Mobile Tech & Gadgets

Perovskite is the “holy grail” of solar energy, but its industrial manufacturing was hell. This new technique changes everything at once

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Solar energy has a clear favorite to lead the future: tandem solar cells. The idea is brilliant and simple on paper, since if you combine traditional silicon with a top layer of revolutionary perovskite, you create a “super panel.” Perovskite swallows high-energy, short-wave light, and silicon finishes the job with longer waves. So the result is capturing much more solar spectrum and generating more electricity than with traditional plates. The valley of industrial death. The problem is that the photovoltaic industry had been banging its head against a wall for years. Perovskite was a wonder in the “Petri dish” of the laboratory, but manufacturing those very thin layers on a large scale, uniformly and quickly, was a true technical nightmare. Technology ran the risk of remaining an eternal promise, until a bridge built between Karlsruhe and Valencia showed that the problem was not the material, but the method. The 10 minute record. A team of researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany and the University of Valencia, supported by institutions in France and Argentina, has just published a historic milestone in the magazine Nature Energy. They have designed an ultra-fast, solvent-free vacuum process that deposits the layer of perovskite at a pace never seen before. They have managed to manufacture tandem cells with a very high efficiency of 24.3% and the conversion process lasts just 10 minutes. To understand why this turns the industry upside down, you have to look at the factory numbers. As Professor Ulrich Paetzold (KIT) explainsIn the industry, not only efficiency matters, but also that the process is robust and scalable. This new method achieves a deposition rate of 47 nanometers per minute, that is, a speed ten times greater than that of conventional thermal evaporation methods. In addition, it consumes very little material and allows sources to be reused, drastically reducing costs. The “magic” of sublimation. The technique is called Closed Space Sublimation (CSS). We could say that it is like a microscopic oven: the precursor materials evaporate and collide directly against the silicon cell, which is placed just a few millimeters away. There they react on site to form the structure of the perovskite almost magically. Sofía Chozas-Barrientos, researcher at the University of Valencia, emphasizes that this system It allows you to do without solvents and save a lot of time. However, the recipe needed to be refined. For the tandem to work, the perovskite The upper part must act as a spectral filter (have a wider bandgap), and this is achieved by adding bromine. The drama was that, when trying to introduce bromine, it literally vanished during the process. The solution, according to researcher Alexander Dierckswas to create a mixed organic source by mixing methylammonium iodide and methylammonium bromide in an exact ratio of 3 to 1. Thus they managed to retain the bromine and nail an ideal band efficiency of 1.64 eV. Ready for the real world. The point is that good solar panels are not smooth; They are full of textures (with micropyramid shapes) to better catch the light. And this CSS process has worked perfectly on smooth, nanostructured and microstructured silicon, without having to touch a single button in the machine’s settings. Microscopes confirmed impeccable coverage in all topographies. As Professor Henk Bolink summarizesfrom the University of Valencia, a process that only works on smooth laboratory surfaces is of no use in industry. The fact that this sublimation achieves uniform layers on textured silicon is what makes this advancement real, viable and marketable. The future, on the roofs. Closing the gap between the laboratory and the factory is the great challenge of our energy era. With this Spanish-German milestone, the mass production of tandem solar technology finally removes the “unviable” label. The perovskite revolution no longer has to wait decades; is ready to make the leap to factories and, very soon, to rooftops around the world. Image | Eurekalert Xataka | Where you see an old bullet from the 17th century, Germany sees a magnificent source of perovskite for solar panels

a millionaire is looking for ideas because money has not given him happiness

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Some people think that the only thing you need to be happy is a checking account whose balance looks like a phone number. This is a fact confirmed by science. Others, on the other hand, cannot even use all the money in the world to achieve happiness. This is the case of Vinay Hiremath, a 34-year-old engineer of Indian origin living in the US who became a millionaire in a short time. but he doesn’t know what to do with his life to be happy. So he didn’t hesitate to make it public. from your personal page to see if anyone would give him ideas about what he could do with his life. “I know. It’s an absolutely otherworldly situation,” the millionaire wrote. Millionaire with all the time in the world Hiremath co-founded the startup Loom in 2015 alongside Shahed Khan and Joe Thomas. The company developed software that allowed screenshots and video capture in third-party applications. At its height, the pandemic meant that we all suddenly needed record meetings and taking screenshots of video calls, so the company’s valuation skyrocketed. In 2023, Atlassian purchased the company he had founded for $975 million, of which Hiremath would receive $60 million as a compensation salary package. for leaving the company. After formalizing the purchase, the young millionaire found himself with a fortune in your pocket and all the time in the world to spend it on things that made him happy. That was the first disappointment. “I have infinite freedom, but I don’t know what to do with it and, honestly, I’m not the most optimistic person about life,” Hiremath said on his blog. The first weeks were spent meeting with entrepreneurs and robotics experts in the hope of finding an exciting idea with which to get involved and help it grow as he had already done with his own company a few years ago. It was useless since none of the proposals inspired him. “I began to realize that what I really wanted was to look like Elon (Musk), and that is incredibly embarrassing. It hurts me to even write this,” the millionaire acknowledged. Since he didn’t know what to do with his money, thought that perhaps it would be a good idea to give a good part of his fortune to his parents so that they could retire earlier. He also tried to have fun traveling the worldand he did that accompanied by his girlfriend for six months. Unfortunately, that didn’t work either and, not only did it not make Hiremath’s life make sense, but he ended up breaking up with his girlfriend after “two years of unconditional love.” “We started arguing frequently and I knew it wasn’t her fault, it was mine.” It’s not what you have, it’s what you do After his romantic breakup, the millionaire understood that nothing he did would make him feel fulfilled if he did not first do an introspection exercise: he needed to “face himself completely.” Founding the company had made him feel fulfilled and, suddenly finding himself without a purposeleft him disoriented and without a vital goal to pursue. Hoping to find himself, he left Himalayan climbing without prior preparation and without any experience. On the verge of hypoxia lack of oxygendecided that his “inner self” was definitely not going to be in the peaks of the Himalayas, so he came to his senses and returned home, but not before climbing two of the peaks of that mountain range. “I completed the two summits I had planned and I realized again how important it is for me to do difficult things. It is the heart of my life and I don’t understand 100% why, but it probably has something to do with the fact that I didn’t have the best childhood,” said the millionaire in his writing. Upon returning home and telling his friends about the conclusions he had come to while hanging from a rappelling rope in the Himalayas, his friends joked that “I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get out of its current crisis and not pay its own debt. So I contacted some people and they accepted me.” For a month, the millionaire was talking to the army of candidates to be part of the new “extragovernmental” department“which created, with more pain than gloryElon Musk. “I learned about the power of urgency and having an undeniable mission. I didn’t read it somewhere, I experienced it.” However, the young millionaire also realized that That wasn’t going to be his battle.. “After four intense and intoxicating weeks, I canceled my plans to move to Washington and embark on a journey to save our government with some of the smartest people I have ever met. And I booked a one-way ticket to Hawaii,” Hiremath said. After a journey through the desert of the human condition, the engineer has “learned to accept that I am happy learning physics.” However, that was not going to be his destiny either. As a restless engineer, Hiremath has found a purpose. Recovering one of the thoughts that went viral from his blog, the young millionaire has managed to “lay the foundations of my basic principles and be able to start a company that manufactures things in the real world.” He has discovered a new passion developing sensors and automation for startup Specterwhich is responsible for implementing “physical intelligence” to control the security data in public and strategic facilities. In the end, happiness was in something as humble as a weld of tin in a silicon circuit. He who has more is not richerbut who needs it least. In Xataka | If the question is whether money brings happiness, a Harvard expert answers: it’s not having money, it’s what you do with it Image | Unsplash (Danka & Peter, Clark Tibbs) A version of this article was published in January 2025.

China is very clear that the future of education involves AI, so it is going to require its teachers to have knowledge

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China has one objective between its eyebrows: become the first world power. It is clearly an ambitious objective, but in the latest Five-Year Plan they detail the roadmap that must be followed to achieve that goal in the period 2026-2030. That of the five year plans is a very communist tradition which was not born in China, but in the Soviet Union, but which the Asian giant began to implement in 1953. It consists of setting guidelines to achieve certain objectives in all the main areas of the country. And one of those objectives is to be sovereign in artificial intelligence. This does not happen have models either chips to train those models: goes through an industrial renewal of all the legs of the system ranging from how it is designed, how it is applied, how it is powered and, above all, how AI is taught. And, to comply with it, China is clear that this is not just a matter for students: teachers must be on the hook. Teachers, learn AI to teach AI In April of this year, China’s Ministry of Education launchedwith the support of other government agencies, the “AI+ Education Action Plan” program. This is a national plan to integrate AI throughout the educational system with the aim of building “an AI literacy system for all levels of schooling and throughout life.” The Ministry exposes We are entering a new era in which teaching and learning must be reconfigured to ensure that all students acquire basic knowledge of AI. That is, it is clear that AI is important and that it is being used in classrooms around the world, but China is aiming for a profound update of the educational program. With this, they show that They consider AI a pillar of the future of education And, if students must obtain knowledge in AI and then be able to apply it in a world in which they will coexist with these systems, someone must transmit that knowledge to them. That will be the new job of the teaching staff. All primary and secondary school students in Beijing receive at least eight class hours of AI courses per academic year – Li Yi, director of the Beijing Education Commission This revision of the educational plan specifies that the program will incorporate AI exams into teacher qualification exams. In fact, this is not something that starts now. In 2025, the Ministry of Education published two guides about the use of AI and generative artificial intelligence to primary and secondary schools. That same year, the Administration organized specific training sessions in AI for directors of primary and secondary schools in which he emphasized the need to reinforce the digital and AI skills of teachers so that they can take advantage of their functions. In the end, everything is framed in that desire to have a world-class educational system by 2035 because this extends beyond primary and secondary school. That “AI literacy” order incorporate AI also in extracurricular services, as well as in vocational training and university, becoming in these cycles a general basic course with programs and degrees aligned with the industrial transformation driven by AI. “We teach children to use LLMs to solve problems and most importantly: think critically, question whether the AI’s answers are correct, and verify information from multiple sources” – Yao Xiaoying, principal of a primary school in Shenzhen And you may be wondering what teachers should apply to comply with this “AI literacy.” Here things are a bit fuzzy because speaks to promote the use of teaching systems throughout the educational process to automate tasks (such as tutoring, questions and answers and corrections), as well as analyze teaching practices so that their workload is reduced and they can spend more time training young people. For the adult population there is also a plan: carry out learning courses so that they adapt and are not left behind. Difficulties The truth is that there has been a debate about this situation for some time. Given the commotion caused by this, the Minister of Education came out lecture to prohibit students from using AI to complete their assignments. As we said before, AI should only be a supervised support tool. Because basically there is a question of class and resources, and there are already those who warn that AI can widen the social gap. While in large cities where parents may have more resources and educational level, families and the center can do a good job in training in AI so that children know how to use it and question the answers. However, in more rural areas where there may be less education, families have lower incomes, and parents must work longer hours, students run the risk of being “locked in” in some cubicles that have begun to bloom by several locations in which there is a tablet, it proposes tests and supervises the children’s responses, but does not teach or explain the subject. There are also those who point Almost as interesting as knowing the Government’s plans for teaching AI to both teachers and students is checking the speed at which all this goes from a political document to the reality of the classroom. In Xataka | China continues to draw up five-year plans in the old communist way. Objective: tech self-sufficiency

If the question is what the European Orion module is doing among giant speakers, the answer is NASA’s extreme tests

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When we talk about Artemis We almost always look in the same place: NASA, the SLS rocketthe Orion capsule and that plan to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon. It makes sense, because the United States leads the program and a good part of the space imagination continues to revolve around its missions. But that reading falls short. Artemis is not just an American story.It is also an international architectureand in that architecture Europe has a much more important piece than it usually seems at first glance. That role has just been realized in a very visible milestone. Airbus Space recently announced that ESM-3, Orion’s third European Service Module and the unit destined for Artemis III, had its four solar wings installed. It is a powerful image because it summarizes well the nature of the project: an American ship with an essential part developed on the other side of the Atlantic. The module, built by the aerospace giant for the European Space Agency, will use those wings to provide electrical power to Orion during its mission, although there is still work to be done before the assembly can be considered ready to fly. The ESM has a much deeper function than a picture of newly installed solar panels may suggest. In the Orion architecture, this module is placed under the capsule where the astronauts travel and concentrates systems that are essential for the mission. NASA explains that provides electricity, propulsion, thermal control, air and waterin addition to serving as support to the ship during flight. That is why its role is not understood as a symbolic contribution, but as an operational part of the vehicle. A test on the ground, between speakers and noise The following, however, was not one of those scenes that we immediately associate with space. Airbus Space noted on May 6 that the next step was an acoustic test, a ground test designed to see how the spacecraft responds to the extreme launch environment. Simply put: before thinking about docking, orbits or manned missions, the module had to deal with the noise and vibrations that occur when the rocket takes off. That trial has already begun to materialize. NASA has shown the Orion service module for Artemis III during its acoustic tests at the Kennedy Space Center, surrounded by a wall of high-powered speakers to simulate the sound and vibrations of launch. According to the center, these tests help measure how the structure responds, verify the physical integrity of the spacecraft, protect sensitive avionics and propulsion interfaces, and detect potential problems on the ground well before launch day. This type of test is known as direct field acoustic testor D-FAT, and involves surrounding space hardware with an array of high-power speakers to reproduce the acoustic environment of launch. In equivalent testing of the Orion European Service Module, ESA has spoken of more than 200 speakers and more than 140 decibels. It’s not a new rarity: NASA already submitted Apollo vehicles underwent vibroacoustic testing in the 1960s to see how their structures and systems responded to the noise and vibrations expected during flight. That this test has arrived now does not make the module a ready-to-fly piece, but it does mark another advance in Orion’s preparation for Artemis III. And there the context matters, because the mission in which this module must participate is no longer counted exactly the same as it was a few months ago. Artemis III was for a long time the mission associated with the return of astronauts to the lunar surface, but NASA has rearranged the calendar and now places it as a demonstration mission in low Earth orbit. The plan involves launching four astronauts in Orion, on the SLS, to rehearse rendezvous and docking maneuvers with one or two commercial lunar landing vehicles from SpaceX and Blue Origin. It is not the end of the lunar goal, but an intermediate step to test an architecture that still needs to fit many pieces. The interest of this module is best understood precisely because of this new role of Artemis III. If the mission will be used to verify docking and operations with commercial vehicles, Orion will have to act as a manned platform within a much broader test than a simple test flight. In this scenario, the ESM-3 is not a peripheral contribution, but rather an integrated part of the ship in which the astronauts will travel. Europe, therefore, does not appear only in the cooperation communications: it appears in the machinery that has to make the mission work. The paradox sums up the moment quite well. Europa has just completed a visible part of the preparation of the module that will travel with Orion, and its next test has not been on the Moon, not even in orbit, but among noise, vibrations and speakers within a test on the ground. That is also the reality of Artemis: large lunar objectives supported by a long succession of technical, industrial and often inconspicuous steps. In that chain, ESM-3 makes it clear that the return to the lunar surface is not being prepared only from the United States. Images | Airbus Space | POT In Xataka | The Earth has had a traveling companion for millions of years and we don’t know where it came from, but there is a ship ready to give us answers

It turns out that at least half of what orbits the Earth is garbage. And that’s only what we can see

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Around the Earth is the moon and a lot of space junk. And it is not an exaggeration: we have decades launching satellites into space without a clear or unified strategy. Of those waters, these muds: only Starlink has 9,000 units orbiting and has requested permission to launch a million more. What began with a technological race between superpowers has become an orbiting dump that has serious implications: threat of catastrophic collisions (every time we launch something, we buy another ticket in this macabre lottery) to risk critical infrastructures such as GPS navigation or communications. But all this is not new: science has been warning about it for years. The truly disturbing thing is not so much that the problem has been diagnosed, but rather that there is no simple solution. Space debris will not degrade with rain nor will it be decomposed by microorganisms. What goes up, stays there. And everything that remains is a real threat to what is there that truly matters. Almost half of what is in orbit is garbage. The engineering company Accu has used public data of the United States Space Corps through the web Space-Track.org and has analyzed them: there are 33,269 trackable objects in orbit, of which 17,682 are satellites. What happens to that other 47%? What is space debris: abandoned rockets, dead satellites and thousands of fragments resulting from collisions, among other unidentified objects. Stay with this information, because it is important and we will return later. Why is it important. From high school physics: we have already seen that there are objects of all types and sizes, but the majority of them they travel At more than 27,000 km/h and that speed, even the smallest piece can be lethal. To put it in context: a one-kilogram fragment impacting at 10 km/s has a kinetic energy of 50 MJ, that is, its equivalence in TNT There are 12 kg of explosive, enough to completely destroy an entire satellite of several tons. Losing a satellite is not the worst thing that could happen (even if its function was critical), but the Kessler syndromean irreversible chain reaction: if two objects collide and generate thousands of fragments, these fragments can collide with each other, generating more and more until making the orbit unusable. Context. It all started with the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, but the problem has gotten out of hand in the last decade due to something that a priori was good: the cost of launches has plummeted, so there are more and more and in fact, there are even commercial constellations, like Starlink. Only between 2020 and 2025 the number of trackable objects in orbit grew by around 10,000 units. You can see the history of all objects launched into space in Space-Track.org. Maybe after hearing so much that the wolf is coming we downplay it, but it is already happening: in 2024 the astronauts of the International Space Station they had to take refuge after the fragmentation of a decommissioned Russian satellite. In 2025 Chinese astronauts they were trapped at Tiangong Station after a piece of trash cracked the window of their return capsule. The worst is what we don’t know. We mentioned before that 47% of space debris, but that is only what we can see: the European Space Agency calculate that there are more than 1.2 million fragments larger than one centimeter in orbit and that more than 50,000 exceed 10 centimeters, enough size to completely destroy an active satellite if both impact. The figure amounts to more than 100 million objects of one millimeter or less, according to NASA. Even a flake of paint. In addition, each space power manages its own tracking data with different levels of transparency, making it difficult to have a complete and reliable picture, a map of what is in orbit. The gap between what is trackable and what is real is abysmal: current surveillance systems can only reliably track objects larger than 10 centimeters in low orbit and larger than one meter in geostationary orbit. Everything that remains outside that threshold is simply invisible, not innocuous. As if that were not enough, there is one more dynamic variable to introduce into the equation: the interaction between debris and space weather. A 2025 study warned that an intense solar storm could cripple satellites’ ability to maneuver long enough to cause cascading collisions and that there would be less than three days to react. Whose fault is it. The origin of space debris is essentially concentrated in three blocks: China, the United States and the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, heirs of the Soviet space program, concentrate on their shoulders about 95% of all waste cataloged in orbit. With data from March 2026, China accounts for 34% of the total debris tracked, closely followed by the CIS (Russia and eight other small countries) with 31% and the United States with another 31%. The underlying problem is legal: the international treaty that regulates space dates back to the 1960s and does not prohibit destroying satellites with missiles. Nor has anyone been serious about minimizing the launches. Without a clear policy to reduce waste, verification mechanisms or real sanctions, little can be expected, such as documents the UN. In Xataka | We have been burning space junk for years to get rid of the problem. It turned out to be a bad idea In Xataka | Orbital cleanup is no longer science fiction: the first regular space debris collection service will arrive in 2027 Cover | Photo of Javier Miranda in Unsplash

They have measured the brain age of people who usually meditate. The result is that he looks six years younger

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The age reflected on our identity card does not always coincide with the real age of our organs. In the field of neuroscience, the “brain age” has become a fascinating biomarker to understand how our nervous system ages and what factors can protect it. And now meditation seems to have a fundamental role in delaying this clock at least during our rest hours. A new study published in the magazine Mindfulness has found that people who practice meditation At an advanced level they have a “brain age” during sleep that is almost six years lower than their chronological age. A striking fact that opens doors in the study of neuroplasticity and the role that this habit can have in the lives of many people. Although logically we must move away from the idea of ​​suffering a miraculous “rejuvenation” How it has been seen. To understand the finding, we must first understand how this “brain age” is measured, and here the researchers did not use MRIs to see the size of the brain, but instead analyzed the electrical activity through electroencephalograms (EEG) during sleep. Its evolution. Something that is known is that, as we age, the brain waves we produce when sleeping change in predictable ways. Under this pretext, algorithms have been used to calculate a “brain age index” based on these electrical patterns. With these data, if the brain produces waves typical of someone of a similar age, the index is similar to zero, but if waves are produced from someone older, the index is positive. The method. The research team evaluated 34 people who meditate at an advanced level, belonging to the discipline Inner Engineering with an average age of 38 yearsand compared their sleep records with those of several control groups who did not meditate. The result here was that people who usually meditate showed an index that corresponded to people six years younger. That is, their brains, electrically speaking and while sleeping, behaved like those of people almost six years younger, while the control groups showed values ​​close to zero or slightly positive. One more biomarker. The findings fit like one more piece in a scientific puzzle that has been years in the making. Previous research already pointed to global changes in the EEG spectrum and greater neuroplasticity, and it was even seen that regular meditation caused an increase in brain gray matter and a possible neuroprotective effect. However, from a clinical standpoint, it is critical not to confuse an EEG marker with literal rejuvenation. The fact that the brain shows younger electrical patterns at night is an excellent biological indicator of brain health, but this study does not clinically prove that meditation is a proven tool for reversing cognitive decline. You have to be cautious. In this case it cannot be categorically stated that meditating rejuvenates the brain because there may be other factors that have not been measured. We must also keep in mind that we are dealing with a study on only 34 people, so the sample should be increased with the aim of extrapolating it to the entire population. Images | Drazen Zigic in Magnific In Xataka | The best 18 meditation, relaxation and mindfulness applications to have better mental health

An Atlassian engineer was fired. He then published a video on YouTube explaining how the company works

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“I was recently affected by layoffs made by Atlassian and wanted to take some time to reflect on the time I spent working there.” This is how it begins the video that Vasilios Syrakis shared on his YouTube channel. The video, titled “I have been fired by Atlassian” seems to be a criticism of the company. It’s something much better. What has happened? On March 11, Atlassian, the company behind software like Jira or Trello, announced that it was going to reduce its workforce by 10%which translates into about 1,600 street workers. The reason, of course, was AI. In the company’s words: “Our approach is not that AI will replace people, but it would be dishonest to pretend that AI does not change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas.” One of those roles was that of Vasilios. The answer. Instead of recording himself criticizing the company’s decision, this engineer opted for something different. What he did was publish a detailed, 38-minute description of everything he built during the eight years he worked at the company. Your video is a masterclass on How the architecture of a company of the stature of Atlassian works and it serves two objectives: it turns your experience into a common good and at the same time it is a letter of introduction for future jobs. what he did. Vasilios did not have a minor role at Atlassian, but for eight years, he worked on the invisible “plumbing” that connects millions of users to Jira and Confluence. In the video he details how Open Service Broker works, the internal platform he built so that Atlassian teams could publish their services on the internet with one click; also the Sovereign system, which acts as the “brain” of the more than a thousand proxies; and how it rebuilt security so that all internal services inherited the same authentication and attack security without having to write it one by one. The context. In the announcement, Atlassian admits that it is achieving very good results. In February 2026 they published their resultsin which they boasted a 23% increase in their total revenues, which reached 1,586 million, and a 26% growth in cloud revenues. Despite the fact that the company is doing very well, 10% of its staff ended up on the streets, including engineers with roles as important as Vasilios’. As mentioned in the Experienced Devs subredditVasilios is careful and in the video he does not seem to mention confidential information about the company, but instead limits himself to talking about the design of its systems, so it does not seem like they could sue him. At the time of writing, Atlassian has not commented on the video, which already has almost a million views. Image | Vasilios Syrakis, YouTube In Xataka | “They blame AI for layoffs they would do anyway”: Sam Altman confirms that AI has been used as an excuse to lay off

Science warns of its silent and devastating impact on fertility

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When we think about the effects that tobacco has on the body, our mind quickly goes to the lung cancer or cardiovascular diseases. However, the damage goes much further and one of the key points here is in the direct impact it has on the fertility of men and women. But it not only alters conception, it alters our DNA and reduces success rates in medical treatments. In the case of women. The scientific evidence is very consistent regarding the effects of smoking on the female reproductive system, since smoking harms conception, alters ovarian follicular dynamics and makes embryo implantation difficult. In fact, a higher risk of delayed pregnancy, as well as primary and secondary infertility, is observed in women who smoke. To highlight some of these points, we must know that women smokers have up to 60% more likely of developing fertility problems. This is justified by the difficulty in forming the blood vessels that will nourish the endometrium. But in addition, it is also estimated that today 13% of infertility cases that have been reported to be related to tobacco itself. Aging. One of the most striking effects is how tobacco steps on the accelerator of ovarian aging. A study of the Women’s Health Initiative found that both active smoking and passive smoke exposure are associated with natural menopause before age 50. Specifically, menopause can be advance between 1 and 4 years in smokers or ex-smokers compared to women who have never smoked. The masculine factor. Although we can almost always blame women for reproductive problems, the reality is that the impact of tobacco on men is equally severe. Here the WHO itself point that tobacco affects fertility and sexual potency, something the CDC agrees with, pointing out that smoking damages sperm and can be one of the causes of erectile dysfunction. Because? Science has seen in these cases that smoking reduces semen volume, sperm count and also how they are moving. But in addition, smoking can negatively affect hormonal production and damage the DNA of the sperm, which makes conception less likely. In assisted reproduction. When a natural pregnancy does not occur after several months of trying, assisted reproduction techniques are used, but here tobacco can also play tricks. And we are not talking about an infallible technique, and that is why smokers face a worse prognosis in in vitro fertilization treatments. To be more specific, the figures suggest that these patients suffer pregnancy rates 30% less and they need a higher dose of medications to stimulate their ovarian reserve. Pass the generations. This is one of the most interesting discoveries that has been made in this case, since smoking not only affects those who ascend to the cigarette, but its trace can follow the offspring. For example, children of smoking mothers may suffer a reduction in sperm concentration of between 20% and 40%. And in the case of daughters there is a risk of being born with a low ovarian reserve. Images | Haim Charbit freestocks In Xataka | ‘Children of Men’ is ceasing to be a dystopia: the global sperm count has been sinking for years

The oldest rocks on Earth are in Australia and force us to rethink how the continents were formed

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The Earth works with the mechanics of plate tectonics, that is, tectonic plates move, collide and sink under each other. The question on the table of science is when it started to work like this and the answer is complicated, simply because no rock older than 4,030 million years is preserved that allows us to reconstruct that period (spoiler: It is the Acasta gneiss and is in Canada). The only clue we have are zircons, crystals so resistant that they can almost withstand anything: they survive even when the rock that houses them disappears, so they function as a kind of time capsule. The oldest in the world They are in the hills of Jack Hillsin Western Australia and are up to 4.4 billion years old. The discovery. An international research team led by John W. Valley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has analyzed the chemical composition of these Australian zircons and compared it with other zircons of approximately the same age found in Barberton, South Africa. What they found was surprising: while the South Africans point to a still and immobile Earth’s crust, the Australians indicate that in that place, one layer was sinking on top of another (subduction). The conclusion they reached is that 4.4 billion years ago different parts of the Earth operated with different tectonic mechanisms at the same time: in some places there was something similar to silver tectonics and in others, the crust remained stagnant, as if it were a rigid lid. Why is it important. Until now, the official history of Earth’s geology tells that the planet went from having a stationary crust to having plate tectonics. around 3.8 billion years and that the change was more or less global and simultaneous. Well nothis study dismantles it: subduction was already happening in some parts 600 million years earlier, which means that the continents began to form much earlier than previously thought. And there were earthquakes back then. This is also important for understanding the origin of life. Subduction produces granite and stable continental crust, which creates land, nourishes the oceans with minerals, and creates the environments where, according to the oldest records available, life began to develop 3,700 – 4,100 million years ago. If subduction dates back to before, those favorable conditions for life were also there before. Context. This debate is not new and in fact, neither is the conclusion. There are studies that hold that plate tectonics began in the early Hadean, others that before the plates began to move, the Earth’s crust was a rigid, immobile layer, like a lid, and the heat from within was released through columns of molten rock rising from the mantle, not through the movement and collision of plates. And be careful, because in both cases they used those same Jack Hills zircons to defend opposing positions, which gives an idea of ​​how difficult it is to interpret them. In fact, already there are previous studies that use Barberton zircons to identify a tectonic regime change around 3.8 billion years ago. What this new work does is add a nuance in the form of complexity: the change was present in Barberton, but in Australia in Jack Hills the story was different and older. How they have done it. With a technique called secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), which makes it possible to measure with high precision some chemical elements present in zircon (scandium, ytterbium, niobium and uranium) because their proportions vary depending on the type of geological environment in which the mineral was formed. A zircon formed in a subduction zone has very different proportions than one formed in a rigid cap zone. In addition, they analyzed the age of the zircons and their hafnium and oxygen isotopes, which indicate both the origin of the mantle or whether water was involved in the process. The complete photo with these four data allows us to reconstruct the geological environment. Yes, but. The big Achilles’ heel of the study is that these zircons are loose grains carried by erosion, not samples of rock in their original place. That is, they could travel thousands of kilometers from their origin. In short: it is not known where they come from. The second major problem is that the method used to identify tectonic environments is calibrated with modern rocksbecause there are no Hadean rocks. This implies assuming that the chemistry then was similar to that of today, something that no one can guarantee. In Xataka | 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, summarized in a spectacular video map In Xataka | We thought we had an accurate photo of what the Earth was like 4 billion years ago. Zircons are telling a different story Cover | Virtual Museum of Mineralogy and Gemini with AI

The strangest museum on the internet has a collection of plugs from around the world that reflect electrical chaos

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Between 1880 and 1930, different countries around the world made an important electrical decision: choosing a type of plug. More or less, everyone did it on their own. When they wanted to realize the amalgam of pegs they had created, it was too late: they were trapped in the infrastructure they had installed. Bridging the distance, like It happened to the Madrid metrowhich turns left. As a consequence, more than a century later you have to put an adapter in your suitcase when you go on a trip. As you travel around the world you can discover them all, or more quickly and educationally: you can also visit the Museum of Plugs and Socketsa Dutch website (one of the old school ones, judging by its design) that has catalogued, photographed and rigorously explained all the domestic sockets that there are and have been on the planet following the technical references of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the international organization that has to bring order to this chaos. The 15 plugs in the world. The IEC uses the letters A to N (curiously, Thailand’s O came later) to classify the types of domestic plugs existing in the world and Here you can consult the complete list. The museum links each letter with its corresponding standard: the NEMA for North America (letters A and B), the CEE for continental Europe (letter C), but be careful because Switzerland has the SN 441011 standard and the J plug, BS 1363 for the United Kingdom (letter G), AS 3112 for Australia (letter I)… each with its dimensions, voltages, pins and safety standards. From my own experience, I forgot to buy specific adapters a long time ago and opted for a universal adapter to live quietly in the hodgepodge. Because why not say it: from the point of view of practicality, this horde of pegs is a glaring failure of technical coordination unmatched in any other industrial sector. Types of plugs in the world SomnusDe via Wikipedia The failed attempt at a universal standard. In the 1930s, the IEC set itself an impossible mission (judging by the results): to achieve international standardization of domestic plugs and sockets. In 1986 he published IEC 60906 standard with that ambition. No need to say it went wrong. Only Brazil in 2002 and South Africa in 2013 adopted the IEC 60906-1 standard and even then, both countries allow multiple standards. The EU said “no, thank you” remembering Rocío Jurado and her “it’s too late now, ma’am.” With complete honesty, the European Commission recognized in 2017 that harmonizing the continent’s plugs would require transition periods of more than 75 years, an investment estimated at 100,000 million euros and would generate some 700,000 tons of electrical waste. That oddity called Switzerland. That strange case called Switzerland. It is no surprise that the Swiss citizenry likes to go it alone: ​​it is there, between Italy, France and Germany, but it does not belong to the EU nor does it use the euro. So, as we mentioned above, has its own plug defined by standard SN 441011 (until 2019 it was SEV 1011) and the J plug, which is only used there and in the Principality of Liechtenstein. In addition to being an “exclusive” plug due to how little it is used compared to others, it also has a particular geometry in the shape of a hexagon. Paradoxically, when the IEC designed what was to be the universal plug in 1986, it based its shape on the Swiss T12 plug, although with differences in the diameter of the pins and the displacement of the ground pin. The world tried to copy Switzerland to create a global standard, but Switzerland continued on its way. The plugs that said goodbye. The museum has an entire section dedicated to plugs that were developed as alternatives to current standards and have been out of production for years and some almost extinct. Some of the most striking cases are the British Wylex and Dorman & Smith, the impractical hook-shaped Hakenstecker or the Greek Tripoliki with three pins arranged in a triangle. Surely all of them now coexist in physical museums and in this digital museum that constitutes the best archive of the failure of global electrical standardization. In Xataka | What plug do I need depending on the country I am going to travel to and what are the best universal adapters Cover | Digital Museum of Plugs and Sockets

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