thought

We thought that using a lot of emojis was immature. Psychology has just shown that the opposite is true.

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For many people, using a lot of emojis in emails, text messages or work chats is a sign of immaturity or unprofessionalism that should not be overlooked. However, the most modern psychology has analyzed the reason for using so many emojis and the reality is that It is not a childish actbut a desperate attempt to recover the emotional nuances that plain text has taken from us. The context. Conveying sarcasm in plain text is undoubtedly a great challenge, and not doing it correctly can result in a message that transmits an edge tone that can ‘scare’ the person to whom we send it. That is why using emojis or any type of expression strategy over text is what saves us from transmitting something that is not what we want. Non-verbal communication. When we speak face to face, words are only a fraction of the message, as tone of voice, posture, a raised eyebrow or a smile convey the true intention behind what we say. In the digital ecosystem, that layer of communication disappears, leaving our WhatsApp or Slack messages at the mercy of the interpretation (and often, pessimism) of the recipient. And this is where emojis come in, since, far from being simple decorations, psychology defines them as substitutes for non-verbal communication. Without going any further, an article published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2021 demonstrated that emojis function as real affective symbols that help convey pure emotional content. It can be measured. An investigation of Journal of Nonverbal Behavior found that adding positive emojis to a completely neutral message makes the recipient perceive it as positive. Likewise, negative emojis can instantly darken the tone of a text that has no point of malice behind it. In privacy, as the magazine points out Symbolic Interactionthe use of emojis in romantic conversations dramatically increases clarity of intentions, reducing the feared ambiguity of the first digital flirtations that in person can be much clearer thanks to the tone or looks we use. There is not a single emoji. With all this evidence, the logical conclusion would seem to be: “Use as many emojis as you can so they can understand you better.” But science warns that there is a catch, since the meaning of emojis is not stable. Here we must keep in mind that, unlike words, which have agreed definitions in dictionaries, emojis are tremendously dependent on the context, the platform and, above all, the generation of the reader. What for a boomer or a millennial It is a simple friendly smile, for Generation Z it can be interpreted as irony, passive-aggressiveness or even contempt. He is the king. The effectiveness of the emoji depends entirely on where and with whom you use it. Research published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports support that, in informal communication, emojis reduce ambiguous interpretations and bring interlocutors closer. However, In the workplace everything changessince, although it brings closeness, it can also alter the perception of competence of the person sending the message. It has even been seen that in formal emails or with superiors, an excess of emojis can generate communicative “noise” and detract from the professionalism or appropriateness of the message. Images | Tim Witzdam In Xataka | Psychology says that people who thank drivers when crossing the street don’t do it just out of gratitude.

We thought that the Chinese RAM manufacturers came to relieve the market. Turns out they’re playing the same game as everyone else.

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When the market is shared by a few, you can’t expect popular prices. The RAM memory segment is dominated by three manufacturers (Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung) and, with most of its production focused on the AI ​​market, the consumer segment is in deep water. In a scenario in which there are simply no chips, the Chinese RAM memory companies seemed like a ball of oxygen. The reality seems somewhat different. Hunting in China. Giants like Asus, Lenovo or Apple have been around for some time knocking on the doors of Chinese companies of RAM memory. Although traditionally it was the two South Korean companies (Samsung and SK Hynix) and the American Micron that supplied RAM to both manufacturers and assemblers, with the current component crisis those companies have been left orphaned and have had to look to the Chinese market. CXMT and YMTC (which is the counterpart of flash memory) are the two proper names of Chinese RAM and in recent years they have been making advances to catch up with consumer chips. There are those who believe that they are not suitable for high-end products, but when the need arises, expectations relax. That is why both have consolidated as a juicy element to alleviate the marketbut it turns out that they did not come to solve the global crisis, but to play the same game as the big ones. Bargaining power. As demand increased, both YMTC and CXMT have started selling their products at premium prices. It is that market that regulates itself, one in which everyone is in the same boat and, if they can sell their products at a higher price, they see no need to do so at a lower one (especially when we are seeing stratospheric financial results in this situation). But the most curious thing is that they are selling the most expensive things… to their own business partners. According to ReutersCXMT has been raising Huawei’s RAM prices for months. Huawei is competing against Nvidia both in the local and global markets, showing its equipment specially designed for a period in which AI inference seems like the next step of this technology, and as pointed out in Reuters, when Huawei asked for a relief in prices, CXMT did not give in. In fact, they point out that a power struggle is taking place with negative consequences for Huawei, since CXMT has been ordering its engineers to leave clean rooms in which they collaborated with partners of the Chinese giant, such as SiCarrier. In fact, it has also been recently commented that Huawei has begun to move to create your own DRAM factory. The one who warns… It is an interesting twist when it was assumed that Chinese manufacturers would arrive to alleviate the situation, competing with aggressive discounts below the prices of the three that control the market thanks to a growth produced, in part, through government subsidies. By competing with prices below those of the market they would be able to get a juicy piece of the pie among consumer brands, but as we have repeatedly said when we talked about itIn the end what rules is… money. Whenever it has been reported that someone opened a new plant or that a new research movement was being carried out in NAND chips, we already commented that the product would not be intended to alleviate the situation worldwide in the consumer segment, but for what is most profitable for the manufacturers of these chips: the AI ​​segment. Seeing the record profits of companies like SK Hynix or Samsung, it was naive to think that a company would enter this sector to alleviate the burden of consumer products. USA with the magnifying glass. Thus, CXMT has become the fourth largest manufacturer of memory worldwide, including the memory that goes into mobile phones and servers for AI, which is giving it brutal bargaining power, enough to put the brakes on a Huawei that has full government trust to become one of the technological engines of the country. However, there is a conflict of interest because Huawei is interested in its hardwarebut where China is also competing globally is in AI, and CXMT has just signed two very juicy agreements in this area. one with ByteDance for more than 7 billion dollars and another with Tencent for more than 3 billion dollars. Both to supply DRAM chips for data center servers for artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, the United States is seeing a new problem being born, as both CXMT and YMTC have started to get your attention. YMTC is listed in the ‘EntityList‘ American and Micron is seeing its business in jeopardy, urging Congress to impose stricter controls on CXMT. Interestingly, Apple is advocating the opposite as it desperately needs RAM and CXMT seems like the ideal candidate. Prepared for the worst. In any case, and as we have said on several occasions, any movement in this direction by the RAM majors will be aimed at producing more chips for hyperscalers. It’s a gigantic market right now that doesn’t seem to have an end or relief in sight. Samsung has achieved a quarter even better than Nvidia and since SK Hynix has issued a clear warning“Next year will be the worst in the history of the semiconductor industry.” Translation: buy now what you think you will need because there is nothing to indicate that the situation will relax in the short term. And when it happens, there are already manufacturers like Lenovo who point out that prices they will never return to the pre-crisis situation… In Xataka | There is a company that has grown 3,000% in the stock market, even beating the performance of Nvidia: Sandisk

In Almería they thought they had seen a drug boat. It turned out to be the solar yacht of a Finn who has traveled 6,000 km without refueling

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The bathers who tried to suffocate the high temperatures of the latest heat waves swimming around Cabo de Gata last sundaythey watched in astonishment the passage of a very unusual boat. It sailed close to the shore, with a lower hull than usual and an extremely quiet engine. It had no mast or visible bridge. Some thought it was a drug boat. Others, directly, in a submarine. It was nothing like that. According to collected Hybrids and Electricswhat was crossing Las Salinas was the Helios 11. When a Civil Guard patrol boat, equally surprised by the appearance of the boat, came to closely inspect that boat on El Zapillo beach, it only found solar panels and batteries. The dream of a Finn who wanted to sail cheap The person that the Civil Guard found on board the boat is Lukas Sjöman, Finnish adventurer, designer and builder of the most sustainable yacht that the Andalusian coasts will see this summer. He built it alone, without a shipyard, in a shed at his house and its price has not exceeded that of a modest car. As Sjöman himself tells in the videos from his YouTube channel, it took about 200 days to have the hull ready, made with a structure of marine plywood and fiberglass. The result is a yacht 11 meters long and 2.4 meters wide, weighing close to 1.5 tons. Inside there is space for some amenities including an electric stove, a light refrigerator and a bathroom with cisternjust enough to live on board, but without the luxuries that millionaires’ yachts usually equip. However, Sjöman’s obsession is not sailing through the most exclusive ports of the Mediterranean. emulating Koru of Jeff Bezos or the superyachts of Arab sheikhs. Their goal was to create a boat that was as sustainable as possible. To achieve this he only had to do one thing: look at the sky. The entire roof of the Helios 11 is covered with solar panels, and as it says on your channelreaches a power close to 6 kW and an expansion to 40 kW is already planned. The system runs on 48 volts and charges the batteries while the boat is underway. The electric motor supported by solar panels allows almost infinite navigation since it does not need to stop to refuel like alternatives with diesel or hybrid engines. Sjöman assures that the boat consumes less while sailing than a domestic blender. On a normal day it travels about 145 miles, about 270 kilometers. In bad weather, the decrease in the charging capacity of its batteries and the greater demand for power during navigation to overcome storms, the figure can drop to 40 miles (about 70 km per day). Helios 11 sailing near the coast A 6,000 kilometer trip to put it to the test And what’s the best way to test that a boat really works? Effectively taking to the sea. Sjöman began a journey of thousands of kilometers to demonstrate that the Helios 11 is a viable alternative to build cheap yachts and with propulsion systems that do not depend on fossil fuels. The Helios 11 route started in Finland and went down rivers and canals, crossing several European countries until reaching the Mediterranean. Sjöman arrived in Ibiza after going through some 5,700 kilometers without refueling. From there he continued his particular Mediterranean cruise approaching the Andalusian coast: Mazarrón, Cabo de Gata and now Almería. Helios 11 anchored in Ibiza The trip has not been perfect. According to collected Supercarblondiewhen he was anchored on the coast of San Carles de la Rápita (Tarragona) his auxiliary boat was stolen. So he had to build another one to continue because the Helios 11 cannot anchor on shallow beaches or in small docks to resupply with supplies, so without the boat the Finn was left “incommunicado” on board. Solar energy solves fuel. It does not solve the logistics or unforeseen events of sailing alone. A clean alternative to the most polluting yachts Current superyachts take more into account comfort and nautical luxury than the emissions from their engines. The few hybrid alternatives that alternate electric and diesel engines are aimed at obtaining quieter navigation and anchoring, not to reduce emissions. According to the report ‘Carbon emissions inequality kills Elaborated by Oxfam International, the yachts of the richest billionaires generated in a single year a carbon footprint which is equivalent to 860 years of emissions from the average person. The problem with these boats is that, as the seized superyachts to the Russian millionaires for the war in Ukraine, they must keep their engines running to feed the air conditioning that prevents the noble materials inside from deteriorating, generating fuel consumption of several thousand dollars a day. In Xataka | If the question is why only the rich can afford to buy a yacht, the answer is more than obvious: the 10% rule Image | TRUE NORTH

An AI model did not have access to the internet. So he thought it was better to have it and decided to hack something along the way

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Last week, OpenAI I was evaluating the offensive capabilities of two of its most advanced models. On the one hand, GPT-5.6 Sol, publicly available. On the other, a second model not yet presented and which in fact is described as superior to the first. It was about measuring their capabilities in the field of cybersecurity, and although the testing environment was theoretically airtight and isolated, both models managed to connect to the internet and hack a very popular AI models and testing platform, Hugging Face. what has happened. Both models were being evaluated using ExploitGyma cybersecurity benchmark developed by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. The goal is to try to find real vulnerabilities in real software. Instead of searching for them on their own, the models detected that the (unspecified) packet logging cache proxy, the only component with limited external access, had a flaw that they could exploit. A study by the AI ​​Security Institute reveals the advances of the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models in cybersecurity. Hello, internet connection. The models did not have internet access, but they exploited that vulnerability to achieve it. Once this was done, they assumed that Hugging Face, the reference platform for models and data sets (datasets) of AI, probably had data on ExploitGym that would allow them to overcome the requested challenge. Hack Hugging Face. So they searched, found and exploited several attack vectors at once, including both stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities. With all this, they managed to access Hugging Face’s production database (that is, the one used publicly on their website), and from there they achieved the solutions to the benchmark. GLM-5.2 to the rescue. The OpenAI security team detected anomalous activity, but Hugging Face I had already detected it a few days ago without knowing what was happening. The curious thing is that to respond to that attack they first tried to use proprietary US AI models to contain them. Those models were blocked by automatic security filters, and Hugging Face turned to the GLM-5.2, the surprising open model from Z.ai that was launched a few weeks ago. The chat with all the details. Adrien Carreira, Infrastructure Manager at Hugging Face, I summed it up in X: “We fight with open models, in the open. AI security will not be solved by a single company acting in secret. Open source puts these tools in the hands of all defenders.” This expert also shared the conversations that they maintained with the AI ​​model to address the problem. Brute force works again. At OpenAI indicated that this was an unprecedented (involuntary) milestone, although some cybersecurity experts reduced the relevance of what happened. “This is not an AI problem. It is negligence on a forty-year-old standard,” explained David Ottenheimer. However, as with Mythos, what this event demonstrates is that AI can apply brute force and analyze possible vulnerabilities (and combine them) in a way that human researchers could not due to lack of time. A fundamental problem. OpenAI acknowledges that the deployment filters that would have blocked the model’s behavior were intentionally disabled because the assessment was intended to measure vulnerabilities. Dierdre Mulligan, professor at Berkeley, indicated that “it seems to me that OpenAI did not properly create the sandbox for the testing environment.” It was not clear to her that passing a test would outweigh the potential damage that an AI model could cause if it “escaped” and gained access to the internet. The end matters, not the means. The models did not have the objective of hacking Hugging Face: that was only a means to achieve their ultimate goal, which was to beat the ExploitGym benchmark. Everything they did along the way—finding the vulnerability that gave them access to the internet, hacking Hugging Face’s database—was simply part of their plan to pass the proposed test. What have each other learned?. Following the incident, OpenAI indicated that they are implementing stricter controls in the configuration of their infrastructure, in addition to collaborating with the developers of the affected component and with Hugging Face to improve their defenses. They have also promised improve “alignment” of their models and the monitoring tasks during this type of tests. In Xataka | Daniel Púa, head of security at Magnific: “Video calls are going to arrive with a video of a family member and things are going to get complicated”

We thought that growing up defined the genus ‘Homo’ from its beginnings. Massive analysis proves we were wrong

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For decades, paleoanthropology has tried to decipher at what exact moment in our family tree we took the big “growth spurt” in our height to go from being relatively small people to the heights we see today in our environment. The classical anatomical belief held that the appearance of our genus was accompanied by a drastic and immediate increase in body size, but little by little We are learning more exact details. A new study recently published point out that the evolution of our body mass was not a sudden jump that defined all the first humans equally at the same moment, but rather a much more complex and gradual process than we thought. What we believed. Traditionally, several evolutionary models suggested that the origin of the genus Homo marked an abrupt anatomical boundary. It was assumed that the first humans quickly developed bodies much larger than those of the australopithecines, thus justifying new locomotor and energetic adaptations for the new ‘functions’ that we would acquire on a daily basis. To test these competing hypotheses, the research team has not simply compared fossil estimates in isolation, but has used advanced statistical tools on a data set composed of 386 specimens spanning 21 different taxa. This methodological rigor allows us not only to compare raw sizes, but also to take into account phylogenetic non-independence, size variation within the same species and the margins of uncertainty inherent to the fossil record itself. When did we take the growth spurt? The results of the analysis are statistically conclusive and rewrite the previous consensus, since, contrary to the classic hypotheses, the researchers found very weak support for the idea that the increase in size was a defining and transversal characteristic of the entire genus. Homo. Instead, the data show strong evidence that the marked increase in body mass occurred exclusively in species of Homo later, explicitly excluding the Homo habilis. That is, the first representatives of our genus continued to maintain a relatively modest size and the true biological leap that led us to scale our body proportions occurred later in the evolutionary lineage. It wasn’t that simple. As New Scientist points out, understanding body size is essential to understanding our past. However, for scientific rigor, the article of PNAS It stands as the essential primary source compared to more generalist readings, since, while there are voices that tend to look for immediate “cause and effect” narratives, the strict biological data of this study demonstrate that human evolution rarely works with changes that occur overnight all at once. That is why this work eliminates the “noise” of previous speculation by integrating multiple variables into a single analytical framework, and the result is that it was selective pressures and millions of years that modeled the physiology and size of the modern human being. In Xataka | The first “social network” in history is 57,000 years old, it was made up of hunters and gatherers and served to avoid extinction

Renfe thought of France as its great business for the future. Already looking at Portugal thanks to a 19th century decision

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“Portugal is a great opportunity for Renfe.” These are the words that summarize the company’s intentions for the medium-term future, according to Expansion. The newspaper assures that the Ministry of Transportation aspires to turn the neighboring country into the company’s new big business. And the secret is in its track width. “A great opportunity”. “Portugal represents a great opportunity for Renfe. With the 15 units of the Series 106, it will have 30 high-speed trains of variable gauge to which the 13 compositions of the new Series 107 will have to be added in the coming months. In total, 43 trains that are also intended to be approved for circulation in Portuguese territory.” These are the words with which, according to Expansionthe Ministry of Transport defends the change in strategy outside the Spanish borders. The company has been looking for a place in France for some time but This country is putting up all possible barriers to hinder its expansion through French territory. The alternative now passes through Portugal and the gauges have a lot to do with it. The Avrils. At the beginning of July, Talgo and Renfe reached an agreement regarding their Avril trains. These trains have been a headache for Renfe because Talgo has delivered them late, they have presented numerous breakdowns and incidents and they even had to be removed from Madrid-Barcelona because they cracked. The great theoretical advantage is that they are trains that, with the necessary equipment, can jump between the Iberian and international gaugethe European standard for high speed. This allows them to be the only trains that operate the Madrid-Galicia without the need to transfer between trains. This gives it a strategic advantage over Ouigo and Iryo in the face of the upcoming liberalization of these routes. In the agreement, Renfe and Talgo decided that the Avril trains that operate with international gauge were going to be adapted to be able to make this track jump. The cost exceeds 130 million euros but it will allow Renfe to move its trains throughout the national territory… or the entire Iberian Peninsula. A strategic change. With the announcement of this agreement, from the Ministry of Transport they indicated that “Renfe “It will be the only operator with the capacity to provide international high-speed rail services with Portugal, which gives it a clear competitive advantage to lead the Iberian train market.” The phrase is not coincidental. The initial intention was to dedicate some of the trains received from Talgo to France, but the company is encountering so many problems in homologating them that it has shifted its projection to Portugal. And the Portuguese country seems to be a perfect market for the company taking into account its track widths. And the connection between Madrid and Lisbon, which should be completed in 2030 but reach minimum travel time in 2034it has to be built under instructions from the European Union using international gauge. However, the Lisbon-Porto line is being built with Iberian gauge, which limits the Madrid-Lisbon-Porto connection to a single train. The Iberian exceptionality. The situation is complex. The Portuguese railway, like the Spanish one, grew around the Iberian gauge. This isolated both countries from the rest of the continent in this sector but the European Union is working so that the exceptionality is, in part, eliminated. That is why in the agreement reached in October 2025 there is the obligation to bring the international width to Madrid-Lisbon. However, nothing has been said of the high-speed line that Portugal is building between Lisbon and Porto. This line is supported by Iberian gauge and will reach the Spanish border with said gauge. This makes it very difficult for new companies to enter.as we have seen in Galicia. But Renfe has the ace up the Avrils’ sleeve. And since these trains can jump between gauges, Portugal opens up as a very attractive market to expand operations, with trains that can cover Madrid-Oporto passing through Lisbon. Something that no other company in the world can do right now.. Photo | Annie Spratt and Nelson Silva In Xataka | Spain aspires to its most ambitious railway challenge: Madrid-Barcelona in less than two hours. And you have already taken the first step

Meta thought it was a good idea for its AI to generate images from your Instagram photos. Days later he has already turned back

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Last week Meta launched Muse Image and Muse Video, its new AI models integrated into the Meta AI app. However, the launch was quickly overshadowed by the criticism he received one of the functions of the image generator. Within Muse Image, in addition to writing the normal prompt, Meta thought it was a good idea to let us tag other Instagram users to Generate images from your photos. All you have to do is type the at sign with your username and Muse Image can access your profile to create any image you can think of. The problem with all this is that Meta activated it by default for all public Instagram accounts, without warning or of course asking for permission. If you wanted to prevent anyone from tagging youyou had to manually disable it from your account settings. Meta backs off: they will no longer be able to tag us in Muse Image Muse Image was announced last Tuesday, July 7, and in the following days the criticism of this decision began to accumulate. Four days later, on Saturday the 11th, Meta issued a statement in which They responded to the controversy. According to Meta, their intention with the tagging feature was to “offer a useful creative tool” and “give users control over whether their public content could be mentioned.” The best way to give control to users would have been to let us activate it if we wanted to be tagged and not the other way around. Meta has confirmed that The labeling function has been removed. This is the full statement: Earlier this week, we announced that one of the ways users can generate images in Meta AI is by @-tagging the public Instagram accounts they want to reference. Our intention was to offer a useful creative tool and give users control over whether their public content could be mentioned in this way. We’ve received feedback that this feature missed the mark and is no longer available. Image | Meta, edited with Magnific In Xataka | Meta has a long history of privacy scandals. We can add one more to the list

Switzerland thought that putting 5,000 solar panels at 2,500 meters above sea level was crazy. He had an unexpected ally: the snow

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The logic of the solar sector tells us that the panels should go down, where it is hot and the roads reach without problem. It shouldn’t be a good idea to put them on top of a mountain, but a project in the Swiss Alps it has surprised us with extraordinary performance. The curious thing is that what drives his performance is exactly what many assumed would make him fail. A solar farm in an unexpected place. The installation is called AlpinSolar and is located on the dam of Lake Muttsee, in the Swiss canton of Glarus, one hour from Zurich. This construction is located at 2,500 meters above sea level and is the highest dam in Europe, as well as the longest in Switzerland. Panels everywhere. Some 5,000 bifacial solar panels, manufactured by the Swiss company Megasol, cover more than a kilometer of the dam wall, facing south to capture sun from morning to night. Being an inclined surface, the snow slides alone without the need for manual cleaning. A complex installation. The dam is inaccessible by land, so every panel, every piece and every tool had to be transport by helicopter. For example, the crane that helped install the panels, and whose components were moved there to then be assembled and ready to operate. Megavarious out of nowhere. The plant, operational from 2022, has an installed power of 2.2 MW and generates about 3.3 million kWh per year, enough to supply between 700 and 750 homes according to various sources. damn fog. The Alpine country generates plenty of electricity in summer, but the same does not happen in winter, which is exactly when it needs it most. That deficit could worsen significantly if Switzerland starts to close its nuclear power plants, and alternatives such as wind energy, have had difficulties developing there. Traditional solar doesn’t help much either: a panel in the valley only generates a quarter of its normal output in winter, in part because fog can sit in low-lying areas for weeks. Better up than down. The curious thing is that the idea of ​​installing the solar farm at high altitude turned the situation around. The plant is above the fog line, and the thin, clean air lets in more sunlight. The cold, far from reducing performance, helps: solar panels work more efficiently when they are not overheated. And the snow acts like a giant mirror, reflecting additional light onto the panels from below (albedo effect), which can boost production. Surprise. AlpinSolar generates about half of its entire annual production during the winter, exactly the season in which the country needed it most. In fact, it produces up to three times more than a similar plant in low altitude areas during the months of February and March. That was enough argument for the Denner supermarket chain to sign an agreement 20-year energy purchase agreement with the project in an alliance with Axpo and IWB, builders and developers of the project. To copy the project. The result has also ended up convincing the Swiss government, which approved a fast-track law dubbed “Solar Express” to facilitate the development of new projects that effectively leave AlpinSolar behind. Among them stands out an alpine park near Sedrun in which up to 4,200 solar projects are planned to be built in lowland and mountain areas of the country. Austria, Italy and other countries are following the experiment closely. That and othersby the way. Image | Axpo In Xataka | The wind industry has been dreaming for years of a turbine that can be assembled without concrete or machinery. France has said ‘hold my tank’“

We have had a nautical chart for almost two centuries in a drawer because we thought it was all wrong. we were wrong

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Sometime in 1835, on the northwest coast of India, Alexander Burnes purchased a roll of paper. Inside was a handwritten navigation chart of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden that the British officer came to describe as a “specimen of naval survey without equal in the cabinets of Europe.” Burnes donated it to the Royal Geographical Society, where a team of experts examined it and put it in a drawer. Since then, the diagnosis has been unanimous: the letter was very beautiful and very attractive, but completely wrong. For 189 years, we have believed it was wrong. But we were wrong. And it’s not that we hadn’t studied it. In the last century alone it has been studied in detail on up to five occasions (1947, 1987, 2002, 2012 and 2022). However, all efforts had been futile. However, in recent years, John P. Cooper of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and his team They have studied the subject in depth. Without much success, really. Until they realized one thing: what if instead of a document, what they had in their hands was a tool? I mean, what if it wasn’t a map to hang on the wall, but something else? How did the thing work? The key, always according to the researchers, is that the letter was only opened to the section that the navigator was using at that time. If you look at the map as a whole (more than 180 islands, plus reefs, land landmarks, religious buildings and flags), you don’t understand; above all, because they do not have continuity. But if you analyze the references fragment by fragment, the idea emerges that it was used to maintain the navigation line, to remind the sailors what they had to do. Its purpose was mnemonic and operational; not representative. How curious, isn’t it? Yes and that is the main problemto think that all this is just ‘curious’. But no, what the letter puts on the table is the Eurocentric bias that still prevails in the history of science: For almost two centuries we judged an Indian tool by the only yardstick we knew (the geometric correspondence to the terrain) and declared it “defective” for not meeting that yardstick. How many thousands more things will we have out there lost, without fully understanding? It never hurts to remember that there are many things that we do not fully understand. Image | University of Exeter In Xataka | Urbano Monte’s world map, one of the most amazing and grandiose cartographies in history

We have just discovered that the lethal weapon to hunt mammoths was not what we thought

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More than a century ago, archaeologists were convinced that the so-called Piltdown Man It was the “missing link” in human evolution. It took more than 40 years to prove that it was a fraud built with a human skull and the jaw of an orangutan. Since then, archeology has learned an uncomfortable lesson: even theories that seem indisputable can crumble when new evidence appears. The great certainty that falters. For decades, archeology books have presented the Clovis culture like the great mammoth hunters of North America. The image was simple: groups of hunters armed with spear propellers, known as atlatlcapable of taking down huge animals from a relatively safe distance. However, two studies published recently They question this reconstruction and force us to reconsider one of the most iconic scenes in American prehistory. The weapon that never appeared. He first study puts the focus on the atlatl, that kind of extension of the arm that multiplies the speed and range of a spear. For years it was assumed that the Clovis used it to hunt mammoths, although there was a surprising detail: A single atlatl has never been found at a Clovis site. Using statistical models, researchers they conclude now that this technology probably did not appear in America until about 4,000 years later before this culture disappeared, a gap too great to continue supporting the traditional theory. Without direction. The consequence of this archaeological gap is so striking that the author of the study, the archaeologist Metin Eren, summarizes it with a sincerity unusual in a scientific article: “We have no idea what the hell they used.” Because if the Clovis did not use atlatls, only hypotheses remain. Perhaps they hunted with javelins or thrust spears, which would have forced them to get much closer to animals weighing several tons and take an enormous risk. Paradoxically, the more research is done on one of the best-known cultures in America, there are fewer certainties about the weapon with which he survived. Or they were not so “hunters”. He ssecond study takes that review even further. After analyzing the fifteen sites where Clovis points have appeared along with remains of mammoths, mastodons or gomphotheres, the researchers they conclude that none demonstrates unequivocally that these animals were killed by human beings. The same marks on the bones and the same broken tips can occur both after a hunt and when using the carcass of an animal that had already died, a problem known in archeology as equifinality. Hunters… or scavengers. Of course, the authors do not maintain that the Clovis never hunted mammoths. What they affirm is that current evidence does not allow us to rule out that, on many occasions, they acted rather as opportunistic scavengers. In fact, remember that a Clovis point has never been found embedded in a mammoth bone, evidence that does exist in much older Eurasian sites. They even reinterpret a famous isotopic study on a Clovis child, proposing that the elevated nitrogen levels could be explained due to the consumption of larvae coming from corpses and not necessarily from a diet based almost exclusively on mammoth meat. Archeology exchanges certainties for questions. Both jobs They reflect a change of trend in research on prehistory. For decades, it was enough for an explanation to be reasonable to become the dominant narrative. Today researchers demand much stronger evidence and are revising some of the ideas that seemed best established, from the weapons used by the first Americans to the role they played in the disappearance of the megafauna of the end of the Ice Age. Sometimes the greatest scientific advance is not in finding a new answer, but in recognizing that the old one was never there. really proven. Image | BioS. In Xataka | The company that is resurrecting the mammoth is creating the Noah’s Ark of the 21st century. And he is doing it in Dubai, of course In Xataka | The crater known as “the door to hell” hid a surprise: a 50,000-year-old mammoth calf

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