dead

thousands and thousands of dead birds

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Recently in Budia, a town in the province of Guadalajara, covered the screens of their paddle tennis court with a white net. Said like this, it sounds like an anecdote, minor news, but things change when two other pieces of information are known. First, Budia has not been the only town to give its paddle tennis courts a spin. In fact, in the same province they have done something similar at least half a dozen municipalities. The second fact (and the most interesting) is that the change does not respond to aesthetic, logistical or sporting reasons. Its objective is to prevent paddle tennis from becoming a death trap for thousands and thousands of birds. And it makes a lot of sense. Spain, land of rackets. That we Spaniards like (we love it) paddle tennis has little new. According to the International Padel Federation (IPF), in 2024 there were in our country 4,500 clubs and facilities and around 17,000 slopes, which leaves one of the best ratios in the world: one slope for every 2,800 inhabitants. Catalonia and Andalusia stand out above all, with more than 3,200, followed by Madrid, with 2,300, and the Valencian Community (almost 2,000). That’s good, right? Of course. Yes, at least from a sporting or even social point of view. The problem is that this vast network of tracks has become a real headache for environmentalists and organizations in charge of protecting wildlife, especially birds. The reason? Many of these sports courts are surrounded by glass, large transparent sheets that become death traps when a blackbird, swallow, hoopoe, kite… hits them in mid-flight and at high speed. It’s not exactly something new. It’s been happening for years with windows and glass buildings, in addition to the acoustic barriers of the roads. What is new is that paddle tennis courts are added to the list. More than an anecdote. It is not a minor issue. Environmentalists know for a long time that glass windows claim the lives of millions of birds around the world every year. In New York alone it is estimated that skyscrapers leave a balance of 200,000 deaths per year. In the case of paddle tennis courts the balance is considerably lower, but it is still significant. In Spain, some studies have already been carried out that, remember elDiario.essuggest that there are clues that cause the death of a hundred birds. It is not bad at all if we take into account that it is an annual calculation and (although not all of them are the same or have glass windows) there are thousands of installations throughout the country. What do the studies say? It is not easy to calculate how many birds die each year in Spain after hitting runway closures. I recognized it already in 2023 the State Attorney General’s Office, whose Environmental Office became interested in the problem. Reliable data is lacking because bird carcasses “often” are not even quantified. They leave the slopes without notifying the authorities or end up in the clutches of cats or foxes, which move them from place to place. That does not mean that we handle some studies on the subject. In 2019, the Aragon Department of the Environment analyzed three slopes in Zaragoza and discovered that in each of them people died every year. between 100 and 135 birds. It is a range similar to that shown in another analysis by the Generalitat Valenciana, which speaks of 75,000 victims per year in 600 tracks, which leaves an average of 125 per facility. In 2023 the Delta Birding Festival (DBF) already warned that only in Catalonia they died at least a year 24,000 birds crashed against the tracks. A question of figures… and something more. Perhaps the best proof that the issue generates concern (some of those birds are protected species) is that it not only worries environmentalists and organizations like DBF, GREFA or SEO BirdLife, which also has raised the voice to warn of the impact of the paddle tennis facilities. In 2023 it was the public ministry itself that moved token alerted by what it considers a “serious threat to birds.” To be more precise, the Environmental Prosecutor’s Office asked its provincial representatives to use the reform of the Penal Code approved that same year to combat the problem. Rethinking padel. Municipal governments have also taken note. Budia is just one of the seven town councils of the province of Guadalajara who have turned to the Group for the Rehabilitation of Native Fauna and Their Habitat (GREFA) to install “bird anti-collision measures” on their paddle tennis courts. In other parts of the country there are public and private organizations that have adopted similar measures. For example in Segovia, Valencia wave Community of Madridwhich in 2017 already installed vinyl on several tracks. He did so after detecting 50 dead birds and another half dozen stunned specimens in 11 months. The (other) pending task. The key is not only in wanting to solve the problem, but in knowing how to do it. The objective is for the windows to stop being ‘invisible’ to the birds and thus allow them to avoid them, avoiding collisions, but achieving this is not so easy. “A fundamental rule is that of the palm of the hand. If there is a gap smaller than a palm, 10 cm, smaller birds will think they can sneak through there,” explains to elDiario Carlos Cuéllar, GREFA technician. The organization’s commitment is rather to install nets like those that can already be seen in Budia, white nylon meshes that birds can detect from a distance and at the same time do not bother the athletes. A priori they are also safer than vinyl, since it prevents the adhesive from creating large pieces of glass if the panel breaks… with the consequent risk of cuts. Images | Bruno Vaccaro Vercellino (Unsplash), GREFA and P-squared Padel (Unsplash) In Xataka | Millions of birds are killed every year by wind turbines. The solution: self-adaptive speed blades

The dead accumulate because they cannot be cremated.

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As missiles continue to fall in the Middle East, their shock wave has suffocated 600 million people in Southeast Asia due to a lethal crisis: lack of fuel. The problem, as collected The New York Timesis an abysmal reserve gap. While rich neighbors like Japan or South Korea have accumulated crude oil for more than 200 days, countries like Vietnam or Indonesia survive with just enough for just three weeks. Thailand, for its part, resists with a margin of only two months. With this time bomb on the table, logistical collapse was not a possibility; It was just a matter of time. The butterfly effect. In the midst of this energy shock, the most unusual and heartbreaking impact is being experienced in the temples of Thailand. An investigative report from South China Morning Post (SCMP) alert that diesel shortage is threatening sacred funeral ceremonies in this majority Buddhist country. In local tradition, cremation, which follows several nights of singing, requires ovens connected to tall chimneys. The smoke they release is a ritual that, according to their beliefs, helps guide spirits to heaven. Today, those furnaces are going out. At Wat Saman Rattanaram, a famous temple about 80 kilometers east of Bangkok, abbot Phra Ratchwachiraprachanart confessed to the Asian newspaper that the suspension of cremations is imminent. “In more than 50 years, I have never seen anything like it,” he lamented. The temple only has about 200 liters of diesel left, the equivalent of two cremations, which is its weekly average. The problem is worsened by the rationing imposed on the streets. Another temple in the northeast of the country has already had to suspend their funeral services because local gas stations refused to allow them to fill plastic drums with fuel. The collapse of economic arteries. While the temples suffer, panic takes over the streets. Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul declared to the agency Xinhua that the country does not face a real shortage of imports, but rather a crisis of public anxiety. The fear of shortages has caused panic buying, shooting up daily fuel consumption from the usual 60-67 million liters to an exorbitant 84 million. The consequences of this panic are palpable. A survey by the Thai Ministry of Energy cited by him SCMP revealed that, of 1,500 gas stations inspected, 10% had closed due to lack of supply and almost 70% reported critical levels. A logistical bottleneck. This whole situation is being reflected in the markets, where sellers cannot get fresh fruits because truckers refuse to make long trips, like the route from Pathum Thani to Chiang Maifor fear of being stranded on the road with an empty tank. And the suffocation extends beyond Thai borders. The figures of The New York Times reflect that in Laos, more than 40% of gas stations have had to close; in Cambodia, almost a third. In Thailand, fishermen like Wittaya Lekdee have their shrimp boat moored in port because the price of naval fuel has skyrocketed by 75%. In the Philippines, the situation is identical: fishermen who previously owned their boats are now looking for work in other cities to pay the rent, unable to meet the costs of diesel. Desperate measures. Governments operate in emergency mode, taking drastic decisions to try to stop the bleeding. According to ReutersThailand is trying to keep a diesel price cap at 33 baht ($1.02) per liter, but its Oil Fund is already running up a deficit of more than 12 billion baht. In a geopolitical shift brought about by necessity, the country is negotiating the purchase of crude oil from Russia, while receiving emergency shipments from Angola and the United States. Energy saving has become a state policy. How the coverage details Guardian, In Thailand, officials have been ordered to stop wearing ties and wear short-sleeved shirts so they can raise the air conditioning to 26-27°C, in addition to suspending trips abroad. Indonesia is accelerating a program to blend conventional diesel with 50% palm oil-based biodiesel. For its part, the Philippine government has implemented four-day work weeks for many civil servants and is providing cash subsidies of 5,000 pesos to bus drivers. jeepneys (local public transport). However, drivers like Elmer Carrascal They explain to the British media that this money only lasts a few days, while their daily income has fallen from 1,000 to 400 pesos, an amount insufficient even to buy rice. The invisible collateral damage. The shock wave of high oil prices has touched unexpected sectors. The Straits Times warns of an imminent crisis in the Thai health system: ambulances in 39 provinces are suffering from lack of fuel. With 14,213 emergency vehicles requiring around 71,065 liters per day, the National Institute of Emergency Medicine (NIEM) has had to turn to Facebook to beg gas stations to reserve between 50 and 100 liters exclusively to save lives. In provinces like Kalasin, municipal ambulances can no longer operate. The agricultural and industrial sector is also dying. The report of The New York Times exposes how In Vietnam the cost of fertilizers for coffee cooperatives has risen almost 30% in two weeks. In Thailand, pet food packaging manufacturers are facing a 40% increase in the cost of plastic pellets. In Myanmar, under a military regime that has imposed alternate-day driving, citizens like Tin Hlaing Moe have been fined 30,000 kyat ($7.50) simply for using their car on a prohibited day to take their heart attack mother to the hospital. Sometimes, the shortage leaves images that border on the surreal: in the ancient Thai capital of Ayutthaya, a camp has informed the British newspaper that its elephants now have to walk five kilometers a day to go to work, since there is no diesel for the trucks that used to transport them. The final price of a foreign war. The Strait of Hormuz is more than 5,000 kilometers from Bangkok, Manila or Hanoi. However, the blockage of its waters has demonstrated the extreme fragility of the globalized world. What is discussed in international … Read more

The canonical “living room furniture” in Spain in the 80s and 90s is dead. That says more about us than it seems.

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There is an object that disappeared from Spanish homes within a generation or two, without almost anyone noticing: the living room furniture. I’m not talking about a base for the TV but about that solid wood architecture that occupied an entire wall, with its display cases, shelves, drawers, space for the TV and, in the most ambitious models, even an integrated minibar, the only thing in my childhood home that seemed like a luxury to me. For decades that piece of furniture was the nerve center of the home. It housed books, television, mini chain (another vestige of another era), family memories and the boy’s judo medals. Today it is a relic that no one millennial buys and that Generation Z doesn’t even recognize. The obvious explanation is practical: televisions grew much faster than the space that these pieces of furniture reserved for them. It became impossible to fit a 42 or 55 inch screen where barely 21 could fit.. Apartments shrank while prices skyrocketed, and dedicating four square meters to a cherry monolith no longer made sense. Furthermore, moves have multiplied because job insecurity forces people to change cities more than in the past, and no one wants to carry a piece of furniture that requires a truck and three rocks. But That doesn’t explain why no one misses them.. What died with the living room furniture was something deeper: the idea that the home should display who we were. These displays were, in addition to functional display cases, a showcase: the good dishes that were only used at Christmas, the collection of porcelain figurines, the religious motifs if the family was a believer, the bound volumes of encyclopedias that no one read but that let visitors know that culture is valued in this house. The shelf with the VHS carefully arranged, the crystal glasses, the framed photos. It was all there to be seen by those who came to see us, to say, “This is our family, this is our status, this is what we value, this is who we are.” That today is, at best, a piece of melanin furniture with some funkos and the Switch. Image provided by an acquaintance. In this case, a 55″ TV covers more than what the furniture manufacturer had planned and there is no room for more. In this case, the tradition of furniture and tea sets coexist with the modernity of consoles, the yoga mat or souvenirs definitely different from those of yesteryear, such as the Japanese torii or the Mexican mask. Where was the ceramic with ‘Memory of Torrelavega’. Today we exhibit on Instagram, or in our profile photo and WhatsApp statuses, but not in the living room. Identity is no longer constructed through physical objects arranged in a display case, but through selected images on a screen. It is no longer necessary to demonstrate to visitors that you have good taste (visits, in fact, are increasingly rare) because your followers They have already seen it in the stories. The other thing is a matter of our parents and in-laws. The living room furniture was a gesture of permanence and stability: We bought one that we knew would last a lifetime, we even inherited it. Now we live in forced flexibility, in rental apartments with annual contracts, in Ikea as religion and in the imperative to travel light. It’s not just that it doesn’t fit. It is that its very logic (the solid, the definitive, the expository) belongs to a time that no longer exists. The space where the furniture used to be is now occupied by a giant television mounted on the wall, a minimalist shelf from Amazon or, directly, nothing. And that absence is not coincidental. It is the symptom of a culture that stopped believing in the idea of ​​the home as a personal museum. and he began to conceive it as a provisional set for a life that happens, above all, elsewhere. On the screens. In Xataka | The 17 photos that explain the 90s as if you had lived them Featured image | Xataka

one dead and 37 injured after a train derailed in Gelida (Barcelona)

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Just over 48 hours had passed since the Adamuz (Córdoba) railway accident occurred, the second most serious in our country, when Rodalies Catalunya reported a accident on line R4 between Sant Sadurní and Gelida (Barcelona). The train driver died in the accident and 37 people were injured. Five of them are seriously injured. What has happened? A retaining wall has fallen on the tracks of line R4 on the Rodalies line in Catalonia. The train has collided and has left the track. As a consequence of the impact and the subsequent derailment, Rodalies Catalunya has reported that a person has died. Click on the image to go to the original tweet The victims. As the company reported shortly before midnight, one person has died. This would be an active machinist or one of the two trainee machinists, they report in The Countryalthough it still has to be clarified. The emergency services have confirmed to the newspaper that 37 affected passengers have been treated. Five are in serious condition, six in less serious condition and 26 in mild condition. Most of them were traveling in the first car, which is the one that received the impact and most of the damage. Rodalies has set up a helpline for victims: 900 101 660. In addition to the emergency medical services, 70 members of the Fire Brigade had to go to the scene of the accident to rescue the people trapped inside the car and shore up the retaining wall to prevent it from continuing to fall. What is known about the accident. Rodalies line R4 connects Sant Vicenç de Calders – Manresa (through Vilafranca del Penedès). At that moment, a train traveling towards Manresa and between the stations of Sant Sadurní and Gelida (Barcelona) collides with a retaining wall that falls in its path, causing it to derail. At the moment, the causes that motivated the detachment are not known, but the first hypotheses point to the heavy rains that Catalonia has experienced in the last few days. Just yesterday, shortly before one in the afternoon, Rodalies reported a civil protection alert to coastal municipalities due to strong waves to prevent possible flooding. Derailment in Blanes. In addition to the Gelida accident (Barcelona) another Rodalies train has also derailed between the stations of Blanes and Maçanet (Girona), this time as a result of some rocks that have fallen onto the track. In this case there are no injuries to be regretted on a train in which only 10 people were traveling. The train axle broke in the crash. Click on the image to go to the original tweet Suspended service. There will be no Rodalies trains on today, January 21, 2026, and there is no estimated reopening date. The company has assured that the service remains suspended until all lines are reviewed and the safety of travelers can be guaranteed. It is estimated that the suspension of the service will affect an estimated number of between 350,000 and 400,000 passengers that move daily along the lines. Photo | Bomber In Xataka | The liberalization of the AVE has not gone down well with Renfe, so now it has a plan: delay the Cercanías movement as much as possible.

When a town found a dead whale on its beaches, it decided to dynamite it. 55 years later they still celebrate it

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One of the most excessive and gory stories you have ever heard in your life is also one of the funniest, because for a change it does not involve the suffering of any living being, but rather a series of unfortunate decisions and systematic ignorance of the laws of physics. It is the story of the whale Oregon explosion, a crazy event that just turned 55 years old… and is still being celebrated. The problem. On November 12, 1970, engineers from the Oregon Highway Division, which is in charge of road traffic on a day-to-day basis, encountered an unusual dilemma on the beach in the small coastal town of Florence: getting rid of a dead eight-ton sperm whale that had been decomposing in the sun for three days. After consulting with the Navy about demolition techniques, the team decided to apply a solution as direct as it was disastrous to the corpse: half a ton of dynamite (twenty boxes), in the hope of pulverizing the cetacean. The seagulls would be in charge of cleaning up the remains. Good marines, bad advisors. The consultation turned out to be counterproductive. The marines advised on demolition with explosives, their specialty, but no one consulted marine biologists or coastal wildlife experts. Walter Umenhofer, a local businessman with military experience, warned Thornton that twenty boxes of dynamite was excessive: he recommended twenty individual cartridges or, if not, a much larger amount to completely pulverize organic tissue. His advice was ignored. Boom. The detonation, at 3:45 PM, caused a 30 meter high sand and grease apocalypsethrowing whale fragments in all directions. Blocks of tissue and muscle the size of coffee tables fell on spectators located at a safe distance of more than 400 meters from the explosion point. The screams of excitement from the hundred or so spectators turned into screams of horror as fragments of tissue fell from the sky. Some of the pieces of fat, almost a meter long, crushed the roof of a vehicle. The smell of burning flesh lingered for days and the seagulls never appeared. The decision of George Thornton, responsible for the action, lacked technical basis from the beginning. In one previous interviewadmitted: “I’m sure it will work. The only thing we’re not sure about is exactly how much dynamite we’ll need to break this… thing up, so the seagulls and crabs and other scavengers can clean it up.” Thornton decided to treat the cetacean like a rock on a road: half a ton of explosives strategically placed under the animal, in the hope that the force would propel the remains into the Pacific. What to do with a whale. Cetacean strandings have posed logistical dilemmas for coastal authorities for decades. Prior to the development of unified scientific protocols (that prioritize scientific necropsy on rapid elimination), methods for dealing with dead whales often relied on improvisation. The most common options They included burial on the beach, towing out to sea for sinking, or simply allowing the animal to decompose naturally. Today, disposal methods have evolved: countries such as South Africa, Iceland and Australia continue to use controlled explosives after towing cetaceans out to seabut the United States ended up abandoning this practice. When 41 sperm whales stranded near Florence in 1979, authorities They buried them without hesitation. Hunting In 1970, Oregon lacked specific guidelines for these cases. The Oregon Highway Division had jurisdiction over state beaches (an administrative quirk arising from the legal consideration of coastlines as part of the public highway system) but no expertise in marine biology. When the sperm whale arrived in Florence, George Thornton publicly admitted that he had been assigned to the case.”because his supervisor had gone hunting“. The closest precedent had been successful because of its modesty: two years earlier, in 1968, authorities in Long Beach, Washington, had managed a similar stranding through a conventional burial without incident. The unforgettable video. All was immortalized by KATU journalist Paul Linnman, who arrived on the scene initially frustrated by what he considered a menial assignment. Until he found out the amount of dynamite involved. With cameraman Doug Brazil documented the event on 16mm film with live magnetically recorded audio, a format that, unlike video, would retain its visual quality for decades. On. After the disaster, most of the sperm whale remained intact on the beach. Highway Division workers spent the afternoon manually burying the remains, including huge sections of the animal that were not moved from the explosion point. Thornton declared to Bacon that same afternoon that everything had gone “well…except that the explosion dug a hole in the sand beneath the whale,” directing the force upward rather than toward the ocean. decades laterThornton continued to defend the operation as a technical success distorted by hostile media coverage. It goes viral. For two decades, the incident remained a regional anecdote until comedian Dave Barry resurrected history in his Miami Herald column on May 20, 1990. Titled “The Far Side Comes to Life in Oregon,” in reference to the immortal series by gary larson. His description of the event introduced the American public to the concept of “epic fail” before the digital age popularized the term. The Oregon Department of Transportation received calls from angry people, convinced the incident had occurred recently. Which makes the exploding whale one of the first stories to go viral on the internet. Beyond the meme. The phenomenon transcended the purely digital. In 2015, Oregon indie musician Sufjan Stevens released the song ‘Exploding Whale‘, where it said “Embrace the epic failure of my exploiting whale”. Of course, the event appeared on ‘The Simpsons’, in the 2010 episode ‘The Squirt and the Whale’. In 2020, the Oregon Historical Society commissioned a 4K restoration of the original 16mm footage of the news story. The laughs. 55 years later, that fiasco in public management has been transformed into folklore and local heritage. In 2024, Florence declared November as “Exploding Whale Month”and the city celebrates the anniversary with a festival that culminates with the “Superlative … Read more

“You can’t trust your eyes to know what’s real anymore.” Instagram CEO announces that the feed is dead

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That the Internet as we knew it no longer exists is not a surprise: it has been filled with search results generated by artificial intelligence and from ‘slop‘. The consequences are already visible: clicks have been reduced by halfwhich is catastrophic for the media. But not only the text is suffering from this barrage of AI that blurs everything: already We do not know how to distinguish if an image is real or notwe have gone from document our life on social networks to the era of influencer content favored by the algorithm to videos and images that are not real, but can pass as such. There are no longer four fingers that are worth it. Instagrammers, the feed is dead. And this is also going to take its toll on social networks. Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, closed 2025 with a publication in the form of a presentation of 20 images where he reflected in depth on what is coming: “the era of infinite synthetic content”, the antithesis of a more personal Instagram that has been dead for years. For Mosseri, AI has turned the carefully maintained grid with its algorithm into something of the past: “Unless you are under 25 years old and use Instagram, you probably think of the app as a feed of square photos. The aesthetics are careful: a lot of makeup, skin softening, high-contrast photography, beautiful landscapes,” Mosseri’s sentence falls like a stone on this millennial, who still uses Instagram as a kind of photo album. “That feed is dead. People largely stopped sharing personal moments on the feed years ago.” Tap to go to the post In search of something real. Mosseri explains that now its users keep their contacts up to date on their personal lives with “improvised photos of unflattering shoes and poses” shared via DM. And this also affects content creators: the omnipresence of images made by AI is going to bring a change: goodbye to those pro-looking photographs in favor of a more real and improvised aesthetic: “Flattering images are cheap to produce and boring to consume. People want content that feels real.” In fact, the CEO of Instagram points to manufacturers, applicable to cameras and mobile phones, who he says are making a mistake by democratizing the ability to “look like a professional photographer from 2015.” Because RAW images with defects are still a sign of reality until AI is able to copy them. But what is real? The time has come to unlearn to believe what our eyes see, something we have been doing all our lives. Javier Lacort explained that our entire epistemology (ranging from court testimony to photo albums) is based on the fact that seeing is a way of knowing. If you see a tiger, there is a tiger. If you see a photo of a tiger, someone has been close to one. This no longer applies: the era of uncover organized fake news has made way for anyone with Nano Banana Pro can get such an absurdly realistic image with a basic prompt in just a few seconds. Now creating a deepfake is trivial. Adam Mosseri think equal. “For most of my life I was able to safely assume that photographs or videos were largely faithful captures of moments that actually happened. That’s clearly no longer the case, and it’s going to take years to adjust. We’re going to go from defaulting to assuming that what we see is real to starting from skepticism. To paying attention to who’s sharing something and why. This will be uncomfortable: we’re genetically predisposed to believe our eyes.” If you can’t beat them… The paradigm shift has already occurred, so now Instagram and other platforms have to adapt to this new reality: “we have to build the best creative tools. Label AI-generated content and verify authentic content. Show credibility signals about who is posting. Continue to improve the ranking of originality.” It is the apocalypse of what is a photo that we have been predicting for years. Focusing on Instagram, Mosseri talks about how “we like to complain about ‘AI junk content,’ but there is a lot of amazing content created with AI.” He doesn’t give concrete examples or talk about Meta tools to make this possible, but Meta has already added AI tools on Instagram and Facebook. Without going any further, his AI Studio allows you to create personalized chatbots to deal with your followers. New times, new identification measures. It is increasingly difficult to identify content in AI, so it proposes fingerprints and cryptographic signatures in cameras to identify real content, forgetting about labels or watermarks. In any case, it advocates greater transparency about who publishes on the platform and improve creativity so that its human users can compete with content made in AI. In Xataka | The future of the Internet is to be flooded with AI. And there are those who have already seen a business niche: content made by humans In Xataka | There is a generation working for free as a documentarian of their own life: they are not influencers but they act as if they were.

There is a startup that turns the ashes of your dead into stones. And he is charging more than 2,000 euros for it

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Cremation is an increasingly common practice after a death and it is not uncommon for many families to keep the ashes or spread in special places. There is a company that has had an idea to turn the remains of our loved ones into a new object: stones. Parting Stone. It is the name of a startup founded in San Francisco that is dedicated to solidifying the ashes of dead people and shaping them into soft, rounded stones. Justin Crowe, the founder, told in a interview with the Wall Street Journal that people usually keep ashes in any closet because it is not something we feel comfortable with, but when transformed into these stones they become a kind of amulet without that negative connotation. “Some families travel with the stones, share them with friends and loved ones, children paint on them; some people keep them in their pockets and even sleep with them under their pillow,” he says. First tableware. that the idea was born after his grandfather’s funeral, a traditional ceremony that made him feel uncomfortable at such a vulnerable moment. After the experience, Crowe began to think about how he could create something new for the grieving process and first came up with an idea: mixing ashes with ceramic glazes. He created tableware with this technique and began to receive orders, the problem was that to make it he only used a small amount of the ashes and he wanted to create something using more. Solidification. The process to turn ashes into stones is quite simple: refine them to a fine powder, mix them with water, shape the stones and cook. Normally about 40-80 stones come out of the ashes of an adult person and they warn that the color depends on each person. The service costs $2,495 for people and $1,195 for cats and dogs, so that’s nothing. The business of ashes. Cremation is a practice increasing around the world. According to Crossing World Group data, This year in Spain, cremation has surpassed burial for the first time, so these types of initiatives are increasingly common. In Spain there is a company called Omneo that turns ashes into a block of wax with an NFC tag. There are also companies that convert ashes in diamondsin trees and even in coral reefs. The most striking proposal of all is that of the Barcelona company Giem Sportswhich proposed the management of spaces within football stadiums to store the ashes of fans. Betis inaugurated a space of this type and they charged 3,000 euros to keep the ashes for a period of 99 years. Image | Pexels In Xataka | More than 300 people have been cryogenized hoping to be resurrected in the future, but no one has proven that this serves any purpose.

The reality is that we are facing a dead end

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There is a race among major AI companies to build a AGI or artificial general intelligence, that which surpasses humans in all areas of knowledge. Sam Altman has been hyping up about AGI for a long time, and he is not the only one. Mark Zuckerberg has spent a million on a team to create it, Dario Amodei believes it will arrive very soon and Elon Musk says Grok 5 could achieve AGI. What if it’s all a big lie? Language and intelligence. It’s not the same. OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic… all these companies have something in common: their path to AGI is LLM or great language models. They count in The Verge The nuance, and it is not just any nuance, is that language and intelligence are two very different things. Decades of research have shown that language is a tool of communication, not thought. In other words, mastering the language is not equivalent to more intelligence, in the same way that not mastering it does not mean ceasing to be intelligent. Language models. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini… are tools composed of hundreds and even billions of parameters, trained on enormous textual corpora. Their technical complexity is undeniable, but they are still systems that They predict the next word from statistical correlations. Its core is language, not ideas or abstract thought in the human sense. Achieve AGI. Getting to AGI with a language model is a dead end. I said it recently Yann LeCunconsidered one of the godfathers of modern AI and, until recently, head of AI at Meta. According to LeCun, the path to achieving AGI is not the LLM, but the LWM or world models. These models they learn from the environment and they can imagine scenarios, like humans do. He hype. If language models are not the way, why do AI companies keep saying they are on the verge of achieving AGI? Because they need it. Their premise is that with more computing power (more chips and more data centers), their AIs will become smarter, so fueling the hype is their way of justifying that absurd amounts continue to be invested to scale AI. Deceleration. At first the evolutionary leaps in AI chatbots were palpable; the first versions of ChatGPT they blew our minds. The reality right now is that Generative AI has entered a stage of continuity or deceleration. There are improvements, but they are no longer as notable or revolutionary. The solution is to generate expectation: with AI agents and, of course, with the AGI. Does this mean that AGI will never be reached? Not necessarily, but it will take more than language models and above all time. According to Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, AGI will take for at least another decade. Image | Meo, Pexels (edited) In Xataka | Someone has taken a look at the dotcom bubble and compared their data to AI. And it’s not optimistic

stuck on a dead end track

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In September, the future European fighter in which Spain participates began to disfigure publicly. Already in November, in a new twist of script, the European fighter began to point to something else. The latest? The Future Combat Air System project, FCAShas ceased to be solely an industrial and technological program to become an uncomfortable mirror of Europe’s ambition (and limitations). The plane is literally at a dead end. A symbol that wobbles. Those ambitions have was staged these days in the figure of Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz, and the Europe they aspire to. Both leaders have spent weeks redoubling a speech that insists on strategic autonomy, digital sovereignty and its own military capacity, a message that is amplified in a continent shaken by uncertainty about the American commitment and by the aggressiveness of a Kremlin that has returned conventional war to the heart of Europe. In this context, the FCAS had been conceived as the emblem of a continent capable of compete with the F-35 American, to secure replacements for the Rafale and Eurofighter that are beginning to approach their operational end, and to demonstrate that Europe can still lead technological revolutions in defense. Reality blow. But the rindustrial and political reality surrounding the program contradicts official rhetoric. Eight years after its presentation, FCAS is accumulating delays, internal disputes and an atmosphere of mistrust that turns each negotiation into a slow erosion of expectations, forcing us to wonder if this plane of 100,000 million of euros has not become a failed test before even taking off. The blockages that show the seams. Behind the common façade, France and Germany carry structural rivalries that become especially visible when they must cooperate in a field as sensitive as combat aviation. Dassault and Airbus, the giants called to work side by side, have been exchanging reproaches. Eric Trappier, head of Dassault, has never hidden his refusal to give up leadership in design, nor has he hidden his disdain for German technical capacity in areas considered critical. From the other side, Airbus accuses Dassault of protect historical privileges incompatible with a modern multinational project. The international success of the Rafale, unexpectedly converted into a symbol of independence compared to the F-35, has further strengthened the French position and has strained the distribution of burdens and responsibilities. None of these frictions are new, but they are have become more corrosive at a time when cooperation is no longer just desirable, but necessary. What should have been an alliance between equals has led to what analysts describe as a marriage of convenience full of suspicions, in which every tactile decision on intellectual property, industrial distribution or technological transfer becomes a clash of corporate cultures. The political factor. Added to the industrial complexity is the political vulnerability of its promoters. Macron, cornered by an internal budget crisis and by the prospect of a 2027 that could hand power to the far right, has lost the ability to impose rhythms or guarantees in long-term projects. Merz, for his part, deals with a economy that seeks to reinvent itself and with a rise of the far right which forces careful internal calibrations, but unlike France, Germany yes it has resources: Its defense budget is heading towards a doubling that transforms Berlin into the dominant partner in financial terms. This asymmetry introduces a power imbalance that irritates both Paris and the industrial partners involved. Believe or not believe. This being the case, cooperation fundamentally requires trust, but that trust is precisely the resource that is most scarce. Without clear leadership, without a sustained common vision and without an architecture that credibly distributes risks and benefits, FCAS has become a hidden battle for influence rather than a joint project. What no one says, but everyone thinks. They remembered on Bloomberg that, as delays increase, hypotheses begin to emerge that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. It we comment a few weeks ago, one way is to transform FCAS into an umbrella digital interoperability that allows each country to build its own plane, all connected by a common data system. This path would allow Dassault to follow a sovereign path, while Airbus would concentrate its efforts on mission systems, companion drones and data fusion. But there is more. Another alternative, more ambitious and politically riskier, would be to abandon the national distribution of work, which assigns tasks by flag, and move to a distribution by industrial skillsrewarding whoever can make each piece better and faster. This last option is what specialists have been asking for for years, but it is also the one that clashes head-on with the electoral incentives of each government. European defense remains organized to maximize benefits at the national levelnot common efficiency, and as long as this does not change, they will repeat the same blocking patterns. Without deep reform, FCAS risks becoming another example of ambition being suffocated by domestic politics. Consequences of failure. He FCAS failure It would be more than the collapse of an industrial project. It would represent a devastating message for a continent seeking to demonstrate that it can guarantee its security without completely depending on the United States. While the F-35 changes balances in the Middle East and while Europe watches, almost daily, how Russian drones penetrate western airspacethe world is moving towards a technologically different war. The countries that lead this transition (from autonomous swarms to sixth generation platforms) will determine the correlation of power of the 21st century. Giving up on FCAS would mean accepting that Europe is late, that it is not prepared for the industrial leaps that modern conflict requires and that, despite the rhetoric of strategic autonomy, it continues to depend from external suppliers for their critical capabilities. This dependence is the same one that Macron and Merz say they want to overcome, although the failure to fulfill their own projects pushes them, step by step, towards it. Between two waters. If you will, the outcome from FCAS It will be a … Read more

The “godfather of AI” believes that AI LLMs are a dead end. Meta has turned him into a vase scientist

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Yann LeCun has been warning for years that Generative AI is stupid. The current models, he claimed a year ago, are no more intelligent than a domestic cat. This speech has become especially uncomfortable especially because LeCun, considered one of the godfathers of AI, was until now one of the most responsible for this segment in Meta. Now everything seems to point to an imminent departure that will see LeCun found his own startup. Why is it important. While AI companies strive to train AI models by collecting more data and spending billions of dollars on computing power, LeCun is clear that this strategy is a dead end. It is something we have been talking about for a long time and that other experts like Andrej Karpathy have also have warned: This scaling of resources previously allowed notable leaps in performance. Not now. He knows what he’s talking about. In 2003 LeCun joined New York University and later founded the institution’s Data Science Center. In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg recruited him to lead his new AI division at Facebook called FAIR (Fundamental AI Research). In 2018, LeCun, along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, won the Turing Awardthe highest honor in computer science, for his contribution to the study of neural networks. LLMs must give way to “world models”. LeCun has prophesied that within three to five years no one in their right mind will be using today’s LLMs. Instead of them, the architecture that will triumph will be that of the so-called “world models”which learn from the environment through visual information, similar to how a baby does, in contrast to LLMs, which are predictive models based on vast text databases. Internal tension. That vision of LeCun has ended up being a problem in Meta. Mark Zuckerberg does not seem to have the same opinion, and in recent months he has made it clear. with a bet multimillionaire in which ended up signing talent and creating its new superintelligence division that precisely reinforced the role of the LLM that LeCun sees as useless. An uncomfortable situation. These signings have caused the FAIR Group that LeCun led to lose prestige, resources and weight in the organization compared to that new AI research organization led by the new rising star, Alexandr Wang. Exit in sight. Last week the first rumors appeared that LeCun is planning his departure from Meta to create his own startup. Precisely this new company would explore the creation of those models of the world that this scientist and researcher wants to develop in depth. If he executed that step, it is very likely that the investment world would support that vision and offer him sufficient funds to work on it. It has happened with startups Ilya Sutskever and Mira Muratithat without having visible product They have achieved multi-million dollar financing rounds. LeCun seems to be right. The evolution of LLMs seems to confirm LeCun’s theory that they are not the valid way to achieve truly notable advances in the field of AI. What current models do is not so much solve problems as locate past instances of solved problems to use probability and apply answers. Don’t even think about pursuing LLMs.. In recent months, LeCun’s work in Meta has become more blurred and he has been seen participating in several conferences. In one of them gave a message clear to those aspiring to get into this field: “if you are a PhD student in AI, you should never work with LLMs.” Image | Goal In Xataka | The only advantage Apple could have in AI was its private cloud. It has been copied by the person we least expected

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