Mobile Tech & Gadgets

There are exactly five things that you 100% haven’t dreamed of. And science already knows why

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He dream world It has its own rules. It is a place where the impossible seems to be the routine, but, paradoxically, some of the most mundane tasks in our lives become impossible to appear in our dreams. And this is something that can cause us many questions about why we have not dreamed of some specific things. The examples. We warn you that this is something that can break your head, because the question is obligatory: have you ever tried to read a text in a dream? (if you remember) o Have you taken out your phone to discover an incomprehensible interface? All this is not a coincidence, because in reality there are some things that we can never dream like we all expected (even if they are very real dreams). It has an explanation. science has several reasons in his lap to convince us why elements of modern life such as the smartphone or computer interfaces have little place in our dreams. Everything focuses on the fact that during the REM sleep phase the activity in the prefrontal networks of the brain are greatly reduced. And it is precisely here where executive control and language are ‘stored’. In this way, if during sleep these neurons are ‘asleep’, then we will not be able to read a text correctly or even hold a smartphone in our hands. When we sleep, it seems that we don’t want to work or be using our cell phone. This is because in this time range the activity of the limbic area, related to the emotional and visual part, is triggered. This results in the content of dreams leaning towards the associative, visual and emotional, rather than tasks that require a great analytical focus such as operating a complex interface. In this way, the material of our waking life is not literally copied from dreams, but rather is integrated in a selective and transformed way, prioritizing emotional charge over functional fidelity. The nightmare of reading. The same neurocognitive principle that we have seen is the one that explains another of the best-known phenomena: the inability to read texts stably. What is basically caused is that the characters literally ‘move’ or distort because the language networks are not being stimulated as much. This applies equally to numbers, mathematical calculations, or the simple task of looking at the time on a digital clock. Stimuli that require fine symbolic precision tend to become illegible or change constantly. Although some studies with lucid dreamers have shown that basic operations can be performed under experimental conditions, outside the laboratory, the stability of the symbols is almost non-existent. No smell or taste. While sight and hearing dominate the dreamscape, other sensory modalities are virtually absent. Systematic studies based on sleep diaries are consistent in showing that olfactory and gustatory experiences are extremely rare. Figures put its occurrence at approximately 1% of all dream reports. Even in laboratory experiments where the olfactory environment is manipulated during the night, most participants do not report smelling anything in their dreams, reinforcing the idea that chemical senses are a rarity in this state. The mirror. It is another quite common phenomenon in dreams: seeing yourself reflected in the mirror is something almost impossible to achieve. In dreams, this is generated predominantly “top-down”, that is, from the brain networks themselves and with very little or no sensory information from the outside. Because of this, high-resolution details, such as a reflected face, text, or an interface, tend to morph or distort as soon as we try to examine them closely. Visual stability is not the norm. The ancestral content. In stark contrast to the absence of cell phones or books, there is one type of content that seems to be overrepresented: threats. Dreaming about being chased, falling, facing dangers or even elements such as storms or snakes is extremely common. And on many occasions we remember it perfectly because we have precisely woken up at the moment sweating or with our heart pounding. This supports the known “Threat Simulation Hypothesis” (TST), proposed by philosopher Antti Revonsuo. This theory suggests that dreams could have an evolutionary function: serving as virtual “training” to rehearse how to respond to danger in real life. However, the scientific literature itself indicates that this hypothesis, although plausible and supported, is also the subject of debate and presents mixed results when compared between different cultures and environments. Images | Shane In Xataka | Years ago we discovered that our ancestors’ dreams were not like ours. There are now thousands of people trying to introduce biphasic sleep into their lives.

Your family tree is on every street

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Madrid, like most large modern metropolises, has been expanding by annexing population centers bordering. Each of these annexed towns has its own history and, some of them, leave curiosities such as that their streets are witnesses of the family tree of the family that owns the land on which an entire district would be built that in 2023 was home to some 143,000 inhabitants. The Usera district, located south of Madrid, is known today for its multicultural atmosphere, especially for the celebration of Chinese New Year organized by the Chinese community resident in the area. However, not many people have noticed a peculiarity in the names of their streets. A surname is repeated insistently in his street map: Usera. The reason is that, paraphrasing the writer and journalist Nieves ConcostrinaUsera, before being a neighborhood, was a gentleman. We can add that, in addition, he had a lot of family. The story of a family with a zip code In Usera’s street map we can find names like Nicolás Usera, Mariano Usera, Marina Usera, Luis Usera, Amparo Usera, Gabriel Usera and Isabelita Usera, all of them, as is more than evident, pointing out that the name Usera was not born by chance. It all dates back to the end of the 19th century, when José del Río, known as “Uncle Sordillo”, a landowner from the south of Madrid, left some land north of Villaverde to his daughter, Carmen del Río Fernández. This rich heiress married Marcelo Usera in 1904, the son of a fallen bourgeois family who had not long ago returned from ill-fated Cuba. Marcelo Usera had joined military service, like so many other young people of the time, where he continued in his military career until 1924 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. At the same time, the young Usera had already proven to be skilled in management, obtaining recognition with the livestock activities on the lands that his wife had inherited. As a curious note and examples of how much Marcelo Usera was prospering with the management of his wife’s assets, the Royal Academy of History collect that Alfonso A “Salamanca neighborhood” for the people However, despite this livestock success, the lands located south of Madrid were not profitable enough to be dedicated to cultivation. Inspired by the Marquis of Salamanca and its urban project that gave rise to the stately neighborhood of Salamanca, Usera decided to dedicate those lands little given to cultivation as a starting point for a settlement for a new working-class neighborhood with houses affordable for workers. Marcelo Usera Public School, built on land donated by Marcelo Usera Usera would take advantage of the facilities offered by the so-called “Cheap Houses Law” of 1911. Under this law, the landowner obtained tax exemptions and the transformation of rural land into developable land was facilitated, thus increasing the economic benefit due to the revaluation of the land. In this way, by promoting the construction of cheaper houses, he would not incur the economic problems that the Marquis of Salamanca’s project faced. As stated the portal of Telemadridthe first colony that the rich landowner planned was called “Colonia Salud y Ahorro”, although it finally ended up being called “Colonia Moscardó”. The urban development of this first colony followed the guidelines of the workers’ colonies of the time. A main street crossed by small perpendicular streets. A street map turned into a family tree As a soldier, Usera began naming his streets with the names of illustrious soldiers, mainly belonging to the Legion that he had founded years before. Millán-Astray. However, he soon ran out of military names, so he began to draw on his own family tree and those close to him. In this way, the Usera street map thus became a small family tribute: the main artery would be Marcelo Usera Street, which with its almost two kilometers serves as the backbone for the neighborhood, with which streets such as Mariano and Nicolás Usera, Marcelo’s brothers, intersect. Corner of Amparo Usera and Nicolás Usera streets Usera dedicated a square to his wife Carmen del Río. Deserved recognition for the heiress who owned the land on which it stood the new neighborhood. Amparo Usera, goddaughter of Carmen and Marcelo, has a street symbolically located parallel to that of her rich godfather and bordering her godmother’s square. As the content creator highlights selpide in the profile on TikTok from Madrid Secreto, Marcelo was not satisfied with honoring first-degree relatives. Numerous nephews of the landowner and urban planner such as Antonia, Gabriel, Luis, Marina or Isabelita Usera are also now street names. Even Marcelo’s maternal grandmother, Isidra Jiménez, and his sister-in-law, Marina Vega, appear in Usera’s street map. Once the names of the Usera clan had been exhausted, the honors began to be extended to friends of the family, such as Carmen Bruguera, José Anespere and Pablo Ortiz, and even to employees, such as Felipe Díaz who, according to what was published by Infouserawas the administrator who designed the layout of the streets and whose house is preserved there. His daughter, Perpetua Díaz, also has a street in the neighborhood. In addition to honoring his family and friends with street names as if they were little cards, Marcelo Usera also wanted to honor those who were directly involved in the success of the urban project. Among those names, Gumersinda Rosillo and Jesús Montoya stand out, two of the first inhabitants of the new neighborhood. In your videoSélpide also highlighted the name of Máximo Carazo, Usera’s first pharmacist, who provided clean water from his well to the inhabitants of the new neighborhood. Since its urbanization, this corner of the south of Madrid has been characterized by peculiarity of their street namess, who remember on every corner that being born into the right family can make a name continue to be remembered decades later, even if its only merit is having the right surname in the right neighborhood. In Xataka | The 25 richest families in the world, displayed in … Read more

The US industrial plan is crumbling because it is being eaten up by a new sector: that of insatiable AI

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Generative AI is stupid. Is Yann LeCun’s opinionone of the godfathers of the artificial intelligencewhich has grown tired of how the AI ​​majors seek AGI and it seems that he is going to set up his startup to achieve it. To make AI more “smart” you have to train it, and for that you have to build data centers. And boy is it being done. To the point that there are already those who calculate that the rise of AI threatens the plan of reindustrialization of the United States. AI walks or doesn’t walk. The United States has a plan: invest whatever it takes to achieve superintelligence before China. China is also investing, but while what it seeks is a cheap and functional AI to monetize nowwhat the US wants is artificial general intelligence, or AGI. That costs money and, above all, investment in huge data centers. One of the Donald Trump’s election promises During his two campaigns he orbited around the commitment to return millions of jobs to Americans. To achieve this, the opening of new factories on national soil through tax incentives and an “America First” policy that we have seen echo in the rest of the world in the form of tariffs. In Xataka SoftBank has always been characterized by very risky investments. And now he just abandoned NVIDIA Capital redistribution. ANDfactories are opening and reopeningbut perhaps not as many expected. In Bloomberg They point to a devastating fact: spending on new data centers has increased by 18% in the last seven months. This is a colossal increase, but it goes hand in hand with another fact: spending on new factories has fallen 2.5% this year. While large technology companies are committed to building data centers, the policies of recent months, immigration restrictions, withdrawal of support for electric vehicles and tariffs are generating uncertainty in the market that slows down investment aimed at opening other types of factories. Not only are factories not opened, but they are laid off. American manufacturing heavyweights are not only facing the biggest corporate tax hike since the 1990s, but are estimated to have lost 38,000 manufacturing jobs this year. Mostly in sectors such as electronics, automobiles or household appliances. In August alone, 12,000 people lost their jobs (and why don’t we include those from the video game industry here…). In Xataka Quietly, the great AI industry has found a gateway to Europe: the United Kingdom brutal difference. Estimates suggest that the monthly spending of manufacturing plants will situates at $18.8 billion, but while the trend is downward, if we look at spending on AI, we see a radically different scenario. Among the big four technology companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet) $400 billion will go to AI infrastructure in 2025 alone. This is an increase of 60% compared to last year and it is not a peak: it is something sustained. In fact, the investment in 2026 is expected to be higher. There are other companies with their own plans, such as OpenAI what is the most valuable private company and can afford lose 11.5 billion in just the last 90 days which is making an investment of between 400,000 and 500,000 million dollars between 2025 and 2027. {“videoId”:”x9sjece”,”autoplay”:true,”title”:”CHINA is WINNING the TECH WAR because they planned it that way 10 YEARS AGO”, “tag”:”china”, “duration”:”721″} Help Uncle Sam. This AI boom is driving other directly linked sectors, such as the construction of the data centers themselves (someone has to build them as long as they do not use already manufactured facilities) and that of energy. Because these facilities need ridiculous amounts of energy to runso much so that Google wants to take them to space and China is submerging them in the sea to spend less on dissipation. Thus, reopening nuclear power plants or investing in modernizing gas turbines to supply data centers is on the horizon, but it is still something that does not impact the American worker, they are not new factories that need personnel. And part of the money needed is coming from the state itself. Recently, AMD announced that the United States Department of Energy had allocated 1,000 million public to power the infrastructure. And both OpenAI and NVIDIA have dropped the need for the United States to get involved to sustain this new industry, which is already awakening bubble feelings. In Xataka While the US reopens nuclear plants, China has already resolved the great limitation to the development of AI: energy Echoes of the 2008 blow. When we talk about such astronomical figures, it is very difficult to get an idea. It was already happening with the 70,000 million dollars that Microsoft paid to take over Activisionand if we now go to amounts of 400,000 or 500,000 million, things are going to get worse. What is evident is that, as we say, these investments fly over the fear of the bubble bursting. If in July of this year 37% of fund managers believed that we were facing a bubble, in October the figure increase up to 54%, although from the technology industry itself It seems that there is no one who brings sanity. Because it is spending a lot, a lot, more than during the dotcom era which did not end too well for many, and even figures as interested as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, have commented that, while it is true that many are oversizing their investments, it is better than being left behind. Only time will tell how everything turns out, obviously, but the article Bloomberg It closes in a quite interesting way. Arno Hill, former mayor of Lordstown, a municipality where there was a large GM plant already closed and which is now part of SoftBank and Foxconn’s plans to create a data center, says that he does not know what will happen with AI, but that people will always need cars. Image | Google Data Centers In Xataka | The world of AI has a problem: there is no energy … Read more

In 2013 London announced its most impressive skyscraper. Back then, no one could imagine the danger that their crystals had.

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There are many stories of skyscrapers with very different endings than those on the plans, some terriblebut in the city of London one is still remembered for its closeness and chaos generated. The history of the so-called like walkie talkie (20 Fenchurch Street) is that of a building that was born wrapped in promises of modernity and ended up exhibiting one of the most unusual and dangerous design flaws in contemporary architecture. An experiment turned into risk. In the summer of 2013, when its glass façade was almost finished, London discovered to its shock that the skyscraper it had so much promoted had a big problem: acted like a gigantic parabolic lens, concentrating sunlight on a narrow strip of Eastcheap capable of melting plastic, deform metal and produce temperatures higher than those of a domestic oven. It was no joke. Parked cars, like the story that went viral Martin Lindsay’s Jaguarsuffered palpable damage, everyday objects began to melt, passersby spoke of softened shoe soles or feeling burns on their skin. You have to give it a name. The phenomenon was such that it ended up being baptized like death rayand it was not an exaggeration: the reflections generated up to 72 degrees Celsius on the street, creating a real danger for anyone passing by. The press documented the episode with fascination and alarmimmediately turning it into a media attraction that placed the building at the center of unprecedented scrutiny. The Walkie-Talkie (20 Fenchurch Street) A failure announced. Far from being an unforeseeable accident, Walkie Talkie It had been conceived with a concave curvature that any student of elementary physics would have pointed out as capable of concentrating light. Its architect, Rafael Viñoly, recognized shortly after the building had initially been designed with horizontal slats to avoid precisely that effect, but they were removed for budgetary reasons. Viñoly admitted also that the team did not have the appropriate tools to model the phenomenon accurately, limiting itself to approximate calculations who predicted a lower risk. The reality was very different, aggravated by the increase in solar radiation in London in recent years. In fact, the problem It was not unprecedented for the architect: already in Las Vegas his Vdara hotel had been accused to concentrate light until they burn the bathers. The skyscraper under construction And more. But in London the error acquired a incomparable public dimensionbecause it affected not a private complex but one of the busiest streets in the City. The urgent installation of a temporary mesh and the subsequent placement of slats on the facade They solved the problem, but they did not avoid the perception that it was a systemic failure, the result of a design process that had privileged aesthetics and costs over urban safety. The Sky Garden Emblem of a city in transformation. Even before the death ray episode, the Walkie Talkie was subject of criticism. Its silhouette, disproportionate and widened upward to maximize profitable views, stood like a sort of “sore thumb” outside the financial cluster, generating a visual impact that the own urban report had described as “significant damage.” However, the real controversy came after its famous Sky Garden: presented as a public contribution comparable to a vertical park. open to all, it ended up being more of a panoramic restaurant complex with controlled access and mandatory reservations. For many Londoners, it represented a symbol of the privatization drift of urban spaces: a supposed “public garden” that responded more to the logic of corporate luxury than to that of the common good. The complaints were so intense that the City even raised a structural reform of space to bring it closer to what was initially promised. A razzie. In 2015, amidst the accumulation of controversies, the building received the Carbuncle Cup for ugliest building of the year in the United Kingdom, a satirical recognition that underlined the extent to which it had become object of rejection collective. Even Sky News tried to fry an egg under his facade and his name mutated into a meme: Scorchie walkie. Over time, its image became associated not only with an aesthetic problem, but with a chain of opaque decisions and urban planning concessions that many consider a paradigmatic example of how not to manage the integration of a skyscraper into the historical fabric of London. The work of the Imperial The rebirth. Despite its rugged origins, Walkie Talkie has undergone a surprising public rehabilitation. In 2025, twelve years after the incident, visitors are lining up to enjoy from the Sky Gardennow fully integrated into the city’s tourist circuit. But beneath that normalization lies a story that could have been tragic. Later studies from Imperial College showed that, in a different meteorological scenario, the death ray could have cause serious injuryfires in nearby homes and even permanent damage to the skin and eyes. Only the chance combination of clouds and the orientation of the beam (which did not fall at its maximum point at street level) prevented major consequences. A reminder. The architecture was a warning about the critical role of climate modeling, professional responsibility, and the need to subject bolder architectural forms to much more rigorous evaluations. If today the majority of tourists who sgo to the Sky Garden They ignore that the building was about to become an icon of the disaster, it is because the city acted quickly and because luck intervened at the right time. In any case, the technical memory persists: Walkie Talkie remains a reminder that, in a dense, vertical metropolis, a miscalculation can become a massive riskand that contemporary architecture (when its interaction with the environment is neglected) can produce both wonders and invisible dangers. An uncomfortable legacy. In retrospect, the Walkie Talkie has ended up occupying a peculiar place in London’s recent history: it is simultaneously a tourist success, a design failurea case study in urban security and an example of the tensions between public interest and the imperatives of the real estate market. Its trajectory shows that a … Read more

“Cozy games” were going to save us from stress and productivity. They have ended up being true slaves of leisure

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The promise of relaxing and clearing your mind for a few hours is what attracts us of the cozy games: those games that surround us with cute little animals, calm us with a comforting visual palette and give us repetitive and friendly tasks that make us escape from stress. It all seems very bucolic; You inherit a farm, plant flowers, decorate rooms or make dream furniture, with the promise of escaping for a few hours from the daily routine. However, that kind of digital refuge has become the materialization of what you wanted to escape from; in a second Google Calendar full of meetings, in a clone of your 9 to 5 job. And ‘Tiny Bookshop’ reaffirms it to us. Released this summer,’Tiny Bookshop‘ quickly became a hit within the crowded category cozy. The premise is clear: you arrive in a small, charming town with your new traveling bookstore project, which you can decorate with hundreds of possibilities. Through your relationship with the neighbors you manage to sell and recommend a large number of books and, in turn, discover all the secrets of the town. This entire initial point is more than striking for fans of the genre (like yours truly). After more hours than I would like to admit, I realized that I had fallen into the gaming trap again. cozy: dedicate hours and hours at a job. Underneath the adorableness of being able to paint everything in pastel tones or recommend ‘Jane Eyre’ to your clients, in the end you find that you have been searching for objects for a while to increase your sales, check the opening hours for the next day and be on the lookout to replenish the shelves with the right genre. You can call this cozybut I call it emulating another workday; and what’s worse, enjoying it. Recommend all kinds of books at ‘Tiny Bookshop’ At the beginning of the 2010s it became quite fashionable, sponsored by the gurus of Silicon Valleya trend called “gamification of work“Through video game or board game mechanics, missions, points or rewards were added within the daily routine of monotonous work tasks. It is worth asking if the cozy games They have done the opposite path, “trafficking” video games. It is true that, as is often the case with these cozy gamesit’s easy to have fun with them and immerse yourself fully in the story. The interactions are adorable, the characters are cute and they have that air of “afternoon movie” that makes them irresistible; but in the end we cannot ignore the fact that we are replicating tasks that we are supposed to escape from, such as spending hours and hours working. And yes, it all depends on the type of player you are and how you manage the objectives of the game, but the cozy games They rarely have to do with something comfortable or warm. We’ve romanticized even paying a mortgage We are not talking about a specific thing that happens with this new release, completing or performing the daily tasks of this style of games can be the least relaxing thing there is. With the pinnacle of the cozy‘stardew valley‘, the day doesn’t last long between milking the cows, collecting the eggs, making jam and going to the mine to get objects. Furthermore, as if it were real life itself, after all these tasks, you have to put on a good face and interact with your neighbors. Something similar happens with another of the big names in the category such as ‘Animal Crossing‘: you have to give objects to your island companions, cut down trees, plant flowers, fish and be attentive to the day the character who is in charge of buying your collection arrives, in order to get money and pay the mortgage. Yes, a mortgage on a beautiful house, but Tom Nook does not forgive the deadlines. After all this, it would be interesting to check the players’ heart rate when their character goes to sleep after completing all those tasks. Spend the day cutting down trees in ‘Animal Crossing’ By becoming something more mainstream and produce some sales more than substantial Since its rise in the pandemic, there are countless games that adopt the “cozy” to capture the public, even when its dynamics move away from what characterizes the genre. It is worth asking if within this label, the greatest exponents should not be games like ‘Abzu‘ either ‘Unpacking‘, where the “you don’t have to do anything” is strictly followed and the objectives do not have a timer. The contemplative and the mechanical is what is essential in these examples, honoring that part “cozy” of mental refuge with peace, serenity and tasks that are repeated over and over again. In fact, there is even metacriticism within this world. ‘Wanderstop‘, a tea shop simulator created by the visionary mind behind ‘The Stanley Parable‘, Davey Wreden. The game ironizes this fact with a character who invites you to attend to customer requests when it seems right to you, without rushing, because the last thing the protagonist needs is it’s more pressure. It is curious that most games cozy They deal with mental health or anxiety, but some have mechanics in line with this and others offer ones that are radically opposite to the feelings they seek to create in the player. The perversion of language, or the excessive use of a label such as “cozy” to sell more copies ends up producing a very specific reality: something is broken when the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about these comforting games is taking care of a farm or a supermarket, watering parsnips or paying for an extension to your house. Productivity as leisure Beyond the mechanics and quality of each of them, the addiction and fanaticism that they generate for us does nothing more than put ourselves in front of the mirror and expose the reality of our daily life: even with our leisure we want to be productive, … Read more

The housing market is so broken that it has found an unexpected channel for express purchases: Telegram

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The housing market is overheated. It comes with taking a look at your price curvehe residential deficit calculated by the sector, the accelerated tempos of the agencies or simply the conditions (increasingly draconian) that real estate agencies require from tenants looking for an apartment to confirm it. There is another place however where that fever is clearly perceivedone that has little to do with agencies, portals like Idealista or the offices of the promoters: Telegram. There it is increasingly easier to find apartment purchases that are closed in minutes with a clear investment focus. Seen and unseen. The news I advanced it a few days ago The Country. If there were doubts about the imbalance between supply and demand in the Spanish real estate market or to what extent housing is awakening the appetite of investors comes with taking a look at Telegram. In the same messaging app that many of us use to talk to our families or friends, there are groups with thousands of subscribers that have become real real estate showcases. Of course, with certain peculiarities: speed prevails in the channels, the ‘seen and unseen’, with a clearly investor focus. It is not unusual for sales to be settled in a matter of minutes, sometimes by buyers who do not even get to visit the home they are purchasing in person. At the end of the day, you are not looking for a home. Generally, those who buy do so attracted by the promise of high returns. And one of the most popular ways is the rental market. How do they work? The mechanism is quite simple. The channels are run by specialized companies that are previously in charge of tracking the market in search of assets with potential, apartments in locations with rising markets, at reasonable prices and in which it is possible to charge tenants monthly payments that, over time, will translate into profitability of the 6%, 8%, 9% or even 13%, far above than other more conventional investments offer. Once the company ‘hunts’ that real estate asset, it offers it on its Telegram channel with a series of key data: area, location, age, sale price, estimated rent and profitability forecasts. Potential buyers send emails showing their interest and then the company chooses among the candidates, either by lottery or following the order in which they have written. It is not unusual for the buyer to never see the property or even live in another city. At the end of the day, what counts is the promise of economic return. How frequent is it? Last year the General Council of Notaries registered almost 716,200 home sales in Spain. Among this enormous volume of operations, those closed expressly through Telegram could have represented a small part (there is no official data), but even so the phenomenon is interesting enough that it has followers. The Country speaks from several companies that launch offers every week through groups in which they reach 3,000, 10,500 or even 15,000 subscribers. Specifically, he cites three companies in the sector: Winteromics, Nexiaprop and Buy 1 apartmentalthough not all of them are the same nor do they use Telegram with the same frequency. More than just speed. That the formula is arousing interest is explained by the characteristics of the real estate market. In cities with very stressed markets, such as Madrid, Barcelona either Valenciarents rise, but so do (and not a little) the price of properties, so its real estate stock loses interest for local investors in search of available homes to direct them to the rental market. Solution? Look beyond the metropolises, in other locations, if possible in municipalities where prices are still reasonable, where population is gaining or an increase in demand is expected in the near future, for example due to the arrival of a multinational. Hence, buyers are interested in homes that may be hundreds or thousands of kilometers from where they live. Mediation companies not only promise huge financial returns. Sometimes, if the expected returns are not achieved, they undertake to cover the difference or even offer their services as intermediaries to take care of the renovations or rental management. That is, even if the investor has in mind becoming a landlord, he or she will not even have to act as such. The company itself takes care of it… after payment (of course) of a commission. Looking for strategic areas. The focus is usually on homes located in working-class areas, without conflicts, with sales prices that usually do not reach or range around 100,000 euros. Companies also manage to ensure that these properties are not even offered on the open market, thus becoming the first to hunt for ‘bargains’ for investors. The companies they allege who with their work increase the rental supply and unlock properties that have been empty for some time. Of course, it’s not all advantages. As in any investment, the sector also recognizes that there are “risks”, especially for buyers who purchase apartments without first seeing them in situ. Images | Ivan Radic (Flickr) and Kaspar Upmanis (Unsplash) In Xataka | For years, motorhomes were a luxury. Now they are something else: the last stronghold against the housing crisis

science has a different opinion

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For a person with celiac diseasesocial life can be a real minefield. Cross contamination is a dangerous enemy that is present in the way food is prepared, but also in the kisses we have with other people. In this way, the question is obligatory: if my partner has eaten bread, pizza or pasta… Is it dangerous for us to kiss if I am celiac? To answer, luckily we have science on our side. Until now, people who have to stay away from gluten for serious medical reasons could be afraid to kiss if their partner had not rinsed their mouth or brushed their teeth before. But science is pretty transparent. in the preliminary study presented at Digestive Disease Week 2025. Their conclusion is quite clear: some gluten can be passed through a kiss between two people, but the amount is so small that it is very unlikely to have relevant clinical consequences. The study. To reach this conclusion, 20 non-celiac people who ate a food with a large amount of gluten were recruited. Immediately afterwards, they had to kiss their celiac partners, allowing the researchers to measure the concentration of gluten in the saliva that had passed from one boba to another. The results were quite clear: in 18 of the 20 couples, the levels in the recipient’s saliva were below the international “safe” threshold, which is 20 mg, and furthermore, none reported symptoms related to intolerance. Although if you drink a little water before kissing, this risk decreases even more. Why 20 mg. This threshold value is not something random, but rather it turns out to be defined by science itself. Here one of the reference studies comes into play, Catassi’s essay and collaborators published in American Journal of Clinical Nutritionwhich administered 10 or 50 mg of gluten daily to adults with treated celiac disease for 90 days. What was seen is that the daily exposure was clearly below that 10 mg range for the majority of patients. A later review in Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics reached similar conclusions: the doses that are beginning to be worrying move in the order of tens of milligrams per day, especially if they are maintained over time, not in single isolated traces. In this way, an isolated kiss has the same concentration of gluten as foods that are categorized as safe. How is it possible that a kiss after eating a large amount of gluten-containing foods is not dangerous? This is the question we ask ourselves after reading these conclusions, and it has an answer, but in studies done on peanutsanother allergen. In this case it was seen that just after eating, the concentration of allergen in the mouth is really high. But after simple measures such as waiting a few minutes, drinking water or brushing your teeth, levels drop drastically. In this way, a kiss does not transfer food, but rather a fraction of a milliliter of saliva. And that saliva, minutes after eating, has already “cleaned” most of the protein that was inside. And this is valid for all allergies that are mediated by immunoglobulin E (which is responsible for generating the allergic response). There is a margin of safety. On a daily basis, people who are intolerable to gluten and who follow a very strict diet to avoid contamination, the truth is that they consume this allergen. Although in a very small quantity. This shows it a study who developed techniques to measure gluten immunogenic peptides (GIP) in urine and feces. The work showed that many people with celiac disease who follow a strict diet have small accidental exposures on a regular basis, the result of cross-contamination in modern life. However, the majority do not show clinical worsening or intestinal damage if these exposures are spontaneous and at very low doses. A kiss, in the worst case scenario, is exactly that: an isolated microdose exposure. The final verdict. What this new study provides is not a revolution, but a reassuring quantification of something that the consensus of experts already sensed. Even the main patient associations, such as the Celiac Disease Foundation or Coeliac UK, have been with a practical message for some time: the risk of kissing is low. The only common sense recommendation, which is still valid, is to avoid kissing right at the moment when the other person is eating gluten or has obvious remains of food in their mouth. You always have to wait a little for the saliva to take effect, but it doesn’t have to be a problem beyond this. Images | Cassie Lopez Wesual Click In Xataka | The difference between celiac disease and gluten intolerance can be difficult to appreciate. But there is a key detail that makes them very different.

There are eight million Airbnbs, but only one where the disconnection is so extreme that there is fine print: risk of death

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At the beginning of the year, the figure by Bryant Gingerich began to circulate in many media. In a secluded corner of the Ohio wilderness, Gingerich, a 34-year-old engineer, seemed to have found an opportunity to transform his professional life by converting a simple cave in a successful vacation rental business. However, if we talk about places far away from the world, none like the one in this story. Stay at the extreme. I told the story a few days ago BBC. In the Kulusuk Fjords of eastern Greenland, the Floating Glacier Hut It has established itself as one of the most remote accommodations, if not the most, in the world. The cabin, installed on a floating hexagonal platform and anchored to the surrounding rocks, it is located in an area where the distances between settlements are enormous and the human presence is minimal. Access is made only by boat and the infrastructure responds to the idea of ​​offering a space completely removed from any urban dynamics, in a territory dominated by glaciers, icebergs and an unpredictable climate. This approach fits with the rise of the so-called as “quietcations” and hyper-remote destinations, which seek to satisfy the growing need for total disconnection that many travelers express in the face of the accelerated pace of daily life. Disconnect without technology. The cabin dispenses with the internet and reduces outside communication to a satellite phone, which forces us to live real isolation throughout the stay. The Finnish-made module is thermally insulated and has a glass roof that allows you to observe the polar sky and phenomena such as the northern lights without leaving the interior. The equipment it’s basic: a small stove, a toilet, a minimal kitchen area and a double bed. The lack of a shower is part of the design, and some visitors resort to quick dips in the frozen sea to clean themselves. This austerity is proposed as a central feature of the experience, focused on the observation of the environment and sensory immersion without digital interference. Views from the accommodation Caution and logistics. Extreme isolation coexists with reasonable vigilance against the risks inherent to the Arctic. According to the local guide Nicco Segretoresponsible for the project, the cabin acts as an effective refuge from potentially deadly fauna like polar bears (there is a sign that warns you before entering), as long as you stay inside. However, the operator warns that weather conditions may prevent the arrival of the boat in charge of transporting guests, an element that is part of the operational reality in the region. The landscape offers opportunities for activities such as glacier hiking, exploring ice caves formed by subglacial rivers, and ice fishing through a small hole prepared in the structure. These excursions show the dynamics of ice and the visible effects of melting, reinforcing the educational value of the trip. A tourist project. Secret discovered a decade ago a glacial cave that today is part of the activity offerand that discovery was the origin of his initiative to develop low-footprint tourism in the area. In addition to generating employment in the Tasiilaq community, the project aims to attract travelers interested in geology, the behavior of ice and the magnitude of the polar landscape. The Floating Glacier Hut It is the initial phase of a broader plan that includes a future retirement of greater capacity, Vision Lodgeaimed at structured stays of several days. The accelerated retreat of the glaciers, visible even year after year, becomes a central component of the experience, which allows us to observe climate changes on a human scale. An exclusive model. The stay, designed for two people, has an approximate cost from 1,000 to 1,200 dollars per night and includes private boat transfers, dinner prepared by the guide himself, and breakfast. Despite the price, remembered the BBC that the accommodation It has received very positive reviews for the combination of isolation, landscape and silence, elements that guests point out as difficult to find in other destinations. Thus, the general perception is that it is an experience designed for those who seek to completely disconnect (from humanity and devices), observe the environment without filters and face a slower pace, where nature is the central axis of the room and the passage of time seems to acquire another scale. Image | Vision Lodge In Xataka | An engineer left his job to transform a cave into a vacation rental. He’s making a fortune a year without Airbnb In Xataka | Italy vetoes one of the great symbols of mass tourism: the use of key boxes for self-check-in is prohibited

It is essential to give us the key to leukemia

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The bone marrow is undoubtedly one of the most complex, and at the same time vital, tissues in the human body. It can be said that it is the “blood factory” of the body where stem cells are born that keep us alive and that gives rise to our defenses or our red blood cells. However, studying it is a real nightmare as it is encapsulated within the bone such as the femur. Until now, scientists had to choose between study cells on a flat piece of plastic (which looks nothing like the real body) or use micewhich, spoiler: they are not human. That is why there is now a real revolution in this field, since they have managed to create a great model that will make life much easier for science. The study published in Stem Cell just changed the rules of the game. A team of researchers have managed to create eVON, a macroscale, 3D, vascularized model of the human bone marrow that not only has cells, but “breathes”, has functioning blood vessels and even nerves. Why does it matter? Although it seems insignificant, the reality is that right now there were many doubts about how they develop diseases as aggressive as leukemia. In this case, this piece of tissue engineering opens the door to finally understanding how leukemia works and how to cure it without depending so much on animal models that are not faithful to the anatomy and physiology of humans. Until now, the solution to research also involved taking a Petri dish, which is nothing more than a piece of plastic, and cultivating the stem cells here that will give rise to the components that we have in our blood. Logically, they died quickly here, since they lacked the environment where they were truly comfortable ‘living’. It is what is known as endosteal niche. This niche is the specific neighborhood within the bone where stem cells interact with blood vessels, bone, and nerves to decide whether to multiply or become white or red blood cells. Something fundamental to understand what is happening there. We already have a solution. eVON is presented as a wonderful alternative, since it has three key elements: A ‘scaffold’ composed of the same mineral that we have in bone to imitate the hard structure of the trabecular bone human. No white gelatin, but something that feels like a real bone. Stem cells that have been reprogrammed in the laboratory to generate both bone and blood tissue. Functional vascularization, thanks to the fact that they have managed to make the cells form networks of capillaries and blood vessels that penetrate the artificial bone. And the truth is that they have managed to introduce all the components that are around them into our marrow. Most surprising is the level of detail: The model spontaneously developed sympathetic nervous system nerve fibers and macrophage-like cells, creating an entire ecosystem that no one had ever had to explicitly “design” cell by cell. They have literally created a blood factory. The fight against leukemia. Acute myeloid leukemia is a cancer that is undoubtedly devastating and that often “hides” in the bones themselves, making it very resistant to chemotherapy since it is difficult for the medication to reach the bones. The good news comes when the study shows that eVON recreates the exact molecular signals that tumor cells use to survive. And this is fundamental, since attacking these genes is like hitting their weak point. In short, it gives us the necessary tools to be able to kill tumor cells and cause them to die. The test. To prove that their “artificial bone” was robust, the researchers did something worthy of science fiction: they implanted the eVON tissue under the skin of mice. And the truth is that the result was very good: the human tissue integrated with the mouse and the human blood vessels connected with those of the mouse. In this way, the human stem cells survived and were able to repopulate the mouse blood with functional human cells. But logically there are still challenges that must be overcome, such as the size of this model. To do this, it still needs to be reduced so that large-scale tests can be carried out with drugs that can kill these tumor cells. Images | ANIRUDH National Cancer Institute In Xataka | 125,000 years ago Neanderthals ate bones to survive. Today we discovered that they were right

Opera Neon promises to be the future of the browser. It is an ambitious vision yet to mature

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I’ve been using it for a week Opera Neon and I don’t know if I’m testing the future of web browsing or participating in a psychological experiment on how much friction a human tolerates before returning to their usual browser. Probably both. Neon comes standard with everything that any veteran Opera user takes for granted: side messaging integrations, music apps in streamingthe multimedia panel… It is the reminder that, despite all the agentic experimentation, there is still an Opera underneath: practical, comfortable and designed for those who live glued to several platforms at the same time. The promise is seductive: a browser that not only answers questions, but act for you. Who browses, compares, reserves, creates. Who understands what you want to do and does it while you focus on more important things. Opera calls this “agentic AI“, and technically it is correct: Neon can take control of the browser, open tabs, fill out forms, compare products. It is AI with hands, it is Opera’s proposal for the same field as Perplexity with Comet or OpenAI with ChatGPT Atlas. The problem is that those hands are sometimes clumsy, unpredictable and dangerously overconfident. Opera Neon maintains all the classic features of Opera, such as the side panels to display messaging mini-applications or streaming music on an upper layer. In the image, Apple Music. Image: Xataka. Three brains in one body To understand Neon you have to accept that It is not an AI browser. It is a browser with three AIs living together. Chat, Do and Make. Each one with its function, its purpose, its personality. And here begins the first big problem: knowing which one to use at all times is a guessing exercise. Chat is the most familiar. A conversational chatbot that answers questions, summarizes pages, translates texts. Typical. It works well when you’re not making things up, which is about 70% of the time. I asked him to count the comments on several articles and he responded with 400 words explaining that there were none. when there were four. Do is where magic and terror live. You ask him to book a CrossFit class, find the cheapest flight to Lisbon, compare prices on headphones, unsubscribe from some newsletters. And sometimes it does. Open tabs, browse websites, fill out fields. Watching him work is hypnotic. It’s also slow, erratic, and occasionally catastrophic. In a test I asked her to add flowers to a store cart. Instead of somehow inferring my zip code or asking me about it, he directly introduced 28001: madridcentrismo to the song. While I, helpless, did click on the correct options that I was completely unaware of. There is no way to correct it while working. You can only watch, like someone who sees their autonomous car getting dangerously close to the cliff. A zip code just because, 350 km from my house. Image: Xataka. Neon spent an absurd amount of time wandering around the web, adding the bouquet to the cart, getting stuck on the shipping zip code, not feeling like anything productive was happening. Image: Xataka. Another example with Do: Image: Xataka. What he did was open Google Shopping, enter the term and not be able to click ‘Search’, apparently due to some subtle change in the website’s code. I gave it myself and Neon continued. It took a long time just to choose the order by price from lowest to highest. Finally he wrote the answer: Image: Xataka. Happy ending, although it is difficult to think of use scenarios where the use really compensates for the time and supervision it requires. If someone doesn’t know about Google Shopping, this is a good use case. If someone knows Google Shopping, they only have to do two clicks. Another example: reading some recipes Straight to the PalateI asked him to add all the ingredients necessary to make them to the Mercadona cart. Let’s go to trouble. Image: Xataka. Image: Xataka. This was one of those scenarios where there was no way I was going to complete the mission. Image: Xataka. Make is the most ambitious. Generate code, build web applications, create videos. I asked him for a memory game with Spanish vocabulary and he did it in minutes. Rough, but functional. It’s like having a mini-developer living in your browser, working in a virtual environment that disappears when you close the tab. A brilliant idea. A little polished perhaps, but brilliant. Image: Xataka. There are also the cardsa kind of templates prompts that function as mental shortcuts. You can combine them – “summarize + compare”, “decisions + follow-up” – or create your own so you don’t start from scratch every time you talk to the AI. It’s a simple but powerful idea: it makes user learning part of the system. Similar to what you propose Day with his Skills. It’s a good idea. What is not being said about Opera Neon Here comes the part that interests me the most, the one I read between the lines after a week living with this thing. Opera Neon is not really a product. It is a testing ground with product pricing. It is a public beta disguised as a premium service. And that wouldn’t be so much of a problem if it didn’t cost $20 a month. Let me be clear: I’ve seen enough technology launches to recognize when a company is testing concepts in the open field. And Neon is that. The bugs They are not occasional, they are structural, like the hallucinations. The Do agent disconnects if your computer goes to sleep. Chat responses are verbose. The Cards interface—those shortcuts prompts reusable—is full of examples with no real useful content. Cards examples interface. Image: Xataka. But there’s something more interesting going on here. Opera is making a counterintuitive bet at the worst possible time. We are in 2025: Google gives away Gemini in Chrome. Perplexity has Comet. The Browser Company (Arc’s company) has Day. Microsoft puts Copilot everywhere. And OpenAI recently launched ChatGPT Atlas. … Read more

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