The controversial bill that will authorize the expansion of irrigation in the surroundings of the Doñana National Park has reached the scientific journal Nature Water this Wednesday. A team of researchers underlines the urgency of conserving the ecosystems of Doñana in the face of this irrigation law that, according to their complaints, will increase the overexploitation of an already badly degraded aquifer. If it goes ahead, it will legalize the establishment of intensive strawberry irrigation on land for forest or dry land use, for which it has been criticized by the scientific community and conservation organizations.

The new article, entitled How a proposed law on strawberry cultivation could put an end to Europe's most iconic wetland, is signed by the scientist Luis Santamaría, from the Doñana Biological Station (EBD-CSIC), and by Julia Martin- Ortega, from the Institute for Sustainability Research at the University of Leeds, both members of the European Waterlands project, which includes around thirty organizations from 14 European countries and whose objective is the restoration of European wetlands.

As Luis Santamaría pointed out in a telephone conversation, this law will mean a “turn in the wrong direction, just when the course had begun to change in 2021” and “reputational and economic damage to the strawberry sector, which is one of the main products exported in the area”. From his point of view, “removing such a law endangers an important economic sector without providing great benefit and causing great environmental damage.”

This new bill promoted by the PP of Andalusia and Vox is being processed by the Andalusian Parliament through an urgent procedure that allows the parliamentary debate to be avoided, but due to the call for general elections for July 23, the process in which Andalusian Chamber has been delayed again so as not to interfere in the electoral campaign. In Andalusia, the proposal therefore has the support of the PP and Vox, and the rejection of the PSOE, Por Andalucía and Adelante Andalucía. The central government is also opposed.

Specifically, the law will expand the irrigated agricultural areas in the Condado de Huelva region, whose owners were left out of the regulation in 2014. Although the president of the Junta de Andalucía, Juanma Moreno, estimated the number of hectares to be regularized at 700, environmental organizations estimate that it will be around 2,000 hectares.. Santamaría admits that they do not know how many hectares will be affected because the “ambiguous” bill does not specify them: “One may think that it is not specified on purpose, but what we want to reflect with this article is that the impact goes much further. beyond the fact that it may be 700 or 1,900 hectares, the greatest impact from our point of view is to give the go-ahead to an illegal change in land use,” he points out.

The PP argues that water from Doñana will not be required to irrigate these crops, but that surface water from the transfer of the Tinto, Odiel and Piedras rivers will be used, but the initiative has provoked the rejection of the central government, the European Commission, experts and environmentalists, who fear that it will end up affecting the Doñana park. In fact, Santamaría considers that these infrastructures mentioned by the Andalusian PP are not built and have been assigned other uses.

As the authors of this study review, the ecosystems of Doñana, a protected area, receive half a million migratory birds and maintain a rich biodiversity, which includes more than 50 species of aquatic birds and emblematic species such as the Iberian lynx and the eagle. imperial. Despite its protected status, they denounce, “the intensive development of its environment has caused the degradation of its vegetation and soils, the drastic reduction of its wetlands, serious decreases in the number of aquatic birds and the virtual disappearance of the rabbit (the prey principal of the lynx and the imperial eagle)”.

For this reason, they consider it nonsense that “instead of implementing the measures to save it, the new law marks the return of obsolete and unsustainable policies that will accelerate its destruction”, as Santamaría points out.. “What the public may not be as aware of is that we've had decades of progressive degradation and one more push could make the system unrecoverable, as it's about to reach a point of no return.”

More sanctions

Spain was already fined in 2021 by the European Commission for failing to adequately protect the Doñana aquifer, and Santamaría considers that “the Andalusian government has entered into an unprecedented confrontation with the European Commission, which has threatened Spain with new sanctions.”

In recent weeks, strawberry importers in Germany have shown their concern about the environmental impact of their products. Approximately 80% of the strawberries grown in the Doñana area are exported, the main buyers being Germany, France and the United Kingdom.. On the other hand, the CEOE employers and various agricultural organizations have asked that the campaign against Huelva strawberries promoted by a German association that collects signatures to prevent German supermarkets from selling imported strawberries from this Andalusian region not be used in Spain for electoral purposes. .

Julia Martin-Ortega, Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Leeds, warns in a statement that the possible boycott of strawberries from this area due to this issue “may compromise the work carried out by legal strawberry growers in the area, who They have been making an effort to reduce water consumption and the use of agrochemicals in their crops”.

'a fraud'

For his part, Fernando Valladares, a scientist from the Department of Biogeography and Global Change at the CSIC's National Museum of Natural Sciences, describes the legislative proposal to expand irrigation in Doñana as “great nonsense” and regrets the way in which it is being carrying out this process, including the veto initially imposed on Miguel Delibes de Castro, president of the Doñana Participation Council, from the list of those appearing in the Andalusian Parliament's Promotion Commission that will evaluate the law, a veto that was lifted before the criticism received.

Last Monday, representatives of various agricultural and conservation organizations showed their opposition to the bill in the Andalusian Parliament, frontal opposition to the bill, in a session convened by the parliamentary group For Andalusia as they had not been able to do so in the commission that processes the legislative initiative.

“I believe that Miguel Delibes de Castro, as a good scientist and a good connoisseur of the area, made it very clear in his appearance. First they vetoed him as an adviser to the scientific committee following the municipal elections because they knew that his voice was going to be critical. Then, as it was something so sad and shameful that they vetoed such a wise and prudent person, they reinstated him but surely they will not pay him any attention but his statements, which have gone around half of Spain, came to say that it was foolish to plan irrigate without water”, comments the researcher in a telephone conversation, unrelated to this study.

In the last 20 years, he details, “the water table in Doñana has decreased by half and it's not all due to climate change, much less. In this case, it is due more to unsustainable water extraction than climate change and that is something that studies clearly show. And we are only talking about the legal wells, only with the legal ones it is unsustainable. And then there are the illegal wells that they now want to legalize.”

The scientist stresses that “there really is no water, there isn't even any to maintain the biodiversity of Doñana or what there is allows it to be maintained with great difficulty. There is no water for strawberries or for irrigated agricultural production and, of course, there is no water for both”, points out. Likewise, remember that “a final ruling from Europe is pending that will impose a multimillion-dollar fine on us. And what is unfair and sad is that we will all pay for it, because it will be paid with public money, even if it is due to decisions that have been made with economic and political objectives that contravene regional, national, European and international directives and protection figures, because Doñana, which is an important space for half a million migratory birds, is in the Ramsar agreement [the main international organization dedicated to the protection of wetlands around the world] and is subject to European legislation.”

The CSIC researcher considers this bill a “great deception”: “Promising water when there is none is a great fraud because what the political leaders would have to do is plan the de-escalation of irrigation, which is going to find one day without water, but by then it will have caused a lot more trouble.

Although the specific mechanisms underlying the differences between the sexes in terms of cancer incidence, clinical outcomes, and tumor biology are not well understood, some research suggests that the Y chromosome, precisely the Y chromosome, may play an important role in this explanation. What determines the male sex?. Its loss is a feature observed in multiple types of cancer, although its clinical and biological significance is unclear.

The study published this Thursday by Nature and carried out by researchers from the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center pivots along these lines, which analyzes how the loss of the Y chromosome can favor the growth of cancer, specifically bladder cancer.

“This study for the first time connects the loss of the Y chromosome and the immune system's response to cancer in a way that had never been done before,” explains Dan Theodorescu, director of that institution and one of the authors of the research, who continues: “We found that loss of the Y chromosome allows bladder cancer cells to evade the immune system and grow very aggressively.”

Each cell has a pair of sex chromosomes: in the case of women there are two X chromosomes and in the case of men, one X chromosome and one Y chromosome.. In men, chromosome loss has been observed in several types of cancer, for example between 10 and 40% of bladder cancers.. This loss of the Y chromosome has also been associated with heart disease and Alzheimer's disease.

The Y chromosome contains the codes or blueprints for certain genes.. Based on the way these genes are expressed in healthy cells of the bladder wall, the researchers devised a scoring system to measure Y chromosome loss in tumors.. They then reviewed data from two groups of men with bladder cancer: one group had a muscle-invasive tumor (when it grows and affects the muscles of the bladder) and had this organ removed, but they were not treated with punctal inhibitors. immune control; the other group participated in a clinical trial and received treatment with an immune checkpoint inhibitor.

The researchers found that patients with Y chromosome loss had a worse prognosis in the first group and much better overall survival rates in the second group.. To understand why this happens, they then compared the growth rates of bladder tumor cells in mice.. To do this, they grew cancer cells in a dish where they were not exposed to immune cells.. They also grew cancer cells in mice that lacked a type of immune cell, T cells or lymphocytes.. In both cases the tumors, with and without the Y chromosome, grew at the same rate.

Work and tests in laboratories

In mice with intact immune systems, tumors without the Y chromosome grew much more rapidly than tumors with the intact Y chromosome.. “The fact that we only see a difference in tumor growth rate when the immune system is at stake is the key to the effect of Y loss in bladder cancer,” Theodorescu explains, adding that these results imply that when cells lose the Y chromosome, they deplete the T cells, and without cancer-fighting T cells the tumor grows aggressively.”

From the results in humans and mice, Theodorescu and his team reached yet another conclusion: Tumors lacking the Y chromosome, while more aggressive, are also more vulnerable and more responsive to immune checkpoint inhibitors ( inhibitors of PD-L1 in tumor cells and PD-1 in T cells). This therapy, one of the two leading bladder cancer treatments available to patients today, reverses that depletion of T cells and enables the immune system to fight the cancer.

“Fortunately, this aggressive cancer has an Achilles heel, in that it is more sensitive than tumors with an intact Y chromosome to immune checkpoint inhibitors,” says Hany Abdel-Hafiz, an associate professor at the Cedars-Cancer Center. Sinai and lead author of the study along with Johanna Schafer, a postdoctoral fellow, and Xingyu Chen, a research bioinformatician at the same center.

Preliminary, yet unpublished data show that loss of the Y chromosome also makes prostate cancers more aggressive, Theodorescu stresses.. “Our researchers believe that the loss of the Y chromosome is an adaptive strategy that tumor cells have evolved to evade the immune system and survive in multiple organs,” adds Shlomo Melmed, vice president of Academic Affairs and dean of the Cedars-School of Medicine. sinai. “This exciting advance adds to our basic understanding of cancer biology and could have far-reaching implications for future cancer treatment.”

Scientists need more research to understand the genetic connection between Y chromosome loss and T cell depletion. “If we could understand those mechanics, we could prevent that T cell depletion. We can partially reverse it with checkpoint inhibitors, but if we could stop it from happening in the first place, there's a lot of potential to improve patient outcomes.”

What is the impact on the female population?

Although women do not have a Y chromosome, Theodorescu says these findings could have implications for them as well.. The Y chromosome contains a set of related genes (paralog genes) on the X chromosome and these may play a role in both females and males.. More research is needed to determine what that role might be.

“Awareness of the importance of the loss of the Y chromosome will focus on the importance of considering sex as a variable in all scientific research in human biology,” says Theodorescu.

And he concludes: “The new knowledge that we contribute with this study may explain why certain types of cancer are worse in both men and women, and what is the best way to treat them. It also demonstrates that the Y chromosome has more functions than simply determining the biological sex of people.

The solstice takes place on June 21 at 4:58 p.m. (peninsular time) and begins with a beautiful conjunction of Venus and Mars with the Moon. We offer you the 10 astronomical keys to the longest day of the year and the phenomena that will animate the sky during the summer period.

1. Start. Summer in the Northern Hemisphere (and winter in the South) will begin on June 21 at 4:58 p.m., official peninsular and Balearic time (3:58 p.m. in the Canary Islands).. But be careful, not every year summer begins on this same day in June; For example: in 2024 summer will start on the 20th. The variations from one year to another are due to the fit of the sequence of years of the Gregorian calendar (some are leap years and others are not) with the actual duration of an orbit of the Earth around the Sun.

2. Conjunction. The season begins with a beautiful conjunction of Venus, Mars and the Moon. To see it, you have to look to the west in the evening twilight, about two hours after the setting of the Sun, on June 21 or 22.. The Moon is these days like a fine bright edge (the new moon took place on the 18th) and we can take the opportunity to observe the beautiful ashen light on the darkened part of the lunar disk.

Conjunction of days 21 and 22 RB

3. summer planets. Venus and Mars will continue to be visible in the evenings until they dip into the sun's glare as they approach the king star in late August.. Mercury will make a brief appearance between July and August. At dawn we will be able to continue observing Jupiter and Saturn, but the giant of the rings will disappear at the end of August, while Venus will then reappear at dawn in the east.

4. Three supermoons and one blue. The three full moons of the season will take place on July 3 and August 1 and 31.. During these three full moons our satellite will be in a position close to the closest possible to Earth (perigee), it is what is sometimes called a 'supermoon'. When a month has two full moons, the Anglo-Saxons call the second one a 'blue moon' (the fourth full moon of a season that has four is also called a 'blue moon'). So the full moon on August 31 will be a 'blue moon', but of course this has nothing to do with the color of the Moon.

5. Aphelion. The paradoxical circumstance occurs that summer in the Northern Hemisphere arrives when the Earth, in its elliptical movement around the Sun, is as far away as possible from the star king.. The furthest point, called aphelion, will be reached on July 6, when the Earth is about 152 million kilometers from the Sun, that is, 5 million kilometers further than the perihelion position we passed through on July 4. from January.

6. Sin eclipses. This summer does not bring us any eclipse, neither of the sun nor of the moon. We will have to wait until October to be able to witness a partial solar eclipse and a penumbral lunar eclipse.

7. Tears of Saint Lawrence. This is a good year to observe the Perseids, the most important meteor shower of the summer. This is because the maximum activity of the rain, on August 12, will take place with the waning moon (the new moon will be on the 16th).. Observation conditions are much less favorable for the Delta Aquarids, which have their maximum on July 30, very close to the full moon on August 1.

solstices and equinoxes

8. The longest day. The shortest boreal night takes place on the day of the summer solstice. On that day, in Madrid the night will last 8 hours and 57 minutes, while there will be 15 hours and 3 minutes of sunlight. Oddly enough, the longest day of the year is not the day the Sun rises the earliest, nor is it the day the Sun sets the latest. This is because the Earth's orbit is an ellipse and the axis of this ellipse is not related to the inclination of the Earth's axis that defines the seasons. The earliest sunrise occurred on June 14, while the latest sunset will occur on June 27.

9. Tropic of Cancer. At the summer solstice, the Earth's North Pole is closer to the Sun than the South Pole. Seen from Earth, the Sun is at noon at the “Tropic of Cancer”, its northernmost possible position.

10. 93 days and 15 hours. Summer will last 93 days and 15 hours. It will end on September 23, 2023 with the arrival of autumn. In fact, summer is always the longest season of the four. This is due to Kepler's Second Law: the line that joins the Earth to the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times. Because the Earth is now in its positions furthest away from the Sun (aphelion), it is moving with less speed, which translates into a longer duration of summer compared to the other three seasons.

Rafael Bachiller is director of the National Astronomical Observatory (National Geographic Institute) and academic of the Royal Academy of Doctors of Spain.

A bronze sword, which is over 3,000 years old but so well preserved that it still shines, has been discovered at an archaeological site in Nordlingen, Germany.

It is a whole sword with an octagonal hilt made entirely of bronze, unearthed as part of a grave goods provisionally dated to the end of the 14th century BC, that is, the Middle Bronze Age.

In the burial, the remains of three people were found who were buried with valuable bronze objects: a man, a woman, an adolescent. The link between them is not yet clear.

The manufacture of octagonal swords is complex, since the hilt is cast on the blade (called superimposed casting).. The decoration is through a marquetry and by means of punches. While there are two actual rivets, another pair of rivets is only implied.. Despite the manufacturing effort and the lack of cut marks, it is assumed to have been a real weapon.

“The sword and burial have yet to be examined so that our archaeologists can classify this find more accurately.. But a find like this is very rare,” said conservator General Mathias Pfeil, head of aviara's State Office for Monument Preservation, in a statement.

The Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products (AEMPS), under the Ministry of Health, has reported the withdrawal and recovery of several batches of concealer makeup from the Essence de 'Camouflage+ Matt concealer 50 warm brand due to contamination, as reported by the product distribution company in Spain.

The distributor Future Cosmetics has communicated to the AEMPS the start of the withdrawal of all the units placed on the market of lots 0DBCB, 0DBCA and 0CBCA due to the presence of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

The bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen that rarely causes disease in healthy individuals; but it can present risks for people with health problems or weakened immune systems.

The person responsible for placing this cosmetic on the market is the company Cosnova GmbH, located in Germany.. For the recovery of the units purchased by consumers, the aforementioned company has published an informative note through its website, informing that they must stop using the product, as well as destroy it or return it to the store where they purchased it.

Users of this product should stop using it.. Thus, the AEMPS recommends that, if you have any unit of these lots, go to the establishment where you purchased it for its return.

In the same way, the company has made available the customer service telephone numbers 00800 267 66 820 and +49 6196 76156 8080, with hours from Monday to Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and the email address 'recall@essence .eu'.