Mobile Tech & Gadgets

removing magnets from the fridge saves exactly zero euros on your bill, although there are other things that do work

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The magnetic decorations that decorate refrigerators in many homes have been the subject of a curious urban legendthat they make our appliance consume more. “Everything in this myth is false,” Endesa pointed out one of the last times the rumor resurfaced. Refrigerator magnets do not have an impact on the electrical consumption of these appliances since the magnetic fields of the magnets that we place in our refrigerators are very weak. So much so that “they don’t even go through the refrigerator door,” the electric company continues to explain on the company blog. And it is that some of the magnets we place on our refrigerator barely have the strength to keep themselves in place, but nor the most powerful magnets in this range they could do it. We would need a very powerful magnet, outside the range of refrigerator magnets to affect its operation. “Only (would consumption increase) if the magnets on your refrigerator were electromagnets” answered a forum user Physics Forums back in 2012 when another user raised this question. Endesa has not been the only company that has spoken out in recent years about this urban legend. When we asked LGthey told us that it was a “myth”: “fridge magnets have no effect on consumption, shelf life or food. The magnets located on the outside of the refrigerator do not influence the operation or the internal cooling capacity of the appliance.” In that same line he answered us another manufacturer, Bosch, which assured that the magnets were not going to affect the operation at all beyond causing scratches on the surface or, if someone feels especially inspired and fills the door with magnets, they could affect the useful life of the door hinge if its weight increases a lot. In any case, they were very emphatic about it: it will never affect the electrical consumption of the appliance. How to save with the refrigerator. The refrigerators can assume the largest source of energy consumption behind heating and hot water and can account for almost a fifth of electricity consumption. They must be plugged in and running all day, which limits possible strategies to save on expenses, although some exist. The option that most reduces electricity consumption is one that may not be available to everyone: obtaining a more efficient refrigerator. We may not have yet paid off the one we have or we may not yet have the budget to change it, but opting for more efficient models will imply less long-term savings. Other ways to save are well known: keeping the door open as little as possible or not putting hot food in it are well-known tricks. Maintain seal from the refrigerator, yes, it goes a little further. To achieve this we must always make sure that there are no foods that could make it difficult to close and that the sealing elements (the rubber) are in good condition. Where we place the refrigerator can also affect its performance. Embedding it, placing it in sunlight, or near a heat source such as a radiator or oven can cause it to require more energy to keep its interior cool. Finally, we must keep the freezer frost free as far as possible. The frost works as an insulator (as if we had an igloo inside the freezer. This causes the freezer to require more energy to cool the products inside. In the midst of a unique energy crisis in almost half a century, saving electricity has become an obsession for some and a necessity for many. That is why it is important focus on those strategies that do allow us to save energy and money. Image | Giulia Hetherington A version of this topic was originally published in 2023. Unfortunately for science, it is still fully valid in 2026…

The last link that Huawei was missing to do without the West in chip design has appeared

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There is an indispensable component to the semiconductor industry that often goes unnoticed: the software used to Design cutting-edge integrated circuitsknown as EDA by its English name (Electronic Design Automation or automation of electronic design). It is currently in the hands almost exclusively of US controlled companies and its allies, so China needs to have its own software tools specialized in chip design. And little by little he is having them. One of the Chinese companies that are already working in this area is SEIDAand, curiously, its leader knows the American idiosyncrasy very well. Liguo “Recoo” Zhang is Chinese, but he has lived in the US for several decades and has worked at Siemens EDA, the US subsidiary of this German company that dominates the chip design software market in China. SEIDA promised to have its OPC software ready (Optical Proximity Correction or optical proximity correction) by early 2024, but has since disappeared from the news radar. OPC software is very important because it corrects in advance the optical distortions that occur during the photolithography process. When ultraviolet light is shined onto a silicon wafer to “print” the chip design, the light diffracts and the resulting shapes are not exactly as designed. Edges are rounded, corners are deformed and fine lines are narrowed. OPC software anticipates and compensates for these distortions by modifying the original design before it reaches the lithography machine. In this way, the final result on the wafer conforms to the intended design. The EDA that changes the rules In October 2025 Qiyunfang, a subsidiary company of YesCarrier and Huawei, advertisement that your EDA tools They were already being used by more than 20,000 engineers in China. This data has not been independently verified, so it is most prudent to collect it with some reservations. In any case, SEIDA and Qiyunfang are not the only assets that China has in the field of integrated circuit design software. LogicFolding architecture folds transistor-level logic within a single chip into multiple vertical layers And a group of researchers from Peking University has presented a prototype of an EDA tool that is compatible with Huawei’s LogicFolding architecture. The goal of the latter company is to produce chips by 2031 capable of matching the performance of 1.4nm integration technology from TSMC, Intel or Samsung, but without depending at any time on Western chip manufacturing tools subject to US export restrictions. The LogicFolding architecture folds transistor-level logic within a single chip into multiple vertical layers. This optimization requires the use of location and routing tools capable of working on the entire vertical structure simultaneously, instead of working on separate layers. Peking University addresses this problem precisely because its prototype treats the multi-layer structure as a unified design space from the beginning, as opposed to conventional designs, in which each layer is optimized separately and then stacked. During initial testing with industrial-grade open source integrated circuits, this EDA tool has achieved, according to its designersreduce the total length of internal wiring by 30%. Besides, has introduced performance improvements and thermal management versus conventional EDA workflows. It doesn’t look bad, but we will have to wait until Huawei places its first commercial chips with LogicFolding architecture on the market to assess whether this technology is really up to the task. This company has anticipated that its next generation of Kirin chips, arriving this fall, will be the first to incorporate these innovations. Image | YesCarrier More information | SCMP In Xataka | The condemnation that afflicts China: after decades of manufacturing a competitive desktop processor, it is six years behind

It can save you a lot of time every day (and now it’s cheaper)

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When working in front of the computer, anything we can do or have to save time, the better. An example that we all have very internalized is having one ultrawide monitor or two monitors above the desktop, something that allows you to work with more windows open at the same time. But be careful how good a Stream Deck can be for us: you have this MK.2 model in white reduced to 129.99 euros. Elgato Stream Deck MK.2 White – Studio Controller, 15 Macro Keys, Activate Actions in Apps and Software like OBS, Twitch, YouTube and Others, Works on Mac and PC The price could vary. We earn commission from these links If this is out of your budget and you want a cheaper option, you also have the Stream Deck Mini available for 77.25 euros. It is true that it is not its lowest price, but it’s cheaper than the previous one. And the only difference is that, instead of having 15 keys, it only has 6. A very versatile and customizable gadget to work with This device has always been closely associated with the world of streaming, but it is useful in many other areas. It is a composite panel, in this model, by 15 keys that we can customize almost to the millimeter. There are thousands of possible options: from assigning an application to one of those buttons (for example, to open Spotify or the email manager) to much more complex actions. What do we mean by that? Let’s imagine that, to work, you need to have three or four programs open, such as the Internet browser or Photoshop. With Elgato software, you can customize one key to open everything at once, ideal when starting the work day. You can also customize the keys for certain specific functions of tools such as Excelso it will also help you once you get to work on your day. Furthermore, since they are LCD keys, they also you can customize the look they havewhich makes it very intuitive to use. It is true that it is not a cheap gadget, but it is very useful to improve daily ‘workflow’. And, although it is not at an all-time low (which is approximately 92 euros), it is a great price if we take into account that it was costing almost 170 euros a few weeks ago. Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Elgato In Xataka | DDR4 or DDR5? What RAM to choose so as not to pay even more than necessary in the middle of the price crisis In Xataka | This is the gaming tower that I would buy. The computers with the best quality-price ratio for gaming recommended by Xataka

Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers have never had it easy to do their thing. Until AI arrived

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Philosophy (thus, with a capital letter) promises to broaden our horizons, expand minds and illuminate the deepest recesses of the human condition, but there is something that always it has cost him a lot promise: employment. Before the pandemic the INE published unemployment rates of the main university degrees in Spain and it turned out that in Philosophy it was around 18.4%. It is not the worst data, but it is well above average. Ironies of life, now the same technology that threatens to destroy thousands and thousands of positions in other sectors is revaluing the figure of philosophers. Of course, we are talking about the AI. AI seeks philosopher. a month ago Henry Shevlinresearcher at the University of Cambridge, shared with his followers curious news on LinkedIn: his signing by one of the leading organizations in the field of AI, Google DeepMind. So far nothing surprising. An academic signing for a company that already employs thousands of people. The curious thing is that Shevlin is a philosopher and in his post he emphasizes that he joins the DeepMind staff as such. “Yes, royal title”, insist before specifying that he will be in charge of working in the field of artificial consciousness, artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the relationship between humans and AI. Is it a unique case? Not at all. And that’s the most interesting thing about it. The development of AI and the extensive (very extensive) list of challenges that accompanies it has made companies in the sector look with growing interest at a very specific profile: that of philosophers capable of helping them train their algorithms, anticipate the ethical and legal challenges (and risks) that may arise in the future and, in general, advance on a path so complex that it will require interdisciplinary teams. It no longer comes with technical profiles. At least 10… and counting. Recently Wired explored how the AI ​​industry is recruiting philosophers and collected an interesting piece of information. It is almost anecdotal and far from offering a global image of the sector, but it is still illustrative: according to its estimates, Google DeepMind already has at least 10 philosophers and Anthropic has four. These are not large figures, but in light of advertisements like Shevlin’s, the bet that universities they are doing for the interconnection between AI and philosophy and the growing interest of Silicon Valley by ethics experts, it is not unreasonable to think that both paths (artificial intelligence and critical thinking) will become increasingly intertwined. “There are many more”. That both fields look at each other with interest confirms this Iason Gabrielan ethicist and part of the team of Google DeepMind researchers responsible for analyzing the social impact of AI: “There are now many more philosophers in those areas,” explains to Wired. For reference, in 2013 only 1% of the jobs on PhilJobs (a leading job platform for philosophy professionals) were related to AI. In 2025 that percentage was already around 16%. Right now your search engine offers 11 vacancies if you do a quick search by entering the terms “artificial intelligence”. Are there more clues? Yes. Last year, during an interview with Tucker Carlson, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, revealed that in developing its models the company consulted with “hundreds of moral philosophers and people who have reflected on the ethics of technology and systems.” It may seem like an exaggeration, but the manager himself acknowledged that one of the issues that keeps him up most at night is the ethical drift of the tool. The focus he did not put it so much in “the big moral decisions” as in the “small decisions” related to the behavior of the chatbots. For example, what questions does ChatGPT answer and what questions does it not? How should you act when the user raises questions related to suicide? How to act in “delicate situations” and make the tool useful in them? How, if you take into account that as ChatGPT becomes popular, it faces users with increasingly disparate perspectives and approaches? These are not just theoretical questions. In 2025 a couple from California sued OpenAI when considering that his chatbot had encouraged his 16-year-old son to take his own life. What can a philosopher contribute? Silicon Valley’s interest in philosophers It’s not exactly newbut it is equally true that AI has reinforced its attractiveness. “This is probably the best time to be a philosopher since Aristotle was hired as tutor to Alexander the Great,” ironizes the philosopher Henry Ajder. It’s not surprising at all. Thinkers like him have been exploring key questions in the development, training and future of AI for years. Can there be an artificial consciousness? And one superintelligence associated with AI? If so, how to address it? Can we talk about ethics in AI? Is it enough for a machine to behave as if it understood or felt to be attributed intelligence? What if it is used for immoral purposes, such as undermining democracies, disinformation, or creating weapons? Is it always appropriate for AI to imitate human behavior? How to respond to “delicate situations” like the one Altman proposed? And the algorithmic biases that affect issues as delicate as diversity or equality? Influencing each other. As the philosopher Manu Collado pointed out in April an article of The Vanguard in which he analyzes the signing of Shevlin, Google hopes that the expert will provide “philosophical rigor when creating conceptual frameworks, clarifying terms such as consciousness, agency and intention and, perhaps most pragmatically in a business sense, anticipating ethical and regulatory dilemmas so that the company is prepared.” In short, achieve best chatbots and go one step ahead in the dilemmas and challenges that the development of AI may generate in the future. “Reason more ethically”. A philosopher expert in logic and metaphysics recently confessed to Atlantic that a company wanted to hire him as a consultant precisely to “train large language models so that they reason more rigorously about ethics.” The truth is that at this crossroads … Read more

There is nothing extraordinary about Hong Kong opening a store 24 hours a day, except that it is run by a humanoid robot.

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China has a particular way of understanding and integrating AI into daily life. While in the US it is committed to leading the large language models, in China the strategy involves creating what they call ’embodied AI’, which we can translate as ‘Personified AI’. China wants to export its strategy and wants to start in Hong Kong, where they will open a store run by a robot. What is happening. It was announced by the Chinese Secretary of Finance, Paul Chan Mo-po, in his weekly blog. In the post, he talks about Hong Kong’s strategy to boost AI and make it an everyday benefit for its citizens. As part of this plan, a convenience store will be opened on the Hung Hom seafront, which will be open 24 hours a day and will be run by a humanoid robot that will be able to offer service in multiple languages. The text does not clarify which company is behind this initiative and simply states that it is a company from mainland China; Among the most prominent robotics companies in China are Unitree and Deep Robotics, although there are many more. According to the announcement, the opening of this store will be their first outside of mainland China and they have chosen Hong Kong as “the first stop in the global expansion of their retail store concept.” Robots working in front of the public. Although it is not clear which company it is, we suspect it may be Galbot. Because? Because at the end of last year my colleague Alex was in Beijing and already He encountered a robot from this company in front of a small beverage store in a shopping center. Alex bought a bottle of water and says the experience was similar to that of a vending machine, but much more expensive and slower. Drones and autonomous cars. During my last trip to China I also came across a similar store run by a robot, but at that time I couldn’t stop to put it to the test. What I was able to experience is what it is like to ride in a Pony.ai brand autonomous taxi and then order a bubble tea to be brought to me by a drone. Both experiences are available in Shenzhen, of course. Taxis are much more integrated into daily life, while the delivery with drones is still a rarity reserved for a few points in the city. The goal behind personified AI. All these examples are part of the push for what the Chinese government calls ’embodied AI’. It is an AI that has a physical presence, that is, it interacts with the environment through sensors and actuators and can take the form of a robot, autonomous car or drone. The government mentions it in its 2025 jobs report and has made it a national priority for a reason: it is the next phase in boosting its robotics industry. In this sense, the fact that more and more robots are seen on the streets of Chinese cities is not a simple technological extravagance, but is part of a more ambitious plan. Robots are the way to sustain industrial growth despite factors such as rising wages or the population aging. Image | Blog of the financial secretariat, China In Xataka | China is preparing a hotel where robots will act as receptionists, waiters, cleaners and security guards: it aims to automate almost everything

It’s about making a movie for a non-existent audience.

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The Masters of the Universe movie It has good reviews, a seemingly infallible fan base and an 87% audience rating. on Rotten Tomatoes. And after its first weekend it is already one of the biggest box office failures of 2026: it seems that the inhabitants of Eternia cannot escape the curse of their audiovisual adaptations, which has followed them since that distant version of the Cannon of 1987. Although more prosaic issues come into play here than an old and endearing evil eye. The figures. On the weekend of June 5 to 7, ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’ raised 29.3 million dollars in the United States and 25 million in the 86 countries where it was released simultaneously, adding a global total of 54.3 million. It is calculated that Amazon MGM invested between 170 and 200 million dollars in production, which would make it necessary for the film, adding marketing expenses, to earn about 425 million just to recover what was invested. For now, Amazon denies the biggest one: Kevin Wilson, head of domestic distribution at Amazon MGM, stated in a statement that the weekend represented “a very solid start” and that the audience response had been “fantastic.” The sights are set, very clearly, on Prime Video. The eighties. The Masters of the Universe have been starring in the same story for about forty years. In August 1987, Cannon Films, the Israeli-American production company known for its films with Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson and other B-movie action stars, released the first live-action adaptation of the franchise, with Dolph Lundgren in the lead role. The budget was 22 million dollars. The final collection, 17.3 million. The failure, added to that of the tremendous ‘Superman IV’, contributed directly to the bankruptcy of Cannon Films. What is the difference. However, the budget differences between the 1987 version and the 2026 version are very noticeable. In the Cannon Wager, for example, budget constraints prevented Orko or Battle Cat from appearing on screen, and most of the story took place in California, rather than Eternia, which was reduced to a couple of wastelands. The 2026 film has a better billing (although if you ask us, the cast of that one is unbeatable: Lundgren was joined by Frank Langella and Meg Foster) and, in fact, this one recovers sequences that were left out in the eighties, such as Beast Man’s attack on Earth. But it has been of no use. Not understanding. What both versions do share is a commercial logic that has failed: a successful toy should produce a successful movie. When ‘Barbie’ raised 1.4 billion dollars globally in 2023Mattel drew a clear lesson: its toy franchises have economic potential on the big screen. The company launched the development of more than 14 films based on their catalog: ‘Hot Wheels’ produced by JJ Abrams, ‘Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots’ with Vin Diesel, ‘Polly Pocket’, ‘Barney’, ‘Magic 8 Ball’… ‘Masters of the Universe’ is the first big bet of this new era. But that reading of ‘Barbie’ ignores why ‘Barbie’ worked. The box office of Greta Gerwig’s film had nothing to do with nostalgia for the original toys, but rather with turning that starting point into a commentary on gender roles that worked even for an audience that had not held a Barbie in their hands in decades, or even that despised the toy for considering that it conveyed a toxic message, precisely the opposite of that of the film. ‘He-Man’, however, appeals to the nostalgia of a very specific segment of the public, adult men who grew up with the animated series in the eighties, without offering anything to those outside that perimeter. Liminals and parodies. A look at last weekend’s box office shows a panorama that Amazon has not been able to interpret. On the one hand there is the success of ‘Backrooms’. The A24 film, directed by Kane Parsons, cost 10 million dollars and has already been 212 million raised in less than two weeks. His film starts from a internet mythology about liminal spaceswithout a franchise to respect by heart, without decades of commercial history to sell. On the other hand, we have ‘Scary Movie’. The sixth installment of the Wayans brothers’ parody franchise, absent from theaters since 2013, grossed 55 million domestics and 105.5 million global with a budget of only 30 million. The first works because Parsons has an organic connection to the material (twenty years old, YouTuber) and an audience that has followed him from the internet to the living room. ‘Scary Movie’ presents a direct proposal, and although it refers to past hits, it does not appeal to nostalgia and its audience knows exactly what they are going to see. Both films, in different ways, respond to a real demand. And ‘Masters of the Universe’, despite its indisputable virtues, seems designed to respond to a non-existent demand. In Xataka | Something is changing in cinema: films by directors trained on YouTube are eating up Disney films

the largest surveillance device at a sporting event

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He World Cup 2026 which begins tonight will be the largest soccer tournament in history: 48 teams will face each other in 104 matches, distributed in 16 venues in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and more than five million fans in the stands. It’s also going to be one of the most watched sporting events of all time. This is the security apparatus that is going to be deployed in the stadiums. A world cup under the magnifying glass. The event is held in a terrorist risk contextfueled by the conflict between the US and Iran. Of the more than 100 games, 78 are going to be held in eleven American cities, which places considerable strain on security resources at all points in the chain, from travel to the stadium itself. They count in Wired that the Trump administration may use this event to deploy an invasive surveillance system without appropriate safeguards. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), has issued a travel warning to attendees to the world cup, in which they specifically warn about “repression of freedom of expression and protest and increased surveillance.” Drones. Both drones and, above all, anti-drone systems will play a key role in the security of events. Stadiums will be no-fly zones, but there are other gathering places that may be targets for drone attacks. The company Fortem Technologies has once again been chosen (already participated in Qatar in 2022) to deploy its kinetic anti-drone technology at US headquarters. Contracts have also been signed with Sentrycs, which will contribute its non-disruptive anti-drone technologyand Axon, which will deploy a full stack of drones and counter-drones in Dallas. Facial recognition. It will be another of the great security systems used during the event, something that already happened during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where more than 15,000 cameras monitored the stadiums. In this edition, the stadiums of Boston, Miami and Atlanta, making up the facial recognition powered by AI to gain access to the premises and make payments, and there will also be facial recognition on Kansas City buses. Robot dogs. In addition to facial recognition in the stadiums themselves, Boston Dynamics robot dogs equipped with cameras will be deployed capable of detecting faces. These robots will be seen at the venues in Dallas, Texas and at the New Jersey stadium, where the final will be held, which has been classified as a “national special security event.” In Mexico, at the Monterrey stadium, they also plan reinforce security with four robot dogs. Command platforms. Lenovo is the official technology partner of FIFA and has announced that will be in charge of managing the command center in which they will monitor the movements of the crowd and manage the devices that each worker will carry. On the other hand, Booz Allen Hamilton will provide his Sit(x) platform of situational information in real time. What if it’s not temporary? In statements to WiredElectronic Frontier Foundation security analyst Matthew Guariglia warns of the risk of this technology being used “to restrict people’s civil liberties and the fact that surveillance infrastructure is precisely that: infrastructure.” That is to say, there is concern that all these supposedly temporary measures will end up being permanent. Additionally, there is concern that ICE performs during the games against the migrant population. The agency’s director has confirmed that ICE will be a key part of the security of the events, but They have not made clear what their role will be. The militarization of sport. As we said, in the previous edition of the World Cup in Qatar there was an enormous security deployment, but also took advantage of this context to reinforce its national security strategy, outsourcing part of that security to allied powers and using the tournament as a test bed for new military and police capabilities. They say in Wired that there is not much information about the companies behind many of the World Cup security contracts, but they are expected to end up in the hands of military industry companies such as Palantir, Anduril and Lockheed Martin. Organizations such as Privacy International fear that these events will be used to normalize mass surveillance tools. Image | Xataka with Gemini In Xataka | Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle: “Citizens will behave because we are recording and documenting everything that happens”

“A green awning on the terrace is like having a radiator over the window”

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With the arrival of the hot months, the facades of the buildings display their particular summer armor: the awnings. In Spain the scene is quite characteristic when you are walking down the street and, curiously, the color that triumphs in our country It’s green. And although it seems like the perfect shield against heatstroke, a recent technical warning has shaken what we thought we knew about the protective effect it has. Voices against him. One of the most important It’s Jordi Martí’stechnical architect who posed a rather important analogy that has collected Decosfera: having a dark green awning is “like having a radiator in front of the window.” And its premise is based on an undeniable principle of materials physics, since the absorption of social radiation is very different depending on the color. This is something that happens in the world of fashion and is in the mentality of society, since in summer normally choose to wear light colored clothing by better reflecting heat. But wearing dark clothes in the middle of summer is actually a bad idea, since sweat is guaranteed. It happens on awnings exactly the same, since while light colors (such as pure white) reflect most of the light radiation and heat up less, dark colors are true thermal sinks. This means that a dark green awning can absorb between 80% and 90% of solar radiation, a figure that in the case of black tarps is close to 98%. According to Martí, the fabric heats up drastically and generates a stagnant “heat pocket” under the awning. And this is a problem because under the awning is our house, which begins to accumulate all the energy and results in an increase in heat, when we want to have the opposite effect. It is studied. To support the scientific basis of this position, the work of Hubertus Pöppinghaus, a German architect who is a reference in the study of shadows and radiation, is often used. In this case, through the use of thermal imaging cameras, Pöppinghaus analyzed the behavior of different materials, evidencing the temperature peaks that dark fabrics reach. And among his conclusions he makes it clear what the tarps we use should be: The outer face must be reflective with a light color so that visible solar radiation bounces and does not accumulate heat. The inner side should be dark, since this drastically reduces the reflection of shortwave solar radiation bouncing off the street and sidewalks, decreasing the total heat flow. The industry does not agree. Here the Spanish Association of Shading and Dynamic Solar Control wants to deny this statement relying on the wavelength of the radiation. And the energy that the sun sends to the Earth arrives in the form of direct solar radiation, mainly short wave, penetrating through the window panes and heating the interior of the houses. But when an awning, whatever its color, intercepts that exterior radiation, it stops the blow and, indeed, heats up. By doing so, the energy that the canvas re-emits to the environment is no longer short-wave, but long-wave infrared radiation, and here is the fundamental detail that dismantles the “radiator effect”: standard window glass is opaque to long-wave radiation. In other words. For the industry, it is physically inaccurate to state that the dark awning transfers heat from the outside to the inside through the glass, since the thermal radiation emitted by the hot canvas hits the glass and does not penetrate the home. According to AESSO, what is truly lethal for energy efficiency is letting the sun hit the glass directly and, therefore, any system that provides shade is positive. Images | Elisabeth Fossum In Xataka | Popular wisdom is not always right: the great heat myths that we should avoid in summer

In 2014, Larry Page bought two private islands for $23 million. The problem is that they already had an owner and he won’t let them go.

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Buying a private island is not as easy as it seems. Especially if someone had already bought it before you. That is, broadly speaking, what the American justice system has been discussing for more than a decade, when Larry Page bought two of the five private islands that it has in the Virgin Islands area. The case has a little bit of everything: companies that negotiate in the shadows, a furious New York real estate developer and one of the co-founders of Google who, according to the documents that are coming to light in the trial, did everything possible so that no one knew that it was he who bought the island. Twelve years later, the dispute over ownership of the islands is still open, but the islands, meanwhile, remain in the hands of Larry Page. Two islands, two buyers. Great Hans Lollik and Little Hans Lollik are two small private islands in the archipelago of the US Virgin Islands. They are just over two kilometers from the north coast of the main island, Saint Thomas, and are located in a privileged enclave because they are surrounded by coral reefs and practically uninhabited, except for a few herds of invasive goats. In 2014, a company based in Palo Alto (California) appeared out of nowhere and bought the two islands that were for sale, closing a transaction worth $23 million, according to collected Business Insider. The problem is that a New York developer named James Eckel had been negotiating the purchase of the property for months. He had even offered 9 million dollars. The deal had not been closed, but he claimed to have a contract that gave him preference in the operation. When the Palo Alto company put its generous offer on the table, the seller chose 23 million and the developer was left hanging. That didn’t sit well with him. Trial for negotiating behind his back. From Eckel’s perspective, the seller (a company called Liberty Bankers Life Insurance Company) had committed to him in a sales contract, which he then ignored when a better offer appeared. So he went to court to claim ownership of the islands. What came next has been a decade of pilgrimage through the courts of Texas and the Virgin Islands. In 2019, a court of appeal of Texas ruled that Eckel was only entitled to compensation for economic damages, but not to ownership of the islands. But that didn’t close the case. The family office which manages Page’s estate and through which the purchase was made, sued Eckel’s company (called Great Hans LLC) to have the courts officially declare that the islands belong to him without any legal burden, so that the developer could not claim ownership again in the future. That process remains unresolved today, despite the fact that Page’s lawyers have been asking the judge to act for years. The opacity of fortunes. The most striking thing about the case is not only the dispute over the ownership of the islands. This is the time it took to find out who the real buyer of the properties was because they found themselves behind a thick corporate framework that protected his identity. The company that acquired the islands was Virgin Island Properties LLC, a limited liability company without a name behind it to reveal who put up the money with which the purchase was made. In fact, as as highlighted Business Insiderit took months of court proceedings and investigations for Eckel’s lawyers to reach Wayne Osborne, the man who manages the assets from Page since 2012. Osborne then confirmed that the purchase was for Page. In his statement he also explained that the islands had been acquired without the intention of building on them, and that the agent who negotiated the transaction (Gil Simon) did not reveal to the seller the identity of the actual buyer. It is a common practice in the operation of companies who manage large assets like that of the co-founder of Google: no document of the operation directly or indirectly mentioned Larry Page. The family office most discreet in the technological world. This trial has served as a window, albeit a very small one, to see how they work management structures of one of the family office most hermetic that exist…even for such a discreet area how is the one of the family office. The company that manages the 290.9 billion dollars of the second richest man in the world It’s called Koop and is based in Palo Alto. His philosophy is total opacity and to achieve it, employees sign confidentiality agreements before entering, LinkedIn profiles are deliberately vague and internal security is supervised by a former CIA agent, as revealed in a exclusive research of Business Insider in 2022. The entire society is organized so that Page does not appear in any of the documents of his own purchases. That is, keep the millionaire as far away as possible from his possessions, so that it is difficult to unravel the corporate network that is woven between the property and who really owns it. In fact, these companies do their job so well that when the judges in the Epstein case tried to locate Larry Page in 2023 to take a statement Regarding his role in the plot, a private investigation firm was unable to find a mailing address for him. It is not that Larry Page did not have a habitual residence, but that everything was designed so that he could not be linked to any real address. In Xataka | The most luxurious “hotel” in the world costs $70,000 a night because it’s not a hotel: it’s an LVMH private island Image | Flickr (Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

If you thought that Renfe was taking… Germany is spending 100,000 million euros so that its trains arrive on time

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We complain a lot about Renfe (and a good part of those complaints, with reason). But although it may seem otherwise, Germany has been neglecting its railway network for decades at decadent levels. And just as they count According to the Financial Times, only six in ten long-distance trains arrive on time. However, the country already has a plan in mind, a plan that involves investing some 100,000 million euros in solving its punctuality problem. The problem. In 2000, 84% of German long-distance trains arrived on time. Today that figure has fallen to 60%. Already last year, an analysis The Financial Times placed Deutsche Bahn, the German public operator, below even the most late railway operators in the United Kingdom. Just like account The German Transport Minister, Patrick Schnieder, even warned in March that the situation threatened to erode public confidence in the institutions. In his own words, he assured that if the State is not capable of guaranteeing basic services, “democracy is harmed.” How we got here. According to the media, this deterioration has been the result of a series of poorly made decisions over two decades. In the early 2000s, the German government considered taking Deutsche Bahn public. The plan never materialized, but to improve the balance sheet for that hypothetical exit, network maintenance was cut. To this was added that between 2005 and 2010 the budget for railway infrastructure was, adjusted for inflation, 20% lower than in the mid-nineties, according to calculations from the FT itself. The icing on the cake came in 2009, when Germany constitutionalized the so-called “debt brake“, which forced the State to balance the accounts every year. This caused investment spending to systematically lose the battle against social spending. The current state of the network. Just like account According to the FT, 16% of the assets of the German railway network are classified as deficient or directly inadequate. There are bridges dating back to the time of Kaiser Wilhelm II and signal boxes installed in the 1960s that are still in service. In fact, according to DB InfraGo, the Deutsche Bahn division in charge of maintaining the network, 80% of all delays are directly caused by deterioration of the infrastructure. You have to open the tap. In 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz took advantage of a constitutional loophole to create a fund of 500 billion euros to renew the country’s infrastructure over the next twelve years. The railway is one of its top priorities since, of that total, Deutsche Bahn has committed 107 billion euros until 2029. However, Philipp Nagl, CEO of DB InfraGo, recognize to the FT that needs at least 130,000 million to cover the accumulated delay. And as he comments, every year, more assets reach the end of their useful life. How it is being executed. The strategy is being extremely drastic, closing entire sections of the network for months to rebuild them from scratch, instead of patching section by section. Furthermore, it is an atypical way of doing things at Deutsche Bahn, which historically had a tradition of keeping lines open while carrying out construction work. “With that method it would take forever,” explains Nagl to the FT. The number of active works on the network has grown by a third since 2024, to exceed 28,000 in 2026. The immediate consequence is more chaos in the short term. And the punctuality goal has been lowered to 70% and postponed until 2029. A real example. In one of the busiest corridors in the country, the one that connects Cologne with the Ruhr Valley, along which up to 280 trains circulate daily, the line has been closed since February. According to account In the middle, the 55,000 regular travelers must resort to more than 200 replacement buses, many of them stuck in traffic jams. In return, 81 kilometers of track, 50 detours and 12 stations are being renewed in five months. The person in charge of the project, Arno Jaeger, defined the medium as “a monumental task” with a budget of 800 million euros. To speed up the work, specialized heavy machinery is used. In fact, one of the machines, colloquially nicknamed Mamut, renews two kilometers of track per shift, four times faster than if they did it through the conventional method. It’s about operators. Beyond Deutsche Bahn, there are private competitors waiting for their chance. And just as account FT, FlixTrain, the railway arm of the Flix group, has reserved 2.4 billion euros to buy up to 65 high-speed trains that it wants to deploy from 2028. The Italian high-speed operator Italo has also announced its intention to enter Germany with an investment of up to 3.6 billion if it gains access to the network for several years. Both point to 2028 as a key year. Cover image | Deutsche Bahn In Xataka | The Spanish west has a forgotten train that it wants to recover. The problem: neither Madrid nor Europe are interested

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