history

the one who has turned war into the most useless war in history

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In modern conflicts, the cost of operating an advanced air force can easily exceed the hundreds of millions daily, especially when they intervene clatest generation acesin-flight refueling and precision guided munition. Added to this is that some key systems, as strategic radars or early warning aircraft, require years to manufacture and they have no substitutes immediate. In this context, there are wars in which attrition is not measured only in territory, but in how much time can be held that rhythm before the accounts stop adding up. In Iran, for example, they had been shot. A show of force. The United States’ Operation Epic Fury on Iran began with the idea of ​​a rapid and controlled campaign, but very soon it revealed his true face after episodes such as the last downing of the F-15E and the complex rescue operation that has followed him, where the United States has had to deploy multiple media and take additional losses even destroying their own equipment to avoid capture. These types of incidents have shown from the beginning that the conflict was far from being surgical and that the level of operational risk was much older than expected. As the days progressed, the narrative of technological superiority began to take hold.face reality of a saturated, chaotic and increasingly expensive environment to sustain. Military wear. The accumulated figures show a significant wear on key platforms, from fighters like the F-15E or the A-10 to critical assets such as early warning aircraft and tankers, in addition to dozens of downed drones. Especially worrying for Americans has been the impact in support systems such as advanced radars or command infrastructures, the loss of which not only has a high economic cost, but also weakens operational capacity future in other strategic scenarios. Plus: added to this are errors such as friendly fire episodes and the vulnerability of apparently secure bases, which reinforces the idea that the campaign not only consumes resources, but also erodes capabilities that are difficult to replace. The number that explains everything. However, the real turning point is not only on the battlefield, but in the accounts: the war has reached a spending rate close to the 1 billion dollars a day only in air operations, a nonsense that shoots the total cost above of the 280,000 million in just 40 days. Add to this tens of billions in ammunition, damage to bases, loss of aircraft and a devastating impact in energy infrastructure key to the Gulf, the same ones that have paralyzed part of global supply and raised the bill even more. The result is an extraordinarily expensive and useless war, possibly the most economically, because in a few weeks a level of expenditure and destruction has been reached that in other conflicts took years, and that is unprecedented. Not only that. A war that, despite all this deployment, has not achieved any of your strategic objectivesbecoming an extreme example of imbalance between investment and results. Overflowing the military field. The impact is not limited to the military: attacks on refineriesgas plants, export terminals and industrial centers have turned the conflict into a regional economic crisis with global effectsfrom energy to inflation. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has amplified the damageaffecting a substantial part of the world’s oil and gas supply, while sectors such as aluminum, logistics and transportation have suffered multi-million dollar losses. In parallel, the need to repair critical infrastructure and replace scarce equipment adds additional pressure that extends the cost far beyond the conflict itself. The ceasefire: more economics than strategy. In this context, the ultimatum issued by Trump ensuring that he was going to end an entire civilization and his rear reverse A few hours before the deadline, they take on a new meaning: more than a purely strategic decision, the ceasefire seems to be understood as a response to a dynamic unbearable and unsustainable. International pressure, nervousness in the markets and fear of a total escalation coincided with a reality that is difficult to ignore: each additional day of war multiplied an already overflowing cost without bringing victory closer. Thus, the last minute break Not only has it avoided a further escalation, but it has exposed the logic that has ended up prevailing: in this war, the problem was not how to win, but how much more could one continue paying for not doing so. Image | The White House Egyosint In Xataka | Someone has analyzed the coordinates of the rescue of the pilot in Iran: not only do they not add up, they point to a very different US mission In Xataka | Iran has found a hole in Israel’s shield: turning a missile into an explosive “storm” in full descent

A rural community lived isolated in caves for 500 years in Burgos. Their DNA revealed a dark history of inbreeding and smallpox

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In the year 711, an Umayyad army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and put an end to the Visigoth kingdom in less than a generation, starting a great upheaval in the Iberian Peninsula with many changes. Kingdoms that were born and died, power struggles and great mobility that began to shape the foundations of modern Europe. However, north of Burgos, a small group of people seemed to know absolutely nothing. Where. The rural site of Las Gobasin northern Spain, offers a vision of life far from those centers of power. One of the most outstanding medieval rock communities on the peninsula, located in the county of Treviño, near the town of Laño. Here the inhabitants dug churches, homes and graves directly into the limestone, where they began to live and die there for five centuries. And now we know that they did it with their backs to the world. How do we know? At the moment we do not have any time machine to see what happened in the past, but a scientific study revealed the secrets of this enigmatic Iberian community. Here the archaeological excavations in the cemetery They discovered the remains of 41 individuals from whom an attempt was made to extract their DNA. In this case they used all the tools available to reconstruct who they were, how they were related and what diseases they carried. What we knew is that the settlement existed from the mid-6th century to the 11th century and Las Gobas had a cemetery that was used continuously from the 7th to the 11th century. But the surprising thing is that it seemed like they were always the same people. Marry each other. The most striking finding of the study does not have to do with any virus or any fractured skull, but rather that approximately 61% of the individuals with sufficient genomic data showed signs of consanguinity, so this population was quite likely to practice inbreeding. And it was not something slight, since in some cases the researchers saw that there were marriages between siblings or even between parents and children. In this way, the only source of genetic variability that could be had in this population was only the women who arrived from abroad to marry. Although the truth is something quite scarce. There was no peace. It may be thought that isolation guarantees absolute peace in the population, but the first centuries of occupation were marked by brutality. The study of the bones in this case has found clear evidence that there was interpersonal violence, including serious bone injuries consistent with direct sword impacts. An invisible enemy. If swords weren’t enough in this case, the 10th century brought with it a lethal, microscopic threat. The metagenomic analyzes carried out have made it possible to detect pathogens and zoonotic diseases, identifying traces of smallpox. Although what is fascinating about this discovery is not only that We are facing the oldest documented evidence of smallpox in southern Europe, but where it came from. Although the south of the peninsula was a commercial hotbed dominated by the Islamic world, smallpox did not reach the south from the Gobas. But the truth is that its genetic signature is similar to the Nordic and European strains of the time. How did it arrive? That a disease from the Vikings or one that was present in Central Europe reached some isolated caves in Burgos is no coincidence. Here the researchers pointed to the nascent European pilgrimage routes, specifically to the first steps of the Camino de Santiago, as the entry route for the pathogen. And although the inhabitants of Las Gobas avoided mixing with their neighbors to the south, the incipient religious and commercial traffic from the north ended up breaking, at least on an epidemiological level, their isolation bubble. Images | Wikipedia Trevino County In Xataka | After 114 years, a scan of the Titanic shows a key fact about its crew: the bravery with which they fought until the end

The first “autonomous” car in history dates back to 1958 and had a peculiar problem: it smelled like fish

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Nowadays, and with few exceptions such as Cybertruckautomobile design is moved by very clear trends. However, in the 1950s and in the midst of the space age, the sky was the limit. Some examples are the amazing General Motors Firebird Ihe Zündapp Janus that you don’t know if it comes or goes or the refrigerator with wheels called BMW Isetta. At that time was born the Golden Sahara IIa car truly ahead of its time. It was so far ahead that it brought driving assistance and full connectivity (of what there was). It is, in short, the grandfather of today’s smart car. A crazy repair idea. If I say George Barris you may not know who I’m talking about, but if I reveal that he is the creator of the Batmobile things change. Well, back in 1953 the car designer had a car accident with his Lincoln Capri: crashed into a hay truck and as a result, the top of the vehicle was destroyed. Probably many of us would have taken the car to the workshop or scrapyard based on the mechanic’s bill, but Barris invested a whopping $5,000 and what was left of his battered Capri (which had a 200 horsepower V8 engine) was built into the Golden Sahara. Be careful, to give you an idea of ​​the inverted grassland: in the 50s the luxurious Cadillac Eldorado It cost $7,750.. Clean slate in the form of an ultra-futuristic car. Equipment from another era. At a time when FM radio was an extra, Barris himself tells its most differential design elements: hand-molded steel panels, vertical design headlights installed in fenders and bullet-type bumpers, fins integrated into the fenders, lounge-type seat with bar furniture on the sides, a removable bubble dome for the roof. Kontinent Media …and paint of with sardines The streamlined design was finished with a two-tone 24-karat gold finish (hence its name) instead of the classic chrome and a paint that shone like a diamond. Barris was looking for a finish never seen before, so he came up with a natural way to achieve a pearlescent touch before that type of paint became popular: with fish scales. As explained the designer in an interview with Jonnie King for his “Hall of Fame Legends” series: “So Shirley and I went to the fishmonger, and I remember that the fish looked very pearly. I had the fishmongers turn all the sardines so that their bellies could be seen until I found the one with the gold. We took it, removed the scales, put it in a jar, took it to the store and mixed it with a natural cellulose clearcoat and toner lacquers. Then I gave it a base of matte white and I sprayed it on top, and it turned out a spectacular pearly gold. The only problem was that it was very difficult to smell because it smelled like fish.” An even more extravagant Golden Sahara II. In 1954 the first Golden Sahara was born and from ’56 to ’58 Barris teamed up with Jim Street and Bob Metz to give it a twist until they found the Golden Sahara II. For this second generation, Goodyear added Translucent and luminous tires to replace the conventional white band tires of the time. It is just the tip of the iceberg of a car that is surprising both on the outside and (especially) on the inside. But Metz also gave it a good facelift and modified the windshield, hood and roof of the vehicle, he put quad headlights and rear fins. And it went from having a radio and steering wheel to truly futuristic technology: with panels on the upper part of the dashboard where it housed a television, tape recorder and even a refrigerator for its bar. It is said that the total cost of the Sahara exceeded $75,000 of the time. Under the hood: ahead of its time. Jim Rote’s electronics It was what made the difference compared to the cars of that era and brought it closer to ours. The steering wheel gave way to a fighter-style central joystick and implemented voice control for tasks such as opening the doors or starting the engine. Likewise, it integrated proximity sensors in two antennas on the front bumper, so that it could brake autonomously. What happened to him. In his days of wine and roses he went to fairs like the Petersen Motorama (his debut), he appeared in ‘cinderfella‘ (1960) with Jerry Lewis, Ed Winn and Judith Anderson and also in the competition ‘I’ve got a secret‘, in 1962. But in the 60s it disappeared from the front page and was relegated to ostracism for half a century, until it returned in style and restored in the Geneva Motor Show of 2019 from the hand of Goodyear. In Xataka | Make your old stickerless car a historic vehicle. A shortcut to circulate through Madrid without fines that does not always work In Xataka | The Bugatti Veyron was a unique car. And we say “was” because Bugatti has decided to betray him with nostalgia Cover | Matti Blume

a puppy from 15,800 years ago rewrites the history of domestication

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For many, the dogs they live with They are another member of the familybecause the link that is created surpasses many friends with other humans. And it is no wonder, because we have been living with them for millennia, but the exact origin of our bond in history has always been involved in a scientific debate. But this has finally been solved thanks to genetics. The study. They have been two monumental published reviews in Nature those that have hit the table thanks to the analysis of the DNA of a puppy that lived 15,800 years ago at the Pınarbaşı site, in modern-day Turkey. This discovery has not only set back the biological clock of our canine companions by at least 5,000 years, compared to previous genetic records, but demonstrate that our alliance with wolves was forged long before we invented agriculture. A puppy with honors. The discovery is undoubtedly a triumph of pelogenetics, since for years scientists depended on the shape of bones to distinguish between a wolf and a primitive dog, a method that has many errors. But now science has turned to the genetic material found inside your cells to clear up any doubt. The remains of three puppies were found at the site, but what is fascinating is not only their antiquity, but also how they lived. Here the chemical analysis that was carried out reveals that these animals had a diet surprisingly similar to that of the humans with whom they lived, including a strong base of fish. Furthermore, they were buried following human rituals, which is a posthumous treatment that demonstrates a deep emotional bond. Its expansion. But the Turkish puppy is not an isolated case, since the first study of Nature demonstrate that, by the Late Upper Paleolithic, dogs had already spread rapidly throughout western Eurasia. Here the team also analyzed remains found in Gough’s Cave, in the United Kingdom. There they identified another domesticated dog from 14,300 years ago whose jaw had perforations, again suggesting ritual practices. The most interesting thing is that, despite the enormous geographical distance that separates Turkey from England, the genomes of both animals present strong genetic similarities, confirming that they belonged to the same large population of Paleolithic dogs. Another study. In parallel, he wanted to broaden the panorama after examine the remains of 200 European dogs from more than 14,000 years ago, managing to confirm the presence of another primitive dog in Kesslerloch (Switzerland), dated at 14,200 years. This second team demonstrated that the lineages of these first Paleolithic dogs did not become extinct, but rather that their genetic signatures have survived and are present in the modern dogs that sleep on our sofas today. Before agriculture. The most classical culture told us that the domestication of animals was a by-product of the Neolithic, since here we began to settle, invented agriculture, and along the way, we domesticated animals. But this has completely changed with these studies, since the genomes analyzed confirm that these dogs descend from a lineage of ancient wolves that formed an integral alliance with strictly hunter-gatherer humans. Images | Road Ahead In Xataka | Traveling with a dog is increasingly common, so the European Commission has decided something: mandatory passport

This is how the most brutal engineering work in urban history was born

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London Underground, known in our language as the London Undergroundis one of the most famous public transportation networks in the world. With more than 543 units, 408 kilometers long and 274 stations, this precious piece of the United Kingdom capital is capable of handling up to five million passengers a day. Now, this service did not become what it is today overnight. London Underground has a fascinating history, a history that, by the way, began more than 160 years ago with a completely innovative project for the time: the construction of an underground railway. Let’s go back in time. In the 1830s, London was the largest city in the world. It was a rapidly growing global economic epicenter that needed to decongest its streetsso the idea arose that trains They will begin to move underground. The problem was that until then nothing similar had been implemented. After many years of being just a proposal on paper, a test tunnel was built in 1855 at Kibblesworth. After this step, which turned out to be a success, work began on the world’s first underground railway, a circuit between Paddington (then Bishop’s Road) and Farringdon that entered service on January 10, 1863. The locomotives ran on steam engines and the carriages were lit with gas. It was basically like putting up a traditional railway system in a closed placewhich translated into inconvenience for passengers, who often had to travel in a polluted environment with high temperatures. In any case, the metropolis continued to grow and there were more and more transportation initiatives with private investment. Therefore, in 1868 the first section of the Metropolitan District Railway was inaugurated. This was a service that ran between South Kensington and Westminster (now part of the District and Circle lines). Electricity reaches trains Both services continued to expand as tunnel construction techniques improved. On December 18, 1890, The City and South London Railway launched the first electric railway. This was a very important advance because it allowed us to solve some of the main drawbacks of the service. In 1905, electrification came to the District and Circle lines, but the London Underground network operated as separate systems. This changed after 1906, when companies began to make their way deep into the city to unify. In all this, the name ‘Underground’ did not yet exist. Artist’s representation of a platform on Baker Street London in 1906 The companies that had come together for the project proposed different names, including ‘Tube,’ ‘Electric,’ and ‘Underground,’ but the latter was the winner. In this way, in 1908 it appeared for the first time the name ‘Underground’ in the seasons, and he did it with the roundel symbol that we know today. The technological progress of the London Underground seemed unstoppable. That same year, electronic ticket-issuing machines arrived and in 1911 the first escalators were installed. In 1929, manually operated doors began to become extinct. These were updated with pneumatic systems. Until this point, the service was operated by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL). In 1933, however, underground transportation services merged with the railroads and bus services under the London Transport brand, which was overseen by the London Passenger Transport Board. That same year Harry Beck’s map appearedan element intended to guide users. The system had grown so large that some stations were just meters away, while others were kilometers away. It is a cartography that was received with skepticism, but ended up triumphing. Aldwych tube station, in 1940 For the first time, decisions about London’s public transport services were perfectly coordinated. This allowed us to improve the service and outline an ambitious improvement plan. However, the outbreak of World War II in 1939 meant that the plan could not be completed as originally envisioned. The underground transport service was converted into a huge air raid shelter between September 1940 and May 1945. Some stations were also used during the war as a warehouse to keep valuable historical items safe, for example pieces from the British Museum. After the war, in 1948, the London Passenger Transport Board acquired a public role. HE nationalized and became the London Transport Executive, years later being renamed the London Transport Board and operating under the orbit of the Ministry of Transport. The system also suffered several tragedies. In 1975 a train heading south did not stop at the final terminal and crashed at the end of the shift. 43 people died and 74 were injured. In 1987, a fire claimed 31 lives at King’s Cross station. Later, in 2005, an attack on the London transport system It caused 52 people to lose their lives. Nails contactless cards called Oyster They were implemented on the London Underground in 2003, but by 2014 you could already pay directly with contactless bank cards. By 2016, some lines provided evening service on weekends. Currently the service is run by an organization called Transport for London (TfL) which comprehensively manages the city’s state transportation strategy. Images | Joel de Vriend | Nelson Ndongala | Tomas Anton Escobar | Tom Parsons | Will H McMahan | The Graphic (Wikimedia Commons) | John Jackson In Xataka | The unfinished dream of the Roman Empire: a 125-kilometer train to link Europe and Asia over the Bosphorus In Xataka | France has been torpedoing the possibility of AVE reaching Paris for years: Renfe’s plan is now regional ones In Xataka | In 2007, Japan made a cat the station master of a dying train line. Today that line is saved

the largest purchase in its history in one of the worst moments

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It has taken a while, but finally Renfe has given the green light to the purchase of new AVE for use in Spain. The Board of Directors of the operator has made it officialin what has been the largest purchase of high-speed rolling stock in its history. Below all the details. What has happened. The Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, announced this Wednesday in the Congress of Deputies that Renfe has approved the tender to acquire 30 new high-speed trains for an amount of 1,362 million euros. The operation, which according to El País It exceeds in size the purchase of 30 Talgo Avril units made between 2015 and 2016, and also includes an extension clause that would allow the order to be increased to 40 trains, with a total investment that would be close to 1,777 million. Why is it coming now? The tender was scheduled for February, but the Adamuz accident in January, in which 46 people lost their lives, forced Renfe to postpone the decision. That accident, in which an Alvia was involved on the Madrid-Seville line, fired alarms about network status and the age of part of the fleet. And the crisis of accumulated incidents in the Spanish railway system has accelerated the need to renew the train fleet. In detail. The new convoys will be designed to travel at 350 km/h, although reaching that speed will require prior infrastructure works. Adif plans to begin the renovation of the Madrid-Barcelona line this year, where the change of sleepers will allow the current limit of 300 km/h to be exceeded. Each train must have a minimum capacity of 450 seats in two classes, and include accessible spaces for people with reduced mobility, bicycle areas and restaurant services. Technically, the trains will operate in standard UIC gauge (1,435 mm) and must be equipped with the ERTMS/ETCS and ASFA signaling systems. The deadlines. The contract demands that the first five trains will be available within 40 months of signing, and that the entire fleet will be delivered within 78 months. The agreed supply rate is one new train approximately every 45 days. The contract has a total duration of six years and also includes the corresponding spare parts. Who can win the contract. The main candidates are Siemens, with its Velaro Novo model, and Hitachi Rail, with the ETR 1000 (the same train that Iryo operates and that was involved in the Adamuz accident, although the investigation points to a failure in the infrastructure as a probable cause). Also have been visited by Minister Puente and the president of Renfe, Álvaro Fernández Heredia, the facilities of the Chinese firm CRRC and the Spanish plants of Talgo, CAF and Alstom. And now what. The arrival of these trains comes with the intention of providing a response to demand growth of the AVE during the next decade. And for this there are several challenges ahead: that the infrastructure is ready to take advantage of the 350 km/h and ensure that delivery times are met. On the other hand, the operator needs regain traveler trustand this purchase seems one of the first steps to make it possible. It remains to be seen who gets the contract. Cover image | Wikipedia In Xataka | Two floors, 200 meters long and one objective: to modernize the most used and chaotic Cercanías line in Spain

Why on earth donkeys arose has always been one of the great mysteries of natural history. Until now

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When we think about the animals that have been accompanying humans since time immemorial, helping us in agricultural and daily tasks, surely the first candidates are horses, dogs, and even cats. Probably the donkeys (Equus africanus asinus) are a little further down the list. Until now we believed that the domestication of the donkey was an event that was repeated in different places and times in prehistory. However, the largest genetic study of these animals carried out to date revealed a different story: that of a single domestication of the donkey, which occurred about 7,000 years ago in the area around the Horn of Africa and what is now Kenya. The closest relatives of the domestic donkey, wild donkeys (Equus africanus) still live today in this African region. The common donkey is sometimes seen as a subspecies of these African donkeys or as an independent species closely related to it (in which case its “scientific” name would be Equus asinus). According to the team, led by French researchers, the donkey was domesticated in this context, and then began to spread throughout the rest of Eurasia, already as a domestic animal about 4,500 years ago, that is, about 2 and a half millennia after being domesticated. The genetic study has not only pointed out the unique origin of this species, but It has also “advanced” the date of domestication by about four centuries. The domestication of the donkey would have made sense in its spatiotemporal context. About 7,000 years ago the Sahara environment witnessed an aridification process that led the desert to expand. The donkeys they had an advantage Compared to other equids, they are more resistant to lack of water, which could have made them ideal for use as an aid in transportation or agricultural work. For their analysis, the international team of researchers analyzed samples of 207 modern donkeys from 31 countries, as well as remains of skeletons of 31 other donkeys who lived in the last 4,500 years. They also used genetic information from other equids to expand the study. The work of the researchers was published in the journal Science. The variety and the mules The study also offers us some curious stories about this animal. For example, genetic analysis of Roman-era remains found in France tells the story of a generation of giant donkeys (up to 25 centimeters larger than the average modern donkey). The Romans They didn’t raise these donkeys colossal for their direct use, but because mules (crosses between male donkeys and horse mares) were of great use to them. The Romans took advantage of an animal that combined part of the robustness of donkeys with the ability to travel long distances more typical of horses. After the fall of the Roman Empire, mules once again gave way to donkeys since economies had become more local, so it was not necessary to use them to transport large loads along the popular Roman road network. The donkey is perhaps the most maligned of domestic animals. Despite having played a key role in human development over the past four millennia, the donkey is often seen as synonymous with stupidity or clumsiness. Such is the point that the donkey has become a threatened species in places like Spain or Mexico. For better or worse, the donkey continues to form part of our cultural heritagefrom the donkey with which Sancho Panza accompanied Don Quixote to that of Friar Perico. Now, thanks to science, we know a little more about the history of what could be the least popular cousin of the equine family. In Xataka | The Iberian lynx is reconquering Spain and that is good news. The challenge now is to understand why In Xataka | Science had always believed that only humans understand geometry. Until we noticed the crows again Image | Ansgar Scheffold

They are going to begin the most ambitious nuclear fusion experiments in history

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The largest experimental reactor of this type tokamak for nuclear fusion that exists is called JT-60SA and it is in Naka, a small city not far from Tokyo (Japan). The construction of this mill began in January 2013, but it was not done from scratch; he did it taking the JT-60 reactor as a starting pointits precursor, a machine that came into operation in 1985 and that for more than three decades has achieved very important milestones in the field of fusion energy. The assembly of the JT-60SA was completed in early 2020, and from the end of 2023 it is ready to start the first tests with plasma. This machine is a device tokamak that just like JET and the future ITER resorts to the magnetic confinement of the ionized plasma. Although the ultimate goal of fusion is to use deuterium and tritium, JT-60SA initially uses only deuterium for its experiments, as it is not designed to handle the high neutron loads of tritium (that will be an ITER task). Either way, this machine is titanic. Colossal. In fact, it has a height of 15.4 meters and a diameter of 13.7 meters. However, the most impressive are the “specifications” that allow us to form an idea about its performance. And it is capable of confining a plasma with a volume of 130 m³, as well as generating a toroidal magnetic field of 2.25 Tesla and sustaining a current inside the plasma of 5.5 MA (5.5 million amperes). These figures are impressive, and presumably when ITER is ready to begin the first plasma tests its figures will be even more astonishing. An engineering prodigy During the last two years, the Japanese and European engineers working on the JT-60SA reactor have installed several extraordinarily sophisticated systems in this machine that will play a leading role during the next experiment campaign. One of these systems is made up of two ring-shaped coils 8 meters in diameter that have been expressly designed to control the confinement of the plasma that is moving at very high speed inside the vacuum chamber. An amazing note: these two devices were wound directly inside the reactor. However, another of the technological solutions that these engineers have installed in the reactor in recent months is even more amazing. Every time the researchers who operate this very complex machine carry out an experiment with it They need to know with maximum precision possible temperature and electron density of the plasma. The main problem they face is that it is not possible to obtain this data by taking direct measurements. The interaction between the laser and the plasma is what allows engineers to indirectly calculate temperature and density For the fusion of deuterium and tritium nuclei to take place, the plasma containing them must reach a temperature of at least 150 million degrees Celsius, and any sensor that comes into contact with it at this temperature will not survive. This is why the JT-60SA reactor engineers have been forced to develop an extraordinarily sophisticated diagnostic system. Thomson dispersion measurement equipment components have been designed and manufactured in Italy, Romania and Japan. Broadly speaking, this device manages to measure the temperature and density of the plasma electrons by analyzing the light it emits with a high-power laser beam dispersed, precisely, by the plasma electrons themselves. In some way the interaction between the laser and the plasma is what allows engineers indirectly calculate temperature and density. The JT-60SA reactor will have two Thomson dispersion diagnostic systems. The core one has been developed in Japan, and the plasma edge one has been devised in Europe. This enormous effort has been worth it. The reactor is almost ready to start the next experiment campaign. All that remains is to carry out a gradual start-up that will allow testing the main systems of this machine, and at the end of 2026 the experiments will begin. They will last for six months. Most impressively, this campaign will take the JT-60SA to an unprecedented level of current, enabling longer, steady-state plasma pulses to be sustained. The researchers operating the reactor are confident that everything they will learn during these experiments will be very valuable in bringing the future ITER to a successful conclusion. Let’s hope that the performance of the JT-60SA will finally live up to expectations. Image | QST More information | Fusion For Energy In Xataka | The JET reactor has successfully completed its final tests with deuterium and tritium. It is a crucial milestone for nuclear fusion

In 1987 he had a problem displaying images on his Mac, so he created an app. Today it is the most used image editor in history

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Maybe with Nano Banana There are people who have banished Photoshop, but the image editor is the tool that has accompanied photography professionals for decades, almost on par with their camera. In fact, it achieved something only within the reach of very few technological products: becoming a verb and even enter the dictionary. We Photoshop an image and Google it on the internet. Like many other milestones, Photoshop was born by chance: It was the result of a screen that did not know how to show grays. In figures. In these almost 40 years of Photoshop’s life, the editor has been accumulating astronomical data of its progress. Its launch price in 1990 was $895. No joke, it would be equivalent to $2,100 today. It has never been a home software but a professional one. Adobe closed last year with record turnover of 23.77 billion dollars. In 2024 billing was of 21,510 million dollars, of which subscriptions represented 20,521 million dollars. In 2013 Adobe played all its cards on the subscription. Time has proven him right: in twelve years it went from 4,000 million annual billing to almost 24 billion in 2025. How it all started. It’s 1987 and Thomas Knoll was pursuing a doctorate at the University of Michigan in computer vision. Then he had a problem: his Mac Plus had a monochrome screen unable to display grayscale images, only pure black and white. So he wrote a few lines of code to fix it. He called it Display. His little program did the trick, but that was it: he had no intention of commercializing it. The one who did have a nose for the business was his brother John, who at that time worked at Industrial Light & Magic (George Lucas’ company in charge of making Star Wars special effects): convinced him to develop the entire program. Brothers and partners, they sold the license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. From layers to AI. Photoshop 1.0 would see the light of day in February 1990 as an editor that required only 2MB of RAM and an 8 MHz processor to run, the minimum specifications for a Mac. To put it in context: today Photoshop recommends 16GB of RAM, 8,000 times more. It included tools as iconic to its users as the lasso or the magic wand. But if there was a technical leap that made the difference, those were the very useful capes: they arrived in 1994 with Photoshop 3.0. Before layers, the editor was destructive: each change overwrote the original image. Almost 20 years later, another functional milestone would arrive: the arrival of AI with Generative Fillthat is, being able to add or delete objects with a prompt. Despite the controversy over authorship and the future of retouchingits numbers were incontestable: in April of last year it had already generated more than 22,000 million images since its launch, according to Adobe. The risky move to the subscription model. Before the tricky decision to include AI in its suite, Adobe made another risky move: in 2013 and when we had still succumbed in subscriptionocracyannounced that it would stop selling its Photoshop on a license forever and start renting it. At that time almost 50,000 customers signed a petition against of this decision and its shares fell 12%. Once again, time and pocketbooks seem to have proven them right: they have multiplied their income by six. In Xataka | 16 years ago a student from Barcelona was looking for an easy way to edit PDFs. The website he created is one of the most viewed on the internet In Xataka | 30 years ago he created a player for the university: today his app has more than 6 billion downloads and is still free and without ads Cover | University of Michigan

The first telecommunications network in history arose in ancient Syria, 3,800 years before the internet

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Nowadays it is difficult to think of anything other than being able to communicate with anyone instantly, no matter how far away they are. As a millennial, I have lived in the era when sending messages continuously was not common: SMS was not free and forced you to economize on language. And of course, before there were telephone calls, the reception of which today causes fear among youth. We can go back in time to the telegraph or the imperial postal networks and even the discreet carrier pigeons, which have been helping humanity communicate from the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations. A recent post from the historian and professor of history at the University of Central Florida Tiffany Earley-Spadoni published within a volume on global perspectives of warscapes brings to the fore the first telecommunications network documented both textually and archaeologically 3,800 years ago: a system of beacons to launch an SOS. The discovery. A cuneiform chart excavated at Mari, eastern Syria, dating to 1800 BC is the oldest known historical evidence of signaling using fiery beacons. But we also know what he said: an official named Bannum writes to the king while traveling to the north of the region with concern after observing the successive lighting of bonfires near Terqa and requests reinforcements. That lighting was not accidental: it was a signal of imminent danger on the border, an early warning system for possible attacks on their cities. Early-Spadoni refers to this system as a “fortified regional network,” or FRN for short. A little context. This documentation is framed within the Syrian Middle Bronze Age, a territory of cities – states in constant conflict. Taking the city meant dealing a blow to the rival and keeping its wealth, hence the siege was the star attack. But conquering a territory was much easier than administering it. Thus, these states had great ambitions, but lacked the infrastructure to govern themselves from a distance. So to better defend themselves and control the territories they used two systems: large walls surrounding the cities and a network of forts, towers and guarded roads in rural areas. This second structure is the seed of the development of empires. Why is it important. Bannum’s letter is the oldest known historical testimony of the use of an intentionally designed telecommunications network with shared infrastructure, nodes, and protocol. Do not confuse with communication methods, since smoke or drums are prehistoric and undatable. But it is also key for civilizations insofar as it allowed us to go from “presumptive states” (which conquers territories it cannot govern) to develop real and lasting territorial empires: without this infrastructure of communication and control, the size of the empires would have been simply ungovernable. How it worked. With a physical structure made up of fortresses, forts, watchtowers and wall segments and with an operation protocol. It essentially served to control routes, resupply military personnel, transmit information and track movements in the territory. The physical hierarchy of its infrastructure was distributed along roads and river crossings spaced at regular intervals of about 20 kilometers to ensure visibility between nodes. The large fortresses were the main nodes with smaller forts between them, with watchtowers for signaling to reinforce points that were difficult to see and segments of walls in strategic areas. The system operated continuously: with smoke during the day, fire at night, and had permanent reserves of wood. Each signal was known by all the nodes, so that when a beacon, the signal traveled through the nodes until it reached the center in a relatively short time. Speed ​​was its great asset and its handicap was how limited it was: it could only transmit simple messages. The early “internet”. Comparing it with the current Internet is not just a rhetorical question: FRNs share with the Internet several of its principles, such as distributed nodes, redundancy to avoid failures, protocols agreed in advance and a topology to maximize connectivity between distant points. A before and after to build empires. This system did not disappear with Mari. For more than a thousand years, each new empire that emerged in the Near East encountered these networks, recognized them as a valuable structure, and implemented them to suit their needs. The Neo-Assyrian integrated them into walled cities and in parallel developed a horse relay system for more complex and confidential messages, impossible to transmit with the original infrastructure. The Urartian Empire made them the organizing principle of an entire empire. And the Persian Empire took the model to its maximum expression with the royal road that Herodotus describes in his Histories: forts at regular intervals, relay of messages and archaeologically confirmed fire beacons in Anatolia. Earley-Spadoni’s conclusion is that without these infrastructures, the largest empires of the ancient world would not have been able to manage themselves. In Xataka | From when a monstrous telecommunications tower and its more than 4,000 cables blocked the sun from the inhabitants of Stockholm In Xataka | In 1901, a Spanish man had one of the ideas of the century: invent the remote control before television Cover | حسن and Ezra Jeffrey-Comeau

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