Human

There is more human junk on the Moon than there are cars in a local junkyard. And no one really knows what to do with it.

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There is a lot of talk about space debris in orbitespecially in low Earth orbit. However, debris resulting from human activity in space is not just floating beyond our planet. Some are found abandoned on the surface of planets, satellites or asteroids. The two largest cemeteries in the solar system are the Moon, where more than 70 objects have passed “on to a better life,” or Mars, where there are 17 landers, rovers and some helicopter destroyed or out of service. These space scrapyards will likely increase over the years. There may come a time when it will be necessary to recycle these materials to continue advancing in space. There are already some projects, but also a lot of legislation that can stop them. The largest cemetery in the Solar System. The Moon houses more than 70 space objects that have landed there in 4 different ways: a deliberate impact, an accidental collision, a controlled deorbitation or a soft and safe landing. Logically, this includes only ships or rovers. They do not count, for example golf balls nor the flags. If we count that, the figure would rise a lot. Some examples. In the group of deliberate collisions we find Moon 2a Soviet ship that hit our satellite on September 13, 1959. It had two objectives. On the one hand, demonstrate that you can reach the Moon. On the other hand, analyze its magnetic fields and radiation. He did this just before impact, while displaying a flag of the Soviet Union. Regarding accidental collisions, we have the Surveyor 2from NASA, which on September 23, 1966 lost control after one of its 3 thrusters did not ignite when it should. In the third group is Lunar Orbiter 1. It was sent by NASA to take photographs and search for sites for the Surveyor and Apollo missions. However, on October 29, 1966, after verifying that it was no longer working properly, the project engineers decided to deorbit it and land it on the Moon. For the last group we have many examples; but, speaking of the most pioneering, on February 3, 1966, the Moon 9 of the USSR made the first soft landing in history. And there it remains, like all of them. viking 1 A scrapyard on Mars. There are many fewer objects on Mars than on the Moon, but little by little there will be more. Currently there are landers from missions that have failed, like Mars 2which crashed in 1971, or who after carrying out their mission successfully have remained there to spend their retirement. This is the case of Viking 1whose lander was in operation from 1976 to 1982. There are also rovers in operation, such as Perseveranceor out of order, as Spirit, Opportunity either Zhurong. There are even some helicopters retired from their duties, such as Ingenuity. In the future there may be more of these objects. For example, NASA recently declared the MAVEN probe lost, which after 11 years It has moved to another orbit from which it can no longer be controlled. It is estimated that the Martian atmosphere will slow it down little by little and that it will end up landing on the red planet within 50 to 100 years. Space recycling is the future. Every extra gram brought aboard a spacecraft counts. Although no permanent base has yet been installed on the Moon, much less on Mars, there are already many scientists exploring ways to exploit its resources. and those around them. Thus, so many materials would not have to be carried from Earth. Therefore, it is not unusual that there are also projects in which recycling is explored of the ships of these space cemeteries. There are even plans to take space debris that is still in orbit and take it to the lunar surface to recycle the materials. Be careful with the legislation. The problem is that, perhaps, one country could not recycle the materials of another. For example, Russia (in the absence of the USSR) could recycle the remains of Luna 2, but not those of Surveyor 2. On the contrary, exactly the same thing would happen. This is due to the United Nations treaty which establishes that “the State in whose registry an object launched into outer space is transported shall maintain jurisdiction and control over said object, and over any person found on it, while it is in outer space.” This would leave some countries at a great disadvantage. For example, while China is advancing at a good pace on its path to the Moon, the reality is that it only has 4 spacecraft in the lunar graveyard, compared to the United States’ 8. Perhaps in the future, when the need arises, certain agreements can be reached, but today that is the legislation. We will have to see how it evolves. Images | Magnific/Unsplash | POT In Xataka | Ingenuity helicopter breaks down on Mars after 72 flights. A photo reveals the damage to one of its blades

The human being is the primate that sleeps the least. Science is clear that it is a “radical evolutionary experiment”

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We spend a third of our lives sleeping, yet the most common complaint in modern society It’s the lack of rest. We tend to blame screens, work stress and artificial light for robbing us of hours of sleep, but here evolutionary anthropology has a much more forceful answer: human beings are genetically designed to sleep less than any other evolutionary relative. It is studied. It is not something that we see from afar as a mere hypothesis, but researcher David R. Samson, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, recently published a book that includes the results of his research. And the truth is that, after living with hunter-gatherer tribes like the Hadza in Tanzania and the BaYaka in the Congo, their conclusion is resounding: humans are an absolute biological anomaly. We are the great early riser. If we take out the calculator and the meter, a primate more or less of our same average body mass, brain size and diet should sleep about 9.5 hours a day. But this figure is limited to a fairly select few people, since we actually sleep around 2.5 hours less than our evolutionary biology predicts, making us the primates that sleep the least of all. This is a pretty clear conclusion. if we compare ourselves with other species that have very high sleep rates, as can be seen in the following list: Chimpanzee: between 9.5-11.5 hours a day. Gorilla: 10-12 hours. Pig-tailed macaque: 14 hours. Night monkey: 17 hours. Because? How is it possible that with the most complex and energetically demanding brain in the animal kingdom we sleep so little? The answer seems to lie in the “deep sleep” hypothesiswhich suggests that evolution forced us to have a much deeper and more efficient sleep to sleep much less than the rest of the hominids. For example, humans spend approximately 25% of our rest time in the REM phase, which contrasts with species such as African green monkeys, which They only dedicate 5% to this phase. But in addition, human sleep has a lower proportion of light sleep, since in return, it has a higher proportion of deep sleep. A necessity. Having a much shorter rest was not a whim of ours, but rather a matter of survival, since by leaving the safety of the trees, where our ancestors slept safely, and descending to dry land, the risk of predation skyrocketed. Regarding shorter sleep, evolution promoted several mechanisms to guarantee our survival, such as sleeping next to the fire and in large groups for greater security. But in 2017 a study showed that natural variation in chronotype allowed someone to always be awake standing guard during the night. Don’t blame the screens. It is tempting to think that we sleep for about 7 hours because electric lights and smartphones have altered us in this modern life. But this is not the case, because after analyzing the sleep of the Hadza, who are a hunting community in Tanzania without access to electricity or mobile phones, it was shown that their patterns are identical to ours, sleeping 6.25 hours a night and maintaining a sleep efficiency of 68.9%. Images | MediaEcke In Xataka | We’ve been sold melatonin as the ultimate harmless sleep supplement. Science does not think the same

AI is already winning literary awards, and the only thing we can do to prove that we are human is to write badly

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On May 18, several X users They made their suspicions public about the last Commonwealth Prize winner of short stories: the winning story in the Caribbean category, published in ‘Granta’ (a very prestigious British magazine that for decades has been the thermometer of the Anglophone literary canon), reeked of ChatGPT. The author’s photo, in fact, did not seem real either. And when the magazine responded to the scandal, it did so in a way that ended up confusing everything: They asked Claude if the text was from AIand Claude said no. How it is detected. Recognizing the prose of a language model is not as simple as it seems, but it is not as difficult once the eye has been trained for some time. Language models do not write looking for the right word– They generate the statistically most probable token, taking into account the context, and it is a process that can be identified. For example, the famous “it’s not X, it’s Y” structure, used as the Rosetta Stone of text AI identification. But there is more: accumulation of metaphors without clear referents, verbs like “go deeper into”… annotators hired to fit the models using RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback) reward that kind of bureaucratic clarity, which also makes everything more obvious. What does the story have? In ‘Granta’s story things are said like “the humming noon” or the “sweet air with the smell of cane and oblivion.” Some authors, such as Benjamin Breen in this excellent analysis have detailed, many of these turns speak of a special attraction for ambient sounds and vague emotional states (nostalgia, sadness, oblivion), which seem to want to touch upon a materiality that the model does not have and, of course, does not understand. The accumulation of sensory stimuli is a creative writing textbook instruction that models apply mechanically and without discrimination. It’s easy to see once you’ve learned to identify it. Why detectors don’t work (yet). The problem is that recognizing that writing intuitively is one thing, and demonstrating it objectively is another. The first generation of automatic detectors (GPTZero, Originality.ai, Turnitin AI) They have a long history of errors. OpenAI, for example, retired its AI Text Classifier in July 2023 after acknowledging that it only correctly identified 26% of AI-generated text and marked almost 9% of human text as artificial. The only exception to this trend documented so far is Pangram. His technique, called mirror datatrains the classifier with pairs of stylistically identical texts but with different origins. The result, according to the first benchmark independent In September 2025, false positives are close to zero and false negatives are between 2% and 4% in medium and long passages; competitors are scoring around 10-40%. However, again, it is not so easy to trust a tool that sells a “humanizer” along with its text reports about the presence of AI, sometimes with outrageously high percentages. The educational part. In the world of books we are facing a specific scandal, that of ‘Granta’, but in American universities we are seeing a permanent escalation of hostilities. In this extensive reportfor example, we are presented with ten students and teachers trapped in a spiral with no way out: the teachers pass the assignments through AI detectors, the detectors generate false positives on students who have not touched any chatbot, and those students resort to humanizers (or directly to writing worse) to avoid accusations. Joseph Thibault, founder of Cursive, has tracked 43 humanizers with a combined audience of 33.9 million views. Grammarly has developedFor example, Authorship, a tool that records the writing session so that students can prove that they wrote the work: according to the company itself, five million reports of this type were generated in the last year. A teacher states in the article: “The better you write, the more the AI ​​believes you are AI. I put my own articles in the detectors just to understand how they work, and it marks me at 98% every time, without having used AI at any time.” Below are the essays. The ‘Granta’ scandal occurs while the publishing market registers another symptom of the same problem. According to data from the Wall Street Journal that is also collected by Res Obscura, the best-selling non-fiction book of April in the United States (‘London Falling’, by Patrick Radden Keefe) placed 13,468 copies in its first week; the first novel was close to 105,000. The president of Harper Group attributes it to podcasts: according to a recent survey, 62% of men and 54% of women listened to one last month, compared to 46% and 39% in 2023. The reason is the same that led to YouTube before: they promise to satisfy in forty minutes what it takes a book to satisfy three weeks. AI is the next step: it does not compete with books or podcasts, but rather replaces them with a summary generated in ten seconds that answers questions without anyone having to write, edit or read anything. The problem, as Breen points out, is that this model aims for immediate responses and eliminates precisely what makes the nonfiction book valuable: the need for attention, permanence over time and all the reflective nuances that this implies. When the AI ​​copies a specific author. The writer Vauhini Vara went further. As he told on Voxcommissioned researcher Tuhin Chakrabarty to train a model on his three published books and several journalistic articles to generate passages from, theoretically, his next novel. He then mixed them with his own fragments and sent them to his closest friends. No one knew how to distinguish them. What’s more: another conclusion they drew from the experiment is that readers tend to prefer AI text over imitations written by humans when they don’t know the origin. When the source is revealed to them, the text ceases to interest them. Vara draws a conclusion from this: what matters to readers is not whether the text sounds human, but knowing that there is someone real on the … Read more

Microscopes had been dependent on human operators for almost a century. China wants to change that with AI

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A team of Chinese researchers has presented in Beijing which they claim is the first transmission electron microscopy system in the world capable of operating completely autonomously. Dubbed “Aeye-1”, the device has demonstrated in tests its ability to replace a human operator in all phases of the process thanks to AI. What exactly is it. A transmission electron microscope (TEM) is a tool that has been essential for decades to observe matter at the atomic scale. It is used to develop new materials, energy technologies, industrial chemistry, and has been a key instrument for evolution in science. For almost a century, these devices have always depended on manual handling by a technician, something that in the end ends up giving subjective results and entails certain difficulties in performing quantitative analyses. Why it is important. Aeye-1 makes the leap from “manual operation” to “AI-led autonomous operation”. According to they count its researchers, the system carries out the entire work chain by itself, from transferring the sample to capturing the images and analyzing the data without the intervention of any person. According to Deng Dehuiprofessor at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and leader of the project, the system works “like an ‘intelligent eye’ that visualizes the atomic world.” In detail. The development was carried out by the team of Deng Dehui and Professor Liu Wei, in collaboration with researchers from the Shenyang Institute of Automation. Together they have designed the algorithms that allow the microscope to perceive, analyze and control the process independently. To achieve this, they had to overcome many technical challenges, including the intelligent transfer of samples in high vacuum, the autonomous optical adjustment of the image, the precise localization of objects at the nanometer scale, the capture and analysis of images in real time and the coordination of all subsystems at the same time. The figures. According to Deng, image analysis It is more than 300 times faster than manual. To understand the magnitude, two weeks of Aeye-1 operation are equivalent to one year of work of a conventional microscope. In tests with molecular sieve catalysts, the system analyzed an average of 168 samples per day, captured more than 4,000 images per day and automatically generated professional reports with detailed statistics on particle size, dispersion or crystal structure. Who supports it. The system surpassed last Sunday an evaluation of scientific and technological achievements held in Beijing and organized by the Chinese Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation. The evaluation committee unanimously concluded that it is a “highly innovative technology, the first of its kind in the world and an international leader.” And now what. Those responsible for it expect that Aeye-1 will be able to continuously provide large volumes of high-quality structural data in fields such as energy, industrial chemistry, advanced materials and life sciences. The long-term goal is for this new team to drive a paradigm shift in AI-supported scientific research. It really is a process in which automation through AI can be highly beneficial. We will have to wait to find out if it ends up setting a trend in the scientific world. Cover image | China Daily and National Cancer Institute In Xataka | South Korea has just entered the most exclusive club on the planet. And China and North Korea are not exactly calm

There are parts of the world dangerously approaching the physiological limit of the human being.

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On Wednesday, May 27, at 10 in the morning, the Yacobabad thermometers they reached 49 degrees. The city in central Pakistan is one of the warmest places in the world, with average summer temperatures exceeding 37 degrees. The only problem is that it is not summer: touching 50 degrees in May, even there, is a big deal. So much so that the press (and the networks) have begun to talk about the “limits of human habitability”, the point from which a human can no longer endure. Because yes, that limit is beginning to be crossed elsewhere and it is worth looking where. What is happening in the Indian subcontinent? The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) issued on May 23 a “severe heat wave” alert which would last from May 25 to 31, 2026. We are talking about expected temperatures 4-6 ° C above normal in much of Sindh and in areas of Balochistan and southern Punjab. But, above all, we are talking about temperatures close to (or above) 45 degrees in many parts of India and Pakistan. However, the worst is not happening in Sukkur at 49°C with 15% humidity; It is happening in Kolkata which enjoys about 38°C, but with 70% humidity. The physiological limit of the human being. This concept has been around the meteorological world for several decades. In 2010, Sherwood and Huber proposed that the physiological indicator that matters It is not the temperature in dry environments, but the temperature in humid environments. In these cases, at a certain point, the sweat does not evaporate and, therefore, the body cannot cool down. Everything starts to fail. In dry climates the risks come from the other side (heat stroke, dehydration, systemic collapse), but in humid climates there are certain thresholds where what exists is a thermodynamic impossibility of cooling down. The figure that is usually set is 35 degrees with very high humidity. It is not clear because there is a lack of available evidence, but we will soon have it. Occasionally, We have already begun to see these configurations in the Persian Gulf. So what about Pakistan and India is not that big a deal? Yacobabad is historical, yes. A May like this had never been recorded. But the real danger is happening elsewhere: on the plains of the Indus and Ganges valleys. A world where it is difficult to live. However, this is just a warning. On May 14, 2026, World Weather Attribution (WWA) published a rapid attribution study about the April 15-29 episode in northern India and Pakistan. This is not what we have in hand, but it serves as a reference: according to the WWA, climate change made this event three times more likely. That is the future we are going to. Therefore, the question of whether there are areas of the world that are going to become literally uninhabitable places is on the table. Image | Windy (via AbaloOrtega) In Xataka | Half of Europe is facing a wild heat wave with temperatures of 40º C. And we haven’t even reached summer

The shape of the hands is one of the last evolutionary mysteries of the human being. And we are one step closer to solving it

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Our hands are, without a doubt, one of the wonders of biological engineering, since for a long time, the dominant evolutionary narrative has focused on how our anatomy transformed to allow precision grip and the manufacture of complex tools. However, if we look beyond the fingers and focus on the wrist, the bones tell a much older and more surprising story. New tests. A comprehensive published study in the magazine Proceedings of the Royal Society B has put on the table quite important evidence about how our ancestors moved. And the conclusion is that the morphology of our wrist retains an undeniable echo of a common ancestor adapted to walking supported on the knuckles. How they have done it. To reach this conclusion, the researchers have not relied on isolated conjectures, but on a large-scale anatomical analysis. The team analyzed more than 2,037 carpal boneswhich are what form the wrist, belonging to different species of primates, crossing these data with the anatomical analysis of 55 fossils of extinct hominins. What they discovered by mapping all this morphology is that human wrist bones don’t look like those of most primates, but instead share deep structural similarities specifically with African great apes. It’s not a coincidence, since it responds to the biomechanical adaptations necessary to support the weight of the body on the hands when they are closed. That is, although today we use our wrists for complex tasks such as typing, painting or even performing surgery, their architecture was designed for walking on the knuckles. Cautiously. Does this mean that our ancestor walked on his knuckles with absolute certainty? In science, closed statements are dangerous, and the authors of the study themselves are cautious, since they do not present this ancient practice as an irrefutable dogma, but as the most consistent and plausible interpretation according to the anatomical evidence on the table. Its evolution. Our body did not evolve suddenly to its current form, but rather went through different phases at different rates. Here the study shows this phenomenon in our hands, since, while the general structure of the wrist has preserved those primitive evolutionary signals shared with African apes, other parts of the hand changed later. Specifically, adaptations associated with fine, precision manipulation appeared much later in our evolutionary lineage. In Xataka | We had always believed that evolution had been arrested for thousands of years. The redheads were telling us the opposite

the extreme experiment in Greenland to test the human microbiota

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The idea of ​​eating rotting meat sounds like a one-way ticket to the emergency room for a major stomach flu at best, but in the most extreme latitudes of the planet, it is a survival technique perfected over millennia. Now, explorer and chef Mike Keen a challenge has been proposed that defies Western physiology: feeding exclusively on decomposing seal for a month in Greenland. And all this to see how your microbiota adapts to this new diet and how grouper’social experiment‘. More than rotten meat. When we talk about the diet that Keen will follow on his expedition, the automatic mental image is that of meat left out in the open without any type of control. However, there is a crucial nuance, since the traditional inuit practiceslike the kiviak or the igunaq They are not just random rotting meat, but have gone through a fermentation process. What does it consist of? It is a controlled fermentation culturally, since for months these preparations undergo processes involving bacteria and very particular metabolites that science is just beginning to catalog. This fermentation not only preserves food during the long, dark Arctic winters, but, according to the researchers’ hypothesis, it could be key to the survival of the Inuit and extract vital nutrients in a diet based almost exclusively on animal products, lacking the plant fiber that normally feeds our intestinal bacteria. His secret. The scientific core of this type of diet is in our digestive system, since various studies have focused on the relationship between traditional fermented foods and the intestinal health of Arctic populations. Here, a study published in Microbiome on the Inuit gut microbiome showed that this is highly dynamic over time and is deeply shaped by the intake of traditional foods. In this way, unlike populations like ours, where the Western diet homogenizes the bacteria in the intestine, for the Inuit there are unique signatures. Centuries of history. Greenland’s dependence on seal meat is not a modern eccentricity, but a historical pillar. Historical records and isotopic analyzes have confirmed that even the Viking settlers in Greenland relied heavily on the seal for survival. It is a food that has been sustaining human life on the island for centuries. However, replicating this type of diet without traditional ecological knowledge carries a lethal danger, since poorly preserved decomposing meat is microbiological Russian roulette. Without the exact temperature control, preparation and anaerobic sealing that recipes like igunaqmeat becomes a breeding ground for serious pathogens such as Salmonella either Listeria that cause pathological conditions very serious. The experiment. By taking these foods, we hope to know exactly the metabolic adaptations that occur when these diets are taken and also to see how the microbiota changes when subjected to a 100% animal and fermented diet for a month. In order to reach clear conclusions, analyzes will be done on the feces, or blood, throughout this month of testing and also afterwards, to be able to have something clear about how its interior changes. Images | DejaVu Designs at Magnific In Xataka | To the question of whether “eating breakfast as soon as you wake up is good for your body”, science offers a clear answer

Human beings evolved to breed in tribes and sleep in sections. We have tried to do exactly the opposite and it is costing us our health.

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It’s three in the morning, the light of a state-of-the-art baby monitor flickers in the darkness and an exhausted mother tries by all means to get her son to fall asleep again to finally achieve those long-awaited eight hours of sleep in one go. The room is full of amenities, but she feels a knot in her stomach. She is surrounded by technology, but feels more alone than ever. If you ask in your group of friends or on any internet forum how exhausting parenting is today, the answer is unanimous: “It is extremely exhausting and constant.” However, science and history tell us that our ancestors probably did not suffer from this level of sleep deprivation, much less this suffocating loneliness. And here comes the great paradox of our era. We might think that the problem is a lack of male involvement, but the data show a different picture. As we recently explained in Xatakaparents millennials Today they spend approximately four times more time caring for their children than parents of the generation of the baby boom. In countries like Spain, policies have taken a historic leap by equating paternity and maternity leave to 19 weeks. The father, culturally and legally, is at home. So why are parents still on the brink of collapse? The answer lies not in a lack of will, but in our biology: we are fighting a losing battle against millions of years of evolution. Human beings evolved to breed in tribes and sleep in sections. Our modern society demands exactly the opposite from us, and it is costing us our health. The end of the tribe and the ancestral dream To understand what has happened to us, we must look to the past. As he explains to the BBC evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the human species would never have survived if mothers had not had “alloparents”—grandmothers, uncles, older brothers, and other members of the community—to care for babies who were born extremely immature. Studies in traditional populations they confirm it: In hunter-gatherer groups such as those in the Congo Basin, babies spend much of the day in arms, with alternative caregivers to the mother providing up to 43% of the baby’s direct care. But not only the tribe has vanished; We have also altered our natural way of resting. In fact, the idea that we should have an uninterrupted eight hours of sleep It is a “modern invention”since before the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of artificial light, the biological pattern of humanity was the biphasic sleep or segmented: people slept for the first part at dusk, woke up in the early morning for a couple of hours (which they took advantage of to chat, pray or take care of the fire), and went back to sleep until dawn. In today’s industrial societies, waking up at three in the morning is diagnosed as insomnia and generates deep anxiety. However, when researchers examine current hunter-gatherer tribes — whose sleep patterns last between 5.7 and 7.1 hours and are full of microawakenings — discover something fascinating: They don’t consider it a problem. The loneliness epidemic and mental burden This break with our evolutionary past is having devastating consequences. In different investigations they talk that we are facing a true epidemic of isolation: today, 65% of parents feel lonelys, a figure that shoots up to 77% in the case of single-parent families. This “clinical loneliness” is not just a passing sadness. It is triggering Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders (known in English as PMADs), which according to medical research affect up to 17.7% of mothers worldwide. Lack of support and isolation increase the risk of depression and cardiovascular problems. In its most extreme cases, psychiatric causes (including suicides and overdoses) have become one of the main causes of maternal mortality. A slab that disproportionately crushes single-parent families, racialized people or those at risk of exclusion and with financial stress, who lack the economic resources to outsource this care. And behind closed doors, the mirage of equality in the couple continues to take its toll. Although the modern father “helps” more than ever, the “mental load”—the planning, conception, and anticipation of family needs— continues to fall overwhelmingly on women. Researcher Eve Rodsky defines it perfectly: today’s mothers act as “project managers” where their partners are often “kind subordinates” waiting for instructions. The result is a burnout (professional burnout syndrome) applied to parenting. Curiously, this parental hyperpresence, born of anxiety, is also harming the little ones. The so-called “helicopter parents”, who fly over their children’s every movement to avoid frustration, are impeding the neurological development of their prefrontal cortex (in charge of solving problems). As studies warnthis has caused psychiatric admissions of adolescents for anxiety and depression disorders to skyrocket at an alarming rate. The verdict of science If we look for culprits for this epidemic of fatigue, science gives us a key clue. In modern societies, between 10% and 30% of people live with chronic insomnia. But if we look at current hunter-gatherer communities (such as the Hadza, the San or the Tsimane), this problem is practically a myth: it barely touches 2%. University of California (UCLA) researcher Jerome Siegel summed it up very well in the pages of Scientific American: The problem is that we have erased the natural regulators of sleep from the map. By living locked up, we no longer let our body feel the nighttime drop in temperature, an essential biological brake for rest. For his part, David Samson, evolutionary anthropologist interviewed by the BBCargues that it is our rigid expectation of perfect sleep that fatigues us. Samson lived with the Hadza tribe in Tanzania and found that its members consider their sleep “good” despite waking up frequently. Instead of getting up, turning on lights, and looking at the clock, they simply accept waking up as natural. This vision links with the proposal of James McKenna and Lee Gettler, anthropologists at the University of Notre Dame. As they explain in their own studyhave … Read more

We are increasingly looking for human answers on Reddit. That is the reason why the Google search engine is now a Reddit in disguise

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Google has updated its search platform for the umpteenth time, but it has done so with an especially significant change. The user experience in its AI search engines (both AI Overviews and AI Mode) attempts to become more “human”. And to do this, in these searches Google will add more context to the links, such as extracts from internet forums and blogs. And if there is a beneficiary (or harmed) of that movement, it is Reddit. Google was already a gateway to Reddit. There is a behavior that Google has been seeing in its data for years and that for a long time it preferred not to publicly acknowledge: when someone wants a real answer to a real question, add “Reddit” to the end of the search. Not because Reddit is necessarily a reliable source, but because Reddit brings together real people who have experienced this issue, tried to solve it, and written about it without anyone paying them to do so. Google, with all its infrastructure and all its algorithms, had not managed to replicate that. So instead of trying it’s going to incorporate those answers directly. What exactly has changed. The search engine update will make in AI Overviews Fragments from forums, social networks and other “first-person sources” appear. When someone searches for something for which there is no single objective answer, Google’s AI will include perspectives and opinions found in all kinds of (supposedly) human sources online. Doing so will add the name of the creator of that content (or their avatar) and the origin from which said perspective comes. Google also promises to add more context about the origin of its AI-generated answers, similar to how ChatGPT or Claude include links supporting their answers. Tired of so much SEO. The reason is obvious: Google’s organic results for practical and subjective questions—”what vacuum cleaner should I buy”, “how do I cure my dog’s ear”, “what is the best neighborhood to live in in Valencia”— They are dominated by SEO and those techniques optimized to appear on Google. It is important to position, not answer the question well. That is precisely where Reddit, like other forums or personal blogs, has something that this content usually does not have: the real experience of someone who was in the same situation. Google sums it up in its own statement bluntly: “For many searches, people are increasingly looking to other people for advice.” The contradiction that Google has not resolved. There is a potential problem in this new way of conceiving these searches with AI. AI Overviews were designed to answer questions directly and thus save the user the work of clicking, reading and researching. Now they will include diverse and even contradictory perspectives from forums and social networks. So, will AI Overviews answer the question, or will it make us go back to the sources to find the answer? If it is the latter, it will not be very different from what I already did the traditional Google search engine. There is an interesting imbalance here between “we give you the answer” and “we give you context so you can find the answer.” In a sense, Google’s decision complicates searches. AI models are becoming less prone to failure. The famous cases of add glue to pizza are much less common now, and new models often boast a significant reduction in “hallucination” rates that they have. GPT-5.5 Instant, released this week, “produced 52.5% fewer hallucinations than GPT-5.3 Instant,” OpenAI indicated in its official announcement. The problem is that these hallucinations are increasingly difficult to detect because these chatbots hide these mistakes very well. That the system now includes unverified or validated content from networks like Reddit can be problematic: community votes do not always measure how truthful or useful a certain thread is. Using Reddit has its drawbacks. This platform has value precisely because it is not optimized for Google algorithms: It is chaotic and contradictory.. Sometimes there are brilliant responses from people, but other times there are completely wrong comments. When a user adds “Reddit” to their search and reads the results, they are automatically weighing which comments are useful and which are not. But that step disappears if Google extracts fragments of those discussions to include in an AI Overview. Eliminate that human filtering step and presents those answers with an authority that perhaps they should not have. Google will have much more difficulty than a human in distinguishing the comment of someone who has been working in plumbing for twenty years from that of someone who tinkers as a hobby. The shadow contract. This is not just an editorial or technological decision. In 2024 Google signed a deal worth $60 million a year with Reddit to access their data and train their models. You are not incorporating content from this social network as a public service: what you are doing is monetizing a commercial contract. Your message that you are highlighting those “original voices” is really saying that you have paid for that privileged access to Reddit content and now you are going to take advantage of that access and make it profitable. That revenue is interesting for Reddit, no doubt, but there is a problem: clicks. The Stack Overflow Precedent. There is no need to speculate much about what may happen because it has already happened. Stack Overflow is the largest technical Q&A community on the internet, but has lost most of its traffic in two years because AI companies They started collecting all those answers. to train your models and then serve them to your users directly. That caused users to stop visiting Stack Overflow and experts to stop answering questions. The quality of the new content on this network was clearly affected, and it became clear that if the AI ​​already gave you the answer without having to enter Stack Overflow, why enter? The danger for Reddit is exactly the same. Google didn’t have many alternatives. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity They have been capturing … Read more

Where is really the limit of the human being?

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April 26, 2026 will go down in history: Sabastian Sawe won the London marathon and became the first human being to go under two hours in an approved race. What’s more, in that same race Yomif Kejelcha and Jacob Kiplimo They also had better times than the previous world record (although only Sawe and Kejelcha went under two hours). Therefore, the key question is no longer When will we be able to get under two hours in the marathon? and it will start to be “where is the physiological limit of the human body really?” The question is essential, yes; but we cannot approach it naively. There are two factors without which Sawe would not have been able to achieve the record: the sneakers (which, although they are from Adidas, are part of the revolution that promoted Nike a few years ago) and nutrition (worked with Swedish nutrition specialists Maurten for 12 months to design a specific provisioning protocol). If the contemporary quest to break the two-hour mark has shown anything, it is that running goes far beyond a physiological issue. What variables rule in the physiological section? Since 1991, the physiology of the marathon is usually understood following a simple model that said Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic.. According to Joyner, sustained marathon pace depends on three variables: The maximum amount of oxygen that the body can absorb per minute. The maximum amount you can sustain for hours without accumulating lactate faster than it is eliminated. The energy cost of maintaining a given speed. Joyner, who lived in a world where the record was 2:06:50, theorized that the limit It should have been around 1:57:58. That’s not enough. Years later, Andy Jones from the University of Exeter added one more factor: physiological resilience. That is, the ability for these three variables to deteriorate as little as possible during two hours of racing. For this reason, shoes and supplies are essential: They are two tools that improve efficiency and resilience. In fact, many experts maintain that the 2016 revolution is a break in the series and the records are “technological, not physiological“. This is important because, using models of the Joyner variables, we can make conjectures of the physiological limit “as long as the same technological conditions are maintained.” And what is the limit right now? Following the real values ​​of the Breaking2 projectsubtracting resilience and considering technological and nutritional improvements, the realistic limit would be between 1:55 and 1:57. Below 1:55 we would need an athlete with physiological capabilities that we have not seen yet. It’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely. Image | Miguel Amutio In Xataka | More and more people participate in popular marathons. Science knows that being overly optimistic has its risks

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