Month: July 2026

A town in Italy has declared war on tourists who walk around half naked

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Summer not only warm up the thermometers. The coming and going of tourists also increases, filling hotels, triggering activity in airports and tightening the rope in those destinations unable to balance the routine of their neighbors and the flow of visitors. It is something that they know well in Barcelona, ​​Malaga, Ibiza, or Tenerife and also in many cities in Italy, such as Florence either Venice. Varenna, a small town in Lombardy, is not so crowded, but it receives enough tourists that its mayor has done something: impose rules of decorum. And these include the prohibition of walking around the town bare-chested and in a bathing suit, under penalty of fines of up to 200 euros. In a place in Lombardy… Varenna is neither Florence nor Rome, but it knows well what mass tourism entails. I remembered it recently its mayor, Mauro Mazoni: although they live in the town only 650 peopleeach year it receives “hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world”, people attracted by its idyllic landscapes. and it’s normal. Varenna is located in the province of Lecco, on the shores of Lake Como, and is full of fishermen’s houses with the mountains in the background. “You can’t sacrifice yourself”. This flow of tourists comes accompanied by wealth, but it also strains coexistence between visitors who come to enjoy a relaxed vacation and neighbors who continue with their daily routine. Hence, the City Council has decided to make a move, tightening the regulations that apply to tourists. To be more precise, the June 26 approved two changes to its regulations that aim to “guarantee a more harmonious coexistence.” “We are proud to welcome hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. However, the quality of life of our inhabitants cannot be sacrificed for the sake of mass tourism. These new regulations are not born from the desire to curb tourism, which remains a crucial resource for our economy, but from the need to manage it in a more intelligent and respectful way,” argues Manzoni, who recalls that the changes in the regulations have already come into force. Be careful with swimsuits. One of the novelties that has caused the most expectation, inside and outside of Varenna, is the one that affects the dress code. No more walking around the center of town with your torso naked or in a bathing suit. No matter how hot it is or if you’ve just taken a dip in the lake, from now on you can only go that way in very specific areas of Varenna: the beaches, piers and piers. In the rest of the town you have to cover yourself. Breaking the rule involves fines of between 50 and 200 euros. Goodbye groups and speakers. It’s not the only thing visitors to Varenna will have to keep an eye on. To prevent the streets from becoming saturated with large groups, the City Council has decided that these should be limited to a maximum of 25 people. That is the limit that tour operators that organize excursions must respect. During your visits you should also remember another guideline: guides will not be able to use speakers or devices that amplify their voice. The goal: to put an end to the noise, something they have already done in Florence. Precisely to reduce inconvenience, groups will have to proceed along pedestrian paths and will be prohibited from standing still in certain “particularly sensitive and crowded” areas, such as Pizetta Brenta, Pizza San Giovanni or Via IV Novembre. Breaking those rules doesn’t come cheap. Guides risk fines of between 100 and 400 eurosa punishment that can be toughened in case of recidivism. Guidelines on group size and organization are only relaxed for educational and school visits. Is it something new? No. And that is the most significant thing. The diary The Republic public a chronicle a few days ago in which I explained that Varenna is not the only tourist town in Italy that has decided to tighten its rules to combat touristification: in Eraclea, Favignana, Levanzo or Marettimo (to name just a few cases) they have also renewed the rules that prohibit walking in a swimsuit or bikini through the historic centers and commercial towns. It is not a new restriction, but the municipal authorities have wanted to reinforce it, increasing the fines in some cases up to 500 euros. Sandwiches, beers, selfies and bikinis. The Italian newspaper recalls that in the center of Apulia, for example, the prohibition of walking in a swimsuit or with a naked torso is not limited to streets, avenues and squares. It is also applied in parks, gardens and public transport. Skipping this restriction can cost up to 500 euros. In other towns they even go further and have prohibited eating sandwiches or drinking beers in the street, lying on benches or become selfies in viewpoints. Italy is not even the only one that has declared war on visitors who decide to walk around half naked, in a swimsuit or bikini. In France they have done something similar and right here, in Spain, there are cities that punish severely walk through the streets and squares without a shirt. The torso in the air, it is better to reserve it for swimming pools, beaches and areas authorized by the regulations. Images | Ray in Manila (Flickr), Becks (Flickr) and Gerry Labrijn (Flickr) In Xataka | “Vacation rentals are losing their appeal”: real estate agencies face the bursting of the tourist apartment bubble

ChatGPT voice mode has learned to listen, shut up and respond better

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Greg Brockman started the OpenAI live doing something very simple: talking to ChatGPT and cut him off while he responded. What mattered was not the questions, but the system’s reaction. Instead of stopping with a sharp cut, as could happen in previous experiences, in the demo the voice seemed to adjust the interruption in a more natural way. It was a short demonstration, but it served to show the promise of GPT-Live– Let ChatGPT’s voice mode not only speak better, but know when to respond, when to wait, and when to shut up. GPT-Live is the name chosen by OpenAI for this new stage of ChatGPT’s voice mode. It’s not just a more polished sound layer, but a family of models designed to process speech differently. An architecture called full-duplex allows AI to listen while generating a response, something the company says reduces the rigidity of traditional shifts. Since 2022, OpenAI has been moving the relationship with its models from the keyboard to increasingly closer forms of interaction. ChatGPT marked a before and after in the massive relationship with text models; early voice features added a more natural layer; and GPT-4o took that ambition to a much more expressive experience, inevitably associated with ‘Her’. The GPT-Live announcement comes after that tour. Its promise is not just to sound more human, but to solve a less spectacular and more important friction: how to have a conversation. without it looking like a sequence of commands. ChatGPT voice no longer works only in turns To understand the change you have to look at how previous generations worked. OpenAI explains that ChatGPT’s first voice mode was a cascade system: one model transcribed the voice, another generated the response, and a third converted it back to audio. Advanced voice mode It reduced that friction by processing and generating audio within a single model, but still operated in turns. GPT-Live changes that logic: you no longer work just with separate messages, but with a continuous interaction that allows you to decide several times per second whether you should speak, listen, pause or use a tool. So what can we do in practice? Well, the company led by Sam Altman gives several examples. We can interrupt with a question, pause to think or ask the system to speak more slowly. The voice can also respond with brief signals such as “mmm” or “yes” to indicate that it is still listening, and the company says it has improved its ability to focus on the user’s voice when there is background noise. Added to this are the nine ChatGPT voices remastered for GPT-Live, visual responses in the form of cards for queries such as weather, sports, stocks and other quick data, as well as support for search, memory, images and file uploads. The other important piece is what happens when the conversation demands more than a quick response. OpenAI explains that GPT-Live can delegate web searches, reasoning or more complex tasks to its frontier models, while keeping the conversation with the user alive. At launch, that support layer will be GPT-5.5although the company says that it will update the model used in the background as it publishes new generations. ChatGPT’s voice mode will also allow you to choose between reasoning levels: Instant for quick responses, and Medium or High when you need to spend more time thinking. The company maintains that the jump is not limited to an impression of use. In their internal evaluations, the GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 mini (the smaller version of the model that lands on free accounts) appear above the advanced voice mode in comparative five- to ten-minute conversations, both in overall preference and fluency, interruptions, turns, and natural feel. OpenAI also cites advances in scientific reasoningagent search and simulated telephone support tasks. Of course, these results serve as an initial reference, but they come from OpenAI itself and we will have to see what impact they have in real life. GPT-Live starts rolling out today for ChatGPT users on iOS, Android and ChatGPT.com. OpenAI speaks of a global deployment and does not mention a specific exclusion for the European Union, although it is worth maintaining the nuance: in other deployments of AI functions there have been doubts or delays in the region. GPT-Live-1 will be the default model for Go, Plus and Pro users, while free accounts, as we say, will use GPT-Live-1 mini. The API will arrive later, without a specific date for now. Now, there is also an important limitation at launch: GPT-Live does not currently support voice with video or screen sharing in ChatGPT, although OpenAI says it is working to introduce those capabilities later. Images | OpenAI In Xataka | Meta already has its rival for Nano Banana 2. Its problem is the same as always: mercilessly invading our privacy

The Phantom 3500 wants to break the mold by changing the windows for screens. And he’s close to getting it

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A year ago we told you the story of Otto Aerospace and its Phantom 3500, a windowless plane that aims to turn its walls into a panoramic view to the outside. As counterintuitive as it may sound, the company has had an idea: that on a plane without windows we can see better than ever what is around us when we fly. A year later, the project has been taking shape Otto Phantom 3500. Otto Aerospace’s Phantom 3500 is a project that should begin to come together next year. Last year we told you This curious project that aims to fill the fuselage of the plane with screens, eliminating all traces of windows. They called this concept Super Natural Vision, a system of screens that should show the outside in real time thanks to the use of cameras. This futuristic concept has, according to the company, the advantage of improving aerodynamics and thus the consumption of the device but also of simplifying the construction of the fuselage, saving costs. What’s new? To begin with, if you have entered the previous link you will have seen that the company has changed its name and is now no longer called Otto Aviation. Now, the company has adopted the name Otto Aerospacewhich gives an idea that its objective goes far beyond commercial transportation medianet private jets. But the most important thing is that the company has reached an agreement with flexjetwho operate huge fleets of private jets, to make the Phantom 3500 part of their fleet. The agreement contemplates a firm order for 300 aircraft and deliveries starting in 2030. It has not been made public how much the purchase figure is, which Yes, it is estimated in specialized media that the plane will cost about 19.5 million of dollars per unit but there is no confirmed figure for the purchase package of 300 aircraft of this type. Is it possible? According to its creators, of course. And with the purchase of 300 airplanes ahead, it had better be so, they will say at Flexjet. According to the company, the first flights of this private jet will begin in 2027 with a view to approval by US regulators. In his statement, Flexjet points that the purchase of 300 units of this device is one of the largest that has been recorded in private aviation and that it will serve to redefine what it means to fly using a service of this type. Can it be approved?. When launching this project, there is an important question that Otto Aerospace will have to answer. If you want to deliver the first planes in 2030, yes, you should have it under control. To approve an airplane, the Code of Federal Regulations of the US Government points out that “each emergency exit must have means that allow viewing the conditions outside the exit when it is closed.” That is, there must be a window or a reliable system that guarantees viewing of the outside without problems. And isn’t it very expensive? The other big question that Otto Aerospace will have faced is the issue of how much to fill the entire fuselage with screens. And to do this you will have to use high-quality flexible panels with a connection to your external cameras that is fast enough to not generate any type of dizziness as a consequence of a possible lag between the image and the movement of the vehicle. Likewise, filling the plane with screens also entails a cable management problem that will multiply compared to any other type of system and will add weight to the whole. Yet, The company claims to reduce consumption by half of fuel from other private jets that are currently in operation. Photo | Otto Aerospace In Xataka | Billionaires tried to hide their private jets. Now they have another problem: anyone can follow their superyachts

No one had ever launched a commercial nuclear satellite. SpaceX and City Labs just did it with Transporter-17

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SpaceX has launched the first commercial nuclear satellite in history. This is BOHR, a CubeSat developed by the City Labs company, and has been completely successfully placed into orbit as part of the Transporter-17 mission, from Elon Musk’s space company. This is intended to demonstrate that the use of nuclear energy to power vehicles, satellites and space probes is not just a matter for large public agencies. Tritium to make history in space. Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability (BOHR) is a CubeSat in which a nuclear reaction similar to the one that has been used for decades takes place. to propel the Voyager probes through space. Although there is a difference. While these obtain energy from the heat generated by the disintegration of plutonium, in this case the beta particles released by the disintegration of tritium are used. Afterwards, these They are transformed into electricity through a semiconductor. The use of tritium is an advantage, as it emits much less radiation, making its pre-launch handling safer. Speaking of the launch. This nuclear satellite was one of the 81 payloads that were part of the Transporter-17 mission on July 7. A Falcon 9 rocket of SpaceX propelled all of them into space after launching from said company’s platform, located at the Vandenberg base. Just 50 minutes after launch, each of the payloads, including BOHR, were placed into their respective orbits. Two possible uses. The use of nuclear energy in space is something that has been studied a lot for two reasons. Firstly, because it can be useful for ships that are going to travel very far, so that they cannot carry enough fuel on board. It is precisely the reason why this energy source was used with Voyager probes. On the other hand, nuclear energy is useful when solar energy is not an option. The Voyager probes traveled a long way from the Sun, but you don’t have to go that far either. The lunar south pole It is constantly in shadow, so in the future, when the Artemis bases are built there, nuclear power could be very necessary. A project with many supports. The development of BOHR was funded under a contract from the United States Department of Defense. In addition, it is the first nuclear mission that has received nuclear launch approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, specifically under the Presidential National Security Memorandum 20 of Donald Trump. Therefore, despite being a private project, it has received all the public support necessary for its implementation. That, along with its inclusion within a SpaceX mission, shows that there are many powerful eyes on this project. It’s just a test. In fact, BOHR has been used to prove that this way of obtaining nuclear energy is viable in space and that it can be used commercially. Currently, the satellite is in orbit, ready to launch the test reaction. However, the CubeSat uses solar panels to obtain energy for its own operation. The next step could be a satellite that exclusively uses tritium decay. For now, this first proof of concept has marked what may be the future of many commercial space missions. Image | SpaceX In Xataka | NASA’s lunar base begins here and now: an investment of hundreds of millions and a date on the horizon

In the Mediterranean it no longer makes sense to talk about a “tropical night” because almost all of them are.

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On June 21, the thermometer at Almería airport did not drop below 30.8ºC throughout the night. In fact, at seven in the morning the temperature was exactly the same as it would have been on an August afternoon twenty years ago. It seems like an isolated event (after all, it is the first time that we have encountered a minimum like this in the Mediterranean in June), but it is not. Just a handful of days later, the AEMET experts made it quite clear: it no longer makes much sense to talk about “tropical nights” in the Mediterranean because almost all summer nights already are. That is, almost no drops below 20 degrees. The June heat wave was (quite) exceptional. Not only because the 22nd and 23rd were the warmest June in the country since at least 1950; nor because the average peninsular anomaly was 7.1 ºC. The most striking exceptionality occurred in the early morning: according to the same AEMET24 of its 86 main stations marked the highest minimum in the historical series. That was the symptom. But the problem is another. A problem that has to do with an indicator that jumps so much that it has stopped meaning something just when we need it most. Or, at least, when we are most aware of the lack of it. In 2025, A CSIC research team published a work in Environment International in which he analyzed 178 cities, separating the effect of warm nights from that of warm days. Their conclusions indicate that nocturnal heat is associated with an increase in mortality of up to 3% and that this effect is independent of daytime heat. The mechanism is also dramatically simple: if the early morning does not ease, the body does not recover, sleep is degraded and cardiovascular or respiratory pathologies worsen rapidly. Why should we care? Because southern Europe is among the regions hardest hit by temperature changes. But there is something else: the same CESIC studyexcess mortality due to nocturnal heat in Spain is concentrated in the interior (Granada, 3.56%; Madrid, 3.45%; or Córdoba, 3.44%) while the Mediterranean coast is holding up much better (Barcelona, ​​0.56%; Alicante, 0.55%; or Almería 0.46%). That is, the problem is adaptability to these types of phenomena. Something in which the coast wins because it has been suffering from it (to a lesser extent, but suffering from it) for many years. The future we are going to. AEMET projects to go from the current 22 heat wave days per year to 47 at the end of the century with intermediate emissions. Preparing is no longer an option if we don’t want to. paint the windows of half the country with chalk or white yogurt. Image | Christian Van Der Henst In Xataka | Beyond gazpacho and salmorejo: Spain’s hidden summer dishes that are crying out to become popular

Climate change has a lethal side effect that we are only just discovering: it locks us in the house and prevents us from moving

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The increasingly frequent heat waves are not harmless for the population as they cause thousands of deaths each year, with vulnerable people being the most affected by this unwanted effect. But beyond this, which is what impacts anyone the most, we are also seeing how the increase in temperature is causing let’s reduce our physical activitysince when the street becomes an oven, sedentary lifestyle skyrockets. It is studied. The first major published work In this regard, he appeared on the scene in March of this same year and analyzed data from 156 countries collected between 2000 and 2022 to identify the “thermal frontier” in which our behavior changes radically from having good physical activity to moving to a sedentary lifestyle. With all this data, the limit was placed at 27.8ºC average temperature, since, according to the study, for each additional month in which a country exceeds this average temperature, global physical inactivity increases 1.5 percentage points. And it is not a simple summer anecdote, but stopping walking, running, cycling to work or playing in the park has direct physiological consequences. In Xataka The El Niño numbers are so strong that they are beginning to make half the world nervous. We have to be able to differentiate risk from hysteria Looking to the future, The figures are chilling, since if we continue with the current trend in an inactive manner, physical inactivity caused exclusively by excess heat will cause between 470,000 and 700,000 premature deaths additional each year around the world. Added to this is the economic impact, since lower productivity and increased medical spending will mean annual losses of between 2,400 and 3,680 million dollars. Spain, Due to its geographical location and its tendency towards desertification, it has been identified as one of the European countries most affected by this phenomenon, along with critical regions such as Central America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Because? To understand the reasons that reach these extremes, we have to look at another study that analyzed 74 years of hourly data, combining temperature and humidity to coin the concept ‘limiting heat’. With this term we talk about those environmental conditions in which the human body cannot carry out physical activity outdoors without its core temperature reaching dangerous levels. The most alarming thing about the study is the speed at which we are losing “working” hours per year. The annual time we spend in conditions of “severe livability limitation” has doubled since the 1950s, and it is not something that affects only the elderly. It affects us all. In young adults, historically there were about 25 hours a year of heat so extreme that it prevented them from moving safely. But today that figure has shot up to 50 hours annually and continues to increase. In the case of those over 65 years of age, their tolerance threshold is lower and they have gone from suffering 600 hours of climate confinement per year to more than 900 hours per year. This means that they spend more than 10% of the year in restrictive environmental conditions. In Xataka The map that splits Europe into two when the heat arrives: where there is air conditioning and where there isn’t He pushes us to the couch. The WHO itself has been warning that climate change acts as a “threat multiplier.” Here we have the perfect example, since heat not only makes us directly sick, but also enhances other modern pandemics such as obesity, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes by promoting a sedentary lifestyle. The solution is not just to tell people “go out and do sports earlier” or “join a gym with air conditioning.” Pass byrethink citiessince if the streets do not have shade, if the parks are cement slabs without climatic shelters, and if urban planning does not adapt to the new temperatures, going for a walk will cease to be a medical recommendation and will become a risky sport for four months a year. In Xataka | The networks are filling up with maps that promise the end of the heat. One thing is what we would like and another, very different, is what we know (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news Climate change has a lethal side effect that we are only just discovering: it locks us in the house and prevents us from moving was originally published in Xataka by José A. Lizana .

Tom Hanks assures that “this is the best movie ever made”, even above “Casablanca or Citizen Kane”

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Tom Hanks claims that the best film ever made is not ‘Casablanca’ or ‘Citizen Kane’, nor is it in the canon of absolute Hollywood classics. Nor is it any of his filmography. It is a 1963 title that failed at the box office and was officially vindicated by the actor when at the 1992 Oscars (although it was not on Oscar night itself) an honorary award was given to the person truly responsible for the magic of the film. 1992: the Harryhausen moment. That night, Hanks did not go on stage to compete for anything of his own, but rather to present the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, a technical recognition that the Academy grants outside of the main gala. The recipient was Ray Harryhausen, honored with this lifetime achievement award at a special ceremony held three weeks before the 1992 Oscars. There he uttered the famous phrase: “Some say Casablanca or Citizen Kane.” He prefers ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ Jason is going crazy. It is the best-known film that Ray Harryhausen made. Directed by Don Chaffey, it freely adapts the 3rd century BC Greek poem The Argonauticas, by Apollonius of Rhodes. The film was a box office failure at the time, but time has turned it into a fantasy classic thanks to the magnificent animations in stop motion from Harryhausen and a specific scene, the sword fight against an army of skeletons, which took the technician three months to animate. It is not the only amazing creature in the film: the bronze colossus Talos, the seven-headed hydra and the two Harpies are other mythological monsters in this adventure. It’s the monkey’s fault. Harryhausen knew that he wanted to dedicate himself to the world of effects because stop motion when he saw ‘King Kong’ as a child, and it was in fact the creator of the gigantic gorilla, Willis O’Brien, who advised him to take his first steps, advising him to study anatomy and art. Harryhausen ended up helping him as an apprentice on films like ‘The Big Gorilla’. Starting in the 1950s, he teamed up with producer Charles Schneer and there his key works would begin, which would ensure him a place in the pantheon of classics. With him, Harryhaysen began in science fiction films such as ‘The Beast from Ancient Times’, ‘Humanity in Danger’ or ‘Earth vs. the Flying Saucers’. Then came the fantasy adventures, often with mythological elements, that made him famous: ‘Sinbad and the Princess’, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, ‘The Mysterious Island’, ‘A Million Years Ago’ and, closing his career in the eighties, ‘Clash of the Titans’, with Medusa as one of his most remembered creatures. Harryhausen was not just an animator: he designed the creatures, sculpted them, built the models with articulated metal skeletons and then animated them himself, almost always alone. Stop motion FTW. Some of the genius’s teachings are relevant today. In a 2006 interview he argued that visual effects with excessive realism They were reduced to something mundane, compared to the almost dreamlike quality that, in their opinion, the stop motion. And it is easy to understand why: any film animated with this artisanal technique, like, without going any further, the very recent ‘I’m Frankelda’ It has a texture of pure wonder that CGI simply cannot remotely aspire to. In Xataka | Warner wanted to change the ending of one of Clint Eastwood’s most acclaimed films. Luckily, he stood his ground.

$30 billion worth of Broadcom chips

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Apple has announced an extension of your agreement with Broadcom which, according to the company itself, will exceed $30 billion. For the company, it is the largest single commitment within its American Manufacturing Program (AMP), but it is also another handful of bills that once again demonstrates how the semiconductor industry is being the central axis of the strategy of big technology. The context. Apple has been trying to demonstrate to Donald Trump’s government for more than a year that is moving part of its production chain to American soil. And it has no other choice, since this commitment is framed within of the 600 billion dollar investment plan in four years that the company announced in 2025, after Trump threatened to impose 25% tariffs on iPhones if Apple did not manufacture more components in the country. According to collect According to the Financial Times, that promise is similar to another similar one that Apple already made during Trump’s first term, when it committed to investing $350 billion in the United States. In detail. The new agreement with Broadcom provides for the production of more than 15 billion chips manufactured in the United States and will create hundreds of jobs, according to Apple. its official statement. Broadcom, which was already working with Apple to supply connectivity components, will expand and modernize its plant in Fort Collins, Colorado, with an additional investment of $1.5 billion. That plant will manufacture advanced radio frequency components, including FBAR filters, which allow Apple devices to connect to mobile, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks. Neither Apple nor Broadcom have yet confirmed when they will have everything ready to work with this new capacity. Between the lines. The announcement comes two days after Broadcom will inform to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it had signed new long-term agreements with Apple to develop custom ASIC-type chips (application-specific integrated circuits, increasingly used in artificial intelligence workloads) that will extend until 2031, according to collects Reuters. So the $30 billion figure now confirmed by Apple puts concrete numbers on those long-term deals. In the last year, Apple has been replacing some of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity chips that it previously bought from Broadcom with its own designs. This had raised doubts among investors about whether Broadcom would lose weight as a supplier, something similar to what happened with Qualcommwhose 5G modems Apple has been phasing out in favor of its own C-series chips. However, it appears that Broadcom will continue to supply other RF components and, according to Bloombergis also working on technology that will support the first artificial intelligence server that Apple plans to deploy next year. The voices. Apple CEO Tim Cook has qualified the components that will be manufactured in Fort Collins as “essential to deliver the performance and connectivity our customers expect,” and thanked President Trump and his Administration for “supporting important projects like this.” For his part, Broadcom’s CEO, Hock Tan, said he was “proud to continue working with Apple after decades of joint success” and highlighted that the agreement will allow it to expand its manufacturing footprint in Colorado. Why it is important. Apple is not massively restructuring its global supply chain, which remains highly concentrated in Asia. Your strategy, as explains the Financial Times, has been to focus on chips, which are the highest-value components in its devices, and announce purchase commitments with manufacturers that already operate in the United States, such as TSMC in Arizona, Texas Instruments in Texas or GlobalFoundries in New York. The Broadcom deal is, so far, the biggest piece of that puzzle. And now what. The announcement comes at a time of transition for Apple. Tim Cook will step down as director of the company on September 1, position that John Ternus will assumecurrent hardware manager. Cook will remain with the company as CEO and, according to Bloombergis expected to maintain his role as the main interlocutor with the White House, a role that has been key to sustaining Apple’s relationship with the Trump Administration in recent months. In Xataka | The US taught that access to advanced AI can be cut off. China is studying the same thing, according to Reuters, and Europe is watching from the outside

We have just discovered that the lethal weapon to hunt mammoths was not what we thought

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More than a century ago, archaeologists were convinced that the so-called Piltdown Man It was the “missing link” in human evolution. It took more than 40 years to prove that it was a fraud built with a human skull and the jaw of an orangutan. Since then, archeology has learned an uncomfortable lesson: even theories that seem indisputable can crumble when new evidence appears. The great certainty that falters. For decades, archeology books have presented the Clovis culture like the great mammoth hunters of North America. The image was simple: groups of hunters armed with spear propellers, known as atlatlcapable of taking down huge animals from a relatively safe distance. However, two studies published recently They question this reconstruction and force us to reconsider one of the most iconic scenes in American prehistory. The weapon that never appeared. He first study puts the focus on the atlatl, that kind of extension of the arm that multiplies the speed and range of a spear. For years it was assumed that the Clovis used it to hunt mammoths, although there was a surprising detail: A single atlatl has never been found at a Clovis site. Using statistical models, researchers they conclude now that this technology probably did not appear in America until about 4,000 years later before this culture disappeared, a gap too great to continue supporting the traditional theory. Without direction. The consequence of this archaeological gap is so striking that the author of the study, the archaeologist Metin Eren, summarizes it with a sincerity unusual in a scientific article: “We have no idea what the hell they used.” Because if the Clovis did not use atlatls, only hypotheses remain. Perhaps they hunted with javelins or thrust spears, which would have forced them to get much closer to animals weighing several tons and take an enormous risk. Paradoxically, the more research is done on one of the best-known cultures in America, there are fewer certainties about the weapon with which he survived. Or they were not so “hunters”. He ssecond study takes that review even further. After analyzing the fifteen sites where Clovis points have appeared along with remains of mammoths, mastodons or gomphotheres, the researchers they conclude that none demonstrates unequivocally that these animals were killed by human beings. The same marks on the bones and the same broken tips can occur both after a hunt and when using the carcass of an animal that had already died, a problem known in archeology as equifinality. Hunters… or scavengers. Of course, the authors do not maintain that the Clovis never hunted mammoths. What they affirm is that current evidence does not allow us to rule out that, on many occasions, they acted rather as opportunistic scavengers. In fact, remember that a Clovis point has never been found embedded in a mammoth bone, evidence that does exist in much older Eurasian sites. They even reinterpret a famous isotopic study on a Clovis child, proposing that the elevated nitrogen levels could be explained due to the consumption of larvae coming from corpses and not necessarily from a diet based almost exclusively on mammoth meat. Archeology exchanges certainties for questions. Both jobs They reflect a change of trend in research on prehistory. For decades, it was enough for an explanation to be reasonable to become the dominant narrative. Today researchers demand much stronger evidence and are revising some of the ideas that seemed best established, from the weapons used by the first Americans to the role they played in the disappearance of the megafauna of the end of the Ice Age. Sometimes the greatest scientific advance is not in finding a new answer, but in recognizing that the old one was never there. really proven. Image | BioS. In Xataka | The company that is resurrecting the mammoth is creating the Noah’s Ark of the 21st century. And he is doing it in Dubai, of course In Xataka | The crater known as “the door to hell” hid a surprise: a 50,000-year-old mammoth calf

Xbox wants to have 1 billion players a day. It’s what 25 Steam would do on their best day

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Another day in the video game industry, this Monday Microsoft announced layoffs at Xbox. 1,600 at once, five studios to make a living and another 1,600 layoffs over the next few months. To carry out the restructuring, what is known as “Xbox reset”Microsoft put Asha Sharma at the head of the company who came from one of the company’s AI divisions and who arrived with a clear mission: to break with the past. After weeks of good words, drastic decisions began and, in a release gigantic, justified the decisions of layoffs and restructuring (the consequences of which we still do not fully know, since we have been learning about layoffs in different Xbox studios for two days). There are interesting data, such as extreme bureaucracy within Xbox that had complicated things in recent years, the enormous investment in Game Pass and the fact that caught my attention the most: the number of daily players that Xbox wants. Because Sharma talks about wanting a billion people to be “entertained” with Xbox every day. And, after wondering what it means to have a billion people every day on your platform, I have only been able to come to one conclusion: I would like to see how they do it. The Xbox of a billion players and the old woman’s account I don’t say this in a defiant sense, but out of genuine curiosity. I would like to see how Xbox, or any company, for that matter, is able to bring together a billion people a day on its platform. Sharma comments that they see themselves capable of achieving that goalbut the point is that there are many more stimuli than ever and, furthermore, setting these goals only has one consequence: when they are not met, there will be more ‘resets’. Let’s go in parts. The changes they are making seek to ensure that “Xbox has a bigger future, not a smaller one.” Furthermore, he notes that “the next decade of games will be bigger, more global and more creative than anything we’ve seen before.” Said like this, you may think that they are going to invest a lot (they themselves say that they are going to invest a lot, but with a better focus and discipline), but there is a problem: are there really that many players willing to be on your platform? What is an Xbox? Answering the first question, players… there are. We are more than 8,000 million people throughout the world and esteem what’s there around 3 billion people who play video games. This in total, not on a daily basis and, furthermore, you must keep in mind that everything is mixed here: the accounts include everything from the most ‘Eat’ of ‘Call of Duty’ to your grandfather who plays ‘Candy Crush’ or a Facebook game. Responding to the second, Sharma says they want a billion people entertained with Xbox. And not only those who have a console count (whose sales are quite poor), but also those who play from PC and Xbox games on Steam and platforms like PS5. That is, everything that has the Xbox seal. That said, let’s tell why one billion people seem to get it “easy” Yes, you have so many franchises and you are present everywhere, but things get complicated if we put the magnifying glass on the few games that can really help the company achieve those figures. They are all estimates, but we would talk about 110 million monthly players in ‘Minecraft’, between 70 and 90 million (counting mobile phones) monthly in ‘Call of Duty’ and between 200 and 300 million players diaries in ‘Candy Crush’. There we see the dimension of mobile games, really, and how they crush those on more traditional platforms. ‘World of Warcraft’ too would enter there, with about 9 million monthly players. These are figures that many companies would like, but they are far from those 1,000 million a day that Sharma points to. To further contextualize, Steam, which is another of the huge video game platforms, had its historical peak of players a few months ago, reaching more than 42 million. In the last 24 hours, almost 39 million people connected and, as we see in graphs like Steamdb, they are very stable… and in growth. Well, Sharma wants the same as they would get 25 Steams every day. As a player, I would love to have so many people because it would allow, perhaps, the industry to be somewhat more sustainable because there would be many more players among which smaller studios could find their place to grow, but the problem I see with these accounts is that, publishing that you want there to be 1,000 million people on your platform, the only result (the most likely, at least) is failure. And when you fail in such a large company when you have set this as an objective, the manager is not the one who pays the bill: it is the employees. It’s something we see constantly and We come from three years of constant layoffs in the industry to be optimistic about the issue. What we have seen these days is that they are changing the strategy in that sense. They are releasing the smaller studios that do not sell to bet on what makes money. An example is King (‘Candy Crush’) and Mojang (‘Minecraft’), which They will report directly to herwith Sharma being the one who will make the decisions to achieve the objective. Another thing is whether people who watch the ‘Fallout’ series, a game series whose license belongs to Xbox, count as “people entertained by Xbox.” We just have to wait and see what happens, but it is evident that Xbox’s turnaround is there, releasing studios that were developing games with soul to bet on what makes money. After all, it is the objective of every company. In Xataka | The best time to buy an electronic device was yesterday. The second best time is today

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