exist

First it was a suspicious cake. Now China has discovered that thousands of restaurants on its delivery apps… do not exist

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One of the most famous stories of the internet era it happened in 2013when American journalists discovered that a supposed restaurant called “The Shed at Dulwich” became one of the best rated of London despite the fact that, for much of its existence, it did not even serve real food. The case demonstrated how a compelling digital presence can be more powerful than an authentic physical business. The cake that uncovered the cake. It all started with something seemingly trivial. A customer from Beijing ordered a birthday cake through a delivery application and received a decorated product with inedible flowers. The claim seemed like just another incident among millions of daily orders, but the subsequent investigation ended up uncovering one of the largest food fraud schemes in Chinese digital commerce. The business he had purchased from claimed to have nearly 380 stores spread across the country. Actually, I didn’t have not a single physical store. The licenses were fake and the company existed only within the applications. What started as an isolated complaint ended up opening the door to a national review that revealed a much deeper problem: “ghost kitchens,” thousands of restaurants that seemed real to consumers. They just didn’t exist.. Food delivery drivers start their workday for Kangaroo delivery service in Beijing The operation. Apparently, the BBC told this week that the so-called “ghost kitchens” were operating by taking advantage of the control gaps of the delivery platforms. These businesses advertised themselves as conventional restaurants, often using rented licenses, falsified documentation, or non-existent addresses. When a customer placed an order, the supposed restaurant I didn’t cook anything. In many cases the order was automatically transferred to intermediary platforms that organized auctions between different suppliers. The order ended up in the hands of whoever agreed to prepare it. for the lowest price possible. The consumer believed they were buying from a specific brand when, in reality, the food could come from any unknown kitchen, without knowing who made it or under what sanitary conditions. The figures of a monster. The national investigation carried out by the Chinese authorities revealed the magnitude of the phenomenon. Inspectors identified more of 67,000 ghost restaurants distributed among the main delivery applications in the country. In addition, they discovered a chain of illegal orders that only in the cake sector had been managed around of 3.6 million orders. The authorities they concluded that delivery platforms, middlemen and numerous sellers had built a parallel supply chain based on opacity and in mass subcontracting. What seemed like a set of isolated frauds turned out to be an industrialized system that operated on a large scale and moved millions of transactions. The price war behind the fraud. They remembered in Nikkei that the origin of the problem lies in the fierce competition in the home delivery sector in China. With almost 630 million users Using these services, platforms compete to attract customers through constant discounts, aggressive promotions and an ever-increasing range of establishments. In that context, the pressure to reduce costs It ended up generating a race to the bottom. An example cited by the investigations showed how a cake sold to the customer for $35 ended up being awarded to a supplier willing to manufacture it. for just 11 dollars. Between intermediaries, commissions and platforms, much of the money disappeared before reaching the chef who actually prepared the product. The consequence was a model that rewarded volume and price above quality, traceability and food safety. The platforms, in the garlic. The investigation was not limited to the sellers. The authorities they concluded that many platforms had deliberately relaxed their controls to accelerate their growth. According to regulators, companies they did not properly verify the licenses of the establishments and allowed the presence of unauthorized sellers because a broader offer helped to attract more users. Some employees they came to recognize that applying strict controls could cause merchants to migrate to rival applications. The result was a situation in which commercial incentives ended up trumping legal and health obligations. Historical fines. Beijing’s response has been one of the most forceful seen in years within the Chinese digital economy. The authorities imposed sanctions worth 3.6 billion yuanabout 500 million dollars, to large companies such as Taobao, JD.com, Meituan, Pinduoduo, Douyin and other platforms involved. Some businesses were temporarily suspended from recruiting new vendors and forced to eliminate detected ghost restaurants. Sector analysts have described the operation as one of the tougher regulatory sanctions imposed on internet companies since the entry into force of the current food legislation. The new digital surveillance. From now on, platforms must verify periodically that the licenses are valid, that the physical addresses exist and that the businesses actually correspond to the advertised establishments. Restaurants without in-person service will have to state it clearly to users. At the same time, some cities have begun to implement transparent kitchens equipped with cameras that allow you to follow the preparation of food live. They are also being deployed artificial intelligence systems capable of detecting fake photographs, supervising kitchens and analyzing possible irregularities. Even delivery drivers have been incorporated into the surveillance system through reward programs for those who report suspicious establishments. The end of uncontrolled expansion. Beyond food safety, the campaign reflects a broader shift in Chinese regulatory strategy. For years, platforms grew by prioritizing the number of users, sellers and orders. Now Beijing wants to replace this accelerated expansion with a model more controlled and predictable. The appearance of tens of thousands of non-existent restaurants showed the extent to which competition had distorted the market. What began with a simple cake purchased online ended up revealing an ecosystem where millions of consumers believed they were choosing between thousands of different restaurants when, in many cases, behind the screen there was no establishment, no dining room and, sometimes, not even a real company. Image | TurnOnTheNight, Tracy Hunter, SKWTAM8 In Xataka | Just Eat knows that we Spaniards are hooked on Delivery. This is how … Read more

We’ve spent years unraveling a signal from space that shouldn’t exist. And finally we have a “Rosetta stone” to decipher it

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It was the year 2018 when a team of Australian scientists detected a strange radio signal in the plane of the Milky Way. The radio pulse was too slow for any known astronomical object. It seemed more like some kind of anomaly or error in the telescopes than a new discovery. However, in 2025 another similar signal was located. And then another and another. Currently, there are at least 12 of these signals recorded, which have been named long-period radio transients (LPTs). Each of them includes a new feature that makes it impossible to find a common thread. Or at least it had been that way until now, since a new group of Australian researchers has located a sign that brings together several of the pieces of the puzzle. It has been so useful that it has been colloquially dubbed a space Rosetta stone. All the pieces together. The signal located in 2018 (although it was published in 2022) occurred every 18.18 minutes. With this periodicity, a star in the Milky Way increased its brightness for 30-60 seconds, and then decreased it again. Later a similar phenomenon was located, in which it was possible to see further. A binary system consisting of a white dwarf and a red dwarf was identified. The interaction between the two produced the emission of radio waves. However, when another LPT was detected, the emissions were not radio waves, but X-rays. How was a single phenomenon going to be defined if each one was different from the previous one? The key, finally, has been another LPT, initially located by the ASKAP telescope, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). With it, and with the collaboration of other telescopes, a binary system composed of a white dwarf and a red dwarf has been identified, whose interaction gives rise to a periodic change in brightness, accompanied by the emission of radio waves and X-rays. All in one. With all the pieces, it has now been possible to reconstruct the event. Four telescopes to reconstruct history. The new LPT has been named ASKAP J1745-5051. It is not possible to know exactly how far away it is, although estimates place it between 1,300 and 30,000 light years away. Observations made with the ASKAP radio telescope made it possible to locate a periodic emission of radio waves every 81 minutes, which corresponded to a possible LPT. In order to check if the rest of the conditions that had been observed individually were met, it was observed with three other telescopes. On the one hand, space telescopes Swift and Einstein Probewith which X-ray emissions were detected. On the other hand, with the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR). With this, a binary system composed of a white dwarf and a red dwarf that orbit each other with a period of 81 minutes was identified. Everything fits. The full story. The conclusion when putting all the pieces together is the following. On each orbit, the white dwarf, which has a large mass concentrated in very little space, gravitationally attracts the red dwarf and extracts material from it. This is channeled by the magnetic field of the white dwarf itself until it reaches its surface, where it collides, producing a temperature increase of millions of degrees Celsius. Furthermore, this very violent interaction causes the release of energy in the form of X-rays. On the other hand, the gas accelerated by the colliding magnetic fields of both stars is what appears to produce the radio signals. A Rosetta Stone. The principal investigator of this new study It’s called Kovi Rose. We might think that this has had to do with the fact that the discovery is referred to as a space Rosetta stone. And maybe it has had a little influence, but the reality is that there are more reasons. The original Rosetta stone It was a fragment of Egyptian rock in which there was a text written in three different languages: ancient Greek, hieroglyphics and demotic writing. Because archaeologists of the time knew how to speak Greek, they were able to use it as a basis for understanding hieroglyphs. One language allowed them to reconstruct another. In this case, the new discovery is also in three languages: radio waves, detected by ASKAP, X-rays, with which Swift and Einstein Probe work, and visible light from SOAR. Three languages, three pieces that, when read together, can help to understand the whole much better. With this Rosetta stone, the authors of the study hope to be able to unravel many of these mysterious signals from the Universe. Image | Hans Hillewaert (Wikimedia Commons)/Magnific In Xataka | We believed that the pyramids of Giza did not hide any more secrets. we believed wrong

Although there are scientists saying the opposite, it is time to recognize it: continents do not exist

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For a couple of years and from time to time, a very specific type of article has gone viral: one that repeats that there is a group of researchers from the University of Derby has found a new (micro)continent in Davis Strait. That is, between Greenland and North America. And yes, it sounds a little Martian. How could we have lost an entire continent in the 1,143 kilometers that that strait measures? It has its explanation What the hell is a continent? The most intuitive answer is “a large area of ​​land surrounded by water”; But the truth is that it only works in theory and, when we tackle the problem, everything gets complicated. Therefore, if the question is “how many continents are there in the world?”, the only logical answer is this: “it depends.” What do you mean “it depends”? The reasons behind many of the divisions we handle are “purely historical and cultural.” In fact, as Miguel García explains“the educational systems of different countries establish different continental divisions”: In Anglo-Saxon countries, it is most common to say that there are seven continents (Europe, Africa, North America, South America, Asia, Antarctica and Oceania); On the other hand, in Romance language countries, the most common answer is that there are six continents (uniting the Americas into one); Six continents are also explained in the countries of the ex-Soviet orbit (although they keep America separate and what they unite is Europe and Asia). There are more options, of course. For example, we could unite Asia, Africa and Europe on a single continent and, together with America, Australia and Antarctica, there would be four. By proxy, we could even remove Antarctica because, well, without its snow cover it would become an archipelago (whose largest island would be smaller than Australia). It’s time to admit that continents do not exist. They are social constructs, like municipalities or provinces. Hence, as García explainsFrom a geological point of view, it can be concluded that continents do not constitute a scientific concept. In any case, we can talk about tectonic plates (and, although defining their number is also a hassle, we would not talk about less than 15). So what are the Derby researchers talking about? Now it’s time to get into the matter: what researchers have used is something elsethe thickness of the Earth’s crust. In general, there are two types of Earth’s crust: continental (about 35 kilometers thick) and oceanic (between 8 and 10). Of what they have realized is that as the tectonic plates between Canada and Greenland have shifted, the Earth’s crust has been reconfigured. The result has been a protocontinental (i.e. extremely thick) crust on what should be an oceanic crust. And what is all this for? It must be admitted that, once we get the matter down, everything seems more boring. However, the finding is very interesting: we actually don’t know very well how tectonic dynamics work. We have very developed ideas and models, yes; But when it comes down to it, there are more questions than answers. Being able to study in detail the formation of a protomicrocontinent is a unique opportunity to understand phenomena such as the one that is dividing Africa in two. And we have already seen that, unlike what we tend to believe, this has a real impact on daily life of millions of people. Image | Kate Ter Haar In Xataka | A huge crack has opened in Kenya’s Rift Valley and it seems it’s just the beginning This article was originally published in 2025. We have updated its content.

This is the US city that does not exist on Google Street View

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Of the more than 9.8 billion square kilometers of the United States, only a small area of ​​just over 22 square kilometers does not appear in Google Street View. Welcome to North Oaks, where the streets are private property and no, we are not talking about the typical gated community, but rather open streets, although with a big ‘but’. North Oaks. Located northwest of Minneapolis, North Oaks is a small residential town with a population of 5,212 inhabitantsthe vast majority upper class. The average household income is more than $230,000 per year, which places it between the richest cities in the entire country. In North Oaks there is no barrier that prevents access to people who do not reside there, but if you access you are committing trespass. How is it possible? There are signs like this at every entrance to North Oaks. Everything is private property. In North Oaks, homeowners not only own their plot, but the property extends to half the road (the other half is owned by the neighbor across the street). This means that there is hardly any public land, but everything is private property and is managed by the homeowners association or NOHOA. The streets of North Oaks are open, but they are lined with “no trespassing” signs and there are automatic license plate readers at the entrances. The unmappable city. In 2008, North Oaks could normally be visited via Google Street View. However, the homeowners association threatened Google with a lawsuit because his Street View cars had trespassed on his property. As a consequence, Google removed all the images and it remained that way for years, until someone tried to map it again with a curious trick. Remapping North Oaks. They count in 404media that a couple of months ago Chris Parr, documentary filmmakerit was proposed to correct this anomaly. The streets are private property, but in the sky this rule does not apply, so armed with a drone and a 360 camera, he dedicated himself to photographing all the streets, as shown in your video on YouTube. For a few days, North Oaks was back on the map, but it suddenly disappeared and Parr received a letter from a law firm on behalf of NOHOA basically telling him to never come back. Image | Google Maps In Xataka | The rich neighborhoods of Madrid and Barcelona have changed their accent: millionaires from the US and Mexico invest their fortunes in Spain

A new “solar system” has just been discovered. There’s just one problem: it shouldn’t exist.

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Observations from NASA and the European Space Agency telescopes have made possible the discovery of a new exoplanetary system 116 light years from Earth. According to research by an international team led by the University of Warwick published in the journal Sciencethis new “solar system” has a peculiarity: its architecture contradicts the standard model of planetary formation. In short, based on the astrophysics we know, it should not exist. We do not know if it will force us to rewrite current theories, but we do know that we will urgently review them. The discovery. The LHS 1903 system is made up of four planets orbiting a red dwarf, the most common and longest-lived type of star in the universe. The question is how they are arranged: the innermost planet is rocky, the next two are gaseous and surprisingly, the outermost planet (LHS 1903 e) is also rocky. That planet shouldn’t be there. LHS 1903 e It is a large super-Earth (it has 1.7 times the radius of the Earth and 5.79 Earth masses, thus achieving a similar density) located on the periphery, but of course, it should not be in that position, according to current models. It is not a minor anomaly: it breaks the paradigm from the foundations. This provision contradicts the usual pattern that we see in all known planetary systems: the rocky planets (refractory materials) are in the hot zone and the gas giants in the outer cold zone, beyond the “snow line“, where ice makes it possible to grow large nuclei that capture hydrogen. The canonical example is our solar system: the rocky Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars orbit closer and the gaseous Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune orbit further away. Why is it important. According to theory, a planet as large as LHS 1903 e in that cold zone should have devoured gas until it became a giant like Jupiter. But there is another reading: that the formation model fails and is not the only recipe that explains how exoplanetary systems form. But as we mentioned above, red dwarfs are the most abundant stars in the galaxy and if the model fails in this system, it is plausible that it will not hit the mark in much of the cosmos either. There may be other “inverted” systems pending interpretation or that we have misinterpreted. A possible explanation. What the research team proposes is the gas-poor formation mechanism hypothesis. In short, the important thing is not so much where but when. Thus, the planets were formed one after another in the opposite order to our solar system, starting first with the innermost one and going outwards from there. When planets form, they consume the gas available in the disk that surrounds the star. LHS 1903 was formed last, when there was no more gas left, so it could no longer become the gas giant that might have been expected. As explains Lead researcher and University of Warwick professor Thomas Wilson: “It means that the outermost planet formed millions of years after the innermost one. And because it formed later, there really wasn’t enough gas and dust left in the disk to build this planet.” The research method. The data analyzed by the international team comes from the collaboration of NASA’s TESS telescopes and ESA’s CHEOPS exoplanet characterization satellite: the first detects planets with the in-transit method and the second studies them in depth, which allows it to obtain information such as size, mass and, from there, density. Among the alternative hypotheses considered is its birth from impacts between planets or the loss of its gaseous envelope, which they ended up discarding. Astrophysics has pending subjects. Beyond finding a clear mechanism, what seems evident is that observing this system of exoplanets opens up a range of possibilities about how planets form around stars that will last for years. Néstor Espinoza, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who was not involved in the study, explains it for CNN: “This system provides a very interesting piece of information that planetary formation models will try to explain for years, and I am sure that we will learn something new about the planetary formation process once they are compared to each other.” In Xataka | How the solar system was formed: for the Earth to be born, a star had to die first In Xataka | We have been deceived by the distances of the Solar System: the closest neighbor to Neptune is Mercury Cover | NASA Hubble Space Telescope

The problem is not that your favorite influencer sells you the motorcycle. The problem is that maybe it doesn’t even exist.

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What text-to-image and image-to-video generation will be able to achieve in the coming years is only easy to imagine if you’re in the business. I have been closely following advances in AI as a method to replace humans doing things. And I can assure you based on my experience that 2026 will be a before and after in a daily practice: consuming content on TikTok or Instagram. It’s happening now. We have been talking about influencers created with AI since 2023. The most famous case is that of Aitana Lopeza model created with AI that surpassed the barrier of 100,000 followers on Instagram. The case remained more anecdote than normal, but in 2025 we began to hear from relevant capital firms in Silicon Valley investing in start-ups created as synthetic influencer agencies. The factory. The girl you see above does not exist. She is an influencer that I created in less than two minutes and for free. If you want to make a minimal investment, you could improve the texture of your skin with Nano Banana Pro 4K or render additional details with Topaz AI. All within the same tool. Higgsfield AI is the largest AI content creation platform, and has had the “AI influencer” function for some time now. With the arrival of models like Banana Pro, the results are indistinguishable from reality. Skin enhancer in Higgsfield. Model created with AI. Maybe it exists… and it’s AI. Until now, we have only talked about creating influencers in a 100% artificial way but… what if I told you that you are already watching videos on social networks of people who exist, but who are not real at the moment you are watching the video? Spanish influencers, such as Janmolinerare starting to use AI to clone themselves and post videos in which they appear, but using an AI avatar that replaces them. This opens the doors to: Much higher content creation volume. Cost savings. What we hate with all our might: more ads created with AI. Indistinguishable. I have been training in this type of tools for some time, my eye is trained to try to detect when it is AI and when it is not, and since the arrival of the latest models I have one thing clear: it is currently indistinguishable from reality, and it will improve even more in the coming years. Big Tech. Microsoft, Google, Meta and Anthropic They are paying real money to content creators to promote their AI, with agreements reaching up to $600,000. The big question is whether, in the medium term, it will continue to make sense for companies to have humans advertise their products… or to have an AI announcing another AI. Image | Higgsfield AI In Xataka | I bought a spell online to make my cat an influencer. Now I have two euros less and even more afraid of AI

China is winning the humanoid robot race. The problem is that this race doesn’t really exist.

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Fritz Lang wanted to imagine the future and painted it for us with humanoid robots integrated into society. That maschinenmensch of ‘Metrópolis’ (1927) was a preview of what they now pursue with more ambition than anyone Chinese manufacturers, who They have not stopped developing more and more of these robots. They are winning the race by far, but the problem is that the race is non-existent. (Almost) nobody buys humanoid robots. These Chinese manufacturers were by far the most responsible for the sales of humanoid robots, which in 2025 amounted to the figure of… 13,000 units. The data reflects a forceful reality: in the world of domestic humanoid robots there is a lot (a lot) of noise, but few (very few) nuts. More than in 2024 = very little. Humanoid robots from Chinese manufacturers sold much more than those from American companies like Tesla or Figure AI according to data from the consulting firm Omdia. The company that has sold the most according to that report is the Chinese startup Shanghai AgiBot Innovation Technology Co., which distributed a total of 5,168 robots in 2025. It was followed by Unitree Robotics and UBTech Robotics Corp. Although total sales were five times those of 2024, the final figure reflects that the market is in its infancy. Huge expectations. Despite this, Citigroup esteem that in 2050 there will be 648 million humanoid robots. The great hope is that the promising evolution of AI models will serve to overcome current limitations and have multiple practical applications, once integrated into robots. There are already promising developments in this regard, and robots and AIs separately have already demonstrated their capacity in limited environments. like the manufacturing, logistics or customer service. China and “affordable” robotics. Although there are notable companies in this field in the US, their humanoid robots are much more expensive. Elon Musk indicated by the end of 2025 that “once production reaches one million units annually, Optimus will likely be priced between $20,000 and $25,000.” Meanwhile, Unitree already offers “affordable” robots (but not humanoid) for $6,000, and AgiBot asks for $14,000 for his. This company was in fact named by Jensen Huang during his talk at the NVIDIA event at CES 2026. The Chinese government helps. As in other industrial areas, there is strong support from the Chinese government in this area, and according to Bloomberg Favorable policies are combined with aid for the construction of training centers. The number of companies and startups developing this type of solutions already exceeds 150, and that even points to a potential “robotic bubble.” The challenge of robotic hands. One of the great challenges of this segment is to ensure that the dexterity of machines is comparable to that of humans. For now this is not the case especially with the example of robotic hands, which mostly They are very unskilledwhich limits its application to real home environments. The battery life of these robots is another obstacle that can hinder their application in our daily lives. Future implications. If these challenges are overcome, we will once again find ourselves with a disturbing panorama in which geopolitical tensions could make access to these robots difficult. There is also the problem of employment: if robots achieve the ability to perform manual tasks, the threat to virtually any human worker will be notable. How will governments react to this situation? Image | Agibot In Xataka | China prepares its next technological assault. Huawei and UBTech have just teamed up to bring humanoid robots to homes

There are a lot of people going to libraries to look for books that don’t exist: an AI invented them

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Junk content made with AI is sneaking into every corner of the internet: it is ruining the authenticity of Etsythe Wikipediait confuses us search for an apartment in Idealista and of course plague social networks. He ‘slop’ of AI is reaching the real world, specifically libraries. What is happening. They tell it inScientific American. There are people going to libraries and archives in search of books or scientific articles that do not appear anywhere for one reason: they do not exist. International Red Cross has alerted to the situation and blames AI tools such as Gemini, ChatGPT or Copilot. They assure that “These systems do not conduct research, verify sources or collate information. They generate new content based on statistical patterns and, therefore, may produce invented results.” In Xataka He "AI slop" turned into art. A Chinese creator is copying the absurd aesthetics of generative AI, and it’s hilarious Fed up librarians. The research director of the Virginia library estimates that at least 15% of the queries they receive through mail are about documents and works generated by ChatGPT and similar tools. “For our staff, it is much more difficult to prove that there is no single record,” he says. A Bluesky user recounts a similar experience when a student asked him to find a series of references. After searching for a while without success, he asked the student where he got the list from and he confessed that it came from Google’s AI summaries. Made-up dating isn’t something that started happening the day before yesterday,In 2023 there were already discussions about it. Seattle University found that it is often very difficult to verify these invented quotes. The reason is that AI usually gives titles of magazines or books that exist, but what does not exist is the chapter or issue where the information is found. What it does is mix information to make it seem convincing, when in reality it is a dead end. AI and books. Invented references are not the only problem, there are librarians who also They criticize books created entirely with AI for being “incredibly bad” and we have recently learned of the case of South Korea and the resounding failure of its AI school book program. On the other hand we have the copyright problem. As with works of art, books too have been used to train AI without compensating their authors. A group of authors sued Anthropicfor this reason, but The judge ruled in favor of the company. {“videoId”:”x8jpy2b”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”What’s BEHIND AIs like CHATGPT, DALL-E or MIDJOURNEY? | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”, “tag”:”Webedia-prod”, “duration”:”1173″} Papers on AI, made with AI. In an article by Futurism They said that a consequence of the AI ​​slop is that the papers that investigate AI themselves are made with AI. It is estimated that the number of papers on AI has doubled in recent years and journals such as NeurIPS have had to ask doctoral students to help them review them. There is a specific case of a researcher named Kevin Zhu who has participated in more than 100 papers in one year, an exorbitant figure for experts. To no one’s surprise, many of these papers are a real disaster full of made up quotes, blatant errors and sometimes hidden text to manipulate the review systems themselves. hallucinations. That AI invents things is quite common, they are the In AI jargon it is known as hallucinations and one of the weak points of language models; The advances are enormous, but the reality is that We still can’t trust AI and it is necessary to verify the information. Hallucinations are often the reason why those who use AI in their jobs are caught, such as the consulting firm Deloitte, which delivered a report to the Australian government that contained references to completely fabricated reports. Image | Cottonbro studio, Pexels In Xataka | The birth of an anti-reading movement: more and more people admit to using AI to summarize books (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news There are a lot of people going to libraries to look for books that don’t exist: an AI invented them was originally published in Xataka by Amparo Babiloni .

“prehistoric fish with armored teeth does not exist, it cannot harm you.” The prehistoric fish with armored teeth:

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“If you had been in Cleveland 360 million years ago, you would be swimming for your life,” said Rachael Funnel a few days ago and the truth is that he is absolutely right in the world. Not only because, at that time, the area in which the North American city is located was a shallow ocean, but because in those waters there was an exceptionally bizarre bug. Welcome to the world of Dunkleosteus terrelli. The fact that? In essence, a predator measuring more than four meters very different from any fish alive today. Although, to tell the truth, they were also different from any fish from 360 million years ago. And why are we talking about this now? Because it was just published a study in Anatomical Record in which the best preserved remains of the species (preserved for millions of years in layers of black shale) have been analyzed. And honestly, what they found is a little scary. They have been able to analyze in detail the bone plates that ‘armored’ the head and trunk of these fish. Furthermore, by analyzing muscle inserts and bone canals, they have unraveled the functional characteristics of the jaw, showing that, in short, we are facing a terrible predator. But ‘terrible’ in the literal sense. To begin with, because D. Terrelli It did not have teeth in the conventional sense: they had large blades of bone that worked with enormous blades that captured and tore apart everything they caught. To continue, because it is one of the first examples of the existence of a specific jaw muscle. The science of sea monsters. He Dunkleosteus terrelli is not news to us: “the last important work that examined in detail the mandibular anatomy of Dunkleosteus was published in 1932, when the anatomy of arthrodirans was still little known”, remembered Russell Engelmanprincipal investigator. For years (for decades!), we have been content to put bones back together correctly and that has prevented us from fully understanding what was happening. For example, not understanding the functionality of these creatures has prevented us from understanding many fundamental characteristics of sharks from an evolutionary point of view. In the end, behind all those bone plates, there was a huge amount of cartilage. That is to say, once again, the world of monsters hides many interesting things to understand natural history. Something that, although it may not seem like it, we still need. Image | Nell Conway In Xataka | We have found two prehistoric sea monsters in the largest cave in the world after 325 million years

life should not exist

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It is the fundamental question: how did it all begin? How, on a young, chaotic, geologically active planet, does a handful of inert chemistry became the first living cell? What we know is that the protocell, called LUCAstarted life and Darwinian evolution did the rest, taking us to the present day. But there are still many questions about why all this arose. The mystery. We really know little about our origins. But we are not referring to whether we come from a monkey or another species, but from why did life begin on this planet. Something that wanted to solve the study by Robert G. Endres, of Imperial College London, but which has only given us many more questions and even a bad taste in our mouths, because according to their results, life should not have arisen. And by applying mathematics, that branch of science that many people hate, a very clear conclusion has been reached: the barriers for life to arise spontaneously are “formidable.” So formidable, in fact, that the odds of it occurring by pure chance within the window of time available on the early Earth are astonishingly low, meaning that it would have been logical that life would never have arisen. Software of life. Endres’s approach leaves out test tubes and focuses on information. A cell is not just a “bag of molecules”; It is a highly structured and orchestrated system over time and related to each other. The question is: how much information is needed to “write” the first protocell that gave rise to life? To estimate it, the study uses modern computational models and AI tools that we already use today, such as AlphaFold (for protein folding) and full “whole cell” models. The result in this case was divided into three different parts: The genetic information for a very simple cell like Mycoplasma genitalium occupies 10⁶ bits, which is quite little. Structural information, that is, how proteins fold and the cell is organized, is also estimated in a range of 10⁶ to 10⁸ bits. Finally, dynamic information, which focuses on metabolic pathways, signaling or DNA replication mechanisms, which is undoubtedly a giant. In this case a value of 140 MB has been given in this world that has been generated. Adding all this together, the complexity of a simple protocell has been estimated at 1 billion bits in software simile. And that is the wall that prebiotic chemistry had to end up climbing. The mathematics. Once you have all the theoretical information, this is where the mathematics becomes very interesting, especially considering that the Earth had a ‘window’ of time available to accumulate all this information. 500 million years until the first protocell was given. In a very simple account, if you divide the necessary information (10000000000 bits) by the available time, you get the minimum information accumulation rate of 2 bits of useful information per year. Seen like this, it seems very easy! The study estimates that the prebiotic “soup”, full of complex molecules, had the potential to generate information of about 100 bits/s, billions of times more than necessary, according to mathematical estimates. So… Where is the problem if there was plenty of time? The problem is that these ‘2 bits per year’ are assumed to be a unidirectional and progressive process. That is, when that piece of useful information is created, it is saved and used for the next step. But chemistry is a chaotic soup that does not work like that, but rather works like a ‘random walk’: you take one step forward and then another step back. That is, when creating something it is accompanied by a loss. This is where the concept of ‘persistence’ comes in, which in short is the time during which the system “remembers” the information it has gained, even if it has been lost. In this way, without immense persistence, the emergence of life would be literally impossible to occur according to this study. The push. But looking at mathematics, in a soup as chaotic as this one, the reality is that leaving everything to chance would have meant that we would never have been able to appear on this planet. And this is the real mystery. For us to be here, there had to be some physical principle, a chemical bias or some ‘memory’ or ‘retention’ mechanism that gave directionality to the process. The study does not say that life is impossible, but that the mechanism Purely random is insufficient. We need “unknown physical principles” or, as the author points out, “some form of prebiotic informational structure.” And it is something that is raised in other studies, such as that of Chrostoph Adami who focused in trying to understand living beings as self-sufficient chains of information to search for the probability that life emerges in a statistical manner. And it is also found with a very low probability. The aliens. It is at this point of mystery that the article cautiously mentions the alternative hypothesis: directed panspermia. Originally proposed by Francis Crick (the discoverer of DNA) and Leslie Orgel, it suggests that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization intentionally “seeded” life on Earth. Although this idea violates the Ockham’s razor (the simplest explanation is usually the correct one), the author admits that it remains a “logically open” alternative. Artificial intelligence. AI has had a lot to say, since thanks to its capabilities it has been possible to estimate the algorithmic complexity of the cell that gave rise to life, giving us the scale of the problem. And the author points out that AI could also be the key to the solution, since he proposes tools that could ‘help reverse engineer candidate pathways’. That is, it could be the one that finally finds that ‘push’ that we don’t know about at the moment. Images | Laura Seaman In Xataka | These Spaniards have just realized that almost everything we know about the origin of life is due to an enormous coincidence

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