invisible

The ugliest and most hated building in Paris is its only skyscraper. Since they cannot demolish it, they have come up with another solution: make it invisible.

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For more than half a century, the Paris skyline has remained practically frozen. You may not have realized it, but in the historic center practically no building can exceed seven floors. This norm was born after a controversial construction of the seventies that provoked such public rejection that it changed forever the urban rules of the city. Today, that architectural experiment is once again at the center of the debate. And they have found a solution. The tower that should never have existed. In a city famous for its uniform horizon of six or seven-story stone buildings, the dark silhouette of the Montparnasse Tower It has been breaking the visual harmony of Paris for more than 50 years. Inaugurated in 1973 with 59 plants and nearly 210 meters high, the mass was born as a symbol of progress in a capital that was trying to modernize after the post-war period and transform the deteriorated Montparnasse neighborhood into a business district. The project had the political support of President Georges Pompidou and the Minister of Culture André Malraux, and had to demonstrate that the city could hug “the modernity of electricity”, fast trains and telecommunications. However, the result was an enormous monolith of dark brown steel and glass that stood out brutally above the urban fabric of the 19th century, almost immediately becoming the building most hated in the capital. Aging too quickly. As usually happens in hyperbolic projects that do not end well, the problem started even before that the tower was finished. The plan had been conceived in the fifties, but could not be started until the end of the sixties due to lack of technology, money and experience to build a skyscraper of those dimensions in Europe. When it was finally built, its late modernist aesthetic already seemed dated, and its dark color (compared by some critics to a nicotine stain) contrasted violently with classical Parisian architecture. It almost instantly became a crooked line of the capital. The black sheep. The public reaction was so negative that just four years after its inauguration, the City Council prohibited building buildings of more than seven floors in the city center, pushing out the skyscrapers towards the business district of La Défense. Since then, the tower has remained an urban anomaly or, if you will, a reminder to avoid: the only skyscraper in historic Paris. The most repudiated building in the most photographed city. Over the decades, many controversial buildings in Paris ended up being accepted and even lovedfrom the Eiffel Tower itself to the Louvre pyramid or the Pompidou Center. The Montparnasse Tower, on the other hand, never achieved reconcile with the Parisians. Jokes about its presence became part of popular culture: many say that the best view of Paris is from your viewpoint because it is the only place from which the tower cannot be seen. Others describe it as the box in which the Eiffel Tower arrived packaged. Even local politicians have called the building of “urban catastrophe”and for years proposals arose to tear it down completely. However, despite widespread rejection, the skyscraper has also maintained a curious cultural life. For example, the famous “French Spiderman” Alain Robert climbed the towerand has also appeared in movies and continues to attract tourists who climb to its observation platform to contemplate the city. An impossible demolition. You may be thinking about it. If Paris hates its own creation, why the hell hasn’t it been knocked down? As tempting as the idea of ​​removing the tower from the Paris skyline is for many, tearing it down was never an option. a realistic option. The reason? The building still houses offices, has a huge commercial infrastructure at its base and its demolition would involve a gigantic cost in addition to enormous logistical and environmental problems. Even those who would like to see it disappear acknowledge that it would be financially unviable. The tower is too big, too complex and too integrated into the neighborhood to simply erase it from the map. This reality forced the city and the promoters to look for an alternative solution: If the most hated skyscraper in Paris could not be destroyed, we would have to try to transform it. EITHER directly delete it. The solution: make it disappear. From this paradox was born one of the most ambitious urban renewal projects in the city. Because the strategy is not to demolish the Montparnasse Tower, but to radically alter your appearance so that, in essence, it is not “seen” and stops dominating the Parisian horizon. The plan, promoted by a consortium of French architects and accompanied by the remodeling of the surroundings designed by Renzo Pianoaims to replace the dark façade with a kind transparent crystal leather crossed by garden terraces, balconies and vertical gardens that visually fragment the volume of the building. The idea is quite clear: lighten its presence to the point that the gigantic brown block stop imposing yourself about him skyline. A “trick” worth 700 million. The transformation of the tower and the entire urban complex that surrounds it will exceed 700 million of euros and aims to convert a degraded environment (marked by an almost abandoned shopping center and an unwelcoming concrete platform) into an open space with squares, pedestrian walkways, green areas and new connections with the neighborhood. In this way, the tower will retain its structure original plan to reduce carbon emissions during construction, will incorporate more efficient energy technologies and add high-rise gardens and a rooftop greenhouse. The project has been caught for years between political debates, neighborhood concerns and architectural discussions, but the closure of the building to evict the tenants now opens the door to start of works. The strange fate of the Montparnasse mass. In short, more than fifty years after that giddy inauguration, the Montparnasse Tower is still being an anomaly repudiated in the city that banned skyscrapers after their construction. Paradoxically, that same singularity has also turned it into a species of unintentional icon … Read more

an “invisible” galaxy made up almost 100% of dark matter

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The Universe continues to be that great unknown. Not only because of its vast immensity, but because human research and subsequent theories that explain its functioning continue to require tweaks and reformulations. we have seen it when calculating the distances between planets of the Solar System, the size of Jupiter either what is the training mechanism of planetary systems. Now, a research team from the University of Toronto has discovered to the strongest candidate for a “dark galaxy”, something that until now was only considered a possibility. The candidate. The study presents the discovery of CDG-2, an acronym that literally means Candidate Dark Galaxy 2. It is an object 300 million light years away, in the Perseus cluster, with a peculiarity: it is almost completely dominated by dark matter, with a minimal number of stars. Thus, between 99.94% and 99.98% of its total mass would be dark matter and it only delivers a light of “only” six million suns compared to the brightness of tens of billions of the Milky Way. Context. Galaxies are something like the Lego pieces that make up the universe and they all contain dark matter. The dark matter It is something scientifically fascinating: it is invisible, it does not emit or reflect light, but its gravitational influence was the scaffolding on which galaxies were formed and is what holds them together today. In the Milky Way, estimates suggest that between 65 and 90% of the mass is dark matter, depending on the model, but astronomy has always wondered if there were even more extreme galaxies. The “dark galaxies” were until now just a theoretical prediction. Why is it important. To begin with, because it empirically confirms what the theoretical models contemplated, but it has more implications: It opens a new way to detect galaxies from statistically significant groupings of globular clusterswhich serve as a trace. As a case study: the most probable hypothesis is that neighboring galaxies ripped away the gas necessary for star formation, leaving only the skeleton. It makes us look at its “twin” CDG-1 with different eyes. Detected previously, it could be a case of an even more extreme dark galaxy, possibly a pure dark matter halo. How they discovered it. The research team came across this galaxy in a striking way: looking for its shadow, since it is practically undetectable. Their fingerprints were four globular clusters, small dense concentrations of stars around the Perseus cluster. After analyzing its disposition with statistics and ruling out that its grouping was a matter of chance, they pointed the three most powerful telescopes available, Hubble, Euclid and Subaru, towards that region and created the image that evidenced its existence. Is, in the words of the main researcher Dayi Li, “the first galaxy detected solely through its population of globular clusters.” Image: NASA, ESA, Dayi Li (UToronto); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) Pending subjects. However, CDG-2 is still a candidate and not a confirmation, which is why it keeps its name. To confirm with certainty the mass of dark matter it would be necessary to measure the velocities of its stars or clusters, something technically very difficult with current technology due to how little they shine. It will be necessary to wait for James Webb and new Euclid observations to improve the image of this object to better define it or continue finding more dark galaxies like it hidden in the universe. It would require measuring the velocities of its stars or globular clusters, something technically very difficult given their extreme tenuity. The next few years, with James Webb and new observations of Euclid, will be crucial to refine the portrait of this object and track whether there are more galaxies like it hidden in the large clusters of the universe. In Xataka | A new “solar system” has just been discovered. There’s just one problem: it shouldn’t exist. In Xataka | We have been deceived by the distances of the Solar System: the closest neighbor to Neptune is Mercury Cover | POT

the invisible leak that locked a town in an industrial dystopia

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This afternoon, the Basque authorities restrictions have been lifted in Muskizbut the fear still remains. Living in the shadow of the largest refinery in the Basque Country, Petronor, has turned this Biscayan municipality into a scene straight out of England at the end of the 19th century. Its streets have been empty, schools with minimal activity and neighbors equipped with masks. The mist that covered the town on Thursday and part of Friday was not fog, but a toxic cloud. The invisible escape. It all started on Thursday morning due to a technical incident in a gasoline tank at the petrochemical plant, which caused the evaporation and emission into the atmosphere of the volatile fraction of the fuel. According to the Muskiz city councilbetween 10:15 and 11:00 a.m., stations such as the one in the San Julián neighborhood recorded peaks of between 100 and 200 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m³) of benzene. To put the figure in perspective, the regulatory limit value for the annual average is just 5 µg/m³, meaning that emissions far exceeded the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO). In addition, the chemist Néstor Etxebarria (UPV/EHU) warned that not only benzene escapedbut also toluene and xylene, completing the dangerous chemical cocktail known as BTEX, very volatile and toxic substances. The real danger of hydrocarbons. To understand the severity of the leak, it is necessary to explain what benzene is. Simply put, it is a colorless, volatile liquid with a sweet smell. that penetrates very easily into the bloodstream through the lungs. In the short term, acute inhalation causes poisoning similar to that of solvents: drowsiness, dizziness, headaches, tremors and, in severe levels, loss of consciousness. However, the real danger lies in its long-term effects. International health and environmental agencies (IARC, ATSDR, EPA) classify benzene as a confirmed human carcinogen (Group 1). This substance directly attacks the bone marrow, depressing the formation of blood cells, which can trigger aplastic anemia and acute myeloid leukemia. The WHO itself assumes in its guidelines that, being a genotoxic agent, there is no exposure threshold that the human body can safely tolerate. Any dose, no matter how small, increases the risk. Communication chaos, dizziness and fear. Despite the obvious chemical danger, the management of the crisis has outraged those affected. Although the escape occurred on Thursday morning, The Mail denounced that the Basque Government It did not issue preventive confinement recommendations until 8:17 p.m., ten hours after the incident. The usual Petronor emergency sirens, which sound every Thursday as a drill, remained silent yesterday, and neither mass alert was sent (ES-Alert) to cell phones because Public Health considered that “it was not an emergency.” While the Local Police patrolled with megaphones asking residents to lock themselves in, the director of Public Health, Guillermo Herrero, minimized the crisis in Radio Euskadiensuring that there was no “risk for the population” and that a “normal life” could be led. This vision contrasted head-on with that of the mayor of Muskiz, Eduardo Briones, who to the microphones Chain Being, He recommended not going out because “it is better to sin by excess.” The human impact was immediate. In statements to The MailItxaso Etxegarai recounted how her asthmatic daughter lost her appetite and suffered severe headaches, while her eyes stung. For his part, retiree José Taboada had to go look for his wife at work because, after inhaling the air, “he had gotten dizzy” and “had lost consciousness a little.” Panic also crossed the walls of the refinery. chow to detail The Jumpdozens of contract workers abandoned their jobs on Friday morning. “No one has told us anything clearly. While we are waiting, we are at the site of toxicity,” an operator reported to the BEsuffering from a sore throat. Unions such as LAB and CCOO demanded the paralysis of the plant. Impunity and legal loopholes. This episode is not an isolated event, but rather the straw that breaks the camel’s back for a population accustomed to living with industrial pollution. In fact, it is the third incident in just two months (in December there was another leak, and this same Sunday an electrical failure caused immense flames and black smoke) As detailed by the chemist and environmental disseminator Julen Rekondo in COPE chainthe problem lies in a flagrant legal vacuum: Spanish regulations sanction companies if they exceed the annual average of benzene, but does not contemplate punitive limits for sharp point peaks. This allows serious episodes not to count as an infraction. Neighborhood fatigue. Petronor’s shadow is long. The refinery is responsible of more than 10% of greenhouse gas emissions and Public Health data show that the Muskiz area registers mortality rates from lung cancer between 11% and 45% higher than the Basque average. Added to this is citizen distrust due to “revolving doors.” The residents gathered this week remembered that former senior officials of the Basque Government, such as Josu Jon Imaz or Iñaki Zudaire, ended up occupying positions of maximum power in Petronor and Repsol, which raises doubts about the rigor of institutional control. To channel this satiety, the neighborhood platform “Las Karreras Variant Stop“has called a protest demonstration for this Sunday, March 1, at 12:00 p.m., demanding real solutions. The air clears, but the indignation remains. The sirens never sounded, but the silence in Muskiz has been deafening. Although at two in the afternoon on Friday, February 27, the authorities lifted the preventive confinement when benzene stabilized at 2 µg/m³, normality here is a fragile concept. The gas will dissipate with the wind currents, but the uncertainty of living in a chemical Russian roulette remains entrenched in the lungs of a people who demand to stop being the collateral damage of industrial progress. Image | Zarateman and Gustavo Fring Xataka | The United Kingdom has found lithium under its feet, but extracting it is going to be a billion-dollar logistical nightmare

the new “atomic bomb” is invisible

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In every major conflict or world war, there was a time when a technology apparently secondary changed the rules of the game and redefined what it meant to have an advantage. Sometimes it is not the loudest, nor the heaviest, nor even the most visible weapon, but the invisible infrastructure that supports everything else from the air. A war in the clouds. The invasion of Ukraine has shown that the modern battlefield is not only measured in kilometers conquered or armor destroyed, but in megabits per second. High-speed satellite connectivity transformed the way to fight by allowing almost instant command, control and coordination at any point on the front. That has led to a dark reversal, because when that network is cut, not only is the Internet lost: Vision, synchronization and response capacity are lost, and the affected army is suddenly disoriented in an environment where every second decision can be lethal. The digital trap. Taking advantage of Russian troops’ desperation to regain access to Starlink after geo-blocking imposed by Elon Musk on SpaceX, a Ukrainian cyber assault unit launched a covert operation on Telegram. The trap: offering false registration services on a supposed Ukrainian “white list.” What happened? That Russian soldiers, believing they were reestablishing their connection, voluntarily sent terminal identifiers, account data and exact location coordinates. Instead of the Internet, they received 155 mm artillery fire. More than 2,000 data entries and thousands of dollars paid for the fictitious service turned the technological necessity into a kind of lethal “honeypot”, where each attempt to reconnect revealed a target. Starlink as strategic infrastructure. In this way, the SpaceX constellation not only facilitated communications, but also allowed to operate dronescoordinate attacks and maintain digitalized logistics on an extended front. A trap that has possibly been a pioneer in the Ukrainian war, but that will surely be the “norm” in future conflicts. When the company limited access only to verified terminals Because of Ukraine, Russia was suddenly deprived of a system on which it also depended. The interruption, in fact, has slowed offensives, forced a return to more vulnerable manned vehicles and generated chaos described by Russian voices as an operational “hell.” Connectivity stopped being a complement and became backbone of combat. Satellite Internet as an “atomic bomb.” The digital deception operation was not only a brilliant tactical action, but the verification of a strategic reality: In contemporary war, dominance of the information spectrum and networks is equivalent to the air superiority of the 20th century. Without real-time data there are no precise drones, no coordinated command, and no synchronized attacks. Disconnection de facto turns a modern force into an army blindexposed and extremely slow. Thus, the adversary that controls the network is not only able to listen and observe, it also has the ability to decide when the enemy speaks or, as in the case at hand, when he falls. Balloons in the sky. The data that confirms the importance of being “connected” on the battlefield has arrived this week. Given the loss of Starlink and the delay of its own Rassvet satellite constellationMoscow has activated emergency solutions such as the Barrage-1 stratospheric ballooncapable of raising 5G communication equipment to 20 kilometers in height to offer regional connectivity. The idea is not new and it could work as temporary nodebut it lacks the global coverage and resilience of thousands of laser-connected satellites. Furthermore, its lower altitude makes it a potential target for anti-aircraft defenses, hunting drones or electronic warfare, transferring the battle for connectivity to the physical sky as well. Without a network there is no modern war. If you will also, the Russian dependence on commercial systems and the Ukrainian effectiveness in exploiting that vulnerability reveal a profound change in the nature of the conflict. Digital infrastructure is no longer a simple logistical support, it has become a decisive weapon that articulates all the others. While Moscow searches technological patches and alternatives that time will tell if they are improvised or not, kyiv has shown that cutmanipulating or controlling the net can upset the balance on the front line faster than any ground offense. In the war that is being fought in Ukraine, and possibly in those to come, whoever dominates the connection in space, dominates the combat. Image | Support Forces of Ukraine Command, Ukraine Defense Ministry In Xataka | It is evident that Russia can absorb thousands and thousands of casualties. So Ukraine is already designing a much riskier plan In Xataka | An unprecedented experiment is happening in Ukraine: bombs have turned dogs into other animals

We just discovered that silicon has an invisible bottleneck, and that has a direct impact on our solar panels

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You turn on a solar cell and wait for the electrons to flow. But there is a moment, invisible and very brief, in which a part of them simply stops. A new study published in Physical Review B just explained why. The discovery. Researchers from the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Nanoscience (IMDEA Nanoscience) and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany (MPIP) have discovered that, in silicon, photoexcited electrons do not activate immediately when they receive light. For a few picoseconds (millionths of a millionth of a second) they become stuck in small traps of the material before they can circulate and generate current. The person responsible has a name: a phonon bottleneck. What are phonons and why do they matter? Silicon has a peculiarity compared to other materials: for an electron to be released when receiving light, photons are not enough. According to account IMDEA Nanoscience in its note also needs the collaboration of phonons, which are the vibrations of the crystalline lattice of the material itself. As has been discovered, when such timing vibrations are scarce, electrons become temporarily trapped in surface defects near the edge of the energy band. What no one expected to find. Enrique Cánovas himself, one of the authors of the study, recognize that the discovery was accidental. “What we observed was an accident. We expected an instantaneous response, but instead we saw the electrons take a breather,” he says. Until now, the phonon bottleneck was known in high-energy situations, when silicon was excited with very energetic electrons. This is the first experimental record of the phenomenon with low-energy excitations, which occur with near-infrared light, or even below, the absorption threshold of the material. Until now unexplored territory. Why it has practical relevance. Silicon is the heart of the vast majority of solar panels of the world. Any inefficiency in how your electrons respond to light has direct consequences on the performance of those photovoltaic cells. Understanding that this transient delay exists, and that it has an identifiable cause, opens the door to two possible paths: designing materials or structures that minimize this jam, or even taking advantage of it in a controlled way to improve the behavior of the device. It remains to be seen if the impact of this phenomenon is significant enough to justify redesigns in the manufacturing of solar cells and photovoltaic systems. Cover image | yue chan In Xataka | Imitating photosynthesis to transform CO2 into fuel was always a dream. One that has already come true

make it so cheap that it is “invisible” to the user

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DeepSeek is the spearhead when we talk about artificial intelligence from China. Not only does it have a great performancebut the own Microsoft has raised the alarm by pointing out that its policy is allowing it to gain users in markets in which others such as OpenAI has it more difficult. Other companies like Tencent or Alibaba are taking giant steps in the fight for AI, and a few days ago ByteDance –TikTok– presented a Seedance 2.0 which is impressive… and now it’s giving you headaches. But the great ones are not the only ones, and with a China focused on the development of robotics and AIwe must talk about other smaller ‘players’. Zhipu AI and MiniMax are two of the “tigers“that, in just a few years, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and that have models that have a radically different philosophy to that of OpenAI and other Western giants. Their models are sold as life companions, tools that people can use on a daily basis without worrying about the price. And, within that speech, MiniMax just launched the M2.5, a model that wants to become a “digital employee” and that its managers have classified as its first “frontier model” so cheap that it is not worth measuring the price. AI too cheap to worry about price M2.5 is now official and, as stated South China Morning PostMiniMax did not want to waste the opportunity to launch it in a hectic week for the AI ​​industry in China. Technically, M2.5 is an LLM – large language model – that can handle about 230 billion total parameters, but only uses 10 billion per token. Being a Mixture of Experts system, each call only involves the experts directly necessary to resolve the request. Bringing the figure down to earth, that means that it is a capable model, but by user request does not use its full potentialwhich implies low inference costs and very low prices for users. Those responsible for it claim that the price is just one dollar per hour of continuous operation, spending 100 tokens per second. This means that you can have an “agent” working continuously throughout that time at a price between 10 and 20 times lower than other models such as Opus, Gemini 3 Pro either GPT-5. Such an aggressive policy makes M2.5 a model “too cheap to quantify,” according to those responsible. facilitating that mass adoption because the user can stop optimizing each order he gives to the AI. That phrase “too cheap to put in” it’s a wink to the historic comment that electricity from nuclear energy would be too cheap to measure. Internal score in different tests | Image: MiniMax And something important is that M2.5 is not a simple chatbot. It is available on platforms such as Ollama, HuggingFace, ModelScope in China or GitHub, and MiniMax itself points out that 30% of the company’s internal tasks are already carried out by M2.5 itself. Furthermore, 80% of new code is generated by the model. That is, it is more optimized for working alone than for chatting. This code created by code thing is not unique to M2.5, and Codex and Opus is also in this boat. The model has already been put to the test and, although in some tasks it achieves notable results, especially compared to other models open-weightits score is far from that of the closed models. In the results internal from the company itself, managed to double the score of the previous model, the M2.1, but as SCMP points out, these internal benchmark scores are difficult to verify independently. Internal benchmark in coding | Image: MiniMax But, in the end, whether more or less capable compared to other models, MiniMax M2.5 is another example of the strategy that China is pushing with artificial intelligence. While the United States is striving to demonstrate that it has increasingly powerful and capable proprietary models, AI is in a narrative in which aims to promote cheaper and more useful models for the user. This implies not only that they have a good performance/price ratio, but also that they can run on everyday devices without enormous computing power. And now that, supposedly, certain Chinese companies You will be able to get your hands on some of the best GPUs of NVIDIA to train AI, the boost to that strategy may be notable. Images | MiniMax (edited) In Xataka | There is another race equally important as the one for chips to win AI and in that China takes the lead

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

Tesla popularized “invisible” car door handles. China has just handed down its death sentence

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In China they have been wanting for a long time ban retractable handles of the vehicles, a design commonly popularized by Tesla. It is no wonder, since over the last few years we have witnessed serious fatal and safety incidents involving this type of handles. The regulations will force many of the best-selling models on the market to be redesigned. what has happened. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China has approved a new safety regulation that will come into force on January 1, 2027. The regulation prohibits door handles recessed in the body and requires that all vehicles have visible handles and a mechanical opening system on each door, according to they count from Financial Times. Why is it important. The hidden handle design has become popular in recent years in electric cars. In China they had been following Tesla’s example for a long time, looking for a more minimalist aesthetic and small aerodynamic improvements. Virtually all of the major electric car manufacturers in China have models with retractable handles. However, these designs have proven to be dangerous in emergency situations. The trigger. A fatal accident in 2024 with Aito’s M7 SUV was one of the main triggers. Three people, including a two-year-old child, died after a crash. Videos shared on social media showed rescue teams breaking windows to try to save victims. As Aito explained in a statement, “the power and signal cables were immediately cut, preventing the handle controller from receiving the ejection signal.” The concern continued after two accidents with the Xiaomi SU7whose videos showed people struggling to open the vehicle doors to rescue those inside, without luck. What the regulations require. Just like they explain from CarNewsChina, the ‘GB 48001-2026’ standard states that each door must have a mechanical exterior handle located in specific areas of the door surface, with sufficient space for manual operation in emergencies such as deployment of restraint systems or battery problems. Electric handles must include independent mechanical mechanisms capable of withstanding forces of at least 500 N. On the other hand, inside, each side door must have at least one mechanical opening handle with graphic symbols of at least 100 mm × 70 mm and clearly visible instructions or pictographic symbols. Impact on the industry. The regulations will affect numerous models from manufacturers such as Xiaomi, BYD and others that have adopted designs similar to Tesla. Bill Russo, founder of Automobility, counted to FT that the standard will require changes to some models but not a complete redesign. “Many manufacturers already design alternative handle solutions for export markets with different regulations,” he explains. “With the new regulation, we will be ready to change any handle as the government wants,” Stella Li, executive vice president of BYD, told Bloomberg TV. Outside China. Perhaps the most notorious case is in the United States, where the issue of hidden handles is also being investigated. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened investigations on Tesla Model Y and Model 3 over concerns about the accessibility of their vehicles in emergencies. A particularly serious accident in California that caused the death of three teenagers in a Cybertruckwhere neither the occupants nor anyone close to the incident could open the doors through the hidden handles and reinforced glass, prompted Congress to take action and Tesla to announce a redesign of its handles. Cover image | Eyosias G In Xataka | Putting solar panels on an electric car sounds like a total win-win: the reality of extra autonomy is a bucket of cold water

The most famous bridge in the US recorded more than 2,000 suicides. Until in 2024 they found an “invisible” solution

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When the golden gate Opened almost a century ago, it was celebrated as an architectural triumph of engineering and modernity. It happens that the history of many of the great works has had a second reading. Sometimes they have failed due to technical problemsand others have ended up marked by uses that no one foresaw. Over time, a bridge can become something very different from what its plans imagined. The bridge and its dark history. The Golden Gate Bridge, inaugurated in 1937 between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific, has been for decades one of the places most associated to suicide in the United Stateswith a rate of more than 2,000 jumps confirmed and a real figure surely higher because not all cases are seen nor all bodies are recovered. In 2006 there was one of the worst years, with at least 34 deathsand that was also the turning point in which relatives of victims, as Paul Mullerdecided that it was unacceptable to continue living with that routine of tragedies without a physical and effective response on the bridge itself. The barrier that changed destiny. The solution ended up being a deterrent system “invisible” installed along both sides of the bridge, one based on stainless steel cables of marine grade placed about six meters below the pedestrian walkways. It is not something that can be seen from afar or from normal traffic, but it is evident to those who look over the edge. The idea is simple and tremendous at the same time: if someone tries to jump, they fall on that structure, are injured or shocked, and the possibility of completing the fatal fall into the water is cut off. The barrier created to prevent suicides The effectiveness of the new impact. For many years the Golden Gate recorded an average of about 30 deaths annuallya figure that seemed entrenched and almost impossible to break. However, in 2024, with the facility entering its final phase and with adjustments still underway, the deaths they went down to eight. Last year, in 2025 and with the system already operating for twelve months, there were only four and there were no falls between June and December, a stretch that could be one of the longest without suicides on the bridge, although old records are not always complete. By the way, from the beginning of 2026 there is already a casewhich reminds us that there is no such thing as zero risk. That said, the general decline is so evident that even its promoters see it as clear proof of effectiveness and a mirror for the rest of the hanging architectures. Surveillance and intervention. The barrier does not act alone, because the bridge maintains an electronic surveillance system and a team of agents whose task is to detect and stop attempts before they occur. In the last year, 94 successful interventions were achieved, about half of what was normal before full installation, suggesting that the problem does not disappear suddenly. In fact, there are still people who come with the idea of ​​jumping, but now the margin of action is greater and death is no longer as immediate or as certain as it was for decades. Installation of anti-suicide barriers, February 2020 Against inertia and cost. The truth is that the installation of the barrier came after a very long road full of political blocks, doubts about aesthetics, discussions about price and debates about if it would really work. Already in 1939 it was recommended to raise the railings, but for decades measures were avoided while the death count rose from 500 to 1,000 and it continued to grow with chilling regularity. The organized pressure from family and professionals ended up crystallizing at the Bridge Rail Foundationand after years of paperwork the work started in 2018. The project also became very expensive, going from an estimate of 76 million dollars to a final cost of 224 million dollarsand even took longer to install than the bridge itself to build. The “invisible” barrier Why it saves lives. One of the central ideas is that reducing easy access to a lethal method works, even if it sounds too simple. A 1978 study by Richard Seiden, at the University of California at Berkeley, followed 515 people who had gone to the Golden Gate with the intention of jumping and were deterred, and concluded that 94% were still alive or had died of natural causes. This reinforces the idea that many suicidal crises are acute and not permanent, and that placing a specific obstacle at the exact moment can make the difference between dying and surviving. Bridges and the same problem. There is no doubt, the Golden Gate incident was not an isolated case, and there are other iconic bridges that have ended up with a similar reputation by becoming recurring scenes of suicides. In the United States, the royal gorge bridge next to Hoover Dam, or the Chesapeake Bay Bridgethey have had known histories and episodes that have fueled debates about surveillance and barriers. In Canada, the Bloor Viaduct in Toronto was for years one of the most problematic points until it was installed a great prevention structureand something similar happened in the United Kingdom with the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, where the combination of height, accessibility and symbolism forced action and reinforce early intervention. Also in Australia, the Sydney Harbor Bridge has been targeted of concern and initiatives preventive, and in Europe there are numerous cases on urban bridges and high-rise viaducts that share the same pattern: very busy and at the same time very exposed. The same idea is repeated in all of them, when a bridge becomes a known point, it is not just a problem of physical security, it is a social phenomenon that feeds on itself, and the more famous it is, the more important it becomes to cut that inertia before it becomes part of your identity. The legacy. The Golden Gate had been in operation for decades … Read more

the secret was an invisible ice “blanket”

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For decades, planetary geologists have faced a paradox that didn’t quite add up. On the one hand, the missions like Curiosity in Gale Crater show irrefutable evidence that there were lakes of liquid water for thousands or millions of years. On the other hand, climate models insist that ancient Mars It was a cold place.with temperatures well below freezing point. A new paradigm. The question in this case is quite clear: how can there be stable liquid water on a planet where the thermometer barely rises above zero degrees? A new study led by Rice University and published in AGU Advances seems to have found the missing piece in the puzzle: seasonal ice shields. The LakeM2ARS model. To solve the mystery, the team of researchers developed a specific model called LakeM2ARS. This model included everything we know about terrestrials, but adapted to the extreme conditions that existed on Mars 3.6 billion years ago. That is, a climate with less sunlight due to a younger Sun, an atmosphere with much more carbon dioxide and much more aggressive freezing and thawing cycles than those on Earth. Using these models, the researchers began to apply different climatic situations, covering a period of 30 Martian years, which is equivalent to 56 Earth years. The results in this case pointed to something quite fascinating: the water in the lakes only froze on their surface, creating a shield of ice. A natural “blanket”. The research introduces the concept of “ice shield” or “natural blanket.” Instead of being a solid block of ice, the Gale Crater lakes they would have been protected by a seasonal ice sheet thin enough to allow dynamic processes beneath it. In this way, this “blanket” acted as a thermal insulator, since ice has a low thermal conductivity. The good thing about this is that once a layer forms on the surface, the liquid water underneath is “trapped” and protected from the frigid air, maintaining a stable temperature even if the thermometer plummets outside. Another advantage. Beyond this we can see that the low Martian pressure causes liquid water to tend to sublimate quickly. The ice thus acted as a physical plug, conserving the water inventory for decades or even centuries. But it is not that the water underneath was completely cold, but rather that since it was a thin layer, sunlight could pass through it (similar to what happens in the lakes of the Dry Valleys of Antarctica), generating a slight internal heating. The missing piece. One of the biggest criticisms of the cold Mars hypothesis was the absence of geomorphological traces. The big question we can undoubtedly ask ourselves is that if Mars was a freezer, where are the large moraine deposits and the scars left by the glaciers as they advance? The Rice University study gives an elegant answer: the ice was too thin. Since they were not massive glaciers, but rather thin and seasonal layers, they did not have the weight or dynamics necessary to erode the terrain drastically. This fits perfectly with Curiosity’s observations, which show fine-grained lake sediments, typical of calm waters, and not the chaos of rocks that a glacier would leave behind. Microscopic life. This discovery changes the rules of the game for astrobiology, which wants above all to search for evidence of life on the red planet. In this case, the theory is put forward that if Martian lakes were sealed by ice, they became extremely stable environments. Under the ice, life would have been protected from harmful UV radiation and extreme temperature fluctuations. This is why Mars did not need to be a tropical paradise to be habitable; It was enough for him to have a good “armor” of ice that would keep his liquid oases safe from the icy vacuum of space. Images | BoliviaIntelligent In Xataka | China has just resolved one of the biggest doubts about going to Mars with the birth of six space mice

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