Mobile Tech & Gadgets Archives - Page 95 of 1539

‘solo-maxxing’ is Gen Z’s answer to the stifling dating industry

June 3, 2026 by usatoday24

It’s Friday night. A decade ago, the routine for a person in their early 20s would have been predictable: choose clothes in front of the mirror, reserve a table at a trendy restaurant and go out in the hope of meeting someone. Today, that same scene is interrupted by a lethal crossroads of notifications on the mobile screen: the notice of rent collection, the status of the bank account and, in the background, the endless catalog of faces on a dating application. By adding up the expenses, the user does the math and reaches a clear conclusion: falling in love is an unaffordable luxury. He cancels the plan, closes the app and stays home. Love is not dead, but its business model has gone bankrupt. Generation Z faces a perfect storm where inflation, the housing crisis, job insecurity and psychological exhaustion after years of digital overexposure have turned traditional romance into a risky sport. Faced with a scenario where a date can cost hundreds of euros and rejection seems more public than ever, dating applications are facing a structural problem: their users are discovering that singleness is not only cheaper, but also much less exhausting. The data paints an uncomfortable picture for the entire romance industry. According to a report by Bank of Montreal collected by Fortunethe total cost of a date in the United States—including dinner, transportation, drinks, and preparations—now reaches $189. Among Generation Z the figure climbs to $205 per meeting, while millennials are close to $252 after experiencing a 32% cost increase. Faced with this emotional inflation, the response has been simple: spend less or not spend at all. A report from Bank of America reveals that 53% of young people from Generation Z He doesn’t spend a single dollar a month on dating. Among those who do, most try to stay below $100 a month. Inflation is not only making the shopping basket more expensive or making it difficult to access housing. It is also transforming the way an entire generation relates to each other. The phenomenon already has visible consequences. a study cited by Newsweek points out that 46% of members of Generation Z do not have any romantic relationship, compared to 28% of millennials and 26% of Generation X. Even large technology platforms are noticing the change. Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Match Group, recently recognized that applications like Tinder can be “intimidating” for those under 30 years of age, in a context marked by the drop in active users and the growing exhaustion towards the traditional model of dating apps. The Spanish case: when rent eats up social life Although many of these trends were first detected in the United States, the Spanish context adds additional pressure: housing. According to the latest data of the Emancipation Observatory of the Youth Council of Spainthe average rental price absorbs 98.7% of a young person’s salary. The risk of poverty among young people who live in rent increases drastically once the cost of housing is taken into account. The problem goes beyond economic figures. For decades, romantic relationships followed a relatively clear sequence: meet someone, become independent, live together and, eventually, start a family. Today that chain has been broken. Spain registers some of the highest ages of emancipation in Europe. Millions of young people continue to live with their parents much longer than they would like, not by choice but by economic necessity. In this context, the problem is no longer just paying for a dinner or a drink. It is also having your own space where you can build intimacy, coexistence or a shared life project. Precariousness not only delays the purchase of a home. It also delays relationships. As Holly O’Neill summarizedBank of America executive, Generation Z is discovering that adulthood has a much higher price than they imagined. However, money explains only part of the phenomenon. The call “paradox of preparation” describes an increasingly common contradiction among young people: they want stable emotional ties, but they feel less and less prepared to initiate them. After years of living much of their relationships through screens, many members of Generation Z perceive dating as an emotionally demanding experience. The fear of rejection still exists, but it is now combined with a constant feeling of public exposure. Social networks have turned every relationship into a small media event. Make a couple official on Instagram using a hard launch or hint at her through a soft launch It can feel like a public statement that is difficult to reverse if the relationship fails. As a result, the first step becomes increasingly complicated. An appointment is no longer requested. Instagram is requested. Then come weeks of messages, reactions to stories, and intermittent conversations that often never lead to a real meeting. The potential connection exists, but the action is suspended indefinitely. The rise of solo-maxxing In this context, a new philosophy has emerged, baptized in social networks as solo-maxxing. Far from presenting singleness as a transitory situation or a waiting stage, this trend redefines it as a conscious choice. Being alone is no longer necessarily interpreted as a sentimental failure, but as a strategy to protect time, money and emotional stability. A MyIQ survey reveals that almost half of young people between 18 and 34 years old consider that being single is more peaceful than being in a relationship. A third say they actively avoid dating to preserve their mental well-being. Behind this trend there is a logic that is difficult to ignore. If each romantic interaction involves increasing economic costs, emotional uncertainty, and a high risk of disappointment, singleness ceases to be a provisional state and becomes a rational decision. For many young people, peace of mind has become an asset too valuable to risk. The crisis is also forcing us to rethink the way people get to know each other. For years, dating apps promised that an infinite number of options would make it easier to find a partner. The result, however, has often been … Read more

kill enemies with a 100% hit

June 3, 2026 by usatoday24

China’s latest Five-Year Plan makes a short-term objective clear: cbecome the first world power. This covers numerous areas such as energy (both renewable and nuclear), the technological with AI, robotics and the development of its own chips, education thanks to new technologies and the military. Curiously, they are all intertwined and there is something that has been playing for a while: futuristic weaponry. Like the rest of the powers, China does not hesitate to show its military potential, but in recent months we are seeing that the discourse is focused on capabilities that, until not so long ago, seemed more typical of the field of science fiction. The latest is a technology for a swarm of drones to be able to orchestrate autonomously on the battlefield with a single objective. Hunt and destroy enemies until not a single one remains. HG-STR. Dubbed ‘Heterogeneus Graph Spation-Temporal Reasoning’, or HG-STR, we are talking about an algorithm that would be the brain of a fleet of fixed-wing drones that would not need humans to operate. Currently, most operations involving drones still require a human at the controls (sometimes those controls are such everyday objects like a Steam Deck either the xbox controller). However, the HG-STR would represent a paradigm shift. According to an undisclosed source SCMPthis technology opens the doors to a future in which swarms of drones could be sent into a high-risk hostile environment in which there is no contact with human operators, but there is a clear order in the programming: eliminate all enemies. Rule change. Currently, hybrid or “traditional” models operate with a single database that unites information on allies, enemies and the terrain in which they operate. In different environments when drones operate autonomously, this creates confusion and that is why a human is needed to take the final command. With this development, things change. The algorithm has different ‘sections’ or mailboxes to which it sends the information it has to process. Instead of operating with a single database, it makes decisions based on whether an ‘object’ is friend, foe, or a search area. In the case of being an ally, it does nothing; If it is a search area, it strives to find the enemy; If it’s an enemy, shoot. According to one of the authors of the study published in China’s leading peer-reviewed aviation journal, “this allows the swarm to instantly understand who to help and who to hunt. This adaptability is important because rules-based systems fail when the enemy does not follow as expected, while HG-STR is able to adapt.” order in chaos. Something key here is speed. The researcher points out that, when a drone is in combat, it is too slow in making decisions. “In the heat of battle, they take seconds to decide, a time in which an unmanned aircraft can fly almost 600 meters blindly, representing a fatal delay in electromagnetic warfare.” HG-STR, however, makes decisions in just 6.6 milliseconds. Practically in real time. It is this chaos where the team of researchers wanted to focus thanks to an interesting solution: providing each drone with a “memory”. Although there is a central algorithm, if one of the drones loses contact with its companions, it ‘pulls’ the memory to remember where its allies were before losing contact and where they last saw enemies. Once those priorities are sorted, the drone searches for its objective and another decision comes into play: do I attack or continue searching? Once this is done, you choose a specific target and finally decide how much ammo you need to take it down. Instead of having one set of general instructions, the drone software divides problems into layers, avoiding clutter by having to process everything at once. “Kill them all.” The study notes that HG-STR is the first known algorithm capable of achieving a 100% kill rate while operating autonomously and fast enough to react in real time to the rapidly changing conditions of a modern warfield. All this is scary, but the most terrifying thing is that, according to the experiments, the researchers carried out different simulations in which they tested this autonomous system. In complicated scenarios where they limited communication systems, they claim the algorithm achieved a 100% kill rate on enemy targets, including those hidden in plain sight. They are now focusing on scaling the system, as they have realized that the algorithm can be adapted to other contexts of larger battlefields, more targets and more drones simultaneously without needing to retrain the AI. Context. As I say, this study does not arrive in a vacuum, but in the context of China’s acceleration towards autonomous drone warfare. A few months ago we already echoed the command of robotic “wolves” who were already doing maneuvers alongside flesh and blood soldiers, but over the last two years we have witnessed other demonstrations in which individual soldiers can control a couple of hundred drones to operate autonomously, as well as other robotic weaponry and even ‘ship’ concepts that seem straight out of ‘Star Wars’. It is, in short, one more step towards what is already known as war without human intervention in which machines are the ones making the decisions independently. And, far from being a private initiative, this HG-STR has been funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, which gives an example of what we said at the beginning of the article: within the Five-Year Plan, everything is connected. Just imagine if the great powers put all this technology into place to meet other humanitarian goals rather than to find more efficient and effective ways to take each other out. In Xataka | China has resurrected the strangest concept of the Cold War: a plane, a ship and a missile launcher in one machine

A homemade drone has just exceeded 700 km/h. And with this he has put the official record on the ropes

June 3, 2026 by usatoday24

When we think of a drone, we normally imagine a device that takes off vertically, remains suspended in the air and allows us to record impossible shots quite easily. He Blackbird It’s not about that. Its objective is much more extreme: fly as fast as possible. In this race, stability in flight matters less than efficiency at high speed, and so a change in the propellers has given it a surprising boost. The official record remains in the hands of Luke Bell and Mike Bell. According to Guinness World Recordsreached an average speed of 408.60 mph, equivalent to 657.59 km/h, on December 11, 2025, with the Peregreen V4 in Cape Town. It was not their first time: Guinness points out that father and son had already achieved this same record in 2024, with 480 km/h, and in June 2025, with 580 km/h. With that bar on the table, the Blackbird attempt has a very specific reading: it does not replace the official record, but it puts it under pressure. Ben Biggs and Aidan’s drone reached 453 mph, approximately 730 km/hduring a test pass. That fact is the most striking, although it is also the one that needs the most context. For now, what we have is an unofficial demonstration with a huge figure and the question if it can be repeated under verified conditions. A record-breaking race played on the propellers Here is the nuance that separates a spectacular figure from a truly comparable measurement. On the 730 km/h pass there was a tailwind of 54.7 km/h, so the estimated airspeed was reduced to 674 km/h. On the upwind pass, the drone reached about 640 km/h. The average of the two was close to 684 km/h, and that is why that data weighs more than the maximum peak when we try to understand how far the project really went. The key is how those new propellers behave when the drone stops flying like a conventional quadcopter and starts moving like a controlled projectile. The carbon fiber blades have a high pitch angle and that allows them to be more efficient at high speed because they are more parallel to the air that the drone passes through. It is not a free advantage: on takeoff and at low speed they push worse, so the motors have to demand more from the battery in that initial phase. The other important detail is in the serrated leading edge of the blades. As they explain, this shape generates small vortices on the surface of the propeller and helps the air not to move laterally along the blade, but rather to come out backwards to push the drone. It also helps to stabilize the boundary layer, that film of air attached to the surface that influences drag. In practice, it allows working with steeper angles without the propeller losing efficiency and behaving more like a piece that removes air than one that generates thrust. The flip side of pushing a quadcopter to the limit is that problems can also arise. Blackbird lost connection at about 633 km/h, due to a combination of antenna geometry, Doppler effect and signal overload. In the second, the drone ended up damaged after a hard landing, when the batteries ran out a few meters from the ground. The official record remains that of the Peregreen V4, but the Blackbird has made it clear where the next attempt may be. The question, now, is obvious: will they call Guinness World Records to try to certify it? Images | Drone Pro Hub In Xataka | The US vetoed the largest Chinese drone manufacturer. Now 8,000 American pilots have a serious problem

One of the most feared airports in Europe faces a new problem. And it comes from the Atlantic

June 3, 2026 by usatoday24

There are airports that seem designed to remind us how complex flying is. It also depends on the exact place where you are trying to land. In Madeirathat reality is understood very quickly: Cristiano Ronaldo airport It coexists with the Atlantic, with difficult terrain and with winds capable of altering operations. The novelty is not that it is a demanding airport, something well known, but that Portugal has put figures to a problem that seems to have worsened. The data. He put the information on the table Hugo Espírito SantoSecretary of State for Infrastructure of Portugal, during a parliamentary hearing held at the end of May. According to DNOTICIAS.PTweather records show an “abnormal variation” in wind speed starting in 2015 at Madeira airport. The average climb is around three knots, approximately 5.5 km/h, a figure that may seem small from the outside, but which in an infrastructure so sensitive to the wind has very concrete operational consequences. In the words of the president himself, this increase “makes a large part of the operations unviable.” An airport conditioned by its geography. To understand why three knots matters so much, you have to look at where the runway is. Euronews describes the airport as one of the most demanding in the world due to an unpleasant combination: one end built on concrete pillars, terrain that rises quickly in the vicinity, cliffs near the other end and winds generated by the nearby mountains. This mix can translate into local turbulence, waiting in the air, detours or cancellations when the weather is not good. Looking for an explanation. After recognizing the average increase of three knots, Espírito Santo explained that the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and Atmosphere and the National Civil Engineering Laboratory are analyzing the phenomenon to determine its causes. That caution is relevant: we know that the records show an abnormal variation in wind speed, but not why. In an airport so exposed to local conditions, this difference between confirming the problem and explaining its origin is key to not taking for granted what is still being investigated. New system. The MAWINDS system combines LIDAR and X-band radar to analyze weather conditions in almost real time around Cristiano Ronaldo Airport. The project was presented by the Portuguese Government in December 2024 with an investment of 3.5 million euros assumed by NAV Portugal, although its technical incorporation was not yet fully closed in May 2026. Its purpose is to better detect episodes of turbulence and adverse wind before they affect the operation. Technology still in development. Everything seems to indicate that installing such a system is not equivalent to fully incorporating it into operations from one day to the next. The Portuguese infrastructure manager acknowledged that there were still no preliminary reports on MAD Winds and attributed the delay in its certification to the complexity of an unusual technology. As he explained, before being installed in Madeira this technology had only been deployed in four airports. That is to say, the airport already has a more advanced tool for observing the wind, but its full use still depends on technical work that cannot be simply accelerated. The roadmap. When MAWINDS was presented in December 2024, it was explained that a one-year pre-operation phase was opening to generate data and give ANAC the necessary information before considering, in the future, a possible revision of the wind operating limits. The system is not only designed to better look at the weather, but to build a sufficiently solid database to allow regulatory decisions to be made without lowering the priority of safety. Images | Madeira Airports In Xataka | The biggest move in history will be in Dubai: 35 billion dollars to build the largest airport in the world

The problem is not that middle managers are retiring en masse. Generation Z doesn’t want their job.

June 3, 2026 by usatoday24

The inverted population pyramid that we have in Spain means that hundreds of thousands of professionals with decades of experience behind them retire every year. Area directors, zone managers, team leaders and other intermediate and management positions that have sustained the structures for decades. The problem is not their exit, which should be a normal and expected process, the real challenge for companies is that now no one wants to take your place. The situation even has a technical name “succession crisis” and the data confirm it. According to data collected in the report ‘Human value: global trends on the future of work‘ Prepared by Manpower Group, 57% of companies globally recognize that their aging workforce is already affecting their human resources strategy. Key management positions are retiring and Generation Z does not seem willing to fill them. Reasons are not lacking. Retirements skyrocket. The first to reach retirement age have been the generation of baby boomersbut the first members of generation Only in Spain, in 2024 they registered 368,065 new retirements, 12.6% more than the previous year, while the 345,000 retirements registered in 2025 show a sustained rhythm for the following years. As pointed out to ExpansionAccording to Óscar Berumen, CEO of Grupo Viraal, what is lost with these departures is not just a vacant position: “When a company lets these profiles go, it loses technical knowledge, strategic memory and a deep way of understanding the business.” It is a type of knowledge that is not contracted with a typical job offer. Generation Z is very clear that they do not want to ascend. The phenomenon even has a name: conscious unbossingor the total disengagement from decision-making positions that generation Z is putting into practice. According to a survey From recruiting firm Robert Walters, 52% of Gen Z professionals actively avoid middle management positions throughout their career. 69% describe them as roles in which a high level of stress is required, in exchange for low financial reward. In other words, the salary improvement that companies offer does not compensate for the additional mental load that promotion entails, which is why young people from Generation Z are not willing to give up mental health or reconciling their personal life. According to the latest data for 2024 from the INEthe average salary of those under 25 years of age in Spain was 1,372.8 euros. Take on more responsibilities without real compensationGraphic is not the most attractive proposal, which is why many young people prefer to fulfill their current positions and maintain conditions compatible with their personal life. AI accelerates the problem from another side. As if the refusal to promote was not enough, the emergence of AI in the workplace has added another reason to stay away from promotions. According the data collected by Revelio Labs for Business Insiderjob offers for middle managers in the US were 42% lower than the maximum recorded in April 2022. The consulting firm Gartner calculated that by 2026 one in five companies will use AI to eliminate more than half of their middle management positions. The last ones layoffs in big technology such as Amazon, Google or Meta have not occurred in a context of financial crisis, but have been carried out with the intention of flattening internal structures. This flattening has especially affected to middle management who were dedicated to transferring the objectives to the rest of the staff and managing their execution. Now that job AI is going to automate itwhich is why young people do not want to play those roles and put a target on their back in the next round of layoffs. A perfect storm. According to estimates of the report According to ManPower Group, by 2030, more than one in four workers in advanced economies will be over 55 years old. Generation Among millennials, that figure rises somewhat more, to 56%, but it is still a minority. Companies that operate with structures designed for linear upward trajectories face the major problem that that model no longer fits the way young people understand work today. The gap left by boomers and generation X will not disappear just because of the passage of time. Organizations will have to decide whether to redesign the role of middle managers to make it attractive again, or they learn to function without them. In Xataka | Finding a job had always been a good way to escape poverty: in Spain it is no longer true Image | Unsplash (tommao wang)

two researchers have found how to approximate it within the game

June 3, 2026 by usatoday24

‘Minecraft’ seems, at first glance, to be the last place we would go to look for a mathematical constant associated with perfect circles. Its world is made of cubes, its landscapes rise block by block and almost everything we see in the game has edges. That is precisely why what Molly Lynch of Hollins University and Michael Weselcouch of Roanoke College have done is so striking: finding a way to approximate π within Minecraft without turning the game into a conventional calculator. What are we trying to calculate?. π It is the constant that appears when comparing the length of a circle with its diameter. It is an irrational number with infinitely many non-repeating decimals. On paper, it seems like an idea inseparable from continuous geometry, of clean circles without edges. ‘Minecraft’ plays in another terrain: everything there is represented by discrete units. That is why the challenge is not only to obtain a number, but to translate a mathematical idea into a gridded world. Too heavy a possibility. ‘Minecraft’ has already proven to be Turing complete, a technical way of saying that, in theory, any program can be implemented within the game if the right mechanisms are built. This opens the door to calculating π as a machine would do, with logical instructions transferred to the universe of blocks. But Lynch and Weselcouch didn’t want to solve the problem by brute force. Translating records, logical operations and steps of an algorithm into ‘Minecraft’ actions would have turned a teaching idea into a huge and inaccessible construction. The choice. Choosing was not a whim, explains Spektrum. Lynch and Weselcouch wanted to bring mathematics closer to young people, and they saw the game as a particularly useful tool to do so. The point was not to demonstrate that Minecraft could replace a computer or to search for a particularly brilliant approximation of π, but rather to take advantage of its internal rules to construct a comprehensible explanation. That’s why his work explored relatively accessible methods for calculating known constants within the game, without turning the experiment into a difficult-to-follow technical demonstration. The darts method. The mathematical key chosen by Lynch and Weselcouch was a technique known as the Monte Carlo method, which the aforementioned publication explains with a very simple image: throwing darts at random against a circular target inscribed in a square. If all the impacts fall within the square, but only some within the circle, the proportion between them allows us to approach π/4. Then it is enough to multiply this result by four to obtain an estimate of π, although we are always talking about a statistical approximation. The translation to the game. Lynch and Weselcouch brought that idea to ‘Minecraft’ by first building a kind of red circle with a radius of 11 blocks, then enclosed within a blue square. From there they needed random events that could be counted, which they found in two creatures in the game: the slimes, which continue moving even if there are no players nearby and change direction at random, and the zoglins, which kill them. To record these eliminations, they used hoppers, funnel-shaped blocks capable of automatically picking up objects that fall on them. The final figure. The researchers recorded 619 dead slimes, of which 508 were eliminated within the circle, and with that data they arrived at π ≈ 3.283. To do this, they compared the deaths recorded within the circular area with the total deaths in the square. It is not a particularly precise approximation, and Lynch and Weselcouch do not hide it: the method would gain precision with a larger structure and with many more recorded deaths. But that limitation does not ruin the proposal. On the contrary, it helps to understand that the goal was to turn an abstract mathematical idea into something visible within Minecraft. Images | minecraft In Xataka | If you had any hope of buying a Steam Deck OLED at a good price, the RAM crisis has something to tell you

We’ve spent years unraveling a signal from space that shouldn’t exist. And finally we have a “Rosetta stone” to decipher it

June 2, 2026 by usatoday24

It was the year 2018 when a team of Australian scientists detected a strange radio signal in the plane of the Milky Way. The radio pulse was too slow for any known astronomical object. It seemed more like some kind of anomaly or error in the telescopes than a new discovery. However, in 2025 another similar signal was located. And then another and another. Currently, there are at least 12 of these signals recorded, which have been named long-period radio transients (LPTs). Each of them includes a new feature that makes it impossible to find a common thread. Or at least it had been that way until now, since a new group of Australian researchers has located a sign that brings together several of the pieces of the puzzle. It has been so useful that it has been colloquially dubbed a space Rosetta stone. All the pieces together. The signal located in 2018 (although it was published in 2022) occurred every 18.18 minutes. With this periodicity, a star in the Milky Way increased its brightness for 30-60 seconds, and then decreased it again. Later a similar phenomenon was located, in which it was possible to see further. A binary system consisting of a white dwarf and a red dwarf was identified. The interaction between the two produced the emission of radio waves. However, when another LPT was detected, the emissions were not radio waves, but X-rays. How was a single phenomenon going to be defined if each one was different from the previous one? The key, finally, has been another LPT, initially located by the ASKAP telescope, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). With it, and with the collaboration of other telescopes, a binary system composed of a white dwarf and a red dwarf has been identified, whose interaction gives rise to a periodic change in brightness, accompanied by the emission of radio waves and X-rays. All in one. With all the pieces, it has now been possible to reconstruct the event. Four telescopes to reconstruct history. The new LPT has been named ASKAP J1745-5051. It is not possible to know exactly how far away it is, although estimates place it between 1,300 and 30,000 light years away. Observations made with the ASKAP radio telescope made it possible to locate a periodic emission of radio waves every 81 minutes, which corresponded to a possible LPT. In order to check if the rest of the conditions that had been observed individually were met, it was observed with three other telescopes. On the one hand, space telescopes Swift and Einstein Probewith which X-ray emissions were detected. On the other hand, with the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR). With this, a binary system composed of a white dwarf and a red dwarf that orbit each other with a period of 81 minutes was identified. Everything fits. The full story. The conclusion when putting all the pieces together is the following. On each orbit, the white dwarf, which has a large mass concentrated in very little space, gravitationally attracts the red dwarf and extracts material from it. This is channeled by the magnetic field of the white dwarf itself until it reaches its surface, where it collides, producing a temperature increase of millions of degrees Celsius. Furthermore, this very violent interaction causes the release of energy in the form of X-rays. On the other hand, the gas accelerated by the colliding magnetic fields of both stars is what appears to produce the radio signals. A Rosetta Stone. The principal investigator of this new study It’s called Kovi Rose. We might think that this has had to do with the fact that the discovery is referred to as a space Rosetta stone. And maybe it has had a little influence, but the reality is that there are more reasons. The original Rosetta stone It was a fragment of Egyptian rock in which there was a text written in three different languages: ancient Greek, hieroglyphics and demotic writing. Because archaeologists of the time knew how to speak Greek, they were able to use it as a basis for understanding hieroglyphs. One language allowed them to reconstruct another. In this case, the new discovery is also in three languages: radio waves, detected by ASKAP, X-rays, with which Swift and Einstein Probe work, and visible light from SOAR. Three languages, three pieces that, when read together, can help to understand the whole much better. With this Rosetta stone, the authors of the study hope to be able to unravel many of these mysterious signals from the Universe. Image | Hans Hillewaert (Wikimedia Commons)/Magnific In Xataka | We believed that the pyramids of Giza did not hide any more secrets. we believed wrong

the last film directed by one of the greatest masters in the history of cinema

June 2, 2026 by usatoday24

Clint Eastwood turned 96 on May 31. And a bit of coincidence, with a statement from his son, jazz musician Kyle Eastwood (saying that “he’s retired now, but I’ve been very lucky to be able to work with him on quite a few films”), we’ve learned that Eastwood is no longer going to make any more films. There have been no official statements, but the retirement of the person responsible for ‘Unforgiven’ or ‘The Pale Rider’ leaves us with a filmography full of great films, of all genres and intensities. Let’s celebrate by remembering the last of them, ‘Jury Nº 2‘, released in 2024 and which you can see in Movistar Plus and HBO Max. ‘Jury No. 2’ is a judicial thriller with a moral dilemma on board, as Eastwood likes them: Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is called to serve on a jury in a high-profile murder case, and discovers that he himself could be more involved in the crime than he thought. The cast is completed with a veritable array of heavyweights such as Toni Collette, JK Simmons and Kiefer Sutherland. The film is Eastwood’s fortieth as a director. ‘Jury No. 2’ was conceived originally as a direct streaming premiere. The change to a limited theatrical release It arrived after some internal passes that yielded very favorable opinionsbut he barely received advertising coverage from the studio, which was said to have resented the author for the poor box office results of ‘Cry Macho’. It was finally released, as was later learned, not only out of respect for the director’s advanced age, but in recognition of his 50-year relationship with Warner Bros. This stimulating thriller closes an absolutely exemplary career, always halfway between popular genres and auteur cinema, since the time of his international fame aboard some of Sergio Leone’s most significant titles. Between those first successes and his recognition by critics starting with ‘Unforgiven’ in 1992, there was the creation of milestones such as Dirty Harry and a series of absolutely superb westerns and thrillers, often directed by himself. He has spent this entire century praised by critics and the public thanks to films like ‘Million Dollar Baby’ or ‘Mystic River’. In Xataka | Rafa Nadal won 22 Grand Slams and lost 18 more due to injury: the documentary that explores those last ones arrives on Netflix today

Bringing wind energy 100 km from the coast seemed impossible. Until China has thrown away its new metallic “heart”

June 2, 2026 by usatoday24

A 25,000-tonne mass of steel, with the surface area of a football field and the height of a 15-story building, is currently crossing the ocean aboard an immense semi-submersible ship. The latest great milestone in Asian engineering is already underway. This colossus has just set sail from the port of Nantong, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, on a 1,090 nautical mile journey to southern China. The protagonist of this monumental journey is called “Hai Feng Zhi Xin“, which translated into Spanish means “heart of the sea wind.” As highlighted in an official statement collected by the agency PR Newswireit is the largest offshore converter station in the world, built by the state-owned Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Co., Ltd. (ZPMC). Its destination is the waters off the city of Yangjiang, where it will connect to the mammoth Qingzhou V and Qingzhou VII offshore wind farms, operated by the corporation Three Gorges. The “bottleneck” of offshore wind. To understand the magnitude of this project, you have to understand the historical problem that the wind sector faced. As the news agency explains XinhuaUntil now, the development of offshore wind energy has hit a physical wall. Conventional wind turbines produce electricity in alternating current (AC). The problem is that transmitting this alternating current through submarine cables over long distances causes severe and unaffordable energy losses. This technical limitation forced engineers to build wind farms in relatively shallow waters and very close to the coast. However, the wind resource is much stronger, stable and constant the further you go into the open sea. That’s where the technological solution of this new project comes into play as it acts as the largest power adapter on the planet. It collects the energy generated by no less than 163 wind turbines, increases its voltage and converts that alternating current into direct current (DC). So why is this a game changer? Because direct current can travel hundreds of kilometers underwater with minimal energy loss. The platform boasts a record unit capacity of 2,000 megawatts (MW) and operates with a flexible ±500 kilovolts (kV) direct current transmission system. In addition, it is a pioneer in the use of ±525 kV submarine cables for these distances. This technical conversion unlocks access to high-quality wind resources located more than 100 kilometers offshore, making ultra-deepwater wind finally commercially viable. When at full capacity, this metal “heart” will pump out 6 billion kWh of clean electricity a year, a vital boost to the decarbonization efforts of the industrialized Guangdong region. A 25,000 ton giant. Building a power plant in the middle of the raging deep ocean is not a viable option. The project was approached as a gigantic set of modular parts. Assembly, integration of all equipment and installation progressed in parallel onshore (Nantong), demanding an unprecedented level of supply chain coordination. Yan Bing, Senior Specialist of ZPMC cited by PR Newswireexplains that they adopted an integrated construction model of “land assembly, transportation as a single unit, and float-over installation.” This offshore installation method is overwhelmingly complex, requiring millimeter-level adjustment precision amidst strong ocean currents to fit the superstructure. Once locked into place, the platform’s working environment will be unforgiving. As detailed Xinhuawill operate completely autonomously, without a permanent human crew, controlled through intelligent maintenance and remote monitoring systems. Inside, a dense network of electrical, ventilation and fire control systems has been specially armored to resist the very high salinity and corrosive humidity of the deep ocean. The urgency of this megaproject. This feat is within China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030). The Asian country has set the goal of reaching 100 gigawatts (GW) of installed offshore wind energy capacity by 2030. China’s problem is that its nearshore wind resources are quickly becoming saturated. Just in February this year, the country connected the first 20-megawatt offshore wind turbine to the grid in Fujian province (made entirely from domestic components), followed by the installation of the world’s largest floating wind platform in Yangjiang. The 100 kilometers from the coast are no longer an unbreakable border. With the imminent ignition of its new energy node, China not only alleviates the energy hunger of its coastal areas, but also establishes a replicable technical model that demonstrates to the entire world that the future of clean energy inevitably requires losing sight of the shore. Image | Xu Congjun/Xinhua Xataka | Japan has realized that it cannot depend on gas, so it is going to set up a mega wind farm on the coast of Tokyo

We are obsessed with magnesium as a dietary supplement. Your “overdose” has a name: hypermagnesemia

June 2, 2026 by usatoday24

In recent years, magnesium has become the star supplement for many people. Promoted as the definitive remedy to sleep betteravoid muscle cramps, slow aging or reduce stress, has managed to penetrate a society that has seen these benefits as a real lifesaver for their daily lives. However, taking magnesium without a laboratory-documented deficiency is not only useless, As we have commented on several occasionsbut it can trigger a very dangerous clinical condition. There are differences with respect to the vitamin complexes that we also sin of taking in an abusive way without an analysis involved. And in these cases the excess is usually easily eliminated through urine without major impact, but serum magnesium operates in a very narrow physiological range, and this means that when we saturate our body exceeding its safety limits, the adverse effects manifest themselves in a domino effect that compromises everything from the digestive system to the heart rate. And it’s something we fall into thinking that ‘the more the better’. The balance. Our body has all its parameters well regulated within a range of fairly well-defined values so as not to generate pathology due to excess or deficiency. In this case, different references suggest that the normal value of magnesium in blood ranges between 1.7 and 2.2 mg/dL, and can reach 2.4 mg/dL in some laboratories. Hypermagnesemia is formally diagnosed when these levels exceed 2.5 or 2.6 mg/dL, and the truth is that it is easy to reach these extremes in the case of widespread supplementation when there is no clear deficit. Its effects. In the case of overdoing it with magnesium intakethe first warning that we are going to have will be in the digestive system, since the magnesium here will act by attracting water to the intestine, causing diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal cramps. But when we increase the excess to a moderate range of between 4 and 6 mg/dL, magnesium begins to act as a depressant of the nervous system and a vasodilator, which translates into a drop in blood pressure and muscle weakness. In serious cases. When levels exceed the barrier of 6 mg/dL, the condition becomes critical, and here the guidelines warn of a profound neuromuscular blockade that can lead to muscle paralysis, which can be fatal if it reaches the respiratory muscles. But it does not stop there, since the cardiovascular system also goes into crisis in this situation, and the electrocardiogram of these patients shows severe alterations that cause it to lose its natural rhythm. The role of the kidney. In completely healthy patients, this organ acts as an extremely filter efficient when it comes to excreting all the excess magnesium through urine. However, when we talk about people who have compromised kidney function, the kidney will not be able to work properly removing magnesium from supplements, so it will accumulate quickly, generating all the complications we have seen before. The physiology. For all this, you cannot take magnesium like a candy, trusting that all the benefits they sell us will magically come true. The recommendation is always to consult a doctor to determine this mineral, and supplement (if necessary) with a maximum between 250 and 300 mg of magnesium per day. Exceeding this dose, especially by consuming multiple supplements or abusing magnesium-containing laxatives, is playing Russian roulette with our electrolyte balance. Images | MIND FAVOR In Xataka | Like so many supplements before, we need to be clear about something about magnesium: it’s not going to work miracles.

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