Mobile Tech & Gadgets

Airbus Beluga retires after failing in commercial aeronautics

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Few commercial airplanes that have flown through the sky have had a shape as particular as the Airbus Beluganamed after that snout so similar to that of the cetacean from which it takes its name. However, despite escaping the perception we have of aerodynamic shapes, its lines made all the sense in the world given its function: carrying large pieces, specifically airplanes. It was an essential aircraft for making airplanes in Airbus logistics. The beluga became small. With a capacity With a load of 47 tons and space to accommodate items up to 30 meters in length, the A300-600ST had the capacity to accommodate one wing per trip. However, in the new BelugaXL two wings fit. The company explained that with an increase in manufacturing and your just in time logisticsthis change represented a before and after in the efficiency of its logistics. For example, for operations such as taking the wings manufactured in Broughton (United Kingdom) to the assembly lines in Toulouse (France) or Hamburg (Germany). By increasing the production rate, with the old Belugas they needed either more ships or more flight hours to meet deadlines. So the half-dozen BelugaXLs became the official ships for Airbus logistics. Airbus infographic to explain the second life of the BelugaST The second life of the Belugas. Designed for last about 40,000 flight hours and with entry into service in 1995, around 2022 Airbus estimated that these units retired for their own logistics still had up to 20 years of life left, so he gave them a new mission: to be delivery planes through the new cargo airline that created for the occasionAirbus Beluga Transport (AiBT). In November 2023 obtained their air operator certificate to operate. In this way, they would cover a specific niche: high-capacity air delivery, aimed at transporting satellites, aircraft engines, helicopters or heavy machinery. The timing was ideal as the enormous Antonov An-124 Soviet containers that were traditionally used for this type of distribution had been recovered for the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The market did not think the same: approximately a year later closed the business due to lack of demand. Only one remains operational. Of the five BelugaSTs that existed, only one remains in service: the one with registration F-GSTC “3”, the rest have been retired or are awaiting destination. The first (registration F-GSTA “1”) was retired in Bordeaux on April 21, 2021, the same city in which the F-GSTB “2” said goodbye on December 18, 2025. The F-GSTD “4” retired in Toulouse on September 17, 2025 and the fifth said goodbye in Broughton on January 29. The F-GSTF “5” is the only one of which we know a clear destination– will become an interactive classroom for STEM studies in the UK. Spain repeats mistake. As happened with his predecessor, Super Guppyit seems that Spain will not keep any Beluga either. At the time he was due for a Super Guppy, but they ended up rejecting it due to lack of space at the Getafe Air Museum. The plane was sold to NASA and still flies. The prototype of the A400M that was in Seville did not have any good luck either: ended up scrapped while its brothers are on display at the French Aeroscopia museum or at the Airbus factory in Bremen. In Xataka | The triangles on the plane window are not for decoration: they are a quick way to check that the flight is going well In Xataka | We believed that everything happened because of the new fighters. The F-16 has been in the air for 50 years and continues to sell like hotcakes Cover | Brian Bukowski CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

There are people capable of testing positive in a breathalyzer test without having drunk a drop of alcohol. And we already know why

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Although it may seem crazy, failing a breathalyzer test after drinking only water and a plate of pasta is possible. And while explaining it that way to a police officer may raise questions about a poor excuse, The truth is that it is a medical reality for those who suffer from the known self-fermentation syndrome. The investigation. Until now we attributed this problem to yeast, but a team of researchers from UC San Diego and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified specific strains of Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae as those responsible for generate intoxicating levels of ethanol in the intestineopening the door to treatments as surprising as fecal transplantation. That is, there are bacteria that can literally make us drunk without drinking a drop of alcohol. The metabolic storm. To reach this conclusion, the study analyzed to 22 patients diagnosed with this metabolic problem, comparing them with 21 healthy relatives. In this case, the results were quite compelling, because fecal samples from patients in the midst of the outbreak were capable of endogenously producing ethanol at alarming levels. In order to know much more, These samples were cultured and an ethanol concentration of up to 136 mg/dl was observed.. To put it in context, in many countries the legal limit for driving around 50 mg/dl in bloodso these patients without drinking would be doubling the level of alcohol permitted while driving. An alcohol factory. The novelty of this study is that it shifts the focus from yeast to bacteria, since genomic analyzes showed a massive enrichment of genes related to mixed acid fermentation. But we must not fall for the statement that these bacteria are ‘bad’, but rather that the ecosystem is broken to give rise to this problem. And what is the trigger? The antibiotics. And the use of these drugs can sweep away the balanced flora, allowing opportunistic pathogens to take control of the intestine and begin to metabolize sugars into alcohol. The treatment. Logically, this is a serious problem, not because of the fact of testing positive in the alcohol test, but because of the toxicity that the body faces. That is why the objective right now is on the treatment that now has the focus on a fecal microbiota transplant. For this study, the donor of his fecal microbiota was a personal trainer with enviable intestinal health. And the result was incredible, since the patient with this problem saw these problems disappear permanently, and his ability to “self-produce” alcohol disappeared after repopulating his intestine with the healthy bacteria of another person. Beyond getting drunk. As we have said before, it may seem ideal to have a feeling of intoxication without having to spend a single euro on a drink, but the reality is that this problem also leads to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And constantly producing alcohol can cause very serious liver damage. But on the social issue, this endogenous overproduction of ethanol has led people to lose their driving license or face labor problems unfairly. All for a problem that may seem like the perfect excuse, but is actually a major medical problem. Images | Lawrence Krowdeed In Xataka | There is an age at which we should stop drinking alcohol forever. Neuroscience is clear why

In Tokyo there is a bookstore with only one book in the catalog. It has been open for ten years and works

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In an alley in the Ginza district of Tokyo, a small white-painted room houses what could be considered the most radical bookstore in the world. Morioka Shotenopened in May 2015 by Yoshiyuki Morioka, reverses the commercial logic of the book: while the Japanese publishing industry produces approximately 80,000 new titles each yearthis establishment only sells one, which is renewed every week. It is not performance. Morioka Shoten It is a business that works, selling multiple copies of a single work for six consecutive days. The interior is unusually bare for a bookstore (concrete walls, a piece of furniture used as a counter, a cable telephone) and serves as a canvas for displays inspired by the current book. It is a bit the absolute opposite of Amazon: from infinite offer to minimalism in choice. How it works. Each title remains on display for exactly six days, from Tuesday to Sunday, accompanied by artistic installations, objects or photographs related to its content. The space functions simultaneously as a gallery and a point of sale. The location of the project reinforces this symbolic dimension: the Suzuki Buildingbuilt in 1929 and protected as historic architecture, housed between the 1930s and the end of World War II the offices of Nippon Kobo, the publisher that produced the magazine ‘Nippon’, which many consider foundational for the modern Japanese publishing industry. The context. The opening of Morioka Shoten in 2015 comes at a critical time for the industry. Two decades earlier, in 1995, Amazon had begun operations, and the domino effect was inevitable: American independent bookstores went from more than 7,000 stores in 1994 to just 1,651 in 2009, a reduction of 76%. The physical bookstore model seemed obsolete given the speed of the Internet and recommendation algorithms. Morioka Shoten proposed just the opposite: concentration, deliberate scarcity and time to focus on a single work. The philosophy of issatsu, isshitsu. The Japanese expression issatsu, isshitsu It means “a room, a book.” For eight years, Yoshiyuki Morioka worked as an employee in second-hand bookstores in the Kanda neighborhood, a traditional bibliophile district in Tokyo. He later opened his own independent bookstore in Kayabacho, where he organized author presentations that multiplied sales. The question that it was done was: why maintain hundreds of works if the optimal experience was produced with just one? The Takram design studio developed the store’s visual identity based on a sketch by Morioka himself: a rhombus that condenses the double metaphor of the project, simultaneously representing an open book and a single room. The resurgence of indie. The proposal is part of a broader recovery of independent book trade. In 2015, a curious phenomenon occurred in the United States: American indie bookstores. They began to multiplyup to 49%. The study cited factors such as the feeling of community, the work of booksellers as curators and the capacity of bookstores as meeting points. The pandemic accelerated the trend: since 2020 The sector grew by 70%, in 2024, 323 new stores were inaugurated and in 2025, more than a hundred additional stores were opened in the first months of the year alone. Quality over quantity. The commercial results of the experiment confirm the viability of the model. Morioka Shoten has sold more than 2,000 works since its inauguration. The weekly catalog has ranged from comics by Tove Jansson to botanical photographs by Karl Blossfeldt, novels by Mimei Ogawa and short stories by Hans Christian Andersen, spanning fiction, non-fiction, manga and illustrated books. In an era that offers immediate access to millions of titles, abundance generates paralysis when it comes to decisions. From that point of view, Morioka’s radical limitation does not restrict, but liberates. In Xataka | The 24 most beautiful bookstores in the world

We have been waiting for years for 8K TVs to take over the world. It is evident that we are going to sit and wait

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In the 80s you guessed that Indiana Jones had a four-day beard, but that’s all. You couldn’t really see it, because on your VHS tapes it was more of a shadow than anything else. Those of us who have gray hair are lucky (or unlucky) to have lived in past times in which image resolution It was something arcane and mysterious. I was content with the video quality of the VHS tapes of ‘The Goonies’ or ‘Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark’ and I was happy with my C64 and its 320×200 pixels and those matches of ‘Match Day II’ with my brother in which we both enjoyed (and fought) as if we were playing the last game. FIFA EA Sports FC. Then, of course, everything improved and we began to realize that the resolution was important. We discovered that DVDs and their 720×576 resolution (in the PAL system used in Spain, in the US the NTSC only reached 720 x480) was like seeing the future until that future became the past with the arrival of HD Ready (720p) and especially Full HD (1080p) resolutions. Suddenly it was absolutely obvious that Harrison Ford hadn’t shaved.

an unfinished highway that isolates half the region

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The A-43 highway, which should connect Ciudad Real with Extremadura, has been stumbling for almost 30 years. Just like counted The Ciudad Real Tribune, the project first appeared in the General State Budgets in 1997, but has not yet materialized. The connection between Ciudad Real and Extremadura is still in an administrative stage, and it has not really been decided which route it will take to the final point. Very curiously, and as the media reminds us, the Romans solved this same dilemma two thousand years ago: by passing through the south. Why it is important. The N-430, which currently connects both regions, is the only unturned national highway in the entire corridor that crosses the peninsula from east to west. Just as it they remembered In El Periódico de Extremadura, it is “a road with great intensity of traffic, volume of goods and accidents with fatalities.” In June 2025, more than 1,500 people demonstrated in Santa Amalia under the slogan “No more deaths on our road.” In detail. The Ministry of Transport approved last October the public information file for the first Extremaduran section of the A-43, between Torrefresneda and Santa Amalia. There are 11 kilometers with a budget of 78.31 million euros. The new route will start at the junction with the A-5 and will connect with the N-430 east of Santa Amalia, including three junctions, seven overpasses and three viaducts. However, this section is just a fraction of what is expected, since the final objective is to connect Extremadura with the Valencian Community. Furthermore, the decision on which direction to take from Ciudad Real to Extremadura has not yet been definitively made. The Government has been debating for years about whether to follow the N-430 north of Ciudad Real or go through Puertollano to the south. It has also been considered not to build a highway and to carry out maintenance works for this national highway and adapt it. The lesson of the romans. The project Itiner-eled by researchers from Spain and Denmark, has mapped 300,000 kilometers of Roman roads throughout the empire. In Ciudad Real, according to publish La Tribuna, the Roman roads anticipated the layout of current highways such as the A-4, the A-43 between Manzanares and Tomelloso, or the N-420. To connect with Extremadura, Rome chose the southern option. Just like they count From La Tribuna, the old road left towards Poblete, as the A-41 does today, passing through Caracuel de Calatrava, Villamayor, the mining city of Sisapo and continuing to Almadén before reaching Mérida. Two millennia ago the northern option was ruled out due to the difficulty of the terrain. And now what. While the Romans have laid out paths that have lasted for centuries, in Spain we still have doubts about how to tackle the problem of the A-43, a project that has been in vain for almost 30 years. The approved section between Torrefresneda and Santa Amalia is progress, but insufficient to solve the isolation of the region. It remains to define the route in Ciudad Real, budget the remaining kilometers and carry out the works. Cover image | Wikimedia Commons and Google Maps In Xataka | Mérida is not a city used to being at the forefront of technology. That is going to change with the electric car

literally, it will bathe its streets in gold

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Architecture and urban planning have flirted many times with extreme materialssymbols of wealth or technical bets at the limitalmost always to send a message of power, modernity or exceptionality. Some came forward and today they are iconsbut others ended up becoming warnings. Dubai has just opposed the list, although it still does not know which of the two. The saying becomes literal. Yes, Dubai has decided to turn into reality one of the most repeated phrases about the city, that of the streets paved with goldannouncing the construction of a road literally made with this precious metal in the future Dubai Gold District. The project, presented at the end of January, deliberately plays with the symbolism of gold as a sign of the economic, cultural and tourist identity of the emirate, although for now it is not clear How far The material will be used in a structural, decorative or symbolic way, a key detail that remains unspecified, and one that is not trivial if we turn to the history of architecture. Bathing cities in “gold”. In Antiquity and the Modern Age, the equivalent of “urban gold” was massive use of noble materials for public spaces. In Rome, imperial avenues and squares paved with imported marbles throughout the Mediterranean, and not out of functional necessity, but to exhibit economic and logistical dominance. In the baroque eralarge urban axes such as those of Paris or Madrid incorporated high quality stone and excessive ornamentation to turn the city into a permanent scene of power. It wasn’t literal gold, of course, but it was deliberate material display. Brasilia pilot plane Technical madness and futuristic city. In the 19th century the fever of “impossible” materials arrived. The Crystal Palacebuilt almost entirely of iron and glass, seemed like a technical madness for its time: gigantic, fragile to look at and completely new in its concept. It worked, but also showed riskssuch as its very high vulnerability to fire, which would end up destroying it decades later. It was a symbolic success and a long-term practical failure. The 20th century is also full of even more ambitious bets. We remain as an example that of Brasiliawhich was conceived as a futuristic city built from scratch, with monumental avenues designed for automobiles and sculptural concrete buildings. The result was impressive from the air, but a chaos for everyday life: enormous distances, total dependence on the car and inhumane spaces. It didn’t collapse, but it did show that grandiosity can clash with actual use. Another example we count recently, with the John Hancock Tower opting for a glass façade. The result It was terrifying. Part of the Neom project And Neom. Of course, few more hyperbolic projects in recent times like Neomthe futuristic city that aims to stay on the plansperhaps so that they can be used in a movie. An example of a project that is too bold and hyperbolic compared to the logistical, economic and practical limits of reality. Gold as an economic identity. Be that as it may, the new Dubai street will be integrated into the reconversion of the historic Deira Gold Soukan area that already concentrates around a thousand merchants specialized in gold and jewelry. The advertisement it is not coincidental: The United Arab Emirates is one of the largest global nodes of physical gold trade, with tens of billions dollars in annual exports, and Dubai has been exploiting that position for years as part of its narrative of prosperity, stability and economic opportunity without direct taxes on wages. Dubai Skyline Architecture as a claim. The “street of gold” fits into a broader strategy, the same one that already we saw in Neom based on creating extreme milestones that ensure global headlines and a constant flow of visitors. Record-breaking skyscrapers, giant Ferris wheels, abyssal pools, artificial islands and air-conditioned streets are part of clear logic: offer experiences that are impossible or difficult to replicate in other places, even when their daily usefulness is secondary to their value as an urban spectacle. Between icon and excess. As we said, this type of project is not without risks. The recent history of architecture in the Middle East demonstrates that excessive ambition can collide with technical, financial or simply practical limits, turning some ideas into reduced versions of what was promised or directly into symbols of overexpectation. The key, as in other extreme urban experiments, will be whether the street of gold It ends up being a functional and durable element or whether it remains a striking gesture designed more to reinforce the Dubai brand than to transform urban life. The message. Beyond the material, the golden way It is a declaration of intentions: Dubai continues to bet on that architecture hyperbolic as a language of power, wealth and uniqueness. It is not just about building, but about telling a story in which the excess is part of the appeal. And as has happened other times in history, it remains to be seen if the bet can become a lasting icon, or another example of how far a city can go when the symbol outweighs urban logic. Image | Ahmed Aldaie via Unsplash, אורי ר.Neom, Norlando Pobre In Xataka | Matalascañas is an example of a major architectural failure: thinking that the beach of your childhood was going to be how you remember it. In Xataka | More than 2,000 people had committed suicide at the Golden Gate. The solution has been as simple as it is shocking for those who throw

I was about to buy the best-selling Chinese motorcycle in Spain. Until I read the fine print

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Chinese motorcycles They are driving the Spanish crazy. So much so that they are achieving the unthinkable: snatch the throne to the historic Japanese Honda and Yamaha. It is no wonder, since both in terms of performance and price, what the Chinese proposals offer is simply unbeatable. Servidor was recently at the Zontes dealership to test what is currently the best-selling A2 license scooter in Spain: the 368G. I went down from trying it convinced of the purchase, until I read the fine print. One that has a lot to do with China’s strategy to conquer Europe. The aforementioned. If you don’t understand much about motorcycles, the summary is easy: this motorcycle is “the SUV” with the best quality-price on the market. It costs less than 5,000 euros, has a 368cc engine and almost 40hp of power, and comes with extras such as rear and front cameras with Sony sensors, heated grips as standard, keyless boot and hood, screen with mirroring for the mobile… The equivalent in any traditional brand costs about 1,500 euros more. The rolling smoothness of the motorcycle is excellent, and although the general qualities are somewhat tight (something completely logical, given the price), it is an absolutely winning purchase. Everything good, except for one little problem. We are guinea pigs. China is achieving something unthinkable a few years ago in the world of motorcycles (and cars). They have not come to compete against smaller brands or carve out a niche for themselves. They have landed in Europe to take the top positions in the ranking and end the leadership of traditional brands. Decades of reign that they have managed to end in a very short time. To do this, at least in the territory of motorcycles, something key is needed in a vehicle for daily use and enjoyment: reliability. And to ensure that the bike passes through the workshop frequently, the inspection intervals are especially abnormal. Yes, but. In the case of this Zontes, the maintenance interval is 4,000km. Yes, every 4,000km you have to go to the workshop. To give you some context, its rivals like the Honda 350 ADV They go through the workshop every 12,000km, and the Yamaha Xmax 300 every 5,000km for oil changes and every 10,000 for the rest of the consumables. The brand is completely aware of the problem this poses, and the 2026 model will arrive in summer with maintenance intervals of 6,000km. It is a substantial change, since every 12,000km a 368g will have passed through the workshop three times. One 2026, two. Little by little. Zontes is not alone in this problem. Voge, the Chinese manufacturer that has managed to become the top 1 in the best-selling trail motorcycles in Spain, has several models with service intervals every 6,000km. But in its star versions, such as 900 DSXthis goes up to 10,000km. If they still sell, imagine in a year. There are many bikers who do not put too many kilometers on their motorcycle, or those who are willing to visit the workshop twice a year in exchange for taking a much more equipped, complete and powerful product. China is managing to place its motorcycles in the top 3 in sales even with this enormous handicap on the table. When your maintenance intervals match the rest of your competitors, the rest will be history. Image | Zontes In Xataka | Spain loves one thing: cheap motorcycles. Europe doesn’t like something else: cheap motorcycles.

In 2010, a student from Barcelona was looking for an easy way to edit PDFs. 16 years later, it is one of the most viewed websites on the internet

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From a form to a receipt to an invoice: PDF is the quintessential extension for sharing documents, regardless of whether you do it from a Windows computer to an iPhone or an Android tablet. It doesn’t matter: you’re going to see the original format no matter what. But, oh my friend, if you have to get your hands on a PDF. Marco Grossi also found himself in trouble with a PDF. One, who is already in her years, had to make a living to avoid paying for the Adobe Acrobat license (in the past it was not a subscription and the price was not exactly cheap) to edit a PDF for a cent by the wind: from printing and scanning to wasting time reconstructing with a word processor. In that first decade of the 2000s I was a student who struggled with documents and Marco Grossi, too. Back in 2010, this Barcelonan, who has studied Multimedia and Photography and also programming, found himself faced with a task as mundane as having to copy and paste a PDF: it was not an easy task. How does it count himself for La Vanguardia“I’m a programmer, and I’m good at computer issues, so it took me about 15 minutes to figure it out.” And then came iLovePDF. As the founder and CEO confesses for El Paísat that moment he discovered that there was a need: “I realized that it was very simple and that I could create it myself.” It was not the first (the ancient but reliable PDFSam It had an interface that was backwards), but it was the one that managed to establish itself as the software to manage PDF for normal and ordinary users (although also for companies reluctant to pay, because it solves the basics quickly and well). A meteoric rise. What started as a personal project that he combined with freelance web design, in 2014 became his 100% occupation. Until 2017 he worked alone from home, but at that moment he took a step forward: He rented an office and hired an old college classmate. Now there are 43 people. At that time, his website was already receiving between 200,000 and 300,000 daily visits from organic traffic. In 2025 Grossi counted which were around 150 million unique users per month. The portal ahrefs listed it in 2024 in 34th place on a global scale, above Amazon in India and just below Wikipedia in Russia. Screenshot of iLovePDF from 2018. via Archive.today Good, nice and cheap free. Your philosophy From the beginning it has been to be a free, accessible, high-quality and easy-to-use service. A quick visit to their website gives us a mosaic with icons and clear messages “Join PDFs”, “Split PDFs” and an agile and intuitive step by step to obtain documents with good quality, without limitations or watermarks. We are using iLovePDF in Spanish, but the website is translated into 25 languages ​​so that language is not an obstacle. In 2018 (the oldest capture saved on Archive.today) also. They also do not market with the data: Marco Grossi details that as a European firm they are governed by the GDPR and that all PDFs are deleted within two hours, without anyone being able to access them. In addition, he explains that they have ISO 27001 certification. In the beginning they financed themselves by advertising, but according to their CEO that is very risky. How iLovePDF Makes Money. So since 2014, in addition to the free options, they offer subscription services, so that advertising generates residual income. They are a small company, but they provide service to those people who visit their website, which we have already seen are many. That is why the Barcelona native explains that “we only need a very small percentage of users who pay to finance us.” 80 – 90% of your income they come precisely from its premium subscriptions, aimed at companies. The rest comes from an advertising banner that, my servant who has been using the service for so many years that she does not remember, nor did she remember it. The cost of being premium It is 5 euros per month and access to extras such as digital signatures or getting rid of ads, but it is totally dispensable: its founder details that the free version is enough for 99.9% of those who use us. They are not for sale. Marco Grossi is not a wolf of Wall Street: he himself admits that he never had an entrepreneurial spirit and that he does not open purchase proposals, something similar to the VLC project and that has turned both platforms into memes of saints or heroes on social networks like X/Twitter. Being a self-financed company allows Marco and his team to maintain their philosophy and reject offers. Although its history is meteoric considering its 15 years of life, the CEO speaks of sustained business growth and that they will never hire 200 people in a year to have to close. Their staff turnover is very low, but solid: they want to replicate their model with their counterpart for images, iLoveIMG. In Xataka | In 1990, a company in Barcelona came up with a crazy and visionary idea: talking on your cell phone while you’re stuck in traffic. In Xataka | In 1901, a Spanish man had one of the ideas of the century: invent the remote control before television

We’ve been believing oatmeal is the perfect breakfast for years, but science has a warning: there’s a limit

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Over the past few years, oatmeal has been crowned the undisputed queen of healthy breakfasts. And you just have to look at the internet a little to see the porridge from Instagram wave cardiologists recommendation to think that we are facing a perfect food without any type of failure. However, everything can have fine print and oatmeal is one of them. Investigating. Even if you eat healthy, there are people who experience abdominal bloating, gas, or general digestive discomfort with oats. And it’s not that oats are bad, but there are chances that we are eating them wrong. This is something you have already researched. to Monash Universitya world leader in digestive health, by putting an exact figure on the table: 52 grams. This is something that also the nutritionist has put on the table Óscar Hurtado who points out that oats are healthy, but they have a very strict “tolerance curve” for some intestines. The reason. The problem with oats is found in the FODMAPs (oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and fermentable polyols). These are nothing more than short chain carbohydrates that the small intestine cannot absorb well, and that is why They continue their ‘journey’ to the large intestine where the bacteria found here rapidly ferment them. producing gas. But not only this, it can drag water causing diarrhea. And this is where Monash University comes in, which has measured the effect that these compounds have on our body. One of its main conclusions It is in that 52 grams of oats (which is half a cup) is the safe amount of fructans for most humans. If we go too far. In the case of passing the barrier of 60-70 grams, the fructan content in the intestine it triggers and begins to cause problems. Something that is of great interest to those who suffer from a digestive problem such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)since it would be going from an ‘anti-inflammatory’ breakfast to a trigger for abdominal distension and pain. More studies. This is not a warning from now, but has great support in science. An example is the Halmos pivotal trial that showed that a low-FODMAP diet reduces gastrointestinal symptoms. between 22% and 45% more than usual diets. This was because they reduced the amount of fructans, very present in oats, in the diet they ate. But in addition, a 2022 study also confirmed that portion control of this type of fermentable carbohydrates significantly improved life in patients with IBS. And it wasn’t about eliminating oats from the diet, but about keeping them in a “safe zone.” There is no need to demonize. With these studies, logically we do not have to reach this point with oats, since it has many benefits behind it. The Spanish Heart Foundation and multiple nutritional studies remind us why it rose to the breakfast throne in the first place. And it has the ability to give satiety, which helps with weight control, and also delays the absorption of carbohydrates to prevent insulin spikes that are really harmful to the body. Although it doesn’t stop there, since for people with high cholesterol its high amount of beta-glucans can reduce the “bad” cholesterol known as ‘bad cholesterol’ or LDL. Based on tolerance. The conclusion we can reach is that if you have an iron stomach and a good oatmeal breakfast does not affect it at all, you can continue taking it normally. But in the event that symptoms such as bloating or diarrhea begin to appear, it is better to start lowering the dose to see if this “perfect breakfast” begins to feel good again. In this way, we are left with its beneficial properties without the digestive discomfort that we can hate so much. Images | Dor Farber In Xataka | We have been relying on the Nutri-Score in stores for years. Science believes that its real impact is zero

inviting to “dinner” is increasingly becoming inviting to order on Glovo

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It’s Saturday afternoon. The sun begins to set and in the living room of a shared apartment, the Catan board It is spread out on the low table. We are four friends. The conversation has drifted, as almost always lately, towards uncertainty: the price of rentals, geopolitical instabilityhow difficult “everything” is. Suddenly, there is silence. It’s 8:30 p.m. and hunger is pressing. A decade ago, someone would have gotten up to the kitchen. “I have pasta, shall we make a quick sauce?” the host would have said. Today, no one moves. Almost by a synchronized reflex, three phones are unlocked at the same time. Nobody wants to cook. Nobody wants to stain. And, above all, no one wants to wait. Within minutes, a delivery person will be at the door. We have outsourced the most basic act of survival and socialization: feeding ourselves. It’s not that we became lazy overnight. The structure of our consumption has changed radically. If we look at the x-ray of Spain, the data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPA) draw an ascending curve that is dizzying, the consumption of prepared dishes has grown by 514.8% since 2004. In the last two decades, we have gone from seeing convenience food as an emergency solution to making it the base of our nutritional pyramid. In 2024, each Spaniard consumed on average almost 17 kilos of prepared food per year. The penetration of this habit is absolute. According to data from the consulting firm Kantar“ready to eat” already reaches 98.6% annual penetration. Virtually all Spanish consumers resort to it. The point is that we no longer look for flavor, or even health as an absolute priority (although it is valued). He drivers The main thing, in 85% of cases, is convenience. Six out of ten Spanish households openly declare “not having enough time to cook.” We don’t buy food, we buy time. The monopoly of “not cooking”: how Mercadona kept half of the cake On this game board, there is an undisputed winner who saw the future before anyone else. Mercadona, with its “Ready to Eat” section, has achieved a dominant positioncapturing 51.2% of the market share in the distribution of ready meals. Juan Roig not only sells ingredients; Now sell the time that you don’t have—or don’t want to dedicate—to cooking them. This brings us to the prophecy that the president of Mercadona launched a year ago and that sounded like a death sentence: “In the middle of the 21st century there will be no kitchens.” Roig maintains that, in the future, houses will not have space to cook because we will simply arrive at them with the food already made. The industry seems to be betting everything on this card: the Familia Martínez group, Mercadona supplier, is investing 150 million euros in facilities to manufacture roasts and gratins on an industrial scale. This trend has transformed even historical giants. Telepizza, the pioneer that taught us to order food by phone in the 90s, has entered the red in 2024. The paradox is cruel: they lose money in the golden age of delivery because the market has been saturated. They no longer compete against another pizzeria, they compete against all types of gastronomy delivered to your door in 30 minutes. Roig’s prophecy is not science fiction, it is current urban planning. Our own homes are expelling us from the stoves. Domestic architecture has undergone a radical bifurcation explained perfectly in a report by elDiario.es: the “decorated” kitchen and the “waste” kitchen. On the one hand, in luxury or renovated apartments for tourist rental, we see immaculate kitchens, open to the living room, designed to be photographed but not used. As the architect Luis Lope de Toledo explains: “Many contemporary kitchens seem designed to be photographed, not to be stained (…) When the kitchen becomes an aspirational symbol rather than a tool for living, it loses its authenticity.” On the other hand, the reality of housing precariousness in large cities pushes towards the model kitchenless (without kitchen). In the growing “mini apartments” and studios, cooking space is reduced to a minimum. The architect Laura Pato points out the harsh reality of the real estate market: “It is very common to see apartments that only have a stove and most do not have an oven.” If your kitchen is a narrow, unventilated hallway or a corner in your bedroom, the app of delivery It stops being a leisure option and becomes an infrastructure necessity. Saying goodbye to the aspiration of cooking If industrial investment is face A of this phenomenon, face B is found in second-hand platforms. Wallapop has been filled with kitchen robots Thermomix of previous models (TM5, TM31) at knockdown prices. At first glance, it might seem that there is a culinary resistance that seeks to equip itself cheaply. But a more cynical—and probably more realistic—reading suggests the opposite: it is a failed operation. Thousands of users are getting rid of an appliance that cost more than 1,000 euros and that promised to make cooking easier, realizing that even with a robot, you have to peel, clean and wait. The Thermomix requires planning that the average user no longer has. Selling the robot is the final act of giving in to immediacy. The decline of cuisine brings with it the death of a sacred ritual in Spain: the after-dinner meal and the traditional structure of meals. According to the Gastrometer 2025 by Just Eathe delivery It is no longer a weekend treat but has become part of the work and family routine. But the most alarming thing is how we eat. The Ministry of Agriculture confirms an extreme simplification: Half of the meals we eat during the week are already single dishes. In the case of dinners, the figure skyrockets: 7 out of 10 times we have a single dish for dinner. We have eliminated the first, the second and the dessert. The dining room table, that piece of furniture that once presided … Read more

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