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Someone has created an AI that knows nothing about what happened after 1930, and it has more use than it seems

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One of the problems with language models is that there is a cut-off date in the training data, that is, the model does not know current events that go beyond that date. Rapier In certain sectors it can be a serious problemis precisely the objective of Talkie-1930, a language model trained solely on texts from before 1930. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to talk to someone from the past, there’s an AI for that. A vintage language model. This is how These LLMs have been baptized who are trained with historical content. Talkie-1930 is a model with 13 billion parameters that does not have access to modern information nor can it consult the Internet, but has only been trained with books, newspapers and other texts from before 1930. To explore the model, the researchers had Claude converse with the model, evaluating his responses. The model showed great knowledge of the world, with many historical details of the time, and a great ability to imitate the style of Victorian authors such as Dickens, although somewhat limited in more satirical formats. More than a cultural experiment. Talkie is the closest thing to talking to someone educated in the early 20th century. This turns the model into a window that allows us to explore the mentality and culture of a past time and learn how society, politics or daily life were described back then. But beyond curiosity, Talkie-1930 also functions as a “control subject” to better study the functioning of AI and achieve important advances. Predicting the future. By being “frozen” in 1930, Talkie makes it possible to better measure how far a model can extrapolate and predict the future from historical patterns alone, without cheating with later data. To test this anticipatory capacity, the researchers showed up to 5,000 descriptions of subsequent historical events, taken from the “On this day” section of the New York Times, and measured the model’s degree of surprise. The result was that the model showed more surprise in the decades after the data cutoff, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, but then its degree of surprise stabilized. According to the researchers, this suggests that predictive performance improves as the time horizon becomes longer, but they point out that it will be necessary to train older models to be able to measure it well. Invention. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, raised a very interesting question at a conference recently: if an AI with a limit of knowledge until 1911 could reach the theory of relativity that Einstein discovered in 1915. In this sense, models like Talkie-1930 are a very interesting tool to observe its ability to generate new ideas that can lead to discoveries. No pollution. Is one of the problems that the models have trained with large corpuses of current data, in which the evaluation data itself usually also sneaks in and ends up causing their capabilities to be overestimated. With vintage models there is no contamination and that allows you to carry out very specific experiments, such as seeing if you are able to learn to program without having any prior computer knowledge. Talkie-1930 is open source and is available on Github. Image | Xataka In Xataka | A macro experiment has tried to find out if we differentiate real images from those generated by AI. The answer is not optimistic

The chip industry has its own Lego black market. ASML created it by accident

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Rick Lenssen works as a data analyst at the Dutch company ASML and builds Lego models on the weekends. It could have remained there, a mere hobby shared with his children if the company that employs him did not design and manufacture the lithography machines necessary to produce microchips, one of the key elements of current technology and one of the key suppliers of TSMC, Samsung or Intel. Now, his Lego designs imitating the original machines reach four-digit figures on eBay. 380 million in 851 pieces. It appeared in the ASML online store at the end of November 2024: a Lego model called TWINSCAN EXE:5000, measured 35 centimeters long and cost $227.95. It reproduced the high numerical aperture extreme ultraviolet (High-NA EUV) lithography machine that the company delivered to Intel in late 2023 and that allows chips to be printed from its 2 nanometer node. The actual equipment weighs 165 tons, has more than 100,000 parts and had to be transported in three Boeing 747s. The Lego set reproduced it in the style of the popular toy brand, it included a purple ray that represented ultraviolet light and a minifigure with the full clean room suit that technicians wear. The product sheet, perhaps anticipating what was to come, already warned that multiple orders from the same customer would be cancelled. Brick Lenssen. This is the nickname given to Rick Lenssen, a 39-year-old company employee who became interested in Legos. by chanceafter taking his children to a toy fair in the Netherlands. His first personal project was an exact replica of the ASML campus in Veldhoven: two years of work, 2,500 euros out of his pocket and 25,000 pieces, with details as obsessive as the peregrine falcon that nests on a roof of the complex, accompanied by a pigeon that, according to him, acts as food. He designed everything first on the computer and assembled it in the attic of his house. Where do I put this. Lenssen then encountered a drama that will be familiar to any Lego fan: what to do once you finish building the set. He offered it to the campus itself, but they didn’t want it. Lenssen wrote to ASML’s CEO on a Friday night, and within hours he wrote back saying he loved the set. To get the model out of the attic, it had to be dismantled piece by piece (like the real ASML machines), and company workers loaded it into a van. Today it is the first thing visitors see when they arrive at the company’s reception. It’s official. The jump to merchandising officer arrived later, with a model of the skyline of the campus in charge of promoting an internal app, and then the two models of machines. He was not the first: Jeroen Ottens, an ASML engineer who had worked at Lego, I had modeled a previous version. The cheapest model in the current range, the TWINSCAN NXE:3400C, at $166.70, was not born as a commercial product either: it started as internal training tool before becoming a special edition open to the public. It took Lenssen a few weeks to design the current two sets, one with a 61-page instruction manual. Your only compensation is a copy of each model. Employees only. The sales policy is one unit per person and verified ASML email is mandatory. For weeks, some fans managed to place orders bypassing that restriction due to a security hole in networks, and measures had to be taken: in December 2024 ASML began canceling orders from buyers without an actual corporate email. The EXE:5000 file even disappeared and can only be consulted today through the Wayback Machine. The same corporate email restriction covers the rest of the merchandising of the company, yes, much less coveted: sweaters, mugs, pins and Christmas decorations. eBay fever. Of course, speculation was not long in coming, as It usually happens with Lego sets that disappear from the market. Individual sets of those designed by Lenssen have been seen for $600, while the complete collection reaches $4,500. Before closing that section of the store, ASML sold 1,355 units of the latest model (there are 44,000 company employees, possibly not all of them interested in building with toy blocks). Although the comparison is absurd, only six of the real machine have been sold. In Xataka | The great fear of the US is that ASML’s UVP machines will continue to arrive in China. So he is going to intensify his trade war

Someone has created the first complete advanced malware by vibecoding with AI. It’s called Voidlink and it leaves an important question

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For a long time, develop malware advanced seemed reserved for actors with experience, time and considerable technical capacity, especially in an environment in which operating systems and many platforms have been tightening their defenses. But the table is changing. What we have seen in recent years is that artificial intelligence not only serves to summarize texts or answer questions, it can also very visibly accelerate the software creation when given precise instructions. And that leaves us facing a reality that is difficult to ignore: the same tool that simplifies legitimate tasks can also reduce part of the effort necessary to create malicious code. That change begins to take concrete form with VoidLink. In his analysisCheck Point presents it as one of the strongest evidence so far of advanced malware developed largely with the help of AI. There is, however, an important nuance in the investigation itself: the company assures that it detected it at an early stage, that it was not deployed against victims and that it was not used in active attacks. But that is precisely why the discovery is so revealing, because it allowed access to development materials that rarely come to light. How VoidLink was built and why it changes the dashboard VoidLink was not, at least on paper, a minor piece or a rudimentary experiment. The cybersecurity firm describes it as a malware framework for Linux with a modular architecture, designed to maintain stealthy and prolonged access in cloud environments. In his analysis he mentions components such as eBPF and LKM rootkits, as well as specific modules for cloud enumeration and subsequent activities in container environments. That level of maturity is just what separates it from other previous cases associated with simpler code. One of the most striking twists in the case is who seems to have been behind it. Check Point explains that, due to its internal structure and the pace of evolution observed, VoidLink gave the impression of having come from a large team, with different profiles and a fairly defined work plan. But the evidence collected by the firm points to something very different: a single actor who, according to the investigation, would have had AI support during different phases of development. There is also another relevant element: that actor would not be a rookie, but rather someone with a solid technical base and previous experience in cybersecurity. The most revealing part of the case is how the project would have been built. The firm describes a working method based on what it calls Spec Driven Development that works as follows: You define what you want to build This idea is translated into architecture, tasks, sprints and delivery criteria The implementation is delegated to the model. In the exposed materials, development plans, technical documentation, coding standards, deployment and testing guides appeared, as well as an organization by teams and phases that supports this model. One of the recovered artifacts, dated December 4, 2025, further suggests that VoidLink had already reached a functional phase in less than a week and exceeded the 88,000 lines of code. That is precisely what separates VoidLink from other precedents. Check Point maintains that this is the strongest evidence of malware created almost entirely with the help of AI. “This is the first confirmed case of advanced AI-generated malware, created with the speed, structure and sophistication of an entire engineering organization,” claims the company. The question now is how far malicious actors can go with these types of techniques. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana | Check Point In Xataka | The Booking hack is a little more disturbing: “Tracking phishing” attacks are here to stay

In 2013, Amazon created a Kindle so good it has proven to last forever. And now he has decided that it must end

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Amazon has announced that, starting May 20, 2026, Kindle devices released in 2012 will no longer have access to the Kindle Store. You will still be able to access the books downloaded on the devices, taking into account that we should not factory reset the Kindle. If we do, we will not be able to register it in our Amazon account. Goodbye to old Kindles. If you have an early Kindle, starting in May you won’t be able to download books from the official Amazon store or register them as new devices when you restore them. Specifically, these are the affected models. Kindle 1st Gen (2007) Kindle DX and DX Graphite (2009 and 2010) Kindle Keyboard (2010) Kindle 4 (2011) Kindle Touch (2011) Kindle 5 (2012) Kindle Paperwhite 1st Gen (2012) Kindle Fire 1st Gen (2011) Kindle Fire 2nd Gen (2012) Kindle Fire HD 7 (2012) Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (2012) Amazon is sending an email to affected users, offering a 20% discount on new Kindle devices and credit compensation for purchasing new books. Likewise, all the purchases we have made on the old device will be available if we log in to the new one with the same account. It’s not the first time. Amazon has long wanted to have tight control over the installation of books on its Kindles. One of its most recent updates ended with a star function: being able to send books to the device via USB. In the same way, Users were required to keep their Kindle updated to access the store. In practice, this meant limiting features—such as downloading books outside of the Kindle Store—to push users to install those more restrictive versions if they wanted to retain access. Almost a paperweight. A book reader to which we cannot download more books is not very useful. A questionable decision considering that this type of device is born to have a useful life only limited by its hardware – that the screen ends up saying enough, which is difficult with electronic ink or that we are left without a battery replacement. Amazon has decided to end the life cycle of a product that still had a war left to fight. Not because the hardware has stopped working, but because maintaining its compatibility no longer fits with your business model or your current ecosystem. In Xataka | We enter book month with sales on Kindle: you can now buy the eReader for less than 100 euros

In 1994, a programmer created a “temporary” interface for Windows. Three decades later he is still with us

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Windows is one step away from turning 40 years old. The first version of the operating system appeared in November 1985and since then it has not stopped evolving. However, Microsoft tends to take a long time to update some components of its products. With Windows 10, for example, it released a renewed user interface, but it was not until years after its launch that it began to get rid of some icons from the Windows 95 era. Now, in Windows 11is renewing programs like paint and Notepad. Regardless of how modern Windows 11 may feel, and all the new features that come with its updates, the system still retains some elements that we could classify as historical. Among them we find the utility to format disks. WINDOWS 10: 9 VERY USEFUL and LITTLE KNOWN TRICKS Currently, if you wanted to format a storage drive from Windows 11 you would find a pop-up window practically identical to the one you could find decades ago. In fact, we know exactly who created it. The format drives dialog in Windows 10 A former Microsoft programmer named Dave Plummer recently shared an some interesting facts about this part of the operating system. The now entrepreneur says he created the Format dialog box one rainy morning from the end of 1994. He says that they were migrating millions of lines of user interface code from Windows 95 to Windows NT, and that the formatting section was very different between systems, so it was necessary to create a new user interface. And Plummer took on this task. The programmer did not think of doing a definitive job, but of providing a temporary solution with the help of a sheet, a pen, Visual C++ 2.0 and the Resource Editor. “It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant user interface arrived,” he says in the message. Plummer also set the 32GB limit for the format of FAT volumes that morning. It is curious, because FAT is capable of working with larger volumes, although to create volumes with this capacity it is necessary to use the command line. The disk formatting utility interface appeared in Windows NT-based operating systems, such as Windows 2000 and Windows XPand it has been with us ever since. Throughout this time it has basically been a temporary solution created in 1994. Images | Windows | Genbeta In Xataka | Intel is hunting and capturing new customers. His next goal: convince Elon Musk and make chips for Tesla

In 1967, a war veteran believed that moving around a computer could be easier. So he created the first mouse

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Things were clear from minute one. When Douglas Engelbarthead of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), at Stanford, wanted to interview a new recruit, gave him a pencil attached to a brick and then asked him to write his name on a piece of paper. Difficult, right?, joked Engelbart, a doctor in electrical engineering and a pioneer in computer development. Well, people would encounter the same problems, he explained to the candidates, if they were not able to offer them more agile and simple tools to use computers. He wasn’t talking just to talk. Engelbart, together with one of his colleagues, also an engineer William Englishwas the father of the first mouse computer in the 1960s. Only that one was not called a mouse, but XY Position Indicator for a Display System; and its design was quite different from the modern peripherals that we use today. To begin with, it was made of wood and had a pair of metal wheels. This is your story. Make it easy for people: “Click” In the early 1960s, Engelbart, a World War II veteran, recent PhD and with just a couple of years of experience at the Stanford Research Institute —today known as SRI— had a clear idea: he wanted accessible technology. And simple. In 1945, while serving in the US Navy, he had read an article by the inventor Vannevar Bush who encouraged scientists to bring knowledge to the streets and he was determined to transfer that slogan to his own field. The golden opportunity came when the Department of Defense, through DARPAgave him the necessary support to set up his own center in the SRI, the ARC. There he had nearly fifty people working for him and efforts were focused on answering a question: What would the future of computer communication be like? At that time, computing had been in development for decades; IBM had manufactured the IBM 650 and the team was convinced of the enormous potential of the sector. The question was how to use it and prevent the systems from being as unwieldy as a pencil stuck to a brick. At that time the most popular devices for pointing on a screen were optical pencilsa system similar to that used in military radars. Since 1961 Engelbart, however, ruminated on an alternative. To make interaction with computers more efficient: install a pair of small wheels across a table so that the user could operate the screen cursor with them. One would rotate horizontally and the other vertically and its operation would be very similar to that of the planimeter commonly used by surveyors, geographers and architects. The idea had been recorded in his notebook, but already in the 1960s, with the financial backing of DARPA, his own team and extra help from NASAEngelbart was able to delve into it. The veteran and his colleagues gathered the best signaling equipment that existed and made a kind of brainstorming which left half a dozen proposals for working with monitors, some of the most curious, such as a joystick or a light pen. Perhaps the most striking of all was a mechanism that was fixed under the table and operated with the knee. A prototype nicknamed “mouse” Also included among that amalgam was a small device manufactured by Bill English after reviewing his notes from the beginning of the decade with Engelbart. The prototype basically consisted of a carved redwood block which included two wheels crimped at the bottom and a button at the top. Your name: XY Position Indicator for a Display System. Its appearance, compact and with a cable protruding, However, it ended up earning him the nickname “mouse.”. It was so comfortable that it prevailed over the rest of the laboratory’s alternatives and the team included it as a standard piece in their research. The SRI applied for the mouse patent in 1967 and received it in 1970. Engelbart and his companions did not stop there. They continued looking for a “companion” for the mouse, another device that the user could operate with their free hand and could use to enter commands and text. After several tests they opted for a device similar to a telephone with five keys. They also carried out tests to perfect the mouse design as much as possible. “We did a lot of experiments to see how many buttons it should have. We tried up to five. We decided on three. That’s all we could fit in. Now, the three-button mouse has become standard, except for the Mac,” Engelbart himself recalled in 2004, in an interview with Wired. With all this material and the rest of the inventions developed by his team, the war veteran decided to put on a gala performance. One like a beast. In 1968 they organized known as “mother of all demos”a historic conference held in San Francisco in which Engelbart showed all the functions they had developed over the last few years. “For 90 minutes, the stunned audience of more than a thousand professionals witnessed many of the features of modern computing for the first time: live video conferencing, document sharing, word processing, windows, and a strange pointing device jokingly referred to as “the mouse“The elements of the screen were linked to others through associative links or hypertexts,” explains the Computer History Museum. “People were amazed. In one hour, it defined the era of modern computing,” English commented to New York Times in 1996. Shortly after that historic achievement, however, the team began to lose its drive. Some staff questioned the lab’s drift, DARPA cut its funding, and other research centers began to emerge, such as the Xerox in Palo Alto (PARC). Result? Many of Engelbart’s employees sought new destinations. With them went the very concept of the mouse. The device, with a trackball, ended up being incorporated into the Xerox Alto computer and in 1983 Apple marketed it with its computer Lisa. After a while –as you remember Washington Post— Steve Jobs’ company was behind almost half of … Read more

A robot rental industry has been created in China that has plunged prices in a year, but it has an asterisk

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From spring 2025 to winter 2026, renting a humanoid robot for a business event in China has gone from costing between 10,000 and 20,000 yuan a day to being listed at 1,796. Robot dogs already cost 78 yuan a day in JD.comless than 10 euros. A drop of 80% in twelve months. Why is it important. Beyond the price war, this is the first real scale laboratory in the humanoid robot business, and what happens says a lot about the real state of an industry that moves a lot of money in financing but still needs a human behind each machine. In figures: Between the lines. The most interesting number in this matter is not any of the above, but this: every robot deployed today arrives with a human engineer behind it. This technician assumes transportation, calibration, live operation and unforeseen events. The actual model is not ‘Robot as a Servicebut rather ‘Robot + Person as a Service’. The logic of SaaS (marginal costs that approach zero when scaling) does not apply here. Each new unit in the catalog implies a new payroll. The bottleneck is therefore not in the supply of machines, but in the supply of people capable of operating them. The context. Qingtianzu, the platform controlled by Zhiyuan Robotics and backed by Hillhouse Capital, connects more than 200 suppliers with companies that need robots for presentations, inaugurations or weddings. like a marketplace. During the Chinese New Year, their orders grew by 70% and exceeded 5,000 orders in one week. JD.com saw searches for “robot” increase 25-fold. The demand exists, the problem is the cost structure. Yes, but. Rent has fallen by 80%, but operating costs have barely budged: transportation, engineers, insurance, logistics… Everything remains basically the same.. The payback period cited by operators (about six or eight months) assumes about ten monthly orders at 2,500 yuan on average. But that works during peak demand. Outside of the holiday weeks, that rhythm is broken. The big question. 65% of orders are for entertainment and marketing: robots that dance or parade at fairs and those types of cute but short-lived acts. Intermittent uses by definition. To have a stable base, the sector needs to enter factories, hospitals and logistics. But experts have already warned: the majority of current humanoids are in the “cerebellum” phase, executing instructions without autonomous decision. That jump, according to the most optimistic estimatesit will take about five years. The panoramic. In a matter of months, China has built an industry with funded platforms, distributed logistics and real demand. It is the first country that has brought humanoid robots to the mass market, even if it is to perform in shopping centers and shake hands in dealerships. TrendForce foresees more than 50,000 units shipped in 2026, 700% more. The sector has its own precedent: drones for shows, which did not take off for their industrial uses but for the shows nightlife in cities across China. Robot rental can follow the same script. The difference is that an autonomous drone no longer needs a pilot. The humanoid robot still does. In Xataka | There is a Chinese startup creating the most amazing robots of the moment. It’s called X Square Featured image | Andy Kelly

In 1987 he had a problem displaying images on his Mac, so he created an app. Today it is the most used image editor in history

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Maybe with Nano Banana There are people who have banished Photoshop, but the image editor is the tool that has accompanied photography professionals for decades, almost on par with their camera. In fact, it achieved something only within the reach of very few technological products: becoming a verb and even enter the dictionary. We Photoshop an image and Google it on the internet. Like many other milestones, Photoshop was born by chance: It was the result of a screen that did not know how to show grays. In figures. In these almost 40 years of Photoshop’s life, the editor has been accumulating astronomical data of its progress. Its launch price in 1990 was $895. No joke, it would be equivalent to $2,100 today. It has never been a home software but a professional one. Adobe closed last year with record turnover of 23.77 billion dollars. In 2024 billing was of 21,510 million dollars, of which subscriptions represented 20,521 million dollars. In 2013 Adobe played all its cards on the subscription. Time has proven him right: in twelve years it went from 4,000 million annual billing to almost 24 billion in 2025. How it all started. It’s 1987 and Thomas Knoll was pursuing a doctorate at the University of Michigan in computer vision. Then he had a problem: his Mac Plus had a monochrome screen unable to display grayscale images, only pure black and white. So he wrote a few lines of code to fix it. He called it Display. His little program did the trick, but that was it: he had no intention of commercializing it. The one who did have a nose for the business was his brother John, who at that time worked at Industrial Light & Magic (George Lucas’ company in charge of making Star Wars special effects): convinced him to develop the entire program. Brothers and partners, they sold the license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. From layers to AI. Photoshop 1.0 would see the light of day in February 1990 as an editor that required only 2MB of RAM and an 8 MHz processor to run, the minimum specifications for a Mac. To put it in context: today Photoshop recommends 16GB of RAM, 8,000 times more. It included tools as iconic to its users as the lasso or the magic wand. But if there was a technical leap that made the difference, those were the very useful capes: they arrived in 1994 with Photoshop 3.0. Before layers, the editor was destructive: each change overwrote the original image. Almost 20 years later, another functional milestone would arrive: the arrival of AI with Generative Fillthat is, being able to add or delete objects with a prompt. Despite the controversy over authorship and the future of retouchingits numbers were incontestable: in April of last year it had already generated more than 22,000 million images since its launch, according to Adobe. The risky move to the subscription model. Before the tricky decision to include AI in its suite, Adobe made another risky move: in 2013 and when we had still succumbed in subscriptionocracyannounced that it would stop selling its Photoshop on a license forever and start renting it. At that time almost 50,000 customers signed a petition against of this decision and its shares fell 12%. Once again, time and pocketbooks seem to have proven them right: they have multiplied their income by six. In Xataka | 16 years ago a student from Barcelona was looking for an easy way to edit PDFs. The website he created is one of the most viewed on the internet In Xataka | 30 years ago he created a player for the university: today his app has more than 6 billion downloads and is still free and without ads Cover | University of Michigan

In 1993 Microsoft created Encarta to revolutionize knowledge. Twenty years later it would be devastated by a tsunami

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It became so popular that its logo and the sound of their intros They became two brands just as identifiable as those of Nokia or Windows. If – like the person writing this – you had to go to school or high school between the second half of the 90s and the first half of the 2000s, talk about the Encarta It does not require large presentations. If not, don’t worry; It won’t take us much time. Before Wikipedia offered free online knowledge and even the use of the Internet became popular, Microsoft launched a digital encyclopedia that revolutionized the sector and became a phenomenon between more or less 1993 and 2009. Its name: Encarta. Today, ironies of history, “Encarta” is one more entry in the index of other encyclopedias; but there was a time when it transformed our way of accessing knowledge. From having to spend their eyelashes and fingertips scrolling through pages in search of information, students began to search for information with the click of a button. The Encarta offered an agile, comfortable and above all didactic way to satisfy curiosity. With articles, yes; but also with videos, audios and even virtual visits and games. You could read about Nepalese temples in the Salvat. Or open the Encarta and “tour” one. Its “pull” was so great that it put the old paper encyclopedias in trouble. When the Spanish edition was presented in early 1997, those responsible presumed that the Encarta CD-ROM, a format that you could store in a drawer or even a folder, contained information that It was equivalent to 29 volumes and 1.2 meters of shelving. Not only that. The Encarta cost 24,900 pesetas, four times less than an equivalent printed encyclopedia. To make matters worse, his landing in Spain was protected by Santillanaa publishing house with considerable weight in school classrooms. How to compete with that? The product was liked and published in Spanish and other languages. He did well until, with the same ones with which he had become a phenomenon, ended up succumbing to the competition. In a way, his success is due to his good sense of smell in the 90s; its decline, to the inability to adapt in the 2000s. This is your story. Objective: reinvent the old encyclopedias In the mid-1980s Microsoft He began to think about the idea of ​​creating a digital encyclopedia. The idea was ambitious. Those from Redmond wanted, neither more nor less, to rethink the concept and operation of a product apparently as mature and closed as the volumes that publishers’ commercials were dedicated to selling door to door. To make its debut in a big way, the multinational tried to negotiate a license with the creators of what was probably the most respected publication internationally: the Encyclopædia Britannica. It didn’t go well for them. In the 1980s, paper volumes of Britannica were sold and They left huge profits. As Enrique Dans remembershis books cost about $250 to produce and the selling price ranged between $1,500 and $2,200, depending on the quality. Why would the firm want to digitize content on a CD and risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs? Microsoft did not give up and looked for ways to move the idea forward. He even had a name for the initiative: Project Gandalf. Some time later he closed a contract with Funk & Wagnalls to use your New Encyclopediaof 29 volumes, in a database that was created at the end of that same decade. To complete its contents, years later two other McMillan encyclopedias would be added, the Collier’s and New Merit Scholar. They were not the Britannica; but it would have to do. However, doubts arose in Redmond about whether or not the project was viable and they decided to park it. It was resumed at the turn of the decade, in 1991, when Microsoft decided to go all out. In 1993, the first edition of the Encarta Encyclopedia was launched, which included the 25,000 Funk & Wagnalls articles and extra material, such as images and some animations. The tool was comfortable, much more agile than the kilometric tomes and even fun, but it started with a huge mistake: the shot was centered wrong. At the beginning of the 90s there were still many houses without a PC and the marketing price was exclusive. When it came out, the Encarta cost about $400, which greatly limited its range. The cost deterred customers and was not too far from that of another competitor that was testing the same niche with a recognizable brand, Compton, which also launched your own multimedia version in 1990, with text and supports such as images and sounds. In Redmond they knew how to react and soon they were deploying a more aggressive strategy. They launched promotions that allowed you to get the Encarta for 99 dollarsthey included their CD with the Windows software package and negotiated with manufacturers to incorporate it into their computers, a tactic not unlike that used with Windows and Office. The promotion of Microsoft itself gave the final push. The new encyclopedia gained fame and began to chain editions, translate into different languages and enrich content with multimedia supports. In 1995, abridged versions of some articles were offered for Microsoft Network ISP subscribers, and starting in ’96, standard and deluxe editions began to be released, an enriched version that could be updated month by month. In 1998, its creators went one step further and acquired the rights to several electronic encyclopedias. The product was growing and, above all, it demonstrated that the sector was experiencing a clear paradigm shift. The best example: in 1996 the once powerful company Britannica ended up underselling for their difficulties. “It allows young and old to explore the world by themes and characters,” their promoters boasted in the Spanish market. And so it was, indeed. Through articles, photos, illustrations, graphs, maps, timelines, recordings, videos and even virtual tours, Encarta won over an entire generation of students. … Read more

has now created the first chemical map of the hidden face

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While NASA chokes on the MoonChina is going like a rocket. Not literally, but they lack little. The satelliteand has become a priority again in space exploration due to its potential in scientific research, but also like mine and even as a ‘battery’and everyone wants their share of the space cheese. China is completing steps at an astonishing speed in their goal of going to the satellite and has just reached another milestone: they have created the first chemical map of the hidden side of the moon. And it is something with the potential to accelerate the next steps on the satellite. In short. A investigation conducted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tongji University and the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics has led to chemical mapping of the entire satellite. That includes something that was “unexplored” in this sense until now: the hidden face. Until nowalmost half of the lunar surface that remains hidden from our eyes was “uncharted chemical territory” because… well, we hadn’t been there. In the Apollo missions, materials were collected that allowed, together with the observation missions, to carry out this chemical profile of the satellite, but only of the visible part. It is, in short, where we had been. The Chang’e-6 mission changed that when, in June 2024, returned from his mission on the hidden side with about two kilos of material from the South Pole-Aitken basin. AI. They were the first samples collected from the far side and the only thing researchers could cling to if they wanted to develop that chemical profile of the satellite. It is, so that we understand each other, like the DNI, and to create the chemical map, they have used artificial intelligence. They dumped the sample data along with other orbital spectral data collected by the multiband imager. Kaguya from Japan and, after a process of data cleaning and refinement, the researchers have mapped the distribution of six large groups of oxides. We are talking about iron, titanium, aluminum, silicon, calcium and magnesium, and this is something that allows us to develop a hypothetical historical profile of the Moon. For example, we now know that the highlands have a higher concentration of magnesian rocks compared to the visible side. And even if you think “so what,” this indicates that the Moon’s magma ocean crystallized asymmetrically: first in one of the hemispheres and then in the other. Importance. There is still data to be revealed, but this chemical map is more important than it may seem. It is a different way of mapping the satellite and… well, it conditions everything we want to do on the Moon soon. Rough wayis a key advance to understand both the elemental composition and the geological evolution of the planet. You can also create a chronology of impacts and something more “useful”: it is a guide for future missions. By having data on the composition of the soil and the probability that there are more or less resources In certain areas, this chemical map allows moon landing sites to be selected based on very specific data. For example, if future missions want to focus on collecting regolith rich in certain elements, the chemical map is a thread of clues to pull on. Future. Because we are no longer talking about “well, when we return to the Moon…” we are talking about powers that have very clear plans not only to send automated probes, but to set foot, again, on the satellite. He NASA’s Artemis program -which continues to accumulate problems- will be the first manned flight around the Moon in 50 years, and future trips They are aiming for lunar landings. China, for its part, wants to send the Chang’e 7 probe to the south pole in search of ice; Chang’e 8 to test the utilization of resources directly on the satellite and manned flight missions for 2028 and a moon landing in 2030. Russia was also in the loop with the Luna project, as well as the creation of the space base in collaboration with China, but its solo projects have been delayed. Therefore, the fact that we have the first chemical map of the satellite is not only an achievement to satisfy scientific curiosity, but also a guide for those future missions on the ground. In Xataka | Mars was the great space battleground between China and the US. Now it’s the Moon and there’s too much at stake

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