Mobile Tech & Gadgets

US companies continue to pursue larger and larger AI models. Those from China continue to demonstrate that it is not necessary

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Until now, Alibaba had a great open model for programming. It is based on Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, but the problem is that it was gigantic with its 397 billion parameters and 807 GB of disk (and memory) size. The Chinese company has done something surprising and has announced these days the Qwen3.6-27B modelwhich in its quantized version weighs less than 17 GB. You would think that at that size he would be much worse than his older brother. But you would be wrong. It is proof that it is possible to give for much less. A dense model. Most large weight models open in 2026 use Mixture-of-Experts architecture (MoE): They have many parameters in total, but only activate a fraction of them when we use them. For example, the Qwen3.5-397B-A17B model precisely indicated that in its name: of the 397,000 million parameters, it only activated 17,000 million (hence the A17B) when using it. With Qwen3.6-27B we have what is called a dense model: the 27 billion parameters are activated in each inference. Although it is somewhat less efficient, it has clear practical advantages. For example, there is no need to configure an expert router, and quantization is more predictable and compact. The idea has worked, and the results prove it. The performance of this “small” AI model is even higher than a much larger previous version. Benchmarks don’t lie (too much). In SWE-bench Verifiedthe most popular benchmark for real programming tasks, Qwen3.6-27B achieves 77.2% score compared to 76.2% for the 397B model. In Terminal-Bench 2.0, which measures how well the model executes tasks in the command console, it achieved 59.3% compared to 2.5% for its rival. But in this test it achieves exactly the same score as Claude Opus 4.5, one of the best recent Anthropic models. That an “Open Source” model that can be easily used locally achieves something like this is unusual, but we must be cautious: the benchmarks are from Alibaba itself, and there is currently no independent verification, although who are wearing they seem be really satisfied with the. Even Alibaba is surprised. What is striking about this launch is that the company that launched it is promoting it above its most ambitious model until recently. Let them compare both versions themselves and recognize that the “small” is the most powerful It is significant. It’s like saying from the rooftops that the largest AI models have no competition, when they have just proven that this is not the case and that models like Qwen3.6-27B can be truly remarkable in behavior. 24 GB of VRAM is “enough”. Thanks to its small size, it is possible to use this model on relatively accessible machines. Thus, the 24 GB of video memory of the RTX 3090 makes these graphics cards a perfect alternative to install and use Qwen3.6-27B with excellent performance. Dense models do not do so well on MacBook or Mac mini with unified memory, and although logically not everyone has access to graphics cards with 24 GB of RAM, access to really capable local models continues to improve. The best essences, in small bottles. Alibaba is a steamroller of “small” AI models, and it demonstrated this in early March when launched several that ranged from 0.8B to 9B. Fortunately there are varied alternatives in that segment of “Small Language Models” (SLMs) and here we have reference examples like Gemma 4just released by Google. Microsoft with Phi-4 (which needs an update, like gpt-oss-20b/120b) or Mistral with Devstral 2 They are examples that Western companies are also making moves in this interesting field. But. According to benchmarks, Qwen3.6-27b is comparable in some benchmarks to Claude Opus 4.5, Anthropic’s most advanced model when it was launched in November 2025. That is surprising and confirms that open weight models from Chinese companies are, as Demis Hassabis saidbetween 6 and 12 months behind the most advanced models from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. But to execute them a significant investment is still necessary, and although local AI models are very interesting in terms of privacy, if today one wants maximum speed and performance it still depends on commercial models in the cloud. In Xataka | Google will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic because the new normal for AI is investing in your enemy

The machines were already beating us at chess and Go. Now they are about to beat us at something much more difficult: ping pong

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Human beings have a curious relationship with machines: we create them to help us, but also to challenge us. We have been doing it for decades, from large industrial systems to artificial intelligence systems and robots that today begin to move in more complex environmentsmore demanding and with less margin for error. And when those machines surpass us, we don’t just see a defeat: we see a clue as to where the technology is going. It already happened in chess and Go. What we are seeing now points to something different: the challenge begins to jump to sports where it is not enough to calculate the next play. The robot that plays ping pong. The last signal comes from Sony AI and is shaped like a ping pong table. Your Ace robot, developed within Project Acehas been presented by the company as the first AI system capable of competing in a real physical environment with elite university players and table tennis professionals under official rules. The firm illustrates this with a recent scene in Tokyo: Japanese professional player Taira Mayuka launched a shot that, under normal conditions, would have decided the point. On the other side of the net, Ace read the trajectory, adjusted the angle of the paddle and returned the ball to keep the exchange alive. A notable jump. Ping pong adds something much less friendly than table games: a ball that moves, spins, bounces and changes direction in a very short time. That’s why Sony insists on Ace’s reaction speed, with an end-to-end latency of 20.2 milliseconds compared to about 230 milliseconds in elite human players. As we can see in the video that accompanies this article, the robot not only has to “see” the ball. You have to anticipate what he will do next and get the paddle at the right angle before it’s too late. How do you get it? The key is that Ace does not depend on a single technology, but on a very tight chain between perception, control and movement. The system integrates nine synchronized conventional cameras and three event-based vision systems, capable of recording movement changes very quickly. With that set, the robot tracks the ball at 200 Hz with millimeter precision and measures the effect up to 700 Hz. An eight-degree-of-freedom robotic arm then executes the returns based on policies learned through reinforcement learning in simulation. Ace didn’t get to that point overnight either. Sony places the start of the project in 2020, within the first works of Sony AI, and describes an evolution in stages: first juggling the ball, then maintaining cooperative exchanges with a person and, later, facing increasingly stronger players. This journey also served to discover limits that do not always appear in a simulation. The limits. Ace’s merit lies in having reached an expert level, not in having turned table tennis into a solved problem. Sony recognizes that there are still humans above the system. In any case, the robot mainly excels in skill, where you decide how to move the robot and how to hit the ball in real time. What happens point to point, and what is planned during a match, can still improve. Images | Sony AI (1, 2) In Xataka | A young man has solved a mathematical problem that lasted 60 years in 80 minutes with ChatGPT. That’s the least interesting thing about the story.

written by letter, printed and with our personal data revealed

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For years we have learned to look with suspicion at the email that promises an unexpected refund, the SMS that asks us to update an account or the WhatsApp message that arrives too urgently. He phishing It has been recorded in us as something digital, glued to a screen, to a suspicious link or to a website that tries to look like that of our bank. But that image is falling short. The same logic of deception too can cross the door of the house inside an envelopeprinted on paper and with the appearance of an official communication. The difference is not so much in the mechanism as in the context. Instead of waiting for us to click a link from our mobile phone, the attacker tries to take advantage of the trust we still place in certain physical communications. And, precisely, therein lies the risk. Paper can give a feeling of legitimacy that a suspicious email no longer always achieves, although the substance is the same as always: impersonating someone to push us to deliver information that we should not share. Paper phishing: the old hoax has found another mailbox A recent example Inés Zuriaga del Castillo shared it on LinkedInwho said he had received a physical letter at his home supposedly sent by Ledgerthe company known for its hardware wallets, physical devices for storing cryptoasset keys. According to its publication, the envelope included paper, an official-looking letterhead and an instruction to scan a QR with the supposed objective of updating the device and sending the recovery phrase. That last point is the most obvious red flag: the recovery phrase should never be shared. On the left, the case of a false letter sent in Ledger’s name. On the right, a fraudulent communication detected by Social Security. Ledger has also warned of such attempts on its support page. The company describes a letter that presents itself as a “security check” notice and asks the user to scan a QR to enter their secret recovery phrase, supposedly to avoid security problems or interruptions in service. The company’s recommendation is clear: do not scan those codes, do not visit those links and never share the 24 recovery words. It is not a minor detail. With that phrase, an attacker can take control of the wallet and move the associated funds. The case is not limited to the world of cryptocurrencies. Social Security has detected In Spain, a campaign of fraudulent letters aimed at beneficiaries of benefits and pensions, requesting personal documentation such as ID or a photo of the bank statement. The pretext, according to the organization, is that data would have been lost due to an alleged computer attack and that this information would be necessary to deposit an amount into the pensioner’s account after an increase in the benefit. The entity remembers that it will never request the sending of information or documentation by email, a sufficient clue to distrust this type of communications. The two examples target different audiences, but share the same architecture. In the case of Ledger, the lure revolves around a wallet and a recovery phrase that should never leave the user’s control. In Social Security, the pressure is supported by a benefit, a pension and the promise of a pending income. They change the language, the impersonated entity and the type of data they are trying to obtain, but the underlying maneuver is identical: construct a communication that is credible enough for the victim to act before checking. In the case of Ledger, the lure revolves around a wallet and a recovery phrase that should never leave the user’s control. The question that remains floating is difficult to avoid: how does a letter like this arrive at a specific address. The truth is that personal data can end up exposed due to breaches in companies, suppliers or administrations, even if the user has done their part reasonably well: use strong passwords, activate two-step verification or be wary of suspicious messages. Without going any further, the AEPD reported that in 2025 he received 2,765 notifications of personal data breachesand noted that those that affected the largest number of people were related to ransomware and intrusions that led to the exfiltration of large volumes of information. From there another piece of the wheel comes in: the stolen data is not always used only once nor does it remain in the hands of whoever obtained it first. As we already said in Xataka, documents such as a Spanish DNI could be found in illegal Internet markets for about 15 euros. This data does not explain the origin of the specific letters that we have seen, but it does help to understand something important: when personal information begins to circulate out of control, it can be reused in different frauds, with different formats and at times very far from the original breach. There is a simple rule that works for both digital phishing and paper phishing: the more a communication pushes us to act quickly, the slower we should go. A letter requesting sensitive data should set off alarm bells. We should not scan the QR out of inertia, we should not scan the email it proposes and we would not call the phone number that appears as the only means of contact. What is recommended? First check on our ownon the official website or on public channels of the entity. It’s less comfortable, yes, but it’s also exactly what breaks the trap. In the end, the format is almost the least important thing. It can be an email, an SMS, a WhatsApp message or a letter on letterhead. What changes is the scenario, not the intention: making us trust enough to deliver something that can later turn against us. That is why these types of cases are useful, even when we do not know all the details of their origin. They remind us that security does not begin when we detect a fake website, but one … Read more

that we take the female anatomy seriously

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You just have to swipe your finger for a few seconds on TikTok or Instagram to come across it: luxury sportswear in pastel tones, pristine sneakers and a huge Stanley glass under your arm. It is the aesthetics of Pilates Princess wave Pilates Moma trend that emerged strongly in 2023 to elevate a lifestyle based on luxurious femininity and devotion to Pilates. It might seem like another frivolous internet fad, but behind this facade of branded tights lies a true revolution in women’s health. For decades, traditional medicine failed to educate women about their own anatomy. According togee Women’s Health In the words of Dr. Larissa Rodriguez, a urologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, “we don’t do a good job of informing women (…) most of them only find out about this when they have a problem.” Paradoxically, it has been algorithms and social networks that have removed the pelvic floor from absolute anonymity. The best example is found in the physiotherapist Sarah Percy (@femalephysiosarah)whose videos teaching how to contract and relax the pelvic muscles in blue pajamas have accumulated more than 21.1 million views and millions of likes. A simple home video has achieved more impact and awareness than years of information leaflets in gynecologists’ waiting rooms. To understand the magnitude of the phenomenon, we must first understand what we are talking about. The pelvic floor is not an abstract concept; It is a hammock-shaped muscular structure that supports vital organs such as the bladder, uterus, and rectum. When a woman becomes pregnant, this hammock must support the weight equivalent to “a huge bowling ball”, causing around 50% of pregnant women to experience disorders ranging from constipation to urinary incontinence. However, the problem goes far beyond motherhood. In the sporting field, this muscle is “the great forgotten one.” The figures are alarming: in certain impact sports, urinary incontinence affects more than 70% of female athletescausing one in five women to abandon physical exercise due to embarrassment or discomfort. The real drama has been the silence. As Cristina and Lucía, founders of the Embody clinic, explain, in Women’s Healthhistorically we have normalized symptoms that are not: urine leakage when jumping, pain during sexual relations or pelvic heaviness. The voice of the experts That Pilates works is a fact, but medical science insists on clarifying why. It’s not about doing traditional sit-ups—which, in fact, make the problem worse by pushing the pressure down—but about re-educating the body. Physiotherapist Lola Ibáñez explains in the magazine Woman Today that disciplines such as hypopressive Pilates base their success on breathing: through expiratory apnea and costal opening, the body works “upwards and inwards”, reducing pressure in the abdomen and elevating the tissues. Along these lines, the experts consulted by specialized means The Bump They assure that controlled breathing is the authentic “superpower” to activate the deep muscles and prepare the body for childbirth. But interest in the pelvic floor has transcended future mothers. A report from Wall Street Journal illustrates how an entire subculture of women in his forties and fifties he is becoming obsessed with pilates, sweep and weight lifting. They do it not out of pure vanity, but as an antidote to the symptoms of perimenopause and an “existential panic” about losing their physical independence in old age. It’s a way to take charge of your own biology. However, there is a fine print: all experts agree on a fundamental caveat. Pilates is not physiotherapy. As pointed out Women’s Healthsome women suffer from hypertonia (a pelvic floor that is too tight and rigid) and need to learn to relax it, so doing Kegel exercises indiscriminately would aggravate their pain. Besides, Guardian echoes the warnings of the Pilates Teacher Associationwarning about the danger of massive “reformer fitness” classes taught by instructors without clinical qualifications, which are causing a spike in back and neck injuries. The hidden side: elitism, algorithms and the “wellness” business Every good report requires looking at the shadows, and this trend is immersed in a hypercapitalist market. As we already detailed in Xataka, The industry has left behind the aggressiveness of the traditional gym to embrace the Cozy Fitness and the Strong Elegance. The global Pilates and Yoga studio market is projected to reach $520.61 billion by 2035. The problem is that health has become a class filter. Guardian emphasizes that the classes of reformer They can easily exceed 25 pounds/euros per session, making pelvic floor care an unattainable luxury for many. Added to this is the brutal aesthetic pressure. The magazine Parents warns that obsession to fit the mold of the Pilates Princess It encourages perfectionism and associates well-being exclusively with thinness, sometimes bordering on orthorexia. Algorithms are largely to blame: academic Carolina Are explains that platforms like TikTok and Instagram actively discriminate against diversity, making large, older or disabled women invisible, to crown the white, thin, cisgender woman as a universal reference. Despite this mercantilist packaging, there is hope. At this moment, we are moving towards the era of Body Literacy (body literacy). Women are no longer satisfied with wearing pretty leggings; They want to understand how your hormones work, your stress response, and your deep anatomy. The end of silent suffering It is undeniable that the phenomenon of Pilates Moms It was born wrapped in the posturing of social networks, the hyperconsumerism of sports clothing and exclusive gym fees. However, its impact has achieved a historic and irreversible milestone: democratizing knowledge about female intimate anatomy. The true legacy of this viral trend is the breaking of a deafening silence that has lasted for generations. Today’s mothers are talking openly with their daughters about menstruation, incontinence and pelvic pain. They are educating the next generation to be proactive and demanding with their health. We have left behind the belief that pain or urine leakage is the unavoidable toll of being a woman, being a mother or getting older. Today, thanks in part to a trend From the internet, we know that the pelvic floor is trained, rehabilitated and, above … Read more

this week, a remake of an explosive thriller, a disturbing documentary and very recent Spanish cinema

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The week of April 27 to May 3 comes packed with new releases on Netflix. The most anticipated title for action thriller fans is ‘The Fire of Vengeance’. In the documentaries section true crime highlights ‘Should I Marry a Murderer?’, a three-episode docuseries about a woman who discovers her fiancé’s dark past. And the gem of the week is the Spanish ‘Mi Querida Señorita’, produced by Los Javis. series Should I marry a murderer? The documentaries true crime are one of Netflix’s safest bets, and ‘Should I Marry a Murderer?’ He wants to continue the streak. The British-produced docuseries begins with a more or less conventional love story: a young forensic examiner meets a man through Tinder and the relationship progresses quickly until a commitment is made. One day the man confesses that he has committed a murder and the victim is still missing. However, the woman decides to keep the commitment while gathering evidence against him. The series is built from real testimonies, archival material and reconstructions of the case. The fire of revenge One of the platform’s most ambitious action bets for this spring goes beyond the simple remake of the blockbuster directed by Tony Scott and starring Denzel Washington in 2004. The series is based on the original novels by AJ Quinnell and proposes a renewed vision of John Creasy’s character, taking advantage of the episodic format: a former special forces soldier suffers from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder that keeps him on the brink of collapse. A former colleague offers him a job as a bodyguard in Brazil, where he develops an unexpected bond with the person he must protect. Other series you will go to hell – April 27 Rescue Me: Rescue Team – April 27 envious (Season 4) – April 29 Parenthood – May 1 30 Rock – May 1 Glory – May 1 Booba (Season 6) – May 1 Miraculous: The Adventures of Ladybug – May 1 Movies Gladiator II One of the great film releases of 2024 arrives this week in the Netflix catalog, returning us to ancient Rome to explore what happened after the death of Maximus, placing the action fifteen years after the duel in the Colosseum. The protagonist is the grandson of Marcus Aurelius and son of Maximus, and is played by Paul Mescal: captured and enslaved after the invasion of his home in Numidia, he is forced to fight in the arena while seeking revenge. A top-notch cast with Pedro Pascal, Denzel Washington and Joseph Quinn stands out in this return by Ridley Scott to the universe that gave him one of his greatest commercial successes. My dear lady Free adaptation of the 1972 film of the same name by Jaime de Armiñán, which completely changed the image of José Luis López Vázquez, and which here delves into much more contemporary terrain thanks to the script by Alana S. Portero and the production by Los Javis. The story follows Adela, the only child of a conservative family, marked by silence about her intersexuality, a condition she is unaware of but that shapes her life. An unexpected friendship with a priest and other decisive events in her life take her from Pamplona to Madrid. The protagonist is Elisabeth Martínez, also an intersex actress who makes her debut here as the protagonist. Premiere: May 1 Other movies My name Agneta – April 29 Janur Ireng – April 30 Miraculous World: Paris, The Adventures of Shadybug and Claw Noir – April 30 Boys and girls – May 1 Exchanged – May 1 The son-in-law – May 1 In Xataka | Today the animated spin-off of the platform’s only powerful franchise premieres on Netflix: ‘Stranger Things’

now you can use their photos to write your name with rivers and craters

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Since they were launched in 1972, NASA’s Landsat satellites have continually taken images of the earth’s surfaceproviding an uninterrupted data archive that helps managers, planners and policy makers make more informed decisions about natural resources and the environment. But there is also a playful part. 50 years goes a long way. Enough to form a complete alphabet with which you can write your name, thanks to a tool designed by NASA for Earth Day. Your name in landscapes. The tool in question It’s very simple. You simply have to write your name or the word you want to transform into Landsat images. Then, after pressing enter, an image appears on the screen for each letter of your name. You can download the full image or place your cursor over each letter to see the exact coordinates and a brief description of the place that appears in them. For example, a tangled river could form the first letter of your name, while the last letter could be a path of volcanic lava surrounded by mountains. The complete alphabet. In case you are curious, you can visit the complete alphabet and check all the possible photographs that NASA has for a particular letter. Some, like A, have many options. On the other hand, others that are somewhat rarer, such as the G, have only one landscape available that evokes their specific shape. LILY An appointed date. This tool was made public on April 22, when Earth Day is celebrated. It is an anniversary created to raise awareness among the population about the problems facing our planet at an environmental level. The images taken by Landsat are very useful both for raising public awareness and for providing useful data to scientists. More about Landsat. According to NASAresearchers have used the Landsat archive, for example, to study how cities, coastlines, crop cycles, and forests have grown. This is a program in which scientific quality instruments and data are prioritized, so that it can be known with certainty that changes in subsequent Landsat images reflect real changes on Earth. And the best thing is that all the information is free and open access, so that anyone, scientist or not, can access them. After all, the Earth belongs to all of us. Just as any human being must be responsible and avoid destroying it, we also have the right to be participants in what is done to take care of it. Even if it is writing our name with rivers, boulevards or lava paths. Images | NASA tool In Xataka | So much ice has melted in Greenland that plankton has grown by 40%. It’s not good news

Are we the bad guys in the movie?

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In the ‘Lord of the Rings’ universe, a palantir is the seer stone that Saruman uses to communicate with Sauron. The fact of having chosen this name for a company that is dedicated to mass surveillance It was already a declaration of intentions. After years of doing ethically questionable work, some employees are now beginning to wonder if they are the bad guys in the movie. Friends, realize. What is happening. They tell it in Wired. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Palantir has become a key player in the government’s anti-immigration policy. The company has signed contracts with ICE and its technology makes it possible to identify and deport immigrants in an irregular situation. In addition, it has been used in military operations such as the Iran war, in which a bombing that killed more than 100 children. This has caused an internal crisis, with some current and former employees concerned that the company has gone from “preventing abuse” to directly encouraging it. Why it is important. Palantir was founded after the 9/11 attacks, a context in which citizen surveillance was justified under the narrative of antiterrorism. Now, Palantir’s technology is being used to surveil its own citizens and is key in attacks that have resulted in fatalities. It’s not that they were little sisters of charity before, but lines are being crossed that are too red even for those who defended them. lin response to the company. Employee criticism began after the murder of Alex Pretti at the beginning of the year. Within a Slack channel, some employees began to question the company’s relationship with ICE. “In my opinion, ICE are the bad guys. I’m not proud that the company I enjoy working for so much is part of this,” one of them commented. Palantir responded by deleting the messages several days later, supposedly to prevent leaks. At the same time, the company began to organize question and answer sessions to address any doubts that may arise, as well as the possibility of learning more details under confidentiality contracts. For many employees this was an attempt to silence criticism rather than address it. The ideological turn. Alex Karp, CEO and co-founder of Palantir, He used to define himself as a socialist and defended Democratic candidates like Joe Biden. However, since 2024 he has become a key ally of Trump and his speech defends authoritarian policies. A few days ago he published a 22 point manifesto in X which has unleashed a wave of criticism for its nationalist and militarized ideas. This text also sparked a conversation on Slack, in which several employees were embarrassed that it had been published using the company’s official account and that several acquaintances had asked them about it. It will be yes. It is the short answer to the question that employees ask themselves and there are many indications that they are, indeed, the bad guys. They count in The Country that the company accumulates many accusations for not respecting human rights. Already in 2020 I warned him Amnesty International and the consulting firm MSCI gave it a score of 2 out of 10 in civil liberties. Peter Thiel, its founder, says openly who does not believe that “freedom and democracy are compatible.” What is striking is that, knowing the history of the company and the authoritarian ideas of its leaders, there are employees who still have doubts. In Xataka | Wall Street’s riskiest bet has its own name: Palantir, a castle in the air supported by AI promises

The Supreme Court has declared the rule illegal, but the money is not going to return

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The Low Emission Zones of Madrid operated for years with regulations that the courts ended up declaring it illegal. During all that time, many fines were imposed and processed that thousands of drivers paid, and the City Council is clear about one thing: that there will be no refunds. What exactly happened. The Supreme Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJM) annulled part of the ordinance that regulated ZBEs in Madrid in December 2024, following an appeal presented by the Vox municipal group. The court considered that the economic impact report was insufficient, since it had not been correctly assessed how much it would cost citizens and small businesses to adapt to the movement restrictions, nor had less restrictive measures with equivalent effects been explored. As the ruling was not final at the time, the City Council continued to apply sanctions while appealing to the Supreme Court. However, the TSJM rejected the appeal on April 15with a sentence of 2,000 euros to the City Council for the expenses of the judicial process. Why there will be no refund. Vice Mayor Inma Sanz counted that current jurisprudence prevents giving retroactive effects to sentences when the sanctioned rule was in force at the time the fines were imposed. Along the same lines, the delegate of Urban Planning, Mobility and Environment, Borja Carabante, defended that the sanctions were placed under a regulatory framework that was valid at the time. The point that remains in the air. The City Council’s position is not completely uniform. Municipal legal services are still studying what to do with the fines imposed in the ZBEs of Plaza Elíptica and Centro (the two special protection zones) during the period between the TSJM ruling (December 2024) and the entry into force of the new ordinance (March 2026). It has been more than two years in which fines have continued to be imposed with a regulation that a court had already declared null. Carabante acknowledges that “whether or not” these specific sanctions are being assessed. The new ordinance as a shield. The Town Hall approved last month a new Sustainable Mobility Ordinance, correcting the previous one based on the indications indicated by the TSJM and keeps all ZBEs operational. The Consistory argues that this new ordinance leaves the sentence without practical effect, since it provides a solution to everything that the TSJM had requested. Among its novelties is that the vehicles of registered residents without an environmental label can circulate in Madrid as long as European pollution limits are respected. Opinion division. The Associated European Motorists (AEA) organization has publicly demanded to Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida the annulment of all sanctions imposed until the publication of the new ordinance in the official gazette, on April 6. According to data from the AEA itselfbetween September 2021 and November 2025, the City Council imposed more than 3.3 million fines related to ZBEs for a value of more than 650 million euros. Its president, Mario Arnaldo, consider that “hundreds of thousands of drivers” have been sanctioned with fines of “dubious legality” through a strategy designed to continue collecting while the judicial process lasted. What those affected can do. The Supreme Court’s decision does not automatically annul any fine, but it reinforces the options of those who want to appeal them. According to the Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU), the situation varies according to each file. And those who appealed at the time and still have the procedure open have a better chance of recovering the money. However, the organization says that those who paid without appeal face a more complicated path, having to go through requesting full nullity. The OCU ask to the City Council to cancel the non-firm sanctions ex officio and return the amounts already collected in files still open, without transferring to the citizen “the burden of legal uncertainty created by an annulled ordinance.” Cover image | Madrid City Council In Xataka | 400 cameras and an ambitious goal: the first metro driven 100% autonomously in the Community of Madrid

How the nutrition revolution has allowed human beings to lose two hours in the marathon

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“Today I had two slices of bread, honey and tea for breakfast” This was Sabastian Sawe’s brief response to the journalist who had answered what he had had for breakfast that morning. It wasn’t an elevator conversation. It was not pure curiosity among office colleagues before facing a day in front of the computer. Although the answer could very well have been the same. Sawe is not just anyone. Sawe is the fastest man on the planet when it comes to covering 42,195 meters. Sawe is, as of yesterday, the winner of the London Marathon, the recordman of distance and the first person to break down the mythical barrier of two hours in distance. A barrier that was considered unattainable just a handful of years ago. But to round off the accumulation of impossible things that were experienced yesterday in London, Sawe is not the only human to run at a sustained pace of 2’49″/km, repeating the effort up to 42 times and an agonizing and endless 195 metres. Yomif Kejelcha entered just 11 seconds later. Of course, he will have the more than deserved consolation of being the fastest debutant in the history of the distance. Jacob Kiplimo must have been astonished when he realized that the 120 minutes and 28 seconds it took him to cover that same distance had only been enough for him to be third when just two hours earlier they would have made him the new world record holder. All of them are the pure embodiment of a sport that has experienced a revolution in a handful of years. “Yomif didn’t have breakfast on race day,” Alfonso Beltrá, CEO of Holy mother. Beltrá is the founder of a Spanish sports nutrition company, which grew up in cycling but has pivoted to athletics. A few weeks ago, Beltrá himself defended on the Find Your Everest podcast that they were sure that they could be the ones to break the mythical barrier. High competition is the result of research and results that put the athlete in front of a challenge that ends up being decided by details. The differences are minimal and nutrition is what has ended up tipping the balance. A revolution to make the impossible possible Although neither Sawe nor Kejelcha ate a copious breakfast as the most undocumented logic dictates, neither of them stood at the starting line empty. Their stomachs were, but the important thing was that their glycogen stores were bursting with energy. “He doesn’t have breakfast at all on race day, we have a specific drink with 100 grams of carbohydrates that he finishes two hours before the race and another product that we will launch in three months. Then he warms up and six or seven minutes before leaving he drinks a gel with caffeine and 45 grams of carbohydrates,” Beltrán tells us about the Ethiopian athlete who ate 145 grams of carbohydrates before departure. “That’s why we skipped the kilometer five aid station, we couldn’t put in more,” he emphasizes. A very similar amount would have been handled by Sawe’s team. The Kenyan athlete took, in addition to the two slices of bread with honey, a Drink Mix 320 by Maurtena company that has revolutionized sports nutrition in recent years. This is equivalent to 80 grams of carbohydrates and added a Gel 100 that provides another 25 grams of carbohydrates. The total sum between energy drinks, gel and breakfast adds up to about 140-150 grams like Kejelcha. It is a figure similar to taking 200 grams of pasta before running. And then, the performance began. Kejelcha uses Santamadre gels diluted in the appropriate proportion of water to take them with bottles and facilitate ingestion. Sawe, for her part, opted for Maurten’s Drink Mix 160 drink at the first three aid stations (kilometers 5, 10 and 15). In the fourth (km 20) take a little less drink, about 130 ml, but take a gel with caffeine. And from here, at kilometers 25, 30, 35 and 40, 130 ml is prescribed but of the Drink Mix 320, which has a greater carbohydrate load. It is believed, however, that a drum fell. In total, Sawe’s intake remained at about 115 g/h of carbohydrates. Sabastian Sawe race protocol. Click on the image to go to the original post. The figure is very high and unthinkable just a few years ago. And, despite this, it pales in comparison to what was planned for Kejelcha. From Santamadre they explain to us that the final objective was to move around 140 gr/h of carbohydrates in this case. “It’s about keeping your deposits full for as long as possible, being aware that you will always be in deficit, losing more than you earn,” says Beltrá. In this case, they do confirm that the athlete had problems at kilometers 25 and 35, where he lost the bottles. “That coincides with the decline that they experienced at kilometer 41″, laments the CEO of Santamadre who, he emphasizes, for them a debut like this shows that “we don’t know their ceiling. When he arrived he was upset for losing the race, he asked us for forgiveness for losing the two bottles… he wasn’t aware of what he had done, nor did he know it when he hugged me at the finish line.” In this case, Kejelcha used Santamadre gels diluted in water. The limit is set, according to the Spanish company, by the athlete’s own stomach. “The protocol has to be personalized. We have controlled all the variables since we started working together, all meals, rest, body temperature, glycemic peaks… the nutritional strategy was studied to take into account the glycemic index of each moment,” Beltrá explains to us. Kejelcha was, in fact, the only athlete among the first finishers to use a different brand than Maurten. This brand revolutionized athletics with the sponsorship of Eliud Kipchoge and has been the leader in recent years thanks to its famous Hydrogel. With this gel, the brand managed to encapsulate … Read more

We already knew that we ate plastic. Now science has discovered the exact chaos it causes in our intestines

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We have long realized that we are surrounded by microplastics, both in the water which we take as in food or even the air that we breathe, causing them to appear even in the human placenta. However, there are still many questions about the consequences of having these microplastics in the body, although science continues to take steps to give us an answer about them. how it can alter our general healthand the last thing we know is related to the effect on our digestive system. Ground zero. Something that is already known by almost everyone is that the intestine is full of billions of microorganisms which are essential for our immunity and also for metabolism, making its alteration related even to issues in the central nervous system. But now, science suggests that microplastics can drastically alter the composition and diversity of this ecosystem by destroying some of the bacteria that we harbor inside us to create a completely different environment that can affect our digestion, but also other parts of the body. How it has been seen. To understand how this happens in real time, CSIC researchers developed a sophisticated patented digestion simulation system known as SIMGI. This is mainly based on introducing artificial particles formed by the typical plastic of water bottles into the stomach and colon and observing how it affected bacterial diversity. From here, different investigations have seen that families of beneficial bacteriaas Lachnospiraceae, Oscillospiraceae and Ruminococcaceaeplummet, while the growth of groups that can generate disease is favored. And we must understand that ‘good’ bacteria occupy a space in our intestine so that nothing else can ‘germinate’ there. But logically, if they disappear, they leave their ‘hole’ for other bacteria to pass through. It goes further. But beyond a bacterial imbalance, there is different research that already points to how microplastics destroy the physical barrier we have in our intestine. In this way, scientists have detected that these tiny fragments cause the generation of oxidative stress and, therefore, the overproduction of reactive oxygen species, which only generates great damage to the tissues. But this chemical attack also adds to mechanical damage, which some experts categorize as ‘sandpaper’, since together they manage to reduce the expression of proteins that are key to maintaining the union structure that characterizes the cells that exist in our intestinal wall. The result. If we destroy the scaffolding that maintains the ‘walls’ of our digestive system, the only thing that will be achieved is that increase intestinal permeabilityso any toxin or bacterial molecule will be able to pass from the intestine to the bloodstream, since there is no ‘wall’ that blocks the access of agents that are not wanted in our body. Logically, the passage of toxins without the control of this intestinal barrier activates our immune system defenses, which results in inflammation maintained over time that favors the destruction of tissues and also progresses in important chronic diseases. There is more. As if that were not enough, it is known that microplastics are excellent transport vehicles, since when they come into contact with our biological fluids they become covered with a “protein crown”. This is something really important, since this layer literally camouflages the microplastic and makes it easier for it to adhere to our living cells. But added to all this, we also see that they can act as the perfect support for bacteria and form what is known as biofilms. In this way, microplastic can be seen as a vehicle for external and potentially dangerous microbial communities directly to our tissues. Where are they going? If microplastics alter our barriers, logically the plastic has a free way and that is why it is capable of traveling to different organs such as, for example, the liver, kidneys or brain. And once here, research already indicates that its accumulation is related to DNA damage, deregulation of the immune system or alterations in our entire hormonal system that can lead to chronic diseases. Images | rimufilms on Freepik In Xataka | Researchers analyzed 280 samples of bottled water. Only one of the brands was free of microplastics

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