history

We know exactly where and when the longest solar eclipse in history will occur: our great-great-grandchildren will see it

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On July 16, 2186, the Moon will align perfectly between the Earth and the Sun, creating an eclipse without historical precedent. Unless he eccentric millionaire determined to rejuvenate succeed, none of us will be here to see it. But our descendants will want to spend that day somewhere in Colombia, Venezuela or Guyana. 7 minutes and 29 seconds. The longest total solar eclipse in history will exceed by almost two seconds the duration of the one that held the record until now: the eclipse of June 15, 743 BC, which reached a totality of 7 minutes and 27 seconds over the Indian Ocean, near present-day Kenya and Somalia. No eclipse will have lasted as long from before 4000 BCand none will do so until after 8000 AD, so we can be sure that it will be a truly unique astronomical event. The longest total solar eclipse in an interval of 12,000 years. The Moon will darken South America. The historic solar eclipse of 7 minutes and 29 seconds will not occur on land: the strip of totality will reach its longest duration over the Atlantic Ocean. However, northern South America will also enjoy extraordinarily long totalities. Especially in Colombia (from Cali to Puerto Ayacucho), Venezuela (from the Orinoco to Imataca) and Guyana (in the entire northern half of the country, including Georgetown). The show will not be limited to that narrow strip. Virtually all of South America, including the entire Brazilian territory, will be able to observe a partial eclipse of great magnitude. The eclipse will also be partially visible from Mexico to Paraguay, and west of Africa. In Spain it will barely touch the Canary Islands at sunset. Why will it last so long? The reason for this extreme duration is a “perfect storm” in the positions of the three bodies. The Earth will be at its furthest point from the Sun (its aphelion), which will make the solar disk appear slightly smaller. The Moon, for its part, will be at its closest point to the Earth (its perigee), so its apparent disk will be larger. And finally, the path of the eclipse will pass very close to the Earth’s equator. This combination maximizes the time it takes for the Moon’s shadow to sweep across the Earth’s surface. How are we so sure? Eclipse prediction is one of the most successful feats of computational astronomy. Scientists feed their supercomputers the current positions and velocities of the Earth and Moon, and then use Newton’s laws of motion to figure out what will happen several centuries or even millennia from now. These algorithms are actually models that integrate gravitational equations to project their positions into the future. And they do it with astonishing precision, usually within a margin of error of less than a minute over hundreds of years. First cousin of the great eclipse of 2024. The total solar eclipse of 2186 belongs to the same “lineage” as the Great North American Eclipse of April 8, 2024, the Saros cycle 139. A Saros cycle is a period of approximately 18 years, 11 days and 8 hours, after which the Sun-Earth-Moon geometry is repeated in an almost identical way, producing a very similar eclipse but displaced about 120 degrees to the west. Discussions among eclipse enthusiasts are already fantasizing about what the hunt for this event will be like in 2186. There is talk of fleets of cruise ships positioned in the Atlantic and flights in hypersonic planes to chase the shadow and further extend the experience of totality. Although we will not see the millennium eclipse, there is no need to wait that long to experience a totality: on August 12, 2026, Spain will chain the first of three Iberian eclipses. They are not the “wonders of the cosmos”, but we cannot complain. A version of this article was published in July 2025 Image | THAT In Xataka | Two European spacecraft synchronized in space to create an artificial eclipse. It is a before and after in solar science

For thousands of years, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens tried to mate insistently. History had another idea

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In 1856, while working on a limestone quarry Near Düsseldorf, two Italian workers found a basin full of bones. They thought they were the remains of a bear and brought them to a professor from a nearby city, known to be a bone collector. They had no idea what they were about to do. When he saw the bones, Johann C. Fuhlrott realized that they were not from a bear, he took the bones to the University of Bonn and, together with Hermann Schaaffhausen, they communicated the discovery to the world. Nobody took them very seriously. It was even said that he was a Russian Cossack with rickets who pursued Napoleon through Europe. Until almost a decade later, the Anglo-Irish geologist William King came to a revolutionary conclusion: that we had not always been alone. But why are we now? With the discovery of Homo neanderthalensis many unknowns were openedbut there is one that has been haunting us for almost 200 years: why did they disappear? How is it possible that a species so ancient, so robust, that had survived so many things, simply disappeared? Why had we been left alone? Throughout all these years, scientists have come up with numerous hypotheses and theories. From prehistoric genocides to a slow and agonizing eclipse. However, Ludovic Slimak, researcher at the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse and one of the leading international experts on Neanderthals, have another idea. The forms of love (and what love is not). For Slimak, if we apply the knowledge of cultural anthropology to what paleogenetics is telling us, the picture is quite different. And, as in all traditional societies in which strong identities coexist, it seems that the different human communities exchanged women. From our perspective, mere expression is already savage. But from the perspective of anthropology, those “family crossing” processes were basic to ensure stable alliances between different communities. And that, if we take into account that we are loaded with Neanderthal DNA, seems to be what happened. However, as Slimak points outthis “fusion” of lineages never fully occurred. The question is why. A (genetically) impossible story. We know that Neanderthals and Sapiens interbred and they had offspring. But we also know that, although the communities tried to establish these relationships and alliances based on miscegenation, things did not work. It was thought that many of the descendants of these relationships were sterile people unable to reproduce. But, as explained Platt, Harris and Tishkoff in February 2026everything seems to indicate that it was mating preferences and sexually biased breeding that decided which Neanderthal DNA survived and which was lost. Searching. It’s curious, said Slimak in an interview for LiveSciencethat “when you’re looking for ancient DNA (from 40,000 to 45,000 years ago) all of these sapiens early have recent Neanderthal DNA, and that’s why we have (neanderthal DNA) today. But when you arrive and try to extract DNA from the last Neanderthals, contemporaries of these first sapiensLet’s say that between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago there was not a single Neanderthal with DNA sapiens“. In 2025, Slimak came to describe Neanderthal disappearance as “a kind of suicide” due to isolation and social fragmentation. Curious and very possibly one of the keys that explain why the most numerous and genetically diverse population of sapiens won the game over the Neanderthals. That is, why we are left alone. A previous version of this article was published in February 2024 Image | Suchosch In Xataka | We usually see Neanderthals as a different species, what if we are wrong?

There is only one person in Star Trek history who has played herself, and the scene remains legendary

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The android Data needed the three most brilliant scientists in history for a game of poker on the holodeck, and the chosen ones were Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The first two had been dead for decades (or centuries). The third was fifty-one years old and had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but he had expressed his desire to appear in the series to Paramount bosses. When was it? On June 21, 1993, the finale of the sixth season of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’. The first ninety seconds of the episode, titled ‘Descent, Part 1’, contain something that It hasn’t happened again. in more than fifty years of franchise: a real person, with a first and last name, playing himself. It was Stephen Hawking. How it started. Hawking visited the offices of Paramount Pictures in 1991 to present a documentary about his life directed by Errol Morris. Rick Berman, executive producer of the series, discovered during the visit that Hawking was a trekkie declared and offered him a tour of the sets of ‘The New Generation’. And once on the set, the scientist made an unusual request: that he be taken out of his wheelchair (something unusual) so he could sit in the captain’s chair. Once installed, he commented to his host Leonard Nimoy (Spock in the original series) that the seat was considerably more comfortable and powerful than his chair. He then asked if there was any chance of appearing on the show. The producers took note. Hawking would return to Los Angeles a few months later, and a filming window was available. All that was left was to know what the hell a theoretical physicist with ALS was going to do in an episode of a science fiction series without it coming off as parody, or even condescending. To do. The scriptwriters decided that the most appropriate thing was a scene in the holodeck, probably accompanied by the android Data. From there, it was time to build a scene that justified the presence of the most famous scientist in the world. Executive producer Michael Piller came up with the idea that solved it all: a poker game. The Enterprise holodeck allowed any historical figure to be recreated with precision, and the lucky ones were Newton, dead since 1727, and Einstein, since 1955. And Hawking, also dead in the fiction of the series, but capable of playing himself. To construct the physics joke that opens the scene, screenwriter Ronald D. Moore called his partner Naren Shankar, a doctor in applied physics and future showrunner of ‘CSI’. Shankar designed the Mercury perihelion joke (a phenomenon that Newtonian mechanics is unable to explain), and proposed the comic dynamic between the three scientists, with Hawking and Einstein mocking Newton. April 8. Hawking filmed his appearance April 8, 1993. Brent Spiner, who played Data and usually had no problem bringing the android’s emotional coldness to life, was nervous. The actor later described that moment as “probably my favorite moment in my entire experience doing Star Trek.” The scene that was filmed that day ended up lasting less than two minutes. In it, after joking about the possible apocryphal quality of the story of Newton and the apple, Hawking wins the hand, and Einstein argues that the odds of that victory could not have been improved even by quantum fluctuations. Hawking replies (with seconds): “Wrong again, Albert.” A historic cameo. It was not the first time that ‘Star Trek’ played with historical figures: we had even seen Abraham Lincoln fighting alongside Kirk and Spock. But Hawking is still, todaythe only real person to have played herself in any series or film in the ‘Star Trek’ universe. Furthermore, that cameo came at a particular time for the franchise: the audience for the sixth season of ‘The Next Generation’ was beginning to experience a gradual decline and ‘Deep Space Nine’ premiered that year. The franchise was expanding and the public was divided, but there was time for a cameo that was almost a declaration of intent. Moore claims that Hawking had helped build, with his work on black holes and cosmology, the type of scientific imaginary that ‘Star Trek’ had been playing with for decades. That he wanted to appear on the show, that he didn’t disdain science fiction but rather enjoyed it, functioned as a kind of circular validation. That’s why there is one last icing on the cake in the chapter: in the future that the episode imagines, it is revealed that Data holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. That same chair was held by Hawking between 1979 and 2009, and before him, Newton between 1669 and 1702. The three would end up sitting at a poker table in a future imagined in 1993. In Xataka | The complex? intergalactic politics: why there are those who say that Star Trek is communist and Star Wars is capitalist

It is the most faithful recreation of a Viking battle in history, in a film that you can watch for free on streaming this week

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There is a sequence in sensational viking epic ‘The man of the north where the attackers move in columns, not in lines, as the Vikings actually fought. Any other production would have ignored that detail, but its director Robert Eggers remained faithful to reality. Now you can check it out for free and until June 19 on the platform RTVE Play. Historian William Short analyzed the combat in the film, evaluating how faithful the film’s depiction of battles was, and gave it a 9 out of 10 for historical accuracy, recognizing that the depth of Eggers’ research is reflected in the attention to these types of details. From Viking combat techniques to the credibility of the costumes, weapons and rituals of the time. For comparison, Short was much less generous with the 1958 classic ‘The Vikings’ with Kirk Douglas, to whom he gave just a 5 out of 10 for historical accuracy. Short’s starting point was precisely that battle formation in columns: the Vikings did not advance in long lines along the battlefield, and in the film three very characteristic advancing columns are distinguished. But his successes go further: Short also examined the figure of berserker played by Alexander Skarsgårdand although the nature of the berserkers remains somewhat mysterious, sources document that they went into a battle frenzy, howling like wolves and biting at their shields. As for the language, Eggers did not opt ​​for the usual English in these productions. He worked with Icelandic linguist Haukur Þorgeirsson to reconstruct Old Norse in ritual scenes and chants, taking poems written in medieval Iceland and reinterpreting them into what would have been the pronunciation of his time. In short: a must-see film for devotees of Nordic culture that is worth claiming, especially considering that it was a failure at the box office with just 69.6 million in worldwide receipts. In Xataka | Today on Netflix: the first stop-motion film made in Mexico arrives with the seal of Guillermo del Toro

It seemed impossible to surpass Qatar as the worst organizer in the history of the World Cups. The US is getting it

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Can a democratic country offer a starker image than an authoritarian one when organizing a sporting event? The United States seems to be searching for the limits. With the connivance of FIFA, of course, which in recent years has awarded its most media and important sporting event to Russia and Qatar and which will repeat in this series of controversial awards with Saudi Arabia. And it has found in the United States a country that has stepped on the accelerator to catch up with what we consider authoritarian regimes. It is true that the World Cup has been used as a weapon of sportwashing since long before we knew what this meant. This has always implied a certain opening of the most reactionary policies during the time the event lasted to offer a friendlier image to the outside world. That is why it is even more surprising that the United States has barely made concessions in its way of doing politics. The competition hasn’t started yet and we already have a referee who has had to return home, public searches of players as if they were terrorists. A team that has tried to be expelled. And the constant threat towards its own citizens. Welcome to the 2026 Soccer World Cup. The World Cup in Canada, Mexico… and the United States. Hold my cubata, Qatar Standing on the shoulders and cheered by thousands of people in a packed stadium. The images of Omar Artan received as a national hero They surprise. They are surprising because Omar Artan is a referee. And I don’t think a referee has ever received such a welcome back to his country. The reason: being rejected by the United States. And Artan, a Somali, will not referee in the 2026 World Cup because one of the host countries He has not let him cross the border. The United States prohibits entry to citizens of Somalia. And he has made no exception with Omar Artan, who was going to be the first referee from his country to officiate a World Cup match and one in which, according to The CountryFIFA’s director of refereeing, the Italian Pierluigi Collina, had high hopes. The reason for the rejection?: “Concerns in the background check.” There are no more details. There are no more reasons. With those words the United States Customs and Border Protection Service (CBP) has settled the matter. Although it has been known that FIFA has tried to mediate in the matter, the organization has only issued a weak statement in which it points out that they do not have any type of influence on the migration policies of the host countries. The Artan case is the latest in a list of controversial decisions that continues to grow. In March, Donald Trump tried to intimidate the Iranian team football team, assuring that their safety could not be guaranteed if they went to the United States. Iran’s first two games are being played in Los Angeles and the third in Seattle, and the United States has toyed with the idea of ​​banning players from entering, citing national security risks. In April it was put on the table that it was Italy, out of the World Cup for the third consecutive time, which Iranian will take over but it was rejected by FIFA. In May, Donald Trump assured that he would allow the Iranian team to enter in statements in which he assured that Gianni Infantinopresident of FIFA who has been very close to the president of the United States until now, would have given him carte blanche to accept or not the Middle Eastern team. Finally, Iran will play in the United States. Yes, but his players will have to concentrate in Mexico, 15 members of the delegation have been rejected and Their fans will not be able to go to the stadium. Click on the image to go to the original tweet Click on the image to go to the original tweet Obviously, Iran is the most striking case but by no means the only one. According to BBCmore than 25% of the countries participating in the World Cup have border restrictions with the hosts. This has led to intense searches of the Uzbekistan and Senegal teams in which metal detectors, dogs and controls on the airport runway itself have been used before giving them the go-ahead. From the official account of the Senegalese team on X They assure that this procedure was carried out on the airport runway to speed up airport control procedures. However, the country’s own soccer federation indicated a few months ago that They would not send fans to the United States on an official trip because the applications had been rejected. Entering the United States is increasingly complicated for a greater number of travelers. Since 2016 to the Spanish It is not possible for us to travel to the United States without a visa if we have previously visited Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen since 2011. And from 2023 the same thing happens with Cuba if we have passed through the island in the last five years. These types of measures are those that on other occasions have been omitted in favor of give some sense of normality in sporting events that take place in authoritarian countries. In Spain we know well how the whitening of authoritarian regimes through sport works, How to bring the Spanish Super Cup to Saudi Arabia and even defend the regime and equate it with Spain, like Xavi Hernández did as coach of FC Barcelona in 2023. FIFA will take the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, with the approval of FIFA, which created an adhoc competition for the country to win the award and overlooked any risk of attacks on human rights to the point that the candidacy has been the best score in history in a selective process. Some human rights which they also seem to want to omit with the United … Read more

FIFA has turned the 2026 World Cup into the most expensive cultural event in history because it has become a new Ticketmaster

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For almost a century, FIFA has not cared about selling cheap tickets: the money in football was in television. But as has happened with the musiccinema and other cultural events, spectacularization is the order of the day, and for the 2026 World Cup the business model is closer to Ticketmaster. Direct consequence: two US attorneys general have already asked him for explanations through judicial means. Pocho record. The World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canada starts this Thursday, becoming the most expensive cultural event in history. The cheapest ticket to the group stage cost an average of $200 and the most affordable ticket to the final started at $2,030. Adjusted for inflation, the price is double that of Qatar 2022 and quadruple that of the United States 1994. Because. The reason is more than obvious: for the first time, FIFA controls ticket sales directly, without delegating it to local organizers, and has launched dynamic prices. Between October and April made at least one category more expensive in 95 of the 104 gameswith an average increase of 35%. The Category 1 ticket for the final went from $6,730 to $10,990. Other niceties. Another novelty this year that is not going down well with fans is that the buyer does not choose a seat either. You pay for a category that corresponds to an area of ​​the stadium and FIFA assigns you a row and seat months later. For example, in April many fans who had paid for Category 1 discovered that their seats were in areas previously marked as Category 2, because FIFA had modified the maps and reserved the best seats for a new “Front Category 1”. More expensive, of course. The law. The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey have judicially summoned to FIFA to investigate your sales practices; The one in New Jersey accuses the agency of turning the purchase into a labyrinth of “false scarcity.” California had previously sent its own letter of request. Justice accuses FIFA of setting up its own secondary market without price caps in the United States and Canada: as explained your own support pagecharges a commission of 15% to the seller and another 15% to the buyer. Only in Mexico does it limit resale to the original price, and by legal requirement. On that platform there have been tickets for the final listed by more than two million dollars. The opacity does the rest. FIFA has almost never reported how many tickets were left per match or per phase, and before publishing any price it sold tens of thousands of “Right to Buy” tokens through its crypto collectibles platform: hundreds of dollars for the right to buy a ticket whose final cost was not known until much later. More opacity: in February, FIFA president Gianni Infantino stated that all matches were sold out. His own organization had to correct himand in April acknowledged that about five of the planned 6.7 million tickets had been sold and that the rest were being held for “continued sales.” Different ticketing experts identify this retention as a classic tactic to create a sensation of demand. Although it is not clear if the play has given the expected results: the United States’ debut against Paraguay accumulated 10,000 entries listed on resale platformsa, many below the original price. The accounts come out. Wow, they come out: in Qatar 2022 the box office contributed about 950 million dollars; for 2026 FIFA budget up to 3,000 million for tickets and VIP packages (premium entry plus experience). The organization foresees earn 8.9 billion with the tournament within a four-year cycle of 13,000 (which is how FIFA organizes its accounts) in the most optimistic calculations. There are those who consider that this calculation even falls short: an academic analysis It projects that the box office and VIP experiences alone will exceed 7.4 billion, and to that would be added TV rights, sponsorships and other income. One but. The Economist It points, however, to a very specific problem this year: the public in the fields is part of the television product that FIFA sells around the world for more than 4 billion dollars. It must be remembered that in the Club World Cup, spectators had to be relocated in front of the cameras in half-empty matches to keep up appearances. All of this underlines the idea that FIFA is torn between a couple of businesses in which it wants to be the leader: squeezing in-person spectators and protecting the image of the spectacle that the rest of the planet sees. For now the eyes with the dollar sign are watching intently at the first one. In Xataka | How to configure your Smart TV to watch the 2026 World Cup in the best possible way

Claude Fable 5 is the most powerful public AI model in history. Also the most expensive, exclusive and frustrating

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When Anthropic presented Claude Mythos Preview two months ago, he did it with a singular message: it is so powerful that you will not be able to use it. That, of course, caused everyone to want access to it. Well: Anthropic has just introduce Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5its new AI models directly derived from that. There is good news, but also bad news. Like Mythos, but capped as a precaution. Anthropic already warned that Claude Mythos Preview was a spectacular tool for finding security vulnerabilities. That made it especially juicy for cybercriminals, so the company decided that only a few trusted entities (under its Project Glasswing) would have access to the model. That learning has now been applied, because in this announcement we have two different (and layered) versions of the model: Claude Fable 5: a model with all the capabilities of Mythos Preview, but with notable security measures that prevent it from being used for malicious purposes. As soon as the model detects that we are asking something “dangerous”, it avoids the question and even forces the use of an inferior model, Claude Opus 4.8. Clear examples: questions about cybersecurity or the development of biological weapons, for example. Claude Mythos 5: This version is somewhat less capable than Fable 5 in terms of cybersecurity, but will only be available to “a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers.” It is the natural heir to Mythos Preview, and according to its creators it is even better than the original version. Claude Fable 5 / Mythos 5 simply sweeps the most demanding benchmarks on the planet. There have never been more powerful models. Anthropic’s internal testing shows that we are facing the most powerful AI models in history. In all benchmarks – including the new FrontierCode programming, much more demanding than SWE Bench Pro – the scores of Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are simply spectacular, well above those of their rivals. The jump from Claude Opus 4.8 is really surprising, but it leaves GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro far behind (they don’t compare with the recent 3.5 Flash). This is a brutal blow to Anthropic’s table, and we will see how both OpenAI and Google respond. Claude Fable 5 is amazing. Ethan Mollick, well-known AI popularizer, has had access to Fable 5 for a few days and is amazed by the experience. With this model he has managed to complete projects such as east of the isochronic map that previous models had never solved, and it has done it almost “the first time”. In one of the cases Fable 5 worked for 9 and a half hours straight to produce a code called Concord of data analysis. Their conclusions are compelling: Last year (when working with GPT-5 Pro) I called him “work with a magician”: you recite the spell and something happens. With Fable, the spell has become so powerful that I’m no longer sure I’m the wizard. I feel more like a patron. I describe what I want, pay for it and evaluate the result. The conspiracy takes place somewhere I can’t see, in hundreds of small decisions over which I never have a say. Work has gone from being a process to being a result. I no longer direct; charge. The criticism is unanimous. Andrej Karpathy, who recently signed by Anthropic, commented on X how this is a qualitative leap that for him is of the same relevance as the one that Claude 4.5 represented in November. That model began the overtaking of OpenAI: this puts it even further away (at least, for now). Other tweetersemployees or not from Anthropic, make it clear that this is an important leap in the capabilities of AI models. It’s only been a few hours since the launch, but everything points because we are indeed facing a notable leap in quality. Consume tokens like there’s no tomorrow. But in the face of that fascination, the criticism. Discussions on Reddit reveal how users who have started using it have quickly detected the problems associated with this release. The first of them: Claude Fable 5 burns tokens like there is no tomorrow. Its consumption is enormous, and the quotas for Pro and even Max accounts run out in minutes if we use the model intensively. If it already seemed to us that we were exhausting the limits of the free or quick payment accounts, with Claude Fable 5 that feeling worsens: Fable 5 is fantastic, but we can barely use it often with the Pro or Max plans because those dreaded messages about waiting X hours to continue using it quickly appear. Extremely cautious. Anthropic has been very serious about avoiding misuse of Fable 5, and as soon as it detects anything suspicious it “brakes” and “downgrades” the model so that at that moment the one that is activated is Claude Opus 4.8 (which is not bad at all). The problem is that users are detecting that the model takes completely harmless prompts as dangerous. Although in Anthropic indicate Although these security measures are activated in less than 5% of sessions, what users are detecting is that they are activated much more. Fable 5 can get silly. Not only that: Fable 5’s own design means that if it encounters a prompt that it detects as dangerous, the model tries to avoid the response and automatically reduces your capabilities (‘nerfing’) without you knowing. It gets a little sillier on purpose, so to speak. As Anthropic itself explains on the system card, We have implemented new measures that limit Claude’s effectiveness in requests related to the development of cutting-edge large-scale language models (LLMs) (for example, in creating pre-training pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or designing machine learning accelerators). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our security measures prevents giving an advantage to those users most willing to violate those terms. Unlike our cybersecurity, biology and chemistry interventions, and distillation attempts, … Read more

If the question is what is the worst job in history, the answer is in 18th century England: the “sin eaters”

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Have you had a sinful life, full of vices and excesses, but you don’t want that to condemn you to eternal fire? No problem. You just have to make sure that, once you die, your family hires a ‘sin-eater’, a freelance that a small feast will be given on your coffin on the day of your funeral. A term will take with it all the faults you committed in life, no matter how serious or reprehensible they may have been. The ‘sin-eater’ charged for his services, of course, but… How much would you (or your family) pay for eternal life? It sounds strange, but the job of sin-eater It existed centuries ago in some regions of Great Britain. In fact, the newspaper archive allows follow his trail until the 19th. Sin Eaters? Exact. And it’s not a metaphor. Natalie Zarrelli, from Atlas Obscura, calls him “worst freelance job ever” and you’re probably right. The no eater (‘comesins’ or sin-eaters) were just what the word indicates: people who fed on the faults of other people who had died suddenly, without time to expire their guilt. They did not do it out of hobby or because they followed an elaborate (and dismal) medieval diet based on sacrilege, but because that was their job. He no eater He arrived at the wakes, participated in a ritual to free the deceased from his sins, and then left silently with a few coins in his pocket. Where did it exist? There is not much information about them, although references can be found in works such as ‘Brand’s Faiths and Folklore’ either ‘Hill and Valley’an essay published by Catherine Sinclair in the 19th century. In recent years, media articles such as Atlas Obscurathe platform specialized in religion Aleteia or (more recently) the magazine National Geographic. The writer and teacher Megan Campisi He also researched it for his novel The Sin Eater. Thanks to them we can obtain some glimpses of this ancient craft, which took shape centuries ago in Great Britain. And when did they exist? The ‘sin eaters’ worked mainly in certain regions of England, Scotland or Wales and their trade continued with ups and downs since at least the 17th century (some they go back even furtherassociating it with a heritage from the Middle Ages) until the end of the 19th century. In fact there is some reference to a no eater who died already at the beginning of the 20th century and his grave can still be visited today. His figure was based on a mixture of superstitions, paganism and Christianity, all against the backdrop of the religious changes that England experienced starting in the 16th century. In fact there is who slides that its role may have arisen in an attempt to recover popular traditions after the Anglican Reformation. What exactly were they doing? The ‘sin-eaters’ were the central figure of a relatively simple ritual that sought to erase the guilt of the deceased. The family of the deceased placed a piece of bread and a bowl of beer or milk on the chest of the corpse and then called the no eaterwho only had to do one thing: sit before the corpse and eat and drink the food that was supposed to have absorbed the sins of the deceased. A simple gesture with which they made other people’s stains their own. How did they do it? “He would sit facing the door. They would give him a fourpence piece, which he would put in his pocket; a crust of bread, which he would eat; and a bowl full of beer, which he would drink in one gulp. After this, rising from his stool, he would pronounce, with a serene gesture: ‘the peace and rest of the departed soul’, for which he would pawn his own soul.” relates a work published in the 19th century. After the mediation of the ‘sin-eater’, the deceased was supposed to be free of reproaches that could condemn him to hell. Of course, the opposite happened to him: those faults of others ended up weighing on his spiritual record. Was it bad business? It is assumed that the majority of the sin-eaters were humble people, with few resources, for whom a new day of hunger represented a much worse prospect than a supposed eternity of damnation in the flames. Although they only received a few coins in exchange for their work, the job was quite painful. And not only for religious reasons. Some versions They maintain that, by ‘devouring’ the sins of others, the no eater went on to become an outcastsomeone who blurred his soul. Was it that serious? Yes. A ‘sin-eater’ who is not very religious, atheist or even ‘infidel’ might not care too much about participating in the ritual in exchange for a couple of coins, a loaf of bread and a bowl of beer, but he knew that his work would entail an extra sacrifice: the “manifest contempt” from his neighbors, for whom he became a kind of pest, someone to avoid. The families requested his services, invited him to their homes, paid for his service and sometimes the no eater He even listened to the confessions of mourning relatives, but once the ritual was over, no one wanted to have him around. What was its origin? Difficult to specify. In her article, Natalie Zarelli remember that some theories relate the figure of the no eater with pagan traditions, others connect it with the medieval custom of nobles paying the poor to pray for their dead and the salvation of their souls. In a way, the ‘sin eaters’ are also related to other deep-rooted traditionssuch as the belief that living relatives can intercede for their dead, the figure of purgatory or the symbolic value of food. When did they disappear? In the 19th century, when Sinclair wrote his book, ‘sin-eaters’ were already on the decline in England, but that does not mean that they had disappeared. His trail can be followed until … Read more

China just launched a rocket without telling anyone. It turns out that it is the most ambitious in its history

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China has taken seriously that “first come, first served” thing. Although the 1967 Outer Space Treaty states that No State can claim sovereignty over the Moon, Mars or any other celestial body, what does apply is that the geostationary orbital positions and frequency bands work as “first come, first served”. What does this mean? Well, the country or company that first registers and coordinates a constellation or a position with certain frequencies gets priority of use. This context is necessary to understand why SpaceX or Amazon are so interested in mass launching satellites into low orbit, and also why China has been accelerating the pace for months with their rockets in an aggressive expansion maneuver. So aggressive that finish of surprise and secret launch of a Long March 12B rocket with a double objective: to continue feeding its satellite constellation and to demonstrate that its reusable rocket can compete against the Falcon 9 from SpaceX. China and the space sprint This past Monday, the operators of the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, in the Gobi Desert, had work. In the American early morning, a rocket Long March 12B It left for low orbit with a cargo of satellites that will feed the Qianfan megaconstellation. This is China’s response to SpaceX Starlink and it seems that the mission went well because the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation declared the flight a success. There is a double reading here. On the one hand, the Long March 12B is one of the responses to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. It is a reusable rocket that has a first stage intended to land by propulsion on a recovery platform on Earth. It can transport 20 tons to low Earth orbit and this was its first flight… although was not done no recovery attempt. The other reading is that China is in aggressive mode launching things into space. It has been a very busy few months with different missions both in low orbit and in its Tiangong space stationbut the interesting thing about this launch of the Long March 12B is that people found out through social networks. When a mission is going to be carried out, whether it is more or less media-related, a series of prior notices are made to both the international authorities that control the air and maritime space in case something goes wrong. However, This mission has been carried out in absolute secrecybeing an unusual practice in both government and private programs. In the end, it is one more demonstration of what we were talking about: China has stepped on the accelerator to claim a space that can only be claimed by getting there and occupying it, and that is vital within the framework of user service (satellite Internet, wow) and, above all, for strategic reasons and technological sovereignty. Because it may seem that companies and countries want to bring the Internet everywhere, but the strategy is different: Controlling constellations and their orbital resources means controlling critical infrastructure such as satellite Internet, Earth observation, and military communications. Geopolitical advantage by arriving first in a space that the rival might want to occupy with other types of satellites. Arriving first forces the others to play on their board. And most importantly: the space you are interested in occupying is finite and everyone wants their land as soon as possible. In the end, this “secret” flight marks number 647 of the Long March series and is one more example that China is deeply involved in a new space race in which it competes directly against the United States, but in which Europe is also working to have something to say. In Xataka | Europe has almost ready something that, until recently, seemed practically a dream: its first reusable spacecraft

the last film directed by one of the greatest masters in the history of cinema

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Clint Eastwood turned 96 on May 31. And a bit of coincidence, with a statement from his son, jazz musician Kyle Eastwood (saying that “he’s retired now, but I’ve been very lucky to be able to work with him on quite a few films”), we’ve learned that Eastwood is no longer going to make any more films. There have been no official statements, but the retirement of the person responsible for ‘Unforgiven’ or ‘The Pale Rider’ leaves us with a filmography full of great films, of all genres and intensities. Let’s celebrate by remembering the last of them, ‘Jury Nº 2‘, released in 2024 and which you can see in Movistar Plus and HBO Max. ‘Jury No. 2’ is a judicial thriller with a moral dilemma on board, as Eastwood likes them: Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is called to serve on a jury in a high-profile murder case, and discovers that he himself could be more involved in the crime than he thought. The cast is completed with a veritable array of heavyweights such as Toni Collette, JK Simmons and Kiefer Sutherland. The film is Eastwood’s fortieth as a director. ‘Jury No. 2’ was conceived originally as a direct streaming premiere. The change to a limited theatrical release It arrived after some internal passes that yielded very favorable opinionsbut he barely received advertising coverage from the studio, which was said to have resented the author for the poor box office results of ‘Cry Macho’. It was finally released, as was later learned, not only out of respect for the director’s advanced age, but in recognition of his 50-year relationship with Warner Bros. This stimulating thriller closes an absolutely exemplary career, always halfway between popular genres and auteur cinema, since the time of his international fame aboard some of Sergio Leone’s most significant titles. Between those first successes and his recognition by critics starting with ‘Unforgiven’ in 1992, there was the creation of milestones such as Dirty Harry and a series of absolutely superb westerns and thrillers, often directed by himself. He has spent this entire century praised by critics and the public thanks to films like ‘Million Dollar Baby’ or ‘Mystic River’. In Xataka | Rafa Nadal won 22 Grand Slams and lost 18 more due to injury: the documentary that explores those last ones arrives on Netflix today

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