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We have been obsessed with measuring deep sleep with a watch for years. Science says what matters is dreaming vividly

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The reality is that waking up feeling like you’ve fallen asleep like a dormouse is one of the greatest pleasures in life, since it makes you start the day in a very different way. Until now, sleep science has told us that to achieve that feeling of rest we had to maximize deep sleepbut now the rarity and the intensity of dreams They are also gaining a starring role here. A new study. A recent published research in the prestigious magazine PLOS Biology by an Italian team has revealed that vivid and immersive dreams are directly related to a greater subjective sense of deep sleep. And most fascinating: this occurs even when the brain’s electrical activity tells us that we are in a phase of light sleep. How they have done it. To reach this conclusion, the researchers did not settle for morning surveys, but rather They took 44 adults healthy people to a sleep laboratory for four consecutive nights. Here they simply had to be connected to a high-density electroencephalogram to monitor their brain activity in real time. The methodology used was quite methodical, since all of them were awakened repeatedly, reaching the figure of 1,900 awakenings in total throughout the entire study. But they were not waking them up at any time, but rather sleep phase N2 which is what belongs to non-REM sleep and is what is considered relatively light sleep, where the biological need to sleep usually decreases as the night progresses. But the important thing is that, after each awakening, the participants had to describe their previous mental experiences and rate, from 1 to 10, how deep they felt their sleep had been just before opening their eyes. The result. By crossing the data from the dream stories with the EEG activity and the subjective perception of the participants, the scientists found a pattern that indicated that when the participants reported vivid, strange dreams, with high emotional intensity or very visually rich, they reported having been immersed in a very deep sleep. In contrast, if the mental activity before waking up was abstract, vague, or the participants had “meta-awareness,” which is thinking about real problems or being aware that they were sleeping, they felt that their sleep had been very superficial. A change. In this way, this sensation of dreamlike depth challenged the electroencephalograms themselves. And the fact is that, although the EEG showed that the participant’s brain activity was dangerously close to wakefulness, if he was immersed in an intense dream plot, his brain interpreted that he was resting peacefully. Memory doesn’t matter. One of the most interesting details of the study points to a situation that can be frustrating: waking up knowing that you had an incredible dream, but unable to remember the entire plot. Here the scientific study demonstrates that narrative memory is not necessary for rest, since the participants continued to rate their sleep as deep and restorative despite not remembering it. In this way, the simple fact that the brain has been “disconnected” from the physical environment and immersed in its own virtual world seems to be enough to preserve the subjective perception of rest. What does it mean? This discovery opens the door to new treatments for sleep disorders, since, in the case of insomnia, the problem could not only be in the clinical architecture of sleep, but in an alteration of dream activity or a lack of mental disconnection from the environment. And this is precisely where science has to begin to investigate. Images | iam_os In Xataka | Waking up at 3 in the morning is totally normal: sleeping straight through is a modern invention, not an evolution

A rural community lived isolated in caves for 500 years in Burgos. Their DNA revealed a dark history of inbreeding and smallpox

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In the year 711, an Umayyad army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and put an end to the Visigoth kingdom in less than a generation, starting a great upheaval in the Iberian Peninsula with many changes. Kingdoms that were born and died, power struggles and great mobility that began to shape the foundations of modern Europe. However, north of Burgos, a small group of people seemed to know absolutely nothing. Where. The rural site of Las Gobasin northern Spain, offers a vision of life far from those centers of power. One of the most outstanding medieval rock communities on the peninsula, located in the county of Treviño, near the town of Laño. Here the inhabitants dug churches, homes and graves directly into the limestone, where they began to live and die there for five centuries. And now we know that they did it with their backs to the world. How do we know? At the moment we do not have any time machine to see what happened in the past, but a scientific study revealed the secrets of this enigmatic Iberian community. Here the archaeological excavations in the cemetery They discovered the remains of 41 individuals from whom an attempt was made to extract their DNA. In this case they used all the tools available to reconstruct who they were, how they were related and what diseases they carried. What we knew is that the settlement existed from the mid-6th century to the 11th century and Las Gobas had a cemetery that was used continuously from the 7th to the 11th century. But the surprising thing is that it seemed like they were always the same people. Marry each other. The most striking finding of the study does not have to do with any virus or any fractured skull, but rather that approximately 61% of the individuals with sufficient genomic data showed signs of consanguinity, so this population was quite likely to practice inbreeding. And it was not something slight, since in some cases the researchers saw that there were marriages between siblings or even between parents and children. In this way, the only source of genetic variability that could be had in this population was only the women who arrived from abroad to marry. Although the truth is something quite scarce. There was no peace. It may be thought that isolation guarantees absolute peace in the population, but the first centuries of occupation were marked by brutality. The study of the bones in this case has found clear evidence that there was interpersonal violence, including serious bone injuries consistent with direct sword impacts. An invisible enemy. If swords weren’t enough in this case, the 10th century brought with it a lethal, microscopic threat. The metagenomic analyzes carried out have made it possible to detect pathogens and zoonotic diseases, identifying traces of smallpox. Although what is fascinating about this discovery is not only that We are facing the oldest documented evidence of smallpox in southern Europe, but where it came from. Although the south of the peninsula was a commercial hotbed dominated by the Islamic world, smallpox did not reach the south from the Gobas. But the truth is that its genetic signature is similar to the Nordic and European strains of the time. How did it arrive? That a disease from the Vikings or one that was present in Central Europe reached some isolated caves in Burgos is no coincidence. Here the researchers pointed to the nascent European pilgrimage routes, specifically to the first steps of the Camino de Santiago, as the entry route for the pathogen. And although the inhabitants of Las Gobas avoided mixing with their neighbors to the south, the incipient religious and commercial traffic from the north ended up breaking, at least on an epidemiological level, their isolation bubble. Images | Wikipedia Trevino County In Xataka | After 114 years, a scan of the Titanic shows a key fact about its crew: the bravery with which they fought until the end

60 years ago, NASA took a look at the Sahara from space and found a very strange “perfect eye”

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Although we tend to think that the unknown is in space and we focus our exploration on what is outside the Earth, our planet continues to surprise us: from the 50,000 volcanoes hidden in the seabed to shapes and constructions that seem too curious to have appeared out of nowhere… especially when we see them from space. It is the case of Great Dam of Zimbabwe (which by the way, is not a dam). We are not leaving the African continent because there is another scar of land with a shape so precise that it is disconcerting. It can’t be seen from the ground, but as you gain height it can be seen better. However, it is from space where it is best appreciated, as NASA has already photographed. There it is simply shocking: it is the inexplicable eye of the Sahara. It is a kind of giant eye that looks at the sky engraved in the rock of the Sahara, it is actually called Richat structure. As says French astronaut Thomas Pesquetalmost all astronauts have taken a photo of it from space simply because it can’t be missed. The Britannica Encyclopedia assures that World War II pilots used it as a reference point. Tap to go to the post After all, they are almost 50 kilometers in diameter. To get an idea, if we moved it to Madrid, it would cover the entire city and reach surrounding municipalities. However, it is in Mauritania, at the western end of the Sahara. More specifically, it sits on the Adrar plateau, on the northwestern edge of the Taoudenni basin, about 500 meters above sea level and in an inhospitable area. As a curiosity, the closest town is Ouadane, it is about 17 kilometers from the edge of the structure and it is not just any city: it was founded in 1147 by the Idalwa el Hadj Berber tribe and its old part has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. The first time we “discovered” it (that is to say, because it was already there) was in the 1930s and 1940s and the person who studied it in depth at that time was the French geographer Jacques Richard-Molard. Later, astronauts James McDivitt and Ed White, aboard the Gemini IV mission, were the first to photograph it from space in 1965. However, the image that illustrates the cover was taken on July 10, 2020 by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, during the Expedition 63 mission, with a Nikon D5 camera with a 50 millimeter lens. Richat’s structure from the inside. Clemens Schmillen What is the Richard Structure and how was it formed? From that orbital height the image shows something that would be impossible to capture from the ground: a series of perfect concentric rings, like the waves left by a stone when it falls into water, but petrified in the desert. The tones of that figure range from ocher to bluish gray, from almost pristine white to rusty red. Each color is a different rock and belongs to a different era. Surrounding the structure, a sea of ​​dunes: on the right, longitudinal dunes that stretch in long parallel tongues and on the left, transverse dunes, wider and more arched. The set is truly strange to have formed naturally. POT Because it is not a lake that has dried up over time. It is neither a volcano nor the crater of a meteorite (the hypothesis which was most popular initially). It’s something much slower but just as violent: is the result of millions of years of geological forces working silently beneath the planet’s surface. And although the group as such was formed about 100 million years ago, those rocks are up to 2.5 billion years old. Or in other words, the Eye of the Sahara was forged in the Cretaceous, but the rocks belong to the time when there were no animals, only bacteria and algae. The Richat Structure is a deeply eroded geological anticline dome that was formed by a subsurface igneous intrusion, which deformed the overlying sedimentary rock layers, exposing concentric rings with the oldest rocks in the center. In a simplified way, a bubble of rock that never burst: the magma from inside the Earth pushed up the layers of rock above it and cooled without reaching the surface. The passage of time eroded that bubble as if it were an onion, exposing the rings of each layer. The hardest rocks resisted and formed the relief, the soft ones disappeared. Hence the circles. The most recent studies They confirm that there was also hot water circulating inside the structure, which accelerated and modeled the final shape. In Xataka | A 2.5 billion-year-old geological wonder: Zimbabwe’s Great Dam seen by NASA from space In Xataka | This is the impressive interactive map to see the Earth in 4K live from space and monitor satellites Cover | POT

a journey of 550 years of colonialism through an illuminating graphic

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On August 14, 1415 in Ceuta, a Portuguese troop under the command of King John I landed in the North African city and conquered it in less than a day. This overseas adventure would mark the starting signal for an aggressive policy that would mark the world geography for centuries to come: that of European powers permanently taking possession of a territory outside the old continent with a clear will to squat itkeep it and exploit it. Colonialism. The Oxford University-linked project Our World in Data has some magnificent open access work such as this either this which are worth stopping and taking a look at. The data from the last come from Colonial Dates Dataset and are prepared by researcher Bastian Becker from the University of Bremen and are the ones Visual Capitalist has condensed in the form of an infographic, synthesizing the data of the best historians of colonialism. In short: a lot of information in a single image that shows the rise and fall of many European empires. Visual Capitalist. Data from Our World in Data – Colonialism Portugal, it all started with you. Officially we can frame the Portuguese empire in a time frame between 1415 and 1999. Portugal was not so much interested in expanding but rather have access to the gold of West Africa, to the spices of the East and to seek Christian allies against Islam. His sequence of conquests was unstoppable: in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, in 1498 Vasco da Gama arrived in India, in 1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral touched Brazil. Its model was that of a network of coastal enclaves, although it also had large territorial colonies such as Brazil, Angola and Mozambique. Visual Capitalist. Data from Our World in Data – Colonialism The Empire where the sun never sets. A short time later, the Spain that was being formed after the wedding of Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon and the conquest of the strategic and independent Kingdom of Navarra. The empire where the sun never sets (referring to the period of Charles I and Philip II) is formally delimited between 1492 and 1976. Spain opted for territorial control: in a matter of a few decades it had overthrown the Aztec and Inca empires in blood, fire and smallpox. In the 18th century the Spanish empire covered 13.7 million square kilometers and was made up of viceroyalties, House of Contract, Councils of India… a display of global governance that got out of hand. France, Great Britain and the others. The real furor of this policy came in 1914, at which time there were 101 colonies. The spotlight fell on Great Britain, where the Industrial Revolution constituted a true differential advantage in the form of capital, railways and weapons to lay the foundations for the largest empire in history. In fact, at that height more than half of the colonies were theirs. France focused mainly on Africa and Southeast Asia, while others such as Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy were left with some succulent leftovers scattered mainly in Africa, but also in Asia. The mechanism of colonization in its maximum expression was synthesized in the Berlin conference (1885) where the European powers literally divided up Africa without any African people being present. Visual Capitalist. Data from Our World in Data – Colonialism The B side of colonization. The graph shows numbers, curves and colors, but the real story is much darker and not only because of the looting. The academic project “Dartmouth & Slavery Project” of the famous Dartmouth University reflects that 74% of the indigenous population of the Americas was annihilated between 1492 and 1800, either by direct violence or by diseases to which they were not immune. In Africa things were no better: between 25 and 30 million people were torn from their homes to be enslaved, as explains Amnesty International. The consequences are not only historical: colonialism generated racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia, as recognized the Durban Declaration in 2001. The great absence: Russia. The graph tracks overseas colonies and there Russia appears marginal, but because where others expanded by sea, the Russian Empire did so by land: over time it covered Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus and parts of Eastern Europe. This study of Loyola University Chicago concludes that the Russian Empire was “a colonial empire in denial,” with essentially colonial practices, especially in Asia. The end of empires: decolonization and inheritances. The colonization process went slowly but surely until it reached its peak and then it collapsed. The two world wars exhausted the powers economically, militarily and also morally (their population) and at that juncture the independence movements found the perfect moment. The Napoleonic Wars were the ideal occasion for the decolonization of Iberian America and in the 20th century, the wave of decolonization swept Africa and Asia in a few decades, although today some overseas territories still persist in special conditions that, although they are no longer considered colonies in the strict and traditional sense of the term, still have self-determination on the table. In Xataka | Africa has more than 30,000 kilometers of coastline and one country has managed to control them without anyone noticing: China In Xataka | The death of one empire is the birth of another: the graph that reviews the history of civilizations from 4,000 years ago Cover | Visual Capitalist

the shipwreck from 2,000 years ago that reveals the “luxuries” of the Roman legions in Switzerland

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Few products of Mediterranean gastronomy are as iconic as wine or olive oil. In fact, if we take a look at current exports of the Spanish statewe will check that both are still at the top. This is not something new: two millennia ago, the Roman Empire had already converted the Iberian Peninsula into one of its great strategic pantries. One of the most compelling evidence is It is Monte Testaccioa 50-meter-high artificial hill in the center of Rome made from the remains of ceramic amphorae, 80% of which came from Baetica (today, Andalusia) and brought olive oil. It wasn’t just trade: it was logistics on an imperial scale, organized and sustained for centuries. That this network reached very far is something that the archaeological record continues to confirm: one of the latest and most impressive finds is in the depths of the Swiss lake of Neuchâtel. The discovery. In the Swiss lake of Neuchâtel they have found the cargo of “the wreck of the Eagles”, a ship sunk between the years 17 and 50 AD, in the middle of the Roman Empire. From 2024 to the present the Octopus Foundation has recovered approximately 600 pieces: hundreds of almost intact plates, platters, bowls and glasses, two large fragments of amphorae for oil or wine, a wicker basket preserved in the lime of the lake with the crew’s kitchen utensils, metal tools, harness and shooting equipment, four cart wheels, legionary weapons, among other elements. Why is it important. The most interesting thing about this discovery is that the Roman Empire had a primitive globalization insofar as they were able to distribute their lands throughout the length and breadth, which was not small: It covered three continents: from Great Britain to the Carpathians in Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor. The Roman soldiers in Switzerland did not only eat local products, but also had access to the flavors of their land. On the other hand, it is worth highlighting the exceptional conservation, something that has been helped by the cold waters and the lack of oxygen at the bottom. Furthermore, the archaeological context is intact, allowing the reconstruction of its organization on board and the combination of evidence of civil tableware, land transport equipment and military weapons. Context. The hypothesis The one on which the research team is working points to the Legio A constant supply was needed to maintain a legion of about 6,000 men. Thus, the cargo would have traveled by cart to the Roman port of Yverdon, south of the lake and from there it would have crossed it to the north. As the cause of the sinking, the team points to a gust of wind when approaching the Thielle channel. That there are swords suggests that it was not a military ship but a merchant ship under armed escort. Be careful, no structural traces of the boat have been found, only its cargo, hence the team does not rule out that the boat did not sink at all or that it did so in another place. The only thing we are clear about that was lost at the bottom of the lake was the cargo. Octopus Foundation Oil or wine? At the moment the Octopus Foundation describe the amphorae only as containers intended for the transport of oil or wine, without further precision, which is why further analysis is pending to clear up doubts. Today olive oil and wine may be associated with more select consumer products, but in ancient Rome they were essential items: liquid gold was used for almost everythingfrom cooking to lighting with lamps through personal hygiene and even for sports, medicine and rituals. And the wine, even if it was diluted with water, formed part of the daily diet of all social classesincluding troops. Octopus Foundation How it is being excavated. The detection of the cargo was aerial, using a drone in winter, when the visibility of the lake is greater. Thanks to 3D photogrammetry they were able to generate maps of the site, which they then divided into grids to determine the exact position of the objects found. They then photographed each piece and recorded it in situ before being extracted individually. The site was kept secret during the year between the two campaigns and was monitored with underwater cameras developed expressly for the project. The urgency to act came from a real threat: the sediments that had protected the cargo for centuries had eroded as a consequence of the hydraulic corrections of the Jura in the 19th and 20th centuries, leaving the pieces exposed to currents, anchoring of recreational boats and looting. What’s coming now. The extracted pieces are being analyzed in the Laténium laboratory with the aim of identifying pottery workshops, determining the content of the amphorae using residual organic chemistry and reconstructing trade routes. Once these doubts have been unraveled, its final destination is a public exhibition at the Neuchâtel archeology museum. In Xataka | The Romans were thirsty for oil and we have just found in Tunisia the second largest press of the Empire In Xataka | The most polarizing and divisive scientific debate of the moment has to do with wine. With one 1,700 years old Cover | Octopus Foundation and Rahime Gül

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

a puppy from 15,800 years ago rewrites the history of domestication

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For many, the dogs they live with They are another member of the familybecause the link that is created surpasses many friends with other humans. And it is no wonder, because we have been living with them for millennia, but the exact origin of our bond in history has always been involved in a scientific debate. But this has finally been solved thanks to genetics. The study. They have been two monumental published reviews in Nature those that have hit the table thanks to the analysis of the DNA of a puppy that lived 15,800 years ago at the Pınarbaşı site, in modern-day Turkey. This discovery has not only set back the biological clock of our canine companions by at least 5,000 years, compared to previous genetic records, but demonstrate that our alliance with wolves was forged long before we invented agriculture. A puppy with honors. The discovery is undoubtedly a triumph of pelogenetics, since for years scientists depended on the shape of bones to distinguish between a wolf and a primitive dog, a method that has many errors. But now science has turned to the genetic material found inside your cells to clear up any doubt. The remains of three puppies were found at the site, but what is fascinating is not only their antiquity, but also how they lived. Here the chemical analysis that was carried out reveals that these animals had a diet surprisingly similar to that of the humans with whom they lived, including a strong base of fish. Furthermore, they were buried following human rituals, which is a posthumous treatment that demonstrates a deep emotional bond. Its expansion. But the Turkish puppy is not an isolated case, since the first study of Nature demonstrate that, by the Late Upper Paleolithic, dogs had already spread rapidly throughout western Eurasia. Here the team also analyzed remains found in Gough’s Cave, in the United Kingdom. There they identified another domesticated dog from 14,300 years ago whose jaw had perforations, again suggesting ritual practices. The most interesting thing is that, despite the enormous geographical distance that separates Turkey from England, the genomes of both animals present strong genetic similarities, confirming that they belonged to the same large population of Paleolithic dogs. Another study. In parallel, he wanted to broaden the panorama after examine the remains of 200 European dogs from more than 14,000 years ago, managing to confirm the presence of another primitive dog in Kesslerloch (Switzerland), dated at 14,200 years. This second team demonstrated that the lineages of these first Paleolithic dogs did not become extinct, but rather that their genetic signatures have survived and are present in the modern dogs that sleep on our sofas today. Before agriculture. The most classical culture told us that the domestication of animals was a by-product of the Neolithic, since here we began to settle, invented agriculture, and along the way, we domesticated animals. But this has completely changed with these studies, since the genomes analyzed confirm that these dogs descend from a lineage of ancient wolves that formed an integral alliance with strictly hunter-gatherer humans. Images | Road Ahead In Xataka | Traveling with a dog is increasingly common, so the European Commission has decided something: mandatory passport

China has been boasting about its driverless robotaxis for years. Until more than 100 have stood at once in Wuhan

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The screen inside said: “Driving system failure. Staff will arrive in five minutes.” But no one came. The passenger pressed the SOS button and was told they were on their way, but it took 30 minutes just to get someone to pick up the phone. Meanwhile, the robotaxi was still stopped in the middle of a lane in Wuhan, with traffic passing on both sides. That is what happened on the night of Tuesday, April 1, in the Chinese city of Wuhan: More than a hundred autonomous cars from Apollo Go, Baidu’s robotaxis subsidiary, have stopped working at the same time due to a system failure. It is the first time that a collective robotaxis blackout has occurred in China, and it has exposed a concern that the sector has been avoiding for some time. Why is it important. Baidu is not a minor player. Apollo Go operates more than 1,000 robotaxis in Wuhan alone, its largest deployment, and has already accumulated more than 20 million trips in its history. The company just started in Abu Dhabi and Dubaithe two large cities of the United Arab Emirates; It is negotiating its entry into the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and has an agreement with Uber to operate through its app. An incident of this magnitude doesn’t come at any time: it comes when the company, like its entire sector, is trying to convince the world that it is ready to scale. Between the lines. Technically, the incident could be explained in many ways. Some Chinese media cited anonymous sources who pointed to the security self-verification systems, which would have detected some abnormal condition and stopped the vehicles preventively. If this were the case, the system would have worked exactly as designed, but the result has been chaotic: cars stopped in the center lanes of expressways, some passengers trapped for more than 90 minutes, collisions caused by vehicles that suddenly braked on highways… That no one has been injured is almost a matter of luck. The contrast. It is not the only precedent. In December 2025, A power outage in San Francisco left Waymo robotaxis immobilized throughout the cityforcing Waymo to send software updates for its entire fleet. Months before, in August, An Apollo Go fell into a ditch in Chongqing; in may, a Pony.ai car caught fire in Beijingwithout causing injuries. It’s easy to see a certain pattern: large-scale autonomous driving has not yet achieved the reliability it needs to justify the trust that is being asked of the public. And now what. Cars stopping is a problem, but an even bigger problem is that no one knows why. Baidu has not explained what caused the failure or how long it took to resolve it. Wuhan police have confirmed the incident but without giving further details about the cause. This opacity weighs as much or more than the incident, especially if we talk about a sector that has been arguing for years that its cars are safer than those driven by humans. We assume that is very true, but block failures like this do not invite optimism without questions. Featured image | Baidu-Apollo In Xataka | Waymo’s self-driving cars have started honking at each other. At 4 in the morning

Artemis II takes off successfully and humanity returns to the Moon after more than 50 years

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Artemis II It has taken off successfully and we are not facing just any launch. What we have seen marks the return of beings humans heading to the Moon more than half a century after the last missions of the Apollo program, a milestone that for decades seemed reserved for the history books. This time, furthermore, it is not just about returning, but about taking a crew further from Earth than any human being has gone in more than half a century, in a mission designed to validate NASA’s deep exploration system in real conditions. To understand the dimension of this takeoff, it is worth stopping for a moment at what exactly Artemis II is. The mission represents the first crewed flight of NASA’s new exploration system, which combines the Orion spacecraft, the SLS rocket and the Kennedy Space Center’s ground systems. For approximately ten days, the astronauts will evaluate the behavior of the ship in real deep space conditions, something that until now had only been tested without people on board. NASA itself raises it as an essential step to pave the way for future missions designed to return to the lunar surface. The journey that returns humans to the lunar environment Before reaching this moment, what we have had has been a countdown with some tension. In the hours before, the teams had to review an anomaly in a temperature sensor of a battery of the abort system, which NASA attributed to an instrumentation problem and which, according to the agency, would not affect the launch. Added to this was another incident in the flight termination system, the safety mechanism that allows the rocket to be destroyed if it deviates from its trajectory and poses a threat, a problem that placed the mission in “no go.” Both setbacks were left behind before takeoff and are now part of the background of a day that finally went ahead. The planned flight path of Artemis II Over the next few days, what we will see will be a relatively short, but very demanding mission. After launch, the spacecraft will first enter a high orbit around the Earth for about 24 hours to check that all systems are working correctly, before beginning the journey to the Moon. From there, the crew will perform various maneuvers, including a manual control test and approach to the upper stage of the SLS, to validate Orion’s behavior in real situations. The plan is to circle the Moon and return without setting foot on our satelliteon a journey of about ten days designed to rehearse each key phase of the trip. The crew of Artemis II If you look at the crew, What we find is a very measured mix of experience and symbolism. Reid Wiseman is the mission commander, accompanied by Victor Glover as pilot and Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen as mission specialists, four profiles who have already experienced space first-hand. Together they have accumulated 660 days in orbit and 12 spacewalks, which fits with a mission in which every decision counts. Added to that is something that also weighs: Koch will be the first woman to travel to the Moon and Hansen the first non-American to do so, opening a new stage in who is part of these trips. There is a detail that touches us a little more closely and that we should not lose sight of. Part of this mission also passes through Spainspecifically by Tres Cantos, in Madrid, where Airbus Crisa has designed, manufactured and validated the Thermal Control Unit of the European Service Moduleintegrated into Orion. This system is responsible for supplying air and water to the crew and maintaining the temperature within appropriate levels for both the astronauts and the equipment. It is a discreet piece within the whole, but without it it would not be possible to sustain a mission like this in safe conditions. In development. Images | POT In Xataka | The Artemis II astronauts will carry out experiments in what will be their own study models

Until now Cantabria was only a transit area for flamingos. They have been refusing to fly south for three years

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When we talk about climate changewe automatically think of melting glaciers or crops altering, but we must also take into account that biodiversity maps are being redesigned in real time. This is what we are seeing in the north of Spain, where southern flamencos have begun to consider Cantabria as your new residence of winter. What the census says. In order to see how the habits of flamingos are changing, we have to turn to the census of wintering waterfowl in Cantabria, which indicates that right now there is a stable population of about 25 southern flamingos who have been settled in the region for three consecutive winters without emigrating. These specimens arriving from the Mediterranean Sea have decided that the climate and conditions of the Cantabrian Sea are sufficient to avoid having to continue their journey to the warmer southern latitudes. And the culprit of this is climate change. The problem of winter. The theory tells us that this type of animal species usually always go to places with optimal temperatures, causing them to be in the north in summer and in the south in winter. But this has changed radically, and these migratory birds are slowly becoming one of the best thermometers of global warming. The explanation here lies in the fact that winters on the Cantabrian coast are increasingly milder, causing this thermal increase to eliminate the barrier of extreme cold that traditionally forced these species, such as the flamingo, to flee to the south of the peninsula or North Africa. Adaptation of the species. By not facing severe frosts that freeze water and limit access to their food, flamingos find the energy expenditure of a long migratory journey unnecessary. They simply “stick” here to an area that is now hospitable. A perfect refuge. For a species to decide to stay, it is not enough for it to be less cold, but food and shelter are also needed. Here Cantabria has one of the richest and most important estuarine complexes in northern Spain. The flamingos in this case have concentrated their colony in two key points of the Cantabrian geography: the bay of Santander and the estuarine complex of the Marinas of Santoña, Victoria and Joyel. Here the high wetland quality It guarantees an ecosystem rich in the small crustaceans and microorganisms that these birds feed on. Images | Jannes Jacobs In Xataka | These birds travel more than 3,000 kilometers every year to reach Spain. The curious thing is that some arrive without fingers

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