Mobile Tech & Gadgets

Downhill, Deals of the day and more MediaMarkt bargains in technology and entertainment, today February 1

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MediaMarkt right now has a good assortment of campaigns and offers that will be available until February 2. There is plenty to choose from technology and entertainmentso in this article we are going to review some of the best deals that we can find during the remainder of the weekend. Google Pixel 10 Pro by 849 eurosone of the best prices we have seen in the store. Fire TV Stick 4K Plus by 39.99 euroshe dongle from Amazon that right now has the best quality-price ratio. Samsung TQ65Q6FAAUXXC by 499 eurosa television with a 65-inch QLED screen. ‘Monster Hunter Stories 3‘ by 54.99 euros When you add it to your cart, the new video game in the iconic Capcom saga. Samsung HW-Q990F/ZF by 739 eurosone of the brand’s most complete sound bars. Google Pixel 10 Pro Most of the offers we see on Google phones are in 128 GB configurations, but this time it is different: the Google Pixel 10 Pro 256 GB has now dropped to 849 euros. It is an excellent mobile phone for photography, but it is also worth mentioning that stands out for its design and softwarewhich will be updated for many years. Google Pixel 10 Pro (256GB) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Fire TV Stick 4K Plus There are quite a few Amazon devices that have dropped in price in this last week, being the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus one of the best in terms of dongle of the brand. By 39.99 euroswe are talking about a good device that plays 4K content and is compatible with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmosthus offering a good image and sound experience on compatible televisions. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Samsung TQ65Q6FAAUXXC If you want to renew your television and are looking for a good screen at a reasonable price, the Samsung TQ65Q6FAAUXXC Right now it is on sale at MediaMarkt for a price of 499 euros. It is a television with a 65-inch QLED screen that is compatible with HDR10+ and Q-Symphony. Plus, it works with assistants Alexa and Google Assistant. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links ‘Monster Hunter Stories 3’ There is still a little more than a month left for its launch set for March 13, but ‘Monster Hunter Stories 3 Twisted Reflection‘ can now be reserved at a discount: by adding it to the MediaMarkt basket, you stay for 54.99 euros. This is the third installment based on the monster hunting saga, which in this case relies on turn-based gameplay that allows you to tame the many creatures in the game. Monster Hunter Stories 3 Twisted Reflection The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Samsung HW-Q990F/ZF Among MediaMarkt’s Offers of the Day, the price of the Samsung HW-Q990F/ZFa sound bar that has dropped to the 739 euros. It is one of the brand’s best models that comes with a pair of speakers and a wireless subwoofer, in addition to the sound bar itself. It incorporates a 23 speaker system at 11.1.4 channelsit is compatible with wireless Dolby Atmos and has both WiFi and Bluetooth as well as a pair of HDMI ports. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links 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 | MediaMarkt and Compradicción (header), Google, Amazon, Samsung, Capcom In Xataka | The best mobile phones, we have tested them and here are their analyzes In Xataka | Best Amazon Fire TV. Which one to buy and recommended models to convert your TV into a smart TV depending on use

The time it takes to get to a highway anywhere in Spain, on a revealing map

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Faced with the pressing housing problem in Spain In large cities, one of the simplest solutions for those who can afford it is to leave stressed centers such as Madrid or Barcelona in search of more accessible municipalities and properties. How much? It depends on your budget, what your work is like and what the destination location offers you in such objective terms as services and infrastructure. And there is one essential to move: the distance to a main road. I speak with knowledge of the facts: this was a key factor when choosing a municipality to buy an apartment months ago. My new location has direct access to the highway and getting from there to my trusted padel club in Pamplona is 10 minutes longer than doing it from my old apartment, located in the center of the Navarrese capital. Although it is not ideal, my pocket has appreciated it and the sacrifice is profitable for me. Now, having chosen an idyllic municipality in the Navarrese Pyrenees would have been a very bad idea in terms of mobility (although bucolic on days like today). That was my personal decision, but given the prices, I know that I am not alone: ​​from buying in the capital to doing so in a municipality in the province there are price variations of up to 131% in Madrid or 126% in Álava, according to the latest Idealista study that collects La Razón. Because if the price of the property in Villagónadas de Abajo is the lowest in the province but it is where Cristo lost his lighter, already such. Well yes: the price differences are abysmal and the communications are too. An x-ray of territorial inequality and Spanish orography This map created by Digital Cartography With data from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, this is evident. The cartography collects the minutes by car to a highway or highway from a good part of the Spanish state (if there are no this type of roads, as happens in Ceuta or Melilla for example, then they do not appear) with information from 2022. To see everything in a more intuitive way, they have used the colors of the traffic light, where green is what can cost you up to 20 minutes and red goes from one hour to 133 minutes in the maroon areas. The access time to a highway or highway in Spain. Digital cartography with data from the Ministry If we superimposed a physical map with a demographic one we would find a clear diagnosis of red zones in critical areas such as the Asturian massif and the Pyrenees, the muga with Portugal (especially in Zamora, Salamanca and western Extremadura), the Iberian System and the maximum expression of “Empty Spain” in the south of Teruel, the north of the basin and areas of Guadalajara or the Betic Systems. We know that in communications Spain It is a centralized state with Madrid as the nerve center and the lines of these main roads, although they do not appear on the map, can be intuited. Without going any further, it is not too difficult to imagine where the A-2 goes to Barcelona or the A-6 to A Coruña. That is the first clue as to why we find such an uneven map: the radial network model, which leaves enormous gaps in peripheral areas that are not linked to large state/European corridors. Obviously the extreme orography of the Pyrenees or the Iberian System makes construction difficult on a technical and economic level (it is not that it is not possible to lay out viaducts or tunnels, it is that it makes the cost skyrocket), but the Average Daily Intensity mandates: for a public work to be approved there is a cost-benefit analysis and if an area has a low population density, the ADI is low, making it difficult to justify the investment. On the other hand, there are environmental restrictions: some of these red zones coincide with national parks or protected areas. In this scenario, obtain a Environmental Impact Statement (mandatory in projects of this magnitude) is an impossible mission. The small print. Something that I greatly appreciated when I returned to Navarra is that there is no traffic… compared to Madrid. The rush hour for leaving work or school may be noticeable in a few minutes of delay, but it is light years away from the traffic jams that I have had to suffer in return or bridge operations when I lived in the state capital. Because although in Madrid almost everything is green, in practice those minutes correspond to a distance traveled respecting the limits of the road and assuming fluid traffic. In Xataka | This is the DGT map to visualize where there are active V-16 beacons in Spain. There is another more useful unofficial map In Xataka | Europe’s passenger car industry, in a revealing map that makes it clear who is the real “engine” of the EU Cover | Digital cartography

In 1901, a Spanish man had one of the ideas of the century: invent the remote control before television

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Televisions change, technologies change, but there are interactions that last despite the passage of years, decades and even centuries. An example of this is the remote controller, which has historically allowed us to interact with devices from a distance, although what we currently know is very different from the first concept of remote control. Although televisions did not become more common in the last decades of the 20th century, the concept of the remote controller appeared much earlier. Specifically, in 1901. And a fact that you may not know is that one of the pioneers of the remote control was a Spaniard, the engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo. The controller anticipated the televisions The history of the remote control dates back, as we said, to the first years of the last century. In 1903, the inventor, mathematician and engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo (1852-1936) conceived, built and patented the first remote control in history. He called it Telekino, and as one might thinkIt is far from the controls for televisionsand other devices we see now. Miniaturization was not a reality until much later and the Telekino took up an entire table. Telekino in Abra. Image: Torresquevedo.org Of course, the Telekino was not created with the idea of ​​controlling televisions remotely, which in reality did not become a reality almost until the incorporation of the cathode ray tube (withthe pushfrom Telefunken and other manufacturers). The idea was to control airships without anyone being in danger in the tests, but finally he tried it with boats as they recalled in the written edition ofThe Countryin 2007, when the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recognized the invention by including it in its official list of milestones in the history of engineering. It was the first time that a Spanish creation became part of this list, in which we find inventions by Benjamin Franklin, Alessandro Volta and Guglielmo Marconi among others. Telekino, as you may have deduced, comes fromTV(from ancient Greek, “far”, meaning “at a distance”, “remotely”) andkinein(also from the Greek, “movement”), by the way. IEEE Recognition Plaque. Image: YouTube We already talked about Telekino inXatakaprecisely because of this historical recognition, also to remember that at the time it was not highly praised. In fact, Torres Quevedo himself would abandon the project as he did not receive sufficient support. The valuable legacy of Torres Quevedo One of the prototypes of the Telekino is located in the Torres-Quevedo Museum, in the Higher Technical School of Civil, Canal and Port Engineers of the Polytechnic University of Madrid. And thanks to a short (virtual) visit to that museum for the centenary of one of the Spanish engineer’s inventions we can discover more of them, also very relevant. Torres Quevedo is credited with nothing more and nothing less than the first Spanish airship, as well as the first ferry suitable for transporting people (or in other words, an open cable car for people). The invention was patented in 1887, and it would not be until 30 years later when it materialized, being launched on Mount Ulía in San Sebastián in 1907. Compensation also came in the form of international export, since the system reached neither more nor less thanto Niagara Falls. Thus, the callSpanish AerocarIt continues to operate today in the well-known region and celebrated its centenary in 2016, having completed more than 10 million transports without recording incidents. Torres Quevedo was also a precursor of modern computing with his Ajedrecista, considered the first chess computer game, and the electromechanical arithmometer, a calculator accompanied by a typewriter, a precursor to digital calculators. In Xataka | In 1925, procrastination was already a problem and someone found the definitive solution: the isolation helmet. In Xataka | We have been fascinated for years by the geniuses who come up with revolutionary innovations out of thin air. It’s always been smoke (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news In 1901, a Spanish man had one of the ideas of the century: invent the remote control before television was originally published in Xataka by Anna Marti .

China urgently needed a train station, so it was built in nine hours with 1,500 workers and 23 excavators.

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Anyone who has done a work at home will have already experienced firsthand that they know when it starts but not when it ends, something that happens in domestic works and that we also see from time to time with public works. And large infrastructures take time, although we have seen real records such as this 10-story building in just 29 hours. Of course, in China. Precisely there, in the city of Longyan in the southeast of the country, is where they have made a train station overnight. Literal. And although the work is a milestone in 2026, the reality is that this reform in record time took place in January 2018 and that left Elon Musk with his mouth openwhich had no qualms in stating that “China’s progress in advanced infrastructure is more than 100 times faster than that of the United States.” As China Central Television narratedat 6:05 p.m. the station closed and only 17 minutes later the remodeling kicked off in an action that more than a construction seems like a synchronized swimming number until 3:30 in the morning, the time of the end. A kind of “open heart operation” in public works Only nine hours for a project that, although it is true that it was not a new station from scratch, was not exactly small: it consisted of a remodeling and connection of roads between a new high-speed line between Longyan and Nanping and three existing railway lines. Furthermore, they decided to do it at night so as not to interrupt daily rail traffic. Because at 6:22 p.m., 1,500 workers grouped in seven units were executing seven different simultaneous tasks, such as Zhan Daosong tolddeputy manager of China Tiesiju Civil Engineering Group, China’s leading railway construction company. To carry it out, they relied on seven trains and 23 excavators. Thus, while one group installed monitoring and signage equipment, another paved the land. The millimeter precision and rapport is such that Reminiscent of open heart surgery but transferred to public works: with workers distributed over a range of 1.5 kilometers in their assigned places and 23 coordination teams to ensure compliance with deadlines and processes. Something like this is not done overnight, but before the day of truth They did six large-scale drills to prepare. The decision to do it at night has an explanation: not to interrupt the day’s rail traffic because in fact, at 1:56 in the morning they already had the first test train accessing the new station. Because they had also estimated a verification period of three and a half hours in which three other trains accessed the facilities. At 5:53 in the morning the rehearsals were over: K297, a normal passenger train, arrived at the station. As impressive as the speed of the project, which involves enormous planning work and prior studies, was the achievement achieved: reducing the travel time between both cities from seven hours to just an hour and a half thanks to the high-speed train that travels along the track at 200 km/h. In Xataka | 100% autonomous factories where it is not necessary to turn on the light: China is already considering manufacturing cars only with robots in 2030 In Xataka | Tesla’s dwarfs continue to grow: the Model 3 is no longer the premium electric that sells the most in China Cover | CGNT

Testing the first light bulb in 1879, Edison came across a material that would be discovered 125 years later: the prodigious graphene.

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Edison has been one of the most prolific inventors of history. In fact, while he was looking for a way to make the light bulb, he carried out an exhaustive materials science experiment: tried more than 6,000 organic materials before decant by the carbonized bamboo filament. eye to the old patent no. 223,898 because it has all the necessary ingredients for the recipe. Tremendous Edison spoiler. He had, without knowing it, set up a primitive nanotechnological reactor to obtain graphene. That same graphene on which Philip Russell Wallace would theorize 20 years after the inventor’s death and 125 years before Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for isolating it with the duct tape method. Or so he has discovered a recent study from Rice University. The prodigious graphene. Graphene is an allotrope of carbon that has a two-dimensional structure of atoms woven into a hexagonal network. Beyond this curiosity, graphene is an amazing material: it is 200 times stronger than steel but much lighter (airbrush, even lighter than air). It conducts electricity and heat better than any known metal. If we also take into account that it is almost transparent and very flexible, we have a prodigious material for technology. Without going any further, for semiconductors. It could also be used to improve roads or for responsive robotic tissues. And there’s a trick: when its layers are somewhat disordered and not stuck together like a block, they are much easier to separate. This is what Edison achieved unintentionally. Edison’s recipe. He turbostratic graphene can be produced by applying a voltage to a carbon-based material until it reaches a temperature of 2,000 to 3,000 °C, known as Joule heating instant. But what Edison had in his power was to light one of his newly patented light bulbs. Unlike the current ones, theirs had carbon-based filaments, more specifically bamboo. When you flipped the switch, the filament heated up and produced… light and maybe graphene. Account Lucas Eddy, the paper’s lead author, was looking for ways to mass-produce graphene with accessible, affordable materials and tried everything from arc welders to trees that had been struck by lightning. Then he remembered the light bulb. Edison’s patent It was a magnificent scheme to reproduce the experiment. Of course, it was difficult for him to find Edison-style light bulbs with carbon filaments and not tugsten. Then he only had to apply power to 110 volts and turn on the switch for 20 seconds. If you go too far, graphite can form instead of graphene. Why is it important. To begin with, because until now we thought that to obtain this prodigious material we had to resort to 21st century technology, but no: there were conditions to do so in the 19th century. On the other hand, it validates Joule heating as an efficient and scalable way to generate high-quality graphene from cheap carbon sources. And why not, because it opens the doors to reviewing other scientific experiments in history: who knows if other nanomaterials have not been synthesized by chance? under the microscope. Using the lens of an optical microscope, the research team was able to see that the carbon filament had gone from dark gray to a shiny silver. A visual change that predicted the suspicions that I ended up certifying with the Raman spectroscopywhich uses lasers to identify substances through their atoms with high precision: it was turbostratic graphene. While Edison experimented to create a light bulb for everyday use he was able to produce the wonderful material of the future (of today’s future). Obviously there is no way to know for sure what happened in their Menlo Park laboratories because even if the original light bulb were available for analysis, any graphene produced would probably have converted to graphite within a few hours. In Xataka | Electrocute elephants to win a war or how anything went in the fight between Tesla and Edison In Xataka | Don’t call it graphene, call it “goldeno”: this is the new material that is achieved using a peculiar Japanese forging technique Cover | Image of Thomas Edison, ca. 1918–1919. Source: National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), United States and HY ART

The regulations allow you to take home a product from three weeks ago

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We go to the supermarket, we pick up a package of eggs where it says in big letters “Category A” or “Fresh Eggs” and we assume that those chickens They laid the eggs a couple of days ago. But the reality is very different, and the legal and biological sections follow very different paths. And it’s something easy to see if we look closely. on best-before dates and if we do the necessary math we will see that what the law considers “fresh” can take almost a month in the world. Many doubts. Seeing this, the most logical questions we can have in this case is if it is safe to consume or even if it is legal. And the reality is that it is. But there is a small print in the 28-day regulations that you need to know before deciding whether to make a curdled tortilla or homemade mayonnaise. The 28 day clock. To understand what we are buying, we must first go to the BOE and to European regulations. In this case, category A eggs —those that we usually find on the supermarket shelves— have a very specific commercial life cycle. According to marketing regulations, these eggs must be classified, marked and packaged within 10 days of laying. But this is where we have the key information: the best before date is set in a maximum of 28 days from laying. That is, the law allows an egg to be legally sold and consumed up to four weeks after it comes out of the hen. In this way, as they collect the labeling technical guides and AESAN itselfthat is the deadline to supply them to the consumer. Therefore, under the legal umbrella, “fresh” does not mean “placed yesterday.” Means “within the 28 day window“. How to know the real age. This is where we find the picaresque and calculation that many popularizers like the doctor Fernández Viso has shared on his TikTok account. In this case, the packaging rarely says the “selling date”, because it is not mandatory, if the ‘best before’ date appears. And with this you can do a kind of reverse engineering. To do this, let’s give an example. If we are in the supermarket on January 8 and see a container of eggs with the best before date of January 18, the operation is quite simple. The deadline in this case is 28 days after placement, and if they expire on January 18, it means they were placed around December 21. That is why nothing fresh. Its meaning. Although originally this time frame was limited to 21 days in order to guarantee proximity and consumption a little more, the reality is that it was changed to 28 days to reduce food waste. It is not that the egg magically stays “ultra fresh” until the 28th, it is that it has been prioritized that they do not end up in the trash if they are still suitable for consumption. The truly fresh one. There is a category that is much more recent, and it is the one that says “extra” or “extra fresh” on its packaging. The EU Delegated Regulation specifies that this term can only be used during the first 9 days after laying. If you see that label, you are guaranteed real freshness. If you don’t see it, you are looking at a standard egg that can be from 10 to 28 days old. The problem is that, in the consumer’s head, the term “fresh” on the shelf is interpreted loosely. Good business practice guides recognize this disparity: the legality of labeling does not match what people intuitively understand by freshness. Furthermore, the common commercial practice of mixing lots on shelves, which is legal as long as traceability is respectedmakes us lose the perception of the exact age of each container of eggs. Food safety. Knowing the age of the egg is not only a question of gastronomic quality, it is a safety issue. The AESAN and the EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) warn that extending the storage time increases the risk of Salmonella poisoning. Risk mitigation. This is a risk that grows exponentially the longer eggs are stored, both in the store and at home. Therefore, the experts’ recommendations are clear, and depend on the calendar we follow. Specifically, for cooking, that is, for the egg to be well set or cooked, it can be rushed until the best-before date without problem. But for raw consumption such as mayonnaise or tartars, freshness is critical. In this case, it is recommended to use eggs that are more than two weeks away from expiration. Images | Jakub Kapusnak In Xataka | Having a cup of coffee as soon as you wake up seems like a great idea. Science has something to say about it

What Zealand explains about climate change

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For decades, geography books taught us that the world was divided into six continents. In 2017, the scientific community made official the existence of a new “intruder” of colossal dimensions: Zealandia. With an extension of 4.9 million square kilometers —equivalent to the entire European Union—, this mass of continental crust separated from Australia and Antarctica about 80 million years ago. What makes Zealandia an absolute anomaly is not just its size, but how well it has been hidden. Unlike the rest of the continents, 94% of its body is sunk under the Pacific. Only its highest peaks manage to show their heads, forming what we step on today such as New Zealand and New Caledonia. This geographical timidity kept it as a “ghost continent” until technology allowed us, finally, to pierce the abyss. The mission to rescue the past from the abyss. Everything changed in the summer of 2017. Expedition 371 of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) It was not a pleasure cruise: the ship JOIDES Resolution set sail with a mission almost surgical. For two months, 32 scientists worked piecework, in 24-hour shifts, to extract “witnesses” from the seabed: cylinders of rock and sediment recovered almost five kilometers deep. These sediment cores are not just mud and stone. They are, in the words of paleontologist Laia Alegret, in statements collected by The Conversation, authentic “libraries of climate history”. The findings were surprising, despite being under the sea today, the scientists found pollen from land plants and spores, in addition to thousands of microfossils of organisms They only live in very warm and shallow waters. This confirmed that Zealandia was not always an underwater world, but had periods of land covered in vegetation. The “mirror” of future climate change. The relevance of Zealandia goes far beyond a geological curiosity. According to researchers from Rice Universitythis submerged continent constitutes a “critical region” for climate science, precisely because it is one of the places where current climate models show the greatest deficiencies. If models fail to accurately reproduce Zealand’s past climate, they warn, their predictions of future global warming may be incomplete or biased. The focus of attention is placed especially on the Eocene, between 53 and 41 million years ago, a time in which the Earth functioned as a true “greenhouse planet”. Carbon dioxide concentrations were much higher than today and there were no permanent polar caps. Studying this period in Zealand allows scientists to “look back at our future,” offering a glimpse of how the planet will respond to conditions extreme greenhouse effect greenhouse effects similar to those we could achieve in the coming centuries. One of the hottest spots. One of the most disturbing findings was the identification of episodes of rapid warming—rapid in geological terms, that is, on scales of thousands of years—during which ocean currents changed unexpectedly. The sediments reveal the arrival of deep water masses originating near Antarctica, a phenomenon difficult to explain in a warm world without permanent ice. This discovery, underlined by The Conversationchallenges the current understanding of how heat is redistributed in the oceans and forces us to rethink some basic assumptions of global ocean circulation. The violent birth in the “Ring of Fire.” Zealand’s history is one of a geological “roller coaster” driven by plate tectonics. According to the results published by the expedition directorsRupert Sutherland and Gerald Dickens, the continent was sculpted by two major tectonic events: The Great Divorce: First, it was torn from Australia and Antarctica 85 million years ago, stretching and thinning until it sank. The Resurrection of Subduction: About 50 million years ago, something “globally significant” happened. What scientists call a “massive subduction rupture” began, giving rise to the Pacific Ring of Fire. In simplified terms, this process caused huge portions of the seafloor to curve, parts of Zealand to temporarily rise above sea level, and then the continent to sink back more than a kilometer to its current configuration. It was not a local phenomenon. These tectonic forces altered the direction and speed of movement of many tectonic plates across the planet, in one of the largest geodynamic readjustments of the last 80 million years. Microfossils and the response of life. To reconstruct these movements with surgical precision, scientists they rely on benthic foraminifera. These single-celled shelled organisms are “diagnostics of the deep.” By analyzing its remains in the ship’s laboratories, researchers can determine whether a rock stratum belonged to a shallow beach or an abyssal plain. Furthermore, complementary technical studies, such as those presented in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology and marine Micropaleontologyanalyze the biotic response to hyperthermals (peaks of extreme heat). The results indicate that marine life does not react uniformly: the magnitude and speed of warming determine whether ecosystems adapt, reorganize or become stressed. These data are essential to improve predictive models of current climate change. A sea of ​​discoveries at risk. Zealandia’s exploration has shown that continents remain to be discovered and that the ocean floor holds the answers to the most pressing questions about our climate survival. However, science depends not only on curiosity, but on investment. Despite the scientific success of the 2017 expedition, there are countries that later do not intervene adequately due to lack of payments. This leaves future expeditions in the air that could continue to unravel the mysteries of this seventh submerged continent, a territory that, although hidden under thousands of meters of water, has a lot to say about the air we will breathe tomorrow. Image | Unsplash and World Data Center for Geophysics & Marine Geology Xataka | For thousands of years, human beings have avoided crossing the Taklamakan Desert. Now China is raising fish there

monitor every move of Russia and China in the Arctic

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First World War II and then the Cold War turned Greenland into a magnificent surveillance platform belonging to Denmark but granting the United States a VIP pass that it now wants to switch to annexation. Because that piece of frozen land (less and less) has rare earthsbut the most attractive thing has always been its strategic location. Old radars are not enough. The melting of Greenland has opened new sea routes that Russia and China have welcomed with open arms. the advantages it offers compared to traditional routes. Of the 15 military bases that the US had in Greenland in 1945, now only one remains: the Pituffik Air Base or Thule. And a problem: outdated and insufficient systems to monitor what happens there, such as acknowledged the Pentagon first and the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies after. So they have gotten to work to solve it: the United States Department of Defense agency responsible for the development of cutting-edge technologies for military use (DARPA) has requested a new technology collected in Frosty. This program aims to develop new radars that operate reliably in the harsh Arctic environment. DARPA is seeking proposals capable of detecting aerial targets at least 75 kilometers away with a detection probability greater than 90%. The coveted new polar “silk road”. The launch of this new radar is important because it would mean having a real lookout in the Arctic and on the new route that has appeared so that the great world powers can gain commercial and military advantage. China has already made clear what do you want be a “great polar power”“. The immediate advantage is reduce shipping times to Europe from up to 50 days to less than half (on its route through Suez). This recent academic article In its security report, the United States Coast Guard reviews other possible risks such as the expansion of its fishing grounds, access to natural resources for scientific cooperation and mentions the existence of its advanced fleet of modern icebreakers and Chinese submarines capable of operating under the ice. Spoiler: With current technology, they are difficult to detect from the surface. For Russia, the new passage route that is being opened is a threat to the current North Sea route, which operates under its jurisdiction. Furthermore, Greenland is part of the GIUK bottleneck (shared with the United Kingdom and Iceland) that its northern fleet must pass through to reach the open waters of the Atlantic, at the gates of the United States. We are talking about nuclear submarines as advanced as the Borei-A class and the Yasen-M. Also at stake is the sovereignty of the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain range that links it to Greenland, which could eventually give it exclusive rights to vast hydrocarbon reserves. And that’s without talking about the massive rare earth deposits The technical challenge of being so far north. The northern lights are very beautiful, but they generate a huge amount of electromagnetic noise when they occur. Since the Earth’s magnetic field lines also converge at the North Pole, the ionosphere is unstablegenerating scintillation that corrupts the GPS signal and absorption in the polar cap. In short, conventional radars not only fall short, but sometimes also go blind. The DARPA wish list. What the US agency wants It is essentially transforming the electromagnetic chaos of the Arctic into a detection tool with a brain in the form of processing software with advanced algorithms that dynamically “filter” interference from geomagnetic storms to isolate potential threats. Furthermore, it would not be a single giant antenna, but rather a mesh of small mobile nodes that share data to triangulate targets. These are the radars you request: A passive environmental noise radar that does not simply emit a signal and wait for the bounce, but uses natural radio frequency noise from the environment to detect objects. That is, it does not treat noise as an interference, but as a source. If a ship passes through that noise, it generates a disturbance that can be detected. Radars Over-the-Horizon that, unlike line-of-sight ones, which travel in a straight line and collide with the curvature of the Earth, these are capable of bouncing waves off the ionosphere to be able to detect objects beyond the Earth’s curvature. They are indicated to detect maritime vessels or aircraft flying at low altitude, thus evading conventional radars. An externally illuminated radar with high-power transmitters located at great distances as power sources, like Alaska’s HAARPwhich allows objects to be illuminated indirectly. For when. As mark your roadmapthe receipt of industry proposals for the tender ended on January 30 and the next 18 months will focus on algorithm development, offline implementation and laboratory testing. Between 2027 and 2028, the integration of the software into real hardware would take place, with field tests in Point Barrow and Poker Flat, Alaska. Therefore, to see this new and ambitious radar network in action we will have to wait until 2028. In Xataka | Russia and China already had an advantage over the US in the Arctic. After Greenland, it has multiplied In Xataka | Now that Europe has sent its troops to Greenland, a question emerges that no one wants to ask: what happens if the US invades it? Cover | JoAnne Castagna / US Army Corps of Engineers (Public domain)

This new short is inspired by his science fiction work

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The comics and animation of the eighties are the key aesthetics of a project that, if all goes well, will see the light of day soon and that comes with a label well known to Spanish fans: that of Alfonso Azpirithe much-missed artist who gave visual form to the great successes of the Golden Age of Spanish soft in games for dynamicTopo and other companies. His unmistakable style is part of the DNA of a very promising project: ‘Love Story’ The origin. To trace the origin of this idea we must go back to a tiny science fiction story written by Carlos Buiza (an essential figure in the development of Spanish science fiction in the sixties as co-creator of the magazine Nueva Dimensión) and which was illustrated by Azpiri still taking his first steps, in 1972. Buiza had already obtained some fame with a story, ‘El asfalto’, which Chicho Ibáñez Serrador adapted in an episode of ‘Stories to keep you awake‘ which achieved notable relevance. In 1972, Buiza published ‘Love Story’ in an issue of ‘Triunfo’ magazine dedicated to science fiction, along with an illustrated header of an Azpiri still far from his days of fame but in whose lines the future genius was already guessed. Later, Azpiri would transform the story into a comic, which appeared on the author’s compilation album ‘Pesadillas’, published in 1985. The influences. ‘Historia de amor’ will become a short film directed by Jose Luis Quirós and David Díaz-Guerra, but it takes a leap in its visual references from the seventies, focusing on a style more typical of the eighties, when Azpiri, already in full command of his art, published comics such as ‘Lorna’, ‘Mot’, ‘Nightmares’ or ‘The Vagabonds of Infinity’. The authors also mention authors of the time such as Moebius or Frank Miller, and animes such as ‘Ghost in the Shell’, ‘Evangelion’ and ‘Cowboy Bebop’ as key influences. What is it about? AZ, a dreamy alien on a barren planet, Polkj, is kidnapped by humans. But he wants to discover the secrets of the universe, life and love before they experiment on him. The connection that arises with humans clashes with the objective of these invaders: that AZ be infected with a virus that will exterminate his species and allow humans to escape from a dying planet Earth. Who is behind. ‘Love Story’ is co-directed by José Luis Quirós and David Díaz-Guerra. The first has been twice nominated and winner of the Goya Prize, and is behind very personal works, such as ‘The tower of time’. Next to him is the Runik Animation studio, which has collaborated in the making of films such as ‘Planet 51’, ‘Catch the Flag’, ‘Fantastic Beasts’, ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Pacific Rim’. As for Díaz-Guerra, this is his first short film as a director, but he has experience as a screenwriter and, significantly, as a theoretical physicist, which guarantees a very stimulating approach to the science fiction that is a core part of the short. How will it be done? The short will use 3D animation as a basis for modeling and lighting, working in real time with Unreal Engine. There will be motion capture to reduce costs and, finally, traditional animation sequences for selected moments. All of this will be combined with selected sequences drawn with watercolors, in search of a style with a nostalgic touch that goes back to Azpiri’s comics. How much and for when. The estimated budget of the project, according to what the creators of ‘Love Story’ tell us, is 50,000 euros, of which they already have 10%. There is a long road ahead of searching for financing to reach the planned goal of releasing in the fourth quarter of 2026. At this moment, Runik Animation, together with producer Juan Nieto and Nvidia (which collaborates by providing hardware to the team) are in the initial phase of developing the script and storyboards. In Xataka | 30 years of ‘Navy Moves’, when Dinamic made the best game of the year in the entire world

How technology hacked psychology so we can’t put down our cell phones

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You’ve spent two hours, three, in an impossible position looking at your cell phone in the middle of a kind of trance. A notification made you unlock it and after jumping from one application to another for a few minutes, you fell into the black hole of the scroll infinite. You could hardly say what you have seen or if you have enjoyed any of the dozens of videos that have passed you by. What perverse mechanism has been capable of hijack your attention for hours? The first thing you have to know is that not even rats escape this spell. In the 1940s, a psychologist named BF Skinner tried to find out how our brain’s reward system works by studying the reactions of laboratory rats with an experiment: the animals learned that if they pressed a lever, they got food. Easy, but it gets complicated. The most interesting part of the experiment, known as skinner boxand the one that can most be compared to the time drain that social networks are is the following part: Skinner stopped rewarding the rats every time they pressed the lever and started giving them food sometimes and sometimes not. Was this enough to discourage them? Far from it: they had tried the benefits of intermittent reinforcement. The logic of intermittent reinforcement For rats, the possibility of food was enough, just as you have only received interesting notifications a few times out of the many times you look at your cell phone, or only one of the publications you have compulsively consumed has satisfied your curiosity. Intermittent reinforcement is a psychological pattern that is characterized because rewards are given unpredictably, so that it creates a hook and strong attachment. “The mechanisms behind social networks are the same as those of slot machines,” David Ezpeleta, neurologist and vice president of the Spanish Society of Neurology, explains to Xataka. He intermittent booster It is also a vice of toxic human relationships, where affection, attention, and validation are marketed. In the case at hand, both the rats with the food and you with the likes, DMsor finding something you want to buy, get a hit of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is released in pleasure-related situations, when the random reward finally appears. “They are short-duration, high-intensity stimuli with the possibility of reward. For every ten times we look at the networks, perhaps we only receive a reward on one. And that possibility is more addictive than a sure reward ten times,” he points out. The first thing we do when we wake up, the last thing we do before going to sleep. (Unsplash) “Technologies are capable of doing anything to keep you reading headlines, clicking links, adding favorites, commenting posts, retweeting articles, looking for the perfect GIF to answer a hater“, writes Marta Peirano in The enemy knows the system (Debate). The text is from 2019, and although some behaviors may have changed since then (who answers with GIFs anymore?) and neither TikTok nor the reels still dominated our attention, the mechanisms that go behind our hitch They are the same since Skinner. There are more and more people who have a profile on some platform and use them for more activities. They are a source of socialization, entertainment and information: 49% of Spaniards between 16 and 30 years old say inform of what happens through social networks, especially Instagram, according to the latest Eurobarometer youth survey. Don’t leave the platform It is precisely this platform that has grown the most in Spain in the last year, followed by Tik Tok. The oldest ones like X (Twitter) and Facebook are in decline although the latter is still the second most used (after Instagram), according to a report from the CNMC. Algorithms are the heart of this design. They are a set of hypercomplex, changing and opaque mathematical operations that decide what you see. They are not neutral or “objective”: they are machine learning systems that select and prioritize content that maximizes user interaction. That is, the algorithm observes what you devote the most attention to, and repeats that pattern to show you more of the same. Social media algorithms have the ability to modify ideas, behavior patterns and, in some cases, contribute to the radicalization of thought, the polarization and to conflict: visceral reactions (anger, fear, indignation) generate more clicks, shares and comments than other types of content. A study published in the journal Science shows that small changes in what is prioritized in a feed can accelerate feelings of political polarization in a very short time, evidencing how the technology behind the algorithm not only organizes content, but also shapes attitudes and emotions. And what purpose does your anger serve them? Regardless of whether or not there is a black hand behind it that wants to direct our attention and our time to a certain focus, the main function of this machinery is to keep you within the current application. Don’t feel the need to consult a website, specialists or an encyclopedia: attention time is the economic value that is sold to advertisers. Can we talk about addiction? Another phenomenon that greatly encourages time to slip away between applications is the so-called Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), whereby it seems that if we do not see everything that happens we feel that we are not part of the conversation, generating problems such as anxiety and giving rise to a continuous and compulsive connection, driving dependence on device platforms. But can we talk about addiction to social networks? For Ezpeleta, “you can talk about addiction when you need the stimulus and, when you withdraw it, anxiety appears.” And at least two important elements are needed: opportunity and habituation. (Unsplash) Each of these apps that fight for your time have something in common: they are on the same device, one that you use to wake up and that is the last thing you look at before going to sleep. For many people it is also a work tool, … Read more

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