The philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) said that joy is not a fleeting state of mind but an emotion that comes from knowledge and reason, and that it becomes a political and ethical tool to transform society. Four centuries have passed and the world does not offer many reasons for joy, between the climate crisis and the rise of hate speech, but Francisco Javier Vera is determined, he says, to "resume the philosophy of the Dutchman Baruch Spinoza" and use joy to change the world. "It is not about denying reality, but about assuming it to try to imagine possible alternative futures not from anger or uncertainty but from joy," he argues.

When the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapsed onto the asphalt and claimed nearly three thousand lives, a new geopolitical order began to be built. If today we are witnessing a gradual transformation of the world order, which is also disrupting old global structures, that was a clean cut, a turning point for the world that barely lasted two hours. The Bush Doctrine, which was promoted as a response, dealt the first major blow of demolition to international law, in the name of the so-called "war on terror." The strategy devised by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other neoconservative hawks surrounding George W. Bush imposed the concept of preventive war as a blank check for Western powers, basically the United States, to attack other countries unilaterally. A new type of war was then set in motion that was no longer between states but pitted governments against insurgent groups with international tentacles. And the era of surveillance also began, with state control over privacy in the name of national security.

Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente was the voice of the wild world for an entire generation. Now his youngest daughter also dedicates her life to explaining the wonders of nature, assuming her father's legacy, but in a very different context, both due to the media environment and the critical situation that natural life is suffering. Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente is a biologist, science communicator, and president of Rewilding Spain. She wrote Félix: un hombre en la tierra, four years ago, when the 40th anniversary of the iconic naturalist's death was reached, and now she publishes Som natura to try to instill in new generations the enthusiasm for nature that she herself inherited from her father.

Drought is not just a problem at home: it is a phenomenon that has increased by 30% since 2000 worldwide. In fact, it is estimated that by 2050, three out of every four inhabitants of the planet will be affected by drought. Even so, the United States has blocked a global agreement against drought and has postponed international negotiations on this issue until 2028. All the world's governments gathered in Mongolia this August have not managed to sign a binding treaty in this regard, but they have announced that they will mobilize 1.3 billion dollars to restore land and combat desertification in 23 states. The protocol to finance these projects, however, was to be defined within this global agreement against drought, which has been left pending.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the international order born out of World War II seems to be in its terminal phase. The symptoms are clearly visible: wars that drag on, borders as spaces of conflict, a new arms race, protectionism, trade wars, disinformation, electoral interference, a crisis of liberal democracies, and a growing inability of international institutions to impose rules.

A sign from the gods, a bad omen, a cosmic wonder, an evidence that mathematics governs the visible world... Eclipses have fascinated humanity since the dawn of time. And at each historical stage they have been interpreted in different ways. Today we know that an eclipse is "the total or partial occultation of a celestial body by the interposition of another celestial body between it and the observer". But perhaps it was more romantic to believe that a dragon devoured the sun, as they thought in China in the 8th century BC.

Days before July 4, 1776, Benjamin Franklin invited twenty-one chiefs of the Iroquois nations to Philadelphia. These leaders represented the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a league of six Indigenous nations whose territories spanned part of what is now New York, Quebec, and Ontario. The Indigenous delegates were lodged on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House—now known as Independence Hall—directly above the room where the U.S. Declaration of Independence was about to be signed.

A universal public subsidy of 150 euros per month that can only be spent on agroecological and local food. This is the Food Social Security system proposed by a report from the cooperative el Pa Sencer, which was presented this Tuesday in Barcelona at an event chaired by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Sofía Monsalve Suárez.

Almost all children in the world face at least one climate threat. But nearly half – about 1.1 billion children – are exposed to three different climate threats that put their health and survival at risk, according to the report Children’s climate risk report 2026, published this Tuesday by Unicef.

In 1874, Jules Duruof and his wife got lost while trying to cross the Atlantic by balloon. At that time, balloons – and airships too – had no maneuverability and were often at the mercy of the wind. They fell into the water, but a fishing boat was able to pick them up. Other aeronautical daredevils were not so lucky. All this led Baldomer Oller, an aeronautics enthusiast born in Calaf and exiled in Paris, to want to devise a device that would allow the balloon to be directed where its crew wanted, and from this came the patent for the airship Catalunya. But the story of this Catalan exiled in Paris is much more interesting and goes beyond technological entrepreneurship. It is a story of trade unionism, anarchism, imprisonment and torture, exile and return, with the culmination of a surprising invention that was never built.

In May of last year, workers at NASA's Goddard Laboratory received the order to go home and work remotely. The Trump administration was rescinding the lease on the building where, since the 1960s, this institute has led the climate and Earth research of the North American space agency. It was an attempt to dismantle the center, which preceded the threat of total closure proposed by the White House in its budget for NASA last year. Fortunately, Congress halted that massive funding cut. But that did not prevent the purge of the Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk from targeting NASA's Earth science program and other U.S. scientific agencies that are crucial for global climate research.

Amitav Ghosh (Calcutta, 1956), one of India's most important fiction writers, has for many years placed his pen at the service of climate activism. Ten years ago he published in English The great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable (now available in Spanish published by Capitán Swing with the title El gran delirio. Cambio climático y lo impensable). As he explained these days in the CCCB debates, Ghosh understands this "great derangement" as a collective disorder that makes us all incapable of assuming the gravity and reacting adequately to the climate emergency. An incapacity that he particularly denounces within literature.

Very few people know that oil was produced in Collserola. In the middle of the last century, owners of farmhouses in this mountain range surrounding Barcelona owned olive trees, made self-consumption oil from them, and sold the surplus. But with the abandonment of the countryside throughout Catalonia, all this productive activity was also lost and the olive trees of Collserola, some centuries old, were swallowed by the forest. If in 1956 21.5% of Collserola were cultivated land, now it is only 6.4%. This not only represents a loss of the typical biodiversity of the area, but also has a dangerous collateral effect: it increases the risk of fire.

A space crew must have diverse professional profiles. "In future long-duration missions, not only engineers and technicians will be needed, but also culture, humanities, and communication," remarks Jennifer García Carrizo, a science communicator at Rey Juan Carlos University. She herself is proof: in February 2025, she participated as a journalist in the Hypatia II mission, which – with an all-female crew – simulated the conditions of Mars in the Utah desert. It was "twelve suns," in practice fifteen days, of an intense mission that she now recounts in the book Mission Mars.

It’s not a race, but if it were, the climate emergency wouldn’t just be winning—it would be doing so with one feat after another. “It’s as if every year a new runner appeared and broke a record, and did so by a wide margin, and the following year it was broken again—that wouldn’t be normal,” says Francisco Doblas, head of the Earth Sciences Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), in a vivid analogy. The paradox is that, in this case, record highs are not achievements to applaud, let alone celebrate.

A 2017 scientific study claimed having one fewer child was the most effective way to fight climate change – more impactful than going vegan or ditching your car. A small but growing number of people have consciously chosen not to have children to help the planet. Yet sacrifice may prove unnecessary. After half a century of population explosion and global overpopulation alarms, the problem now appears reversed: population decline. "We're not preparing for what's coming. Just as rapid population growth disrupted the world, the coming population drop will be equally – or more – swift and disruptive", warns Darrell Bricker, Ipsos researcher and co-author (with John Ibbitson) of Empty Planet.

Humanity returns to the Moon 50 years later. NASA's Artemis program, which made history this April by breaking the record for the furthest manned space voyage, responds to an openly declared objective by Donald Trump himself: “Get to the Moon before China”.

We've seen it in countless movies: "Hello, my name is so-and-so and I'm an alcoholic." We know the acronym Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and what it represents. But what we might not know is that behind these initials –and this recurring phrase– lies a twelve-step therapeutic method created by two men from Ohio in 1935, which has since helped millions of people worldwide. This method is now applied in 68 countries, including Spain, where there are up to 586 active Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) groups. A study by Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital concluded in 2020 that this AA twelve-step therapy "is more effective than other established treatments for increasing abstinence" and improves outcomes, especially "in the long term," helping people stay sober for longer. The survival and constant global expansion of this system for nearly a century also attest to its effectiveness.

In all space missions, there is an evident risk to the lives of astronauts. And the most delicate moments are always takeoff and landing. But in Artemis II, NASA's mission that concludes this Friday after ten days of travel, the return to Earth is undoubtedly the most risky moment. To begin with, because during takeoff the astronauts had an ejection system in case of emergency (which would have expelled them to save them in case of an explosion), but above all because the re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere this time presents some extra challenges compared to previous missions.

Mission accomplished. The four Artemis II astronauts are back on Earth, after going to the Moon and returning. This historic mission, which lasted 10 days, is the first in over 50 years to take humans to the Moon, and it has made them the people who have traveled farthest from Earth in the history of humanity. At 1:53 AM, Catalan time, the Orion capsule carrying the astronauts re-entered Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 40,000 km per hour, faster than any other spacecraft before. A particularly risky maneuver, but one that has been successfully overcome.