unthinkable Archives

the pieces come from the most unthinkable place

December 18, 2025 by usatoday24

They have been so many the occasions in which Ukraine has intercepted a Russian drone, has opened it and has found that Moscow had little less than the name, that it seemed difficult for kyiv to be surprised again by an “unboxing” of the enemy. It so happens that Ukraine has been demanding help for weeks to combat a very special Russian missile. And when he managed to intercept one, the surprise came again. A modified shahed. The appearance on the Ukrainian front of a new armed Russian Geran-2 drone with an air-to-air missile It marked a new turn in the evolution of the conflict and in Moscow’s constant adaptation to a battlefield increasingly dominated by unmanned systems. According to Ukrainian military intelligence, this model (derived from the Iranian Shahed-136) has been seen for the first time equipped with a soviet missile R-60originally designed in the seventies for combat fighters. This is not a mere technical curiosity, but a deliberate attempt to introduce a direct threat against helicopters and airplanes Ukrainians dedicated to air defense and drone interception tasks, expanding the role of the Geran-2 beyond the classic suicide attack against ground targets. The military logic of the missile on a drone. The main objective of this modification, according to the Ukrainian evaluation, has been degrade effectiveness of Kyiv’s tactical aviation, forcing it to operate with greater caution against swarms of drones. In fact, this adaptation has been a pain in the ass for kyiv helicopters. As? By integrating an infrared-guided R-60 missile with a range of approximately 10 km, Russia introduces the possibility that a traditionally vulnerable drone, can fight back if it detects a nearby helicopter or aircraft through its cameras. This represents a clear trade-off: the missile takes up space and weight, which reduces the drone’s internal explosive charge and, therefore, its destructive capacity against ground targets, but in exchange increases its potential survivability and its value as an aerial deterrent tool. UK report on Shahed missile upgrade The “allied” pieces. And here comes the moment when Ukraine has returned to be surprised. One of the most sensitive elements of the GUR report is the confirmation, when dissecting this evolution, that this new Geran-2 contains the majority of components manufactured outside Russiaincluding elements from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, China, Japan and Taiwan in the equation. This pattern, like we have been counting many times, it is not even much less newbut it once again highlights the limitations of international sanctions. Despite export controls and technological restrictions, civilian components (chips, sensors, electronic systems) they keep coming to the Russian military industry through gray markets, intermediaries or countries that evade or laxly apply control standards. Sanctions, loopholes and a doubt. Ukraine takes time alerting of the magnitude of the problem. In one of the massive attacks this fall, President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that they had identified more than 100,000 components of foreign origin in a single package of 550 drones and missiles launched by Russia. The figure illustrates not only the persistence of gaps in the sanctions regime, but also the industrial scale that Moscow has achieved in the production and adaptation of drones, relying on technologies that, in theory, should be out of its reach. Testing ground. Although the use of armed drones with air-to-air missiles It is striking, the truth is that it is not completely unprecedented in this war. Ukraine has also experienced with the integration of surface-to-air missiles in naval drones, managing to shoot down Russian aircraft over the Black Sea. The conflict has thus become a real-time laboratory where both sides test improvised combinations of cheap platforms and inherited weaponry, adapting them to new missions with surprising speed. Drones as a strategy. we have been explaining throughout the months. The introduction of this armed Geran-2 coincides with a sustained investment of Russia in drone operations, both in national production as in the creation of new launch infrastructures. Beyond the immediate impact on the battlefield, the message is strategic: Moscow seeks to complicate every layer of the Ukrainian defense, even at the cost of sacrificing some of the destructive power of its drones, and demonstrates that, despite sanctions, it continues to find a way to combine foreign technologyinherited weaponry and mass production to sustain their war effort. Image | Kyiv City State Administration In Xataka | A day later the satellites leave no doubt: Russia fortified a bridge, and a Ukrainian drone made science fiction a reality In Xataka | If Europe thinks that the end of the war in Ukraine is the end of its problems with Russia, Finland has just woken it up

The “lost continents” of our planet are leaving their trail in an unthinkable place: the earth’s magnetic field

September 7, 2025 by usatoday24

Life as we know it depends largely on the stability of the Earth’s magnetic field. But this stability (or the absence of this) depends in turn on factors that we still do not understand. Some of these factors are in the outer space, others instead are thousands of kilometers hidden under our feet. From the bottom up. Huge geological structures located in the land mantle They could be contributing To destabilize the magnetic field that protects the land from radiation and particles from space. These are the “sunk continents”, the large provinces of low speed (LLVP). Sunk continents. This last name is due to the fact that these rock masses located in the deep layers of the land mantle stand out from the rest of its surroundings because the seismic waves move more slowly through them. Through this method we know the existence of two large LLVP, one located under the African tectonic plaque and the other located under the peaceful plaque. We do not know exactly what they are or what is the origin of these rock masses. A hypothesis indicates that could be remains of the impact between the primal earth and a second planet called Theia. The Moon would be one of the results of that impact, another would be that part of The remains of Theia would have been “embedded” on earth, specifically in the mantle, giving rise to these “lost continents.” However, other studies have pointed out that these masses would be formed, at least partially of ocean cortex buried through subductive geological processes, which would make them more close to “lost continents” of the surface of the earth. The new study can be linked to this last hypothesis. Fed by a “fire ring.” The team He modeled the movements Convectives of the land mantle, also creating a reconstruction of the possible movement of the tecton plates on the surface of the Earth in the last 1,000 million years. Thus they found indications that the African dough would contain older and more “mixed” than the peaceful mass, which would contain 50% more oceanic crust, a more “young” cortex and different from the surrounding mantle. This could be explained with the call “Pacific Fire Ring”, A vast network of failures, many of them subductive that little by little they engulf part of the earth’s crust. This “banquet” would have been producing for at least 300 million years and would be serving to feed the Pacific LLVP. The details of the study were published In an article In the magazine Scientific Reportsof Nature. In diversity is the key. Until now, intuition pointed out that these two underground “continents” had a similar composition. The reason is precisely that the two slow down the passage of seismic waves in a similar way, which leads us to the intuition of thinking that these are very similar in their characteristics. However, the team responsible for the new work indicates that this may not be the case. The reason is that the temperature is more than the material that makes these regions slow the waves that cross them. The balance is complicated. The formations are more or less opposite in the Terrestrial globe, which in principle is great news: since these masses influence the way in which the temperature of the earth’s core is spread in higher layers, which in turn affects the conductive movements inside the nucleus of the planet. Since these movements are those that allow the existence of a magnetic field On Earth, the way in which they occur has a lot of impact on this field. If the LLVPs are different, the way in which the field is generated ceases to be symmetrical as one would expect, which gives rise to the appearance of imbalances. Discussing the different hypotheses. As we pointed out at the beginning, the new study can be linked to the idea that the LLVPs are the result of the sinking of earth cortex pieces and not the remains of a planet of the original solar system. Although the study does not offer conclusive evidence confirming this first hypothesis, It can be seen as a new more test in this address. In Xataka | Julio Verne was right: there are three times more water in the depths of the earth than in all oceans together Image | Oxford University; Panton, Davies, et al. (2025) / NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

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