danger

the danger of connecting anything to the mobile USB

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When the heat hits, we look for desperate solutions. Let them tell the Parisians by installing aluminum foil and thermal bags on the windows to try to mitigate the heat. At home, we turn on the air or the fanbut on the street it is suffocating and something I have been seeing a lot these last few days is people with portable fans. These devices are interesting because, although little, the air flow allows us to cool our faces a little. I’ve also seen passersby with more ‘pro’ solutions like neck fans (We have tried some, by the way.). A few days ago I was in London and I was looking at the tools that people were carrying, and among all the heat patches, I saw several using fans connected to their cell phones. And if I am writing this it is so that, if you use one of these USB-C fans connected to the port of your mobile, think a couple of times if you want to risk the integrity of the smartphone because it is something that can free you from the heat for a while, yes, but also It is more than likely that it will end up frying your phone. And no, it is not an exaggeration. The USB-C fan that fries your phone Although the USB-C port is great for connecting all kinds of accessories to your mobile, it is one thing if we can do it and another if we should. Not to mince words, plugging a USB-C fan directly into your phone works to power the fan, but it can damage the port, battery, or even the motherboard of your device. The reason is that these mini fans generate voltage spikes because they have cheap components and, above all, a motor that does not have a filter, so it “takes” what it needs without taking into account anything else because it does not have any filtering circuit. And that “nothing more” is the integrity of the device to which we connect it, which can be the mobile phone, but also the USB of a laptop. This video is tremendously revealing: The one of LeftyMaker It is a spectacular channel to dabble in electronics at home, but in recent years it has published several videos on battery and powerbank technology with ridiculous sizes, but great power and capacity. He usually gets to the point and the fan couldn’t be more direct. “Don’t buy this dangerous USB fan for your cell phone” is the title of a video in which, in less than three minutes, he demonstrates the reason why it should not occur to us to plug in the accessory. In it, he states that, with the help of an oscilloscope, he has observed voltage peaks above 20 or 40 V, depending on the fan. The mobile phone is not designed for that. According to the youtuber, it is due to the nature of the DC motor, since the current switches many times per second through the coils, generating those peaks when the current is interrupted even by a thousandth. Basically, the motor is continuously switching current between coils. Each short interruption acts as a small “disconnect” of an inductive load, and this generates momentary overvoltages. He explains that, although they are very brief peaks, because they are so constant they can reach the energy management chips, regulators and other components of the smartphone that are designed for 5 V, not for dozens of them, with the associated risk of permanent failure. Fan measurement | Screenshot of LeftyMaker video Measurement with the capacitor. He says there are still mini-peaks, but the decrease in voltage is evident | Screenshot of LeftyMaker video Can it be fixed? Yes, with a capacitor placed in parallel with the motor, something that costs a few cents, but not all of us know how to install nor do we have to know that we need it. And, although he does not show it on camera, he claims that he tested it on a real phone and the screen began to show lines that flickered as soon as he turned on the fan. His conclusion is clear: don’t buy it or give it only to someone you don’t likeand if you are hot, use a fan that is not powered directly by the USB port of a mobile phone, but by a powerbank that is more prepared for those peaks (it is not ideal either, but it is better to “kill” a 40 euro powerbank than a 500 euro mobile phone) or, directly, use fans that have their own battery. In Xataka | What science says about the “trick” of two crossed fans to cool the house: it works, but with limits

We have been drinking beer on the beach all our lives to cool off. Science warns of great danger to our body

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On any summer afternoon, the beaches and terraces are filled with people seeking refuge from the high temperatures, and the instinct of the vast majority is to order a cold beer. This classic drink in Spain gives a false sensation of immediate coolness and temporary relief, but here the question we must ask ourselves is: is it really useful to drink it to alleviate the sensation of heat? A myth. Given this classic scene, science suggests that it is a bad idea to have a beer to quench thirst, since alcohol causes exactly the opposite by triggering a response that dehydrates us. And this is explained by a fundamental hormone called vasopressin or antidiuretic hormone. As its name indicates, its function is to retain water in the kidneys when the body needs it because it is dehydrated, and alcohol suppresses it almost immediately. And it is something proven, since studies show that ethanol blocks the release of vasopressinpointing out that after ingesting alcohol, an acute drop in this hormone is observed in the bloodstream. This causes the kidneys to stop reabsorbing fluids and begin to expel water at a rapid rate to promote the production of urine and, therefore, the loss of fluids. an experiment key here demonstrated that the subjects studied lost up to 0.9 kg of water weight in just two hours. That is, for every beer you drink to “hydrate” your body expels more liquid than it consumes. And this is a context of heat and high sweating; It is a one-way ticket to a state of dehydration if you do not also drink water. The broken thermostat. The second big problem with drinking alcohol in the sun is thermal. Alcohol is a powerful vasodilator and this means that it widens the blood vessels, bringing more blood to the surface of the skin, which produces that typical facial flushing and sudden feeling of heat when we drink. And although at first the breeze on the skin may make us feel cooler, we are actually compromising our ability to regulate internal temperature. A model published in International Journal of Legal Medicine demonstrated that drinking alcohol before facing a high temperature environment drastically worsens the body’s response. Alcohol literally “hacks” the brain nuclei responsible for thermoregulation, activating abnormal responses of the body to heat. Water is the best. Drinking a cold beer has logically become socially rooted in our society, but when you are thirsty and have been sweating for a long time, it is best to hydrate with water first. And this also confirms that there is no alcohol that is “safe” from a medical point of view. Non-alcoholic beer can be an option since, since it is composed mainly of water and lacks alcohol, it does not have an effect on our antidiuretic hormone. Images | Nicolas Postiglioni In Xataka | Generation Z is reinventing the way they drink alcohol, but there is something that remains untouched: the stigma of teetotalling

extreme heat has put parmesan cheese in danger of extinction

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Summer has started strong with a heat wave that has affected all of Europe and experts are already warning that an even worse one is coming. Extreme temperatures not only affect us, animals also suffer from them and it is wreaking havoc on a very important industry in Italy, that of Parmesan cheese. what’s happening. They tell it in Reuters: Extreme heat is threatening the production of the most famous Italian cheese. The maximum temperatures, which can exceed 40 degrees, cause the cows to eat less, spend more time lying down and consequently produce less milk, the main ingredient in this cheese. Specifically, up to 10% less. Cool cattle. Livestock farmers decades ago only had to open the windows of the stables at night so that the livestock could cope better with the heat, but now this is no longer enough. The windows are constantly open and some ranchers have installed fans with water misters to lower the temperature a little more. The energy cost. The problem with installing these fans is that farms have seen their electricity bills increase. It is also being a problem for the companies that store the parmesan wheels, whose air conditioning systems have increased energy consumption by up to 30% more to maintain the optimal storage temperature, but the expense goes beyond the refrigeration itself. Giancarlo Ravanetti is the director of one of these facilities, known as “The Bank of Parmigiano”, and stores half a million wheels of parmesan worth 300 million euros. Speaking to Reuters, he indicated that “To make our facilities as energy efficient as possible, we have improved our cooling and boiler systems, modernized building insulation and increased renewable energy production.” Without grass, there is no parmesan. There are still more problems. Authentic Parmigiano Reggiano is produced in five provinces within the Emilia-Romagna region. To receive the designation of origin, the cows must be fed with grass and hay grown in this area, but with the heat and lack of rain this is an impossible task. The president of the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium laments that “If it does not rain, the grass does not grow, hay cannot be produced and it is impossible to obtain the milk necessary to make cheese.” A million-dollar industry. Parmesan is not only an icon of Italian cuisine, it is also the industry that supports much of the economy of Emilia-Romagna, where it employs thousands of people. It is estimated that it generates about 4.5 billion euros annually, of which half comes from exports, with the US being its main client. According to Paolo Ganzerli, sales director of the GranTerre food group, the situation is critical: “If extreme events become longer and more intense, they will undoubtedly have an impact on both the quantity and quality of milk, but above all they will cause an increase in costs.” And he adds that “Parmigiano Reggiano has been around for more than 800 years. We don’t want to be the last generation to eat it.” Image | Unsplash, edited Direct to the Palate | How Italians have made Parmesan cheese known (and imitated) all over the world

AI browsers arrived with the promise of changing everything. Not only have they not done it: they are a danger

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Artificial intelligence browsers did not come promising a smarter tab or a search engine with better answers. They arrived with a much greater ambition: OpenAI talks about getting closer to a “true super assistant”, Perplexity summarizes Comet as “the browser that works for you” and Google presents Gemini in chrome under the idea of ​​a new era of navigation. The promise is clear: that we stop moving around the web alone and start delegating part of the way. The problem is that that same promise is beginning to show a more delicate side. The warning. The University of Washington has now focused on this emerging risk. In an investigation Presented at the Agents in the Wild workshop, and released by the university itself on June 30, a team analyzed seven popular agentic browsers to see how they relate to basic protection of the modern web: the same origin policy. Their conclusion was clear: four of them opened relevant risk avenues and the researchers managed to run a complete proof of concept in ChatGPT Atlas in Agent Mode. The bottom jump. A traditional browser shows us pages and waits for our decisions. We can open a service, copy data, paste it somewhere else, compare options or fill out a form, but each step depends on us. Agentic browsers alter this logic because they incorporate systems capable of interpreting what appears on the screen and moving forward within the browser itself. We are no longer just talking about summarizing a page, but rather coordinating tasks between tabs, operating on open pages and completing actions that were previously left in the hands of the user. A new front. The risk does not arise just because a page is malicious, but because the agent can interpret that page as part of its instructions. That’s where he comes in prompt injectiona technique in which external content tries to alter the behavior of the model with hidden, camouflaged or simply inserted commands where the user does not expect to find them. In a chatbot, that is already a problem. In an agentic browser, the scope changes, because the system can process information from a page and convert it into actions within the browser. The barrier that was there. The same origin policy is one of those protections that we rarely see, but that underpins much of the modern web. Its function, simply put, is to prevent one page from freely reading or manipulating information from another just because both are open in the browser. Thanks to this separation, any website should not be able to simply access what we have in a bank, an email or a private service. The problem arises when an agent groups together information that was previously much more separated. Let’s imagine that we visit a seemingly normal page and ask the agent to summarize it or help us complete a task within it. Under certain conditions, that page may include content from another source, such as an iframe, along with a malicious instruction intended for the model and not for us. If the agent has sufficient permissions, it could access content that the attacking website should not be able to read directly and move some of that information to a form controlled by the attacker. The web would not have directly broken the barrier; he would have used the agent as a bridge. The important nuance. It should be noted that the study does not say that all users will suffer an attack or that any browser with AI is insecure by definition. The researchers analyzed specific versions, at a specific time, and worked with proofs of concept, not with attacks against real services or with sensitive user data. They also observed relevant differences between products: browsers that granted fewer permissions to the agent tended to reduce risk. The paradox. These browsers are attractive because they promise to save steps, understand pages, relate information and execute tasks with less intervention from us. But that same capacity is what makes the failure weigh more: it does not occur only in an isolated tab, but in an environment where there may be open sessions, personal data and pending actions. They may not yet be a massive habit, but the security debate is already here, precisely because their proposal consists of giving them more margin. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | Selecting all the traffic lights is no longer enough to prove that you are not a robot. Now you have to scan QR codes

“The existence of the company is in danger”

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The Volkswagen Group is at risk of collapse. That, at least, is what six out of nine managers think behind closed doors, according to the German newspaper Manager Magazine. The media assures that the company has conducted an internal survey of its top managers and two out of three agree with its diagnosis. “The company is in danger”. This is what six out of nine managers have answered, according to this German media, to the question of an internal survey that has been circulated among the company’s top leaders. The other three, always according to information from Manager Magazinedescribed the company’s situation as “tense.” The survey has moved among the board of directors through a management consulting company that is analyzing the internal way of working. And the result has been overwhelming: the Volkswagen model is sold out. Some discrepancies. In the German environment Elektroauto They expand the information ensuring that the company that carried out the survey is Boston Consulting Group and that the eight boards of directors of the group and Michael Leiters, head of Porsche, have participated in it. But, without a doubt, the most problematic thing is that, according to this medium specialized in the electricity market, there was no internal consensus on the functioning of the board of directors. Four members of the board of directors assure that the management is united but four others denied it. A position, the latter, that was repeated among eleven of the 14 people who make up the Company Supervisory Board. Same old problems. Among those surveyed, the German media agree, the problems that Volkswagen has on the table seem clear: A perfect storm. Volkswagen’s financial situation is not a coincidence, it is the result of multiple factors in which the coin has come out tails (they have more or less responsibility as a company). In China, the market has turned to local manufacturers. Companies are managing to sell more striking and advanced products than traditional manufacturers but, above all, they are doing so at a much more competitive price. They have entered into a price war that threatens to take manufacturers ahead and is fueled by a public that feels pride in buying Chinese products to the detriment of what comes from abroad. In the United States, tariffs imposed by the Government are severely punishing factories located in Mexico but they have also made the product manufactured within the country itself more expensive because there are pieces that continue to cross the border even if they are assembled on American soil. And brands like Porsche, which have the United States as their big market, They do not manufacture a single car within the country. The result. Volkswagen’s accounts are compromised because investments in the electric car and some concepts that revolve around it have not yielded good results. For example, Cariad, the company dedicated exclusively to producing the software for its future vehicles, it has turned out to be a disaster and has forced important cars to be delayed for Audi or Porsche. This, added to the fact that the electric embrace of the public has not arrived when expected, has sunk the profit of Volkswagen, Seat/Cupra or Porsche, they point out in the German newspaper Welt. For its part, Bentley is also showing red numbers and Audi has entered a lethargy from which it wants to escape with ambitious new proposals to recover brand image. In doubt. In the internal survey that has been carried out within the company, some managers have indicated that they find it impossible to comply with the monetary adjustments announced by Oliver Blume, its CEO, years ago. They consider that to carry out these adjustments it is even necessary to cancel the development of new platforms for future vehicles, according to Elektroauto. In 2025, The Volkswagen Group recorded its worst data in the income statement since 2016when they came marked by the Dieselgate. All of this has led to the unanimity of the board of directors, the nine people that comprise it, thinking that it is necessary for the company to redefine its strategy and its business model, according to the German media. Photo | Volkswagen In Xataka | Volkswagen was late to the transition to the electric car. The price to pay now is 50,000 layoffs

Every time the Vatican has warned of the danger of a technology, that technology has ended up changing the world. It’s up to the AI

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Let’s do a little memory. The 15th century was ending and The Christian Church found the printing press wonderful.almost providential. The adoption of that invention by ecclesiastical institutions was enthusiastic because it allowed them to amplify their mission. It didn’t take long for the discourse to change noticeably. in the bull Inter multiplies In 1487, Pope Innocent VIII praised it but warned of its risks: the same thing that served to spread the word of God, could serve to spread heresies and false ideas. It was then that censorship was introduced according to which no book should be printed without the approval of the ecclesiastical authorities. That laid the foundations for the future Index librorum prohibitorum which established a list of prohibited works for all of Christendom. That didn’t go too well. Martin Luther precisely took advantage of that divine invention to distribute your propaganda during the Protestant Reformation, and if this movement ended up being successful it was undoubtedly thanks to the printing press. It is not in vain that Luther is considered the first author of best-sellers of history. The encyclicals in the face of technological advances Let’s move forward. In 1891 Pope Leo XIII published his encyclical Rerum Novarumpossibly the most famous social encyclical in history. In it the pontiff focused on the rights of workers as response to the disturbing Industrial Revolution. He denounced the concentration of wealth and new technologies “in the hands of a few,” and warned that this was turning workers into slaves. Let’s keep moving forward. 90 years ago, Pius XI launched his act Vigilanti Cura (1936), dedicated exclusively to cinema. It recognized the technological progress that cinematography represented, but warned that if it was not strictly regulated, it would become the greatest instrument of moral corruption and mass manipulation in history. That message would be accompanied by the encyclical Miranda Prorsus (1957), by Pius XII, which extended that warning to both radio and televisionwhich had as much or more capacity than cinema to be beneficial but also toxic to humanity. There have been other social encyclicals related to technology: Pacem in Terris (1963) by John XXIII spoke of the atomic danger, while Evangelium Vitae (1995) by John Paul II was a wake-up call against eugenic biomedical techniques and embryo manipulation. The curious thing is that most of these encyclicals were published many years after certain technological advances had occurred. That would make one think that there are one or several encyclicals dedicated to the internet, mobile phones or social networks. There are not, although these topics have been mentioned by the last Popes in other messages. Arrives Magnificent Humanitas Therefore it is surprising that Pope Leo XIV has dedicated an entire encyclical to artificial intelligence. He has done it just three years after ChatGPT was launched, and he has also done it with a unique title: Magnificent Humanitas (2026). A fact: Robert Fracis Prevost, Pope Leo XIV, graduated in mathematics in 1977 from Villanova University in Philadelphia. This encyclical follows a very clear historical line of argument: on many occasions in which a disruptive technology appears, the Vatican adopts the role of “ethical brake” and tries to warn of something relevant: technical and technological advances must be subordinated to human beings. In Magnificent Humanitas the discourse is known and reasonable: warning that large AI companies They will end up imposing their moral vision on the entire planet. It is not just that hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) or companies like OpenAI or Anthropic dominate this market in the commercial section: it is that this dominance also translates into a form of influence that is even more worrying than cinema or television were (and are). The encyclical also warns of how AI is causing a “cognitive displacement” in which human beings end up preferring that algorithms think for them instead of making a reflective effort. The text is very long (40,000 words, which is approximately equivalent to a novel of about 150 pages) and ambitious, and covers many more areas, but the univocal message is that of a warning about the dangers of this technology. If one looks at this entire catalog of papal warnings from a historical perspective, it is impossible not to see the paradox. Most of the technologies that the Vatican once denounced as existential threats ended up, in the end, making the world a better, more prosperous and more connected place. The printing press democratized culture, the Industrial Revolution raised the global standard of living, cinema and television enriched the collective imagination, and biotechnology saves lives. History shows us that these bad omens of the Popes never came to pass completely, but we must be careful. The value of these encyclicals is not in their ability to predict the future, but in their function as ethical counterweights. It’s okay and necessary that someone warns about the risks, because those dangers were and still are real. Image | The Holy See In Xataka | Spain has been a Catholic country for more than 1,500 years. “The Change” now wants to turn it into an evangelical one

Wind turbine blades are a deadly danger to birds. The solution: paint them like poisonous snakes

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One of the great drivers of the global energy transition are wind turbines. Of course, they have been carrying a silent problem for decades: they kill animals. Wind turbines kill 368,000 birds a year in the United States and Canada alone, according to this study published in PubMed. The data for Europe is more fragmented and varies greatly by country and type of facility: in Germany for example place mortality between 100,000 and 250,000 birds per year and SEO/BirdLife esteem that between 1.2 and 4.6 million birds die per year (data from 2023). Given that the expansion of wind power seems unstoppable, the question is how to minimize these deaths, e.g. with self-adaptive speed blades. A research team from the University of Helsinki and the University of Exeter has just publish a proposal unexpectedly simple but effective (judging by its results): painting the blades with the colors of poisonous animals, appealing to one of the most solid principles of evolutionary biology. Those dangerous snake-painted wind turbines. The research team exposed birds to videos of turbines spinning in four color schemes: standard white, a black blade, red-white stripes, and a red-black-yellow biomimetic pattern that was inspired by coral snakes and dart frogs. The result was clear: the birds systematically avoided the blades with the biomimetic pattern and moved closer to the white ones. The remarkable thing about the discovery is why it works. It was not necessary for the birds to learn in the experiment to associate those colors with danger like Pavlov: They were already learned from home. The key is in aposematism, just the opposite of camouflage: signaling danger with colors, something that has been engraved in the nervous system of birds for millions of years. The team simply transferred that evolutionary signal to a huge steel structure. Why is it important. The United States Renewable Energy Institute calculate that per megawatt installed the turbines kill between two and six birds and between four and seven bats, figures that seem small but are considerable on a global scale: the world’s wind capacity already exceeds 1,000 GW installed, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. Reducing the death of animals is the main reason, a good practice that is even more relevant if the species in question has a small population. If the solution is also something as cheap as changing the paint color, the cost-benefit in terms of conservation is difficult to ignore. Context. Aposematism is a documented evolutionary mechanism for almost two centuries: The idea is that certain toxic or dangerous animals warn of their danger with bright colors. The winning combination to scare you is red-black-yellow, universally recognized as a sign of toxicity among vertebrates. What this study does is apply this principle outside of the natural world by projecting it onto an industrial infrastructure. It is not a pioneer: there is a previous investigation in Norway in which they tried painting a blade black to break the optical illusion of a “still hole” created by the spinning turbines and the results were already promising. This new study goes a step further by actively exploiting the perception of danger. How it works. The birds process color in a radically different way from humans. They have four types of photoreceptors instead of three, which gives them tetrachromatic vision and allows them to detect ultraviolet. In short: they appreciate contrast better than humans, so apostematic signals are extraordinarily striking to them. For the experiment they used touch screens designed specifically for birds, so that they interacted with them by moving closer or further away from the stimuli, thus allowing them to precisely quantify how they behaved in response to each pattern. The biomimetic pattern was the most avoided of all. Yes, but. As the research team acknowledges in the paper, all tests were carried out in the laboratory, with birds in front of screens, not with wind turbines spinning in the open field. Perception distance, approach angle, flight speed or weather conditions are variables that the experiment does not replicate. Taking it to the real world can be a very different story. Furthermore, the study was carried out with a limited number of species. Aposematic responses depend on the evolutionary history of each lineage and whether that group has coevolved with those dangerous species in its territory. Come on, what may be useful for birds native to an area may be useless for migratory raptors or for species affected in specific wind farms. In Xataka | There are cannibalistic rabbits on a farm in Valladolid. His rancher is clear about the reason: wind turbines In Xataka | Spain’s bats live in uncertain times. The reason, according to the CSIC: the wind turbines Cover | Gonz DDL and David Clode Alfonso Castro

We just discovered a new island in an oceanic “danger zone”

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In February 2026 the SWOSan international team of 93 science professionals, embarked on the icebreaker Polarstern from Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) toward the northwest Weddell Sea with a mission: study what the flow of water and ice was like in the Larsen Ice Shelf to determine its influence on the planet’s ocean circulation. Neither more nor less. However, a strong storm forced them to seek shelter, changing the course of the expedition. What they found when they turned aside was an island of solid rock that did not appear on the maps. There is a new island on the map. The island is in the northwest of the Weddell Sea, in the vicinity of Joinville Island, near the Danger Isletsan area that fulfills what its name promises: it has dense ice, part of which is hidden beneath the surface, and the navigation conditions are extreme. Its dimensions are approximately 130 meters long, 50 meters wide and it rises 16 meters above sea level, more or less like the Polarstern, whose length measures 118 meters. Despite being a full-fledged island, the island had no name or coordinates nor did it appear in international cartographic databases in the area, vaguely defined as “a danger zone for navigation”, as explains Simon Dreutterfrom the AWI Bathymetry section. The few charts that hinted at its existence did not even locate it well (deviation of one nautical mile, about 1.85 kilometers). Although it doesn’t have a name yet at the SCARYes, we know how to place it on the map. Why is it important. From a geological point of view, this finding shows that although we are immersed in space exploration, there are still corners of our planet to discover. World cartography is incomplete and the Wedell Sea is precisely one of the territories with the most candidates to harbor surprises: it has difficult access and little data coverage, in addition to the interpolation systems that generate bathymetric maps such as the IBCSO can literally erase unregistered objects physically, as the entity itself warns. Simply put, the island may have remained invisible for decades simply because no ship had boarded it with the right tools. Its discovery is also a reflection of the retreat of sea ice in the region since 2017, attributed to warming surface waters. The retreat of the ice has made a previously impenetrable area navigable, which raises the question: was the island always there or has it emerged recently? From a biological point of view, it is a virgin laboratory: its flora and fauna are completely unknown, which constitutes a magnificent opportunity to understand adaptation to that environment. Context. The Weddell Sea is a key piece of global ocean circulation. That is where the Antarctic bottom waterone of the densest and coldest masses of water on the planet. This mass of water feeds the bottom currents of all oceans and regulates the exchange of heat and carbon on a planetary scale, as documented in oceanographic literature. Altering its dynamics, as is happening due to the retreat of the Larsen Ice Shelf, has consequences that spread thousands of kilometers. The SWOS expedition was designed precisely to quantify these changes and so far what they have discovered is how much the thickness of the ice varies: up to four meters on the western continental shelf, where the tides compress and deform the ice, and just five feet to the east, where it comes from the Ronne and Filchner ice sheets, which are subject to less pressure. Antarctic bottom water is formed in the Antarctic Ocean as a result of the cooling of surface water in polynyas.Wikipedia How they discovered it. That storm that forced the Polastern to seek refuge in the shelter of Joinville Island. It was then that Simon Dreutter detected an anomaly in the charts and went up to the bridge. There he saw what looked like an unusually dirty iceberg. Like it was a rock. Approaching with caution, always keeping at least 50 meters of water under the keel to minimize the risk of hitting ice, the team confirmed that it was an island. The ship surrounded it at a distance of about 150 meters and took the opportunity to map both its seabed (with a multibeam echo sounder) and its orography using a drone. They already had the first elevation model of the island. What’s going to happen now. Once the official naming process is complete, the team will publish the coordinates of the island and all that information will be incorporated into the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean and international nautical charts, so that its existence will no longer surprise anyone again. As a curiosity, due to maritime tradition, whoever discovers such a geographical feature has the privilege of proposing the name in a process that can last months. Beyond the name, the island opens up a new scientific range: rock samples will determine its lithological composition and age and biological studies will help understand how Antarctic ecosystems respond to climate change. In Xataka | A century ago Denmark built an island to defend its capital. Now it is full of tourists and is sold for ten million In Xataka | China prepares a pilotable “floating island” for marine exploration: for whatever reason, it resists nuclear explosions Cover | Alfred Wegener Institute / Christian Haas

Today the green turtles are finally out of danger

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Halfway between South America and Africa, in the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean, a small volcanic point emerges that is the ascension island. For centuries, this piece of land was the scene of a systematic massacre, but today it represents one of the greatest success stories of marine conservation in the 21st century, culminating last October with a historic announcement that the green turtle has officially gone from being “endangered” to being classified as “least concern.” His story. To understand the magnitude of the Ascension phenomenon, you must first understand the journey since each season, thousands of green turtles They travel 2,300 kilometers from the coasts of Brazil to this remote island to spawnthat is, release their eggs. But… How do they manage to find this small island in an ocean as enormous as the Atlantic? A GPS. The famous biologist Archie Carr proposed in his day that these creatures use a kind of “olfactory GPS”, with which they were capable of find chemical fingerprints dissolved in the ocean currents that emanate from the island. Although the exact mechanics remain the subject of study, since genetic analyzes based on mitochondrial DNA leave no doubt that there are perfectly differentiated Atlantic populations and that of Ascension has a unique signature. In fact, studies indicate that turtles born in Ascensión travel throughout the American continent, representing between 43% and 47% of those captured on the coasts of Uruguay and entering the Patagonian Sea. A dark past. Since its discovery in 1501, Portuguese and British sailors saw Ascension not as a sanctuary, but as an all-you-can-eat buffet, as has been masterfully documented. in works as Ascension: The Story of a South Atlantic Island by Duff Hart-Davis. For centuries, common practices were “flipping” where sailors literally turned turtles over on the beach, immobilizing them to keep them alive with their fresh meat for months. Here there are historical testimonies such as that of chaplain John Ovington in 1691 who recounts the industrialized slaughter of these reptiles, which were sent alive to England to satisfy the demand for “turtle soup.” Something that brought the species to the brink of extinction. A turning point. It arrived in 1977, and coincides with the moment it began control and monitoring of this species on nesting beaches, reversing centuries of human impact. And the results indicate that while in 1977 3,752 nests were counted annually, today the island hosts more than 25,000 nests each year. Images | wirestock on Freepik In Xataka | We have been thinking for 40 years that Spain escaped Chernobyl because it was far away. AEMET has discovered that it was pure luck

We have been terrified of superbugs for decades. The real silent danger is “superfungi”

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When we talk about the antibiotic resistancemany people are already aware of the great problem that not having medications against superbacteria poses for public health, since today there are many antibiotics that have no effect on bacteria. But the WHO launch an alert very important to expand our field of vision also to the “super mushrooms“. Growing danger. If there is a protagonist in this new threat, it is Candida auris, precisely because, unlike other fungi that have been with us for centuries, this one has recently emerged as a global public health problem by causing serious infections, especially in people who are admitted to hospitals or nursing homes, who already have other associated diseases. A genomic macro-study in which the Carlos III Health Institute has participated analyzing more than 300 isolates from patients in 19 countries, has drawn the map of the evolution of this multi-resistant fungus. And the reality we face is that it is capable of spreading rapidly among fragile patients, and worst of all, it is very resistant to the anti-fungal drugs that we use on a daily basis. It is very complete. As experts point out, the enormous expansion of C. Auris is not only focused on the ability to evade the first-line antifungals that we have, but also on its ability to form biofilms on hospital surfaces or medical devices. This causes an object used by several patients to become ‘infected’ and spread the infection among them. It was suddenly. The reality is that today there are many fungi from the Candida family that coexist with us by being on our skin naturally, and without causing problems. The trigger comes when our defenses fall because we are sick, immunosuppressed due to a transplant or naturally because we are older. And this is where this fungus goes from being a being that lives with us ‘in peace’ to completely invading us and causing disease. The culprit. Paradoxically, our efforts to kill bacteria have part of the blamesince here the experts point to a structural problem of abuse of broad-spectrum antibiotics that “sweeps away” the natural bacterial flora of our body. In this way, if bacteria that colonize our digestive system are destroyed, for example, it creates free ‘holes’ that can be used by fungi without control. Added to this is a serious pharmacological problem, since right now we do not have many medications to fight fungi. And the problem is that its structure is quite similar to the surfaces of our own cells as it contains cholesterol in many cases. This means that drugs that destroy the fungus without producing a toxic effect on the patient are not very abundant. There is more. Although we focus on C. auris, there are other threats in this same kingdom, such as Scedosporium prolificansa multiresistant fungus that, through unique evasion mechanisms, causes very high mortality rates in immunosuppressed patients. The solution. Right now, science indicates that we cannot address the crisis of superfungi and superbacteria with patches, but rather we must create a unitary strategy that encompasses human, animal and ecosystem health. And right now the massive use of fungicides in agriculture causes the fungi in the environment to resist our medications that we use in the most serious patients. Images | Adrian Lange In Xataka | Faced with the need to look for weapons against superbacteria, science has opted to send viruses into space

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