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The million-dollar question in Cupertino is whether Apple can continue being Apple without Tim Cook: Crossover 1×45

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Tim Cook will stop being CEO of Apple after almost 15 years at the head of the company. It will do so next September 1, the date on which will pass the baton to John Ternusa man of the house with a different career. While Cook has proven to be a genius of logistics and efficiency, Ternus is a man of product and not so much of numbers. This makes us think about the impact that this movement can have from an Apple that in recent years many have criticized for having lost its innovative spirit. The company has shown great success in making the iPhone the absolute center of its strategy, but will that continue to be enough?

While we continue planning how to colonize the Moon, China already has a bricklayer robot to start building a base

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If we talk about lunar exploration we immediately think of the Artemis programbut the United States is not the only country pushing towards the colonization of our satellite. China also has a program underway and they just showed off a new lunar rover with four wheels and a humanoid upper body. Your job will be to assist in the collection of samples, transportation and deployment of instruments, something like a porter mason. What exactly is it. It is a robot weighing about 100kg with a lower part with four wheels and a humanoid torso with two arms on the upper part. It is not a typical scientific rover, but Its main function is to act as a carrierpicking up and placing different objects and instruments in their positions. The hybrid design, with wheels to move and arms to manipulate, responds to a specific need: on the Moon there are no operators who can move equipment, connect sensors or install instruments. Someone has to do it, and that someone is going to be this robot. Technical challenges. The robot is equipped with AI systems, remote vision and 3D mapping to be able to function in a totally unknown environment. The team that developed it, led by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has South China Morning Post that the main challenge is to ensure that both arms move in a coordinated and precise manner to manipulate fragile instruments. On Earth it is already a complex task, but here you will have to do it in a hostile environment with extreme temperatures, uneven terrain and no one who can repair a possible breakdown. To operate, the robot is powered by solar energy and is designed to operate for two years on the lunar surface, which implies that it will spend 24 lunar nights, each of more than 14 Earth days. During these periods, as it does not receive sunlight, the robot will have to enter a hibernation state and wake up at the beginning of a new day. The mission. The robot is part of the Chang’e-8 missionscheduled for 2028-2029. It will be the eighth mission of the series Chang’e, which China has been using since 2007 to progressively explore the Moon: first orbiters, then landers, rovers and sample collection. The goal of the Chang’e-8 mission is to deliver materials and begin preparing the ground for a permanent presence at the lunar south pole. That’s why the robot is not only designed to explore, but also works. Chang’e-8 is a key part of the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), the joint project of China and Russia to build a base on the Moon using 3D printing techniques. Why the south pole. The choice of location is not accidental. The lunar south pole has great strategic importance for space agencies because It is where reserves of water ice have been discovered in its craters. That ice has the potential to become fuel, oxygen and water for any permanent base. Whoever arrives first, learns to navigate the terrain and installs more instruments will have a huge advantage. That is why both Chang’e-8 and Artemis III go to the same region. Image | Xataka with Gemini In Xataka | China’s most ambitious space project: an advanced hyperspectral satellite to make a “CT” of the Earth

After a catastrophic 2025, Tesla sales continue to decline in China. The solution is an old acquaintance

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Sales of electric cars have fallen in China. Although the loss is not as high as that of pure combustion vehicles, the decline in the market is producing very bad results for Tesla. And Elon Musk’s company has brought out one of its traditional tools to boost sales again. An obvious fall. Sales of electric cars in China are not reaping the best results although, everything must be said, recent weeks are beginning to give some hope to companies. At the moment, if global sales are not suffering a setback it is because the accelerator has been put into exportswith record numbers and growth of more than 70% compared to last year. But in the domestic market, sales of “new energy” cars (plug-in hybrids and electric) have fallen 21%reaching 2.92 million cars sold compared to 3.66 million last year. In recent weeks, the Hormuz crisis has served to begin to ground the decline of this type of car. Without state aidits sales had fallen but in recent days we have seen how the savings compared to gasoline have turned the situation around, to the point of break record in plug-in penetrations in the market. Damaged. The context so far this year has not been easy for brands that only sell plug-in vehicles. Much less, therefore, to those who only sell electric vehicles, like Tesla. Without state aid at the beginning of the year and a Chinese New Year longer than usual, sales of this technology fell in a market accustomed to growing year after year. This situation rewarded those who have the most diversified business. In January and FebruaryGeely, which has a portfolio where electric, plug-in hybrids and pure combustion cars are intertwined managed to surpass BYD whose leadership seemed untouchable. Tesla has been through a similar situation. So far this year, Its sales from January to April 2026 have fallen by 15%. It is a bad figure considering all the difficulties the company went through last year. This has led it to lose more market share and remain at just over 3%. Interests. Among the sales of its cars in China, The company has a huge dependence on the Model Ywhich represents around 75% of sales so far this year. But in April, where the Model 3 had a year-on-year drop of 66.09%, the sedan barely accounted for 11% of sales. The fastest solution has been through an old tool: loans. The company has an active campaign in China to defer payments for its cars at 0.99% interest in the case of the Model 3 and 0.92% in the Model Y. The idea is simple, aiming to reward the customer in the long term because it is increasingly difficult for them to compete at the starting price. Right now, in Spain it gives loans above 3% which, however, remains relatively low for our country’s market. However, the company has been offering similar loans before and, right now, In Germany a 0% interest offer is available. Other solutions. Very low interest loans are not Tesla’s only move in China. Aware that the Model 3 has little sales at the moment, GigaShanghai’s exports have skyrocketed so far this year. So much so that global sales, internal sales and those outside Chinese borders, they have grown 36% last April. This means that, clearly, Tesla is trying to move the focus of its target audience. The company has encountered the problem that in China the customer has turned to the local product that usually offers more for less money. The solution is to push the European market, which is now receiving the first units of the Basic Tesla Model 3. less margin. The problem for the company is that it can no longer push the price as hard as before. Before the massive embrace of the Chinese car in its local market and new models began to arrive in the European market, Tesla played as it wanted with demand rising and falling prices. Today those days are over and, what is worse for the company, Your profit margins cannot respond as before. As the price has fallen, the margin has narrowed, losing ability to continue moving in the market. This explains why the voices calling for smaller and more affordable versions of their cars are heard louder. A ship that, given what has been seen, Elon Musk’s company has not been able to bring to fruition. Photo | Priscilla Du Preez and Sou Jest In Xataka | Elon Musk called the $25,000 Tesla an “absurd idea.” Now you need it to compete in China

The spike in Google searches after the 2024 eclipse reveals that we continue to ignore science

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It has been known for a long time that It is not healthy to look directly at a solar eclipse. It is said that Socrates himself I already recommended looking at it reflected in the waterbut never directly. However, human beings have a fairly significant tendency to ignore scientific recommendations. This is possibly the reason why in 2024, after an eclipse in the United States, Google searches for the phrase “my eyes hurt” had a very abrupt peak. The time and place coincide. That peak of searches took place on April 8, 2024 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Just at that moment a solar eclipse was occurring whose strip of totality crossed from Mexico to Canada, passing through the United States. The states where the most searches were carried out were Vermont, Arkansas, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, all of them immersed in the path of the eclipse. Eclipse retinopathy. When looking directly into sunlight, the retina can suffer serious damage. The condition that occurs is known as eclipse retinopathy and causes symptoms such as photosensitivity, blurred vision and headache. Vision can be affected for months or even permanently in the most severe cases. For this reason, no matter how much it may seem like the sun is covered, we must look at it with adequate protection. No sunglasses or x-rays. We have all heard at some point that it is safe to look at an eclipse through an x-ray or a photo negative. However, this is a myth that can be very dangerous. Sunglasses are not safe either. Generally, These are prepared to filter approximately 99.9% of solar ultraviolet radiation.. However, in the event of an eclipse, in which we look directly at the sun, this protection is needed, added to a filter of 99.999% of visible sunlight. It is necessary to use special eclipse glasses, always with filters approved by the competent authorities. Be careful with binoculars and telescopes. We should also not look directly through telescopes or binoculars without using filters. These are placed outside the lens and protect our retinas from solar radiation when we look through them. If none of this seems right to us, we can always resort to a pinhole camera, which reflects the image of the eclipse on another surface. Something like what Socrates advised about looking at the reflection in the water. It is important to use approved glasses You shouldn’t even look at a total eclipse. When the eclipse is total, the Sun is completely obscured. At that point, we might feel safe without protection. The problem is that it is not easy to calculate the exact moment in which the eclipse will begin to dissolve and with just a little bit of light, just when the Sun begins to reappear, we can damage our retinas. It is important to use protection from the beginning. It wasn’t eclipse retinopathy. In reality, the symptoms of eclipse retinopathy They usually appear several hours after the event. Interestingly, eye pain is not one of these symptoms. Therefore, what all those people were looking for was due to another reason. When we look at the sun, we usually experience a blink reflex that forces us to look away. However, with a solar eclipse the brightness is dimmed enough for this reflection to disappear. As a consequence, we can comfortably look at the Sun and keep our eyes fixed, without blinking. That’s what can make our eyes hurt or feel a burning sensation. Specifically, that is not dangerous. Still, those Google searches show that many people were worried. Many of them may not have used protection and regretted it. Ready for August. Next August 12 we will have the first of the eclipses that make up the Iberian Trio. Many people have already bought tickets to travel to some of the points in the totality zone. There are even those who have gotten tickets for one of the many festivals that will be celebrated for this reason. Whatever plan we choose, the important thing is protection. Maybe, even if we protect ourselves, there will be a peak in Google searches, but it better be because we don’t blink for a while and not because we have really damaged our retinas. Image | Magnific/NASA | POT In Xataka | The trio of eclipses that await Spain on the horizon: an unprecedented and historic chain between 2026 and 2028

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron are already working on DDR6 while memory prices continue to skyrocket

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The market is going through an unprecedented component crisis. In 2020, a perfect storm caused there to be no chips, but it was known that the storm would pass sooner rather than later. The problem is that the storm of current NAND chip crisis It doesn’t look like it’s going to give us a break in the short term. All memory manufacturers have focused on creating chips for artificial intelligence platformsbut in the meantime, they continue developing DDR6 memories. It will take a long time for consumers to be able to taste them. In short. DDR5 memory has not had a normal life cycle in the consumer market. It was expensive and, when prices began to drop, AI hyperscalers arrived to take over everything available. This is how we have reached a situation in which just 32 GB exceeds the 400 euros: all production is focused on hyperscalers and there are no ‘pills’ for consumption. However, that doesn’t mean that DDR5 has done poorly, not at all. Samsung or SK Hynix they are breaking records and, for them, things are working out great. That is why, together with Micron, they are starting to prepare the ground for the new technology: DDR6 memories. Last year JEDEC (the consortium that is responsible for standardizing DDR, LPDDR and NAND microelectronics) already detailed the standard LPDDR6 and it seems that the fringes are being polished for DDR6. Now, as we read in Wccftechthe big three of memory They are warming up for the near future with their new generation. Performance leap. These new memories will not only be faster. It talks about speeds minimum of 8,800 MT/s according to that JEDEC standard, but can reach up to 17,600 MT/s as the technology develops. They would practically double the performance of DDR5 and the trident of the RAM it takes a few months working together with Intel, AMD and Nvidia in the prototype validation processes. But it’s not just about pure speed, but about architecture. About 2×32-bit DDR5 RAM we would pass to a 4×24-bit subchannel architecture. It is something that brings challenges when it comes to managing temperatures and consumption, but also presents a clear advantage: improved parallelism and greater use of bandwidth. Plate change. For players, that is going to be a little problem, since an architecture change usually entails a board change. And, if the rumors and leaks are true, that plate change will be assured. The reason is that there are sources that they point that CAMM2 is going to gain a lot of weight with DDR6, especially in laptops and compact computers, and could gradually displace the traditional DIMM in certain segments. If this doesn’t tell you anything, visualize how RAM is mounted on a current motherboard. These are modules that are mounted perpendicular to the plate, something that has been around for years and that, although it has been functional for a long time, presents friction when you want to reach certain speeds. On the contrary, we have M.2 SSDs that are mounted in parallel, just like the LPDDR memory of laptops. Precisely, this is what these DDR6 tablets would be like, so manufacturers would have to redesign their boards to adapt either from the front or by adding the connectors to the back of the plate. Context. You probably have two questions in mind: how much DDR6 memory will cost and why the rush. We cannot answer the first question, but for the second question we can guess where the shots are going. We have commented that DDR6 RAM will come hand in hand with a notable improvement in bandwidth, and that is something that the artificial intelligence industry is desperately looking for. Until now, there were many powerful GPUs in data centers to train AI models, but in the era of Agentic AIwhat is needed is equipment more similar to a traditional PC. This is why Intel and AMD sand they are moving to mass-produce their professional processors again, and that is where DDR6 memory would make perfect sense thanks to that improvement in bandwidth. For inference, it’s great. It is already being tested with an arrival on the market for 2028 or 2029, but it will be the hyperscalers who monopolize all DDR6 memory production. Only when the voracity of data centers calms down will the modules begin to reach the mass consumer market. The translation is that Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung are already working on it, but to be able to build a desktop PC with DDR6 there are several years ahead. In the meantime, I’d say we can settle for DDR5, but looking at the prices… Image | Luan Gjokaj (edited) In Xataka | The RAM crisis is destroying all of Valve’s plans with its Steam Machine

If you were waiting for Xiaomi to launch cheap cars, its CEO encourages you to continue waiting seated

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Xiaomi has been in the automobile market for a couple of years (although it is still we are waiting for your arrival in Europe), and in contrast to what the brand offers in other areas such as smartphones, the company wants to position itself rather high in the price table of its cars. Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi, confirmed during a live broadcast on April 17 that the brand has no intention of launching electric vehicles below 100,000 yuan (about 12,500 euros) in the coming years. Here, as expected from the figures, he talks about the Chinese market. Communication. Lei Jun made these statements during a live autonomy test in which he drove a new generation SU7 Pro from Beijing to Shanghai (1,265 kilometers) with a single stop to charge. On the way, he took the opportunity to chat with the chat, a calculated communication strategy that has been noticed. Luckily, during the talk, we were able to find very interesting statements from the head of the brand himself and get an idea of ​​his roadmap. No to the cheap car. According to counted Jun during the broadcast, today’s competitive electric cars increasingly depend on intelligent driving systems, and that type of technology has a high cost that does not fit with a sales price below that barrier of 100,000 yuan in China. According to collect the media CarNewsChina, Lei himself recognized that the new generation of the SU7 It accumulates more than 100 improvements compared to the previous model, with an increase in material costs of almost 20,000 yuan, but its selling price only rose by about 4,000 yuan. For Xiaomi, the equation applied to an entry-level car simply does not add up. Where Xiaomi does want to be. The updated SU7 starts at 219,900 yuan (around 27,500 euros), and the brand’s direction points even higher, as the firm is ready to launch its SU7 Ultra which already competes in the high-performance segment, and in the not too distant future models such as the YU7 GT or a premium variant of the SU7 will also appear, according to they count from ChinaEVHome. We will have to see prices when the firm lands in Europe with its SU7, but everything indicates that Xiaomi wants to consolidate itself within the field of the mid/high range of automobiles. The Chinese car is not synonymous with cheap. Xiaomi is not the only one that avoids the price war in the entry segment. He Xiaopeng, president of XPeng, declared during the presentation of MONA M03 that his company also has no plans to go below that 100,000 yuan threshold. Among the reasons it gave were too tight margins, unsustainable investment in smart technology and real risk of a destructive price spiral. What the numbers say. Sales data in China reinforce this reading. And it is that according to figures collected by CarNewsChina, entry-level electric cars, such as the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV or the BYD Seagull (Dolphin Surf here in Spain), registered year-on-year falls of almost 58% in the first months of 2026, partly due to the end of tax exemptions on purchases. The sedan and utility vehicle segment as a whole also fell almost 20% year-on-year in March. The volume is there, but the profitability is not. Promises. All in all, Lei Jun left a door ajar in the long term. Their goal is for Xiaomi to be among the five largest car manufacturers in the world. Reaching that scale would, sooner or later, require greater price coverage. But for this scenario to come true, there still seems to be time. Cover image | Xiaomi In Xataka | Journey to the center of the Chinese motor (part 2): I have seen the future of cars in Beijing and yes, it is electric (and very cool)

US companies continue to pursue larger and larger AI models. Those from China continue to demonstrate that it is not necessary

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Until now, Alibaba had a great open model for programming. It is based on Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, but the problem is that it was gigantic with its 397 billion parameters and 807 GB of disk (and memory) size. The Chinese company has done something surprising and has announced these days the Qwen3.6-27B modelwhich in its quantized version weighs less than 17 GB. You would think that at that size he would be much worse than his older brother. But you would be wrong. It is proof that it is possible to give for much less. A dense model. Most large weight models open in 2026 use Mixture-of-Experts architecture (MoE): They have many parameters in total, but only activate a fraction of them when we use them. For example, the Qwen3.5-397B-A17B model precisely indicated that in its name: of the 397,000 million parameters, it only activated 17,000 million (hence the A17B) when using it. With Qwen3.6-27B we have what is called a dense model: the 27 billion parameters are activated in each inference. Although it is somewhat less efficient, it has clear practical advantages. For example, there is no need to configure an expert router, and quantization is more predictable and compact. The idea has worked, and the results prove it. The performance of this “small” AI model is even higher than a much larger previous version. Benchmarks don’t lie (too much). In SWE-bench Verifiedthe most popular benchmark for real programming tasks, Qwen3.6-27B achieves 77.2% score compared to 76.2% for the 397B model. In Terminal-Bench 2.0, which measures how well the model executes tasks in the command console, it achieved 59.3% compared to 2.5% for its rival. But in this test it achieves exactly the same score as Claude Opus 4.5, one of the best recent Anthropic models. That an “Open Source” model that can be easily used locally achieves something like this is unusual, but we must be cautious: the benchmarks are from Alibaba itself, and there is currently no independent verification, although who are wearing they seem be really satisfied with the. Even Alibaba is surprised. What is striking about this launch is that the company that launched it is promoting it above its most ambitious model until recently. Let them compare both versions themselves and recognize that the “small” is the most powerful It is significant. It’s like saying from the rooftops that the largest AI models have no competition, when they have just proven that this is not the case and that models like Qwen3.6-27B can be truly remarkable in behavior. 24 GB of VRAM is “enough”. Thanks to its small size, it is possible to use this model on relatively accessible machines. Thus, the 24 GB of video memory of the RTX 3090 makes these graphics cards a perfect alternative to install and use Qwen3.6-27B with excellent performance. Dense models do not do so well on MacBook or Mac mini with unified memory, and although logically not everyone has access to graphics cards with 24 GB of RAM, access to really capable local models continues to improve. The best essences, in small bottles. Alibaba is a steamroller of “small” AI models, and it demonstrated this in early March when launched several that ranged from 0.8B to 9B. Fortunately there are varied alternatives in that segment of “Small Language Models” (SLMs) and here we have reference examples like Gemma 4just released by Google. Microsoft with Phi-4 (which needs an update, like gpt-oss-20b/120b) or Mistral with Devstral 2 They are examples that Western companies are also making moves in this interesting field. But. According to benchmarks, Qwen3.6-27b is comparable in some benchmarks to Claude Opus 4.5, Anthropic’s most advanced model when it was launched in November 2025. That is surprising and confirms that open weight models from Chinese companies are, as Demis Hassabis saidbetween 6 and 12 months behind the most advanced models from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. But to execute them a significant investment is still necessary, and although local AI models are very interesting in terms of privacy, if today one wants maximum speed and performance it still depends on commercial models in the cloud. In Xataka | Google will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic because the new normal for AI is investing in your enemy

a million Spaniards continue to watch it every year

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Each Easter weekWithout fail, something happens that defies any logic of the audiovisual market: millions of Spaniards sit down to watch a film that they have already seen, which lasts almost four hours, which was filmed 65 years ago in Rome and which is not recommended by any algorithm. A chariot race that, for some reason, continues to draw viewers as if it were a recent release. The figures. Since 2008, the film ‘Ben-Hur’ has been broadcast on Spanish channels (free and pay) a total of 85 times over 17 Holy Weeks. That is equivalent to an average of five passes per holiday period, according to data from the consulting firm Barlovento Comunicación. has provided ‘El País’. No other religious-themed title has accumulated so many broadcasts in that interval. It is followed by ‘Quo Vadis?’, with 73 appearances on the grid, and ‘The Ten Commandments’, with 61. Completing the usual group are films such as ‘Barabbas’, ‘Spartacus’ or ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, almost all of them produced between the 1950s and 1960s. It doesn’t sound familiar to me. Well, they are all titles from a time in which Hollywood turned the biblical epic into an industrial venture, with million-dollar budgets and excessive technical ambition. ‘Ben-Hur’ cost $15 million in 1959 (the largest budget of any film up to that time) and grossed approximately $80 million worldwide. It won eleven Oscars from twelve nominations, a record that only ‘Titanic’ (1997) and ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’ (2003) have equaled. Why do they still work? ‘Ben-Hur’ has an advantage: Jesus appears in it as a peripheral figure, with his back turned or in the distance, which turns the film into an epic adventure production with a Christian subtext, rather than a typical religious film. The chariot race, filmed in five weeks with 15,000 extras and on a gigantic set in Cinecittà, works as a hook regardless of the viewer’s beliefs. ‘Quo Vadis?’ places Saint Peter fleeing Rome during Nero’s persecutions, but a vision of Christ appears to him asking where he is going, and Peter turns around and returns to the city to remain with the martyrs. It is the only scene in which Jesus has a direct presence, since he always appears mediated by his apostles, or with the conversion process of the Roman commander Marcus Vinicius. But the spectacle that the film sustains for the non-believing public is another: the burning of Rome, the circus with the lions, the megalomania of Nero… The hearings. Since 2021 La 1 has programmed ‘Ben-Hur’ every year on the after-dinner meal on Thursday or Good Friday. The results: screen shares of 11.4%, 10.7%, 12.5%, 11.3% and 11.1%, with figures around one million viewers in the three and a half hours that the film lasts. Today few programs achieve those numbers on a regular basis. The record remains the Holy Thursday screening of 2012, when more than two million people watched it on the night of La 1. For this year, RTVE has confirmed that La 1 will broadcast ‘Ben-Hur’ and ‘Pompeya’ on the afternoon of Good Friday, and ‘The Ten Commandments’ during the weekend. La 2 will offer ‘The Sacred Robe’ on Holy Thursday at 10:00 p.m. The private ones, less pious. Since 2018, La 1 has broadcast a total of 45 films with religious themes or those linked to Holy Week. Antena 3 barely reached seven. Telecinco, four. Atresmedia and Mediaset are betting on other types of programming on these dates, leaving the religious field almost exclusively to RTVE… …and the autonomous ones. These have turned this niche into their own asset. Between 2018 and 2025, Telemadrid programmed 99 films with religious themes, Canal Sur 82 and CMM (Castilla-La Mancha Media) 72. These are figures that reflect both the cultural harmony of these stations with their territories and a very economically efficient programming strategy: the rights to these classic titles are considerably cheaper than those of recent productions. And Channel 13. This is what takes logic to its ultimate consequences. The Episcopal Conference network has broadcast almost 300 religious films during Holy Week over 17 years. In 2025 alone, it programmed 19 different titles in that week, with more than 50 hours of special content that included broadcasts of processions, connections with the Vatican and film series ranging from Cecil B. DeMille classics to premieres such as ‘His Only Son’ (2023). Thirteen seems like a television built specifically for these dates. Last stop: ‘The Life of Brian’. There is a case that deserves separate analysis: ‘The Life of Brian’, the 1979 Monty Python film, has been broadcast at Easter on Spanish channels on 22 occasions over 17 years. In most cases it was on thematic channels, and La 2 only dared to program it in 2020 and 2021. The results were clear: a 7.4% share in full confinement and 5.5% in 2021, figures well above the channel’s usual average. Neox issued it the last two Good Fridays with equally notable results for its usual figures: 2.6% and 3.4%. The data is revealing because it makes it clear that the viewer of Holy Week is not necessarily looking for devotion, but rather cultural markers of the period. ‘Life of Brian’ fits that way just like ‘Ben-Hur’, albeit from the opposite end of the spectrum. In Xataka | We believed that Generation Z was returning en masse to the Church. An error in a survey is to blame for the mirage

AI already dominated chess. Now it is forcing us to play in a different way to continue competing

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There is something almost universal in how we understand chess. We imagine it as a duel of pure intelligence, two players in front of a board, trying to anticipate, read the opponent and find the best response at all times. That image still holds true for most of us, whether playing at home or on an app, but in the elite the game has changed a lot. Not because chess has broken down, but because the emergence of increasingly powerful engines has altered the way it is studied, prepared and competed at the highest level. That change did not come suddenly, although it did leave a very clear scene in 2018. The world championship between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana ended with the 12 classic games in drawssomething never seen in the history of the tournament, which dates back to 1886. That result was not an isolated rarity, but the visible sign of a trend that had been maturing for years. The more the best players relied on analysis engines to prepare their games, the narrower the margin to surprise from the start and the more difficult it became to break the balance. The trick was to stop playing like a machine To understand what has happened you have to look at how professional chess is studied today. The great masters have been working with engines, programs for years specifically designed to analyze positions and find the best continuations with precision well above the human level. We are not talking so much about conversational models as ChatGPT either Claude, who according to Bloomberg are pretty bad at chessbut from tools like Stockfish or the legacy it left AlphaZero. The underlying issue is that these tools have homogenized part of the knowledge in the elite: many players come to the board with a very similar preparation in the first plays, and that reduces the room for surprise. This shared preparation began to have a very concrete effect in practice. If both rivals know in advance the strongest lines and the most reliable answers, winning requires much more than avoiding gross errors. For years, the feeling grew that classical chess was becoming more closed at the top, not because of a lack of talent, but because each important detour was much more studied than before. Bloomberg also recalls that the fear of a “death by draw” was not new, but the arrival of engines superior to humans, since Deep Blue in 1997 and later with increasingly stronger domestic programs, gave that fear a different dimension. Carlsen’s career helps to understand to what extent this change has weighed on the elite. After the 2021 World Cup, an exhausting duel that included an eight-hour game and seven draws, The Norwegian decided not to defend the title again and cited a lack of motivation. He did not abandon classical chessin fact won Norway Chess in 2025 and is still the highest-rated player in the world, but he was showing more and more interest in faster formats such as rapid and blitz, and also in freestyle chess, which alters the initial position of the pieces to neutralize the preparation. The message that this evolution left was quite clear: even the best player on the planet seemed to look for spaces where previous study did not determine everything. The interesting thing is that the most powerful response came not only by changing the format, but also by changing the way of playing within the board itself. A new generation of grandmasters, already raised with motors, began to assume something that sounds counterintuitive: always following the computer’s first suggestion does not guarantee an advantage over another human. The aforementioned media gives a very concrete example in the 2024 Candidates Tournament, when Praggnanandhaa chose a play considered suboptimal by the engines against Ruy López, took his rival out of preparation and ended up winning. That’s the key to change. In elite chess it is no longer enough to ask what the best move is in the abstract, it is also important what it is. the most uncomfortable for the person in front of you. Engines may consider several nearly equivalent options, but not all of them create the same type of practical problem on the board. On the other hand, the engine can show you an optimal line, but that does not mean that it has taught you to understand it. Seen this way, what we are observing is a much more interesting transformation. The engines remain unbeatable and have been far ahead of humans for years, but precisely for this reason they have forced the grandmasters to move the battle to another terrain. Precision continues to be essential, but it is no longer enough on its own if it is not accompanied by judgment, understanding and the ability to adapt. Images | Florian Cordier | Pavel Danilyuk In Xataka | A study says that AIs are “cheating” at chess. That’s what we want to think

What exactly happens to your body if you continue drinking after age 65?

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The alcohol is quite normalized in our society as it is for sale to the public as long as you are of legal age, and almost always because we associate it at leisure. But the truth is that we are talking about a drug that has important harmful effects on our body, that at 30 years old may not be noticed because we have a strong body that processes it relatively easily. But when we reach the barrier of 65-70 years this changes completely. An older organism. What at 30 years old can be easily counteracted with healthy organs, cannot be achieved with organs that are more ‘worn out’ with the passage of time. This means that science suggests that, from a certain age onwards, it is advisable to stop drinking alcohol, and scientific evidence behind It never stops giving us reasons to do so if we want to have a better old age and with fewer diseases. A structural change. The first and most critical factor that alters our relationship with alcohol as we age is drastic change in body composition. As we age over 65, the body experiences a progressive loss of lean muscle mass and, crucially, a reduction in total body water. This is vital, because alcohol is a substance that is diluted in water, and that is why, as there is less water in the body to dilute it, the same amount of alcohol ingested by a 65-year-old person will result in a significantly higher concentration than in a younger person of the same weight and gender. We go slower. Added to this is the slowing down of liver metabolism, since the aging liver produces Less of the key enzymes responsible for breaking down ethanolwhich means that alcohol remains in the bloodstream longer, prolonging its toxic effect. The direct result is drunkenness that comes much sooner with less alcohol, drastically increasing the risk of loss of balance, falls and bone fractures. Something that at that age is almost a sentence for the muscle loss that it entails. Neurotoxicity. If we start talking now about the direct effects that alcohol has on the different organs of our body, the first obligatory stop is the brainwhere one of the most severe impacts of continued consumption occurs. Here alcohol acts as a neurotoxin that accelerates neuronal lossa process that already occurs naturally due to aging, but that ethanol multiplies. Prestigious neurologists such as Richard Restak emphasize that neuronal damage after the age of 65 is irreversible, recommending total abstinence here. This joins reviews carried out in Spain that demonstrate that alcohol accelerates cognitive deterioration, the impact being even more serious with distilled beverages compared to fermented ones. In memory. But the loss of brain matter, which can lead to severe dementia, is also accompanied by loss of memory and control of what we do. Cohort studies, such as the NEDICES projecthave linked high alcohol consumption in people over 65 years of age with notably lower neuropsychological scores. Furthermore, the loss of motor coordination explains why 60% of serious falls in the elderly they are related to alcohol consumption. Multi-organ damage. Continued consumption in the elderly is not limited to one organ, but causes cascading systemic failure aggravated by oxidative stress, which is the great enemy of aging. A recent cross-sectional study made in Extremadura With more than 2,800 participants, it was demonstrated that in men over 65 years of age, the prevalence of risky consumption reaches an alarming 30%, being strongly associated with increased cholesterol, hypertension and cardiovascular risk such as a heart attack. The heart. Undoubtedly, you suffer the onslaught of alcohol-induced hypertension and an increased risk of arrhythmias, while blood vessels lose their elasticity. This makes it much easier to have high voltage spikes that lead to a stroke, for example. In the liver. Without a doubt, one of the most affected organs, being the ‘factory’ that is in charge of processing all the alcohol that enters the body. Chronic toxicity here not only increases the risk of cirrhosis, but, due to poor metabolism, prolonged exposure to toxic metabolites exponentially increases the risk of developing cancer, especially liver, breast and colorectal. Something that responds to the greater damage suffered by DNA in the elderly who continue to drink with some frequency. In the intestine. Perhaps one of the most recent notes we have is the erosion caused by alcohol in the intestinal mucosaand therefore to the microbiota found here. Little by little we are seeing that the microbiota is more important than we think, and it has been shown that its loss allows endotoxins to pass into the bloodstream, favoring chronic inflammation of different parts of the body. Something that is linked to many other effects. Without going any further, this inflammation aggravates the osteoporosis that is already marked at this age, damages the pancreas and causes an accelerated shortening of cellular telomeres, which translates into premature biological aging and a fragile immune system incapable of fighting respiratory infections effectively. The silent trap. A critical factor that is often overlooked is the polypharmacysince the vast majority of people over the age of 65 take several prescription medications daily. It is not uncommon to see a person with a pill for stress, diabetes, pain, to reduce fluid retention… The problem is that combining some of these pills, such as anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen, increases the risk of suffering severe digestive bleeding. Images | Vlad Sargu In Xataka | The work ethic has been selling for years that getting up at 05:00 AM is good. Science is clear that absolutely

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