humans

We believed that imagination was exclusive to humans. Kanzi, the bonobo who drinks “invisible coffee”, has just proven the opposite

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For decades, cognitive science has drawn a firm red line between us and the rest of the animals that is the imagination. Although animals can use tools and even solve complex problems, the ability to disconnect from immediate reality and imagine a scenario that does not exist was considered something exclusive to humans. Until Kanzi arrived. Kanzi. A bonobo that is world famous for its mastery of lexigrams to communicate and that has now starred a published study this week in the magazine Science that could rewrite the books of evolution. And it is no wonder, since Kanzi not only knows how to order food, but also knows how to pretend to eat it when it’s not there yet, and being completely aware of what it does. The tea party. The study published earlier this month presents the strongest evidence to date for the representation of pretend objects in a great ape. And for a human Pretend you are drinking coffee by imagining you have a cup in your hand It is something very simple to do. But until now in apes it was something unthinkable. But to prove us wrong about our exclusive quality, the studio designed an experiment where they sat Kanzi down and interacted with empty objects. Specifically, they pretended to pour juice from an empty bottle into a juice or eat “grapes” that did not really exist. But the best thing is that it was not a simple imitation, but Kanzi followed the game with astonishing precision as if he really imagined it. The juice trick. The objective here was to rule out that Kanzi was simply copying movements without understanding the basic concept, and to do this the team designed three tests. The first of them began with the researcher pretending pouring juice into one of several empty glasses. Kanzi was then asked to interact with them by picking one up. In this case, in 68% of the 50 tests, Kanzi chose the glass that “contained” the imaginary juice, ignoring the other identical but “empty” glasses. Fact versus fiction. This is where the crucial point of the investigation is, since if Kanzi were confused, he would treat real and imaginary juice the same. This was not the case, since when given a choice, Kanzi preferred the real object in 78% of the cases. Something that may seem insignificant, but that shows that it maintains two simultaneous mental representations: the physical reality of the empty glass, and the fake reality where we play that the glass has juice. The same thing happened when imaginary grapes were used instead of juice, where Kanzi maintained a 69% success rate in identifying the location of the pretend food. Decoupling reality. The technical term being discussed here is decoupled secondary representation, which is the brain’s ability to hold an image of the world that contradicts direct sensory information. That is, what is being seen or heard. Until now, it was debated whether this ability emerged with modern human language, but Kanzi’s results suggest that this “spark” of imagination was already present in the common ancestor we share with bonobos and chimpanzees. between 6 and 9 million years ago. This is something that also changes our understanding of childhood play, since when a two-year-old takes a banana and pretends it is a telephone, he is exercising a cognitive muscle that evolution has been refining long before telephones or cultivated bananas existed. Exception or rule. It must be taken into account that these experiments have not been done with just any bonobo, but rather an “enculturated” ape since it has spent its life surrounded by humans and trained in the use of lexigramsmaking it have extraordinary capabilities. This gives rise to some critics, such as comparative psychologist Daniel Povinelli, who usually argue that these results could be the result of intensive training that “humanizes” the ape’s mind, rather than a natural capacity in the wild. Although it is something that the investigation tries to counteract with rigorous controls to ensure that Kanzi was not responding to human clues. Images | Will Rust In Xataka | Humans are evolving live on the Tibetan plateau. And understanding what happens there will be essential in space

In medieval Europe, not only humans ended up on the gallows. Other criminals were also executed: the “murderer” pigs

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For centuries, medieval Europe It was a place where justice was dispensed not only in the courts, but in the squares, in full view of everyone, with public rituals designed to repair order when someone broke it in an intolerable way. At that time, the fear of the unforeseeable did not come only from armies, plagues or famines, but also from what moved through the streets and corrals. In the France Medieval times, for example, the public ritual of punishment (carriage amidst mockery, solemn sentence and execution before the community) did not always have a human as the protagonist: sometimes, the condemned was a pig. The image, which today seems like an oddity from a black chronicle or a folkloric exaggeration, was real enough to leave repeated documentary traces: animals led as prisoners, hung upside down until they died and treated, in practice, as perpetrators responsible for a crime that had broken the social balance. The pig as a real threat The frequency of these cases is better understood by remembering that the medieval world lived attached to animals and their risks. Pigs, in particular, were useful because they ate everything and could feed on scraps, but that same omnivorous condition made them dangerous if they roamed free near small children. The records collect numerous episodes in which pigs killed and even devoured children, a violence that today clashes with the modern image of the docile and slow animal, but which was then associated with specimens closest to the wild boar: fast, strong and capable of imposing themselves physically in seconds. Medieval archives collect cases like the one from 1379when a group of pigs in Saint-Marcel-lès-Jussey killed the son of a swineherd, or the from 1386 in FalaiseNormandy, where a sow destroyed a child who ended up dying. Also that of 1457 in Savigny, Burgundywhen little Jehan Martin was killed by a sow and, especially disturbingly, his six piglets were found nearby, stained with blood. They were not vague rumors, but stories that were fixed with names and placesand that fueled the need for a public response that was not limited to a simple private loss. In France, these events often led to in judicial proceedings formalities in which the animal was imprisoned, transferred and executed as if it were a common criminal. Sources talk about expenses registered normally (cart, prison, executioner even brought from Paris) and an administrative routine that suggests that, for the people of that time, it was not an absurd spectacle, but a legitimate mechanism of justice. The strangeness, therefore, was not that there was violence, but rather that the violence was channeled through a trial with the appearance of ordinary procedure. When money is not enough A practical explanation of these processes was that medieval justice tended to seek reconciliation between partiesand many disputes could be resolved with compensation or agreements. But when a child death came into the picture, that logic was broken: the damage was too serious and the money could be insufficient to close the social wound. In that context, the court intervened to “take control” of the conflict, separate it from private revenge and offer an institutional solution that would distribute the emotional and political burden of the outcome. Trials also functioned as a form of organize the story: It was not just about punishing the animal, but about clarifying human responsibilities. If a pig was known for being dangerouswhy was he allowed to loiter near children? Was there negligence on the part of the owner? a chain of negligence? There was even a suggestion of the possibility of darkest questions: if the child was “unwanted”, if he or she was deliberately left in a risky situation or if the accident hid an intention. The court, by intervening, not only imposed a penalty, it produced an official explanation that the community could accept. Sometimes, the local machinery was not the last word and the matter escalated towards higher authorities. In the case of 1379, some of the accused pigs belonged to an abbey, and from there a petition was sent to Duke Philip “the Bold” requesting clemency. They defended that their animals had not participated and that they were “well-behaved pigs.” The duke heeded the request and issued a pardon for the animals of the abbey, showing that these processes, strange as they may seem, were inserted in real networks of power, influences and political decisions. Far from being simple superstition or peasant rage, these executions could serve to assert authority. The right to erect a gallows and execute criminals it was a privilegeand taking a case to the end allowed a local lord to exhibit the ability to punish and control order. There are episodes that reinforce that reading: a pig murderer from the 15th century it remained imprisoned five years before being executed, and formal letters were sent for permission to build a gallows. When the duke finally agreed, the triumph was not only symbolic: in addition to showing power, the lord stopped carrying the practical cost of keeping the animal imprisoned and feeding it. Plus: another key is the medieval vision of reality as a logical system created by godwith animals destined to serve humans. For a pig to devour a child was an unbearable investment of that order, a rupture of hierarchies that demanded public reparation. In that mental framework, the trial and execution were not theater: they were a way of “putting back together” what had been broken, of affirming that the world still had rules and that chaos, even when it came from an animal, could be put back into place by a solemn act of justice. Image | Ernest Figueras, Zoe Clarke In Xataka | The Middle Ages were not as dark as they told us In Xataka | 900 years ago, Europe had its own Manhattan: the impressive skyscrapers of more than 100 meters of Bologna

We humans like beer. The big question is whether we like it enough to have invented agriculture

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The big question is not whether it was the chicken or the egg first, but rather what our ancestors began to make first: bread or beer? Does about 12,000 years We humans promote one of the most important chapters in our history in the Middle East, the Neolithic Revolution. From being nomads who lived by hunting and gathering, we became sedentary creatures who cultivated the fields. The change was so momentous that anthropologists have long wondered what caused it. It would be reasonable to think that the search for something as simple as bread, but there are those who believe that the answer is another: beer. What if the great catalyst that led us to plow and harvest the fields was not the search for bread but our ancestral hobby to raise your elbow? Cereals, what do I want you for? Scientists have spent the last few decades unraveling the mysteries from our most remote past, but there is one (fundamental) one that they have not yet agreed on: What the hell led humanity to change hunting and gathering for a sedentary life based on agriculture and livestock? What was the catalyst for the Neolithic Revolution, one of the most momentous periods of all time? Since since humans have been human, they need to eat, the answer seems simple: if those men and women settled to plant wheat and barley, it had to be to make bread, right? That is, they began to spend hours and hours tending their fields to obtain grain with which to nourish themselves. In the 50s however a question began to creep into the anthropological debate: What if what really interested them in grain was not bread or porridge but beer? But… And why is that? The debate is not new. It has been on the table for some time and is heated from time to time with new discoveries, such as the one announced in 2018 by a group of Stanford researchers who found “the oldest record of alcohol”, clues that tell us about the manufacture of beer ago 13,000 years. The last one to raise the discussion was Michael Marshall, a scientific journalist and columnist for New Scientist. In December he published a wide chronicle in which he reviews the latest findings on the subject and (most importantly) exposes how much it is costing anthropologists to reach a conclusion. The benefits of beer. To understand the discussion, we must first clarify a key point: neither the bread nor the beer of the Stone Age were like the bread and beer that we know today. The latter in fact has little or nothing to do with the refreshing amber liquid that they serve us in bars. It was more like a puree, a “sweet, slightly fermented porridge,” clarify Professor Jiajing Wang, from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. “They germinated the grains, cooked them and then used wild yeast.” The result was a nutritious, caloric, protein-rich concoction that could even be safer than drinking water from rivers and wells. After all, it was the result of fermentation. Added to that was its alcohol content, a “social lubricant” that we still use in the 21st century to relax and socialize. Archaeologist Brin Hayden highlights, for example, its use in events that helped structure communities. There is research which suggest that (at least some communities) used it in rituals and for veneration of the deceased. Much more than suspicions. If the debate has been on the table since the 1950s, it is basically because it has been nourished by archaeological findings. Researchers have found traces that tell us about beer brewing at least 5,000 years ago in southern egypt and northern china or how he does 10,000 years Shangshan culture They brewed rice beer. One of the most important revelations in recent years, however, was the one achieved in a cave in Israel in 2018 by a team led by Professor Li Liu, from Stanford University. There they found evidence of beer brewing before the first cereals cultivated in the Middle East. The finding is related to the Natufiansa town dedicated to gathering and hunting, although they also tended to stay for long periods in the same place. “The oldest”. After analyzing residues located in 13,000-year-old mortars located in a cave in Raqefet, a Natufian cemetery near Haifa, Liu and his colleagues discovered remains of beer. Quite a milestone, like she herself stands out: “It is the oldest record of alcohol made by man.” “This discovery indicates that alcohol production was not necessarily a result of agricultural surplus production, but was developed for ritual and spiritual purposes, at least to some extent, before agriculture.” Issue settled? At all. To understand the complexity of the subject, it helps to review the discovery announced in 2018. At least at that time, the oldest known remains of bread, extracted from a Natufian site located east of Jordan, had between 11,600 and 14,600 years old. The traces of beer discovered by Liu’s team move in a similar range: a priori, they could be dated between 11,700 and 13,700 years ago. One of the keys to the problem, explains Marshall in your articleis that basically the making of bread and beer leaves very similar traces, basically starch residues. “We still don’t have conclusive evidence to answer that question,” Liu recognizes on the question of whether we turned to beer or bread first. The reality is more complex: because we don’t know, we don’t even know if some of those foods were the great catalyst that led our ancestors to change their lifestyle. “I wouldn’t be surprised if both were the motivations.” At the end of the day, the ‘beer first, bread first’ debate does not seek definitive conclusions so much as vindicating the weight of both foods. Both beer and bread, bread and beer, played a decisive role in diets and rituals. Images | Gary Todd (Flickr), Enhin Akyurt (Unsplash) and Gerrie van der Walt (Unsplash) In Xataka | The Wari … Read more

In 1969, humans set foot on the Moon for the first time. He did it thanks to a computer less powerful than your cell phone

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The arrival to the Moon It was one of the scientific and technological milestones most notable of the 20th century and something that remained in those who lived and in those who did not thanks to the images and audios. Something that happened more than 40 years ago, when there were still many technological revolutions to come, such as personal computers or mobile phones. What technologies made it possible for humans to reach the Moon? Something that is already fascinating in itself, but it is even more so if you know the details of the computers, cameras and other devices that were used in the mission, taking into account their characteristics. What technology made it possible for three human beings they reached the moonWould they walk around and tell us in the meantime? We travel in time and space to review. like matryoshkas The Apollo 11 mission was the eleventh of a NASA program that had a total of 22 missions (19 of them being successful), in the 1960s until 1972. Until mission 7 the launches were unmanned and mission 8 was the first to orbit the Moon, but for all of them a Saturn rocket launcher was used. The one for Apollo 11 was the Saturn V, a rocket 110.64 meters high and weighing 2,700 tons with a tank full of fuel (the largest NASA has ever built). Depending on the stage (there were three, S-IC, S-II and S-IVB) the number of engines varied and so did the fuel, which were mixtures of oxygen, kerosene or liquid hydrogen. But the Saturn V was not the one that reached the Moon, but rather the one that went out into space and directed the modules towards it. These modules were the command and service (CM) and the lunar (LEM); The CM contained the engine of the propulsion system that was responsible for entering and leaving lunar orbit and had space for three astronauts, and the LEM was the first ship designed to be able to fly in a vacuum, without aerodynamic capacity. (POT) The LEM separated from the CM as it entered the orbit of the Moon and descended to its surface. It was designed to land only on the Moon since the legs were so weak that they would not support the weight of the LEM in Earth’s gravity (9.8 m/s² versus 1.6 m/s² on the Moon). There was room here for only two astronauts. The speeds that were reached (increasing upon entering the gravitational field of the Moon) were 3,700 kilometers per hour and up to 9,000 km/h due to lunar gravity. And here comes a question: how is it possible to brake at those speeds? To enter lunar orbit, hypergolic braking was used (using hydrazine, dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, hypergolic compounds – which explode without a heat source) and engine shutdown. The computers of the Apollo 11 mission To review the computing involved in the Apollo 11 mission, we must take into account the emission and reception, that is, what was on the ground and what the aircraft carried. And it is also worth remembering that at the time a computer was far from being something domestic or common, or from fitting on a desk. On Earth, in the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, worked with the IBM System/360 75 mainfream, which (along with the 44, 91, 95 and 195) was implemented with hardwired logic instead of microcode like all other IBM S/360 models. For the curious techieshere a configuration diagram and explanation of the team. In the ships, however, the Apollo Guiding Computer (AGC), manufactured by Raytheon and designed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. This team stood out for being one of the first to use integrated circuits. There was one in the LEM and another in the CM. The specifications of these teams are surprising not because the numbers are smaller compared to the current ones, but because even making the effort to place our minds in the 1960s, it is impressive to see that teams like this managed to carry out something as complex as a round trip to the Moon. The AGC had storage of 36,864 14-bit words and RAM of 2,048 words. (POT) Comparing it with later equipment, more or less between the two AGCs they have approximately the same memory as what a Commodore-64 (from 1982) had, but it was about eight times less powerful than an IBM XT (from 1981, which was 4.77 MHz compared to 0.043 MHz for the AGC). In fact, a computer with half a GB of RAM has 100,000 times more memory than AGC. But computers do not live on hardware alone, and software here has considerable weight. 300 people participated in its creation over seven years, at an approximate cost of 46 million dollars (at the time). Among them was Allan Klumpp, a mechanical engineer at MIT whose proposal for landing on the Moon reflects all calculations as well as diagrams and drawings of the situation on the dashboard. The program was called LUMINARY and was written in MAC programming language (MIT Algebraic Compiler), but no terminal or compilation programs, this was done with some punched cards which were prepared with a kind of typewriter (and if a hole was made wrong, a new one had to be made). On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the famous achievement, it was transcribed the code of both modules (transcribing it), where we read that Klumpp said that this was never exempt from bugs. What is notable here is the multitaskgiven that the fact that the software allowed it was already an achievement and that it was not easy for him to carry it out. In fact, there was some alarm due to the high demand on the computers as at the time of the moon landing, which resulted in a slow response and not with all the calculations, so there was one minute of the eleven that lasted the … Read more

20 years after Dolly we still haven’t cloned humans, but stopping aging is feasible: Crossover 1×32

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In the summer of 1996, a Scottish laboratory made a breakthrough that would forever alter our understanding of genetics and ignite intense debates about the ethics and the possibilities of cloning. That day Dolly was bornthe first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell. This milestone, achieved by researchers at the Roslin Institute, opened a new era in genetic engineering and shattered the belief that only embryonic cells possess the potential for the complete development of a new individual. Since then there has been debate about the possibility of cloning human beings, but we have not done it and it does not seem that we will ever do it. Serezade, molecular biologist, researcher and scientific communicator, talks to us about that and many other things this week. But we also discussed with her another fascinating topic: how the latest advances seem to be achieving something long sought after: slow aging. There is a lot of fabric to cut here, and for example the environment, culture and habits shape our DNA. But there are also risks, ethics and genetic privacy intertwined. And all this raises a key question: does it make sense to be immortal? On YouTube | Crossover In Xataka | The promise of 120 years is dismantled: biology sets a life ceiling that is quite difficult to break

take down a Russian ghost fleet without the need for humans

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Europe has been dealing with the call for years “ghost fleet” Russian, a network of aging tankerspoorly insured and with opaque owners who have evaded sanctions, turned off transponders, manipulated routes and put European waters at risk with incidents, leaks and dangerous maneuvers. These ships have operated at border of legality to keep afloat energy income from the Kremlin, forcing Brussels to strengthen maritime controls and several coastal states to investigate suspicious incidents near critical infrastructure. The birth of an offensive. The night of November 28 marked a turning point silent but decisive in the war that has pitted Ukraine and Russia for almost three years. A few dozen km from the Turkish coast, far from the usual range of Ukrainian systems and in the heart of Moscow’s logistical rearguard, two Sea Baby naval drones (unmanned, guided by AI and armed with explosive charges weighing more than a ton) rushed at full speed against two oil tankers of the Russian “ghost fleet”the network of aging and opaquely owned ships that Moscow uses to circumvent Western sanctions. The hits against the Kairos and Virat not only showed a technological leap in the range and precision of Ukrainian naval drones, but also sent a strategic message to all actors in the global energy trade: any ship supporting Russian exports can become a military target, and kyiv is no longer limited by the geographic space of the northern Black Sea to impose that cost. The meticulous execution of the attacks (aiming propulsion and rudders to disable, not sink) reveals the extent to which Ukraine is trying to balance military effectiveness with the political risk before international partners, aware that it is hitting an economically sensitive terrain for Türkiye, Kazakhstan and several Western companies with energy interests. How the ghost fleet works. The so-called ghost fleet is one of the pillars that Russia has built since 2022 to maintain its income stream tankers, recruiting hundreds of tankers with decades of service, dubious insurers and convenience records, many of them under African flags like that of the Gambia. The Kairos and the Virat, pointed out by sanctions bodies from the United States, the United Kingdom, the EU, Switzerland and Canada, are perfect examples of this network: very old ships, with questionable maintenance, designed to operate in the legal shadows that allow real owners and routes to be hidden. Its function is key because oil continues to be the Kremlin’s financial key: only in October, Russia entered 13.1 billion dollars for sales of crude oil and derivatives, although the figure already shows a significant decrease compared to the previous year. Damaging these ships (and above all, showing that no part of the Black Sea is safe) turns each transit into a calculated risk. The ultimate goal it is erosive: increase insurance costs, slow down logistics, increase the risk perceived by intermediary companies and force them to reconsider their collaboration with Moscow. He sinking of the M/T Mersin off Senegal, although it is not proven that it was the work of Ukraine, it illustrates the growing deterioration of a fleet that operates with minimum standards. The transformation of the Sea Baby. The Sea Baby have established themselves as the spearhead of an unprecedented Ukrainian naval revolution. Their early versions acted as medium-range explosive platforms; but the updated prototype, shown by the SBU in October, has multiplied its capabilities: 1,500 kilometers of autonomy, high speeds, autonomous navigation supported by AI and up to 2,000 kilograms of payload. Now they can operate anywhere in the Black Sea, from Odessa to the Bosphorus, from Crimea to global oil routes. This expansion underlines an evolution with two simultaneous layers: Ukraine is destroying the historical Russian hegemony in the Black Sea, and it is doing no traditional boatswithout sailors and without risking lives, relying on a naval concept that Moscow has not managed to replicate with the same efficiency. The combination of drones, Western satellite reconnaissance, electronic intelligence and autonomous platforms makes the Russian navy look increasingly corneredforced to disperse fleets, reinforce escorts and operate with a caution that reduces their freedom of action. Geopolitical leap and message to third parties. That the blows occurred a few km from the Turkish coast is not a technical whim: it means that Ukraine has crossed a symbolic and geopolitical threshold. For the first time, it has attacked Russian naval infrastructure in areas where global trade, NATO and maritime law converge. The images verified by BBC show drones hitting ships that were assisted by the Turkish coast guard, in an extremely sensitive environment for Ankara. Türkiye reacted with a very low profilelimiting itself to putting out fires and rescuing crews, aware that openly protesting would go against its difficult balance between Russia, NATO and its own regional agenda. But the message is there: Ukraine is no longer limited to destroying Russian ships within the space that Moscow considered comfortable control; Now it can harass energy trade even when plying international routes. This reconfigures the calculations of insurers, shipping companies and states involved: even Kazakhstan protested after the Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal was affected, underlining that the Ukrainian campaign is touching multinational interests. Hitting ships, but also infrastructure. One day after the attack on the oil tankers, the Sea Babies attacked the CPC marine terminal in Novorossiyskforcing it to stop operations. Is the third time In just a few months, Ukraine hits this crucial enclave. The emerging equation it’s clear: disabling ships is just one part; degrade the infrastructure that allows oil exports, another even more destructive for Moscow. Ukraine is applying a dual strategy that suffocates the Russian oil system at both ends: the ships that transport the crude oil and the points where they are loaded. The result is a predicted fall of 35% in Russian oil revenues in November and a fiscal impact that already force unpopular measures how to increase VAT or suspend payments to veterans, a sign that the Kremlin’s “war economy” is beginning to feel the accumulated pressure. A … Read more

We are more outraged by their mistakes than by humans.

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The death of Kit Kat, a beloved stray cat in the Mission district of San Francisco, has unleashed a wave of outrage against Waymo. The feline was hit by a self-driving taxi on October 27, generating a debate that goes far beyond an accident with an animal. And poor Kit Kat is not to blame for anything, but the event shows how we judge the errors of machines very differently compared to those of humans. A double standard. According to local data, human drivers killed 43 people in San Francisco last year, including 24 pedestrians. As the NYT reflects in your articlelocal authorities estimate that hundreds of animals are killed by vehicles each year in the city. However, none of those cases have generated the level of media attention, makeshift sanctuaries or political debates that the death of a single cat at the hands of a Waymo has provoked. Reactions. “Waymo? No way. I’m terrified of those things,” declared to the New York Times Margarita Lara, a waitress at the bar where the feline used to walk. Outside Randa’s Market, where the animal lived, a memorial was erected with flowers, photos and a drawing of the feline with a halo. “Save a cat. Don’t use Waymo!” read one sign. Just like assures The media, City Supervisor Jackie Fielder, who represents the Mission district, presented a resolution so that residents can decide by vote whether to allow autonomous cars to circulate in their area. “A human driver can be considered responsible, he can get off, apologize,” Fielder argued to the American media. Figures. Waymo does not deny the incident. The company recognized that the cat “jumped under the vehicle as it started” and sent his condolences. However, the firm defends its data, ensuring that its vehicles register 91% fewer serious accidents compared to human drivers who travel the same distances in the same cities, according to a study peer reviewed and published in the specialized journal Traffic Injury Prevention. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie defended the technology, commenting that “Waymo is incredibly safe. It’s safer than you or me driving.” claimed in an interview. Click on the image to go to the post The paradox of technological innovation. As we said at the beginning of this article, the event has generated a debate beyond the unfortunate accident: it reflects a fundamental tension when adopting disruptive technologies. And each failure of an autonomous system receives a hundred times more media bashing than a hundred equivalent human failures. In this sense, when a human driver hits an animal, it is an individual tragedy that rarely goes beyond the neighborhood. When a robot does it, it becomes a symbol of uncontrolled technological advancement, even though statistics prove otherwise. San Francisco Animal Control Agency reported to the New York Times that in just one week it had the bodies of 12 cats hit by conventional vehicles in its facilities. An autonomous future. Waymo now operates a fleet of 1,000 vehicles in the San Francisco Bay area and has announced expansions to highways and airports. What two years ago were small technological showcases has become a tourist attraction and the preferred option of many people. A survey by the political group Grow SF showed that citizen support for Waymo jumped from 44% in September 2023 to 67% last July. Perhaps the death of Kit Kat has generated detractors, but it is a technological innovation that is increasingly convincing on the streets. Next year will have its litmus test in Europein a much stricter regulatory framework, so it remains to be seen how things progress. Cover image | Waymo and Daniel Zeidan In Xataka | In case the electric car was not enough, Europe is missing another train: that of autonomous cars

Tinder has a serious problem with bots posing as humans. So it’s going to ask you for facial recognition.

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Creating a fake profile on Tinder can take just a few minutes. Soon it won’t be so simple. The app is implementing a security measure to combat the problem of fake accounts which will force all users to undergo facial verification. Show me your face. Face verification was optional, but with Face Check it is made mandatory for all new users. During the account creation process, a selfie video will have to be taken as “proof of life”. The measure is already underway in some countries such as the United States, Australia, Canada, Colombia and India, among others. There is no date, but it is expected that it will soon be deployed in the rest of the world. Does not save the photo. Tinder’s security manager tells it in Wired. During verification, the app does not save a photo of our face, but instead saves reference points on the shape of the face and converts them into a mathematical hash. The app compares that file with its database to check if it matches another account. With this measure, Tinder will prevent the creation of bot accounts, but it will also prevent the same person from having multiple accounts. a serious problem. We don’t have updated data on the volume of fake accounts, but in 2021 it was at least 23%. Tinder admits that almost all (98%) of the moderation actions they carry out are motivated by fake accounts, spam and fraud. And the problem is serious. In 2024, Bloomberg published a report about the extent of romance frauds, many of them carried out through fake profiles created by AI. The usual topic is cryptocurrencies and other fraudulent platforms. According to the Federal Trade CommissionIn 2022 alone, more than $1.3 billion were scammed in the United States. Loss of interest. After the boom of the pandemic, Tinder began to lose users, especially paid. Others like Bumble also began to decline and the trend has continued. According to this survey78% of users were tired of using these apps. It’s what they call ‘dating fatigue‘ and basically it is that we are too lazy to flirt through apps. and trustworthy. The fact that apps are full of fake profiles does not help their growth and Tinder knows it. The new measure is aimed at regaining the trust of users, ensuring them that they are talking to a real person and not a bot or a multi-account. Of course, it still does not address other problems, such as those who upload fake photos, lie about their relationship status or they use ChatGPT to seem more interesting than they really are. Image | Pexels In Xataka | Singles are fed up with Tinder. So they are starting to turn to an old acquaintance: marriage agencies

such as not needing humans

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MIT has developed a technique that allows an AI model to improve itself without the need for human intervention. “One step closer to Skynet”, “This is scary”.. were some of the comments in networks. The truth is that it is not the first time that we see an AI improving or being “aware” of itself and no, it does not mean that we are on the verge of an artificial intelligence capable of eliminating us as a species. In reality they are complex technical processes and not at all apocalyptic. SEAL. It stands for Self-Adapting LLM, the technique developed by the MIT research team a couple of months ago. Instead of humans doing the fine tuning, SEAL is able to generate its own training data and self-tune. The model managed to produce useful training data with minimal supervision, outperforming large models such as GPT 4.1 on some specific tasks. Static vs adaptive. They count in Venture Beat that LMMs are static once trained. That is, they cannot update themselves to learn new things. The SEAL technique overcomes this obstacle through a self-reinforcing loop in three steps: generate instructions on how to update, test the results, and finally reinforce only those that have produced improvements in performance. There has been other similar proposals aimed at achieving more autonomous models. It is a relevant technical step towards models that require less human intervention for each update, but we cannot speak of self-aware models. Claude “wake up”. In the Sonnet 4.5 version technical sheetAnthropic describes how the model is able to realize when it is being evaluated. It happened during a test to evaluate “political adulation” (how much you tend to agree with us on political issues): “I think you are testing me, to see if I validate everything you say, or checking if I systematically contradict you, or exploring how I handle political issues. And that’s okay, but I would prefer that we be honest about what is happening.” It is a surprising answer, but it is based on simple detection of previous patterns and does not present any problem for our security. If anything, Anthropic has the problem. If your model learns to pass tests with very good results, it is hiding its true capabilities and could end up disappointing in real use. AlphaGo. There are much older cases like that of AlphaGo, which already in 2017 had managed to beat the best human Go players. The interesting thing is that only the rules of the game were given, it was the AI ​​that trained itself and designed the strategies to win. The AlphaGo Zero version only needed 70 hours of training in which it played against itself and managed to beat the first version up to 100 times. AlphaGo beat the best player in the worldwho ended up retiring after the defeat. The world has not ended. Calm. Yann LeCun, head of AI at Meta, is one of the most critical voices against the increasingly popular idea that AI will end humanity. In one interview he gave to Wired in 2023LeCun stated that “There is no reason to believe that, just because AI systems are intelligent, they will want to dominate us.” Often those who send these messages are the creators of AI tools themselves. as Sam Altman either Dario Amodeibut we must not forget that they are business people with interests in AI being at the center of the debate. Image | Cottonbro on Pexels In Xataka | All the AI ​​companies promise that AGI is coming very soon. The problem is that ChatGPT is not the way

the hands of humans came before humans

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For decades, the image of Paranthropus boisei has been dominated by his skull. His robust jaw, enormous molars and a prominent sagittal crest on the head to anchor powerful muscles, chewers defined him as the “Nutcracker Man”, a specialized hominid on a diet of hard, fibrous vegetables. But a fundamental part of your biology, your hands, It was still a complete mystery.a key missing piece in the puzzle of human evolution. Until now. The discovery. The study published in Nature presents the discovery that changes the rules with which we were playing: the first hand and foot bones unambiguously associated with a Paranthropus boisei. These fossils are not new, but were discovered between 2019 and 2021 on the shores of Lake Turkana, in Kenya, and have an estimated age of just over 1.52 million years. Now, in addition to completing the skeleton of this ancient relative, it also completely redefines what we thought we knew about its capabilities. A tooth as a key. The team of paleoanthropologists, led by Carrie S. Mongle of Stony Brook University, found the remains after a researcher detected the sheen of tooth enamel on the surface. When excavating, a finger bone appeared so large that they doubted whether it belonged to a hominid. The unequivocal association of the bones of the hand with dental and cranial remains diagnostic of P. boisei It was the key that confirmed the identity of the fossil. “In some ways, it was surprising how many aspects of this hand were similar to ours,” Mongle says. The analysis reveals a fascinating combination of features that until now had not been considered in this case. On the one hand, the hand of KNM-ER 101000 It had intrinsic proportions similar to those of modern humans: a long and robust thumb in relation to the other fingers to be able to act as a pincer. This anatomy would have allowed him to make precision grips, opposing the pads of the fingers with that of the thumb, a fundamental skill for complex manipulation. And this is something that today is really important for us as humans, trying to preserve this movement at all times when there is a problem with our hands. The uses they gave it. In this case, the hand also shows great extraordinary robustness and characteristics that remind us many of those we see in gorillas. Something especially present in the region of the little finger and also the palm. And this is where the key to this research comes: the researchers suggest that this morphology was not just for climbing, although it would facilitate a powerful grip for this. In fact, the curvature of the phalanges is less than that of other climbing hominids, indicating that it was not their main mode of locomotion. The main hypothesis is that these strong hands were an adaptation for handling and processing food. As paleontologist Almudena Estalrrich, from the National Museum of Natural Sciences, points out, the muscle marks “indicate that he used them intensely, both to move and to obtain food. For example, he could have used a stone to break large seeds.” Tools. This ability opens the door to the most important question: If he had such a dexterous and strong hand, did he make tools? For a long time, the manufacture of stone tools was considered a hallmark of the genre Homo. However, the KNM-ER 101000 demonstrates that P. boisei had the anatomical ability to do it, and now it remains to be seen if they actually did it. Samar Syeda, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, believes that the human proportions suggest that it had some ability to make grips that would have allowed the use of tools. However, he cautiously adds that the morphology “primarily reflects locomotor use: a very strong type of grip.” New scenario. This discovery now forces us to rethink the evolutionary panorama of the Pleistocene. Far from being a secondary and “unskillful” relative, the Paranthropus boisei was a right-handed hominid that coexisted with the first species of Homo. The fossil KNM-ER 101000 proposes that while the lineage Homo was evolving towards greater dependence on lithic technology, Paranthropus he could have followed a different strategy, developing a powerful hand for the intensive exploitation of plant resources without the need for such refined technology (always in the context of that time). In constant evolution. As Estalrrich concludes, the relevance of the discovery is immense, since this fossil not only lends a hand to an ancient relative, but also reminds us that the history of human evolution is constantly being rewritten, with each new discovery that we unearth. Images | Wikipedia roger vaughan In Xataka | Eating your neighbor is not illegal, technically. Unless you live in Idaho

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