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the spectacular technology that finally turns fencing into a spectacle

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The tip of a foil in a professional fencing competition moves faster than the human eye can follow, and that limitation has condemned the sport to a secondary role in broadcasts for decades. A Japanese studio has been working since 2012 on an answer that combines 4K cameras, deep learning and augmented reality. This April 25, it debuts in its first professional competition, in Los Angeles. It’s difficult to follow. Fencing has rules like right of way in foil and saber, used to determine who wins the point when both fencers touch the opponent’s body at the same time, forcing the spectator to follow movements of the weapon in fractions of a second. According to the Rhizomatiks official technical documentationthe tip of the weapon takes up just a few pixels even captured in 4K, and the blade deforms so much when flexing that classic image processing methods cannot follow it clearly. How it works. This visualization system is called Fencing Visualized and is born from an alliance between the Japanese studio Rhizomatiksdirected by Daito Manabe (known for collaborations with Björk, Perfume and the closing ceremony of Rio 2016), the agency Dentsu Lab Tokyo and the fencer Yuki Ota, the first Japanese Olympic medalist in the discipline. The idea germinated from previous work with dancers in which the team used motion capture and high-speed cameras to draw graphics on the bodies on stage. The official phase began in 2013 and the concept already appeared in Tokyo’s bid video for the 2020 Games. Early versions of the system depended on retroreflective markers attached to the weapon: In 2014 it was tested live during the Yuki Ota Cup and in 2017 the balls were replaced with reflective tapes so as not to hinder the shooter. From reflective markers to deep learning. The technical leap has come now, when the team has worked to introduce the system in official competitions without interfering with the athletes’ competition equipment, mainly weapons. Therefore, in 2016 they rewrote motion detection with the help of deep learning. According to the engineer Kye Shimizuthe solution is a multistage network based on YOLO v3, fed by 24 4K cameras on both sides of the track, and whose results are crossed to estimate the position of the tip. This new version without physical markers debuted as an exhibition at the 71st Japan National Championships in 2018 and was seen in official competition a year later. The next milestone was Tokyo 2020, where the technology was deployed on site during the Games. That time at the Olympic Games is, in fact, what has allowed it to be sold to other competitions. Money. The American premiere on April 25 responds to a commercial logic adopted by the World Fencing League (WFL) that organizes the event, a professional league founded at the end of 2025 by three-time Olympian Miles Chamley-Watson. The competition brings together twelve athletes in mixed teams with a total distribution of $100,000 in prizes. The WFL itself describes the installation as a system of blade tracking with AI intended to make new viewers understand the action instantly. In other words: the league is interested in ensuring that, as a television show for all audiences, each round is understood intuitively, without knowing the regulations. More visions of the future. Fencing Visualized It is not an isolated case: There are systems like Hawk-Eye in tennis and cricket, Second Spectrum as the official optical tracking provider for the NBA and Premier League, or semi-automated offside in football. But the tiny tip of a saber is a more demanding problem than tracking a ball. On the other hand, this vision of the future also fits into the trend that the IOC has been promoting for years with Alibaba Cloud and Intel, and which turned Paris 2024 into the first end-to-end 8K broadcast with multi-camera 3D replay. The Los Angeles 2028 Games are a good space for this system to be integrated into the audiovisual dissemination of this sport. In Xataka | We have been living with robots for years that beat us at chess. Now we have robots that beat us at tennis

It turns out that they have a loving arm that tastes the sex of females

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Few animals are as fascinating as octopuses. These very intelligent invertebrates (since I saw “What the pulse taught me“I have a hard time consuming it) They have a brain in each armthree hearts, blue blood and a nervous system distributed by its tentacles. However, one of its greatest mysteries was truly intimate: how does a male manage, in the absolute darkness of a sea crevice, to locate the female’s reproductive system with surgical precision. Until now, science thought it was pure tactile instinct, but no: a recent study from Harvard University published in Science and led by Pablo Villar has discovered that the octopus does not look, it tastes love with the tips of its fingers. fingers suction cups. The love scene. Octopus mating is a sophisticated maneuver of extreme delicacy. The protagonist is the hectocotylthe third arm of the male: this tentacle is not used for eating or exploring, but for loving (in the most reproductive sense of the word). The maneuver is as follows: the male introduces this arm under the female’s mantle and there navigates between vital organs until he finds the oviduct, an opening of just a couple of millimeters. Once located, both remain motionless for approximately one hour, the time necessary for the transfer of sperm packets that the female will store throughout her life in a specific gland. Fingers that smell and taste. What the study shows is that the octopus does not “see” the path, but rather “feels” it on a chemical level. If it sounds strange, it is because humans actually lack that sensory modality, contact chemoreception. Going a little more into detail: the female emits progesterone, which will be the chemical lighthouse for the male in this internal navigation. He sensor of the hectocotyl is in its suction cups, covered by an epithelium similar to our retina or tongue, rich in receptors CRT1. According to the experiment, the male’s love arm is indifferent to other hormones: only when its CRT1 detects progesterone is the search and coupling response activated. It is literally tasting your goal with your fingertips. Why is it important. Beyond the obvious biological curiosity, this discovery has critical implications such as helping to understand how species separate and how biodiversity arises, as these receptors act as a sensory barrier: if the male’s receptor does not match the female’s chemistry, there is no copulation. On the other hand, they also put on the table the seriousness of endocrine disruptors as environmental contaminants, substances that act by imitating hormones that can confuse the male octopus and cause it to get lost. Finally, it is valuable information for aquaculture: octopus farming is a global challenge due to its complex reproduction and this finding is a step forward to optimize its sustainable breeding. From hunter to lover. One of the most fascinating aspects of this paper is how this ability originated: the octopus did not invent this loving arm out of thin air, but rather it is a recycling of an old tool for a new use. And originally the CRT1 receptors were used to detect molecules from their prey during hunting, but over time these receptors mutated with a kind of “hydrophobic pocket” that made it possible to develop that special sensitivity towards progesterone. An evolution from a survival sensor to one of genetic continuity. In Xataka | We knew that octopuses were very intelligent. But not to the point of having a “brain” in each arm In Xataka | England is experiencing an unprecedented invasion. The problem is that they are octopuses, and they are devouring everything they can find. Cover | Dear Sunflower

This cool 3D map of light pollution turns cities into mountains of light

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This 2026 is the year that opens a fantastic period to enjoy astronomical milestones, since the first of the three eclipses planned between 2026 and 2028: it will be next August 12, it will be a historic event in these latitudes (it has been more than a century since the Iberian Peninsula has witnessed a total solar eclipse) and not everyone will be able to see it: It will only be total in a strip. Being in the right place at the right time is only the first step: the next thing to be able to enjoy both the solar eclipse and any astronomical event, or simply to be able to see the stars well and distinguish constellations is total darkness. Or at least, try to be in a place free of light pollution. Getting away from the big cities is the first step as they tend to be the main sources of light, but not the only one: there are many infrastructures that can spoil the experience. Our recommendation if you plan to see the solar eclipse is that you do not leave it to improvisation and be clear about where to go to enjoy it better and here in addition to the map of the National Geological Institute To follow it, it is worth having on hand a good light pollution map. Where the solar eclipse will be seen: areas where it will be total and areas where it will be partial. IGN But does a light bulb next to you bother you so much to see the sky?? Yes, essentially because it is never usually just a light bulb. In fact, it’s not even just too much light. An example: when you approach a city with your car and it is getting dark or it is night, you can see a glow of the sky (skyglow) fruit of the rebound of light against dust particles, humidity and aerosols in the atmosphere, returning as a luminous veil that destroys astronomical observation. The underlying problem is the increase in the brightness of the sky: a star or a nebula does not compete against darkness, but against that background. If the background is brighter, the contrast drops (excepting the distances, it is like cheap TVs with bad backlighting scheme). The heavens are measured by the Bortle scalewhich goes from 1 to 9 where a class 1 sky is the darkest possible, practically a miracle in continental Europe (most medium-sized cities are around 7 – 9). With a class 9 sky you can barely see the brightest stars and the moon. Where not to see the solar eclipse of August 2026 And it does not only affect large cities (in Madrid it can be seen from quite a few kilometers away), but also industrial areas and ports. In these cases, it is also usually permanent lighting without any control. Also the road networks. A picture is worth a thousand words: the map by cartographer and geospatial developer Jacob Wasilkowski and Petrichor Studio called Earth at Night. Earth at night. JWasilGeo & Petrichor Studio This map combines several sources: night light data comes from NASA (Suomi-NPP satellite, VIIRS sensor) and background satellite mapping is provided by Earthstar Geographics along with other commercial providers integrated into Esri’s World Imagery service. The technological infrastructure to render it in 3D is also from Esri, a Californian company specialized in GIS software. Wasilkowski is the one who has put it all together to convert luminosity into topography. Simply put: It has converted the luminosity of NASA’s nighttime images into elevation, so that cities are mountains. The bigger the city, generally the bigger and higher the mountain will be. Note that there are areas, such as northern Italy or the German border with Belgium, that are real garlands. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean coast, the Portuguese coast and a point in the middle of everything stand out: Madrid. These are the areas to escape from if we want to see the sky well. Earth at night. JWasilGeo & Petrichor Studio And just the opposite, the valleys are the most interesting areas to observe the eclipse or any other astronomical milestone: they are the dark areas. Although its controls are intuitive, you have options to switch to the satellite layer, you can zoom, pan and rotate. The map is a few years old now, but for those of us who like to observe the sky it is a good idea to always have it at hand. Furthermore, when this map was launched a decade ago it had a great impact on the cartographic community, winning the award GOLD from the KANTAR Information is Beautiful Awards 2019 in the category “Maps, Places and Spaces”, under the name “Earth at Night, Mountains of Light”. And why not say it: it is evocative. After all, it uses real light captured from space to re-sculpt the Earth, letting it be human activity that defines its topography. In Xataka | Solar eclipses visible in Spain: these are the three astronomical events of 2026, 2027 and 2028 In Xataka | Half of Spain waits expectantly for the historic eclipse of August 2026. The authorities are already thinking about the problems Cover | JWasilGeo & Petrichor Studio

It turns out that there is a Soviet submarine at the bottom of the Norwegian Sea releasing radiation for 40 years

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On April 7, 1989, the Soviet nuclear submarine K-278 Komsomolets sank in the Norwegian Sea after an uncontrolled fire fruit probably short circuit in the electrical panels of compartment 7, which led to a massive and uncontrollable deflagration because the atmosphere was critically enriched with oxygen due to failures in the air regeneration system. Of the 69 people on board, only 27 survived. It wasn’t just any submarine: it had a double titanium helmet that allowed him descend to unreachable depths for his rivals of the time. Its cutting-edge technology hid a dangerous core: a nuclear reactor and two plutonium warheads that have since lain at the bottom of the sea, 180 kilometers southwest of Bear Island, in the Svalbard archipelago. And according to the most complete study carried out to date, published a few days ago in the scientific journal PNASthe Komsomolets remains an active source of radioactive contamination in the Arctic. The discovery. In 2019, a Norwegian research team went down with the Ægir 6000 underwater robot to thoroughly inspect the submarine using cutting-edge technology. As they approached the ventilation tube they found a visibly distorted column of water, as if it were smoke, as you can see in the video immediately after this block. It is a leak with intermittent behavior. They took samples and the results were overwhelming: concentrations of Cesium-137 800,000 times the normal radiation of seawater in the area and Strontium-90 400,000 times. Both isotopes are direct products of nuclear reactor fission. The analysis shows that the radiation comes from the propulsion system (the nuclear reactor) and that the reactor fuel is in the process of corrosion with the environment. Why is it important. The good news is that this radioactive leak does not come from the nuclear warheads: two torpedoes with atomic warheads. For now, that threat is under control: the Soviets sealed the torpedo compartment with titanium plates in the early 1990s and judging by analysis, the sealing continues to work because they have not detected weapons-grade plutonium in the marine environment. The bad news is the reactor. It does not explode or disappear, but simply the zirconium cylinders that protect the uranium and plutonium are corroding, leaking these isotopes into the sea in a slow and invisible leak that is diluted in the ocean. Fortunately, samples taken in relatively close areas show that dilution is rapid, as they return values ​​close to normal. In fact, the hull is full of sponges, corals and anemones and its samples contain low traces of cesium-137, but without detectable damage. Context. Man-made radioactivity in the oceans has three main sources according to the International Atomic Energy Agency: the atmospheric nuclear tests of the 60s and 70s, the Chernobyl accident and the authorized discharges from the Sellafield and La Hague reprocessing plants, in the United Kingdom and France respectively. The sunken nuclear submarines, where the Komsomolets would enter, have a marginal contribution. Their importance is more qualitative than quantitative: they are point sources, localized and that tend to worsen over time. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the Soviet Union came under great international pressure. When the Komsomolets sank three years later, Moscow organized inspection missions with MIR submersibles. When he confirmed that the warheads had been in contact with sea water, he acted: in 1994, with the economy in free fall and western funds involvedRussian technicians they sealed the cracks of the torpedo compartment with titanium plates. Since 2007, Norway has undertaken regular monitoring of the wreck as part of its nuclear safety responsibilities in the Arctic. Current risk status. For now the nuclear warheads are contained, their sealing works and there are no signs of weapons-grade plutonium in the water. The reactor is the active problem now: the fuel is corroding, the emissions are real, and the research team does not understand why they are intermittent or what the rate is. Any attempt to recover or physically manipulate the submarine would probably be more dangerous than leaving it where it is, since if the radioactive materials reached the atmosphere, the contamination could reach land with worse consequences than today. . A nuclear laboratory under the sea. The research team has two goals ahead: to understand why the leak is intermittent and whether that corrosion rate is accelerating over time. Inadvertently, the Komsomolets is now a natural laboratory to study what happens to submerged nuclear reactors in the long term. Information that is not trivial, given the number of nuclear devices that sleep on the seabed. In Xataka | Russia’s most advanced nuclear submarine was a secret. Until Ukraine has revealed everything, including its failures In Xataka | The Soviet Union needed to save millions of people from hunger so something was invented: the art of making sausages Cover | Karina Victoria

The return of BTS turns K-pop into macroeconomics thanks to 4 million copies and a 2 billion tour

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After four years of group silencethe return of the undisputed kings of K-pop, BTS, is going beyond the mere cultural event: 3.98 million copies of her new album sold on the first day and the announcement of an 82-concert tour whose projected revenue rivals Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. BTS is already more than one of the most important pop groups in the world. It is an event of almost microeconomic magnitude. The farewell BTS’s last joint concert was in March 2022. A few months later, the group announced a pause for its seven members to complete mandatory military service in South Korea, a commitment of between 18 and 21 months from which not even they were exempt. The last to graduate was Jin, in June 2025. In between, each member launched solo projects with mixed success while HYBE, the company that owns the group, endured the pressure of not having its main asset working. Strangled without BTS, but not much. Because of this forced absenceHYBE’s operating profit fell 73% in 2025up to 49.9 billion won and while restructuring its operations in the United States and investing in new business lines. Its fan platform Weverse, however, managed to enter its first year of profit, with 11.2 million monthly active users generating stable income through memberships and expenses linked to digital commerce. The search for ‘Arirang’. This past weekend, BTS released ‘Arirang’, their fifth studio album. The title is loaded with meaning: it refers to a Korean folk song considered the country’s unofficial anthem, with centuries of history and dozens of regional variants. A clear manifesto, as they have said in various interviewsabout the group members’ common Korean identity. They produced more than 120 songs for this album in two months, of which 14 survived, all deliberately brief to please generation Z and its more than recognized difficulty concentrating your attention at a point beyond a few minutes. The sales. ‘Arirang’ sold 3.98 million physical copies in its first 24 hourssurpassing the record that the group itself had with ‘Map of the Soul: 7’. On Spotify, the platform recorded 110 million global plays on Spotify in its first 24 hours, and was positioned among the most pre-saves in the history of the service, with more than 5 million prey. The album’s 14 songs simultaneously occupied Spotify’s global top spot, while the single ‘Swim’ debuted at number one with more than 14.6 million views. The absolute historical record for the platform is still held by Taylor Swift with ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ and 314 million listens. Concert in Seoul. The day after the release, on March 21, BTS held a free concert in Seoul’s massive Gwanghwamun Square. Around 260,000 people traveled to the venue: 22,000 fans were in front of the stage and tens of thousands more followed the show on giant screens installed in the surrounding area. Municipal authorities and HYBE 8,200 people were deployed between police, medical staff and management teams. The concert was, furthermore, broadcast live on Netflix: It was the platform’s first global live broadcast of a music concert, and could be enjoyed in 190 countries. The tour is the key. The tour is where the economic magnitude of the return is concentrated. The ARIRANG World Tour will begin on April 9 in Goyang (South Korea) and will end about 11 months later in Manila, with 82 concerts in 34 cities in 23 countries. The tour includes Europe (Belgium, United Kingdom, Germany and France), North America, Latin America (Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil), Southeast Asia and Australia. How will it be? Apparently, BTS will use a 360 degree scenario instead of the usual front format. This will eliminate restricted visibility areas that normally render between 15% and 30% of the seats unusable: a 70,000-seat stadium in frontal format sells approximately 55,000 usable tickets; with the round design it can reach 65,000. The analysts They project total income from the tour of up to $1.8 billion, figures that would place the tour in the same league as Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour. For comparison: that of Taylor Swift It generated nearly $2.07 billion with 149 concerts. BTS could approach that figure with half the number of concerts. The stock market hype. Following the announcement of BTS’ comeback, HYBE shares reached their highest in the last four years, rising up to 9.5% and adding more than one trillion South Korean won to the company’s market capitalization. It is expected HYBE’s revenue in 2026 is expected to grow by 47% to 3.87 trillion won, with an operating profit of approximately 480 billion won: ten times that of 2025. Impact on tourism. According to data from the South Korean Ministry of Justice, foreign visitor arrivals between March 1 and 18 grew by 32.7% compared to the previous year, driven especially by tourists between 20 and 29 years old. Europe was the market with the highest relative growth, with an increase of 51%. The Korea Culture and Tourism Institute esteem that the tour will generate 1.2 trillion won of impact per concert held in South Korea. Some economists are modeling the entire return as a macroeconomic event in itself, with projections pointing to a contribution of up to 0.5% of GDP when tourism, hospitality, retail and country brand growth are added. What has changed. Four years later, BTS returns to a different market than the one they left: the short-form video (Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok) is no longer an accessory promotional tool, but the very core of what needs to be covered with any launch. Artificial intelligence has been installed in music production (in the interview with Bloomberg, Suga compares it to the Industrial Revolution and speaks of “irreversible” changes). It has also changed how we see live musicincreasingly in need of spectacularity. And, of course, how the international perception of K-pop has changed after the success of ‘The K-pop Warriors’ from Netflix. A world in perpetual change to which, for the moment, BTS does … Read more

Hollywood has been debating for years whether AI can replace real actors. With Val Kilmer the debate turns into practice

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A year after his death, Val Kilmer will appear in a fiction film without filming a single scene. ‘As Deep as the Grave’ uses generative AI to bring the actor to life with the explicit support of his family and respecting the rules of the actors’ union. It is the first documented case of a Hollywood star being digitally recreated on this scale and with this level of legitimacy. Perhaps in the future this film will be seen as the point at which there was no turning back. As deep as the grave. Val Kilmer died on April 1, 2025, at the age of 65, from pneumonia resulting from the throat cancer that he had been fighting since 2014. This week, almost a year later, the production company First Line Films has announced that the actor will return to the screens in a role that he was never able to film. The film, initially known as ‘Canyon of the Dead’, is a historical drama based on the true story of Ann and Earl Morris, early 20th century archaeologists who documented the culture of the Navajo people in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. Kilmer was cast five years ago to play Father Fintan, a Native American Catholic priest and spiritualist. The role was designed around him: Kilmer identified with the character’s Native American heritage and with the story’s spiritual link to the American Southwest, where he made his home in New Mexico. “We were ready to film his part. Just, (Val Kilmer) was going through a very, very difficult medical time,” has counted director and screenwriter Coerte Voorhees. Go for AI. The production accumulated six years between filming and forced stops due to the pandemic. When the Voorhees brothers (Coerte directs, John produces) reviewed the material, they saw that Father Fintan’s scenes were essential to the story. Replacing the actor was a possible solution, but they did not have the budget to repeat the shoot. So they chose to generate it artificially. What makes this recreation technically unique is not only the use of images of the actor at different stages of his life, many contributed directly by his family, but the decision to use his real voice, deteriorated by the tracheotomy that Kilmer had to undergo during cancer treatment. Father Fintan suffers from tuberculosis in the fiction, which turns his altered voice into a character trait. The character generated by AI occupies, according to those responsible, a significant part of the final footage. Pioneer Kilmer. The curious thing is that Kilmer was one of the first actors to actively resort to AI to preserve his communication skills. In 2021, while working on the documentary ‘Val’, he collaborated with the startup Sonantic to reconstruct your voice from hours of archival recordings. The company had to develop new algorithms (the available material was ten times less than what they used in other projects) and generated more than 40 different models before selecting the most expressive. That work reached the general public in 2022, when Kilmer appeared in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, in an appearance that was one of the most talked-about moments of the film. Seal of approval. What distinguishes ‘As Deep as the Grave’ is the consents that support it. The actor’s daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, states that “my father always looked at emerging technologies with optimism, as a tool to expand the possibilities of the story. This spirit is what we honor within this film.” The producers also assure that the film followed the SAG-AFTRA union guidelines and that the actor’s family receives financial compensation. The environment. This news comes amid constant updates on the topic of AI to generate prototypes of real actors or completely new virtual creatures. In recent months, the Xicoia company launched Tilly Norwooda character entirely generated by AI whom she presented as an actress, and which SAG-AFTRA unambiguously condemned, calling her a direct threat to the profession. Here, however, we have the posthumous realization of a job that the actor himself had accepted. But… what will happen when the technology is accessible to productions without family endorsement? How is compliance with SAG-AFTRA standards monitored in independent productions? Can a case like this normalize practices in less scrupulous hands? Header | Variety In Xataka | Seedance’s strategy was to copy first, go viral later and back away later. Until Hollywood said “enough”

We have been looking for fire hydrants in photos for years to prove that we are not a robot. Turns out we were the robot after all

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It happens to us every day: we try to enter a website and suddenly a grid of poor quality photos requires us to identify all the traffic lights, buses or even fire hydrants even though in Spain, for example, they do not have the characteristic design that is applied in the US. When we solve these puzzles we are not only proving that we are not a robot: we are working for Google. Google slaves. In the early 2000s, bots were destroying the internet, but a young man named Luis von Ahn had a great idea to stop them. Believe CAPTCHAa system that forced us to identify distorted words to prove that we were human and thus be able to access the content. That system evolved and Google bought the idea and turned it into a perfect system for something we have barely noticed: working for it. From Google Maps to Waymo. Since then, Google has not stopped taking advantage of the system for two intertwined objectives. The first, effectively, protect us from bots. The second, also known but much juicier for the company, is to turn us all into information taggers. Internet users first recognized words and became a gigantic OCR system that was applied to Google Maps. Then, with images, we ended up helping Google’s image recognition systems improve significantly. That has served, among other things, to feed the Waymo autonomous driving systems. Statistical consensus. How does Google know that when we choose a fire hydrant or a bus we are responding correctly? It knows this through the so-called “statistical consensus.” Google usually presents images in pairs: one of them (the control image) has already been previously identified by thousands of people, while the other is an “orphan” image that its computer vision algorithms cannot decipher. If you guess the known one, Google assumes you are human and uses your answer about the unknown image to feed its database. We are the product. All of our readers were probably already very aware of this reality, but now a debate is beginning to activate about the ethics and ownership of digital work. It is something that we already saw with social networks, which were fed by our content, and that certainly also applies to Google: to what extent is it legal for a company to have a huge AI infrastructure thanks to the billions of hours of unpaid “microwork” of its users? Here the famous “If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product.“. It is true that these Google systems have protected us from bots and we have not paid for them “with money”… but with those micro-jobs that we have carried out when solving the puzzles of the reCAPTACHA systems. Is it possible to poison the algorithm? Here also doubts arise about the true reliability of the system. If a mass group of users decided to mislabel traffic lights or fire hydrants in an organized way, would a self-driving car make dangerous decisions in the real world? That risk seems reasonable, and considering that AI models are increasingly more capable in abstract reasoning and even overcoming captchasan attack by AI bots that did something like this poses a threat worrying. The invisible CAPTCHA. Google itself knows that visual CAPTCHAs are no longer so insurmountable for machines, so it has been moving its systems towards reCAPTCHA v3a invisible system that does not require you to look for buses, zebra crossings or fire hydrants that you will never see on a street in Malaga or Bilbao. Instead, this system opaquely analyzes your behavior in front of the PC: how you move the mouse, what cookies you have installed and how you navigate. Or what is the same: Google thinks it knows how a human behaves when you’re going to click on “I’m not a robot”… when we’ve been working like robots for years and solving those puzzles. a brilliant idea. What is clear is that CAPTCHA has been a brilliant idea with implications that not even Google could have anticipated. In fact, it has turned this tool into a way to feed its artificial intelligence systems with our help, without us practically knowing (or caring much). But you know: the next time a website asks you to identify fire hydrants before entering it, remember that you are not demonstrating your humanity. You’re signing on to the afternoon shift at one of the largest data factories on the planet. In Xataka | The US blocked its most advanced chips from China to stop its AI. The result: China makes tokens cheaper than anyone else

We have been filling the refrigerator with kefir and high-protein yogurts for years. It turns out that the solution was invented in the year 874

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For decades, the Mediterranean basin has held an absolute monopoly on nutritional health. They convinced us that olive oil, wheat and southern ferments were unbeatable. In the dairy aisle, this hegemony translated into the undisputed reign of Greek yogurt, a product that went from being a traditional food to becoming in the supermarket star thanks to its thick texture and high concentration of complete proteins. However, nutrition science has turned its sights toward much colder latitudes. Today, the undisputed protagonist of healthy diets, recommended by both sports nutritionists and metabolic researchers, does not come from Athens, but from Iceland. Is called skyrand although its appearance deceives us, it is rewriting the rules of what we consider a perfect breakfast. At first glance, the skyr It looks like some kind of ultra-creamy Greek yogurt, but it’s not technically a yogurt. Actually, it is about of a fresh, skimmed whipped cheese, made through a double fermentation process. From the Vikings to the supermarket shelf The history of this product begins with the first Viking settlements in Iceland, around the year 874. The Norwegian settlers who arrived on the island encountered an extreme climate and unfriendly lands. In that scenario, the skyr It became a real life insurance: a food ultra-concentrated in nutrients that allowed them to survive the harshest winters when there were hardly any resources. The traditional process starts with skimmed and pasteurized cow’s milk that is heated to 75ºC and cooled to 37ºC. Lactic acid bacteria are added to this base (such as Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus) and, crucially, rennet. After hours of fermentation, the product is carefully strained to eliminate the liquid whey. The result is a dense paste, with hardly any water, that requires three to four times more milk to produce than conventional yogurt. Today, the skyr has conquered supermarket shelves such as Lidl, Mercadona, Aldi or Alcampo. Nutritionist Blanca García-Orea points out that success in the supermarket lies in their clean labels: the best commercial options contain only two ingredients, pasteurized milk and lactic ferments, without added sugars or sweeteners. The clinical fascination with skyr It is based on its macronutrient profile. According to data collected by Healthlinea typical serving provides between 11 and 19 grams of protein, practically double that of a standard natural yogurt, while maintaining an almost non-existent level of fat (between 0% and 0.5%). But how exactly is it different from its direct competitors in the refrigerator? Nutritionist Laura Parada clears up the usual confusion between the skyrhe kefir and the yogurt. While the kefir stands out for a microbiota very diverse that includes yeasts and acetic bacteria, and normal yogurt It is based on lactic fermentation simple that leaves a light texture, the skyr It makes the difference because it is a fresh fermented cheese with a very high protein concentration and very thick texture. Added to this are other physiological advantages. The rigorous casting process of skyr eliminates approximately 90% of its lactose contentwhich allows many people with mild intolerance to consume it without experiencing digestive discomfort. At the micronutrient level, the portal Ingredia Food highlights that A 150-gram serving covers about 15-20% of the recommended daily intake of calcium, essential to protect against osteoporosis, and 19% of vitamin B2 (riboflavin), linked to the reduction of oxidative stress. What happens in your body when you eat it When you eat a tub of skyr, you’re giving your muscles exactly what they ask for. According to the magazine Nutrition & Metabolismits proteins are loaded with leucine and other key amino acids that trigger muscle synthesis. Basically, it’s an excellent tool for shielding lean mass when you’re looking to lose weight or prevent muscle from deteriorating with age. As if that were not enough, it takes away your hunger suddenly. The Aarhus University in Denmark did an experiment in 2024 pitting the classic breakfast of bread and jam against a bowl of skyr with oats. The conclusions of researcher Mette Hansen were resounding, the Nordic mix boosted mental concentration and satiety throughout the morning. Some women in the study were so full that they couldn’t even finish their portion. Science continues to find medical applications. Last year, the International Dairy Journal published a discovery very revealing about him skyr fermented with strains such as L. plantarum. It turns out that these formulations are capable of stopping blood glucose spikes after meals, while helping to reduce cholesterol and acting as a powerful shield against cellular inflammation. Not all the skyr it’s gold However, you have to put a magnifying glass on the shadows of any fashion product. That a container has the word printed skyr It does not make it a safe passage to comprehensive health. Magazines like Men’s Health warn that the industry is already marketing ultra-processed versions, such as ice cream skyrwhich although they provide protein, camouflage glucose syrup, fructose and added sugars in their ingredients. In addition, Healthline remember thatbeing made from cow’s milk, the skyr It is strictly not recommended for people with allergies to casein or whey protein, as it can trigger severe reactions. On the other hand, the debate about fat arises. Although the original version of skyr is applauded for being skimmed, a deep analysis that we did in Xataka We explain the historical demonization of dairy fat. Modern science is rehabilitating natural whole dairy products thanks to the “dairy matrix” (the membrane of the fat globule), which appears to have a cardiovascular protective effect and greater satiating power. This suggests that, although the skyr It is an excellent tool due to its protein density, completely dispensing with dairy fat in our diet based on ancient dogmas could be a mistake. The emergence of skyr in the global diet is not a marketing accident, but the convergence of an ancient tradition with the demands of modern metabolic medicine. Contemporary nutrition has stopped looking for shortcuts in laboratories to fixate on food matrices dense, real and fermented. Although it is not a magical food nor … Read more

It turns out that to innovate in mobile phones, only one thing was needed: (very) useful little things.

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Neither the latest Qualcomm processor, nor “agent” AI, nor a camera with 200 megapixels. What surprised us most this week with the launch of the Galaxy S26 Ultra It was his anti-gossip screen. A friendly reminder that, perhaps, innovation in technology does not involve the most technical characteristic, but rather the most useful one. A touch of attention. We have been criticizing for years (and rightly so) that mobile phones do not innovate. For some time now, attending the presentation of a new model is usually summarized in: Same mobile Best camera (sometimes not even that) More power AI functions that, with a high probability, we will never use The umpteenth improvement in hardware that has been nearing its peak for years This is why, as soon as we see one of those novelties of the “oh, I want that in my daily life“, we return to that smile from when mobile phones were devices designed to make our lives easier, and not so much to sell hardware deployments at the highest possible price. The anti-peeping screen. Yes, we already know that there are €1 screen protectors that perform a similar function, but the point is that this screen includes it from the factory, and with brutal technology. It is capable of regulating the emission of the pixels so that we are only able to see the panel from the front. This opens the door to having a native security layer on our screen and, by the way, being able to put a quality screen protector on it (protection ones are usually not). The matte screen. A couple of years ago, Samsung surprised the world with the matte screen of the Samsung Galaxy S24an anti-reflective layer that represented a before and after when viewing content. Apple tried something similar in its last generation, but couldn’t come close. Once again, a silent innovation that did not impress on the technical sheet, but in terms of utility it was outstanding. Apple’s square sensor. People take selfies, lots of selfies. And turning the phone to do them is not a drama, but if you can save it, all the better. It is just what Apple invented with its iPhone 17 and the square sensor: one that allows the mobile to record and take photos both vertically and horizontally in the same position. NXTpaper screens. Although the superiority of the physical book over the electronic reader is a debate that I do not want to open (and that I do not intend to lose), TCL has been doing something for some time that its competition does not dare to imitate: dual panelswhich can be used as an electronic reader and as a traditional panel. How does it work? These phones and tablets are modified LCD panels with a different matrix than the rest. The backlighting system, the anti-reflective layer and the microtexture of the surface itself are adjusted to emulate an electronic ink panel, and thus be much less aggressive to the eye when we are reading. 10,000mAh batteries. Quietly, smartphone batteries are undergoing their biggest revolution. The main change: betting on silicon to give us much more generous capacities. Because yes, innovating is making the phone last three days, and not one as we have been accustomed to for years. Image | Xataka In Xataka | Mobile phones have been stagnant for five years when it comes to innovation. There is an explanation

We have been reading philosophers from the West and Asia for centuries in search of the secret of happiness. Turns out the Aztecs had it

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Each course Lynn Sebastian Purcell, philosophy professor, repeat the same experiment. After reviewing the passage from the ‘Odyssey’ in which Ulysses renounces an eternal life of pleasures with the nymph Calypso to search for his wife and son, the teacher presents a dilemma to his students: How many would do the same as the king of Ithaca? “How many of you would reject immortality and a pleasant existence on the condition that you never see your family and loved ones again?” defiant spear Purcell to the classroom. The answer is always the same: nobody. The ‘Odyssey’ is an epic poem that connects with the Greco-Latin tradition, but in reality that particular passage about Ulysses summarizes well the vital philosophy of a civilization that lived thousands of kilometers from the Ionian Sea: the aztec. Goal: happiness. I don’t know exactly who you are, but it’s quite likely that you, me and the more than 8 billion Of people who share this world, we agree that it is desirable to have a happy life. Logical, right? Happiness is one of those golden nuggets that philosophy has been searching for for centuries. I did it in times of Epicurus and he does it in our days. In fact one of the most famous treatises of Bertrand Russella famous philosopher of the 20th century, is titled with a phrase that is quite a proclamation: “The conquest of happiness”. The lesson of Ulysses. However, it is one thing to aspire to happiness and another to decide how to achieve it or even what exactly happiness is. This is where the passage from the ‘Odyssey’ of the nymph Calypso. If it’s just about seeking happiness, Ulysses already had it, right? If we agree that the goal is to be happy (just like that), isn’t it a good idea to spend an eternal life, free of illness and deprivation, living with a goddess on a distant paradise island? Why does Ulysses decide to return to the sea… and his hardships? “Let it be worth it”. Ulysses’ attitude (like that of Purcell’s students) connects fully with a philosophical ethic that for decades has gone unnoticed in the West: that of the pre-Columbian Aztecs. For them, remember the teacherwhat humanity really seeks is not so much a life full of happiness and pleasures as “an existence that is worthwhile.” That’s the goal. The texts that are preserved and tell us about how the Aztecs saw the world show that for them humanity faced “an existential problem,” In Purcell’s words: a brief, fickle existence, during which it is impossible to control everything just as it is not to skate in a quagmire. “Slippery is the land”. “What they wanted to say is that, despite our best intentions, our life is prone to error, failure in our objectives and, therefore, to ‘fall’, as if we were going to end up in the mud. Furthermore, this earth is a place where joy comes mixed with pain and setbacks,” explains the professor in an article published by the Philosophy Association (APA). In it he remembers that this entire conception of the world can be summarized in a popular saying: “Slippery, slick is the earth”“slippery, slippery is the earth.” Wait, Aztec philosophy? Exact. It has not been easy to survive and in the West we may not have paid enough attention to it, but that does not mean that the pre-Columbian Aztecs created a valuable philosophical corpus, with different currents and treatises. “We have many volumes of his texts recorded in his native language, Nahuatl,” claims Purcell at the BBC. “While few of the pre-colonial hieroglyphic-type books survived the Spanish burnings, our main sources of knowledge derive from the records made by Catholic priests until the early 17th century.” A different vision. Thanks to them we preserve codices with sayings, exhortations, poems, dialogues… different manifestations that essentially tell us about the same thing: how the Aztecs who lived between the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th approached existence. Good example is the ‘Florentine Codex’a bilingual work by friar Bernardino de Sahagún on pre-Columbian knowledge. His legacy is not only interesting because of what he tells us, it is also interesting, Purcell claimsbecause it opens our eyes to “another pre-modern culture with an ethics of virtues”, one different from the legacy of Aristotle or even Confucius. “Place of joy with fatigue”. At this point the question is obvious… If the Aztecs believed that what humans really want are lives “worthwhile”, even more than joyful and pleasant existences, how to achieve it? How to face the passage through this world, “a place of joy with fatigue and pain”, as an Aztec passage says? The key is in a recipe with four ingredients, four “levels” that allow us to enjoy a rooted life, “neltiliztli”. Continuing with the metaphor of existence as a swampy terrain, full of mud, the idea is to take root to gain a foothold. And how to achieve it? To begin by ‘rooting’ in one’s own body. As Purcell explains, the figurines and descriptions we preserve of the Aztecs show us that they liked to exercise their bodies. In fact, they had a regimen of activities aimed at stretching and strengthening the body that is partly reminiscent of yoga. Rooted in the body, it had to be done at another level: the “psyche”, seeking a balance between the heart and the head, desires and judgment. “Only in the middle can you go, only in the middle can you live”, advises one of his works. Social creatures… and of the earth. In an article Published years ago in Aeon, the scholar of Latin American philosophy points out two more levels at which those who want to achieve a rooted life must work, “neltiliztli”, a term that is also used as “truth” and “goodness.” The first level is “rootedness in the community.” We live surrounded by people, in societies in which we play a role that connects us with others and activates the … Read more

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