lost

Sudan hid hundreds of unknown tombs of a lost civilization. They have appeared thanks to satellites

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If there is a known civilization within the African continent, it is Ancient Egypt and figures like Ramses or Cleopatra. However, relatively nearby there was another kingdom studied at length by archaeology: Nubia (although less famous to the general public). And between the two, a desert to pass by, literally and figuratively. Because there is the Atbai desert, a region between the Nile and the Red Sea where an archeology team just discovered hundreds of tombs from more than 5,000 years ago arranged in a monumental way, as you can see on these lines. The discovery. An international archeology team has identified 280 stone funerary monuments scattered throughout the desert, of which only 20 were known to exist. That is, 260 are “new.” The funeral complex has been called Atbai Enclosure Burials and its construction probably dates back to between 4500 and 2500 BC. These structures consist of large circular or ovoid enclosures delimited by large walls made of local stone, whose diameters vary from five meters in the most modest examples to reaching 82 meters. Inside they have found remains of both humans and cattle, sheep and goats. The internal layout of some tombs points to a certain social inequality: in several landmarks there is a central burial that dominates the structure, with other humans and animals arranged around it. In fact, the tomb with the most grave goods contained the remains of about 18 cows. Why is it important. Because these tombs suggest that the region was not a mere passageway between civilizations, but the home where pastoral people lived. The Atbai Desert was not a no man’s land between Egypt and the Red Sea, but had its own identity. As suggests the paperthe monuments are the cultural expression of a society with social strata in which wealth was evidenced with rituals, these stone milestones and livestock, like other neighboring regions. Context. According to previous excavations and the radiocarbon used on them, these monuments were probably built during the decline of the African Humid Period, when that area located in northeastern Africa went from more humid conditions to aridity because at that time the Atbai desert was not such: it contained vegetation and water sources, even if they were seasonal. As the climate became harsher, herding cows also became a more arduous task, so they adapted their herds: sheep, goats and finally camels. How they discovered it. In a word: satellites. The team made up of archaeologists from Macquarie University, France’s HiSoMA research unit and the Polish Academy of Sciences used satellite remote sensing over the eastern Sudan desert to map 1,000 kilometers of desert in search of more clues to its history. Why would an archaeologist want to avoid digging? Basically because in Sudan there is an armed conflict which means that field work can be directly lethal. But in addition to locating the tombs, the satellite images also revealed dense networks of ancestral trails engraved in the landscape by the repeated passage of livestock between grazing areas and water sources, a direct and visible trace of livestock activity linked to the funerary sites. That is, they not only found where they buried their dead, but also the paths they traveled in life. Yes, but. The first “but” is obvious: the majority of this funerary display has only been seen on satellite and has not been excavated, which leaves basic information such as precise dating in the air. On the other hand, this discovery located in the Atbai Desert could be just the tip of the iceberg: others may have been lost due to erosion, floods or even modern mining, which is very active in the area. The authors themselves acknowledge that they do not know with certainty whether these structures are exclusive to the Atbai or if they existed in neighboring regions and simply have not survived. The million-dollar question is: if in a desert as little studied as this one, 260 monuments have just appeared at once, how much history of the pastoralist Sahara will still be hidden under the sand waiting to be discovered? In Xataka | We just discovered that a semi-legendary Nile king really existed thanks to a 17th century document found in trash In Xataka | A Spaniard claims to have solved how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built: the answer was right under our noses Cover | Atbai Enclosure Burials: Monumentalism, Pastoralism and Environmental Change in the Mid-Holocene East Nubian Deserts edited with Gemini

Claude has helped a man recover $400,000 worth of bitcoin he lost 11 years ago. Logged in and forgot password

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An X user named Cprkrn recently told of his odyssey with a (very) happy ending in X. In 2015 he bought five bitcoins (BTC) when the price was around $250. In a fit of university euphoria he decided that his password should be an anti-establishment manifesto and changed it to the phrase ““lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)”. The problem is that he did it completely stoned, and when he got up the next morning he realized that his money had disappeared. He then began an odyssey to try to remember that password. One with a happy ending. Eleven years of despair. For eleven years, those five bitcoins remained lost while their value continued to increase. Today its value is around $400,000, and our protagonist has not stopped seeing how this fortune had slipped through his fingers. To try to recover the password he tried everything, especially brute force attacks to try to guess the password with thousands of combinations. He looked through old folders that he had saved without success, and then something occurred to him: turn to Claude. Claude didn’t hack your wallet, he was just a spectacular detective. What Cprkrn ended up doing was ask Claude to analyze 1 GB of iCloud backups, old Apple notes, emails, and forgotten system files saved on a computer I had used in college. The challenge was not to “crack” the password, but to find the trace of how it could have been created. Order within chaos. What Claude did was organize all that data that was scattered to turn it into a perfect structured file that could be analyzed. After evaluating all the information, the AI ​​model realized that it was trying to open the wrong file. He located a file called wallet.dat from before the password change that caused the nightmare, and crossed it with a mnemonic phrase that the user had written down in an old notebook that he had discarded. That allowed that password to be reconstructed, and in less than an hour Cprkrn had recovered his fortune and regained access to your BTC wallet. Money safe. The first thing he did after discovering that password was move those bitcoins to another secure wallet to avoid problems: every conversation we have with Claude or other chatbots is recorded on the servers of those companies in plain text, so Cprkrn covered his back to prevent that information from being used to avoid scares. Blessed Darius. The joy of having recovered those five bitcoins led this user to publish a message on Twitter telling the whole adventure. In said message promised who would name his future son “Darío” in honor of Anthropic CEO, Darío Amodei. Needles in the haystack. History shows that great language models are extraordinary tools for finding needles in haystacks. Traditional tools helped, but AI’s ability to analyze information and find patterns is once again amazing. This anecdote is linked, for example, to recent rise of models like Claude Mythos Preview to find security vulnerabilities that seemed impossible to find. Again, everything is based on the ability of these models to “understand” the data provided to them, organize them and extract what is needed from them. Being a digital Diogenes has a reward. For years the recommended practice for those changing or upgrading equipment was “delete/format the old, start from scratch with the new.” This story changes the focus, because in the age of AI, messy data from 15 or 20 years ago is not digital garbage: it can be a treasure that helps us review our past and reveal data that we no longer remember. The story, however, contrasts with that of James Howells, who for years struggled to try to recover the hard drive with thousands of bitcoins that ended up in a landfill. He ended up giving up after the court’s refusal to give him permission to search for that hard drive. Image | Kanchanara In Xataka | The NYT claims to have found Satoshi Nakamoto and the evidence is as conclusive as ever: little or nothing

The United Kingdom has just activated an unprecedented air mission over a lost island in the Atlantic. There is a hantavirus suspect

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In 1961, a nurse had to be urgently evacuated from Tristan da Cunha after a volcanic eruption forced completely vacate to the entire population of the remote island. For weeks, that small territory lost in the middle of the Atlantic remembered something that remains true today: when an emergency occurs there, arriving on time can become an extremely complicated operation even for a country like the United Kingdom. The forgotten island of the Atlantic. While dozens of passengers from the MV Hondius cruise They began to disembark in Tenerife between health checks and repatriation flights for a hantavirus outbreakmuch further south and far from the cameras, the United Kingdom has started an operation completely different on an island that almost no one would know how to locate on a map. Tristan da Cunha, considered the most remote inhabited island on the planet, has suddenly become the scene of a unprecedented air mission for British forces after a british citizen showed symptoms compatible with hantavirus after leaving MV Hondius. With just 221 inhabitants, no airport and almost a week by boat from the nearest major port in South Africa, the island was caught in an extremely delicate situation when oxygen reserves began to run out and the small local medical system found itself unable to face the risk of contagion and isolation alone. An unprecedented military mission. The British response was as extraordinary as the place where he was to be executed. The Royal Air Force mobilized an Airbus A400M Atlas from RAF Brize Norton accompanied by a Voyager tanker plane to carry paratroopers, doctors and tons of medical supplies to the middle of the Atlantic. There was no possible landing strip, so the United Kingdom took a unprecedented decision: drop military doctors by parachute over the island. Six members of the 16 Air Assault Brigade They jumped alongside a doctor and an intensive care nurse in an extremely complex operation marked by strong winds and a minimal margin for error. The jump was made practically over the ocean before to correct the trajectory towards the island, with the real risk of ending up falling directly into the Atlantic if something went wrong. Never before have British forces deployed medical personnel by parachute drop on a humanitarian mission of this type. Medical supplies were dropped on the remote island, which has no landing strip and has a population of just 221. The cruise ship that took the problem to the middle of the ocean. It all began weeks before aboard the MV Hondius, the expedition cruise ship that was sailing through the South Atlantic when it appeared a hantavirus outbreak which would end up leaving several dead and multiple confirmed cases. The case has been of particular concern because the identified variant belonged to the Andean strain, one of the few capable of be transmitted between people. Apparently, the British citizen who ended up isolated in Tristan da Cunha had abandoned ship mid April and began to develop symptoms days later on an island that, as we said, does not have advanced hospital capacity and is normally cared for by just two medical professionals. While some passengers were treated in the Netherlands or South Africa and others were isolated in the United Kingdom After returning from Tenerife, the British health authorities quickly understood that the real problem was no longer on the cruise ship, but in that small isolated community in the middle of the ocean where any worsening could turn into a emergency impossible to manage with conventional means. Geography as a threat. Plus: the operation revealed the extent to which geography continues to condition even to countries with enormous military capabilities. Tristan da Cunha has no airport, no regular air routes and its sea connections are extremely slow and limited. Simply evacuating paratroopers and medics after the mission will require a complex maritime operation carefully planned due to health risk. I was counting a few hours ago BBC that the jump was not made over a large open space either, but rather over a small island buffeted by winds that usually exceed 40 kilometers per hour. The soldiers, in fact, ended up landing at the local golf course while the island’s inhabitants improvised receiving medical equipment and unloading more than three tons of supplies for the hospital. All this to contain a possible contagion in a territory where any logistical failure can take days to correct. The unknown Atlantic. If you will, history also reveals an uncomfortable reality about major modern health and geopolitical crises: almost all the attention tends to be focused on in visible places and connected while huge peripheral spaces remain out of focus until an emergency breaks out. Thus, while the media focus has followed the arrival of the cruise ship to the Canary Islands minute by minute, the hantavirus has ended up activating parachute dropsmilitary doctors and extreme logistical operations on Tristan da Cunha, a place so remote that even a relatively small health emergency forced resources to be mobilized normally associated with war scenarios or major catastrophes. Image | Ministry of Defense In Xataka | It is not so contagious, but it is very lethal: in Argentina the hantavirus went from 17% to 33% in the blink of an eye In Xataka | We believed that hantavirus did not jump between humans. Until someone went to a birthday party in Argentina

Not only has the US just lost the “eye” that Hormuz watched, its nuclear aircraft carrier is in Africa for fear of being shot down

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Year 2019, an American surveillance drone more than 200 million of dollars disappears from the radar over the Gulf of Oman and, a few hours later, Iran shows its remains to the world on television. It was not the first time something like this had happened, but it was one of the most uncomfortable: a machine designed to see everything had been seen before it could react. Since then, in that part of the map, each silence in the systems begins to weigh more than it seems. Losing the “eye” that watched Hormuz. Confirmation of the fall of MQ-4C Triton a few hours ago is not a simple technical incident, but the loss of one of the most advanced pieces of the US surveillance system in the Persian Gulf. This drone, capable of operating at high altitude for hours and equipped with cutting-edge sensors, was key to monitor naval movementsdetect threats and maintain situational control around the strait. His disappearance, under circumstances still unclearleaves a most uncomfortable void at a time when every piece of information matters, especially in an environment where mines, drones and speedboats turn any mistake into a real threat. The “scared” aircraft carrier. Plus: the diversion of USS George H.W. Bush Going around Africa instead of crossing the Suez Canal is not just any logistical decision, but a symptom of that operational vulnerability What Washington is suffering from. The reason? Avoid passing through Bab el-Mandeb It means recognizing that even a nuclear aircraft carrier battle group, one of the most powerful assets in the world, cannot guarantee their security in a strait where actors such as the Houthis have demonstrated the ability to attack ships with drones and missiles. This detour not only lengthens times and complicates deployments, but also shows that military superiority does not always translate into freedom of movement. The uncomfortable precedent. Not only that. They counted the Forbes analysts that the decision of avoid Bab el-Mandeb It raises a disturbing question for the immediate future, because if this step is already considered too dangerous, what happens to Hormuz, much narrower, guarded and saturated with Iranian defensive systems? The logic is a huge question. Iran not only has more advanced technology than its regional allies, but also decades of specific preparation for that scenario. That makes any attempt to operate there a very high risk betand where even a single relevant impact could completely alter the strategic balance of the area. The strategic paradox. If you also want, what emerges from these movements is not that image of overflowing force that is presupposed, but rather of calculation and extreme fear. While American political discourse speaks of pressure, blockade and control, tactical decisions are revealing prudence, we would even say caution. The simple fact that the route of a nuclear aircraft carrier is redesigned to avoid a hot spot shows that the margin of error it’s tiny. And in an environment where a successful attack on a high-value ship could trigger disproportionate military and political consequences, the priority is no longer projecting strength and power, but avoiding losses at all costs. When losing a little is too much. In summary, the combination of drone crash Triton and the rnuclear aircraft carrier odeo paints a crystal clear picture: right now, the United States is not operating from a position of comfort, but rather in an extremely delicate balance. In that scenario, it doesn’t take a devastating blow to change the rules of the game, just with a symbolic one. Because a lost surveillance drone may be acceptable, even if it has the characteristics of the MQ-4C, but a damaged warship or a compromised nuclear aircraft carrier would be a very different story. Image | USN In Xataka | The US already has the first response to its blockade of Hormuz: a boomerang of unpredictable consequences called China In Xataka | The US has closed all exits from the Strait of Hormuz. And now Iran can put into practice what it has been preparing for 25 years

is that Iran has “lost the keys” and without them the balance is broken

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There are only a few maritime passages in the world capable of altering the global economy in a matter of days, and some of them are so narrow that they could fit inside a large city. Through those corridors they circulate every day hundreds of ships loaded with energy, raw materials and essential goods. Their fragility is such that a large military deployment is not necessary to alter them: it is enough that something stopped fitting so that the entire system suffers. Closed… but not by what it seems. For weeks, the international focus has been on whether the Strait of Hormuz was open or closedbut the reality could be much more disturbing: that Iran is not fully in control of the shutdown it caused. After laying naval mines in response to attacks by the United States and Israel, the passage was practically paralyzed, raising energy prices and giving Tehran a powerful tool of pressure. However, this same strategy has generated an unexpected situation in which, according to Iran has slippedthe blockade no longer depends only on a political or military decision, but on a technical problem that is much more difficult to reverse. The concept of “losing the keys”. Because the core of the problem is how the mines could have been deployed: hastily, disorganized and, in the worst case, without a record. accurate of your location. Some were even able to move through ocean currents, further complicating their location. So, this weekend counted the new york times that what in theory should have been a controlled closure of the strait has become something more chaotic and disturbing, where not even those who placed the mines know with certainty where they all are. The metaphor of “losing the keys” is not rhetorical, but rather a quite literal description of the situation that has been heard. in embassies in Tehran: Iran has blocked the door, but can no longer open it easily. An effective weapon against. He use of minescombined with the threat of drones and missiles, managed to reduce maritime traffic to a minimum and generate strong global pressure, but that strategic advantage began to turn against Tehran. To mitigate the impact, Iran has maintained limited corridors and spread supposedly safe routes, even allowing some ships to pass under certain conditions. Even so, the traffic flow has not been normalizedbecause the risk remains too high and uncertainty about the location of the mines persists. The technical limit of a modern war. Basically, something that we have been counting these weeks: the elimination of naval mines is one of the more complex operations in the military field, and not even powers like the United States have sufficient capabilities to quickly clear a road as critical as Hormuz. In this context, the Iranian situation is even more delicate: its own technical limitations, aggravated by the attacks to its naval infrastructuremake a quick reopening unfeasible. This introduces an unexpected factor into the negotiations, since the “technical limitations” mentioned by its leaders are not a diplomatic excuse, but a real obstacle. Unstable balance with risk of escalation. The result is a scenario extremely fragilewhere a partially blocked strait depends as much on political decisions as an out-of-control minefield. Neither Iran nor the United States have a clear image of how many mines there are or where they are, while Tehran retains the ability to plant more with small boats that are difficult to track. Of course there is also an option that no one rules out. Now that it is the United States that has decided to block Hormuz. Iran could be playing its cards, because the normal thing is that all the mines are mappedand that Tehran simply does not trust Washington and refuses to take any steps before receiving concrete concessions. And in all these scenarios, Hormuz becomes an area where any error, accident or incorrect calculation can escalate quickly, because the problem is no longer just who controls the passage, but that no one has full control of what happens underwater. Image | Jenikir In Xataka | The most buoyant market right now is selling streaming and satellite images of US movements to Iran. In Xataka | Commercial aviation is based on very old aircraft. The Iran war is going to make it even worse

To locate the pilot lost in Iran, the US used two tools. One was given by Boeing, the other is science fiction

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The call quantum magnetometry has promised to measure magnetic fields so weak that they border on detectability, using microscopic defects in synthetic diamonds capable of registering imperceptible variations. In the laboratory, these techniques already allow biological signals to be observed at surprising scales, but always in environments controlled and at very short distances. Outside of these ideal conditions, between noise, interference and distance, the great unknown remains the same: how far that sensitivity really goes. The United States claims to have the answer, and it is very difficult to believe. Two tools to find a missing person. Washington has counted that the operation to rescue to the airman shot down in Iran was based on a very specific combination of technologies that, together, made the difference between finding a man or losing him in an immense terrain. On the one hand, the pilot had a standard and well-known system available as Boeing’s CSELa communications device that allows send encrypted signals via satellite and guide rescue teams with relative precision. This type of tool, widely distributed in the armed forces, was key to confirming that he was still alive and limiting his initial position in an extremely hostile environment. The other tool that borders on the implausible. The second element of the rescue is the one that has generated the most interest (and doubts), since different information supported by a exclusive to the New York Post point to the use of a system called “Ghost Murmur” capable of detecting the human heartbeat at long distance using quantum magnetometry combined with artificial intelligence. On paper, the idea is extraordinary in a movie, but apparently also in the real world: identify the electromagnetic signature of a living body in the middle of the desert, isolate it from noise and convert it into an operational coordinate. It happens that the unknowns also begin here, because these types of signals are extremely weak and, until now, they could only be measured at a very short distance in controlled environments, which raises serious doubts about its real range in combat conditions. Between the plausible and the inflated. The context of the rescue itself suggests that, rather than replacing the classic system, this technology would have acted as a complement under very specific conditions: an environment with low electromagnetic interference, few human signatures or signals, and a target forced to briefly expose itself to activate its beacon. That is, not so much an omniscient tool as a very limited capacityuseful in ideal scenarios but difficult to extrapolate to more complex situations. The narrative of “finding someone by their heartbeat from miles away” fits well as a concept or in a Nolan film, but until now it clashed with known physical limitations. The “Venezuelan” precedent. Many skeptical analysts have gone for the jugular of these claims, speaking reverse engineering of another futuristic weapon to achieve the “Ghost Murmur”. Because skepticism does not arise in a vacuum, but in a recent context where technologies wrapped in an almost fantastic halo have already been presented, such as the supposed “discombobulator” mentioned by Trump in the operation against Nicolás Maduro. In that case, experts pointed out that it was probably a mix of capabilities real (electronic warfare, acoustic weapons or directed energy systems) presented as a single almost magical device. The pattern is recognizable: existing technologies reinterpreted or exaggerated in the public narrative. The war is also fought in the technological story. If you also want, as a whole, the rescue reveals something deeper than a simple military operation: the growing importance of technological narrative in modern conflicts. The United States used a tangible tooleffective and proven to locate the pilot, no more no less than a GPSbut he also hinted at another capacity that, real or not in the terms described, projects a image of superiority almost total. And possibly there, between what is technically possible and what is communicated, there is a space where perception matters as much as reality, and where sometimes the border between advanced technology and science fiction becomes deliberately blurred. The rescue movie, of course, has already been practically written. Image | US Air Force In Xataka | The rescue of a fallen US pilot in Iran seems like a science fiction story. And there are elements to think that it is In Xataka | Iran has found a hole in Israel’s shield: turning a missile into an explosive “storm” in full descent

To rescue the pilot lost in Iran, the US has told a story worthy of Spielberg. Some explosive images tell a very different story

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In military manuals, rescue missions in enemy territory are as rare as they are dangerous: In decades of modern conflicts, only a few have been successfully completed without becoming a complete disaster. Some have marked history for their failuresothers for their execution to the limit, but most share something in common: the margin of error It is practically non-existent. Two stories for the same mission. When explaining the rescue mission of an American pilot on Iranian territory, Washington has told a story that Spielberg himself would sign: a wounded airman, alone and hiding in a mountain crevice, resisting for almost two days while the enemy searches for him and an elite force that bursts in between explosions to get him out alive. Of course, there is another version that is not narrated by American communiqués, but by some explosive images launched from the Iranian side: destroyed aircraft, improvisation on the ground and an operation that, although successful in its end, seems much more chaotic than what was intended to be conveyed. Between the two, a story full of chiaroscuros is built where epic and uncertainty coexist. The demolition and the race against time. lThe story started several days ago with the downing of an F-15E in Iranian territory, an already exceptional fact as it was the first American fighter lost in combat in years. The two crew members eject, but only the pilot is quickly rescued, while the weapons systems officer is isolated in a hostile mountainous area. From there a race against time: The wounded airman climbs a ridge, hides in a crevice and emits intermittent signals so as not to give away their position, while Iranian forces, militias and even civilians motivated by rewards search the area. For hours, not even Washington is clear if he is still alive. The perfect official version. The American narrative presents the mission as an impeccable display of power and coordination, with special forces, bombers, drones and massive air cover executing one of the most complex rescue operations in its history. There is talk of surgical precision, absolute control of airspace and clean extraction no American casualtiesculminated with a triumphalist message that elevates the operation to a symbol of military superiority. The CIA involvement adds an almost cinematic component, with an apparent deception campaign that confuses the Iranian forces as they locate the pilot “like a needle in a haystack.” A US Army AH-6 Little Bird helicopter The “other” details. However, upon delving into all the data that has been appearing, important cracks appear in the story. The first rescue attempt fails under enemy fireseveral helicopters are damaged and at least one A-10 falls during the operation, which already calls into question the idea of ​​total control. It happens that the final extraction is not goes as planned. How much? Apparently, two special operations planes were trapped on the ground after their wheels sank on a makeshift runway, forcing emergency reinforcements to be sent and, attention, to destroy them later to prevent them from falling into Iranian hands. The images of the place They show charred remains of aircraft and helicopters, evidencing a much more eventful and risky operation than the official story suggests. The ambiguity of combat. Because another key point is the nature of the confrontation. While some versions speak of a “mass shooting”other more detailed sources indicate that there was no direct combat sustained on the ground, but rather air strikes against approaching Iranian forces. This difference is neither trivial nor minor, because it actually transforms a narrative of heroic confrontation in a very different where technological and aerial superiority was the truly decisive factor, reducing the drama of hand-to-hand combat, but increasing the feeling of distance between what was told and what happened. Propaganda, perception and war of stories. If you like, everything indicates that the rescue was not only a simple military operation, but a narrative battle in the middle of war. From the sidewalk in Washington, the story became a kind of “Easter miracle” useful for bolstering domestic support and projecting strength. However, from the sidewalk of Tehran, the simple fact of having shot down the plane It already served as proof that he could challenge the United States. In that context, every detail counts the same that every omissionbecause control of the story is almost as important as the tactical result. Success with many shadows. The pilot seems to have been finally rescued and that, in military terms, marks the success of the operation. However, the path to achieve it reveals something more complex: a mission on the edge, with failures, improvisation, extreme risks and decisions made on the fly that contradict the image of perfect execution. Perhaps for this reason, between the story that seems written for the cinema and the one revealed by the smoking remains on the ground, it remains a conclusion most uncomfortable: even the most successful operations can hide a reality much more fragile than one wants to admit. Image | US MARINE In Xataka | The US is going to end its war in the Middle East with a very uncomfortable reality: Iran had years of advantage underground In Xataka | If the question is “how close are we to an escalation in Iran,” the answer is US A-10s flying there

Microsoft’s problem is not having lost a quarter of its value in three months. It’s just that he’s been wrong for a long time.

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It seems like not so long ago when many celebrated Microsoft’s commitment to Azure. The decision of Satya Nadella Focusing on cloud computing soon began to translate into good financial results, propelling the Redmond company to achieve record revenue figures. But there was something more relevant in that movement: the realization that it could generate enormous benefits beyond Windows. That strategy, started in 2014ended up marking a before and after that became especially visible in 2019, when the firm reached for the first time a market capitalization of one trillion dollars. However, not even the most long-term oriented strategists, like Nadella, are free from errors. Microsoft has been chaining questionable decisions for some time that have ended up having a direct impact on its quarterly results. Specifically, the company has lost almost a quarter of its value in just three months. To put it in context, we are talking about its largest quarterly drop since the 2008 financial crisis. A decline of this magnitude, logically, does not go unnoticed. From cloud leadership to a strategy under pressure If we want to understand why the story has gone wrong, we have to start with the most obvious: the market has reacted harshly and, above all, selectively. In the first quarter of 2026, Microsoft lost about 23% of its stock market value, according to CNBCwhile the Nasdaq lost around 7%. It is not a minor movement, among other things because we are talking about a drop of a magnitude that has not been seen in almost two decades. This gap compared to the rest of the sector begins to point out problems that go beyond the general context. For a time, the commitment to OpenAI was seen as one of Microsoft’s great strategic successes, and it is not difficult to understand why. The company has invested around 13 billion dollarss to integrate this technology into Azure and into products like Copilot, which allowed it to place itself in a very advantageous position in the race of the artificial intelligence. However, with the passage of time we have also begun to see the other side of that decision: a very high technological dependence and a growing pressure to justify that deployment. As the months have passed, that close relationship has also quietly begun to change. Although Azure remains a key partner for OpenAI, the company led by Sam Altman has started to open your infrastructure to other actors to sustain the growth of its models, which increasingly require more computing capacity and energy. This does not break the alliance, but it does change its meaning, because Microsoft no longer concentrates with the same clarity all the strategic advantage that it had achieved in the first phases of the agreement. If we go down to the field of the product, where all these bets should materialize, the case of Copilot is especially illustrative. Microsoft has tried to make this assistant the axis of its new value propositionintegrating it into Microsoft 365 and a good part of its ecosystem, but the adoption It is not going at the expected pace. According to The Information, almost no one uses Copilot. What we have seen is that bringing artificial intelligence to the daily life of companies is more complex than it seemed on paper. Added to all this is a tension that is not always seen, but is very present in the backroom of this race: that of how to distribute resources in an environment of growing demand. Microsoft is investing massively in infrastructure to sustain the rise of AI, but at the same time it has to decide how it allocates that capacity between Azure and its own services. In January, CFO Amy Hood came to point out that Azure’s growth in the December quarter would have been even greater if the company had allocated more chips to the cloud instead of distributing some of that capacity among services like Copilot. Attrition is not limited to artificial intelligence, and that should also be taken into account. Also this year we have seen notable drops in income and in various areas of the Xbox ecosystemin a context also marked by previous price increases in Game Pass and on the consoles. It may seem like a minor front next to Azure or Microsoft 365, but it helps complete the picture of a company that has been opening too many flanks at the same time. What we have seen is that even in areas where it had a consolidated position, Microsoft is finding it more difficult to keep pace. Put all these pieces together, and what begins to emerge is an increasingly evident disconnect between Microsoft’s operational strength and the way the market is valuing its strategy. The company remains the fourth most valuable on the planetcontinues to grow, with revenue up close to 17% year-on-year in its last reported quarter and with Azure advancing 39% in the December quarter, but that strength is not translating to its price or valuation. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana 2 In Xataka | The ghost of IBM: Satya Nadella’s great challenge is to prevent Microsoft from becoming a technological fossil

A crew member of the International Space Station lost his speech and NASA does not know why

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Last January, four astronauts had to leave the International Space Station early due to a medical emergency. At the time it was pointed out that it was due to the health problems of one of the astronauts. However, at no time was it clarified which of them it was, in order to preserve their privacy. Over time, NASA has dropped some new data in dribs and drabs. Now, we know who it was and why, but the cause of his illness remains a mystery. The facts: At the beginning of January, NASA announced the cancellation of a space walk that astronauts Michael Fincke and Zena Cardman should have done. Just a few hours later, the imminent return to Earth of the entire Crew 11 was announced. That included both Fincke and Cardman as well as Kimiya Yui, from the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) and Oleg Platanov, from the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos). The return trip was planned to take place in February, but it finally took place on January 15. At that time, NASA had not yet announced which of the crew members was sick. It was only noted that he was stable and that he would have to undergo more tests. Without words in space. Shortly after that mysterious medical emergency, NASA announced that the sick astronaut was Mike Fincke. However, at that time he still did not provide information about the illness that led him and his companions to return home early. Now, finally, we know what happened. As stated by Fincke himself in statements to the mediaon January 7, while eating with his companions, he realized that he could not speak. Thanks to the quick intervention of his colleagues and the remote support of NASA doctors, he was immediately stabilized. However, it was urgent to return to Earth to perform the relevant tests. The episode has not been repeated and it has been ruled out that it was a heart attack or stroke. More tests. Fincke will possibly have to undergo more tests so we can find out why he temporarily lost his speech. However, he himself has reported that NASA suspects that it could be an effect of his stay in space. For this reason, the medical records of other astronauts are being reviewed, looking for an episode similar to theirs. space brain. Living in space can affect your health in many different ways. All organs are susceptible to the effects of microgravity. In the case of the brain, It has been proven that it can even move inside the skull. It is not known for sure what could have happened to this NASA astronaut. However, it seems quite likely that his medical emergency was for this reason. And now what? If all goes well with Artemis II, NASA hopes to travel to the Moon more and more regularly and even build a space base there at some point. Other companies, like SpaceX, have the same dream. Therefore, it is vital to study how microgravity or cosmic radiation can affect the health of future colonizers. All astronauts of Crew 11 Astronauts on the International Space Station have been testing these types of events for a long time. What has happened to Fincke at the moment is a mystery, but logically it is something that must be taken into account. What happened to him will have to be investigated to prevent it from happening again, whether on the International Space Station, on the Moon or at any other point in outer space that humans reach. Image | NASA | Unsplash In Xataka | Spanish technology in the return to the Moon: the system designed in Madrid that NASA will use in Artemis II

The bill is 45,000 euros and two lost trials

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When a traffic light stops working there are road rules that we must follow until it is repaired. The worst thing is when this repair takes several days, causing chaos in traffic. That was what happened in 2023 in Valencia, and the dispute between the Superior Court of Justice of the Valencian Community (TSJCV) and the maintenance company remained unresolved until a few days ago. What happened. For five days in November 2023, the pedestrian traffic light located on Doctor Manuel Candela Avenue with Santos Justo y Pastor Street showed the red light and the green light at the same time. According to they count From El Motor, the first alert was registered on November 14 at 6:45 in the morning. Four days later, a municipal inspection confirmed that the problem remained unresolved. Why did it take so long? The origin of the failure, according to the Valencia City Council, was that the company that had to take charge replaced the burned out halogen lamps. for other LED types with E27 socket. Municipal services described them as “glaringly unsuitable for traffic light networks.” The problem, furthermore, was not only the type of bulb that was used, but the technical procedure they followed to install them. A procedure that municipal reports described as “technically inappropriate.” blegal attack. The City Council imposed a penalty of 45,000 euros on Electronic Trafic SA, the company awarded the contract. The company appealed, arguing that it had resolved two different breakdowns, both in less than two hours, and that the council had “deliberately” confused the terms breakdown and incident, which would entail different economic implications depending on the contract. He also alleged “animosity” from the head of the Mobility Service towards the company. The courts did not see it that way. What the judges said. The TSJCV confirmed the sanction on February 26, supporting the City Council’s thesis. The sentence highlights “the seriousness of the behavior followed by the contractor”, which left the incident unresolved for more than four days at an intersection where there is special traffic. The court highlighted that the municipal reports were “highly precise and exhaustive” and that the company did not provide sufficient technical evidence to refute them. According to point The Motor, in addition to the 45,000 euros, the company must pay 2,500 euros in procedural costs. What this sentence implies. The issue here is that the company notified of the problem but the traffic light continued not to work correctly during those days. Therefore, the city council insist in which the responsibility falls on the company, from notification to solution. The failure being a traffic light, a critical road safety device, all the more so the urgency of finding a solution. More and more cities are outsourcing intelligent traffic management to private companies, and the ruling certainly sets a precedent. What happens now? The crossing operates normally. The ruling still allows for an appeal, although the fact that two different courts have endorsed the city council’s position means that the company has little room for maneuver. Cover image | Georgi Zvezdov In Xataka | We already have the VAT discount at the pump: now the battle begins to prevent gas stations from absorbing it

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