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with a bridge built in record time

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Satellite images reviewed by the BBC confirm that the first direct connecting highway between Moscow and Pyongyang will be operational in the coming weeks. That is to say, there will soon be a bridge that connects Russia and North Korea by road, materializing an alliance that is reconfiguring the conflict in Ukraine. What is happening. The Khasan-Tumangang Bridge, which crosses the Tumen River on the border between Russia and North Korea, is nearing completion. The satellite images that share The middle shows the structure already united in its central section, along with new access roads, a border control post, support infrastructure and parking areas. The Russian embassy in Pyongyang confirms that the planned opening date is June 19. First time in history. Until now, the only physical link between both countries was the so-called Friendship Bridge, a Soviet-era railway crossing inaugurated in 1959, and whose use for road vehicles was limited. The new bridge is, therefore, the first road link in history between Russia and North Korea. It measures approximately one kilometer in length, has two lanes and is built on concrete pillars with metal openings. It also runs parallel to the old railway bridge. Numbers. According to share In the middle, the crossing has been designed to support up to 300 vehicles and nearly 3,000 people a day. Its total cost exceeds 9 billion rubles, according to Russian state media, which is equivalent to about $120 million. Construction has been rapid, taking about a year, a pace that analysts consider strikingly fast. “The speed of construction reflects the volume of commercial activity between both parties,” said Victor Cha, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Where does this project come from? The agreement to build the bridge was reached during Vladimir Putin’s visit to Pyongyang in June 2024, when the Russian president met with Kim Jong Un. At that same meeting, both countries signed a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty that includes a mutual defense clause: if one of the two is attacked, the other is obliged to respond. The bridge, therefore, was born under the protection of that pact and has been built in record time. More than concrete. It is inevitably necessary to analyze its geopolitical context. According to data from South Korea, Pyongyang has sent around 15,000 soldiers to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine, in addition to long-range missiles and weapons. Seoul also estimates that some 2,000 North Korean soldiers have died in that conflict, although neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have confirmed these figures. In return, North Korea is believed to have received food, fuel and military technology from Russia. “This is an alliance largely driven by North Korean supply of troops, weapons, ammunition and manpower for Putin’s war in Ukraine,” explained Cha about it. What exactly will it be used for? Once open, the bridge will connect the Russian settlement of Khasan with the North Korean town of Tumangang and link directly to the Russian road network, reducing the distance between Vladivostok and the border town of Rason to 320 kilometers. Of course, Russian and North Korean drivers will be prohibited from driving their vehicles into the territory of the other country. In this way, the exchange of goods would take place at the border post itself, transferring the load from one truck to another. “This bridge will offer a very useful route to transfer military material and ammunition, both to North Korea and Russia,” counted Dr. Edward Howell, an expert on Korea at the University of Oxford, spoke to the media. The other side of the coin. Russian Foreign Ministry has described the opening of the bridge as “a truly historic stage in Russian-Korean relations” whose “significance goes far beyond a purely engineering task.” Moscow presents it as a symbol of cooperation in trade, economy and humanitarian relations. But for Western analysts, the reading is very different: a logistical artery designed to sustain a military alliance that transcends the war in Ukraine. “The construction of the bridge exemplifies how North Korea’s ties with Russia aim to continue beyond any end to the conflict in Ukraine,” pointed out Howell. China. It is not just Russia that is seeking to strengthen its physical connection with North Korea. China resumed last month the first passenger train service with Pyongyang after six years of interruption. North Korea, which for decades has been one of the most isolated corners of the planet, is being progressively integrated into the infrastructure networks of its two great allies. “It is fair to say that this connection, before the war in Ukraine, was one of the most dormant links between North Korea and its two neighbors,” Cha acknowledged. It seems that that lethargy has been left behind. In Xataka | While we were looking at gasoline, the Iran crisis has skyrocketed the price of asphalt. And the roads of half the world are already suffering from it

His parents built the Chinese economic miracle by working 12 hours a day. Their children have decided not to work almost at all

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Working twelve hours a day, six days a week, was common in Chinese companies, especially in the technology sector. It is what is known as day 996 and fortunately, the government banned it in 2021. They did not expect that that same year a new concept called Tang Ping and it means just the opposite: doing the minimum to survive. Lay down on the couch. Its literal translation is ‘lie flat’, but we like the creative translation better. Tang Ping It is a social phenomenon that arises as a rejection of the culture of overwork and endless days that barely leave time to sleep. A person who follows a lifestyle Tang Ping He works the minimum necessary to survive and does not have great ambitions; He doesn’t want to buy a car or a house, he spends little on food and he doesn’t want to get married or have children. The latter has not been any fun in Beijing. National security concern. We have talked about the birth rate crisis that China is going through and how the government is doing literally everything for get young people married and have children, so this movement goes against everything they are promoting. The government’s discourse on this trend has taken on a more severe tone. Last April, They published an official warning in which they stated that it is an “ideological infiltration” financed by “hostile anti-China forces” with the aim of “eroding the minds of Chinese youth.” They have turned a lifestyle into a political act that must be repressed. The safety net. They count in Baiguan News that, to understand the rise of this trend, two social mechanisms must be understood. The first is that the parents of these young people were born in the 60s and 70s, so their professional career grew along with the economic development of the country and they are currently the richest demographic group in the country. This means that if their children have financial problems, they can provide support. The second factor is deflation, which is making everything cheaper. In China it is possible to eat for just 1 or 2 dollars in exchange, which makes it viable to live while spending very little money. If we add that youth unemployment is at 16.9% and job opportunities are shrinking, it is the perfect breeding ground for lying down. The generational contrast. The parents of these young people grew up in poverty and, if they worked 72 hours a week, it was not out of pleasure, but out of pure necessity and fear of continuing to be poor. That fear was the engine of Chinese economic growth and allowed the next generation to grow in the abundance that their parents built. The difference is that these young people do not feel that raising the country depends on them, nor do they feel the fear that drove their parents, and many have decided to put their well-being before their professional career. Image | HANVIN CHEONGUnsplash In Xataka | We have been talking about “day 996” in Chinese companies for years. The reality is more complex: “day 323”

More advanced chip factories are being built in China and Taiwan than anywhere else. It’s only good for them

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According to SEMI, an international organization that looks after the interests of the electronics and integrated circuit industries, only six of the 64 new factories of semiconductors that are going to come into operation in Asia before 2029 will reside in Southeast Asia. The remaining 58 They will be located in China and Taiwan. These two countries have compelling reasons to strengthen its chip industry and develop its integrated circuit production capacity. It is essential for China to set up new plants equipped with cutting-edge photolithography equipment. And that is precisely what SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor and other Chinese chipmakers are doing. Currently this nation is limited by the difficulty of going beyond 7 nm without being able to use the extreme ultraviolet lithography (VVE) of ASML. Even so, Huali Microelectronics, the division of Hua Hong Semiconductor specialized in manufacturing chips for third parties, is preparing to start the production of 7nm integrated circuits at its Shanghai plant. Taiwan also needs to expand its semiconductor industry, although its motives are very different from China’s. The two largest Taiwanese integrated circuit manufacturers, TSMC and UMCthey need to develop more cutting-edge plants in order to satisfy the growing needs of their customers. TSMC’s 2 and 3 nm nodes in particular cannot cope, so it is essential for this company to expand its production capacity in the midst of the boom in data centers for data applications. artificial intelligence (AI). SEMI is concerned about the vulnerabilities of the chip industry Ajit Manocha, the executive director of SEMI, assures that “we want to see more centers emerge in related countries. We want more plants to be established to reduce the risk derived from vulnerabilities.” What worries the spokesperson of this organization is that the geopolitical tensions maintained by the US, China and Taiwan end up threatening the integrated circuit factories that reside in these last two countries. TSMC’s in Taiwan are especially sensitive to a possible conflict with China due to the undoubted strategic importance that they have not only for Taiwan, but also for the US and its allies. Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand are candidates to host new cutting-edge chip plants Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand are strong candidates to host new cutting-edge chip manufacturing plants. In fact, Several centers already reside in Malaysia Intel’s advanced packaging and verification software. However, Manocha You are also concerned about other types of vulnerabilities. The most critical of all is the shortage of critical minerals, as well as bromine and helium, two fundamental gases in chip manufacturing processes. What is happening with helium in particular is very worrying. This gas is a byproduct of natural gas processing, and its price skyrocketed in March shortly after the war that the US, Israel and Iran have been fighting since then began because Qatar was forced to stop production of liquefied natural gas. In the current unstable scenario, SEMI argues that Southeast Asian countries should aim to build more semiconductor manufacturing plants over the next decade to help the sector diversify and reduce supply risks. Image | TSMC More information | Reuters In Xataka | The US’s problem in the AI ​​and humanoid race is not China: it is all of Asia and it is greatly disadvantaged

someone has built a map with more than 7,000 letters

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At its peak, the Roman Empire It covered three continents: from Great Britain to the Carpathians in Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor, an immense terrain under the umbrella of the same civilization. The Romans They had more roads than we thoughtbut to govern, negotiate and maintain power at a distance they used cards. Precisely these epistles have served to document how that civilization faded away, but also how they lived and thought. The problem is that these letters were scattered, in Latin and in academic editions, which in practice distances them from most mortals. So a dev has thought of changing it with a website that collects more than 7,000 letters from the late Roman world: Roman Letters. What is Roman Letters. It is a website that brings together 7,049 letters from 100 to 800 AD and constitutes the largest corpus of late Roman correspondence in English, with 54 collections of epistles by individual authors. In reality, the project tells a story in eight chapters, from the fervent connection of the 11th-century Empire to the silence that falls on the West after the year 600. And it does so precisely with those letters translated and accompanied by a map of the correspondence, a graph of networks between characters, an academic thesis and the source code on GitHub. The good thing is that the same can be used for academic research, to analyze networks or specific periods, since the project is registered in the CERN academic repository and can be cited, but also as complementary material in teaching or mere curiosity. Letter 1001, from Pliny the Younger to Septitius Who has done it. The project is carried out by Craig Vander Galiena software developer who was inspired by Patrick Wyman’s doctoral research on the fall of Rome to develop it. The dev signs both the data corpus and the academic thesis that supports it. There is no university behind it or institutional funding, but rather it is an individual work. The result is impressive, but the effort is even more so: it has 3,123 translations into English made for the first time, which means bringing some of this material closer to the Anglo-Saxon world. Why is it important. Because the decline of Rome can be seen graphically: in the period of greatest correspondence activity (the years 350 and 390) 2,112 letters survive per generation. In the year 600, that number drops to 182. When the roads deteriorate, the postal system disappears and literacy is concentrated in the monasteries, then it is the end of letters. This project demonstrates it with testimonies, maps and graphs. On the other hand, it shows that historians such as Peter Brown They are right: the Eastern Roman Empire did not collapse in the 5th century, since thousands of letters continued to be sent. It came to an end two centuries later, with the Arab conquests. Roman roads and communication flows. Roman Letters How to use it. If you enter out of curiosity, the easiest thing is to access the main page, scroll down and let the eight chapters tell the story from ‘The connected world’ to ‘After the letters stopped’. Each letter takes you to the author’s collection, where you can see the complete available letters and their context. If you prefer something more visual, you can use the ‘Maps’ sections to view the cartographies with Roman roads and the flow of superimposed charts, being able to filter or move the timeline. For more advanced use, the network graph in ‘Network’ shows who was writing to whom and who were the central nodes of the system. And a recommendation to contextualize everything better: take a look at Vander Galien’s methodological thesis. The fall of Rome, in letters The decline of the Empire, in letters. Among the very interesting topics in which the correspondence is classified, there are some such as plagues and famine or women, but there is a common event that marks a before and after in the perception of the Romans about their destiny: the sacking of Rome in 410. An example: Epistle 127 of Jerome of Strydon. One of the voices that best captures the end of the West is Sidonius ApolinarGallo-Roman aristocrat and bishop of Auvergne who, with more than 100 letters, constitutes a first-hand source for knowing the history of the 5th century in Gaul. Yes, but. It is worth remembering that despite the effort and size of the project, this corpus only includes what has survived and what remains is a biased sample: a good part are from ecclesiastical figures or from the high aristocracy, so there is a lack of voices that are not from the upper class (whether they knew how to write or not) to better understand what their society was like. The decrease in the number of letters shows the collapse of the elite’s communication networks, which can be extrapolated to the entire society. On the other hand, those unpublished translations are valuable, but the peer review process is missing. Not that they are incorrect, but they should be taken with caution like any other unreviewed source. In Xataka | Someone has created the definitive interactive map of the roads of the Roman Empire: there are more than we thought In Xataka | The death of one empire is the birth of another: the graph that reviews the history of civilizations from 4,000 years ago Cover | János Szüdi and Cover | Valentin de Boulogne and Tataryn

the history of the Torres Colón, the Madrid skyscraper built upside down

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Around here we love megastructures (and who doesn’t), but there are also curious stories in buildings that do not hold records of any kind and that even seem everyday to us. An example are the Columbus Towersin Madrid (Spain), whose architecture and construction posed certain challenges at the time and which almost made the saying “start the house with the roof” literal. There are 23 floors above and six underground, and its construction was possible thanks to the suspended architecture attributed to its architect Antonio Lamela (died in 2017). Or what is the same, the floors hang from each other, so that the upper floors do not rest on the lower ones. Not one tower, but two, and built from top to bottom This popular saying was already stated by Antonio Lamela, its architect, who maintained that towers could only exist if they were built from top to bottom. The reason: the irregular 1,710 square meter plot on which they were going to settle was too small and the municipal ordinance required many parking spaces, as explained in The Country. For this reason, the foundations would have to occupy a small space, hence Lamela began the construction in the opposite direction, something that in the end would cement (pun intended) an architectural work with a unique building in the entire world. and the decision to do two towers and not a single building as the City Council proposed, it was due to the fact that the architect and his staff confirmed that building a single tower would have deteriorated the urban image “due to the implementation of an element of enormous proportions.” Building them there was by no means a coincidence. The site was in the heart of the city and the City Council established that “the building must be an architectural unit of marked verticality”, as explained on the Estudio Lamela website, and there were numerous changes of criteria regarding a project (as we will see later) that had to adapt to a predictable urban framework, but that could never become a reality because of this. Image: Estudio Lamela And why build them? from the top to the base? As the study itself explains, they found a problem that could not be solved with the usual systems: the adaptation of the needs of the building (residential and with commercial spaces on the ground floor) was incompatible with traditional means, in addition to the irregularity of the site. Hence the idea of ​​”hanging” the towers, so that a double structure could be proposed with the two parts independent and in the end there would be a set of three almost independent buildings: the two towers and the one that acts as a base. Thus, the method consisted of raising a narrow pillar in the center (the core), on which to place the hanging platform (that is, the large concrete head). From there the floors were built downwards, the weight of which falls partly on the central pillar and the rest on the side braces. The pressure of the platform was in turn transmitted by these lateral braces, thanks to the tension of steel cables, thus compressing the soles against the head. “It’s like the building was turned upside down.” Antonio Lamela, architect. A project that was changing in its development The design of the Colón Towers, 116 meters high, was planned from the beginning, differentiating itself from what was usually done in “hanging” buildings, starting from steel structural heads. What was done is a design completely in reinforced concrete, using high-resistance post-tensioned concrete and making the slabs of the typical floors rest on their perimeter on the external tie rods, thus not being in tension but compressed against the post-tensioned concrete structure as we have explained before. In this way, the upper structure (in which the installation machinery would be located) receives the load from the 21 suspended slabs, transmitting it to the core, through which it descends to the ground foundation. For the façade, in principle folded sheet metal was used. anodized aluminum bronze color, although as we will see later this was not what was left in the end. They also count in The Country that this green crown art deco so particular, that it has been popularly known as “the plug”, that the reverse construction of this building baffled those who were watching the progress for years. The Colón Towers began to be built in 1967, but in 1970 the Madrid City Council stopped the works due to “political interests”, according to the architect in numerous interviews. With this (and the lawsuits), the City Council’s compensation allowed the initial use for luxury residences that had been planned to change to house offices, restarting the works and finishing them in 1976. A spectacular ending, but it was not the desired one either. The Colón Towers were considered the “building with the most advanced technology in building construction until 1975” made of prestressed concrete at the World Congress of Architecture and Public Works. It was a pioneering work in its construction, although there were already suspended structures (especially bridges) and over time we have seen more examples of both suspended architecture like this way of building them, like the corporate building of the Nykredit bank by Schmidt Hammer, the Media Tic building by Enrique Ruiz Geli or Hovenring, a suspended platform by ipv Delft that we saw talking about When buildings adapt to bicycles (and not the other way around). The project began being called Torres de Jerez, although it was named after Columbus as its construction took hold and was promoted, in the early seventies and by the construction company Osinalde. After deciding that they would be offices and once built, they were acquired by the family Ruiz Mateosbeing later expropriated to finally be bought by the British group Heron International. The construction company decided to change the aesthetics with a glazed exterior skin to avoid revocation, so that there was a double layer that increased … Read more

China says it has built its largest data center. And confirms that your problem is precisely in the chips

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China has just turned on its new technological pride in Shenzhen: an AI cluster with 14,000 petaflops built entirely with Huawei Ascend 910C chips. the city has presented it as the first scale computing center with 10,000 cards with completely national technology. It is an undeniable milestone, but if we give it context, an alarm signal and a dose of reality. Why is it important. The Shenzhen cluster, with all its rhetoric of technological sovereignty, represents about 1% of the capacity of the largest US data center in operation today. In other words: China has built, with great institutional effort, what OpenAI already had available to train GPT-4 in 2022. The gap is not a question of ambition (China has it) or capital (it also has it) or energy (of course, he also has it). It’s a chip issue. What are they capable of manufacturing and in what volume today. Between the lines. The Shenzhen government statement highlights energy efficiency metrics and occupancy rates of 92%. It’s really good data. But the selection of indicators (the cherry picking) says a lot so it is omitted: there are no direct comparisons with the clusters of NVIDIA H100 that colonize the data centers of Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Posting only what you have is also a way of not publishing what you lack. The context. At this point no one doubts that China does not lack electricity, not even engineersnor money to build large-scale AI infrastructure. What is still missing, despite the advances, are the chips. Export restrictions imposed by Trump They have cut off access to advanced semiconductors from NVIDIA and TSMCand that has forced China to accelerate its own ecosystem. Huawei has responded with the Ascend 910Ca capable chip but that still has performance limitations and, above all, volume production. If wafers were not in short supply, this data center would be a hundred times larger. Yes, but. Can China close that four-year gap before it gets even bigger? The answer depends almost entirely on how much its domestic semiconductor industry manages to scale, and whether or not Western sanctions manage to stifle that process. At the moment, in Shenzhen they are celebrating an achievement as undeniable as it turns out that in the eyes of Silicon Valley they are still in 2022. Featured image | Huawei In Xataka | Memory prices have started to fall in some markets. There is still a long way to go to close the AI ​​crisis

Mitsubishi built a remote, car-free city in the middle of the sea with one goal: mining coal

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About 15 kilometers off the coast of Nagasaki, in the East China Sea, there is a small island that houses blocks of concrete and semi-ruined buildings, surrounded by a retaining wall that protects them from the Pacific. The island is called Hashimaalthough it is also known as “Gunkanjima”which in Japanese means “battleship island.” and its history It is fascinating and dark in equal parts.. An island that was born from coal. All infrastructure was built for one reason: coal. The mineral was detected on the seabed beneath the island around 1810, but its systematic exploitation did not begin until 1887. In 1890, the Mitsubishi Goshi Kaisha company purchased the island and took control of the underwater mines. Extracting coal from the bottom of the sea was extraordinarily complicated, as the miners worked in tunnels that went up to a kilometer below the surface, with temperatures of 30 degrees and very high humidity. Between 1891 and 1974, the island produced some 15.7 million tons of coal. A decision that changed everything. Moving workers daily from Nagasaki was expensive and inefficient, which is why Mitsubishi made the decision to build an entire city on the island. In 1916, the company erected the first concrete building armed of large dimensions in the history of Japan, and it was precisely on this same island. These types of buildings were the only way for the buildings to withstand the typhoons that hit the region every autumn. A compressed city. During the following decades, Hashima grew upwards because he could not grow sideways. The island measures just 480 meters long and 160 meters wide. And yet, at its peak, in 1959, It housed 5,259 peoplemaking it the most densely populated place on the planet at that time. On that small piece of land there were apartments, schools, a hospital, shops, a cinema, public baths, a swimming pool, rooftop gardens, a pachinko parlor and even a cemetery. Of course, there were no cars, since there was neither space for them nor did it make much sense. a hidden face. Hashima’s story has, however, a deep shadow that for decades tried to ignore. From the 1930s until the end of World War II, Mitsubishi used forced labor at its facilities on the island. There, both Korean conscript civilians and Chinese prisoners of war were forced to work in extreme conditions. According to an academic article published on Tandfonline, around 1,000 Koreans were taken to Hashima between 1939 and 1945. Estimates of the death toll vary. On the one hand, in the book “Life in Gunkanjima 1952-1970: Report of the investigation into the Hashima homes”, by academic Uzō Nishiyama, the death toll is estimated at 137; other non-Japanese sources raise that figure to more than 1,300. The workers descended into the mines during extreme hours, and any resistance was punished brutally. They were not workers, they were slaves, and escape was practically impossible, since the nearest coast was more than 18 kilometers away by open swim. Abandonment. In the 1960s, oil began to displace coal as an energy source in Japan. Mines across the country were closing one after another. Hashima’s was no exception. Mitsubishi officially closed the mine in January 1974. and the residents left the island on April 20 of that same year. The exodus was so rapid that many left behind furniture, clothing, photographs and all kinds of personal belongings. In a matter of weeks, a city of more than five thousand people was turned into a ghost scene. For the next thirty years, Hashima remained closed to the public and was slowly devoured by typhoons and sea salt. movie set. In 2002, Swedish filmmaker Thomas Nordanstad visited the island accompanied by Doutoku Sakamoto, a man who had grown up there as a child, and filmed a short documentary. Years later, Nordanstad met Daniel Craig in Stockholm, while he was filming ‘The men who didn’t love women‘. He told him the story of Hashima. According to collect world, Nordanstad thought for a time that the actor wanted to buy the rights to the documentary, but that was not the case. Two years later it was released skyfall (2012). In the film, the abandoned island serves as the lair of the villain Raoul Silva, played by Javier Bardem. The producers traveled to Hashima to consider filming there, but concluded that the buildings were too unstable and dangerous. Therefore, they ended up building a replica at Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom. The exterior images of the island that appear in the film are the only ones shot on location. World Heritage with controversy. In 2015, the island It was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, within the category “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution”. However, this designation came accompanied by diplomatic problems. South Korea initially objected because Japan did not recognize the use of forced labor on the island. In the end they reached an agreement: Japan agreed to include that part of the story in its materials, but they didn’t do their part. In 2021, the UNESCO Committee issued a resolution in which they expressed regret that Japan had not provided sufficient information on forced laborers. In fact, the Industrial Heritage Information Center, opened in Tokyo in 2020 to lend credibility to that narrative, was criticized for including testimonies that denied the existence of slavery conditions on the island. As of today, the debate has not yet been closed. A tourist destination with scars. Since 2009, Hashima can be visited in small groups organized from the port of Nagasaki. The tour lasts approximately one hour and is strictly delimited for safety reasons. In fact, 95% of the island remains restricted to visitors. Images | Wikimedia Commons In Xataka | The most extreme symbol of the touristification of Madrid are the TukTuk. And there is already an initiative to ban them

In 1885, Finland mistakenly built a lighthouse in Sweden, so its neighbor redrew the border to return it to them.

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The Market Island It is most particular. How Guinness certifiesalong with Koiluoto, is the smallest uninhabited island shared between two nations: Sweden and Finland, once integrated into the Russian Empire (became independent in 1917but the history of Finland is another story). Unlike other islands with this casuistry such as Hispaniola (shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic), its border is not more or less a straight line: It looks like an S, as you can see in the image that illustrates this article. The reason for this winding muga is a lighthouse. As a curiosity, the Market lighthouse It had its lighthouse keeper in charge of managing it until it was automated in 1977, at which time the island became uninhabited, beyond tourists who came to visit its impressive fauna. Located at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea, Märket is halfway between the islands bordering the Swedish provinces of Uppsala and Stockholm to the west, and the Finnish archipelago of Åland to the east. The western part of the island is administered by Sweden and is also divided into two provinces: Uppsala and Stockholm. The eastern area corresponds to Hammarland, belonging to the Finnish autonomous territory of Åland. Although the exact date on which Märket emerged from the sea is unknown, geology is based in the postglacial rebound rhythm of the region (greater than 5 mm per year) to point to the 16th century. Märket barely has 0.033 square kilometers, spread over a surface of mostly smooth diabase rock, with a maximum elevation of about 3.5 meters above sea level. On its northern and southern coasts there are coves that serve as natural ports for small boats. To prevent ships from running aground on its reef, in 1885 the Tsar of Russia commissioned the construction of a lighthouse, designed by the Finnish architect Georg Schreck: the wayward Märket lighthouse. Stay with one piece of information: Schreck chose the highest point on the island to build it with all the sense in the world: it is the least exposed to waves and ice. The Märket Island lighthouse has caused Sweden and Finland to change their borders But before we go to 1885, let’s move to 1809, the moment when Sweden and the Russian Empire drew their borders in the Treaty of Fredrikshamn. According to this agreement, the borders would be fixed on geographical elements and the sea border would be fixed in the Åland Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia, with the islands assigned to the nearest country. The topographical description of 1811 ruled: that line crossed Märket exactly through its geographical center. This original border can be revised in the historical archive Histdocwhich houses the official record: Original Märket border. Official document of the governments of Sweden and Finland. Via Histdoc You don’t have to pay much attention to observe an abysmal difference between the original border and the current one. Now it is time to travel back in time to 1885 when, after enduring the harsh climate (even in summer) of the island, the construction of the lighthouse was completed. Then two other attached buildings would arrive, a warehouse and a machine room. There was just one tiny, tiny problem.: They had planted it on the Swedish side. Märket is (and always has been) an inhospitable island in the wilderness, not a place to pass through or stay. So no one bothered to solve this little problem until the 1980s. Specifically, the formal border demarcation process of 1979-1981 officially showed that the lighthouse was between 35 and 60 meters west of the central point of the islet: on the Swedish side. As you can see on the map, the buildings are marked in part B, entirely on the Swedish side. So in 1985 they resolved it amicably. A joint Swedish-Finnish commission decided to modify the border so that the lighthouse was on the Finnish side through an exchange of territories, which generated that characteristic S shape. The maritime borders could not be modified without affecting the fishing areas, so they were limited to the land. Since then, the border has been marked with perforations in the rock itself (doing it any other way is not feasible due to its meteorological conditions) for almost 500 meters. In Xataka | A man bought a desert island in 1962: he planted 16,000 trees and turned it into an anti-rich sanctuary In Xataka | There is a paradise island that you only enter armed. And the United Kingdom wants to “liberate” it from the United States Cover | Google Maps and tt_koski

It is literally the largest and heaviest machine ever built by humans and it does one thing: extract coal.

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In North Rhine-Westphalia, western Germany, the largest machine that man has put on earth operates. Forget about huge ships, aircraft carrier either oil platforms: It’s an excavator. It is called Bagger 293, and its very existence is the moving memory of what industrial engineering is capable of when it is demanded without limits. What is it, exactly? The Bagger 293, also known as the MAN TAKRAF RB293, is a bucket wheel excavator (those that have a giant toothed disc at one end) designed for open pit mining. It was built by the German company TAKRAF, a subsidiary of the MAN group, between 1990 and 1995 in Leipzig. His goal from day one was only one: extract lignitethe so-called brown coal, in the Hambach mine, one of the largest mining operations in Europe. Today it remains operational, owned by RWE Power AG, Germany’s second largest energy producer. Numbers. It is 96 meters high, equivalent to a building of more than 30 floorsand 225 meters long, which is more than two football fields placed in a row. It weighs 14,200 tons. The Guinness Book of Records officially recognizes it as the largest and heaviest land vehicle in the world. Shares title with its predecessor, the Bagger 288although the 293 surpasses it in size and capacity. It also cannot be transported. And moving it about 120 kilometers requires more than three weeks of continuous work, with progress of just 5 or 6 kilometers a day. How it works istea monster. The heart of the machine is a 21.3 meter diameter rotating wheel armed with 18 buckets, large steel buckets, each capable of loading up to 15 cubic meters of material per cycle. That wheel spins non-stop, tearing off layers of earth and rock to reveal the veins of lignite, which are then transported by giant belts to the electricity generation plants. Under normal conditions, the Bagger 293 can move up to 240,000 tons of material in a single day. Furthermore, it is estimated that what it does in one day is equivalent to the manual work of about 40,000 miners. All this with only five operators on board, controlling the system from a central cockpit. electric appetite. To start such a structure, a direct external energy source of 16.56 megawatts is needed (about more than 22,500 HP if we do the conversion). This would be approximately equivalent to the electricity needed to supply a city of about 20,000 inhabitants. On the other hand, it should be noted that the Bagger 293 does not have its own conventional engine, it is permanently connected to the industrial electrical network. Its 12 steel tracks, each 3.8 meters wide, distribute the immense weight over the ground in a controlled manner so that the ground does not give way under it. Leaf where you work. The excavator works in the Hambach mine, the largest open-pit mine in Germany, with an approved area of ​​up to 8,500 hectares and a depth that reaches 500 meters below ground level. According to Bloombergthe mine produces around 40 million tonnes of lignite per year, enough to power around 8 million homes. But the mine is not without controversy. Brown coal is the most polluting fossil fuel per unit of energy produced, and the exploitation of Hambach 90% of the historic Hambach Forest has been wiped outan ecosystem more than 12,000 years old. As of 2012, environmental activists They occupied the remaining trees for years in a protest that ended up becoming a symbol of the climate debate in Germany. In 2018, tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the mine’s expansion. Greta Thunberg herself visited the place in 2019stating that he found it “devastating” to see places like the Hambach mine. In January 2020, the German government agreed to preserve the remaining forest, and in August of that same year Germany committed to its definitive exit from coal by 2038. According to Global Energy Monitormining at the Hambach mine will cease in 2029, and the plan is to transform the territory into a reclaimed landscape that will include a large artificial lake. Images | Andreas Lippold (Wikimedia Commons), Stefan Fussan (Wikimedia Commons), Steve Rowell In Xataka | The key hidden infrastructure for AI is not data centers: it is undersea cables and the Middle East leads the way

A plant was on the verge of extinction in the Mojave Desert. So they built a solar park on top

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The Mojave Desert is not only a paradise when it comes to filming movies, setting video games and name operating systems: It is also home to thousands of plant species that are accustomed to an extremely hostile climate. It is estimated that there are about 2,000 species and a very specific one is in danger of extinction. Until they decided to build one of the largest photovoltaic plants in the United States on top of it. The Gemini Solar Project. In short. The journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution revealed a few weeks ago the results of a curious study. The ‘threecorner milkvetch’ plant (which has a name for everything except a plant) went from 12 specimens in the Mojave Desert to 93. This plant was being evaluated for inclusion in the Endangered Species Act in the United States and not only has its number multiplied: the new plants are larger and produce more flowers. And they have “only” had to build one of the largest photovoltaic plants in America on top of it, next to Guanchoi in Chileto achieve it. Threecorner milkvetch. It is a creeping plant that has curious needs: it only grows in sandy soils of the Mojave Desert. However, it is dependent on rainfall because its seed remains dormant in the soil and only germinates and reproduces with favorable rainfall. In dry years, it remains completely unnoticed, waiting for a little rain. And it is so rare that the species remains under evaluation for status as threatened or endangered under U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulations. In the same desert there is another threatened species: the desert tortoise Gopherus agassizii. The habitat of the two species should be the last one on which it would be decided to build a photovoltaic plant, but there is the Gemini Solar Project. The plant Megaplant. When such an installation is to be carried out in the desert, a technique known as clearing and leveling is used. In essence, all vegetation is removed, the land is leveled and prepared for install the pillars of the solar panels. Not only is a lunar landscape created, but any type of latent seed beneath the surface, such as that of the threecorner milkvetch, is destroyed. However, the Gemini Solar Project’s approach was different. The company wanted the land because it is especially ‘fertile’ within the US to harvest sunlight, but concessions had to be made. One was to minimize the alteration of the habitat of both species to conserve the desert surface with all its biological resources, preserve the topsoil and adapt the facility to the natural relief. On the US Geological Survey website we can see photos of little turtles between the panels. Works. This is part of what we know as ‘ecovoltaics’, with a branch called ‘agrovoltaics’ that we have also talked about and that, although it can be used by companies as a facelift, it serves to unite energy activities with agricultural activities. In the study on the impact of the Gemini Solar Project and the evolution of the plant, researcher Tiffany Pereira discovered what we have mentioned: there were more plants and they were healthier. This showed that the energy company had done its part by not destroying the soil because the seeds had been able to germinate, but they found something else. The plants inside the installation evolved earlier than those outside it and grew not under the panels, but in the strips between the rows. This implies that they still need intense sunlight to mature. The yellow zone is where the Sun shines the most hours. The blue one is the stripe that varies depending on the position of the Sun. The red one is where direct light never shines. Okay, but then… what is the role of the panels in the improved evolution of these plants? The hypothesis used by the researchers is that the panels provide partial shade on the groundslowing down evaporation. We have already said that seeds are dormant until they have the necessary humidity conditions to germinate, and in this context, a more humid microclimate has allowed plants to grow more and produce more seeds. Not all the field is oregano. Now, like almost every scientific study, we look at the other side of the coin. The rainfall in recent years has been favorable and we will have to see what happens with periods of prolonged drought. In a few years we could talk about long-term effects. But, in addition, this absence of plants under the panels could indicate a possible loss of potential habitat in very humid years. In any case, Pereira’s study is not isolated. Other studies point to improvements in both the number of flowering plant species and pollinators in agrovoltaic installations in a state like Minnesota. AND in China there are also indicators that those photovoltaic plants in deserts is contributing to the moisture pocket construction in which plants can thrive more easily. As we said, it remains to be seen the impact of the panels on the creation of a “new” biodiversity in the long term, but for now, what is evident is that it is not necessary to raze land to build a photovoltaic plant. Images | DRI, Tiffany PereiraGemini Solar Project In Xatka | The biggest fiasco of solar energy is in the Nevada desert: it is useless and its promoter blames a Spanish company

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