Author: Ezra

The field lived three days ago the biggest protest in its history. Thousands of farmers, ranchers, irrigators and especially hunters from all the autonomous communities demonstrated in Madrid to claim a future for the rural world and the activities that support it. All aggravated by the current socio-political situation, the war in Ukraine and the transport strike, and by the general increase in costs derived from the rise in raw materials and labor costs. An immense tide of 200,000 orange vests, the Spanish and rural version of the mobilizations in France, came to life. With everything and for all. To…

The consequences of the transport strike are already being felt in supermarkets. After nine days in a row, the Platform for the Defense of the Transport of Goods by Road maintains the indefinite strike that is unraveling the Spanish supply chain. The Government’s announcement of direct aid of 500 million euros to subsidize the price of diesel has not caused any change in the position of the platform, which is why the strike is prolonged and, with it, the risk of food shortages and other products. The most affected? The consumers. Supermarkets are registering an increasingly rapid shortage that, together…

The crisis caused by the war in Ukraine has aggravated the problem of rising prices for raw materials, energy and fuel. The bad economic situation had been hitting some sectors of the Spanish economy for some time, such as carriers. But now the country is being one of the hardest hit by inflation. Some projections estimate a rate of 6.8% for this year. On average, each Spaniard will pay 2,666 euros more in 2022 as a result of the increase in fuel prices and the shopping basket. If the war drags on, inflation could shoot up to 10%. This economic…

An earlier version of this article was published in 2016. The Ukrainian conflict has raised the possibility of a nuclear standoff. One appeased, but plausible after all. As we saw at the time, there are more than eight thousand nuclear bombs capable of destroying all of humanity with a stroke of the pen. Since we know what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the tests in unknown regions of the earth carried out decades later, it is possible to know what would happen if all the nuclear warheads were detonated on the same day. And there are those…

Biology doesn’t always matter. But sometimes it matters too much. The commotion that has formed around Lia Thomas is proof. This University of Pennsylvania student is an excellent swimmer, there’s no doubt about it. She often beats her rivals by tens of seconds, breaking records. But her success is based on three things. One is natural talent. Another is relentless training. And the third is biology. This transgender swimmer (biologically born male) has swept the 500-yard event at the championships organized by the NCAA in the United States. A fact that has not happened before and that has caused controversy…

Netflix has a complicated scenario right now. The streaming king has seen his growth slow and his annual production budget for churning out new hits get bigger and bigger. In other words, Netflix needs more money. With less room for maneuver than Disney or Amazon, since they cannot take advantage of movie premieres and have to adapt to their own structure as a business model, they have begun to press on the only side they can: the customer. Netflix has for years ignored the fact that many of us take advantage of the accounts of our friends and family. But…

An earlier version of this article was published in 2017. “The Gate of the Underworld exists”, or so hikers around the 90’s thought when, upon reaching a rural area in the region of YakutskSiberia, they saw a huge crater in the ground with a geological structure virtually unknown (only a handful of similar holes have been found on Earth, almost all in Siberia) to the human eye and from which came a series of strange noises. How do you explain such a particular phenomenon of nature? The responsibility is ours, for a change. The felling of trees in the area…

An earlier version of this article was published in 2017. Lines bus They are designed in such a way that each of the vehicles in circulation appears at its stop every five or ten minutes. The objective is to distribute passenger traffic in such a way that the bus never exceeds its volume of seats. However, it is common to get off at the corner stop and find that a bus is followed by another bus on the same line. How is it possible? To find out, nothing better than the visual explanation developed by two students at the University…

An earlier version of this article was published in 2018. The environmental footprint generated by our way of life, the way we consume and the way we relate to our surroundings, is often invisible. We don’t see it directly. Few elements represent the abstract of pollution like a smartphone: silent, tiny and ubiquitous, the phone that we always carry in our pocket is one of the polluting vectors of the planet. And their associated emissions are going to skyrocket in the future. The CO2 of a smartphone. It is true, a mobile terminal does not generate polluting gases. But building…