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We have spent years looking for how to stop muscle fragility as we age. The answer was hidden in garlic

May 16, 2026 by usatoday24

Aging brings with it a series of inevitable tolls, and one of the most limiting is loss of muscle mass and strengthwhich is a problem known as sarcopenia. This can cause a person to not be able to move comfortably around their home, causing them to have significant limitations in their daily lives. But now we have seen that there is a compound in garlic that can help us delay this agingalthough without being magical. A new study. Now, a promising new study published in the prestigious magazine Cell Metabolism has identified a specific compound derived from garlic that improves age-related muscle function. But we must keep in mind that we are not talking about the raw garlic that we add to the pan and which for many has a horrible taste, but rather about a very particular metabolite present in the aged garlic extract. The protagonist. This study focuses specifically on S-1-propenyl-L-cysteine (S1PC), which is one of the metabolites that is generated during the aging process of garlic. This is where we can find a little help to delay aging. But it is essential to avoid the promises of “anti-aging elixir”, since eating raw garlic daily will not provide you with the necessary doses of this compound to replicate the results. Furthermore, it must be taken into account that it is not a “cure against old age”, but rather a solid therapeutic target to combat muscle fragility and sarcopenia. A surprising connection. The most fascinating thing about the study is not only what S1PC does, but how it does it, since when ingested it directly activates an enzyme called LKB1 that encourages adipose tissue to secrete a key protein called eNAMPT into the bloodstream. This protein is essential, since when it reaches the brain it acts on the regulatory centers of systemic metabolism and causes nervous and chemical signals to be sent from the brain that drastically improve the function of skeletal muscle tissue. Just what we want to improve in aging. Your results. To verify that this mechanism really works, the researchers carried out tests in both animal models and humans. Here, aged mice, after being administered the metabolite S1PC, improved their muscle strength and reduced markers of frailty related to aging. In the case of humans, the team conducted a human clinical trial using aged garlic extract, and the results confirmed that consumption of this compound raises the levels of eNAMPT that we have discussed before. But the most interesting thing is that the effect is greater in those people with enough body fat, which makes sense, since this protein is released by the adipose tissue itself. Images | wirestock at Magnific In Xataka | It is possible to convince an AI that shoving garlic up your ass is a good idea. You just need the right words

20,000 million more will be spent on a factory with little water and labor

May 13, 2026 by usatoday24

TSMC’s journey in Arizona (USA) continues. Yesterday the board of directors of this chip manufacturer, the largest on the planetapproved an injection of 20 billion dollars in what is already its most advanced semiconductor production plant of any it has in the US. The start-up of this factory It was full of setbacks.. In fact, it started production of integrated circuits almost a year late due to how much it cost TSMC. find qualified personnel that I needed. At the beginning of 2025 the first good news arrived. The plant had been producing semiconductors for several months at the N4 lithography node, which belongs to the 5nm FinFET family, and was ready to deliver to Apple the first batch of SoC A16 and SiP S9. This factory, known as Fab 21, made $514 million in profit last year according to Yeh Chun-Hsienthe minister of the National Development Council of Taiwan. This is not bad at all if we keep in mind that during the first year of operation, semiconductor plants do not usually deliver profits. In this scenario, the investment of an additional 20 billion dollars in the expansion of Fab 21, which is the purpose of this money, makes sense. In fact, this project is part of the $165 billion expansion plan that TSMC presented last year. However, not everything is going well for this company in Arizona. According to the newspaper Taipei Timesthe shortage of labor, and, above all, of water, is giving many headaches to the management leadership of this factory. And solving this last problem is not easy. Arizona’s water shortage is a huge challenge for TSMC Arizona is the second driest state in the US only behind Nevada. Semiconductor factories need a large amount of this resource, but it is not ordinary water like what comes out of our taps; They need a type of water almost impossible to find in nature. And its scarcity is getting worse. In fact, it is slowly becoming a systemic threat to the industry that sustains the artificial intelligencecell phones, electric cars and virtually any device that has an advanced chip inside. The water we are familiar with, such as that which comes from the tap, spring water, and even bottled mineral water, is full of impurities. It contains bacteria, dissolved gases, mineral salts and microscopic particles in suspension. This is not a problem for most of the everyday applications we usually use it for, but This water is not suitable for making chips. Even the slightest impurity invisible to the human eye is pure poison when involved in the production of cutting-edge semiconductors, such as the 2nm integrated circuits currently being manufactured by TSMC. The industry standard calls for water with an electrical resistivity of 18.2 megohms per centimeter The integrated circuit manufacturing process requires cleaning silicon wafers dozens of times. Every time a geometric pattern is transferred to wafers using lithography, they need to be cleaned. Also after pouring chemical reagents and photoresist fluids on them. However, the water used to remove any residue that may have deposited on the wafer cannot have the slightest impurity. It must be absolutely pure. In fact, the industry standard calls for water with an electrical resistivity of 18.2 megaohms per centimeter, which is the theoretical limit of water purity at room temperature. The problem is that producing ultrapure water is not easy. And it is not because it is necessary to subject it to reverse osmosis in multiple stages and ion exchange treatments. It is also necessary to degas it under vacuum, eliminate any microorganisms it may contain with ultraviolet light and filter it using membranes expressly designed to capture the slightest impurity. In this article we do not need to investigate these processes in detail, but there is something that we cannot ignore: this treatment consumes energy and requires the use of a large amount of chemicals. Furthermore, a significant part of the water that is processed is not transformed into ultrapure water, so it cannot be used. Once the water has been subjected to this demanding treatment, it acquires such a high purity that it becomes corrosive if it comes into contact with a very wide range of materials. Because it lacks its own ions, ultrapure water absorbs ions from virtually any material it comes into contact with. This is the reason why the pipes used to transport it must be made of materials immune to corrosion, such as PVDF (polyvinylidene fluoride), a fluorinated thermoplastic polymer similar to Teflon, non-polluting and extremely stable because it does not give up ions to ultrapure water. A single cutting-edge semiconductor plant consumes between 10 and 30 million liters of ultrapure water every day. This range is equivalent to the daily drinking water consumption of a city of between 50,000 and 150,000 inhabitants. Plus, there’s another challenge we haven’t looked into yet: ultrapure water degrades very quicklyso chip factories must have a very sophisticated production and distribution system capable of working in real time to deliver the ultrapure water required by the manufacturing process of advanced integrated circuits. Image | TSMC More information | Taipei Times In Xataka | Intel’s plan against an unattainable TSMC: beat Samsung and consolidate itself as the second largest chip manufacturer

Big Tech spent $725 billion on AI. Then they ran out of money in their pockets.

May 11, 2026 by usatoday24

This is non-stop. Big tech companies have already spent an irreverent amount of money in 2025 to not lose footing in the AI race, but this year things are getting better. Together Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta have announced a capex of $725 billion, which represents an astonishing 77% growth over last year’s (also astonishing) figure of $410 billion. The numbers they are dizzyingbut they are having a worrying consequence. A lot of money saved. For years, Big Tech has been able to boast extraordinary accounting books in which revenues and profits have practically not stopped growing. They’ve built up exceptional cash flow, but now they’re taking advantage of all that money to fund an AI race that doesn’t seem to end at the moment. Cash flow plummets. The amount of investments is of such magnitude that all of these hyperscalers have encountered a problem: their cash flow—the available liquidity— has collapsedthey indicate in the Financial Times, and now it is at levels that we have not seen since 2014. Before, the average was to have 45,000 million dollars since the pandemic, but now that figure is expected to fall to 4,000 million in the third quarter of 2025. Source: Financial Times. Let’s see who spends more. Amazon leads this unique race for spend more than others. The company led by Andy Jassy foresees an investment of 200,000 million dollars in 2026, which will lead it to burn about 10,000 million of its cash flow this year. Meta will continue that same trend in the second half of the year, while Microsoft could enter negative territory in at least one quarter. Even Google, which remains positive, will post its lowest level of cash flow in a decade. Debt, new fuel for AI. To finance this deployment, both Alphabet and Meta have had to resort to massive debt issues and suspend their share buyback programs for the first time in almost a decade. Alphabet issued $48 billion in bonds recently (in February a partdoes some days other), while Meta sumo 55,000 million debt in just six months. Bet now to win later. This strategy marks a paradigm shift: it is no longer investing only with the income one has in cash, but Big Tech is mortgaging its future. The objective is what we have mentioned time and time again: not to lose step in a race where, as Zuckerberg said, staying behind is not an option. Disguising the beads. These companies fear Wall Street’s reaction to these movements, so they are moving billions of dollars in infrastructure but they are doing so outside of their conventional balance sheets. In the FT they explain how Big Tech are using special investment vehicles that allow them to attract external capital and hide debt. They are also more opaque about who will be impacted if the AI does not meet expectations. The memory crisis is also having an impact: in such a way that Microsoft already has added 25 billion dollars to its investment needs this year just to be able to assume the increase in component prices. The danger of going with the flow. CEOs justify these moves by comparing them to what happened with cloud investment two decades ago, but analysts warn: investing when the competition invests is not always a strategic choice, but rather a forced response to staying out of the race. In Xataka | The chip crisis is leaving no stone unturned: motherboards seemed untouchable, but their time has come

California wants to preserve mountain lion DNA, so it spent $100 million on a highway bridge

May 1, 2026 by usatoday24

While for humanity roads are essential means of communication, for animals it is the opposite: a barrier that can be lethal. In fact, every year millions of animals die trying to cross roads that cut their habitats in half: we see the same thing in Iran with the Asiatic cheetah that in the India, where elephants are run over (although yes, with trains) is one of the big problems of its railway system. One of the solutions proposed by conservation biology are wildlife steps: an infrastructure, whether a bridge, tunnel or walkway, that allows animals to move safely through their domain by crossing roads or railway tracks. California just took this idea to another level with the largest structure of its kind ever built. The megastep for California pumas. It is about the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossinga colossal plant bridge about 64 meters wide that crosses the US-101 highway as it passes through Agoura Hills, in Los Angeles. The structure has more than 11.8 million kilos of concrete, 82 bridge beams and more than 6,000 cubic meters of living soil to house more than 50 species of plants native to the region. The idea is to faithfully recreate the coastal sage scrub or coastal sage scrub, aromatic shrubs that are abundant in the area, but on one of the busiest highways. The project is a public-private collaboration that started formally on Earth Day 2022 and has cost $114 million. Its inauguration is scheduled for autumn of this year, thus becoming the largest wildlife crossing in the world. California Government Why is it important. The United States National Park Service has spent decades documenting that mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains are genetically isolated by roads and urbanization. And an isolated population is doomed: it does not have genetic exchange with other groups, there is endogamy, genetic variability is lost and the species loses its capacity to adapt. That is to say, the passage of US-101 not only kills animals by being run over, but it is also an evolutionary trap. That said, the bridge is not an infrastructure that will benefit exclusively the puma: it is also designed for red lynxes, foxes, coyotes, reptiles and a long chain of species whose mobility is essential for the ecosystem. Finally, the structure is framed within the California 30×30 objectivewhich aims to conserve 30% of the state’s coastal lands and waters before 2030, in this case connecting the protected spaces of the Santa Monica Mountains with the environment. Context. Wildlife passages are not something new: the first were built in the 50s of the 20th century, in France. In fact, Europe has been developing this technology for more than 70 years and has a long list of structures of this type. What is unique about this project is not so much the structure itself, but its scale and location: it is in a huge city and crosses a 10-lane highway where More than 300,000 vehicles pass through each daynot on a secondary road in deep America. However, there are already promising precedents such as the recently inaugurated Colorado’s Greenland Wildlife Overpass on I-25, connecting approximately 15,800 hectares (39,000 acres) of habitat for deer, elk, mountain lions and bears. Scientific literature also supports the bet: after analyzing 89 fauna passages in Europe, North America and Australia, this study published in Biological Conservation concluded that they are highly effective and that they reduce animal mortality due to roadkill by up to 90% compared to unprotected stretches. Other wildlife passes. Although the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing will be the largest in the world, there are other wildlife crossings (mainly in Europe) equally ambitious: Natuurbrug Zanderij Crailooin the Netherlands. At 800 meters long and 50 meters wide, it is the longest ecoduct in the world. Doñana National Park It has a network of wildlife crossings and ecoducts built specifically for the Iberian lynx, whose 80% of deaths occur due to being run over. On the A4 highway in the Lower Silesian Forest in Poland there are 15 ecoducts and wildlife crossings. It has been monitored for three years its use by wolves, ungulates and other carnivores. Veluwe ecoduct network in the Netherlands. Nine ecoducts in a natural area of 1,000 square kilometers, with almost 5,000 deer and wild boar crossings documented in a single year. Ecoduct on the Türkiye – Central Europe highway. It was built after multiple attacks by brown bears, achieving reduce collisions to zero. Yes, but. Despite its potential ecological value, the project has faced criticism for its high cost: It started with a budget of 92 million and in addition to being delayed, it will end up costing approximately $114 million. In addition, there are those who wonder whether a single structure is enough to save an entire population, suggesting that it is more necessary to implement smaller-scale but more numerous interventions rather than a single megaproject. From a strictly scientific point of view, the effectiveness of these steps is neither automatic nor guaranteed. A paper published in the Journal of Applied Ecology cautions that most available studies measure the number of crossings but not the actual impact on population viability, and that population-level effects remain difficult to quantify. Furthermore, design matters: those structures less than 20 meters wide are used noticeably less by animals. And if it has a bad location it can end up being useless. We will have to wait years of monitoring the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing to determine its effect. In Xataka | There are only 27 left in the wild and the war in Iran is their sentence: the drama of the rarest and rarest feline on the planet In Xataka | We have a serious problem with the extinction of bees. The United Kingdom wants to solve it with bricks Cover | California Government and Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦

15 minutes of work a week and then warm up the chair. Leyla Kazim spent a year without giving a damn and no one noticed

May 1, 2026 by usatoday24

Leyla Kazim has taken chair warming very far. Writer and presenter for the BBC, a few weeks ago she told it on her Substack A Day Well Spent his experiment, a sort of ‘The Fiaca‘ by Talesnik applied to the world of work as Marisa executed with mastery in ‘The discontent‘the sharp debut feature of the brilliant Beatriz Serrano, but elevated to maximum power: a year without hitting the water in a London technology company. Nothing happened. Neither conflict nor dismissal nor discovery, unlike the ghost official of Cádiz who spent six years without going to work: it was the worker herself who took her knives things and closed the door from the outside, evidencing in a crude and documented way the structural cracks of large corporations and office positions. A real experiment on bullshit jobs and face-to-face work. Let Rita work. In 2013, Kazim spent an entire year doing absolutely no work for the London-based tech company where she was employed. Nobody noticed. In 2014 he left the office permanently voluntarily: neither reprimands nor dismissals were appropriate. His trick? He spent as little time as possible fulfilling his contractual obligations, doing so at a level competent enough not to raise suspicions. The mechanism was quite simple: he spent 15 minutes a week preparing for meetings where he showed fictitious progress and meanwhile spent the hours with an open Excel sheet. Neither budgets nor calculations for projects: he planned his personal trips. She made her efforts, but in other tasks, the most important: those dedicated to herself. Why is it important. The case of Leyla Kazim is not an isolated anecdote: this YouGov poll put on the table that 37% of British adult workers believe that their work contributes nothing to the world. And this has consequences: there are investigations from the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham who point out a relationship between the sense of purpose in employment and psychological well-being. Come on, if you think that your work is useless, you’ll burn out sooner. On the other hand, it exposes business control systems: if a corporation is unable to detect that one of its employees has not worked for twelve months, something is wrong: the performance metrics it uses, whatever they may be, do not work. Context. Kazim’s experiment is a practical application of bullshit jobs, or shit jobsa concept coined by anthropologist David Graeber. His thesis is as simple as it is uncomfortable: between 37% and 40% of workers in rich countries feel that their work is worthless. In this sense, automation has been part of the problem: according to Graeber, instead of freeing us from repetitive tasks, it has led to the creation of empty jobs. The consequences are twofold. For the person who works, psychological deterioration: it is difficult to get up every morning knowing that what you are going to do does not matter. For the company and the economy it represents a waste of talent and money. But the most revealing thing about Graeber’s theory is precisely what the writer has done: those who occupy these positions know it perfectly well and yet they pretend that they don’t. They keep up appearances because the system demands it. Added to this phenomenon is the in-personismthat cultural mechanism that allows shitty jobs to go unnoticed: it doesn’t matter about productivity, the important thing is to be in your chair all the hours that your workday marks. Since 1998, it has been studied and defined as “the tendency to remain at work beyond the time necessary for effective performance.” When a company measures visibility instead of results, in-person attendance becomes the norm: just what protected and masked Leyla Kazim for a year. In detail. Kazim masterfully exploited both phenomena: on the one hand, a job with functions so diffuse that reducing it to the minimum essential did not generate any imbalance (what Graeber calls box ticker tasks) and on the other, he took advantage of the company’s face-to-face culture. It is worth remembering that there are work environments that consciously or unconsciously perceive better and reward those who arrive earlier and leave later. In fact, has been proven that there are managers who show a predilection for in-person workers compared to remote ones due to proximity bias. As long as she had Excel open, kept her schedule, and attended meetings, the lack of effort went unnoticed. What he learned. The now BBC presenter’s conclusion is that modern office work is something of a play. Once you accept that your work has no real purpose and understand the rules of the game, you have a better chance of winning, which in this context means spending as little time as possible on contractual obligations. Of course, he issues a warning: his experiment is neither universal nor does he recommend it. Having a shitty job with diffuse tasks and wrong performance metrics is not the same as having someone whose job, even if it is shit, consumes their health or their room for maneuver is tight. On the other hand, let’s remember that even this perception of having a shitty job ends up taking its toll on psychological well-being. In Xataka | We believed that AI was going to take our jobs. At the moment he has started whispering to your boss who he should fire In Xataka | Spain has become accustomed to something abnormal in the rest of Europe: working with unsustainable stress levels Cover | Vitaly Gariev

Five years ago, Venice spent more than 5 billion on a system of barriers against the sea. Now look for a plan B

April 21, 2026 by usatoday24

There was a time when Venice looked at the Adriatic with ambition. The sea not only shaped the city, permeating its DNA, it also propelled it until it became a naval power who fought for dominance of the Mediterranean. Today things are different. The Serennissima (turned into tourist power) observes with increasing concern the coming and going of the tides, the same ones that in 2019 submerged it under 187 cm of water, flooding 80% of the city. The reason is very simple. Everything indicates that the multimillion-dollar system that Venice was equipped with a few years ago to protect itself from the threat of high water It won’t take long for it to become obsolete. And it is not very clear what the alternative is. One figure: 18. The threat of flooding is not new in Venice. In fact, one of the worst in memory was suffered six decades ago, in November 1966when an intense storm caused the water to reach 194 cm, flooding much of the city. However, experts have been detecting worrying signs for some time. It is not just that Venice sink or the sea level rising (which too). There are increasingly clear signs that suggest that floods will become more frequent in the future. Recently, a group of researchers dedicated themselves to analyzing the “extreme” episodes suffered by the city, those in which 60% of its surface was flooded. Throughout the last century and a half, it counted 28 incidents of those characteristics. The surprising thing is that the vast majority of them (18) were concentrated during the last 23 years. One measurement: 0.42 m. Today more than half of Venice is alone between 80 and 120 cm above the average sea level and projections show that this scenario will soon worsen: in the best of cases, if we manage to drastically reduce our polluting emissions, the sea will rise 0.42m by 2100. In the worst case, it will be 1.8 m, which would greatly complicate the outlook for the Serennissima. In fact, now the high tide already leaves St. Mark’s Square only 30 cm above the water level. One name: Mose. Aware of how much is at stake in Venice, the Italian Government has long been looking for a way to protect itself from floods. The result was Mose (experimental elettromechanical module)a system made up of four barriers and 78 independent mobile gates that allow authorities to protect the Venetian lagoon from what is known as high watertides that flood the city. The objective: to temporarily isolate the Adriatic lagoon and thus protect Venice from the most dangerous tides. To achieve this, the barriers were strategically installed in the inlets of Lido, Malamocco and Chioggia. Each gate also measures 20m wide and between 18.6 and 29.6 m long. An investment: 5,000 million. It is said that the project mobilized an investment of more than 5.5 billion of euros (its execution was marred by corruption). Its work began in 2003 and after several delays it carried out a first test in October 2020, in an event led by the then Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. A year earlier, Venice had suffered a of the worst floods that are remembered, during which the water reached 187 cm, flooding part of the entrance to the Basilica of Saint Mark. An indicator: frequency. The problem is that the authorities are turning to Mose much more often than expected. EuroWeekly assures that in less than a month, between January 28 and February 19, the system was activated 30 times. Other media report that since their inauguration at the end of 2020, the barriers have saved Venice from flooding in 154 occasions. The problem is that the use of Mose does not come free to the region, neither in economic terms nor on a social and environmental level. Setting up the enormous Mose floodgates has a direct cost, but it also has another indirect cost: by isolating the lagoon, the system alters, for example, the activity of the port sector and interrupts maritime traffic with the port of Marghera. Guardian points out that pressing Mose’s button has an economic impact of more than 200,000 euros for Venice. For this year’s Carnival alone the total bill would be around five million euros. An extra concern: the lagoon. Not everything is measured in operational cost, maritime traffic and economic impact. Altering the tides in the area also has an impact on its ecosystem and that is something that worries experts like Andrea Rinaldo, from the scientific committee of the Lagoon Authority. Especially if two fundamental data are taken into account: first, the frequency of use in recent years; second, the forecasts for sea level rise. “With one more meter, the Mose barriers would have to be closed an average of 200 times a year, which means that they would practically always be blocked,” explains Roinaldo. “When this happens, the lagoon loses its function as a transitional environment. It would become a pond.” A victim: the lagoon itself. As explains GuardianBy blocking the flow of water, the barriers encourage the growth of algae. The problem is that when these die and decompose they directly affect the quality of the water and the rest of the flora and fauna. Does that mean Mose was a mistake? Rinaldo thinks not. The changes are simply happening much faster than engineers expected, forcing authorities and technicians to think about the future in the medium and long term. At the end of the day, if Mose taught anything, it is that projects of his importance are not approved and executed overnight. One question: What to do? The great unknown. Those responsible for Mose are looking for ways to reduce its impact, but it is not an easy decision. Among other things because the Venetians themselves have become accustomed to the barriers and gates coming into operation at the slightest risk, points out Giovanni Zaroti, one of the system technicians. Rinaldo mentions the possibility of launching an international call … Read more

Meta spent 2 billion on a Chinese AI startup. China is clear that it was a conspiracy

April 20, 2026 by usatoday24

With China and the United States dancing the dance of artificial intelligenceboth countries and companies want to get the best cards for their decks. Meta is investing millions in the development of AI and, even so, it seems to be lagging behind. To turn the tables, he closed 2025 with a $2 billion purchase: that of a Chinese startup called Manus. The operation was so notorious that the Chinese government itself raised an eyebrow and undertook an investigation to see what was happening there. And they are already clear. It was a conspiracy. The Manus case. Although it has rained a lot and these last few months in China AI companies have come out from under the stones, during the first half of 2025 the proper name was that of deepseek. It was the great competition from the Western OpenAI or Google Gemini, but in March something that looked like an AI agent began to appear: Manus. That’s how they sold italthough it was really a deep investigation mode that helps you perform actions, but does not do them for you. It didn’t matter: the expectation was there and, although there were doubts about his behavior and limits, Manus began to move a lot of money (more than 100 million in estimated income) and attract attention from the big players. One of them was Meta, who took over the company. The purchase. A good question is how China let something like this slip away for a technological and strategic rival to buy. And it’s a good question, but the answer is that, at some point, Manus stopped being a Chinese startup. In the middle of last year, Manus moved to Singapore, allowing the company to bypass export and import controls imposed on China. To the not having your own LLMthey depended on others like Claude which they could more easily access from outside China. This already set off alarm bells in the Government, but with the purchase of Meta the bells echoed. China put to work to various organizations to see what was really happening, the largest of them being the Chinese National Security Commission, which is commanded by President Xi Jinping himself. The reports prepared by this body are directly supervised by the leaders of the Communist Party, so it is a voice that must be taken into account. Conspiracy. And the result of the investigation is clear. As they comment in Financial Timesthe conclusion is that Meta’s acquisition of Manus is a conspiratorial attempt to try to undermine China’s technological capabilities. These are big words that do not remain in a vacuum, since the founders of Manus – Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao – were summoned by the NDRC last March to address issues such as possible violations of foreign investment rules in China. He did not stay for a meeting and, as the FT points out, both have been prohibited from leaving the country during the review process. In fact, there are sources that suggest that Manus would be considering backing out of the agreement, but even so, it is not clear that the Chinese authorities will be satisfied. For his part, Meta points out that they did everything according to the law and it seems that he has already started to integrate Manus systems into their tools, so taking that step back would be very complex. And now… what. That the National Security Commission has classified the case as “conspiracy” is something serious, since it was the trigger for a broader review that involves more agencies in the country that are currently reviewing everything. And the underlying problem is the speed with which everything happened. Manus took off and, just four months later, they moved everything to Singapore to break away from China just before the purchase of an American company. The investigation is shaking the Chinese technology sector because it is not the first time something like this has happened. Although on a smaller scale, it is an operation called ‘Singapore washing’ in which startups founded by Chinese move to the city-state to bypass China’s control and have a more direct line with the United States. The problem is that, at a time when the commercial and strategic war has intensified, calling the Manus case a “conspiracy” sets a precedent. One in which it is stated that China does not want to let artificial intelligence talent and technology escape because this advance has become one of the country’s strategic legs for the next five years. We will see what happens when the case is resolved, but it is clear that Beijing’s objective, like Washington’s, is to prevent its assets from escaping, and Manus can be the example for national technology companies do not follow a similar model in the future. In Xataka | We don’t know if “crisis” means “opportunity” in China, but there is one business where it does: RAM memory

We have spent our entire lives blaming spring for our tiredness. Science has just shown that we have lived deceived

March 25, 2026 by usatoday24

March is coming, the days are getting longer, temperatures rise and suddenly our body begins to fill with a feeling tiredapathy and drowsiness that takes over us. Traditionally, this is considered ‘spring astheniaand people, logically, do not stop searching for their symptoms on the Internet and buying expensive vitamin complexes to compensate for the bad feeling that the change of season leaves. But… What is true in all this? A paradigm shift. Until recently, evidence on this phenomenon was scarce and contradictory; however, a key investigation published in the Journal of Sleep Research has recently come to shed light on the matter. The research, led by Dr. Christine Blume from the Center for Chronobiology at the Psychiatric University Hospital of Basel, followed 418 adults from Germany, Switzerland and Austria for more than a year, from April 2024 to September 2025. Every six weeks, participants answered questionnaires about fatigue, drowsiness, insomnia and sleep quality, and at the end of the research they only had to cross-check information to determine if there really was any interfering pattern. with our health. The results. Here what was seen is that a resounding 47% of the participants claimed to suffer from “spring asthenia”, but the reality is that when the information was cross-checked there was absolutely no seasonal or monthly variation in the levels of fatigue, daytime sleepiness or quality of sleep. And statistically the tiredness that people feel in spring is statistically identical to what they feel in autumn or winter. In fact, fatigue in daily activities tended to decrease slightly as the days had more daylight hours, without any specific “peak” of fatigue being recorded during the spring. In this way, the conclusion drawn is that the discrepancy between what people think they feel and what objective data shows suggests that we are dealing with a cultural phenomenon and not a genuine seasonal syndrome. Why do we believe it? This is where the study gets genuinely interesting, since the authors do not simply deny the phenomenon, but rather propose a psychological explanation for why we experience it so convincingly. Nocebo effect: if we expect to be tired in spring, we interpret any sign of fatigue as confirmation of what we thought was going to happen. Cognitive dissonance: good weather generates high social pressure to enjoy it with outdoor activities. The problem is that when the energy does not appear, saying that you have ‘spring asthenia’ is a good excuse to not feel guilty for not following the group. Labeling effect: Like wine tasting better when we’re told it’s expensive, knowing that “you get tired in spring” actively changes how we interpret our own physical sensations. What chronobiology says. It is a reality that we are not robots and that our body reacts to the environment, and this is where chronobiology confirms that there are seasonal variations in sleep linked to the number of hours of daylight we enjoy. Studies in pre-industrial populations in Tanzania, Namibia or Bolivia show that in winter they sleep approximately one hour more than in summer. Likewise, recent research on university students in Seattle confirms that exposure to daylight is vital for our circadian rhythm, however, none of these physiological changes translate into a “clinical picture” or a peak in fatigue in spring. In medicine. Nowadays, when you go to your primary care doctor, it is impossible to receive treatment for ‘spring asthenia’ because it is not included in any official classification. However, doctors warn that a patient who arrives with great fatigue for consultation should not be sent away, even though he relates it to the arrival of spring. It must be remembered that there are many diseases that can cause this condition, such as anemia, a severe allergy, an infection or even thyroid disorders, among others. A lucrative business. While science dismisses the existence of ‘spring asthenia’, the reality is that people’s sensation is the perfect breeding ground for private clinics and dietary supplement brands. When we feel bad, we want a quick solution with a pill, and this makes the sale of multivitamin complexes, caffeine pills and a host of products related to reducing fatigue increase their sales. Images | Vitaly Gariev Arno Smit In Xataka | Only one in four Spaniards has rested on vacation. The culprits: work anxiety and the inability to disconnect

I spent 8 hours a day watching porn to train the AI. Today he leads the workers union that fights against that

March 17, 2026 by usatoday24

Spend a workday tagging porn there’s nothing fun about it. Content moderators They have been denouncing terrible working conditions for years and now The same thing is happening with data labeling to train AI. In 404media They tell the story of Michael Geoffrey, a Kenyan who spent months working for two AI companies, until they completely destroyed his mental health. The jobs. Michael stayed in front of his computer for eight hours watching porn, describing what was happening in the images in great detail. It was no affiliation, but rather he worked for a data labeling company that then used all those descriptions to train AI models. When the day was over, his second job awaited him at a sexual AI chatbot company. In this job, Michael had to maintain sexual conversations with users, adopting whatever role was necessary each time; I had to pretend to be a man, a woman, straight, homosexual… and of course adapt to the context in each conversation. Behind the AI. Although they have the last name IA, in reality These sexbots have a lot of human work behind them. That is, when someone talks to their girlfriend or boyfriend AIyou may be talking to a real person. Michael wrote his testimony and said that he had to fake intimate connections with anonymous users. Their interactions were then used to train the AI. In the case of data labeling, workers are exposed to all types of content, some extremely violent. For example, for AI to be able to detect content of sexual abuse and violence, these workers must see thousands of images of abuse and extreme violence, and all for ridiculous salaries. In a Time reportthey said that one of these companies paid between 1.3 and 2 dollars net per hour. The consequences. After several months on the job, Michael suffered from insomnia, stress and began to have problems having sexual relations. He tells 404media that “there came a point where my body no longer responded. When I saw someone naked, I didn’t even feel anything.” Endless hours, exposure to very unpleasant content and very low salaries. Some claim that it is like a form of modern slavery. The companies behind. One of them is Sama, a San Francisco-based company that defines itself as “the perfect example of ethical AI.” It’s the company that paid 2 dollars an hour. Another company that has also been at the center of the controversy is Remotasks, a Scale AI subsidiaryone of the largest labeling companies. It was founded by Alexandr Wang, current head of AI at Meta. By Remotasks it is said that he pays late and often not the amount that was originally promised. These and other similar companies They are outsourced by OpenAIGoogle, Meta and more to train your AI models. The workers organize. Currently, Michael is the secretary of the Data Labelers Association of Kenyaan organization that wants to give voice and make visible the work of these underpaid and invisible workers. Other organizations have also been created such as African Content Moderators and Tech Workers who demand better working conditions and resources to care for the mental health of workers. In Xataka | People Blaming ChatGPT for Causing Delusions and Suicides: What’s Really Happening with AI and Mental Health Image | Data Labelers Association

A woman spent six months in prison because an AI made a mistake. The terrible thing is that no one checked it

March 13, 2026 by usatoday24

Angela Lipps is a resident of Tennessee (USA) who has never been on a plane or taken a trip to other states in the country. Even so ended up in a security cell 2,000 km from her home for a terrifying reason: AI facial recognition software decided that her face matched that of a scammer operating in North Dakota. we have it. It all started with the clue given by the security cameras. Fargo police were investigating a bank fraud in which a woman used fake military IDs to withdraw huge amounts of money. The detectives in charge of the case decided to entrust the work of recognizing the images from the security cameras to a AI facial recognition softwareand after the analysis the system returned a name: Angela Lipps. An agent took a look at her social media, decided that her body and hairstyle matched those of the suspect, and signed the arrest warrant. like in the movies. A US Marshals team showed up at Lipps’ home in Tennessee and He detained her at gunpoint. She was babysitting four children, but that didn’t matter: she was treated like a fugitive from justice. They did not ask him any prior questions, nor did they compare his version. They didn’t even have physical evidence that placed her in North Dakota beyond what the facial recognition system had said. And since the AI said it, it had to be true, right? Six months in prison (and in limbo). Being considered a fugitive, Lipps was not eligible for bail, and spent 108 days in a Tennessee jail waiting to be extradited to a state she had never visited. Then, in late October, she was transferred to a prison in North Dakota. In all that time, no one at the Fargo Police Department bothered to even check to see if the suspect had an alibi because once again, there was no need to check: AI couldn’t fail. At least, according to the police forces that were in charge of the case. Zasca. The funny thing is that proving Lipps’ innocence was really easy. When a public defender finally reviewed the suspect’s bank statements, the case fell apart. While the scammer was stealing thousands of dollars in North Dakota, Angela Lipps was buying tobacco at a Tennessee gas station, using Uber Eats and cashing her Social Security check in her hometown. The GPS and bank records were definitive and irrefutable evidence. Come home come back. On December 24, on Christmas Eve, the prosecutor’s office in charge of handling the case dropped the charges and Angela Lipps was released. Of course: they did it without further ado, on the street, in a state she didn’t know and where it was very cold while she had been arrested wearing summer clothes. The defense lawyers were in charge of paying for a hotel for him and another NGO called F5 Project helped him return home. The tragedy does not end there. The problem is that his return to Tennessee was not happy at all. During the six months he spent in prison, Lipps was unable to pay his bills and ended up losing his house, his car, his savings and even his dog. The Fargo police chief, who held a news conference to mark his retirement, did not even want to answer questions about the case. There has been no official apology or compensation for this huge police error. It’s not the first time, but it seems incredible that it won’t be the last.. We do not know what will end up happening with this scandal, but it is not the first of its kind that has occurred. In the US they have been arresting suspects using facial recognition systems for some time, but These systems fail and cause arrests of innocent people. This type of problem of poor application of AI tools in criminal investigations is present in Spain, where we already talked about the tragic consequences of using VioGén or what happened to him false complaint detection system just a year ago. AI can help, but in these types of processes human supervision is especially crucial. Image | Xataka with Freepik In Xataka | AI videos have broken Instagram and TikTok algorithms. Welcome to the new “AI dumps”

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