researchers

Researchers extracted photos and statuses from 3.5 billion WhatsApp users. Meta didn’t react until they told him.

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Between December 2024 and April 2025, a team from the University of Vienna identified 3.5 billion active phone numbers on WhatsApp (practically its entire user base) from a single server and without encountering too much technical resistance. They processed more than a hundred million numbers per hour and extracted not only the existence of accounts, but also public keys, profile photos, status texts, and device metadata. They did it without having to hide, from the same university IP, same server, five accounts. For four months, no one in Meta noticed. Why is it important. This is not the first time that this vulnerability has been demonstrated, as it has already occurred in 2012 and 2021but the first at this scale and speed. The finding exposes a structural contradiction in WhatsApp: Your architecture should show whether a number is registered to enable contact discovery… …but that functional need collides with the privacy of its users. Knowing who uses WhatsApp in countries where it is prohibited, such as China, Burma or North Korea, can have serious consequences. There they detected 2.3 million, 1.6 million and five accounts respectively (not five million, just five). The investigation, published a few weeks ago in NDSS 2026shows that this crack not only persists, but has widened. The context. The researchers developed ‘libphonegen’, a tool that reduces the search space from billions of theoretical combinations of possible mobile phone numbers to “just” 63 billion real candidates for 245 countries. Using unofficial WhatsApp clients that directly access the XMPP API, they queried these numbers at a rate of 7,000 per second. Neither his IP was blocked nor his accounts sanctioned. Meta did not respond until researchers explicitly reported the finding in March of this year, and countermeasures did not arrive until October, just a couple of months ago. The figures. He dataset resulting five times higher the scandal of scraping from Facebook 2021: India leads the document with 749 million users (21% of the total), followed by Indonesia and Brazil. In Spain, 46.5 million accounts. 81% use Android. More than half have a public profile photo. 29% have the status text visible. Between the lines. The researchers were able to infer the operating system by analyzing initialization patterns of the cryptographic keys. Android starts certain identifiers at zero. iOS does this in random values. This detail matters because iPhone users are higher-value targets for attackers. They also detected that public keys are reused. They found 2.3 million different keys used on 2.9 million different devices. In Burma and Nigeria, tens of thousands of numbers shared the same key, pointing either to faulty implementation or outright fraud. They even found twenty American numbers that use a private key composed only of zeros. In detail. The method is not limited to confirming the existence of the accounts. For each one they extracted public keys, timestamps and the list of linked devices. This allows you to build detailed profiles without accessing the content of the messages. The age of the device can be estimated by counting key rotations. The “popularity” of a user is inferred by the frequency of depletion of their prekeys single usewhich are consumed every time you start a new conversation. Researchers downloaded 77 million profile photos of the +1 rank (prefix for the United States and Canada) in a matter of hours. 66% of them contained recognizable faces. They also found disturbing status texts, such as those from traffickers listing prices, accounts business advertising drugs or publicly visible corporate emails from governments and armies. And now what. Meta has deployed probabilistic cardinality counters to limit how many unique accounts a user can query without blocking legitimate contact discovery. It has also restricted bulk access to status photos and texts. The researchers confirmed that the measures work in subsequent tests. But no countermeasures protect those who were already listed during the months in which the system has been wide open. The big question. For four months, from a university server without even hiding their identity, they looted practically the entire user base of the most used application on the planet without anyone at Meta realizing until they were explicitly told. If these researchers were able to do it under these conditions, who else did it before without telling anyone? In Xataka | WhatsApp brings the big update of the season: the most important change is not on the mobile, but on the computer Featured image | Dimitri Karastelev

Researchers removed Instagram and TikTok from 300 young people to see if their anxiety decreased. The results speak for themselves

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The debate about whether social networks are the new tobacco for the mental health of the generation Z It’s been on for years. There are many young people who They can’t go without watching TikTok completing the streak with their friends, uploading stories of what they eat to Instagram or simply away from the cell phone. And this is something that can be tremendously harmful. What we knew. Until now we could make one of them, and parents undoubtedly remember this message when they spend many hours in front of the phone. Even companies offer the tools to be able to limit the amount of time that we spend in an app and it even applies limits to us. With numbers. But now science has shed light on this problem with a published study in JAMA Network Open that provides concrete data. The premise was simple: ask a group of young adults (ages 18 to 24) to reduce their consumption of social networks this week. Once done, we wanted to see if the symptoms of anxiety, depression or insomnia were reduced. And it is precisely the excessive use of social networks is related to depressionsince it generates social isolation, low self-esteem, cyberbullying or even physical disorders due to the effects of blue light from the screen. So… Does giving up the cell phone also improve the quality of life of young people? The study. To do so, they not only focused on what users said they did with their mobile phones, since lying can be very easy in this case. What they did was passively record what was done with the phone through the ‘digital phenotyping‘. In total, there were 373 participants in this study, of which only 295 were able to complete the intervention, which was completely voluntary. They only had to reduce consumption for one week of the main social networks: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and X. The results. Simply put, the results showed significant clinical improvement across key areas after just seven days. The data indicated that depression symptoms were reduced by 24.8%, anxiety by 16.1% and sleep problems fell by 14.5%. Interestingly, the study found that the effects were much more pronounced in those participants who already had symptoms of moderate or severe depression at the start of the experiment. Don’t let go of your cell phone. A priori, one might think that when a young person automatically leaves social networks aside, their cell phone will be of absolutely no use to them. But nothing could be further from the truth. He digital phenotyping revealed that although social media use fell from about 2 hours a day to just 30 minutes, total screen time increased slightly by 4.5% and participants spent 6.3% more time at home. In this way, users replaced the infinite scrolling of TikTok with other digital activities such as messaging, browsing the internet or even playing games. However, despite still being glued to the screen, mental health improved. This reinforces a theory that is gaining weight among experts: the problem is not the screen itself, but how we use it. The study points out that objective use time has a weak association with mental health, since what is really harmful is “problematic use”, such as negative social comparison or emotional addiction to platforms. Easier apps to leave. We can all have more ‘affection’ for a specific social network, which is surely more difficult to stop using. In this case, it was seen that it was easier for users to reduce the time they spent on TikTok or X. But Instagram or Snapchat were the “hard bones” to beat. Specifically, 67.8% of Instagram users and 48.8% of Snapchat users failed to comply with the reduction and continued to use them significantly during the detox process. It is not a treatment. Although the percentages sound like a victory, it is necessary to maintain the usual scientific skepticism. Dr. John Torous, co-author of the study, warns in statements collected for him New York Times that reducing networks “would certainly not be your first or only form of treatment (for mental health problems),” although it is worth experimenting with. This focuses on the fact that the study has some limitations such as the lack of a reference control group and it was not seen how long the detoxification process from social networks lasted. But what did not improve was loneliness, since eliminating these social networks in people can have the opposite effect by also cutting the connection link that unites them with other people. Images | Panos Sakalakis Vitaly Gariev In Xataka | Social networks were once a place to tell our lives. Now the trend is different: “zero posts”

Chinese researchers wanted to know if it was possible to block Starlink in Taiwan: now they have an awkward answer

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Communications have become the invisible thread that sustains any modern military operation. Troops, vehicles or missiles are no longer enough: without a stable and resilient network, the situation can become complicated. During the Ukrainian war, Starlink demonstrated be able to keep Ukrainian forces connected even under pressure, and has since been placed at the center of the debate over its role in military scenarios. According to South China Morning Posta group of Chinese researchers linked to defense institutions has examined to what extent that network could resist a large-scale interference attempt on a territory like Taiwan. Starlink is not a typical satellite network. Instead of relying on a few high-altitude satellites in fixed positions above the equator, it is made up of thousands of small satellites that orbit the Earth at low altitudes and on changing routes. This architecture allows a terminal on the ground to not always connect to the same satellite, but to jump between several in a matter of seconds, forming a flexible mesh that is difficult to interrupt. That dynamic behavior largely explains why it has become a key element in debates about electronic warfare. A laboratory experiment. The study that has put numbers to this scenario is titled “Simulation research of distributed jammers against mega-constellation downlink communication transmissions” and appeared on November 5 in the Chinese magazine Systems Engineering and Electronics. It is signed by a team from Zhejiang University and the Beijing Institute of Technology, an institution with a prominent presence in the country’s military research. It should be noted that it is not an operational document or an official proposal from the Chinese Army, but rather an academic simulation that explores, from a technical point of view, what it would take to interfere with a network like Starlink on a regional scale. {“videoId”:”x9ri2iu”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”How China, the biggest polluter on the planet, has also become the complete opposite”, “tag”:”webedia-prod”, “duration”:”740″} A constellation designed to avoid interference. The study does not limit itself to describing that the terminals change satellites, but analyzes how this change thwarts any attempt at sustained interference. When a hostile signal affects a link, the terminal automatically redirects traffic to another visible satellite, and the network adapts the channel and frequency in real time. That reaction, combined with highly directional antennas capable of concentrating the signal toward specific points, reduces the impact of interfering emitters. The researchers highlight that even if a connection is momentarily blocked, the network can restore communication from another angle or frequency almost immediately. A thousand drones in action? The simulation was based on real data from Starlink’s orbital positioning and modeled how the signal would behave for twelve hours over eastern China. The researchers placed a virtual network of jammers 20 kilometers high, spaced between five and nine kilometers apart, as if they formed a checkerboard in the sky. The study considers that these nodes could be installed on drones, balloons or similar aerial platforms, capable of supporting coordinated interference systems. Using 26 dBW power and narrow beam antennas, each node managed to block an average of 38.5 square kilometers. With that efficiency, at least 935 units would be needed to cover a territory the size of Taiwan, not counting redundancies, failures or geographical barriers such as mountains. In Xataka China is sending drones to an island 100 km from Taiwan. The problem is that Japan and the US are filling it with missiles The authors themselves acknowledge that their results are only an approximation. They explain that they do not have real data on the radiation patterns of the terminals or measured signal suppression coefficients, which limits the precision of the simulation. They also do not know Starlink’s internal adaptation mechanisms against coordinated interference. Even so, they consider that the model serves to estimate the scale of the necessary effort and opens a line of study that allows quantifying, although imperfectly, how a blocking strategy would work in a real scenario. Images | starlink In Xataka | Starlink satellites have transformed war: China and Russia work on “Starlink Killers” to deactivate them (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news Chinese researchers wanted to know if it was possible to block Starlink in Taiwan: now they have an awkward answer was originally published in Xataka by Javier Marquez .

Researchers find a piece of ice from six million years ago. What is really valuable is the air trapped inside

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A team of scientists has achieved something extraordinary in the frozen Allan Hills, east of Antarctica: extracting 6-million-year-old ice samples, the oldest ever directly dated. Trapped inside are air bubbles that date back to Earth’s Miocene atmosphere, when our planet was much warmer and sea level considerably higher than today. A time capsule in the form of ice. The discovery, published in the journal PNAS on October 28 and led by Sarah Shackleton of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and John Higgins of Princeton University, more than doubles the age of the oldest known ice so far, which dated to about 2.7 million years ago. “Ice cores are like time machines that allow scientists to take a look at what our planet was like in the past,” explains Shackleton. “The Allan Hills cores help us travel much further back than we thought possible.” How they found it. Between 2019 and 2023, the Center for the Exploration of Older Ice (COLDEX) team drilled between 100 and 200 meters deep into the ice sheet in the Allan Hills region, located about 2,000 meters above sea level. Just like they count From the Middle Space, this area is especially valuable because the topography of the terrain and ice flow patterns allow extremely old ice to be preserved closer to the surface, unlike the Antarctic interior where it would be necessary to drill more than 2,000 meters to reach similar ages. Dating. The researchers They determined the age of the ice measuring the radioactive decay of argon isotopes present in trapped air bubbles. This method allows ice to be dated directly, without the need to examine the rocks or soil around it. The result: 6 million years, a time when the Earth was home to now extinct creatures such as saber-toothed tigers, arctic rhinos and the first mammoths. Cooling. Analysis of oxygen isotopes in the cores revealed that the Allan Hills region has cooled approximately 12 ºC during the last 6 million years. It is the first direct evidence that quantifies how much the Antarctic climate has cooled since that ancient warm period. Ed Brook, director of COLDEX and paleoclimatologist at Oregon State University, stands out that “the team has built a library of what we call ‘climate snapshots’ about six times older than any previously reported ice core data.” Why does it matter? While Antarctica and the Earth as a whole have progressively cooled for millennia, humans are now rapidly increasing global temperatures by release large amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Studying these bubbles of ancient air will allow scientists to reconstruct past greenhouse gas concentrations and ocean heat levels, which could give us clues to what natural factors have contributed to the climate. climate change throughout the entire history of our planet. Surviving extreme conditions. “We are still discovering the exact conditions that allow such ancient ice to survive so close to the surface,” points out Shackleton. “Along with the topography, it’s likely a mix of strong winds and intense cold. The wind blows fresh snow and the cold slows the ice almost to a stop. That makes Allan Hills one of the best places in the world to find shallow old ice, and one of the toughest to spend a season in the field,” he continued. Next steps. The COLDEX team plans to return to Allan Hills in the coming months to carry out more drilling. They hope to recover even older samples and produce a more detailed record of Earth’s ancient atmosphere. “Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered in Allan Hills, we have also designed a new comprehensive long-term study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to carry out between 2026 and 2031,” concludes Brook. Images | COLDEX In Xataka | What are sixth generation fires: the megafires that create their own weather

8 kilometers of ice have been lost in two months and researchers only agree on one thing: it is something to worry about

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Predict their future the antarctic glaciers It is undoubtedly a great challenge for science, but the most important thing above all is to know How will it affect global sea level?. The worst of all is that the latest news we have at our disposal is not at all positive, since the Hektoria glacier It has retreated 8 km in just two months, which is an unprecedented speed in the modern era. Where we start from. Normally, the retreat of glaciers It is measured in hundreds of meters per year. It is one of the clearest metrics we have to be able to ‘measure’ global warming, and that is why now what a team from the University of Colorado Boulder has just recorded on the Hektoria glacier, on the eastern peninsula of Antarctica, plays in a completely different league. The measurement. In just two months during 2023, the Hektoria lost almost half of its mass. In total, 8 kilometers of ice disappeared. A speed of collapse that has never been seen in modern history and that, according to the authors of the study, is more typical of the end of the last ice age. Something that doesn’t add up in this case. Hektoria is relatively small by Antarctic standards (about 300 km², less than the city of Malaga), but its collapse was so sudden that it left researchers stunned. A coincidence. Ironically, the research team wasn’t even studying Hektoria. They were analyzing satellite and remote sensing data for another project when Ochwat realized that the glacier had essentially disappeared from the images. The measurements. This is where technology comes into play. The team had to combine data from multiple satellites to understand what had happened and, above all, how quickly he did it. “If we only had one image every three months, we couldn’t say that the glacier lost two and a half kilometers in two days,” explains Ochwat. In this case, by combining images from different satellites you can fill in the time gaps and confirm with evidence in hand how quickly the ice has been melting. But the key was not only in the images. They also used seismic instruments that have the ability to detect a series of “glacial earthquakes” that occurred exactly during the period of rapid melting. And these earthquakes are not measured for the sake of it, but to confirm something crucial: the glacier was anchored to the bedrock (and not floating) just before breaking. This is fundamental both for science and for the entire planet, since ice that is floating (such as an ice shelf) does not raise sea level when it melts, any more than an ice cube does in a glass of water. But ice that rests on land (or anchored to a seabed) and falls into the sea does contribute to the global rise in sea level by increasing its volume. Your Achilles heel. The collapse was not due to simple superficial melting. The cause was topographic, since many Antarctic glaciers rest on deep canyons or underwater mountains. The Hektoria, however, had the misfortune of resting on an “ice plain”: an area of ​​bedrock that was exceptionally flat and below sea level. This flat topography caused a gigantic section of the glacier to begin floating all at once, rather than gradually. The moment the glacier lost its anchorage to the ground (its “line of support”), it was exposed to the forces of the ocean, and therefore everything began to advance very quickly. The process was brutal, since it all began with the warmest ocean water that seeped underneath and began to open cracks from the bottom of the glacier upwards. At the same time, the glacier already had cracks on the surface. Eventually, the lower and upper cracks met and the glacier literally disintegrated. A warning for future glaciers. The Hektoria case is a first-rate warning. Scientists know that there are numerous glaciers in Antarctica that also rest on these types of ice plains. Until now, it was thought that their collapses would be centuries-long processes. Hektoria shows that they can be months, which should set us off due to the implications it would have on sea level. And while the collapse of a small glacier like Hektoria won’t dramatically change global sea level, it alone does demonstrate that a rapid collapse mechanism, until now theoretical or believed to be typical of past geological eras, is perfectly possible today. If this same mechanism is activated in much larger glaciers, sea level rise could accelerate very considerably and much sooner than expected. Images | Cassie Matias In Xataka | When glaciers melt, bodies appear: archaeologists are recovering them in a time trial

We thought two-step authentication apps were secure. Researchers have shown how easy it is to hack them

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The two-step verification With authentication apps it is one of the safest methods to protect our accounts, or so we thought. They count in Ars Technica that a group of researchers from several American universities have discovered a new type of attack on Android that is capable of copying these codes in less than 30 seconds, which is precisely the time it takes to refresh. Pixnapping. It is the name of this new attack capable of stealing two-step authentication codes from apps such as Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator. These apps show codes that are automatically refreshed every 30 seconds, so it is more secure than, for example, SMS verification, which usually gives a margin of 10 or 15 minutes to copy the code. With this technique, researchers have managed to crack the six-digit code in just 23 seconds, which leaves plenty of time to use the code and log in to the account they want to steal. How it works. Any app on Android can launch a pixnapping attack without needing to obtain special permissions. Once underway, the attack occurs in three steps: The malicious app uses Android APIs to communicate with the app it wants to spy on. These calls force the target app to display specific data (the authentication codes) and send this information to the Android rendering pipeline, which is responsible for displaying each app’s pixels on the screen. Pixnapping performs graphical operations on the pixels that have been received by the rendering pipeline. Identify the coordinates of each pixel of interest and check if the color is white or non-white. White pixels take less time to render than non-white pixels. By measuring time, pixnapping is able to reconstruct images from the render pipeline data. Speed ​​is key. Pixnapping can also obtain other types of information that is visible on the screen, such as account numbers or personal information, but the speed with which it runs makes it especially dangerous for these authentication apps. To achieve this, the researchers reduced the number of samples per pixel, so that they could decipher all six digits in 30 seconds. Which phones does it affect? As we said, pixnapping only affects the Android operating system, but it seems to extend to quite a few versions. The investigation verified that the attack could be carried out on devices with versions from Android 13 to Android 16. They have only reproduced it on Pixel phones and a Samsung Galaxy S25, but they believe that due to the mechanism of the attack, any Android will be affected. How to protect yourself. Waiting for now. Google has already released a patch does little to mitigate this attack, but they have found that there are ways to bypass it. In statements to The RegisterGoogle confirmed that they would release a second patch in December to put an end to it. The good news is that they say they have no evidence that there are apps taking advantage of this vulnerability. Image | Pixnapping In Xataka | One click and goodbye to our passwords. This is the vulnerability that affects the extensions of several managers

40 years ago three researchers insisted on blurring the borders of quantum physics, today they have won the Nobel

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It was 1935 and Erwin Schrödinger was already tired of reading nonsense. It was not a decade since the birth of modern quantum mechanics, but the world had already filled with delusional pseudophilosophical reflections on what reality really was. It was then that poor Erwin inflated his noses and decided to talk to us about his cat. The happy cat of Schrödinger. Of his cat, of a closed opaque box and, in addition, of a container with a poisonous gas. The container in question is controlled by an opening device that only works if a radioactive particle disintegrates over a certain period of time. After that period, the probability that the cat is dead is 50% and that it is also alive of 50%. “If we do not open the box,” the standard version of this ‘paradox’ tells us, “the cat will be alive and dead at the same time.” Or, in other words, we could be calm: as long as we did not open the box, the cat would not be really dead. According to many interpreters, in fact, it would be the one that opens the box that kills the cat. No one understands poor Erwin. The interesting thing about all this is that, although it has been used to the fed up to illustrate The idea of ​​quantum overlapSchrödinger used it to demonstrate how absurd it was to apply categories of quantum mechanics to the real world (macroscopic). For the Austrian physicist, the happy cat would be alive or dead regardless of the opening of the box or not. But … what if not? However, half a century after all this, there were a group of researchers from the University of Berkeley who did not have it so clear. For some years it was known that we were missing a key piece to understand the process of molecular disintegration. That is, “the ability of individual particles to disintegrate is well known” (this is, for example, the physical fact that there is Behind carbon-14); What happens is that according to what we knew about physics, that could not be. The particles should not disintegrate. Between 1984 and 1985, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis They performed a series of experiments With a closed electrical circuit with superconductors and showed that, well, Schrödinger was wrong. How was it wrong? As I say, the intention of the cat’s mental experiment was “to demonstrate the absurdity of this situation, since the special properties of quantum mechanics usually disappear on a macroscopic scale. The quantum properties of a complete cat cannot be demonstrated in a laboratory experiment.” However, since these researchers were successful in demonstrating that the very strange properties of the quantum world can also be seen in a larger system, none of this is so clear. This explains very well people like Anthony Leggett Because, although “a macroscopic system composed of numerous pairs of Cooper remains many orders of magnitude smaller than a kitten”, the key of the experiment is that “there are phenomena that involve a large number of particles that, together, behave as they predict quantum mechanics.” A Nobel to kill a cat. “It would surprise you very much if the ball suddenly appeared on the other side of the wall. In quantum mechanics, this type of phenomenon is called a tunnel effect and is precisely the type of phenomenon that has given it the reputation of being strange and not very intuitive,” explained the award committee. That is precisely what these researchers showed that it could happen at the macroscopic level. But they did something else. And I do not mean to lay the foundations that have allowed us to create the technological system we know: from the transistors of the computer microchips that we see everywhere to quantum cryptography. No. I mean blurring the wall that separated the world from the very small with the world we know. Along the way, “they killed a cat”; But because of the gap they opened, one of the best science we have was sneaked. Image | Nobel Foundation In Xataka | Don’t call it “Nobel Prize,” call it “how Swedes are dynamiting current science”

In 1995 some researchers discovered the “peaceful gene” of our body. Today their finding has earned them a Nobel

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The Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm has done it again. He has rewarded one of those investigations that, for years, seemed like a page note in textbooks, but today are the basis of revolutionary treatments. He Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine of 2025 He has been granted jointly to Japanese Shimon Sakaguchi and Americans Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell for “their discoveries about Regulatory T cells And the role of Foxp3 gene In the immune function “ The beginning. Already in the previous decade, Sakaguchi had identified a subset of T lymphocytes that did not attack, but did the opposite: they suppressed the activity of other T lymphocytes. They were pacifying cells, a kind of riot police of the immune system. In 1995, He published a job Key that characterized these cells, today known as regulatory T cells (TREGS). The finding was transcendental. Sakaguchi showed that without these tregs, The immune system went crazy and began to attack the tissues of the body itself, causing devastating autoimmune diseases. He had discovered the natural mechanism of the body to maintain tolerance and avoid self -destruction. But the key piece of the puzzle was missing: what made a T cell become a peacemaker and not a soldier? Brunkow and Ramsdell. Although this discovery was transcendental, the reality is that there was a lot of skeptic that he did not believe in his theory. But the answer to the big question that stayed in the air came in 2001 (still far from the year 2025 and the delivery of this award). Here, on the one hand, Mary E. Brunkow’s team investigated a rare and deadly disease Autoimmune in children called IPEX syndrome. The investigation pointed to a gene as a cause of this disease: Foxp3. On the other hand, Fred Ramsdell’s team was studying a mouse model with very similar symptoms and reached the same conclusion: The defective gene was Foxp3. The connection. The connection was immediate and explosive: Foxp3 was the “master switch”. It is the gene that, when activated in a T lymphocyte, gives you the instructions to become a TREG. Without functional FOXP3, there are no regulatory T cells, and the immune system is uncontrolled. Sakaguchi’s discovery finally found his genetic explanation and already gave him enough weight so that the scientific community saw that he had sat a great precedent. A revolution. This double discovery, Sakaguchi’s cell phone and Brunkow and Ramsdell’s genetic, has completely changed the immunology paradigm and has opened two great therapeutic pathways with immense potential. On the one hand, the door opens up to the fight against autoimmune diseases since with the lack of tregs the body attacks itself. The solution in this case is to increase this type of cells, and there are already different clinical trials to extract patient T cells, “convert” them into the laboratory and re -inject them to the patient. Something we now know as ‘immunotherapy’. But it also serves for the fight against cancer. In these cases it has been seen how tumors are ‘intelligent’ and surround themselves with tregs to protect themselves to the immune system that tries to end these cells. These pacifying cells prevent “soldier” T lymphocytes from attacking cancer. The new immunotherapies seek precisely to temporarily deactivate these tregs or block the action of Foxp3 in the tumor environment, eliminating the protective coat of cancer so that the immune system can destroy it. This has been especially promising in tumors such as lymphoma. Time has passed. The most surprising of all this is the large amount of time between the initial discovery and recognition with a Nobel. If it is true that it has been expected to have a crucial relevance within the clinical aspect, with trials that give very good results for diseases that are really serious. Images | Wikipedia (2, 3) In Xataka | A Spanish team has taken a giant step in a hopeful cancer treatment: chemoinmunotherapy

Chinese researchers believe they have discovered a simple “trick” to lose weight: eat raw vegetables

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For decades, scientists have discussed the effects of vegan and ovo -vegetarian diets on weight loss and heart disease prevention. Without much success, really. Not because The clues in favor have not accumulatedbut because something was missing. A common link, a thread that organized all that scientific evidence and gave meaning. In recent years, a team of doctors from the Qilu Hospital of the University of Shandong He thinks he found That piece that was missing. And it’s an important piece. Above all, because obesity is becoming The great epidemic of the 21st century. 1.9 billion overweight peoplesome 600 million people with obesity and up. Something that would not be a problem if it wasn’t because, like They wrote Yani Xu and his team in their research, “obesity and its associated complications not only lead to an increase in morbidity and mortality, but also to a reduction in quality of life.” Finding simple weight loss strategies goes beyond aesthetics or fashion: it is an investment in quality of life. But did not solve Ozempic? It is true that the arrival of Ozempic (and the rest of New agonist medications from LPG-1) has radically changed our way of seeing overweight: as Antonio Ortiz said, these medications are helping us understand that Metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral elections. Biological facts that, as we see, bring huge social consequences. Plan b. Therefore, although the “new ozempics” are being revolutionary, they are far from being the solution to all our problems. Not only is these very expensive medications (and obesity shows a clear correlation with greater rates of poverty and precariousness economic); They are not substitutes for healthier and more balanced habits. That’s where Yani Xu and his team enter. In search of lost evidence. Tracking in the previous bibliography, Chinese researchers found 24 studies that followed more than 2,000 people. They were quite quality studies (randomized clinical trials) and that has allowed them to conclude that there was a detail that showed very strong links with a lower risk of obesity and heart problems: raw vegetables. In fact, this is true even when they eliminated the effect of genetic factors from the equation. Something not too common and, therefore, very interesting. “The vegetarian diet is a viable option for people who wish to control their body weight and (prevent) metabolic diseases,” They explain. How is it possible? The researchers They shuffle some ideas: From its high content of phytosterols and fatty fats to its role in reducing inflammation and oxidative stress. However, it is not too clear: we have a statistical explanation, but we still lack a mechanism of action. We may have solved one of the big problems when establishing a clear relationship between weight loss and veganism, but not at all. However, with the data that Let’s have on the tableit seems that the idea of ​​progressively increasing the weight of vegetables (and raw vegetables) seems like a positive strategy. More positive than we thought. Image | Elena Mozhvilo In Xataka | Ozempic to lose weight: its effects and risks beyond controversy, according to science *An earlier version of this article was published in September 2024

Some researchers created a company where all employees were AI agents. They did not make a quarter of the work

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With a generative AI that already shows Signs of decelerationthe next great jump already glimpses on the horizon: the AI agents. Unlike chatbots, an AI agent can be given a complex task and will act independently, making decisions on the march to achieve their goal. Everything pointed to the fact that 2025 was going to be the year of the agents ia And, to verify it, some researchers did A curious experiment: They put several of these agents to work in a fictitious company. It didn’t go very well. A fictitious company. The study was conducted by Benegie Mellon University researchers and sought to measure the effectiveness of the AI ​​agents. In it, they created an environment that pretended to be a small company dedicated to the development of software to which theagentcompany baptized. The company had 18 employees and an objective plan for the sprint quarterly. In addition, they had enough internal documentation such as an employee manual, human resources policies or good practices guide. Employees communicated through a Slack type chat program for communication between them. He Staff. The AI ​​agents who put to work in Theagentcompany included Google, OpenAi, Meta and Anthropic models. They were assigned roles such as Financial Analyst, Project Manager or Software Engineering. A technology director and a human resources manager were also created to which each agent could contact if they need it. Among the tasks they had to do was write code, search the Internet, open programs or organize data on spreadsheets. Quite typical in a company of these characteristics. The problems. The agents began to work and at first everything was going well, but it soon appeared problems and misunderstandings. One of the agents had to access information, but a popup appeared on the screen and could not see it. Although I could close it by clicking the X of the upper right corner, he asked for help to human resources, which told him that the computer department would soon contact him to solve it. He never contacted and the task was not completed. The agents also developed a curious behavior when they were not clear what were the steps to follow. Sometimes they cheated and created shortcuts to skip the difficult part of a task. For example, an agent did not find the person who had to ask a question. What he did was change the name to another user for that of the user he had to ask. The results. The employee medal of the month was taken by Anthropic and his Claude 3.5 Sonnet model. But, although he was the best, he only managed to complete 24% of the tasks assigned to him. Germini 2.0 Flash and Chatgpt only completed 10% of the tasks and the worst employee was Nova Pro 1 of Amazon with 1.7% of completed tasks. The most common failures were caused due to lack of social skills and not being well looking for the Internet. The threat of AI agents. According to the last World Economic Forum Reportthe AI ​​will destroy more than 90 million jobs in the next five years (although it is also expected to be created almost twice new positions) and AI agents have a threat to many jobs. However, experiments like this show that technology is not yet ready to replace 100% of a human employee. Currently, AI agents They make many mistakes And, like Tesla’s Autopilot, for now it is better Do not remove your hands from the steering wheel. Image | Gemini In Xataka | The workers have stopped fear of AI as a machine to destroy jobs: software engineers do not think the same

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