making

A “floating gas station” in the middle of the ocean is making a fool of the US

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In the satellite images of certain points in Southeast Asia there are days in which dozens of oil tankers appear completely stopped in the open sea, forming a kind of improvised parking lot in the middle of one of the busiest shipping routes of the world. Some stay there for hours, others for days, with no apparent direction, as if waiting for something that never comes… or that happens when no one is watching. An invisible map in the middle of the ocean. I told the story this week CNN through data by MarineTraffic reviewed by the media. For years, the Iranian oil trade has followed a logic that barely left a trace in official records, with ships disappearing and reappearing in tracking systems and shipments whose origin changes depending on the document consulted. This dynamic, it seems, has allowed us to sustain a constant flow towards China even under sanctions, relying on a network of intermediaries, opaque routes and an aging fleet that operates on the margins of the international system, similar to the “Russian model”. It happens that what seemed like a succession of dispersed maneuvers begins to draw a much more defined pattern: a floating infrastructure that works away from the spotlight. The “floating gas station”. They explained in the exclusive that, in waters near Malaysia, in the area known as Eastern Outer Port Limitsa key point has been consolidated where dozens or even hundreds of ships remain waiting, exchanging oil in ship-to-ship operations that completely transform crude oil traceability. This enclave acts as a authentic service station intermediate where Iranian oil changes hands, identity and destination before continuing its journey towards Asia, becoming a central gear which allows Tehran to maintain stable exports despite international pressure. Its location, close to critical maritime routes and outside effective control, makes it the ideal place for this type of operations. SAR satellite images show vessels within the outer boundary of the Eastern Harbor off the coast of Malaysia on April 18, 2026 How the shortcut to China works. The system follows a precise and repeated logic: one where large oil tankers load crude oil at Iranian facilities, cross the Indian Ocean and reach this area. where they transfer their cargo to other ships, which in turn transport it to Chinese refineries. In this process, oil change label and appears as originating from countries such as Malaysia or Indonesia, hiding its real origin in official data. This mechanism allows China to continue receiving large volumes of crude oil at reduced prices, while Iran ensures constant income that sustains its economy in a context of sanctions. MarineTraffic data shows the multiple trips the MT Tifani made between the Persian Gulf and the EOPL from April 2025 until its capture by US forces in April 2026 “Ghost” fleet that does not stop. Behind the system are hundreds of vessels that change flag, name and owner frequently, making them difficult to track and reducing their exposure to sanctions. Many operate without identification active for long periods, activating and deactivating its location systems as appropriate, which further complicates any control attempt. The magnitude of the activity is growingwith hundreds of annual transfers that, in practice, turn this maritime space into one of the most active (and least transparent) points of global energy trade. The fight with Washington reaches another board. In the background, a story that remembered the wall street journal the weekend. Recent oil tanker seizures like MT Tifani They reflect a change in strategy on the part of the United States, which has decided to extend its pressure beyond the Middle East and act directly on these distant routes. These interventions they seek to interrupt a system that has operated for years with relative impunity, although they also show the difficulty of stopping such a distributed and adaptable network. Each intercepted ship is a signal, although the total volume of traffic suggests that the mechanism remains fully operational. Floating reserves and economic war. Beyond the immediate exchangethis network also works as a strategic reserve on the high seas, one with millions of barrels stored on oil tankers waiting to be delivered when conditions permit. There is no doubt, this capability offers Iran a mattress facing blockages or interruptions, bringing oil closer to their final buyers and reducing its dependence on vulnerable routes like right now in the Strait of Hormuz. In short, the system represents much more than an evasion of sanctions, approaching an entire logistics architecture designed to keep open a critical avenue of income in the midst of conflict. Image | Department of Defense, MarineTraffic, Sentinel 1/European Space Agency In Xataka | Ukraine taught how to use drones. Iran has gone one step further: turning them into a crusher for US radars and bases In Xataka | If the war resumes again, the US runs a risk unprecedented in the history of war: that the only one with missiles will be Iran.

AI is making it increasingly difficult to know what is real and what is not. And child sexual predators are taking note

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The era of artificial intelligence is making everything happen very quickly, very quickly. Companies like Mercadona, Google or Anthropic already point out that the vast majority of your code is written by an AI, Mozilla flowers Mythos and Jensen Huang is excited about the benefits of AI and everything that allows us to create. Among these creations there is everything, such as an enormous amount of child sexual abuse material. Researchers ask for help, and I can tell you that there are things that are not easy to assimilate. In short. This Wednesday, Bloomberg published a report that condenses six months of research in which they focused on the rapid proliferation of child sexual abuse material generated by artificial intelligence. It is not something that is surprising if we take into account the enormous amount of false information that we already have to deal with every day both in text form and in increasingly realistic images and even on videobut there is an important nuance. While in the case of the fake news It is the press and the people who must deal with it with common sense so as not to swallow the hoax, wasting time in the process. In the case of this content generated by AI, it is the police and investigators who must waste their time to rule out that it is true information. And, while they are doing that, they stop investigating cases of child sexual abuse, other types of abuse or disappearances that are real. The figures. They are scary, of course. The report points out that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 1.5 million reports during 2025 that had a general generative intelligence component. Among them, more than 7,000 reports about users generating or possessing child sexual abuse material generated with AI and more than 30,000 cases of people generating this type of content. It’s stupid. On the other hand, the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) evaluated more than 8,000 AI-generated images and videos that very realistically depicted acts of child sexual abuse. There were 3,443 videos compared to the 13 registered in 2024. In total, an increase of 26.385%. The growth is important and the IWF itself pointed out in the report that 65% of this video content generated by AI shows events classified as ‘Category A’, the most serious within this type of material. Cases. Do not think that they are cases of dark websince AI chatbots have been discovered on the open web that host these images and encourage them to be created. What type of content are we talking about? Here comes the delicate part. Bloomberg points out some examples that are part of those thousands of more complex cases that are currently being processed by the authorities and where there is… everything. A man who used the faces of children in his neighborhood to generate content with them having sexual relations with their mothers or grandmothers, another who produced sadistic images of small children and babies, another man accused of altering the image of a prepubescent girl to enlarge her breast and posting the images on Onlyfansa priest who spent years collecting material and then created even more thanks to AI or an army soldier who sexualized images of children he knew with AI. Where do the images of children come from?. Facebook and Instagram. That’s the simple answer. According to Joe O’Barr, one of the researchers who lent a voice to the Bloomberg investigation, “people steal images from Facebook and Instagram, things that parents freely post, and They post them on artificial intelligence platforms”. One pattern that has been discovered is that many create images involving children they know in the real world, thus fulfilling their fantasies. For example, a case of a man who took photos of his partner’s six-year-old daughter, manipulated them with AI and then posted them next to his own naked images on Onlyfans. “The fact that the perpetrator knew the victim made my hair stand on end. It meant that the girl could be in real and imminent danger” – Joe O’Barr What platforms do. Those same platforms on which the images are hosted do not sit idly by. Researchers trust that those same companies will raise the alarm when they find something, but there is a problem: Google, xAI, Meta or OnlyFans are delegating the monitoring task to AI. Numerous cases have been reported of humans who can’t stand flagging that type of content and that is why they either hire in countries like Kenya, or they directly delegate to AI. The problem is the number of false positives that the AI ​​finds and that end up overloading the researchers’ ‘mailbox’. A North Carolina investigator notes that he has seen an 11-fold increase in those ‘tips’ his office receives, and last year alone the volume doubled to 52,000 reports. He points out that any human would say “this is not content to investigate”, but since the AI ​​does not know this, it sends everything: from serious things to investigate to simple insults. Unbearable. “The more cases we have to investigate, the more difficult it is to treat each case individually,” says one of the researchers. Meta itself has recognized that its system is not perfect and adds “some noise” to the researchers’ network. As we said before, it is an enormous amount of material that prevents investigators from doing their work in real cases of minors who are being abused or who are missing. “We are doing this massive job with the same amount of resources we had ten years ago. We can’t take it anymore and we don’t want to miss a real child who is being sexually abused,” an agent tells Bloomberg. Legislators, get your act together. The work of these investigators depends on the Department of Justice and funding that consists of about $30 million for 61 state task forces. They point out that it is a very small figure and, to put … Read more

“Toxic” people are altering your DNA and making you age almost a year faster

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‘Toxic’ people can be anywhere, such as the office, school or even in one’s own homewith an effect that quickly depletes our energy when dealing with them. In psychology, these types of people are beginning to be called ‘hasslers‘ and are defined as people who complicate life, whether they are family members, work colleagues or even partners. The problem is that they can even affect physical and mental health. They make us old. That a toxic person can damage our mental health It is something that we have already internalized enough from our own experiences, but now the PNAS magazine has confirmed that chronic stress derived from these relationships has an impact on the “biological clock”, causing our cells to age much faster. How it looked. To reach this conclusion, the researchers analyzed to more than 2,000 adults from the state of Indiana in the United States for almost 20 years. But here they did not limit themselves to asking them about their stress levels in a survey, but rather they cross-referenced the data with different biological markers from their saliva. From here, scientists used epigenetic clocks as algorithms that do not measure how old we are on the DNI, but rather different key points in our DNA that indicate how aged our cells are. Among these points, for example, stands out the methylation of DNA or some very specific chemical marks. The results. This is where it was seen that indeed people who were in relationships with very conflictive people in their immediate environment had an accelerated aging rate of an extra 1.5%. This means that biological age increases by an average of nine months. Because? That something that seems purely psychological affects on a physical level seems like something that has little to do with it, but the reality is that interacting with these people constantly increases the levels of cortisol in the blood, which is the stress hormone. And having a lot of cortisol is not recommended at all, since it is related to an increase in oxidative stress that damages cells. But in addition, the study observed that this process inhibits a key enzyme in cells such as telomerase. And it is key because its function is to protect DNA to prevent it from shortening at an accelerated rate to the point where the cell has to be destroyed. Something that also favors cellular aging. Not everyone suffers the same. Here women, smokers and people with low social support show greater vulnerability to this accelerated aging by being with the wrong people. Furthermore, the study identified that family members and work colleagues have a greater weight in this wear and tear than friends, probably due to the difficulty of “escape” from those ties easily, while with a colleague you have to put up with it no matter what. It can be fixed. Until now we are quite clear that having a toxic relationship gives us more misfortunes than joys, but the question is obligatory: can we go back? Here science suggests that we are facing a partially reversible process, meaning that with psychological therapy, the establishment of clear limits in the social sphere or even physical distancing from that toxic person, the clock can be “slowed down.” Images | Italy Gariev In Xataka | The science of being single: a macro study warns that well-being plummets if you have not had a partner by 25

‘GTA Online’ has been making more revenue than many new games for 13 years

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A game released in 2013 for previous generation consoles is earning more than a million dollars a day in 2026. It is the online mode of ‘Grand Theft Auto V’, which has just a few months left before its own creators try to replace it with the most anticipated sequel in video game history, ‘GTA VI‘. The dilemma this poses for Rockstar is unprecedented (and the figures that show it came in a not exactly official way). The hacking. On April 11, the ShinyHunters group (responsible for previous security breaches in Ticketmaster or Santander bank, among others) accessed the Rockstar Games servers through an exploit in cloud management software. The company confirmed the attack, although it described it as having limited impact on its operations. What hackers posted after Rockstar refused to pay a ransom for the information it was not code from the long-awaited ‘GTA VI0, but business metrics extracted from the internal analytics platform Anodot. And what they leaked was not bad news, quite the opposite. To the point that Take-Two’s shares rose as soon as it went public. A million a day. According to leaked information (which Rockstar has neither confirmed nor denied), ‘GTA Online’ earned an average of $9.59 million per week between September 2025 and April 2026, with a weekly maximum of almost 28 million and a minimum of 4.7 million. The annual figure is around 500 million dollars. More than a million a day, not bad for a game that debuted in 2013. How they do it. The backbone of the model is Shark Cards, packs of virtual currency that players purchase to acquire cars, properties or weapons within the game. The Shark Cards generated more than 5 billion dollars between 2014 and 2024but the thing is that only 4% of the active player base has spent real money on the game. They are the so-called “whales”, users who concentrate practically all of the spending, and who generate these exorbitant incomes. ‘GTA Online’ is, in that sense, a business model like the most aggressive free-to-play games. The cherry on top of GTA+. Added to all this is GTA+, a paid monthly subscription that Rockstar launched in 2022 and which, according to the same leaked data, reached its peak of 1.3 million subscribers in December 2025, coinciding with the launch of the update.A Safehouse In The Hills‘. It added luxury mansions to the game and resumed the narrative of ‘GTA V’ with the reappearance of one of its protagonists, Michael. The death of ‘Red Dead Online’. These figures also explain why Rockstar stopped updating ‘Red Dead Online’ regularly. The online mode of ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ generated an average of $507,000 per week between June 2024 and April 2026, compared to 9.59 million weekly for ‘GTA Online’. Take-Two was immediately clear where resources needed to be concentrated. Coexistence. Although Rockstar has not officially detailed what its online component will look like, leaked court documents They suggest that ‘GTA VI’ will include a multiplayer mode (something that, now that the colossal income of ‘GTA Online’ is known, no one doubts). But at the same time, that’s the problem: in a message to shareholders in FebruaryTake-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that “I have every reason to believe that we will continue to support ‘GTA Online’. There is a large community that enjoys it and remains engaged.” Does that imply two live-services simultaneous, with the consequent investment in resources, updates and player service? There is a precedent. When ‘GTA Online’ arrived on PS4 and Xbox One in 2014, Rockstar did not close the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. Both generations coexisted for more than a year receiving the same content, and in 2015 the ‘Ill-Gotten Gains Part 2’ update was the last significant one for the old platforms. Even so, those servers were not permanently turned off until December 2021, six years later. The history problem. If they were two different services, the online mode of ‘GTA VI’ would arrive without twelve years of updates, without thousands of accumulated missions, without the ecosystem of properties, vehicles and businesses that ‘GTA Online’ players have built for more than a decade. The examples of sequels that failed to attract the players of the previous game are numerous, but ‘Payday 3’ stands out among them all (the number of players for ‘Payday 2’ is still five times higher). Big losses. Players who have spent years accumulating virtual money, garages, businesses and personalized clothing in ‘GTA Online’ will hardly dare to start from scratch. And at the moment no one has dared to talk about a transfer of assets between both games: the practical and design implications of such an exchange make it practically unfeasible. (And so not to mention FiveMthe community role-playing mod based on ‘GTA V’ that Rockstar bought in 2023 and is still an active source of income). Most likely. As Kotaku predictswe’ll most likely see a multi-year period of coexistence, with Rockstar gradually trying to move the user base from one game to another while keeping both running. Controlled closure of ‘GTA Online’, indefinite maintenance with minimal updates or something in between? It all depends on how fast ‘GTA VI Online’ grows into a game that, let’s not forget, will attract thousands of new players. At the moment, the bar he has to reach is very high. In Xataka | In a time when almost no one develops their own graphics engine, ‘GTA VI’ arrives to punch the table

LaLiga’s massive IP blocks are making life impossible for users, companies and developers. So you can claim

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LittleCranky67, which is the alias of our protagonist, didn’t know what was happening with his computer this weekend. This developer was doing something that never gave him any trouble: working with the GitLab platform to download a Docker software package. That process kept giving him strange errors, and LittleCranky67 ended up realizing what had caused it all: LaLiga’s indiscriminate IP blocking. After share your frustration on HackerNewshundreds of comments confirmed other similar cases, and in them we also discovered something interesting: how to officially claim LaLiga. Or at least, how to try. A sad old story. LaLiga he shields himself in the Judgment of December 18, 2024 issued by the Commercial Court No. 6 of Barcelona. This allows you to demand from operators such as Movistar, Vodafone, Orange or Digi to block at the IP level any address that is identified as a source of illegal IPTV broadcasts during LaLiga football matches. Many of those IPs are Cloudflare shared IPs, so when the IPTV service IP is blocked, all domains associated with that shared IP are blocked, which can be hundreds or even thousands. And in those domains there are web pages of private usersfrom companies that they stop being able to sell and also critical services for developers such as Docker, GitHub or GitLab. The irony is that lockdowns don’t work. While many users complain about these blocks and how are affecting websites and services that usemany others continue to remember on social networks that in reality the blocks to view these IPTV broadcasts can be easily circumvented in many ways. The most popular, use VPN services. In LaLiga they know that this method is widely used, so for months They are also working on blocking those services. It doesn’t seem to be serving a lotand whoever really wants to watch the football game without paying has many relatively simple ways to achieve it. If you are affected, you can claim. In that thread, several users remember that one way to try to change things is for users to protest, complain and complain en masse. There are several ways to do it: Telecommunications User Service Office. It is the official body in Spain for these cases. A formal claim can be filed for arbitrary loss of service or censorship, and even claim financial losses if the blockade prevents you from working. Those who have a digital certificate or Cl@ve can do so directly online. Complain to your internet provider. It is also important to open a support ticket with your operator. It is true that they are obliged to follow court orders, but they must know that the blockade is causing collateral damage to services that have nothing to do with football. Common Electronic Registry (SARA network). This portal It also allows you to send formal complaints to management if other methods fail. Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD). Those responsible for RootedCON have been fighting this situation for some time, and offer another recommendation: report LaLiga to the AEPD. This template allows you to complete that complaint in a simple way Demagive to Telecommunications Operators. At RootedCON they also suggest filing a complaint against ISPs, and explain the process in a small thread on Twitter. Again, just download a request and file it individually. Complaint to the European Commission. It is also possible to enter the European Commission complaints website to send a claim to the entity. We explained it in Xataka and the process is another way of trying to stop this situation with the help of European bodies. The BOE serves as a defensive argument. In these complaints it is advisable to cite the BOE-A-2022-10757 as a legal reference. It corresponds to Law 11/2022, of June 28, General Telecommunications (LGTel) and is the fundamental rule that regulates your rights as an internet user in Spain. The message that we can write is the following: “Under the protection of Law 11/2022, of June 28, General Telecommunications (BOE-A-2022-10757), specifically regarding the rights of end users (Chapter IV) and the principles of continuity and quality of service, I present this claim for the blocking of access to legitimate IP addresses (specify which ones, e.g. Cloudflare/Docker) unrelated to any illicit activity. This blockade constitutes a violation of my right to communication and the contracted service, causing harm (professional/personal) by preventing the operation of work/security tools. “I request the immediate cessation of said technical restriction in compliance with the provisions of the aforementioned Law.” The nightmare continues. The debate in HackerNews is nothing more than confirmation of what internet users in Spain have been suffering for more than a year. A private organization has the power to order ISPs in a country to indiscriminately block IPs without judicial review in real time, during regular hours, causing documented harm to third parties that have nothing to do with the original violation. In that thread some users compare the situation with that of the Great Firewall of Chinanot so much in intensity as in its logic. We are faced with an infrastructure of selective censorship that seems to be able to be applied to any content that an actor with sufficient judicial power wants to block. From football to tennis or golf. In fact, things could go further, because what began as an attack against illegal broadcasts of football matches could now be seen in other sports such as tennis or golf. Telefónica —which follows in the footsteps of LaLiga— wants to extend indiscriminate blockades to the Champions League, tennis or golf. This threatens to suffer these side effects for many more days and for many more hours, and can mean that for a good part of the week, users like LittleCranky67 find themselves unable to download Docker packages or access thousands of legitimate websites that end up being knocked down by these blocks. Images | Wirestock | LaLiga In Xataka | LaLiga has been at war with Cloudflare for years over piracy. It has just joined forces with its main competitor

70% of the world’s salmon comes from farms and their meat should be gray. The industry has been making sure you don’t notice for decades

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In the heart of Tjuvholmen, a small neighborhood located on an even smaller peninsula that runs from Aker Brygge towards the Oslo Fjord, lies The Salmon. It is a restaurant, yes; but above all, it is an interpretation center for Norwegian salmon. There, just before enjoying two dozen different preparations, facilitators explain in detail “the entire salmon process – from smoking to export” and explain to diners “the historical development of salmon farming.” And it is logical. 70% of the salmon consumed in the world comes from aquaculture. Only in the North Atlantic, farms produced more than three million of metric tons in 2025 and Norway is (by far) the main producer. They explain all this in The Salmon; What they don’t explain is the color. Le Salmon, 1866–1869, by Édouard Manet The color? Salmon, in the cultural imagination of the entire world, has a very specific color: a pinkish-orange which, in short, is what we have been calling salmon color. The curious thing is that, under normal conditions, the meat of farmed salmon would be pale gray or whitish. And the reason is very simple: the characteristic color of wild salmon depends on the diet. They are big fans of krill, shrimp and other crustaceans which, in turn, feed on microalgae that produce astaxanthin. That’s what gives them the color. Instead, farmed salmon are fed feed composed of fishmeal, oil, soy, corn gluten and other poultry by-products. None of them have astaxanthin naturally and, therefore, they could not acquire their iconic color. And that, of course, is a problem. Early farmed salmon producers realized that color was difficult to manage. It is true that there is a wild salmon native to Alaska that does not naturally fix astaxanthin in its meat and is sold as a gourmet product. But that is one thing and trying to convince millions of people that this farmed pale salmon is the same (or better) than the wild one is another. Since the 1980s, researchers and producers got to work, discovered the origin of the problem and introduced chemically synthesized astaxanthin into the food chain of farmed salmon. It’s not cheap: these additives represent between 6 and 20% of the cost total feed. But it is necessary. And, by the way, they “tint” them, like the Astaxanthin is a powerful antioxidantfish improve liver function, immune response, fertility and resistance to oxidative stress. And why should we care about all this? Spain is the second largest consumer of fish and seafood in the EU; Salmon, in fact, is one of the most consumed species. The color of salmon is something well known (and completely safe), but it is not something that is usually advertised: the fear of growing distrust towards farmed fish is always there. One of the great food paradoxes of our time. Producers, in fact, have been saying for years that they would lower the amount of astaxanthin if consumers agreed to buy paler salmon. But that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen: as we’ve seen time and time again, food depends critically on fashions and trends. this pink is in fashion. Image | Katja Ano In Xataka | We are drugging the salmon with cocaine and anxiolytics. And that’s causing them to behave strangely.

making history. Orion has landed after a mission that we have not seen since Apollo

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Artemis II already had a place in history assured before it even hit the water, but its closure gives the mission a different dimension. Orion has splashed down off the coast of San Diego (United States) and with this has culminated a ten-day trip that has returned astronauts to the vicinity of the Moon for the first time since 1972. What we have seen has not only been a round trip flight around our satellite, but also the validation in real conditions of a ship, a crew and a roadmap with which NASA and its international partners want to go further than ever. The key moment has arrived at 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 10, equivalent to 2:07 a.m. on April 11 in Spanish peninsular time. With this splashdown, Orion’s flight sequence is closed and a less visible, but equally measured phase begins: recovery in the ocean. We are not just talking about a capsule touching the water, but about the point at which a maneuver calculated to the minute gives way to helicopters, military means, medical checks and transfer of the crew out of the vehicle. Artemis II has made history: the most difficult return culminates over the Pacific The most delicate part was not the lunar flyby, but the return home. To return safely, Orion had to enter the atmosphere under the right conditions, with heat shield exposed after separating from the service module and prepared to withstand extreme conditions: intense friction, plasma around the capsule and a communications outage expected for six minutes. NASA had further explained that, in a nominal profile, the crew could withstand up to 3.9 G. Everything in this phase depended on physics, engineering and timing being exactly where they needed to be. The US space agency communicated this sequence in EDT time, but to better follow the outcome from Spain it is advisable to transfer it to peninsular time, where everything happened already in the early morning of April 11. 01:33: service module separation and heat shield exposure (completed) 01:37: final adjustment of entry path (completed) 01:53: start of upper atmosphere re-entry and start of communications blackout (completed) 02:03: opening of drogue parachutes at high altitude (filled) 02:04: deployment of three main parachutes to reduce descent speed (completed) 02:07: Orion splashdown off San Diego (completed) Before 04:07: crew recovery and transfer to support ship (earring) As we say, from this moment on the recovery device that NASA has deployed together with US military personnel off the coast of California comes into play. According to the sequence planned by the agency, the crew must be extracted from the capsule and transferred by helicopter to the USS John P. Murtha, where the first medical evaluations after ten days of mission. If we look at the mission as a whole, Artemis II leaves several well-defined milestones. It was the first manned flight beyond Earth’s orbit since 1972, it completed a lunar flyby without landing on the moon and established a new distance record for humans by exceeding 400,000 kilometers from Earth, above the Apollo 13 mark. In between so much hard data, Artemis II has also left small scenes capable of becoming fixed in the collective memory. There are the images of the hidden side of the Moon taken by the crewcaptures of a solar eclipse or video calls from deep space. And then there is the most unexpected detail of all, the one that gave the mission a touch of color in the middle of the institutional solemnity: a jar of Nutella appearing floating in the ship during one of the broadcasts. What comes next helps you better measure what you just finished. NASA now faces a demanding calendar phase for the next stages of the Artemis program, with a new mission already in preparation and with the focus on the operations that must support a future lunar landing. The next test will seek to advance that architecture with new maneuvers and tests before taking the next leap. When the images of the landing, the parachutes and the recovery in the Pacific pass, what will remain will be something much more profound than a postcard of the return. Artemis II will have shown that it is possible send astronauts back to the lunar environmentbring them back and successfully complete the most demanding part of the flight. Images | POT In Xataka | We knew there was water on the Moon, but not why some craters were empty. Finally we have the answer

We have turned WhatsApp into an “emotional pacifier”. And science warns that it is making us more fragile

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A message sent, a double check blue and, suddenly, silence. In that period of time, which can last minutes or days, the stomach shrinks. The immediate reaction for many is instinctive: unlock the screen of the smartphoneimmersing yourself in social media, sending looping messages seeking solace. We have turned our devices into an “emotional pacifier” to calm the anxiety of “not knowing.” In an era where hyperconnection promises us instant answers, science and psychology issue a clear warning: our inability to tolerate uncertainty is making us increasingly fragile. The brain in the face of chaos. To understand what happens to us, we have to look at our biology. As psychologist Regina López Riego explainsour brain is evolutionarily designed to look for patterns and make sense of everything around us. “This was key to our survival as a species: identifying threats and anticipating dangers,” he says. However, in today’s world, that need for certainty translates into constant suffering. The problem is that we live in a universe governed by entropy. From the team of Nalu Psychology remember thatbased on chaos theory and thermodynamics, systems tend toward disorder. “The future is uncertain and, one way or another, we deal with it as best we can,” they explain. When changes threaten, fear takes center stage, alerting us to possible danger. To mitigate that fear, we resort to a patch: control. However, it is a trap. The brain processes the symptoms of anxiety in the same way that it relates to uncertainty, releasing large amounts of norepinephrine that affect our nervous system. The more we try to tie down the future, the more discomfort we generate. The trap of overthinking. When the mind has no data, it invents it. The psychologist Marta Valle In his blog he explains that overthinking not as a lack of intelligence, but as a failed protection mechanism born of fear of error and low tolerance for uncertainty. It manifests itself in two ways: ruminating on the past or worrying in anticipation about the future. “You think that if you think about it enough, you will avoid a problem,” he details, but the end result is paralysis, insomnia and disconnection from the present. Experts from Harvard Mental Health Services (CAMHS) They have a name for this phenomenon: “toxic time travel.” Dr. Rue Wilson, a psychologist at this institution, describes how we try to feel in control by imagining different outcomes. “We get stuck ruminating, overwhelmed by ‘what ifs,’ and disconnected from the present, which is where we really have the most certainty.” Feed a bigger monster. This loop ends in what psychologist Laura Marín defines as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)where concern is constant and fueled by overestimating the risks. Marín illustrates this with a clear example: two women, Alicia and Brenda, undergo a medical test. While Alicia asks whatever is necessary and continues with her daily life, Brenda compulsively searches for information on the Internet and needs her partner to continually reassure her. It is the so-called “reinsurance search”. Checking emails, postponing decisions or constantly asking for opinions are strategies that give false relief in the short term, but in the long run make us unable to tolerate the slightest doubt. The cell phone as an escape route. The need to escape from uncertainty has found in smartphones your best ally, but at a high cost for mental health. Rigorous research supports this claim. In a couple of published studies in the scientific journal Science Direct (led by Jon D. Elhai and colleagues in 2017), it was demonstrated through systematic reviews that the severity of depression and anxiety are strongly linked to problematic mobile phone use. One of the most revealing findings of Elhai’s research differentiates between “social” use of the phone (messaging, networks) and “process” use (consumption of news, entertainment, scroll passive). The study found that anxiety is much more related to process use than social use. That is, people with anxiety use the non-social functions of their devices as an avoidance mechanism (such as doomscrolling or addictive consumption of news) to avoid facing stress, this “use of process” being the direct bridge to mobile addiction. In fact, Dr. Leigh W. Jerome warns precisely about this habit. In the face of global chaos, doomscrolling It does not prepare us for the future, but “can cause headaches, muscle tension, high blood pressure, and difficulty sleeping.” Leon Garber, mental health counselor, adds a vital reflection on compulsive doubt avoidance: “Avoidance, in and of itself, is not negative (…) but imagine how many missed opportunities for growth or connection, over time, add up to a lost relationship.” Garber points out that even therapy has a limit if the patient is only seeking definitive answers. “We have to learn to live with uncertainty. Fundamentally, we have to learn to live,” he says. The trap of the hyperconnected world. The desire for certainties not only affects the individual, but shapes our society. An analysis published in The Conversation reminds us thatAccording to Maslow’s pyramid, security is a primary need. However, the obsession with eliminating all risks has a dark side. “There are desires that should not be fulfilled and that of radical security is a desire that can never and should never be satisfied,” the article underlines. Trying to control everything, whether through algorithms, surveillance cameras or the transfer of freedoms, strips us of our humanity and leads us to voluntary servitude. Instead of delegating control to technology to avoid panic, experts advocate a “pedagogy of responsibility”, appealing to the values ​​of Kant and Rousseau, where we assume that zero risk does not exist. How to inhabit the void. Since uncertainty is inevitable, the solution is not to find all the answers, but to change our relationship with the questions. According to institutions such as Harvard CAMHS and diverse psychology professionalsthere are four keys to navigate the uncontrollable: Focus on what you control: challenge the illusion of absolute certainty. If you lose your job, you can’t control when you’ll be hired, but you … Read more

Stanley Kubrick’s brutal trick to film one of the most terrifying scenes in ‘A Clockwork Orange’: making it real

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In the 70s, the world of cinema experienced a period in which some directors pursued realism in ways that are unthinkable today: scenes were filmed without doubles, with extreme practical effects and with days that dozens could be repeated (or even more than a hundred) times until the desired result is achieved. That obsession with authenticity left unrepeatable moments… and also stories that are difficult to believe today. Real pain. At that time in history, the sector was going through a period of radical experimentation where some directors were willing to take its actors to the limit in order to capture something authentic on the screen. In that context, one of the most disturbing scenes of modern cinema, a sequence that not only sought to make the viewer uncomfortable, but ended up transferring that suffering directly to the body of the leading actor. Thus, what should be a representation of control and violence ended up becoming a extreme physical experience that would forever mark the person who played it. Along the way, he would extend the legend of a director: Stanley Kubrick. When perfectionism is risk. Stanley Kubrick was already known for his obsession with detail, but in this case he crossed an extremely dangerous line. As? Instead of simulating the most famous scene of Clockwork Orangedecided to make it as real as possible: the devices that kept Alex’s character’s eyes open They were not propsand the medical procedure wasn’t a cinematic illusion either. In other words, the search for absolute authenticity led to a situation in which actor Malcolm McDowell’s security was compromised. in the background compared to the final image, reflecting a way of directing where the result justified practically any means. The impossible scene: hours of open eyes. Yes, McDowell was literally tied to a chair with his eyelids forced to remain open while he watched violent images during long days of filming, exactly as happened to the character he played. a real doctorin charge of keeping his eyes hydrated, had to constantly apply drops to avoid irreversible damage. However, the situation became complicated when that same doctor received instructions to act on the scenedividing his attention between his medical function and his improvised role. The result was a disastrous environment where control was diluted just when it was needed most. An avoidable injury. The failure was as simple as it was disturbing: while the instruments kept the actor’s eyes open, the eyelids began to slide out of their position. directly scrape the cornea. Plus: under anesthesia, the actor could not feel the damage at that moment, which made the situation even more dangerous. When the effect wore off, the pain was immediate and extremeto the point of requiring urgent treatment with morphine. The most shocking thing was not the injury itself, that too, but its character completely avoidable: it was enough that the doctor had been focused on his role or that the scene had been filmed with simulated effects. The price of perfection. Far from stopping, filming continued. The director, dissatisfied with some plans, demanded to repeat the sceneforcing the actor to once again face an experience that he already knew was painful. That decision turned an accident into a conscious process of sufferingone where the anticipation of pain was as harsh as the physical damage itself. In short, if the scene that the viewer perceives was uncomfortable, it was because, to a large extent, he was not alone in front of a sublime performance (which also, of course), he was in front of a real reaction in an extreme situation. Kubrick and his actors. The truth is that the episode was not an exception, but part of a pattern. Kubrick’s method was based on countless occasions in repeating takes until the actor’s emotional defenses are broken and more authentic reactions are obtained, as also happened in another case famous with actress Shelley Duvall in The Shining. His way of working has been celebrated for the results, but also questioned for the human cost which it implied. In this case, the line between demanding management and unnecessary risk became especially blurred. The final paradox. For years, McDowell himself came to resent the film for what it had cost him, physically and emotionally. Over time, however, ended up accepting that had been part of an unrepeatable work. The great irony here is that one of the most iconic scenes in modern cinema owes part of its force to a suffering that should never have happened. If you will, it is also an uncomfortable reminder that, sometimes, behind cinematic perfection there is not only talent, but also errorsrisks and decisions that today would be difficult to justify. Image | Warner In Xataka | The wildest race on the Olympic tracks in Cortina was in 1981. A man launched himself dodging bullets and assassins on a motorcycle In Xataka | One of the best comedies in history turned this simple scene into the most expensive. 9/11 and a highway were to blame

The board game that was removed for making children steal food rations from Titanic survivors

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There have always been games with a morbid theme, but they are certainly not a thing of today. Already in 1975, board game creators were racking their brains to come up with the darkest and most impactful idea for the whole family. And what better way to spend an afternoon of harmless fun in the company of loved ones that one of the greatest tragedies in the history of modern locomotion. It sinks. When in 1975 Ideal Toy Corporation put on the shelves ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’the slogan printed on the box left no room for imagination (or interpretation): “Play while the ship sinks… and then face the dangers of the open sea.” From 8 years and older, be careful. The controversy, of course, was immediate, the game was withdrawn from the market, and although it was reissued under different names, today it is a sought-after piece for collectors of classic board games. How to play. The game has two phases. First, players are ship’s officers who must navigate the cabins of the Titanic rescuing passengers and stocking up on food and water rations as the ship sinks. In the second phase, with the liner already under water, survivors in boats race to reach the rescue ship. The first to arrive with two passengers, two rations of food and two of water wins. What does it look like? The board is cleverly articulated into two pieces joined by clips. Every time someone rolls a 1 or 6 with the dice, the board “sinks” into the bar, and more and more squares of the ship’s hull disappear under the water. If an empty lifeboat touches the water, it is removed, and if the player cannot find a place in any boat, he loses. In 1975, the idea was very ingenious: a board that is transformed. Ideal itself had already explored these possibilities with a previous success, ‘Mouse Trap‘, in 1963. Storms and cannibals. But the real morbidity (and, let’s face it, the distancing from historical facts) came with the modifying cards that threw the players against “violent storms, cannibals, the cruel sea and each other,” as the instructions. Actually, the game has little to do with what happened on the Titanic, and in that sense it is quite modest: there are no mention of real passengers and the tropical islands with cannibals have nothing to do with the frigid North Atlantic where the real ship sank. The controversy. Ideal received criticism for turning tragedy into entertainment. The game was withdrawn from the market and re-released under the name ‘Abandon Ship’, with all references to the Titanic eliminated, something not difficult because as we have said, the game had few authentic elements, except perhaps the unmistakable silhouette of the cruise ship on the box. Because of this, the original version of ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’ has been revalued and It is easy for it to reach approximately 150 euros on websites like eBay. Too soon. The Titanic sank in April 1912 and Ideal recovered from the tragedy 63 years later. What is significant is that the remains of the ship, located by oceanographer Robert Ballard in 1985, had not yet been found. The 1,500 bodies that lay four kilometers deep certified, with bodies included, the magnitude of the tragedy. But ten years before, after the sinking of the Titanic, there were only ghosts missing in the sea, a myth about the unfathomable dangers of the ocean. In 1975 you could still make a board game about it. In Xataka | AI is so good at chess that it is changing something: the way humans play it

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