china

Foie gras was one of the last armored culinary symbols of France. They did not have a rival that measures it in tons: China

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In 1778, French Marshal Jean-Pierre de Clermont-Tonnerre gave foie gras to King Louis XVI and the monarch was so impressed that he rewarded the cook with lands and a pension. Since then, the product was sealed as one of the great gastronomic symbols from France. More than two centuries later, that culinary crown is beginning to find competition far from Europe. The gastronomic bastion that seemed untouchable. For decades, the Foie gras It was one of those symbols that France considered almost part of its national DNA. It was not just a luxury product or a profitable export, it was a centerpiece of your food sovereigntya cultural emblem protected by designations of origin, rural tradition and a political machinery willing to protect it. When the sector celebrated a trade surplus in 2025 of 35.6 million eurosthe message was clear: after years of bird flu and mass slaughter, French foie gras was still standing. The wound of bird flu. The blow of bird flu It was deep. In 2022, French production fell to historic lows, barely touching the 8,000 tonsan unthinkable figure for a country used to dominating this market. The mandatory vaccination of ducks starting in 2023 managed to stabilize the sector and return it to levels close to 17,000 tons in 2025. That recovery seemed to confirm that France had closed the crisis. What no one expected is that, while he was healing his wounds, another actor was growing at full speed. China enters the scene. that actor it was china. In just a decade, it went from producing about 2,000 tons to touch 14,000placing itself dangerously close to the French leadership. The quote by Fabien Chevalierpresident of CIFOG, summarizes the surprise of the sector: “We didn’t see them coming like this.” And that is perhaps the key to everything. France thought that foie gras remained one of its last armored culinary totems. What he did not have was a rival who does not measure his ambition in tradition, but in tons. Scale changes everything. The comparison is brutal. While an average French producer produces around 10 tons per year, Chinese farms like Li Fengshan’s They produce 300 and aim for 500. The contrast is almost industrial versus artisanal. Li, who grew up in poverty and today drives a Maserati Thanks to foie gras, it symbolizes the Chinese transformation: turning a Western luxury into a mass product. On their farms, each worker handles more than 400 geese and the livers can exceed a kilo, easily doubling the usual size in France. Where the French see terroir, the Chinese see scalability. From luxury to popular consumption. The great revolution is not only in producing more, but in changing the meaning of the product. In China, foie gras is no longer just an elite delicacy: mixed with fried riceserved in a hotpot or transformed into cherry or rose-shaped desserts bathed in red wine. This democratization has triggered internal demand and has allowed prices to be drastically lowered. A dish can cost between 4 and 10 dollarscompared to 15 or 40 euros in many French restaurants. That changes the global market: when luxury becomes cheaper, the symbolic monopoly begins to break down. The next step: export. Until now, most of Chinese production stayed at home. That barrier is beginning to break down. As? Reuters counted that Chinese producers are already preparing exports to South Korea, Japan, Russia and Southeast Asia, and some have already sent batches to the United Arab Emirates. For France, the threat is not so much in Europe, where denominations continue to carry a lot of weight, but in those emerging markets where the “foie gras” label is worth more than its origin. The battle between story and volume. France continues to rely on its main advantage: the prestige. Labels such as “foie gras du Sud-Ouest” continue to be a cultural and gastronomic guarantee that is difficult to replicate. The problem is that economic history is full of examples where scale ends up eroding the story. China has subsidies, intensive labor, low costs and a immense industrial capacity. In fact, even now start talking about robots to automate force feeding. French foie gras still retains its aura, no doubt, but for the first time in a long time its dominance no longer seems like a natural inheritance. It seems like a position that will have to be defended. Image | Annie Tu, Charles Haynes In Xataka | 3D printed meat was a utopia years ago. You can now buy it in the supermarket, for 3.5 euros and made in Navarra In Xataka | France has found a way to stand up to China: the first pilot line to recycle rare earth magnets

The most powerful supercomputer in the world is in China. The other part of the story is even more interesting

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The biannual TOP500 list with the most powerful supercomputers on the planet has given a striking surprise in its June 2026 edition. The Chinese LineShine system, installed at the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center, has debuted directly at number one. It thus displaces the American supercomputer El Capitan, which had dominated the ranking for years. China has not managed to lead this classification since 2017, thus breaking a decade of North American hegemony. Unprecedented raw power. The performance tests used to configure this list leave no doubt: LimeShine has achieved 2,198 exaflops of performance in the benchmark HPLcompared to 1,809 exaflops for its American rival. The Chinese machine is therefore 20% more powerful than the flagship of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. It is a whole new milestone in global supercomputing. Surprise: zero GPUs. The performance is extraordinary, but even more so is the way this supercomputer has been created. Most modern supercomputers rely heavily on GPUs, specialized graphics chips from Nvidia or AMD, for massive data processing. However, LineShine uses CPUs instead of focusing everything on GPUs, something that differentiates this supercomputer from its rivals and makes the feat even more striking. Heart ARM. The fundamental pillar of LineShine It is the LX2 CPU. The data they point because it has been designed by Huawei, and in each of those CPUs we have two dies HBM computing and memory. Each die It has 152 ARMv9 cores that have EVS and EMS supportwhich allows the system to process vectors and matrices in an exceptional way even without GPUs. In total LineShine has 304 of these processors with a total of 13,789,440 cores. Avoiding vetoes. One of the reasons that have undoubtedly contributed to this design decision is the US trade war with China. Tariffs and export bans on hardware and software have made things very complicated, especially when it comes to getting Nvidia GPUs for AI processing. Despite all this, China has once again demonstrated an astonishing ability to advance technologically. Another curiosity: the system has been built without public funds from the Chinese government. Source: TOP500.org AI clusters don’t compete here (but they would “win”). This prestigious list had always offered us that vision of the most powerful computing systems in the world, but today the panorama has changed. It has done so because the AI ​​clusters created by big technology are probably more powerful than any of these systems. As explains Jimmy Goodrich of the University of California, “if hyperscalers competed with their systems, ‘fastest’ in the world wouldn’t even be in the top five.” That phrase, yes, has crumbs. But it’s comparing pears with apples. However, the supercomputers on the TOP500 list and the AI ​​clusters that hyperscalers are building to meet global demand are very different. The root problem is in floating point precision. Classic supercomputers like El Capitan are designed for high-fidelity scientific simulations, where the slightest rounding error can be fatal. That is why they operate under the FP64 standard with which tens of decimals are calculated: it is a slow and expensive process in energy, but extraordinarily precise. AI rounds with joy. In contrast, AI models are very resistant to numerical “noise.” They don’t need perfect precision to recognize patterns or generate text. That allows AI chips to use reduced precision formats like FP16, FP8, or even FP4. By processing much shorter numbers, they multiply their speed and efficiency significantly. So when an AI cluster achieves tens of exaflops, it does so rounding up quite happily. These machines are exceptional for AI tasks, but they do not threaten the future of traditional supercomputers. Europe (and Italy) and supercomputing. If we look in detail at the list, we see great news for European supercomputing. The HPC7 system created by Eni has entered directly at number 6 on the list, while Jupiter Booster (Germany) is at number 5. Europe has four systems in the top 10 of the TOP500 list (two of them, from Italy), and eight in the top 20. Spain is still present on the list thanks to MareNostrum 5which yes, drops from 14th to 16th place. In Xataka | The EU wants to close the gap in the race for AI with 750 million euros. And it is good news for Barcelona

China just reminded you who moves the most pieces

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The United States has been trying for months to open an exit door in one of the territories where China retains the most industrial power: rare earths. We’re not just talking about mines, but about processing, magnets, permits, entity lists and a supply chain that connects defense, automotive, semiconductors and advanced technology. What we have seen now is a fairly direct reminder of that reality: Beijing has targeted American companies that are part of that attempt to build an alternative. The measurements. China’s latest move materializes on two levels. On the one hand, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce added ten American companies to its list of entities, which in practice means restricting operations with them. Those affected include MP Materials, owner of the Mountain Pass mine in California, as well as USA Rare Earth and Aveox. On the other hand, the Chinese Ministry of Finance announced purchasing restrictions on another 46 American companies in the defense sector. Beijing presented the measure as a response to the “unjustified” inclusion of Chinese entities on the US list of “Chinese military companies” and as a way to protect its “national security and interests.” The immediate context. The move comes less than two weeks after the Pentagon will reinstate Alibaba, Baidu and BYD to a list of Chinese companies considered a risk to US national security due to their alleged links with the People’s Liberation Army. Chinese companies denied such military connections. Therein lies one of the keys to the movement: Beijing presents its response as a response to Washington’s decisions. Washington’s plan. The United States has begun to move with unusual intensity, according to CSIS diagnosis. The think tank outlines an industrial policy strategy that combines more than $7.3 billion in capital, direct investments, public financing and procurement commitments to accelerate magnet mining, processing and manufacturing. The Department of Defense, for example, agreed to take a $400 million stake in MP Materials and set a floor of 110 dollars per kilo for ten years for its production of neodymium-praseodymium. It’s a lot of money, but also a race against industrial deadlines. The difficulty. CSIS noted that the April 2025 restrictions on heavy rare earths and permanent magnets caused rapid disruptions in allied defense and industrial chains, and exposed the fragility of a system that then remained highly dependent on Beijing. Nevertheless, Financial Times collects a cautious reading of China’s recent move. An American executive in the Asian giant, cited anonymously, described it as “measured and symbolic,” because companies in sensitive sectors, such as defense technology, already have very restricted access to contracts from the Chinese Government and Army. Are rare earths important? The key is that rare earths are neither a laboratory oddity nor a footnote in the trade war. They are much closer to our daily lives than it seems. These 17 elements appear into components such as magnets, batteries, phosphors and catalysts, which are then used in sectors such as healthcare, transportation, electricity generation, oil refining and consumer electronics. That is, we are not just talking about minerals: we are talking about tiny pieces that can end up in a wide range of devices, including military components. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | In China, a university student can now study a degree in one of its best businesses: rare earths

China has found an unexpected shortcut to bring AI to millions of homes: the robot vacuum cleaner

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You may already be using Chinese AI at home without giving it much thought. Not necessarily in the form of a chatbot, nor as a hidden function on the mobile, nor as another promise within the television. Maybe it’s in something much less solemn: a robot vacuum cleaner that runs across the floor of your living room while you do something else. The history of the robot vacuum cleaner did not begin with devices running around pointlessly. He Electrolux Trilobitemarketed in Europe in the early 2000s, and the Roomba Intelligent FloorVacpresented by iRobot in 2002, already incorporated sensors and navigation routines to move around a home with a certain autonomy, although their capabilities were far from current ones. What has changed since then is the perception layer: advanced models no longer just detect walls or stairs, but build richer maps, recognize objects and make decisions with more context. Electrolux Trilobite The scale data helps to understand why this story is not just about technological curiosity. According to IDCthe global home cleaning devices market reached 32.72 million units in 2025, up 20.1% from the previous year. Within that universe, smart robot vacuum cleaners remained the main category, with 24.12 million units and a growth of 17.1%. IDC measures shipments, not installed homes, but the scale helps to understand the dimension of the phenomenon: we are talking about tens of millions of home cleaning robots moving through the global market in a single year. AI also enters the house through the floor The most striking thing is who occupies the center of that category today. In the first three quarters of 2025, the global Top 5 of smart robot vacuum cleaners consisted of five Chinese brands: Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame, Xiaomi and Narwal. The consulting firm speaks of a reorganization of the market, with 17.42 million units shipped in that period and a year-on-year growth of 18.7%. The reading is quite clear: China is not entering this sector as an aspirant, but as the block that sets the commercial pace of an increasingly technological category. And here the interesting thing begins: we are not just talking about a cleaning product. An advanced robot vacuum cleaner is probably one of the most complex home devices we can have moving around the house, because it must clean, orient itself, avoid problems and make decisions in an environment that changes every day. When he avoids a wire to avoid getting trapped, surround a sockdistinguishes a carpet or adapts its route room by room, there is more than just aspiration: there are sensors and artificial intelligence. Xiaomi H50 Pro At Xataka, for example, we have tested the Roborock Saros Z70, a robot vacuum cleaner with a robotic arm capable of lifting objects weighing up to 300 grams. In our experience, it reached for a sneaker, and Roborock claims it can also pick up socks, small towels, or tissues, although it doesn’t always recognize everything it finds. When we talk about the artificial intelligence race, we usually look towards the great models: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen, systems designed to summarize, schedule or respond from one screen. That terrain is still the most visible, but it is not the only one. China is also pushing a much more physical and everyday path: products capable of bringing perception, navigation and decision capabilities to household tasks. The iRobot case summarizes the change of era very well. Roomba made the idea of ​​the robot vacuum cleaner famous, but the company no longer occupies the central place it had for years: it was left out of the Top 5 global smart robotic vacuum cleaners indicated by IDC and declared bankruptcy before pass into the hands of the Chinese firm Picea Robotics. This, added to the most recent market data, suggests that the old Western benchmark lost ground while a new generation of Chinese brands conquered the market. Images | Roborock | Electrolux | Xiaomi In Xataka | A man tried to control his robot vacuum cleaner with a remote control: he ended up having access to 6,700 devices around the world In Xataka | The problem is not that there is AI on TikTok. It’s already more than half of what you see as soon as you enter.

China has just published a manual to hunt them from 3,000 km

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Japan designed the battle of midway convinced that the distance and dispersion of his fleet gave him an advantage. The problem is that the United States had deciphered the plan and converted that distance in a trap in 1942: four Japanese aircraft carriers ended up at the bottom of the Pacific in just a few hours. In naval warfare, staying away has never been a guarantee of safety. Retreat is no longer a refuge. For years, the United States’ response to China’s military buildup in the Pacific was clear: move away its aircraft carriers and large naval assets from the Asian coast. The reasoning seemed sound. The further away they were from Chinese ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, the harder it would be to destroy them. Bases like Guam They thus became a kind of strategic sanctuary… until Beijing just made something uncomfortable clear: distance no longer guarantees security. The Chinese manual. A group of Chinese military scientists, led by Gao Tianyun from the National University of Defense Technology in Nanjing, has published a study which describes how to destroy an aircraft carrier battle group at 3,000 kilometers. The figure is by no means coincidental. It is practically the exact distance between Shanghai and Guam. What is striking is not only the ambition of the plan, but the implicit message: the refuge that Washington chose to protect its most valuable ships is already within the threat map that China says it is studying. The great chain of death. The study does not present a “miracle weapon,” but rather something more dangerous: a complete system. First locate, then follow, and then saturate. The proposal combines satellites, drones, radar aircraft, submarines, ships and signals intelligence to build a chain of constant monitoring of an enemy naval group. Once the objective was set, the real key would arrive: a massive attack with coordinated missilessharing data in flight, differentiating decoys from real targets and assigning targets from multiple angles of attack. The war of exhausting defenses. The Chinese logic is not so much to pierce the armor of an aircraft carrier as to break the defensive architecture that protects it. An American battle group depends on Aegis destroyersinterceptor missiles, electronic warfare, decoys and CIWS systems last line. The problem is that all these systems have limits. The goal of a coordinated swarm is not to be unstoppable, but to make the defense run out of timewithout radar capacity or without sufficient interceptors. In other words, it is a war of exhaustion in seconds. Hiding is no longer enough. Here is possibly the central idea that worries Washington. The United States dispersed its ships and moved its aircraft carriers away to avoid having “all their eggs in one basket,” making it difficult for China to locate and attack them. But he chinese study issues a very specific warning: hiding and dispersing does not necessarily mean being safe. If the detection and tracking chain works, distance ceases to be a barrier and simply becomes a logistical variable. The most difficult point. Of course, work does not mean that China can do it tomorrow. The analysis itself makes it clear that the problem is not the range of the missiles, but maintain targeting data precise information about a naval group that moves, maneuvers, camouflages itself, emits interference and deploys decoys. Why hit a moving target? 3,000 kilometers It remains one of the most complex tasks of modern warfare, and although the theory now exists, the practice is a very different matter. More message than capacity. Because perhaps that is precisely the point. Post this study It doesn’t seem like a technical demonstration so much as a strategic statement. If you like, Beijing is also saying something very concrete to Washington: move your aircraft carriers Any further does not solve the problem, it only changes its form. In other words, the new Pacific war is no longer about getting close enough to strike, but about proving that even thousands of miles away no one is really out of reach. Image | US Navy In Xataka | While the world looked at Iran, China has seized an island in the Pacific without a single shot. And now he is militarizing it In Xataka | Japan has crossed a red line in the Pacific with the US: China has just responded with warships closer than ever

China is strangling critical materials that the US needs for its technology industry. It’s a two speed war

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In early May, Trump went to China on an official trip and took an entourage of CEOs on Air Force One. They were all from the technology (Cristiano Amon, Tim Cook, Elon Musk or Jensen Huang, for example), but also others energy, the space industry or semiconductors. One of them was Jim Anderson of Coherent, who was very interested in something very specific: why China is taking more than necessary in issue export licenses of indium phosphide. Anderson is blown away by indium phosphide for a very specific reason: It’s an essential material for high-speed optical chips. And, although it may seem very specific, it turns out that it is the key piece that the data centers new generation of the United States. And China, as with other strategic materials and metals, is in control. Optical chips. Data centers house miles and miles of visible cables that connect servers to the network and power, but they are not the only ones. Within each device, the chips are linked by cable and it is a functional technology, but with a limit that is beginning to be reached. If you want to improve latency and bandwidth (and, therefore, the performance of artificial intelligence platforms), you must rethink the internal connection to communicate the chips. That’s where optics come into play. By connecting chips by laser, the performance of the equipment is multiplied and Nvidia is so convinced of this that, a few months ago, invested 4 billion dollars in two companies: Lumentum and Coherent. They estimate that, with copper that is at its limit, connecting clusters of thousands of processors by laser is the solution to the physical problem that they are beginning to encounter. They are components with a very high degree of specialization and a series of materials from the rare earth which, as we have said on numerous occasions, are under the control of China. Indium phosphide is not a rare earth derivative, but it is a strategic material. Strangling the market . And therein lies the problem. The United States wants to promote its technological independence (because they have Big Tech, but practically everything is manufactured outside the United States) and, to achieve this, they need a series of materials that are not in their possession. China has that dominancebut with each restriction and veto that is applied to them from the US, they respond with the same currency, but vetoing what American technology companies need so much: rare earth metals. That is why they are classified as minerals, metals and strategic components, and indium phosphide is among them. China produces approximately 70% of the world’s indium and started to apply restrictions to the supply chain in February 2025. This has caused not only prices to skyrocket by 250%, but also American technology companies to pressure to reverse the situation. The main complaint is that, instead of directly blocking the finished products, it slows down the entire process because They are capable of conditioning the export of the materials used to create those products. Therefore, the optical module ecosystem cannot scale as quickly as hyperscalers need. Domino. Taking this situation into account, what is happening with these security systems advanced photonics It is exactly the same as with NAND chips: all the fish are sold for the next few years. In this sense, as consumers we absolutely don’t care because it is something that only affects AI companies, but it is estimated that Lumentum will have everything sold out in 2026, 2027 and… 2028, despite having quadrupled its production. It not only affects American companies, since the Taiwanese VPEC and LandMark Optoelectronics are also suffering interruptions in the supply of the material. And it doesn’t matter if Lumentum or Coherent are multiplying their capacity by opening new plants because the raw materials continue to leave China and, if those export controls are in place, It is an insurmountable funnel. The other side of the coin. On the other hand we have the Chinese industry. In recent years, its technologies have taken a giant leap, expanding its capacity and beginning to make waves in the international conversation with both user level components (RAM memory and computers) and in the high technological spheres (photonics and semiconductors). Because China has detailed the plan to become the world’s leading technological power by 2030 and it is clear that they have both a very defined roadmap and, above all, the materials necessary to achieve that goal and which companies are the ones that will define that future. Huawei or SMIC are two proper namesbut there are others like Yuanjie that have skyrocketed in the stock market. The reason? They are the ones who are creating photonics components for data centers. In Xataka | Huawei no longer competes: it is building its own parallel reality

This is the hydroelectric colossus with which China “is trying to tame nature”

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China has proposed a titanic challenge in the heart of the Himalayas: the construction of the Motuo megadam on the Yarlung Tsangpo River, which aspires to become the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. With this project, the Asian country seeks to far surpass the legendary Three Gorges Dam. However, as Tenzin Norgay, a researcher at the International Campaign for Tibetwith this monumental display “They are trying to tame nature.” Your numbers. To understand the scale of this hydroelectric project, just look at the figures, since according to experts, there is nothing on the scale of this dam when talking about numbers that are stratospheric. As a first piece of information, the generation capacity stands out, which will mean between 60 and 70 GW of power. Another important data is the annual energy production that point to 300 billion kWh per year, which is triple the capacity of the already monstrous Three Gorges Dam. In perspective, This means generating the energy for everything the United Kingdom consumes annually, and to achieve this the project requires digging 20 kilometer long tunnels in mountainous terrain. And if that were not enough, more than one wall is needed, making the dam made up of five interconnected hydroelectric plants. Reading these figures we can assume that it is not something cheap at all, and the truth is that we are not wrong, since the cost My dear of the entire work ranges between 167,000 and 170,000 million dollars. It’s a risk. The great technical challenge of the Motuo dam is not only its dizzying size, but also the place chosen to build it, since the Himalayan belt is an extremely unstable at a geological level. A report by Probe International warns that incessant seismic activity puts a big question mark over this superproject, especially in a Tibetan region where 68 dams are already operating and another 101 are in the planning phase. Looking back, recent events have highlighted the real risk of earthquakes for infrastructure located on the “roof of the world.” Internal doubts. Even within China itself there are doubts since Chinese geologist Fan Xiao has warned that the associated risks and lack of electricity demand in sparsely populated Tibet make the project unjustified. Added to this are the enormous economic and energy transmission costs necessary to transport that electricity to the urban centers of the country. Side B. Beijing defends the project as a necessary step towards decarbonization and here experts contextualize that this work is part of China’s strategic sustainability vision to abandon its enormous dependence on coal. However, Darrin Magee, a hydropower expert at Western Washington University, pointed out that this source of energy is not so sustainable in the long term due to the large greenhouse gas emissions produced by the reservoirs and suggests that, in Tibet, alternating with wind and solar plants would be more prudent. Images | Tejj In Xataka | More than 600 dams collapsed in Europe last year alone. The proud responsibility is the European Union

In China, ‘bookfluencers’ are the sales engine of the publishing industry. The problem is that no one can read 700 books.

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In China, publishers have discovered a rich vein thanks to bookfluencers. Reviews on social networks such as Douyin (the Chinese TikTok) or RedNote have become the sales engine for many books in recent years. However, the volume of books and the intense competition between these influencers has led to the credibility of the model beginning to be questioned. what has happened. They tell it in world of chinese. A book content creator posted a 25-minute video exposing another professional colleague who has more than half a million followers. In the video, he shows a paper almost 5 meters long with a list of 700 books that this bookfluencer had supposedly recommended on his social networks. There wouldn’t be any problem if it weren’t for the fact that they were the readings of a single year. It comes out almost two books a day. Authenticity not found. There is even more and, when reviewing the reviews, he found something curious. They were full of repeated and very exaggerated phrases. For example, this influencer felt “transformed” by 17 different books and “healed” by 33 more. We don’t know if he used AI to summarize the books and do the reviews, but clearly they weren’t real reviews. The online community of readers had been criticizing the lack of authenticity for some time and this video was the last straw. Read for the algorithm. Reading fans criticize the model that has been created with online recommendations. For several years now, the publishing industry has made these influencers a key resource to promote their launches, but with the passage of time, the volume of readings and the need to keep up to date with all the trendsis transforming reading from a leisurely and private activity to something manufactured for the “by weight” algorithm. The business works. Video reviews are giving publishers very good results, as in the case of the novel ‘The Last Quarter of the Moon’, which went from 600,000 copies to more than 6 million after a famous influencer recommended it. Large publishers allocate a specific budget and pay commissions of between 15 and 30% of the sales generated through their channels. The dependence on this promotional model is such that, according to editor Bai Bai, “In many cases, if no influencer is willing to take charge of a book or promote it, the book is practically doomed to failure at the moment of its publication.” A precarious job. Although publishers turn to these creators and give them good commissions, it does not mean that it is exactly a grateful job. There is enormous competition between creators, who have to constantly be up to date with trends in order to satisfy the algorithm and have their content go viral. Still, income is very unstable, pushing creators to post more reviews and exaggerate the impact the books have had on them. Anqian Reads, one of these bookfluencers, says “The ironic thing is that since I’ve been a book influencer, I have less time to read.” Image | 愚木混株 Yumu in Unsplash In Xataka | Universities are discovering something: fewer and fewer students are reading long essays without losing concentration

China is responsible for 3 of the 4 worst space debris episodes of the 21st century and a latest event shows that it is not getting better

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On June 9, the Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket released two satellites into low Earth orbit without any incident. With this, the upper stage of the rocket had already completed its mission. China does not reuse rockets, how SpaceX doesFor example. However, like any other space company, whether private or public, it has the obligation to try to ensure that its discarded rockets do not pose a risk to its space neighborhood or to the Earth itself. Unfortunately, the Asian country is not very efficient at preventing this from happening. Therefore, it is not entirely surprising that the upper stage of Zhuque-2E ended up exploding, violently ejecting more than 100 pieces at a dangerous distance from the International Space Station and much of Starlink satellites. By the hair. A United States Space Force dedicated to inspecting space for possible dangerous activities was the one that raised the alarm about this event. Not many details were given, other than that the person responsible for the explosion had been the Zhuque-2E rocket, with an upper stage 8 meters long and 3.35 meters in diameter. However, Darren McKnight, senior technical researcher at the orbital intelligence company LeoLabs, did venture to calculate in statements to Ars Technica that the explosion would have possibly released between 100 and 150 debris into low Earth orbit. The highest part of the orbit in which everything happened intersects the orbit of the International Space Station. However, the residual atmospheric resistance would be pushing the debris beneath it, so it would not pose a danger to it. The same cannot be said for the Starlink satellites, many of which are still quite close to some of the fragments from the explosion. Fortunately, also because of the residual atmospheric resistance, this debris will continue to fall, so that in a few months it should re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up into much smaller fragments that would no longer pose a risk. Many fear China. The experts They have been warning for years on China’s role in generating space debris. Currently, Russia and the former Soviet Union lead the list of launch-related debris into long-duration orbits. They are followed by China and the United States. However, while Russia and the United States are decreasing these numbers more and more, the number of this type of fragments associated with the Chinese space race has increased by 150% in the last 5 years. 3 of 4 dangerous events. A good example of the risk China poses in this regard is that it is responsible for 3 of the 4 largest explosive debris release events in low Earth orbit during the 21st century. The first of them took place in 2007, with Fengyun-1C. This was an anti-satellite test, so a kinetic destruction vehicle was used to deliberately hit a Chinese weather observation satellite. 3,500 pieces of debris were released. On the other hand, in 2022 and 2024 there were explosions in the upper stage of a Long March 6A rocket. It was something similar to what has happened now, although more fragments were formed. 500 in 2022 and between 700 and 900 in 2024. The only case that is not Chinese. The fourth of these dangerous events was another anti-satellite test, but this time carried out by Russia. This is how the Cosmos 1408 satellite was destroyedwith the subsequent release of 1,800 fragments. Space debris is an increasingly serious problem The solutions. All companies releasing inactive vehicles into low-Earth orbit or geostationary orbit should do everything possible to prevent them from becoming dangerous fragments. On the one hand, you can try to make a controlled deorbitation so that the objects return to Earth, without losing control over them. Passivation can also be carried out, in which the tanks are emptied of fuel to prevent explosions from occurring due to pressurization. Possibly, what has happened in China is due to the fact that some residual fuel has remained. Rockets or satellites can also be sent from geostationary orbit to a graveyard orbit. This is a higher orbit, far from any operational orbit where there are satellites, spacecraft or facilities of any kind that are operational and could be impacted. Finally, if the object in question is in a very low orbit, it can be monitored until it deorbits naturally. China could do all this, but it does not seem to be investing enough in optimizing results. Beware of the domino effect. These types of events could be dangerous if they occur something known as Kessler syndrome. It is a phenomenon that begins when a fragment of space debris collides with another or with an active object, such as a satellite, breaking it and generating more fragments that in turn continue to collide. It would be a kind of domino effect that could cause serious damage to the entire space infrastructure that we have been deploying little by little. For all this, what happened with this latest Chinese rocket is a wake-up call to what could happen in the future. It is not a serious case, compared to others, but it still happens. If this country does not take action, the consequences will be increasingly dangerous. Image | 中国新闻社 | POT In Xataka | Orbital cleanup is no longer science fiction: the first regular space debris collection service will arrive in 2027

Chile approved a direct submarine cable to China. The decision unleashed a diplomatic scandal with the US in the middle of everything

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For decades, Chile has tried to reduce its digital dependence on North America. The arrival of China Mobile as an alternative seemed like a solution to all their problems with the laying of a submarine cable from Valparaíso to Hong Kong. However, the issue has led to a tremendous geopolitical mess that is difficult to deal with. All because the United States had not liked the move one bit. Dependent independence. Almost all of the submarine cable infrastructure that connects Chile with the rest of the world passes through US territory or is in the hands of North American technology companies such as Google, Meta or Amazon. When Chile sought a direct route to Asia, it found that the only viable option passed through China. And of course, that set off all the alarms in Washington. What was being negotiated. China Mobile, a Chinese state telecommunications company, presented a $500 million proposal to lay an underwater cable of about 20,000 kilometers between the Chilean city of Concón and Hong Kong. The project, called Chile-China Express, would have been the first transpacific data connection from Latin America to Asia without passing through North America. The Chilean Ministry of Telecommunications approved the proposal last January. Washington’s response. Just like share Rest of World, two days after Chile signed the concession decree, the ministry annulled it, alleging “a technical error.” According to the mediumChilean officials had been urgently summoned to the US embassy in Santiago. And on February 20, the State Department revoked the visas of the Minister of Transportation and Telecommunications, Juan Carlos Muñoz, along with two other senior officials in the sector. The official notification was that their actions had “compromised critical telecommunications infrastructure and undermined regional security.” Munoz explained to Rest of World that the sanction prevented him from visiting a key country for his work and that it had damaged his reputation. What Chile defended. From Chile’s perspective, the evaluation of the project was an ordinary procedure. Jorge Heine, former Chilean diplomat, pointed out to the environment that diversifying digital communication sources is essential to avoid outages caused by geopolitical tensions. “The State Department entered uncharted territory,” he said, by sanctioning officials for doing their jobs legally. The new president inherits the problem. The change of government on March 11 complicated the scenario even more. The previous president, Gabriel Boric, acknowledged having ordered the withdrawal of approval after threats from the United States about long-term consequences. His successor, the right-wing José Antonio Kast, came to power with the poisoned task of maintaining relations with China, his main trading partner, without raising blisters to the United States (which is his main foreign investor). Complicated. The US ambassador to Chile made it clear shortly after the inauguration that the Chinese cable was “ruled out.” The official position has become more nuanced. The Kast government initially counted on Google’s Humboldt cable, that will connect Chile with Australia in 2027made the China project unnecessary. But more recently, executive sources have acknowledged that the China Mobile project “continues to be evaluated.” Pedro Huichalaf, cybersecurity researcher and former secretary of telecommunications, explained to Rest of World that for Chile “it still makes sense to create redundancy” with a main and a secondary route to Asia. The geopolitical trap. The Google cable does not completely solve the problem. And according to point Heine, intelligence agreements between the United States and Australia mean that South American data trafficking to the Asia-Pacific will continue under American supervision. And there is already precedent for this, since after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s global surveillance programs, Brazil and the European Union accelerated the deployment of the EllaLink cable to connect directly and avoid passing through North America. How the board looks. China has been expanding its digital presence in Latin America. And the country operates 5G networks and data centers in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina through companies such as China Telecom, Huawei, ZTE and Alibaba Cloud. Brazil, for its part, is promoting its own 35,000-kilometer cable that would connect with China, India, Russia and South Africa. Washington views each of these moves as a threat to its influence in the hemisphere. In fact, just as stands out In the middle, the so-called Donroe Doctrine of the Trump administration formalizes that position by not allowing “foreign adversaries” to use trade as a lever to control critical infrastructure in the region. And in the long term. Just like point Rest of World, the most solid solution for Chile is not to choose between Washington and Beijing, but to reduce dependence on both. Aisén Etcheverry, former Minister of Science and Technology in the Boric government and a technology consultant, told the media that “Latin America has built lasting relationships with a wide variety of partners. Although this provides resilience, it is not enough. Developing its own capabilities must be a priority.” Cover image | aboodi vesakaran and AI generation with Gemini In Xataka | An unexpected salvation for the end user emerges from the memory market debacle: Chinese chips

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