reality

Predicting Alzheimer’s 10 years in advance is now a scientific reality. The challenge now is to prevent healthcare from collapsing

by

Alzheimer’s is a devastating disease that is undoubtedly a true ghost, since it only It becomes visible when the damage is already irreparable and that, despite trying to stop it, it is becoming difficult to control it. And historically, the medical diagnosis comes when memory begins to fail, but by then the brain has been suffering in silence for years, even decades. Now science focuses on the need for early diagnosis so that treatments can work. A new analysis. One of the ways to detect this disease before it begins to show the classic symptoms such as memory loss is through a blood test. This is the milestone that has been collected in The Lancet magazine recently thanks to research from the University of California, and that could generate a large population screening that is not free of controversy. What they did. The researchers followed 1,350 people aged between 56 and 69, without any type of dementia, for more than 35 years. And here the key was to look for specific proteins circulating in the blood that increased in the earliest phases of Alzheimer’s, as occurs with others marked in other diseases such as PSA in prostate cancer. And they found two biomarkers. The first of them is Aβ42/40, which is an early indicator that warns of the accumulation of hateful beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. But they also found the protein p-tau217, which is considered today the most precise marker for the pathology. The results. The 6% of participants who tested positive for these biomarkers showed a four-fold increased risk of developing verbal memory problems and a decline in their cognitive speed a decade later. But science has been trying to refine this tool for years, looking for markers such as GFAP, which rises about ten years before symptoms appear. See the invisible. The blood test does not walk alone in this diagnostic revolution, since on the same day, The Lancet published a second study based on nearly 800 participants from the US and Canada that tests a new and sophisticated neuroimaging technology: the MK6240 PET plotter. Until now, visualizing the tau protein, which is one of those responsible for Alzheimer’s by accumulating in neurons, was a great challenge. But this new tracer promises to be much more sensitive, detecting twice as many positive cases in healthy people with amyloid accumulation compared to the standard used today. You have to wait. Before throwing the bells in the air, it should be noted that experts point out that this test not ready to be used as general population screening. The reason lies in mathematics, since the prevalence of asymptomatic Alzheimer’s in healthy middle-aged people remains low in absolute terms, so applying this test to everyone would generate a very high volume of false positives. That is, an increase in this protein that is not actually related to early Alzheimer’s. But logically, the fear, anxiety and the resulting cascade of confirmatory tests would collapse the health services that are already stressed, and furthermore, the drugs we have, despite the fact that they stop the effects of the disease in its earliest phases, are not yet definitive. That is why we must remain on the right path, but there is still a long way to go to get this disease under control. Images | Robina Weermeijer Testalize.me In Xataka | Alzheimer’s no longer seems irreversible: science allows brains with advanced damage to recover for the first time in animals

We thought AI was laying off engineers. In reality, it has pilloried another profile: middle management.

by

We’ve been hearing for several years that AI was going to change work as we know it. What perhaps no one anticipated is that the first mass casualty They would not be factory operators or data analysts, but the layer of professionals that holds together the structure of any company: middle management. The phenomenon is already leaving a trail of layoffs with the successive restructurings that the big technology companies have been applying for the last year. Departments are reduced by the implementation of AI and become increasingly autonomous in decision-making, so the intermediate step that united everything becomes unnecessary. The profile that worries the most. Middle managers have been acting as a transmission belt between the management that dictates strategies and the teams that execute them for decades. The function of these positions was to collect data, synthesize it, transfer decisions and coordinate day-to-day operations. That intermediary job is exactly the role that AI is automating most easily, making middle managers the most important link. likely to be fired in that chain because it is not related to either decision-making or their execution. The pressure on this intermediate profile has been building for some time and the data confirms it. By the end of 2025, job offers for middle managers in the US were 42% lower to the maximum recorded three years earlier, according to Revelio Labs. The consulting firm Gartner calculated that by 2026 one in five companies will use AI to eliminate more than half of their middle management positions. Companies are applying it. Just a few weeks ago, Block, the payments company founded by Jack Dorsey, announced the dismissal of 40% of its staff and presented a new organizational model in which AI assumes the role of a link between teams. In one later blog postDorsey and councilor Roelof Botha explained this move: “There is no need for a permanent layer of middle management.” Brian Armstrong picked up Dorsey’s baton in your ad of dismissal for 14% of the Coinbase workforce, specifying that the intermediate positions were going to disappear as such and that they were now going to contribute by “getting their hands dirty with their teams.” What is lost when a link disappears. In statements to GuardianFreeland Abbott, former CTO of Square, warned that “AI cannot provide team motivation, human connection, and support the way a person can,” removing the human component from middle management in companies. Furthermore, the elimination of this role could mean another obstacle in promotion options for junior employees, who usually find those opportunities by starting to manage the work of other junior employees as they gain experience. According to the study By Anastassia Fedyk, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, as AI tools allow more work to be shifted from managers to their subordinates, these structural changes could become permanent. Rehire middle management. Matthew Bidwell, professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, assured on his podcast on the labor market that there are precedents of companies that tried eliminate intermediate hierarchies and they ended up turning back. According to their analysis, middle managers are in an especially vulnerable position in restructurings because it is more difficult for them to demonstrate their value to management. Far from putting an end to the “productive” positions held by engineers and administrators, AI seems to have opened the door and the piece that is being most affected to the point of placing it as a species at risk of extinction are middle managers. Above all, after his post-pandemic proliferation. In Xataka | Generation Z is avoiding promotions to mid-level positions: too much stress and too little reward Image | Unsplash (Austin Distel)

The Solar Impulse made the dream of the solar airplane a reality. Now it has ended up destroyed after an accident

by

There was a time when the Solar Impulse 2 It seemed like it came from a simple question: how far can a plane go if we leave out conventional fuel. The answer was not a commercial product, but an experimental aircraft powered by solar energy and batteries that ended up flying around the world. That is why the news has a special charge. That plane that symbolized a different way of imagining aviation has ended crashed in the Gulf of Mexico during an autonomous test. The coup came on May 4. According to Aviation Safety Networkthe Solar Impulse 2 was conducting an autonomous test flight when it lost power and ended up crashing into the water. The least bitter part of the news is that there were no injuries or deaths, something important because the plane was already flying without a crew in this new stage. The most symbolic part is another: the device that for years turned a technological promise into something visible has been reduced to the remains of an accident. Behind the project was Bertrand Piccarda figure marked by a family tradition of explorers: his grandfather Auguste Piccard was a pioneer of the depths and his father, Jacques Piccardarrived at the Mariana Trench. In 2003 started to imagine a solar aircraft capable of going around the world to draw attention to the “sustainable energy“First came Solar Impulse 1, with its initial flight in 2009and then the final jump. The plane that converted the sun into flight energy What is striking is that this ambition was not based on a gigantic machine in the traditional sense. The Solar Impulse 2 had a huge wingspanabout 71 meters, higher than that of a Boeing 747, but it weighed around 2.3 tons thanks to its carbon fiber structure. The energy came from 17,248 photovoltaic cells distributed throughout the plane, with a maximum power of 66 kW to drive four electric motors and charge four lithium-ion batteries. The moment that made it more than a technological oddity came in 2016. That year, the Solar Impulse 2 completed the first trip around the world of a fixed-wing plane powered entirely by solar energy, a journey that It lasted for more than 15 months. Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, co-founder of the foundation, alternated at the controls during the tour. It was not a demonstration of speed, of course: the plane was moving between 31 and 62 miles per hour, slowing down during the night sections. After that feat, the story changed tone. In 2019, the Solar Impulse Foundation announced the sale of the plane to Skydweller Aero for an undisclosed amount. The Spanish-American company did not view the project from exactly the same place as its creators: its interest was in exploring the potential of the aircraft as a surveillance and communications platform, a very different destination from the original message of energy awareness. With Skydweller the technical transformation of the device also began. After incorporating numerous modifications, the plane completed in Spain his first autonomous flight in 2023and the following year it carried out its first completely unmanned operation at Stennis International Airport, near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The company’s stated goal was to develop a fleet of solar aircraft capable of non-stop flights at certain latitudes, between Miami and Rio de Janeiro. The ambition was evident: almost continuous operations for military and commercial contracts, at a much lower cost than satellite-based options. A huge promise that has ended underwater. Images | Solar Impulse (1, 2, 3, 4) In Xataka | While we all look at Iran, something is moving in the Arctic Circle: Russia is sending bombers with missiles

There are people who buy plants to purify the air in their home. The reality is that you are wasting your time

by

When we want to give a little life to our homes, the first thing we think about is putting in several plants with the idea that, in addition to giving it a more natural touch, they will also clean the air we breathe. And it’s no wonder, because all you have to do is take a look around the internet or through the hallways of any nursery to find us. with the promise that pothos, mother-in-law’s tongue or ribbon are “natural purifiers” that eliminate toxins. But It’s not like that. The origin of the idea. To understand why we blindly believe in the purifying power of the plants that we can have in our home, the responsibility lies with NASA and its classic studies published in the 80s. Here, in their quest to find ways to clean the air on space stations, researchers placed different plants in hermetically sealed chambers and injected volatile organic compounds that were partly removed by the plants. This was very relevant, but the extrapolation to the general population, not so much. And these investigations were carried out in an airtight chamber in a laboratory, and at the moment a home or an office is not hermetically closed, but there is the possibility of air constantly entering and leaving through windows, doors or cracks. But this detail has not resonated so much with the population. A bath of reality. This arrived in 2019, where a study from Drexel University analyzed a dozen previous studies to evaluate actual plant performance using a standard metric: the clean air delivery rate, or CADR. Here the conclusion reached is that potted plants do not improve indoor air quality in a relevant way. And the explanation is purely mechanical, since the normal ventilation of any building eliminates volatile organic compounds at a rate faster than the absorption capacity of an indoor plant. Size matters. With this premise, for the plants to match the purification achieved by the ventilation system of a standard building or the simple act of opening windows, you would need between 10 and 1,000 plants per square meter. I mean, you would have to literally turn your living room into a dense, impassable rainforest to notice the difference. Very controlled exceptions. This does not mean that all pro-plant studies lie, but rather that context is everything, since some studies point to a decrease in CO₂ levels. A notable example is a study conducted in a school in Portugal, where flower pots were introduced into classrooms and an improvement in the air was measured. However, the scientists themselves warn that these are highly specific and controlled environments and their results cannot be mathematically extrapolated to what happens in the living room of a normal apartment or in a standard office. There is no evidence. Given all this that we already know, the authorities are sharp noting that there is no evidence that a reasonable number of indoor plants remove significant amounts of pollutants in homes and offices. What do we have to do? In order to improve air quality inside the home, the important thing here is to reduce the use of chemicals and avoid smoking indoors. In addition, opening the windows every day to renew the air is the key measure, as well as the installation of air purifiers, which are almost mandatory in many cases for people who have significant allergies. Images | freepik In Xataka | The countries that pollute the most in the world, gathered in a detailed graph

The reality is that only 0.1% wins and almost everyone loses

by

In recent years, so-called prediction markets such as Kalshi and, above all, Polymarket. Here you can bet on all kinds of things happening today and get rich, or that’s what they advertise. The reality is very different. 67% for the 0.1%. A Wall Street Journal analysis has revealed that in Polymarket, as in the world in general, only a small group shares most of the profits. The analysis, which covers 1.6 million accounts and took data from 2022, concludes that 67% of all profits generated have been distributed among only 2,000 users, which represents 0.1% of the total. In figures, we are talking about about 500 million dollars, so each of these users amounts to 250,000 dollars. Not bad. The rest. What is left over from the profits is much more competitive and is distributed among approximately a third of the total users analyzed. The striking thing is in the largest portion of the pie, which are users who not only are not earning, but are losing money. At Kalshi, a competitor of Polymarket, the ratio of profitable to unprofitable users is 1 to 2.9. That is to say, for every person who earns money, there are almost three who are losing. In other words, many finance the party of a few. The winners. Who is behind that 0.1%? They are not ordinary people with a good eye, but professional traders and ‘quant firms’ that work as a team and buy data sets in real time at very high prices. With this information they feed algorithms that execute tens of thousands of operations a day, hunting for price microvariations that a normal user would miss. Many also act as ‘market makers’: they constantly set purchase and sale prices, pay fewer commissions and even charge incentives for providing liquidity. The losers. The typical Polymarket user is in the red between $1 and $100, but of all of them there are 10% with losses of $4,000 on average. They are casual users who make decisions guided by intuition or by what they want to happen, based on superficial information. What ends up happening is that your money ends up in the hands of that small professional group. Disguised gambling addiction. Prediction markets like Polymarket have managed to give a financial appearance to what is essentially still a game of chance. Lifelong bets are presented as informed investments, disguising gambling addiction under trading language. We can call it whatever we want, but the reality is that for many users, the losses are very real. Image | Xataka with Gemini In Xataka | We have a problem with Polymarket: it has become the Bet365 of geopolitics without any regulation

When the fathers of quantum physics discovered the fundamental ideas of reality, they discovered that a Jesuit had already been there 200 years before.

by

The story is a classic of popular science: 200 years before the birth of quantum physics, the Jesuit Ruđer Bošković advanced the central ideas of 20th century physics: field theory, the uncertainty principle and even dark energy. Furthermore, he did it alone. What Bošković did, as Héctor Farrés points outit’s incredible. Not only is it real and important, but it is beyond doubt (Heisenberg himself lor recognized in 58), but what he didn’t do too. The latter is, in fact, the most interesting. What Bošković knew. In 1758, the Jesuit (who was one of the great mathematicians of the time and had even helped fix the dome of St. Peter’s) published in Vienna ‘Philosophiae naturalis theoria redacts ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium‘. In this book he developed ideas that he had already presented almost 15 years earlier in Rome: that matter was not made of extended solid corpuscles (as Newtonian physics maintained), nor of inextended metaphysical monads (as Leibniz thought). For Bošković, matter is essentially composed of dimensionless points that only exist as points of force. In essence, Bošković believed that Newton’s inverse square law was a ‘limiting case’ (for planetary bodies) of a different equation that governed the relationship of all things in nature. Just this idea that scale is important, that the behavior of forces could change radically depending on it, deserves to go down in the history of physics. Because? Because it is the piece that helps us stop understanding matter as impenetrable ‘bodies’ and allows us to understand that impenetrability as an effect: it was giving mathematical entity to atomism. And the most interesting thing is that his later influence is real. It is documented, come on: there is a chain of readings that takes us from these ideas to those of William Rowan Hamiltonthe most direct precursor of quantum mechanics. Apparently, Werner Heisenberg, he of the uncertainty principle, he even said in 1958 that “the remarkable concept that forces are repulsive at small distances and must be attractive at greater distances has played a decisive role in modern atomic physics. (…) Bohr’s quantum theory of the atom can be precisely related to this concept, and the study of the atomic nucleus during the last thirty years has taught us that the particles that constitute the nucleus, protons and neutrons, are bound together by precisely such a force.” However, one should not exaggerate either. As Borges said when talking about Kafka, authors create their own precursors. That is, as Heisenberg himself said, Bošković’s work “contains numerous ideas that have only achieved full expression in modern physics in the last fifty years.” They were brilliant intuitions that are fully understood in the light of quantum physics, but not seeds that logically contained all the physics of the 20th century within them. A very common mistake. Too common, in fact. We don’t usually approach history from what we already know and there, of course, the similarities shine in the middle of the night. The reality is that what we see are usually ‘pareidolias’: things that say more about us and the functioning of our brain than about what happened in the past. Image | Xataka In Xataka | One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century already identified the problem of Generation Z: “Not tolerating boredom”

The rental market is so broken in Spain that more and more tenants are facing a reality: record overcrowding

by

In Spain he increasingly lives more lonely people. And every time he lives more people crowded also. I know: it sounds contradictory, but that is the curious reality drawn by the studies that are in charge of ‘x-raying’ the country’s homes. As paradoxical, counterintuitive and even ironic as it may be, statistical observatories such as the INE or Eurostat confirm that while a part of Spain is forced to live in overcrowded conditions, sharing a house or even fourththe number of single-person households is growing at such a speed that in a few years they will probably be the most common in Spain. That tells us a lot about how the country, its society, the economy and (also) the residential market are changing. Overcrowded Spain. Among its many functions, Eurostat is responsible for reviewing every year how the overcrowding data from the different countries of Europe. Said like this, the concept ‘overcrowded’ may sound subjective, but its technicians have a clear guideline to distinguish what is (and what is not) a home. ‘overcrowded’. In general terms, a home is considered saturated when it does not have a room for each couple, for each adult or for each two young people of the same sex. In Spain that is a reality they deal with more and more people. Especially if we talk about people who live in rented houses. A percentage: 9.5%. The data from Spain leave two clear readings. The first, positive one, is that in our country the overcrowding rate It is much lower than that of other European nations. At a general level (if we take into account all types of housing, owned and rented, both in the free and regulated markets) Eurostat calculates that 9.5% of the population Spanish resides in ‘overcrowded’ houses. Although in practice this is equivalent to millions of people, it is far from the 16.8% average of the 27 EU countries or the ratio of states such as France (10.8%), Italy (24.3%), Portugal (12.7%) or Germany (11.7%). That’s the positive part. The negative part is how the indicator has evolved. In Spain the overcrowding rate has not stopped growing in the last five years until it is at its highest level in the last decade. For reference, in 2018 marked 4.7% and in 2016 it was at 5.4%. The EU average has advanced at a much slower pace. In fact, it has been practically stagnant for years. around 16.8%a value somewhat lower than that recorded in 2016, when it was around 18%. A tenant problem. The Eurostat data They reveal something else: although there is no market that escapes overcrowding, not everyone suffers from it equally. Its incidence is especially high when we talk about people who reside in homes rented at market prices. That is, without taking into account protected housing. In that case the overoccupation rate shoots up to reach 20.5%. What does that mean? That a fifth of Spanish tenants who have rented houses on the free market live in what Eurostat considers overcrowded conditions. Once again, the figure is below the EU average (23.8%) or the rate of nations such as Italy, but it exceeds the indicators for France (18.6%), Germany (18.3%) or the Netherlands (8.3%). And again too stands out for its evolution. Beyond the comparison with the rest of the EU, the reality is that this 20.5% is considerably above the 12.5% ​​in 2016 and represents the highest value since at least 2014. Spain General overcrowding rate Overcrowding rate among tenants in the free market 2016 5.4 12.5 2017 5.1 12.4 2018 4.7 12.8 2019 5.9 16.3 2020 7.6 18.8 2021 6.4 15.4 2022 6.6 14.9 2023 7.6 17.5 2024 9.1 20 2025 9.5 20.5 What is the reason for this increase? A sum of factors, as stated this week The Country in an analysis on the increase in overcrowding in Spain. One of those (crucial) elements is how the housing market has performed in recent years. Idealistic reveals that in general the price of rents has almost doubled in the last decade, at least if we talk about nominal values (without taking into account the effect of inflation): from €7.7/m2 in April 2016 we have gone to €15/m2. In highly stressed markets, such as the one from Palmathat increase has been even more pronounced. The increase in housing prices (extended to both the rental and purchase markets) directly influences the behavior of families. Not only does it limit the options that those looking for housing can choose from, it also complicates emancipation and assume the rent of an apartment without sharing expenses. Not to mention that the imbalance between supply and demand can lead some landlords to opt for renting single rooms and makes it difficult for families who, after growing up (due to reunification or the birth of children) aspire to a larger apartment. A more populated country. There is another key factor. The increase in the overcrowding rate coincides with the general growth of the Spanish registry. According to the INE, at the beginning of 2026 they resided in the country 49.57 million people. Not only is this 440,000 more than a year before, it also represents “the maximum value in the historical series,” in words of the INE. This growth is also supported by immigration, which broke its own record. In January, the foreign-born population exceeded the ten million of people. Why is it important? Although inflation may have led some families to rent part of their homes to make mortgage payments more bearable, it is not unreasonable to think that this increase in migration explains in some way the rate of overcrowding. The economist José García Montalvo remember in The Country that the foreign population tends to group together in support networks and part of the migrants who arrive in Spain choose, at least at first, to settle in the homes of people they already know. “So where three live, five end up living,” he illustrates. In any case, the phenomenon … Read more

Meta and Google talk about nuclear fusion for the future; The short-term reality is that they are pulling natural gas

by

Silicon Valley has an undeniable gift for selling the future. If one listens to the great technological leaders, Artificial Intelligence will soon be powered by energy sources worthy of a science fiction novel. Goal just signed an agreement to obtain solar energy directly from satellites in space, while figures such as Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, They assure that nuclear fusion It is the great “silver bullet” that will save the sector. However, it is enough to look down from the stars to the earth to find a much smokier reality. To feed the insatiable “energy monster” that AI has unleashed, big technology companies are turning to the technology of the past. As explained from Axiosthe race to dominate artificial intelligence is accelerating at such a dizzying pace that the industry’s ambitious climate goals are taking a discreet backseat. Today, the world’s most sophisticated cloud is being built on a foundation of fossil fuels. The numbers speak for themselves. Far from nuclear fusion laboratories, the actual infrastructure being built in the United States tells a story based on natural gas. Meta’s case is perhaps the most graphic, as detailed in Bloomberg, US utility Entergy Corp. has had to increase its capital spending plan by almost a third, reaching $57 billion, to build 10 new natural gas plants dedicated exclusively to powering the new data campus Hyperion of Meta in Louisiana. This gigantic complex will require more than 7 gigawatts of power, the equivalent of the output of seven large nuclear reactors. Google, the historic champion of clean energy, is not far behind either. An investigation by the market intelligence firm Cleanview has brought to light Google’s partnership with the company Crusoe Energy to develop a huge data center in Texas named “good night“. The project includes a 933-megawatt gas plant built outside the traditional electrical grid. The end of the green utopia? The environmental impact of this installation is not minor, how to explain Guardianthe plant will emit up to 4.5 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. To put it in perspective, this exceeds the annual emissions of the entire city of San Francisco or is equivalent to putting 970,000 additional gasoline cars on the roads. Given this, Google’s official position is cautious. Chrissy Moy, company spokesperson, does not deny the project before the mediaalthough it clarifies that, although they are linked to the campus, they still “do not have a contract in force” to acquire energy from said gas plant. How have they developed in oil pricethe origin of this sudden gas rush is that data centers are putting local power grids under unprecedented pressure, causing consumers to bear the cost of this increased energy competition. To overcome the slow expansions of the public network and the endless waiting lists for permits, Wired points out that data center developers They are choosing to generate their own energy “behind the meter” (off-grid). And in that fast and private strategy, gas is king. Their green mask falls off. This is a serious blow to Silicon Valley’s green image. As you remember GuardianGoogle was once a pioneer in promising net zero emissions by 2030. However, the company itself has had to admit that its carbon emissions have increased by 48% in the last five years due to data centers. Now, those environmental objectives have been internally downgraded to the category of climate moonshots (speculative projects very difficult to achieve). The underlying problem is purely physical. As he reflects Impakterenergy—not chip shortages—is emerging as the real bottleneck for AI. Traditional renewable sources are intermittent, and large language models require devouring electricity 24 hours a day. A systemic problem that is already raising blisters in Washington. The return to natural gas is not an isolated anecdote of a couple of companies. There are currently about 100 gigawatts of gas-fired power in development in the United States destined for data centers alone. Microsoft just signed a deal with oil giant Chevron in Texas, and permits for OpenAI’s Project Jupiter in New Mexico suggest it could emit up to 14 million tons of greenhouse gases annually (triple that of Google’s project). Faced with this fossil avalanche, Democratic senators such as Whitehouse, Van Hollen and Heinrich have sent letters demanding formal explanations from leaders of Meta and OpenAI for putting the country’s climate commitments at risk. The industry defends itself by arguing that it is a necessary evil. Cully Cavness, president of Crusoe, explained that natural gas it is a critical “bridge” and the only power source available today capable of scaling at the pace AI demands. Next-generation clean alternatives will take decades. Meta’s promising agreement to receive solar energy from space will not have a pilot satellite until 2028and its commercial viability is not expected, at best, until the 2030s or 2040s. The same happens with commercial fusion reactors: they will not dump a single watt into the grid well into the next decade. The great paradox of AI. Business magazines celebrate the financial success of this revolution. In their profiles of the most influential companies, TIME relates how Google, under Sundar Pichai, has reached a $4 trillion market value driven by its advances in AI, while Mark Zuckerberg celebrates record ad revenue on Meta by promising systems that will soon “understand the unique personal goals” of each user. Silicon Valley promises that this same Artificial Intelligence will one day help us solve humanity’s great challenges, including climate change itself. But the current paradox is inescapable: in the real world of 2026, to train the most brilliant and avant-garde artificial mind ever created, human beings still inevitably need to set natural gas on fire. Image | Photo by Tasos Mansour on Unsplash Xataka | Solving the mystery of the red balls on high-voltage cables: a simple way to save lives

They believed they had found jobs in large companies. In reality they were being deceived: this is how the trap works

by

Looking for a job is already hard enough without having to be suspicious of every message that arrives in your inbox. And yet, that is exactly what the campaign that has warned about proposes. NordVPN: a trap set up to look like a real opportunity. We are not talking about a clumsy email or a sloppy website, but rather something much more refined, with names like Meta, Disney, Coca-Cola or Spotify as a claim. That’s the key to everything: they play with the illusion of those who believe they may be on the verge of an interview or a new job, when in reality they are entering into a fraud. The investigation alerts of a campaign of phishing specifically aimed at job seekers. The attackers have set up an attack chain in several phases that impersonates large brands and seeks to take the victim to a very specific point: a false login screen with which they intend to keep their Facebook credentials. Let’s see in detail the strategy of these cybercriminals. The mechanics behind fraud that imitates real selection processes It all starts with cold recruitment emails, carefully written and with a professional tone that seeks to resemble real human resources communications. It is not a minor detail that some of these shipments are made through legitimate services such as Google AppSheetbecause not only can that help you avoid spam filters, it also helps make the scene more believable to the person on the other end. The trap, at least at the beginning, is not presented in a crude way, but with a very careful appearance. From there, one of the most peculiar pieces of the entire chain appears: the so-called “HUB” domains. According to the investigation, these are pages that do not show their most sensitive content to anyone who enters directly. If a security analyst or an automated system visits that domain without coming from the specific link included in the email, what they find is a generic website, with hardly any visible activity. The truly important part is only activated when the visit arrives from that specific reference, which acts as a key and reveals the next step of the deception. The next move of the campaign is to give the victim exactly what they expect to see after a convincing recruitment email: a website that looks like a job portal. The research explains that, after that first access, the user lands on a intermediate domain which simulates a legitimate job offer portal and where you can consult positions that seem real and associated with the company whose identity they are impersonating. The more the scene resembles a normal job search, the easier it is for the person to interpret everything that comes after as a logical part of the same process. Campaign replicates legitimate job pages and uses Facebook login as hook The decisive moment comes when the victim clicks on “Request” or “Send request”. That click does not open a job form or a next phase of the supposed selection process, but rather a phishing page that asks you to log in with Facebook to continue. That’s where the trap stops insinuating itself and begins to execute its true purpose. All of the above was designed to lead to that exact point, one in which the request may seem like another simple verification within the application, when in reality what is being delivered are the account credentials. The supposed job opportunity was nothing more than the decoration of an operation with a much more specific purpose. According to the research, the final objective is steal Facebook credentials and thus obtain access to the victim’s account, with the possibility of also compromising other services connected to it. That’s why it’s a good idea to stick with a practical idea: before entering any credential, you should check the URL carefully, check that you are on the official domain, and be wary of any strange login. Images | Xataka with Grok | NordVPN In Xataka | AI is crucial for the US military. So he’s naming OpenAI and Palantir leaders as lieutenant generals

What did Nietzsche mean by “we contradict an opinion when in reality what we find unpleasant is the tone”

by

I’m not sure how to write this so as not to be unpleasant, but Nietzsche was right. Yeah, he had a weird mustachehe was loaded with opium and loved to take long walks in the Alps; but he was right. At least when it comes to one of his most apparently innocuous, but most radical ideas: that it often doesn’t matter if someone is right or wrong, that we make the decision to agree with them beforehand, that what matters most to us is the tone, the forms. The rest, although it doesn’t hurt to admit it, doesn’t matter. 150 years after Nietzsche, cognitive science has proven him right. What did Nietzsche mean…? In 1878, in the midst of a break with Wagner and Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche published ‘Human, too human‘. It was his first book of aphorisms and in it he abandons romantic aesthetics and sets out to find a new way of observing the world. In that book, the Austrian philosopher makes a complete x-ray of the psychological junk of human beings. “Opinions are born from passions,” he says in aphorism 637. “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies,” he writes in 483. But the one that interests us is 303. Where Nietzsche discovered confirmation bias. “Often, we contradict an opinion when in reality what we find unpleasant is only the tone in which it was expressed,” says that aphorism. And that sounds a lot like what modern cognitive science calls ‘confirmation bias‘: the tendency to search for, interpret and remember information in such a way that pre-existing beliefs, expectations or hypotheses are reinforced. First we form an idea from the tone of the person speaking to us and then we justify it. Simple, clean and perfectly confirmed by the evidence. Ultimately, what Nietzsche did is anticipate many of the ideas that Kahneman and Tversky They earned him the Nobel Prize. But that matters little, what matters is what we can learn. And, under that sullen and savage reputation, Nietzsche has a lot of useful ideas. This intuition, without going any further, has a direct and everyday application: when someone addresses us with a tone that we perceive as aggressive, condescending or arrogant, our brain activates defense mechanisms that prevent us from rationally processing the content. We do not evaluate what they tell us, we evaluate how they tell us. Reactanceconfirmation bias and post-hoc rationalization: the perfect combo to act automatically without paying attention to reasons or consequences. In the same way, Nietzschenian reflection helps us think about how we address others. And that is worth it. Image | Xataka In Xataka | “A place of joy with pain”: the phrase that summarizes the Aztec philosophy to be happier in this life

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.