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Europe believed that the Russian ghost fleet moved oil. Report points to something much worse: drone “aircraft carriers”

July 6, 2026 by usatoday24

During the First World War, the United Kingdom created the called Q-ships: Seemingly harmless merchant ships that hid cannons under their decks to attract German submarines and surprise them when they approached. The idea of turning a commercial ship into a weapon It wasn’t new.. The striking thing is that, more than a century later, it could have evolved much more than we imagined. It all started with some drones. At the end of 2024 they began to register drone raids on several American military bases in England and, shortly after, on other strategic facilities in Germany. The devices appeared and disappeared without a trace, forcing investigations to be opened that they never identified publicly to those responsible. Those flights seemed like another episode in Europe’s growing hybrid war, although a new report maintains that the true origin could have been much further from the coast. Capture of the IISS report The hypothesis. a study from the International Institute for Strategic Studies maintains that it is “highly probable” that Russia used ships linked to its well-known ghost fleet as platforms to launch and recover drones. This network of oil tankers and merchants had been associated until now with crude oil transportation to avoid Western sanctions. If the hypothesis ends up being confirmed, those ships would have also played a military function much more sophisticated covert. A tanker can become an aircraft carrier. They counted TWZ analysts that the great advantage of a merchant ship is precisely that no one expects it to act as a military platform. A ship can remain for days in international waters, discreetly approach the coast, launch a reconnaissance drone and continue its trade route without raising suspicion. Compared to an aircraft carrier, whose presence is impossible to hide, a cargo ship offers perfect cover for operations that are difficult to attribute. The chosen bases. The targets included facilities such as RAF Lakenheathwhich is being prepared for host nuclear weapons American, as well as RAF Mildenhall, RAF Fairford, RAF Feltwell and Ramstein air base in Germany. The researchers collected around of 170 citizen noticesof which approximately half were considered credible after being corroborated by several witnesses or images. They also detected coordinated flight patternsdifferent types of aircraft and trajectories incompatible with recreational use. The sea offers an explanation. The report poses that some drones were able to take off from Russian-related ships located out of visual range of the coast. Among the possibilities is the Orlan-10a military drone with sufficient autonomy to cover these distances and equipped with intelligence sensors, surveillance, reconnaissance and even electronic warfare capabilities. The authors themselves recognize that using an identifiable military model would increase the risk of attribution, so they do not rule out the use of modified commercial drones to make it even more difficult to trace their origin. The boss worries. Plus: the study’s authors admit that their conclusions rest on a combination of cluesknown capabilities and geographical coincidences, not on definitive public evidence. No European government has officially linked a specific ship to a specific incursion, although various policymakers have called for new investigations. For their part, both the British Ministry of Defense and the US Air Force in Europe have confirmed drone flights, but remain silent on any intelligence information related to their possible authorship. The hybrid war. If the hypothesis is correct, the problem would no longer be solely the existence of a ghost fleet dedicated to transporting Russian oil. Europe would also have to assume that some of those same ships can serve as discrete platforms for espionage operationsreconnaissance or electronic warfare hundreds of kilometers from the front. In other words, the biggest threat of the report is not to identify who launched those drones, but to propose that a simple merchant ship could play part of the role that until now was only attributed to an aircraft carrier. Image | Google In Xataka | Europe has encountered a problem bigger than Russia: drones cannot be stored for more than eight weeks In Xataka | Cities such as London or Madrid appear on Russia’s new objective map. The reason: drone production

In 1967, Ebro moved to the Free Zone of Barcelona. 69 years later, we have seen how Ebro once again manufactures cars in it

June 30, 2026 by usatoday24

Entering the 500,000 square meters that the Ebro Factory plant in Barcelona occupies is, in large part, a visit to the origins of the brand and its deep connection with the Catalan capital. The same naves and corridors that In 1967 they saw the last Ebro vehicles leave to become later at Nissan Motor Ibérica. In 2026, the factory that opened its doors in the Barcelona Free Trade Zone almost 70 years ago, manufactures vehicles again (and not just assembly) with the Ebro logo on its grille. Ebro has just opened its facilities to the press for the first time, and we have been able to see first-hand what it is like to manufacture a car. What we have found is a factory full of welding robots, automated parts supply lines and state-of-the-art assembly lines that They look more to the future than to the past. A plant with many stories The old Nissan factory closed on December 31, 2021 after 41 years of activity. The cessation of activity left some 2,500 workers on the streets. Three years later, Ebro confirmed his reindustrialization plan of the plant returning its activity. And he did it, to a large extent, with the same workers he had. Of the almost 2,000 employees that the company currently has, nearly 1,000 employees who work here today They were already with Nissan. Of them, about 400 are product engineers, 200 process engineers and 200 welding and assembly line specialists. These employees know every hallway, every corner and, according to those responsible for the factory, they have played a leading role in the start-up of the plant. The factory occupies 500,000 m2 Our guide throughout the visit was Paco DuranDirector of Production Control and Logistics. According to what he said, he himself started at this same plant in 1998, when the Nissan sign still hung on the door. When the Japanese stopped production he spent some time at Stellantis. When Ebro started his reindustrialization plan, he returned to what he considered his Alma mater. Durán is, in all likelihood, the person who best knows how these facilities work. Nissan veterans like him helped design each booth of the new assembly line based on the years of experience that the assembly of Japanese cars gave them. They knew exactly what had worked before and what had failed. That muscle memory acquired by years of automobile production has weighed more than any manual and has contributed to the Ebro Factory will start walking in record time. First as an assembly center, and now as the only Ebro manufacturing plant in Spain and Europe, in which the Spanish brand already manufactures four models with welding, painting, assembly and quality control processes. Barcelona outside and inside There is a very curious detail in how this factory is designed. It is inspired by Barcelona and the two rivers (the Besós and the Llobregat) that frame it. Being called Ebro, it makes sense. Like these rivers, the entire flow of supplies flows from mountains to sea. It is not the only inspiration that Ebro engineers have borrowed from Barcelona when designing it. The interior of the factory has the same structure as the streets of Barcelona Its interior is arranged in streets perpendicular to each other, well-defined islands, without intersections that block the passage or flows that collide with each other. The reference is the Cerdà Plan of 1859who created the orthogonal grid so characteristic of Barcelona that it ordered the Eixample of Barcelona. An urban model that is still a reference in half the world. A small Barcelona within an icon of Barcelona’s industrial past. Under this spatial arrangement, the materials enter at one end of the factory and advance in line to the other, without setbacks or countercurrents. As Durán explained, this flow “towards the sea” reduces errors, improves response times and, as an added advantage, facilitates the evacuation of the plant in case of emergency. The plant works on two levels. All the assembly of the different components occurs on the ground, while the automatic transports of parts and bodies circulate suspended in a complex logistics system that takes the bodies from one section to another without interrupting the assembly work below. To give us an idea of the magnitude of this aerial infrastructure, the equivalent of three days of production of components and bodies was circulating above our heads at all times. 696 meters of line and 20 cars per hour Since November 2024, the factory operated with the M0 assembly line, in which the cars arrived from China semi-assembled and the rest of the parts were assembled at the Ebro factory. However, the heart of the visit, and the new jewel in Ebro’s crown, is the M1 assembly line. There are 696 meters, 97 work stations and a cycle of 160 seconds per vehicle. That is, each operator has that time to assemble the elements assigned to that station. The body is welded in a 23,000 square meter warehouse with more than 150 robots. Around 95% of this process is fully automated. There the floor, sides and roof are welded until forming what is called the Body-in-Whitethe empty structure of the car before receiving any paint or components. From there it travels by air to the painting area which, for safety reasons due to the chemical agents used there, we were not able to visit (we needed PPE and additional protection). In this section, the car chassis go through degreasing baths, paint is applied through cataphoresis and an anti-corrosion treatment. Afterwards, the already painted bodies fly back to the assembly area, but not before disassembling the doors, which travel in parallel, to improve the workers’ access to the interior. Something that caught my attention was that all the cars I saw on the assembly line were Ebro S700 red in color (the Red Blood Stone, to be more exact). When we asked Paco Durán about the reason, he explained to us that instead of responding to color … Read more

Polymarket and Kalshi have moved $130 billion so far this year. Zuckerberg has said he wants his share

June 27, 2026 by usatoday24

The so-called prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi have ceased to be minority apps and have become a global phenomenon, one that has already moved more than 130,000 million so far in 2026. Apart from the ethical issuesit is clear that it is a good business and Meta is preparing an app to get fully into it. What is happening. They tell it in the New York Times. Meta is developing a prediction markets app that they internally call “Arena.” The app is designed as an independent application from the rest of the Meta catalog and, at least for now, it does not work with real money but rather transactions are with a points system as if it were a video game. At the moment, the project is in the experimental phase, but the company has marked it as a high priority. Why is it important. Polymarket and Kalshi have already managed to get rid of the stigma of gambling addiction in betting houses and casinos, disguising their service with an aura of finance and trading. That Meta enters this could be the definitive step towards normalization, turning betting into another activity within online life. Let us remember that Meta has a daily user base of more than 3.5 billion between Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Furthermore, this would give Meta a new type of very sensitive data: it is not only what people see and publish, it is also what they think is going to happen. By crossing all the data, they could outline future beliefs and expectations. It’s not the first. Meta already tried his luck in this prediction markets in 2020, when They launched an app called Forecast which allowed predictions to be made about real-world events, such as the COVID pandemic that was ravaging the world at that time. The app was launched only for the United States and Canada and also worked with a points system. Meta’s goal at that time was not to make money, but to make online conversation more rational. “We were interested in prediction markets because, when they work, they help participants be rational,” said Rebeca Kossnick, project leader. It didn’t last long and In October of the same year they closed it. Prediction markets. At that time, prediction markets were niche apps that almost no one knew about, but in recent years they have become almost a cultural phenomenon that has been announced at major events such as the Super Bowl or the Golden Globes. So far this year, Polymarket has been in the news for various reasons, from bets on Maduro’s capture with insider information its recent blockade in Spainwhere legislation requires them to have a gaming license. We have also learned that the vast majority of users are not making money, rather they are losing it, while professional traders take the lion’s share of the pie. Even so, prediction markets are in fashion and Meta wants to take advantage of the trend. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | I don’t bet, I invest: Polymarket and company have sophisticated gambling addiction to the point of making it indistinguishable from “investing”

Polymarket and Kalshi have moved $130 billion so far this year. Zuckerberg has said he wants his share

June 27, 2026 by usatoday24

Anthropic has moved ahead of OpenAI in its race to go public. This is very bad news for Sam Altman

June 2, 2026 by usatoday24

Anthropic confirmed on Monday which has formally registered its application for its long-awaited IPO. The operation may become the largest in the history of its type, and reminds us of another singular moment. In August 1995, Netscape went public and marked the beginning of the era of the Internet and dotcom fever. That turned out to be a bubble, but “good”. The question is if it will be repeated what happened then. The original Netscape moment. When Netscape went public, the company had only been on the market for 16 months and had not made a profit in all that time. It didn’t matter. The shares went on the market on August 9, 1995 with an initial price of $28. On its first day of trading, the value skyrocketed quicklyreaching a high of $75 before closing at $58.25. In December of that year it would reach its maximum value, $171 per share. The rest, as they say, it’s history. Netscape’s IPO sent the Nasdaq technology index soaring… until the dot-com bubble hit in 2000. Source: Reuters. Anthropic could break all records. Anthropic’s spectacular growth in recent months has made the company in the pretty girl of the AI sector. The recent investment round has raised its valuation to $965 billionan incredible figure considering that the company is barely five years old. It has also overtaken OpenAI, whose valuation It is currently around $850 billion.. Both were moving to go public this year, but Anthropic has gone ahead again, something that at first glance seems like another victory against its main rival. What Netscape taught us. The explosion of Netscape in 1995 gave rise to fierce competition: companies promising gold and moro did not stop appearing, and the dotcom bubble grew. Too many companies managed to attract investment without a clear business plan and the situation ended up leading to the bursting of the bubble. A few companies survived and managed to become the great giants of today’s technology. good bubbles. That bubble could be described as “good” because although many companies failed, those that remained and those that were created later ended up leading this revolution called the internet. For many, the AI bubble exists, but it is similar to the dotcom bubble in that: many companies could disappear if it bursts, but the final result, they say, will be positive for the evolution of our planet. But Anthropic is very different from Netscape. Although these IPOs present certain analogies, the situation of these companies is very different. Netscape suffered greatly to monetize its software and would end up in the hands of AOL in 1999 when its stage was closing. Anthropic has shown that its approach to businesses works, and in fact this past quarter it surprised by achieving profits (with small print) when everyone expected losses. And still, total uncertainty. Anthropic’s projection—like that of OpenAI—is spectacular on paper, but we are talking about companies that in recent years have not stopped burning money to achieve the most powerful models on the market. All technology companies have been devoured by the AI fever, but today the only ones who win (a lot) money are those that provide components for AI infrastructure. Milestone. The bet is that this infrastructure will be necessary because we will all use AI models on a massive scale, but it is not at all clear that this expectation will be met. It may not, but Anthropic’s IPO will certainly mark a milestone in the dizzying growth of this segment. And victory for Amodei. This year we will likely see three historic IPOs. SpaceX seems to be the first in breaking records, but both Anthropic and OpenAI follow in their footsteps. That the company led by Dario Amodei has formally confirmed its preparation for that exit is a symbolic victory against its great rival, Sam Altman, who is also planning the IPO of OpenAI. In recent months Anthropic has managed to turn the tables, and has gone from being the pursuer to the leader of a race that certainly is not over yet. Image | Wikimedia In Xataka | Anthropic is one step away from being worth as much as Samsung. And what the market is buying is not Claude

when Istanbul moved 45,000 tons from its old airport in less than 45 hours

April 19, 2026 by usatoday24

Modern aviation is not only measured in knots or altitudes, but also in the ability of airports to process huge flows of people or cargo on a continuous basis. But there is an unwanted scenario that could occur: that the airport is not enough. When it collapses, it dies of success and serious logistical measures have to be taken. This is what happened in Istanbul: the need to expand the old Atatürk airport encountered an insurmountable barrier in the form of urban geography. For great evils, great remedies: they had to move the entire airport while international aviation and the country’s logistics continued their course. The event is known as “The Great Move“and constitutes the largest move in civil aviation. In less than 45 hours the center of gravity of air transport in the region moved 42 kilometers north, to the new Istanbul Airport (IST), with all that this entails. The move. In aviation, this operational transfer program is known as ORAT (Operational Readiness and Airport Transfer) and it goes without saying that this move was not spontaneous, but rather the opposite: it took two years of meticulous preparation in which they trained 33,000 airport staff and carried out two large-scale drills to detect potential problems. It all started immediately after the opening of the new airport in October 2018 and the final phase (that move), was executed in a continuous 45-hour window between April 5 and 6, 2019 to move more than 10,000 pieces of equipment with a total weight of 47,300 tons. In fact, it was even better: they did it in much less time. Why is it important. If a move has its ins and outs per se, for an airport the problems and the need to execute it without errors multiply as long as it is a living infrastructure with interdependent systems such as fuel, air traffic control, security, IT, passengers and luggage. Disconnecting, transporting and reconnecting everything without collapsing the air traffic of one of the busiest cities in the world is a high-flying engineering challenge. “The Great Move” showed that a world-class hub is possible without a prolonged dual transition, minimizing the operational risk of managing two airports simultaneously. Finally, the movement consolidated Istanbul as a great connection point between Europe and Asia, rivaling others in the Middle East such as Doha or Dubai. Without this move, Turkish Airlines’ growth would likely have been stagnant due to the physical limitations of the old airport. Context. In 2017, Atatürk Airport was the fifth busiest in Europe, behind Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. Without going any further, in 2018 served to almost 70 million passengers, making it the tenth busiest on the planet. But it was limited: it was surrounded by the city on three sides and by the Sea of Marmara on the fourth, so expansion was physically impossible. The secondary airport of Sabiha Gökçen It had also reached its maximum capacity. The lack of space was so critical that it prevented the Airbus A380 from operating, making Atatürk the only major airport in Europe and the Middle East unable to receive such aircraft. So in 2013 they made the decision. The flight that brought down the curtain on Atatürk was Turkish Airlines TK54: it took off on April 6, 2019 at 02:44 to Singapore. In figures. Although there are slight variations in sources directly involved such as Turkish Airlines or the documentary he recorded of the process by the airport operator with the collaboration of National Geographic, are minor and do not detract from the colossal nature of the operation: A planned duration of 45 hours (which they reduced to 33 according to the IGA and less than 30 according to Turkish Airlines) More than 10,000 pieces of equipment moved between airports, with a total weight of 47,300 tons. Equivalent to 33 football fields. 686 semi-trailers used for transportation, according to the CEO of Turkish Airlines. 1,800 people were directly involved in the process. They estimated the distance traveled by the trucks in 45 hours to be 400,000 kilometers, that is, going around the Earth about 10 times. How they did it. It took two years of meticulous preparation in which they trained 33,000 airport staff and conducted two large-scale drills to detect potential problems. Planning required more than 100 meetings and workshops and there were three logistics companies involved. For execution, they developed a logistical transfer plan with details of the movement of each vehicle in 15-minute windows. The route was established through a corridor between the two airports, using the new highway connection between both facilities and each vehicle was checked twice: once at the departure gate and once in a separate control area. The whole process was monitored in real time with GPRS to detect any incident. At 02:59 on April 6, 2019, the IATA code changes were made: Atatürk’s IST code was renamed ISL and the new airport inherited it. Between 02:00 and 14:00 that day, both airports were closed to commercial flights, a 12-hour period that constituted the critical core of the entire operation. The new airport. Istanbul Airport had an estimated budget of 22 billion euros, becoming at that time the second most expensive airport ever built, as told Reuters. Designed with a single terminal under a single roof of 1.4 million square meters, initially allowing 90 million passengers annually. The master plan contemplates expansions up to 200 million, with independent runways that allow simultaneous landings and takeoffs, eliminating waiting in the air. In 2025, the airport rondo 85 million passengers, making it the second busiest in Europe after Heathrow and the seventh in the world. In Xataka | The unfinished dream of the Roman Empire: a 125-kilometer train to link Europe and Asia over the Bosphorus In Xataka | One of the largest and strangest airports in the world is not going to be in Dubai or the UAE: it is going to be in Ethiopia Cover | Ercan Karakaş and Kulttuurinavigaattori

the strike has barely moved

March 9, 2026 by usatoday24

We have been hearing for years that artificial intelligence is going to destroy millions of qualified jobs. Dario Amodei himself, CEO of Anthropic, said last year that AI could affect half of administrative jobs entry level in the coming years. Mustafa Suleyman, head of AI at Microsoft, was more aggressive in your estimatesensuring that most professional work would be replaced within twelve to eighteen months. Now the same Anthropic publish a study which, without denying that the risk exists, forces these predictions to be greatly qualified. What the study measures. The research, signed by economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory, introduces a new metric called “observed exposure.” The idea is that instead of asking what tasks AI could do in theory, the authors analyze what it is actually doing now in professional settings, using usage data from Claude in work contexts. The gap between theoretical capacity and actual use. Taking the computer science and mathematics sector as an example, language models would be capable, in theory, of executing 94% of the tasks associated with these professions. In practice, Claude covers 33%, according to the study. In office automation and administrative positions, the theoretical capacity is close to 90%; actual use is far below. The authors themselves illustrate their metric with an example: authorizing the refilling of medical prescriptions to pharmacies is a task that a language model could easily automate, but the study’s researchers have not observed that Claude was currently doing it. And the barriers to AI not automating these types of tasks include legal restrictions, the need for human verification, barriers with software integration, and more. That is to say, the researchers show that all of these tasks could already be done theoretically by AI, but they are not yet being done due to these restrictions that the human being himself imposes. Who are the most exposed. According to the studythe jobs with the highest observed exposure are computer programmers (74.5%), customer service positions (70.1%) and those who operate by entering data (67.1%). At the opposite extreme, 30% of workers have zero exposure: cooks, mechanics, lifeguards, or waiters. They are jobs that require physical presence and that, according to the study, no language model can replicate. For this we would still have to give robotics a lot of time. The demographic profile of the most exposed group also breaks with the usual imagination. According to the study, these workers are 16% more likely to be women, earn on average 47% more, and have significantly higher levels of education. Anthropic reveals in the study that it is not the warehouse worker who is in the spotlight, but the financial analyst, lawyer or software developer. Unemployment. This is the most striking fact of the investigation, because since the arrival of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 until today, the study says that there is no statistical evidence of a systematic increase in unemployment among workers most exposed to AI. The effect, according to the authors themselves, is “indistinguishable from zero.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics yes it projects that the most exposed jobs will grow less between now and 2034. We will have to wait a few years to study how the metrics progress. The youngest, the most affected. The researchers do detect a worrying sign among workers aged 22 to 25: the rate of entry into jobs in high-exposure sectors has fallen by approximately 14% in the post-ChatGPT era compared to 2022. The authors attribute this phenomenon more to a slowdown in hiring than to layoffs. But they warn that the signal is “barely statistically significant” and that the causes could be several: from young people who simply stay longer in their current jobs, to those who opt for other sectors or going back to school. What limitations does the study have? From Forbes, some analysts have pointed out that the research measures the use of Claude, not the use of AI in the economy as a whole. Companies also use ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini or own models, and those interactions do not appear in the data. The authors are aware of this and acknowledge it in the text. The conclusion that “AI is far from reaching its theoretical capacity” depends in part on the limits of what they can measure, and not just the actual limits of adoption. So should we relax? The authors themselves advise against it. The proposed analysis is said to be designed precisely for scenarios in which the impact arrives gradually and is difficult to detect until it is too late. They point out that the effects of AI on employment could be more like those of the internet or trade with China than those of COVID: slow, diffuse, complicated to isolate from other economic factors. They also warn that if the gap between theoretical capacity and actual use closes, as they expect to happen as models improve and adoption spreads, the most vulnerable groups will be precisely those who today have better salaries and more training. Cover image | Unsplash (charlesdeluvio, Emiliano Vittoriosi) In Xataka | NVIDIA has lost hope in China, which is why it has started manufacturing its own next-generation GPUs for AI

Pedro Sánchez has only detected that the social conversation has already moved

February 3, 2026 by usatoday24

Pedro Sanchez From Dubai, he has promised five measures against digital platforms: criminal liability for managers, prohibition of access to minors under 16 years of age and criminalizing the manipulation of algorithms. The package sounds grandiose, but the most relevant thing is not in the technical details or its parliamentary viability. The panoramic. We are seeing the beginning of the “smoking” of the smartphone even at an institutional level. In society it started a few years ago. Social media is the stated goal, but the gateway is the device. The pattern. We have seen it before. There was a time when smoking on a plane was normal, getting tipsy during pregnancy did not cause social alarm, it was acceptable to travel with four children crammed behind in the car, and sugar was simply an innocent pleasure. In all cases, the change followed a similar sequence: First, scientific studies that point to a course of action. Then, a critical mass of citizens begins to “feel” that there is a problem. Next, governments move toward regulation. Finally, what was normal becomes unacceptable. Where are we. Right now, in phase 2 and approaching phase 3. The evidence on The impact of mobile phones on the attention and performance of minors they are growing. But that doesn’t matter much anymore. What matters is that a growing majority of parents, educators and citizens have come to the conviction that something is wrong. When you ask if children spend too much time on their cell phones, almost no one says no. Between the lines. Politicians do not usually lead these changes in consciousness, they simply detect and amplify them. Sánchez has not invented concern about social networks, he has only smelled that the wind is blowing in that direction and has placed himself in front of the current. This is what governments do when they sense that a cause has more support than detractors: fertile ground to announce something that will generate sympathy. The contrast. Just a decade ago, criticizing social networks placed you in the camp of technophobes, boomers disconnected, those who did not understand progress. Today that position has been almost completely reversed. Defending that a 12-year-old child have unlimited access to TikTok is beginning to be the cause of almost unanimous bad looks. The one that was before mainstream Now he has to explain himself. See a child today (or not so child) spend dinner making scroll to chain videos provokes a different reaction than doing it seven years ago. In another seven years it will surely be even more different. Yes, but. The analogy with tobacco has its limits because the cell phone is not only a vector of addiction, it is also a tool for communication, learning and socialization. Prohibiting access to minors under 16 years of age sounds reasonable until you think about how a 15-year-old teenager today coordinates his or her class work or meets up with friends. The upcoming regulation will have to be somewhat more surgical than that of tobacco, which was simply prohibited in closed spaces. The big question. Or big questions. Will we remember this time as we now remember the photos of doctors smoking in hospitals? Will our children stare in disbelief at images of entire families staring at screens in a restaurant, each absorbed in their own feed? If the pattern repeats itself, probably yes. Whether the measures that Sánchez has just anticipated succeed or not is the least important thing. What matters is that you have correctly read where the conversation is moving. In Xataka | Meta, Google and TikTok have condemned an entire generation to “doomscrolling.” And now they are going to be judged for it Featured image | Xataka

We have been wondering for centuries how the statues on Easter Island moved. The answer was very simple: walking

October 19, 2025 by usatoday24

Can you walk a block of stone the size of a school bus? Can a rock that weighs tons and measures several meters long be walked? The most logical answer is (obviously) no, but things change if what we are talking about is the moai of Easter Island, the unmistakable carvings sculpted and distributed throughout the Polynesian island several centuries ago through the old town of Rapa Nui. Beyond your meaningcharacteristics or design archaeologists have always wondered how the hell the natives managed to move those multi-ton masses from the quarries to the ahuthe ceremonial platforms on which they stood. The answer was just that: no more and no less than ‘walking’. An ancient mystery. There are few sculptures in the world as iconic, unmistakable and fascinating as the moai of Easter Island, the enormous rock heads that seem to emerge from the earth on the distant oceanic island. Since Jacob Roggeveen and its people arrived there in 1722, the world wonders what they were for, what they represent and of course how their creators, the people of Rapa Nui, managed to move them from the quarries to their destinations. Why is it so surprising? Because the statues, carved especially in volcanic tuff of the Rano RarakuThey measure several meters long and weigh tons. In fact, it is said that on average they are around 4.5 meters and 10 talthough there are older specimens. Taking that into account and that they had to move from the places where they were made to their platforms, how did the islanders move them? It is not a minor question if we remember that on the island there are hundreds and hundreds of statues, some have the buried torso and were manufactured mainly among 13th and 16th centuries. Their displacement has aroused so much curiosity that over the last decades it has inspired various theories, such as the one that maintains that the figures they lay down on a kind of wooden sled with ropes. Now a group of researchers he thinks he has settled the debate once and for all. And your answer has little to do with trailers, horizontal loads and logs. ‘Walking’ sculptures. The ancient legends of Rapa Nui they assured that the moai arrived “walking” to their ceremonial platforms, the ahu. And although that possibility has always sounded like a pure fable, it seems that it was not so far off the mark. Thanks to a study that combines physics, 3D modeling and field experiments, a team led by experts from Binghamton and Arizona universities has confirmed that “the statues really walked”. And the most interesting thing is that this process had very little mysterious about it. It was simple physics and engineering. All that was needed was ropes, people, paths and a special design. “After studying nearly a thousand moai, Professor Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt discovered that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui probably used ropes and ‘walked’ the gigantic statues in a zigzag pattern along carefully designed paths,” he explains. a statement launched by Binghamton University. Is it something new? More or less. The theory itself is not new. In the 80s a Czech engineer (Pavel Pavel) already raised that the moai moved upright thanks to a system that propelled them from two points. Carl Lipo himself and his colleagues they argued does years that the statues “walked” with vertical and oscillating movements, contravening the hypothesis that the people of Rapa Nui transported them upside down with the help of logs. To prove it they even did a practical demonstration that attracted interest of National Geographic. Despite these efforts, there were still critical voices that questioned the theory. And that is what Lipo and Hunt have now wanted to settle by deploying their entire arsenal. From the theory… To the facts, which is what the investigators have done. For prove the validity of his theory and better understand the movement of the carvings, Lipo and his colleagues turned to high-resolution 3D models and thoroughly studied the shape of the moais, both those that remain upright and the dozens that fell by the wayside when their creators tried to remove them from the quarry. Not only that. The team also incorporated practical tests into its argument. Practical tests? Yes. The researchers built a moai of 4.35 tons and they dedicated themselves to moving it with the help of ropes. The result is fascinating and Binghamton University itself has taken care of divulge it on YouTube. The team needed just 18 people to move the moai 100 meters in 40 minutes. “Once it gets moving it’s not difficult. People pull with just one arm. It saves energy and it moves very fast,” comment Professor Carl Lipo. “The tricky part is getting it to swing in the first place.” That experience, added to the 3D models and the rest of the analysis, demonstrates, in the opinion of the archaeologists, that their theories “really work.” And to silence voices they have captured it in a paper published in Journal of Archaeological Science with a headline as revealing as it is provocative: “The hypothesis of the walking moai.” Have they discovered anything else? Yes. The researchers identified certain “distinctive characteristics” in the design of the moai that, a priori, made it more feasible for them to advance with an oscillating and zigzag movement with the help of the ropes. What features? The archaeologists quote two specifically: “wide ‘D’ shaped bases and certain inclination forward” (between 5 and 15º). To be more precise, the experts appreciated bases wide and roundedespecially in the moai that were left halfway, which suggests that the islanders used them to move them (the design served to lower the center of gravity). Then, once the figures reached their destination, they carved them to settle them. Another of the clues they have found is in the paths used by the islanders of Rapa Nui. Its width (4.5 meters) and concave cross section invites experts to think that roads were “ideal” … Read more

Europe saw the Ukraine War from home comfort. Until the war has moved to its airports

September 25, 2025 by usatoday24

The war in Ukraine has devoured Russia’s human and material resources at a devastating rhythm: more than 250,000 soldiers dead and about one million of total casualties, a cost higher to all its wars since 1945. This fact has conditioned Moscow, but has also enhanced a war that has turned the airspace of the rest of Europe into chaos: The hybrid war. The bleeding and the turn. Forbes counted This week that, despite that human sacrifice, Moscow has barely expanded 12% The territory under its control, at the price of losing ten men for each square mile conquered. Thus, unable to sustain the conventional war, the Kremlin has replaced the number of troops by the Drones deploymentcapable of launching more than a thousand projectiles and responsible for Up to 70% of the Ukrainian casualties. The bet is so clear that it is expected to form more drone operators What infantry soldiers From here to 2030. With this transition, Moscow has converted the swarm of unmanned aircraft into the central tool of a hybrid strategy that not only points to Ukraine, but now Also to all of Europe. Civil aviation, the first front. The European airports They have been the first to feel the effects of this war in the shadow. Drone raids forced the Temporary airport closure In Copenhagen and Oslo, while a ransomware attack paralyzed billing systems in London-Heathrow, Berlin and Brussels. What were previously isolated incidents has become a coordinated series of interruptions that show to what extent civil aviation, highly interconnected, is vulnerable to hybrid sabotage that combines low cost devices with cyber attacks. The experts They point That these episodes seek to measure the European reaction capacity, and warn that the cost of modernizing antidron systems (radars, inhibitors, lasers) is so high that many airports are not prepared to assume it immediately. The result: hundreds of delayed or canceled flights and an unprecedented exhibition of the weaknesses of an essential sector. Denmark as an epicenter. In just one week, Denmark has undergone a Succession of incursions with drones on key airports such as Aalborg or Billund and on military bases where their f-16 and F-35 fighters operate. Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulen, described These operations as a hybrid attack executed by a “professional actor” and acknowledged that they could lead to activate Article 4 of NATO for the first time in the history of the country. Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, He described Copenhagen’s closure as the most serious attack suffered by Danish critical infrastructure. The government even studies legal changes to authorize civil operators of strategic facilities to demolish drones in case of threat. In parallel, political pressure has led to Call of meetings Joints in the EU to discuss the creation of a “drone wall” on the eastern borders of the continent. Europe and a challenge. The incidents In Poland, Romania, Estonia and Denmark have uncovered a major problem: Europe’s inability to face Cheap threats and massive like drones. The systems designed to intercept fighters or ballistic missiles are revealed ineffective against swarms of small low -cost devices, which go unnoticed to the radars or saturate the defenses. The magnitude of the Intrusion in Poland and airspace violations In Estonia They have shown that the gap is real. General stones They warn That what they need are not very expensive and scarce systems, but scalable defenses, cheap and mass produced: sensors, electronic war tools, small interceptors and short -range missiles. The proposal of A “Drones Wall” that covers borders with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine reflects urgency, but also the complexity of protecting against a threat in constant evolution. The conflict at home. The truth is that, for a long time, Europe contemplated the invasion of Ukraine from a distance, with the feeling that the war was fought in a foreign scenario. Today that perception It has vanishedat least in part: The hybrid war It has already closed airports In Denmarkparalyzed systems in Berlin, Brussels and London, and put at risk the safety of commercial flights. Thus, the front has moved to the tracks, to the navigation systems and the digital networks that support the daily life of millions of Europeans. If you want also, Russia has made the war cease to be a distant echo to become A tangible reality In the heavens and in the infrastructure of the continent, forcing NATO and the EU to rethink its defense in a new and most disconcerting terrain. Image | State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, monitorwar In Xataka | Russia is running out of one of its guts in war: Ukraine has destroyed the last Soviet jewel, and there are no spare parts In Xataka | Two hidden Russian soldiers wrote something unpublished to a drone. That day in Ukraine changed the rules of wars

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