Month: May 2026

The spike in Google searches after the 2024 eclipse reveals that we continue to ignore science

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It has been known for a long time that It is not healthy to look directly at a solar eclipse. It is said that Socrates himself I already recommended looking at it reflected in the waterbut never directly. However, human beings have a fairly significant tendency to ignore scientific recommendations. This is possibly the reason why in 2024, after an eclipse in the United States, Google searches for the phrase “my eyes hurt” had a very abrupt peak. The time and place coincide. That peak of searches took place on April 8, 2024 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Just at that moment a solar eclipse was occurring whose strip of totality crossed from Mexico to Canada, passing through the United States. The states where the most searches were carried out were Vermont, Arkansas, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, all of them immersed in the path of the eclipse. Eclipse retinopathy. When looking directly into sunlight, the retina can suffer serious damage. The condition that occurs is known as eclipse retinopathy and causes symptoms such as photosensitivity, blurred vision and headache. Vision can be affected for months or even permanently in the most severe cases. For this reason, no matter how much it may seem like the sun is covered, we must look at it with adequate protection. No sunglasses or x-rays. We have all heard at some point that it is safe to look at an eclipse through an x-ray or a photo negative. However, this is a myth that can be very dangerous. Sunglasses are not safe either. Generally, These are prepared to filter approximately 99.9% of solar ultraviolet radiation.. However, in the event of an eclipse, in which we look directly at the sun, this protection is needed, added to a filter of 99.999% of visible sunlight. It is necessary to use special eclipse glasses, always with filters approved by the competent authorities. Be careful with binoculars and telescopes. We should also not look directly through telescopes or binoculars without using filters. These are placed outside the lens and protect our retinas from solar radiation when we look through them. If none of this seems right to us, we can always resort to a pinhole camera, which reflects the image of the eclipse on another surface. Something like what Socrates advised about looking at the reflection in the water. It is important to use approved glasses You shouldn’t even look at a total eclipse. When the eclipse is total, the Sun is completely obscured. At that point, we might feel safe without protection. The problem is that it is not easy to calculate the exact moment in which the eclipse will begin to dissolve and with just a little bit of light, just when the Sun begins to reappear, we can damage our retinas. It is important to use protection from the beginning. It wasn’t eclipse retinopathy. In reality, the symptoms of eclipse retinopathy They usually appear several hours after the event. Interestingly, eye pain is not one of these symptoms. Therefore, what all those people were looking for was due to another reason. When we look at the sun, we usually experience a blink reflex that forces us to look away. However, with a solar eclipse the brightness is dimmed enough for this reflection to disappear. As a consequence, we can comfortably look at the Sun and keep our eyes fixed, without blinking. That’s what can make our eyes hurt or feel a burning sensation. Specifically, that is not dangerous. Still, those Google searches show that many people were worried. Many of them may not have used protection and regretted it. Ready for August. Next August 12 we will have the first of the eclipses that make up the Iberian Trio. Many people have already bought tickets to travel to some of the points in the totality zone. There are even those who have gotten tickets for one of the many festivals that will be celebrated for this reason. Whatever plan we choose, the important thing is protection. Maybe, even if we protect ourselves, there will be a peak in Google searches, but it better be because we don’t blink for a while and not because we have really damaged our retinas. Image | Magnific/NASA | POT In Xataka | The trio of eclipses that await Spain on the horizon: an unprecedented and historic chain between 2026 and 2028

Some archaeologists have found 80 tons of stones under the sea. Everything points to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

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At the end of the 19th century, several fishermen in the port of Alexandria began to accidentally catch huge fragments of stone entangled in their networks. Some were so large and strange that stories circulated for years about giant ruins hidden underwater off the Egyptian coast. Long before underwater scanners or digital archeology existed, the Mediterranean was already hinting that beneath its waters remained buried a monumental part of the ancient world. 80 tons to return a wonder. Archaeologists and divers they have been finding for years huge blocks of granite and limestone under the waters of Alexandria, but the latest works have triggered a fascinating idea: everything indicates that the Mediterranean is returning key fragments of the legendary Alexandria Lighthouseone of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Some of the recovered blocks weigh up to 80 tons and were part of monumental entrances, platforms and gigantic structures that for centuries remained dispersed on the seabed. The discovery is not only allowing us to reconstruct what the lighthouse really was like, but it is also changing many of the theories that existed about its size, its engineering and its final appearance. A gigantic tower that dominated the Mediterranean. The Lighthouse of Alexandria began to be built at the beginning of the 3rd century BC under the reign of Ptolemy I Soter and it was designed by Sostratus of Cnidus on the island of Pharos, opposite the Egyptian port. Ancient sources described a structure of more than a hundred meters higha type of Hellenistic skyscraper visible dozens of kilometers out to sea thanks to its enormous night fire and complex reflective systems. For more than sixteen hundred years it served as a guide for ships arriving at one of the most important ports in the Mediterranean, also becoming a political symbol of the Ptolemaic power and the ambition of the Alexandria founded after the death of Alexander the Great. Some Roman chroniclers even stated that its light was so intense that it could be confused with a star. 3D reconstruction of the Alexandria Lighthouse The sea ended up swallowing the wonder. The structure withstood earthquakes for centuries, but several huge earthquakes between the 14th and 15th centuries they ended up destroying it almost completely. Part of its stones were later reused to build the Qaitbay fortresswhich still occupies the same coastal area, while the rest of the ancient city began to slowly sink under the sea due to geological movements and the relative rise in the level of the Mediterranean. Over the centuries, the lighthouse eventually disappeared beneath murky waters filled with sediment, architectural remains, and huge stone fragments scattered across dozens of underwater acres. For a long time, historians even thought that ancient descriptions of its size had been exaggerated. Remains of a lighthouse in the Mediterranean Sea A gigantic puzzle. Everything began to change when French and Egyptian archaeologists began to systematically map the eastern port of Alexandria in the 1990s. Sphinxes, columns, colossal statues and gigantic door frames weighing up to seventy tons appeared under the water, but recent work from the PHAROS project They have taken the process much further. Only in recent campaigns have rrecovered 22 huge blocks of granite using special cranes mounted on barges, including lintels, jambs and pieces of a hitherto unknown structure that mixed Egyptian architectural elements and Greek construction techniques. Each find reinforces the idea that the lighthouse was not just a functional tower, but a monumental demonstration of the multicultural power of Hellenistic Alexandria. Reconstructed block by block… but digitally. The New York Times said last February in an extensive report that the great advance of the PHAROS project is not only in removing stones from the water, but in virtually rebuilding the lighthouse with a never seen before precision. The researchers have scanned thousands of fragments using photogrammetry to create a “digital twin” capable of recomposing the building piece by piece without continually moving extremely fragile and heavy materials. Thanks to this, engineers and archaeologists are discovering how the blocks really fit together, how they worked the joining systems and what techniques allowed such a gigantic structure to be built more than two thousand years ago. Investigations have also revealed that the lighthouse used advanced assembly systems with clamps and huge interconnected blocks, something that helps explain how it was able to survive so many centuries against earthquakes and storms. The modern Mediterranean like ancient earthquakes. Archaeological work is also carried out in an increasingly complicated environment. The waters off Alexandria have very poor visibilityare full of pollution and suffer a progressive rise in sea level while the coast itself continues to slowly sink. The researchers they warn that the Mediterranean is warming faster than many other regions of the planet and that the accumulation of waste and sediments makes underwater documentation tasks increasingly difficult. Paradoxically, while technology allows one of the greatest wonders of Antiquity to be digitally reconstructed, the environment where its physical remains remain becomes more hostile and vulnerable year after year. One of the Seven Wonders reappearing. The most striking thing of all is that the project has already managed to dismantle many historical doubts about him Alexandria Lighthouse. Researchers now believe that the ancient chronicles probably they did not exaggerate: The tower really must have been as colossal and advanced as classical authors described. The recovered blocks, some almost impossible in size even for modern engineering, are allowing locate monumental entrancesplatforms and structural elements with unprecedented precision. Little by little, under the waters of Alexandria, one of the most famous constructions in all of human history is ceasing to be a myth and once again taking on a real form. Image | PHAROS, SciVi 3D studio, Roland Unger In Xataka | Some 5,000-year-old tombs went unnoticed for millennia. Until we look from the sky In Xataka | The “Gate of Hell” has been burning in the middle of the Turkmenistan desert for half a century. And now it’s fading

psychology has a much more uncomfortable explanation

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A new smell that you can’t identify, a bit of lipstick on your shirt or a small mark on your neck was enough to know that your partner hadn’t gone out with his friends for a few beers. Or maybe yes. However, now your gaze is fixed on the moment you receive a notification and turn your phone over, or when you discover that your chat histories are empty. According to data from a psychology portal30% of current couple breakups already include some digital component as a triggering factor. However, the central thesis defended by modern psychology is different: betrayal is much older than the culture of celebrities, smartphones or social networks. Technology did not invent infidelity; it simply altered its speed, its scale and, above all, its visibility. The blurring of the lines The very concept of infidelity has become so ambiguous that it is often difficult to define. Today we sail through the waters of micro-cheating (micro-deceptions), which include subtle behaviors such as saving numbers in the address book under false names, constantly reacting to third-party Instagram stories or maintaining active profiles on dating apps “just for the sake of watching.” These dynamics facilitate a digital double life that silently erodes trust. In fact, these behaviors related to infidelity on social networks (known academically as SMIRB) can create a dangerous distraction, causing the cheater to experience a false sense of life satisfaction while destroying their primary relationship. The clinical psychologist Rita Figueiredo, cited by Wiredexplains that we live in the era of “paradoxical secrecy.” People maintain parallel connections that are deeply emotionally intimate, but they manage to convince themselves that they don’t count as infidelity simply because they didn’t share the same physical room. But technology has crossed an even more disturbing frontier: non-human deception. As we have documented in Xatakadivorce petitions in which the reason for the breakup is the use of Artificial Intelligence chatbots are increasing. People are developing intense romantic bonds with conversational AIs, and the impact is real: recent surveys suggest that 64% of users consider this artificial intimacy to be, for all intents and purposes, a form of infidelity. But what drives us to deceive? If applications are not the creators of infidelity, what pushes us to do it? The psychotherapist Esther Perel points out that The “illusion of the alternative” is key: people don’t cheat just because they are unhappy, but because they believe they could be happier. Technology has created a constant background hum of options; On the internet, the grass always seems greener. Added to this are deep emotional deficiencies. As explained in the American Institute of Health Professionals (AIHCP)infidelity often begins with low self-esteem and a desperate need for external validation. This search for applause dangerously intersects with personalities marked by the so-called “Dark Triad.” Research reveals that individuals with high traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy are more likely to seek casual sex and commit infidelities opportunistically through dating apps. If we add family inheritance to this personality cocktail, the risk skyrockets: studies like the one published in International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors show that having a history of parental infidelity and having an avoidant attachment style significantly increase intentions to be unfaithful. However, the path to betrayal is not the same for everyone. science has shown that the decision-making process differs drastically by gender. Men tend to separate sex from love and often fall into infidelity through a process of “progressive justification,” where small moral compromises accumulate like a snowball. On the contrary, the decision in women is much more complex, strategic and non-linear. It involves strong internal rationalization and, on many occasions, they use the affair as a mechanism to regain power, agency and autonomy within controlling or suffocating relationships. Consequences beyond pain The impact of being cheated on is not limited to sadness or breakup; Science shows that it generates real trauma. a study published in Stress and Health by Lydia G. Roos reveals that up to 45.2% of unmarried young adults who experience infidelity show symptoms that suggest probable Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This symptomatology is severe. Psychologically, it is classified as an “attachment injury”, a rupture so deep that it destroys the victim’s sense of security and trust, assimilating to the trauma of a child separated from their care figure. Experts argue that romantic betrayal should be treated clinically, as victims experience hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, systematic avoidance, and uncontrollable emotional volatility. The severity of these symptoms is such that modern psychology is turning to therapies originally designed for war veterans and victims of serious assault, such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). This therapy helps patients process intrusive images of deception and deactivate their nervous system’s extreme alert response. This is where the great digital aggravation comes in. Unlike traditional infidelity, where the victim assimilates a verbal confession, digital infidelity leaves explicit and rereadable evidence: screenshots, hidden photographs, and GPS locations. This generates pathological hypervigilance in the betrayed partner, who suffers constant and re-traumatizing damage by compulsively monitoring the other’s devices. The jealousy industry and the metadata trail Digital exposure has turned surveillance into a spectacle and a very lucrative toxic routine. We live in an ecosystem where privacy is a mere illusion and home technology has become a sentimental pocket detective. As I detailed a few months agotoday there are creepy tools like Cheater Busteran app that, for just 18 euros, uses facial recognition Artificial Intelligence to track Tinder profiles and confirm if your partner is active, avoiding false names or aliases. This leads us to an unprecedented ethical dilemma. According to global data from the audit association ISACA, more than 60% of users are willing to sacrifice their privacy in exchange for “transparency”, which has ended up normalizing spying practices (consensual or not) within the couple. On a clinical level, the therapeutic challenge in this connected era is monumental. Regaining trust after digital infidelity is an exhausting process that requires between 18 and 24 months of conscious … Read more

we have just discovered that it contained a material ‘impossible’ for physics

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In July of last year an academic investigation shook materials physics with an unexpected protagonist: a space rock collected in Germany three centuries ago. Inside it housed a mineral whose thermal behavior does not fit into any known classification. The most disconcerting thing is not the material itself (that too), but that it had been gathering dust in a glass case since 1724: no one had looked at it with the appropriate instruments until now. The meteorite of 1724. Called the “Steinbach meteorite” after the German region of Saxony where it fell. The remains quickly joined museum collections due to their exotic origin and beauty, without attracting special attention from the scientific community. Among them, in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, where the fragment that was used for this research is located. What that fragment contains is meteoric tridymitea form of silicon dioxide extraordinarily rare on Earth. It is a polymorphism of quartz that is only generated under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, conditions that do not occur in ordinary terrestrial geology, but do occur in meteorite impacts or volcanic environments. Why it is important. In a phrase: because of its properties. The tridymite from the Steinbach meteorite maintains a practically constant thermal conductivity between −193 °C and 107 °C (80 and 380 kelvin), something that beyond meaning that it conducts heat the same whether you are in the cold winter of Iceland or in a heat wave in the desert, it has a peculiarity: no known material behaves like this. This thermal stability is a rarity in itself in materials technology and gives it clear applicability for thermal management: it allows designing electronic devices that do not overheat and aerospace insulation systems with an efficiency unthinkable under the laws of classical physics. Context. In 2009 the physicist Michele Simoncelli together with Nicola Marzari and Francesco Mauri developed a unified equation based on the Wigner transport formalism capable of simultaneously describing the thermal behavior of crystals, glasses and any intermediate state. That equation theoretically predicted the existence of materials with temperature-invariant thermal conductivity like this one. The problem is that no one had found that material in the real world. In the universe, most minerals form under Earth’s pressures and temperatures that force atoms to adopt standard crystal lattices. But in the asteroid belt, the remains of distinct protoplanets undergo cooling processes and catastrophic collisions that generate mineral phases that do not exist naturally in the Earth’s crust. Tridymite is common in volcanic rocks, but this one of meteoric origin has the advantage of having been thermally stabilized in space for millions of years. Something doesn’t add up. Until now, science assumed that a solid material must be either a crystal (ordered structure) or a glass (ordered structures) and its thermal properties depended on that structure: the thermal conductivity of a crystal decreases with increasing temperature because the vibrations of the crystalline lattice (the phonons) disperse among themselves with more intensity. Just the opposite happens in glass because its internal disorder facilitates additional ways of transmitting heat when heated. They are opposite trends, robust and well documented experimentally for decades. The Steinbach meteorite breaks the rules and behaves like both at the same time. Steinbach meteoric tridymite has an atomic structure that presents order in the chemical bonds like a crystal and geometric disorder in the arrangement of those bonds like a glass. This combination generates an exact compensation between both transport mechanisms, the propagation mechanism (typical of crystals) and the tunneling mechanism (typical of glass), which is what the research team calls PTI conductivity, propagation-tunneling-invariant. How they discovered it. The discovery it has been possible thanks to thermoreflectometry, which measures variations in the optical reflectivity of a surface when it is thermally excited with a pulsed laser, allowing thermal conductivity to be inferred with high resolution. What they saw was that the silicon atoms were not in perfect rows, but they were not random either: they followed a “middle-range order” sequence that previously only existed in mathematical models, confirming point by point the predictions of the Wigner equation. Yes, but. The Meteoric tridymite is disruptive in materials technology, the problem is reproducibility and scarcity. So far we have only found this material in the Steinbach meteorite, a limited sample of an astronomical milestone that occurred three centuries ago. Obtaining it from meteorites is simply not feasible and the challenge of manufacturing this glass-crystal synthetically is not exactly small. A curiosity: the paper explains that in the Gale crater Martian tridymite has also been detected, raising questions about how it has influenced the geological history of the red planet or opening the possibility of eventual space mining. On the other hand, and although it is true that the material defies the laws of physics, it is important to highlight that we are talking about current physics: it is not that the laws were false, it is that they were simply incomplete. In Xataka | In 2023 an asteroid disintegrated off the coast of Normandy. At that time we were not aware of how lucky we were In Xataka | In 2011, a collector bought a meteorite in Morocco. It has turned out to be direct evidence of thermal water on Mars Cover | Fred Kruijen and Batu Gezer

How Albert Camus, the great symbol of the philosophy of the absurd, had the most absurd of deaths

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There are times when the line between tragedy, irony, absurdity and cruelty is so fine that it is almost impossible to appreciate it. It happened on the afternoon of January 4, 1960 in the Route Nationale 5 of France, near the town of Villeblevinin Burgundy, when a luxury car left the road and crashed into a plane tree. The impact was so violent that it immediately killed one of its occupants, the famous writer Albert Camus. That’s the tragic part of the story. The ironic (or cruel, who knows) thing is that this absurd death silenced a writer who had stood out precisely for its depth when analyzing the meaninglessness of the human condition. A fateful change of plans They say that Albert Camus he didn’t like them cars or speed. True or not, the reality is that his initial idea to return to Paris after spending the Christmas holidays in Lourmarin was to take a train. Even came to buy the ticket, which according to some versions he had in his pocket at the time of his death. If he finally chose to travel by road it was because Michel Gallimardhis friend and editor, convinced him to return with him and his family aboard his brand new Facel Vegaa French luxury car brand that fell in love, inter aliato Pablo Picasso, Ava Gardner or James Dean. That change of itinerary (now we know) was a blunder. On the afternoon of January 4, 1960, while driving through Burgundy, Gallimard’s Facel Vega FV3B suffered a puncture that caused it to lurch, according to a reconstruction published at the time by the magazine L’Automobile and rescued in 1961 by Atlantic. What exactly happened? The left rear tire is believed to have burst. The tire slid on the asphalt. The right front wheel went into a ditch. And the car went to the side. The Facel Vega ended up hitting a tree. The impact was so strong that the vehicle spun and suffered a second collision against another of the plane trees that flanked the road. The scene, which the drivers of National Route Number 5 soon approached, gives an idea of ​​the violence of the accident: the engine and gearbox were thrown and the chassis ended up twisted. As for the people who were traveling on board, they all suffered the impact, but not to the same extent. Gallimard’s wife and daughter were bleeding after being thrown from the back of the car, although they were well enough to call the family pet. The driver was unconscious, so he had to be taken to the hospital, where despite all attempts to save his life (he was even transferred from Villeneuve-la-Guyard to Paris) he died days later. The worst off was Camus, who was traveling as a passenger in the right front seat. After the first crash and lurch, the Facel Vega was bounced and hit a second log, which hit the door located right next to the writer. It is believed that he died instantly. When the reporters began to arrive at the scene, after learning that this was not just another accident, but the accident that had deprived French literature of one of its great promises, they found a destroyed dashboard that left two figures to remember: the clock, whose hands marked 1:54; and a speedometer stuck at 145 km/hwhich raises the question to what extent speed played a key role in the tire blowout. “Unforeseen and absurd” Although Camus was only 46 years old (he had turned two months earlier) he was already a celebrity inside and outside France, both for the scope of his literary work and his prestige as an intellectual, activist and philosopher. As if that weren’t enough a few years earlier, in 1957had become the second youngest writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. This great fame explains why French public radio interrupted its musical programming to break the news, which ended up reaching media outlets around the world. The Korean newspaper The Chosun Daily dedicated multiple pages and in Spain the news was picked up by, among others, the newspaper ABCwhose correspondent I remembered that the blow had been so violent that the car was broken into three pieces. The chronicle the firm Federico García-Requena, correspondent in Paris, who chose a headline that went beyond simply informative: “The death, unforeseen and absurd, of Albert Camus.” The term ‘unforeseen’ is obvious, but to understand the term ‘absurd’ (beyond the fact that all deaths on the asphalt are absurd) it is necessary to know more about Camus’ philosophical legacy. If he explored something in his work, both from narrative fiction (‘The Stranger’) and from the philosophical essay (‘The Myth of Sisyphus’), it is the absurdity, the absolute meaninglessness of human existence. Although for the writer of Algerian origin, assuming that maxim is not equivalent to adopting a defeatist attitude. On the contrary: “This essay considers the absurdity, taken until now as a conclusion, as a starting point“, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ startsperhaps the work in which he deepens his vision of existence the most. “All that can be said is that this world, in itself, is not reasonable. But what is absurd is the confrontation of that irrational and that unbridled desire for clarity whose call resonates in the depths of man,” Camus exposes on the following pages. “The absurd is born from this confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world. This is what must not be forgotten. This is what must be clung to, since the entire consequence of a life can be born from it.” Faced with this suffocating reality, Camus reminds us that embracing the absurd is not equivalent to resignation. On the contrary. “This rebellion gives life its value. Extended throughout an entire existence, it restores its greatness. For a man without blinders there is no more beautiful spectacle than that of intelligence in struggle with a reality that surpasses it. The spectacle of human pride … Read more

mount a solar panel on top

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Aragón is one of the autonomous communities of “energy Spain” and its capital is positioning itself as one of the leading European cities in the urban energy transition. Within your strategy “Zaragoza Smart and Climate Neutral City“, the capital of the Ebro has just start the works to increase its photovoltaic park within the city without altering the available space for other infrastructure. As? Installing photovoltaic canopies in four public parking lots. Parking lots converted into solar parks. The facilities are distributed in four locations: the Miguel Servet parking lots (780.64 kWp), Pignatelli (460.53 kWp), Parque de Oriente (963.9 kWp) and the Macanaz discretionary bus parking lot (279.65 kWp), reaching a total installed power of 2,484.72 kWp. In total, there will be 4,176 solar modules to cover 10,816 square meters of canopies and will produce 3,638.5 MWh per year, which is approximately equivalent to the consumption of a thousand average homes. according to city council data. The structures are not simple panel supports, but canopies designed to integrate into current urban aesthetics, so that they offer shade and protection to vehicles. In addition, of the 651 spaces that will be protected under a photovoltaic cover, 40 will incorporate charging points for electric vehicles. Why is it important. As explains the Renewable Foundationthe parking lots – photovoltaic parks are three in one: they provide shade for vehicles, provide “clean” electricity to electric car charging points and also make energy from renewable sources available for self-consumption or supply. The third point is especially interesting: there will be homes close to the parking lots (within a 5 km radius) that will be able to benefit from this energy without having to install panels in their buildings and all that this entails in terms of investment or bureaucracy. Furthermore, consuming energy where it is produced minimizes transportation and distribution losses. At an institutional level, the council will reduce its energy bill and advance its climate neutrality objectives for 2030. Architecturally, the relevance of this project lies in the efficiency of land use, since it uses existing infrastructure that is already sealed by asphalt, which prevents the degradation of natural or agricultural land. Context. The project is part of the European Commission’s mission of “100 Smart and Climate Neutral Cities by 2030” of which Zaragoza is a member, which forces the capital city to accelerate its energy efficiency and sustainable mobility policies. Zaragoza already has successful solar projects under its belt, such as host the first “solar neighborhood”“of the Spanish state. On the other hand, the Spanish regulatory framework (Royal Decree 244/2019) has facilitated the expansion of collective self-consumption through a simplified compensation mechanism for the energy produced and not consumed instantly by small self-consumers, which makes it technically and legally viable that, for example, the solar parking in Macanaz can provide energy to nearby schools or homes. The regulations allow an installation of up to 5 MW with consumption points up to 5 km away, which gives more breadth and flexibility. This legal certainty has allowed Zaragoza to be one of the most ambitious cities in the deployment of urban photovoltaics in Spain. chow they do it. Through a public-private collaboration where the city only provides the land. The project was awarded in January 2025 to Repsolwhich executes it through Solar360, a joint venture of the energy company and Telefónica Spain specialized in photovoltaic self-consumption. The investment is 5.66 million euros and is borne by the company: the City Council does not pay anything for the installation or maintenance. In exchange, Repsol operates the service for 25 years and pays the council a fixed fee of 6,000 euros per year for each of the four parking lots, plus a percentage of the energy generated in kind: 10% in three of the lots and 4% in the fourth. Yes, but. The work requires the felling of about 38 trees in the first two lots, which will be compensated with 55 new 16/18 caliber trees (not a seedling, but not an adult tree either) and a contribution of 23,990 euros. The problem is that they do not replace an adult tree and its functions (shade, water regulation, minimizing the heat island effect), something for which they will need decades. On the other hand, according to the Renewable Foundationthis type of installation is amortized over a period of four to eight years. With a 25-year concession, Repsol will recover its investment in less than a third of the period granted, which raises reasonable questions about whether the fee received by the City Council is proportional to the profit the company obtains. When the project is operational and we know real production data and participating homes, we will know the answer. In Xataka | Aragón already has cheap energy, so now it is going to activate the second part of the plan: attract the industry In Xataka | Zaragoza is so full of data centers that Amazon has decided to take one to… a town in Teruel with 900 inhabitants Cover | Saragossa and Pedro Sanz

Europe feared an apocalypse due to Hormuz. A cocktail of batteries, rain and reactors is saving us in extremis

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The world seems to be burning from all sides and global logistics has gone into panic. We had been holding our breath for weeks before the Third Gulf War, the fear of a crisis identical to that of 2022 has materialized in tangible disasters: airlines like Lufthansa they had to cancel up to 20,000 flights for this summer due to the shortage and extreme rise in aviation fuel prices (jet fuel). However, in the midst of this oil cataclysm, something counterintuitive is happening that defies all predictions. As the expert Javier Blas sharply points out In his recent opinion column for Bloomberg“despite the oil shock due to the Iran war, Europe’s electricity markets are calm.” This is the great anomaly of 2026. Breaking down the phenomenon To understand the miracle, you must first understand the threat. In a normal scenario, the logistical shock that means that 20% of the entire planet’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) cannot pass through the Strait of Hormuz should have shredded European domestic economies. The contagion mechanism has a clear theoretical culprit: the marginalist system of the electricity market. In this model, the most expensive technology that comes in to cover demand (historically, gas) is the one that sets the final price of all electricity. Therefore, if the missiles in Qatar make global gas more expensive, the electricity bill in Madrid, Paris or Berlin should be through the roof. But surprisingly, this time the drive belt has broken. The invisible shield The backbone of this European resistance focuses on what energy analyst Javier Blas defines it as a miscalculation: many continue to look at the market “through a filter focused only on oil that belongs to a bygone era”, when today electricity is the true pulse of the economy. The current shielding is the result of a conjunction of factors that act as a providential recovery. First, the rescue in extremis of French nuclear energy. If in 2022 the French country had dozens of reactors stopped due to cracks and was operating at 30-year lows (less than 21 gigawatts), Today it is injecting between 45 and 55 GWproviding a vital energy base not only for France, but for its neighbors, including Germany. Added to this is the end of the drought. The heavy rains in southern Europe and normal rainfall in the rest of the continent has revived hydropower, the EU’s fourth largest source. But the real protagonist is someone else. Solar energy is breaking records, sinking short-term prices to negative levels on weekends in Germany, or to just 18 cents in Spain. In fact, the “fiscal shield” of the Spanish Government, together with the record deployment of 30 GW of solar and wind energy since 2022, have managed to sink the wholesale market to a low €41.5/MWh, allowing the regulated rate to drop by almost 5% year-on-year. The final piece of this puzzle is provided by a report from the IRENA agency: the miracle of batteries. Its cost has plummeted by 93% since 2010. Today, the combination of solar and wind farms with batteries is already capable of offering uninterrupted electricity at prices that compete head-on with Chinese coal or new global gas plants. The cracks in the shield. Despite this triumphalism, European armor is not titanium; It has significant cracks. Although Javier Blas emphasizes that the post-2022 investments in the electricity grid are bearing fruit, the system hangs by a thread every day when the clock strikes eight in the afternoon. Our “Spanish green shield” has a blind spot: the sunset. As the sun disappears, and as there is still no massive deployment of batteries nationwide, the gas combined cycles have to be turned on to sustain the network, returning tension to prices (with nighttime peaks that in March reached €247/MWh). Furthermore, experts agree that the hydroelectric mattress It will evaporate with the heat of the imminent summer. To this we must add that the French nuclear “miracle” hides some worrying fine print. France has broken its historical record by exporting 92.3 TWh, but it has done so, in part, because its internal consumption is stagnant and they continue to lag enormously behind in electrification. Worse still, in its eagerness to protect the profitability of its pharaonic atomic industry, the Elysée acts as a protective wall: it deliberately blocks interconnections with the Iberian Peninsula to prevent hyper-cheap Spanish solar energy from flooding Europe. Finally, structural problems plague the entire continent. According to platform data Earth40% of European transmission lines are more than 40 years old. They were designed for large fossil plants, not to integrate millions of solar rooftops. Without urgent modernization, the network could become our biggest Achilles heel. The new security doctrine. What this Third Gulf War makes clear is that the ecological transition has mutated. It is no longer a mere question of saving the planet; It is a matter of geopolitical survival. Renewables are being explicitly redefined as “weapons of energy security.” The figures speak for themselves: in the first weeks of the war in Iran alone, the European solar fleet saved more than 110 million euros per day in imported gas costs. This is why the European climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, insists in statements to Euronews that Europe must be “more radical”. This involves accelerating electrification using heat pumps and betting on deep geothermal energy, capable of replacing up to 42% of current fossil generation operating 24 hours a day. War as a catalyst. As Blaise’s central thesis concludesEurope is resisting what many call the worst energy shock in history with an electrical fortitude that was unthinkable four years ago. However, catalysts alone do not guarantee results. Inflation and interest rate increases derived from this same war threaten to make more expensive financing future clean infrastructure. It is clear that we have bought a valuable truce thanks to the rain, the efforts of French nuclear power and the sweat of solar panels. This crisis has impressed upon us a definitive lesson: always It will be infinitely … Read more

Your Gmail inbox has been filled with emails obviously written with AI. Google wants to fix it with more AI

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We’ve all spent several minutes staring at the cursor, thinking about how to respond to that important email; Find the tone that is forceful and kind at the same time, but not too kind. With Gemini integration into Gmail We don’t have to think so much anymore, we can say just that and the AI ​​writes it for us. The cost is that all emails sound like AI, and Google knows it. Help me write. It is a function that Google integrated into Gmail a long time ago and that allows us to compose emails from a prompt. Google just announced improvements for this feature: contextualization of the theme (you can now connect with Drive and Gmail to extract relevant information) and customization of tone and style. Google says it creates drafts that “reflect your personal writing style.” It is a way of recognizing that AI is homogenizing everything, including how we communicate. All emails sound the same. Automatic reply suggestions and writing aids have been a blessing for those who have to write and respond to many emails a day. When it comes to “cold emails” that seek to attract the recipient’s attention, in the end none of them stand out. A marketing manager has on Reddit that before it used to read them all, now it deletes them directly. It only reads them if it looks like a human wrote it. The problem goes beyond our inbox, social networks like X or LinkedIn are full of posts written with AI. It is even being noticed in the works submitted by students at the university. Humanize AI. This is where we are: we use AI constantly, but we don’t want it to be noticed. a search It gives us dozens of tools that promise to humanize our texts generated with AI. And it doesn’t just happen with texts, an illustrator friend told me that a client presented her with some illustrations so she could improve them. They were AI illustrations and the problem wasn’t that they were bad, it was that they said they were AI too much and I wanted them to look handmade. Plus, I wanted to pay him less because I just had to remake them in his style. He refused. Non-communication. The novelty that Google has announced is based on your writing style of previous emails, but what happens when all those previous emails were also written with AI? It’s an endless cycle: you write an email with AI, they respond using AI, you read the summary that the AI ​​has made of the email and you respond again using AI. The writer Tim O’Brien said: that if “no one has written it, no one has read it.” This is not just a stylistic issue, it is a bigger problem: we are delegating something as basic as our own communication. In Xataka | From chaos to calm: this is how I manage my email using the “inbox zero” technique Image | Google

There are those who want the V-16 beacon to be optional. The director of the DGT has a message: “There is no going back”

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126 days. That is how long the V-16 beacon has been mandatory in our country. A period in which, due to the DGT’s own unclear information, it is not clear whether the agents are fining or not for not having it in the car. What is certain is that there are still those who doubt its effectiveness and try to get the triangles to return. For them, Pere Navarro has a message. “There is no mark behind”. The statements are from Pere Navarro, director of the DGT, who in the forum Pedestrians and road safety organized in A Coruña and in which the city council and the Galician Federation of Municipalities and Provinces have participated has assured the following collected by Motorpassion: “(The beacon) is here to stay, there is no going back. It is an important safety element and is mandatory. And it also serves to avoid accidents” The director of the DGT has thus tried to settle a controversy that continues to rage despite the fact that since last January 1 This signaling element is mandatory, replacing the classic emergency triangles. Because? Pere Navarro’s response obeys the amendment that Vox has registered in Congress to try to reverse the use of the connected V-16 beacon. Or, at least, significantly modify its use. The intention of the political group is that the V-16 beacon is only an optional addition to the emergency triangles but that the latter are the ones that are really mandatory. Vox also searches end connectivity of the device, a focus of controversy despite the fact that the signaling object cannot be identified with the driver who activates it. “Everything is advantages”. For his part, Navarro is clear about it and has made it known in the forum: “everything is an advantage.” In words collected by elDiario.eyesthe director of the DGT defends that not getting out of the car in the event of a breakdown before signaling the danger is a step forward. Let us remember that From 2023 it is mandatory to stay in the car in the event of a breakdown unless the driver and passengers have access to a safe place to wait for emergency or help services. Navarro has also pointed out that “we should be proud” of the use of the beacon, after the European Commission confirmed that it is an object fully in line with European law although at first it was doubted how it was implemented. Surrounded by controversy. Since the connected V-16 beacon project was launched, the DGT has had to face all kinds of controversies. Various associations have questioned its effectivenessproducts were sold that have been invalidated by lack connectivity and along the way we have seen it flourish a very lucrative business to companies based in China. Furthermore, it is also not clear whether an agent would fine us or not if we do not have it. In a press conference, the Minister of the Interior Fernando Grande-Marlaska pointed out that was not going to be fined for a “reasonable” period of time but it was never determined what time window that definition includes. However, we know that just a few days after the new signaling system became mandatory there were already agents who fined the drivers. In Xataka | “We have not done it well”: the DGT assumes that something has failed in the arrival of the V-16 beacons

Graphing calculators are very expensive, so a 15-year-old boy from Almería has declared war on them with open source

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It was 2003 when I started college with great enthusiasm and an old Casio calculator from high school that I ended up replacing shortly after with a Texas Instruments TI-86 graphing calculator. At that time it cost me 150 euros, but I spent it because there was no other option and it was going to make my life easier with graphs and matrices. My old TI-86 is already a relic, but those who start engineering this 2026 will spend at least those 150 euros on a more current model like this either this other one from HP. They have a slightly more modern aesthetic and a color screen, but the essence and prices have barely changed. So to a young developer from Almería an idea has occurred to him: build a professional level scientific and graphing calculator for about 20 euros using open source software. And as its creator, Juan Ramón (alias El-EnderJ), explains, at 15 years old he still doesn’t need it: “I did it simply because of that great injustice.” A DIY calculator with open source. The project is barely a couple of months old and its premise could not be more ambitious: NumOS (its operating system) runs on the ESP32-S3 microcontroller and aims to break the monopoly of commercial models that cost around 150 euros. It is not a mobile app or a website: it is a piece of physical hardware that the user assembles and programs from scratch. Knowing how difficult it is for the education system to accept a DIY calculator for exams, El-EnderJ has in mind a “factory-sealed version that is completely legal.” Disclaimer: the final product will use ESP32 S3 N16R8 and a 3.2″ IPS screen. Grapher app. Via: GitHub Why is it important. The educational calculator market is controlled by an oligopoly: Texas Instruments, Casio and HP, with devices whose hardware has not been significantly renewed for decades and a price range that has neither changed much over the years nor differs too much from each other. But the underlying problem is also one of access: this is the case of fantastic free and quality tools such as GeoGebra and Desmos. As El-EnderJ explains: “To use them you must use a mobile phone, a tablet or a laptop, which is completely prohibited in most classrooms. The educational system requires dedicated devices that do not have an internet connection to avoid cheating.” On the other hand, on a technical level it is notable that NeoCalculator integrates a complete CAS engine within such a low budget as manufacturers such as Casio, HP and TI reserve only their high-end models. And be careful, this engine shows the intermediate steps of derivatives, integrals and solving equations. The eternal? calculator oligopoly. Juan Ramón says that, encouraged by what he saw people doing with graphing calculators (like programming), he looked up the price and was surprised: “I was shocked when I saw that a calculator from more than 30 years ago cost more than 150 euros. So I looked a little more and realized that the cost of producing them is below 20 euros, so you are paying a 130-euro premium.” Free software has been democratizing tools that were previously either expensive or exclusive for decades, but in hardware everything has been slower. The clearest precedent is NumWorksthe French calculator founded in 2015 that was the first to completely open its source code and allow anyone to modify its operating system. NeoCalculator goes one step further: not only is the software free, but so is the hardware design. From Shanghai to Almería: the ESP32-S3-BOX-3 chip from Espressif How it works. The base is the microcontroller ESP32-S3which according to its official documentation incorporates a dual-core Xtensa LX7 processor capable of running at 240 MHz, with 512 KB of internal SRAM, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 connectivity, as well as support for vector instructions aimed at accelerating neural networks and signal processing. It is a chip designed for IoT converted into the brain of a high-performance calculator. El-EnderJ is critical of what it replaces: “The ESP32-S3 is from 2020; the Zilog Z80 of the TI-84 Plus is from 1976. There is a clear difference.” The mathematical core of the project is not development from scratch, but sophisticated integration. “The biggest challenge has been putting the Giac engine, which is the same one used by the HP Prime, in a chip that has thousands of times less memory than a computer.” In fact, Giac is an open source symbolic calculation engine originally developed at the University of Grenoble and indeed, it is the engine that equips the HP Prime G2. For the graphical interface, the project uses LVGL, an open source embedded graphics library widely used in the industry. Combining hardware SPI with LVGL, NeoCalculator maintains a smooth interface at 60 FPS, which is a demanding performance target for a microcontroller in this price range. Yes, but. The incipient project of the Almeria developer has important technical and regulatory limitations. The most important is precisely the connectivity of the ESP32-S3, something strictly prohibited in exam contexts. This implies that in its current state NeoCalculator could not be used in official university exams (not the EBAU, which generally restricts graphic models). On the other hand, this fantastic project is still very green: it lacks an integrated physical keyboard and is still pending receipt. OSHWA certificationessential to ensure transparency, the ability to customize or repair each component of the device. In Xataka | Someone has passed 12,000 laws and reforms to source code and now searching the BOE is no longer an ordeal In Xataka | The “ChatGPT for lawyers” exists, it was born in Spain and has just reached a milestone: becoming a unicorn Cover | Anoushka Puri and El-EnderJ

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