bug

They came to believe that the horoscope predicted true love. It was actually a bug in the 2001 British census.

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When searching a new lovethere are many people who are looking for the best possible compatibility, but not only in terms of tastes or hobbies, but also to the zodiac sign that corresponds to each of the people. Nowadays there are dating applications that allow you to filter by zodiac sign, since it is not uncommon to see or hear that being a Leo or Scorpio sign is something catastrophic. But science has something to say here. Demonstrating it. When asked if the zodiac sign affects the compatibility that exists in a couple, researcher David Voas wanted to give him an answer to see if it is a definitive tool or not. And to do so, he analyzed a sample of 20 million people from the census of England and Wales, which is equivalent to 10 million couples. This way, if there is any relationship in such a large sample, it has to be seen somehow. And here we didn’t want to see if the fire signs get along with each other, but rather something more basic: is there any combination of signs that occurs more or less frequently than pure chance dictates? The first results. At first glance at the different couples analyzed, it seemed that the astrologers were right and that people were grouped according to the affinity of their zodiac signs. But the truth is that the researcher did not stop at this and continued digging into the data in order to see if there was something more. The real results. Upon further investigation, he discovered that this “astrological sign” did not come from the cosmos, but from imputation errors and biases in the collection of census data. Here he observed that in records where the exact day of birth was missing, officials used to assume that it was the 1st day of the month by default, which generated artificial accumulations of people in certain signs and created patterns that were not real. With all this, it was seen that many apparently compatible couples were simply sharing registration errors or rounded birth dates, which is something quite common within the administration. And once these statistical artifacts were corrected and matches by birth month were separated from matches that actually crossed the boundary between zodiac signs, the effect disappeared completely. In short, there was no trace of a “force” that united the signs. It’s always the same. This new research sits in a long tradition of scientific attempts to validate astrology in some way, and the truth is that it always comes to the same conclusion: there is no relationship. As Carlos Orsi explains in his work published by Columbia University Press, the problem with couple astrology is that not even astrologers themselves agree, since there is no homogeneous theory about which combinations are “good.” And given this lack of consensus, the Voas test is the fairest possible: look for any deviation from chance. And chance won by a landslide. Images | lookstudio in Magnific freepik In Xataka | Esperanza Gracia had been explaining the horoscope to the Spanish for three decades. Its closure illustrates a deeper change

That bug has been waiting for its moment in Spain for 60 years. And your time is now

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In 1964, someone decided it was a good idea to release a handful of estrildas in Portugal. Before the end of the decade, this small opportunistic bird from sub-Saharan Africa had already settled in Extremadura and Andalusia. By the 80s, it had already reached the east of the peninsula. For 60 years, estrildas had remained in a discreet background. It had taken root, but they weren’t getting traction. However, that has begun to change: in the last 15 years, Valencian estrilds have multiplied by 10 and in Catalonia the population has tripled. AND, to the surprise of the expertsthe key to the boom has been two other invasive species. What has happened? In recent days, several media have begun to publish reports announcing that the African bird “has already arrived” in Spain. However, the common estrilda has been here for decades. What is new is not that: what is new is that in recent years the proliferation of uncultivated plots (one in five are) is becoming the perfect breeding ground for two other exotic species, the common reed and the Pampa duster. And those species make the perfect habitat for estrildas. Do they eat them? No no. That’s why I say it’s curious: the researchers they have realized that it is not that birds consume these plants. The plants provide shelter, roosting sites and perfect structures for this species. The strilas have been surviving for years in a very hostile territory, now they have found some areas that suit them like a glove. The story, as you can see, is more complex. Above all, because it has an agricultural substrate. Without the profound changes of recent years in the countryside, neither the Pampa duster nor the common sugarcane would have reached where they have. In this sense, what is truly worrying is not the estrilda (a bird that, as far as we know, is not affecting the local fauna either). What has experts worried is the chain of invasions. You just have to think about it a little to understand: the feather duster is South American, the common reed is Asian, and the estrilda is African. Together, they have managed to become strong in southern Europe. Fauna and flora have logics that we are still unable to understand in depth. In the end, the key is always in the same place: that there is a moment when we are going to have to assume that the only way to get out of all the problems we are creating is to start comprehensively managing the field. Image | XRTF In Xataka | England is experiencing an unprecedented invasion. The problem is that they are octopuses, and they are devouring everything they can find.​

Do you sneeze when eating dark chocolate? It’s not an allergy, it’s a “bug” in your DNA inherited from Neanderthals

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Buy a bar of chocolate with 90% cocoa to get home and put the first piece in your mouth to have that bitter and pleasant hit that many seek. But what you find is a series of sneezes as if it were an allergy. If you have identified with this microstory, you are not allergic to cocoa, but you are part of a curious minority victim of a neurological “short circuit” that science has studied and that could directly connect with Neanderthals. A crossing of cables. Sometimes the body gives us many surprises, such as sneezing when we get a bit of sun after leaving the house. But if we focus on chocolate, the reality is that We are not talking about an immune response with histamine involved. The explanation most accepted by the scientific community lies in the trigeminal nerve. The trigeminal nerve is one of the most important nerves we have and is responsible for transmitting sensitive information from the face to the brain. In the event that we eat dark chocolate, especially with a purity greater than 70%, compounds such as theobromine and caffeine intensely stimulate taste receptors. The theory. What is being proposed right now is that in certain people this signal is so powerful that the trigeminal nerve becomes “confused.” In this way, when passing close to the optic nerve and the respiratory tract, the brain interprets this explosion of bitter and intense taste as a nasal irritant or a powerful visual signal, triggering the sneeze to “expel” the supposed threat. The solar connection. As we have mentioned previously, there is a well-documented phenomenon in which 25-30% of the population sneezes when looking at bright light like that of the Sun. This is what is known as a photic sneeze reflex and science has strong support for stating that it is due to hyperexcitability in the visual cortex. Well, chocolate sneezing seems to be a variant or “first cousin” of this photic reflex. In fact, it is quite likely that if a person sneezes on chocolate, they will also do so when leaving the house on a sunny day. Both are failures in the filtering of signals in the trigeminal nerve. Neanderthal heritage. As explained by biologist Gerry Ward in an archived blog postthis trait is not a random error that exists in the population, but is a direct inheritance in our genetic material, and goes one step further by pointing out that it may come directly from Neanderthals. The hypothesis on the table is that, in prehistoric times, this reflex acted as a defense mechanism to clean the respiratory tract against unknown tastes or smells that could be dangerous. In this way, what today is a great nuisance when eating a simple dessert, 40,000 years ago could have been a great evolutionary advantage that marked the survival of certain individuals. It’s more complex. Although dissemination almost always falls into great simplicity, genetic data is complex. In this case, Ward’s theory placed the responsible gene in the chromosome 11but later data from 23andMe, the famous genetic analysis company, identified specific markers associated with this phenomenon on chromosome 12. But this later changed, since studies on the photic reflex pointed to variations in the chromosomes 2 and 3. This suggests that the trait is polygenic since there is not a single “switch” for sneezing, but rather several genetic components that increase the probability of suffering from it. How many suffer from it. Although a priori you may hear that this is a ‘problem’ that is present in 30% of the population, the reality is that this figure corresponds to the photic reflex related to sunlight. The sneeze caused specifically by dark chocolate is much more unique, since, according to data collected by 23andMe among its users, only about 1% of the population reports systematically sneezing after consuming dark chocolate. In this way, we are facing a select club within the largest group of those who sneeze for light. Images | Tetiana Bykovets Towfiqu barbhuiya In Xataka | Something strange is happening with the chocolate crisis in Spain: households consume less, but business improves

the “bug” of toxic relationships

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Love without a doubt is a really complicated matter to understandsince falling in love is not something mechanical or that has a great perfect theory behind it. There are several voices that try to shed light on this, with messages such as that one falls in love with whoever one wants. by the psychoanalyst Gabriel Rolón. But the truth is that Science has put the data on the table to understand loveand childhood trauma is undoubtedly very present. The theory of attachment. Formulated by John Bowlby and that suggests that the dynamic with our primary caregivers installs an emotional “operating system.” In this way, if there was security during childhood, a secure attachment develops, but if there were problems in childhood, the brain develops insecure attachments, whether anxious or avoidant. Current science has gone a little further and has managed to measure the duration of this effect, confirming that what happens in the first years does not stay there, but rather dictates the architecture of our future relationships. The trauma. A very recent study, published in 2025analyzed 1,404 university students using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. The results are devastating for those who believe that romantic love is random, since the research found a chain effect where childhood trauma not only bothersbut rather negatively predicts romantic satisfaction in adulthood. The most relevant finding of this study is mediation. The data statistically confirm that early traumatic experiences generate an insecure attachment, and it is this attachment style that triggers the low quality of the relationship that is formed. There is precisely a direct correlation that validates that, the greater the early injuries, the lower the neurological and emotional capacity to enjoy a partner, unless this mechanism is intervened. From adolescence to adulthood. If the 2025 study offers us a snapshot of today, a work published in 2008 gives us the complete movie. In this case, research was done with 559 young people from Iowa to track the subjects from their adolescence to early adulthood. The fascinating thing about this follow-up is how positive family interactions during adolescencecharacterized by warmth and low hostility, accurately predicted greater security of romantic attachment years later. This means that if the family environment resolved problems without aggression, the young person’s brain learned that this is the norm of intimacy, successfully replicating it with their partners in adult life. That is, much less toxic relationships were formed. A dangerous pattern. Perhaps the hardest part of the recent evidence is that it links these patterns not only to unhappiness, but to violence. A specific study confirmed that an insecure attachment derived from “harsh parenting” and hostile parents directly correlates with aggression in adult couples. Basically, the conflict resolution patterns experienced at home are modeled and repeated. In the same line, a study published in 2024 points out that repeated trauma alters internal models, increasing vulnerability. People with these wounds are not only at greater risk of aggression, but of tolerating abusive relationships because their internal danger “alarms” are out of calibration. Having normalized conflict since childhood, the brain does not identify toxicity as an immediate threat, but as a familiar environment. Are we doomed? In these situations, it is logical to think that if you have had a tough childhood with a complicated family environment, then all future love relationships will be doomed to be toxic. But the reality is that no, since destiny is not written in stone, although it is engraved in the neurons. The same study published in 2025 shed important light by discovering the social support clock, demonstrating that external support acts as a moderator capable of cushioning the impact of insecure attachment on the couple’s relationship. Images | Mayur Gala In Xataka | The science of being single: a macro study warns that well-being plummets if you have not had a partner by 25

We thought this bug was a pig. Now we know that it was two meters tall, weighed a thousand kilos and was a killing machine related to whales.

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Almost 200 years ago, a paleontologist found some completely improbable bones. They thought about it a thousand times, tried to find some sense in it; but everything ended in the same delirious image: that of a huge pig with the capacity to destroy everything in front of it. And that’s what we called him for decades: the ‘pig from hell’. What we have just discovered, two centuries later, is that we know almost nothing about them. Now they are even more terrible. But what really is a ‘hell pig’? It is the popular nickname by which entelodonts are known; an extinct family of large prehistoric mammals that lived about 30 million years ago. The bug was described for the first time in the 1840sbut it was in the early 20th century that paleontologists assumed it was closely related to pigs or peccaries. It was not something irrational: on a strictly physical level, entelodonts looked very similar to modern-day pigs. Two meters tall, weighing more than a thousand kilos and jaws capable of crushing bones, but pigs nonetheless. With “crushing bones” we are falling short. Recently, a team from Vanderbilt University could examine in detail the teeth of these animals and, thanks to three-dimensional models of dental microwear, they have managed to turn around everything we thought we knew about the role of these animals in North American ecosystems 30 million years ago. Your conclusions they leave no room for doubt: “the largest specimens were capable of crushing bones with an efficiency similar to or even greater than that of lions and hyenas.” Luckily, they weren’t very smart; And, according to the researchers, “it has a brain-body relationship similar to that of reptiles, so they were very unintelligent creatures.” A complex story. At first, experts thought that this monstrous animal was a born hunter. Then, partly because of this familiarity with pigs, they came to the conclusion that they were omnivorous animals, capable of eating small animals and carrion. Now, thanks to this team, we know that they were most likely at the top of the food chain of their ecosystems. This, in fact, raises the possibility that different species (or subspecies) occupied different ecological niches. However, there are curious things. To begin with, entelodonts have nothing to do with pigs. In fact, they are closer to whales and hippos than anything else. But, above all, it shows us the difficulties we continue to have in understanding our past. Little by little, we are understanding that if our way of looking at the past conditions the futureour ability to understand what the world was like 30 million years ago will radically change many things we think we are. And the best thing is that, even though I get melancholic and retrospective, everything we know makes it clear that the “pig from hell” is more infernal than ever. Image | Carnegie Museum of Natural History In Xataka | The deaths of cows, reindeer or rhinos are not a mystery: they are the consequences of a curse, that of “large animals”

a bug that prevents the car from moving

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He Renault 5 It is a car that is being liked. We verified this by driving it during our first impressions where we say that it is, without a doubt, one of the cars with which I have felt the most observed. And it is easy to verify with sales. The deployment in the French car market has been spectacular. During the month of December he fought face to face with the almighty Tesla Model Ywho managed to take away the honor of best-selling electric car in France for just over 100 units (4,807 units of the Tesla Model Y compared to 4,681 units of the Renault 5). The emergence has been such that with just over two months on the market it has reached close to 10,000 units and has managed to become the seventh best-selling electric car in France, according to data collected by Clean Technica. But some Renault 5 buyers have reported a worrying bug. One that leaves the car unusable because it does not allow them to move from position N. A problem that Renault is already solving The story comes to us through our French colleagues from Jeuxvideowho echoed the case via an official Renault forum in France. In it, the owner of an electric Renault 5 says that, just a week after purchasing the car, his small electric vehicle does not change gears. It is “frozen in N (Neutral) mode,” he explains in the post that you can read at this link. In it it states that the car cannot jump to D/B mode (to resume driving) or R (to reverse). Furthermore, he assures that other drivers have had the same problem, as explained to him by the person who towed the car to the workshop. Of a case collected three weeks ago, “he told me that another owner (of whom I attach a photo) had exactly the same problem“he emphasizes in the publication. In that same publication, two other drivers claim to have had the same problem. One of them assures that it was solved after half an hour and that the vehicle has to be updated. The problem is known to Renault. In fact, the company itself has offered an official response which explains that they have provided a patch to fix this bug that leaves the car unusable. If this happens, they recommend performing a complete reset of the vehicle, which can take between 20 and 30 minutes. Simply using the car again should have solved the problem. In Xataka We have contacted Renault, who have guaranteed us that they have no reports that this could have happened in any of the Renault 5s that already operate in our country. Despite everything, if we find ourselves in this situation and are not at home, Renault also explains that we can wait inside the vehicle for the reset to be completed but that we must comply with the following instructions: Make sure the vehicle is not charging. Do not use interior lights (dome lights, etc.). Do not use screen mirroring, radio or applications. Lock the vehicle using the key and/or the button on the instrument panel. Wait for the SOS LED to turn off before starting the car again Photo | renault In Xataka | Renault surprises with a bombshell: we will have an electric Renault 5 Turbo, rear-wheel drive and 500 HP

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