EL PAÍS

Norwegian influencer buys failed property development in Spain to build ‘self-sufficient’ eco-community

Beatriz Olaizola — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:37:47 +0000

It was going to be a huge success: the homes would be built on a 500,000 square meter (123-acre) tract of land nestled in the mountains of Alicante, in the Spanish Mediterranean, on the idyllic shore of a water reservoir and close to a friendly village of just 700 residents. The original project, which began in 2006, was dubbed La Joya de Planes (The Jewel of Planes) and envisioned as a large residential development of 435 homes facing the Beniarrés reservoir, a few miles from the existing village of Planes. The plot of land had previously been owned by the family of Esteban González Pons, a politician with Spain’s conservative Popular Party (PP) and a member of the European Parliament between 2014 and 2023. The plot was rezoned and approved for building before the surrounding area received protected status in 2007 due to its high environmental value.

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Independent commission of inquiry to investigate ‘genuinely strange’ accident

Beatriz Olaizola — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 10:28:07 +0000

Spain’s Minister of Transport Óscar Puente has described the rail accident that has left at least 39 people dead and dozens seriously injured in Adamuz (Córdoba) as “very strange.” Puente appeared before the media early Monday morning at the facilities of state-owned railway infrastructure manager Adif in Madrid’s Atocha station to report on the circumstances of the derailment, emphasizing that it is “strange, very strange, very difficult to explain at this time.” According to the minister, all the railway experts he spoke with on Sunday night “are extremely baffled” by the accident.

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Nancy Knowlton, marine biologist: ‘Scientists have to speak out against Trump’

Beatriz Olaizola — Sat, 17 May 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Nancy Knowlton, 75, was born in Evanston, Illinois, but spent nearly every summer of her childhood by the Atlantic Ocean. Her grandparents lived on the Long Island Sound between Connecticut and New York, and it was there she discovered that if you took a snail out of its shell, it can’t get back in. Her desire to observe, learn, discover and understand led her to graduate with a degree in biology from Harvard University, and to get her doctorate in zoology from the University of California. For 50 years, she has studied the coral reefs and the creatures that inhabit them — including snails.

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Laura Lladó, surgeon: ‘The population should not have the perception that they are going to have a pig’s organ implanted’

Beatriz Olaizola — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 18:34:16 +0000

On February 23, 1984, the first liver transplant was performed at Bellvitge Hospital in Barcelona, at a time when only four teams in the world carried out the surgery regularly. Nearly two decades later, in the same hospital, a young 35-year-old surgeon performed the first transplant of her career. She doesn’t recall the patient’s identity — only that he was thin — but she does vividly remember how she felt in that moment: overwhelmed with emotion and thinking of the most important people in her life, imagining their pride in seeing her in the operating room.

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Elisabeth Bik, expert in scientific integrity: ‘We need to slow down scientific publishing’

Beatriz Olaizola — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 16:41:27 +0000

Elisabeth Bik, 57, does the work of a detective. She spends hours reading and rereading documents, delving into pages, making notes, asking questions and solving cases. But her cases have nothing to do with murders, scams, robberies, infidelities or state secrets, but rather science. A microbiologist by profession, she has been a scientific integrity consultant since 2019 and has revealed academic errors in thousands of scientific articles. Her analyses focus on images that accompany a research paper that may have been retouched or duplicated by the authors, either by mistake or for fraudulent purposes. Bik, who speaks to EL PAÍS by video call, believes that the publication of scientific articles has become an unstoppable and accelerated wheel and that it must be slowed down to prevent a rise in falsehoods and manipulations.

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Steve Horvath: ‘I’d like people to have the choice of whether they want to die, as opposed to it being prescribed by nature’

Beatriz Olaizola — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:05:00 +0000

Steve Horvath was 17 years old when he decided that he wanted to travel through space. He soon realized that going as far as he intended takes, at best, a few hundred years, so he shifted his focus to a new challenge: aging. In 2011, the researcher from the University of California, Los Angeles, proposed a method to measure biological age through chemical markers in the DNA that modify genetic expression. The process, known as DNA methylation, was named the Horvath clock. The scientist now works for Altos Labs, a company specialized in rejuvenation financed by billionaires like Jeff Bezos that offers considerable compensations to its researchers. “I’m no longer interested in space travel at all. I wouldn’t leave. I like planet Earth. But I’m still interested in this issue of prolonging our lifespan,” he says via video call, in conversation with EL PAÍS.

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Linda Darling-Hammond: ‘Kids need to be taught how to deal with phones, not just have them taken away’

Beatriz Olaizola — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 15:50:54 +0000

Linda Darling-Hammond, the president of the California Board of Education since 2019, has spent a lifetime speaking, writing, studying and teaching about education. A teacher at Stanford University and educational advisor during Barack Obama’s 2008 and Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaigns, she has written numerous books and articles on education policy and believes that teaching is currently at an inflection point. For the academic, who spoke with EL PAÍS via video call, the students of the new generations need less memorization and more support, exams where they can apply what they know and tools that help them learn wherever they are.

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Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization: ‘There’s a disconnect between what the science shows, and the speed of our response’

Beatriz Olaizola — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 23:48:16 +0000

On January 1, 2024, Celeste Saulo (Buenos Aires, 59 years old) was appointed Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), becoming the first woman to head the organization, which plays a leading role in the global fight against climate change. A meteorologist and director of Argentina’s National Meteorological Service since 2014, Saulo was appointed to the post by the World Meteorological Congress — a body linked to the UN and involving all 193 countries — in June of last year. From her newly opened office in Geneva, Switzerland, she spoke to EL PAÍS via video call.

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Care of the future: Can robots care for the elderly or the sick?

Beatriz Olaizola — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 17:07:36 +0000

Nine years ago, a plump white robot — with a round head and tiny black eyes — reached the screens and hearts of millions of people… both children and adults alike.

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‘Pink cocaine’: The expensive and trendy drug is neither cocaine nor high quality

Beatriz Olaizola — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 20:07:52 +0000

The substance is pink, sometimes smells like strawberries and in Spain goes by different names: tucibi, tusi, pink powder. Most commonly, it is called pink cocaine and considered a luxury drug for affluent people: a single gram costs 80, 90 and even 100 dollars. The same amount of ordinary cocaine costs around 60 dollars, according to a report that the Spanish Observatory on Drugs and Addictions (OEDA in Spanish) published this year. But pink cocaine is neither cocaine nor luxury. Between 2019 and 2022, Energy Control – an organization that works to ensure the safe consumption of narcotics – analyzed 150 samples of pink cocaine. It found dye in almost all of them and cocaine in only two. Most pink cocaine was a cocktail of several cheaper drugs; 44% of the samples contained ketamine, MDMA (ecstasy) and caffeine.

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