problem

Jaén was the largest producer of lead in the world. Decades later, he wants to repeat the game with rare earths, but he has a problem: reality

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Somewhere between Linares and La Carolina there is a rusty derrick: the iron skeleton of what was, at the end of the 19th century, the largest producer of lead in the world. It is, obviously, the past, but in recent years many are completely obsessed with it being also the future. We have the latest example of this about 80 kilometers north of that derrick. There, in Aldeaquemada, an Australian company has just extracted a drill core and to announce that it is “a high quality area”. The question that hovers over Jaén these months is not whether there are minerals under its feet. We all know that. The question is whether all this dance of prospecting that we are seeing is something real or is it simply the expression of the desire of a province that continues to associate its ‘golden age’ with mining. What is happening? The last episode, as I say, stars Osmond Resources. In the SOR-08 survey has cut more ore than expected north of the province. We are talking about a project that covers 756 mining units between Aldeaquemada and Santiesteban del Puerto and search “titanium, zirconium, hafnium and rare earths” trapped in quartzites that hundreds of millions of years ago were beach sand. The ad has a trick, yes. What they have announced is a confirmation ‘during’ drilling. Laboratory analyzes (those that count) will take weeks. But, in reality, that is not what interests us. It is enough to do a small search on the internet to confirm that Jaén entire is being drilled with passion and enthusiasm for months now. And where does all that enthusiasm come from? In principle, three relatively independent engines. The first is geopolitical: in 2024, the European Union pressed the accelerator on ‘mineral sovereignty’ and approved a regulation on critical raw materials. The idea was to ensure that the extraction, processing and recycling of strategic raw materials carried out in Europe cover respectively 10%, 40% and 25% of EU demand. A project like Orión, oriented towards rare earths, is typical of something that in Europe (and in Madrid) sounds like glory. The thing about Madridor it is rhetorical. Just a couple of months ago, the Government approved a raw materials plan of 414 million euros which includes the largest mining prospecting campaign in Spain in more than half a century. Sierra Morena is expressly cited in it. Sara Aagesen he came to say that “with all certainty” rare earths will appear in the country. And then there’s the bag… That is the third engine. Companies like Osmond Resources live off the deposits, yes; but above all they live off the news cycle. After all, its market capitalization depends more on the ‘media battle’ than on the final results. In a field as complex as mining, failure is almost a given. And why is it important? Because behind all this noise there are a lot of small, aging towns those who are sold a new future. The mayor of Aldeaquemada It didn’t take long to celebrate Osmond’s results as a way to “generate jobs and wealth.” But the reality is that the Most exploration projects never produce. The energy transition has served as an alibi to look underground again, but the sector has changed so much that for the vast majority of actors, expectations are beginning to be more useful than reality. And that, in Empty Spain, is an existential problem. Image | Shane Mclendon In Xataka | Where there was lead before, now there will be rare earths: Jaén revives its mining past for the energy transition

“Cyclical” productivity sounds great as a way to organize work according to the rule. The problem is that it’s a bluff

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Patricia Gosálvez told that for some time now talks about how to organize the work agenda according to the phase of the menstrual cycle have been the order of the day. There are different approaches and different discourses, but the general idea is the same: “do social tasks when you are ovulating and reserve planning and solitude tasks for your period days.” We knew that ‘cyclical productivity’ swept TikTokWhat we didn’t realize was that he was already proselytizing among the management class throughout the country. And we shouldn’t be surprised. A priori, the idea sounds like empowerment and militant feminism. The question, however, is whether it makes any sense. But… what exactly are we talking about? In general terms, we can see it as a work adaptation of something that has been talked about for quite some time: the cycle syncing. A self-care practice in which things like diet, exercise routines, or lifestyle habits are adjusted to match the hormonal fluctuations of the menstrual cycle. Applied to the workplace, the month is divided into four phases and tasks are distributed: planning is reserved for bleeding, during the follicular phase work is brought forward, ovulation are “ideal days to negotiate, ask for a raise and everything that needs power and security” and the luteal phase is fantastic for detailed work. It sounds good, but it’s a bluff. Especially since the model assumes a hormonal cycle that most women don’t really have. In general, cycle syncing is right that there is an infradian hormonal cycle (that is, with a period longer than one day), but it jumps to the idea that it is a closed scheme that is easy to program without a break in continuity. In fact, there are two large systematic reviews on this sort of thing that do not support the ideas of cyclical productivity. According to the latest meta-analysis from 2025there is no robust evidence that cognitive performance (neither attention, nor memory, nor executive function, nor spatial ability) changes over the cycle. On the other hand, the most robust studies of physical performance also find that the cycle effect is “trivial”. This does not mean that menstruation does not have an impact very significant in the lives of women and that pain in many cases is a huge problem. It doesn’t even mean that PMS doesn’t exist. What this means is that the hormonal cycle does not seem to serve to schedule tasks with that level of detail in the general population. But it does have a problem. And behind the façade of ’empowerment’, the truth is that there is a very problematic message that “women’s competence fluctuates with hormones.” It is something that reinforces stereotypes and, as we have seen, is a lie. As the endocrinologist Carme Valls said to Gosálvezis an idea that “makes women too biological, too animal.” And he does it without contributing too much. Above all, because as Valls continues, in a normal cycle the variability is minimal: “40% of women hardly feel anything.” That is to say, although from an individual point of view knowing the cycle is very useful, from a population point of view it introduces noise. The problem is not the initial intuition, nor the idea that talking about the rule is good. The problem is the promise of productivity associated with it. A promise that, as we see, in general terms has no relationship with reality. Image | Annika Gordon In Xataka | Period pain in adolescence is not “normal”: massive study links it to increased risk of chronic pain in adulthood

Pamplona is being invaded by thousands of white moths. The funny thing is that this is the only harmless part of the problem

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In recent days, there is a specific type of Navarrese videos that do not stop roaming the internet: storms of white moths invading entire houses, covering terraces and “taking” rooms. We are talking about white butterflies about four centimeters long that voraciously seek any point of light. The result is chairs, tables and columns, floors, ceilings and walls completely “upholstered” by them. I said “videos”, yes; but the word I was looking for was “nightmares.” And the funny thing is that this is the only part of the process (of the boxwood moth cycle) that is not really a problem. What is happening? Nothing new is actually happening. As predicted for weeks, the boxwood moth (Cydalima perspectalis) has hatched en masse in the Pamplona region, coinciding with the first heat stroke of the summer. It is not only that, as the local press remembersthese moths have caused problems before. It is that in the 2018-19 season caused a decline in the ‘bojedales’ of Atlantic Navarra which put the entire botanical community in the north of the country on alert. In other words, the new thing is the videos: the problem comes from further away than it seems. I mean, it’s a problem, right? The curious thing is that the moth (about 4 cm wingspanwhite and with nocturnal habits) is not usually so. In its adult phase it does not eat boxwood, It is not stinging, it is not dangerous for people or pets. It is very scandalous and somewhat annoying, but little more. The real problem is caterpillars and, as far as we are talking about moths, the damage has already been done. A sentence that already lasts 20 years. The caterpillars are monophagous. That is, they only eat boxwood; But, in addition, they eat it in a big way: they gnaw the leaves until the nerves are stripped. And it shows: according to the Ministry, after two years of ‘defoliation’ 72% of boxwoods do not resprout. It has been 20 years since the plague arrived in Europe and about 12 that arrived in Spain. However, today (and only in Catalonia) there are already 180,000 hectares affected. A third of everything in Catalonia. And now what? Little now. As I say, moths are annoying, but they are not dangerous. The authorities trust that it will be achieved a natural ecological balance that keeps the boxwood alive. The problem is that the climate works against us: if the heat continues to rise we cannot rule out several generations a year. And that would compromise everything. Image | Denis Chanter In Xataka | We are on the verge of the first heat wave of the year: an anomaly of up to 15 degrees never seen since 1950

The problem is not that there is AI on TikTok. It’s already more than half of what you see as soon as you enter.

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Since we have models of image generation and videos with AI so cutting edge, we have begun to get used to seeing all types of content generated by artificial intelligence on social networks. It’s no longer just that we eat the occasional deepfake, it’s that much of the entertainment content that appears in our feed has been generated by AI. An analysis of more than 10,000 videos reveals that TikTok, the most susceptible to what we know as ‘AI slop‘, shows this type of content at a rate three times higher than that of YouTube, and that children’s content is the most affected. The problem has a name. As we have mentioned before, It’s called AI slop, and it’s Pretty cheesy, mass-produced content with artificial intelligence tools with the sole objective of accumulating views. In this content it is very common for us to see cartoon characters in absurd situations, videos that aim to give us educational lessons, or voices generated by AI over images that are deformed, among many others. There is now data that measures the presence of this type of content on TikTok, with a rather uncomfortable precision. What the study says. Kapwing, a San Francisco-based video editing company, has analyzed 10,742 videos spread across 20 TikTok categories and placed special emphasis on the first 500 videos that the platform showed to newly created accounts. 294 of those 500 videos, that is, 59%, were classified as AI slop. The study states that the methodology was manual and without automation, and the data collected corresponds to May 2026. Kapwing defines this type of content as videos with obvious use of AI-generated images, or low-quality compilations with clearly artificial scripts and voice-overs. In perspective. That rate is almost triple what Kapwing recorded on YouTube when performing the same test with a new account. On the Google-owned video platform, 21% of the first 500 videos in the Shorts feed were AI slops. YouTube has also taken more aggressive measures, last January canceling 16 channels with a combined 35 million subscribers for violating its artificially generated content policy. On TikTok, on the other hand, the phenomenon seems to have established itself as the natural state of the algorithm before the user even begins to personalize their experience by scrolling. Children, the most exposed. The category with the highest slop density on the entire platform is children’s content, with 57.4% of videos classified as AI-generated garbage. Within the #CartoonKids hashtag, 97 out of every 100 videos analyzed were artificial. Furthermore, as the study points out, in #babysong and #cartoons, the proportion was around 83%. In #forkids, 79%. In this content it is very common to see characters from well-known series getting into situations that make no sense, lessons to be learned that make mistakes, or animations that mutate in a strange way. Exposure to AI from an early age. The Next Web medium share the words of Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago, who describes the phenomenon as “AI disinformation for young children on an industrial scale.” “Each experience builds a million new neural connections. Without meaning to, you will be wiring the brain incorrectly,” he warned. The risk is not limited to meaningless content, since the categories of science, education, health and history also register high rates of slop, between 33% and 35%, according to the study. The algorithm amplifies the problem. According to Kapwing’s own study, when a new account shows interest in AI content, the algorithm interprets that signal and ends up showing more. TikTok’s personalization mechanism, designed to fine-tune the feed based on user behavior, turns the initial slop into a starting point that feeds back. As well as points out The study, by the time the platform activated a control in November 2025 that allows users to increase or reduce the amount of AI-generated content in their feed, had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AIGC (AI-generated content). What TikTok has done. In addition to feed control, the platform has allocated two million dollars to an educational fund to develop content on literacy and AI. But the study’s numbers suggest that these measures have not significantly curbed the volume of slop reaching new users. Furthermore, having an inexhaustible source of content, such as that generated by AI, contributes to the retention of the platform, so it is understandable that the platform does not have much interest in passing the broom. Cover image | Kenneth Schipper and ROBIN WORRALL In Xataka | Commodore conquered millions of users with the C64 in the 80s. It wants to repeat its success with a very rare smartphone

Spain had a master plan for the European fighter. The problem is that Germany just got a girlfriend with a lot of “money”

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In 1986, Spain, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom decided to join forces to build the Eurofighter Typhoon. It took almost two decades to turn it into realitybut that project left a key lesson: in Europe, fighters are not built with engineering alone, but with industrial and political balances that sometimes last longer than the technology itself. The collapse and plan B. It we count last week. He collapse of the Future Combat Air System has not only been the failure of a large European military program of 100,000 million euros, it has also been the moment in which Spain understood that he could not wait for France and Germany to resolve their industrial wars. For years, the FCAS It was sold as the large sixth-generation European fighter, but tensions between Airbus and Dassault Aviation they ended up blocking the distribution of work, leadership and technological architecture. When Berlin withdrew, Madrid lost more than just a partner: it lost the pillar that supported its own bet. FCAS concept The Spanish exit. Spain had been moving in silence for some time. With Indra gaining weight in defense and with growing conversations with Saab, the idea was clear: if FCAS sank, there was room to build an alternative axle with Germany and Sweden around satellite technologies such as sensors, combat cloud, accompanying drones and command systems. It was not yet a “new fighter” as such, but it was a survival platform industrial so as not to be tied to Paris. It was a lateral route to keep the Spanish option alive within the sixth European generation. Italy changes the board. And then Italy has appeared. Leonardo’s new management has made it clear that it would be delighted to open the door of the Global Combat Air Program to Germany. On paper, that is a logical invitation: Berlin brings money, industry and experience accumulated with the Eurofighter Typhoon. But strategically it is a bomb for Spain. Because the centerpiece of your plan B (Germany) could stop looking towards the Swedish axis and turn towards Rome, London and Tokyo. In a matter of weeks, the Spanish escape route could become a dead end. Germany is looking for a leading role. The German movement also has internal logic. Berlin does not want to be a secondary partner. He made it clear within the FCAS and he is repeating it now: if he enters another program, he wants a role proportional to your investment and its industrial weight. That sits poorly with France, where Dassault Aviation never wanted to let go control, but it fits much better with Italian flexibility. Furthermore, BAE Systems and the German branch of Airbus already they cooperated successfully on the Eurofighter. For Berlin, GCAP is starting to look less like an alternative and more like a logical continuation. The Spanish dilemma. And here is the big crack for Spain. If Germany joins GCAP, Madrid stays trapped between two worlds: a mortally wounded FCAS and an alternative plan that loses its most important partner before consolidating. Spain can try to continue punch to France, but that would mean accepting a (much) more subordinate role. You could also look for a direct approach to Italy or even Japan and the United Kingdom, but arriving late to an already structured program reduces a lot the negotiation margin. The risk is brutal: being left out of the table where the next great European air combat ecosystem is decided. Europe repeats its old problem. All this once again reveals the great industrial drama European: too many projects, too many egos and, above all, too much overlap. While the United States and China move forward with centralized programs, Europe continues to fragment its resources between rival blocs. In that sense, Spain believed it had found a safety net after the FCAS. The problem is that this network depended on Germany… and now Germany has a new dance couple. Image | Picryl In Xataka | Spain, France and Germany had joined together to illuminate the “European fighter” of the future: now that path is dead In Xataka | The European fighter has died, but Europe still has one last bullet to avoid the F-35: the alliance of Spain and Sweden

In China, ‘bookfluencers’ are the sales engine of the publishing industry. The problem is that no one can read 700 books.

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In China, publishers have discovered a rich vein thanks to bookfluencers. Reviews on social networks such as Douyin (the Chinese TikTok) or RedNote have become the sales engine for many books in recent years. However, the volume of books and the intense competition between these influencers has led to the credibility of the model beginning to be questioned. what has happened. They tell it in world of chinese. A book content creator posted a 25-minute video exposing another professional colleague who has more than half a million followers. In the video, he shows a paper almost 5 meters long with a list of 700 books that this bookfluencer had supposedly recommended on his social networks. There wouldn’t be any problem if it weren’t for the fact that they were the readings of a single year. It comes out almost two books a day. Authenticity not found. There is even more and, when reviewing the reviews, he found something curious. They were full of repeated and very exaggerated phrases. For example, this influencer felt “transformed” by 17 different books and “healed” by 33 more. We don’t know if he used AI to summarize the books and do the reviews, but clearly they weren’t real reviews. The online community of readers had been criticizing the lack of authenticity for some time and this video was the last straw. Read for the algorithm. Reading fans criticize the model that has been created with online recommendations. For several years now, the publishing industry has made these influencers a key resource to promote their launches, but with the passage of time, the volume of readings and the need to keep up to date with all the trendsis transforming reading from a leisurely and private activity to something manufactured for the “by weight” algorithm. The business works. Video reviews are giving publishers very good results, as in the case of the novel ‘The Last Quarter of the Moon’, which went from 600,000 copies to more than 6 million after a famous influencer recommended it. Large publishers allocate a specific budget and pay commissions of between 15 and 30% of the sales generated through their channels. The dependence on this promotional model is such that, according to editor Bai Bai, “In many cases, if no influencer is willing to take charge of a book or promote it, the book is practically doomed to failure at the moment of its publication.” A precarious job. Although publishers turn to these creators and give them good commissions, it does not mean that it is exactly a grateful job. There is enormous competition between creators, who have to constantly be up to date with trends in order to satisfy the algorithm and have their content go viral. Still, income is very unstable, pushing creators to post more reviews and exaggerate the impact the books have had on them. Anqian Reads, one of these bookfluencers, says “The ironic thing is that since I’ve been a book influencer, I have less time to read.” Image | 愚木混株 Yumu in Unsplash In Xataka | Universities are discovering something: fewer and fewer students are reading long essays without losing concentration

The biggest problem for Spanish olive trees is neither costs nor climate change: it is ‘ghost oil’

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Something smells bad in the olive oil market. We knew it for a long timebut it is now with the collapse of prices at source (almost 46%) that everyone has become nervous. The figures do not add up and the bill will not be paid by the large olive oil groups, but by the small producers. For this reason, on June 15, a COAG representative stood in front of the microphones and reported that 81% of olive oil Tunisian was entering Spain undercover. But how do you put 65,500 tons of oil under the radar? It has not been easy to determine, the truth is. But if the organization is right, the oil ship has more than one leak compromising its future. But it doesn’t have it. Always according to the COAGa good part of that oil comes from Portugal. But the ‘Portuguese way’ does not add up: with the data from the 2024-2025 campaign, Portugal produces between 160,000 and 195,000 tons of its own and imported only 3,406 of Tunisian oil. Those 3,406 tons cannot explain the 131,877 that it re-exports to Spain. Some part yes, but not all of it. And then? The problem seems different. It looks like ours, in fact. Because what COAG does seem to be right about is that a good part of the oil that entered the country did so under a special regime: that of active development. It is a formula of the Customs Code of the European Union that allows the importation of non-EU merchandise without tariffs or VAT as long as it is transformed and exported again. What the producers point out is that a good part of the oil that arrives in Spain to be “perfected” ends up being sold in the country without appearing in the statistics (marked, in fact, as community). The consumer does not notice it substantially in the price, but it is noticeable at the source. And a lot. But there is more. A few years ago, honey became a problem. Nobody really knew what they were eating in Europe. The key to this was to mix it up. Above all, because with completely insufficient regulation, it was enough to put “mix” so that there was nothing more to ask. This was attempted to be resolved with Directive (EU) 2024/1438 (the “Breakfast Guidelines“) which has not come into force in Spain until June 14, 2026. Among many other things, Brussels demands that the package states where what is inside comes from. Easy, clean, effective and… …non-existent for oil. The big problem, as almost always, is traceability. Not that we have problems, but that there is almost no real interest in doing it. As we have said many times, the Spanish agricultural market is a giant with feet of clay and now is the time to think if we want it to be something else. In Xataka | Something strange is happening with the price of olive oil and farmers have just denounced it: there are up to 2.8 billion at stake

We don’t know if AI is going to take our jobs. The problem is that whoever is developing the AI ​​doesn’t know it either.

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The arrival of AI has sown the seed of uncertainty in many sectors putting on the table a question for which, today, no one has a clear answer: Is AI going to take our jobs or not? The most curious thing is that not even those who are developing those models that would replace millions of employees they have a clear answer. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, heads of OpenAI and Anthropic, have been offering two completely opposite visions for the same issue. After predicting a almost apocalyptic scenarioAltman now says everything will be fine. Amodei, for his part, warns of a very hard blow to employment. The data also does not shed light on the future employment of those who now must choose a career professional. Altman says he was wrong (for the better). Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, has greatly softened the defeatist speech he had been holding. A while ago I talked about entire job categories that were going to disappear. Now he says something else, although perhaps he does so more conditioned by the IPO of your company than for the certainty of a future with more jobs. According to collected ReutersAltman is “I’m glad I was wrong about this; I thought the elimination of entry-level administrative jobs would have already had a bigger impact than it actually has.” This is a pretty big script twist coming from someone who has been setting the pace for the sector for years. Amodei and Anthropic do not let up. At the other end of the narrative is Anthropic. Its co-founder, Chris Olah, repeated at a conference on ethics and AI in the vatican the same idea as his boss, Dario Amodei, has been defending for a long time. There is a real possibility that AI will replace human work on a large scale. It does not speak of a smooth change or an easy transition. Talk about a serious, and sudden, impact. However, although both talk about the same type of technology and with similar data on the table, their interpretations of what is to come are clearly opposite. Employees were an expense, but AI doesn’t come free. As leaders at major AI companies debate the future of the millions of employees they will replace with AI, companies are beginning to realize that AI It’s not going to be much cheaper either. than an employee. The companies that have opted the most for workforce cuts and increased use of AI are receiving your first billsand they scare. So they have put a stop to the so-called “tokenmaxxing“: pay without limit to use models without measuring the return well. According to collected Business InsiderUber’s chief operating officer said AI costs are increasingly difficult to justify, just after its chief technology officer burned the annual AI budget early. According what was published by The VergeMicrosoft, also began reducing Claude Code licenses among its employees, a cut that Fortune linked to the high cost of massive use of these models. More jobs for programmers and security teams. However, the implementation of AI in companies, far from eliminating jobs, is increasing the demand for certain profiles. According to data from the hiring platform Indeed collected by Axiosvacancies for software engineering positions have grown by 18% in the last year, while total employment falls by 4.3% in the same period. Why is this happening? More code written with AI means more code that someone has to check. Companies continue hiring security analystsauditors and people who validate what the models generate. Automation detects failures at high speed, but prioritizing and fixing them still depends on human judgment. For now, that criterion remains scarceand expensive. Generation Z is not trusting. Without a doubt, those most affected by all this uncertainty are the generation that has just entered the labor market. Without enough experience enough to face the new demands, but too advanced in their professional career to choose another career path. Given all this uncertainty and closed doorsGeneration Z no longer sees AI as an opportunity. He increasingly sees her as a direct threat to his first job, so he has chosen to fight it. A survey According to Gallup, enthusiasm for AI among young people fell 14 points in just one year, and anger towards the technology rose to 31%. And they don’t stop complaining. a survey of Writer together with Workplace Intelligence, pointed out that 44% of Generation Z employees admit to actively sabotaging their company’s AI implementation plans, compared to 29% of the entire workforce. With all this on the table, the only thing clear is that no one has the complete picture about the future of AI in the labor market. Neither those who sell the technology, nor those who use it, nor those who are about to look for their first job. Probably the answer is neither disaster nor total calm, but a little of each, distributed very unevenly depending on the sector and the country. In Xataka | Technology workers have better salaries and an important “but”: more than half fear being replaced by AI Image | Flickr (World Economic Forum/Pascal Bitz, Sandra Blaser), Unsplash (syful islam)

The world’s leading expert in identifying deepfakes has a big problem. No longer able to identify them

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Is called Hany Farid and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on deepfake videos. This digital forensics expert was capable of uncovering videos manipulated by governments, for example, but now he has decided to leave Silicon Valley for one simple reason: It is no longer able to differentiate the real ones from those that are being generated with AI tools. And we are not surprised. Deepfakes indistinguishable from reality. In the last two decades Farid, 60, has specialized in identifying fake videos. This professor at the University of California at Berkeley has confessed that advances in generative AI have made traditional detection methods are no longer of any use. Their conclusions confirm the feeling that we have had for a long time with this type of content: AI has advanced so much that the problem is no longer just deepfakes: it is that we distrust even real photos. Farid’s reputation precedes him. His father worked for 50 years as a chemist at Eastman Kodak, and Farid grew up visiting the dark room often, watching photos become photos as they passed through the different liquids. He ended up designing a “digital fingerprint” system that made it possible to detect cases of child pornography hidden on the Internet. In fact, its technology has led to 30 million cases of potential abuse being reported each year, as well as leading to hundreds of arrests and several rescues. I surrender. Faced with the avalanche of perfect deepfakes generated with AI, Farid has decided to leave his job to take refuge on a farm in Vermont. His surrender is the latest demonstration of a harsh reality: We can no longer trust what we see on networks. Now he is dedicated to working with wood, and has distanced himself from networks and technology. The missile that changed everything. The turning point that demonstrates this crisis of this digital forensic task occurred after the viral spread of a video showing the alleged impact of a US missile on a school in Iran. Farid spent an entire day breaking down the sequence frame by frame: analyzing the geometry of the shadows, the sound delay rate of the explosion according to the laws of physics, or the pixel length of the projectile. Impossible to decide if it is false or not. He found nothing that could prove that the video was fake, and the same thing happened to other specialists. None could issue a clear verdict of authenticity, and that made it clear that AI video generation is currently so advanced that real content is indistinguishable from a deepfake generated with these latest generation models. Verifying is too complicated. There is another problem here: generating a fake video, whether toxic or not, with cloned voices that are perfectly synchronized with the interlocutor is easy, fast and cheap. Carrying out a forensic investigation to try to detect whether the video is real or not takes hours of computational and direct analysis by specialists. Given that deepfakes manage to go viral in just 20 minutes if they are successful, the methods to contain this spread are useless for a simple reason: they arrive late. The biter bit. The researcher himself was a victim of this reality: cybercriminals cloned his phone number and used AI to generate his voice and thus impersonate his identity. With that clone, they called a close contact who was involved in a court case and managed to extract confidential information. Farid and his wife, a vision researcher at Berkeley, they had to create a secret safe word at the beginning of each family call to certify that each interlocutor was who they said they were. The situation generates a disturbing paranoia and mistrust. “I’m going blind”. In the report of The New York TimesFarid explained that his studies show that most people can no longer differentiate a real photo from a digitally created one. “I feel like I’m going blind,” he indicated, showing his concern about an AI that is managing to obscure the truth and distort reality. Watermarks as a solution. Faced with this avalanche of images and videos generated by AI that are indistinguishable from reality, one of the potential ways to mitigate the problem continues to gain strength. It is, of course, the watermarkstotally invisible and which are part of the metadata of those files. Two promising initiatives. There are several initiatives in this regard, although the most notable It is that of the C2PA coalition which includes, for example, Google and OpenAI. AI tools should add those watermarks identifying those contents (“This video has been generated with this AI application, this image has been generated or edited with this other one”), but at the moment that type of option is not applied by default. Another important project in this sense is SynthIDGoogle’s technology to “mark” these contents as created with AI. Image | Bild (CC0) In Xataka | What happened to Technicolor: evolution and death of the company that changed cinema and was overwhelmed by its ambition

the problem was never the nuclear bomb

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In October 1973, during the first great oil crisisgas stations in the United States posted signs “Sorry, last car in this line” to cut kilometer-long queues and ration fuel. That image became the symbol of an uncomfortable truth that remains valid half a century later: when energy is what gets stuck, even the great powers change their priorities. The end of a war with another truth. For more than a hundred days, Donald Trump sold the war against Iran as a crusade to prevent Tehran from crossing the nuclear line. The rhetoric was clear: unconditional surrender, dismantling of the atomic program and maximum military pressure. But the agreement that now it just closed with the Iranians reveals another, much more uncomfortable reality: the priority was never really the bomb. In fact, if it had been, Washington would not have accepted a pact that leaves the regime intact, postpones nuclear negotiations and turns the issue of enriched uranium into an issue. for later. What was urgent, what was truly unbearable for the White House and the markets, was something else: reopen Hormuz. The neck of the world. we have been counting these months. The Strait of Hormuz became in the royal center of war because about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes through there. When Iran closed it de facto, it not only paralyzed regional exports, but turned the conflict into a systemic threat for the global economy. Oil skyrocketed, gas followed suit, and markets began to discount something much more dangerous than a regional war: a global energy crisis. Trump could continue bombing and wasting ammunition (maybe too much), but each day that Hormuz remained blocked it more damage to Washington than to Tehran. The weapon that Iran did have. For years there was discussion about the hypothetical iranian bombbut in the end Tehran’s real pressure capacity was not underground in those missile cities in Fordow or Natanzbut floating over the Gulf. Tehran demonstrated that it could cut off the planet’s energy artery and keep it closed long enough to bend American strategic logic. Therein lies possibly the great lesson: because it did not need to manufacture a nuclear weapon to acquire deterrent power. It was enough for him control a chokepoint vital and show punitive capacity against US bases and regional allies. That changed the entire balance of the negotiation. The economy and its cracks. While the war continued, the world began to consume strategic reserves at a worrying speed. The United States drained its so-called Strategic Petroleum Reserve to levels not seen since 1983, Japan and South Korea saw reduce your inventories and Europe was beginning to strain its refined fuel supply chains. It is true that there was no collapse yet, but there were clear signs of fragility and that we were approaching red lines. In other words, the market continued to function thanks to these “shock absorbers”, but everyone knew that they were finite. Because the war could continue, but the energy cheap No. The agreement that reveals priority. And then it has arrived the unthinkable pact when the United States launched its bombing campaign. Sixty days of ceasefire, gradual reopening of Hormuz, withdrawal of the US naval blockade and temporary permission for Iran sell oil again. The sequence is revealing: before resolving the nuclear program, Washington has resolved first the flow energetic. Next will come talks on uranium, if there are any, oversight of the International Atomic Energy Agency and possible sanctions relief phases. That is to say: the nuclear issue is still important on paper, but it was no longer the strategic urgency dictated by the clock. An imperfect peace, but necessary. There is no doubt, the agreement It doesn’t close the wound. Benjamin Netanyahu keep hitting to Hezbollah day in and day out, and the Lebanese front can vturn everything back on. Iran maintains its regime, its regional influence and much of its negotiating capacity. But the war has made one conclusion brutally clear: When the stability of the global energy system began to falter, Washington downgraded its maximums to minimums. In the end, the “bomb” was the political argument, oil was the real problem. And when crude oil began to run out, peace stopped being an option and became an imperative necessity. Image | Google Earth, US Navy In Xataka | We have been fearing the Apocalypse for 100 days due to the closure of Hormuz. The blow is going to be given to us by a heat wave in China In Xataka | Ukraine turned drones into hunters. A helicopter shot down in Hormuz has transformed them into a Spielberg film

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