destroyed

A young planet neighboring Earth was destroyed before it finished forming and now we have found a piece in the Sahara

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According to estimates based on the fireball tracking, is calculated Approximately 17,000 meteorites fall to Earth per year. Only a few of them recover. There are about 80,000 registered worldwide. However, the numbers must be much higher. There will be a multitude of meteorites abandoned in drawers or lost as simple unidentified stones that would make that figure much higher. It’s a shame, because a single meteorite can give us very useful information about our planet and its neighbors. A good example of this is NWA 12774, a fragment found in 2019 in the Sahara. Thanks to it, a team of scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder has managed to extract very interesting data about the dawn of the Solar System. The reconstructed history. The analysis The composition of this meteorite, as well as computer simulations, have allowed us to establish that it must be a fragment of a protoplanet of a size similar to the Moon or Mars, which 4.5 billion years ago decomposed into debris, possibly after colliding with another celestial object while rotating around the Sun. An especially rare angrita. Initial analysis of this meteorite indicated that it is an angrite. This is a very rare type of rock among meteorites. In fact, it is estimated that of the 80,000 that have been registered, only 68 are Angritas. They are rare meteorites because they contain very little silica, a material that is very abundant on rocky planets like Earth. Initially, angritas were thought to be asteroid fragments. However, in this case it is doubly rare, because it also contains clinopyroxene, a very common crystal in the Earth’s crust and mantle. As if that were not enough, said clinopyroxene is rich in CaTs forms, a “version” of this mineral in which one magnesium atom and one silicon atom are replaced by two aluminum atoms. It is a process that requires very high pressure conditions to occur. A large origin. According to the computational reconstructions that have been carried out, to generate such a quantity of CaTs it would be necessary for this object to be subjected to a pressure of 17.5 kilobars. It is something immense. To give us an idea, in the depths of the Mariana Trench barely reaches one kilobar. This pressure could not originate inside an asteroid. According to the calculations made by these scientists, an object of at least 2,000 kilometers in diameter would be needed. Even more. Another relevant fact about this meteorite is that it has sharp edges and chemical patterns that would have been erased if it had originated at a great depth within its parent body. This tells us that said body is immense, since what is relatively shallow compared to its size is actually great depth in terms of pressure. Therefore, the 2,000 kilometers would be short. We would rather be looking at about 3,600 kilometers in diameter, approximately that of the Moon. Some estimates would point to something even larger, like Mars, but in principle they fit the dimensions of the Moon. Very different from Earth. Protoplanets are planets in birth. They must continue colliding and fusing material around them to finish becoming planets. The object that originated this meteorite did not do so. But it should have been part of the dawn of the Solar System. Thanks to him, we know that, at first, the composition of rocky planets would be very different from that of Earth. Something must have changed over time. It would be ideal to analyze more meteorites, since there must be others like NWA 12774. The problem is that we will have to dust off those abandoned drawers to find them. Image | John Kashuba In Xataka | We have been trying to answer the question “where do meteorites come from” for years. And it’s harder than it seems

They have found a 1968 vampire film that they thought was destroyed for being too scary. Now we can check it

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A projectionist at a cinema in the British county of Dorset opened a rusty film can in a warehouse. It was an episode of a series that had been missing for years and about which the legend had spread that it was too scary. However, the explanation for its disappearance was much more mundane: the same reasons why seventy percent of British television programming at the time had disappeared (or so it was believed). What they found. On May 23, the film preservation organization Film is Fabulous! announced the discovery. Darren Payne, a projectionist and technician who runs the 35mm film exhibition collective ‘Dirt in the Gate Movies’, commissioned a small collection of film reels that was about to be destroyed. One of the cans had handwritten, without further detail, ‘Late Night Horror’. “I’m a horror fan and the title resonated with me,” Payne explained. He took the film home, screened it on his own computer, and what he saw left him speechless: the first episode of a series that had been believed to have been destroyed for more than half a century. Nothing like a vampire. ‘No Such Thing as a Vampire’ is the pilot episode of ‘Late Night Horror’, a series of six 25-minute episodes that BBC2 broadcast in the spring of 1968. It was the network’s first color horror production, although the recovered print is in black and white: a 16mm secondary run made for international distribution before the color masters were removed. What is it about? The script was based on a story by the great Richard Matheson, a writer to whom the fantastic Anglo-Saxon owes, among other things, the founding novel ‘I am legend’ and 16 episodes of the original series of ‘The Twilight Zone’. The plot follows a woman who appears paler and weaker every morning, with marks on her neck, while her husband and the family doctor discuss whether or not there is a vampire in the town. The answer is the kind of twist that Matheson was adept at: rational, disturbing and with a bitter aftertaste. Who is behind. The direction was, amazingly, by a woman: Paddy Russellwho at that time was already an exceptional figure at the BBC. She was the first female plant manager of the entity and one of the first two directors of the chain, at a time when the technical teams were dominated by men to the point that the name with which she appeared in the reports (Paddy is a diminutive of Patricia, but can be perceived as an acronym for Patrick) also functioned as a kind of protection. Russell directed two of the six episodes of ‘Late Night Horror’: the first, now recovered, and ‘The Corpse Can’t Play’, the only one that was already known. With this discovery, his complete work in the series once again exists. The episode aired on 19 April 1968 at 10:55 pm and attracted 1.8 million viewers, the highest audience of the series and one of the highest BBC2 had recorded since its launch in 1964. The legend. This is where we must clarify the legend of “the episode that was destroyed because it was too terrifying”, a rumor that has been spreading on the internet mainly due to the creepy credits of the series. Actuallybetween the mid-1950s and mid-1970s, the BBC eliminated between 60 and 70% of its television production due to company policy: two-inch tape masters were very expensive, union contracts prohibited more than one or two rebroadcasts, and there was no legal obligation to archive the material. It was not until 1981 that the BBC began to retain its archives. ‘Dr. Who’ is the case of the most famous series with episodes lost due to this policy. ‘Late Night Horror’ disappeared, exactly like hundreds of other shows disappeared. That is why a 16mm copy has been found: it was certainly not in BBC warehouses. With this international material, lost episodes of ‘Doctor Who’ have also been recovered. It will be seen. At the moment the BBC is investigating whether it is technically possible to recover the original color through chromatic restoration processes, since the episode was recorded in color but only survived in black and white. And there will be a grand premiere: on September 20, 2026, as part of Grindfest. It will be the first time the episode has been seen since its only showing in 1969. Who knows if they will appear in some forgotten warehouse. Like a horror movie. In Xataka | The curse of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’: the horror story that Hollywood has been trying to adapt for 20 years without success

The Solar Impulse made the dream of the solar airplane a reality. Now it has ended up destroyed after an accident

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There was a time when the Solar Impulse 2 It seemed like it came from a simple question: how far can a plane go if we leave out conventional fuel. The answer was not a commercial product, but an experimental aircraft powered by solar energy and batteries that ended up flying around the world. That is why the news has a special charge. That plane that symbolized a different way of imagining aviation has ended crashed in the Gulf of Mexico during an autonomous test. The coup came on May 4. According to Aviation Safety Networkthe Solar Impulse 2 was conducting an autonomous test flight when it lost power and ended up crashing into the water. The least bitter part of the news is that there were no injuries or deaths, something important because the plane was already flying without a crew in this new stage. The most symbolic part is another: the device that for years turned a technological promise into something visible has been reduced to the remains of an accident. Behind the project was Bertrand Piccarda figure marked by a family tradition of explorers: his grandfather Auguste Piccard was a pioneer of the depths and his father, Jacques Piccardarrived at the Mariana Trench. In 2003 started to imagine a solar aircraft capable of going around the world to draw attention to the “sustainable energy“First came Solar Impulse 1, with its initial flight in 2009and then the final jump. The plane that converted the sun into flight energy What is striking is that this ambition was not based on a gigantic machine in the traditional sense. The Solar Impulse 2 had a huge wingspanabout 71 meters, higher than that of a Boeing 747, but it weighed around 2.3 tons thanks to its carbon fiber structure. The energy came from 17,248 photovoltaic cells distributed throughout the plane, with a maximum power of 66 kW to drive four electric motors and charge four lithium-ion batteries. The moment that made it more than a technological oddity came in 2016. That year, the Solar Impulse 2 completed the first trip around the world of a fixed-wing plane powered entirely by solar energy, a journey that It lasted for more than 15 months. Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, co-founder of the foundation, alternated at the controls during the tour. It was not a demonstration of speed, of course: the plane was moving between 31 and 62 miles per hour, slowing down during the night sections. After that feat, the story changed tone. In 2019, the Solar Impulse Foundation announced the sale of the plane to Skydweller Aero for an undisclosed amount. The Spanish-American company did not view the project from exactly the same place as its creators: its interest was in exploring the potential of the aircraft as a surveillance and communications platform, a very different destination from the original message of energy awareness. With Skydweller the technical transformation of the device also began. After incorporating numerous modifications, the plane completed in Spain his first autonomous flight in 2023and the following year it carried out its first completely unmanned operation at Stennis International Airport, near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The company’s stated goal was to develop a fleet of solar aircraft capable of non-stop flights at certain latitudes, between Miami and Rio de Janeiro. The ambition was evident: almost continuous operations for military and commercial contracts, at a much lower cost than satellite-based options. A huge promise that has ended underwater. Images | Solar Impulse (1, 2, 3, 4) In Xataka | While we all look at Iran, something is moving in the Arctic Circle: Russia is sending bombers with missiles

The war in Iran has destroyed another critical supply chain for consumer technology: PCBs

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While the war in Iran is leaving us with a global energy crisis unprecedented, it is also hitting the technology industry squarely in one of its most critical components: printed circuit boards (PCB). These boards are found in basically any device, and in the last month their price has skyrocketed by up to 40%, according to they count from Goldman Sachs. The reason: an attack on a critical plant for the manufacture of PCBs that puts the global supply of these boards in check. Stroke. ANDIn the first days of April, Iranian forces attacked the Jubail petrochemical complex in Saudi Arabia. SABIC (Saudi Basic Industries Corporation) operates in this complex, a company that produces approximately 70% of the world’s supply of high-purity polyphenylene ether (PPE) resin, an essential material for manufacturing the laminates with which PCBs are built. According to they count From Reuters, since the attack, SABIC has been unable to resume production. And that is a problem on a global scale. Raw material at stake. It is not just about the direct attack on Jubail. The conflict has also generated serious disruption in maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf, one of the most critical logistics routes connecting Middle Eastern chemical producers with Asian electronics manufacturers. Added to this is the pressure on copper, which represents around 60% of the total cost of raw materials in PCB manufacturing, according to they count from Victory Giant Technology, one of the largest Chinese suppliers in the sector with clients such as Nvidia. The company warned this month that the conflict could make key materials such as resin and copper even more expensive. According to Reuters, the price of sheet copper has risen up to 30% since the beginning of the year. Qproduction ties. From Daeduck Electronics, a major South Korean PCB manufacturer that supplies Samsung, SK Hynix and AMD, among others, confirmed Reuters that the company has started talks with its customers to pass on the price increases. The company pointed out that the waiting period for materials such as epoxy resin has gone from three weeks to fifteen. A market that was already stressed. PCB prices had already been rising for months due to the skyrocketing demand for AI servers. According to Reutersdemand has accelerated sharply since March, with manufacturers trying to secure supplies before the situation worsens. Goldman Sachs points out that large cloud service providers are willing to take on further increases because they expect demand to outstrip supply for years. On the other hand, research firm Prismark projects that the global PCB sector will grow 12.5% ​​in 2026, reaching $95.8 billion. And PCBs aren’t the only thing affected. The technology supply chain is taking hits from all sides. According to inform The Elec Korea, large Japanese manufacturers of photoresist (a key chemical in chip production) have begun to notify clients such as Samsung and SK Hynix of problems in the supply of gasoline, a raw material that these suppliers obtain more than 40% from the Middle East. Besides, the price of helium (essential gas in the manufacture of semiconductors) has almost doubled after the Iranian attacks on Ras Laffan, in Qatar, which provides about a third of the global supply, according to Fitch Ratings. What does this mean for the consumer. The impact will end up reaching the final price of the products. PCBs are in absolutely everything that has electronics inside, and a 40% increase in their cost is difficult to absorb without the increase being passed on to the user. Manufacturers are already negotiating price transfers with their customers, and these, in turn, will transfer them downstream. The worst thing is the timing, since we are also in the middle of a RAM and storage crisis and the pressure around the markets only increases. Cover image | Random Thinking In Xataka | There is a company that has grown 3,000% in the stock market, even beating the performance of Nvidia: Sandisk

In the 13th century, some monks destroyed a valuable manuscript of the Bible. We just recovered 42 of your pages

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The one of ‘Codex H’ It’s an ironic story. Despite its enormous value, in the 13th century the monks of the Great Laura Monastery (Greece) They decided to dismantle it to reuse their materials in other works. Parchment was scarce and it was time to recycle, even if it was at the cost of destroying a manuscript that was already more than 400 years old at that time. Historians have always considered its content lost. Now, with the help of science, they have rescued more than 40 pages. And they are a real treasure. What is the ‘H Code’? A 6th century manuscript especially valuable for its content. Beyond its age, its heritage value or as a curiosity, the work is interesting because it offers us a copy of the Letters of Saint Paul made only a few centuries after the apostle himself wrote them. That is, the codex was written in Greek a few centuries after (VI) Paul of Tarsus wrote his epistles in the 1st AD. It may seem like a long time, but to scholars who study the New Testament it offers a valuable treasure: a clue to how those epistles were organized in the Early Middle Ages. The ‘Codex H’ also has another peculiarity: it is the oldest sample of the known as “Euthalian Apparatus”a system of divisions and annotations of the New Testament. And what happened to him? That the work ended up dismantled. Literally. In the 13th century, parchment was a scarce commodity, so in the Monastery of the Great Laura, on Mount Athos (Greece), they decided to sacrifice the manuscript to take advantage of your materials. Their idea was to use parchment to bind and create endpapers for other works, so they inked their pages again. This explains why researchers have found fragments of the work scattered throughout libraries in Italy, Greece, Russia, Ukraine and France. Other pages never appeared and were considered lost forever. And it wasn’t like that? Not quite. The monks of the 13th century may have recycled the parchment to make endpapers and bind other manuscripts, but that does not mean that the original pages (and their content) had been lost. Not at least when examined with the help of science of the 21st century. “We knew that, at some point, the manuscript was re-inked. The chemicals in the new ink caused ‘shift’ damage to the facing pages, creating a mirror image of the text on the opposite sheet, sometimes leaving traces of several pages, barely visible, but very clear with the help of the latest imaging techniques,” explains Garrick Allenprofessor at the University of Glasgow and one of the experts who have studied the codex. What exactly have they done? With the collaboration of the Electronic Library of Ancient Manuscripts (EMEL), the researchers used multispectral imaging and processed the preserved pages in search of “ghost” texts. The term may sound strange, but it basically allows experts to get the most out of a folio, looking for traces that allow them to reconstruct other pages that are no longer physically preserved. To guarantee historical accuracy, the team led by Professor Allen collaborated with experts from Paris who, thanks to radiocarbon dating, confirmed that the material they were working with was parchment from the 6th century. What did they find? Neither more nor less than 42 pages lost (so far) from ‘Codex H’. And that is much more important than it may seem at first glance. The recovered texts are fragments of the Letters of Saint Paul, writings that were already known and do not represent any historical novelty in themselves. What is really interesting is not so much his sentences but everything that surrounds them. What does that mean? That those 42 pages provide an enormous amount of information to researchers on issues such as the way the scribes worked, how they related to Paul’s work, how they organized them and (of course) how they reused the materials when the codices aged. Does it give you that much information? The University of Glasgow stands out especially how the 42 pages of the codex help us better understand the changes that the New Testament has undergone. “They offer a unique perspective on how it has evolved and been interpreted over the centuries,” notes the institution before stopping specifically at the “list of chapters.” “These pages contain the oldest known examples of chapter lists from Paul’s Letters, which differ drastically from how we divide these letters today,” they need in Glasgow. The Greek codex also provides information about how 6th-century scribes corrected, annotated, and interacted with the epistles of Saint Paul with whom they worked. Images | University of Glasgow In Xataka | The Bible has always been the most sacred book. Young Christians are filling it with post-its, underlines and cute covers

ChatGPT enables pay per click ads. And with them the problem that destroyed the credibility of SEO is repeated.

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ChatGPT already charges advertisers for each click their responses generate. OpenAI has activated a cost-per-click (CPC) model of between $3 and $5 within its advertising platform, as it progresses DigiDayuntil now limited to large advertisers who paid for impressions. Why is it important. This marks the moment when ChatGPT stops being a neutral tool and becomes a system with direct economic interests in which answer appears first. And that leap has consequences for anyone who uses AI as a source of information. The context. OpenAI launched its advertising business a few months ago with a CPM model (pay per impressions) and with a minimum investment of $250,000. In that time, the price has dropped from $60 per 1,000 impressions to $25, and the minimum has been reduced to $50,000. The direction of the movement says a lot: OpenAI needs more advertisers and it needs them faster. Between the lines. A CPC of 3-5 dollars is equivalent, in effective CPM, to figures much higher than the market average. OpenAI is not looking for cheap volume: it wants to position itself as premium inventory, at the level of Google Search, where clicks are worth more because the user arrives with a clear intention, especially in certain types of searches: health insurance, urgent loans, lawyers specializing in traffic accidents, etc. The problem is that this intention premium still needs to be demonstrated. The inevitable conflict. The CPC model introduces a conflict that any content platform knows well: the best answer for the user and the answer for the payer are not always the same. It is not a problem exclusive to OpenAI or search engines. It is the fundamental contradiction of any business that combines information and advertising revenue, including the media, and that each actor manages with greater or lesser success depending on their size, reputation and incentives. Google has been navigating this conflict for 25 years with increasingly debated results. Let’s think about what a Google results page looked like in 2005 and what it is like today. It’s not even your only conflict of interest. OpenAI inherits that same conflict from day one, without the reputation cushion that gave Google margin for two decades, and at a time when the demand for transparency about how AI systems work is increasing. Yes, but. There are those who argue that the LLMs They are different because contextual conversation generates a more qualified intent than traditional search, which would justify the premium price and make the advertising presence more tolerable. It is possible. But the same thing was said about branded contentof the native advertising and SEO in its beginnings. If history tells us anything, it is that economic incentives end up winning over product design, not the other way around. In Xataka | AI already knew how to create images. OpenAI says it has found the missing piece with the new ChatGPT Images 2.0 Featured image | Xataka

The war machine that the US destroyed, Iran has put it back on its feet

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During the Vietnam War, American pilots bombed for days a network of tunnels near Cu Chi convinced that they had completely rendered it useless. When the troops advanced on the ground, they discovered that not only was it still operational, but the combatants they had reappeared from hidden exits a few meters from their positions. The scene left a brutal lesson: destroying from the air does not always mean eliminating what is below. A start of war that changes everything. The first hours of the conflict in Iran set the tone of everything that would come later: an intensity of fire rarely seen, with hundreds of missiles and almost a thousand drones launched in just two days, forcing the defensive systems to operate at the limit from the first moment. That volume not only showed the scale of the Iranian arsenal, but also the type of war that was being waged, one in which saturation was almost as important as precision. From that starting point, the expectation was clear for all the actors: if that rhythm was sustained, the key was not going to be who hit the hardest, because that actor had a name from the beginning, but who last longer. The illusion of total destruction. Because the United States and Israel responded in the first 48 hours of war with a massive campaign of bombings that sought to disable the Iranian military infrastructure, attacking thousands of targets and sealing access to underground bases to leave the launchers trapped. For weeks, the official message It was forceful.: The missile program had been devastated and the country’s response capacity was practically nullified. However, even at that time doubts arose from within the US apparatus itself, which warned that a significant part of these systems had not been destroyed, but simply blocked or temporarily inaccessible. Iranian efforts underway at a missile base in Tabriz on April 10 The mountains as a shield and strategy. It we count at the time. The real differentiating element was not in the missiles, but in where they were stored. Iran has spent decades building a network of underground facilities in mountainous environments, many of them excavated in granitic rock capable of resisting extremely powerful attacks. These “missile cities” not only store weapons, but also integrate complete logistics systemswith tunnels, launch points and escape routes designed to minimize exposure. It is an architecture designed for survive the first blowassume damage and keep the operational core intact, in a logic that prioritizes resilience over invulnerability. A loader over debris blocking an entrance to a missile base near Khomeyn, April 10 Dig, reactivate and launch again. Satellite images now have confirmed that, as soon as a ceasefire window opened, heavy machinery went into action to remove debris and reopen accesses blocked by bombings. As? The Telegraph said Through satellite survey that dozens of excavators, trucks and engineering equipment were deployed at key points to clear sealed entrances and regain access to buried launchers. Again, what is relevant here is not just that it is being done, but the speed: in a matter of days (and even in just 48 hours in some cases) those facilities have become operational again, suggesting that much of the military capacity was not destroyed, but simply paused. Designed to resist. All of this, furthermore, fits with a very specific doctrine: assume that the enemy will have air superiority and design the system to survive it. Unlike a conventional war, where losing control of the air usually implies the progressive destruction of infrastructure, here the logic is different and focuses on protect assets critical underground, absorb the first attack and recover capacity combat as soon as possible. This approach turns conflict into a race of attrition, where each cycle of attack and reconstruction erodes both the attacker and the defender. The real problem. If you like, the direct consequence of this dynamic is that the apparent initial success of Washington (and Israel) has lost weight in the face of the recovery capacity Iranian. Because, although the attacks have been massive and technically effective, the speed with which Tehran is restoring its bases raises an uncomfortable scene for their adversaries: every pause, negotiation or ceasefire in the fighting becomes an opportunity to rearm again or, literally, dust off the bunkers In that context, the question stops being whether an infrastructure can be destroyed and becomes how many times it can function again before the other side is left behind. without resources or without political margin to continue. Image | Airbus In Xataka | If the question is where is the US nuclear aircraft carrier, the answer is uncomfortable: hidden so that it does not sink In Xataka | We sensed that Iran bombed the US military bases with help: some coordinates have revealed its name, and it is Made in China

With the RAM market completely destroyed, Valve has a message to create the Steam Machine: “help”

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Valve is not having any luck in the hardware world. If with software it is the undisputed queen of the PC ecosystem thanks to Steamwhen they try to launch a console things don’t go so smoothly. More than a decade ago they already tried it with some first Steam Machines that they had no identity. Now they have returned to the fray with a Steam Machine that it looks very goodbut it comes at the worst time. And in the middle of the RAM memory crisisValve only has one thing to say. Aid. The crisis. At Xataka we have been covering the RAM memory news because, although it seems that it is a crisis of a specific component, it is really something that It is affecting the entire industry of semiconductors… and consumption. If in 2020 it was a perfect storm What caused the semiconductor crisis is now the enormous demand for RAM by AI companies. They are all building gigantic data centers and there is a problem: there is only three big RAM manufacturers (plus a fourth that is emerging in China) and all of them have focused on creating RAM for data center equipment. The consequence is that there is no RAM for anyone else. And this not only affects RAM as such: it affects the price of cell phones, computers, cars and even to the router. And, of course, to the Steam Machine. Hey kid, do you have RAM? Valve announced its new machine at the end of last year and they targeted early 2026 to give a release date and price. The problem is that the days were passing, the price of RAM was rising and the question arose: What about Steam Machine? Well what happens is that Valve is desperate. They have already said that it will be released this year (in principle it was going to be spring), it seems that it will be expensive and, in addition, they have pointed directly to the crisis in the supply problems they are having with his other console, the Steam Deck. With this panorama, Valve has appeared at the GDC fair to explain its vision of the console/PC and, in an environment full of manufacturers and professionals, launched a request to the public: If you have access to a large amount of RAM, we are in the market and we would like to buy it.” Complicated. It is a humorous comment, but also somewhat symptomatic. Valve has the money as punishment, but it is not even close to being a premium customer of those few foundries capable of creating RAM. If even Apple can have a bad time, being the second client of the giant TSMCValve does not even enter the annex in the memory request sheet. There are analyzes of all kinds about the consequences of this crisis. In it mobile market will feel a strong bloweven targeting manufacturers that will have to stop launching devices due to market conditions. But on PC, things are more or less the same, with global shipments forecast to be 11% less than the previous year. Captain after the fact. It’s no longer that the Steam Machine may or may not come out, it’s that if it does come out, it would be very expensive. It is something similar to what would happen with the rumored PlayStation 6 that could have seen the light this year and about which we already know that we will not have news in the short term. And here the big question may arise: why didn’t Valve release the Steam Machine when they announced it? Obviously, there were units prepared because they were shown to the press and, furthermore, it is not cutting-edge hardware, so it would have been easy to have it on the market in November 2025. But of course, the situation escalated at a dizzying pace and launching a console at X price and two months later raising it by 200 euros due to the price of RAM or, even worse, stopping selling it because you don’t have units available would have been a tremendous blow. Not so much to the coffers, which in the end with Steam they get a good pinch, but to the reputation. And it is clear that a second disastrous launch of a Steam Machine is something that Valve cannot afford. Now we just have to wait to see when they will be able to launch the machine and, above all, if the price corresponds to components that have already been available for five months. they seemed somewhat fair to us for the most demanding games. Images | DOTA2 The International In Xataka | The price of RAM has skyrocketed and the best example to see the debacle is a 100 euro PC: the Raspberry Pi

We tend to think that the war of extermination was invented by the modern State. A mass grave from 2,800 years ago has just destroyed the myth

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There is an almost romantic tendency to idealize the remote past. Perhaps, inspired by the myth of the “noble savage” they often let’s imagine prehistory and the first societies as peaceful environments where extreme violence and systematic was an aberration or, in any case, an invention that came with the help of more modern times. But the reality is that if we had a time machine, this would be one of the few places where we would have to travel. A reality. Archeology has an uncomfortable habit of unearthing truths that do not fit our prejudices. The latest blow to this idyllic vision that some may have comes from the Balkans, specifically from a mass grave in Gomolava from 2,800 years ago that reveals a calculated, selective and brutal massacre against women and children. A mystery. In the 9th century BC, during the first Iron Age, the Carpathian and Balkan region was inhabited by societies that we today consider primitive. Specifically, they could be found semi-nomadic groups and sedentary communities who were beginning to clash for control of the territory. But here there were neither states nor regular armies. In this way, when archaeologists found a huge mass grave with the remains of 77 individuals at the Gomolava site, the first hypothesis was the most logical for the time: a catastrophic epidemic devastated everyone. However, a new study published in the magazine Naturehas completely rewritten the history of this site, combining forensic, genetic and isotopic analyses. Annihilation. Here the DNA was clear, since there was no trace of deadly pathogens. In this case, people died not from a disease, but from an outbreak of deliberate violence that has shocked the scientific community. Not only because of the violence, but because of the demographic profile, since 70.8% of the adults were women and 66% of the total were children and adolescents. Here the forensic analyzes revealed a terrifying pattern, since the vast majority had injuries at the time of death in the skull. Thus, they were forceful blows inflicted from above, suggesting that the attackers could have been on horseback or executing the victims while they were kneeling or subdued. Why children and women? The answer is pure strategic calculation, since the study of isotopes and DNA revealed that, with the exception of a mother and her two daughters, the victims were not related to each other and came from various regions with varied diets. But it was not a simple robbery gone wrong, but rather an interregional selective annihilation designed to wipe the reproductive future of rival groups off the map. And, in a context of profound social restructuring and territorial conflicts in the Carpathian Basin, eliminating offspring and those people who can produce even more offspring, such as women, was the most brutal and effective way to assert power in an area. Without a doubt, a great strategy to prevent anyone from claiming rights in that area. Ritual. To add another layer of complexity to this dark episode, the burial was not improvised. Contrary to what happens in many mass graves that are quickly made to throw the corpses, andIn this case they took their time. Investigators saw that the victims were buried next to bronze jewelry, ceramics and even sacrificed animals, so it was quite taken care of. Here the theory proposed is that it is a “macabre demonstration of power”: an act where the brutality of the massacre coexists with the socioeconomic value of the victims and the need to maintain the funeral customs of the time. Image | Sarah Nylund (Nature) In Xataka | When did human beings start “cooking”? The answer lies in some carp from 780,000 years ago.

beaches destroyed and unusable now that the season begins

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Now that the rains have lost relevance and everything is, little by little, returning to normal: Andalusia is beginning to realize that the winter storms have left much more than accumulated water: they have left a much more uncomfortable truth than the community is willing to accept. Because now Easter is coming and the “Andalusian paradise of sun and beach” has become a succession of destroyed promenades, damaged infrastructure and stretches where the beaches are completely missing. It’s something we knew and didn’t want to see. It is something that the storm is going to force us directly. What has happened? The first part of the story is simple and we have repeated it many times: trains of storms, persistent rains, water systems at the edge of their capacity. But also bad sea, wind and huge waves. As a consequence, while we were all 100% aware of overflows and reservoirs, several provinces have seen how the loss of sand and damage to coastal infrastructure became our daily bread. Huelva, we have already talked about ithas taken the worst part. And yes, the Andalusian Parliament has asked the central government (who has powers in the Coasts) for “stabilization, protection and restoration” works through emergency means. But even if they arrive, that will only be a temporary arrangement. The Andalusia that also lives off its coasts. Beyond the stereotypes, there are many Andalusias. And yes, one of them (or several) lives off its coasts. In 2025, without going any further, tourism broke his own record of visitors and income: we are talking about 37.9 million visitors and more than 30 billion. Now the calendar is tight and the problem has become evident, but the urgency cannot make us forget that it was there from the first moment. Because? As experts remember, the profile of the beaches “it constantly changes in response to changes in transverse sediment transport produced by marine dynamics, especially waves.” This “has never changed in all of history”, what has changed is that in recent decades it has begun to matter to us. How much we have changed. Well, because the emergence of mass tourism starting in the 1960s turned beaches into a very valuable resource and filled them with investments, infrastructure and capital. When the beaches began to change, we applied brute force: as we have explained on more than one occasion“the construction of breakwaters, the annual filling of beaches and the construction of coastal infrastructure to ‘secure’ the line have been the daily routine of our relationship with the beaches.” And as we have more and more investments in them, the problems become more critical and, for this reason, it is more expensive to insure these investments. But we can’t. It’s a race to nowhere; because, nowhere, can we answer the big questions left by the storms: will we be able to withdraw from the eroded front line in an orderly and fair manner? Will we be able to convert that tourism into something that maintains jobs, families and population? Will we be able to understand that behind these rains lies an entire country with a huge problem or will we continue as before? Image | Suomi In Xataka | Twenty years after the Prestige, Galicia faces another environmental disaster on its beaches: pellets

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