Month: April 2026

‘Avatar’ is one of the most profitable films in history. And yet Disney is considering killing the saga

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James Cameron’s trilogy has generated 6.7 billion dollars at the box office. Despite this, the future of the two remaining sequels is up in the air, Disney is considering making the following films cheaper, and the theme park attraction that was announced with all honors a few months ago may never be built. The numbers. The figures for ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’, the third installment of the franchise, are objectively colossal: 404 million grosses in the domestic market, 1,085 million in the rest of the world, third highest-grossing title of 2025. A success for any current Hollywood franchise, but at this point we are all clear that James Cameron’s saga is not a typical product. The low. The first way of reduce enthusiasm is by comparing the collection with its precedents. The first installment, from 2009, is still the highest grossing film in history, with 2,920 million dollars. The second, ‘The Sense of Water’, is the third with 2,340 million. Compared to those figures, ‘Fire and Ashes’ is no less than a billion short. It remains a good business (350 million, plus 150 in marketing), but It’s not even the highest-grossing movie of 2025since it was beaten by ‘Zootopia 2’, also from Disney, and by ‘Ne Zha 2‘. The Wrap has made an in-depth analysis of the topic and highlights the opinion of Paul Dergarabedian, head of market trends at Comscore. The analyst states that “‘Fire and Ashes’ grossed half that of the first film. And the ticket prices in 2009 were not those of 2025.” In March, during the Saturn Awards, Cameron collected trophies for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Science Fiction Film for the third ‘Avatar’ and recognized that “To be perfectly clear, we have not even made a decision to move forward at this time.” Short and cheap. The Wrap is also the medium that I spoke with insiders from Disney who confirm that internal conversations are being held to make the next deliveries “shorter and cheaper.” The release dates of the fourth and fifth films (December 2029 and December 2031), and the answer to how to reduce costs without extirpating the identity of ‘Avatar’ is not easy to elucidate. Why are they so expensive? Some details of the process that illustrate why “cheaper” can be a complication: for example, the production involves at least two complete shoots: one motion capture with actors and another, mostly digital, to define the staging, the camera movements and all the elements of the computer-generated universe. According to Cameron acknowledged.making the fourth and fifth deliveries together (as he did with the second and third) would mean an investment of around 800 million without changes in the method. More expenses: Costume designer Deborah Scott, Oscar-nominated for her work on the third installment, illustrates the scale of the problem. Each suit is designed, manufactured in the physical world, and then digitally “translated” with the help of animators and technicians. This process is multiplied in each film by hundreds of characters, creatures and environments. Cameron has publicly committed to do not use AI and always support the human work behind the film, which also prevents lowering prices in this way. What has gone wrong? Why hasn’t the third ‘Avatar’ reached the 2 billion of the previous installments? Cameron’s team affirms, according to the same medium, that Disney launched the film in a very similar way to ‘The Sense of Water’, three years earlier, but with more margin: there was more time between the trailers and the premiere, which allowed some expectation to be generated. Added to this are commercial obstacles such as the fact that it is the longest film in the saga (197 minutes) and that there has been a certain lack of merchandising and other parallel actions. It all adds up to making it a film that could have performed better. California über alles. The uncertainty extends beyond the movies: Disney had announced the construction of an ‘Avatar’ themed area at Disney California Adventure, designed to complement the popular Pandora land that has existed since 2017 in Animal Kingdom (Florida). Construction was scheduled to begin in 2026 but the scheduled closure of the ‘Monsters Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue’ attraction, necessary to begin work, has been postponed until 2027. One year late, for now. Disney parks expert Jim Shull told The Wrap that the franchise “as a cultural force is exhausted. No one is demanding to see more. If ‘Avatar 3’ had been a massive hit and people were clamoring for the fourth and fifth installments, that would change the equation. But there’s not much demand.” And he proposes a much more obvious alternative: expanding the ‘Zootopia’ areas, in line with the success of the ‘Zootopia: Hot Pursuit’ attraction at Shanghai Disneyland. In addition, there are logistical issues: the ‘Avatar’ water attraction required a complicated and expensive water treatment plant of its own. In Xataka | China saves ‘Avatar 3’: a good part of its billion in revenue comes from the only market that still goes to the movies

The largest naval project in German history since World War II is turning out to be a crazy disaster

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In Europe, large military programs often take more than a decade to be completed and, in many cases, end up costing several times more than initially anticipated. It is not uncommon for complex projects to accumulate thousands of technical requirements and go through multiple reviews before reaching production. In this context, some plans are born as emblems of modernization… and end up becoming examples of how difficult it is to bring them to fruition. From something historic to something unsustainable. He program F126 was born as the great symbol of German rearmament and largest naval project of the country since the Second World War, but over time it has become quite the opposite: an example of how an ambitious plan can derail to the point of collapse. Conceived as a latest generation frigateflexible and prepared for decades of service, the project has not only accumulated delays and cost overrunsbut has called into question Germany’s ability to execute large military programs at a time when it aspires to lead European defense. Technical errors and chaos. He told in an extensive report the financial times that the origin of the problem seems as modern as it is devastating: a failed bet on a new software design that was not ready for a project of this scale. What should have been an advanced tool ended up generating cascading errors, from cables incorrectly located on the plans to steel parts manufactured with incorrect shapes, forcing manual corrections and slowing down the entire production. The result was a system that was moving at just a fraction of its planned pace, with delays that pushed the initial delivery several years later than planned. A culture shock. It turns out that the problem was not just technical. Apparently, the media reported that the project was trapped in a deep shock between the Dutch shipyard’s way of working and the German contracting system, known for its extreme rigidity. Thousands of specifications detailed even the smallest elements, while approval processes were they dragged on for months within a complex bureaucracy that required paper documentation and rejected even plans in English. This combination made collaboration a slow, frustrating, and, in many cases, unproductive process. Skyrocketing costs and limit decisions. As the problems piled up, so did made the invoice: The project, initially valued in the billions, began to go off track with significant cost overruns and structural delays. As it is, Germany now faces critical decisions ranging from replacing the main contractor to accepting billions already invested. as irrecoverable losses. At the same time, faster but less ambitious alternative solutions are being studied, reflecting the extent to which the original project has lost credibility. Notice to sailors of rearmament. If you like, the case of the F126 goes beyond a simple industrial failure: it reveals the limits of European military cooperation even among closely integrated countries and raises questions about the continent’s ability to implement complex joint programs. In a context of increasing of defense spending and increasing strategic pressure, the project has become a clear warning: It is not enough to invest more, you also have to know how to manage better. Because otherwise, even the most important projects can end up being, as in this case, a costly and lengthy example of what not to do. Image | Give me In Xataka | Germany is experiencing a new “industrial miracle” that it already experienced 90 years ago: that of weapons In Xataka | Germany was a sleeping military giant: now it has been awakened and it is already surpassing the US in bullets produced per year

French crossing the border with jerry cans

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In cities like Madrid and Barcelona, ​​today Diesel starts at 1.94 euros per liter, with gasoline close to 1.60. These are absolutely sky-high prices if we compare them with those of the last few months before the start of the conflict between the United States and Iran. But for the French it is a candy they are not willing to reject. The French case. France is one of the countries with the most aggressive taxation of its fuels. Something that has caused prices to skyrocket above 2.30 euros. This same week, 12% of French stations have run out of fuel. Reason? TotalEnergies capped the maximum price at 1.99 euros per liter for gasoline and 2.09 euros in the case of diesel. Within a few hours they were practically out of supplies. Solution? Spanish. Those transport professionals and regular drivers close to the border are reactivating a practice they resort to when fuel costs skyrocket: refueling in Spain. In some cases the price difference reaches close to one euro per liter, which has caused a very high influx at low-cost Easygas stations in Guipúzcoa, according to Diario Vasco. Filling drums. A deposit may not make a difference. But a few, yes. On their gas station pilgrimage, the French are filling drums and jugs with fuel, according to the newspaper. The regulations allow up to 60 liters of gasoline per container to be transported, up to a total of 240 liters. Europe is not so happy. Although prices continue to be high, Spain is an anomalous case compared to Europe. Brussels is warning the Government that the VAT on fuel cannot be reduced from 21% to 10% as the executive stated, and threatens sanctions if the tax is not modified. Sources from the Ministry of Finance have defended that The measure is “temporary and not structural” and that its “priority” is “supporting families, self-employed workers and companies to mitigate the effects of a war that should never have started.” On March 26, Congress approved a package of measures that includes tax cuts to contain fuel, gas and electricity bills during the conflict. France sleeps peacefully. Spain, Croatia, Hungary and Germany are European examples of attempts at fuel containment. Either through reductions in the tax burden, or through limits on price increases by gas stations, such as the Alemán case. Meanwhile, in France, the Government has not intervened in the price in any way, which has catapulted the final ticket to one of the highest positions in the European ranking. In Xataka | Finding the cheapest gas station in your area is very simple thanks to this very powerful tool

Anthropic has become the darling of AI and has sought a partner to guarantee its future. It’s not the one we thought

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When we think about the big players in artificial intelligence, we tend to draw pretty clear lines between competitors and allies. Anthropic and Google They usually appear on the same board, yes, but as direct rivals that develop their own models and compete for the same ground. Therefore, the fact that they now appear linked in the same agreement draws attention from the first moment. The firm led by Dario Amodei has closed an alliance with Google and Broadcom to ensure next-generation computing capacity, and that movement, beyond the technical, leaves a message that does not go unnoticed. If we go to the details of the announcement, what is relevant is not only who participates, but the scale of what has been signed. Anthropic speaks of multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity that it expects to come online from 2027, an infrastructure designed to support its famous Claude models. In its statement it insists that demand from its clients has accelerated this year, and presents this movement as a direct response to that pressure. In fact, it describes it as its biggest bet in computing so far, although Amazon remains its main cloud provider. The unexpected partner in the battle for computing The agreement makes a lot of sense if we look at the figures that the company has shared. In 2024, it registered annualized revenues above $30 billion and more than 1,000 business clients exceeding one million annual spending, when in February there were more than 500. So this undoubtedly translates into a greater load on your infrastructure. And that’s where this movement fits in, not so much as an isolated strategic coup, but as a response to that growth. And, as we can see, this agreement has two different pieces. On the one hand there is Broadcom, a semiconductor company that has benefited greatly from the rise of AI. On the other hand, the Mountain View giant appears, which in addition to providing infrastructure, driven by its focus on TPUalso competes directly in model development. And that is where the agreement gains interest, because it mixes technical collaboration with a competitive relationship that already existed. It is also worth stopping at where Anthropic is, because it helps to understand why it can close such a deal. The company has been building its position by moving away from the race for the flashiest features and focusing on business environmentwhere security, control and reliability outweigh the initial impact. This approach has allowed him to excel in tasks such as programming, with Claude Code, and security with the new Mythos. And, little by little, it has been gaining something that is not achieved overnight: the trust of large companies. But there is more. Anthropic makes it clear that Claude works on AWS TrainiumGoogle TPU and NVIDIA GPU, and adds that this variety allows it to improve performance and resilience. That gives us a pretty clear clue about what he’s doing now. Rather than betting everything on a single supplier or a single family of chips, it is consolidating a more flexible base to sustain its growth. And in an industry so stressed by hardware demand, that decision makes a lot of sense. Images | Anthropic In Xataka | The “token economy” is broken: flat AI programming fees are mathematically unsustainable

Behind oil, the US had a much more mundane reason for attacking Iran: pistachios

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Since the United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, unleashing a war that has lasted more than a month and now hangs on a fragile truce, the world has been attentive to the ups and downs in the price of oil and the traffic of goods such as urea either helium. Logical Your flow has been greatly damaged by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and sectors as important as transportation, agriculture or the technology industry depend on them. There is, however, another commodity that has grabbed much fewer headlines and is equally affected (perhaps even more so) by the war: the pistachio. green gold. No market remains immune to the passage of time, but few have changed as much over the last half century as that of pistachio. If we go back to the 60s, even the 70s, talking about the world pistachio market was talk basically about Iran. The country dominated global trade, placing itself far above from rivals such as the United States or Türkiye. Today the photo is different. Has it changed that much? It comes with looking at the graph above. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), during the 2025/2026 season the US will strengthen its global leadership with 712,700 tons metric, 65% of total production. Iran takes 18% of the pie, followed not so far by Türkiye (11%). These are not current figures, but the new reality. Although the pistachio industry is a business marked by cyclical patterns of its production, its global photo has hardly changed in the last decade: the USA dominates, followed by Iran and Türkiye, which have sometimes reached exchange the second and third position. At the distancefollowed by Syria and the EU, Spain included. It’s the market… and politics. That Iran has lost its global leadership in favor of the United States is hardly a coincidence. Nor is it explained only by reasons of production or pure economics. As I remembered recently analyst Justin Fox in Bloomberg, in reality the US authorities did not begin to bet on pistachio production in California until the middle of the last century. The plantations as such did not arrive until the late 1960s and the first commercial harvest with a certain scope was harvested in 1976. However, the future of the world pistachio market has been influenced by both the geostrategic decisions made in Washington and the work of pistachio farmers in the San Joaquin Valleyin the state of California. Reviewing history. At the end of the 70s, after the overthrow of the Shah and the takeover of the embassy American in Iran, Washington imposed a trade embargo on the country that cleared the way for Californian farmers eager to dominate the national market. The trade penalty was lifted in 1981, but just a few years later the US gave another boost to its industry by applying a tariff of 241% to raw Iranian pistachios in shell. Since then the scenario has become more complicated, but its result is evident: California has become a heavyweight in global production. And with it the US, which surpassed Iran for the first time in the 2004 campaign and has been more than doubling its annual harvest since 2020. “What’s behind that takeoff?” That’s the question Justin Fox asks himself in your analysisin which he slips several ideas: this boom is partly explained by changes in water policies that led American farmers to bet on almonds and pistachios, the advantages of their production during droughts and the boost of Stewart and Lynda Resnickowners of Wonderful Company, a firm that brings together between 15 and 20% of California pistachios and found the key to popularizing the product. And for proof, a button: since the middle of the last decade, per capita consumption in the country has tripled. Beyond the geostrategic value of Iran, its weight in the oil industry or the turbulent relationship with Israel, there are those who have seen the pistachio market as one of the factors that have conditioned the relationship between Washington and Tehran over recent decades. “Hostile relations with Iran seem to have benefited California producers,” says Fox, who recalls that there is even a documentary, ‘Pistachio Wars’which “even hints that pistachio interests are partly responsible for that hostility.” Is it that important? It is estimated that the ‘vede gold’ was the 17th export in terms of value of the US agricultural industry during fiscal year 2025. And it is not unreasonable to think that this position will improve. Both for the growing popularity of pistachio, driven in recent years by the fever of ‘Dubai chocolate’as well as the commitment of US farmers. The New York Times esteem that pistachio orchards have exploded in surface area in the last quarter of a century: from around 100,000 acres in California in 2001, they have grown to more than 600,000. And the war came. At this point the question is obvious… How is the war in Iran affecting the world pistachio market? There are those who believe that the American industry will be one of the best stops. “This war will limit what Iran can make and export to customers in Europe and China,” explains to TNYT Adam Orandi, responsible for a pistachio tree extension in San Joaquín. It is not only about a possible loss of strength of the Islamic Republic in the market, but about the behavior of prices. Orandi is not the only one who has pointed in that direction. In recent weeks other voices have speculated about the benefits that California companies could obtain, especially considering the good estimates of harvest that they handle in the US. Click on the image to go to the tweet. Has the war affected that much? Yes. A few weeks ago Times of India slid and to some of the threats that the war represents for the Iranian pistachio trade: logistical paralysis (conditioned by disturbances in maritime routes), the increase in premiums charged by insurance companies, power … Read more

Artemis II is a million-dollar mission, but its astronauts have had to wear t-shirts as blinds

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Luckily, all the systems vital for the proper functioning of Orion they are going swimmingly on his trip to the Moon. However, he is having some more mundane unforeseen events, such as problems with outlook wave freezing of the urine reservoir. Added to all this is having to use t-shirts as blinds. And it was not an outburst from the astronauts, but rather direct instructions from Houston. Colder than at Pingu’s communion. The Orion capsule is not exactly the most air-conditioned place. It is very cold inside, so the Mission Control Team, from Earth, has been working to warm it up. Together with the crew, it was decided to move the ship so that it was as exposed to the Sun as possible. But there is a problem with that. The blinds that astronauts use to be able to sleep without the room becoming too bright absorb that heat and overheat. Possible damage to windows. If the blinds overheat, they could transmit that heat to the windows themselves, which would be at risk of damage. For this reason, the Control Team recommended to the crew on April 4 that they remove all the blinds. They explained to them that they understood that this would be very uncomfortable, since the interior of the capsule would be very illuminated. For this reason, they added a most strange recommendation: that they cover the windows with T-shirts. In the communication system recording, a crew member is heard complying with the order and indicating that they would follow the advice. But what advice. delicate windows. We might ask ourselves why it is necessary to protect the windows from the Sun if the ship is prepared to withstand the very high temperatures of re-entry into the atmosphere. It’s a good question, but the truth is that it is not the same type of heat. To begin with, reentry involves very great heat that spreads throughout the ship in a very short time. On the other hand, what comes from the windows is a much more focused and maintained heat. Orion’s heat shield protects it from the heat of reentry. Furthermore, the windows They have an outer layer of fused silica capable of withstanding 2,760ºC. But the inner layers are not as strong. Therefore, if they are exposed to solar radiation maintained and focused directly on them after being absorbed by the blinds, they may not withstand the heat. The future. Despite that small mishap, everything is going smoothly. In fact, Orion already has broken the record of going further than any other manned spacecraft and is close to beating another, reaching the highest speed at which any human being has traveled. If all goes well, this will happen next Friday, April 10, although in Spanish time it will already be the early morning of the 11th. In addition, they stand out for being the first lunar mission in which a woman, a black person and someone who is not American travel. It is not understood how in such an ambitious and expensive mission it has been necessary to use t-shirts as blinds, but at least it has been a failure that does not put the crew at risk. Images | NASA and Freepik In Xataka | For this alone, Artemis II has already been worth it: the impressive photos of the far side of the Moon

AI flat rates for programming are mathematically unsustainable

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A Claude Max user, who pays $100 a month, generated $5,600 in actual API costs in a single billing cycle. It is just an (extreme) example of the enormous gap between the price of such a plan and its spending potential. Other analyzes place it on the range of between 1,000 and 5,000 dollars. Anthropic has just cut off access to third-party tools (such as OpenClaw) to your subscription plans. In addition to for protecting your fenced gardenis also the inevitable arithmetic consequence of selling tokens at open buffet prices when real consumption has skyrocketed between 10 and 100 times. Why is it important. The business model that has financed the explosion of AI for programmers (flat rates, unlimited access, subscription model) has been built on a statistical fiction that development agents have destroyed. What is assumed when a flat rate is sold in any area is that light users subsidize the most intensive ones and the averages are sustained. That works in the data rates of a telecom, in the gyms, in Netflix and in an all-you-can-eat buffet. But it doesn’t work when any user can become, from one day to the next, a beastly consumer of computing. And that’s exactly what happens when an agent comes into play. And since December we are in the era of the agents. Between the lines. The person who has best explained this problem is Luo Fuliresponsible for the team MiMo model on Xiaomi and ex-DeepSeek, who has published a long tweet which has moved especially in Chinese technological circles. Your diagnosis is that third party tools like OpenClaw are not optimized to reuse Claude’s context cache, so each query regenerates context windows of over 100,000 tokens from scratch. The actual number of requests per query is several times higher than what Claude Code himself would generate. “That’s not a gap. It’s a crater,” Luo said. The backdrop. In China, AI programming plans have become one of the most sought-after technology products on the market. Alibaba Cloud quotas They usually sell out in the first hours of the work dayand Tencent’s appear as “unavailable” permanently. Developers go so far as to set morning alarms and write scripts self-purchase to get monthly access. The demand is real, but the underlying economics point in the opposite direction: subscription plans, designed for a world where each interaction consumed a few hundred tokensnow absorb agent workloads that consume 10 to 100 times more per task. Yes, but. Anthropic has not closed access to third-party agents. You have moved them to another invoice: from flat rate to pay-as-you-go API. The measure includes a one-time credit equivalent to the monthly price of the plan and discounts of up to 30% for those who pre-purchase “extra use” packages. The problem is that for many independent developers, the jump in costs, potentially tenfold, makes the use of agents no longer economically viable. Some have already announced that they will migrate to other models. Someone has to pay for that party, and until a new, more efficient solution arrives, no one knows who it will be. The big question. If flat rate can’t survive actual agent usage, what pricing model can? Luo Fuli believes that economic pressure will eventually force third-party tool developers to optimize their context management and maximize cache reuse. He may be right and his approach is logical. But in the meantime, the entire industry is operating with a business model whose math doesn’t add up, and the question of who will absorb the difference (suppliers, developers or end users) remains unanswered. In Xataka | Companies have been investing in AI for years. The problem is that many projects are not producing results. Featured image | Fotis Fotopoulos

who are the names that move the country’s economy

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The size of a company is, ultimately, a matter of perspective. For example, Inditex worth more in the stock market than any other Spanish company, but Repsol far surpasses it if what we look at is its income. On the other hand, Mercadona, without being listed in any index, employs more people in Spain than any large multinational based in the country. They are three different data that return three business maps that barely overlap, but together they form the business reality of Spain and about how the Spanish economy is built, revealing which sectors generate wealth for investorswhich ones move the most money and which are those companies that really move the employment needle in our country. The Top 10 companies of the IBEX35 The most common when we talk about large companies is to go to the IBEX35, the Spanish stock ranking which does not measure how much a company invoices or how many people it employs, but rather how much investors trust in your future. With that criterion, Inditex leads the list with a wide difference. At the end of March 2026, after publishing its annual resultsits stock market value was around 163,500 million euros, although in December 2025 it reached 175,155 million, its historical maximum. At that time, investment bank Jefferies revised upwards its target price for the share, which would imply a value greater than 200,000 million euros. Inditex’s capitalization advantage over the rest of the companies does not come from your sales volumebut of what the company founded by Amancio Ortega win with every euro you sell. In its fiscal year of 2025, the textile company obtained a record net profit of 6,220 million, 6% more than the previous year. This explains why large banks, such as Santander, BBVA or CaixaBank and energy companies such as Iberdrola or Endesa, with larger business figures, are left behind on the stock market. In 2025, by first time in historyfive Spanish companies exceeded 100,000 million euros on the stock market at the same time. Despite this, the index continues to be dominated by banks and electricity companies. However, sectors with a very important presence in the daily lives of Spaniards (such as the food industry, hospitality, automotive) barely have a presence in this index. Largest companies in Spain by turnover When the criterion is not investor confidence, but the total income that a company generates, the map turns upside down. The oil, gas and electricity companies They occupy the first positions because they buy and sell enormous quantities of raw materials, although what they keep as profit is a relatively small part of that figure. In this case, Repsol is the clearest example. In 2025, the fall in the price of oil, with a barrel of Brent falling 14.5% to $69.1 on average, took its toll. His operating result It fell 12.2%, to 5,312 million euros, although the final net profit rose 8.1%, to 1,899 million. That is, billing is not the same as entering. The big surprise from the list of companies with the highest turnover in Spain It’s Mercadona. Without being listed on the stock market and with hardly any presence in the financial debate, the Valencian chain founded by Juan Roig closed 2025 with 41,858 million euros in sales (8% more) and a net profit of 1,729 million (25% more). These figures have left Mercadona with 28.5% of market share in food in Spain, six tenths above 2024. Juan Roig qualified the “historical” exercise. Inditex, on the other hand, despite being the most powerful company in market capitalization, remains in a middle position in the income ranking. Largest companies in Spain by number of employees There is a tendency to think that a large company also needs a large workforce, something that large technology companies also insist on denying month and month with their large rounds of layoffs. In fact, the proof of nine for this theory is that the list of largest companies in Spain for the employment they generate subverts the order again. The company that hires the most people in Spain is neither the largest on the stock market nor the one with the most turnover: it is Santander Bank and all the personnel it employs in the operations management area. More than 198,400 employees, despite the cuts to your workforce of branches. Mercadona closed 2025 with 110,000 workers between Spain and Portugal and that year raised salaries of its entire workforce 8.5%. The most striking contrast in the ranking is the one between the extremes with Repsol, which heads the billing list, is located at the bottom of the employment list since its workforce is around 25,000 people thanks to the high level of automation of its activity. Inditex or ACS need staff five or six times larger than Repsol to function due to the nature of their activity. The difference between selling clothes or build roads and extract oil or distribute electricity, explains why the impact on employment of these companies has nothing to do with their weight on the stock market or income. The largest companies in Spain by autonomous community Reading the business map of Spain by autonomous community reveals something that economic or national lists tend to hide: the country’s economy is more decentralized than it seems, and many of the companies that lead the economy or employment in their region are not even listed on the stock market or are those that obtain the most profits. Autonomous Community Company Sector Billing approx. 2025 Madrid Repsol Energy and oil €76.3 billion the Basque Country Iberdrola Electrical energy €45,546 M Com. Valencian Mercadona Food distribution €41,858 M Galicia Inditex Textile retail €39,864 M Cantabria Santander Bank Banking €135,000 M Catalonia seat Automotive €12,000 M Aragon Stellantis Spain Automotive €4,159 M Navarre Volkswagen Navarra Automotive €12,000 M Castile and León Renault Spain Automotive €10,000 M Andalusia Airbus Spain Aeronautics and defense €73,420 M Asturias ArcelorMittal Spain Iron and steel industry €3,749 M Murcia The Well Feeding €2,000 … Read more

While specialty cafes are filled with Salomon, more and more people are walking barefoot in the mountains

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It’s Saturday morning in the center of any big city. In specialty coffee shops, among flat whites and sourdough bread, an urban army parades equipped to survive a blizzard in the Alps. We talk about fever Gorpcore: waterproof technical jackets and sneakers trail running ultra-reinforced, designed to devour kilometers of rocks, but today they will only step on tiles and asphalt. However, hundreds of miles from that cafe, on the actual trails where those sneakers should be getting dirty, the exact opposite is happening. We have reached the technological peak of footwear outdoorbut a growing wave of purists, adventurers and elders have decided to take an evolutionary step back: take off their boots and feel the raw earth. Yes, there are people walking barefoot in the mountains. The image of a barefoot mountaineer ceased to be a rarity for hermits and became a global movement. According to GuardianGen Blades, an Australian researcher, says she was hiking the 147-kilometer Namsan Dulle-gil route in South Korea when the terrain changed to a stretch of wet clay (“hwangto”). Neither quick nor lazy, she took off her shoes. He described the feel of the mud oozing between his fingers as “revitalizing, like a massage.” You don’t have to go to Asia to find these devotees of the bare foot. In Australia, Dale Noppers, 37, organizes routes of up to seven hours through the Serpentine National Park stepping on mud, gravel and rocks. He confesses that the experience makes him feel “quite primitive” and assures that, despite the risk of stepping on insects or glass, the soles of his feet are so soft that “it looks like they have had a pedicure.” For Uralla Luscombe-Pedro, 32, who has walked hundreds of kilometers along Australia’s wild coast, feet are “sensory organs.” After weeks of walking like this, he claims to feel like a leaner animal and concludes that our modern concrete human habitat is “strangely boring” in comparison. This is not new, but it has gotten out of control. Europe has been flirting with this idea for decades through the Barfusspark or Barefoot Parks. The German environmental organization NABU documents about 50 of these venues in Germany, with Bad Sobernheim (opened in 1992) being one of the pioneers. An example An example of its magnitude It is the Egestorf parkwhich has almost 3 kilometers and more than 60 stations where visitors step on pine cones, fine sand, spring water and deep mud. But if in Europe it is a recreational activity, in South Korea It’s real institutional madness.. 68.7% of the country’s 243 local governments have ordinances to encourage barefoot hiking. Seongnam City invested 3.45 billion won (about $2.7 million) to build six red clay courts and budgeted another 3.5 billion won by 2024. The private sector not left behind: The Sun Yang Soju liquor company built a 14.5-kilometer runway and donates $800,000 annually for its maintenance. The obsession is such that roads are being built in greenhouses for use in winter. Unfortunately, overcrowding is already causing ecological havoc, such as the degradation of the ecosystem in wetland marshes such as Sorae in Incheon. The key question: why? Defenders of this practice divide their arguments into two large blocks: the mechanics of the body and the “magic” of the earth. On the one hand, mechanical advocates point to physical health. Without shoes, the body constantly adjusts, improving coordination and balance. Small forgotten muscles are activated and the 28 bones, 20 muscles and more than 100 tendons of the foot benefit. Furthermore, when going barefoot on uneven ground, we usually abandon landing with the heel and start stepping with the ball of the foot (metatarsus). This reduces the impact, although it requires 53% more energy, turning the walk into an intense workout. On the other hand, there is the phenomenon of “Earthing”. There are studies that suggest that this direct contact neutralizes free radicals that cause aging, reduces blood viscosity and improves heart rate variability. Attracted by these supposed benefits, patients in Korea claim that the practice has reduced their blood sugar levels, alleviated insomnia and even cured cancer. Science hits the brakes. Podiatrists applaud the freedom of the foot, but with nuances. Dr. George Murley warns in Guardian that you have to treat this transition “almost like a gym session for your feet” and do it progressively. Alejandro Martínez, expert podiatrist, explains in Men’s Health Magazine that “a healthy foot works best when barefoot.” However, when faced with miraculous cures, the medical community pulls out its claws. Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale School of Medicine, calls “earthing” pseudoscience that lacks physical sense, denouncing that many of the studies are poorly designed and financed by companies in the sector. Oncologist Ahn Hee-kyung is blunt about the risks: Walking barefoot exposes vulnerable or immunocompromised patients to potentially lethal bacterial infections, such as staphylococcus or tetanus, through small cracks in the skin. As a result, hospitals report an increase in plantar fasciitis and cellulitis from these reckless walks, and many doctors attribute much of the supposed “cures” to a strong placebo effect enhanced by the environment. The alternative that unites worlds: “Barefoot” footwear. For those seeking tetanus-free biomechanics, the industry has perfected footwear barefoot (or respectful). These are shoes with “zero drop” (no heel), a wide last that does not compress the fingers and an extra-thin sole. Brands like Xero Shoes, leguano, Groundies or Freet dominate the niche, and even Zara has launched its own line. Its effectiveness in hostile terrain is proven: Traveler Matouš Vinš managed to climb the 5,000 meters of Mount Kenya in Africa with minimalist footwear, overcoming the challenge without problems while his heavy-booted companions suffered from blisters. Likewise, adventurer Viktorka Hlaváčková claims to be faster on demanding terrain thanks to these shoes, and emphasizes that her feet maintain great blood circulation even below zero. The cushioning paradox. It is revealing that, at a time of greatest hyper-technization in the footwear industry outdoorthe most striking phenomenon is leaving shoes at home. While … Read more

amounts, how to request them and what are the requirements

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Let’s tell you how to apply for your MEC scholarship for the 2026/2027 academic yearexplaining the requirements to be able to do so and the amounts of this aid. These are scholarships from the Ministry of Education for students. We will also review both the amounts of this scholarship and the specific process to apply for them, something for which I warn you that you will need to identify yourself with DNIe either Electronic certificateas well as the Cl@ve PIN or Permanent Cl@ve. Dates to apply for the scholarship The deadline to apply for the MEC scholarships for the 2026/2027 academic year opened on April 7, 2026, and will close on May 18, 2026 at 3:00 p.m.. Therefore, you have a window of more than a month to request them, although it is advisable not to wait until the last day in case they ask for additional documents to validate your request. How to apply for the scholarship To apply for the MEC scholarships for this school year, you have to enter the website of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training. Once you are inside, click on the tab Scholarships and aid that you have at the top of the screen to go to the corresponding section. When you enter the section, click on Apply for your scholarship. You will go to a page where you can click on the option to access the electronic office, which will take you to this web page where you will have to identify yourself. To do this you can use your digital certificateincluding the FNMT certificate and that of DNIethe PIN code or Mobile Code, or your DNI number. Once you log in, you will go to your general scholarship application screen. Here, what you have to do is click on the button Access to the procedure which you will see at the top in blue to begin the application. The first thing you will see is a page with all the information about the scholarship, the conditions and what you will need to apply for it. On this page, Go down all the way and click on Continue to start the application. And this will take you to the beginning of the scholarship application. Here, you will only have fill in all the information they ask for until completed. Then, you will have to wait to find out if it is assigned to you or not, something you can do by logging in again on this website. Requirements for MEC scholarships If you want to be able to apply for this scholarship, you will have to meet a series of requirements. These will be economic and academic, based on purchasing power and the number of failed subjects. General requirements are the following: Spanish nationality: You must have Spanish nationality or that of a member state of the European Union. Not having an equal or higher degree: If you are going to ask for it for specific studies, you cannot already have completed the same or higher ones. If there is a disability: It will have to be 25% or higher to qualify for the scholarship. university year: Depending on whether it is your first year at university or Vocational Training studies, or if you have taken previous courses, you will be asked for minimum credits ranging from 65% passed for engineering and scientific careers to 90% passed in Social Sciences or Humanities careers. Economic requirements In addition to this, Your family must be below certain family income thresholds which depend on the number of members. These are the thresholds: No. of members Threshold 1 threshold 2 threshold 3 1 8,843 euros 13,898 euros 14,818 euros 2 13,264 euros 23,724 euros 25,293 euros 3 17,685 euros 32,201 euros 34,332 euros 4 22,107 euros 38,242 euros 40,773 euros 5 25,664 euros 42,743 euros 45,572 euros 6 29,181 euros 46,142 euros 49,196 euros 7 32,718 euros 49,503 euros 52,780 euros 8 36,255 euros 52,850 euros 56,348 additional member to the 8th 3,536 euros 3,340 euros 3,561 euros If the student’s family does not exceed threshold 1: They will be able to obtain the fixed amount linked to income, the fixed amount linked to residence, the fixed amount linked to excellence in academic performance, the variable amount and the tuition scholarship (for the studies for which it can be requested). If threshold 1 is exceeded but they are below threshold 2: They will be able to obtain the fixed amount linked to residency, the basic scholarship (if applicable for the study completed), the fixed amount linked to excellence in academic performance, the variable amount and the tuition scholarship (for the studies for which it can be requested). If threshold 2 is exceeded but they are below threshold 3: They will be able to obtain the fixed amount linked to excellence in variable academic performance and the tuition scholarship (for the studies for which it can be requested). Academic requirements For Secondary, in the 1st year of high school: You must have a minimum of a 5 in the 4th year of ESO. For Secondary, in 1st year of FP middle or basic cycle: Having enrolled. For Secondary, in 1st year of higher cycle FC: You must have a minimum of a 5 in the 2nd year of Baccalaureate, in the middle cycle or in your access test. For Secondary, in second years: You must have passed all subjects except one, or a number of modules that make up 85% of the total hours in FP. For University in 1st year degree: Obtain at least a 5 grade in university admission. For University in 2nd year or later of technical and science education: Exceed 65% of the credits enrolled the previous year. For University in 2nd year or later of health sciences: Exceed 80% of the credits enrolled the previous year. For University in 2nd year or later of social and legal sciences, arts and humanities: Exceed 90% of the credits enrolled the previous year. … Read more

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