Human

We believed that human programmers would end up being code reviewers. Anthropic just killed that

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The rise of the Generative AI The world of software development seemed to follow a clear script: models would write the code and humans would review it. It was the new balance. Well, Anthropic just killed him. The problem of programming with AI. What we know today as vibe codingthis practice of giving instructions in natural language to an AI so that it generates code at full speed, has skyrocketed software production in companies. Anthropic affirms that the amount of code generated by each of its own engineers has grown by 200% in the last year. And now there’s a problem: there’s so much new code that reviewing it has become the bottleneck of the process. Human developers can’t cope. Many pull requests (change proposals that must be reviewed before integrating new code) are skimmed or not read very carefully at all. What Anthropic has done. The company Code Review has been releaseda tool integrated into Claude Code that, instead of waiting for a human to review the code, deploys a team of AI agents to do it automatically every time a pull request is opened. This new system is now available in preview phase for Team and Enterprise plan customers. Cat Wu, Product Manager at Anthropic, explained told TechCrunch that the question they constantly received from their clients’ technical managers was always the same: “Now that Claude Code is generating a ton of pull requests, how do I make sure they are reviewed efficiently?” How it works inside. AI agents work in parallel autonomously the moment a pull request is opened, examining the code from different perspectives. An end agent then aggregates and prioritizes the issues it has found, removing duplicates and sorting them by severity. The result reaches the developer through a featured comment, accompanied by more online comments about specific bugs. The focus, according to Anthropicis in logical errors, not in matters of style, something designed on purpose so that the feedback does not generate too much noise. Issues are labeled by color depending on how important they are: red for critical, yellow for attention, and purple for pre-existing code. Numbers. The company has been using Code Review internally for months before launching it to the market. According to what they saybefore implementing it, only 16% of their pull requests received meaningful review comments. With the tool, that percentage rises to 54%. In large pull requests (more than 1,000 modified lines) 84% returned results, with an average of 7.5 problems detected. And less than 1% of those results are flagged as incorrect by the engineers themselves. In one of the cases documented by the company, they spoke of a single line change that seemed routine. However, Code Review marked it as critical, as it apparently could have broken the entire service’s authentication. The bug was fixed before integration. Furthermore, according to the company, the engineer later acknowledged that he would not have caught it alone. ANDhe new role of the programmer. The narrative that had spread in the last two years was that developers would evolve towards a profile closer to that of a reviewer or supervisor of code generated by AI. Now that transition is also being automated, at least in part. Anthropic does not eliminate the human from the equation (in fact the tool does not approve pull requests), but it does compress the review work that was supposed to be the last bastion. It seems that now the human goes from reviewer to final arbiter. Price. It is not a cheap tool. Each revision has a cost based on token consumption. Anthropic esteem The average price per review is between $15 and $25, depending on the complexity of the code. It is a cost that the company justifies in the context of large technology companies where errors that escape review have a much higher price. Cover image | Compagnons In Xataka | Software companies sank on the stock market for a simple reason: investors are panicking about AI

We thought that human beings began to walk in Africa. This 7.2 million-year-old fossil says otherwise

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The scientific consensus has been telling us for decades that the cradle of humanity and the origin of our ancestors who began to walk on two legs was in Africa. However, a new paleontological discovery in the Balkans just launched an order to this official story. More specifically, a fossilized femur that suggests our earliest ancestors may have started walking on two legs in Europe. A bone. The centerpiece of this discovery is a femur cataloged as FM3549AZM6 and found at the Azmaka site, in Bulgaria. From this, the research team began to analyze the bone down to the millimeter, highlighting above all the anatomy it had. Researchers here have identified key biomechanical traits that point to partial bipedal locomotion, meaning that our ancestor could walk on two legs. Specifically, they have seen that the neck of the femur is unusually long and it has specific muscle insertion points that strictly arboreal primates do not have. These characteristics suggest that Graecopithecus He spent considerable time walking upright on the ground. A new hypothesis. This finding does not come out of nowhere, since in 2017 this same team of researchers already raised eyebrows in the scientific community by suggesting that the evolutionary divergence between humans and chimpanzees could have occurred in the eastern Mediterranean, and not in Africa. That hypothesis was based on analysis of a jaw found in Greece and a tooth from Bulgaria attributed to Graecopithecus freybergi. Now it comes to light again. At that time, definitive proof of locomotion was missing, but Azmaka’s femur fills that gap that we needed to begin to reach clear conclusions. Why did they stand up? Evolution rarely occurs without a strong environmental push, and the Europe of 7 million years ago looked nothing like it does today. Here investigations at Bulgarian sites, such as the Struma Valley, show that the landscape was dominated by a savanna environment very similar to the African one, caused by a global confrontation and severe droughts in the Mediterranean. This loss of dense forests would have forced the region’s primates to come down from the trees and adapt their movement to travel long distances in open fields in search of food. In this way, it was geography and not the continent that forced bipedalism. The debate. The new Bulgarian femur revives one of the hottest debates in paleontology, since until now, the title of the oldest bipedal hominin was held by Sahelanthropus tchadensisabout 7 million years old and found in Africa. But now, if this team’s dating and analysis are accurate, Graecopithecus would not only equal, but slightly surpass in seniority Sahelanthropusmoving the “kilometer zero” of bipedalism to the Balkans. But at the moment it is too early for the textbooks to change definitively, since, as with previous discoveries, the scientific community will demand more independent analyzes and will seek to debate every notch of the femur. What is undeniable is that the African monopoly on the origin of our lineage now has a serious European competitor. In Xataka | Humans are evolving live on the Tibetan plateau. And understanding what happens there will be essential in space

If we want to increase human fertility, mice have something to tell us: fecal transplants

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We knew that the bacteria that live in our intestine They are really positive and offer us extra protection against numerous threats from outside or even against Alzheimer’s. Now they have just added a new star function: they can help us improve our reproductive health. And all this with a simple fecal microbiota transplant. New evidence. This same month of March the magazine Nature has published an article that breaks with several scientific paradigms and demonstrates a bidirectional communication between the microbiome and women’s ovaries. The study here wanted to demonstrate that fecal microbiota transplant can completely remodel the behavior of the ovaries, reducing inflammation and even increasing reproductive success. But the most amazing thing about the experiment is not the ‘what’, but the ‘how’, since it has quite surprised the experimenters that the result has gone against what they expected. How is it possible? To understand this finding, we must first know the concept of ‘strobolome‘ which will give a lot to talk about in the coming years. In a simple way, it is a set of intestinal bacteria that are capable of metabolizing and modulating the level of estrogen, which is one of the main female sex hormones and closely related to reproduction. Until now, we knew that the microbiota played a role in almost every part of our body, ranging from digestion to our own mental health. But they wanted to go further, and in the past it was noted that they had already begun to explore how to transfer faeces from young mice to old ones, which would improve their ovarian reserve. But the best thing is that doing the opposite could accelerate the aging of the ovaries. The new study. Knowing this, this research team designed an experiment in which healthy adult mice were taken and given antibiotics to cleanse their intestinal flora. From here, they underwent a fecal microbiota transplant from mice in the ‘estropausal’ phase, which is like human menopause. What the researchers here were expecting is that if they were introduced to the microbiota of aged rats in reproductive decline, their ovaries would suffer damage. But the truth is that they were wrong. Results. The results here showed that adult females who received the “estropausal” microbiota not only did not worsen, but rather improved ovarian function and an increase in their fertility. Because? By thoroughly analyzing the organism of these ringworms, using sequencing of the genetic material of the ovaries, it was seen that the transplant had caused a massive remodeling of the ovarian transcriptome. That is, the way in which the genes in the ovaries were expressed had completely changed towards a “younger” profile. In addition, the analyzes revealed a drastic drop in the expression of genes linked to inflammation. The explanation that scientists are considering points directly to the strobolome, since it is possible that the microbiota of the stropausal mice, in its attempt to survive the natural drop in hormones of its original host, has developed brutal compensatory mechanisms. By transplanting these “surviving, super-optimized bacteria” into a young environment, they boosted the health of the recipient ovary. The future. Although in this case this effect has been seen in mouse animal modelsthe implications of this study may allow us to continue advancing treatments that can improve human reproductive health. The goal here is to be able to isolate what exactly are the specific microbial candidates or metabolites responsible for this improvement and in the future we could be talking about probiotic treatments or microbiome-based therapies to prolong fertility. Images | Kelly Sikkema CDC In Xataka | Drinking coffee in the morning has very positive consequences for someone unexpected in your body: the microbiota

Scientists have connected 200,000 human neurons to a chip. And he made them play ‘Doom’

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If they tell us that human neurons are playing ‘Doom’, the first thing we would think of is science fiction. However, that is exactly what the Australian company Cortical Labs has shown with your CL1 system: about 200,000 live neurons grown on an array of electrodes on a chip, capable of receiving information from the game and responding through electrical patterns. We are not talking about conventional artificial intelligence, but rather biological tissue interacting with software through an interface designed for that purpose. Human neurons and ‘Doom’. The demo isn’t just launching the game and letting something random happen. In the material shared by Cortical Labs, those responsible explain that the system receives signals from the video game environment and generates electrical patterns that translate into the character’s actions. This is a form of learning in which the system modifies its response depending on the result obtained. The key here is not skill, but the ability to adapt, which, according to the company, they are managing to train and mold in real time. How the interaction loop is established. For the experiment to work, it is not enough to display images on a screen. According to CTO David Hogan, an independent developer managed to convert the game’s visual signal into “electrical stimulation patterns” that are applied directly to the cell culture. These stimuli provoke electrical responses in neurons, and certain firing patterns translate into specific actions within ‘Doom’. In this way, the system creates a closed loop in real time in which each decision has an immediate effect on the virtual environment. look back. In 2021, the same company managed to make a system based on more than 800,000 neurons play ‘Pong’an experiment that required years of scientific work and specific training. That precedent laid the foundations for what would later become the CL1, the equipment presented at the Mobile World Congress in 2025 as the world’s first commercial biological computer. As we explained at the time, the system combines neurons grown on silicon with software called biOS, responsible for exchanging electrical information with living tissue. It is advisable to adjust expectations. The system, it should be noted, falls far short of advanced human performance. Brett Kagan of Cortical Labs emphasizes that the experiment is not intended to replicate a miniature brain, and rejects the direct comparison: “Yes, it is alive, and yes, it is biological, but it is actually used as a material that can process information in very special ways that we cannot recreate in silicon.” The emphasis, therefore, is not on skill, but on the type of processing that this biological substrate allows. Starting point. In the video, the team encourages researchers and developers to interact with the CL1 open API. Cortical Labs hopes to address progressively more demanding tasks than a classic video game, although the video itself also recognizes that there is room to fine-tune the feedback of successes and errors. For now, what we have is a proof of concept that shows potential, but whose path will depend on what others manage to build on this platform. Images | Cortical Labs In Xataka | Sam Altman has spent his entire life saying one thing and doing exactly the opposite. And this time it didn’t even take 48 hours.

Genetics suggests that Neanderthal males preferred human females

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We have known for years that today’s non-African populations They preserve between 1 and 4% Neanderthal DNA as a legacy of the prehistoric crossings that existed. However, when looking at our X chromosome (which determines sex), geneticists repeatedly encountered an absolute void, a phenomenon that has been dubbed ‘neanderthal desert‘since there was no ancient DNA. And the question here is quite obvious: Why did the imprint of this species disappear from our sex chromosome, but not from the rest of the chromosomes? The key data. From here science began to investigate, and a new published article in Science proposes an answer much more focused on demographics: sex between both species It had a very strong gender bias. That is to say, the fact that a member of each species had sexual relations with great frequency has survived to this day with this genetic imprint. How do you know? What was done to be able to see what happened to the genetic material and its passage between generations within the Neanderthal populations was simply to analyze genomes. Specifically, the DNA of women from current African populations, who do not have any Neanderthal genetics, and compared them with genomes of female Neanderthals, mainly the Neanderthal of Altaibut also specimens of Chagyrskaya and Vindija. The result. Here the researchers realized that the X chromosome of the Neanderthals analyzed presented a large amount of DNA that came from the Homo sapiens. Specifically, an excess of 62% was seen compared to the rest of the organism’s chromosomes. The only thing that confirms is that the genetic exchange between both species was not a one-way change, but rather that both parties were enriched, causing the Neanderthals to also have sapiens DNA, but in different proportions. A matter of preferences. How is such a brutal asymmetry in the sex chromosomes explained? Until now, the most accurate hypothesis to justify our “Neanderthal desert” was biological incompatibility between species. Here it was thought that male hybrids suffered fertility or viability problems if they received this DNA, which caused a negative selection of testicular genes that erased the Neanderthal imprint of our X chromosomes. However, science has now ruled out that this 62% excess on the Neanderthal side is due to the sapiens DNA giving them an evolutionary advantage, since they ended up disappearing in a until now inexplicable way. The conclusion. Everything indicates here that there was an extreme sexual bias in the miscegenation. That is, the crossings occurred overwhelmingly between Neanderthal males and females. Homo sapiens, and always with this pattern. This mating preference persisted across generations, where Neanderthal males preferred females sapiensand the resulting hybrid offspring were also “preferred” in group dynamics. In this way we are faced with the piece that fits into the bidirectional puzzle of our evolutionary history. There are nuances. As usual, there is always a ‘but’ in these stories. In this case, the researchers point out that, although the genetics are quite clear, the behavioral interpretation has nuances, since the pattern we see today could be the result of a mixture of factors. One of them is that societies where women sapiens They left their tribe to join the clans of their Neanderthal partners, introducing their X chromosome into the genetic pool of the other species. Images | Jan Jakubowski In Xataka | The extinction of Neanderthals has always been a mystery. Science now believes that they are still with us

If you don’t optimize your resume, the AI ​​will filter it out, leaving you out. If you use AI, a human recruiter will leave you out

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The use of AI in hiring processes personnel is increasingly widespread, both by human resources departments with the use of automatic ATS filtering of candidates (Applicant Tracking System) and by candidates to, precisely, overcome AI filters. However, using AI to optimize resumes may have overwhelmed recruiters searching for candidates. that stand out from the restnot clone resumes. The boom in CVs generated by AI. The implementation of AI systems has radically changed the way we find employment. Simply copy and paste the job description into ChatGPT, you get an optimized resume for that specific offer, filled with keywords that exactly match the terms that the bot waiting on the other side of the Submit button will select. As and as they described From the Manfred technological employment platform, this means that each offer receives a flood of identical applications, where everyone repeats the same terms. According to a survey According to the consulting firm Hays, at the end of 2024, 40% of professionals were already using AI for their CV that year, 3% more than in 2023, and they expect it to reach 80% in five years. As a result of this increase, recruiters receive hundreds of profiles that pass the filters and appear to be the ideal candidates, but fail. at the first human glance. Companies want to hire people. As and how I collected Washington Postrecruiters have developed the ability to identify these “synthetic” resumes. Patterns such as the absence of synonyms, mechanical repetitions or an excessively polished tone reveal the use of AI in your writing. according to human resources experts. According to a survey conducted by the employment assistance platform Resume.io, 49% of hiring managers reject resumes suspected of being generated by AI. The recruiters interviewed in the article Washington Post They are in favor of using AI as an assistance tool to “cover gaps” and make the writing of the resume more complete. But delegating it completely to AI generates rejection because, in reality, they don’t know who they are hiring. “If this is how you apply and this is how you work, I don’t want to hire you,” said Joseph Eitner, director of human resources at Eaton Capital Management, a New York investment firm. “Job seekers should use it to enrich their work. They should not use AI for the entire process,” said Ron Sharon, chief information security officer at financial consulting firm PTMA Financial Solutions. Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI developers, positioned itself along the same lines in its job offers, urging its employees not to use AI to complete the application form with the aim of getting to know their candidates better and emphasizing that it did not matter if they did not have the appropriate training since the form was not going to pass any AI filter. A game where everyone loses. The use of AI in preparing resumes and cover letters has increased in response to ATS filtering systems. Candidates simply hope to pass the initial filter and advance through the selection process to reach the interview phase and meet face to face with an interviewer. In this sense, it is the companies and recruiters themselves who they have created the monster which they now repudiate. According what was published by Forbes82% of companies use AI to scan candidates’ initial applications, creating a race between algorithms to optimize for each other. Along the way, the candidate loses his “humanity” but the company also loses its culture and values. Candidates cannot be blamed for adapting to a technology present in a good part of open personnel selection processes. The process is broken. Huntr’s Q2 2025 ‘Job Search Trends Report’ points out that 85% of candidates looking for a job take more than nine months to find a job. For its part, a meta-analysis of the sector revealed that 63% apply for more than 337 vacancies, of which only 2% manage to interview with a human recruiter. On LinkedIn, they only respond to 3.3% of the candidates. This constant bickering It exhausts companies and candidates alike, complicating the search for suitable candidates for open positions. Currently, companies are experiencing a contradiction in their hiring processes, as they claim adaptability and attitude in their candidates, but surely those candidates were discarded in the first filter because his CV was not optimized by an AI. In Xataka | If your chair limps during a job interview, it’s no coincidence: they’re evaluating more than just your resume. In Xataka | The latest trend to ace job interviews: training with ChatGPT as a recruiter Image | Unsplash (Vitaly Gariev)

Neuro-sama is the AI ​​that has dethroned all human streamers on Twitch because it doesn’t need to eat or sleep

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2026 already has its first milestone in the history of streaming: for the first timethe channel with the highest number of active subscribers on Twitch does not belong to a human creator. Neuro-sama, a VTuber generated entirely by artificial intelligencereached 162,459 active subscribers at the beginning of the year, dethroning all flesh-and-blood streamers on the platform. This figure places the channel vedal987from where Neuro-sama emits, in an unprecedented position: an artificial entity that surpasses established rivals in paying audiences. More human than humans. The origin of Neuro-sama dates back to 2019, when the British developer known as Vedal designed an artificial intelligence system initially aimed at running games of the rhythm video game ‘osu!’. Three years later, in December 2022, the project evolved into its current format: a VTuber that combines multiple technological layers to simulate the presence and activities of a human streamer. According to its creator, Neuro-sama’s visual infrastructure is developed in C# using the Unity engine, while the artificial intelligence systems work in Python. It is expressed. Neuro-sama’s architecture rests on a LLM (Large Language Model), technology that processes billions of parameters to generate coherent conversations in real time. These models form the basis of chatbots such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot, and operate by predicting sequences of words according to patterns learned during their training. Added to this conversational core are voice synthesis systems that generate the characteristic high-pitched tonality, and an avatar animated using Live2D technology that reacts visually to interactions. The result is a digital entity capable of maintaining dialogues, playing video games and responding to chat without direct human intervention during broadcasts. Audience records. Neuro-sama’s upward trajectory in terms of viewership is completely unusual. In January 2025, during its second annual “subathon” (a continuous broadcast format whose duration depends on subscriptions received), the channel set a world record by reaching level 111 on Twitch’s Hype Train system, an indicator that measures the intensity of subscriptions and donations over concentrated periods of time. That milestone, which surpassed the 106 levels of the previous record, seemed difficult to match. However, just eleven months later, in December 2025, Neuro-sama pulverized its own brand. The channel completed a level 120 Hype Trainaccumulating 118,989 subscriptions and 1,000,073 bits in a limited period of time. This figure makes vedal987 the only channel that has managed to break the global Hype Train record twice in a row, a distinction that earned him a global Twitch emote usable by any user of the platform. You peel them. lThe economic implications are notable. According to data from TwitchTracker, with 162,459 active subscribers and applying Twitch’s standard revenue split (which varies depending on individual agreements, but is usually around 50% for the creator), the channel would generate approximately $400,000 per month exclusively from subscriptions, not counting direct donations, additional bits or advertising deals. Currently, vedal987 occupies the 3rd place in the historical ranking of channels with the most Twitch subscriptions. He has a sister. In March 2023, Evil Neuro was born, presented as the “twin sister” of the original character. Vedal conceived this second entity so that Neuro-sama could interact with herself, but the project resulted in a differentiated personality with its own voice, visual model, and behavior. Both AIs have transcended the streaming format: in December 2022, Neuro-sama premiered ‘LIFE‘, his first original song. In August 2024 both launched ‘NEVER‘, the first duet between the two entities. The problems. The phenomenon has problematic antecedents: Nothing, Forevera series inspired by Seinfeld and generated entirely by algorithms, was suspended from Twitch after making transphobic comments. The Rubius experimented Similar dilemmas with DegenerIAa channel where ChatGPT controlled all conversations. In fact, one of the DegenerIA characters made derogatory comments about the streamer Pokimane, showing that automatic moderation systems do not always filter inappropriate content. Neuro-sama herself faced a temporary ban in 2023 for controversial statements, a reminder that the conversational autonomy of these systems carries risks. The rise of VTubers with AI. Conventional VTubers, until now, were humans controlling virtual avatars in real time through facial and body motion capture systems. Hololive, the Japanese agency that dominates this sector, manages figures such as Gawr Gura, whose YouTube channel exceeds four million subscribers. These creators choose to represent themselves through animated characters for reasons ranging from protecting privacy to building digital identities. Neuro-sama represents a qualitative leap: here there is no human behind the avatar. The VTuber industry has experienced sustained growth that YouTube quantified like this: Between 2022 and 2024, VTubers-related content generated an average of 50 billion views annually on the platform. The market for tools to produce this type of content has also become democratized: platforms such as Akool, HeyGen and VTube Studio allow creators without advanced technical knowledge to generate interactive avatars with a very small investment. Doubts about the future. What is clear is that this boom of technology-driven VTubers is full of imbalances. Continuous broadcasting without the need for rest gives these entities a structural advantage over human streamers who need to sleep, eat or simply disconnect. The question of whether this constitutes unfair competition or simply technological evolution remains without a clear answer. In Xataka | We have a problem with AI. Those who were most enthusiastic at the beginning are starting to get tired of it.

Johannes Klæbo, the human locomotive that has dynamited cross-country skiing

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The first thing is the message. An electrical current that crosses the brain. And everything is unleashed. The brain sends the signal: more wood for the locomotive. The nervous system executes the order. More fibers and more fast fibers are put into motion. The muscles demand more energy. The heart rate goes up. The heart pumps more blood. With blood comes oxygen. And the quadriceps, the hamstrings, the calves become the coupling rod of the locomotive. Boom. Boom. Boom. Up and down. Johannes Klæbo only needed to steam his head. Its engine already seemed to be running at full capacity when the storm hit. How wrong we were. It remained to be seen how he crushed the ground with his skis with the frequency of someone fleeing from the enemy but the rage of someone who crushes him. With the determination of someone who knows they are making history. Click on the image to go to the original tweet (and see the devastating attack) An overwhelming number Three minutes and 40 seconds to cover a thousand meters. Nothing too special. If we talk about putting on some sneakers and hitting the asphalt. Very different when you put on skis, face a slope and reach peaks of 18 km/h to destroy your rivals. This is how Johannes Klæbo broke the sprint distance cross-country ski race. 3’39″74 Less than 220 seconds to cover a distance of 1,585 meters on skis. Where of course you go down, but where you also have to go up. Klæbo let himself go in the final meters, enjoying his overwhelming superiority as he did before. Usain Bolt in Beijing in 2008. How will you enjoy? Remco Evenepoel with the Eiffel Tower behind him in 2024. Or as Tadej Pogacar repeats over and over again, the athlete with whom he is most compared for his domain. Johannes Klæbo was born in Trondheim (Norway) in 1996. It will be 30 years in October. By then, it is certain, he will be able to display 15 gold medals accumulated in World Cups in his living room. On the other wall his nine Olympic medals will stand out, seven of them gold. Who knows if four more will accompany him as he did at the 2025 World Cup in Trondheim, his home. Because after gold in the speed test and the 10+10 kilometer skiathlon, the Norwegian can become the Winter Olympian with the most gold medals in history. At the moment, the reign is held by two other Norwegians. Marit Bjoergen, distance runner, is the person with the most Olympic medals in a winter games with eight golds, four silvers and three bronzes. He is followed by Ole Einar Bjoerndalen, biathlete, with another eight golds, four silvers and two bronzes. If he wins his six golds in these Olympic Games in Milano Cortina 2026, Klæbo would remain at 13 medals but the weight of 11 golds would elevate him to a new level. So far, it’s already been seven. The Norwegian skier is one of those forces of nature that dominates any distance record and type of race within his sport. Like Pogacar, Armand Duplantis or Kilian Jornet, he is one of the chosen ones. One of those athletes who go down in history. Athletes who not only win, they crush any type of insurrection. And the most meritorious thing, they turn it into a spectacle. Johannes Klæbo is also part of a generation of Norwegian athletes that are breaking with the established. Jakob Ingebrigtsen is the result of a father who worked obsessively with his three children popularizing double threshold training. Karsten Warholm He was the first man to break the 46-second barrier in the 400-meter hurdles. Kristian Blummenfelt He is a triathlon world champion, Olympic champion and Ironman distance world champion. Johannes Thingnes Bø, biathlete, recently retired with five Olympic gold medals, two silver and two bronze. Magnus Carlsen is another of those geniuses whose roof, perhaps, only “El Mundo” can put it. Photo | Olympics In Xataka | The Winter Olympics are facing the most unexpected technological doping: penis punctures

human poop in parks

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The case I told it Marisa García, apothecary, has been on Instagram for some time now. One day he was walking through a park in Majadahonda when he lost sight of his dog. The scare did not last long. The dog reappeared after a few minutes, but it did so after having feasted on human feces. Up to this point the scene may be eschatological, but it is not of much interest either. If you have a dog you will know that it’s not strange that are interested in poop. The problem is that those specific feces contained traces of drugs, which is why the animal ended up in the vet. The problem is that it is not an isolated case. More than an eschatological anecdote. The video of García is from September 2024 but the poisoning of dogs that end up ‘high’ (and admitted to a veterinary clinic) after feasting on human poop is far from being a curiosity or problem of the past. Quite the opposite. It continues to happen (at least in the Community of Madrid) and with astonishing frequency. This has been revealed The Country in an article in which he cites several veterinary cases that corroborate that they are no longer surprised to encounter dogs that, due to their owners’ carelessness, have ingested poop… with some type of drug. A member of the Reina Cristina emergency center assures that they have attended to up to four emergencies in a week. Even in the film ‘Sirât’Oliver Laxe’s Oscar-nominated film, is winks to these types of cases. “I had already been warned”. García’s experience is illustrative. In September 2024 counted how he lost sight of his dog while walking through a park in Majadahonda (Madrid). When the animal appeared, it did so with surprise: “It had eaten someone’s feces.” The problem is that those human poops were ‘seasoned’ with something else. Whoever had left them there had consumed drugs, substances that left traces in their stools. “Dogs eat it and get intoxicated from marijuana, cocaine… In this case it also had traces of tricyclic antidepressantsfrom opiates… Maybe from someone who was taking some type of medication,” remember the apothecary. “Apart from vomiting and becoming very sad and ill, the dog’s back legs began to fail and he couldn’t walk. That alerted us and we took him to the vet.” García recognized that cases like the one she had experienced were relatively frequent because, whether due to lack of public bathrooms, urgency or simple habit, there are people who choose to relieve themselves in the parks… leaving their excrement and everything they contain, including traces of drugs or legal medications. “I had already been warned. This can happen to anyone. There are more and more dogs that become intoxicated by the drugs that humans consume,” Remember Garcia. “A plague”. How frequent is it? One of the veterinarians interviewed by The Country speaks directly of “plague.” The problem is by no means new, but cases such as that of García or that of Paula Valdeón, another Madrid native who had to take her dog (Balkis) to a clinic after she ate human feces during a night walk through Madrid Río, suggest that it has worsened. The reason? One possible explanation is the change in drug use. A european report of 2025 on the subject concludes that 13.3% of Spaniards between 15 and 64 years old have tried cocaine at least once in their lives. This is the highest figure in the EU, considerably above nations such as France and Denmark (9.4%) or the Netherlands (8%). Not all are negative indicators (cannabis use has collapsed among adolescents), but Health data show that the prevalence of the consumption of hypnosedatives, ecstasy, cocaine or hallucinogens is significantly higher today than in the 90s. Are there more factors? Yes. Several. The first explains why the report of The Country or García’s video point to the same region: Madrid. Beyond the greater or lesser consumption of drugs, the capital deals with a handicap: the high cost of nightlife, which forces groups to look for alternatives, such as meeting in public areas or organizing bottles. If to that is added the the small number of public toiletsthe story tells itself: feces within reach of the dogs, with everything they have ‘on board’, both medications and illegal drugs. Beyond Madrid. The problem of pet poisoning is not exclusive to the parks and gardens of Madrid. A year ago the Radio and Television of the Principality of Asturias warned that several dogs from Oviedo had gotten sick after eating human poop with traces of drugs. For the neighbors, the origin of the problem was clear: the drinking parties held in a park in the area. There are also animals that become intoxicated without setting foot on the street. In 2024 JAMA Network Open public a study by Orrin Ware and Renée Schmid that shows that episodes of this type are not strange within homes themselves. For their study, the researchers analyzed hundreds of calls made between 2019 and 2023 to the organization Pet Poison Helpline in which pet owners reported that their animals had become poisoned. The sample must be handled with some caution because it coincided with the pandemic, a period during which many people were forced to confine themselves and carry out their daily lives inside their homes, but their conclusions are interesting: they reveal a worrying (and growing) exposure of pets to drugs. Images | Courtney Mihaka (Unsplash) and Colin Davis (Unsplash) In Xataka | In 2001, a yacht took refuge on a remote island in the Atlantic. Days later its inhabitants breaded fish with coca

They have become human garbage cans

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Japan has spent decades elevating cleanliness to an almost competitive. It is not trivial, since even organize official championships garbage collection on the street, where teams compete to see who leaves the most impeccable environment. In a country where there are initiatives that turn civility into sport, the relationship with waste is not a minor detail, but a profound expression of how public space and individual responsibility are understood. And yet, the arrival of hordes of tourists has revealed a paradox. A clean country without trash cans. Yes, Japan has been surprising the world for decades with a paradox that baffles anyone who visits it for the first time: impeccable streets, sparkling stations and, at the same time, almost no garbage can in sight. This absence is not a system failure, but a direct consequence of a culture who avoids eating while walking, prioritizes taking waste home and individually assumes the responsibility of not littering public spaces. For local people, buy something in a konbini or in a vending machine already implies having a mental plan to manage the packaging, a routine so internalized that it makes trash cans on the street unnecessary. Garbage cans, but human. The problem appears when this cultural ecosystem collides with mass tourism. With dozens of million visitors a yearJapan has been filled with travelers who eat on the go, buy viral drinks and “Instagrammable” snacks and, when they finish, discover that there is nowhere to throw anything away. The result is an image as absurd as it is revealing: hordes of tourists turned into human trash canswalking kilometers with glasses, wrappers and bottles in their pockets, backpacks or improvised bags. The official surveys they confirm it: For visitors, the lack of trash cans is already the main logistical problem of the trip, above the language or the crowds. Local rules, foreign habits. The friction is not only due to the physical absence of cubes, but to a profound difference in habits. In Japan, eating while walking is frowned upon and, in some cities, it is outright prohibited. “Takeaway” food is effectively taken home or to work. Tourists, on the other hand, consume on the street and expect to find an infrastructure similar to that of their countries of origin. When there is not one, the system suffers: scarce trash cans that overflow, waste abandoned in discreet corners and a growing tension between traditional Japanese courtesy and the reality of tourism that does not always know how (or can) adapt. Safety, costs and trauma. Added to this equation is a less visible but decisive factor: security. After the sarin gas attack in the Aum Shinrikyo sect in the Tokyo subway in 1995, many trash cans were removed for fear that they were used to hide explosives, a logic that also explains why the few that exist usually have transparent bags. Added to this are the maintenance costs and strict municipal regulations on public space. The result has been an urban landscape deliberately devoid of cubeseven when the social context that supported it has changed radically. Cities that are beginning to give way. In any case, it counted the wall street journal in a report that the continued pressure of tourism is forcing some cities to rethink dogma. In especially saturated places, such as central Tokyo neighborhoods or busy historic parks, calls have begun to appear. “smart” binssometimes with messages in English, sensors or compaction systems. Other initiatives border on the surreal, especially for the “foreigner” without any context, such as students who they walk with garbage cans behind their backs to collect waste in exchange for donations or advertising. That said, these are more of creative patches to a deeper culture clash: Japan hasn’t really changed its idea of ​​cleanliness, but the world has arrived en masse and without warning, and now millions of visitors travel around the country carrying their garbage on them, discovering that in the most tidy place on the planet… the bucket is them. Image | PexelsCorpse Reviver In Xataka | Sushi was a sleeping giant of the fast food industry: in the US it has already begun to eat hamburgers In Xataka | Japan has been mired in a demographic debacle for years. Now it suffers a new crisis: that of coming of age

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