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A professor from Malaga decided to rewrite ‘Don Quixote’ in Gothic calligraphy. Now he says it’s worth a million euros

July 17, 2026 by usatoday24

Manuel Marín Navarro, artistic drawing teacher from Vélez-Málaga, had an idea. “A madness”, rather, as he himself says: rewriting the entire great work of Miguel de Cervantes using Gothic calligraphy. By hand, dedicating between 7 and 8 hours a day. It’s been six years, seven months and 26 days and he still hasn’t completed the 344,000 words that make up the, why not say it, best book in the history of universal literature. Anyone would say of ‘The Quixote’ rots sanity. Wait, I emphasize it well, then Jesús G. Maestro gets angry: ‘The ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha’. Miguel de Cervantes gave birth to a textually transmitted virus and, four centuries later, the pathogen is still free. Rewriting the 2.1 million characters in a Gothic font, letter by letter, ink on paper, is his great dream, the legacy of a life. A retiree doing lettering with the pulse of a teenager on TikTok? The difference here lies in the commitment. His company borders on the wild: the final book is on its way to weighing 20 kilos and, if it goes on sale, the author values this monstrosity at one million euros. Shooting low. That million euros is a calculation that obeys pure labor arithmetic. Marín Navarro added hours, days and years, after such a monastic confinement in front of the folio, he estimates a salary equivalent to that of a medieval copyist in the current market. Not in vain has he drawn two million one hundred thousand characters with a pen. Pens that he has made himself. It has filled one thousand three hundred and five giant-sized (A3) pages. His cellulose monster is called ‘El Quixote Axárquico’, an orthographic nod to the princes edition of 1605. A geographical tribute to his native Andalusian region. The best book, the neatest edition. “I play music from the 17th century, I get into the character, I read the chapter first, I get the idea and then I start writing. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.” The devotion of this professor and writer for the work of Cervantes is indisputable. Of his personal library, which houses more than 4,000 volumes, three hundred of them are different editions of the hidalgo from La Mancha. At home he keeps eccentric jewelry and pays fortunes at closed auctions. Its most expensive copy cost 6,000 euros. It treasures absurd physical oddities, like a miniature tome printed on a single sheet. That is, the reader needs a powerful magnifying glass in front of that tiny paper. But his recent Gothic manuscript breaks any balance. The dimensions of the work require a brutal binding, so the professor is looking for a brave craftsman. It will take the entire skin of a cow to cover the caps. From prison to museum. And anyone who knows the biography of the writer from Alcalá de Henares well will know that he set foot on the cobbled streets of Vélez-Málaga. The roots go back a long way: he walked there in the hot summer of 1594, acting as a tax collector for King Philip II. He collected money and wheat for the coffers of an insolvent and corrupt empire. And the crown excommunicated the novelist twice for his zeal. What’s more, Cervantes collected debts from the all-powerful Church and it is said that the priests kicked him out of the atriums. A Sevillian bank went bankrupt with the royal collections deposited and that is how Cervantes ended up in a damp and gloomy cell in Seville. And there the figure of the crazy gentleman was born, influenced by Italian literature. Andalusian tradition venerates this prison origin of the work. And of course, Marín Navarro has decided to return the geographical favor to his land, giving his manuscript to the city Museum. The old San Juan de Dios Hospital will host this literary mammoth as long as no one sells the original volume to private funds, nor prints cheap copies for clueless tourists. He reserves a personal and final facsimile: the mother manuscript will sleep under institutional lock forever. Why gothic letters and not Comic Sans. It’s not because Marín Navarro is reviewing HIM or the work of Bauhaus and The Cure. On the contrary, the man from Malaga listens to lute and harpsichord madrigals locked in his study, assimilating tragedy and comedy in silence, using the best black Chinese ink, writing slowly. It takes a whole day to fill out a single page—the first page took a full week of trial and error. To avoid frustration with marks, ten handmade pens were made from reed and metal and it was imposed not to use modern white correctors, scraping the paper with a sharp blade if a mistake was made. As for the use of Textura font, which imposes straight lines and sharp angles, it is simple: history. Johannes Gutenberg applied it in his first printed Bible and German monks perfected it in monasteries. It is not the natural calligraphy of the Spanish Golden Age but it is the one associated with arcane knowledge. The Gothic line provides a brutal dramatic weight and requires much greater physical rigor in the wrist. Navarro does not give up: infected with COVID-19, during confinement the fever kept him in bed. Giving classes with a webcam, he pondered whether to give up or what, but in the end he pulled through and returned to writing the hard way. Between dirty cottons and blows, he already accumulates typos for the interior endpapers of the book. Illustrated by the best. Pictorial art always attacked the Cervantes novel with obsession. It was Gustave Doré who established the visual image in the 19th century—he traveled through Spain in 1861 and drew 370 detailed engravings. Many others wanted to repeat the play. Pablo Picasso sketched the starving silhouette in 1955, using the same black India ink. Salvador Dalí did the same with an American edition in 1946. And ignoring the works of Salvador Tusell, even the comedian Antonio Mingote contributed his … Read more

Wikipedia has banned using AI to write or rewrite articles in English. Human knowledge begins to raise barriers

March 27, 2026 by usatoday24

The English version of Wikipedia has just banned articles made with AI. In the last update of their guidelines are clear: content generated with language models violates content policies. The largest encyclopedia on the internet positions itself as a refuge for content created by humans. AI no thanks. The ‘AI yes or AI no’ debate has been going on for a while generating tension on Wikipedia and they have finally opted to support human content with an overwhelming majority 40 to 2. The new restriction imposed reads as follows: “Text generated by large language models (…) often violates several of Wikipedia’s fundamental content policies.” Those fundamental policies What it refers to are the neutrality of the content, verifiability and that the content cannot be original research, but must be attributed to reliable sources. With this change, editors are prohibited from using LLM “to generate or rewrite article content.” Two exceptions. Wikipedia contemplates two scenarios in which the use of AI is allowed: Basic style suggestions and corrections, as long as the LLM does not introduce its own content. They warn that it must be used with caution since LLMs tend to “go beyond what is asked of them and alter the meaning of the text.” Translation of articles into other languages, as long as it is reviewed by a person competent in the two languages involved. Here it is important to note that Wikipedia has already had dramas in the past because of AI translations. Why is it important. Wikipedia has positioned itself as a repository of genuinely human content in an internet that is flooded with artificial content. At a time when distinguish the authentic from the synthetic is increasingly difficult, the largest encyclopedia in the world chooses to rely on human authorship as a guarantee of reliability. There is certainly something ironic and that is that Wikipedia rejects AI, but AI continues to draw on Wikipedia to provide answerscausing them to lose clicks and saturating your servers. AI generated vs human made. Until recently we thought that the solution was flag artificial content on platforms with the classic ‘AI’ label, but we are already at a point where it is more valuable and useful to highlight the opposite: that it is made by humans. The advancement of image generation tools and the amount of texts made with AI are overwhelming, to the point that an anti-AI current is emerging; Some artists are starting to designing “badly” to differentiate itself from AI homogenizationthey have created extensions to return to the internet before ChatGPTthere is browsers that filter AI results and even ‘Not by AI’ badge has been created. The point is that it is a David against Goliath. The Etsy case. It is perhaps one of the most bloody cases of the flood of low-quality AI content. The platform that It was presented as a refuge for the authentic, today it is an AI market which also tries to pass itself off as artisanal. Ghibli-style portraits for 20 euros, profiles managed entirely by AI that say things like “I can’t wait to draw you”… Etsy allows content made with AI, but says you have to label it as such. Nobody does it. Proof that the label is no longer useful. A key detail. The last paragraph of Wikipedia’s guidelines is especially striking because it talks about possible sanctions for those who violate the rule, the problem is how they plan to detect who uses AI. Wikipedia admits that “some editors may have writing styles similar to those of large language models” and that “more evidence than mere stylistic or linguistic clues is needed to justify the imposition of sanctions.” We have no idea how they are going to do it, what we do know is that AI text detectors fail more than a fairground shotgun. Image | Wikipedia, edited In Xataka | The last barrier against AI is good taste. The problem is that an entire generation is growing up without developing it

the discovery that forces us to rewrite the history of engineering

February 24, 2026 by usatoday24

The old one city of petrasculpted in the majestic reddish rocks of modern-day Jordan, has always captivated the world for its architectural monumentality. But the truth is that there was still much to discover here, and a recent team of archaeologists has focused on the bowels of its urban engineering and the ssystem they used to transport water in a desert environment. The discovery. Archaeologists have unearthed astonishing evidence pointing to a water system of unprecedented sophistication in this region, and which has transformed the understanding of how the Nabataean civilization managed to thrive, and not just survive, in a very arid desert environment. Where was it seen? This discovery has been published in the magazine Raise by the team led by archaeologist Niklas Jungmann where he has documented the findings in the ‘Ain Braq aqueduct after surveys that began in 2023. Now the researchers have been able to reveal a complex network of aquifer infrastructures that challenge previous conceptions about the hydraulic technology of antiquity in the Near East. What has been seen? The epicenter of this astonishing discovery is the identification of a secondary conduit made up of lead pipes that extends approximately 116 meters. The point is that the presence of these lead pipes It is an extraordinarily rare phenomenon, especially outside the context of complex buildings or large Roman baths. In Petra, this conduit was not a mere fortuitous pipe, but a highly precise piece of technology integrated into a system that combined open channels carved directly into the natural rock with these advanced metal conduits. Its function. The function of this hydraulic system was to exhaustively regulate the pressure and flow of water. The researchers here point out that the lead section functioned mechanically as an inverted siphon, which is a great technical feat that allowed the water to overcome the pronounced unevenness in the terrain. And with these levels it could be very easy for the pipes to collapse, but with the mechanism that they devised at the time, it made it possible to give pressure to the water and maintain the momentum wherever it passed. More complex. Although this type of inverted siphon has attracted a lot of attention, nine conduits, a large reservoir, two cisterns and seven smaller tanks must also be added to the system. All this aimed at capturing scarce water, minimizing its evaporation and supplying the desert city. Its evolution. The study goes further by pointing out that the aqueduct system experienced at least two major phases of development. The first was characterized by the use of lead, an expensive and demanding material. Here experts link this majestic work with the era of the Nabataean king Aretas IVindicating that this system would have been vital in supporting key monuments of the city, such as the Great Temple. The second phase focused on the installation of a terracotta conduit next to the original. This transition to a much cheaper and easier to replace material demonstrates the flexibility and long-term technical efficiency of Nabataean engineering. Its importance. Having found this evidence of a complex hydrological system forces historians and archaeologists to rethink the level of technological development in Petra. Beyond their famous rock-cut architecture, the Nabataeans were true masters of water. And it is no wonder, because it was necessary to have a good infrastructure capable of challenge an unforgiving desert that could condemn those cities that did not know how to evolve and adapt to the conditions where they were developing. Images | Brian Kairuz In Xataka | Archaeologists have been searching for Hannibal’s war elephants for centuries. They only had to dig in Córdoba

The ruins of a temple located in the Andes can rewrite the history of a forgotten pre -Hispanic civilization

June 28, 2025 by usatoday24

It is possible that the name Tiwanaku does not sound too much. It is not among the great most famous pre -Hispanic civilizations such as the Incas, Aztecs or Maya. However, this missing society before Europeans arrived in the South American continent reached unique dominance of their surroundings. The last discovery is proof of this. More than 200 kilometers. A team of researchers has documented A temple built by the civilization of Tiwanaku. This temple was found about 210 kilometers south of the power center of this civilization which allows us to better understand the geographical extension of the domain of this pre -Columbian culture. The state of Tiwanaku. There is little we know today about Tiwanaku. This civilization would have emerged south of Lake Titicaca, in what is now Bolivia. Tiwanaku would have managed to be one of the most powerful civilizations on the continent, but disappeared around the year 1000 of our era,, giving rise to the arrival of the Incas that would dominate the region five centuries later. This civilization would have achieved, Explain the responsible team of the new discovery, an advanced social structure and left behind traces of its architecture in the form of pyramids, staggered temples and monoliths, distributed in the vicinity of Lake Titicaca. However, delimiting the area of influence of Tiwanaku is difficult among those who study this civilization. The last discovery can be helpful. The Palaspata temple. The site was baptized as the Palaspata temple in reference to the name by which the natives call in the area. As described, these ruins show a rectangular complex with 125 meters long and 145 wide. I would have had 15 quadrangular enclosures and an inner courtyard. The temple disposition would not have been random since it is aligned with the equinox. In the enclosure, fragments of Keru glasses were found, which were used for chicha consumption, a corn beer. Corn is not a local crop so The team considers that Palaspata’s environment would have been a commercial node in the Tiwanaku civilization. Combining techniques. To study the diffuse brands left by the old temple the team had to combine different satellite images, images that combined with those taken by drones with those who fly over the site. They also resorted to the photogrammetry technique, that is, three -dimensional reconstruction from multiple photographs. The details of the study were published In an article In the magazine Antiquity. Recycling the stones. Although we have just discovered the nature of this archaeological site, the environment was well known by local people. In fact, some of the stones and artifacts that constituted this temple had been “recycled” by local farmers in their own constructions. A triple border. Palaspata’s significance lies in its location as we indicated at the beginning, a “strategic” location for those responsible for the finding. This area, they explain, connected three of the main trade routes that communicated three valleys with two ecosystems: the high and fertile lands next to Lake Titicaca; The Andean Altiplano, livestock zone where the flames grew; and the Andean valleys east of Cochabamba, another agrarian region. In Xataka | We have found 21 human remains of 6,000 years ago in Colombia. They do not look like any current living population Image | José Capriles / Penn State

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