He is 82 years old and has earned 746% betting on a mine that doesn’t even work

Canadian Eric Sprott has multiplied his investment in Hycroft Mining by eight thanks to the precious metals boom. And its stake is now worth more than $2.1 billion, despite the fact that the mine has not been operating for years. Numbers. Sprott is a veteran investor commonly recognized as the “gold magnate.” In 2022 it invested $28 million in Hycroft Mining. Today its participation exceeds 2.1 billion dollars, having achieved a profitability of 746%. The company’s shares have soared more than 425% in the last two months and have accumulated a rise of more than 1,500% since the tycoon began to expand his position last summer. A mine that does not mine. Hycroft owns an open pit deposit in northern Nevada that has been operational since the 1980s, but the company has not mined gold since 2021. Instead, it reprocesses previously mined ore that remains on the surface. Most of its reserves are underground and the company lacks a defined plan to resume mining operations. In fact, it has not generated income since 2022, when it had a turnover of just $33 million, according to data from Bloomberg. Gold and silver rally. Hycroft operates as if it were “a huge underground ETF,” according to defined Brian Quast, precious metals analyst at Bank of Montreal. Gold and silver prices have reached all-time highs over the last year, and investors are looking for any way to get exposure to this rally. Even if the mine is not operating, its reserves gain value with each rise in prices. Sprott has been defending investment in gold and silver for decades, and this bet has placed him among the few billionaires who have been able to capitalize on the current boom. From almost bankruptcy to stock market stardom. Just like account Bloomberg, Sprott’s initial investment came as Hycroft was close to insolvency. Together with AMC Entertainment, which had plenty of liquidity after the meme stock phenomenon, the Canadian ended up saving the company from its creditors with this investment. The announcement skyrocketed the shares almost 100% in the premarket, although the enthusiasm did not last long, as by the end of 2022 the value had fallen below half the entry price. Sprott sold a fifth of his position, barely recovering his investment. For three years, his bet remained stagnant while the price of gold rose without stocks following suit. Searching results. Last summer, Sprott changed strategy. Between June and January it has invested an additional $187 million to almost double its stake to exceed 40% of Hycroft’s capital. “I am doing everything possible to expand my position to the maximum,” declared in October to Tony Denaro, content creator dedicated to finance. Their move coincided with new drilling results that identified higher-quality silver deposits than expected and areas with expansion potential. AMC stared. The other major investor, who rode the wave with Sprott in 2022, was the AMC cinema chain, although it did not suffer the same fate. In December, when his Hycroft shares finally turned positive after years of losses, he sold 80% of his stake to Sprott for $24 million. Adam Aron, CEO of AMC, justified the operation ensuring that it was “the right time to monetize and reallocate capital” to its core business. Two months later, that block of shares is worth $172 million. The gold fortune. Although precious metals are on the rise, few big fortunes have been able to take advantage of the boom. According to the report UBS Global Family Offices 2025, these types of asset structures barely allocate 2% on average to precious metals. Only a few investors like Sprott or Hong Kong’s Cheah Cheng Hye have bet heavily, as share Bloomberg. For Sprott, Hycroft’s spotty track record is precisely its biggest draw, because as gold and silver prices rise, the likelihood increases that reprocessing will become increasingly profitable, opening up more possibilities for monetizing underground reserves. “You cannot find a more leveraged and significant reward,” said the investor. in the interview with Denaro. Cover image | Palisades Gold Radio and Leonie Clough In Xataka | Seven of the ten largest fortunes in the world in 2026 are due to AI: this illustrative graph makes it very clear

A Harry Potter fan fiction was so successful that it changed the names of its protagonists. And thanks to this he earned 3 million dollars

A Harry Potter fanfic has just become one of the most successful publishing releases of the year. ‘Alchemised‘, SenLinYu’s debut novel, sold 300,000 copies during its first week in bookstores and reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list. But the real impact came days before its publication, when Legendary Entertainment paid more than $3 million for the film rights, setting a record for a debut novel. How it was done. The story behind the book is as notable as its figures: ‘Alchemised’ was originally titled ‘Manacled’, and was a fanfiction that mixed the universe of harry potter with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘ by Margaret Atwood, focusing on the relationship between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy. Over 18 months, SenLinYu transformed his viral story (which racked up millions of reads on the fanfictions Archive of Our Own) in a completely original work, eliminating all traces of intellectual property of JK Rowling and Atwood of the text, but trying to preserve the core of the narrative. The result: Favorite Debut Novel of 2025 at the Goodreads Choice Awards. What is it about? Alchemised follows Helena Marino, an alchemist and healer who awakens after 14 months as a prisoner of war of the necromancers, the victorious side in a devastating civil war. Helena discovers that her mind has been magically altered, erasing crucial memories from a part of her life she doesn’t even remember owning. The book has a violent and dark approach, and that is why SenLinYu rejects the “romance” label despite the love component: “I didn’t write this book with the idea that it would be seen as aspirational.”he states. The author’s past. The appeal of the book lies precisely in that uncompromising darkness. SenLinYu, of Japanese descent, injects into her fantasy elements based on the real horrors of war (her maternal grandmother was in American concentration camps during World War II) and has sought to recover ignored historical perspectives, particularly the experiences of Soviet women on the Eastern Front. That combination of epic fantasy and anti-war criticism has connected with readers who seek more mature and disturbing narratives than those usual in the genre. The paradigmatic case. The path of fanfiction The publishing phenomenon has an inescapable antecedent: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. In 2009, EL James began publishing chapters of ‘Master of the Universe’ on Fanfiction.netreimagining the relationship between Edward Cullen and Bella Swan from ‘Twilight’, without vampires but with a domineering billionaire. Reader reaction was so positive that James self-published the story in 2011 after removing explicit references to Stephenie Meyer’s saga and renaming the protagonists Christian Gray and Anastasia Steele. The leap came in March 2012, when Random House acquired the rights of the novel in a seven-figure contract. The result was more than 150 million copies sold globally and a film trilogy that grossed $1.3 billion at the global box office. Even then Jennifer Bergstrom, executive at Simon & Schuster, declared that “the fanfiction It has definitely become part of what we publish. This is changing the industry at a time when traditional publishing needs it most.” For the first time, major publishers were publicly acknowledging that online communities of amateur writers were a legitimate talent pool. Other successes. The success of ‘Fifty Shades’ was not an isolated case. Anna Todd wrote a story about One Direction’s Harry Styles on Wattpad in 2013, publishing it in serial format under the title ‘After’. The story accumulated more than 1,000 million readings on the platform before Simon & Schuster offered him a contract with which sold more than 10 million copies and generated five movies. More recently, Ali Hazelwood transformed her fanfiction of Star Wars centered on Rey and Kylo Ren in ‘The Love Hypothesis’, which It will soon be adapted to film. The journey here. This transformation of fanfiction into a bestseller would not have been possible without the digital ecosystem that supports it. Archive of Our Own It houses more than 13 million works and has become the most important archive of transformative writing. ‘Manacled’ by SenLinYu It was the second most read story in the entire history of the web when it was removed in January 2025, having accumulated more than 10 million views and 84,000 kudos (the equivalent of “likes”). This phenomenon has forced the traditional publishing industry to rethink its methods of attracting talent. Literary agents and editors now systematically scour Wattpad, Archive of Our Own, and Fanfiction.net, identifying high-impact stories before offering contracts. Removing references to other people’s intellectual property is now a standardized process, and thanks to this, trends such as videos on ‘Manacled’ accumulated millions of views years before ‘Alchemised’ hit bookstores. A whole tide of public before the official publication of the book. In Xataka | JK Rowling against fandom: How the Harry Potter universe lost its magic

Russian oil never stopped arriving in Europe and this 30-year-old German knows it well because he has earned millions by supporting the system.

JR Ewing, the oil magnate dallasused to repeat that “the essential thing in this business was to always be one step ahead.” If I lived in 2025, I probably wouldn’t be wearing a Texan hat: I’d be a trader in my late 30s with a laptop, a rented office in Dubai, and a German passport. And perhaps he would look a lot like Christopher Eppinger, the young man who, according to an extensive report in the Financial Timeshas managed to become a millionaire by speculating with sanctioned Russian oil while Europe proclaimed from the rooftops that it was breaking dependence on the Kremlin. Because while Brussels talked about “energy sovereignty” and announced price caps, a parallel ecosystem of nomadic traders, ghost fleets and opaque companies continued to move millions of barrels away from the official radar. In that underground of the global economy, Eppinger found his opportunity. The sanctioned oil never stopped flowing; It simply stopped being visible. And he knew how to make it profitable. When a door closes. Christopher Eppinger, marked since childhood by the chapters of dallas that he saw with his grandmother, he found in the war a window to get rich. The young German moved with the same logic that much more veteran intermediaries have used for decades: special purpose companies in the United Arab Emirates, triangulated operations with India or China, sales contracts for discounted crude oil and the logistics of a ghost fleet that operates on the margins of maritime law. While European governments presented sanctions in solemn press conferences, he took advantage of every crack in the system to buy low and resell high. He didn’t need his own ships, or infrastructure, or even physically touching a barrel: it was enough to know where the opportunities were and who didn’t want to look too closely. Showing an uncomfortable truth. The story of this young German is not an anecdote, but evidence that the sanctioning system never acted as intended. Organization reports like Public Eye show that, between 2023 and 2024 alone, newly created companies or companies relocated to Dubai accounted for more than half of the Russian oil exported by sea, displacing traditional centers such as Switzerland and Singapore. According to Bloombergkey figures in the energy trade, such as Murtaza Lakhani, helped Rosneft reconfigure its export chains through the Emirates to keep flows active despite sanctions. And while much of Europe tried to break ties with Moscow, some countries —like Hungary and Slovakia— took advantage of exceptions to continue receiving crude oil and gas through the Druzhba pipeline. Energy dependence, far from being broken, fragmented into a more chaotic, less transparent and more vulnerable system. In this environment, profiles like Eppinger’s are not only possible: they are almost inevitable. The recipe for enrichment. Eppinger’s method follows a clear logic that the Financial Times details precisely. The first step is to move to Dubai, which has become the “Desert Ireland”thanks to minimal taxation, thousands of special purpose companies created in record time and a confidentiality regime that allows operations without revealing the beneficial owner. The United Arab Emirates does not apply sanctions against Moscow and serves as a perfect platform to move cargo, contracts and dividends without European surveillance. The second pillar is the ghost fleet: hundreds of aging, poorly insured oil tankers, with registrations in opaque countries and with transponders that turn off just when the ship approaches a Russian cargo. These ships They are the heart of parallel trade which has kept Russia exporting above the $60 limit imposed by the G7. The third consists of the Offshore transfers and triangulations. The scheme is simple: buy cheap Russian crude, transfer it to another tanker in international waters, mix it or rename it “Malaysian” or “Indian”, and resell it at an international price. A digital business, fast and — above all — difficult to track. And the fourth element is the ambiguous tolerance of the West. As Bloomberg has detailedthe United States avoided acting harshly for months to avoid causing a global rise in the price of oil. In the EU, exceptions and loopholes allowed non-European companies, although controlled by Europeans, to operate without restrictions. Eppinger moved precisely in that gray space: a legally ambiguous but economically explosive territory. The great gray void where everything is possible. The short answer is: it depends. The long answer is more uncomfortable. According to regulators cited in the different sources, an operation can be technically legal if Russian oil is purchased below the price ceiling, transported to a country that does not apply sanctions and is executed from a legally established entity outside the EU. Switzerland even recognizedaccording to Public Eye— that subsidiaries of Swiss companies established in Dubai are not subject to Swiss sanctioning legislation, as long as they are formally “independent.” This legal architecture allows traders like Eppinger to act without violating the letter of the law, even if they clearly violate its spirit. The question is not so much whether what you do is legal, but why it is possible to do it. Will there be consequences? The cracks in the system are beginning to produce visible effects. On the military front, Ukraine has expanded the war towards Russian energy infrastructure: attacking refineries thousands of kilometers from the front and disabled tankers linked to sanctioned crude oil trading. Russia has lost around 13% of its refining capacity and several regions have suffered queues and gasoline rationing, according to the Financial Times. On the diplomatic and economic level, according to BloombergWashington is already studying specific sanctions against intermediaries in the Emirates, while the United Kingdom has begun to penalize marketing companies with opaque property registered in Dubai. In Europe, pressure is growing on countries that continue to receive Russian energy by land, such as Hungary and Slovakia, identified as leakage points in the system. Eppinger’s business, like that of many others, could have its days numbered if the regulatory fence tightens. For now, it is still profitable. Russia gets richer while Europe … Read more

In 1995 some researchers discovered the “peaceful gene” of our body. Today their finding has earned them a Nobel

The Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm has done it again. He has rewarded one of those investigations that, for years, seemed like a page note in textbooks, but today are the basis of revolutionary treatments. He Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine of 2025 He has been granted jointly to Japanese Shimon Sakaguchi and Americans Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell for “their discoveries about Regulatory T cells And the role of Foxp3 gene In the immune function “ The beginning. Already in the previous decade, Sakaguchi had identified a subset of T lymphocytes that did not attack, but did the opposite: they suppressed the activity of other T lymphocytes. They were pacifying cells, a kind of riot police of the immune system. In 1995, He published a job Key that characterized these cells, today known as regulatory T cells (TREGS). The finding was transcendental. Sakaguchi showed that without these tregs, The immune system went crazy and began to attack the tissues of the body itself, causing devastating autoimmune diseases. He had discovered the natural mechanism of the body to maintain tolerance and avoid self -destruction. But the key piece of the puzzle was missing: what made a T cell become a peacemaker and not a soldier? Brunkow and Ramsdell. Although this discovery was transcendental, the reality is that there was a lot of skeptic that he did not believe in his theory. But the answer to the big question that stayed in the air came in 2001 (still far from the year 2025 and the delivery of this award). Here, on the one hand, Mary E. Brunkow’s team investigated a rare and deadly disease Autoimmune in children called IPEX syndrome. The investigation pointed to a gene as a cause of this disease: Foxp3. On the other hand, Fred Ramsdell’s team was studying a mouse model with very similar symptoms and reached the same conclusion: The defective gene was Foxp3. The connection. The connection was immediate and explosive: Foxp3 was the “master switch”. It is the gene that, when activated in a T lymphocyte, gives you the instructions to become a TREG. Without functional FOXP3, there are no regulatory T cells, and the immune system is uncontrolled. Sakaguchi’s discovery finally found his genetic explanation and already gave him enough weight so that the scientific community saw that he had sat a great precedent. A revolution. This double discovery, Sakaguchi’s cell phone and Brunkow and Ramsdell’s genetic, has completely changed the immunology paradigm and has opened two great therapeutic pathways with immense potential. On the one hand, the door opens up to the fight against autoimmune diseases since with the lack of tregs the body attacks itself. The solution in this case is to increase this type of cells, and there are already different clinical trials to extract patient T cells, “convert” them into the laboratory and re -inject them to the patient. Something we now know as ‘immunotherapy’. But it also serves for the fight against cancer. In these cases it has been seen how tumors are ‘intelligent’ and surround themselves with tregs to protect themselves to the immune system that tries to end these cells. These pacifying cells prevent “soldier” T lymphocytes from attacking cancer. The new immunotherapies seek precisely to temporarily deactivate these tregs or block the action of Foxp3 in the tumor environment, eliminating the protective coat of cancer so that the immune system can destroy it. This has been especially promising in tumors such as lymphoma. Time has passed. The most surprising of all this is the large amount of time between the initial discovery and recognition with a Nobel. If it is true that it has been expected to have a crucial relevance within the clinical aspect, with trials that give very good results for diseases that are really serious. Images | Wikipedia (2, 3) In Xataka | A Spanish team has taken a giant step in a hopeful cancer treatment: chemoinmunotherapy

‘Tele family’ has earned many detractors in their first week. And that includes much of TVE

Only one week and the star program of the afternoons of La1, ”TV family‘, keep giving dislikes to RTVE. A new problem is now added to his weak audience results: the presence of his collaborator Marta Riesco in the Vatican has bothered the public entity’s council for the bad image he is giving. The controversy. This Thursday, Riesco appeared in the Vatican to cover Pope’s choice. A day later, the Informative Council launches a statement to protect RTVE’s credibility. In his opinion, the arrival of Riesco “to a clearly informative event” and “using the RTVE microphone” is problematic by the form and style, very similar to that of traditional news. “Information professionals in this house have long days in Rome informing seriously and rigorously,” says the statement. The singular thing about the case is that Riesco had no chance to inform too much: After a first block in which he informed about the situation and chatted with some nuns in a relaxed but serious and respectful tone, The White Fumata arrived. The address of ” The family of TV ‘cut the broadcast of the program to give way to the news. A day before, two historical RTVE, María Escario and Ángeles Caso, criticized La1 for including in their programming a space that could be understood as Continuation of ‘Save Me’: Scario, already retired, spread on social networks a very critical case of case Posted in article 14. The family in trouble. It is not the only stumbling block that ‘the family of TV’ has had: its first day of the first day of ride were not spectacular (8.7% and 9.1% of Share), but then they went down. He Tuesday They made 8.7% and 7.4%, and the Wednesday They touched background with a single 6.2%block. He Thursday It was issued only in desktop, and also obtained minimal in that strip, 8%. Facing next week, maybe RTVE has to consider the content and format of a space that for now does not rise from fourth place, leaving behind the sixth. Objective: Save the series. ‘TV family’ initially raised as a couple of square brackets that framed, with their two halves, to the two main dishes of the afternoon, the series ‘Wild Valley’ and ‘The Promise’. At the moment they are not being affected by the changes, and in fact on Thursday the first one made 10.1% of Sharethe Second best share of its history. But right now they are the float that keeps the afternoons of La1. Will RTVE continue to be risking that ‘the TV family’ drag with their results to seemingly infallible fictions? Innocence interrupted. ‘The family of TV’, with this unwanted controversy with the Informative Council and with the weak audience results, thus becomes the first great stumbling block of the Directive headed by Sergio Calderón. Under his mandate, programs are being happening (some of them, yes, inherited from the previous directive) that are working and renewing the image of RTVE: Broncano (which, yes, Starts to falter against ‘El Hormiguero’), Marc Giró, Buenafuente (That by the way, started with an excellent audience12.8%) … ‘The family of TV’ was a project clearly very dear to Calderón, since before he was in the direction of the public channel he worked in Studio manufacturers, producer of ‘Save Me’. A stumbling block that is still in time to fix if he does not want him to become a first notch in his history in RTVE. Header | RTVE In Xataka | The audiences, in unpredictable terrain between the bad Broncano streak and the increasingly patent recovery of TV5

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