mysterious

A mysterious Chinese structure has remained for five days in one of the most tense points in Asia

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In September 2023, a Philippine patrol cut and removed a floating barrier of about 300 meters that China had installed at the entrance to the Scarborough Shoal lagoon. The scene was so symbolic that it gave around the world: a simple cable supported by buoys had become one of the most delicate geopolitical hotspots in Asia. Five days in suspense. It all started with a series of images by satellite that showed something unexpected at the entrance to the lagoon Scarborough Shoalone of the most sensitive and disputed enclaves in Asia. For several consecutive days, different satellite captures recorded the presence of a reflective object accompanied in some cases by a type of linear barrier that seemed to partially cross the access to the atoll. No one could determine with certainty whether it was a buoy, a floating platform or a more permanent installation, but its mere appearance was enough to trigger investigations in the Philippines and attract the attention of specialized analysts. When new images taken days later showed that the object had disappearedthe questions remained the same: what the hell exactly was it, who placed it, and what was it trying to achieve. Why Scarborough Shoal is much more than a reef. The reaction is explained by the strategic importance of the place. Scarborough Shoal is situated within the exclusive economic zone claimed by the Philippines, but remains under effective Chinese control since the crisis of 2012. Since then it has become one of the main points of friction between both countries. Its waters are valuable for fishing, its lagoon serves as a natural refuge for boats and its position offers an important advantage to control sea routes and airspace in a region through which billions of dollars in commerce circulate each year. In such a sensitive environment, even a structure less than ten meters tall can acquire disproportionate geopolitical relevance. Scarborough Shoal The suspicions behind the mysterious structure. The images showed a visible object for at least five days and a possible barrier similar to those that China has previously used to restrict Filipino fishermen’s access to the lagoon. That sparked speculation about whether Beijing was taking a new step to tighten its control over the atoll. The experts they warned that, if it was a fixed installation, it could be interpreted as a disruption of the status quo in an area whose sovereignty remains disputed. Although no authority has been able to confirm the exact nature of the object, the episode reflects the extent to which satellite surveillance has become in a key tool to detect movements that just a few years ago would have gone completely unnoticed. A dispute that has never stopped escalating. The appearance of the structure also coincided with a particularly tense moment. China maintains an almost permanent presence of coast guard and vessels around scarboroughwhile the Philippines increases its patrols and strengthens military cooperation with the United States. Shortly before the object was detected, US and Philippine forces had carried out new joint maneuvers in the area. Manila also denounced the presence of dozens of Chinese vessels operating within its claimed waters. The result is something like a constant cycle of shows of force where every patrol, every maneuver and every potential construction is watched with enormous attention by all parties involved. The great transformation. What happened in Scarborough also fits into a much broader trend. As we have been countingOver the last decade, China has turned practically submerged reefs into authentic artificial islands equipped with ports, radars, military installations and even landing strips. The transformation of places like Mischief Reef, Fiery Cross Reef or Subi Reef changed completely regional balance and demonstrated that physical construction can become a tool of territorial control as effective as military presence. Each new structure detected satellite arouses concern precisely because there is a clear precedent of how small initial changes can end up becoming permanent bases. A race to consolidate positions. The response of the other claimants has been to assume that the scenario has changed. Vietnam has been expanding reefs under its control for years, building ports and new infrastructure. The Philippines reinforces its existing positions, expands landing strips and strengthens isolated detachments. The feeling that dominates the region is that the multilateral negotiations have failed and that each country is trying consolidate what you already control before circumstances worsen. In this context, the mysterious structure of Scarborough It is especially symbolic. Regardless of what it really was, it reminded all the actors involved that in the South China Sea a simple spot detected from space can become for a few days the center of a geopolitical dispute that affects a good part of Asia and in which China continues to be, by far, the most powerful player. Image | Vantor In Xataka | China has a problem: behind thousands of food delivery restaurants there is no establishment, no kitchen, no restaurant In Xataka | The US had a ship with 2,000 marines ready to invade Iran. Now he has sent it right to the place where China worries the most

Almost 2,000 years ago a man died with a mysterious case while fleeing Pompeii. We finally know his secret

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Get in the situation. It’s any day of any month and you are at home doing something when suddenly you hear screams in the street. You look out the window and see people running away in terror. Not only that. In the distance you see how the ash and burning rock rise from a volcano that both you and the rest of your neighbors thought were immersed in unalterable lethargy. What would you do in the face of such a scenario? something similar They lived 1947 years ago the Pompeians. Now we finally know what one of the unfortunate people who did not manage to save himself did: hold on to your briefcase of doctor. When Vesuvius woke up. The ruins of Pompeii were discovered long ago several centuries and archaeologists have been unraveling its mysteries for decades, trying to know above all what happened that fateful August 24, 79 AD (some versions speak of October) in which Vesuvius erupted and condemned the city of Campania, along with other towns such as Herculaneum, Stabia and Oplontis, asphyxiated under a layer of ash. However, despite all the research and rivers of ink that have flowed on the subject in recent years, the ruins of Pompey continue to retain their ability to surprise us. A figure in Ortho dei Fuggiaschi. One of the corners that has aroused the most fascination is the Ortho dei Fuggiaschithe ‘Garden of the Fugitives’, where we have found the remains of some 13 victims of Vesuvius. The reason is very simple: thanks to the method archaeologist molding Giuseppe Fiorelli20 centuries later, their corpses continue to starkly reflect the desperation of those men, women and children who tried to save themselves while their city was eclipsed by a dense rain of ash and lapilli, the walls collapsed and Vesuvius spewed pyroclasts. We knew that the victims who ended up perishing in the Ortho dei Fuggiaschi were probably seeking refuge, we also have a fairly precise idea of What were your last moments like? before dying. Thanks to Fiorelli’s plaster mold method we can even visualize the scene. The big question is… Can we go further? Who were those people? What did they do? What did they do before leaving their homes on the run? They are fascinating questions. Especially because, before perishing, some victims of Vesuvius they left us clues about your routine. There are cases, for example, in which the scene suggests that the victims were carrying jewelry and coinswhich leads us to think that they were trying to keep their most valuable possessions safe, perhaps so as not to lose them. Perhaps to start a new life in an impulse not so different from the one we would have today. Clinging to the medicine cabinet. Now researchers have discovered another story in it Ortho dei Fuggiaschil. More than 70 years after the first excavations and thanks to the use of To be more precise, scientists have identified a small box of organic material with metal parts and a series of instruments “compatible with a medical kit.” For example, a slab of slate that could have been used to make medical or cosmetic substances and surgical instruments. The x-ray and tomography examination has also shown a cloth bag with bronze and silver coins and a mechanism with a toothed wheel that allowed the box to be closed. Those responsible for the site stand out Furthermore, the study was carried out without putting the molds at risk. The decline of a doctor? That is the hypothesis with which the researchers work, who believe that the briefcase gives us a clue as to who the person who died next to him was. “He was probably a doctor, a victim of the tragedy while trying to escape, taking with him some of the tools of his trade,” he explains in a statement the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, which insists that the instruments located inside the case provide us with “a valuable and rare clue about his profession.” “2,000 years ago there were people who were not limited to practicing medicine during office hours, but were doctors at all times, even when fleeing the eruption, which was thwarted by the pyroclastic cloud that reached the group of fugitives who were trying to leave the city through Porta Nocera,” reflect Gabriel Zuchtriegel. “This man took his instruments with him to be prepared to rebuild his life elsewhere thanks to his profession, but perhaps also to help others.” Images | Pompeii Archaeological Park In Xataka | 2,000 years later, Pompeii continues to reveal fascinating things: the latest is a blue room for unknown uses

a mysterious whistle without explanation

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In 1969, the Apollo 10 astronauts and one of the Apollo 11 astronauts They heard an intriguing whistle between ghostly and spatial that left them stunned. In both cases, they heard this type of music when they were flying over the Moon. Therefore, it could be expected that the Artemis II crew would have heard it as well. However, we know that he has not. Not only because they have not commented on it, but because today the origin of that sound is known and in the case of this new mission it would have been impossible for them to hear it. Nobody will believe us. It was the month of May 1969 when the Apollo 10 mission, the equivalent of Artemis II if we compare the Apollo program with Artemis, made its particular trip to the Moon. When they were orbiting around the far side of the satellite, the entire crew began to hear a mysterious whistle. The pilot, Gene Cernan, was the first to comment on the matter. “That music even sounds like outer space, right? You hear it? That whistling sound?” Everyone else joined in the comments, which later would appear in NASA transcripts. Later, John W. Young would add: “We’re going to have to find out about this, no one will believe us.” History repeats itself. Contrary to what Young thought, they did believe them. So when the Apollo 11 astronauts embarked on their own journey two months later, they were warned that they might encounter that sound. Two of the astronauts on this mission didn’t hear it, but one did. As the command module pilot, Michael Collins, would later explain in his memoirs, when he was flying over the Moon alone, with his companions perched on the satellite, he heard exactly the same noise. Even though he had been warned about it, he couldn’t help but be overwhelmed. No aliens in sight. In reality, the sound that all these astronauts heard was not alien at all, but something very terrestrial and human: an interference. Apollo 10 didn’t just fly over the Moon. He also tested the empty lander, to check that it undocked correctly from the command module. It did not touch the selenite surface, but it did separate and descend a little. It was at that moment that the sound was heard. In the case of Apollo 11, only Collins heard it at exactly the same moment. When the two parts of the ship were separated. Over time, those in charge of NASA’s transmission system discovered that it was interference between the lander’s radio system and the command module. When they separated, their respective radios they competed between them, causing this curious effect. YoIt is not possible that it was heard in Orion. On the Apollo missions, astronauts could use the command module or the landing module. While the second was on the Moon, the first remained orbiting around it, with only the pilot on board. Instead, Orion consists of a single capsule powered by European Service Module engines. For this reason, during the lunar flyby nothing was separated from the ship and there were no different radio systems that could interfere. Even so, communications systems are no longer what they were. Even if they had separated, a way would have been found to avoid interference. Or maybe not. Yeah your urine freezes and They have to wear t-shirts as blindsperhaps communication would have also given them some problems. The children surpass those parents. Artemis is a younger mission than Apollo, but it has already surpassed it in many aspects. Although the Artemis II astronauts have carried out a mission very similar to that of Apollo 10, they have gone further, breaking his record and, furthermore, they will possibly also surpass them in speed when they enter our planet again. It is a more advanced mission, but without mysterious music or whistles. It’s progress, but also a little more boring. Image | POT In Xataka | The Artemis II astronauts will carry out experiments in what will be their own study models

More than 40 years ago we discovered a mysterious hexagon on Saturn. Today there is only one possible explanation

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If there is a planet within the Solar system as enigmatic as it is striking, it is Saturn. And not just because of their rings, probably caused by a collision of their moons. But it’s not the only thing that baffles the scientific community: if you look at Saturn’s north pole from space, you will discover a perfect geometric shape: a hexagon. 30,000 kilometers in diameter. To get the idea, two planets could fit inside it. Of that mysterious hexagon We know that it is there at least since 1981, when the Voyager 2 probe flew over the planet, leaving testimony of its existence. It is not that nature is not capable of making geometric shapes, but the hexagon is not exactly the most common. The latest and most solid hypothesis that attempts to elucidate what Saturn’s hexagon is to date was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offering a possible explanation: the internal dynamics of the planet’s atmosphere. The hypothesis. What the research team from Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences suggests is that the hexagon is not a surface structure, but rather is generated by rotating deep convection inside Saturn. The turbulence of the deep layers of its atmosphere generates vortices that push and bend a high-speed air current that surrounds the north pole, deforming it so much that it acquires its hexagonal shape. The hexagon is not the storm, it is the trace of what happens underneath. Qor why it’s important. Because we have been carrying around the mystery of the hexagon since 1981 and none of the previous theories fit as well as this one, capable of generating the hexagon from basic physics without artifice. Also, it answers a question: how far do Saturn’s winds reach? According to this model, to the bottom. On the other hand, if this explanation is correct, it changes the perception of how we understand the dynamics of giant planets, not just Saturn. Saturn hexagon with images from the Cassini probe. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute context. Before this 2020 theory, there were two clear sides: The forced Rossby wave proposed that the hexagon was an atmospheric wave held in place by an anticyclone, visible south of the pole in Voyager 2 data. When the Cassini probe arrived at Saturn in 2004, there was no trace of that anticyclone. That of the surface jet suggested that the hexagon was a surface wind that, when it becomes unstable, undulates and adopts a polygon shape. The problem was that it needed a starting current. Furthermore, it places the phenomenon in superficial layers, which contradicts the gravitational data of Cassini’s Grand Finale whose gravitational data suggest that Saturn’s winds maintain their intensity up to 100,000 bars of pressure. In both cases, they all reproduced the hexagon if you already gave them a base wind, but none of them generated it from scratch. How have they done it. The methodology is quite abstract, but roughly what they did was simulate a slice of Saturn, spinning it and heating it from below and letting physics act. No winds or hexes in the initial setup. So much the code used in the simulation like the data They are openly available, so anyone can reproduce and verify the results. Yes, but. The hypothesis developed by the Harvard team may be the best so far, but the paper itself recognizes Some objections to take into account. Thus, the simulation polygon is faster than what happens in reality, something that could be solved with a more powerful simulation. The simulation polygon moves faster than what happens in reality, something the authors attribute to the computational power available. Furthermore, the simulation only tests specific conditions and for a relatively short time: no one has yet verified whether the result holds under different parameters or on longer time scales. In Xataka | We have just discovered a true cosmic anomaly: an “invisible” galaxy made up almost 100% of dark matter In Xataka | A new “solar system” has just been discovered. There’s just one problem: it shouldn’t exist. Cover | NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

“Six. Four. Zero. Nine.” A mysterious radio has been repeating numbers in Iran since the start of the war, and no one knows why

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The short waves They were for decades one of the strangest territories on the radio planet: anyone with a cheap radio could hear metallic voices reciting meaningless numbers, repetitive melodies or absurd phrases that seemed straight out of a spy movie. During the Cold War, thousands of radio amateurs recorded these emissions mysterious things spread all over the world, many of them active for years without anyone officially knowing who was behind them. Some disappeared after the fall of the Soviet bloc. Others, surprisingly, they never left altogether. A voice in the middle of the war. I told the story this morning the financial times and begins shortly after the United States and Israel They will start their attacks against Iran on February 28. Then a sound began to be heard strange transmission on short wave directed at the country: a male voice in Persian that bursts through the static repeating “Tavajjoh” (attention) three times before reciting long sequences of numbers with an almost mechanical cadence. The emissions, detected by radio amateurs and signal trackers, apparently come from somewhere in Western Europe and are repeated twice a day for about an hour and a half. Although its exact origin has not been confirmed, former US intelligence officials consider it very likely that it is a emergency communication system to maintain contact with agents inside Iran at an especially sensitive time, when the war has raised the risks for any informant and the Iranian government has restricted access to the internet and other international communications. What the V32 station really is. The mysterious emission has been identified by observers like V32a call “number station”a type of shortwave transmission historically used by intelligence agencies to send encrypted orders to spies on the ground. The system works in an extremely simple way: the agent only needs a radio and a code book (the so-called one-time pads) to convert the figures heard into understandable messages. The station began broadcasting in Persian exactly coinciding with the start of the war and has already tried to be interfered with through electronic noises which probably come from Iranian jamming systems, but the mysterious voice has been limited to change frequency and continue with his reading of numbers. These types of broadcasts are almost impossible to completely neutralize, because anyone can tune in and because counterintelligence can only act if it detects a spy transcribing the message or if the operators make mistakes. The shadow of the Cold War. The pattern that this station follows is directly reminiscent of one of the most disturbing elements of 20th century espionage: the digital radios that proliferated during the cold war. For decades, services like the CIAthe KGB or the Stasi emitted metallic voices that recited numbers, letters or even melodies followed by coded sequences aimed at agents infiltrating enemy territory. These transmissions could heard around the world and yet its meaning was indecipherable to anyone who did not possess the proper key. Some stations became famous among radio amateurs for its peculiarities (childish voices, strange music or seemingly absurd phrases), but its logic was always the same: to offer an untraceable and extremely secure communication system. The method survived for decades because it was cheap, discreet and resistant even the most sophisticated espionage systems, and although the phenomenon decreased after the end of the Cold War never disappeared full. The Cold War Morse/Voice Generator is a machine that has been used in many well-known number stations Old, but it works. The reason why these stations continue to be useful in the 21st century is precisely their simplicity. If the internet goes down, if phones are tapped, or if digital communications are blocked, a simple shortwave radio still works and allows orders to be transmitted without leaving an electronic trace. For the secret services, it also offers additional benefits: The recipient can listen to the message in seconds, destroy their codebook immediately afterwards, and disappear without leaving any evidence. That simplicity makes even a single person well located can receive instructions capable of causing enormous consequences, from sabotage to more complex intelligence operations. By the way, messages are usually repeated several times to minimize the risk that the agent in question will have to expose himself for too long listening to the transmission. What could the mysterious voice be saying. Although they are all hypotheses and no one outside of their operators knows the real meaning of the sequences, former intelligence officials they point to several plausible possibilities. Emissions could serve to activate agents who remained waiting inside Iran, order evacuations to meeting points or even coordinate operations covered up during the conflict. There is also another more strategic interpretation: that the station is deliberately designed to sow doubts within Iranian counterintelligence, suggesting that there are high-level infiltrators awaiting instructions from the West. In that case, even without transmitting specific orders, the very existence of the station would force Tehran to mobilize cryptographers, researchers and resources to try to decipher a message that may never be understood. Weird, but still alive. Number stations are one of the few times when the normally invisible work of intelligence services becomes audible for anyone with a radio. Although they are much less common today than during the confrontation between blocs of the 20th century, they still there are transmissions regulars associated with countries such as Russia, Poland, Taiwan or North Korea. Some even preserve an almost ceremonial style, such as the Taiwanese station known as New Star Broadcastingwhich begins with a flute melody and ends by wishing “health and happiness” to its listeners before issuing coded numbers intended for agents on extremely sensitive missions. Iran and the difficulty. For the United States, maintaining intelligence networks inside Iran has always been especially complicatedpartly because it does not have an embassy in the country and because the Iranian security apparatus is one of the most vigilant in the world. That forces Western services to retain emergency communication methods capable of working when all else fails. … Read more

Make the “most mysterious book in the world” with dice and cards. How we are understanding the Voynich manuscript without deciphering a single line

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Voynich is an old acquaintance of this house: for years, we have been tracking (and gutting) each of the attempts to decipher the “most mysterious manuscript in the world.” They have all been unsuccessful and that includes, of course, the attempts to some of the sharpest minds of history. Now, however, we have a new idea. And, despite not solving absolutely anything, it sounds very good. What is the Voynich manuscript? Let’s start at the beginning: Between 1404 and 1438someone somewhere started writing a book in a language or code that no one has been able to decipher. A book that, since its rediscovery in 1912, has baffled everyone and especially cryptographers. Overall, this is an extraordinarily strange piece (full of illustrations of rare or non-existent plants, astrological symbols, strange creatures and naked women) about which we know only a handful of things. We know, for example, that it is a natural language (or a code related to a natural language) because complies with Zipf’s Lawan empirical regularity that only occurs in natural languages ​​and that describes the frequency of appearance of words. Invented languages ​​(especially languages ​​invented in the 15th century) do not comply. We have known this since the 60s, but little else. And people are still trying to figure it out? Yes, absolutely yes. The Voynichians are a group of people who are extremely passionate (and ‘insistent’) about their manuscript and, in fact, have members in almost every social strata in the wide world. An example is today’s protagonist. A few weeks ago, the magazine Cryptology public a job of Michael A. Greshko in which a new and very interesting idea was proposed. Greshko is a renowned science journalist, he is an editor at Science and has worked for media such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Nature, Scientific American and National Geographic. He is someone who is risking part of his prestige on this, come on. And what does he propose? Greshko has exposed something called “Naibbe cipher”. Basically, it is an encryption system that allows languages ​​such as Italian or Latin to be transformed into a pseudo-writing that preserves properties of ‘voynichés’ (the ‘language’ of the manuscript). Respect, for example, things like glyph frequencies or word lengths. All this, with plausible cryptographic tools for the 15th century. And that’s precisely what’s interesting: Greshko doesn’t try to “read” the book; It attempts to demonstrate that, at that time and starting from a common language, a text similar to that of the manuscript could be constructed. How to make your own Voynich at home. According to the work of Cryptologiathe Naibbe method does things like break words into blocks (splits ‘gatto’ into ‘g’, ‘at’ and ‘to’), uses random systems (like dice or card rolls), and generates a homophonic cipher (ciphers specially designed to “counter the main deciphering tool for monoalphabetic substitutions, frequency analysis”). So, have we solved the problem? Not even close. As I said, Greshko has not deciphered the manuscript. He has simply looked for ways in which that manuscript could have been produced. For years, artificial intelligence algorithms have failed in the translation of the Voynich and, as the author explains, this may be because they do not know very well what to look for. Systems like Naibbe draw constructive possibilities that expand the options among which we can search. And in that sense, yes: Voynich is still much smarter than us. Although we don’t know for how long. Image | Gunnar Klack In Xataka | No, no “artificial intelligence” has deciphered the Voynich manuscript

China has unveiled its most mysterious vessel to date. And then the theories have begun, some very crazy

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Just two weeks ago China completed that plan for world domination that had staged at the end of summer through a military parade unparalleled. And he did it showing the Type 076 In its first tests, an unprecedented technological leap in the Chinese naval industry as it is an amphibious assault ship with electric propulsion and electromagnetic catapults. It turns out that there was a “one more thing”. Challenging the known. Yes, the appearance of a mysterious black trimaran in what appears to be the Huangpu shipyard has revealed for the first time the complete silhouette of a ship that China had been hiding for months under tarps and that until now was only known by satellite analysis. Its lines combine features typical of a surface ship with unmistakably underwater elements, giving shape to a hybrid design about 64 meters in length, designed to operate both in exposed navigation and in submersible mode, an architecture that radically expands the possibilities of stealth, range and survival against adversary sensors. Theories. They counted the TWZ analysts that the presence of a type propellant pump-jetvisible in the new imagereinforces the impression that acoustic discretion and efficiency have been prioritized during long journeys, while its sail with depth markings, snorkel or mast points to long immersion cycles and a behavior closer to that of a light submarine than to that of a simple unmanned surface vehicle. With or without humans. That has been the big question since the image was made public: the question of whether the ship operates with a crew or if it belongs to the new generation hybrid USV/UUV that China has begun to deploy in recent years. Its design, without a classic superstructure and with a minimal sail, supports the possibility of a vehicle capable of ssubmerge almost completelywhich would place it in an intermediate category between a semi-submersible drone and a small displacement submarine. The presence of draft marks on the sail and other areas of the hull suggests that total immersion is contemplated, and that the ship is somewhat more sophisticated than the semi-submersibles used in surveillance or infiltration operations. If it is confirmed that it is an unmanned system (or with a minimum crew) we would be faced with a notable jump in Chinese naval doctrine, which has been experimenting for years with distributed fleets of autonomous platforms capable of operating far from bases and with less political risk. Render seen in nets of the boat More hypotheses. One of the stronger theories maintains that this trimaran represents the Chinese evolution of the naval arsenal concept: a stealthy, difficult-to-detect, unmanned or reduced-crew vessel loaded with land-attack or anti-ship missiles that could surface, launch its salvo, and disappear again beneath the waves. In times of sensor proliferation, anti-satellite warfare and constant surveillance, such a platform would expand the Chinese navy’s depth of fire without exposing more valuable frigates or destroyers. Although the available image does not show a VLS system that confirms this function, the internal volume of the ship and its profile fit with the unofficial renders that have been circulating for years on a possible semi-submersible prototype capable of hiding its thermal and radar signal. If China were testing this concept, it would try to replicate the logic the United States explored decades ago: a “floating arsenal” that provides fire mass without compromising manned vessels. Unofficial render appeared on networks before the leaked image The drone mothership option. Another interpretation with increasing weight is that of a drone mothershipboth air and sea, an idea that would fit with the tactical revolution seen in the Black Sea, where Ukraine has shown the devastating potential of swarms launched from small platforms. In this case, the interior of the trimaran could house VTOL drones or ramp launchers for long-range loitering munitions similar to the Shahed, expanding China’s ability to saturate defenses or conduct remote attacks without compromising manned aircraft. The absence of a flight deck Conventional does not rule out this function: an internal catapult system or inclined launchers could be adapted without the need for an open hangar. This approach would make the ship a force multiplier within a distributed combat architecture that the PLAN has been cultivating for yearsdrawing inspiration from both the American model and recent lessons from the war in Ukraine. Secret missions. A third possibility is that it is a platform designed for special operationscapable of infiltrating equipment into archipelagos, reefs or highly monitored coastal areas without the acoustic and thermal signal of a conventional submarine. The ability to surface surf long distances and then submerge to conceal aligns with special forces doctrines that privilege silent penetration and discreet exfiltration. Similar vessels have been developed by the United States (like the Sealion) and for other navies operating in densely monitored environments. China, with its growing interest for projecting power in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straitwould have a clear incentive to test vehicles capable of moving between islets and shallow waters where a standard submarine would be impractical. A test bench. It cannot be ruled out, however, that this trimaran is above all a prototype intended to experiment with technologies that will end up being integrated into other platforms. The recent history of the PLAN is full of test ships and experimental structures used to validate sensors, thrusters, stealth helmets or autonomous systems before scaling up production. Ambiguity is part of the message: by showing a ship of indeterminate purpose, China introduces uncertainty in adversary planning, forcing the United States, Japan and Australia to contemplate a whole collection of potential threats without being able to rule out any. In that sense, the opacity, reinforced by its black paint and the absence of official details, is part of the strategic game. A symptom. Be that as it may, for now there is only one certainty: the discovery of the image It does not dispel the mystery, but rather expands it. The ship represents a deliberate experiment with concepts that are redefining 21st … Read more

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard removed all their songs from Spotify. Immediately afterwards some mysterious versions took their place

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You can leave Spotify, but you don’t leave it completely until Spotify allows you to. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard just found out the hard way: They left the platform in protest of the CEO’s investmentsbut there are still his songs inside. The terrifying thing about it: they are not the ones who composed or recorded them. We go, or not. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard left Spotify in July 2025: it was a protest against Daniel Ek’s investments in military technology. Weeks later, however, they discovered that several of the group’s songs were still available on the platform. But they were not the originals, but rather instrumental versions that imitated the original songs, with the same artist name, identical titles and official covers. According to Platformer accountthese songs managed to accumulate more than 10 million views before being detected. The trick. Spotify presented these tracks as authentic. As a fan of the band tells Platformer, when playing ‘Deadstick’ from the album ‘Phantom Island’, what sounded was a simplified version, almost a cell phone ringtone, a kind of low-quality version. But without knowing the original song (and especially taking into account how fond of jokes and experimentation this unclassifiable and prolific band is) any listener could have confused it with the real song. The same thing happened with other songs on the album such as ‘Aerodynamic’ and ‘Grow Wings and Fly’. The article sparked a wave of protests that led Spotify to remove the content, confirming that it violated its anti-phishing policy. There are currently no songs from the group on the platform. It is not an isolated case. According to data from the company itself published in September 2025Spotify has removed 75 million tracks classified as spam over the last year. The consulting firm Luminate estimates that about 99,000 songs are uploaded daily to streaming services, often through distributors that do not verify the identity of the artist. The situation is accentuated on other platforms, in what seems to be a widespread problem with a clear trigger: the ease with which songs can be generated using AI. Deezer, for example, counted this same month which receives more than 50,000 tracks completely generated by artificial intelligence every day, 34% of all the content that reaches its servers. 70% of AI-generated music plays, he says, are unauthorized songs or songs that replace real artists. The Ghost of The Velvet Sundown. In June 2025, a band called The Velvet Sundown reached more than one million monthly listeners on Spotify. Its promotional photos had that artificial appearance characteristic of images generated by AI, and its members did not exist on any social network, but the group started with 550,000 monthly listeners after being recommended by the platform’s algorithm. After weeks of denying the accusations, those responsible admitted it was an “artistic provocation” created with artificial intelligence. His songs are still available on Spotify. The dead artists. However, in terms of impersonated artists, the case of deceased artists is more disturbing: numerous songs generated by AI began to appear in official profiles of deceased musicians. The page of Blaze Foley, country singer-songwriter murdered in 1989, received new songs. It also happened with Guy Clark, a Grammy winner who died in 2016, Sophie, an electronic artist who died in 2021, and Uncle Tupelo, Jeff Tweedy’s former band from Wilco. All of these tracks were uploaded by distributors without any verification and remained active for weeks before being detected. A systemic problem. Although Spotify is the visible head of this chaos, there is a real mess at many points on the diffusion scale. For example, distributors like DistroKid allow massive topic uploads without verifying the real identity of the artist. In the aforementioned September communication, Spotify announced new anti-spoofing policies and an anti-spam filter, but at the moment its effectiveness has not been proven. For now, the King Gizzard case raises a devastating question: after abandoning a platform, you do not abandon it completely. Maybe you’ll never do it. Header | Paul Hudson

There were thousands of mysterious holes lined up in Peru. We didn’t know why until a drone saw them from the air

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In the arid hills of Pisco Valleyin the south of Peru, extends a monument as mysterious as it is precise: a strip of almost a kilometer and a half made up of some 5,200 perfectly aligned cavities, known like Mount Sierpe or the Band of Holes. Discovered in 1931 by the geologist Robert Shippee and Lieutenant George R. Johnson during one of the first aerial expeditions over the Andes, the site baffled generations of archaeologists. Until now. A mysterious landscape. For decades, theories were proposed ranging from its defensive use to fog capture or water storage, but none of them quite fit. Now, a new study published in Antiquity provides a convincing hypothesis from a point of view that no one had valued: from the air. In this way, Mount Sierpe would have functioned as a accounting and barter system on a large scale, a kind of “spreadsheet” of the pre-Hispanic Andes. The geometry that speaks. The international team of researchers, led by archaeologist Jacob Bongers from the University of Sydney, used drones to map the site with millimeter precision. Aerial images revealed an organized structure into about 60 blocks or sections, each with distinct alignments and regular number patterns. Some areas show rows of nine by eight holesothers alternate between groups of seven and eight. This internal order, absent any defensive or agricultural logic, suggests an administrative purpose. Sediment analyzes extracted microscopic remains corn, totora and willow (plants traditionally used to make baskets and mats), which suggests that the cavities were lined with plant fibers and were used to store goods, possibly in packages or braided baskets. The holes of Mount Sierpe From local barter to administration. Researchers believe that Monte Sierpe was born as a space for exchange between highland and coastal communities, an organized market for balance the flow of goods in the absence of currency. Products (for example, corn, coca or cotton) could be deposited in each cavity as a visible representation of the value of one good compared to another, allowing quantities to be compared in a public and transparent manner. Centuries later, with the expansion of inca empirethat system would have been reinterpreted and expanded as an accounting tool to manage the tribute of local populations. Each block of holes would have corresponded to a different community group, and the variations in number and arrangement would reflect the contribution levels or work shifts required by the Inca State. In essence, Monte Sierpe would have been a physical data recorda stone matrix destined to organize the unwritten economy of the Andean world. A carved khipu. The most revealing finding is the similarity between the structure of the site and the Inca khipusthe rope systems with knots used to record censuses, taxes or resources. One of the khipus found near Pisco presents around 80 groups of lacesa figure surprisingly close to the 60 segments of Monte Sierpe. This correspondence suggests that the Band of Holes could have been a three-dimensional khipua monumental version of that woven numerical language, designed to coordinate the flow of goods and work between communities. Unlike the tablets or inscriptions of other civilizations, the Andean peoples turned geography itself into a support for information. Code in the desert. If you also want, Monte Sierpe redefines our understanding of pre-columbian organizational intelligence. Without writing, without currency and in a hostile environment, Andean societies managed to develop a visual, modular and mathematical method to represent their economy. Each hole would have been a cell a great living recordmanaged collectively, perhaps accompanied by ceremonies or ritual exchanges. Thus, in its apparent geometric simplicity, this “spreadsheet” carved into the rock reveals a advanced economic systembased on reciprocity and communal control of resources. What for the first explorers were simple rows of holes now emerge as the physical testimony of a civilization that, centuries before European contact, had already found its own way of turning the landscape into memory. Image | JL Bongers In Xataka | We have found 76 megatraps in the Andes. It’s amazing we hadn’t done it before. In Xataka | A secret room has just revealed how they ruled in Peru 2,000 years ago: with the help of drugs

China had been testing a mysterious satellite in orbit for years. A counterespionage company has finally revealed what it was

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On October 16, the starry skies of the Canary Islands were illuminated by a spectacular fireball that crossed the sky from south to north. It was not a meteorite, it was a Chinese satellite that until a few days ago had been a complete mystery. A mystery called XJY-7. Since its launch in December 2020, as part of the maiden flight of the Long March 8 rocket, the Xinjishu Yanzheng-7 had been an unknown. China officially described it as a “new technology verification satellite.” Aside from a blurry render, the world knew almost nothing about its configuration, purpose, or capabilities. And although its re-entry was news in itself, the real news is that, just before it disintegrated, an Australian company managed to photograph it in orbit, finally solving the mystery of what it was and what it was doing up there. Counterespionage in orbit. Using its network of satellites to photograph other objects in orbit, the Australian company HEO achieved what ground-based radars could not: take photos of the XJY-7 up close. The images and the 3D model that HEO built from them revealed features that China had neglected to mention. According to the company has declared to SpaceNewsthe satellite was not a simple test platform; It was equipped with “a large radar antenna” and, most tellingly, a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) antenna. It was a spy satellite. SAR is an advanced remote sensing technology that allows high-resolution images of the Earth’s surface to be obtained in any weather conditions, day or night. The “mysterious” test satellite was, in reality, an advanced surveillance and remote sensing satellite. The HEO observations also revealed a fascinating detail about its design: the satellite had fixed solar panels. This forced it to “rotate its entire body” to maintain power generation, a behavior that the Australian company was able to verify through multiple simultaneous observations from different angles. Satellites that monitor satellites. Traditional monitoring methods (ground-based radars and telescopes) are no longer sufficient to monitor the activity of other nations in orbit. HEO uses a network of more than 40 sensors in flight to take satellite-to-satellite images for your clients. When one of its associated satellites passes near a target, it takes a photo of it. It is a “non-invasive flyby method” that offers real photographs where you can see antennas, panels, thrusters and payloads. With this technique, HEO has managed to identify more than 80 space objects before they appeared in any public catalogue. In an environment where satellite constellations are deployed by the dozens, knowing whether an object is an operational satellite, a piece of space junk, or what type of antenna it carries is crucial for intelligence and defense. Mysterious until his re-entry. Ironically, the mystery that surrounded XJY-7 in its useful life also accompanied it in its death, as the United States Space Command never issued a reentry alert. This is “strange” for an object of this size, says expert Marco Langbroek. It is estimated that XJY-7 had a mass of between 3,000 and 5,000 kg. That an object weighing more than three tons bypassed re-entry warning systems highlights the gaps in conventional space tracking. Even worse when it comes to a satellite with secret capabilities. Image | H.E.O.

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