problem

The IOC has a new method to exclude trans athletes from the Olympic Games. The problem is that biology doesn’t work like that.

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At the end of March, the International Olympic Committee announced undoubtedly one of the most controversial decisions in its recent history: starting with the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, no transgender athlete will be able to compete in the women’s category. But beyond the social and political debate that can be generated, we must also focus on the method chosen to determine this exclusion: a simple genetic analysis where a single gene is searched. And this is something highly discussed among science. His discoverer. The gene in question, which will be analyzed in athletes who want to participate in the female category, will be SRYwhich is nothing more than the “Sex Determining Region Y”. A gene that was discovered in 1990 by molecular biologist Andrew Sinclair and who pointed out that its presence is a determining factor in male sexual development. It is, literally, the scientific father of the test that the IOC has chosen to integrate into its Olympic requirements. But the thing is that he himself is against using it for this. Your disagreement. This decision is not a big news, since if we look back, the body that governs world athletics, World Athletics, adopted this same test in September 2025 to participate in their competitions. Here is Sinclair himself He did not hesitate to publish an opinion article where he made it clear that the result is not definitive, since the only thing the analysis can say is whether the gene is present or not. Because. In this way, it must be detailed that being positive in SRY does not give us information about whether it is working to form a testicle, if it stimulates the production of testosterone or even if it expresses the necessary receptors so that testosterone can be used. Put another way: knowing that an athlete has the SRY gene does not tell you anything conclusive about her physiology, her hormonal levels or, by extension, about her supposed competitive advantages from having testosterone. The biology of sexual development is infinitely more complex than the presence or absence of a genetic marker, which will now mark the ‘everything’ before the IOC. There is more evidence. This researcher is not the only one who opposes this decision, since at the beginning of March it was published an article signed by 34 academics to respond to the decision of World Athletics. Here they pointed to the same thing: we are facing a test that reduces everything to a single gene when biology is much more complex. And biological sex is the result of a very complex interaction of human genetics, hormones, receptors, tissues… Furthermore, the IOC’s argument suggests that this test protects against competitive equity, but for academics, they point out that there is no solid scientific evidence to demonstrate that the presence of the SRY gene is directly related to having a greater sporting advantage. It’s not something new. Although we now see a big scandal in the sports world over this decision, the reality is that if we look at the newspaper archive, something similar was already being done in the 90s. 30 years ago The IOC decided to require women to verify their sex through chromosomal testing and also by determining the SRY gene. But finally the tests were withdrawn due to technical limitations, the absence of medical evidence and also because of the legal problems it could have. A Spanish case. Due to these tests, the Spanish athlete María José Martínez Patiño was disqualified in 1985 after testing positive in the chromosome test despite not having any physiological advantage over her peers. In this way, her career was practically doomed, but she was able to recover it thanks to the help of a geneticist who was able to document her case with scientific evidence that showed that it was not giving her an advantage over the rest of her competitors. The debate. If the basis for requiring genetic testing is to protect competitive fairness, we must ask what science says about the real advantages of transgender athletes. And at this point much less is known than the general population believes. One of the most important studies It was made in 2015 by a transgender researcher who analyzed the running times of eight athletes before and after their transition. In this case, the brands slowed down and their relative performance compared to runners of the same sex remained quite stable. An IOC study. Published in 2024 and partially financed by the committee itself, produced results that do not fit with the discourse we keep hearing: transgender women showed worse results than cisgender women in lower body strength and lung function. But logically it does not mean that there cannot be residual advantages in certain sports, which is something that to this day remains a question that needs an answer. And now what? We are undoubtedly facing a dispute about which tools are valid to solve a genuinely complex problem. Right now, science suggests that the SRY gene test is not the best tool, but because it does not give us a complete answer, since the SRY gene may be present and the body may not respond to testosterone. But this is something that today must continue to be investigated to obtain evidence that can guarantee this equity, but always with a scientific basis behind it. Images | Umanoid Erik van Leeuwen In Xataka | We have accepted that sport is “medicine” for the body. Now science is discovering its side effects

The United Kingdom has just detained a Russian oil tanker in Gibraltar. The problem is the possibility that they are armed

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Spain controls one of the busiest maritime passages on the planet: for the Strait of Gibraltar More than 100,000 ships cross each year, including thousands of oil tankers. Just a few kilometers from its coasts, a good part of the crude oil that feeds Europe circulates, and any alteration in that flow has a direct impact on the Spanish economy, from the price of energy to maritime security. From sanctions to interceptions. What for months was a silent economic war you have just crossed a new visible line. The Royal Navy no longer limits itself to observing Russian maritime traffic, it now follows it, identifies it and makes it easier to approach. The case of the MV Deyna oil tanker in Gibraltar mark that change. It is not an isolated incident, it is the symptom of a strategy that is beginning to materialize at sea. And in this turn there is a key detail: for the first time, the pressure on the shadow fleet stops being just legal or financial and becomes operational. The fleet in the shadows. Russia has built a network of hundreds of opaque tankers to continue selling crude oil despite the sanctions. This includes everything from old ships to constant flag changes or business structures that are difficult to trace. All designed for keep the flow of income that fuels its war economy. This network has been for years difficult to attack because it operates on the margins of international law. But now that margin is narrowing, and every interception at key points like Gibraltar points directly to a critical vulnerability of the Russian system. HMS Cutlass stopped the tanker Gibraltar and the bottleneck. The strait, furthermore, is not just any place. As we said at the beginning, it is one of the most guarded maritime crossings on the planet. and convert it at pressure point against Russian oil has a clear logic: controlling traffic is controlling business. HMS Cutlass operations near France show that NATO is willing to use intelligencesurveillance and naval presence to stop this flow. If you will, each intervention sends a message that goes beyond the specific ship, one that announces that it is no longer safe to operate in the shadows near Europe. The problem. It turns out that this is where the story really changes. Because Russia not only wants to protect its fleet, it is considering doing so with military means. Armed patrols, fire equipment on board and even the possibility of militarizing the tankers themselves. What until now were civil ships with economic functions could be transformed into platforms with defensive capacity. And that turns any approach or follow-up into an operation with a real risk of escalation, where an inspection can turn into an armed incident. From drones to oil tankers. Ukrainian naval drone attacks against Russian ships have been the trigger of this change. They have shown that even large maritime assets are vulnerable, and Russia has responded hardening his stance and preparing an active defense. This connects directly with the current global scenario, where energy transportation has become in strategic objective. The sea, which for decades was a relatively stable highway, is beginning to look more and more like a diffuse war front. The domino effect. The paradox is quite evident. While the West try to cut Russia’s revenues, the war in the Middle East has put Moscow’s crude oil back to the center of the market global, with India and China absorbing shipments that previously found no buyer and prices rising higher and higher. And meanwhile the shadow fleet returns to be indispensable. That makes any try to stop it have global consequences, turning each interception into more than just a naval operation: a piece in a much larger battle for control of the global energy flow. A new red line. If you like, the final scenario is the most uncomfortable and dangerous. A Russian tanker detained in Gibraltar It is no longer just a sanctioned ship, it may be the first link in a chain of tensions that escalate rapidly. Because if those ships start to go armedeach interaction at sea stops being administrative and becomes potentially military. And at that point, the question stops being whether the shadow fleet can continue operating, and becomes what will happen the day someone shoots first. Image | kees torn In Xataka | The Canary Islands and Galicia have set off the Navy’s alarm bells. Russia’s ghost fleet has arrived in Spain with warships In Xataka | A ghost fleet has mapped the entire underwater structure of the EU. The question is what Moscow is going to do with that information.

The problem is that there are already gas stations that have absorbed them

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The liter of diesel reached 1.96 euros on average last Saturday, its highest since the conflict broke out in Iran, and gasoline was dangerously close to two euros. However, that same weekend, it came into effect the government’s tax reduction. Prices have dropped, but now the question is how long it will last. Why has fuel increased? The conflict in the Persian Gulf has increased diesel prices by 44.8 euro cents per liter, and gasoline by 28.2 euro cents, according to a study published by the OCU. The trigger is the war in Iran, which has strained the crude oil markets through the Strait of Hormuzan artery through which nearly 20% of the world’s oil transits. In just three weeks since the start of the conflict, prices at the pumps ended up skyrocketing to levels not seen since the Ukraine crisis. What has the Government done? The Executive approved on Friday, March 21 a shock package which includes, among its most important measures, lowering the VAT on fuel from 21% to 10% and temporarily eliminating the special tax on hydrocarbons. The estimated savings were around 30 cents per liter, which represents around 20 euros of savings per tank, according to the estimates of the Government itself. The measure published in the BOE on Saturday it came into force immediately, although it will have to be validated in Congress this Thursday. The Government has set the validity of this temporary reduction until June 30, at which time it will review the impact of the measure depending on how the energy markets evolve. How much have prices really dropped? This Monday, March 23, the average price of 95 gasoline in Spain was located at 1,595 euros per liter and diesel at 1,786 euros. The drop is real and significant. And in fact, if you go to almost any gas station, you will see that the prices have nothing to do with those of a few days ago. However, it is worth putting it in perspective. And the average price of a liter of diesel on March 19 was 1,917 euros, and the VAT reduction reduces it by about 17.4 cents. That is still well below the average increase of 45 cents that we were able to verify between March 2 and 19. Likewise, the tax decrease does not fully compensate for what fuel prices have increased in recent weeks. ANDl rocket and feather effect. The fact that VAT drops on paper does not guarantee that the price at the pump will drop just as quickly or completely. Economists call this the rocket and feather effect: When the price of oil rises, fuels immediately reflect that increase, while the declines are much slower. Part of this slowness also has an explanation: the cut in the hydrocarbon tax has not yet been applied to all gas stations because many are depleting the stock they had bought with the previous tax. ANDthe first day of the descent. In about 42% of service stations the VAT reduction from 21% to 10% did not fully materialize the first day, and the situation was even worse in agricultural and transport cooperatives, which in most cases had not yet passed on the discount. Some have attributed this to the lack of time to adapt the computer systems (the announcement came on Friday, the publication in the BOE on Saturday and the reduction was to be effective on Sunday) since many stations had purchased fuel at higher prices just the day before. The director of the Spanish Confederation of Service Station Employers (CEEES), Nacho Rabadán, has indicated that in many cases there have been service station managers who the day before purchased fuel with a price increase greater than the impact of the VAT cut. And a quarter of gas stations took the opportunity to go up. The most striking thing comes from FACUA. And it is that according to the data According to the consumer organization, 1,837 gas stations that communicated new prices to the Ministry on Sunday took advantage of the VAT reduction to apply a new increase. Of them, 177 completely absorbed the tax reduction by maintaining their prices without adjustment, and another 40 even increased it compared to the previous price. In the specific case of diesel, FACUA calculates that, if the tax reduction had been fully transferred, the decrease would have reached 17.8 cents, placing the average price at 1.785 euros; However, the real price was somewhat higher. FACUA concludes that lowering taxes without setting price ceilings is “exactly the measure that speculators have been demanding.” 2022 is not that far away. We have the most recent precedent in the bonus of 20 cents per liter that the Government applied during the Ukraine crisis. This cost us around 4.25 billion euros, according to a study of the economists Juan Luis Jiménez, Jordi Perdiguero and José Manuel Cazorla-Artiles. The effectiveness of the bonus was, to say the least, questionable. And in addition to the study, other independent reports from Esade and Funcas They also concluded that a significant portion of that aid did not reach consumers. The CNMC began an investigation that concluded last February with a fine of 20.5 million euros to Repsol group companies for abusing their dominant position. This history is precisely the reason why the Government has opted this time for a direct tax reduction that acts on taxes instead of repeating the universal bonus. From the CEEES, Rabadán had already qualified the 2022 bonus as “well-intentioned, but poorly designed and worse executed.” What a difference the measurement makes this time. Unlike the 2022 bonus, the VAT reduction acts directly on the tax included in the final price, which theoretically makes it more difficult for gas stations to appropriate the benefit. However, given FACUA’s complaint after the events of the first day of the sale, we see that the fact that it is more difficult for the price to be absorbed does not mean that it is not impossible. Given the … Read more

Elon Musk often promises impossible things like Terafab. The problem is that sometimes he manages to turn them into reality.

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It was up to Elon Musk to revolutionize the automotive industry with Tesla and the electric car. Probably no one believed he could do it. Then he did the same with the aerospace industry with SpaceX, and that was more of the same: it seemed impossible. It may be many things, but the truth is that although Elon Musk promises many things and does not always fulfill them when he says (hello autonomous car), has achieved unimaginable things. That’s why when you talk about Terafab, maybe we should give it a chance. Because this seems almost as impossible as his other feats. Terafab and Musk’s master plan. On Saturday night, from a power plant that has not been used for a long time, Elon Musk advertisement the last of the components of its master plan: Terafab. The objective is to create a chip factory in which Tesla, SpaceX and xAI will collaborate. According to Musk, this plant will be capable of manufacturing between 100 and 200 GW of computing capacity per year on earth, but it will reach 1 TW in space. The problem, as always with Musk, is distinguishing what part of the plan is engineering and what part is theater and fireworks. He doesn’t do it just because. At that event, the magnate explained that semiconductor manufacturers do not produce enough chips for their AI and robotics needs. And since TSMC and the rest of the manufacturers cannot meet Musk’s demand, he has proposed manufacturing them directly. You need them for your robotaxis and your humanoid robots, Optimuswhich he hopes will end up multiplying by 10 or 100 the production rate of his cars. But it also needs chips so that xAI can compete in the field of AI, and SpaceX needs them for its satellites. That is, it actually needs a lot of chips. Many. Chips from space. At Terafab they intend to create two types of chips. On the one hand, there will be those intended for autonomous vehicles or Optimus robots. On the other, the chips that already have their own name, D3, and that will be designed specifically for space, with products that use them that work in low Earth orbit and are powered by solar energy. For Musk, the idea “becomes an obvious decision”: there will come a point where putting payload into orbit is so cheap that host data centers in space It is cheaper than doing it on land because solar energy is practically unlimited there. Too many unknowns. Everything was very nice and promising, but once the speech and promises were over, the questions began. Building a state-of-the-art semiconductor factory is a colossal challenge. It’s not just a matter of money: it’s that advanced chip manufacturing is in the hands of three companies around the world (TSMC, Samsung and Intel), and requires photolithography with UVE technology which is only manufactured by the well-known Dutch company ASML. And here’s the thing, that Musk: Did not announce any agreement with ASML It has not shown orders that demonstrate that it will have these equipment He has not named a technological partner for the project No estimated dates or calendar have been given. And he hasn’t talked about the budget either. It’s all a gigantic unknown. The most ambitious vertical integration in tech history. On several occasions Musk repeated how at Terafab they intend to cover the entire development, manufacturing, packagingtesting and improvement in the same facilities. If we fulfill that promise, we would be facing another unprecedented achievement, because the semiconductor industry has been doing just the opposite for decades: hyperspecialization by different suppliers: some design, others manufacture, others package… Musk wants to do it all, and if he succeeds he will become a direct rival for Samsung or TSMC, which a priori he would no longer need. Promises and realities. This project seems especially diffuse, but with Musk anything is possible, as we have said. In recent years, yes, we have seen how several of his ideas or they have failedor they have been delayed, or they have been left in no man’s land. The robotaxis still haven’t arrived, the Cybertruck arrived late and it’s not settingand companies like The Boring Company or products like Solar Roof have had less reach than they promised, at least for now. Terafab seems like another impossible project from Musk. We’ll see if it ends up not being so. Image | tesla In Xataka | 8 years ago Elon Musk launched a Tesla Roadster into space: it continues to orbit and was mistaken for an asteroid

Nuclear waste is a problem, so Germany is looking for the solution in a Jurassic rock in Switzerland

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Nuclear energy is capable of generating clean electricity, continuously and in large quantities. A marvel except for two small details: the risk of a possible leak and what to do with its waste. The most widespread solution is bury them in a nuclear cemetery and wait. How much? Well, it depends, but it could be hundreds of thousands of years, until they are no longer dangerous. The million dollar question is where. An international research team led by Germany has started to drill a hole in a Swiss mountain to try to answer it. The project. Her name is DEBORAH (Deep borehole to resolve the Mont Terri Anticline Hydrogeology), stands for deep drilling to understand the hydrogeology of the Mont Terri anticline and is exactly what it does. Your goal? Document in great detail the layers that exist and their properties. There is some especially interesting material: Opalinus Clay. This deep experiment involves the German Geosciences Research Center GFZ and the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), the Nuclear Waste Service (NWS) of the United Kingdom and Swiss researchers from the University of Bern. Why is it important. Because it can be the ideal rock to build a radioactive waste deposit. As details GFZSwitzerland has already made the decision, but Germany and the United Kingdom (the other parties to the project) have not yet. The key is what the analysis of the drilling says: details such as how much water it allows to filter, at what speed or where it will be key to making the decision. It is not trivial: a leak, no matter how slow and small, can contaminate aquifers. What’s special about it. The Opalinus is a clay rock dating back to the Middle Jurassic, with an estimated age of approximately 175 million years. Simply put, it is clay that has been compacted into rock. And it has a property that makes it a good candidate for nuclear storage: its very low permeability. Context. The study of Opalinus is not new by any means: GFZ’s on your radar for 30 years because, in addition to its very low permeability, it has properties such as its plasticity (under pressure, warps instead of breakingsomething convenient if it works as a radioactive deposit) or its ability to retain certain radionuclides. Switzerland has already chosen it, but it remains to be known how it behaves under the conditions that exist in much deeper areas, where, for example, temperature or pressure change noticeably. How they do it. In the Swiss canton of Jura, near the municipality of Saint-Ursanne, there is that Mont Terri. In its bowels there is an underground laboratory that is accessed through the security gallery of a highway tunnel, about 150 – 200 meters underground. A drilling platform works continuously there, advancing meter by meter, until reaching a depth of 800 meters. The drill uses a hollow crown that allows extracting intact rock columns, the sample that is later analyzed in the laboratory. Each advance works as a witness insofar as it reveals the age, the composition, the fractures and the differential quality: how it behaves with water. In addition, they use seismic and gravimetry techniques to obtain a complete x-ray of what is hundreds of meters deep. In Xataka | Ships have been damaging the oceans with noise for centuries. Germany is working on silent propellers to solve it In Xataka | 700 tons of nuclear waste have arrived in Germany from England. The Germans are not entirely happy Cover | Ilja Nedilko and Evangelos Mpikakis

The rain has transformed the driest desert on the planet into a sea of ​​flowers. It’s a sight to behold and a problem for experts

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The Atacama Desert bloomed again in spring. After the August rains, more than 200 species from the Chilean region were activated and provoked the first major flowering since 2017. The Internet was filled with impressive photos, but (beyond the hype) there is a central problem: increasingly clear signs of a destabilized climate system. What has happened? In August 2025, a storm left accumulated between 40 and 60 mm in the Chilean Atacama Region. Specifically in the south: in Huasco, Freirina, Vallenar and the Llanos de Challe National Park. As a consequence, flowering started in the third week of September and reached its peak between the end of September and mid-October. He show was amazing: a mantle of red and yellow añañucas, of sighs, of huilles, of guanaco legs and lion’s claws. And why are we talking about this now? It’s a good question. Historically desert blooms occurred between 5 and 7 years. Typically linked to El Niño phenomena. In the last 40 years, Chile has recorded about 15 superblooms. The striking thing about this case (as happened in 2022 and 2025) is that it is linked to La Niña conditions. And, indeed, one may be a coincidence, but three so close together mark a trend. And the problem is that more blooms are not always good news. And so? As explained Maria Fernanda Pérezan ecologist at the PUC of Chile, out-of-season blooms generate a gap between flowering and pollinators. What’s the point of having pollen if we don’t have bees to do their job? Indeed: absolutely nothing. What’s more, if climate change causes this type of blooms on a regular basis, this deregulation could cause very serious problems. After all, just think that a guanaco paw seed can spend fifteen years on the desert floor until its time comes; If it germinates and there is no one to pollinate it, there will not be another seed. Climate change is going to cause us more problems than we are able to imagine. Because the serious thing is not the sea level, the melting of the glaciers or the rise in temperatures (that too). The most important thing is these little things that change everything. Things so small that we haven’t thought about them. Image | In Xataka | The Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on the planet. And right there a bunch of “crazies” are trying to get water out of the fog.

OpenAI’s big problem all these years has been a chronic lack of definition. Now he wants to solve it with a super app

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OpenAI spent much of 2025 announcing new features, not new models (that also), but new products. We saw him with his Sora 2 video generator or with ChatGPT Atlas browser. Now, the company recognizes that they were diversifying too much and their plan is… to launch another app. The super app. They have an exclusive Wall Street Journal that OpenAI is preparing a desktop tool that will unify the ChatGPT app, its Codex code platform and the Atlas browser. This super app will offer agentic capabilities, not only oriented to code, but also to productivity. This is aiming directly at the business field, a field in which its rival, Anthropic is quite ahead of him. Too many products. The company’s goal with this move is to simplify the experience and reduce fragmentation between products. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, a company spokesperson assures that it will allow them to unify the different teams, which will be able to focus their efforts on one product instead of several. In an internal note, OpenAI explicitly acknowledges that they were spreading their efforts across too many apps and needed to simplify them. The change will be led by Fidji Simo, the head of apps at OpenAI, who recently brought the employees together to give them a message: “We cannot waste this moment because we are distracted by parallel projects.” And diversifying consumes many resources, both economic and computing capacity, and OpenAI is not to be wasted none of them. Without direction. OpenAI has the most used chatbot in the world, but what they don’t have is a clear product strategy. They have wanted to be too many things at once without a clear strategyand in addition, half-abandoned products have been left along the way. The Atlas browser is the best example of this. I had all the potential to be a serious alternative to Chrome which had not yet integrated Gemini. The reality is that, five months after its launch, ChatGPT Atlas is still exclusive for Mac and also has lost functions. Something similar happened with Sora 2: they got the viral moment they were looking for, but today the app remains exclusive for users in the US and Canada. Competition where it hurts most. While OpenAI launched its video memes or its browser, the competition moved forward with a much less flashy, but better thought-out plan. According to a Menlo Ventures reportin 2023 OpenAI had a 50% share in the enterprise segment, while Anthropic had only 12. In 2025 the tables turned: Anthropic had 32% and ChatGPT 25%. If we focus only on programmers, 42% prefer Claude and only 21% ChatGPT. ChatGPT still has many more users, but the vast majority are for personal use. Financially, business users are much more valuable because they have no qualms about paying for subscriptions that often exceed $200 per month. Image crisis. In case Anthropic was not eating enough toast, the image crisis caused by the agreement with the Pentagon. ChatGPT began to lose users at a worrying ratewhile Claude was placed in the top of most downloaded applications. What they were missing. Image | Amparo Babiloni, Xataka In Xataka | There was a time when ChatGPT was a magical and free tool. That time is about to end

Apple’s problem with AI is not just being very late. The fact is that allying with Google will not be enough

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We still do not have a date for Apple to finally release the new Siri which he has been promising for two years. But the biggest problem with being late is not just being late: it’s arriving at a time when you don’t even all the efforts you have put on the table They are enough. Comet arrived. Perplexityquietly, is beginning to conquer an important piece of mobile territory. Its latest alliance comes from Samsung, natively implementing its artificial intelligence in star models like the Galaxy S26. One of Perplexity’s most powerful tools is its browser Cometwhich just landed on iOS. A browser that, by default, uses Google as a search engine, but whose technology is above what Gemini manages to offer today. Why is it important. Comet is not smoke. It is also not a browser with minor functions that adorns the desktop of our iPhone. The interface is simply outstanding Block ads by default Find information for us Manage tabs Allows voice searches with interactive answers It is capable of playing video for us and summarizing it without us having to see it. Summarize websites Comet stops short of being fully agentic AI, but it replaces the browser with a more reliable solution than chatbots like Gemini or GPT: you’re using AI inside a browser, not AI that accesses the internet to find (or invent) links. And so, with everything. 2026 is being a wild year for AI. In fact, it is exhausting to open the computer every morning and see how practically every day a new model has come out that surpasses the previous one. 2026 is being a year in which AI advances day after day. Nobody knows how Apple will be able to launch something at the level of what may already be obsolete today Although the iterations are minimal, we are seeing spectacular phenomena such as OpenClaw. While Chinese brands like Nubia begin to implement it on their phones, Apple only has the promise that Siri will be smart one day soon. Soon, it is assumed. According to Gurman leaks, we will see the new Siri throughout the first half of this year. The “according to” is important, because the rumors pointed to a February in which we have not yet seen a trace. Apple has been accumulating delays since it promised a Apple Intelligence which disappointed, and beyond the announcement of its alliance with Google, we have no more relevant news. Image | Xataka In Xataka | What have Apple and Google agreed on for the new Siri? Nobody knows because Google doesn’t even want to mention it.

the problem is different and it is much closer

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Bitcoin It has been presenting itself for years as a decentralized system, resilient by design and less exposed to the single points of failure that affect traditional banking. The idea is powerful and, to a large extent, true. But it has an important nuance that is usually left out of the conversation: to function, Bitcoin continues to rely on a very specific physical infrastructure that connects the world and that also conditions its real resistance. The study that puts figures on resilience. A study by the Cambridge Center for Alternative Financebased on eleven years of network traffic and 68 real cable incidents explains something very interesting. The significant disconnection threshold of the clearnet of Bitcoin is between 72% and 92% of submarine cables in random failure scenarios. However, the same work introduces a decisive nuance: this solidity changes noticeably when the problem is no longer random. Decentralization, but not isolation. Just because Bitcoin does not have a central authority does not mean that it works independently of other infrastructures. Its network is made up of distributed nodes that constantly exchange information, but they do so through providers, routes and physical systems that also support the Internet. The Cambridge study itself highlights this interdependence between layers, where the logical and the material coexist. For this distributed network to work, the nodes need to continuously exchange data, and that occurs over a global infrastructure shared with the rest of the Internet. We are talking about submarine cables, terrestrial links, service providers and routing systems that determine where information circulates. Bitcoin’s resilience, according to the study, depends largely on how all these components are organized and connected. Where everything changes is in targeted attacks. Compared to the resistance shown in random scenarios, the study warns of a much more accessible vulnerability when the attack focuses on large ASNs or key routing infrastructures. Damaging cables indiscriminately is not the same as hitting specific surfaces of the network, and this difference paints a very different scenario from that of massive and indiscriminate failures. Researchers support their conclusions with documented events. One of the most significant is the cable cutting recorded on March 14, 2024 off the Ivory Coastwhich affected multiple countries in the region. On a global scale, the impact on the Bitcoin network was minuscule, although at a regional level the consequences were much more visible. Tor’s role in resilience. The study identifies another element that influences the robustness of the network: the growing use of the protocol Tor. According to their data, in 2025 around 64% of Bitcoin nodes will already operate through this network and, in the four-layer model used by researchers, this evolution not only does not weaken the infrastructure, but rather increases its resilience against cable cuts under the current geography of the relays. So, overall, the study paints a less intuitive scenario than is usually proposed. Bitcoin does not seem particularly exposed to a collapse caused by massive and indiscriminate failures in the global infrastructure, but rather to much more focused disruptions. The key, according to researchers, is not so much in the scale of the damage as in where it occurs, which forces us to rethink how we understand its resilience. Images | Jen Titus | Erling Løken Andersen In Xataka | Seedance 2.0 has used Hollywood intellectual property to go viral. Hollywood has used the courts

The problem is that no one can agree on what they are.

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He James Webb Space Telescope It has been targeting the most remote regions of the universe for years and, with each new observation, it has revealed something that doesn’t quite fit. In his images, small, tiny, bright red dots appear, which repeat with a frequency that is difficult to ignore. They are not a specific anomaly or an observation failure: they are objects that astronomers have been studying for some time without having yet achieved a convincing explanation of their nature. The novelty. A recently published study in The Astrophysical Journal, led by Devesh Nandal and Avi Loeb, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, opens an alternative to the most widespread interpretation. Specifically, it suggests that some of these red dots might not be systems dominated by active black holes, but rather supermassive stars formed in the early universe. Speaking to Live ScienceNandal argues that this type of star can explain key features of these objects without depending on the presence of growing black holes. Before this turn, the so-called “little red dots” had already been on astronomy’s radar for some time. The term began to be consolidated in studies published in 2024, when several teams began to analyze them systematically after the first Webb observations. We are not talking about a recent discovery, but rather an accumulated enigma: At Xataka we already address it as a phenomenon that is difficult to fit into current modelswith very compact, extremely luminous objects present in the early universe. The dominant hypothesis. During the first years of analysis, the explanation that gained the most traction was that these red dots were driven by growing black holes. In the first phase, some of the researchers attributed its red color to dust in the environment, although later work has shifted part of that focus to hydrogen gas. What is starting to not fit. With the passage of time, some observations have complicated this initial interpretation. Several of these objects do not show clear X-ray emissions, one of the most common signs of active black holes, and their spectra lack strong metallic lines beyond hydrogen and helium. Added to this is “The Cliff”, one of the objects analyzed by the RUBIES program, which does not fit either as a conventional galaxy or as a system dominated by dust. The proposal of the new study fits into this context, which proposes a different reading for at least part of these objects. Instead of active black holes, some small red dots could be supermassive stars formed from primordial gas, composed almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, and observed just before collapsing. According to the model developed by the team, this scenario reproduces both its extreme brightness and specific features of its spectra, without having to assume the presence of a growing black hole. The new study does not close the debate, rather it expands it. The researchers themselves acknowledge that directly demonstrating what lies behind these objects remains extremely difficult, and other voices in the scientific community insist that none of the hypotheses can yet be ruled out. The presence of black holes in these systems remains to be demonstrated directly and, for now, is inferred mainly from their brightness and how abundant they are. Images | NASA/ESA/CSA (1, 2) In Xataka | The Zoo Hypothesis: Why Aliens Likely Know About Us and Don’t Want to Contact Us

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