caused

It is widely known that Orson Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ caused a social panic. It is less known that it is a lie

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In my years of training as a journalist I remember how they told us to study the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. My Radio and Television Information teacher told us that it was an exemplary event that could help us in the future practice of the profession to evaluate the responsibility of the media and to understand the mechanisms by which the so-called “fourth estate” could influence the social reality we serve. What perhaps the teachers who transmitted that information to me did not think is that they were right in what they had told me, but for a twofold and partially wrong reason. The legend of War of the Worlds The story is well known: HG Wells, a widely known science fiction writer at the time, had a story titled The War of the Worldsthrough which aliens would come to Earth to conquer humanity. A beginner but ambitious young man named Orson Welles decided to adapt the script to the radio format, giving it a newsreel structure for his television program. Mercury Theater on the Air on CBS and that he would read with other colleagues on the night of October 30, 1938, on Halloween Eve. The broadcast, the reading of this work, lasted an hour in which the aura of truthfulness was maintained except in three momentsone at the very beginning, another 40 minutes into the recording and another at 55. They indicated that it was a dramatization. For the rest, the fiction of that Martian invasion that was taking place in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, remained live. The myth, the documentaries and reports about the case and the journalism classes I attended said that Welles, the hired actors and the sound montages were so believable (and the audiences so naive) that within minutes of them starting to simulate a supposed alien attack the streets of the country were filled with hysterical and shocked masses. Panic attacks, people stockpiling supplies, collapsed police services and who knows what else. We assume that the people who did not hear those warnings were able to connect to the program after the warning and listened to the program without knowing that it was fake. And why wouldn’t we think like that? The newspapers of October 31 had carried the story to the foreground: “False war bulletin spreads terror throughout the country”, “Radio play terrifies the nation”, “Radio listeners panic, they confuse a war drama as a real chronicle”. These are some of the headlines that could be read about an event that, as it was said later, caused rivers of ink to flow in the form of more than 12,000 articles in newspapers throughout the United States. The reality is that, as a series of experts have reflected on different occasions, this interpretation largely falls into the realm of fake news. To support it here we use, above all, the study of professionals and experts from Princeton University, from the work of scholar David Miller in his essay Introduction to Collective Behaviorfrom the book Getting it Wrong by W Joseph Campbellfrom the work of sociologist Robert E. Bartholomew and from what journalists Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow have collected for Slate. What events did occur The broadcast did cause some effects. We know that some Grover’s Mill locals, believing their town’s water tower had been transformed into a “giant Martian war machine,” fired guns at the water tank. There was at least one woman who sued Welles and his team for causing her a panic attack and one man received direct compensation from the future film director who paid for the shoes that a listener said he had given up to pay for the train ticket he needed to escape the alien catastrophe. It is also true that calls to hospitals increased from people telling them where they could go to get donate bloodand police stations in the New Jersey area were also called, but most who did this were looking to find out if it was a false alarm. They wanted confirmation that it was a joke, but they also called to protest about this program that could be deceiving people or to congratulate them on that great special on that Night of the Dead. But nothing more. All of them came together to serve the approach that the written press wanted to give: that the CBS program had caused mass hysteria, that the radio was lying and deceiving its listeners and that they had created a major problem. And the lies that were published The rumor that people were being treated for shock in New Jersey hospitals was false, as the Princeton Radio office later revealed. The news that a man had died of a heart attack because of the program, as reported by the Washington Post, was also not true. People didn’t jump out of the windows either. In general, hundreds of articlesmany with supposed witness accounts, witnessed chaos that, in truth, had not been such. I remembered Some time later in his memoirs Ben Gross, radio director of the New York Daily News, that in truth the streets of New York They were half empty. It would also later be known that CBS had disconnected the Welles broadcast in different local affiliates in the country to show regional bulletins that, they assumed, would interest their audience more than a little play by Martians. The biggest scandal of all, the audience figures. It was said that more than a million people had listened to the program, when it could not be true. In fact, most people were listening to the NBC rival to ventriloquist Edgar Bergin’s popular radio show. And with most people we are talking about a 2% audience for the NBC show, as demonstrated by an independent survey that was done simultaneously with the broadcast. There is no doubt that in popular culture the idea that The War of the Worlds was a a before and afterthat the phenomenon must have been … Read more

In 2020, humanity was confined by covid. And that caused a species of bird to modify its beak to survive

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During the COVID-19 pandemic the world stopped completely. Something that scientists have named ‘anthropause‘: a sudden silence of human activity that left many of us confined at home and that even affected nature. This effect was so extreme that even a species of bird changed its beak as science has now seen. The study. Although in the past we saw some disorders in nature, such as the appearance of wild boars in Barcelona or dolphins in Venetian ports, now a team from UCLA has gone further. a study published in PNAS indicates that a population of urban birds modified his physical anatomy in record time. The objective they had was to survive the absence of humans at that time. But the most surprising thing is that when everything returned to normal and humans began to go outside, the birds returned to their original beak. The dilemma. To understand the discovery, you first have to know the protagonists: the dark eyed juncos. Some small birds that are very common in the field of the University of California in Los Angeles. Before 2020, these birds had short, wide beaks. Something that makes perfect sense, since they were in an environment full of students and, therefore, His diet was based on leftovers. that were left This is why it needed to have a robust beak to handle these ‘artificial’ foods. In contrast, their relatives that live in wild forests have longer, thinner beaks, designed like precision tweezers to search for insects and seeds hidden in vegetation. The pandemic. When UCLA closed its doors in 2020 and the students disappeared, so did the easy food. And this was where the university researchers saw a unique opportunity to study what happens when you eliminate humans from the ecological equation. The results. What was seen in this case is the new generations of reeds that were born precisely in this time of ‘loneliness’ they developed longer and thinner beaks. All this because since there was no human garbage, they had to behave like wild birds again, foraging on the ground and looking for food alternatives. But what was most fascinating happened after the reopening. As soon as students (and their snacks) returned to campus in 2022, the morphology of the peaks quickly reverted to the urban form with a short, thick shape. This is ultimately an extremely rapid evolutionary change that is very rare to see. A change of mind. What makes this study so relevant to the scientific community is the speed of the field. Generally, we think of evolution as a process that takes thousands of years. However, what we observed here suggests that urban species have a much more elastic capacity for adaptation than we believed. Since it’s not just the peak. Previous studies by the same team had already noted behavioral changes: during the pandemic, these birds lost their fear of humans, becoming less aggressive and more curious, although that behavior also readjusted with our return. Its importance. This case is a brutal reminder of our ecological footprint. We don’t just alter the climate or the landscape; our mere presence and our waste acts as an evolutionary force that shapes the biology of the animals around us like these birds. The UCLA rushes have taught us that nature is not static; It is a dynamic system that reacts to our habits almost in real time. The question that remains in the air is: if a couple of years of silence changed the shape of a bird, what other invisible changes are we causing without realizing it? Images | Vincent van Zalinge David Mitran In Xataka | The insects of Antarctica had been living peacefully for thousands of years. Until microplastics arrived

Atomic clocks seemed untouchable. A blackout caused a difference in the official US time

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To think that the official time of a country could fail is, at first, almost impossible. We are not talking about a domestic clock or just any server, but about the system that sets the pace of networks, satellites and critical services. That is why it is surprising to discover what happened recently in the United States. A power outage in Colorado was enough to remind us that extreme precision is not isolated from the physical world that sustains it. According to CBS, Xcel Energy applied a preventive shutdown to reduce the risk of fires due to very strong gusts of wind, and the NIST complex in Boulder was affected on Wednesday of last week. The power outage was followed by a backup generator in the institute’s laboratory. In that sequence, and according to information confirmed by NIST, the country’s time reference was slightly off for a brief interval, until part of the supply could be restored. Put a tiny deviation into context. The figure that came out of the NIST systems was 4.8 microseconds, that is, just a few millionths of a second different from what was expected. To get an idea of ​​that magnitude, NIST itself explained that A human blink lasts around 350,000 microseconds, a very different scale from the recorded mismatch. The variation is so small that for the vast majority of everyday uses it is irrelevant, but it serves to illustrate the extent to which even a minor deviation is measured, recorded and taken seriously in temporal reference systems. To understand why this offset is considered relevant, it is worth clarifying what exactly the official time of the United States is. The country is not governed directly by UTC, the coordinated international standard to which multiple nations contribute, but by a national implementation known as NISTUTC. Since 2007, that reference is established under the supervision of the Secretary of Commerce and the US Navy, and is adjusted to stay aligned with global coordinated timing. NIST-F4 Cesium Source Atomic Clock NIST calculates the official time from a weighted average of sixteen clocks spread across its campus, including hydrogen masers and cesium beam clocks, each with different functions and strengths. This approach allows us to gain stability and resilience, since the final signal is not conditioned by the behavior of a single instrument. Therefore, even when one of the elements of the system is affected, the whole continues to offer an extremely precise reference. What broke was not the watch. During the blackout, the atomic clocks continued to run thanks to their battery systems, as explained by NIST. The problem occurred in the connection between some of those clocks and the measurement and distribution systems that consolidate the final signal. When that communication was lost for an interval and one of the planned backups failed, the resulting time reference slowed down slightly. Technical personnel who remained at the facilities later activated a reserve diesel generator, which allowed part of the operation to be recovered and the system to be stabilized. NIST page The institute stressed that this gap has no appreciable effects on daily life. The nuance appears when looking at certain technical sectors, where extreme synchronization is an operational requirement. Critical infrastructures, telecommunications networks, positioning systems or some scientific environments work with such tight margins that even a minimal deviation deserves to be recorded and reported. The next step was to return to operational normality. NIST indicated that the correction of the gap will be carried out when all systems are fully powered and can be recalibrated with guarantees. Xcel Energy announced yesterday Monday that it was completing the restoration of service after the storm and the preventive cuts applied due to fire risk. Meanwhile, the institute began an internal review to evaluate the impact of the blackout and verify that redundancies and protocols responded as planned. Images | NIST In Xataka | China says it has detected an NSA operation against its most sensitive infrastructure: the center that controls the time

the last one caused a big change in their way of living

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For ten years, in Kibali National Park (Uganda), a silent and brutal war was fought. Its protagonists were not humans, but the community of Ngogo chimpanzees largest known, which maintained a constant conflict with its neighbors until they ended up exterminating them to keep their territory. Now science has wanted to find biological meaning in this, and it has succeeded. Something natural. From the outside, this conflict can be seen as something very bloody, like the one we see between humans themselves to dominate a specific territory. But science believed that there was something more behind it, and in the end it has been seen that these wars They are more natural than we think within nature itself. And it gives us a concrete idea of ​​how the minds of these animals work. The PNAS scientific journal just found the biological logic behind this massacre, and has not hesitated to confirm that we are facing an evolutionary strategy very profitable. After the victory, the females in the winning group not only doubled their fertility, but infant mortality plummeted. A spoil of war. The investigation, led by Brian Wood and veteran anthropologist John Mitani, puts numbers to this brutality. And in this lapse of time the Ngogo expanded their domains by 22% at the cost of eliminating the neighbors who were occupying it in that case. But just like humans, we often create wars. to get more resourcesanimals seem to do something similar. This territorial expansion brought with it a great abundance of food resources that completely transformed the demographics of the group. To get an idea, the researchers in this case compared data from the three years before the conquest with those from the three years after. In this case it was seen that before the victory there were only 15 births in the group, while after the victory there were 37 new offspring. And it is not something random, since it is the first time that cooperative killing between groups has been linked to “territorial gain and greater reproductive success.” The biological sense. But beyond the fact that more chimpanzees are born in this environment, it has also been seen that much more survive. And in the chimpanzee population, infant mortality is really high because they suffer from serious malnutrition at the beginning of their lives, as well as diseases or infanticide. The data is quite clear. Before winning the war, 41% of the offspring died before they were three years old. After annexing neighboring territory and eliminating border threats, that figure radically dropped to 8%. Because? The equation is quite simple: more food in the environment, less competition and greater security as there are not so many enemy incursions that kill their young. Josep Call, a primatologist at the University of St Andrews, defines it as “biological rationality”. It is not a moral decision, it is pure natural selection: the genes of those who successfully apply this violence are much more likely to perpetuate themselves. Death patrols. A question that we can ask ourselves in this case is how an animal with these characteristics can be organized to go to war. And although we may think that they do it without thinking about it first, the reality is that they organize very well calculated border patrols in their territory. Upon reaching the border, these animals completely change their behavior, as they become much quieter to maintain stealth, with a strategy that is quite similar to what we can see in a human military exercise. The moment they encounter a rival group, if they are outnumbered they know that they will not be able to win and the smartest thing to do is to retreat. But if the situation is contrary, it will be attacked without mercy. Attacks include hitting, biting and dismembering. It is a coordinated violence that, in the case of the Ngogo, was favored by an unusual demographic factor: they had a disproportionate number of males, which allowed them to form patrol “squads” that were more lethal than those of their neighbors who did not have this advantage. War? Although the parallel with human conflicts is inevitable, scientists prefer the term “intergroup violence.” The reasons that exist to defend this difference are that among chimpanzees there is no ideology, but rather they do it exclusively out of biological necessity, such as having food or providing for the smallest members of the community. And the truth is that annihilating the neighbors is one of the smartest ways to achieve this. Images | Satya deep In Xataka | These researchers are not only convinced that chimpanzees can talk, but that we have proof since 1962

Apple is resisting the push for AI PCs because AI PCs have caused complete indifference

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On paper everything was the sea of ​​pretty. Copilot+ PCs wanted resurrect and reinvent the PC turning it into a device with which you can do much more with much less effort. There was a lot of talk about TOPS power, how AI would do a lot of things for us, and an argument that would boost sales. Do you know what? Its impact has been practically zero. For better or worse, the PC segment has not undergone major changes. Sales have not suddenly started to grow, nor have they plummeted. If the Copilot+ PCs wanted to boost sales, they certainly haven’t seemed to succeed. But at least they don’t seem to have had a negative impact either. Own elaboration. Data: IDC The arrival of AI features on PCs should theoretically have had an impact on PC sales by boosting them, but also theoretically on Mac sales, from which it should have stolen some share if AI had been an important argument. As we know, Apple has barely emphasized the AI ​​functions of its equipment. Although introduced Apple Intelligence in June 2024, it did so in a very limited way and almost a year and a half later its functions remain modest. Own elaboration. Data: Apple quarterly reports. The people keep buying Macbut not because of Apple Intelligence, but because they are just that, Mac. This has been noted throughout this period in which sales have remained relatively stable. The Mac is a lot of Mac The recent presentation of the MacBook Pro M5 could encourage sales towards the end of the year, but where Apple seems to have a winning horse is in the MacBook Air M4which has only been on the market for eight months and offers an enviable price-performance ratio. In the US, for example, you can get it right now for 800 dollars (without taxes). Here, for 949 euros. Few Windows laptops can compete with Apple’s offering, which is surprisingly balanced and has extraordinary room for maneuver thanks to its Apple M4 chip. When we tested the Acer Swift Go 14 AIFor example, we find a device that at 719 euros is undoubtedly cheaper and boasts 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of SSD, but is inferior in its chip, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus. In Geekbench single-core it is around 2,400 points, and in multi-core it is 10,500. The Apple M4 is around 3,600 and 15,000 points respectively. Acer’s, like other manufacturers selling PC Copilot+, is on paper a comparatively decent proposal, but still fails to impose that TOPS argument and AI functions. They are there and can help, but they are not a decisive argument at the moment, at least if we look at the sales of these devices. PC sales may pick up and boost in the short term, but if they do it will probably not be because of AI features, but for the simple reason that Official Windows 10 support has ended —although that has small print— and many users and companies may have decided to renew their IT infrastructure. However, the promise that AI was going to revolutionize our PCs remains just that: a promise. Apple seems like it can rest easy. And it must be, because this last quarter the Mac division has grown 13% in revenue compared to the same period of the previous year. Not bad. In Xataka | Microsoft is already thinking about what the computers of 2030 will be like and has come to a conclusion: touching is overrated Image | Wesson Wang

Altri’s megaplant has caused a huge social response in Galicia. And now the government has given him the lunge

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In April 2022, the Portuguese company Altri chose Palas de Rei in Lugo to install a large plant initially destined for textile fibers (Lyocell). It was presented as “The most important project” From the Galician candidacy for the Next Generation funds and received early political support. However, according to They met The procedures and the real scope, collective and critical means began to refer to the initiative as a large cellulose panel, with much broader impacts than the “biophabic” label suggested. Three years later, the star plan runs out of plug: the central government leaves it out of electrical planning until 2030, and the project enters the risk zone. The decision that changes everything: without substation, there is no projectThis week, the Ministry for Ecological Transition He has left out of its 2025-2030 planning both the substation and the access to the network that Altri claimed for its plant. According to El Paísthe Executive has prioritized “more viable” investments, with greater socioeconomic return and lower environmental impact, and avoids loading consumers with projects associated with projects With financial uncertainty. Greenfiber – the promoting society participated by ALTRI and Greenalia— maintains that it is of a “purely political” resolution and announces resources; The PP of Galicia speaks of “punishment” to the Lucense industry, while neighborhood and environmental platforms celebrate the pass, without lowering their guard. He No of the central government. The Secretary of State for Energy claims that the substation and connection requested would only serve this project, whose execution is not yet guaranteed its financing, including request of 250 million euros in public aid (decarbonization belong). “We cannot assume a network investment that could be idle,” Sources from the Ministry transfer. For its part, According to El ConfidencialAltri warns: “Without connection there is no investment”, but progress that will exhaust “all resource mechanisms.” The position of the Xunta. The Galician government argues that the project meets and that the favorable day (published in the DOG) support your environmental viability under conditions and surveillance program, waiting for other authorizations. The Xunta insists that the factory It would be “energetically neutral” and that its electrical exclusion “takes Lugo from the industrial map.” Therefore, as they detail in the confidentialhas translated into a political confrontation has resulted in hard crosses between Alfonso Rueda and the leader of the PSdeG, José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, who advanced the government’s decision. The project from within. Different groups of neighborhood platforms such as Ulloa Viva, Brotherhoods of Marshamers of the Ría de Arousa and NGOs such as Adega and Greenpeace alert three key impacts: Water: Collection of 46 million liters daily of the Ulla and discharge of about 30 million liters/day – part at 27 ° C— in a river already tensioning for episodes of eutrophication, with potential condition to the Ría de Aruous. Raw material: estimated annual consumption of wood between 1.2 million m³ and even 2.4 million tons of eucalyptus. The divergence of figures underlines the controversy over eucalypticization and its effects on biodiversity and fire. Emissions and air: 75 -meter chimney and compound emissions acid rain precursorswith corrective measures subject to regulations. The Water War reaches courts. While the electrical board clears, the judicial one is turned on. Adega and the Da Ría de Arousa (PDRA) platform, together with the CIG, have filed contentious-administrative resources to declare the water grant file, having exceeded the legal deadline of 18 months without resolution, According to the jump. To the offensive They have added seven brotherhoods of the Ulla-Arousa and the entire sector of the Galician mussel. The Xunta replicates that the complexity of the procedure justifies the delay and that there is no damage to third parties, an interpretation that the plaintiffs reject to generate “legal insecurity.” And now what? Electrical exclusion opens a period of allegations and probable more intense prosecution of the file. Although the favorable day of the Xunta keeps the administrative channel, the “Electricity Class” and Water Concession alive places the project at its most fragile time. “Without water and without connection,” the detractors agree, “there is no macrocellulose.” Galicia returns to live a pulse between industrial promise and territory protection. Between an investment that the Xunta considers a tractor and a social license that, for now, does not arrive. The Palas de Rei plant, a symbol of that conflict, remains in the air: aside, the lack of network and the judicial front; On the other, the political effort to keep it afloat. The outcome is no longer settled only in offices: also on the banks of the Ulla and in the Ría de Arousa – and in court. Image | Greenpeace Xataka | Renfe is delighted to have competition in Madrid-Galicia. Especially since he knows that he will not have competition

The Morgue of Paris organized “Open doors.” And caused tumults with thousands of daily visits

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The bodies in the Paris deposit lie, motionless, completely naked except for small leather shrouds. Each one has died for a different cause, and all impute the reasons. Some have been stabbed in the belly. Another has drowned, he is swollen and his skin exhibits a obscene violet color. Another has been crushed by a heavy machine in one of the factories of the French city, increasingly industrialized and implacable. They all have something in common. They lie in almost vertical tables, which allow them to contemplate, on the other side of large windows, the thousands of Parisians who spend every day through the morgue. All bodies in the deposit can be contemplated by citizens. And it has become the favorite show of the pedestrians. In the mid -nineteenth century, walk in Paris to pass in front of the deposit and See the bodies It was the entertainment of fashion among citizens. Of course, there was an excuse: to help identify those who still had no name. But the morbid seized the population and went to see the exposed corpses became an entertainment that went far beyond public service, to the point that appeared in The guides of the time of the Parisian shows that the visitor should not be lost. Under the name of ‘The Museum of Death’, it was organized an entire industry around the facade of the body depositand it was easy to find actors, juggers and street artists asking for money in the surroundings of the great windows. He French playwright Leon Gozlan He described it like this: “You will see the drowned just like you go to other places to see the latest fashion.” And the very Emile Zola wrote: “The morgue is a show within the reach of all the pockets and that poor and rich passers -by may see free. The door is open, whoever wants to enter” Paris Danger At that time, Paris was a dangerous city (like all the great cities of Europe): crimes followed and occupied the first flat of the newspapers. And not only that: at this time when Industrialization grew by leaps and boundsthe mortality in the factories was very high, often the injured did not even have family in the city, but they came from rural areas and had arrived in Paris in search of money to feed their families, so that the bodies remained days in the deposit until they were claimed. These exhibitions in the morgue was like an extension of the black chronicle: the Parisians read in the newspaper about a crime or an accident and immediately could Expand the information going to see the bodies to the windows of the deposit. 40,000 people came to go to the dead daily (for getting an idea: Before your fireNotre-Dame received 30,000 a day). A true morbid show without a paragon in the history of the city. An example of what people came to see: on November 8, 1876, two packages containing the dismembered body of a woman were found in the Seine. The body was rebuilt, covered with a canvas and placed its head on it. A grotesque and brutal aging … that four days later of the crimes came to see more than 30,000 visitors, 40,000 on the 13th and 14th, the morgue records reached 68,250 entries. Almost a week after crimes, which makes a state of considerable decomposition. Finally, the closing of the show arrived: the Morgue of Paris closed the doors to the public in March 1907, when Criticisms won the unstoppable increase in morbid. Many newspapers complained, because their chronicles of which bodies were going to be exposed were among the most read of the daily rotations. The new century had just been born, and they were to come much more terrible shows. Although a little more modest. Header | Jstor Daily In Xataka | € 1,200 per body: the funeral home that sold bodies of deaths to universities and charged for false incinerations

A tsunami that caused thousands of dead

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He Magnitude earthquake 8.8 Registered this morning on the Kamchatka Peninsula, it reminded many of the earthquake and subsequent Tsunami that devastated a segment of the Japanese western coast in 2011. However, to find a precedent closer to the recent event we have to go back further in time, as of November of the year 1952. Some precedents. Specifically to November 4, 1952at 18:58, Spanish peninsular time, 3:58 am in the Kamchatka Peninsula. It is estimated that this day, the failure that separates the Pacific and North America plates slid generating an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 (it must be taken into account that the logarithmic nature of the scale implies that the difference between both events could be remarkable). The event happened almost 73 years ago is maintained as the largest earthquake recorded in the region, although the archives of the United States Geological Service (USGS) also highlight an earthquake that occurred in 1923 that reached magnitude 8.4. Both the Today’s earthquake Like 1952 they had their OSONRO EPICENTROS (At a distance of only 30 kilometers from each other), unlike the one that occurred in 1923, whose epicenter was in the coast of the Peninsula. The consequences of an earthquake. The 1952 earthquake was not only the largest registered in the region, it was also the fifth largest earthquake measured by the instruments of the geologists. This event also unleashed a powerful tsunami with waves of up to 12 meters captured on the nearby Paramushir Island. The NCEI records (National Centers for Environmental Information), body responsible for preserving data and geophysical information of US institutions, indicate that the 1952 event cost the lives of between 4,000 and 14,000 people, with estimates that place the number in about 10,000 deaths. Despite its magnitude, there is no direct record of direct damages cause of the earth movement in itself. As on other occasions, it was the posterior tsunami that wreaked havoc: the estimates of the NCEI indicate that 99% of the victims of the event would have died as a result of the tsunami. More than earthquakes. Kamchatka is a geologically active region. In the environment in which the earthquakes of 1952 and this year were given, the Pacific plaque moves in the west-northwest direction, at a speed of about 80 mm a year with respect to the North American plate. This implies that between the two earthquakes the plates moved about six meters, Remember the USGS. Proof of the geological activity of the region are also the numerous volcanoes located in the Peninsula. The volcanoes of the region They are still active (As you have seen during the last incident), but also make up an interesting ecosystem that led Unesco to include them in your list of the World Heritage. In Xataka | Uploading to a roof in case of Tsunami only makes sense in one place: in Japan they take us decades of advantage Image | USGS / US Navy

How a decision in France and a connection in southern Spain caused the blackout

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Huenaja, a small Granada town of just 1,100 inhabitants and with more than 700 megawatts installed of solar energy, It was the zero zone of the blackout of April 28. In seven seconds, everything It was plunged into a total collapse. Now the expert committee of the European Network of Transmission Systems Operators (Entso-E) has identified Two questions. The investigation. For more than six weeks, this European agency has worked to find the causes of the blackout, apart from the Electricity of Spain and its Portuguese homologous, Ren. According to the reporthalf an hour before collapse, two episodes of power and frequency oscillations were recorded in the European continental network. The Iberian Peninsula, connected to the continent mainly through lines with France, began to lose synchronism. A new detail. The ETSO-E has pointed out that at 12:16 and 12:22, there was a change in interconnection with France: a system with dynamic control (hiking of direct current) was passed to a fixed export mode of 1,000 MW to the Gallic country. According to the experts consulted, this decision left the Spanish system without support for synchronous power, which reduced its margin of action before oscillations. As a piece of dominoes. Almost in parallel, Ree made an internal connection of lines in southern Spain, which, According to Entso-ewould have caused surge located in areas such as Huenaja (Granada), Valdecaballeros (Badajoz) and Don Rodrigo (Seville). Several electrical plants then activated their automatic protections, disconnecting to avoid damage. This further aggravated the tension in the network, triggering a chain reaction: generation falls, frequency loss and total disconnection of the Iberian system of the rest of Europe. Was any system activated? System defense plans, automatic mechanisms designed to stop these processes, were activated, according to has confirmed The report. However, they were not able to contain the fall due to the speed and intensity of the event. At 12:18:47, the interconnection lines between Spain and France were disconnected by protection against the loss of synchronism. At that moment, the peninsula was isolated and collapsed completely. A major debate. This crisis has uncovered a great conflict at the technical and political level, while responsibilities They pass like a hot potato. The debate is intensified around the backup systems and the penetration of renewable energy. On the one hand, nuclear plants They were criticized For disconnecting, but three were in scheduled stop, and the others operated normally until the system collapsed, activating protection protocols. On the other hand, the lack of inertia of the system has been stated again. Not synchronous renewable energies, such as solar and wind, They do not contribute inertia to the electrical systemwhich makes it difficult to stop sudden frequency falls. However, blaming renewables would be to simplify excessively. However, the technical report is clear: it was not exclusive fault of renewables, but a systemic failure, aggravated by operational decisions and structural limitations such as low international interconnection. An interconnection problem. The blackout has evidence They have demanded France that is committed to concrete deadlines and binding actions to advance in electrical interconnection corridors. What comes now. The Entso-E expert panel continues their research and have created A web page for this. Now they will meet on June 23 and will be delivered to the European Commission. Meanwhile, the event leaves an awkward lesson: in an increasingly renewable and decentralized electrical system, technical coordination, The operational resilience and cross -border planning They are more crucial than ever. Image | Unspash Xataka | Spain and Portugal are tired of promises: they ask France to leave the electric alley

In case they were happening few things, the sun has just caused a radius blackout with its most powerful eruption of 2025

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The sun has decided to remind us that we are in their hands. A new active region of sun spots, called AR4087, has released this morning a solar eruption of class X2.7, the most powerful so far this year. The sun was not asleep. Eruptions, glows or solar flares are classified as Five categories According to its intensity: A, B, C, M and X. Each letter represents events ten times more intense than the previous letter. An eruption X2.7 is located at the lower end of the most powerful category, but remains an important and unusual eruption. Observatories that constantly monitor the solar crown They detected it on May 14 at 08:25 UTC (10:25 in Spain). The X2.7 class flares has been the strongest of 2025, demonstrating that the sun is still awake After last year’s activitywhen it reached the solar maximum. Radio lock. Although it was not directed directly to the Earth, the eruption launched an intense X -ray pulse and extreme ultraviolet radiation that reached our planet at the speed of light. When impacting with the upper atmosphere of the Earth, this radiation has rapidly ionized, interfering with the high frequency radio signals (HF) on the visible face of our planet. As a result, a R3 level radius blackout was detected (cataloged as “strong”) in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The show begins. The sun stain AR4087 remains very active and Soon he will look directly to the Earth As the sun revolves on its own axis. In the last hours he has produced class rashes M5.3, X2.7 and M7.74. The big question now is whether the most powerful eruption was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection, the famous solar plasma and magnetic field languages ​​that, when impacting with the Earth’s magnetic field, can cause geomagnetic storms and intense auroras to different latitudes, Like the historic Red Auroras of 2024. At the moment, the AR4087 region is at the visible edge of the sun, so the earth seems to be out of reach. Image | Spaceweather In Xataka | Webb and Hubble telescopes watched Jupiter’s auroras at the same time. The problem is that they did not see the same

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