increasingly

In their search to make the increasingly productive olive trees, these researchers have had an idea: to throw coal

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The jungle floor is between reddish or yellowish; He is sterile and ungrateful, blinding and distemper. It is plagued with mineral oxides or empty of calcareous materials. It is and has always been a bad ground. Therefore, when in the middle of the Amazon, the settlers met the ‘Terra Petra‘They couldn’t believe it. It was a black, tremendously fertile land, incredibly resistant to the decomposition of organic matter. For decades, nobody knew where he had been able to leave. A dark enigma for a bright future. Some said that the Andes volcanoes could have come, others suggested that they should be a product of sedimentation of the tertiary lakes. But, When analyzing they realized that they were truffled with ceramic remains, fish swords, jewelry and human objects. The miracle of the ‘Terra Preta’ was the miracle of huge agricultural communities mixing land, vegetable coal, organic material of all kinds and favoring the growth of an own ecosystem within them. Charcoal? Indeed. That same face The researchers stayed. The jungle peoples often use a burning system to create fertile soils. The problem is that they lose fertility quickly. With the ‘Terra Preta’ it does not happen and the secret is in that coal. What in jargon is known as ‘biochar’. And that is really working? That is what The European Soil O-Live project has been askedif the olive trees could treat with a mixture of biochar and compost. The result is what brings us here: what Yes it works. According to researchers at the University of Jaén, coal treatment increases oil production between 7 and 24%. That is, between 0.4 and 1.7 kilos of oil per olive tree. It is true that it is a preliminary investigation, but without a very promising place. And what do we want it for? That is, without this type of “treatments” Spain is already the place of the world where more oil occurs and not for: grows 15% per year. The problem is that the machine cannot stop because demand It grows even more. Where will this race take us, that voracity? That is one of the great questions of the century. Image | KEVIN MARTIN JOSE | Wander Fleur Image | In full climate crisis, a United States startup proposes an millenary technology of the Amazon: Capture CO2 on the ground

China needs cardiologists in an increasingly aged society. His answer is an AI that “reason” as the best

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820,000 people. That is the number of patients that the Department of Cardiology of the Zhongshan hospital attended in 2024. A very high figure for a country in which doctors are missing and that sees that, every so often, every so often, His hospitals overflow. Increased higher health coverage, especially for an increasingly aging populationand the answer has been found in artificial intelligence. In a cardiologist, specifically, which has trained with a base of hundreds of thousands of people and has all the support of the government. Cardiomind. That is the name of artificial intelligence that has been developed by the Zhongshan hospital, the University of Fudan and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Academy for Science. It is a joint effort to create an AI that, according to them, is able to reason as their best cardiologists. GE Junbo is one of those outstanding cardiologists of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Comment They are feeding the system with data, but they also teach him “to think as an expert first level cardiologist.” Co-pilot. In this way, Cardiomind compares patient history and the results of tests based on global research to generate diagnostic suggestions. And if you were raising one, leaving the possibility of leaving your heart’s health on the awareness of a machine, in the word “suggestion” is the key. According to its creators, the idea is not that doctors are replaced, but that it helps those members of a congested system to work faster and more accurately. “With their help, our doctors can attend more patients, reduce the workload and improve both the quality of the diagnosis and the treatment,” commented The doctor. Pillars. The secret of the pizza is in the dough, in the case of AI, that special sauce is the training. Cardiomind is a multimodal system that can analyze and process data from various sources (electrocardiograms, ultrasound and laboratory results, for example) to provide its diagnosis, and it is what has been trained. The source has been hundreds of thousands of medical records that the Hospital Cardiology Department had stored for decades, learning in the process how doctors think both in the diagnosis and during treatment. In addition to multimodal and very trained, it specializes in one thing: cardiovascular diseases. Total government support. And all this comes from the hand of itself. China is investing strong in development of artificial intelligences and, although in the West only a few as Deepseek They are the ones that attract attention, the country has been betting for the development of these systems to decongest several organisms. And that of medicine is fundamental. In January of this year, and apart from Cardiomind, established In Shanghai the first test and verification center of large models of AI in the field of medicine. Their fields will be assistance, disease prediction, personalized treatment according to the history of each patient and support to develop drugs. Necessary. Such is that impulse that several hospitals already have their own AI platforms, even some that They combine Contemporary and traditional medicine. And the reason why this technological development is being promoted is the one mentioned above. The population is getting older and doctors are missing. It is estimated that the country has 1.9 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants and They want have 5.5 nurses per 1,000 people for this year. In other countries, the average is devastating. In Spain, for example, there is 6.21 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants. In the case of nurses, the figure is 7.12. Challenges. Now, despite that government impulse, there are three elements to take into account. One is that of the data security to guarantee privacy. In the case of Cardiomind, those responsible developed a firewall with encrypted data. Other countries are studying How to apply AI in cardiology and, precisely, data leakage and ethics is a point that is usually present Among the concerns. Ethics also plays a role, since if it goes from suggesting to a more important role, it would be necessary to legally regulate it. At the moment, or they are in charge “only” of paperwork and records or, if they attend decision making, the last word has a human. In addition, there is the technological issue itself. The development of these artificial intelligences needs servers and calculation power. It is something that China is solving more or less controversial forms buying items that They should not be able to buy due to the commercial war with the West, but also using solutions developed at home, such as the chips of a huawei that is the spearhead in development of hardware for AI in the Asian giant. Images | Huawei, In Xataka | It is impossible to escape from Huawei: not even the oldest hospital in Spain in its ambitious digital transformation

Cosmologists are increasingly clear where the most energy particles in the universe come from

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Cosmic radiation bathes our solar system, and therefore also our planet, from the moment in which it was formed from A gigantic cloud of gas and dust does more than 4.5 billion years. During most of our history we have not been aware of its existence, so to find the first scientist who told us about the presence of a form of radiation that had to proceed from the outer space we must go back to 1912. The Austrian physicist Victor Franz HESS was the first to identify the origin of a form of radiation whose intensity increases with altitude and its abundance varies with latitude. To carry out his experiments he used probe balloons inside whose measurement devices expressly designed to measure the radiation present in the atmosphere. His valuable scientific findings were rewarded with several awards, among which is the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with the American physicist Carl David Anderson in 1936. Many other scientists continued HESS’s research, and thanks to all of them we know today a little better A radiation form that transports to our planet very valuable information about the universe to which we belong. Kilonovas seem to be responsible for the most energy radiation Cosmic radiation is constituted by high -energy ionized atomic nuclei that move through space at a speed very close to that of light (which is approximately 300,000 km/s). That they are ionized indicates that they have acquired electric charge because they have been stripped of their electrons, but these atomic nuclei are made of the same matter that constitutes us and everything that surrounds us, a quality that reveals to some extent their origin. One of the most important characteristics of cosmic radiation is its essentially perfect isotropy. This parameter reflects that the rays arrive from all directions with the same frequency, which indicates that they must coexist simultaneously numerous sources capable of generating them. And this invites us to ask ourselves one more question: where cosmic radiation comes from. A good part of the cosmic rays we receive comes from outside our solar system. Of other stars An important part of the radiation that permeates the atmosphere of our planet comes from the sun, which, as we all know, is the closest star. However, it is not at all the only source of external radiation that reaches the earth. A good part of the cosmic rays we receive comes from outside our solar system. Of other stars. And travel through space with enormous energy until impacting with the atoms present in the upper layers of the atmosphere of our planet. What astrophysics did not know with certainty until very recently was the nature of the source that originates the most energy particles that we can find in the universe. But researchers from the University of New York have published a scientific study in Physical Review Letters in which they argue that this form of radiation proceeds with a high probability of kilonovaswhich are nothing other than the clash and fusion of two neutron stars to give rise to the formation of a black hole. “After six decades of effort it is likely that we have identified the origin of the mysterious most energy particles in the universe. This discovery provides a new tool to understand the most aggressive events of the universe: the fusion of two neutron stars to form a black hole, the process responsible for the creation of many precious and exotic elements, such as, for example, gold, platinum, uranium, iodine or xenon. Gennys R. Farrar points outPhysics professor and one of the people who sign the study. When they are close enough, gravity takes control and the two neutron stars are condemned to collide Neutron stars are not always lonely. Sometimes one of them is part of a binary system next to a “living” star, and if the appropriate conditions are given, the latter can also become a neutron star. In this scenario the binary system ends up being constituted by Two neutron stars that turn around the other. As time goes by, angular momentum is being lost, which causes their orbits to narrow and approach more and more. And when they are close enough, gravity takes control and the two neutron stars are condemned to collide. The main contribution made by Farrar and their research partners is their defense of the existence of a very close relationship between the energy of the most intense cosmic rays and their electric charge. Their conclusions have to be experimentally endorsed, but they represent a breath of fresh air in a field in which it is not easy to elaborate new knowledge. Image | Generated by Xataka with Dall-e More information | Physical Review Letters In Xataka | The great challenge of cosmology: what happened to the universe in its first moments to expand so fast

It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no “normal” body temperature.

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If you ask us what the “normal” temperature of our body is, the instinctive answer will be 37º Celsius. When the thermometer exceeds that mark, we usually talk about fevermild or high depending on how far we move away from the figure. However, over time health experts have realized that the reality is a little more complex. The body temperature issue It is not a mere curiosity. Fever is an important response of our body to many diseases or disorders, generally to infections. The fever It is a double-edged sword: our body raises its temperature to try to kill viruses and bacteria that may be damaging it, while activating our body’s immune response; However, in the process, fever can also put the proper functioning of our organs at risk and cause other problems such as dehydration. Since fever is a common response to various illnesses, it can also cause us serve as a diagnostic toolto narrow the circle on the possible conditions that affect us. Answering the question of what is the “normal” temperature of our body is difficult. And the reasons behind this are several. Firstly, because, over the last century and a half, the estimated average temperature of the human body has been reducing. The notion that our body temperature It is at 37º and dates back to the mid-19th century. In 1868, the German doctor Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich conducted a study using 25,000 patients and more than a million temperature measurements. From these data, he calculated that the average temperature was 37ºbut also observed certain deviations. However, more recent studies have observed lower average temperatures. A recent example of this we found it in a studio Made in the United States and published in 2020 in the magazine eLife. The analysis indicated that Americans’ body temperatures had been dropping at a rate of about 0.03º Celsius every decade. A previous study conducted in the United Kingdom and published in 2017 in the magazine B.M.J.estimated an average temperature of 36.6º in its sample of more than 35,000 participants and 250,000 measurements. We don’t really know why body temperature has been reducing over time. A possible explanation It lies in the improvements in hygiene and immunity, which would imply a lower incidence of infections in the population and therefore lower average temperatures. But this is just one of the various hypotheses that seek to explain the phenomenon. Wunderlich himself observed in his study that men and older people tended to have lower body temperatures, while women and younger people had higher temperatures on average. Which brings us to the second reason why establishing a “normal” reading is especially difficult. And it depends. Sex and age are two of the factors that can make what is “normal” for one person not “normal” for another. But other factors can also alter this figure. a study published in 2023 in the magazine JAMA Internal Medicine measured the degree to which these factors affected body temperature, but also added new variables such as height, body mass, and the time of day at which the measurement was taken. Among the sample of 618,306 observations, the average temperature was at 36.64º Celsius. Among the participants, the average readings for each individual ranged between 36.24º and 36.89º. It is also worth remembering that there are different ways to measure body temperature (tympanic, oral, axillary…) and that each one It presents some slight associated deviations. So at what temperature fever comes? As is evident after what we have read, the answer is that it depends on each person and situation, although fortunately, with the variations being less than one degree, the interpretation of the results of a thermometer may not be as different from the conventional one as to affect decisions such as whether or not to stay home during a cold. However, for health experts, having better knowledge about these variables can be of great help. That is why new studies have also investigated this question. One published in November of last year in the magazine Scientific Reports by South Korean researchers, analyzed the body temperature of 9,195 hospital patients through tympanic temperature measurements (the tympanic temperature It is usually half a degree above the oral measurement and about one degree above the axillary measurement). The team estimated an average temperature of 36.91º Celsius, and a limit of 37.81º for fever. In Xataka | What to do when we have the flu: what measures to take and in which case we should ask for help Image | Polina Tankilevitch

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