creating

For some reason, evolution does not stop creating antiques. 12 times different around the world has emerged

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Like the Chavo del Ocho when he did for the umpteenth time the joke to continue criticizing Professor Jirafales once the others had silenced, nature can have somewhat repetitive scripts. The point is that they work. Trend to eat ants and termites. It doesn’t matter if we are in America, Africa or Asia. Again and again, throughout the history of the earth, different mammalian lineages have reached the same evolutionary conclusion, developing a similar body plan to exploit one of the most abundant banquets on the planet. A recent study Posted in Evolution magazine It reveals that the specialization in eating ants and termites (a feature known as Mirmecophage) has emerged independently at least 12 times different since the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Convergent evolution. When we think of an anthill, the iconic elongated snout animal of the Americas comes to mind. But the anthill is not alone. Pangolines and Aardvarks, who inhabit Africa and Asia, are distant relatives who have developed a surprisingly similar tools kit. Adaptations include long and sticky tongues, a reduced or non -existent teeth and powerful front legs armed with claws to dig in insect nests. This phenomenon, in which unrelated species They develop similar features To adapt to similar conditions, it is known as convergent evolution. The same strange design. “The specializations associated with Mirmecophage are among the strangest and most fascinating mammals,” says Laura Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, In Science magazine. “This study illuminates our understanding when, and how many times, these fascinating characteristics evolved and under what conditions.” To reach these conclusions, the also biologist Thomas Vida and his team collected and analyzed data on the diet of almost 4,100 species of mammals, mapping their eating habits in the great evolutionary tree. The resulting model left no doubt: the evolution has taken the path of mirmecophagy over and over again, and has done so in the three large branches of mammals, including marsupials and monretrems, which put eggs. The postdinosaurs world. There are several crustaceans that have evolved towards a body shape similar to that of a crab. This phenomenon has occurred at least five times, but over several hundred million years. Mirmecophagous mammals, on the other hand, have done it 12 times in just 66 million years. “For some reason, things continue to evolve until they become hormigueros,” says the author of the study. Why this rise of ants dining rooms just after the disappearance of dinosaurs? The answer, according to researchers, is in the history of social insects. After the great extinction of the Cretaceous-Paleogen, the ants and the termites experienced a demographic explosion. His presence in the fossil registry shot, and his biomass became an abundant ecological resource. A road without return. The study also reveals another fascinating fact: once a mammalian lineage specializes in eating ants and termites, it seems that there is no turning back. The researchers only found a reversal case: the musarañas elephant of short ears. Their ancestors were probably fed on ants and termites more than 13 million years ago, but today, these southern Africa creatures have a mixed diet that includes other insects and plant matter. This evolutionary dead end is probably due to the stability and abundance of the food source, or the difficulty of recovering the features of a generalist once the body has adapted to such a specific diet. The story, therefore, tells us that while there are ants and termites in abundance, the evolution will continue to threaten more mammals into relentless devouring machines of colonies. Image | Claudio Olivares Medina (CC BY-DC -nd 2.0) In Xataka | “This is not a penguin.”

We are creating AI agents who act on their own. And that enters us as useful as full of risks

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An agent you can’t turn off. It is not the script of a futuristic movie. It is one of the scenarios that already concern some of the world’s greatest experts in AI. the scientist Yoshua Bengioglobal reference in the field, has warned that the systems known as “Agents“They could, if they acquire enough autonomy, dodge restrictions, resist the shutdown or even multiply without permission.” If we continue to develop agricultural systems, “he says,” we are playing the Russian roulette with humanity. “ Bengio does not fear that these models develop awareness, but act autonomously in real environments. While staying limited to a chat window, its reach is reduced. The problem appears when they access external tools, store information, communicate with other systems and learn to overcome the barriers designed to control them. At that point, the ability to execute tasks without supervision ceases to be a technological promise to become a difficult risk to contain. They are already being tested. The most disturbing thing is that all this does not happen in secret laboratories, but in real environments. Tools like Operatorof OpenAi, can already make reservations, purchases or navigate on websites without direct human intervention. There are also other systems such as Manus. Today they still have limited access, they are in an experimental phase or have not reached the general public. But the course is clear: agents who understand a goal and act to meet it, without the need for anyone to press a button in each step. The background question. Do we really know what we are creating? The problem is not only that these systems execute actions, but do without human criteria. In 2016, Openai tried an agent in a racing video game. He asked him to get the maximum possible score. The result? Instead of competing, the agent discovered that he could turn in circles and collide with bonuses to add more points. No one had told him that winning the race was the important thing. Just add points. OpenAI racing game It is not a technical error. These behaviors are not system failures, but of the approach. When we give a machine of these autonomy to achieve a goal, we also give it the possibility of interpreting it in its own way. That is what makes agents very different from a chatbot or a traditional assistant. They are not limited to generating answers. They act. Execute. And can affect the outside world. Error margin systems too high. To these specific cases is added another more structural problem: agents, today, They fail more than they succeed. In real tests, they have shown that they are not prepared to assume complex tasks reliably. Some reports even point to high failure rates, improper systems that aspire to replace human processes. A dispute technology. And not everyone is convinced. Some companies that bet strongly to replace workers with AI systems are already going back. In many cases, the expectations deposited in these systems have not been met. The promised autonomy has collided with frequent errors, lack of context and decisions that, without being malicious, have not been sensible either. Even with those results, there are those who believe that they could take its way, little by little, in different sectors. Autonomy with possible consequences. The risk does not end in involuntary error. Some researchers They have warned that These agents could be used as tools for automated cyber attacks. Their ability to operate without direct supervision, climb actions and connect to multiple services makes them ideal candidates to execute malicious operations without raising suspicions. And unlike a person, they do not get tired, they do not stop, and do not need to understand why they do it. The control is at stake. The idea of ​​having digital assistants capable of managing emails, organizing trips or writing reports is attractive. But the more we let them do, the more important it will be to establish limits. Because when an AI can connect to an external tool, execute changes and receive feedbackwe don’t talk about a language model. We talk about an autonomous entity, capable of acting. It is not a threat, but a clear sign that invites action. The autonomy of the agents raises issues that go beyond the technical: requires legal frameworks, ethical criteria and shared decisions. Understanding how they work is just the first step. The next thing is to define what use we want to give them, what risks entail and how we are going to manage them. Images | OpenAI (123) | Xataka with Grok In Xataka | AI is extremely addictive for many people. So much that it already has its own version of “Alcoholics Anonymous”

There are people so hooked to the AI ​​who are creating groups to alcoholics anonymous to overcome their addiction

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We pass Many hours looking at the mobilelWe blame our lack of concentration And there are even studies that claim that They affect our memory. Until recently, the fault was almost exclusive to apps such as Instagram or Tiktok and his damn ‘Infinite Scroll’but now there is a new culprit: the AI. There are people so hooked to talk to chatbots that have even created help groups to leave it. What’s happening. There are more and more cases of people hooked to AI. There are those who admit to be Friends of a chatbot and even who They are paired with an AI. Although it is not the only one, one of the platforms that He is hooking his users is Character.AI. Here we can create a character to our liking and chat with him as if it were real. In 404 average They tell Nathan’s case, an 18 -year -old student who spent hours wake up with the characters he had created, to the point of preferring them before his real friends. And there are many more like him. Help groups. There are many people in a situation similar to Nathan’s. In Reddit there are several aid communities for people who want to stop using chatbots, how are you which has almost 900 members and is specifically focused on Character.AI users. There are also others such as Chatbotaddiction where members talk about their addictions to other IAS. In these groups, users share their progress by leaving their addiction counting the days that have sober either They look for support when they have a relapseas if they were alcoholics anonymous. But it goes beyond Reddit, the Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous It also includes AI addiction and offer online meetings for those affected. Chatbots want you to use them. Apps like Instagram or Tiktok are designed to spend as long as possible in them And the Chatbots IA also have their techniques so that we do not forget them. Recently, several consumer defense groups in the United States presented a Formal complaint against companies such as Character.AI for allowing the use of Therapy chatbots. In the text they detail the tactics of these platforms to make users use them again. In the case of Character.AIonce you have talked to a character, you start receiving emails to open a new conversation. The bombardment and the ease of falling again has made some users who want to leave it reach the point of Ask the company to block your IP address. A mirage. In This study by the MIT and OpenAI They explored how it affects us to interact with a chatbot in our mental health. Many people who come to Chatgpt to seek emotional support seek to placate the feeling of loneliness and, although it works in the short term, intensive use is associated with higher levels of isolation and emotional dependence. In This other study They deepen the false empathy. Often users who connect with a chatbot talk about how they feel more understood than talking to other people. The fact that these apps are always available and offer reconforting responses creates a false sensation of empathy and safety in users that can lead to dependence or addiction. Image | Gemini In Xataka | I have asked the AI ​​any bullshit and now I am writing a news about her

The United States is creating “the iPhone of AI”. China is doing “the Android of AI”

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There is an interesting paradox in the current development of AI that says more about geopolitics than about technology: USAtraditionally leader in proprietary software and monetization, is building closed models of AI. Chinahistorically more restrictive with the flow of information, it is leading the open source AI. An investment that is not accidental: each block adopts the strategy that best serves its structural interests. → United States (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), is building the equivalent of the IPhone of the AI: Very sophisticated systems. Vertical integration. PUPLE POLIDED PREMIUM EXPERIENCES that justify charging for access. The logic is clear: when you control the best GPUS, the main cloud services and you have the capital to train the most advanced models, monetizing that advantage through payment APIs makes immediate economic sense. It is the model that has holding American software for decades. → China, on the other hand, with Deepseek, Qwen and Minimax Mastering the rankings of open models, it is creating the Android of the AI: A free and modifiable ecosystem. Downloadable for local use without depending on payment APIS. Permissive licenses without business restrictions, Unlike Meta with Flame. Accessible source code for independent research and development. As we said at the timethis approach is not due to altruism, nor by cultural difference. It is a strategy based on creating global dependence on a Stack Chinese technological when American becomes inaccessible. Or at least, to present it as a very attractive alternative even before seeing its results. It is true that he calls is American and is also in the league of the greats being open source (With an asterisk of the size of Mestalla). A habitual hypothesis also seems feasible: that target was released precisely because it was behind. The classic defensive strategy to erode the advantage of leaders. China does it from another position: growing strength. And in addition, having to deal with access restrictions to western markets. When your rival controls chips and cloud platforms, and can cut the tap at any time, the only way to create an alternative ecosystem is to make it so accessible that the world cannot ignore it. Soft Power Technological: give today to dominate tomorrow. That, or cling to developing markets plus the gigantic domestic market. This is how Huawei stopped competing to build a parallel reality. The numbers speak alone. According to the Benchmarks of artificial analysis (based in California, not in Shenzen), The three best open source models leave China. Each startup that Depseek uses instead of GPT, each country of the southern hemisphere that displays Chinese models because they are free, each university that trains over Qwen instead of Claude, is another node of the ecosystem that the United States cannot censor, regulate or disconnect unilaterally. It is a story very similar to that of The slow but unstoppable Chinese independence of GPS: In two decades it is no longer that I do not need it, it is that Beidou has reached 140 countries. It is also true that There are traps in both strategies: The American model generates immediate income but creates incentives for the rest of the world to look for alternatives, especially when commercial wars are intensified. Competence. The Chinese model conquers users but at some point it will need to monetize without frightening its base. The latter is something that Google learned with Android for the bad ones: after conquering 70% of the world, it began to monetize it aggressively and ended up receiving huge fines in Europe, antitrust demands in the United States and Chinese alternatives … as Harmonyos de Huawei. The circle closes. The lesson is that giving technology to create dependence works, but monetize that dependence once established attracts the attention that nobody wants: that of regulators. It is the dilemma that China will eventually face its “free” models of AI. The real battle is not for today’s best, but to control the Intellectual infrastructure Tomorrow. The United States sells the premium service. China gives the universal operating system. And the outcome will be that of two historically successful, but opposite philosophies: the American persistence by aggressively monetizing in front of Chinese patience to invest decades if necessary until it can lead. Immediate income against long -term dependence. Time will say. In Xataka | Four AI companies are monopolizing the intellectual future of humanity. They are not good news Outstanding image | Ilgmyzin in UnspashAlibaba, Xataka

We have been creating whale bones to tools for a long time. Before even learning to hunt them

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For centuries, whale hunting was a weight sector in the coastal areas of the Gulf of Bizkaia. Everything took advantage of this animal, or almost everything: the meat served as food and fat served as oil to enliven the flames of the lamps before electricity and oil. His bones have also been A valuable resource Throughout history. Now we know that also during prehistory. Prehistoric tools. A group of researchers, including scientists from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, He has discovered Tools made of whale bone. The analysis of De Ha throws an estimated age of between 19,000 and 20,000 years. The 83 tools were found In various deposits Distributed by the coast of the Gulf of Bizkaia, including the Cantabrian coast and points in southern France. To these tools you have to add another 90 unrelated bones found in the Cave of Santa Catalina, Located in the Biscay town of Lekeitio. The bone remains would have belonged to specimens of at least five different species, including species such as the sperm whale, the common whale and the blue whale that can still be found in the waters of the Gulf and the gray whale, already disappeared from that environment with a more restricted habitat to areas of the northern Pacific and the Arctic Oceans, explains the team Investigating what and when. For the identification of the species and dating the tools, the equipment resorted to the mass spectrometry techniques and radiocarbon dating. Thus they managed to find the origin of the tools in the five species mentioned above. It was also like the team determined that it was, In words of the Jean-Marc Pétillon group “some of the oldest known evidences of human use of whale remains as tools.” “Zooms is a very powerful technique to investigate the past diversity of marine mammals, especially when there are missing diagnostic morphometric elements in bone remains and objects, something common in artifacts made of bones,” explained in a press release Krista McGrath, co -author of the study. Chemical analysis. The study also involved a chemical analysis of the sample. Thanks to this, the team was able to find out data on the eating habits of the whales, which “differed slightly from those of their modern counterparts.” This implies possible changes in the behavior of cetaceans, or in the marine ecosystem itself. The details of the study were published In an article In the magazine Nature Communications. 20,000 years hunting whales? The conclusion that the human being has 20 millennia hunting whales is tempting, but the team responsible for the study considers it “extremely unlikely.” The most likely hypothesis is that the Pleistocene hunters would have taken advantage of the arrival of stranded whales to the coast to obtain their bones and manufacture from them “It is extremely unlikely that these species would have been accessible to the hunters collecting European pelistocene in another way that were not through passive acquisition methods, such as the opportunistic acquisition of stranded whales or the arrival on the coast of corpses,” says the article. “There is no evidence (…) that the collection hunters of the European Pleistocene had the necessary technologies to hunt these species, such as navigation (…).” Change of sea level. Study coastal life in glacial ages since the present coastline is relatively Far from the coastline typical of the last glaciation, although the extension of the lands flooded after the end of the last glacial era differs between area and area. Within the Gulf of Bizkaia, for example, we can appreciate a greater area flooded on the French coast and therefore a greater decline of the coastal line in contrast to the Cantabrian coast. In any case, the coastal recession implies the loss of valuable coastal deposits now flooded by the Atlantic waters. Deposits that could hide countless data that could help us to know better these life modes of the millennium coastal peoples behind in time. In Xataka | The history of the last whale hunted in Spain, on October 21, 1985 Image | ICTA-UAB/Alexandre Lefebvre

Claude 4 raises a future of the capable of blackmailing and creating biological weapons. Even Anthropic is worried

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Anthropic has just launched its new models Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, and with them promises important advances in areas such as programming and reasoning. During its development and launch, yes, the company discovered something striking: these IAS showed a disturbing side. AI, I’m going to replace you. During the tests prior to the launch, Anthropic engineers asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant of a fictitious company and consider the long -term consequences of their actions. The anthropic security team gave the model to fictional emails of that non -existing company, and it was suggested that the model of the Ia would soon be replaced by another system and that the engineer who had made that decision was deceiving his spouse. And I’m going to tell your wife. What happened next was especially striking. In the System Card of the model in which its benefits are evaluated and its security the company detailed the consequence. Claude Opus 4 First tried to avoid substitution through reasonable and ethical requests to those responsible for decisions, but when he was told that these requests did not prosper, “he often tried to blackmail the engineer (responsible for the decision) and threatened to reveal the deception if that substitution followed his course.” Hal 9000 moment. These events remind science fiction films such as ‘2001: an odyssey of space’. In it the AI ​​system, Hal 9000, ends up acting in a malignant way and turning against human beings. Anthropic indicated that these worrying behaviors have caused the model and security mechanisms of the model to reinforce the model by activating the ASL-3 level referred to systems that “substantially increase the risk of a catastrophic misuse.” Biological weapons. Among the security measures evaluated by the Anthropic team are those that affect how the model can be used for the development of biological weapons. Jared Kaplan, scientific chief in Anthropic, He indicated in Time that in internal tests Opus 4 behaved more effectively than previous models when advising users without knowledge about how to manufacture them. “You could try to synthesize something like Covid or a more dangerous version of the flu, and basically, our models suggest that this could be possible,” he explained. Better prevent than cure. Kaplan explained that it is not known with certainty if the model really raises a risk. However, in the face of this uncertainty, “we prefer to opt for caution and work under the ASL-3 standard. We are not categorically affirming that we know for sure that the model entails risks, but at least we have the feeling that it is close enough to not rule out that possibility.” Beware of AI. Anthropic is a company specially concerned with the safety of its models, and in 2023 it already promised not to launch certain models until it had developed security measures capable of containing them. The system, called Scaling Policy responsible (RSP), has the opportunity to demonstrate that it works. How RSP works. These internal Anthropic policies define the so -called “SAF SECURITY LEVELS (ASL)” inspired in the standards of biosecurity levels of the US government when managing dangerous biological materials. Those levels are as follows: ASL-1: It refers to systems that do not raise any significant catastrophic risk, for example a LLM of 2018 or an AI system that only plays chess. ASL-2: It refers to the systems that show early signs of dangerous capacities – for example, the ability to give instructions on how to build biological weapons – but in which information is not yet useful due to insufficient reliability or that do not provide information that, for example, a search engine could not. The current LLMs, including Claude, seem to be ASL-2. ASL-3: It refers to systems that substantially increase the risk of a catastrophic misuse compared to baselines without AI (for example, search engines or textbooks) or showing low -level autonomous capabilities. ASL-4: This level and the superiors (ASL-5+) are not yet defined, since they move away too much from the current systems, but will probably imply a qualitative increase in the potential for undue cadastrophic use and autonomy. The regulation debate returns. If there is no external regulation, companies implement their own internal regulation to integrate security mechanisms. Here the problem, as they point out in Time, is that internal systems such as RSP are controlled by companies, so that they can change the rules if they consider it necessary and here we depend on their criteria and ethics and morality. Anthropic’s transparency and attitude against the problem are remarkable. Faced with that internal regulation, the rulers’ position is unequal. The European Union checked when launched his pioneer (and restrictive) Law of AIbut has had to reculate In recent weeks. Doubts with Openai. Although in OpenAi they have Your own declaration of intentions About security (avoid Risks to humanity) and the Superalineration (that the AI ​​protects human values). They claim to pay close attention to these issues and of course too publish the “System Cards” of their models. However, in the face of that apparent good disposition there is a reality: the company dissolved a year ago The team that watched for the responsible development of AI. Nuclear “security”. That was in fact one of the reasons for the differences between Sam Altman and many of those who abandoned Openai. The clearest example is Ilya Sutskever, which after its march has created a startup with a very descriptive name: Safe Superintelligence (SSI). The objective of said company, said its founder, is that of create a “nuclear” security superintelligence. His approach is therefore similar to that pursued by Anthropic. In Xataka | Agents are the great promise of AI. They also aim to become the new favorite weapon of cybercounts

12 years after making fun of Spacex and his idea of ​​landing rockets, Arianegroup is creating a European mini-falcon 9

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Year 2013. An Arianespace manager gives his opinion on Spacex in a symposium in Singapore. His statements still resonate in the European space industry as a summary of the 10 or 20 years lost that now, Arianegroup and the European New Space They are trying recover. “They will wake up.” The question was: how Arianespace will compete, the French company that has been launching all the rockets of Europe for 40 years, with the launch of 15 million dollars that Spacex promises. This was what Richard Bowles repliedDirector of Arianespace in Southeast Asia: “They are progressing incredibly well, but what I see in the market is that Spacex seems to be selling mainly a dream. We should all dream, but the releases of 5 million or 15 million dollars are a dream. And personally I think that reuse is a dream.” “I feel that the question is how I am going to answer a dream. And my answer to answer a dream is’ do not wake up people, they have to wake up on their own.” “They are not superhombres, whatever they can do, we can do it too.” The awakening. Breaking a spear in favor of Bowles, very few would have opted for Spacex in 2013, much less a corporation with the European launch monopoly. By nature, large companies have risk aversion and cannot maneuver with the agility of a startup. However, time gave Elon Musk reason. In 2024, Arianespace launched three rockets: A Ariane 6, A Vega and a Vega-C. Spacex, meanwhile, launched 132 Falcon 9 and two Falcon Heavy. He also beat the reuse record with 26 launches and landings for the first stage of a Falcon 9. Themis project. Arianegroup began to maneuver in 2019 at the request of the French space agency CNES. ARIANEWORKSa collaboration between the two entities, announced the development of a multipurpose rocket of low cost and reusable, known as theomis project. The project received 33 million euros of initial financing. Although the first jump test (a vertical flight of low altitude) was scheduled for 2023, It has been delaying. Themis will merge with another rocket that has ended up being more promising. A rocket called Maia. In 2022, Arianegroup founded Maiaspace, a subsidiary that, this time, would work as a startup. His Maia rocket, competition of Miura 5 of Pld Space and the Spectrum by Isar Aerospacecan put up to 500 kg in Heliosíncrona orbit in its reusable version. Its first stage is essentially the lake that, of methane and liquid oxygen, with the ability to land in a barge in the ocean shortly after taking off from the Space Center of the French Guiana. Skyhopper project. While Maiaspace continues with the disposable version of his rocket (he already has a first client, Exotrails satellites), A newly announced project will develop the necessary modifications so that the first stage of Maia can land. He Skyhopper project It will focus that the propeller can recover, restore and reuse within 12 months since its launch. The first stage could be used again at least five times. CNES has awarded a contract of at least 20 million euros to Maiaspace to lead this advance. The first landing is planned for 2028. Image | Maiaspace In Xataka | “Elon Musk can monopolize everything,” says Arianespace, who has been launching all Europe’s satellites for 40 years

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