complete list with all models

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We bring you a list with Android mobile models compatible with AirDrop from Apple, so you can send files, links and everything you want from one to another wirelessly. For years, AirDrop was the technology for all Apple devices to communicate with each other and share files easily, although Android was not compatible. But this has now changedsince Google has broken down this wall and its Quick Share now allows you to share photos or documents with devices with AirDrop. And after this technological milestone, we now have the list of the first compatible mobile phones. Yes indeed, not all manufacturers have made a move yet embracing this compatibility, which means that some may be missing. Android phones compatible with AirDrop And here we go with the current list of mobile phones compatible with AirDrop. If your mobile appears on the list, you just have to activate the option Share with Apple devices in the section Quick Share of the settings Connections. Inside, click More connections and you will see the Quick Share option. Google phones compatible with AirDrop Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold Google Pixel 10 Pro XL Google Pixel 10 Pro Google Pixel 10 Google Pixel 10a Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold Google Pixel 9 Pro XL Google Pixel 9 Pro Google Pixel 9 Google Pixel 8a Samsung phones compatible with AirDrop Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra Samsung Galaxy S26+ Samsung Galaxy S26 Oppo phones compatible with AirDrop Oppo Find N6 Oppo Find X9 Ultra Oppo Find X9 Pro Oppo Find X9 Vivo mobile phones compatible with AirDrop Mobile phones that will soon be compatible with AirDrop The above are the mobile phones that are already compatible, but there are also several that are known to be “soon” compatible. They are the following: Samsung Galaxy S25 Series Samsung Galaxy S24 Series Samsung Galaxy Z Flip7 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold Oppo Find X8 OnePlus 15 Honor Magic V6 Honor Magic8 Pro In Xataka Basics | How to send files from your Android to an iPhone using Quick Share with AirDrop

We have been searching for extraterrestrial life for decades. According to these astrobiologists, we have been doing it wrong all this time

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We are very used to hearing that someone has found possible signs of life in space. Then life is never found, but the trail seems to be there. All of these findings often end up being false positives, something astrobiologists are more than familiar with. However, According to a study just published in Nature Astronomy, They could be overlooking false negatives and that would be serious. Pass life long. What the authors of this study point out is that false negatives could be more common than we think. That is to say, many of the times when it is clearly concluded that there is no life in a place in space, it could be that it did exist, but it had been passed by without being detected. The causes. There could be three reasons why these false negatives occur. On the one hand, no traces of life are preserved. That is, it exists or has existed, but has not left a detectable trace. It could also be that this fingerprint is difficult to detect. Or, perhaps, that the methods used to detect it have limitations. Along these lines, the authors of the study give an example. Let’s imagine that there is a living being that, through its metabolic reactions, generates some gas that is understood as a trace of life. Maybe oxygen or methane. But let’s also imagine that there is a geological activity in that place that captures that gas from the environment. I wouldn’t have time to measure it. Therefore, the detection of life would have to be covered from other points. The risks. There are two main risks of not paying attention to false negatives. On the one hand, instruments that would help find even more traces of life would be deprioritized. If we do not find anything that justifies its development, we limit the possibilities of continuing searching. On the other hand, if life is not adequately searched for, resources from other planets where such life is found could be exploited. We would destroy it before we even knew it existed. Solutions. These scientists believe that searching for patterns using artificial intelligence could be an option. If the usual methods have not worked so far, perhaps we should ask an algorithm to detect patterns that have gone unnoticed to find new search paths. Along the same lines, it would also be necessary to study the terrain better and pay attention to anomalies. For example, if an unconventional type of oxidation is detected on a planet, inexplicable with what we know on Earth, it could be that it was associated with some form of life. It may not look like the oxidation carried out by terrestrial living beings, but who says it has to be the same? You have to think outside the box. Combine different types of work. In short, these scientists consider that to adequately search for life it is necessary to combine laboratory experiments with modeling and field work. But, above all, it is important to change the questions we ask ourselves. What if it has already been found? In 2019, a former NASA scientist told in an article for Scientific American that, according to himhis agency found life on Mars, but accidentally destroyed it. Supposedly, it all happened in the 1970s, in an experiment that was part of the Viking mission. This consisted of depositing nutrients in the soil and checking if gases typical of microbial decomposition were produced. Then, to ensure that it was not a coincidence, they would repeat the process, but adding a substance lethal to living organisms to the soil. In that case, gases should not be produced. And no, they were not produced, so there was something alive generating the gases. It was great news, but NASA did not publish that result, because when trying to replicate the experiment it came back negative. In science it is very important to replicate the results, so they concluded that it must have been a false positive. However, this former member of NASA, Gilbert V. Levin, believes that they destroyed life unintentionally and that is why they could not replicate it. This is no longer an anecdote. Most likely, they would not have found life. However, this story shows that we are always more predisposed to false positive than false negative. The focus would have to be changed a little. Maybe then we will finally find some life beyond our own planet. Images | Eric Erbe and Christopher Pooley (illustrative image of E.coliit has nothing to do with the study)/ Brett Ritchie (Unsplash) In Xataka | Life on Earth underwent a spectacular change 540 million years ago. We have a new explanation why

DeepSeek is good, pretty and very cheap. And above all, the weapon to create a Chinese hardware industry independent of Nvidia

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The arrival of DeepSeek-V4-Pro It hasn’t caused that much of a stir. like the one caused by DeepSeek R1 a year and a half ago, but we may be facing an even more important model. If that version revealed to the world that China was advancing spectacularly in this race, this other one is beginning to allow us to glimpse something else more interesting. What most people see is a very decent model and above all “low priced”. Which hide the company It’s another more important thing: achieve independence from Nvidia and US hardware. what has happened. Last Friday, those responsible for DeepSeek announced something surprising: their promotional offer with a 75% price cut to use their DeepSeek-V4-Pro model will be maintained permanently. That makes this model offer very decent features (but not exceptional) for a really low price: 1M entry tokens 1M tokens output DeepSeek-V4-Pro 0.435 0.87 GPT-5.5 5 30 Opus 4.7 5 25 Gemini 3.5 Flash 1.5 9 Good, pretty and very cheap. It is true that the performance of DeepSeek-V4-Pro is inferior to that of rival models from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. Artificial Analysis tests indicate that the DeepSeek model is at a very good level, but it is also much cheaper than its competitors. This is especially relevant for agentic tasks that consume many tokens and that with this model become accessible and very affordable. According to Artificial Analysis, DeepSeek is close to the performance of the best models in the industry, and although it is slower in its responses, it is also much cheaper than the frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. A different strategy. How is this company going to make money? It does not have subscription plans like its local competition (GLM, Kimi) or the western one (ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro). It also does not have voice or image models. It does not have an AI agent for programming that competes with Claude Code. It publishes the open weights of its models and shares its technical innovations with the industry (and with its competitors). For those who closely follow the company and these decisions, the strategy is clear. DeepSeek’s goal is not to win the AI ​​model race. Their goal is to build a Chinese AI hardware industry that doesn’t depend on Nvidia or TSMC… and get paid their share in that process. Hardware independence. China has a structural problem in this AI race: sanctions and vetoes imposed by the US make you unable to access the most advanced chips nor to ASML UVE photolithography. And since China cannot currently compete in terms of computing power, what its companies are doing is ensuring that their AI models need less computing power to achieve similar results. Efficient architectures. The Mixture of Experts (MoE) and Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) architectures are two key weapons in this strategy. The first already existed but was adapted by DeepSeek for their model: with it only part of the total parameters of the model are activated to answer the query without losing precision. What MLA does is compress the attention information (the so-called KV Cache) with which the model maintains the context of a conversation, reducing it by 90%. Both techniques allow us to reduce the need to use high-speed HBM memories, something that is also striking in order to reveal DeepSeek’s probable strategy. The importance of KV Cache. As the GDP analyst explains in Xthat use of MLA allows that for one million tokens, DeepSeek-V4-Pro only needs 5.48 GB of HBM memory. Competitors like Zhipo AI, which develops GLM 5, need 60 GB for the same, while Alibaba’s Qwen 3 needs 89 GB. This advantage allows DeepSeek to offer much lower prices to obtain performances similar to those of its competition, but it also means that DeepSeek models can run on Chinese memory chips that cannot compete in speed with HBM modules. Goodbye HBM, hello NAND and SSD. These innovations open the door to the use of NAND memories and even SSD drives to process this data, and there YMTC enters the scenea Chinese Flash memory manufacturer that is slowly becoming a global giant. Also CXMTwhich manufactures DRAM memoriesbecomes an alternative here and the reason is equally interesting: DeepSeek introduced a memory search module in LLMs called Engram which is also intended to avoid excessive dependence on HBM memories. How to bypass the CUDA monopoly. Nvidia continues to have a fundamental element in CUDA to maintain its market dominance, but here DeepSeek too has proposed an alternative. Is called Tile Kernels and these are software cores created with TileLang (a variant of Python for this field) that allow governing advanced AI chips (GPUs). Huawei as an invisible ally. Those responsible for Huawei recently indicated that its new Ascend AI supernodes fully support DeepSeek v4 models. Precisely this provides another fundamental advantage to the company, which thus avoids (at least in part) total dependence on the use of Nvidia chips and prepares to further strengthen Huawei’s relevance in a market in which until recently Jensen Huang’s company was queen and mistress. Open models to attract the hardware industry. US companies continue to maintain their closed and proprietary models, but DeepSeek is one of the many Chinese startups that publish them with open weights. With this, what she and the others intend to do is not only attract AI developers and users, but also create a hardware ecosystem that adopts these architectures. DeepSeek invites its rivals to use techniques such as MoE or MLA precisely so that all these advances become a de facto standard and hardware manufacturers also adopt them and integrate them in an optimized way into their designs. A round of 10,000 million to advance. The company is also preparing a financing round in which they intend to raise 10,000 million dollars and with which they would achieve a valuation of between 45,000 and 50,000 million dollars. Still far from the mammoth valuations of OpenAI or Anthropic (already close to a billion dollars) but certainly … Read more

The iPhone 17 finally drops in price. New historical low for very few days

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Apple mobile phones are going through a very particular situation, and that is that in addition to the lack of stock that they have had since their launch eight months ago (especially the base model), the offers have been very brief with very unattractive discounts. However, MediaMarkt is celebrating its new Apple Days right now and it is precisely the iPhone 17 who stars in the campaign with a historic minimum price. If you were thinking of buying the mobile, now you can do it for 899 euros. Of course, the offer will end along with the campaign on May 28 at 9:00 a.m. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links The iPhone 17 at an all-time low price He iPhone 17whose official and recommended price is 959 euros, has received very few offers since its launch. The stock has also been very irregular, preventing, for example, buying it in some stores for a while. However, right now there is sufficient stock in the MediaMarkt online store, allowing it to be purchased at this new price in its five different colors. This mobile phone is the one that has benefited the most from the generational leap, since it is the one that has changed the most compared to the iPhone 16. We find a very good screen both for its quality and for its 6.3-inch format, but above all because it now has the 120Hz refresh rate that until its launch we only saw in the most expensive Apple phones. Another of the great news is that Apple has finally started manufacturing its mobile phones with a 256 GB minimum configuration internal storage, a larger number to store information locally. In addition, it is also worth mentioning that the iPhone 17 incorporates the A19 chip and that it has wireless charging through MagSafeone of the most useful technologies in Apple phones. ⚡ IN SUMMARY: iPhone 17 offer today ✅ THE BEST The arrival of 120 Hz: Until its launch, we only saw this refresh rate in the most expensive Apple models. Increasing base internal storage: Apple has finally abandoned the minimum configuration of 128 GB. ❌ THE WORST It gets too hot: something that happens especially during long gaming sessions or with intensive use. Its fast charging: It improves generation after generation, but it is not up to par with the competition, which has much cheaper mobile phones with greater fast charging. 💡 BUY IT IF… You are looking for the best quality-price ratio within Apple’s current generation, if you are coming from Android phones and want an iPhone with a 120 Hz refresh rate and you are also looking for a model that is compact. ⛔ DON’T BUY IT IF… The 256 GB of storage is not enough because you usually take a lot of photos (and in good quality) or if you are looking for a cheaper iPhone, like the iPhone 17e. You may also be interested Spigen Case for iPhone 17, Ultra Hybrid MagFit Compatible with MagSafe (Dura Clear Technology) – Light White The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Apple AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancellation, Wireless Headphones, Bluetooth, Adaptive Audio, Ambient Sound Mode, Custom Spatial Audio, USB-C Charging Case and Wireless Charging The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Antonio VallejoApple In Xataka | The best mobile phones, we have tested them and here are their analyzes In Xataka | Best truly wireless (TWS) earbuds with noise cancellation. Which one to buy and seven recommended models

Perovskite is the “holy grail” of solar energy, but its industrial manufacturing was hell. This new technique changes everything at once

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Solar energy has a clear favorite to lead the future: tandem solar cells. The idea is brilliant and simple on paper, since if you combine traditional silicon with a top layer of revolutionary perovskite, you create a “super panel.” Perovskite swallows high-energy, short-wave light, and silicon finishes the job with longer waves. So the result is capturing much more solar spectrum and generating more electricity than with traditional plates. The valley of industrial death. The problem is that the photovoltaic industry had been banging its head against a wall for years. Perovskite was a wonder in the “Petri dish” of the laboratory, but manufacturing those very thin layers on a large scale, uniformly and quickly, was a true technical nightmare. Technology ran the risk of remaining an eternal promise, until a bridge built between Karlsruhe and Valencia showed that the problem was not the material, but the method. The 10 minute record. A team of researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany and the University of Valencia, supported by institutions in France and Argentina, has just published a historic milestone in the magazine Nature Energy. They have designed an ultra-fast, solvent-free vacuum process that deposits the layer of perovskite at a pace never seen before. They have managed to manufacture tandem cells with a very high efficiency of 24.3% and the conversion process lasts just 10 minutes. To understand why this turns the industry upside down, you have to look at the factory numbers. As Professor Ulrich Paetzold (KIT) explainsIn the industry, not only efficiency matters, but also that the process is robust and scalable. This new method achieves a deposition rate of 47 nanometers per minute, that is, a speed ten times greater than that of conventional thermal evaporation methods. In addition, it consumes very little material and allows sources to be reused, drastically reducing costs. The “magic” of sublimation. The technique is called Closed Space Sublimation (CSS). We could say that it is like a microscopic oven: the precursor materials evaporate and collide directly against the silicon cell, which is placed just a few millimeters away. There they react on site to form the structure of the perovskite almost magically. Sofía Chozas-Barrientos, researcher at the University of Valencia, emphasizes that this system It allows you to do without solvents and save a lot of time. However, the recipe needed to be refined. For the tandem to work, the perovskite The upper part must act as a spectral filter (have a wider bandgap), and this is achieved by adding bromine. The drama was that, when trying to introduce bromine, it literally vanished during the process. The solution, according to researcher Alexander Dierckswas to create a mixed organic source by mixing methylammonium iodide and methylammonium bromide in an exact ratio of 3 to 1. Thus they managed to retain the bromine and nail an ideal band efficiency of 1.64 eV. Ready for the real world. The point is that good solar panels are not smooth; They are full of textures (with micropyramid shapes) to better catch the light. And this CSS process has worked perfectly on smooth, nanostructured and microstructured silicon, without having to touch a single button in the machine’s settings. Microscopes confirmed impeccable coverage in all topographies. As Professor Henk Bolink summarizesfrom the University of Valencia, a process that only works on smooth laboratory surfaces is of no use in industry. The fact that this sublimation achieves uniform layers on textured silicon is what makes this advancement real, viable and marketable. The future, on the roofs. Closing the gap between the laboratory and the factory is the great challenge of our energy era. With this Spanish-German milestone, the mass production of tandem solar technology finally removes the “unviable” label. The perovskite revolution no longer has to wait decades; is ready to make the leap to factories and, very soon, to rooftops around the world. Image | Eurekalert Xataka | Where you see an old bullet from the 17th century, Germany sees a magnificent source of perovskite for solar panels

a millionaire is looking for ideas because money has not given him happiness

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Some people think that the only thing you need to be happy is a checking account whose balance looks like a phone number. This is a fact confirmed by science. Others, on the other hand, cannot even use all the money in the world to achieve happiness. This is the case of Vinay Hiremath, a 34-year-old engineer of Indian origin living in the US who became a millionaire in a short time. but he doesn’t know what to do with his life to be happy. So he didn’t hesitate to make it public. from your personal page to see if anyone would give him ideas about what he could do with his life. “I know. It’s an absolutely otherworldly situation,” the millionaire wrote. Millionaire with all the time in the world Hiremath co-founded the startup Loom in 2015 alongside Shahed Khan and Joe Thomas. The company developed software that allowed screenshots and video capture in third-party applications. At its height, the pandemic meant that we all suddenly needed record meetings and taking screenshots of video calls, so the company’s valuation skyrocketed. In 2023, Atlassian purchased the company he had founded for $975 million, of which Hiremath would receive $60 million as a compensation salary package. for leaving the company. After formalizing the purchase, the young millionaire found himself with a fortune in your pocket and all the time in the world to spend it on things that made him happy. That was the first disappointment. “I have infinite freedom, but I don’t know what to do with it and, honestly, I’m not the most optimistic person about life,” Hiremath said on his blog. The first weeks were spent meeting with entrepreneurs and robotics experts in the hope of finding an exciting idea with which to get involved and help it grow as he had already done with his own company a few years ago. It was useless since none of the proposals inspired him. “I began to realize that what I really wanted was to look like Elon (Musk), and that is incredibly embarrassing. It hurts me to even write this,” the millionaire acknowledged. Since he didn’t know what to do with his money, thought that perhaps it would be a good idea to give a good part of his fortune to his parents so that they could retire earlier. He also tried to have fun traveling the worldand he did that accompanied by his girlfriend for six months. Unfortunately, that didn’t work either and, not only did it not make Hiremath’s life make sense, but he ended up breaking up with his girlfriend after “two years of unconditional love.” “We started arguing frequently and I knew it wasn’t her fault, it was mine.” It’s not what you have, it’s what you do After his romantic breakup, the millionaire understood that nothing he did would make him feel fulfilled if he did not first do an introspection exercise: he needed to “face himself completely.” Founding the company had made him feel fulfilled and, suddenly finding himself without a purposeleft him disoriented and without a vital goal to pursue. Hoping to find himself, he left Himalayan climbing without prior preparation and without any experience. On the verge of hypoxia lack of oxygendecided that his “inner self” was definitely not going to be in the peaks of the Himalayas, so he came to his senses and returned home, but not before climbing two of the peaks of that mountain range. “I completed the two summits I had planned and I realized again how important it is for me to do difficult things. It is the heart of my life and I don’t understand 100% why, but it probably has something to do with the fact that I didn’t have the best childhood,” said the millionaire in his writing. Upon returning home and telling his friends about the conclusions he had come to while hanging from a rappelling rope in the Himalayas, his friends joked that “I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get out of its current crisis and not pay its own debt. So I contacted some people and they accepted me.” For a month, the millionaire was talking to the army of candidates to be part of the new “extragovernmental” department“which created, with more pain than gloryElon Musk. “I learned about the power of urgency and having an undeniable mission. I didn’t read it somewhere, I experienced it.” However, the young millionaire also realized that That wasn’t going to be his battle.. “After four intense and intoxicating weeks, I canceled my plans to move to Washington and embark on a journey to save our government with some of the smartest people I have ever met. And I booked a one-way ticket to Hawaii,” Hiremath said. After a journey through the desert of the human condition, the engineer has “learned to accept that I am happy learning physics.” However, that was not going to be his destiny either. As a restless engineer, Hiremath has found a purpose. Recovering one of the thoughts that went viral from his blog, the young millionaire has managed to “lay the foundations of my basic principles and be able to start a company that manufactures things in the real world.” He has discovered a new passion developing sensors and automation for startup Specterwhich is responsible for implementing “physical intelligence” to control the security data in public and strategic facilities. In the end, happiness was in something as humble as a weld of tin in a silicon circuit. He who has more is not richerbut who needs it least. In Xataka | If the question is whether money brings happiness, a Harvard expert answers: it’s not having money, it’s what you do with it Image | Unsplash (Danka & Peter, Clark Tibbs) A version of this article was published in January 2025.

China is very clear that the future of education involves AI, so it is going to require its teachers to have knowledge

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China has one objective between its eyebrows: become the first world power. It is clearly an ambitious objective, but in the latest Five-Year Plan they detail the roadmap that must be followed to achieve that goal in the period 2026-2030. That of the five year plans is a very communist tradition which was not born in China, but in the Soviet Union, but which the Asian giant began to implement in 1953. It consists of setting guidelines to achieve certain objectives in all the main areas of the country. And one of those objectives is to be sovereign in artificial intelligence. This does not happen have models either chips to train those models: goes through an industrial renewal of all the legs of the system ranging from how it is designed, how it is applied, how it is powered and, above all, how AI is taught. And, to comply with it, China is clear that this is not just a matter for students: teachers must be on the hook. Teachers, learn AI to teach AI In April of this year, China’s Ministry of Education launchedwith the support of other government agencies, the “AI+ Education Action Plan” program. This is a national plan to integrate AI throughout the educational system with the aim of building “an AI literacy system for all levels of schooling and throughout life.” The Ministry exposes We are entering a new era in which teaching and learning must be reconfigured to ensure that all students acquire basic knowledge of AI. That is, it is clear that AI is important and that it is being used in classrooms around the world, but China is aiming for a profound update of the educational program. With this, they show that They consider AI a pillar of the future of education And, if students must obtain knowledge in AI and then be able to apply it in a world in which they will coexist with these systems, someone must transmit that knowledge to them. That will be the new job of the teaching staff. All primary and secondary school students in Beijing receive at least eight class hours of AI courses per academic year – Li Yi, director of the Beijing Education Commission This revision of the educational plan specifies that the program will incorporate AI exams into teacher qualification exams. In fact, this is not something that starts now. In 2025, the Ministry of Education published two guides about the use of AI and generative artificial intelligence to primary and secondary schools. That same year, the Administration organized specific training sessions in AI for directors of primary and secondary schools in which he emphasized the need to reinforce the digital and AI skills of teachers so that they can take advantage of their functions. In the end, everything is framed in that desire to have a world-class educational system by 2035 because this extends beyond primary and secondary school. That “AI literacy” order incorporate AI also in extracurricular services, as well as in vocational training and university, becoming in these cycles a general basic course with programs and degrees aligned with the industrial transformation driven by AI. “We teach children to use LLMs to solve problems and most importantly: think critically, question whether the AI’s answers are correct, and verify information from multiple sources” – Yao Xiaoying, principal of a primary school in Shenzhen And you may be wondering what teachers should apply to comply with this “AI literacy.” Here things are a bit fuzzy because speaks to promote the use of teaching systems throughout the educational process to automate tasks (such as tutoring, questions and answers and corrections), as well as analyze teaching practices so that their workload is reduced and they can spend more time training young people. For the adult population there is also a plan: carry out learning courses so that they adapt and are not left behind. Difficulties The truth is that there has been a debate about this situation for some time. Given the commotion caused by this, the Minister of Education came out lecture to prohibit students from using AI to complete their assignments. As we said before, AI should only be a supervised support tool. Because basically there is a question of class and resources, and there are already those who warn that AI can widen the social gap. While in large cities where parents may have more resources and educational level, families and the center can do a good job in training in AI so that children know how to use it and question the answers. However, in more rural areas where there may be less education, families have lower incomes, and parents must work longer hours, students run the risk of being “locked in” in some cubicles that have begun to bloom by several locations in which there is a tablet, it proposes tests and supervises the children’s responses, but does not teach or explain the subject. There are also those who point Almost as interesting as knowing the Government’s plans for teaching AI to both teachers and students is checking the speed at which all this goes from a political document to the reality of the classroom. In Xataka | China continues to draw up five-year plans in the old communist way. Objective: tech self-sufficiency

If the question is what the European Orion module is doing among giant speakers, the answer is NASA’s extreme tests

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When we talk about Artemis We almost always look in the same place: NASA, the SLS rocketthe Orion capsule and that plan to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon. It makes sense, because the United States leads the program and a good part of the space imagination continues to revolve around its missions. But that reading falls short. Artemis is not just an American story.It is also an international architectureand in that architecture Europe has a much more important piece than it usually seems at first glance. That role has just been realized in a very visible milestone. Airbus Space recently announced that ESM-3, Orion’s third European Service Module and the unit destined for Artemis III, had its four solar wings installed. It is a powerful image because it summarizes well the nature of the project: an American ship with an essential part developed on the other side of the Atlantic. The module, built by the aerospace giant for the European Space Agency, will use those wings to provide electrical power to Orion during its mission, although there is still work to be done before the assembly can be considered ready to fly. The ESM has a much deeper function than a picture of newly installed solar panels may suggest. In the Orion architecture, this module is placed under the capsule where the astronauts travel and concentrates systems that are essential for the mission. NASA explains that provides electricity, propulsion, thermal control, air and waterin addition to serving as support to the ship during flight. That is why its role is not understood as a symbolic contribution, but as an operational part of the vehicle. A test on the ground, between speakers and noise The following, however, was not one of those scenes that we immediately associate with space. Airbus Space noted on May 6 that the next step was an acoustic test, a ground test designed to see how the spacecraft responds to the extreme launch environment. Simply put: before thinking about docking, orbits or manned missions, the module had to deal with the noise and vibrations that occur when the rocket takes off. That trial has already begun to materialize. NASA has shown the Orion service module for Artemis III during its acoustic tests at the Kennedy Space Center, surrounded by a wall of high-powered speakers to simulate the sound and vibrations of launch. According to the center, these tests help measure how the structure responds, verify the physical integrity of the spacecraft, protect sensitive avionics and propulsion interfaces, and detect potential problems on the ground well before launch day. This type of test is known as direct field acoustic testor D-FAT, and involves surrounding space hardware with an array of high-power speakers to reproduce the acoustic environment of launch. In equivalent testing of the Orion European Service Module, ESA has spoken of more than 200 speakers and more than 140 decibels. It’s not a new rarity: NASA already submitted Apollo vehicles underwent vibroacoustic testing in the 1960s to see how their structures and systems responded to the noise and vibrations expected during flight. That this test has arrived now does not make the module a ready-to-fly piece, but it does mark another advance in Orion’s preparation for Artemis III. And there the context matters, because the mission in which this module must participate is no longer counted exactly the same as it was a few months ago. Artemis III was for a long time the mission associated with the return of astronauts to the lunar surface, but NASA has rearranged the calendar and now places it as a demonstration mission in low Earth orbit. The plan involves launching four astronauts in Orion, on the SLS, to rehearse rendezvous and docking maneuvers with one or two commercial lunar landing vehicles from SpaceX and Blue Origin. It is not the end of the lunar goal, but an intermediate step to test an architecture that still needs to fit many pieces. The interest of this module is best understood precisely because of this new role of Artemis III. If the mission will be used to verify docking and operations with commercial vehicles, Orion will have to act as a manned platform within a much broader test than a simple test flight. In this scenario, the ESM-3 is not a peripheral contribution, but rather an integrated part of the ship in which the astronauts will travel. Europe, therefore, does not appear only in the cooperation communications: it appears in the machinery that has to make the mission work. The paradox sums up the moment quite well. Europa has just completed a visible part of the preparation of the module that will travel with Orion, and its next test has not been on the Moon, not even in orbit, but among noise, vibrations and speakers within a test on the ground. That is also the reality of Artemis: large lunar objectives supported by a long succession of technical, industrial and often inconspicuous steps. In that chain, ESM-3 makes it clear that the return to the lunar surface is not being prepared only from the United States. Images | Airbus Space | POT In Xataka | The Earth has had a traveling companion for millions of years and we don’t know where it came from, but there is a ship ready to give us answers

It turns out that at least half of what orbits the Earth is garbage. And that’s only what we can see

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Around the Earth is the moon and a lot of space junk. And it is not an exaggeration: we have decades launching satellites into space without a clear or unified strategy. Of those waters, these muds: only Starlink has 9,000 units orbiting and has requested permission to launch a million more. What began with a technological race between superpowers has become an orbiting dump that has serious implications: threat of catastrophic collisions (every time we launch something, we buy another ticket in this macabre lottery) to risk critical infrastructures such as GPS navigation or communications. But all this is not new: science has been warning about it for years. The truly disturbing thing is not so much that the problem has been diagnosed, but rather that there is no simple solution. Space debris will not degrade with rain nor will it be decomposed by microorganisms. What goes up, stays there. And everything that remains is a real threat to what is there that truly matters. Almost half of what is in orbit is garbage. The engineering company Accu has used public data of the United States Space Corps through the web Space-Track.org and has analyzed them: there are 33,269 trackable objects in orbit, of which 17,682 are satellites. What happens to that other 47%? What is space debris: abandoned rockets, dead satellites and thousands of fragments resulting from collisions, among other unidentified objects. Stay with this information, because it is important and we will return later. Why is it important. From high school physics: we have already seen that there are objects of all types and sizes, but the majority of them they travel At more than 27,000 km/h and that speed, even the smallest piece can be lethal. To put it in context: a one-kilogram fragment impacting at 10 km/s has a kinetic energy of 50 MJ, that is, its equivalence in TNT There are 12 kg of explosive, enough to completely destroy an entire satellite of several tons. Losing a satellite is not the worst thing that could happen (even if its function was critical), but the Kessler syndromean irreversible chain reaction: if two objects collide and generate thousands of fragments, these fragments can collide with each other, generating more and more until making the orbit unusable. Context. It all started with the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, but the problem has gotten out of hand in the last decade due to something that a priori was good: the cost of launches has plummeted, so there are more and more and in fact, there are even commercial constellations, like Starlink. Only between 2020 and 2025 the number of trackable objects in orbit grew by around 10,000 units. You can see the history of all objects launched into space in Space-Track.org. Maybe after hearing so much that the wolf is coming we downplay it, but it is already happening: in 2024 the astronauts of the International Space Station they had to take refuge after the fragmentation of a decommissioned Russian satellite. In 2025 Chinese astronauts they were trapped at Tiangong Station after a piece of trash cracked the window of their return capsule. The worst is what we don’t know. We mentioned before that 47% of space debris, but that is only what we can see: the European Space Agency calculate that there are more than 1.2 million fragments larger than one centimeter in orbit and that more than 50,000 exceed 10 centimeters, enough size to completely destroy an active satellite if both impact. The figure amounts to more than 100 million objects of one millimeter or less, according to NASA. Even a flake of paint. In addition, each space power manages its own tracking data with different levels of transparency, making it difficult to have a complete and reliable picture, a map of what is in orbit. The gap between what is trackable and what is real is abysmal: current surveillance systems can only reliably track objects larger than 10 centimeters in low orbit and larger than one meter in geostationary orbit. Everything that remains outside that threshold is simply invisible, not innocuous. As if that were not enough, there is one more dynamic variable to introduce into the equation: the interaction between debris and space weather. A 2025 study warned that an intense solar storm could cripple satellites’ ability to maneuver long enough to cause cascading collisions and that there would be less than three days to react. Whose fault is it. The origin of space debris is essentially concentrated in three blocks: China, the United States and the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, heirs of the Soviet space program, concentrate on their shoulders about 95% of all waste cataloged in orbit. With data from March 2026, China accounts for 34% of the total debris tracked, closely followed by the CIS (Russia and eight other small countries) with 31% and the United States with another 31%. The underlying problem is legal: the international treaty that regulates space dates back to the 1960s and does not prohibit destroying satellites with missiles. Nor has anyone been serious about minimizing the launches. Without a clear policy to reduce waste, verification mechanisms or real sanctions, little can be expected, such as documents the UN. In Xataka | We have been burning space junk for years to get rid of the problem. It turned out to be a bad idea In Xataka | Orbital cleanup is no longer science fiction: the first regular space debris collection service will arrive in 2027 Cover | Photo of Javier Miranda in Unsplash

They have measured the brain age of people who usually meditate. The result is that he looks six years younger

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The age reflected on our identity card does not always coincide with the real age of our organs. In the field of neuroscience, the “brain age” has become a fascinating biomarker to understand how our nervous system ages and what factors can protect it. And now meditation seems to have a fundamental role in delaying this clock at least during our rest hours. A new study published in the magazine Mindfulness has found that people who practice meditation At an advanced level they have a “brain age” during sleep that is almost six years lower than their chronological age. A striking fact that opens doors in the study of neuroplasticity and the role that this habit can have in the lives of many people. Although logically we must move away from the idea of ​​suffering a miraculous “rejuvenation” How it has been seen. To understand the finding, we must first understand how this “brain age” is measured, and here the researchers did not use MRIs to see the size of the brain, but instead analyzed the electrical activity through electroencephalograms (EEG) during sleep. Its evolution. Something that is known is that, as we age, the brain waves we produce when sleeping change in predictable ways. Under this pretext, algorithms have been used to calculate a “brain age index” based on these electrical patterns. With these data, if the brain produces waves typical of someone of a similar age, the index is similar to zero, but if waves are produced from someone older, the index is positive. The method. The research team evaluated 34 people who meditate at an advanced level, belonging to the discipline Inner Engineering with an average age of 38 yearsand compared their sleep records with those of several control groups who did not meditate. The result here was that people who usually meditate showed an index that corresponded to people six years younger. That is, their brains, electrically speaking and while sleeping, behaved like those of people almost six years younger, while the control groups showed values ​​close to zero or slightly positive. One more biomarker. The findings fit like one more piece in a scientific puzzle that has been years in the making. Previous research already pointed to global changes in the EEG spectrum and greater neuroplasticity, and it was even seen that regular meditation caused an increase in brain gray matter and a possible neuroprotective effect. However, from a clinical standpoint, it is critical not to confuse an EEG marker with literal rejuvenation. The fact that the brain shows younger electrical patterns at night is an excellent biological indicator of brain health, but this study does not clinically prove that meditation is a proven tool for reversing cognitive decline. You have to be cautious. In this case it cannot be categorically stated that meditating rejuvenates the brain because there may be other factors that have not been measured. We must also keep in mind that we are dealing with a study on only 34 people, so the sample should be increased with the aim of extrapolating it to the entire population. Images | Drazen Zigic in Magnific In Xataka | The best 18 meditation, relaxation and mindfulness applications to have better mental health

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