the true antidote to aging is in a step

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For decades, standard medical advice for older adults has been nearly unanimous: walkswim or do a little stationary cycling. In the end we talk about low impact activities focused on the cardiovascular system, but recent scientific evidence is giving a 180 degree turn to this recommendation, since the real enemy of aging is not only the lack of physical background, but sarcopeniawhich is the loss of muscle mass and strength. And to combat it, science points to a simple exercise. A simple exercise. Something as simple as stepping up a step, especially if done with optional extra weight, known as a weight step exercise, is not just a ’90s aerobic movement, it’s top-notch functional training. And one of the great benefits of this exercise is that it does not require having to go to a gym or have extensive equipment, but rather it can be done at home and integrated into your daily routine. Studied. It is not something that personal trainers say just for the sake of it, since there are different essays published in several top-level magazines that demonstrate that doing training sessions stepping They are tremendously effective tools. The first of them consisted of analyzing a program of only six weeks of stepping with weight at home in women over 65 years of age. The result was that they increased the power of their lower extremities by 10 to 11% and improved their stair climbing time by 9%. Another 12-week study confirmed that step aerobics Elevates overall functional fitness, muscle volume and balance. An undisputed king. Although he step It is fantastic for legs and glutes, the truth is that this should be the gateway to doing strength training with loads. This is something that made clear a systematic review of Cochrane which analyzed a meta-analysis of 121 randomized clinical trials with more than 6,700 participants. In this case, progressive resistance training, using weights 2 or 3 times a week, has a very important effect on improving muscle strength, reversing the unwanted effect of age. In this way, short sessions of just 20 to 30 minutes are enough to improve the ability to carry out complex daily activities, reduce osteoarthritis pain and increase muscle mass. More evidence. As if that were not enough, the Mayo Clinic points out that doing interval training from the age of 70, such as 6-second sprints on a stationary bike, is capable of reversing the aspects of muscle aging at the cellular level. In this way, with only 1 or 2 sessions a week for 8 weeks, participants not only reduced their blood glucose, but showed 100% adherence without serious adverse events. Of course, studies emphasize that this type of routine requires professional supervision in the beginning to avoid overtaking people or falls that are fatal at this age. Images | Vitaly Gariev In Xataka | Neither walking nor running: science suggests that the squat is the true “drug” for healthy aging

Larry Ellison promised them very happy with his new luxury yacht named after a Japanese goddess. Made a rookie mistake

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In the world of technology, there are more or less discreet billionaires and then there is Larry Ellison. He millionaire founder of Oracle has made ostentation his watchword: has a private island (where he wanted to feed the world with a sophisticated 500 million dollar irrigation system), a long list of properties distributed throughout the United States and other countries such as Japan, an exclusive private jetand is also investing in the search for eternal youth. Of course, he also has boats: he currently owns the Musashi, which is his fourth superyacht. Love for ships and Japan. Ellison’s love for the sea dates back to at least the 90s, at which time he even became a sponsor of the BMW Oracle Racingwinner of the 2003 America’s Cup. His current superyacht is 88 meters long, cost him about 160 million dollars in 2011 and its name is clearly of Japanese origin. In fact, it is a tribute to one of the most famous samurai. Its interior also shows Japanese influences. In addition to the Musashi, in its history of boats with Japanese names there is the Sayonara sailboat, with which won several world championships racing, or the 75-meter superyacht Katana. But his first motor superyacht was the Ronin and it cost him some headaches. Ronin It means lordless samurai, but that was not his original name. It was conceived as Izanami. The impressive Izanami. In the late 90s Ellison set his sights on a superb second-hand superyacht called Izanami. Designed by none other than Norman Foster in the early 90s, built at the German Lurssen shipyard and commissioned by a mysterious Japanese businessman, it stands out for its defined geometric lines and its aluminum hull. It combines modernist architecture with great performance: at 59 meters in length, it was capable of reaching an impressive maximum speed of 34 knots. Inside, five cabins to accommodate up to 10 guests and 14 crew members in total. The mistake that no one saw coming. The name chosen by its original owner, Izanami, comes from Japanese Shinto mythology: the goddess of creation and death, consort of Izanagi. On paper, it fits like a glove: it is cultured, it is evocative… it fits for such a superb yacht. Larry Ellison paid 25 million dollars for it and was preparing to enjoy it when, docked in San Francisco Bay, in Sausalito, his name made a splash. If you read the name “Izanami” backwards you find a tasteless surprise: “I am a Nazi”, especially considering the German manufacturing and Ellison’s Jewish origins. Change of name and owner. The tycoon tells it in his authorized biography “Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle” from 2003: “When local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backwards, I had to choose between explaining Shintoism to reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or renaming the ship.” He did the latter: Izanami became Ronin. Ellison enjoyed the Ronin until 2013, at which time He sold it to the Venezuelan banker Víctor Vargas and this one would later be sold to the Italian businessman Alessandro Del Bonothe CEO of the pharmaceutical company Mediolanum Farmaceutici. Today is for sale for 28.5 million euros. In Xataka | In 1988, Larry Ellison rented a Concorde and filled it with journalists just to say that Oracle 6 was going at supersonic speed. In Xataka | Larry Ellison has overtaken Mark Zuckerberg as the second richest man in the world. Their secret: building a home for AI Cover | Flickr and Lidija Jakovljevic

The Tax Agency has not made the income tax return manual accessible for decades. A Valencian man did it in three hours

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“Javier, has the program PADRE come out yet?” Every year, at the end of March, my father—not to be confused with my FATHER—asked me the same question, because I was like an AI alerting him that he could finally get down to it. the income tax return every year. For him that was not just an obligation. I would say it was a hobby. Almost a passion. Something to which he dedicated hours and hours in his office armed with his pens, his tight handwriting, his calculator and of course with the Nobel package next to it. He is no longer here, but if I have not inherited something from him, it is that passion for filing income tax returns. In fact, I have never done it, perhaps because as I saw that he dedicated so many hours and effort to making it perfect, that caused me some trauma. “Ugh, this costs too much,” I told myself then and I continue to tell myself now. And here I am, with a reverential fear of completing that task, which I end up entrusting to a manager because time, they say, is money. And yet, it is a small outstanding debt that I have. Last year I tried to try it, and this year I told myself that maybe with the help of some local AI model (because of privacy) I should try it again. But while I was thinking about it, these days the practical manual of Income 2025and one person decided to do something very interesting with that information: he turned it into something useful. This is how the LaRenta.es Open Source project emerged This manual, no matter how complete and detailed it may be, has a problem: it is very inaccessible. The information is there, but neither the wording nor the structure or its organization make it a particularly useful document for most users. That’s where it came into action. Paul March (@paumrch), a public administration worker who lives in Valencia and who, at 31 years old, has a profile completely aligned with the so-called civic technology. Although his training is not technical, he is a very restless self-taught person who has been “tinkering” with all kinds of personal technological projects for more than 15 years. And the latter has become especially popular. We have had the opportunity to speak with Pau and he told us that by working in public administration and being interested in the application of technology to his field, “I have always been interested in the issue of digitalization of the administration because I know it and I know the room for improvement there is and I am convinced that citizens need that improvement.” When the Income 2025 practical manual appeared, he realized that he could try to do something with it. With the experience of previous projects and the new AI tools that he had been using for months, he got the ball rolling. In just three hours, he confesses, he created LaRenta.esa web service that allows any user Know what state and regional deductions you can take advantage of in this statement. The first question of the questionnaire is important: where we pay personal income tax. The deductions to which we may be entitled depend on this parameter. To do this, it has created a very simple system in which, from a small questionnaire that takes two minutes to complete, we can obtain information about these deductions. The process is reduced to going through seven stages of this questionnaire with a few questions, from which it is possible to obtain a final summary with deductions to which we may end up being entitled. And in each of them, we will have an indicator to know what percentage of the total of each deduction we may be entitled to, as well as detailed information about each particular deduction. In these details, the information present in the 2025 income manual is used more clearly and directly, but although the language is still somewhat harsh, at least in this project only that which is directly related to that deduction is shown in a more readable format. We are therefore faced with a project that is not intended at all to prepare your income tax return, but rather to at least provide the information that exists is more accessible and easier to understand. And as March says, it is far from being a perfect project, but it certainly shows that all that information offered by the public administration can be converted into something even more useful in a relatively simple way. From idea to application in three hours These days this entrepreneur explained the process of creating this webapp in an article posted on his Twitter account (X), and as I said there, the cycle was surprisingly simple. AI was his companion throughout the project, and he took advantage of his experience with previous projects to then take advantage of several tools: The interface design was carried out with the help of GoogleStitch The programming was done with the plugin Claude Code in Visual Studio Code. He used Opus 4.6 to plan the entire project, and Sonnet 4.6 to program it, although for some basic tasks he indicates that he also used Anthropic’s basic model, Haiku. He did it all on March 19, right during the Cremá, the big day of the Fallas in his city, Valencia. The project absorbed him so much that he didn’t even enjoy the party and he spent that afternoon and part of the night polishing the errors he was detecting. The result, as can be seen on LaRenta.es, is a fully functional, fast, clear and practical web application. Not only that: it is totally private. Pau explains that no data is saved except for the email if a user wants the summary PDF report to be sent to them. The potential of civic technology When the project was finished, Pau decided post a message to share it through your Twitter … Read more

We are stuffing ourselves with supplements because of the networks. Science points out that we are almost always wasting money

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A scene that can be quite common (or at least it has happened to me) is opening TikTok and, at some point, between cat videos and recipes that seem very simple, a person appears and explains why. Magnesium will change our lives. Sleeping poorly, having anxiety, muscle pain or even going constipated These are some of the claims that constantly bombard us so that we end up supplementing our diet with some of the products that are available (and that are not cheap). The problem is that it is getting out of hand. A great use. Get out of bed and, before drinking your first coffee, there is already a row of pills that you have to take to start the day: vitamin D, creatinethe ashwagandhamagnesium… A real ‘skincare‘but for the metabolism, which is becoming more and more aggressive. According to 2024 datain the United States 61.72% of adults take some type of dietary supplementation, and the figure has been growing for years. But the worst of all is that, of this high percentage, almost half of the people take it independently, without following the advice of a doctor who has been able to detect the deficiency of a specific vitamin. The problem of networks. A systematic review of 82 studies published in Healthcare in 2025 analyzed the impact of social networks in health behaviors between the years 2010 and 2025. Here he was able to identify health misinformation as one of the five categories that dominated the digital content ecosystem, since these platforms function as tools that dictate what to do to be healthy, even if there is no evidence behind it. What encourages all this is nothing more than a business model that is seeing as its income they don’t stop increasing. And logically here it is not interesting to point out that the vast majority of people can receive these ‘miraculous’ minerals thanks to a varied diet. And everything that is taken in excess can end up being excreted very well. What does science say? In 2022, a study focused on vitamin supplements and minerals to prevent the appearance of cardiovascular diseases or even cancer, the truth is that it was very revealing. The conclusion here was that for beta-carotene, vitamin E supplements or multivitamins there was not enough evidence to say that they were positive for health. But they weren’t very harmful either. If we go further, a published meta-analysis in it Journal of the American College of Cardiology In 2022, it reviewed 884 randomized clinical trials with 883,627 participants on 27 types of micronutrients. The picture is nuanced but clear in general terms: vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E and selenium showed no effect on cardiovascular disease. Beta-carotene, again, increased overall mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and stroke risk. But there are exceptions with omega-3 that did reduce the risk of heart attack and cardiovascular mortality. Magnesium. Without a doubt, the revolution of the moment, since it seems to be used for absolutely everything. In 2020 it already appeared a review on magnesium oral to see if it actually reduced muscle cramps, and the truth is that the conclusion was that it was unlikely to provide clinically significant relief to older adults with night cramps. This does not mean that magnesium is useless in all contexts. It means that if you are a healthy adult who takes magnesium because “a TikTok influencer recommended it to you for cramps” you are wasting your money. But if it is taken because an analysis has confirmed that magnesium levels are below normal, it can be very useful. Vitamin D. A few years ago this was the fashionable supplement for everyone, since it was sold that there was a general deficit among the population. In this case, the experts pointed out that vitamin D should not be supplemented on a general basis in healthy adults under 75 years of age to reduce the risk of disease. There is evidence in favor of supplementation in specific groups such as children and adolescents to prevent diseases such as rickets, people over 75 years of age to reduce mortality, and pregnant women to reduce the risk of preeclampsia and premature birth. In this way, supplementation is useful, but always with medical advice behind it that sees it justified to send a vitamin supplement. When to take them? The honest answer is: in specific and well-defined contexts, with clear clinical indication and as preventive life insurance to avoid all diseases. In some cases it is clear that it must be done, such as folic acid in pregnancies, vitamin B12 in vegan diets or vitamin D in groups with documented deficiencies. But what doesn’t make sense is taking a daily cocktail of eight supplements because we have been sold that it is necessary for our body to ‘start’. But it also has the logic of why we take it, since we have a constant feeling that we need to be more rested, focused and healthier. Here supplements offer us this very easy solution: with a pill. The problem is that our body works with constant balances and no matter how much we throw at it, it will not respond as we can expect. Images | Jellybee MIND FAVOR In Xataka | Magnesium has become the star supplement for sleep. Science is clear about who it really works with (and who it doesn’t)

If you think that renovating your house is urgent, think about this building in Ukraine. Its hole is so big that it is a danger for Europe

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He Chernobyl accident released so much radiation that some areas they remain uninhabitable almost four decades later. In fact, the plant continues to house materials capable of remaining dangerous for thousands of years. Therefore, keeping them under control is one of the greatest engineering challenges ever faced in Europe. A challenge that a drone has put to the test. It was to last a century. The story we tell it a few months ago. The gigantic steel arch built over Chernobyl reactor 4 was conceived as a definitive solution to contain the worst nuclear accident in history for at least a hundred years, a colossal structure designed to isolate the ancient “sarcophagus” and buy humanity time. More than 100 meters high and capable of housing entire monuments inside, this system had to resist extreme conditions and allow the safe decommissioning of the reactor, encapsulating hundreds of tons of radioactive material that remain active decades after the disaster. The impact that changed everything. But everything changed in February 2025when a drone attack in the middle of the night pierced that shell seemingly invulnerable, opening a breach in the structure and exposing a system that was never designed to operate in a war environment. Although there were no immediate leaks or casualties, the damage compromised critical functionsespecially ventilation that controls humidity and prevents corrosion, introducing a silent but growing risk that could degrade the structure in a few years. What is still hidden under the steel. Under the damaged arch remains an environment extremely unstable: remains of the reactor, tons of nuclear fuel and melts of highly radioactive materials that continue to react slowly. The old “sarcophagus,” hastily built in 1986, was never structurally reliableand is actually completely dependent on the new cover to maintain the insulation. In other words, if that balance fails, the risk is not immediate, but potentially devastating, with the possibility of release radioactive dust that the wind could disperse throughout Europe. A “reform” as expensive as it is complex. System restore will not be neither quick nor easysince it involves working in conditions of high radiation, with strict limitations on time and exposure for operators. Temporary solutions barely contain the most urgent damage, while full restoration will require rebuilding highly specialized internal layers within a structure designed as a technical “sandwich”. We are talking about an estimated cost that exceeds 500 million of euros, a figure that reflects both the technical complexity and the hostile environment in which repairs must be carried out. The war enters Europe’s greatest nuclear risk. If you like, the incident it is not isolatedbut part of a context in which nuclear infrastructure have become exposed elements within an active conflict. Paradoxically, the Chernobyl exclusion zone that we had to protect from any danger has been the scene of military operationstroop movements and constant overflights of missiles and drones, which multiplies the risk of new impacts, whether accidental or intentional. In that scenario, even a technical failure or trajectory error could trigger consequences continental in scope. A reminder of what never ended. They remembered in a special from the Financial Times this week that, decades after the accident, Chernobyl remains the same latent threat, one that requires constant vigilance and international cooperation, and the drone impact has revealed the fragility of the systems designed to contain it. The infrastructure that was to definitively close the disastrous episode of 1986 now faces a new type of risk, thus demonstrating that nuclear safety depends not only on engineering, but also of geopolitical stabilitya (and common sense). In that delicate balance, each crack is not just a structural failure, but a warning about the limits of our ability to control the consequences of our own creations. Image | EBRD In Xataka | Drones in Ukraine have mutated into a system reminiscent of the Alien universe: an exoskeleton turns troops into super soldiers In Xataka | Iran is exploiting the US’s weak point: it is not its F-35s or its Patriot missiles, it is the bill every time they take off

Does Apple’s computer have real competition?

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He MacBook Neo It has burst in like an elephant in a china shop because many of us have been asking Apple to launch an affordable laptop for years. The question at this point is how it compares to Windows laptops that are around a similar price. We have selected three interesting models for this price and we are going to put them face to face to see how the new Apple equipment looks in front of them. You have the models in question right below. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links HP 15-fd0402ns – 15.6″ FHD laptop (Intel Core 5 120U, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Intel Graphics, Windows 11) Blue – Spanish QWERTY keyboard The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 Gen 8 – 15.6″ FHD Laptop (Intel Core i5-13420H, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, Intel UHD Graphics, Wi-Fi 6, Win 11 Home, Office Trial) Spanish QWERTY Keyboard – Arctic Gray The price could vary. We earn commission from these links acer Aspire Go 15 – 15.6″ Laptop (Intel Core i7 13620H, 16 GB DDR5 RAM, 1024 GB SSD, Windows 11 Home, Intel UHD Graphics) Silver Color, Spanish QWERTY Keyboard with Numeric Keyboard The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Differences between the MacBook Neo and similarly priced Windows alternatives Fewer inches, but a higher quality screen The MacBook Neo has a 13 inch screensmaller than the rest of its rivals in this comparison, at 15.6 inches. It is a difference that is noticeable in practice, especially if you are a user who usually works with several windows open at the same time. Now, this smaller size will also be noticeable in the dimensions and weight of the equipment, something we will talk about a little later. If we remove the issue of size from the equation, the MacBook Neo’s screen will win over that of these laptops with Windows operating systems. Not only in color representation (Apple’s True Tone technology does a lot there), but also in the brightness levelwhere he has one higher than that of his opponents. What does this mean? If we work in a room or in a place where there is a lot of light, we will be able to see what we are doing more easily. The operating system is the most important difference A difference that must be addressed and that is not exclusive to this new Neo is the issue of the operating system. Choosing the Apple laptop will introduce us to MacOS, a lightweight and visually very clean operating system. It is true that it is much less customizable than Windows, but in it you will find all the most typical office tools or similar that you need to work or study. Also, if you have an iPhone, you can receive your notifications on your laptop. Or even use an iPad as a second screen. On the other hand, there is Windows. It is a more demanding operating system for the hardware, but in exchange it is also more customizable and usually works better with several windows at the same time. Besides, It is also easier to install applications and gamesalthough these teams are not designed to play. You can also connect your mobile phone to this operating system, although it does not reach Apple’s level of integration. The hardware differences, beyond the numbers Let’s move on to the hardware, which is where the meat of this comparison is. By numbers, if we look at the specifications of the three Windows laptops (you can find them below in a comparison table), they are superior. The MacBook Neo comes with a mobile processor (the A18 Pro that was mounted on the iPhone 16 Pro), but that doesn’t mean it should be underestimated: has more power than a MacBook Air M1. Putting the processors of Windows computers on the table, we have a quite different bouquet. The Acer laptop comes with a 13th generation Intel Core i7, which can offer Better performance in heavy tasks like 4K video editing than the rest. The Lenovo, with its Intel Core i5 of the same generation, is the intermediate option and the HP, with an Intel Core 5 120 U, is the least powerful of all, but with enough for office automation and simple tasks. Important point related to the processor: temperature management. A laptop, due to space issues, has very little room to cool its interior. With very intensive use, it is possible that Windows laptops tend to heat up more and emit noise from the fans. This is something that the MacBook Neo will not suffer at that level, since Apple laptops They are characterized by being very quiet. Processors aside, there is also the issue of memory. The MacBook Neo only has an 8GB RAM configuration, just half of what the three similarly priced Windows options offer. Here we have two things to keep in mind: MacOS is a less demanding operating system, so we will have a more fluid experience than in Windows. However, the 16 GB of RAM is better if you are one of those who has dozens of tabs open in the browser. And finally, there is the issue of storage. This is where the Apple team loses the most, since this configuration It only comes with 256 GB capacity (There is one with 512 GB, but it is more expensive). The HP and Acer laptops win by a landslide, both with 1 TB of storage. The Lenovo falls right in the middle with its 512 GB of storage. If we are going to move a lot with it, the Apple laptop is better The beauty of a laptop is, above all, that it is portable. They are devices designed to work there and there, no matter if it is in the office or on board a train. We may spend part of the day carrying them and, logically, the lighter … Read more

Lisa Ann retired from porn over a decade ago. AI has given him a second career without him having to act again

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In the porn industryfew careers last as long as Lisa Ann’s. He started in adult cinema in the mid-90s and retired in 2014, more than two decades later. However, what seemed like a permanent retirement has turned out not to be because Lisa Ann is back, or rather her AI avatar. Reincorporation. They tell it in Wired. The well-known porn actress Lisa Ann has returned to the adult entertainment industry, and she has done so through OhChat, a platform like OnlyFansbut in which, instead of with real people, users interact with AI avatars. Ann, who confesses to being an AI enthusiast, thought it was a good way to continue monetizing her image without having to return to porn. “It keeps my name alive and it will never get old,” he tells Wired. Lisa Ann is not the only former porn actress on the platform, there are also others like Cherie Deville, Tera Patrick or Brandi Love. The Onlyfans of AI. In OhChat, users pay an amount depending on the interaction they seek with the avatar. For $5 you can have unlimited text conversations, but if you want to have images and audio you have to go up to $10, although with limitations. To get all the unlimited content the cost is $30. Each creator has their own subscription, just like OnlyFans, and the company keeps 20%. There are other apps like Joi AI, SinfulX.AI and My.Club that offer similar content. Not just porn (but almost all porn). OhChat has already reached 400,000 users and has more than 350 creators (almost all women), although only 193 appear to us. Each avatar is marked with an icon indicating whether it offers explicit, topless, or ‘sexy’ content. The latter is what other types of profiles offer, such as the well-known actress Carmen Elektra or even influencers. However, the explicit content far exceeds the more restrained one; Doing a search we only found 35 avatars that offer sexy content and 109 that make explicit sexual content. Consensual deepfakes. The sexual deepfakes They have been making headlines for a long time now, there have been fines and even the government wants to regulate them. We recently witnessed the case of Grok and how filled X with photos of naked womenall without the consent of those affected, of course. Platforms like OhChat are presented as a way to create and monetize these deepfakes, without intermediaries. For creators, it is a way to generate passive income and, in the case of well-known profiles like Lisa Ann, continue exploiting their image without having to get in front of a camera. AI Relationships. This is just one more example of a trend that is increasingly gaining more presence, and that is People are making connections with AI. There are those who engage a friendly relationshipwho is looking for a romantic or, as in this case, simply sexual connection. Which In 2013 it was the plot of that great movietoday it is a reality for many people: AI has become an accompaniment and many companies have seen a business there. Image | Wikipedia, OhChat In Xataka | There are people cheating on their partners. Everything normal except because they are doing it with an AI

It should be impossible for an iPhone 17 Pro to run a gigantic 400B AI model. Ought

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The iPhone 17 Pro has 12 GB of unified memory. It is a very decent figure for a mobile phone, but in theory absolutely insufficient to run large AI models locally. And therein lies the surprise: a new project has made it possible for this mobile phone to run locally a model with 400,000 million parameters (400B). And that opens the doors to a promising horizon. Giant AI model, dwarf memory. A developer named Daniel Woods (@dandeveloper) has created, thanks to AI, a new inference engine called Flash-MoE whose code has been published as Open Source on GitHub accompanied by a study about his behavior. woods managed to run locally the Qwen 3.5 397B model (the full version, without distillation or quantization) on your MacBook Pro with 48 GB of RAM. Downloaded the model (209 GB on disk) and developed that inference engine to achieve something that seemed almost impossible. Other developers have gone even further and have managed to run models like DeepSeek-V3 (671B) or even Kimi K2.5 (1.026B!!) on their MacBooks. The speed is slow, no doubt, but they work, they work. It’s amazing. iPhone 17 Pro is capable of running a 400B model. Another developer called Anemll wanted to go a little further and try to run this model with almost 400,000 million parameters on his iPhone 17 Pro with 12 GB of RAM… and he succeeded. It is true that the model is very slow in responses (0.6 tokens per second, very unusable), but achieving something like this opens the doors to a future in which video or unified memory is no longer so critical to be able to use huge AI models locally. a few hours ago doubled the speed at 1.1 tokens per second, reducing the number of experts to four (2.5% quality loss in responses). It is still not entirely usable, but the technical demonstration is evident. Another user has preferred to use a somewhat smaller model (Qwen 3.5 35B) but still huge for the iPhone, and has already managed to get it to run locally at about more than acceptable 13.1 tokens per second. Why it matters. The AI ​​models we use in the cloud (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) are gigantic and run in data centers with thousands of chips and enormous amounts of memory and storage. They are the most powerful because they run on the most powerful machines. Although it is possible to use AI models locally, the models that we can run are much smaller and that makes it difficult for them to behave equally well both in quality of responses and in their speed or precision. This method opens the door to a future in which even on “modest” machines it is possible to run giant AI models that give better answers and allow us to avoid using models in the cloud. Apple already warned. Three years ago a group of Apple researchers published the study ‘LLM in a flash‘ which precisely pointed to that: to run AI models locally it would be possible not only to take advantage of the unified memory of Macs, but also their storage units. The speed would be slow, yes, but this would open up the possibility of running gigantic models locally on machines with much smaller amounts of unified memory. Woods used Claude Code with Claude Opus 4.6 and applied the new methodology “autoresearch” by Andrej Karpathy to implement Flash-MoE based on that research. The result is really promising. Video memory was everything. On my Mac mini M4, for example, I have 16 GB of unified memory. This means that with tools like Ollama you can install and run models like Qwen 3.5 4B locally with some fluidity, but 7B models or others like gpt-oss 20B would be much slower in responding (or would get stuck altogether). Video memory (or unified on Apple devices) is the most important parameter when running local models, both in terms of quantity and bandwidth. If you want to use them fluidly, that’s the limiting factor. It is possible to use “regular” RAM, but the speeds when using it are reduced so drastically that it is often better not to use that option at all. If you have a fast SSD, you have a treasure. Now the limiting factor is our SSD drive, since the model uses it as if it were a kind of substitute for video memory. And the faster the SSD drive on our computer, the better. There is good news here, because lately we are seeing how PCIe 5.0 drives they achieve about 15 GB/s without too many problems, and that speed already gives enough room for maneuver to use much larger AI models locally than we could use before. A promising future for local (and more private) AI. This discovery is really striking for everyone who wants to use AI locally, because it allows you to use huge models without having to make a huge investment in the latest generation graphics cards or, for example, in a Mac with a lot of unified memory: a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 512 GB of memory, for example, costs more than 10,000 euros. With this new method we could opt for a much cheaper machine that, with a good SSD unit, would allow us to use giant models in a fairly decent way. Not as fast as those other options, sure, but still very decent. It’s a notable step forward in enjoying the benefits of running local AI models, including the biggest of them all: privacy. With this type of local execution, our conversations and everything we tell the chatbot stays on our machine, it does not end up on the servers of companies like Google, OpenAI, Meta or Anthropic. In Xataka | Jensen Huang believes we have reached the “coming of the AI ​​wolf.” It is perfect for feeding a Tamagotchi

Sony and Honda have canceled Afeela, their first electric car. One more example of China’s triumph where others fail

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Honda has encountered a wall called the electric car. One that has carried out the development of three of its own electric cars, another that was underway with Sony and that will have an impact on its accounts of about 22.5 billion dollars. The situation, it seems, is not the best. Honda’s jump to the electric car It seemed like an immutable reality just seven years ago. Seven years may seem like a long time but in automotive industry terms it is just the usual jump between two generations of cars. Perhaps that is why the plans, in addition to being immovable, seemed risky. In October 2019, the company announced that From 2022 it would only sell electric cars in Europe. Our continent seemed to be moving towards the electric car under pressure from regulations. Tesla was booming and the companies thought that this was the best path for our market. Today, Honda’s catalog for our country does not have a single electric car. In these years, the Honda e has obtained a very discreet result, victim of a very high price. He e:Ny1, a sort of electric HR-V, is also no longer available after selling an almost negligible number of cars in our country. Along the way, they announced the development of three new electric cars for the US market, all with a groundbreaking and futuristic aesthetic. Also a car that would arrive together with a collaboration with Sony. All of this has been cancelled. The Chinese surprise Much has changed in recent years so that Honda has gone from targeting only the electric market in Europe, developing three new cars with this technology for the United States and another with Sony, to canceling everything. And the company confirmed a few days ago that he reversed his electrical project. First with the cancellation of cars designed only for the American public. The move almost seems logical. The country still does not clearly embrace the electric car and Donald Trump is giving wings to keep every combustion car alive and without any effort. With a country of enormous distances and a charging network that remains insufficientthe electric car continues to have significant pitfalls. This cancellation has had two clear consequences. The first is an impact on Honda’s accounts of more than 20,000 million dollars. How we have the case of Stellantisthis money is not a direct loss, it is the sum of the investments already made, the fines to be paid to suppliers for unfulfilled agreements and the money that is not received from the sales that had been estimated, among other items. The second impact is that Afeela 1 has also been cancelled. This car was born from a collaboration between Sony and Honda. At CES 2023 It was already announced that it would arrive in 2026. Last year, at the same fair, the car was priced for the US market: $89,900 for the “cheap” version and more than $100,000 for the “face.” This year, at CES, we had no news. Less than three months later we know that the project has been canceled because, among other things, it rode the same platform as Honda’s other three electric cars. Once this was cancelled, producing a single car with a single platform was economically unviable. Sony’s car was sold as a leap forward for Hondaa preview of where the market was going to go. The intention was that Honda would provide the hardware and its knowledge making cars, Sony would provide the software and its experience getting the most out of elements such as cameras or sensors. Qualcomm and Epic Games were also supporting the project, the latter company creating an on-demand mobility service for the vehicle. The evolution of the automobile industry has attracted various technology companies. First it was Dyson the company that surprised us by announcing its own electric car. We know that Apple has tried to bring its own car forward and along the way he has left 10,000 million dollars. Microsoft was an investor in Cruise before its closure. Google is making efforts with autonomous cars. This company also wants Android Automotive be an essential part of the future of the electric car. Of all these companies that have been involved in the development of electric cars, all of them have failed. Only Google with Android Automotive seems to be building a long-term ecosystem, which Apple doesn’t seem to be getting it with CarPlay either. We are not talking about companies that supply hardware to automotive companies like Qualcomm or Nvidia, we are talking about companies that also they get involved in the development of a car through their software services or their knowledge to take advantage of that hardware. And, here, China is leading the market. What Sony and Honda intended was to demonstrate that two leading Japanese companies still had enough muscle and knowledge to produce a ground-breaking and competitive electric car. At that time, Xiaomi has built it itself. And Huawei is giving a lesson in China on how to take advantage of these collaborations. Right now, this last company collaborates with Toyota on the latest electric vehicles they have launched for the Chinese market. Its cars have their own ecosystem developed by Huawei that relies on, among other things, the electric motors that Huawei also develops. That is, the Chinese company is in charge of providing its parts and its software knowledge for the ultimate control of them. Huawei and Xiaomi are taking over the operating systems of Chinese electric cars with HarmonyOS and HyperOS. Both companies have extensive experience designing interfaces and digital experiences for the user, an essential service in China to sell electric cars and where Europe, Japan and the United States are still in their infancy, if we compare ourselves to what we see there. Specifically, Huawei has spread its tentacles in the industry until getting its hands on Toyota developments and having cars on the street that will rival Porsche, like the Aistaland GT7sedans that … Read more

Campo de Montiel has rare earths to cover 33% of European demand, according to a mining company. The Board has said “no, thank you”

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Oil may be the resource that makes most of the headlines today, but the rare earthare “the cover” of the technology industry: they are decisive practically in any sector and also set the geopolitical agenda at a time of tariffs and vetoes. And if there is a country that cuts cod into rare earths (spoiler: They are neither earth nor are they rarebut 17 metals) that is China: there is no one to cough or in reserves neither in production. There was a time when The United States dominated this sectorbut that time passed away. And Europe? Well, at the moment rare earths are not produced, but we are working on it: has stepped on the accelerator at the Per Geijer superminein Kiruna (Sweden), where you could get 18% of what you need. Meanwhile, in a place in La Mancha whose name I don’t want to remember, there is who points that could obtain 2,100 tons per year of lanthanides, enough to cover 33% of European needs. There is only one little problem: the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha has said that they are not interested. And they are not alone. Campo de Montiel is a (potential) mine. Back in 2013 the Spanish company Quantum Mining put under his magnifying glass the region of Campo de Montiel, in Ciudad Real. Next to Torrenueva is that promising site that is the object of your desires: Matamulas. According to their analysis, it is full of monazite (along with bastnasite, the main rare earth ore) gray. But really loaded: the company assures that in Campo de Montiel more than 2,100 tons could be produced per year. Is that a lot or a little? According to the company, it is approximately a third of European consumption needs, although Eurostat figure in 12,900 annual tons imported by 2024, which would leave the percentage around 16% (the company does not publicly detail with what reference it calculates that third). The firm lands it with applications such as the construction of 350,000 electric cars or 10,000 wind turbines. Quantum Mining Production Estimates “We’re not interested.” A month ago Quantum Minería tried again and you already have an answer of the autonomous government: Mercedes Gómez, the Minister of Sustainable Development, explains that they are not interested in holding a competition so that tastings can be carried out at the Matamulas site. Not again: in 2013 the Board granted the mining company (and two other companies) exploitation permits, which was rejected in 2017. In 2024 came back to request permits, this time framed within the Neodimio project, again encountering a no. The EU also left them outside of their strategic projects. What Quantum wants to do. The mining plan It involves temporarily removing a half-meter layer of vegetation (mainly cereal) so that, once the process is finished, it can be reused in the restoration. Afterwards, backhoes extract two meters deep to reach the gray monazite. That material is taken to a concentration plant to be screened using physical processes, without chemical additives, so that the soil can be returned to its site later. Then the land is leveled and the crop is replaced. These works are carried out hectare by hectare, so that it does not interrupt the agricultural processes in the surroundings. According to the company, when the land is restored it can be cultivated “even in better conditions than the original ones.” Why not. Given the insistent interest of Quantum, the citizen platform ‘Yes to the Living Land‘ and other citizen activism movements once again opposed, in addition to one of the wineries in the region. A decade ago Ecologists in Action detailed that the environmental impact of this operation on the 27,500 hectares included in the project would be severe. One of the bottlenecks is water: for this operation they estimate that between 310,000 and 500,000 cubic meters of water would be needed annually during the estimated ten years of exploitation (washing and processing are two processes that consume a lot of water). In that area the water pressure is high, with droughts, reservoirs in states of emergency, overexploited aquifers and intense grassroots agricultural activity as icing on the cake. In addition, in the region there are two Special Protection Areas for Birds and it is the habitat of the lynx. In Xataka | The world’s rare earth reserves, laid out in this graph showing the brutal dominance of a single country In Xataka | Europe seeks its sovereignty in rare earths and knows how to achieve it the fast way: with a supermine in Sweden Cover | ダモリ and Karen Paredes Carabantes

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