bed

A millionaire went to bed one day being the richest man in the world the next day he was bankrupt… twice

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History is full of names that they lose their fortunes for an achievement of bad decisionsbut also of others who lost their assets due to a stroke of bad luck. The story of Nelson Bunker Hunt is one of the latter, who not only lost his fortune once due to a stroke of bad luck: he lost it twiceand neither time was the fault entirely his. The name of this millionaire is barely known today, but between the late 70s and early 80s, he was synonymous with enormous wealth: the richest man on the planet, owner of oil wells in the Libyan desert and such a large portion of the world silver market that he managed to twist the arm of Wall Street. A coup colonel and a bad Thursday in 1980 reminded him that no fortune, no matter how enormous, is safe from history. From Arkansas to the Libyan desert after the black gold Nelson was born in 1926 in El Dorado, Arkansas. His father, H. L. Huntwas already an oil magnate with fifteen children from three different women. Nelson wanted to match him, at least in terms of wealth, so he went looking for oil outside of Texas. His first attempts in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan They were a total failure. But the third time’s the charm and in 1961 he tried his luck in Libya. A stroke of luck led the young entrepreneur to obtain Concession 65, a huge area of ​​32,400 square kilometers of desert land to exploit the Sarir sitewhich still today continues to be the largest oil field of the country. That made him a multimillionaire almost overnight. As and how did he count the BBCfor more than a decade, Sarir generated billions of dollars for Hunt’s company. Muammar al-Gaddafi It all ended in 1973, when a colonel named Muammar al-Gaddafi took power and nationalized all its oil wells without prior notice. Over time, that same site served to amass the dictator’s personal fortune, which some researchers even valued at more than 200,000 million of dollars. However, Hunt lost the goose that laid the golden (black) eggs of his oil empire due to a coup d’état, and bad luck, that he did not see coming. Silver as an unexpected refuge Far from giving up, Hunt He reinvested what was left of his fortune on ranches, in breeding thoroughbred horses and in new oil businesses. Together with his brothers Herbert and Lamar, he began buying silver in the mid-seventies, as strategy to protect your fortune against inflation. What started as an investment in a safe haven soon became an obsession. By 1979 the Hunts controlled about a third of all the money deprived of the planet. The price of silver went from trading at six dollars an ounce to exceeding $49.45 thanks to the position of power over the silver market exercised by the Hunt brothers. Which implied that his fortune was also growing in the same proportion. The Hunt brothers’ control of the silver market reached levels that even Tiffany’s published an advertisement in it New York Times accusing them of artificially make any silver object more expensivefrom baby spoons to photo reels. “We find it unacceptable for anyone to hoard billions, yes, billions, of dollars in silver and therefore drive up the price so high that others have to pay artificially high prices for items made of silver,” the article read. According what was published for the BBCthe silver magnate reportedly told Time magazine in January 1980 that “silver seemed safer than oil concessions abroad. And precious metals were a good hedge against paper money.” Anyone has a bad Thursday Thursday, March 27, 1980 would be a day that would be burned into Hunt’s head. His arrived second major financial disaster. That day, known as Silver Thursdaythe price of silver plummeted below $11 in a matter of hours. The Hunts’ silver position, valued shortly before at more than $4.5 billion, was transformed into a debt of $1.7 billion, as detailed Britannica. A group of New York banks had to set up an emergency line of credit to prevent the Hunt bankruptcy from dragging down half of Wall Street with them. Years of trials later, the Futures Trading Commission fined them each $10 million and a lifetime ban to operate with raw materials. In 1988, Nelson Bunker Hunt officially declared bankruptcy. His assets, then valued at just 150 million, were completely liquidated to pay debts and back taxes. He had to sell up to his 580 purebred horses. When asked by Congress about his fortune, he replied with dark humor: “a billion dollars is not what it used to be.” He spent his last years in a modest house in Dallas, and died in 2014 in a residence, at 88 years old. His brother Herbert had better luck: sold his assets in Montana for $1.5 billion in 2012 and died in 2024 with a assets of 4.7 billion dollars, according to Forbes. Nelson, on the other hand, went down in history as the man who He was the richest on the planet and ended up with nothing… twice. In Xataka | In the 19th century, a US millionaire set out to invade countries on his own: he founded two republics of which he was president Image | Hall of FameUnsplash (Mohamed Fsili, Scottsdale Mint, Colton Sturgeon), Flikr (Esther Vargas)

“If you’re still awake twenty minutes after going to bed, get up.”

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Going to bed and starting to toss and turn while watching all the early morning hours pass by on the clock is something that may be familiar to more than one person. Right now, the truth is that the simple act of closing your eyes tightly and thinking about falling asleep doesn’t work too muchbut it further increases anxiety and frustration due to not being able to be rested the next day. But here the experts suggest that it is better to get up. A simple rule. Beyond breathing techniques and treating a blank mind, we have a good ally with us: the “20 minute rule.” A practice that, far from being viral advice on social networks, the truth is that it has scientific support behind it that indicates that the best strategy against the inability to fall asleep is to get up. Its operation. To understand it, we must first descend to the substrate of associative learning, where the human brain is, above all, an optimizer of environmental patterns. In this way, when a healthy person goes to bed, the central nervous system interprets the physical stimulus of the mattress, pillow and darkness as a signal to initiate a transition to sleep. However, if we spend long periods awake in bed experiencing anxiety or having the same idea running through our minds all the time, the pattern becomes corrupted. Here the brain already associates the bed with frustration, and the bedroom stops being a parasympathetic sanctuary and becomes a way to activate our body. Your defender He is currently Dr. Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. And it is so important that he includes it as another piece of advice in one of his published books titled ‘why we sleep’ that says the following: Don’t stay awake in bed. If you’re still awake twenty minutes after going to bed, or if you start to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy. The anxiety of not being able to sleep can make it harder to fall asleep. What must be done. To follow the rule, it is important to get up and, logically, not turn on all the lights in the house, but rather use dim lights and, under no circumstances, look at screens such as television since it can activate us more. The ideal here would be to read a somewhat monotonous book (or in the case of students, notes), do breathing exercises or mechanical hobbies. From here you should return to bed only and exclusively when you feel sleepy again to try to sleep again. The guides say it too and, more specifically, the Clinical Practice Guide on Insomnia in Primary Care which specifically points to the following advice for patients: If it’s been 30 minutes since you went to bed and you’re still not sleeping, get out of bed, go to another room, and do something that doesn’t activate you too much, like reading a magazine or watching TV, for example. When you feel sleepy again, go back to your bedroom. The goal is for you to associate your bed with falling asleep as quickly as possible. Images | Magnificent In Xataka | We thought insomnia was just not being able to sleep. Now we know that there are five different disorders

Experts agree that “the quality of rest depends on whether you go to bed at the time when your body is ready to sleep”

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When you read the question “what time should you go to bed?” He usually waits for a number, a specific time, a recurring pattern to do as the day ends. Bad news. What research has discovered is that the ‘perfect time’ for going to bed is with parents. That is, genetics (chronotype) and a handful of other things. That’s why it’s time to see what the experts say. The time to go to sleep. These days, there are some statements from dr. Celia García Maloneurologist specializing in Sleep Medicine and co-director of the Madrid Clinic CISNe in which she explains that the quality of rest does not depend only on the number of hours. On the contrary, it often depends on sleeping at a time when the body is biologically ready for it. This is interesting because it shows a paradigm shift in global sleep science. That moment matters, yes (but not that much). In 2021, Nikbakhtian and his team reviewed sleep routines of more than 100,000 adults. The interesting thing about this study is that they did not use self-reported responses, but rather what a week of wrist accelerometer data said. Their conclusions were clear: going to bed between 10:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. was associated with a lower cardiovascular incidence. It was bad news for Spain, the European country that takes the longest to go to bed. However, the details are important: it was not a question of ‘the earlier you go to bed the better’ (because going to bed before 10pm was also a problem); It was about finding the appropriate moment for each society, country or culture. And that’s where the surprises begin. Because what we are discovering is that regularity is the key. In this case, the Windred team reviewed data from six years of life of about 60,000 people. Their conclusions were that the most regular quartiles showed between 20% and 48% less mortality from all causes compared to the most irregular ones. This is because, we now believe, genetic variants are associated more with schedule than with duration and quality of the dream. The researchers’ thesis is that when we find a stable time to go to bed, the rest of the pieces begin to organize themselves. What does all this mean? For us mortals who just want to sleep, there are a handful of consequences: There is no magic hour. What we have to do is look for a stable window: if we find a time to go to bed, the rest of the system tends to adapt. However, chronotypes exist. It’s a good idea to find out which one is ours and “negotiate with it.” Take care of your dream. Although we sometimes insist on sleeping at a certain time, we often forget that sleep hygiene (and, above all, light) is one of the most important things to sleep well. Image | Annie Spratt In Xataka | You take some melatonin and fall asleep. It seems like a harmless practice for your health but it is not so.

This is how going to bed with a full stomach affects sleep

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Closing the computer late, shuffling home and sitting down to dinner at ten at night. For us it is a picture of customs; For the rest of Europe, an incomprehensible eccentricity. However, the shock is not only cultural but also biological. Although our social “normality” dictates that dinner is served after dark, our body tells a very different story. Evolutionarily, our body is not designed to digest large amounts of food when the sun has set. It’s not just about counting the calories we put on the plate; The real problem, the one that acts as a real time bomb for our health, is what the clock ticks when we put the fork in our mouth. Eating dinner late is altering our metabolism, sabotaging our quality of sleep and, silently, increasing our cardiovascular risk. Your pancreas doesn’t know that in Spain they have late dinners. To understand this phenomenon, we must look to the chrononutritionan emerging field of study investigating the close relationship between food intake and circadian rhythms. Our body works like an orchestra perfectly synchronized by light and darkness. By eating dinner at odd hours we are desynchronizing “peripheral watches” of vital cells located in the pancreas or liver. Meal timing acts as a critical signal for these peripheral biological clocks, which can modulate the quality of our sleep by regulating the rhythm of our central clock. The immediate consequence is a drastic worsening of glucose tolerance and insulin secretion. When we really should be sleeping. Here the body comes into conflict. On the one hand, there is a large release of cortisol (the well-known stress hormone) and, on the other, the release of melatonin is delayed, which is the master key to falling asleep. In fact, large-scale data support this: comprehensive analyzes of chrononutrition patterns reveal that later meal times—including the first meal, middle meal, and last meal of the day—as well as greater number of meals, are directly associated with higher scores on the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), which translates into a worse rest. Added to this is a problem purely mechanical: A reduced time gap between the last meal and bedtime can lead to a prolonged sleep latency period, that is, we toss and turn more before falling asleep. And digesting while lying down is the perfect recipe for the appearance of gastric reflux, a discomfort that can ruin anyone’s night. You eat the same as your early-rising neighbor and you gain more weight. According to the study published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolismadults who eat dinner at 10:00 p.m. burn 10% less fat and suffer a 20% higher blood sugar spike than those who eat dinner at 6:00 p.m., even if both groups eat exactly the same and go to bed at the same time. Alexis Supan, dietician at the Cleveland Clinic, summed it up perfectly: “When you eat late at night you are going against your body’s circadian rhythm.” The natural limit should be marked by the beginning of melatonin secretion. The researcher Marta Garaulet, a world reference in chrononutrition, has already demonstrated that people who eat later at midday lose less weight than those who eat early, even when they consume the same calories, expend the same energy and sleep the same. The time alone makes the difference. The consequences of ignoring this limit go far beyond the scale. A study led by the institute ISGlobalbased on cohort NutriNet-Santé with more than 100,000 participants, concluded that dining after 9:00 p.m. It is associated with increased cardiovascular risk, especially impacting the risk of cerebrovascular disease in women. On an emotional level, a recent meta-analysis from 2025 details that eating late worsens the rhythms of key neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine, increasing the risk of depression. On top of that we hit the same clock twice. But there is a modern factor that makes this scenario worse: screens. Not only do we eat dinner late, but we do so under the beam of our cell phones. Light of any kind suppresses melatonin, but as you warn harvardthe blue night light does it in a much more powerful way, blocking it for twice as long as other lights and moving our circadian rhythms out of phase by up to three hours. Recent clinical studies have demonstrated that exposure to blue LED light significantly suppresses melatonin secretion after two hours of exposure and maintains this suppression over time. We have a late dinner and then look at our phones in bed: a combination that our biological clock simply cannot accommodate. Our children are headed towards the same error. The problem worsens when we look at the new generations. The magazine The Lancet has warned that Spain could be the fourth country in the world with the highest childhood obesity in 2050. The VALORNUT project of the Complutense University has shed light on this: Late dinners and very long “eating windows” in children translate into more improvised diets, with lower nutritional value and worse cholesterol profiles. Furthermore, 60% of these children sleep fewer hours. The experts’ recommendation it’s clear: concentrate all meals in a period of less than 12 hours. The solution is to adjust the clock. So when should we have dinner? The golden rule agreed upon by experts is to allow between three and four hours to pass between the last meal and the time of going to sleep. If we take the Spanish average of going to bed around 00:30, we should be finishing dinner, at the latest, at 21:00. Here it is important to qualify the context. We have been cushioning this metabolic blow in part for decades thanks to a cultural pillar: the Spanish Mediterranean diet tends to make dinner a much lighter meal than the midday meal, leaving the energy weight of the day in earlier hours. A late, heavy, ultra-processed dinner followed by a trip straight to bed is not the same as a light dinner with some physical activity before going to sleep. … Read more

The flying experience has changed. Airbus thinks it can take it much further with a double bed, bathroom and bar

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For years, flying has been an experience increasingly split in two. While the economy class has been adjusting space and services, the highest part of the plane has become the terrain where airlines and manufacturers try to mark distances with increasingly exclusive proposals. What we have seen now fits squarely into that logic: Airbus has taken advantage of the Aircraft Interiors Expo 2026 to show how far you think you can stretch that idea in your A350-1000the model with which he wants to take first class to an even more ambitious level. The European manufacturer has set the direction of its cabins for the coming years quite clearly. In the center there is a “Master Suite” for two passengers, located between the two corridors at the front and designed as the most exclusive space of the entire complex. According to Airbus, there would be access to its own bathroom, a changing area, a bar and a double bed. A series of elements and comforts of a much higher level. Of course, it is important not to lose sight of the important nuance: we are not facing an already closed cabin for an airline, but rather a concept whose development has just started. How Airbus wants to remake the A350-1000 first class To make room for this new first class, Airbus has not limited itself to drawing a larger suite within the already existing space. What it proposes is a deeper reorganization of the area located between doors 1 and 2, making the most of that part of the plane to dedicate more surface area for higher category passengers. According to the company, elements that previously took up space in the main cabin, such as sinks or storage areas, would move to a new central module placed just behind door 1, in front of the cockpit door. Access to the crew rest area would also be moved there, with the idea of ​​reducing inconvenience and gaining privacy. That Airbus has chosen this model to develop the idea does not seem coincidental. We are talking about the largest member of the A350 family, a version that, according to the company itself, is seven meters longer than the -900 variant and can accommodate up to 40 more passengers. In its commercial sheet, Airbus presents it as its reference model in the large fuselage market and ensures that it offers 40% more surface area for premium category seats. Added to this is another argument that fits well with this proposal: high ceilings, a spacious cabin and interior proportions with which the manufacturer believes it can further reinforce the feeling of space. Behind all this there is also a fairly clear commercial reading. Airbus maintains that it already there are 10 clients that have chosen first class cabins for their A350s and adds that around five airlines are currently in the customization phase, so they could study incorporating parts of this concept. So everything seems to indicate that the calendar is moving in the long term: Airbus places the possible entry into service of the first elements around 2030. What Airbus wanted to do here goes beyond showing a striking suite or a conceptual fair image. It also lets us see where the company believes the most exclusive part of the cabin can evolve, with more space, more privacy and an even more differentiated service offering. Still, between that vision and a plane operating passengers there is quite a way to go. For now we are dealing with an idea in development, but an idea that helps understand how Airbus wants to strengthen its more premium proposal in the coming years. Images | Airbus In Xataka | Commercial aviation is based on very old aircraft. The Iran war is going to make it even worse

We have been sending pregnant women to bed for decades as a precaution. Science has just proven that it is a big mistake

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In the face of a potentially risky pregnancy, the prescription that was administered was very clear: absolute bed rest to avoid any fall or inappropriate movement that could cause an abortion. But this is something that today is no longer the norm, since staying still during pregnancy not only does not prevent the premature birth of a baby, but it can be very harmful. You have to move. Here, institutions as important as the Mayo Clinic are quite blunt in their guidelines by noting that there is no evidence that bed rest is effective in treating preterm labor. To reach this conclusion, they logically resort to different clinical studies inside the Cochrane Library In this case, they point out, for example, that in singleton pregnancies, routine bed rest does not prevent premature births and, in fact, the adverse effects of being immobilized outweigh the supposed benefits. In the situation of being in a multiple pregnancy, hospitalization and strict rest do not reduce perinatal risks and, ironically, an increased risk of spontaneous birth has been observed. What dangers does it have? Lying in bed may be something that a priori is seen as completely harmless, but the reality is that science advises against it for different reasons. The first of them is that immobility increases the risk of venous thromboembolism if one is not properly anticoagulated. In addition, it causes bone demineralization, where an estimated loss of bone mass is 2% to 3% per month, muscle atrophy and weakness, orthostatic hypotension, and is also associated with low neonatal birth weight and a higher rate of cesarean sections. Beyond the physical. Having complete rest isolates the pregnant woman in a bed watching television all day, and this only causes increased emotional stress, anxiety, and can lead to depression. In studies, this is something that currently affects 20% of pregnant women subjected to this isolation in countries like the United States. What is recommended. The objective of the different international guidelines to treat these pregnant women has taken a great turn in recent years. The SEGO guide of Spain, for example, recommends these women with aerobic activity for 3-5 days a week, avoiding routine rest. If we cross the ocean, in the United States it is recommended 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week, also to reduce the rate of cesarean sections and gestational diabetes. There are exceptions. Generalizations are never good, and that is why you cannot ask all pregnant women for absolute rest, but neither for a lot of activity. Here the most current guidelines establish that there are very specific and documented cases, such as premature rupture of membranes, where this rest is necessary. But these cases are very few. What we must stay with here is that immobility during pregnancy is not the best, and we must stay active as much as possible with activities logically adapted to the pregnancy situation. Images | Anna Hecker In Xataka | There are couples who couldn’t have children. Now AI has managed to give them hope

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