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A Russian family lived isolated in Siberia for more than 40 years. He didn’t know about World War II or the space race.

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In the cold, vast and desolate siberian taiga one would expect to find spruce trees, maples, streams and acres covered in frozen silt. Maybe (hopefully) some lone pso or wolf. What no one would include on that list is what he discovered around mid 1978 an expedition that flew over a mountain located more than 240 km from any human trace. There, in the middle of the Abakan mountain rangea group of geologists came across a family that had been isolated for 42 years. Its story still fascinates today. And that cabin? Such a question must have been asked 47 years ago by a group of Soviet geologists flying over the Siberian taiga, an area rich in oil, gas and mineral reserves. He ran summer of 1978 and the team, led by Galina Pismenskaya, was traveling by helicopter in a region of Siberia located 160 km from the border with Mongolia when the pilot saw something between the trees. Something unexpected. A rudimentary cabin with a small garden. In most parts of the planet, such an image would be of little interest, but Pismenskaya’s team was supposedly in an unpopulated area. In fact, the Soviet authorities were not aware that anyone lived there. The nearest houses were supposed to be more than 200 kilometers away, so the question was obvious… What the hell was that shack doing there, built next to a stream, among trees? They were so intrigued that geologists decided to land. “We come to visit”. The impressions of Pismenskaya and her colleagues when approaching the hut we know them thanks to Vasily Peskova Russian journalist and traveler who would later interview the protagonists of that story to collect it in a book. Upon landing, the researchers found a hut made with the little that the taiga offered: bark, branches, trunks and pieces of wood blackened by humidity. On one side there was a tiny window. On the other side there was a door through which an old man appeared. “Like something out of a fairy tale”, would relate some time later Pismenskaya, who recalled that the man was barefoot, was wearing a patched shirt and pants and sported a scraggly beard. “He seemed scared. We had to say something, so I started: ‘Greetings, Grandpa! We’ve come to see you.’” The fact is that that old man was not alone. When they entered the hut with him, the geologists discovered that he lived with his four children. They all shared that wooden construction without rooms, blackened by smoke, cold and with the floor covered in shells. Upon seeing the new arrivals, one of the young women began to pray, scared. Another, hidden behind a post, ended up collapsing from suffocation. Logical. The family had not seen another human for four decades. Dating back to 1936. The old man in question was called Karp Osipovich Lykov and the fact that he lived there, in conditions almost medieval people, hundreds of kilometers from any hint of civilization and surrounded only by his children, is explained in light of what happened in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Just like his Karp family was an old believera member of a church split from Orthodox Christianity that embraced the ancient liturgy and ecclesiastical canons. The path of Karp’s coreligionists had diverged from the Russian Orthodox already in the 17th century, after Nikon’s reformwhich made them outcasts. This had happened in times of Peter I…and with the Bolsheviks. This harassment affected the Lykov family directly. Around 1936, a patrol shot his brother on the outskirts of the village where they lived, so Karp made a radical decision: he gathered his wife Akulina and the two children they had at the time (Savin, nine years old, and Natalia, two) and escaped into the forest. Literally. He walked away as far as he could. Without looking back and with light luggage that included just a handful of seeds, a rudimentary spinning wheel, a couple of jugs to boil water and the clothes they were wearing. Once in the taiga, the family built a cabin with what they had on hand, set up a garden and continued with a life marked by isolation, their beliefs and deprivation. In 1940 the couple had their third son, Dmitry; and four years later the fourth and last daughter, Agafia, was born. Back to history. The Lykovs continued with that life until Osipovich’s helicopter located them in the summer of 1978. It may sound strange, but the family had settled in a particularly inhospitable place. No one saw them before because no one looked there. The marriage moved as he encountered difficulties, moving further and further away from the villages and towns, until settling at a point located more than 240 km of the nearest settlement. Not even the Soviet authorities were aware of the existence of that family. The consequences of that isolation are obvious. For the Lykovs, time, politics, science… stopped dead in 1936. The family did not know that Europe had been shaken by World War II, nor that man had stepped on the Moon in 1969, nor was it aware of the space race, the name Kennedy or the Beatles did not ring a bell… Some family members marveled at seeing a television or items as seemingly simple as matches or a roll of transparent cellophane. Fascinating yes, bucolic no. The Lykovs’ 42 years of isolation were, however, hardly bucolic. Their cabin was built next to a stream and the forest offered them wood, fruit and even game, but the harsh conditions of the taiga subjected them to a constant test. Especially the first years. Agafia even told how towards the end of the 1950s the family faced their peculiar “years of hunger”, during which they had to decide whether to eat the little they harvested or save some of the seeds to grow them the following year. “We were hungry all the time,” he admits. Years later the family suffered a frost … Read more

NASA has had its ships exposed to hackers for three years. An AI discovered it in just four days

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If there is a place where they should be open to any type of communication, it should be in a space agency. And it is no longer just a cinematic issue (although it has gone to great lengths to delve into that topic in the cinema), it is that communications are critical: from things as mundane as explaining that all processes are going well, to anomalies, to the specific future of a mission. Getting your hands on the communications of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has to be a real treat and not only to boycott the American entity, but also to access confidential information or even to develop conspiracy theories that dismantle that man will reach the moon. Well, as incredible as it may seem, hacking NASA has been easier than you might think. Three years exposed and billions of dollars at stake And it hasn’t just been a little while: communications between Earth and NASA spacecraft have suffered a critical vulnerability for three years against possible computer attacks. Nor was it trivial: that breach in security could have allowed attackers to take over space missions like the agency’s rovers on Mars. The consequence would not have been cheap either: it poses a threat to billions of dollars in space infrastructure and the performance of these missions. Vulnerabilities are usually detected when it is too late or thanks to the action of researchers, although in this case it was the work of artificial intelligence, more specifically a cybersecurity algorithm integrated into AISLE security software, whose objective is to protect communications between spacecraft and terrestrial systems. This vulnerability had gone unnoticed by human eyes in multiple code reviews throughout that time. However, this autonomous AI-based analyzer detected it and helped correct it in four days, account the team of the Californian startup. As detailed, the fault was in the authentication system and to take advantage of it you only needed to have operator credentials. A little social engineering such as phishing or infecting computers to obtain usernames and passwords of NASA workers would be enough to make this possible. From here, something as common as authentication would become a weapon to, for example, inject commands that are executed with full privileges to access the system. The consequences could be fatal: from intercepting data to hijacking a ship. The only “good” thing about this vulnerability is that it was an essential requirement to execute it on the system locally, which obviously reduces the risk compared to remote. The integration of systems with AI in collaboration with humans is the order of the day and although in this case it has been the machine that has brought out the colors for the team of people, it is worth remembering that with the fall of half the internet because of Amazon servers, the responsibility fell on automation: It was the operators who had to intervene to fix it manually. In Xataka | NASA finds ‘space gum’ and glucose on Bennu: we now have the missing ingredient to explain the origin of life In Xataka | NASA invites you to send your name to the Moon for free. Behind it there is something more than a simple symbolic gesture Cover | Photo of NASA Hubble Space Telescope in Unsplash

In 1845, John Franklin’s expedition set sail in search of the Northwest Passage. 180 years later his loss remains a mystery

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On the morning of May 19, 1845, Captain John Franklin and his expedition weighed anchor from the Greenhithe Harboralmost at the mouth of the Thames. They were looking for the Northwest Passagethe (at that time theoretical) maritime route that would link the Atlantic and the Pacific through northern Canada. They never came home. 129 men who never returned and who, for 170 years, have been one of the great questions of scientific and naval exploration. We now know why the men of John Franklin’s lost exploration died. There are those who insinuate that the trip started badly from the beginning. It should never have been in the first place. John Franklin. The first option William Edward Parryone of the great English explorers, but he had already traveled to the Arctic five times and “was tired.” So he declined the offer. Secondly, they thought about James Clark Ross. Ross has just arrived from Antarctica where he had explored the Ross Sea and Island. In fact, the ships on that expedition were the same as those that would be used on this mission (two of Ross Island volcanoes They are called Erebus and Terror in honor of the ships). But upon returning to England, he became engaged to his future wife and decided that great explorations were no longer for him. He was followed by James Fitzjames (discarded due to inexperience), George Back (considered too controversial) and Francis Crozier (who, well, was Irish and that was more than enough reason to rule him out). Seeing the yard, John Barrow, second secretary of the Admiralty, called John Franklin. To this day no one knows why Franklin, who was already a legend at the time and was almost 60 years old, he said yes. But the fact is that, as I said, they left the vicinity of London that day in 1845. They stopped in Orkney and the convoy formed by the two main ships (HMS Erebus and HMS Terror), the HMS Rattler (the first English warship with steam propulsion) and a transport headed to Greenland. There they sacrificed ten oxen and the expedition began its solo journey. The search for the Northwest Passage The travels of Marco Polo are a peculiar book. Not only does it remain a very interesting precedent for current anthropology, but it served as an inspiration for many during the era of great exploration. The image you can see above is precisely the annotated copy of ‘The Voyages’ that Christopher Columbus had. In one of its versions, the Italian one from 1559, a Chinese province called Anian. We assume that it was from there that the geographers and explorers who discussed whether America was a new continent or, on the contrary, an Asian peninsula, got the name of the Strait of Anian, the separation between Asia and America that would give access to the Northwest Passage. It is what we know today as the Bering Strait and for years it was pure mythology. But, first, Ferdinand Magellan and his crew turned around Cape Espiritu Santo and found themselves face to face with the southeastern passage; and, second, a Dane in the service of Russia, Vitus Beringrediscovered for the West the strait through which Semyon Dezhniov had already traveled sixty years before. The rest was geopolitics: the quick passage to the Pacific without having to pass near the Spanish territories in America was too juicy. In 1745, an English law promised 20,000 pounds to whoever discovered the pass and the boom began. I have tried to convert the amount to a current currency and I have not been able to do it accurately, but I have drawn one conclusion: it was a lot of money. Favorable weather In early August 1845, two whalers, the Prince of Wales and the Enterprise, encountered Franklin’s ships in Baffin Bay. They were waiting for favorable weather to enter the Strait of Lancaster. That was the last time they were seen. Two years passed. And, little by little, Lady Jane Franklin, some members of Parliament, and the fledgling British press began to ask the Admiralty to send someone to search for the heroes of Franklin’s expedition. The Government sent three expeditions: one by land and two by sea, one through the Atlantic and another through the Pacific. They failed. Fearing that they would be forgotten, Lady Jane Franklin composed her lament, the song you can hear just above. And, although I don’t know if it was for that reason, the truth is that was not forgotten. In fact, the search for the lost expedition “became nothing less than a crusade.” In 1850 alone, eleven British and two American ships tried to locate them. It was then that the first tombs were found. Over the years, the different expeditions found fragments, Inuit stories and objects from the expedition. In 1855, following the indications of some Inuit tribes, pieces of wood were found with the name of Erebus. In 59 two messages were found. The first, dated May 28, 1847, was from Franklin himself and read “Sir John Franklin, Commander of the Expedition: All Well.” It is the document on the right. It was a common practice at the time, documents were left in different places so that, in case of problems, they could be reconstruct the details of the trip. But in this case, something curious happened: on the edges there was another message, dated April 25, 1848, explaining that the ships had been trapped in the ice. Franklin and twenty-three other crew members were dead. And the rest, the survivors, had abandoned the ships looking for an exit to the south. In the next few years some objects, some rumors and some tombs appeared. Nothing else. The ships never appeared and we never, in 150 years, discovered what had really happened to Captain John Franklin’s lost expedition. One hundred and fifty years without news In the 1980s, the University of Alberta launched a project to track the expedition. The different possible routes were traveled … Read more

We send fewer and fewer paper letters. So Denmark Post has said goodbye to the service after 400 years

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“Denmark is the canary in the mine.” The comment is by Marvin Ryder, researcher at the McMaster University (Canada), and what he talks about is not about markets, finances or geopolitics, but about something that has been part of the daily lives of a large part of the world’s population for centuries: the mail. The postal operator PostNord has decided that on Tuesday, December 30 will send his last letter in Denmark. In fact, it has been removing its characteristic red mailboxes from the streets for months and Monday the 29th will be the last day it accepts certified envelopes. From now on he wants to focus on sending packages, something that makes a lot of sense in view of his results. The question, how Ryder slidesis whether the end of postal mail will be limited to Denmark or will reach more countries. Goodbye letters, goodbye mailboxes. End of cycle in Denmark. The once powerful Danish postal service has decided to adapt to the times and say goodbye to postal mail. It’s not exactly new (the announcement did it months ago), but the effects of the measure will begin to be felt now, with the turn of the year: in 2026 the operator PostNord will stop collecting and delivering letters in Denmark. In fact the company takes time preparing the ground for change: in June it began to withdraw its 1,500 mailboxes from the streets, on the 18th it stopped accepting letters and on the 29th it will collect the last certified envelopes with acknowledgment of receipt. One day later, New Year’s Eve, PostNord will deliver its last envelopes. Chart on letter sending (in millions) from PostNord Danmark. A key figure: 90%. PostNord, a Nordic operator founded in 2009 from the merger of Denmark’s Post Danmarck and Sweden’s Posten AB, has been very clear about its motives. Stop sending letters in Denmark because its users have stopped doing so. Only in the last 25 years has its flow been reduced more than 90% without the demand showing signs of having hit rock bottom. If in 2000 they were distributed more than 1.4 billion of letters, in 2024 they did not reach 200 million. This collapse has coincided with the increase in online commercewhich is precisely where the operator has decided to focus its efforts. From now on in Denmark it will focus exclusively on the parcel service. “We are forced to adapt to the new situation and take the next step to build a strong PosNord for the future,” claims. It makes sense considering that the MitID system already allows Danes to receive all their official notifications digitally, the option chosen by the vast majority of the population. Only 5% of adults has renounced that possibility. Will there be no more letters? Yes. And no. PostNord has decided to turn the page 400 years of postal history (the service operates from the 17th centuryin times of Christian IV), but that does not mean that paper envelopes will no longer be sent. Danes will be able to continue sending letters to each other through Daoa courier firm that is already operational and is now preparing for a considerable increase in activity: if its estimates do not fail, it will go from 30 million letters in 2025 to 80 million in 2026. Of course, the service will be somewhat different for citizens: whoever wants to send a letter will have to go to one of their locations to deliver it or pay extra if they want it to be picked up at home. Question of obligations. In the statement in which it advanced its plans PostNord made it clear that its decision comes preceded by a change at a legal level that, in practice, frees its hands. “Our responsibility for the universal postal service in Denmark was extinguished with the Postal Law which came into force on January 1, 2024, except for mail for the visually impaired, small islands and international mail during a transition period,” clarify. Things will be different in Sweden, where PostNord will continue to operate a mail system “self-financed and profitable” and assuming the postal service. “Difficult decision”. Breaking a tradition that dates back to the 17th century is not easy. And this has been recognized by PostNord, which talks about “a difficult decision” and an “important step” designed to be strengthened in the future. For now, his goodbye has served to unleash collecting fever for his mailboxes: the operator put 1,000 units on sale for between 270 and 200 euros (depending on their state of conservation) and sold out of stock. in just a few hours. It is estimated that its network is made up of about 1,500 mailboxes and in January they will be auctioned another 200. Beyond Denmark. Where PostNord’s movements are probably also followed with interest is in the Post Offices. Although there are signs which suggest that Generation Z is reconnecting with the pleasure of sending written letters, the truth is that postal mail is also going through slow times in Spain. The National Markets Commission calculate that in ten years the exchange of letters has plummeted by 64%, which has forced Correos to try new (and multiple) avenues of business. Parcel shipping is increasing, moving at “record levels”, but precisely for this reason it is a sector with fierce competition in which it is not easy to gain a foothold. In Denmark, the readjustment of the postal service will be accompanied by a snip of staff, with the loss of 1,500 jobs. Images | News Ãresund – Johan Wessman (Flickr) and PostNord In Xataka | Correos wants to be a bank in 2025. It is an eye-catching plan in the face of the continuous closure of bank branches

Five board games that you can’t miss to have fun this New Year’s Eve with friends and family

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Christmas is a time when we tend to get together much more with friends and family, and not only on the two specific dates such as Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. If you want to have a fun time on Christmas evenings (especially this New Year’s Eve), count on a good assortment of board games will make a difference. We present five totally essential options that you cannot miss at home. Exploding Kittens In the corner intended for board games at home, one of the ones that cannot be missing is Exploding Kittens. This has managed to achieve the achievement of being the most supported game (in all history) in Kickstarter. One of the main reasons for the success of this game is that it allows you to play quick games of about 15 minutes and from 2 to 5 players. The objective is simple: build your own deck of cards while avoiding the explosion of any of the protagonist kitties. Asmodee Exploding Kittens, Game for children and adults from 7 years old The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Throw Throw Burrito Another game that has already had some success at gatherings with friends and family is Throw Throw Burrito. It is for ages 7 and up and the games (like the previous one) are quick (about 15 minutes) and between 2 to 4 players. It’s a board game very simple to play: you will get points with the cards you win, but you will lose them if you get hit by the soft burritos, which are the protagonists of the game. This game is created by the same authors as Exploding Kittens. Exploding Kittens Throw Throw Burrito The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Catan One of the essential board games if you like classic strategy games is Catan. It is designed for three or four players and the games last between 45 minutes and an hour. This is a game for bring out your negotiating streak. From Catan, it can be noted that you will never play two identical games. Likewise, you can buy separately a good number of expansionswith which to give greater depth to the game and have new gameplay options. Devir – Catan, Board Game The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Taco, Cat, Goat, Cheese, Pizza On any Christmas evening with children, I personally recommend Taco, Cat, Goat, Cheese, Pizza; a very simple gamebut with which fun and laughter are more than guaranteed. Created by Lupilo, it is perfect for players from 8 years old and the games can be played up to a maximum of eight players. The mechanics are simple and when the card matches the word it says, the last one to put their hand on the central amount wins the pile. The games are also quick, about 10 minutes. Ludilo – Taco Gato Goat Cheese Pizza | Board Games The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Trivial Pursuit The last of the board games that we believe are essential in any home is Trivial Pursuit in your classic version. Above all, it is a perfect option to have fun while learning about different categories. Of course, you should know that it is a game suitable for those over 16 years of age, although there are also editions for children and with specific themes, such as harry potterFor example. The objective of the game is simple: go around the board and answer the questions correctly. six categories (entertainment, geography, science and nature, sports, art and literature, history and hobbies) and get a cheese of each color or category to be declared the winner. Hasbro Gaming Trivial Pursuit (in Spanish) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Exploding Kittens, Hasbro, In Xataka | The 41 Best Board Games: From ‘Catan’ to ‘Gloomhaven’ In Xataka | These are the board games that are never missing in my suitcase when I go on vacation with my partner

What comes after the coldest Christmas in 15 years?

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If this was ever normal, the truth is that, today, December 25, 2025, it has been something completely exceptional: we not only talk the coldest day of 2025we’re talking about the coldest Christmas in more than 15 years; We are talking about snow levels at 500 meters and thermometers at -6ºC in half of Spain. Although the warnings have been limitedare big words. What has really happened? Something very simple, really: a combination of polar air and precipitation in the east. It is the result of atmospheric blocking to the north with the consequent diversion of cold air masses towards our latitudes (and the successive arrivals of storms from the west also linked to that blockage). Be that as it may, the result is the same: a few icy days, with frost in the interior and in the mountains, snow at low levels and problems on around thirty roads. And, of course, as usually happens, while we focus on the ‘snow’, the real risk is on the ice. The sum of night frosts and humidity generates invisible plaques on secondary roads and mountain passes. That in a period of very high mobility (like Christmas) is a ticking time bomb. The underlying question, however, is another.. We already know that a day at -6 degrees is not enough for us to talk about a cold wave. And yet, the social sensation is clear: in a climate framework that tends to make this increasingly rare, a cold episode of this type is beginning to be very striking. But what will come next? The answer, depending on available modelsis that the cold “loses its bite”; but the minimum temperatures will remain low so the risk of frost will not decrease. For its part, during the weekend, instability will last a little longer in the Mediterranean and the Andalusian Atlantic coast. Then New Year’s Eve will comeanother of those “big days” in mobility. There we also expect colder than normal in almost all of Spain (except in the Canary Islands). However, no heavy rain is expected. January is still too far away to know what will happen for sure. Something we are not used to. We must not forget that Christmas 2023 It was very mild; we spent 2022 almost in short sleeve with “values ​​within the 95% percentile: that is, temperatures could occur in the range of the 5% of highest temperatures recorded for the date.” And what 2021 was closed with temperatures up to 25 degrees in places like Bilbao airport. The normal thing, lately, is an increasingly warm December in a context of increasingly warmer years. So we better enjoy it, it doesn’t seem like this cold is going to be common in the coming years. Image | ECMWF In Xataka | La Niña is going to be meteorologically “less intense” than we expected. And that actually hides a problem.

China has been dumping tons of sand into the ocean for 12 years. And now we are seeing islands emerging in the middle of nowhere

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It has been more than a decade since China began a striking strategy of territorial expansion: throwing tons of sand into the South China Sea. This is not unique to China and, in fact, Japan thus built an airport that soon it will be an underwater airportbut China is doing it massively and with one objective: to claim what is its own. And seeing how they raise these artificial islands is… hypnotic. Context. The end of 2013 marked a turning point in China: the country started to massively fill in seven of the reefs of the Nansha and Xisha archipelagos (Spratly and Paracels, respectively). In record time between December of that year and June 2015, China carried out the first phase of the operation: the filling phase. From 2015 onwards, they have dedicated themselves to consolidate that territory through the construction of infrastructure such as landing strips, hangars, ports, radars and support structures. According to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, between December 2015 and October 2015, China had built artificially about 12 km² of land on the Nansha reefs. While the United States said it with concern, the Chinese media confirmed the information with pride. Before and then How they do it. They did not use overly complex methods to do so. On the one hand, they cut the coral bottom and pumped sediments to shallow areas. The earth was deposited as fill to later build dikes and retaining walls around the reef. The next step was to deposit more fill and, finally, large steamrollers and shovels were compacting that earth to give consistency to the whole. The last thing was to create paving, landing strips, roads and other infrastructure. The result is more than 12 km², and put in context they represent “17 times more land claimed in 20 months than all the other international claimants have achieved during the last 40 years.” In action. Seeing the satellite photos that show the before and after, something easy to do using the history function of Google Earth, is interesting, but seeing a timelapse of how one of these new territories has been built is, as I said, something hypnotic. An example, the following video ‘tweet‘ (if you can’t see it, click on it): Narrative. What motivation does China have for such a deployment of resources and money? It depends who you ask. On the one hand, the Chinese government has defended that the creation of these islands serves the support in rescue missions on the high seasalso to fishing, scientific research, navigation support points thanks to these radars and the collection of data for its meteorological service. Finally, it also serves for defense if necessary. The neighbors are not convinced by the explanation and, in fact, think that it is a strategy that responds to a single interest: claiming territories that China considers its property. The Ministry of Defense of Japan assures that these infrastructures allow a permanent Chinese presence in waters that do not belong to it, with offensive capacity in practically the entire South China Sea. Military. Recent reports, such as the one from CSIS in 2025, underlines that China’s recent near-perennial activity in the South China Sea has only been possible thanks to that decade-old construction work. Western analyzes they point that the runways for aircraft are prepared for combat aircraft and land transport, as well as the presence of ports for warships, underground facilities and even missile platforms. The tension is evident because Beijing claims sovereignty over territories that its neighbors deny. Those neighbors are Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan or the Philippines. And Vietnam, in fact, is doing the same thing as China in 2013: throwing land into the sea. Their progress has also been considerable in a short time in an area that has become a real hotbed. The ecological impact. But beyond the intentions of each other, something undeniable that cannot be hidden under any narrative is the environmental damage that these artificial islands cause to their surroundings. In some articles it has been indicated that this ‘island’ desire has caused the loss of some 12 to 18 km² of reef, damaging some of the best preserved reefs in the region directly, but also affecting distant systems due to the ‘clouds’ of sediment formed during the dumping of sediments. Chinese scientific articles have also shown that these practices eliminate completely the ecosystem of the occupied area and negatively affects currents and sediment patterns, causing the aforementioned degradation of neighboring areas. However, the State Oceanic Administration of China defend that all projects were thoroughly evaluated and do not harm corals. The fault of it? Global trends such as sea acidification or climate change. Images | Ma Wukong In Xataka | China is building something that looks like an oil well. It is actually a nuclear bunker with a command center

30 years later it is the glue that keeps the internet alive

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Three decades ago, a joint release from Netscape and Sun Microsystems introduced the world to JavaScript, a scripting language designed for creating interactive web applications. Behind that press release A story of technological survival was hidden: said language had been born months before, the result of a frenetic ten-day sprint led by engineer Brendan Eich. What began as a hurried prototype to give life to the netscape browserhas today become the infrastructure that supports a huge percentage of the visible web. The myth of ten days. The legend tells that Eich wrote the core JavaScript in just over a week. And it is true, but the result was a hybrid of influences. Pressured by Netscape management to make the language more like Java, Eich adopted a syntax of curly braces and semicolons. However, under the hood, it injected the functional elegance of Scheme and Self’s prototype-based object model. This mix, born out of haste, left a legacy of technical inconsistencies that developers still suffer from (and love) today. From Mocha to confusion. You may not know that the language was not always called that. It was born as Mocha, became LiveScript and was finally named JavaScript in a marketing maneuver to take advantage of the popularity of Java. What’s more, the confusion over names continues to this day among less knowledgeable users: but Java and JavaScript have the same thing to do with each other. car (car) and carpet (rug), as is usually answered when someone asks about their differences. The strategy worked, but angered rivals like Microsoft. His response was to create his own version called JScript, something that caused notable fragmentation that made Bill Gates himself complain about Netscape’s constant changes. To bring order to the chaos, the language ended up being established in 1997 under the name ECMAScript. Image by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash Ajax and the conquest of the server. For years, JavaScript was seen as a toy for doing simple validations, but that all changed in 2005 with the arrival of AJAX. This technology It allowed websites like Gmail or Maps to update data without reloading the page: the step was taken from static websites to dynamic apps. The second leap occurred in 2009 with Node.js, which took JavaScript out of the browser and onto the server. Key for developers to use a single language for the entire stack and which now involves between two and three million packages in the npm registry. Absolute domain. Despite the emergence of modern rivals, the hegemony of JavaScript is indisputable. According to the 2025 Stack Overflow surveycontinues to be the language most used by 62% of developers, something that puts them ahead of others such as Python or SQL. Its ubiquity is such that it has transcended the web: it powers desktop apps using Electron, mobile development with React Native and even AI tools. It is the default language for learning to program and chosen by 60% of students. This mass success has brought with it a complexity in the JavaScript ecosystem: Frameworks like React, Angular and Vue dominate the market (used by 40% of web developers). The weight of libraries is beginning to take its toll on the performance of the web. Therefore, predictions for 2026 point to a resurgence of pure JavaScript either Vanilla JavaScript. Forced maturity. Despite its birth defects, JavaScript was able to evolve. In 2015, the ES6 update radically transformed the syntax, but the real paradigm shift came from Microsoft: with the TypeScript creationa layer of security and types was added that solved much of the original chaos, something that allowed it to become the almost mandatory standard for professional development. JavaScript is still the engine, but TypeScript is the precision flywheel. A legal problem called Oracle. The paradox of JavaScript is that, despite being an open standard, its name is proprietary. Oracle inherited the “JavaScript” trademark after purchasing Sun Microsystems, although it has never released a product with that name. Recently, key figures such as Brendan Eich himself and the creator of Node.js have signed a request so that the US patent office can cancel the trademark due to abandonment. The legacy of a hack. It is ironic that the companies that sponsored his birth have disappeared or been absorbed, while his creation remains more alive than ever. Authoritative voices like Douglas Crockford (creator of JSON) have come to suggest they should “retire” it for its basic design flaws, but the reality is that the modern web would not exist without it. JavaScript is not just code; is the lingua franca of the internet, the invisible glue that turns static documents into digital experiences. Without its existence, the network would only be a collection of texts and images without movement, something similar to a PDF newspaper that we see on our screen. In Xataka | There is a shadow giant pulling all the technological strings that connect TikTok with AI: Oracle

what happens when a Cabernet ages 20 years

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A bottle that has spent two decades in a cellar comes out of the shadows and rests on the table with the care reserved for something that has been awaited for years. It’s not just glass and label: it’s contained time, decisions made long before the world was what it is today. Before even uncorking it, the question arises: what has happened in there for 20 years? Wine is famous for improving with age, but the myth is based on one exception. As winemaker and critic Jancis Robinson recalls in his column for the Financial Timesless than 10% of the wine produced in the world is actually designed to age. Precisely for this reason, storing a bottle for two decades is not a romantic gesture, but rather a technical, chemical and, in part, risky bet. Understanding how it happens is understanding the true science of patience. The myth that it gets better with age. From the outside, the first thing that reveals the passage of time is color. A young Cabernet Sauvignon is usually opaque, violet, almost black. After twenty years, Robinson explains.that color has become lighter and garnet, ruby ​​and even brick shades appear on the edge of the glass. It is not a sign of decline, but of transformation. The wine has lost some of its original pigments because they have reacted with each other and with oxygen over the years. Something similar happens in the mouth. Cabernet Sauvignon is born with powerful, harsh, mouth-drying tannins. During aging, these tannins soften, the wine loses aggressiveness and gains complexity. Sediments appear in the bottle, the physical result of chemical reactions accumulated over decades. According to Robinsonthe big question for any wine intended for aging is whether it will have enough fruit, acidity and structure to survive that process. When it achieves this, the result is not a more intense wine, but rather a more subtle, deeper and, paradoxically, more fragile wine. For this reason, if Cabernet Sauvignon has become a privileged candidate for this trip, it is no coincidence. Its natural combination of abundant tannins, sufficient acidity and antioxidant capacity makes it one of the few varieties capable of communicating with time for decades without prematurely collapsing. Looking with the microscope. Wine aging is anything but passive. Various scientific publications, like the review Bottle Aging and Storage of Wines In the magazine Molecules, they explain that the main protagonist is oxygen. In trace amounts, oxygen slowly enters the bottle through the cork and triggers a series of controlled chemical reactions. Among them, the polymerization of tannins: small and aggressive molecules join together forming larger structures, perceived by our palate as softer and silkier. At the same time, the compounds responsible for color—especially anthocyanins—combine with tannins and other phenols. Studies like the one published in Foodsfocused on the chemical evolution of red wines during aging, show how these compounds decrease over time and give rise to new, more stable pigments. In parallel, the primary aromas of fresh fruit are transformed into what the popularizer Rana Masri described in The Grape Grind as tertiary aromas: tobacco, leather, humid forest, cigar box. They don’t appear out of nowhere; They are the result of decades of slow and irreversible molecular rearrangement. The final destination of wine. Aging does not depend only on the wine, but also of its environment. Storage conditions – stable temperature, darkness, humidity and absence of vibrations – are essential. A wine stored at 14ºC for twenty years does not age in the same way as one subjected to sudden changes in temperature. Time, in wine, needs calm to work well. Furthermore, the study Wine aging: a bottleneck story has shown that oxygen entry occurs not only through the cork, but also at the interface between the cork and the neck of the bottle. This explains why two bottles of the same wine, from the same batch, can evolve differently. Aging, even under ideal conditions, is not completely controllable. As they remember on the specialized page Wine Follyacidity, alcohol balance and tannin concentration determine whether a Cabernet is prepared for a long life or if it will collapse prematurely. Aging wine is not a guarantee of improvement, but rather a constant negotiation with failure. It won’t be the same to open a bottle. After twenty years, a Cabernet Sauvignon is not simply an older wine. It is the result of thousands of micro-decisions: of the viticulturist, of the winemaker, of the type of closure, of the winery and, finally, of the collector who decided not to open it before. Science explains much of the process, from the polymerization of tannins to the slow controlled oxidation, but there is always a margin of mystery. Wine ages, but it also risks. Maybe that’s why as Jancis Robinson points out with some ironymany wineries and collectors face the same dilemma, knowing when to stop waiting. Because wine, no matter how fascinating its molecular journey, is not made to be eternal. It is made to be drunk. And sometimes, the greatest act of wisdom is not to keep the bottle for another ten years, but to uncork it and accept that patience, after all, had a liquid destiny. Image | Unsplash Xataka | If the question is why are non-alcoholic drinks so expensive if they are not taxed, the answer is simple

Bermuda shouldn’t be there, but there is a compelling reason for it to remain after 30 million years

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Bermuda is an anomaly in themselvessince it is normal that they were not there. To understand it, you have to know that this volcanic archipelago was formed 30 million years ago, and the normal thing, after so much time of inactivity, is that the oceanic crust would have cooled and sank. But this has not happened, and science now believes it knows why. The study. A priori the islands should be submerged, but They are still there elevated about 500 meters above what would correspond and Yale University wanted to find the solution. And the truth is that they have found it hidden 20 kilometers under our feet. An x-ray of 400 earthquakes. To solve the mystery, researchers did not use excavators but seismic waves. Analyzing the data of almost 400 earthquakes recorded by the BBSR station in the Bermudathe team managed to create a map of the innermost layers beneath the archipelago. What they found is a unique structure in the world: a lower layer about 20 kilometers thick located right between the planet’s crust and mantle. And its function is really important, since it acts as a floating support that keeps the Bermuda on the surface without sinking. And all thanks to the fact that it has a much lower density than the material that surrounds it that generates a buoyant force. Something unique. Beyond understanding why Bermuda is still there, we also see that this is a very unusual structure. So much so that it is unlike anything seen in other similar archipelagos, such as Hawaii. Its origin. When it comes to finding out how that plate is in its current location, there are several theories currently in force among the scientific community. The first of them is based on the fact that a remnant of volcanic activity from 30 million years ago was “sealed” under the crust. The second theory that is used focuses on a chemical process where sea water penetrates the rocks of the mantle, altering them and making them less dense, and, therefore, causing them to float. But whatever the origin, the study confirms that Bermuda sits on a tectonic anomaly that defies geological models. The end of myths. The truth is that Bermuda has always been a great mystery, starring for example in the ‘Bermuda Triangle‘ where it is said that things like airplanes disappear. Something that we try to explain with the meteorological phenomena that develop in this location. But what seems to have finally turned out is how Bermuda was in that location when it should have been on the seabed for many years. Although this has only made geologists have to rethink how tectonic plates work under the oceans. In Xataka | Spain turns in the opposite direction to the rest of Europe. It is part of a geological plan: close the Mediterranean

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