century

In the 16th century, Spain wanted to control the Strait of Magellan by founding a city. It became a cursed settlement

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A coin is a coin. And a compass, a compass. What seems so obvious changes when we talk about the old (and ephemeral) city ​​of King Don Felipea Spanish settlement founded more than four centuries ago by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa on the northern shore of the Strait of Magellan. Its objective was to become a fortress that would reinforce the control of the Spanish Crown in a strategic maritime passage, but the mission became so complicated that the town ended up becoming a death trap for its settlers. Things went so badly that with the passage of time the citadel ended up being renamed ‘Port of Hunger’a name much more in line with what happened there in the 17th century, and its memory it faded in the mists of history. We had to wait until well into the 20th century so that the secrets of King Don Felipe would emerge from oblivion… and the earth. Now the archaeologists have found among its ruins a small piece of silver that in March 1584 Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa himself deposited there during the founding ceremony of the town. In its day it was a simple currency (a real of eight) that was used for ritual purposes. In 2026 it has become something more: a compassa guide that will help researchers better understand the structure and location of the city of Rey Don Felipe, the cursed citadel in the Strait of Magellan that should never have existed. At the ends of the world Today the world lives pending what happens in the Strait of Hormuz. Almost five centuries ago the eyes of the Spanish Crown were directed towards another maritime strait with important strategic value: that of Magellana navigable strip located south of what is now Chile and that stands out as the natural connection between the Pacific and the Atlantic. Since Ferdinand Magellan crossed it for the first time, in the autumn 1520the pass became an object of desire for the Spanish Empire, especially after other expeditions managed to cross it successfully and the English entered the race for its control through late 1570s from the hand of the corsair Francis Drake. To guarantee Spain’s geopolitical plans and its exclusive control of the transoceanic passage, the authorities had an idea: found permanent settlements in the area. The mission fell to Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboaa hardworking sailor who, among other missions, had participated in a (frustrated) mission of the Viceroyalty of Peru to hunt down Drake. Sarmiento first undertook an expedition with two ships in the autumn of 1579 to reconnoiter the coastline of the strait and explore its coasts and, once back in Spain, in 1580 he played a decisive role in getting the Council of the Indies to decide to build citadels and fortifications in the transoceanic passage to America. The expedition left Sanlúcar at the end of September 1581 with a fleet of 23 boats and around 3,000 men, including sailors and future settlers. Despite his enormous ambition, the adventure started badly. And not only because of the differences between Sarmiento and Diego Flores de Valdeswho had been appointed captain general of the Strait Navy. Before even leaving Cádiz, a storm sank half a dozen ships and killed 800 men. What followed next was a journey marked by disagreements between Sarmiento and Valdés, illnesses, the inclemency of the ocean and storms that caused the expedition to lose ships, crew and supplies. After various incidents and vicissitudes, Sarmiento and his men arrived at the strait at the beginning of 1584 and founded a city that they named ‘Purification of Our Lady’. It didn’t work. The location and climate did not help, so Sarmiento looked for a new enclave, near Cape Vírgenes, and founded a settlement which he called ‘Name of Jesus’. Determined to continue with the mission, the sailor chose part of the 340 people he kept and looked for a third location to create another citadel. On this occasion he baptized it with a nod to the Habsburg court (King Don Felipe) and celebrated the founding ceremony in March 1584. We know that Sarmiento himself participated in the ritual. On March 25, he laid the first stone of the citadel church and, with it, in the foundations, buried a real of eight silver. As they explain from the Bernardo O’Higgins University of Santiago, it was “a symbolic gesture that marked the birth of the city.” If the ritual was intended to promote the settlement’s fortunes, it only half worked. It has served archaeologists of the 21st century, who have just found the coin “in place and position” described by Sarmiento in his writings and now, thanks to that clue, they will have an easier time interpreting a map of the 16th century in which the buildings of the town are represented. The one who certainly had no use for the currency was the colonists who settled in Rey Don Felipe city. Theirs was a tragic story from the beginning. a cursed city Ciudad Rey Don Felipe may have enjoyed a privileged location from a geopolitical and strategic point of view, but the truth is that it soon became hell for its settlers. And not only because the crew of the ill-fated (and diminished) Armada del Estrecho arrived in Magallanes at the limit of their strength. In ‘Port of Hunger. Beyond the legend’a work signed by the historian Soledad González and the archaeologist Simón Urbina, a key piece of information is provided: “On board the ships or on land they saw people die or desert. nine out of ten colleaguesfriends or family. As if that were not enough, after founding the Nombre de Jesús settlement, the crew divided into groups to expand towards the Santa Ana peninsula, precisely to establish Rey Don Felipe. Once there, and despite the fact that Sarmiento de Gamboa was quick to lay the foundations of the new citadel (both in a metaphorical and literal sense), things did not improve. The scene looked so bad … Read more

In 1967, Canada built futuristic homes like Lego pieces. Half a century later they still don’t know how to repair them

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When Moshe Safdie designed Habitat 67 As an architecture student, he had a revolutionary idea: he used thousands of Lego pieces to test how housing modules could fit together in three dimensions. Decades later, the architect himself I kept remembering who even emptied entire Lego stores in Montreal to build the models. And maybe that was the problem. Reinvent the home like Lego. In the early 1960s, Western cities were trapped between two models that seemed inevitable: huge blocks of impersonal apartments or endless car-dependent suburbs. A young architecture student named Moshe Safdie He believed that there was a third way. His idea was apparently simple and radical at the same time: build prefabricated homes by stacking concrete modules as if they were giant lego piecesso that each family could have light, a terrace, vegetation and the feeling of an individual house within a large urban structure. The project ended up becoming Habitat 67, the great futuristic icon of the Montreal Expo. What Canada presented to the world as the definitive future of cities ended up being one of the most fascinating and problematic works of architecture of the 20th century. Habitat 67 was a utopia. The image of the building continues to look futuristic even today: 354 huge concrete modules prefabricated, each weighing about 90 tons, stacked in irregular shapes on an artificial peninsula facing the St. Lawrence River. Safdie was obsessed with solving a problem he considered central to the urban future: how to maintain density from the city without sacrificing privacy, nature and the feeling of home. His motto was “For everyone a garden”. Each apartment had to have its own garden, cross ventilation, open views and elevated pedestrian streets instead of closed corridors. Inspiration came from both the Pueblo homes of the American Southwest and the japanese metabolism that we talked about a few days ago, an architectural movement that imagined buildings made up of modular cells capable of growing and reorganizing like living organisms. The big problem: making it cheap. The paradox of Habitat 67 is that it was born precisely to make urban housing cheaper… and ended costing a lot more than expected. Safdie imagined that industrial prefabrication would allow apartments to be manufactured in a chain quickly and efficiently, but the reality It was very different. The complex required an extremely sophisticated assembly system, a factory installed within the work itself, gigantic cranes and very complex technical connections between modules. Each box had to leave the factory practically finished, with windows, wiring, bathrooms and kitchens incorporated before being lifted into its final position. The reduction of the original project (from 1,200 planned homes to just 158) shot even more the costs. The experiment designed to democratize the city ended up becoming a too expensive complex even for the middle class it sought to attract. Leaks and mold appear. As time went by, the other great enemy of Habitat 67 appeared: the water. The stepped structure full of terraces, gardens and joints between modules generated a waterproofing nightmare. The concrete began to leak constantly in Montreal’s extreme climate and water ended up penetrating walls and ventilation systems. Some residents reported serious problems moisture and mold for years. The repairs they were never simple because the building does not function like a conventional block: each module is a structural part of an extremely complex three-dimensional framework. Half a century later, restorations are still almost surgical. In the major rehabilitation carried out for the 50th anniversary, it was necessary to remove outer layersre-insulate huge surfaces and redesign entire systems to protect the structure from Canadian winters. From social dream to elite symbol. Another of the most striking ironies of Habitat 67 It is its social evolution. What was born as a manifesto for accessible urban housing ended up becoming one of the directions Montreal’s most exclusive. The original rents were already prohibitive in the 60s and subsequent privatization converted the apartments in luxury properties. Today some units reach millionaire prices and the monthly maintenance costs are very high. The “city for all” ended up being an enclave for cultural elites, businessmen and architecture lovers. Yet even its critics admit that the building accomplished something extraordinary: demonstrating that dense housing could be emotionally distinct from the repetitive blocks that dominated modern urbanism. He never completely died. The most fascinating thing is that, despite all its problems, Habitat 67 continues to exert a gigantic influence on architects and urban planners. decades later keep inspiring modular projects, terraced complexes and new ideas on how to combine urban density and quality of life. Even today’s digital tools have resurrected the original never-built project. In recent years, Safdie Architects and Epic Games they virtually recreated the gigantic “Project Hillside” which the Canadian government cut due to lack of money in the 60s. Thanks to Unreal Engine, drones and hyper-realistic models, the architect was able to tour for the first time the complete version of the modular city that he had imagined as a young man. There is something deeply symbolic in that image: Habitat 67 was so ambitious that not even the technology of its time could do it. fully viable. Maybe that’s why it continues to fascinate today. Because it seems like a relic of the past… but also a vision of an urban future that we still don’t know how to build without collapsing due to leaks, crazy costs and eternal repairs. Image | Parcours riverain – Ville de Montréal, Thomas Ledl, Vassgergely In Xataka | In 1970 Japan built homes of the future where each capsule would be replaceable. Half a century later he discovered that no one knew how to repair them In Xataka | The incredible story of the tallest building on the planet that ended up becoming the largest swimming pool in the Soviet Union

In 1970 Japan built homes of the future where each capsule would be replaceable. Half a century later he discovered that no one knew how to repair them

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In 1970, during the Osaka World Expomillions of people lined up to enter pavilions where Japan showed how it imagined the 21st century: domestic video calls, automated cities, assistant robots and modular homes capable of changing over time. That event was so impressive that many visitors came away convinced that the future was going to arrive much sooner than expected. The spaceship that Japan wanted. In 1972, in the heart of Tokyo, a building appears that seemed to have landed from the future. The Nakagin Capsule Tower It was unlike anything of its time: two concrete towers covered by 140 metal capsules with circular windows, like a stack of futuristic washing machines or a block of space modules suspended over Ginza. The architect Kisho Kurokawa He imagined those capsules as replaceable homes that could be removed and replaced every 25 years, just as an organism renews its cells. The idea perfectly summed up the Japanese postwar optimism: mutable cities, living architecture and a future where houses would function more as interchangeable pieces than as permanent buildings. Half a century later, Japan discovered something much more uncomfortable: no one really knew how to repair that vision of the future. Nakagin Capsule Tower The metabolic dream. The Nakagin was born within the Metabolist movementa Japanese architectural movement obsessed with constant change. After the destruction of World War II, architects like Kurokawa wanted break with the western idea of eternal buildings of stone and brick. Japan lived with earthquakes, fires and permanent reconstructions. For them, the city had to behave like a living being capable of growing, adapting and transforming. The capsules were the perfect symbol of that philosophy. Each module It measured just ten square meters and included a bed, folding desk, compact bathroom, Sony television and even a tape player. They were aimed at typical Tokyo office workers who wanted a small urban retreat during the week, avoiding hours of travel to the suburbs. Kurokawa saw those capsules as the beginning of a new way of ultramobile life where people would change their homes just as they change their technology. Interior of one of the capsules The problem: the future cannot be dismantled. The great irony of the Nakagin is that the central element of its design it never worked. The capsules had to be periodically undocked and replaced with more modern versions, allowing the building to survive for centuries. On paper it seemed brilliant, but in practice It was almost impossible. Individual capsules could not be removed without disassembling all those that were on top, the costs were gigantic and the system hid structural problems that worsened over time. The joints began to rust, constant leaks appeared, and asbestos complicated any serious attempt at renovation. As Tokyo continued to move towards the 21st century, that supposed architecture of tomorrow began to look an aged relic from an old science fiction. The capsules that were supposed to be renovated like Lego pieces ended up converted into small corroded boxes where there were hardly any permanent residents left. Entrance to the Tower From futuristic utopia to cult ruin. As the decades passed, Nakagin stopped functioning as a residential experiment and began to transform into something else: a work of worship. Architects, photographers, designers and tourists arrived fascinated by that impossible building that continued to resist in the middle of Ginza like a time capsule from the 70s. Many apartments were used as creative studioswarehouses or simple occasional shelters. The community that formed around the building ended up being almost more important than its original use. Some residents organized guided tours, parties and campaigns to save the tower as the deterioration continued. In fact, Francis Ford Coppola, Keanu Reeves and numerous international artists They visited the complex attracted by that strange mix of decadence and futurism. What had failed as a practical solution survived as a cultural icon. Demolishing a utopian future. In 2022 it finally started the disassembly of the Nakagin Capsule Tower. The images were almost poetic: cranes tearing off the capsules one by one, as if they were dismantling an abandoned space station. Most were destroyed, but a small group of owners and preservationists managed to save 23 modules. Some have been completely restored with their original televisions, telephones and furniture, others have ended up in museums, galleries, hotels or exhibitions spread across Japan, Europe and the United States. Paradoxically, Kurokawa’s idea ended up being fulfilled otherwise: The capsules did end up separating and traveling around the world, although not as part of a living city, but as fossils from a future that never came to exist. The failure that changed architecture. The Nakagin It failed as a building, but triumphed as an idea. It inspired capsule hotels, modular architecture, and much of the contemporary obsession with micro-apartments and flexible spaces. Furthermore, its influence can be traced in high-tech projects later and even in current debates on sustainability and compact housing. What is fascinating is that the building simultaneously demonstrated two opposite things: that futuristic architecture can be decades ahead of its time… and that a vision that is too advanced can also become impossible to maintain in the real world. Japan dreamed of housing where each apartment would be replaceable and adaptable forever, and in the end he discovered that he had built something much stranger: a masterpiece of the future condemned to age before the future itself. Image | David Meenagh, Jordy Meow, Kestrel, Dick Thomas Johnson In Xataka | The incredible story of the tallest building on the planet that ended up becoming the largest swimming pool in the Soviet Union In Xataka | After the Guggenheim fever in Bilbao, Alcorcón wanted to replicate its success with a megaproject in 2004. It ended very badly.

The mouse cursor has hardly changed for half a century. Google just tried to make that no longer the case

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Google DeepMind has published the principles and demos of Magic Pointera mouse pointer powered by Gemini who understands what you are pointing out and why. Without writing anything. Just pointing. Why is it important. The chatbot as the main interface has been the dominant model in AI for two years: you open a window, write and you get a response. Magic Pointer proposes the opposite: the AI ​​moves with you around the screen, reads what is in front of you and acts without you explaining the context. If it works as promised, the text box is no longer the gateway to AI. The logic behind the project is that the problem with current AI is not its capacity, but the friction to use it. Every time you want to ask a model for something, you have to drag your world into it: open a window, paste text, explain the context from scratch, etc. Magic Pointer reverses that flow: the AI ​​goes where the cursor is. In detail. The system captures visual and semantic context around the pointer. You indicate a date in an email and Gemini suggests creating an event. You select two images, a sofa and your living room, and the model composes them. You hover over a table and you can request a graph without opening any more apps. The objective is to replace the prompts long by what DeepMind calls “natural shorthand”: point out something, say what you want, and have the system fill in the gaps. There are live demos at Google AI Studio and the system now reaches Chrome. In autumn it will land in Googlebookthe new Google laptop with Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo as manufacturers. Between the lines. We are looking at three ways to put AI in a computer: Apple integrates it within each application. Microsoft puts Copilot on a side panel. Google puts Gemini inside the pointing device itself: it is not in the background, it is the cursor, it is the widgetis the interface between the user and the machine. That last one is a philosophical bet. And it has implications for the chatbot model: if the cursor acts as a contextual agent, the chat window loses its monopoly as an entry point. Yes, but. Googlebook arrives in autumn as a premium product, with no announced price yet. The Android ecosystem on the desktop remains the weak flank: if developers do not build native apps for the big screen, the Magic Pointer points to a world that does not yet exist. And in any market where Gemini is restricted by regulations, the entire proposition becomes empty. In Xataka | The AI ​​industry already knows how to make more money. Just use the fear strategy Featured image | Google

China is successfully replacing a 19th century industry with drones: skyscraper window cleaners

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When we think of skyscrapers, the Western culture in which we have grown up makes us inevitably associate them with the United States and iconic skylines in cinema such as New York or Chicago, but the current reality is very different: China is the country that breaks the cord, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitatthe world’s leading authority on the classification of tall buildings: it is home to more than half of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. This architectural explosion has created an unprecedented maintenance challenge: having to clean millions of square meters of glass and metal facades. What started as a need for manpower has become a testing ground for advanced robotics and unmanned aviation thanks to a state plan called “Robot+” that automates tasks to compensate labor shortage. One of the most striking recent examples: automated cleaning from Nanchang Railway Station. Goodbye to human window cleaners. The traditional Spider-Man of buildings is disappearing and it makes perfect sense: the risk of accidents and the climatic conditions of cities like Shanghai or Guangzhou have made this profession increasingly less attractive for new generations, so cleaning companies it is difficult for them to find relief: the perfect scenario for automation. Furthermore, the data from cleaning drones is compelling: going from being able to clean 200 square meters a day to 10,000 with a cost between 10 and 20% less, according to the Wuhan startup Aero Technology collected by China Daily. Drones are best suited to difficult outdoors such as corners and nooks and work even on rainy or windy days without risk. And when finished, the drone uses its camera to capture images of the clean surface, which it transmits to ground personnel for review. If it doesn’t comply, give it a review. Why is it important. We have already glimpsed some of the advantages of automating cleaning at height, but one is truly essential: safety. According to the WHOfalls are the second global cause of death due to unintentional injuries, only behind traffic accidents, with about 684,000 deaths annually. In the specific workplace, they constitute one of the main risks in sectors such as construction or industry. especially dangerous are the falls in height. In the United States, OSHA data They return that falls represent between 35 and 39% of construction-related deaths. In Spain, falls from height represented in 2024 12.2% of all work-related deaths during work hours in all sectors and this year alone they cost the lives of 79 people in the Spanish state alone. The other big advantage is price: less labor, less operating time because they clean faster, lower equipment costs, and lower insurance premiums. Aero Technology quantifies savings between 10 and 20% compared to traditional methods, although the drone company Apex is more optimistic for your business, raising the range of savings up to 30 or 50% (although the reason is probably that you consider assemblies like scaffolding). Regarding water consumption, a study by Shanghai University of Engineering has shown which spends 21.8% less. Context. China faces the worst possible scenario in this framework: it is the country with the most skyscrapers in the world, it has a lot of air pollution that quickly dirtys its facades and it also suffers labor shortage for manual jobs. Although if we are looking for pioneers in the drone cleaning segment we have to go to the North American one. Surname born 2014, the Elevation from the Swiss Aerotain AG back in 2015 or the Norwegian KTV Working Dronethe owner and mistress of drone window cleaning is China. China had been preparing the ground for years, as demonstrated by different academic research papers on glass and facade cleaning robotsas this of cable-driven parallel robots from Tsinghua University or this other of fan-powered cleaning robots from the Harbin Institute of Technology. The Asian giant has the academic ecosystem, state financial support and an obvious need. Said and done: China was the one who democratized technology, moving from prototypes and more or less “artisanal” devices to large-scale production with scalable industrial systems and companies like DJI, UAEAV and Foxtech. Today they already produce between 80-90% of the world’s commercial drones and lead an industry that in 2024 was valued at 248 million dollars and has a projection of 1,257 million by 2033. according to Growth Market Reports. The substitutes. China has developed a complete industrial ecosystem that is essentially divided into two major technological aspects. On the one hand, high-pressure cleaning drones that are connected to water pumps that are on the ground, such as the DJI M400 or the solutions of Foxtech Robotics. On the other hand, autonomous climbing robots with sensors and AI navigation (such as robot vacuum cleaners) such as those from OneMovecapable of detecting and adapting to variations in façade surfaces. In between, variants in the form of projects with hybrid platforms such as that of Skybotics Technology Limited or wired parallel systems that offer high precision, such as this from the Faculty of Engineering of Shanghai University with three degrees of freedom. Some of the technologies that can be found in this type of robots are adaptive joints to reduce wind discomfort or “zero distance” spraying to increase pressure, both present in the DJI M400one of the most popular in the sector. Yes, but. Although facade cleaning robots are a revolution for the sector, they are not a panacea: they work best on flat surfaces, they have height restrictions (typically between 60 and 120 meters for wired systems) and although they have more margin than human labor to operate in worse weather conditions, they are not infallible. Finally, the initial cost is significant, which constitutes a barrier to entry for smaller companies because it is not only the drone, it is also extra auxiliary elements such as pumping stations, batteries, software or safety certifications. For example, only the complete Lucid Bots Sherpa kit It costs $75,000.which leads to opting for solutions such as renting or leasing. In any case, and … Read more

Nolan has portrayed Antiquity without colors in ‘The Odyssey’. It is a major error that has been around since the 18th century.

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The new trailer of ‘The Odyssey’ by Christopher Nolan It has everything that is expected from the director: enormous ambition, armies of extras, a Trojan horse, a cyclops, and its share of controversy. Beyond the anachronistic armor, both this and the previous trailer have highlighted how the film is bathed in a color filter (or non-color, rather) that turns Ancient Greece into a twilight, joyless place. What is significant is that this is not an innocent choice. Color missing. The new trailer, which makes the visual muscle of the film very clear (four months of filming at sea, 250 million dollars budget) has unleashed opinions that speak of “lack of color“, or of a proposal “dark, dirty and full of black armor.” Nolan affirms which has sought a realistic approach to the Greek epic, with locations in Greece, Morocco, Sicily and Iceland, practical effects and without the artificial shine of the classic Hollywood peplum. However, its approach is also a visual convention. Dirty past. The phenomenon is more than studied among experts in historical representation. The blog ‘Tragedy and Farce’ analyzed it in depth in 2021documenting how historical cinema has come to systematically associate the past with dirty browns, metallic grays, and unpolished armor. The trend became so dominant that it ended up filtering into epic fantasy: the Gondor of ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’ works with a completely desaturated palette that contrasts with the vivid colors of the rest of the saga. The story. What is significant, as said the historian Patricia Gonzálezis that this is how a story is constructed: we are sent the message that the past was dark, brutal and primitive, and modernity consists of color and light. Going from black and white to technicolor, a bit in one inverted and less innocent version of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. The past is different from the present, it is described to us as distant and pre-rational, and at the same time it is romanticized in the military: man against the world, his own against what is foreign, the epic of noble violence. A message ideologically loaded to the brim, although there are authors like Nolan who, when adopting it, have no intention of launching an explicit political message. What archeology knows. Since 1981, the Liebieghaus Polychromy Research Projectin Frankfurt, analyzes traces of color preserved in classical sculptures and architectural fragments thanks to a combination of techniques including ultraviolet photography, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, and chemical analysis of pigments. Their conclusions are that the marble and bronze sculptures were painted with bright reds, deep blues, greens and gold. His physical reconstructions were shown to the public for the first time between 2003 and 2004 in Munich, the Vatican and Copenhagen, under the title ‘Gods in Color’. Polychromy was not limited to sculptures. Clothes were dyed, walls were painted, weapons of the elite were decorated, tapestries told stories with intensely colored illustrations captured with complex and intricate techniques. It must be taken into account that the very term “polychromy” It was coined by the theorist Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy in 1814. from the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The origin of the problem. In the Renaissance, restorers convinced that the paint covering the sculptures was accumulated dirt removed it, and by the 18th century there were hardly any visible traces left. It was then, in 1764, that the German historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann published his ‘History of the Art of Antiquity’, which for generations established the canon of classical beauty. in itWinckelmann maintained that color contributed to beauty but was not beauty, and that the whiter the body, the more beautiful it was. Liebieghaus Polychromy Research Project Winckelmann and the neoclassicists who followed him built on that historical accident an entire aesthetic ideal, that of white marble as the pinnacle of civilization and art. Museums displayed the sculptures in their deteriorated state as if that were their original appearance. Today’s public, upon seeing the polychrome reconstructions of the Liebieghaus, reacts with discomfort, but in reality this rejection is the result of two centuries of conditioning. White history. The most important Nazi propaganda forum on the internet, Stormfront, uses images of the Parthenon as iconography, invoking a “white history”. Identity Evropa, an American far-right organization, uses classical white marble sculptures in its propaganda. “Molon labe”, the legendary roar of Leonidas at Thermopylae, is today the slogan of armed Nazi militias. Before all that, Hitler banned any representation of classical art other than white marble in Nazi Germany. Sparta and Rome serve to sustain racialized narrativesxenophobic and Islamophobic, with the whiteness of marble as a central element of the imagination. A gray, violent and militarized past fits perfectly into that story: epic, where the hard man prevails (hence the famous “Roman Empire” in which men, apparently, they can’t stop thinking), separated from the “soft” present… Nolan is not propagating Nazi ideas, of course, but his imaginary, absolutely contrary to historical reality (is there anything more luminous and colorful than the Mediterranean?) is born from these trends that date back to the 18th century. Therefore, the decision of filming in Western Sahara It is not only economic: it is necessary to erase the light of classical history. In Xataka | This song is so important in Nolan’s ‘Inception’ that Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack revolves around it

If the question is how much an employee would have to work to earn the same as a manager, we have the answer: a century

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The wealth gap between the richest and the poorest is skyrocketing around the world. There are people whose salary in a single year far exceeds what any other average job could earn by working their entire life. It’s not an exaggeration: it’s what the numbers show. A report of Oxfam Intermón and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), analyzes the salary data of 1,500 large companies in 33 countries and quantifies the difference between what an average worker earns and what he earns a senior manager in Spain: That gap is no longer measured in years of salary, it is measured in centuries. A century of work to earn the same. According to data from the Oxfam report, in Spain, the general directors of the 12 largest companies in the country earned an equivalent average remuneration in 2025 98 times the national average salary. That means that an employee in Spain with an average gross salary in Spain of between 27,300 and 31,600 euros would have to work almost an entire century to accumulate what one of those senior managers earns in a single year. The data in the report is in line with what was included in the fourteenth edition of the remuneration report that published The Countrywhich stated that the annual salary received by the managers of Ibex 35 companies was 103 times higher than that of their employees. A gap that has become an abyss. The problem is that the gap is not only enormous, but it is widening every year and risks becoming an unbridgeable abyss. The average compensation of CEOs grew by 16% in the last year, while the average salary of workers in Spain it only increased 3.6% in 2025. At a global level the figure is not much better, since the real salary of workers globally fell by 12% between 2019 and 2025 due to inflation and wage stagnation. What happens in the rest of the world. The data from the report shows that, on a global scale, the situation is not very different, and the 1,500 highest-paid CEOs in the world earned an average of 8.4 million dollars in 2025, compared to 7.6 million the previous year. That represents an increase of 11% in real terms. For an average worker to accumulate that same salary, they would need to work 490 years non-stop. Meanwhile, the real salary what the worker receives average taking inflation into account, barely rose 0.5% between 2024 and 2025. That means that the highest paid executives improved their income 20 times faster than your employees. Real salaries, in free fall since 2019. The data on workers is worrying in itself, regardless of any comparison. Since 2019, workers’ real salaries have fallen by 12% worldwide, which is equivalent to having worked 108 days without pay between 2019 and 2025, 31 of them in the last year alone. Although the study shows that productivity per worker has grown by 51% since 2004, the part of GDP that goes to salaries has been reduced by 2 percentage points in that same period. Miguel Alba, head of Inequality and the Private Sector at Oxfam Intermón, pointed out that: “The remuneration of senior managers in large companies reaches exorbitant dimensions, very far from what ordinary people earn to cover living expenses.” Extreme wealth and a demand for change. The report also points to the growth of large fortunes as part of the same phenomenon. In Spain, the billionaire wealth It increased by 29.5% in the last year, representing 13.8% of GDP, distributed among 44 billionaires. In contrast, the average net wealth of Spanish households only grew by 3% between the end of 2022 and the end of 2024, according to data from the Bank of Spain collected in the report. On a global scale, among the largest beneficiaries of dividends in 2025 are Bernard Arnault, owner of LVMH, with $3.8 billion, and Amancio Ortega with 3.7 billion dollars (3,234 million euros). Faced with this scenario of extreme differences, Oxfam Intermón and the ITUC call on governments to limit the remuneration of senior managers, to tax the richest more fairly and to guarantee that minimum salaries are updated in line with inflation to ensure that employees do not lose purchasing power. In Xataka | Low salaries have ruined the job satisfaction of Spaniards: only 28.7% are satisfied with their job Image | Unsplash (Muhammad Sultan Ali, Ruthson Zimmerman)

The current that warms Europe will weaken by 51% before the end of the century. And Spain, according to experts, is already beginning to notice

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“The 5% chance just became 50%.” This quote from Stefan Rahmstorf, the world’s leading expert on the collapse of the AMOC, describes the change it introduces the study just published by the University of BordeauxIt’s this April 15th. But the story goes beyond the number: it is the latest installment of the great climate debate of the decade. A debate that, whoever wins, we are all losing. What exactly is AMOC and why do we care? The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is the North Atlantic branch of the thermohaline circulation. Since the sun does not heat the sea equally everywhere and freshwater flows reach the ocean at very specific points, this is the basic mechanism by which the oceans balance differences in temperature and salinity. The AMOC is a good example of this regulation. After all, as explained from AEMETit is an “Atlantic basin-scale north-south ocean flow that begins with cold sea water sinking to the bottom off Greenland, subsequently flowing south, and being replaced by warmer water flowing at the surface from the south, transferring heat from the tropics to the east coast of North America and the west coast of Europe.” Therefore, it is a key mechanism and if it stops, as studies began to say a decade ago, the problems for Europe would be enormous. Huge? “Without it, Western Europe and eastern North America would cool significantly, with a host of potential adverse effects,” said Sánchez Laulhé. We talk about a “widespread cooling throughout the North Atlantic and northern hemisphere in general” that would collapse the temperature in Europe would drop several degrees and cause a “strengthening of winter storms, with more and more powerful explosive cyclogenesis” and a “greater proportion of precipitation falling in the form of snow throughout Europe.” However, scientists do not fully agree. In 2021, the IPCC said the AMOC was “unlikely” to collapse. In 2023, the Ditlevsens not only said that it was a probable scenario, but that they set the first date for the collapse. In 2024, 44 signatories They asked to take the problem seriously. But in January 2025 Terhaar, Vogt and Foukal said which, in short, had not weakened since 1063. Now, the University of Bordeaux states that the AMOC will weaken by around 51% by the end of the century with a confidence level of 90%, under the intermediate emissions scenario. What can already be seen. French researchers they are right in which the most recognizable observational signal of the weakening of the AMOC is the “cold spot” of the subpolar Atlantic south of Greenland. In the midst of climate change, “the only point on the planet that has cooled in the last century.” However, we are also not clear what that really means. And there is the key. So will Europe freeze? Probably, but that’s not what’s interesting. Throughout the history of the Atlantic it has been passed many times. The question is whether it will be soon, if it will be our fault, if we can avoid it and what consequences it will have. Be that as it may, Spain will not be the most affected, but it will be. It is being. Stefan Rahmstorf, for example, said last year at the Autonomous University of Madrid that “the slowdown of the AMOC is already having impacts in Spain.” You just have to know how to read the signs. Image | Xataka In Xataka | We have been fearing the fading of the AMOC current for years. We have good news

In the 13th century, some monks destroyed a valuable manuscript of the Bible. We just recovered 42 of your pages

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The one of ‘Codex H’ It’s an ironic story. Despite its enormous value, in the 13th century the monks of the Great Laura Monastery (Greece) They decided to dismantle it to reuse their materials in other works. Parchment was scarce and it was time to recycle, even if it was at the cost of destroying a manuscript that was already more than 400 years old at that time. Historians have always considered its content lost. Now, with the help of science, they have rescued more than 40 pages. And they are a real treasure. What is the ‘H Code’? A 6th century manuscript especially valuable for its content. Beyond its age, its heritage value or as a curiosity, the work is interesting because it offers us a copy of the Letters of Saint Paul made only a few centuries after the apostle himself wrote them. That is, the codex was written in Greek a few centuries after (VI) Paul of Tarsus wrote his epistles in the 1st AD. It may seem like a long time, but to scholars who study the New Testament it offers a valuable treasure: a clue to how those epistles were organized in the Early Middle Ages. The ‘Codex H’ also has another peculiarity: it is the oldest sample of the known as “Euthalian Apparatus”a system of divisions and annotations of the New Testament. And what happened to him? That the work ended up dismantled. Literally. In the 13th century, parchment was a scarce commodity, so in the Monastery of the Great Laura, on Mount Athos (Greece), they decided to sacrifice the manuscript to take advantage of your materials. Their idea was to use parchment to bind and create endpapers for other works, so they inked their pages again. This explains why researchers have found fragments of the work scattered throughout libraries in Italy, Greece, Russia, Ukraine and France. Other pages never appeared and were considered lost forever. And it wasn’t like that? Not quite. The monks of the 13th century may have recycled the parchment to make endpapers and bind other manuscripts, but that does not mean that the original pages (and their content) had been lost. Not at least when examined with the help of science of the 21st century. “We knew that, at some point, the manuscript was re-inked. The chemicals in the new ink caused ‘shift’ damage to the facing pages, creating a mirror image of the text on the opposite sheet, sometimes leaving traces of several pages, barely visible, but very clear with the help of the latest imaging techniques,” explains Garrick Allenprofessor at the University of Glasgow and one of the experts who have studied the codex. What exactly have they done? With the collaboration of the Electronic Library of Ancient Manuscripts (EMEL), the researchers used multispectral imaging and processed the preserved pages in search of “ghost” texts. The term may sound strange, but it basically allows experts to get the most out of a folio, looking for traces that allow them to reconstruct other pages that are no longer physically preserved. To guarantee historical accuracy, the team led by Professor Allen collaborated with experts from Paris who, thanks to radiocarbon dating, confirmed that the material they were working with was parchment from the 6th century. What did they find? Neither more nor less than 42 pages lost (so far) from ‘Codex H’. And that is much more important than it may seem at first glance. The recovered texts are fragments of the Letters of Saint Paul, writings that were already known and do not represent any historical novelty in themselves. What is really interesting is not so much his sentences but everything that surrounds them. What does that mean? That those 42 pages provide an enormous amount of information to researchers on issues such as the way the scribes worked, how they related to Paul’s work, how they organized them and (of course) how they reused the materials when the codices aged. Does it give you that much information? The University of Glasgow stands out especially how the 42 pages of the codex help us better understand the changes that the New Testament has undergone. “They offer a unique perspective on how it has evolved and been interpreted over the centuries,” notes the institution before stopping specifically at the “list of chapters.” “These pages contain the oldest known examples of chapter lists from Paul’s Letters, which differ drastically from how we divide these letters today,” they need in Glasgow. The Greek codex also provides information about how 6th-century scribes corrected, annotated, and interacted with the epistles of Saint Paul with whom they worked. Images | University of Glasgow In Xataka | The Bible has always been the most sacred book. Young Christians are filling it with post-its, underlines and cute covers

Mexico’s real problem is that it is warming three times faster than a century ago

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Mexico is experiencing the first major consolidated heat episode of 2026 and there is more than 22 entities affected on the Pacific slope and the southeast. That’s highs of up to 45 degrees in a country that is warming up to three times faster than the last century. And, despite everything, no one seems too worried. Why would they be? Mexico closed 2025 with reservoirs at 72% and by April 15 only 12.3% of the territory is affected by drought. You only have to go to 2024 to find a spring with 76% of the country in a critical situation: no matter how much the heat is getting earlier, it is logical that no one takes it very seriously. Especially if we take into account that experts do not agree on the nature of the event. Once it has been ruled out that, technically, it is a ‘heat wave’; The National Weather Service says we talk about a ‘color wave’ and services like Meteored doubt whether that can even be talked about. The great Mexican mess. While the thermometers of Sinaloa, Durango, Nayarit, Guerrero, Michoacan, Chiapas and, occasionally, Jalisco will be placed above of 40 degrees; the rain will reach the eastern half of the country: It is a clear example that the asymmetry in how climate change affects Mexico means that the country begins to live in several seasons at the same time. And that is the central issue: Mexico is warming rapidly and that means innumerable problems. Heating up rapidly? According to the UNAM Climate Change Research Programbefore 2012 the warming rate per century was 1.9 degrees. Now that rate has catapulted to 3.5. This means that projections speak of 1.95 degrees only for 2026, while the average is 1.5. And El Niño is knocking on the doors. Therefore, the fact that there is water in the swamps does not solve anything: it simply makes us trust. But let’s talk about the problems. Because, although we do not usually emphasize it, heat has a direct impact on public health. Only in 2024 306 people died from heat stroke in Mexico. The fact that the heat is ahead is not good news. Above all, because as we already know, the hot Mexican season produces peak values ​​between April and May. In this way, it is reasonable to think that all this heat is nothing more than part of what is coming. Image | BenBaso | Xataka In Xataka | We are living in the hottest years on Earth and the consequences will be so severe that not even our grandchildren will see the end.

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