A group of thieves stole most of a 3,000-year-old collection of gold, silver, amber, and other prehistoric artifacts from a museum in eastern Spain Thursday morning. The four-minute raid stripped the Treasure of Villena of 59 of its 66 pieces, including bracelets, bowls, and bottles. Police were lured to a sports center on the outskirts of town minutes before the break-in. Valued at more than $2 million, the collection is considered Europe’s most extensive prehistoric treasure. Archaeologist José María Soler discovered it in a dry riverbed in Villena in 1963. The robbery follows a series of museum heists that prompted a warning from Europol last week.
Image Credit: El Museo de Villena
True Spies
Brief Histories: Information Warfare
How do you turn information into a weapon?
Long before social media and artificial intelligence, rulers understood the power of controlling a narrative. In ancient Rome, Octavian used poems, Mark Antony’s secret will, and commemorative coins to portray his rival as un-Roman and strengthen his own standing with the public. After defeating Antony at the Battle of Actium, Octavian went on to become Rome’s first emperor.
By World War I, propaganda had become an organized part of warfare. British newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe used his publications to promote anti-German messaging. His department used information gathered from German prisoners of war to create leaflets designed to damage enemy morale.
During World War II, British diplomat and intelligence operative Robert Bruce Lockhart was involved with an early propaganda group known as Woburn. Later in the war, Britain’s Political Warfare Executive invested heavily in radio, creating broadcasts disguised as legitimate German stations that blended fact and fiction for audiences in Germany and occupied Europe.
More recently, the internet has transformed the scale of information warfare. EU Disinfo Lab uncovered a network of more than 250 websites disguising their origins while publishing anti-Pakistan material, while Russia’s Internet Research Agency used online publications and troll farms to spread pro-Kremlin narratives. With AI now making convincing bots easier to create, knowing who is behind a message is becoming more difficult.
Join series producer Joe Foley in this week’s podcast selection, ‘Brief Histories: Information Warfare,’ to uncover how propaganda, disinformation, and new technology have been used to influence what people see, hear, and believe.
Take on immersive games and challenges at SPYGAMES! Test your team's skills and strategy, compete to climb the leaderboards, and recharge with food and drink in your own private space hosted by a dedicated staff member.
Book your next team social.
Take on immersive games and challenges at SPYGAMES! Test your team's skills and strategy, compete to climb the leaderboards, and recharge with food and drink in your own private space hosted by a dedicated staff member.
You’re drawn to information that isn’t meant to be easily understood.
A message locked behind a cipher. A communication that needs protecting. A code designed to keep someone else out.
If you’re a Cryptologist, you’re interested in how information can be secured and how those protections can be broken. You might be building increasingly complex ciphers to protect important communications, or working out how to crack the codes used by hostile targets.
In the intelligence world, Cryptologists are constantly trying to stay one step ahead. As ciphers become more sophisticated, improvements in computer processing power make them increasingly possible to break.
In everyday life, that same mindset might show up in how you approach information, your attention to detail, and your precision with work.
After the death of Auric Goldfinger, word of his vast stockpile spread through the criminal underworld. One criminal mastermind seized the opportunity to rob Goldfinger's vault, but an unexpected battle between the thief’s henchmen and James Bond has left behind a trail of evidence. Follow the clues to solve this week’s SPYSCAPE crossword and discover who orchestrated the theft.
Give your party guests an unforgettable experience designed to engage, entertain, and inspire. Our dedicated staff will be on hand to help, and you'll even get your own private space to celebrate.
Host your birthday at SPYSCAPE or SPYGAMES.
Give your party guests an unforgettable experience designed to engage, entertain, and inspire. Our dedicated staff will be on hand to help, and you'll even get your own private space to celebrate.
Can a new pill improve survival in pancreatic cancer?
The Food and Drug Administration has approved Rasonque, a twice-daily pill for late-stage pancreatic cancer. In testing, people receiving the drug, also known as daraxonrasib, lived a median of 13.2 months, compared with 6.7 months for those receiving chemotherapy.
The treatment targets mutations in a family of genes called RAS, which help control cell growth and are altered in about 90% of pancreatic cancer cases. The proteins produced by these mutated genes have flat surfaces, making them difficult for drugs to bind to. In 2013, a cofounder of California-based Revolutionary Medicines identified a small pocket on the protein where a drug could attach.
Pancreatic cancer has a five-year survival rate of 13% among the roughly 67,000 Americans diagnosed each year. RAS mutations also drive more than a quarter of all cancers, and Revolutionary Medicines is now investigating a potential treatment for lung cancer, where they are involved in roughly 20% or more of cases.
Quirky
Space Cookies
Would you eat a cookie made from recycled plastic?
A NASA-funded project is exploring an unusual way to feed astronauts on long missions: 3D-printed, high-protein cookies made using crop waste and recycled plastic. The prototypes, called µBites, have not yet been approved for people to taste, although researchers say they smell good.
To make them, the team breaks down polyethylene terephthalate, the main component in single-use water bottles, using water, heat, pressure, and oxygen in a 32-step process. The resulting carbon-rich liquid is fed to specially engineered yeast, which converts the carbon into proteins, fats, and other nutrients. These are then mixed with sweetener, fiber, and starch to form a paste that can be printed into cookies.
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