decades

For decades, companies have accumulated capital and talent. Satya Nadella Thinks They Need Something Else Now: Token Capital

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The reflections of the CEOs of large companies must always be taken with some caution since they are not usually simple reflections thrown into the air. They seek to give someone their ear: investors, rivals, users or to calm the waters among its employees. Satya Nadella, has published in their profiles of social networks a text in which he redefined, without much dissimulation, what a company should be in the era of artificial intelligence. It was not just a statement, but rather it almost pointed to become a manifesto in which the focus of the race was changed by develop the best AI model (an area where Microsoft seems to accept the Copilot’s defeat) and defines that the future of companies involves generating a third pillar to their structure: token capital. The company of the future needs a new type of capital: token capital. Nadella does not conceive AI as a substitute for human employees since, according to his thesis, human capital is the basis for turning AI into a truly disruptive tool that is nourished by knowledgethe criteria, the relationships and the reading of patterns that employees provide. However, it brings a new element to the business equation: token capital. This new element is formed by the AI ​​that a company builds and owns, not in the models that third companies rent to it. Currently, most companies use AI as a subscription service in which they pay for a model that they use to perform tasks with it. However, when they stop paying for it, all that knowledge and evolution is lost and the company retains nothing of all the knowledge. time and resources you have invested in fine-tuning its use. Nadella maintains that this path leads to transferring value to a few suppliers and the only ones who accumulate advantage are those who sell the models, the knowledge of each company ends up being the raw material that feeds others. The loop that becomes active. The Microsoft CEO’s idea revolves around what he calls a “learning loop”: a system that feeds back with each decision made and each workflow completed. That is, it is a knowledge base that makes the company’s memory permanent and not lost when changing the AI ​​model or employees. “This cycle becomes the company’s new intellectual property,” highlights the Microsoft CEO. “I look at it as a hill-climbing machine.” The key is that this asset, unlike what happens today, is evolutionary and is built based on training with real company data and internal measurements of its response. The more you use it and tune it, the more value it has. And, Nadella argues, the company that builds it will soon have something that can’t be bought in any AI model marketplace: a tool that has been “trained” to do a very specific job in a custom context. AI as a tool, not a monopoly. There is a paragraph in Nadella’s statement that is striking coming from the CEO of a company valued at three trillion dollars. Nadella compares the current risk with what happened in the first phase of globalization: entire industrial sectors were emptied by outsourcing. The macroeconomic figures of the countries they endured the loss of industrial fabric, but the social fabric ended up suffering by adding tension in the labor market. His warning leaves no room for interpretation: “If all value is concentrated in a few models, political economy simply will not tolerate it. There is no social permission for an AI future that destroys entire industries.” The goal, he says, has to be an ecosystem where each company can build its own learning, not be another cog in an AI monopoly. Actually, this is not new, since it is the same principle with which Microsoft built its platform business in Azure cloudwhich used Microsoft’s infrastructure for companies to generate more value than the platform itself had. The problem that the manifesto does not solve. However, Nadella’s words also raise a series of contradictions with respect to the latest movements of Microsoft and other large technology companies. The CEO maintains that human capital becomes essential as token capital grows since it is the employees who make a company’s AI learn. However, his own company has been half doing the opposite. Microsoft fired to more than 15,000 employees during 2025, and in April 2026 it offered voluntary retirement packages to some 8,750 workers in the US, something it had not done in its 51-year history, linking these layoffs to your commitment to AI. It is not an exclusive case of Microsoft. In the first quarter of 2026 they are already more than 92,000 layoffs among the employees of large technology companies and the argument that all companies repeat is the same: AI allows us to do more with less people. In Xataka | Jensen Huang enters the Samsung salary controversy: “Workers should earn as much as possible”

For decades we climbed this New York skyscraper without knowing that the screws that held it in place could not hold.

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The situation was more or less like this. For two decades, hundreds of thousands of people entered and left the doors of one of the largest skyscraper in New York City. These people, many of them workers, went up and down in the elevator completely unaware of the critical failure that the building had, terrifying in architectural terms, and that no one took into account. Rarely in the history of urban planning in large cities has there been a similar situation. The story dates back to the beginning of the 20th centurywhen the Lutheran church of Saint Peter was located on land of 53rd Streetbetween Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan. By 1960, the church community was experiencing serious financial problems, which led the city council to sell the land. The negotiations were not easy and lasted years. Mainly, because the church demanded the creation of a new building separate from the apartment block in which it could continue its activities. In the end the project was given the green light. The developer accepted the conditions, and Citi Bank commissioned Hugh Stubbins & Associates to design the skyscraper. William LeMessurier was in charge of engineering. The final project consisted of a skyscraper, a church, a public space below street level and landscaping. The most important element was, of course, the skyscraper. The plan marked 46 floors that were to be distinguished from the rest of the city by the polished and anodized aluminum of the façade. In addition, between the panels there were rows of windows. It didn’t really look complicated, at least not like the roof and base of the building. The happy roof Thus, in 1977 the skyscraper was completed. By then it had grown larger, with 59 floors and a total height of 279 meters. An architectural work that dazzled at first glance on the city skyline, a colossal tower where its 45-degree inclined top stood out. The top of the roof resembles an isosceles triangle. The original plan was to build terraces and apartments, but over time the architects decided to install huge solar panels. LeMessurier, a professor and graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, carried out a series of tests to verify their efficiency. It turned out that the energy converted by the installation was insufficient. Eventually, the idea of ​​a small solar plant was abandoned. However, nothing like the base on which the building stood. Some “stilts,” as LeMessurier himself described, among which the then seventh largest skyscraper on the planet seemed to float. We are referring, of course, to those four gigantic pillars (34 meters each) that are located in the center of each side (rather than in the corners) of the base. It also had a single column in the center, in this case narrower, which housed the building’s elevator banks and provided additional strength to the frames. This design made room for the church under the northwest corner of the building, and gave the giant structure a brutal effectalmost as if he were levitating. In fact, it was exceptionally “light”, of only 25,000 tons (for reference, the Empire State Building was 60,000). The famous pillars The base became an architectural icon, as it made the space in the corners empty. LeMessurier had the weight of the skyscraper distributed to the exterior skeleton. Specifically, in a grid of triangular-shaped frames hidden under the façade. Interestingly, this structure was visible from the inside. The elements were not completely welded, but only fixed with bolted joints. Apparently, the steel frame designed in this way was intended to withstand perpendicular winds. According to the engineers, other types of wind should not pose a threat. Furthermore, municipal regulations did not require other air gusts to be taken into account in the design. The truth is that the architecture hid an important mechanism on the upper floors. The Citigroup Center had one of the first tuned mass dampers (TDM). It is a 360-ton concrete sphere embedded in oil. When vibrations from the ground or wind moved the building, the mechanism would oscillate in the opposite direction to the tilt of the building. The problems begin This swing was in turn balanced by hydraulic arms that support the sphere. With this solution, the skyscraper was able to “maintain balance.” As LeMessurier explained at the time, this piece was key, since its function was to cut the sway of the building in half by converting the kinetic energy of sway into friction. Once completed, the building was praised, but also the first doubts arrived. New York is not a major hurricane state, but it does have them from time to time. What would happen if, once every 50 years, the winds blew over 100 km/h? These winds can blow from different directions. The Citigroup Center opened in 1977 under the name Citicorp Center (which changed to Citigroup Center in 1998 following the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group). But only a year after its inauguration it became clear that it could have a very serious defect structural. A year later, LeMessurier receives the call that no architect expects in life. It was Diane Hartleyan architecture student at the prestigious Princeton University who had studied the construction of the skyscraper for her thesis. The first of the calls was to ask him several technical questions about the design. Hartley’s professor had expressed doubts to him regarding the strength of a tilted skyscraper where the supporting columns were not at the corners. Hartley did some calculations of the building’s wind load. He then compared them with LeMessurier’s calculations and discovered that the construction engineers’ figures were incorrect. The student asked to be sent exact load calculations for different types of wind. Only received data related to perpendicular winds and guarantees on the solidity of the structure. What’s more, LeMessurier told him that the professor had no idea and that everything was in order. The geometry of the building’s frame worked perfectly with the pillars in such positions, … Read more

Triton has been looking like a strange moon for decades and the worst thing is that it seems to be entirely to blame

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Neptune It’s a strange planetboth for himself and for his environment. For starters, it’s tilted in a somewhat strange way. Its axis is 28º. It is not outrageous if we compare it with the 23º of the Earth. However, it is quite puzzling, because according to traditional planetary formation models, it should be much closer to zero. On the other hand, most of Neptune’s moons are very different from those of the rest of the gas giants. He only has one that could fit the predictions. But what about the rest? These questions have long intrigued astronomers. Now, thanks to two recently published studies, there are hypotheses for each of these phenomena. The curious thing is that both point to Triton’s guilt. A violent irruption. According to models recently made for the publication of two studies differentNeptune’s anomalies could have been due to the irruption of Triton into its satellite system. Possibly, during the dawn of Neptune, there would be several Moons rotating around it, all in the same direction. However, a passing Kuiper Belt object came close enough to be gravitationally attracted to Neptune. It was traveling in the opposite direction, so it violently burst into the window system, like a car bursting onto the highway in the wrong direction. Many moons shot out of the Neptune orbit. Others ended up directly destroyed. Only one, Nereid, stayed there, but with a much longer orbit. As for Neptune, its axis suffered that new inclination that does not fit with that of models of a calm planetary youth. Clues that didn’t add up. Neptune has 16 moons around it. The rarest is Tritonbecause it rotates in the opposite direction to that of Neptune and, due to its composition, it looks more like an object in the Kuiper belt than the Moon of a gas giant. Then we have Nereid, which is in an abnormally elliptical orbit, in which it takes 360 days to orbit the planet. The rest are much more homogeneous satellites, but too small and not very massive for what would be expected from the moons of a gas giant. Nereid, having such a rare orbit, has long attracted the attention of astronomers. When it was recently analyzed more closely with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, it was found to be more similar in composition to the icy moons of other gas giants, such as Saturn or Uranus, than to a Kuiper Belt object. With all this in mind, it was decided to carry out a series of computer simulations, thanks to which we already have an answer. The most likely story. In 20% of the simulations, the result was a case unleashed by Triton. When it was attracted by Neptune, it destroyed the satellite system initial of this planet, as we have seen previously. Nereid held on without destroying itself or flying out of orbit. However, its orbit was deformed, giving rise to the strange orbit it has today. As for the rest of the moons, many of them became debris that regrouped under the effect of gravity, giving rise to the rings of Neptune. Furthermore, some of those fragments became the small moons that orbit the planet today. Triton, the cause of chaos, remained in a fairly stable orbit, becoming just another moon. Of course, a moon that rotates against the current, as a clue to the cosmic chaos that it unleashed at the time. A probe is needed to confirm. All this makes a lot of sense, but it is still a hypothesis with a not too high percentage of success in the simulations. The authors of the study insist that it will be necessary to send a probe to study Neptune closely and clarify the answers. Still, it is possible that Nereid is the only moon capable of truly telling us about Neptune’s past. It is a rare moon, but because it has endured a lot to be able to remain there. Image|NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Naomi Rowe-Gurney (NASA-GSFC) In Xataka | We have been deceived by the distances of the Solar System: the closest neighbor to Neptune is Mercury

We have been thinking for decades that plastic recycling was worth something. Maybe we were wrong

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That the plastic recycling system is broken is an open secret. But it is only little by little that we are realizing the dimension of the problem. The American association Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) published the year 2024 a report on plastic recycling. In it, they attacked the plastics industry, which they accused of having promoted the recycling of these materials even while knowing of the poor technical and economic feasibility. A difficult task. Recycling plastics is not an easy task. In our daily lives we use a wide variety of materials of this type, each one with certain functional and chemical characteristics. They all end up in the same container, the packaging, but from there it is necessary to separate each type of plastic to proceed to recycling when possible. It is not always possible. Disparate data. According to Ecoembes data, in 2024, 589,885 tons of plastic packaging were recycled in Spain, although NGOs such as Greenpeace cast doubt. According to GreenpeaceIn other years, the difference between the plastic recycling rate declared by Ecoembes (89.2%) and that estimated by the NGO itself (34.8%) is notable. It should be noted that it is still higher than the world average of 9% estimated by the OECD. According to the reportfigures like these are just a reflection of an impossibility: effectively recycling plastics is out of our reach. Not only from an economic perspective but also from a technological point of view. Single use. However, the report emphasizes an accusation: even knowing this impossibility, the industry promoted the idea that recycling was possible and viable to pave the way for single-use plastics like the ones we use in packaging. “They knew that if they focused on single-use (plastics) people would buy and buy,” explained to Guardian Davis Allen, CCI researcher and co-author of the report. Another point of view. The reaction of the industry did not take long to arrive. The American Chemistry Council, in a statementnoted that “American plastic manufacturers are investing billions of dollars in better, innovative products and technologies that separate, capture and recycle larger quantities and more types of plastics.” They allege that the “erroneous report” made reference to obsolete technologies and that it represents a misleading characterization of the industry and the present capacities for recycling plastics. “As is typical, instead of working together toward real solutions to plastic waste, groups like CCI choose political attacks over constructive solutions,” protested Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, in a statement also collected by Guardian. Be that as it may, California took legal action in the matter. Will we make it? We may never achieve an efficient system of recycling that we can apply to the plastics of our daily life. In fact, the UN Global Plastics Treaty has failed again and again. But perhaps one day we will be able to treat this waste so that its waste does not contaminate our environment. One of the big bets In this sense, it is the discovery of enzymes capable of decomposing plastic polymers, breaking these chains to convert them into harmless molecules. It is undoubtedly a great promise that is getting closer and closer, but it is still far from being able to solve the problem. Although time is not what is left over. Pollution caused by microplastics is already a reality. These wastes have appeared in the most remote places on Earth, a sign of the great reach of these contaminants. Furthermore, we know very little about the potential impacts on health and the environment of this waste. In Xataka | I’ve always been curious about what they did with the yellow containers: so I followed one In Xataka | “In 200 years, archaeologists will search through our trash and find a terrible image of ourselves”: the dirty reality of what we throw away Image | Krizjohn Rosales *An earlier version of this article was published in February 2025

We have been mapping Antarctica for decades. We have just discovered that its largest basins form a single tectonic “fan”

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For decades, researchers have mapped the frozen continent, finding huge depressions and subglacial lakes that have left us in awe. Until now, these formations were studied as isolated pieces of a geological puzzle; However, a new study has turned this view on its head. The demonstration. This study has been published in Nature Geoscience and has just demonstrated that the great basins of East Antarctica are not independent accidents, but form part of a single, gigantic fan-shaped tectonic province. The tectonic fan. The research team, using a combination of subglacial topography, gravity and magnetism data, proposes that this entire vast region is the result of a distributed rotational extension process. To understand it, we can imagine the Earth’s crust in this area opening and stretching asymmetrically, unfolding as if it were a fan. This colossal tectonic movement makes East Antarctica one of the largest known examples of rotational extension in continental crust on the entire planet. The beginning. The origin of this continental scar is closely linked to the history of our planet, specifically to the tectonic phases linked to the fragmentation of the supercontinent Gondwana and the dramatic separation between Antarctica and Australia. As the land masses separated, the crust stretched and fractured, leaving this “bounced topography” that today lies hidden under miles of ice. Its importance. Beyond the undoubted geological and historical value, understanding this structure has a practical and urgent application, since Antarctica is the great thermostat of the Earth and its stability is key in the face of climate change. The topography beneath the Antarctic ice sheet acts as a mold that conditions absolutely everything that happens on the surface. This is seen, for example, in how the shape of bedrock controls the flow of today’s glaciers and determines how subglacial lake and basin systems are distributed. That is why, if we want to predict with mathematical precision how the Antarctic ice will respond to global warming and how it will flow towards the ocean, we need to know the tectonic “pipe” on which it rests to the millimeter. Its mystery. Although the article Nature Geoscience manages to unify structures as massive as the Wilkes and Aurora basins under the same theoretical framework, the authors maintain scientific caution. The exact age at which this fan province formed and the fine geodynamic mechanism that triggered it remain, to a large extent, open questions, and this means that work still needs to be done to find out exactly when the movements of the Antarctic crust will occur. Images | Tam Minton Nature In Xataka | Antarctica was practically the last corner of the Earth immune to touristification. That’s ending

Microsoft believed it would take decades to have a useful quantum computer. Majorana 2 just pushed that deadline to 2029

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Finding the Majorana particle would be the best thing that could happen to them. quantum computers. The Italian physicist Ettore Majorana mathematically described its existence in 1937, and since then many researchers have become obsessed with it because it has a characteristic that makes it unique: it is both a particle and its own antiparticle. What makes it very attractive for quantum computing is that, when it appears, it does so in pairs and its topological nature gives it a resistance to external noise that conventional qubits do not have. This distribution of information at two separate points means that local errors triggered by vibrations, temperature or radiation cannot easily erase it. The coincidence of this duplicity and its stability suggests that these particles could be used to make qubits that are more stable and less prone to external perturbations than the qubits used in current quantum computers. Or that, at least, is what Microsoft is pursuing, although with an important nuance: it sounds very good, but after the cold water of 2021 physicists are extraordinarily careful when dealing with them. Microsoft promises to have a functional quantum computer in 2029 Microsoft does not work with Majorana fermions in the strict sense of the elementary particle predicted by Ettore Majorana. What you are looking for are Majorana modes or Majorana quasiparticles: collective excitations that emerge in certain topological superconducting materials and that behave as if they were Majorana fermions. They are not fundamental particles; They are emerging phenomena in the field of condensed matter. This strategy allowed Microsoft officially present in February 2025 Majorana 1, the first topological quantum processor. However, the scientific community received it with skepticism. And it did so because the Redmond company claimed to have created a state of matter in silicon that until then it only existed in theory. His proposal was to use Majorana modes as a basis for more stable quantum computing. Majorana 2 has been developed with the help of Discovery artificial intelligence The problem is that Microsoft had tried to demonstrate something similar before, in 2018, and the scientific article that supported it ended up being retracted by Nature three years later. Majorana 1 was, in that sense, both a technical advance and an attempt to regain credibility. And now Majorana 2 arrives. Microsoft has confirmed that this new quantum processor has been developed with the help of its artificial intelligence (IA) Discovery, and has also explained that it incorporates new materials with the purpose of accelerating the arrival of an error-resistant, and therefore fully functional, quantum computer. Chetan Nayak, CTO and Corporate Vice President of Quantum Hardware, has explained that the Microsoft Quantum team has improved the materials stack used in Majorana 1 for the purpose of create a more stable topological phase. Majorana 2 replaces aluminum with lead, and upgrades the semiconducting active region to a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide-antimonide. This change in materials has triggered, according to Microsoftsignificant performance improvements. And it also helps protect the fragile qubits of cosmic disturbances that can destabilize them. Be that as it may, this statement from Nayak summarizes the impact that Microsoft believes Majorana 2 will have on its roadmap: “Based on this rapid progress, we are accelerating our plan toward a scalable and practical quantum computer: we have cut our schedule in half and now aim to reach this goal in 2029.” It is an ambitious promise. And with Microsoft’s track record in quantum computing, the scientific community has reason to continue to be demanding when evaluating it. Image | Microsoft More information | Microsoft In Xataka | 38% of AI experts in the US have been trained in China. They are essential to sustain your leadership

Antimatter has a property that has taken physicists decades to measure. CERN just did it a hundred times better than anyone else

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Antimatter is fascinating not only because of its essence; It is also due to the still enigmatic role he played in the origin of the universe. Scientists still do not have the necessary tools to understand with any precision the role of this form of matter in the formation of the cosmos and the mechanisms that govern the tenuous line that delimits the imbalance between matter and antimatter. Fortunately, what they do know are its constituent elements and some of its properties. Understand what is antimatter It’s not difficult. And we can observe it as an exotic type of matter that is made up of antiparticles, which are particles with the same mass and spin as the particles we are familiar with, but with the opposite electrical charge. In this way the antiparticle of the electron is the positron or antielectron. And the antiparticle of the proton is the antiproton. Antimatter has a surprising property: when it comes into direct contact with matter, both annihilate, releasing a large amount of energy in the form of high-energy photons, as well as other possible particle-antiparticle pairs. It is currently being studied in many of the most important research centers specialized in particle physics in the world with the hope that knowing it better will help us understand some of the mysteries of the cosmos that remain out of our reach. The hyperfine cleavage of antihydrogen has been revealed CERN’s antimatter factory produces this form of matter by firing high-energy protons from an adjacent synchrotron at a metal block. This process generates a cascade of secondary particles, and among them antiprotons arise. These latter particles can then be cooled to be used in the facility’s experiments. ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus or antihydrogen laser physics apparatus), which is one of them, is specialized in producing antihydrogen by fusing antiprotons with positrons. Researchers then use magnetic fields to trap the antihydrogen for further study. An antihydrogen atom is composed of an antiproton in its nucleus and a positron orbiting around it, in the same way that a hydrogen atom contains a proton around which an electron orbits. Deuterium and tritium, the two isotopes of hydrogen, also have one or two neutrons in the nucleus respectively. The researchers of the ALPHA experiment have achieved something amazing: have measured hyperfine division of the ground state of the antihydrogen atom with a precision of 4 parts per million, improving the previous result by two orders of magnitude. This milestone is very important because it allows very rigorous tests to be carried out in the field of quantum electrodynamics. Hyperfine splitting of the ground state of the antihydrogen atom is the small splitting of the lowest energy state of the atom due to the magnetic interaction between the antiproton and the positron. According to the fundamental symmetries of nature, this measurement should be identical to the equivalent effect observed in hydrogen. Be that as it may, this milestone is very important because it allows very rigorous tests to be carried out in the field of quantum electrodynamics, which is the most precise theory that explains the interactions that occur between charged particles and light. Jeffrey Hangst, the spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment, explains that “the hyperfine splitting of the ground state of hydrogen is the origin of the so-called 21 centimeter lineso prized by radio astronomers and researchers searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (…) When the antimatter factory was conceived in the 1990s, the hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen was one of the key measurement objectives justifying the construction of the facility.” “The current measurement represents the culmination of many years of effort,” Hangst pointed out. “We have pursued the precise determination of the hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen since we demonstrated how to trap antimatter atoms in 2010. And now another group in the antimatter factory, the ASACUSA collaboration, is also trying to study this very important transition. Their technique, if demonstrated, has the potential to achieve even greater precision.” Thanks to ALPHA’s high level of precision, the measurement of hyperfine cleavage is sensitive to the effects of the internal structure of the antiproton at the center of the antihydrogen atom. In any case, this result is a very important step in the effort to further explore the nature of antimatter. Image | CERN More information | CERN In Xataka | European science gets serious: EUROfusion and CERN will work together on nuclear fusion and new colliders

Dark matter has been a mystery for decades. A strange event from 2019 could be the evidence we were looking for to unravel it

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December 18, 2019. A star of the great Magellanic cloud increases its brightness. It does so in a way that is intense enough not to go unnoticed by scientists analyzing the data from the Víctor M. Blanco telescope at the Inter-American Observatory of Cerro Tololo (Chile), but not so intense that it corresponds to an explosion. Rather, it is a gentle increase in brightness, followed by a symmetrical decrease in brightness. The entire process lasts 1 hour and baffles scientists, who baptize the object causing this phenomenon as Phoebe. Since then, Phoebe’s origin has been a mystery. Now, the same scientists who made the discovery they have answers that point to what would be one of the oldest objects that have ever been detected. Phoebe’s origin. There are three hypotheses for Phoebe’s origin. For one thing, it could be a free floating planet in the Milky Way. That is, a planet that was expelled from its solar system and now wanders through our galaxy. It could also be exactly the same, but in the Large Magellanic Cloud instead of the Milky Way. Finally, it could be a primordial black hole. That is, a very small black hole that, instead of being formed by the collapse of a star, was caused by fluctuations in the density of matter in the cosmos during the first seconds of the Big Bang. The authors of the study that has just been published have calculated the probabilities of each hypothesis and the third one beats the rest by a factor of 100,000. A gravitational microlens. While Phoebe’s origin has been a mystery all this time, it didn’t take long for scientists to understand the phenomenon that had caused the star’s brightness to fluctuate in 2019. It must have been gravitational microlensing. This is a phenomenon which is formed when a very massive object is placed between our telescopes and another object. The mass of the central object is so great that its gravity is capable of bending space-time, forming a kind of lens that magnifies the image of what is behind it. On the other hand, if what is behind it is a very distant star, what is magnified is its brightness. That is why this increase in brightness occurred, because Phoebe was passing between the star and the telescopes of the Chilean observatory. The key is in the duration. Previous studies with gravitational lensing show that the duration of the event can give us an idea of ​​the mass of the body that causes the lens to form. The lighter the object, the faster it moves and the shorter the increase in brightness lasts. In this case, the phenomenon lasted an hour. It may seem like a lot to us, but in cosmic terms it is quite little. In fact, it is just above the detectable limit. This tells us that the object that caused this increase in brightness must have been very light. According to calculations made by scientists at Swinburne University taking into account fluctuations in brightness, it would have approximately the mass equivalent to three moons. A winning option. Black holes that form from stars usually have at least the mass of about 5 suns. 3 moons is much less. It is also too small an object to correspond to a planet wandering in the Milky Way or the large Magellanic cloud. This, together with the geometry of the event and the expected spatial distribution, has led the probability calculation to lean so clearly towards the primordial black hole. Primordial black holes Big news about something very small. Primordial black holes are theoretical phenomena. It is believed plausible that could have formed in the first seconds of the Big Bang, when fluctuations in the density of matter in the cosmos caused an accumulation of matter dense enough to collapse. Most of them would be very small. They would have most of the characteristics of a black hole, but radically smaller in size. They would form before there were stars or matter as we know it, but they could be related to one of the greatest mysteries of astrophysics: dark matter. Only 5% of the cosmos is made up of “normal” atoms. The rest is unknown. One part is known as dark matter and another as dark energy. It is not known what they are, but one of the hypotheses about dark matter is that it could be composed in part of primordial black holes. Therefore, if it is shown that Phoebe is really a primordial black hole, we would perhaps be facing one of the first demonstrations of the composition of dark matter. And now what? Logically, this is just the beginning. We will have to continue looking for more objects like Phoebe to be able to prove that these scientists are right. For this, You have to know well where to point the telescopes. To begin with, not any of them will do. They need to be sensitive enough to detect gentle changes in the brightness of stars. They also need to be able to focus on large fields of vision. And, if possible, focus on places with a large concentration of stars, since it is easier for the gravitational lensing phenomenon to occur there. It is expected that some observatories, such as the Vera Rubin, will provide interesting data in this regard. Now we will have to analyze them and look for points in common with Phoebe. That December 18, 2019, a pandemic was brewing on Earth, but in space the clue could be jumping that would resolve one of the greatest mysteries in the history of astrophysics. Image |Martin Bernardi |NASA In Xataka | We have been deceived by the distances of the Solar System: the closest neighbor to Neptune is Mercury

Researchers solve a problem that has been stuck for decades

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A team from Monash University in Australia has developed an ultrathin membrane able to operate hydrogen fuel cells at 250 °C and, most surprisingly, without the need for water. This is a wall in which technology has been crossing for a long time and the discovery has been published in the journal Science Advances. Below these lines we tell you all the details. Why is it important. Hydrogen cells are one of the great promises to decarbonize transportation, heavy industry and sectors where batteries fall short. They only emit water and heat, they recharge quickly and offer autonomy comparable to gasoline. The problem is that current membranes, such as those based on Nafion (a synthetic resin), they need to be permanently hydrated so that the protons can circulate. And that forces us to operate below 80-100 °C, because at higher temperatures the water evaporates and the entire system collapses. In detail. The team, led by researchers Huanting Wang and Kaiqiang He, has built atomic-thick nanosheets made of graphene and boron nitride. Between those layers they have introduced phosphoric acid in a state that researchers call nanoconfined, where the acid is trapped in tiny spaces from which it cannot escape or evaporate, even at 250 ° C. The result It is a membrane of just 50 micrometers, named GBP, that acts as a dry highway through which protons move at high speed without depending on a single drop of water. How it works. Wang, professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Monash, account that “by combining proton-conducting nanosheets with nanoconfined phosphoric acid, we have developed a membrane that maintains rapid proton transport without water.” The trick is in a mechanism that the authors define as synergistic, in which protons directly pass through the hexagonal rings of graphene and boron nitride and, at the same time, jump along the network of hydrogen bonds that forms the acid confined between layers. On the other hand, He adds that this combination is what gives the membrane high conductivity and stability in dry and high temperature conditions. The figures. In laboratory tests GBP achieved a proton conductivity of 166 mS cm⁻¹ at 250 °C and a power density of 1,011 mW cm⁻² in a hydrogen-oxygen stack, well above industry reference membranes. In addition, the team kept it running for 150 hours straight at that temperature without signs of degradation. Between the lines. Working at 250°C is a game-changer on several fronts. One: The water management and humidification systems are eliminated, which in current hydrogen cars are heavy, bulky and expensive. Two: at that temperature the platinum catalyst tolerates impurities better such as carbon monoxide, which opens the door to using less pure hydrogen and, therefore, cheaper to produce. Three– Cooling the system becomes much easier, allowing for smaller radiators and lighter vehicles. Beyond the car. Although we usually focus on the hydrogen cars When we talk about this type of technology, the truth is that the potential applications go much further. GBP was also tested in direct methanol cells and performed at 502 mW cm⁻² with 16 M concentrated methanol at 250 °C. This suggests that it could be used for portable systems where hydrogen is difficult to store. In addition, the authors point to uses in data centersplanes, trains, factories and hospitals as energy backup, and other electrochemical processes such as the separation of water molecules, the reduction of carbon dioxide or the synthesis of ammonia. And now what. The next step is the usual one. And when a laboratory announces an advance like this, we have to wait until it ends up coming to fruition and its commercialization on an industrial scale is viable. If they succeed, the combination of cheaper batteries, less pure hydrogen and simpler systems could accelerate the arrival of this technology in sectors where electrification with batteries does not quite fit. Cover image | CARMAN and Monash University In Xataka | The world depends on gas to produce food. Paraguay believes it has the definitive solution thanks to the Itaipú dam

We have been searching for extraterrestrial life for decades. According to these astrobiologists, we have been doing it wrong all this time

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We are very used to hearing that someone has found possible signs of life in space. Then life is never found, but the trail seems to be there. All of these findings often end up being false positives, something astrobiologists are more than familiar with. However, According to a study just published in Nature Astronomy, They could be overlooking false negatives and that would be serious. Pass life long. What the authors of this study point out is that false negatives could be more common than we think. That is to say, many of the times when it is clearly concluded that there is no life in a place in space, it could be that it did exist, but it had been passed by without being detected. The causes. There could be three reasons why these false negatives occur. On the one hand, no traces of life are preserved. That is, it exists or has existed, but has not left a detectable trace. It could also be that this fingerprint is difficult to detect. Or, perhaps, that the methods used to detect it have limitations. Along these lines, the authors of the study give an example. Let’s imagine that there is a living being that, through its metabolic reactions, generates some gas that is understood as a trace of life. Maybe oxygen or methane. But let’s also imagine that there is a geological activity in that place that captures that gas from the environment. I wouldn’t have time to measure it. Therefore, the detection of life would have to be covered from other points. The risks. There are two main risks of not paying attention to false negatives. On the one hand, instruments that would help find even more traces of life would be deprioritized. If we do not find anything that justifies its development, we limit the possibilities of continuing searching. On the other hand, if life is not adequately searched for, resources from other planets where such life is found could be exploited. We would destroy it before we even knew it existed. Solutions. These scientists believe that searching for patterns using artificial intelligence could be an option. If the usual methods have not worked so far, perhaps we should ask an algorithm to detect patterns that have gone unnoticed to find new search paths. Along the same lines, it would also be necessary to study the terrain better and pay attention to anomalies. For example, if an unconventional type of oxidation is detected on a planet, inexplicable with what we know on Earth, it could be that it was associated with some form of life. It may not look like the oxidation carried out by terrestrial living beings, but who says it has to be the same? You have to think outside the box. Combine different types of work. In short, these scientists consider that to adequately search for life it is necessary to combine laboratory experiments with modeling and field work. But, above all, it is important to change the questions we ask ourselves. What if it has already been found? In 2019, a former NASA scientist told in an article for Scientific American that, according to himhis agency found life on Mars, but accidentally destroyed it. Supposedly, it all happened in the 1970s, in an experiment that was part of the Viking mission. This consisted of depositing nutrients in the soil and checking if gases typical of microbial decomposition were produced. Then, to ensure that it was not a coincidence, they would repeat the process, but adding a substance lethal to living organisms to the soil. In that case, gases should not be produced. And no, they were not produced, so there was something alive generating the gases. It was great news, but NASA did not publish that result, because when trying to replicate the experiment it came back negative. In science it is very important to replicate the results, so they concluded that it must have been a false positive. However, this former member of NASA, Gilbert V. Levin, believes that they destroyed life unintentionally and that is why they could not replicate it. This is no longer an anecdote. Most likely, they would not have found life. However, this story shows that we are always more predisposed to false positive than false negative. The focus would have to be changed a little. Maybe then we will finally find some life beyond our own planet. Images | Eric Erbe and Christopher Pooley (illustrative image of E.coliit has nothing to do with the study)/ Brett Ritchie (Unsplash) In Xataka | Life on Earth underwent a spectacular change 540 million years ago. We have a new explanation why

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