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South Korea has just entered the most exclusive club on the planet. And China and North Korea are not exactly calm

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In 2004, South Korea admitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency that years before it had rperformed secret experiments of uranium enrichment without officially declaring them. That caused a small diplomatic crisis and revived a question that has been chasing Seoul for decades: how far it is willing to go to not be left behind in Asia. Now he has taken an unprecedented step. The great leap. South Korea just gave one of the most important strategic steps in its recent military history: entering the small club of countries capable of operating nuclear powered submarines. Until now, this terrain was reserved for powers such as the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom or India. He Jangbogo-N project It completely changes Seoul’s position in Asia because it stops being only an advanced industrial and technological power and also becomes a naval actor with oceanic ambitions and a much more sophisticated deterrence capacity. The decision has an enormous symbolic component, but above all practical: A nuclear submarine can remain submerged for months, travel enormous distances and operate with a freedom impossible for traditional diesel models. For China and North Korea the message is clear. South Korea no longer wants to limit itself to protecting its coasts; It wants to have a permanent presence and response capacity throughout the regional board. Announcement of the project in the South Korean defense ministry Seoul’s great obsession. He official argument revolves around the North Korean threat and especially the growth of Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal. North Korea has been developing ballistic missiles launched from submarines and working on their own naval nuclear propulsion programs with possible Russian help. In this context, South Korea considers that its current diesel submarines are no longer sufficient to maintain a credible long-term deterrence capacity. The new nuclear models would allow the waters near the peninsula to be monitored for much longer and guarantee second attack ability much more difficult to neutralize. Even without nuclear weapons on board, the simple possibility that these platforms could disappear under the sea for long periods makes any enemy military calculation much more complex. China in the equation. Although North Korea is the immediate threat, the greater strategic background clearly points towards China. They remembered the TWZ analysts that Beijing has been expanding its submarine fleet and strengthening its naval presence for years throughout Asia-Pacificas South Korea watches the regional competition shift away from focusing solely on the Korean Peninsula. The construction of nuclear submarines reflects precisely this mental change in Seoul: the country is beginning to see itself as a regional maritime power with much broader interests. Hence China has publicly criticized the program and has insisted on the obligations non-proliferation. Beijing understands perfectly what it means this technological leap. A neighbor with its own nuclear submarines implies a presence that is more difficult to track, a much deeper surveillance capacity and a navy capable of operating far from its ports. The most delicate detail. Impossible to pass by, because South Korea insists that does not intend develop nuclear weapons and will use low-enriched uranium under supervision international and coordination with the United States and the IAEA. However, the movement remains extremely sensitive because historically almost all countries with nuclear submarines also ended up developing atomic arsenals. Therein lies a good part of the regional concern. Although Seoul maintains officially your commitment With non-proliferation, the project brings it technologically closer to capabilities that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago. Furthermore, the international context has changed. Blind trust in the US military umbrella It’s not so solid anymore. As before, in South Korea the debate has been growing for years about whether the country needs a more autonomous deterrence capacity against Pyongyang and against an increasingly powerful China. A gigantic industrial bet. The program is also a statement of industrial power. South Korea wants to build the submarines within its own territory using its naval, nuclear and technological industries, something that fits perfectly with the country’s obsession with gain strategic autonomy. The government estimates that the project will last more than forty years between construction and operation, it will generate tens of thousands of jobs and strengthen key sectors such as modular reactors, advanced shipbuilding and military engineering. Market reactions have made the expected impact clear: the large South Korean naval companies they shot in the stock market after the announcement. Seoul understands that this project not only redefines its military strength; It may also establish the country as one of the few nations capable of designing and maintaining complex nuclear naval systems on its own. The silent race. The most important thing is that the movement of South Korea can further accelerate the submarine and nuclear race in Asia. Australia now advances with AUKUS To obtain nuclear submarines, North Korea seeks its own with Russian support and China continues to expand one of the largest submarine fleets on the planet. Now Seoul officially joins to that strategic underwater competition. If you also want, the region is entering a stage where the ability to disappear under the ocean for months has become one of the maximum symbols of military power. And South Korea just announced that is going to be part of that exclusive group, even if that means further altering the security balance in East Asia. Image | x In Xataka | Russia has built an imposing nuclear submarine with one mission: to launch one of the most extreme weapons ever devised In Xataka | North Korea has cleared up doubts about its alliance with Russia: it has just announced its first nuclear submarine

the ranking of the ports with the most traffic on the planet

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The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has forcefully reminded us of the importance of maritime trade: it moves approximately 80% of the volume of world trade, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Essential to that logistics chain are 20-foot-long container ports, measured in TEU (the acronym for Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit), the standard unit of maritime transportation. So that we understand each other, TEUs are the currency with which port traffic is measured globally: the more TEUs, the more important they are in logistics and the world economy. Know where those ports are is, in reality, knowing who’s in charge in the global economy. And the map has a clear dominator. This graph created by Visual Capitalist is a ranking of the world’s 20 busiest container ports ordered by total cargo volume processed in a year from from the 2025 Lloyd’s List databaseone of the leading voices in the sector. The metric used to measure it is precisely the TEU, that metal box measuring 6.06 meters long × 2.44 meters wide × 2.59 meters high. Each bar on the graph is equivalent to tens of millions of these boxes moving through the planet’s oceans. In 2024, the 20 main ports in the world generated consolidated traffic of 414.6 million TEUs, 7.1% more than the previous year. Spoiler: 14 of those 20 ports are located in Asia. This Asian dominance is neither an accident nor by chance: it is the reflection of decades of accelerated industrialization, enormous investments in port infrastructure and the consolidation of Asia as the factory of the planet. AND who says Asia, says China: that Made in China that you find even in the soup. For you to see that silkscreen on an iPhone, on a shirt or on a lighter, the product in question had to cross half the world in a container to get here. The ports with the most container traffic in the world. Visual Capitalist with data from Lloyd’s China dominates manufacturing and maritime logistics China concentrates more than 40% of global container traffic. Of the six busiest ports in the world, five are in China. Above the rest, Shanghai stands out, which processed more than 51.5 million TEUs in 2024, quite far from the 41.14 million in Singapore, the second. The leadership of Shanghai is absolute: It has held that title for almost two decades and it alone moves more cargo than all the major European ports combined, to give us an idea of ​​its magnitude. In any case, the eight Chinese ports present in the Top 20 generated 55.6% of the combined traffic in the ranking. Special mention deserves the port of Hong Kong, a historic giant that has been the gateway to China for decades. Today is a victim both its own geography and the Chinese economic transformation: Pearl River Delta ports such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou have taken traffic away from it on the one hand. On the other hand, the rise of Shanghai and Ningbo-Zhoushan has ended up relegating it until it disappears from the Top 10. This was rounded off by the reconfiguration of global shipping alliances, which began to replace Hong Kong as a hub with mainland ports with more capacity and lower operating costs. You have to get out of the Top 10 to find a port outside Asia. The first is Rotterdam, the bastion of maritime trade in Europe, which is in eleventh position with 13.8 million TEUs moved last year. Besides, had modest growth 2.8% compared to the previous year. The photograph of the old continent returns an image of residual influence: the accumulated traffic of the 10 main European ports reached just 65 million TEUs in 2024. If any past time seems better, it is because it was, at least in maritime trade. Obviously, colonization favored that flow (at least unidirectionally). More of the same in America: the busiest port is in Los Angeles and handles approximately 9.9 million TEUs: the Californian port is the gateway for trade from the Pacific, closely followed by Long Beach, with 9.1 million. The influence of America and Europe on maritime merchandise traffic is a clear reflection of their production structures, with relocation by flag. In Xataka | Africa has more than 30,000 kilometers of coastline and one country has managed to control them without anyone noticing: China In Xataka | Each lighthouse in Europe has a different light and flashing: this wonderful interactive map brings them all together Cover | Visual Capitalist

The first dual core and 200 qubits on the planet is now ready

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The pulse between the US and China in the field of technology goes beyond semiconductors and the artificial intelligence (AI). The US leads the industry quantum computersand, although probably not all the achievements that Chinese companies and research centers have achieved have transcended, those that we know of reflect that China is also a power in quantum computing. In fact, these two countries have achieved notable milestones over the past few years. The quantum supremacy is one of those that share, but if we stick to quantum telecommunications China is intractable. In addition, the country led by Xi Jinping is one step away from having indigenous superconducting quantum computers. In recent years, Chinese companies and research centers have been forced to buy high-density microwave connectivity modules abroad, mainly in Japan. This dependency is about to come to an end, if it has not already done so. Be that as it may, the latest milestone for this Asian country has been signed by CAS Cold Atom Technology, a Chinese quantum technology company based in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province. And it has presented the world’s first quantum computer with neutral atoms and double core: the Hanyuan-2. We have known for a long time that China is very advanced in superconducting qubits, but now we also know that it is a competitive country in qubits of neutral atoms. Hanyuan-2 is a unique machine Neutral atom quantum computers are an alternative to quantum machines with superconducting qubits and ion traps, and are still in an experimental phase. Those responsible for the design of Hanyuan-2 have confirmed that this device incorporates two independent and complete arrays of qubits of neutral atoms. It integrates 100 atoms of rubidium-85 and another 100 of rubidium-87 to build a dual-core system that implements a total of 200 qubits. Each logical qubit is abstractly built on top of several physical or hardware qubits. Both matrices can work in parallel (hence this machine has 200 qubits) in order to increase its calculation capacity. However, and this is very interesting, one of them can operate as the main nucleus and the other can act as an auxiliary nucleus to build logical qubits. more stable and less sensitive to noise. An important note: logical qubits represent a way to overcome the difficulty involved in using hardware or physical qubits, which are extremely sensitive to noise, and therefore prone to making errors. Each logical qubit is abstractly built on several physical or hardware qubits, so that a single logical qubit encodes a single qubit of quantum information, but with redundancy. It is precisely this redundancy that allows us to detect and correct the errors that are present in physical qubits. Until very recently the number of hardware qubits needed to implement a single error-immune logical qubit made error correction infeasible in practice, but this limitation has been lifted thanks to the work of IBM and CAS Cold Atom Technology, among other companies. Although the quantum computer that you can see in the cover image of this article is the Hanyuan-1, its successor also has a conventional design. In fact, both look much more like a classical computer than a quantum machine with superconducting qubits or ion traps. What is truly striking about Hanyuan-2 is that does not need a cryogenic cooling environment to function. Instead, it uses a small laser cooling system with a total consumption of less than 7 kilowatts, which allows it to be installed in practically any space without extraordinary technical requirements. Image | CAS Cold Atom Technology More information | Global Times In Xataka | China has reached one of the holy grails of quantum physics. So says Peter Zoller, father of quantum computers

The incredible story of the tallest building on the planet that ended up becoming the largest swimming pool in the Soviet Union

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During the coldest winters of the Soviet Union, there was a place in Moscow where thousands of people they continued bathing outdoors while huge clouds of steam completely covered the landscape. In fact, from some points in the city the silhouettes of the swimmers could barely be distinguished among the artificial fog. For many foreign visitors, that scene seemed more like something out of a science fiction movie than in the center of a Soviet capital. I don’t remember spaces that have given so much, literally. The cathedral that Stalin erased from the map. Yes, for decades, one of the strangest places in Moscow was that huge smoking circle where thousands of people swam under the snow without thinking much about what had existed there before. The fascinating thing is that that place had first been the largest orthodox cathedral of Russia, then the land chosen to build the tallest building on the planet and finally the outdoor pool bigger. Today, on that same site, it rises again a gigantic cathedral golden Few stories explain so well how architecture can become an ideological battle permanent between empires, revolutions and erased memories. The monument that celebrated the defeat of Napoleon. The story began after Napoleon Bonaparte’s withdrawal from Russia in 1812, when Tsar Alexander I promised to raise a huge cathedral in honor of Christ the Savior as thanks for the survival of the Russian empire. The project went through decades of delays, design changes and ideological disputes until it became a gigantic cathedral orthodox partially inspired by Hagia Sophia of Constantinople. Its construction took more than forty years and the final result completely dominated Moscow skyline with huge golden domes visible from the Kremlin. The building represented the union between religion, monarchy and Russian imperial power at a time when the country was trying to project itself as a great European power. The ancient Cathedral of Christ the Savior Stalin wanted to erase the old Russia and build something greater. After the Revolution of 1917the Bolsheviks began a fierce campaign against religion because they considered that the new Soviet society couldn’t share space with symbols of the old imperial order. Churches were closed, confiscated or reused as warehouses, cinemas or homes, but the Cathedral of Christ the Savior It was too visible to survive. In 1931, by direct order of Joseph Stalin, the building was demolished with explosives to make way for to the most delirious project of Soviet architecture: Palace of Soviets. The plan was to build a 415 meter colossus crowned by a gigantic statue of Lenin about one hundred meters high, a building so enormous that it would have surpassed any existing skyscraper on the planet. The objective was not only architectural. Stalin wanted to physically demonstrate that Soviet communism had forever replaced the old, religious, tsarist Russia. This is how the Palace of the Soviets would have looked The tallest building on the planet never came into existence. The architect Boris Iofan He spent years obsessed with that monumental project, designing enormous auditoriums, stepped terraces and spaces designed to glorify the Soviet State and its leaders. It was excavated a gigantic crater next to the Moscova River, the foundation work and part of the metal structure began got upbut reality ended up destroying the Soviet propaganda dream. The terrain was difficult, water continually flooded the area and the German invasion of 1941 definitively paralyzed the works. Much of the steel accumulated for the building ended up reused in fortifications and bridges during the war. What should have been the greatest architectural symbol of world communism ended up becoming a huge muddy hole in the middle of Moscow. Then something even more surreal happened. Instead of resuming the project after the war, the Soviet regime made a completely unexpected decision: transform that immense circular foundation into a gigantic public swimming pool. This is how the Moskva swimming pool was born, inaugurated in 1960 under Nikita Khrushchev. The place became the outdoor pool bigger of the Soviet Union and possibly the world, with 130 meters in diameter and capacity for thousands of people. The water remained heated even in winter, creating huge clouds of steam over the center of Moscow as citizens swam surrounded by snow and sub-zero temperatures. For entire generations of Soviet people, that space stopped being a religious or political symbol and became simply an everyday place where they could learn to swim, meet with friends or escape the cold. The most famous swimming pool in Moscow and its legends. The gigantic circular pond acquired over time a almost mythological fame. The dense columns of vapor made visibility difficult in winter and began to circulate rumors about accidents, drownings and alleged “suicide cults” linked to the ancient sacred ground where the destroyed cathedral had stood. There were also stories about humidity and corrosion that the complex caused in nearby buildings and nearby museums. Still, millions of people used the pool for decades and for many Moscow residents that place ended up forming an inseparable part of their personal memories, even if they knew that they were literally swimming over the ruins of one of the most important temples of imperial Russia. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior restored on what was the largest pool The fall of the USSR changed everything again. With the Soviet collapse, Russia began to recover religious symbols and nationals who had been persecuted for decades. Maintaining the gigantic pool turned economically unsustainable due to the enormous cost of heating and electricity, while a movement grew that demanded the reconstruction of the original cathedral. In 1994 the pool was emptied and demolishedand soon after began an accelerated reconstruction financed by donations and institutional support. He new temple was built in just a few years and consecrated in 2000 as a almost exact replica of the building destroyed by Stalin. For many Russians, that reconstruction symbolized the return of religion and Russian historical identity after the Soviet period; For others, it … Read more

China is preparing the most powerful and rare exascale supercomputer on the planet. No GPU: only Chinese CPUs

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An exascale supercomputer is one capable of performing at least 1 exaflop (10¹⁸) of floating point operations per second. These machines are the most powerful currently available if we stick to classic computers and leave aside the prototypes of quantum computers. The classification TOP500 identifies the most capable supercomputers on the planetand, as expected, four exascale machines appear at the top of this list: The Captain, FrontierAurora and Jupiter. The first three reside in the United States and the fourth in Germany. Curiously, no Chinese supercomputer appears in the top ten positions of this classification, although we know that some of its most powerful machines are not officially reported to the TOP500 for geopolitical reasons. Be that as it may, the Government led by Xi Jinping is determined to change this scenario. And the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center has announced that is going to build a supercomputer called Lingshen that, according to this institution, will have a sustained performance of more than 2 exaflops and will integrate only components designed and manufactured in China. Lingshen supercomputer architecture is very unusual The supercomputer ‘The Captain’ from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA) is a real beast. This machine exceeds 1.8 exaflops, making it currently the most powerful on the planet. The APUs are responsible for its brute force. Instinct MI300A from AMD, which work hand in hand with the EPYC 9005 processors. However, the most surprising thing is that it brings together no less than 11,340,000 cores and delivers 1,809 PFlops/s Rmax and 2,821.10 PFlops/s Rpeak. Lingshen will bring together 47,000 processors of Chinese origin that will be distributed in Huawei Kunpeng servers The architecture of ‘El Capitan’ is very similar to that of the other supercomputers in the TOP500 classification, but the machine being prepared by the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center is going to take different paths. And it is that according to Lu Yutongthe director of this center, the Lingshen supercomputer will use only general purpose processors (CPU), and will not use GPU. Not a single one. It is a very unusual decision, and it is surprising that in theory it will exceed 2 exaflops only with this type of chips. Be that as it may, this is not the only thing we know. Lingshen will bring together 47,000 processors of Chinese origin that will be distributed in servers Huawei Kunpeng equipped with Taishan cores with ARM architecture. Lu Yutong has also confirmed that this machine will have 650PB of storage and a million-port interconnection. Everything that the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center has announced sounds great, but this project also leaves us with some very reasonable doubts. The most obvious is that Lingshen is just a project at the moment. It has not yet been built, so its theoretical maximum performance comes from an estimate and not from a measurement provided by a real test bench. On the other hand, it is very surprising that the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center has chosen to integrate only CPU. Huawei, Moore Threads and Cambricon Technologies are three of the chinese companies which have domestically made GPUs that could presumably fit into this machine. In any case, it is worth keeping track of this project to see if Lingshen finally lives up to the expectations it has raised. Image | TOP500.org More information | Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center In Xataka | The Frontier supercomputer is the second most powerful exascale machine on the planet. And it has a mission: nuclear fusion

why the USSR was obsessed with a planet that literally ate its machines

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There was a time when it was thought that Venus would be a good planet to explore or even terraform. After all, it is close to Earth. Carl Sagan himself made a theoretical proposal to adapt this planet for human life. Therefore, it is not surprising that it became one of the biggest objectives of the Soviet Union (USSR) during the beginning of its space race. With the Venera missions, dozens of probes were sent to explore the neighboring planet. A few were enough to prove that it was a more inhospitable place than one thought. However, that did not make those scientists give up their efforts. Only 16 named probes. Between 1961 and 1984, The USSR sent 28 probes to Venus. Only 16 of them, those that partially completed their mission, were baptized as Venera. Of those 16, only 13 crossed the atmosphere of the neighboring planet and 10 managed to land. Some even survived a few minutes to transmit important information to Earth. The violent destruction of each probe provided new data that was used to improve the next one. Even knowing that the next one would also succumb, the program continued forward and laid the pillars of the space exploration technologies that came later. An inhospitable planet. Venus It is an extremely inhospitable planet for many reasons. To begin with, its temperatures are very high. Temperatures can reach 465ºC, which is why many Venera probes literally melted when they reached their destination. The pressure is also very high. It is equivalent to about 90 atmospheres and could quickly crush a submarine. Many of these probes were also crushed. On the other hand, more than 96% of its atmosphere is carbon dioxide, making it highly toxic, although that is not as problematic as the corrosive clouds of sulfuric acid that accompany it. The Venera probes also had to deal with this corrosion. step by step. The first Venera probes lost communication with Earth before even reaching Venus. Others, however, managed to transmit information from the surroundings of the neighboring planet or even on its surface. The first to send data before being crushed by the pressure were Venera 5 and Venera 6. Previously, Venera 4 had been the first probe to manage to pass through the atmosphere of a planet other than Earth. Venera 7 even managed to land and stay 23 minutes on the surface of Venus before being torn apart by the heat and pressure. Later, Venera 9 sent the first black and white images. Images of the surface of Venus taken by the Venera probes Special mention to Venera 13. Possibly the greatest advances came with Venera 13. Although it was planned to last 32 minutes, the probe stayed on Venus for 127 minutes before disappearing like all the others. There he managed to take photographs much more advanced than those of Venera 9. He also measured the composition of the atmosphere and used a lightning detector to measure the electrical activity of Venus. It was even able to analyze the winds thanks to its built-in anemometer. Along with Venera 14, it was possibly the probe that provided the greatest discoveries before disappearing like all the others. 40 years later. With the Venera missions, the USSR verified that, in reality, Venus was a planet too inhospitable for exploration. But knowing our neighbors can help us know ourselves. For this reason, despite knowing that it was all suicide, 28 probes were sent, with landing, chemical analysis or image taking technologies that have continued to be used over time. Today, more than 40 years after the launch of the last probe, we can access the data obtained by many other missions that have also headed to Venus. Other missions. First it was NASA, in 1970, with its Mariner 10 probe. Although its main objective was Mercury, it also had time to explore the surroundings of Venus. Later in 1989 The Magellan mission made the first global map of the Venusian surface. Today the American agency is preparing for the launch of VERITAS and DAVINCI+, which should leave for the neighboring planet in the coming years. For its part, Europe launched the Venus Express probe in 2005 and Japan launched the Akatsuki probe in 2010. In the next decade, Europe is prepared to launch Envision, which will be in charge of studying the core of the planet. All of these missions were clearly inspired by the Venera probes. Of course, even if we can never live there, being able to send probes to a planet that melts and crushes ships is a great achievement of space technology. Images | Reimund Bertrams (Wikimedia Commons) | USSR In Xataka | A day on Venus: the (hellish) conditions on the surface of the neighboring planet

Iceland was one of the last places on the planet that mosquitoes had not reached. That’s now history

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For centuries, Iceland has held the ‘privilege’ of being one of the few habitable places on Earth where mosquitoes did not exist, something that can be a source of envy for many, especially with the arrival of summer. All thanks to its particular climate, with constant cycles of freezing and thawing that prevented the larvae from maturing, it acted as an insurmountable biological shield. However, climate change and human action have just broken down this barrier and this Icelandic ‘exceptionality’ has ended. The discovery. The history of this biological invasion starts in October 2025where Björn Hjaltason, a resident of the Kjós region noticed the presence of some unusual insects in his garden. From there he wanted to see them closer, and to capture them he used a fairly rudimentary method based on some ropes soaked in red wine. With this trap he obtained three specimens that were immediately sent to the Icelandic Institute of Natural Sciences, where the entomologist Matthías Alfreðsson confirmed the unthinkable: they were two females and a male. Culiseta annulataa species of mosquito common in Europe, but which had never managed to establish itself on the island of ice and fire. How have they arrived? Their disembarkation in the country may have been conditioned to different situations, such as travel aboard ships that came from Europe or even in the landing gear of commercial airplanes. All this, added to increasingly higher temperatures in Iceland, means that we are facing a major ecosystem problem. A hot Arctic. This very rudimentary discovery has served as a substrate for a profound analysis that has been published in the magazine Science, where it is noted that the appearance of mosquitoes in Iceland is only the symptom of a radical transformation throughout the Arctic. And global warming is affecting this region at breakneck speed, since the Arctic is warming four times faster than the world average. This thermal increase is not only allowing invasive species to survive the Icelandic winters, but is causing a serious biological imbalance throughout the boreal region. A domino effect. The arrival of mosquitoes and the alteration of the populations of native arthropods is not only a problem of annoying bites for its inhabitants or tourists, but it is a threat for birds. Here the early thaw is causing the peak of insect abundance to no longer coincide with the breeding season of waders, leaving them without their main source of food when they need it most. Furthermore, the large swarms of mosquitoes in arctic areas are already affecting the behavior of reindeer, which spend vital energy fleeing from the swarms instead of feeding, compromising their winter survival. That is why experts point to the need to control the arthropods that arrive in the region and, above all, a tracking system for these ecological changes that are so relevant. Images | Andreas M In Xataka | Mosquitoes attack me in summer and I tried these TikTok tricks to get rid of them

The rarest and rarest feline on the planet has found the nail in the coffin that was missing: the war in Iran

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He asian cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus) is one of the rarest and most endangered subspecies of big cats on the planet. There are only 27 individuals left at large, all of them are identified one by one and all of them live in Iran, as explains Bagher Nezaminational director of Asiatic Cheetah Conservation Project. There is no other known population anywhere else on the planet. In serious danger of extinction, what was already a critical situation has become an emergency since the attacks by the United States and Israel in Iran began in February 2026: the war has paralyzed the only monitoring system that kept this subspecies under control. What is happening with the Asian cheetah. As account the environmental science and conservation news platform Mongabay, just nine days after forest guards filmed a female with five cubs in the province of North Khorasan, the armed conflict began. Since then, access to the reserves where these animals live has been drastically restricted. The risk is not so much that a bomb falls on a reserve, but rather the lack of vigilance. The field vehicles used by field scientists and park rangers to guard the small population of Asiatic cheetahs can be mistaken for military targets in their scattered habitat (especially in the desert), so many of Iran’s environmental NGOs have stopped their activity. The country also suffers an internet blackout. This means that monitoring, field studies and field use are no longer operational. The species. The Asian cheetah diverged from African populations between 32,000 and 67,000 years ago. It is not an African cheetah implanted in Asia, but rather it has its own evolutionary lineage: it is smaller and has lighter fur than the African one and is adapted to arid areas and mountainous terrain. In fact, its monitoring is more complex not only because there are few of them, but because it lives in inhospitable areas. In any case, both are true Ferraris: they can exceed speeds of 100 km/h in short races. The IUCN has it classified on the Critically Endangered conservation scale since 1996, the highest alert before extinction in the wild. From an ecological perspective, it serves as a specialized predator on medium-sized ungulates—mainly gazelles—in the desert ecosystems of central Iran. Their disappearance could not be compensated by introducing African cheetahs: the genetic, physiological and behavioral divergence between both groups is too great and hybridization proposals do not have scientific support as a viable short-term solution. Why is it important. Because it is not a rare subspecies of a known felid, but rather it has a genetically differentiated lineage and is native to Asia. It has more than 30,000 years of history independent of African populations and its disappearance is not compensated by introducing African cheetahs. Furthermore, it fulfills its function there: it is a specialized predator on medium-sized ungulates in the arid ecosystems of central Iran, thus maintaining the balance of gazelle populations. In short: it has its place in the food chain of the desert ecosystem in the interior of the country. The situation of the Asian cheetah is also a direct indicator of the state of biodiversity conservation at war, as pointed out this article in People and Nature: its consequences are suffered decades after the conflict and sometimes, they are simply irreversible. Iran is home to exceptional biological diversity: Persian leopard, brown bear (Ursus arctos), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), gray wolf (Canis lupus), among others. The collapse of the cheetah conservation system irremediably affects the rest. Context. Since 1959, the Asiatic cheetah has had legal protection in Iran. In the following decades its population was stabilized, but the Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s they were wasted years: Lax law enforcement wreaked havoc in the form of zero patrolling, destruction and fragmentation of their habitat, uncontrolled hunting, and decline in prey. In January 2022, Hassan Akbari, deputy minister of natural environment and biodiversity at Iran’s Department of Environment, declared that the Asiatic cheetah population had plummeted to just 12, down from an estimated 100 in 2010. In August 2025, the Tehran Times reported that only 20 copies remained. Monitoring them is very complicated per sebut there are also circumstances that work against it. For example, the controversial use of camera traps: in 2018 several people from Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation accused of using camera traps for espionage. One person died in prison and the rest were pardoned in 2024. This case paralyzed international collaboration for years. In addition, Western sanctions have also systematically prevented the arrival of financing, essential for adequate monitoring. Asiatic cheetah dies. The main cause of death for Asian cheetahs is not poaching or predators, but the road. More than 52% of documented deaths They are due to accidents on roads that cross or border key habitats and cheetahs cross them without fear and repeatedly following their prey, such as Abbasabad-Mashhad and Mehriz-Anar. There are a couple of especially notorious cases of females run over, pregnant or with their young, in recent years: Meyami and Helia. Since the beginning of the conflict, these roads now also transport military material and people for evacuation, which increases traffic. With 27 individuals registered, there is no longer room for errors or unsupervised times: genetic analysis published in Conservation Genetics details that genetic diversity is critically low and inbreeding poses an additional risk to the viability of the subspecies. What can be done. Wild Tomorrow analyzes this problem in detail, advising to ignore social media campaigns that call for “emergency evacuations” without rigor: moving big wild cats across militarized borders is medically risky and informal channels can prove to be a route for illegal trafficking. Furthermore, we have already seen that proposing clandestine communications can expose those who protect the cheetah to accusations of espionage. What does have a real effect is supporting the Iranian Cheetah Society, the organization with the greatest field knowledge of this population. Likewise, at the international level there are organizations with real capacity … Read more

We thought we were 8 billion people on the entire planet. Until some researchers started crunching the numbers

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In November 2022, the UN celebrated that we were now 8 billion humans on Earth. They are estimates, of course, but beyond the figure, the really interesting thing is that in 2023 we do not reach the replacement rate and that humanity will reach its peak at the end of the century to, inevitably, start to fall. But… to what extent can we trust these accounts? It is something that has been on the table for some time and, according to a study of 2025, we have made a mistake in counting. So much so that we have left several hundred million people behind. Can we trust the numbers? “Calculating the number of people on the planet is an inexact science.” That was demographer Jakub Bijak’s comment to BBC in mid-2024, just when the World Population Prospects study. Something scientific is something exact, but the researcher also commented that the only thing you can be sure of when predicting population figures is the lack of certainty. That, be careful, does not mean that demographers take figures out of thin air. “It is a difficult thing based on our experience, knowledge and every piece of information we have access to,” said Toshiko Kanera, an expert in demographic forecasts. Demographers draw on the data and trends of each country since 1950, but… what if it had not been counted correctly? We are missing millions. In a 2025 study published in Natureresearchers at Aalto University in Finland show how the data sets handled by demographers “profoundly and systematically” underestimate population figures around the world. The serious thing is that we would be talking about hundreds of millions more people living on Earth. Example of the tools that demographers use in their analysis. Each one corresponds to a different bias Rural areas. Josias Láng-Ritter is one of the researchers in charge of the study and points to the accounts carried out in a specific segment: that of rural population. “For the first time, our study provides evidence that a significant proportion of the rural population could be missing from global population data sets,” he notes. As we say, we are not talking about a few million, but billions. “Depending on the data set used, rural populations have been underestimated between 53% and 84% in the period studied. The results are notable, since these data sets have been used in thousands of studies and have widely supported decision making, but their accuracy has not been systematically evaluated,” comments the researcher. The map shows the location of the 307 rural areas analyzed in the study. The populations reported in the graph were found to be underestimated by between 53% and 84% | Aalto University Biases. Attempts to review this data are not new, but previous research has focused on specific countries or urban areas. Researchers from Aalto University wanted to give a more global picture by comparing the five most used population data sets worldwide. They have used maps that divide the planet into high-resolution grids and have taken something very specific as a reference: resettlement figures from more than 300 rural dam projects in 35 countries. Why this bias of the dams? Because when a dam is builtthe population that lives in the area that will be flooded is relocated and accurate resettlement data is usually available. Comparing that population data from 1975 to 2010, the researchers found that the 2010 maps were more accurate, but still left out between 32% and 77% of the rural population. Between 2015 and 2020 the data sets were updated, but demographers continue to believe that underestimation of the rural population continues to exist and is a problem that persists in all regions of the world. Consequences. And we are talking about a problem whose resolution is complex. According to the researchers, no matter how much the data is reviewed, it is a structural problem. Governments do not have the resources to collect accurate data in these rural regions, there is a huge discrepancy between the real population and that reported on the population maps used to carry out demographic studies and that influences decision making. Average percentage of rural population underestimated (red and orange) and overestimated (blue) | Aalto University And it’s important. Current estimates place 43% of the 8.2 billion inhabitants of the world in rural areas -about 3,526 million people- and if we take into account that it is a percentage that has been underestimated between 53% and 84%, we are not talking about a small population, precisely. And it is essential to know exactly how many we are for a simple reason: the redistribution of resources. No data. The lack of accurate demographic records can affect political decision-making. Ritter gives the example of social decisions. “In many countries, there may not be enough data available at the national level, so they rely on global population maps to support their decisions: Do we need a paved road or a hospital? How much medicine is needed in a specific area? How many people could be affected by natural disasters like earthquakes or floods?” he says. Doing quick math, in the best scenario – that of 53% deviation in the rural population – we would be talking about 1,869 million people who would not have been counted. In the worst case, in that of the 84% not registered, we would talk about 2,962 million people. In the Nature study, they give the example of Paraguay, which in the 2012 census may have left out a quarter of the population. Reviewing the methods. In the team’s analysis, there are countries that fare better than others. They point to Finland as an example of reliable data, even in rural regions, because they began keeping digital records of the population 30 years ago. However, in countries where this thorough digital registration has taken longer to be implemented due to crises of any kind, the differences between the real population and the estimated one can be significant. “To provide rural communities … Read more

This planet is too big for its star. When we tried to find out the reason, we found something even more disconcerting.

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The universe is so immense that it should not surprise us that it is full of exceptions. But even so, there is still such disconcerting findings that obsess astronomers. This is, for example, the case of TOI-5205 b, an exoplanet that attracts attention due to its size, too large for its star. That alone would be truly exceptional, but a new study has found that, if that were not enough, it also has a very unusual atmosphere. Too big for a red dwarf. TOI-5205 b is a gas giant, slightly larger than Jupiter. But only a little. While Jupiter orbits the Sun, this exoplanet orbits a red dwarf. That is, a relatively cold and very small star, with a mass ranging from 7.5% to 50% of the mass of our Sun. Typically, stars are MUCH larger than the planets that orbit them. However, the radius of this red dwarf is only four times that of TOI-5205 b. To continue with the comparisons, our Sun has a radius approximately 10 times larger than that of Jupiter. And it’s not just a radio issue. The mass of this exoplanet is also striking, as it is equivalent to 0.3% of the mass of the red dwarf. Jupiter’s mass is approximately 0.095% of the Sun’s mass. All this tells us that TOI-5205 b is too big for its star. An even more disconcerting clue. Recently, a team of scientists from NASA and the Carnegie Science Institute decided to study the composition of the atmosphere of TOI-5205 blooking for clues about its origin that explain why it is so big. However, what they discovered was even more disconcerting. They carried out the analysis of the atmosphere studying the transit of the planet. That is, analyzing the changes in the light of its star when the planet passes in front of it. When light interacts with the planet’s atmosphere, it interacts with the molecules found in it. Each element reflects light in different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, so, with the help of a spectrograph, you can know which elements the light has interacted with and, consequently, what the composition of the atmosphere is. Astronomical metals. For astronomers, any element other than hydrogen or helium is considered a metal. Just for them, chemists don’t like this. The point is that this decision the concept of metallicity arises. It refers to the proportion of metals that a planet or star has in its atmosphere. When a star forms, it is assumed to take most of the hydrogen and helium present in the stellar nursery with it. Therefore, when a planet later forms around it, it is normal for its atmosphere to have a higher proportion of metals. For this reason, it is said that the metallicity of the planets is higher than that of their stars. But with TOI-5205 b that does not happen. According to analyzes of its transit, its metallicity is lower than that of the red dwarf. hidden metals. To verify what this phenomenon is due to, the authors of the study that was recently published carried out a series of mathematical models. With them, they wanted to check how the atmosphere of this exoplanet could have evolved under different scenarios. This allowed them to verify that the current situation is consistent with their metals having been buried inside the planet. It is true that when it was formed absorbed a greater amount of metals, since the star had taken more helium and hydrogen. However, these metals did not remain in the atmosphere, but were they saved inside TOI-5205 b. In the atmosphere, however, there is some helium and hydrogen, but also other compounds, such as methane and hydrogen sulfide. What this exception teaches us. As explained in a statement One of the authors of the study, Anjali Piette, “these findings have implications for our understanding of the process of giant planet formation that occurs early in the life of a star.” Sometimes, it is the exception to the rule the one that can provide us with the most data. There’s nothing like thinking outside the box. Image | Katherine Cain (Carnegie Science) In Xataka | Since we were children we have been told that Jupiter is enormous, colossal, exaggeratedly large. It is 8 km smaller and that changes everything

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