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Researchers solve a problem that has been stuck for decades

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A team from Monash University in Australia has developed an ultrathin membrane able to operate hydrogen fuel cells at 250 °C and, most surprisingly, without the need for water. This is a wall in which technology has been crossing for a long time and the discovery has been published in the journal Science Advances. Below these lines we tell you all the details. Why is it important. Hydrogen cells are one of the great promises to decarbonize transportation, heavy industry and sectors where batteries fall short. They only emit water and heat, they recharge quickly and offer autonomy comparable to gasoline. The problem is that current membranes, such as those based on Nafion (a synthetic resin), they need to be permanently hydrated so that the protons can circulate. And that forces us to operate below 80-100 °C, because at higher temperatures the water evaporates and the entire system collapses. In detail. The team, led by researchers Huanting Wang and Kaiqiang He, has built atomic-thick nanosheets made of graphene and boron nitride. Between those layers they have introduced phosphoric acid in a state that researchers call nanoconfined, where the acid is trapped in tiny spaces from which it cannot escape or evaporate, even at 250 ° C. The result It is a membrane of just 50 micrometers, named GBP, that acts as a dry highway through which protons move at high speed without depending on a single drop of water. How it works. Wang, professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Monash, account that “by combining proton-conducting nanosheets with nanoconfined phosphoric acid, we have developed a membrane that maintains rapid proton transport without water.” The trick is in a mechanism that the authors define as synergistic, in which protons directly pass through the hexagonal rings of graphene and boron nitride and, at the same time, jump along the network of hydrogen bonds that forms the acid confined between layers. On the other hand, He adds that this combination is what gives the membrane high conductivity and stability in dry and high temperature conditions. The figures. In laboratory tests GBP achieved a proton conductivity of 166 mS cm⁻¹ at 250 °C and a power density of 1,011 mW cm⁻² in a hydrogen-oxygen stack, well above industry reference membranes. In addition, the team kept it running for 150 hours straight at that temperature without signs of degradation. Between the lines. Working at 250°C is a game-changer on several fronts. One: The water management and humidification systems are eliminated, which in current hydrogen cars are heavy, bulky and expensive. Two: at that temperature the platinum catalyst tolerates impurities better such as carbon monoxide, which opens the door to using less pure hydrogen and, therefore, cheaper to produce. Three– Cooling the system becomes much easier, allowing for smaller radiators and lighter vehicles. Beyond the car. Although we usually focus on the hydrogen cars When we talk about this type of technology, the truth is that the potential applications go much further. GBP was also tested in direct methanol cells and performed at 502 mW cm⁻² with 16 M concentrated methanol at 250 °C. This suggests that it could be used for portable systems where hydrogen is difficult to store. In addition, the authors point to uses in data centersplanes, trains, factories and hospitals as energy backup, and other electrochemical processes such as the separation of water molecules, the reduction of carbon dioxide or the synthesis of ammonia. And now what. The next step is the usual one. And when a laboratory announces an advance like this, we have to wait until it ends up coming to fruition and its commercialization on an industrial scale is viable. If they succeed, the combination of cheaper batteries, less pure hydrogen and simpler systems could accelerate the arrival of this technology in sectors where electrification with batteries does not quite fit. Cover image | CARMAN and Monash University In Xataka | The world depends on gas to produce food. Paraguay believes it has the definitive solution thanks to the Itaipú dam

The US is using an exascale power supercomputer to solve the biggest challenge of nuclear fusion

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The Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) linked to the US Department of Energy is one of the most powerful on the planet. In fact, it is currently the second most capable exascale supercomputer after El Capitan according to TOP500 ranking. These machines are very valuable tools that are already being used by researchers to try to solve some of the most complex scientific problems that humanity faces. And one of them is the behavior of plasma when it is under the influence of a magnetic field. A group of ORNL researchers is using two of the most powerful tools currently available to humans, the Frontier supercomputer and the artificial intelligence (AI), to understand with the greatest possible precision the chaotic behavior of the plasma of stars. An important note before moving forward: plasma is an extremely hot gas made up of particles endowed with an electrical charge, which is why it can be confined inside a magnetic field. This knowledge can presumably help scientists very accurately simulate the supernovaswhich are nothing more than the explosions that occur when a massive star loses hydrostatic balance by burning most of its fuel. When a supernova is triggered, a good part of the chemical elements that the star has produced through chemical reactions nuclear fusion It shoots towards the stellar medium with a lot of energy. From supernovae to experimental nuclear fusion reactors Dr. Eliu Huerta, a computational scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory (USA) who has had the opportunity to supervise the work of the ORNL researchers, express clearly why this scientific initiative is so important: “This type of capability has long been the dream of astrophysicists and many other scientists. This is the first time that this level of understanding has been achieved through AI for systems of this complexity (…) The more chaotic the system, the more difficult it is to simulate it.” Understanding very precisely how the plasma of stars behaves is important not only to have more information about supernovae; It is also crucial for predict solar flaresor even to simulate the interaction of the Earth’s magnetic field and the high-energy ionized atomic nuclei that constitute the cosmic radiation. Frontier’s role in this research is critical: it provides the computational power required to train the models needed to generate thousands of detailed plasma simulations. Inside nuclear fusion reactors it is still a challenge to keep turbulence under control However, there is another application in which this technology has the ability to make a difference: the development of nuclear fusion reactors. We can intuitively imagine a nuclear fusion reactor as a pressure cooker in which two essential ingredients are cooked: deuterium and tritium. In order for the nuclei of these two hydrogen isotopes to fuse and release the neutron that will ultimately allow us to obtain a large amount of energy, it is necessary to confine them in an extremely hot plasma. In fact, for this process to take place it must reach a temperature of at least 150 million degrees Celsius. Scientists know how to do it, so subjecting deuterium and tritium nuclei to the pressure and temperature necessary to make them fuse is no longer a problem. What still represents a challenge is to achieve keep turbulence under control. Otherwise the plasma will be destabilized, its density in critical regions will be affected and sustaining the fusion reaction over time will not be possible. The mechanisms that govern this process are very complex, but little by little physicists and engineers working on fusion energy are managing to understand them better. The research of ORNL scientists seeks to better understand the behavior of plasma confined inside the vacuum chamber of experimental nuclear fusion reactors with one purpose: to minimize turbulence so that energy loss is minimal. And they are on the right track. In fact, they already have a system ready that is capable of delivering very detailed turbulence predictions in just a few seconds, thus reducing errors by more than half compared to previous methods. Image | Fusion For Energy More information | ORNL | Interesting Engineering In Xataka | ITER has faced one of the great challenges of nuclear fusion: preventing plasma at 150 million ºC from destroying the reactor

Since we cannot solve the drought, we are creating plants that are 100% resistant to it.

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Five amino acids. For 450 million years, everything has depended on five amino acids. A team led by the Blas Cabrera Institute of Chemistry-Physics has managed to identify the ‘minimal molecular code’ that determines how plants perceive and respond to water stress. In fact, using crystallography and mutagenesis techniques, they have mapped the evolutionary history of that receptor. What’s more, they have shown that it can be rewritten. What is water stress? It is, in essence, something key for plants: the hormonal apparatus of plants uses abscisic acid to detect when they have to activate or not activate procedures to calibrate responses to water restrictions. We discovered how these receivers worked 19 years ago and, until now, we have not been able to obtain a commercial version that has benefited from this knowledge. This is what the IQF people want to solve. After all, 10,000 years of agricultural selection have radically improved plant productivity, but have left it highly exposed to drought. However, it is not that they have solved the problem. What they have achieved is, in reality, finding the grammar with which to rewrite the problem. The good news: The EU has just changed the rules. For years, European regulation has been very conservative when it comes to gene editing and, although it is true that The Regulation of New Genomic Techniques does not resolve the problem, yes it is a big step forward. Although, of course, that doesn’t mean much: almost 20 years of work has failed miserably. Perhaps the only difference (besides what we are discovering) is that we are running out of time. Time? From the change in rainfall regime in the 80sSpain has experienced increasingly intense drought episodes. In these 40 years, we have experienced at least three very intense episodes. And the structural agrarian impact of all this is enormous: 13 million hectares are rainfed and we do not have water to reconvert them. In the end, sooner rather than later, we are going to need those plants. Image | Wolfgang Hasselmann In Xataka | Spain faces its greatest agricultural challenge of the century: converting 1,901,529 hectares of olive groves into irrigation before it is too late

urine is helping solve the fertilizer crisis

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I never imagined that one day I would find myself in the position of calculating how much human urine Spain produces each year, but here we are: adding permanent residents and international tourists, the country produces 23,948 million liters of urine per year. 23,000 million that we are literally flushing down the toilet and that, in short, could help us solve the enormous problem that is approaching us with the fertilizer crisis. Use urine as fertilizer? It’s not a new idea. In fact, it has been around for more than fifteen years and there are already commercial fertilizers on the market (the Swiss Aurin, for example) and others that are under development (one in Spain by the ICTA-UAB). In places as diverse as the United States, France or the International Space Station, the use of urine is the order of the day. For years the Rich Earth Institute Vermont (USA) has a program dedicated to examining the safety and efficiency of using urine for this purpose. As they themselves explained on the BBCthe idea of ​​recycling urine responds to two basic reasons: the first is “the fertilizers it produces, which are valuable for agriculture”, the second is “the pollution it avoids”. Resolved. As if that were not enough, as our DAP colleagues explainthe University of Surrey has just solved one of the key processing problems: clouding of membranes in the concentration process. And then? If we have been working for 15 years, why do we still depend on the Gulf? Because the barrier is not scientific, the barrier is infrastructure and regulation. Let’s think about it for a moment: yes, Spain produces almost 24,000 million liters of urine, but how the hell are we going to collect it? We would need an entire circuit of toilets with urine separation, a channeling, collection and processing system on a national scale. Plus, if we had all that, there would still be a ton of regulatory issues and associated risks (like pharmaceutical waste). The thing is moving. That is true: the rising price of Gulf urea makes all these alternatives more attractive. And it does it automatically. In that sense, the 473 liters of urine produced by each adult can be a small ‘gold mine’. The issue, as I say, is that it is not simple: studies indicate that in the sewer urine is diluted up to 100 timesso it must be separated at source and collected with separate circuit toilets (something that, well, right now is anecdotal in urban environments). But it starts somewhere. Because, as said Siddharth Gadkari, lead author of the study published in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, human urine hides a kind of paradox: “although it contains the essential nutrients we need for agriculture, we currently treat it as waste.” With a little luck, these connection tests will move legislation and in a few years we will begin to see how that begins to change. Image | Philippe Murray Pietsch In Xataka | Going to the bathroom is a waste: urine is the real liquid gold and is full of valuable things

6 ways to solve this problem

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Let’s tell you How to solve the problem of some apps not showing on Android Auto. Because it can be frustrating to start your car and realize that apps are missing from the screen that were there the day before, especially if some important ones disappear, such as music ones. Therefore, we are going to tell you what things can you look at one after the other, because these problems are usually due to specific things such as the launcher configuration, permissions, or even battery restrictions or if you are left halfway after installing an app update. Therefore, we are going to review the solutions one by one. Check if the app is hidden The first thing you have to do is check if you have the app activated on Android Auto. You have to do this in Android, where you access a list of your mobile applications and decide which of them are shown or not in Android Auto when you connect it to the car. To do this, you have to enter the Android Auto settings on your mobilewhich is usually within the section Connected devices. and once inside, look for the option to customize the applications menu. You will go to the list of apps, where those that are selected will be seen in the car, and those that are not selected will be hidden. Check that Android Auto is updated Many times we don’t worry too much about updates because we assume that they happen on their own. But if Android Auto is not updated or the associated services either, there may be strange behavior or errors. Therefore, it is advisable to check Android Auto in Google Play, Google Play Services and the phone’s system update itself, if it has been pending for a while. Make sure everything is correctly updated. View an app’s battery restrictions Many manufacturers implement different systems to manage the battery and save consumption with their applications. There are options for restrict the app from being used in the background to save battery, and if one of your apps has it, it simply won’t be seen in Android Auto. To find out this you have to enter Settings and go to the section Applications to display the list of all installed ones. Now click on the one you want and you will enter its settings, where you can click on the battery section and check if it has permission to run in the background. See if the app has the permissions it needs When you use an application for the first time, Android asks you to give it permissions to access your device’s hardware, such as the microphone or location. If you have restricted these permissions to maximize privacy, the app may not work properly on Android Auto. Here, you have to enter your mobile settings, click on Applicationsand access the list of apps. Once inside, click on the one that is affected and does not appear or does not work well in Android Auto. When you do, review the following permissions: Notifications. Microphone, if it is a calling or voice messaging app. Location, if dependent on real-time services. Files and multimedia content, in some audio or navigation apps. Sometimes it could be a problem with the app There are times when the problem is not with Android Auto or any configuration, but with the application itself. Compatibility may have been temporarily lost after a poorly resolved update. To check this, you can take the following three steps: Check if the app is updated in the Google Play Store. Go to Google Play and see if it is still listed as compatible with Android Auto. Check if another app of the same type does appear, to rule out that the problem is general. With this you will be able to know if Android Auto is displaying the menu incorrectly, or if the specific application has simply changed something and no longer works as well in the car system. You can reinstall the application Turning it off and on again has been the great solution for many software problems for decades, and you can try it on your Android mobile. Another final solution is reinstall the application that is giving you problems. To do that, simply uninstall it and reinstall it. In Xataka Basics | News from Google Maps: new incident reports arriving for mobile and Android Auto

There are two Madrid startups that want to solve the logistical labyrinth of space

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If receiving an order from Madrid to Castilleja de la Cuesta (Seville) can cause you some headaches in the form of a delivery person who never arrives, imagine sending a package from Madrid to the moon. Space logistics is one of the last major bottlenecks in the commercial aerospace industry. For decades, sending cargo to space has been reserved almost exclusively to government agencieswith astronomical budgets and opaque processes. Today the industry is more open than ever, the demand for space shipments is growing, but the logistics infrastructure that supports them remains artisanal and fragmented. Two Madrid startups, Usyncro and Eye4Skythey are trying to change it. A packet destined for space. Send a kilogram of cargo into space costs approximately 20,000 euros and that is just the beginning. That package in question has to go through customs in several countries, go through the hands of multiple carriers and comply with export regulations for sensitive material. ESA and NASA satellite components are subject to dual-use regulations that vary between jurisdictions and require specific licenses for each international transfer (e.g. export control regulations and laws such as NASA’s ITAR). And when you arrive at your destination there is no one to sign a receipt. There is also no warehouse or workers. Just a satellite in orbit waiting for a critical component on which a scientific mission depends. The presentations. Usyncro is a SaaS platform founded in Madrid in 2018 that digitizes international trade logistics through blockchain and artificial intelligence, connecting all the actors of a shipment in a single panel: carriers, customs and operators. Eye4Sky is a spin-off of the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA). It was founded in 2022 by researchers with more than twenty years of experience in space optics. Manufactures polarization modulators based on liquid crystalsoptical devices the size of a spectacle lens and barely 200 grams that analyze light to obtain information about the solar magnetic field or the composition of the atmosphere of other planets, something that a conventional camera cannot do, at a lower cost than traditional instruments and equivalent performance. It operates from the Madrid Science Park, within the ESA BIC incubation program. Why is it important. What Usyncro and Eye4Sky are building goes beyond their own businesses because it points to a structural problem: managing the supply chain of a space mission has always been the territory of large contractors and government agencies. A traceable and standardized digital corridor could lower that barrier to entry. On the other hand, INTA is not a university, it is an organization attached to the Ministry of Defense with a long research tradition but little history of serving as a seed for commercial companies. That Eye4Sky is its first spin-off after decades of applied research represents a paradigm shift: institutions that have historically operated in public and military logic are beginning to open up to civilian commercialization. As for projects on the table, Eye4Sky modulators are already present on the solar observation satellite jointly developed by the European Space Agency and NASA Solar Orbiter, are confirmed in VigilESA’s first space weather mission and in the quest Talisman of Satlantis to detect methane in the Earth’s atmosphere. Usyncro, for its part, already certified via blockchain the launch of Hydra Space satellites and executed the first digital air cargo corridor between Europe and Latin America. The joint project would be the definitive leap: applying that same logic to the most complex logistics chain that exists. Context. Usyncro was a conventional logistics company specialized in coordinating land, air and sea transportation chains. Its value proposition was clear: digitize and centralize the management of complex logistics operations with multiple actors, eliminating the dispersion of information and manual processes. It worked well on land, but the sky is the limit. The turning point came when joining the Retech Digital Entrepreneurship Network of the Community of Madrid, whose aerospace node is located in Tres Cantos. There they met Eye4Skya company that manufactured components for ESA and NASA missions, but had no way to reliably and traceably manage its logistics chain to the satellite. Just what Usyncro knew how to do: manage complex logistics chains with multiple actors. Of course, this time the final destination is in orbit. How they do it. Usyncro is developing a digital logistics corridor, a system that centralizes the entire journey of merchandise in a single control panel, from when it leaves the factory until it reaches its orbital destination. Each party involved in the chain is recorded, each transaction generates a documentary record and at each node along the route images are captured that certify the status and position of the shipment. Blockchain technology guarantees the integrity of the data and reduces time in each phase of the process. The final delivery is certified automatically, without the need for a physical recipient. In essence, it is applying to space logistics the same logic that has transformed land logistics in the last decade: total visibility, real-time data and end-to-end traceability. Yes, but. The project is still in the testing phase. Usyncro and Eye4Sky are shipping material to different countries via multiple routes to validate that the system works under real conditions before scaling up to space missions. Digitizing terrestrial logistics is already a complex problem, but doing it for space cargo adds extra difficulty in issues such as legislation or handling conditions. The margins of error are practically zero. It remains to be seen whether the platform can withstand the operational, regulatory and technical pressure of a real mission before the first big test next year. As Delia Rodríguez, CEO of Eye4Sky, tells: “Our devices are the eye of missions that protect the Earth and that starting in 2027 will monitor from space the invisible shield that protects our planet.” In Xataka | Spanish technology in the return to the Moon: the system designed in Madrid that NASA will use in Artemis II In Xataka | We have been deceived by the distances of the Solar System: the … Read more

Japan sent the wrong creature to eradicate snakes from an island. The disaster was so big that it took half a century to solve it

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Once again, desperate situations lead to extreme measures. Save a species sometimes it involves “exterminating” another. We have seen it in South Africa and his plan to annihilate miceeither injecting radioactive material into the horns of rhinosthe cases of hunt the wild cator the plan for exterminate half a million owls. However, sometimes things do not go as governments imagine. In Japan they know it perfectly. The incident of ’79. The story begins in 1979 on the Japanese island of Amami Ōshima, located in the Kagoshima prefecture. That year, Amami’s rabbit is rediscovered (Pentalagus furnessi), an endemic species and considered a “living fossil” due to its evolutionary antiquity. Before the discovery, the rabbit was thought to be on the brink of extinction due to habitat loss and hunting. The discovery marked a before and after for the conservation of the species and highlighted the importance of protecting the natural environment of the island, home to many other unique species. An event that also highlighted the need for greater conservation efforts at Amami Ōshima, for example trying to eradicate or control the snake population. A wrong “bomb”. Thus, a few months later, Japan launched a plan. Introduces around 30 mongooses to the island with the intention of ending the population of snakes, specifically the habu (Trimeresurus flavoviridis), which represented a threat to the local inhabitants. The idea, on paper, was a seamless plan: that the mongooses, which are natural predators of snakes, would reduce the number of habus and improve security on the island at all levels. However, that project was far from infallible. The mongoose was not the ideal creature to eradicate snakes. Firstly, because they are animals active during the day, therefore, they could not catch the nocturnal habu snakes, which continued to inhabit the following decades without problem. What happened as a result had an enormous ecological impact. A specimen of Trimeresurus flavoviridis Predation of endemic species. Thus, during the day, instead of focusing on the habu snakes, the mongooses began to prey on a wide range of native species, including several that had no natural enemies on the island until then. That seriously affected the local fauna, especially endemic and endangered species, like the same Amami rabbit that had just been happily announced months ago. Hundreds of thousands of mongooses. The situation reached such a point that the mongooses, brought in to eradicate one pest, had become an even larger and more dangerous one, one that It reached around 10,000 copies. at its peak around the year 2000. The truth is that Japan had already started a mongoose control project in 1993 that was expanded over time. As? Around 30,000 traps were set on the island to capture the animals and cameras with sensors were installed to monitor them. In addition, local residents formed the so-called Amami Mongoose Bustersa team specialized in capturing mongooses (they captured thousands). The end? In 2018, the last official capture of a mongoose on the island occurred. It occurred in the month of April, and since no creature has been captured for a long period of time, the expert panel, which is tasked with determining whether the animal is eradicated from the island, estimated that the eradication rate was between 98.8 and 99.8% in February last year, reaching a preliminary conclusion that it is reasonable to say/think that mongooses are eradicated from the island under the current circumstances. Finally, on September 3, 2024, Japan’s Ministry of Environment declared eradication of non-native mongooses on the island of Amami-Oshima, declared a World Natural Heritage Site by UNESCO. The statement was based on the opinion of the expert group on scientific grounds, taking into account that the capture of mongooses has not been confirmed for more than six years since the last one in April 2018. A unique case. The ministry itself did not hide the disaster that was the attempt to control the snakes in 1979. In fact, and as the administration has announced, it is one of the largest cases in the world in which non-native mongooses that had been established for so long have been eradicated. After the statement, the government explained that it will remove the traps that were placed on the island, although it will continue to monitor with cameras to prevent a new group of these small creatures from entering again. After all, if it took half a century to get them out of there, any contingency method is more than understandable. A version of this article can be foundlaunched in 2024 Image | Animalia, TANAKA Juuyoh, Patrick Randall In Xataka | “There are so many that you can hold them with your hand”: the daily nightmare of a town in Pontevedra with flies In Xataka | Salamanca faces its biggest environmental plague in decades. And the problem is that you can’t legally stop it.

“Divide each difficulty into as many parts as necessary to solve it”

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Honesty above all. What I had in my hands last Sunday afternoon while reading on the balcony of my house was not the ‘Discourse on method’ of Rene Descartesbut ‘Jotadé’a (highly recommended) novel by Santiago Díaz. At a given moment in the story, however, one of its characters quotes one of the French philosopher’s maxims. He does not do so by sticking to literality or with the high epistemological purpose that his author wanted to give him in the 17th century, but there were Descartes’ words with all their burden of common sense: “Divide each difficulty into as many parts as necessary to solve it”. In the novel, the protagonist’s father, a troubled police officer, shares this reflection with his son at a time when everything seems to be going uphill for him. It is unlikely that when Descartes he wrote itfour centuries ago, did it thinking about life advice or bestsellers police, but the truth is that it fits into the novel just as well as it does into his philosophical treatise. Doubting everything Back in 1637, Descartes asked himself one of those impossible questions that seem condemned to dead ends: How can I be sure of the certainty of what I consider ‘true’? Are we humans doomed surrounded by doubts, without reliable handholds to lean on? How do I know that what I judge ‘real’ is not a deception of my senses, an erroneous idea that I have assumed to be true? To get out of such epistemological quagmire the philosopher made a curious movement. He used doubt against doubt itself. He assumed that he only had access to his own mind and confirmed the obvious: that he was in doubt. Then he pulled the thread to formulate what is probably his most famous phrase: “Cogito ergo sum”which is usually translated as “I think, therefore I am” or “I am because I think.” Another way of putting it is that if there is anything undoubtable, it is the act of doubting itself. In words from Descartes himself: “Considering that the same thoughts that we have when awake can come to us when we sleep, without there being any true ones in that state, I pretended that all the things that had entered my spirit were no truer than the illusions of my dreams.” “But I realized that, while I wanted to think in this way that everything is false, it was necessary that I, who thought it, be something. And observing that this truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was so firm and so certain that the most extravagant assumptions of the skeptics were not capable of undermining it, I judged that I could admit it as the first principle of the philosophy I sought.” At that point, how to move forward? How to continue collecting valid knowledge? To get out of this new quagmire, Descartes, philosopher, mathematician and physicist, had a bigger idea: he developed the so-called ‘Cartesian method’. His system encourages us to carry skepticism as our flag and proposes a series of steps that are as valid for working in a laboratory as they are for facing personal problems such as those that concern Jotadé in Díaz’s novel. What steps are those? We quote back to Descartes. “The first consisted of not admitting anything as true without having known with evidence that it was so. That is to say, to avoid haste and to admit nothing more than what presented itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind that I had no reason to doubt it.“. “The second, to divide each of the difficulties to be examined into as many parts as possible and necessary for its best solution.“. “The third, in conducting my thoughts in order, starting with the simplest and easiest to know objects, to ascend little by little, gradually, to the knowledge of the most complex and even assuming an order among those that do not precede each other.” “And the last, to make in everything such complete enumerations and such extensive revisions, that one would be sure of not having omitted anything.“. Descartes basically encourages relying only on logical analysis or (even worse) relying on authority as an infallible source. What it invites us to do is to resort to observation and experimentation, to cultivate the methodical doubt and be thorough in pursuing knowledge. Its four rules are a valuable guide to develop critical thinking, but its application is not limited there. This was claimed a few years ago by the writer and professor Shaunta Grimes in an article published in Mediumin which he focuses precisely on the second step of Descartes’ method, the one that encourages us to divide problems. “The phrase alludes to his method of evaluating the logic of a statement, but its applications are much broader,” clarify Grimes. In his opinion, Descartes also offers a guide for facing problems that seem unsolvable. The tactic is very simple: think of a problem that worries you. Then think about how you can solve it. Complicated, right? But… What if you cut it apart? The challenge as a whole may seem insurmountable, but it is likely that it is actually a sum of smaller problems. If we can divide it into as many parts as possible, just like a big puzzlewe will surely find a first piece that will no longer seem so complicated. We exchange a seemingly unsolvable whole for manageable parts. Grimes illustrates it with an example. Imagine that a friend confesses to you that he is not feeling well. The logical thing would be to ask: “Why?” He may respond that he misses a family member, that he hasn’t played sports for a while, that he hasn’t slept much in recent weeks, or that he feels frustrated at work. Among these ‘pieces’ there are some that are relatively easy to deal with (if you sleep little you can go to bed earlier), others may not be so easy, but even in those cases they can break … Read more

The chemical composition of galaxies has always been full of unknowns. James Webb has taken a huge step to solve it

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The James Webb Space Telescope sees where others can’t: its infrared vision pierces clouds of cosmic dust and reaches galaxies so far away that it took billions of years for its light to reach us. Looking far into space is, in that sense, looking back in time. However, what James Webb has seen in these galaxies differs from what was expected: these early galaxies seem to have too much nitrogen, much more than expected. Among the exotic possible explanations of science, hypotheses such as gigantic stars never seen before, black holes functioning as catalysts for galactic chemistry or large quantities of stars have passed. In fact, that was the topic of conversation in the middle of a phone call while Mexican astrophysicist José Eduardo Méndez-Delgado waited in line for the doctor. On the other end of the line, his colleague Karla Arellano-Córdova, who was in Edinburgh. In that informal talk they decided to change the prism: perhaps the problem was not the galaxies, but how we measure them. The discovery. The proposal from this international team is to analyze three light signals from the same oxygen ion to calculate temperature and density at the same time, without starting from one to calculate the other (the original source of error). The result: the gas was a hundred or a thousand times denser than was assumed in those galaxies. With that correction, the galaxies turned out to be richer in metals than they appeared and the excess nitrogen was drastically reduced. Why it is important. First, because the metallicity of a galaxy is directly related to its history: the more metals there are in its composition, the more stars have been born and died within it. Until now we were underestimating this figure, which made those early galaxies appear very different from our own and suggested a sharp and discontinuous evolution. Now they look more like what we know. But the elements essential for life, such as carbon, oxygen or nitrogen, did not exist when the universe was born: they were manufactured by the stars inside and expanded when they died. Hence the interest in knowing the chemistry of galaxies: it helps to understand when the universe had the necessary ingredients for life. With the wrong measurements, we don’t know if those ingredients were there earlier and in more places than we thought. Context. The standard method to know the composition of a distant galaxy is to analyze the spectral lines of its light based on the density of the gas and its temperature. The problem is that in these primitive galaxies the gas is much denser than expected, so its application as a thermometer works poorly. And from here on, everything failed. The nitrogen anomalies appeared in the first scientific data from the James Webb Space Telescope, as this either this. Since the results did not fit the models, the scientific community threw itself into trying to find explanations. This paper proposes to take a step back: before interpreting stellar physics, check that the measurements are correct. Besides, the Webb now allows it: simultaneously detects oxygen lines in the ultraviolet and in the optical in such distant galaxies. How they do it. In essence, the trick is choosing the right signals. One of the oxygen light lines, visible in ultraviolet, has a special property: it does not distort even if the gas is very dense, something that happened with the lines they were using previously. By combining it with two other signals from the same atom, the research team can calculate temperature and density at the same time, as if they were solving two simultaneous and independent equations. Using statistical simulations, the team found that the results were consistent with other independent measurements of the same galaxies. Yes, but. As the team explains in the work, their method corrects the density error, but not other possible errors that are equally important: the gas of these galaxies also has internal temperature variations, and that can bias the results in ways that this study does not resolve. Furthermore, the method only works well when all three light signals from oxygen are clearly detected. In three of the six galaxies analyzed this was not possible, and the results are less precise. Nitrogen remains a problem. The overabundances come almost entirely from a particular ion whose emission is extraordinarily sensitive to temperature: a variation of just ten percent in that parameter would reduce the calculated nitrogen by half. No one has yet measured that temperature directly. However, it points out a path to follow before looking for “exotic” explanations: verify that the measurement tools are up to par. In Xataka | For a time it was one of the asteroids most watched by astronomers: the Webb has just resolved a key doubt In Xataka | James Webb has been detecting red dots in the universe for years: the only problem is that we don’t know what they are Cover | Oleg Moroz

Terence Tao is the best mathematician in the world. He has recognized that he is using AI to solve one of the Millennium Problems

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Stating outright which person is the best in the world at something is risky. If we stick to cutting-edge research in the field of mathematics the German Peter Scholze, the British James Maynard or the Chinese-American Yitang Zhang, among other researchers, are usually considered the most capable living mathematicians. However, in the scientific community there is an almost unanimous consensus that Terence Tao, who has dual Australian and American nationality, is the authentic “Mozart of mathematics.” His prestige has been earned hard. He won the Fields Medal, which is often considered the Nobel Prize in mathematicsin 2006, when he was 31 years old. And he was awarded it for his contributions in three fundamental areas: number theory, partial differential equations and harmonic analysis. However, the Fields Medal committee especially highlighted his ability to connect areas that most mathematicians considered isolated. In any case, this is not all. Tao is often admired for his versatility. Many elite mathematicians specialize in a specific field, but this scientist has produced cutting-edge work in combinatorics and compressed detection, in addition to the three areas for which he received the Fields Medal. And, furthermore, he has earned a reputation as a generous researcher who works very well in a team and is always willing to adopt new technologies to address the greatest mathematical challenges. AI is an essential tool in mathematics for Terence Tao Dwarkesh Patel, an Indian-American content creator specializing in technology and artificial intelligence (IA) who has established himself as one of the most influential voices in Silicon Valley thanks to his interviews with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Ilya Sutskever and Demis Hassabis, published just a few days ago a very interesting conversation with Terence Tao. And AI has been the absolute protagonist of a dialogue in which this mathematician has enthusiastically defended the role that this technology already has as a “trusted co-author” in research in the area of ​​mathematics. Terence Tao is currently one of the biggest promoters of Lean within the scientific community In October 2024 Meta AIMeta’s AI, managed to generalize the Lyapunov function. Russian mathematician Aleksander Lyapunov proposed the concept of the function that bears his name in 1892. His work is a very important tool in the study of dynamical systems, but mathematicians have struggled since then to find a general method that would allow them to identify Lyapunov functions. And they were not successful. However, Meta AI has had it. This is just one example that clearly illustrates the capacity that AI already has when it comes to facing some mathematical challenges. Terence Tao does not believe that AI will end up replacing researchers; argues that it is actually a very valuable tool that allows mathematicians to leave behind individual research and collaborate on much larger and more ambitious projects. And he leads by example. In fact, you have introduced Lean into your daily workflow. This tool is a proof assistant and programming language designed to verify mathematical reasoning and verify that it is completely correct. Tao is currently one of the biggest proponents of Lean within the scientific community. “I hope that the AI ​​of 2026, when used correctly, will be a trusted co-author in research in mathematics. And in many other fields as well,” defends Terence Tao. He is currently using this technology to confront some of the biggest math challenges there aresuch as the Collatz conjecture or the Navier-Stokes equations. The latter give shape to one of the Millennium Problems and they seek, broadly speaking, to understand how fluids behave. Interestingly, these equations are constantly used to predict the weather or design airplanes, among many other applications, but we still don’t understand precisely how they work. Terence Tao and AI are one of our best assets when it comes to definitively solving this enigma. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | Dwarkesh Patel In Xataka | These two problems have baffled mathematicians for decades. A genius has solved them with a stroke of the pen

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