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España-Argentina, el Mundial más grande y el regreso de EBRO: la otra historia de la final de 2026

18 July 2026 at 15:44
España y Argentina disputan la final del Mundial más grande, pero fuera del césped aparece otra trama: el regreso de EBRO, una fábrica recuperada en Barcelona y una alianza con tecnología china que resume los dilemas de la industria europea.

The Bear Team Releases Public Beta of Lettera, a New Mac Markdown Editor

18 June 2026 at 18:21

Today, the team behind note-taking app Bear announced the public beta of Lettera, a new Mac text editor, based on Panda, an earlier beta that was used to work out the Bear 2.0 text editing engine. That immediately caught my eye because I’ve been using Panda for months. In fact, it’s the default way I open Markdown files now.

What drew me to Panda was the automation work I’ve been doing with agents. I use the Superpowers plugin (which got an excellent 6.0 update this week) with both Codex and Claude Code, which generates plans, design documents, and specs as part of its process. Panda turned out to be a great way to read those documents because the Bear 2.0 UI is excellent, and with Panda, I could open any Markdown file as a standalone document that didn’t require importing it into Bear itself.

According to the Bear team’s post today, Lettera is designed to preserve Panda’s simple approach to Markdown files and extend it to the Mac’s file system:

Lettera works around your setup. Open a single file to read and edit it, or open a folder as your writing workspace…

That way, Lettera can be used as your default Markdown editor no matter where Markdown files are saved, which is how I’ve been using Panda, or as a text editor with a dedicated folder of working files in iCloud, which is a departure from Bear, which hides the file system from users. Other features will be familiar to anyone who has used Bear before, including its excellent Markdown rendering, versioning, a table of contents sidebar, and support for multiple export formats.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of Lettera, but I was already a fan of the more limited Panda, so I expect Lettera to quickly become the text editor I use for any writing that isn’t an article like this one, for which I’m still using Obsidian, thanks to its extensive plugin catalog.

You can download the beta of Lettera from the Bear post announcing the app.

AI companies want to water down Australia’s copyright laws. Artists are outraged, Labor is split

Anthony Albanese will deliver a landmark speech on AI this week as MPs are torn between attracting datacentre investment and protecting the rights of creatives

When Anna Funder stood before a pack of journalists at Parliament House this month, she presented herself not just as a writer but also a “victim of crime”.

The Stasiland author was using the analogy to illustrate how technology companies have flagrantly “hoovered up” her literary works for their own profit.

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© Composite: Victoria Hart/AAP/Getty Images

© Composite: Victoria Hart/AAP/Getty Images

© Composite: Victoria Hart/AAP/Getty Images

Wally Funk, last of Mercury 13 and oldest woman in space, dies at 87

10 July 2026 at 12:30

Wally Funk, who in 2021 became the oldest woman to fly into space—60 years after she and 12 other women sought the same opportunity as NASA's original astronauts—died on Wednesday at 87 years old.

Funk was the last living member of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (FLATs, or as they were later dubbed by the media, the Mercury 13), a group of women pilots who volunteered to go through the same physical and psychological tests as the United States' first spacemen.

Despite performing as well or better than their male counterparts, though, the Lovelace Woman in Space Program was conducted separately from NASA, and the space agency required that its astronauts be test pilots with jet time. The US military, however, did not accept women into its flight programs.

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Scientists Used Water to Uncover a Strange, ‘Invisible’ Quantum Phenomenon That Remained Elusive for Decades

30 June 2026 at 13:17

A team of physicists set out to recreate a 60-year-old quantum mystery using a large water tank. While their experiment produced the expected results, it also revealed an unexpected behavior in the water.

The experiment centered on the Aharonov–Bohm effect, a strange quantum phenomenon where electrons respond to a magnetic field even when they never actually pass through it. First predicted back in 1959, this effect has been notoriously difficult to confirm because the changes it causes in electron waves are incredibly subtle.

Instead of using electrons and a particle accelerator, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), along with collaborators in Oslo and Chile, recreated the effect using water waves, making an otherwise invisible quantum effect visible in a tabletop experiment. The team reported their findings in Communications Physics.

A 1980 Idea Gets a Modern Upgrade

In 1980, physicist Michael Berry showed that classical systems could model the Aharonov–Bohm effect. In this analogy, a vortex at the center of a water tank replaces the solenoid that creates a magnetic field in the quantum experiment. Water waves take the place of electrons. When these waves travel around the vortex, rather than through it, they acquire a measurable distortion. This appears as a pitchfork-shaped pattern in the wave fronts, showing that the vortex changes the phase of the waves without direct contact. The OIST team extended the approach by testing a new scenario.

“With waves traveling the opposite direction, you see a mirror image pattern,” says Jonas Rønning, co- author and former postdoc in the OIST unit. “The question for us was, what happens if you send waves from both directions at the same time? We thought that the patterns might cancel each other out, or both pitchfork-like patterns would be visible, but our intuition was completely wrong.”

Two Waves Walk Into a Vortex

The researchers constructed a custom tank, created a vortex at its center, and sent waves from opposite sides to meet in the middle. They used a high-speed camera to observe how the waves interacted on the water’s surface.

Without a vortex, the peaks and troughs remain in place. When the vortex is there, the standing wave breaks down. The vortex shifts the phase of the waves as they travel around it, altering the standing-wave interference pattern and creating rotating nodal lines. These are lines of momentarily flat water that spiral outward and turn in the opposite direction of the vortex.

“This was something new and unexpected,” says Aditya Singh, a PhD student in the Nonlinear and Non-equilibrium Physics Unit and co-first author of the study. “That’s what makes this fluid analogue system so valuable. It reveals topological effects — wave behaviors that occur across the whole system — that can’t be seen in quantum experiments.”

At first, the team suspected their equipment was causing the rotating lines. However, the same pattern also appeared in their computer simulations.

“When we first saw these lines, we thought they were an experimental artifact,” Singh says. “But when we also saw them in our simulations, we dropped everything and quickly worked out the mathematics underlying how they arise.”

More Speed, More Lines

As the strength of the vortex increased, more rotating nodal lines appeared, always moving in the direction opposite to the vortex. The study showed that the number of lines is quantized, meaning it is fixed to whole-number values determined by the vortex’s circulation. In other words, the topology of the vortex determines how many rotating nodal lines appear. This effect was observed across the entire wave field, not just near the vortex core as earlier models suggested.

This finding differs from Berry’s original experiment, which observed changes only near the vortex. In this case, the researchers discovered a non-local effect, a pattern that covers the entire system and depends on the overall setup. Instead of being limited to the area near the vortex, the rotating nodal lines appeared throughout the whole standing-wave pattern.

Although the practical uses of these newly discovered nodal patterns are not yet clear, the study shows that simple classical systems can reveal behaviors that are challenging to observe in quantum experiments. By making these effects visible, the researchers plan to explore more complex wave systems that could offer new insights into superconductivity and other quantum phenomena.

“One direction is to make the system more complex by introducing multiple vortices and arranging them into a lattice,” senior author Mahesh Bandi says. “That setup would mirror conditions in some superconducting materials, with the water waves behaving like a supercurrent. We don’t yet know what we’ll see — and that’s exactly what makes it worth doing.”

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

Desarrollo de nuevas tecnologías cuánticas de muy bajo consumo

16 July 2026 at 06:45
En el ámbito de la espintrónica superconductora, un campo de investigación emergente que aúna magnetismo y superconductividad, investigadores de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid han estudiado unos sistemas que transportan información magnética a largas distancias sin disipar energía. Se trata de sistemas híbridos formados por materiales como el vanadio o el hierro y una fina capa de óxido de magnesio. El hallazgo es un paso importante hacia una electrónica donde el calor desperdiciado y las pérdidas energéticas puedan reducirse drásticamente.

Anticipar el impacto climático del gas 2-fluorobutano: un reto clave para la industria química

14 July 2026 at 06:08
Actualmente, existen alternativas a los gases de efecto invernadero para determinados usos industriales, pero es importante evaluar con rigor su impacto climático. El grupo de investigación FOTOAIR de la Universidad de Castilla La Mancha ha estudiado el comportamiento atmosférico de un gas alternativo, el 2 fluorobutano. Los resultados muestran que tiene un tiempo de vida y un potencial de calentamiento global muy inferior a las estimaciones previas y a los límites regulatorios. Estos hallazgos evidencian la importancia de caracterizar rigurosamente los nuevos gases antes de su uso para reducir su impacto ambiental.

Lecciones de la DANA sobre el riesgo microbiológico del lodo tras una inundación

9 July 2026 at 06:57
Tras la DANA de 2024 en Valencia, el lodo depositado no fue solo un problema de limpieza. También era una matriz ambiental compleja formada por materia orgánica y restos urbanos. Este trabajo muestra que estos sedimentos contenían bacterias capaces de crecer en condiciones favorables, algunas propias de patógenos oportunistas. El hallazgo no debe interpretarse como una alarma sanitaria, sino como una llamada a incorporar la vigilancia microbiológica en la gestión de futuras inundaciones.

Las esponjas marinas, un filtro natural contra compuestos volátiles contaminantes en las costas

Se ha investigado por primera vez la capacidad de esponjas marinas mediterráneas para eliminar compuestos orgánicos volátiles del agua. Los resultados muestran que, especialmente las esponjas con alta abundancia microbiana, eliminan eficazmente halometanos, compuestos de azufre e isopreno a tasas muy superiores a las del bacterioplancton. Estos hallazgos revelan que las esponjas son importantes sumideros naturales de compuestos volátiles orgánicos y destacan su potencial para la biorremediación y la mejora de la calidad ambiental en zonas costeras.

Los europeos apoyamos el uso de la IA en la salud, pero con vigilancia y control público

La población europea tiene una predisposición favorable al uso de la inteligencia artificial en el ámbito sanitario, pero con matices. Los resultados de un estudio a partir de los datos del Eurobarómetro 551 muestran que este apoyo se encuentra acompañado de preocupaciones sobre privacidad, despersonalización y opacidad. La investigación subraya que una mayor aceptación del uso de la IA en la salud está asociada a una mayor demanda de regulación, evidenciando la importancia de la confianza y la gobernanza pública en estas cuestiones.

Materiales sostenibles para la captura selectiva de CO2 a partir de residuos de crustáceos

30 June 2026 at 06:54
Se ha investigado el desarrollo de un nuevo tipo de material para la captura selectiva de dióxido de carbono (CO2) consistente en films porosos de quitosano, un biopolímero natural que se obtiene a partir de residuos de crustáceos. Este biopolímero, tras un proceso de modificación química, muestra un aumento significativo en su capacidad de adsorción de CO2 y una mayor selectividad frente al nitrógeno. Los resultados demuestran que la modificación química de biopolímeros es una estrategia viable y sostenible para diseñar nuevos adsorbentes de CO2.

El estigma de la maternidad después de los 35 en la sociedad contemporánea

25 June 2026 at 06:11
Un examen de la maternidad después de los 35 años desde una perspectiva social y de género analiza los estigmas, las normas culturales y las barreras estructurales que la condicionan. Los resultados muestran que la edad sigue funcionando como un criterio de juicio que genera desigualdades simbólicas, emocionales y laborales para las mujeres. La relevancia del estudio radica en visibilizar estas dinámicas y en señalar la necesidad de marcos sociales y políticas más acordes con la diversidad de trayectorias vitales.

El valor de las umbrella reviews, o síntesis de revisiones, en educación

23 June 2026 at 06:49
Un trabajo de la UCM ofrece una guía para elaborar umbrella reviews, es decir, artículos científicos de revisión que a su vez resumen otros reviews sobre un tema, en el ámbito de las ciencias de la educación. Los investigadores reunieron y compararon revisiones a través del caso concreto del uso y los efectos de los diarios digitales en el aula. Los resultados de la síntesis demuestran que los diarios digitales facilitan el aprendizaje, la reflexión, la comunicación y la participación en diversos contextos, aunque su eficacia requiere planificación y acompañamiento docente. La nueva guía facilita la elaboración de este tipo de revisiones en educación, lo que favorece la toma de decisiones pedagógicas informadas por la evidencia.
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