanother place popular with tourists, the trails were closed after an attack in August. What is the reason? Better to talk about ‘reasons’, in plural. When analyzing the problem, a cocktail of causes is usually cited in which environmental issues are mixed with other social and demographic issues. At the end of the day the record of attacks arrives in full abandonment from rural areas and farmland and with a serious population decline that the country has been dragging on for several decades. There are those who include other causes in the equation, such as the effect of climate change on food availability or fluctuations in acorn and beechnut harvests, which cause food scarcity among the adult population. The truth is that Japan is losing inhabitantsis suffering a rural exodus, has seen the borders between populated centers and forests blur and the country has also seen a clear increase in the bear population. Yomiuri Shimbun ensures that the number of black bears has tripled since 2012, with tens of thousands of copies, to which are added the brown from Hokkaido. And how to solve it? The big question. A month ago the country took an important decision and not exempt from controversy: Amended its wildlife protection and management law to relax rules governing what hunters can and cannot do in densely populated neighborhoods. To be more precise, the new regulations allow municipalities to commission hunters to carry out “emergency hunts” for dangerous animals in inhabited areas. Until now, the general rule prohibited killing wild animals with weapons in public spaces. It could only be authorized (and exceptionally) by the police in cases of imminent danger. After the legislative changemunicipal governments may authorize hunts against brown or black bears in densely populated areas provided that certain requirements are met: first, it must be an emergency measure; second, there can be no room for other solutions; and third (and most importantly) it must be ensured that no stray bullet will end up harming a resident. The idea is that only authorized hunters intervene. End of the problem? Not quite. Japan has decided to rely on hunters to solve bear attacks, but the problem is that in the country (like in Spain) there are fewer and fewer hunters. The diary The Mainichi published on Thursday a extensive report in which he recalls that the number of licenses in force in Japan has been decreasing as the population has decreased, the fields have been abandoned and society has changed. If in 1976 there were 500,000 first-level permits approved, since 2012 the figure has always been below 100,000. Who will shoot the bears? In Japan, there is also debate about who will be able to kill bears in neighborhoods full of houses and people. The Government already has announced that the measure will be accompanied by training workshops to guarantee that the system works correctly, which also includes planning security measures, restricting access and evacuating residents. “Emergency shots” are not in any case the only solution that the country has on the table. On the trails of Fukushima, for example, they have installed devices with sensors that seek to scare away animals. The idea: that they emit an annoying buzzing sound that becomes more intense when the bears approach. Images | Suzi Kim (Unsplash) In Xataka | Wolf hunting throughout Spain depended on a red button that changes its status. And Europe has decided to press it

If the question is how the struggles of the Roman gladiators were, the answer was in Serbia: they included bears

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Archaeologists (and also novelists and Of course Hollywood) Imagine the Roman amphaters full of gladiators, weapons and wild animalsbeasts captured to submit them in the circus sand. One thing is however imagine or intuit it based on what historical and mosaic stories tell us, and another very different is to find palpable evidence. That is what has achieved A team of archaeologists in Serbia, near the remains of the Roman amphitheater of Viminaciumformer province of Moesia. And the story he tells is fascinating. Much more than bones. What the researchers have found in the vicinity of the Viminacium Amphitheater, a wide venue built towards the second century DCoval, with high walls and capacity for some 7,000 people, was part of the skull of a brown bear. Nothing else. Nothing less. For the common of mortals the bones could have gone unnoticed, but Nemanja Marković and the rest of the researchers who They have just published his findings in AntiquityThey saw something else: a story that tells us about beasts, gladiators and struggles. Why’s that? Because beyond the characteristics of the bones, which reveal to what kind of animal they belonged to, the skull retains marks that tells us about its last days in Viminacium. What did he do, what treatment he received, where he lived and what the bear died. Thanks to the application of bone analysis techniques, radiographs, microscopic analysis and DNA sequencing, the first thing the archaeologists found is that the skull belonged to a Ursus arctosa male of about six years that the hunters probably arrested in the same region, in one of the forests that extend through the Balkans. The fact is interesting because it suggests that the Romans had a hunting network that supplied animals for their shows. It is nothing new. Other studies They have revealed how the Empire counted of a sufficiently greased, broad and efficient system to bring lions to Britannia. All for the purpose of supplying the amphitheaters where the elites and the people were distracted. What the wounds reveal. If the bones tell us things, much more do their wounds and brands, the great source of information to which Nemanja Marković and his colleagues have resorted. The first thing that caught their attention was an injury in the front of the skull, a broad wound in which the scientists appreciated two indications: one of healing, another of infection. That already tells us about a serious injury that the animal suffered for a season. The next question is evident: how was it? The other protagonist: the Venatore. To answer that issue, researchers have looked directly at the amphitheater and a very concrete type of show: the fighting between beasts and Venators (either Bestiarii), fighters who dedicated themselves to the sand with animals to delight the public. “The Roman amphitheats also organized ‘Beast Cacerías’ (Venation), which faced people against animals, a show that lasted from the republican period to late antiquity, ” They remembered Recently in Plos One The authors of another study that found another evidence of that kind of shows in Roman Britannia: the pelvis of a relatively young man (he was not more than 35 years old) who showed a clear and deep dentellada de León. Unraveling the story. “We cannot say with certainty if the bear died directly in the sand, but the evidence suggests that the trauma occurred during the shows and the subsequent infection significantly helped his death,” Marković explains in Live Science. The finding is relevant because until now historians only had references to use bears in this kind of shows. Do not test palpable. “This study provides the first direct osteological evidence of the participation of brown bears in Roman shows.” Not just that. Beyond the front wound caused perhaps by the spear of a Venatore, The researchers observed something else. The bear jaws also seemed to show traces of infection. And above all their canines were spent. The reason? The study slides that could be due to prolonged captivity during which the animal was dedicated to biting the bars of its cage. “It is likely that he has been in prison for years, not just weeks,” says the expert, which leads him to think that he participated in several Viminacium shows, where they came to reside several tens of thousands of people. One last mystery. That’s how it is. The bones hide a last mystery, a question that remains by driving at the archaeologists table: the skull of the brown bear was among the remains of a small building close to the entrance of the amphitheater. Was he buried there? And if so, why? “Previous investigations suggest that the dead animals in the sand were dismembered nearby, their meat was distributed and the bones were ruled out near the amphitheater, not buried in a formal animals cemetery,” Comment The Serbian researcher. “The fact that this bear was buried and not discarded as other animal remains suggests that the spectators or organizers of the games attributed some symbolic value. Perhaps respect, perhaps superstition. What is clear is that his death was not anonymous or banal,” Marković ditch in statements collected by National Geographic. Archaeologists too They discovered Part of the skeleton of a leopard in the same construction and bones of other wild animals, including brown bears, near the amphitheater. When analyzing these bone remains, the researchers dated them between approximately 240 and 350 AD Images | 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič (Unsplash) and Wikipedia 1 and 2 In Xataka | The incendiary arrows are the favorite weapon of medieval fictions. They really didn’t serve anything

Ivanka Trump denounces the existence of a cryptocurrency that falsely bears her name

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Ivanka Trump, eldest daughter of the nation’s president, warned American investors about the existence of a cryptocurrency that falsely bears his name. Through a message published on platform “I have learned that a fake cryptocurrency called ‘Ivanka Trump’ or ‘$IVANKA’ is being promoted without my consent or approval. To be clear: I have no relationship with this coin. This fake currency risks misleading consumers and defrauding them of their hard-earned money, and the unauthorized use of my name and image is a violation of my rights. “This promotion is misleading, exploitative and unacceptable,” he said. The announcement of Ivanka Trump arises after his father signed a executive order that promotes cryptocurrencies under the commitment to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” Unlike Donald Trump’s first stage in the presidency, Ivanka Trump this time ruled out working as his advisor. (Credit: Wilfredo Lee / AP) Since Donald Trump assumed the US presidency for the second time, the value of Bitcoin, the longest-lived cryptocurrency on the market, began to increase to exceed $105,000. Years ago, the New York tycoon came to cryptocurrencies as a “scam,” but during his campaign seeking to return to Washington he modified his speech by testifying how they have become the new market for investors from around the world. However, through the order signed by Trump, the establishment of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) is prohibited, this with the aim of strengthening the trust placed in the dollar as the world reserve currency since July 1944. Keep reading: • Ivanka Trump claims to hate politics for being “a very dark and negative business”“ • Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner complete construction of their $24 million mansion • 2025 will be a challenging year for immigrants with the return of Trump

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