destroyed

The war in Iran has destroyed another critical supply chain for consumer technology: PCBs

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While the war in Iran is leaving us with a global energy crisis unprecedented, it is also hitting the technology industry squarely in one of its most critical components: printed circuit boards (PCB). These boards are found in basically any device, and in the last month their price has skyrocketed by up to 40%, according to they count from Goldman Sachs. The reason: an attack on a critical plant for the manufacture of PCBs that puts the global supply of these boards in check. Stroke. ANDIn the first days of April, Iranian forces attacked the Jubail petrochemical complex in Saudi Arabia. SABIC (Saudi Basic Industries Corporation) operates in this complex, a company that produces approximately 70% of the world’s supply of high-purity polyphenylene ether (PPE) resin, an essential material for manufacturing the laminates with which PCBs are built. According to they count From Reuters, since the attack, SABIC has been unable to resume production. And that is a problem on a global scale. Raw material at stake. It is not just about the direct attack on Jubail. The conflict has also generated serious disruption in maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf, one of the most critical logistics routes connecting Middle Eastern chemical producers with Asian electronics manufacturers. Added to this is the pressure on copper, which represents around 60% of the total cost of raw materials in PCB manufacturing, according to they count from Victory Giant Technology, one of the largest Chinese suppliers in the sector with clients such as Nvidia. The company warned this month that the conflict could make key materials such as resin and copper even more expensive. According to Reuters, the price of sheet copper has risen up to 30% since the beginning of the year. Qproduction ties. From Daeduck Electronics, a major South Korean PCB manufacturer that supplies Samsung, SK Hynix and AMD, among others, confirmed Reuters that the company has started talks with its customers to pass on the price increases. The company pointed out that the waiting period for materials such as epoxy resin has gone from three weeks to fifteen. A market that was already stressed. PCB prices had already been rising for months due to the skyrocketing demand for AI servers. According to Reutersdemand has accelerated sharply since March, with manufacturers trying to secure supplies before the situation worsens. Goldman Sachs points out that large cloud service providers are willing to take on further increases because they expect demand to outstrip supply for years. On the other hand, research firm Prismark projects that the global PCB sector will grow 12.5% ​​in 2026, reaching $95.8 billion. And PCBs aren’t the only thing affected. The technology supply chain is taking hits from all sides. According to inform The Elec Korea, large Japanese manufacturers of photoresist (a key chemical in chip production) have begun to notify clients such as Samsung and SK Hynix of problems in the supply of gasoline, a raw material that these suppliers obtain more than 40% from the Middle East. Besides, the price of helium (essential gas in the manufacture of semiconductors) has almost doubled after the Iranian attacks on Ras Laffan, in Qatar, which provides about a third of the global supply, according to Fitch Ratings. What does this mean for the consumer. The impact will end up reaching the final price of the products. PCBs are in absolutely everything that has electronics inside, and a 40% increase in their cost is difficult to absorb without the increase being passed on to the user. Manufacturers are already negotiating price transfers with their customers, and these, in turn, will transfer them downstream. The worst thing is the timing, since we are also in the middle of a RAM and storage crisis and the pressure around the markets only increases. Cover image | Random Thinking In Xataka | There is a company that has grown 3,000% in the stock market, even beating the performance of Nvidia: Sandisk

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

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

ChatGPT enables pay per click ads. And with them the problem that destroyed the credibility of SEO is repeated.

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ChatGPT already charges advertisers for each click their responses generate. OpenAI has activated a cost-per-click (CPC) model of between $3 and $5 within its advertising platform, as it progresses DigiDayuntil now limited to large advertisers who paid for impressions. Why is it important. This marks the moment when ChatGPT stops being a neutral tool and becomes a system with direct economic interests in which answer appears first. And that leap has consequences for anyone who uses AI as a source of information. The context. OpenAI launched its advertising business a few months ago with a CPM model (pay per impressions) and with a minimum investment of $250,000. In that time, the price has dropped from $60 per 1,000 impressions to $25, and the minimum has been reduced to $50,000. The direction of the movement says a lot: OpenAI needs more advertisers and it needs them faster. Between the lines. A CPC of 3-5 dollars is equivalent, in effective CPM, to figures much higher than the market average. OpenAI is not looking for cheap volume: it wants to position itself as premium inventory, at the level of Google Search, where clicks are worth more because the user arrives with a clear intention, especially in certain types of searches: health insurance, urgent loans, lawyers specializing in traffic accidents, etc. The problem is that this intention premium still needs to be demonstrated. The inevitable conflict. The CPC model introduces a conflict that any content platform knows well: the best answer for the user and the answer for the payer are not always the same. It is not a problem exclusive to OpenAI or search engines. It is the fundamental contradiction of any business that combines information and advertising revenue, including the media, and that each actor manages with greater or lesser success depending on their size, reputation and incentives. Google has been navigating this conflict for 25 years with increasingly debated results. Let’s think about what a Google results page looked like in 2005 and what it is like today. It’s not even your only conflict of interest. OpenAI inherits that same conflict from day one, without the reputation cushion that gave Google margin for two decades, and at a time when the demand for transparency about how AI systems work is increasing. Yes, but. There are those who argue that the LLMs They are different because contextual conversation generates a more qualified intent than traditional search, which would justify the premium price and make the advertising presence more tolerable. It is possible. But the same thing was said about branded contentof the native advertising and SEO in its beginnings. If history tells us anything, it is that economic incentives end up winning over product design, not the other way around. In Xataka | AI already knew how to create images. OpenAI says it has found the missing piece with the new ChatGPT Images 2.0 Featured image | Xataka

The war machine that the US destroyed, Iran has put it back on its feet

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During the Vietnam War, American pilots bombed for days a network of tunnels near Cu Chi convinced that they had completely rendered it useless. When the troops advanced on the ground, they discovered that not only was it still operational, but the combatants they had reappeared from hidden exits a few meters from their positions. The scene left a brutal lesson: destroying from the air does not always mean eliminating what is below. A start of war that changes everything. The first hours of the conflict in Iran set the tone of everything that would come later: an intensity of fire rarely seen, with hundreds of missiles and almost a thousand drones launched in just two days, forcing the defensive systems to operate at the limit from the first moment. That volume not only showed the scale of the Iranian arsenal, but also the type of war that was being waged, one in which saturation was almost as important as precision. From that starting point, the expectation was clear for all the actors: if that rhythm was sustained, the key was not going to be who hit the hardest, because that actor had a name from the beginning, but who last longer. The illusion of total destruction. Because the United States and Israel responded in the first 48 hours of war with a massive campaign of bombings that sought to disable the Iranian military infrastructure, attacking thousands of targets and sealing access to underground bases to leave the launchers trapped. For weeks, the official message It was forceful.: The missile program had been devastated and the country’s response capacity was practically nullified. However, even at that time doubts arose from within the US apparatus itself, which warned that a significant part of these systems had not been destroyed, but simply blocked or temporarily inaccessible. Iranian efforts underway at a missile base in Tabriz on April 10 The mountains as a shield and strategy. It we count at the time. The real differentiating element was not in the missiles, but in where they were stored. Iran has spent decades building a network of underground facilities in mountainous environments, many of them excavated in granitic rock capable of resisting extremely powerful attacks. These “missile cities” not only store weapons, but also integrate complete logistics systemswith tunnels, launch points and escape routes designed to minimize exposure. It is an architecture designed for survive the first blowassume damage and keep the operational core intact, in a logic that prioritizes resilience over invulnerability. A loader over debris blocking an entrance to a missile base near Khomeyn, April 10 Dig, reactivate and launch again. Satellite images now have confirmed that, as soon as a ceasefire window opened, heavy machinery went into action to remove debris and reopen accesses blocked by bombings. As? The Telegraph said Through satellite survey that dozens of excavators, trucks and engineering equipment were deployed at key points to clear sealed entrances and regain access to buried launchers. Again, what is relevant here is not just that it is being done, but the speed: in a matter of days (and even in just 48 hours in some cases) those facilities have become operational again, suggesting that much of the military capacity was not destroyed, but simply paused. Designed to resist. All of this, furthermore, fits with a very specific doctrine: assume that the enemy will have air superiority and design the system to survive it. Unlike a conventional war, where losing control of the air usually implies the progressive destruction of infrastructure, here the logic is different and focuses on protect assets critical underground, absorb the first attack and recover capacity combat as soon as possible. This approach turns conflict into a race of attrition, where each cycle of attack and reconstruction erodes both the attacker and the defender. The real problem. If you like, the direct consequence of this dynamic is that the apparent initial success of Washington (and Israel) has lost weight in the face of the recovery capacity Iranian. Because, although the attacks have been massive and technically effective, the speed with which Tehran is restoring its bases raises an uncomfortable scene for their adversaries: every pause, negotiation or ceasefire in the fighting becomes an opportunity to rearm again or, literally, dust off the bunkers In that context, the question stops being whether an infrastructure can be destroyed and becomes how many times it can function again before the other side is left behind. without resources or without political margin to continue. Image | Airbus In Xataka | If the question is where is the US nuclear aircraft carrier, the answer is uncomfortable: hidden so that it does not sink In Xataka | We sensed that Iran bombed the US military bases with help: some coordinates have revealed its name, and it is Made in China

With the RAM market completely destroyed, Valve has a message to create the Steam Machine: “help”

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Valve is not having any luck in the hardware world. If with software it is the undisputed queen of the PC ecosystem thanks to Steamwhen they try to launch a console things don’t go so smoothly. More than a decade ago they already tried it with some first Steam Machines that they had no identity. Now they have returned to the fray with a Steam Machine that it looks very goodbut it comes at the worst time. And in the middle of the RAM memory crisisValve only has one thing to say. Aid. The crisis. At Xataka we have been covering the RAM memory news because, although it seems that it is a crisis of a specific component, it is really something that It is affecting the entire industry of semiconductors… and consumption. If in 2020 it was a perfect storm What caused the semiconductor crisis is now the enormous demand for RAM by AI companies. They are all building gigantic data centers and there is a problem: there is only three big RAM manufacturers (plus a fourth that is emerging in China) and all of them have focused on creating RAM for data center equipment. The consequence is that there is no RAM for anyone else. And this not only affects RAM as such: it affects the price of cell phones, computers, cars and even to the router. And, of course, to the Steam Machine. Hey kid, do you have RAM? Valve announced its new machine at the end of last year and they targeted early 2026 to give a release date and price. The problem is that the days were passing, the price of RAM was rising and the question arose: What about Steam Machine? Well what happens is that Valve is desperate. They have already said that it will be released this year (in principle it was going to be spring), it seems that it will be expensive and, in addition, they have pointed directly to the crisis in the supply problems they are having with his other console, the Steam Deck. With this panorama, Valve has appeared at the GDC fair to explain its vision of the console/PC and, in an environment full of manufacturers and professionals, launched a request to the public: If you have access to a large amount of RAM, we are in the market and we would like to buy it.” Complicated. It is a humorous comment, but also somewhat symptomatic. Valve has the money as punishment, but it is not even close to being a premium customer of those few foundries capable of creating RAM. If even Apple can have a bad time, being the second client of the giant TSMCValve does not even enter the annex in the memory request sheet. There are analyzes of all kinds about the consequences of this crisis. In it mobile market will feel a strong bloweven targeting manufacturers that will have to stop launching devices due to market conditions. But on PC, things are more or less the same, with global shipments forecast to be 11% less than the previous year. Captain after the fact. It’s no longer that the Steam Machine may or may not come out, it’s that if it does come out, it would be very expensive. It is something similar to what would happen with the rumored PlayStation 6 that could have seen the light this year and about which we already know that we will not have news in the short term. And here the big question may arise: why didn’t Valve release the Steam Machine when they announced it? Obviously, there were units prepared because they were shown to the press and, furthermore, it is not cutting-edge hardware, so it would have been easy to have it on the market in November 2025. But of course, the situation escalated at a dizzying pace and launching a console at X price and two months later raising it by 200 euros due to the price of RAM or, even worse, stopping selling it because you don’t have units available would have been a tremendous blow. Not so much to the coffers, which in the end with Steam they get a good pinch, but to the reputation. And it is clear that a second disastrous launch of a Steam Machine is something that Valve cannot afford. Now we just have to wait to see when they will be able to launch the machine and, above all, if the price corresponds to components that have already been available for five months. they seemed somewhat fair to us for the most demanding games. Images | DOTA2 The International In Xataka | The price of RAM has skyrocketed and the best example to see the debacle is a 100 euro PC: the Raspberry Pi

We tend to think that the war of extermination was invented by the modern State. A mass grave from 2,800 years ago has just destroyed the myth

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There is an almost romantic tendency to idealize the remote past. Perhaps, inspired by the myth of the “noble savage” they often let’s imagine prehistory and the first societies as peaceful environments where extreme violence and systematic was an aberration or, in any case, an invention that came with the help of more modern times. But the reality is that if we had a time machine, this would be one of the few places where we would have to travel. A reality. Archeology has an uncomfortable habit of unearthing truths that do not fit our prejudices. The latest blow to this idyllic vision that some may have comes from the Balkans, specifically from a mass grave in Gomolava from 2,800 years ago that reveals a calculated, selective and brutal massacre against women and children. A mystery. In the 9th century BC, during the first Iron Age, the Carpathian and Balkan region was inhabited by societies that we today consider primitive. Specifically, they could be found semi-nomadic groups and sedentary communities who were beginning to clash for control of the territory. But here there were neither states nor regular armies. In this way, when archaeologists found a huge mass grave with the remains of 77 individuals at the Gomolava site, the first hypothesis was the most logical for the time: a catastrophic epidemic devastated everyone. However, a new study published in the magazine Naturehas completely rewritten the history of this site, combining forensic, genetic and isotopic analyses. Annihilation. Here the DNA was clear, since there was no trace of deadly pathogens. In this case, people died not from a disease, but from an outbreak of deliberate violence that has shocked the scientific community. Not only because of the violence, but because of the demographic profile, since 70.8% of the adults were women and 66% of the total were children and adolescents. Here the forensic analyzes revealed a terrifying pattern, since the vast majority had injuries at the time of death in the skull. Thus, they were forceful blows inflicted from above, suggesting that the attackers could have been on horseback or executing the victims while they were kneeling or subdued. Why children and women? The answer is pure strategic calculation, since the study of isotopes and DNA revealed that, with the exception of a mother and her two daughters, the victims were not related to each other and came from various regions with varied diets. But it was not a simple robbery gone wrong, but rather an interregional selective annihilation designed to wipe the reproductive future of rival groups off the map. And, in a context of profound social restructuring and territorial conflicts in the Carpathian Basin, eliminating offspring and those people who can produce even more offspring, such as women, was the most brutal and effective way to assert power in an area. Without a doubt, a great strategy to prevent anyone from claiming rights in that area. Ritual. To add another layer of complexity to this dark episode, the burial was not improvised. Contrary to what happens in many mass graves that are quickly made to throw the corpses, andIn this case they took their time. Investigators saw that the victims were buried next to bronze jewelry, ceramics and even sacrificed animals, so it was quite taken care of. Here the theory proposed is that it is a “macabre demonstration of power”: an act where the brutality of the massacre coexists with the socioeconomic value of the victims and the need to maintain the funeral customs of the time. Image | Sarah Nylund (Nature) In Xataka | When did human beings start “cooking”? The answer lies in some carp from 780,000 years ago.

beaches destroyed and unusable now that the season begins

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Now that the rains have lost relevance and everything is, little by little, returning to normal: Andalusia is beginning to realize that the winter storms have left much more than accumulated water: they have left a much more uncomfortable truth than the community is willing to accept. Because now Easter is coming and the “Andalusian paradise of sun and beach” has become a succession of destroyed promenades, damaged infrastructure and stretches where the beaches are completely missing. It’s something we knew and didn’t want to see. It is something that the storm is going to force us directly. What has happened? The first part of the story is simple and we have repeated it many times: trains of storms, persistent rains, water systems at the edge of their capacity. But also bad sea, wind and huge waves. As a consequence, while we were all 100% aware of overflows and reservoirs, several provinces have seen how the loss of sand and damage to coastal infrastructure became our daily bread. Huelva, we have already talked about ithas taken the worst part. And yes, the Andalusian Parliament has asked the central government (who has powers in the Coasts) for “stabilization, protection and restoration” works through emergency means. But even if they arrive, that will only be a temporary arrangement. The Andalusia that also lives off its coasts. Beyond the stereotypes, there are many Andalusias. And yes, one of them (or several) lives off its coasts. In 2025, without going any further, tourism broke his own record of visitors and income: we are talking about 37.9 million visitors and more than 30 billion. Now the calendar is tight and the problem has become evident, but the urgency cannot make us forget that it was there from the first moment. Because? As experts remember, the profile of the beaches “it constantly changes in response to changes in transverse sediment transport produced by marine dynamics, especially waves.” This “has never changed in all of history”, what has changed is that in recent decades it has begun to matter to us. How much we have changed. Well, because the emergence of mass tourism starting in the 1960s turned beaches into a very valuable resource and filled them with investments, infrastructure and capital. When the beaches began to change, we applied brute force: as we have explained on more than one occasion“the construction of breakwaters, the annual filling of beaches and the construction of coastal infrastructure to ‘secure’ the line have been the daily routine of our relationship with the beaches.” And as we have more and more investments in them, the problems become more critical and, for this reason, it is more expensive to insure these investments. But we can’t. It’s a race to nowhere; because, nowhere, can we answer the big questions left by the storms: will we be able to withdraw from the eroded front line in an orderly and fair manner? Will we be able to convert that tourism into something that maintains jobs, families and population? Will we be able to understand that behind these rains lies an entire country with a huge problem or will we continue as before? Image | Suomi In Xataka | Twenty years after the Prestige, Galicia faces another environmental disaster on its beaches: pellets

AI has already destroyed the world of programmers as we knew it. Now it’s the turn of the translators

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On November 8, 1519, an extraordinary meeting took place: Hernán Cortés met with Emperor Moctezuma II. Of course, neither one nor the other understood anything of what their interlocutor was saying: Hernán Cortés spoke Spanish and Moctezuma spoke Nahuatl, but that problem was solved thanks to two chain translators: Malinche translated from Nahuatl to Mayan, and Jerónimo de Aguilar went from Mayan to Spanish, and vice versa. History is full of legendary translations like that one, and in all of them, human beings depended on human translators to understand the other party. That has been changing with various technologies, but the one that is really about to change everything is AI. With AI we have found (and translated) In fact, translation technology has run parallel to technological evolution itself. From the translation based on rules of the second half of the 20th century we moved in the 90s to the automatic statistical translations which, for example, ended up using Google Translate. These systems looked for the “most likely” translation, not the “most correct” one. These statistical models improved with the phrase-based translationbut The final leap was made by DeepLwhich appeared in 2017 to change everything with the use of neural networks and neural machine translation. Google had also started to adopt that system in 2016, and it was clear what the path was. With the arrival of generative AI we have found ourselves with another potential leap in this field. There are, however, differences: these systems are based on large language models (LLM) that are then trained and tuned specifically for translationwhich a priori gives them an advantage when it comes to achieving more natural and versatile translations. The application of AI models to the field of translation seems to be following in the footsteps of what we have seen with programming. Developers have embraced this revolution and many of us have realized it thanks to the vibe coding that it is possible to program without knowing how to program. The same clearly occurs with these systems that enable us to know how to speak languages ​​that we don’t actually know how to speak. Machines do it for us, and they do it better and more immediately. The real-time translation is very fashionable and both Google and Meta—which has been warning for a long time— they are integrating it into their current or future glasses augmented reality. Apple, which does not usually launch things that are not mature, has just integrated it on your AirPods. The user experience may not perfect at the momentbut it is clear that this type of function is going to become more and more common, a commodity technological more. The transition And this transition that wants to turn access to quality translations into something “trivial” has been made evident these days with the launch of two platforms. The first, the ChatGPT Translatorwhich is surprising not because it is an obvious and simple use case for AI, but because it is a logical indiscriminate copy of the services that already work, Google Translate and DeepL. Being able to do the same with AI shows that that problem seems solved. The translation of Gemma 3 27B was already good. TranslateGemma’s is even better, even with smaller models and challenging language pairs. And if it didn’t seem like it enough, Google has just presented its new generative AI models specifically aimed at translation. It is about TranslateGemmaa family with versions 4B, 12B and 27B (the latter, logically, the most capable) that allow these tasks to be carried out locally, privately and without connection to the cloud. They support 55 language pairs and of course they are prepared for the most popular ones (English, Spanish, Chinese, French, Hindi), but their creators already indicate that they are training them with 500 additional language pairs for the future. We are therefore facing a moment in which learning a language will probably end up becoming something more vocational or aspirational than something that we really need on a daily basis. Human translators, like human programmers, will still have valuebut once again what is clear is that AI is going to make this type of capability more accessible than ever. In Xataka | Some of the emails you read may not say exactly what was written. A forgotten Gmail setting is to blame

When the Pope dies, his rooms are sealed and his ring is destroyed. It is the beginning of a ritual that ends in white smoke

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As Cardinal Kevin Farrel has confirmed, the Pope Francis has died At 88 years of age. With his death, a protocol as old as ancient, a meticulous process designed for centuries of ecclesiastical tradition has been automatically activated. This has begun a kind of choreography of ancestral rituals that regulate the transition of the most emblematic spiritual power in the world. These are all the phases that will end in white smoke. Sealed for centuries. As we said, after the death of the pontiffthe head of the Vatican Health Department, the Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrellcurrent head of the position, ha officially verified Death. The body will now be transferred to the Pope’s private chapel, dressed in a white cassock and liturgical ornaments, and placed in a zinc -lined wood coffin. Next to him They will be deposited His miter, the canopy and a bag with coins of his pontificate, in addition to a “rogito”, a scroll that summarizes his life and legacy, which will be read aloud before closing the coffin. Meanwhile, the Pope’s private room, located in the Santa Marta housewill be sealed, and the fisherman’s ring (the official seal of the Pontiff) will be ceremonially destroyed with a small hammer to prevent any type of falsifications. Farrell will write a Official Death Act and will be responsible for ensuring the Pontiff’s personal documents. The period called then begins vacant headquartersduring which ecclesial leadership is in the hands of the Cardinals College, but without faculties to make transcendental decisions until the new successor is chosen. Public tribute. Faithful to his style austere and away from the boatoFrancisco had already reformulated the rules Papal funeral home in 2024. He did it by eliminating many elements of the traditional pomp. Namely: your body will not be Exposed in a catafalco high or transferred for private views of ecclesiastical hierarchs, but will be displayed directly inside the coffin in the Basilica of San Pedro so that the people can pay tribute. Thus the nine -day mourning will begin to be known as novel. Francisco had abolished the tradition of the three coffins for the deceased pontiffs, replacing them with A single simple coffin of wood and zinc. This decision, contained in the new edition of the Ordo Exsequiarum Romani PontificisI was looking for (in words From the master of liturgical ceremonies, Diego Ravelli) “show that the funeral of the Roman pontiff is that of a pastor and disciple of Christ, not that of a powerful man in the world.” Funeral without ostentation. The procession to the temple will be directed by Camarlengo Farrel, and the Cardinals College will set the date of the funeral, planned between four and six days After death (that is, from Monday). Throughout nine days, funeral masses and prayers will be held throughout Rome. In addition, and contrary to the custom of burying the Pontiff in the Vatican crypts, Francisco has also arranged REposar in the Basilica of Santa María la Mayor, place of deep personal devotion and frequent fate of prayer during his papacy. With this choice it will become the First Pope in a century in being buried outside of San Pedro. The conclave. Fifteen to twenty days after death, the College of Cardinals will be summoned by its dean, the cardinal Giovanni Battista reto give Start the conclave which will designate the new Pontiff. Only cardinals under 80 can vote (about 120 approximately) and all must swear absolute secret before being isolated in the Sistine Chapel, the sacred space that becomes the headquarters of the most hermetic and solemn process of the Church. By the way, the term conclave (From Latin cum key“Under key”) refers to the obligatory confinement that prevents delays and guarantees confidentiality. Voting, which can be repeated up to four times a day, require a two -thirds majority for a candidate to be chosen. White smoke After each vote, the ballots are burned together with chemical additives that generate smoke: black if there is no agreement, white if there is. Once the consensus is reached, the chosen one is asked if he accepts the position and what papal name wishes to adopt. As a reference, Francisco’s choice (first non -European pontiff in 1,300 years.) He required five votes in 24 hours, but in the past there were conclaves that extended for months or even years. Habemus The new Pope is then dressed in the White Sotana in the next sacristy, and after greeting his voters, he goes to the central balcony of the Basilica of San Pedro. There, before thousands of faithful gathered in the square and millions of viewers worldwide, a cardinal announces in a solemn voice: Habemus Papam. Now, the new Pontiff greets and offers his first blessing Urbi et Orbithus opening a new chapter in the millenary history of Catholicism. No doubt, the figure of the Pope, in addition to being a spiritual guidance of more than one billion faithful, exerts a remarkable moral and diplomatic influence on the global scenario, and his choice will surely be observed with attention both by believers and by international leaders. Meanwhile, Francisco’s legacy (marked by a preaching focused on humility, social justice and institutional reform) will be sealed not only in his Rogitobut also in the memory of an era in which the throne was occupied by a man who chose to “walk among his.” The truth is that the death of a Pope remains an event of enormous global resonance, wrapped in a solemnity and a symbolism that transcends the religious to become an expression of historical continuity and spiritual power in the 21st century. Image | Diariocritical, Penn State In Xataka | Pope Francis made his opinion clear about the medical ethics of the end of life. The one we do not know is that of the Vatican In Xataka | In the sixteenth century it was believed that coffee was a satanic drink. So Pope Clemente VIII decided to “baptize him”

that of 1755, the disaster that destroyed the city and changed science

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Earthquakes in Lisbon can be more or less intenseto have greater or lesser reach and unleash or not alarm, but since the mid -eighteenth century all (whether strong, medium or slight) have something in common: in addition to stirring the ground, they remove the memory. Ease in the Portuguese capital is synonymous with 1755. of disaster. Of destruction. Of Thousands of dead. And also, in its own way, of regeneration. It is so for a very simple reason: in Lisbon it is impossible for the soil to be stirred without the Lisbon remembers The drama that their great -grandparents lived (and perhaps some more tátara) on all the saints of 1755, when in a matter of a few hours the city trembled, burned and sank. Literally. The tremor recorded yesterday afternoon in the Lisbon Metropolitan Areaof Magnitude 4.7 And to which two other mild ones have happened today, 2.8 and 2.3they are no exception and (as has already happened with another similar In August of magnitude 5,3) dusting the memory of 1755. A November morning … The history of the earthquake that He swept Lisbon In 1755, there has been thousands of times and in almost all chronicles a circumstance is highlighted that continues to fascinate even today, 270 years after the disaster: its date. The ground trembled on the morning of November 1, All Saints’ Day, with the devotees Catholics praying in the temples and large amount of candles lit in honor of the deceased. Maybe it seems silly, but ultimately it turned out A key detail. Thanks to testimonies such as the English Reverend Charles Davywho remembered that autumal morning prior to the earthquake as the “most beautiful”, we know that Towards 9.30 a.m. The Lisbon gathered in the city’s temples felt a rumble. The noise was so intense, so loud, that Davy believed that it was a carriage march. “I soon disappointed myself, I discovered that it was due to a type of strange and frightening noise underground, similar to distant and hollow rumble of a thunder “, He recalled The British. It was right. That rumble was not caused by the wheels and horses of the horses as they moved on the cobblestone of Lisbon, but an earthquake that the researchers They still study today. In July 2021, without going any further, Nature public An article that deepened in Its causes and tectonic origin. What neither Davy nor the rest of the inhabitants of Lisbon could know in 1755 is that the city would not be shaken by a single earthquake. They happened two or three tremors Of which the second was, from afar, the most intense. Today it is estimated that it reached a magnitude of between 8.5 and 9 On the Richter scale, almost double that it shook yesterday the capital and superior to the one that hit Morocco in 2023. From the Institut de Ciènces del Mar They clarify In fact, one of the natural events is considered ” more destructive in history from Europe “. Temples fell. Palacios fell. Public buildings fell. And houses fell. Earthquakes and something else 1755 Maybe it is far behind in time, but the Lisbon of then reacted to the tremors in the same way that we would do today: they sought refuge. A good part of the survivors of the first earthquake, regardless of sex or rank ran to the great open square next to the Tajo River. There Mr. Braddick, an English merchant whose testimony He rescued years ago The BBC was found to swirled. There they cried mercy to heaven. And there they were surprised by the second shock of the ground, which like Braddick tells, “The ruin completed” of the buildings that had already been damaged. It is not necessary to imagine it. One of the forced stops for tourists visiting Lisbon is naked Gothic arcade of the church of Convent do carmoone of the architectural victims of that unfortunate day. Just as if a drama in three acts were, the earthquakes that shook Lisbon’s foundations were only the beginning. The earthquake generated a tsamot with waves of between six and nine meters(It was felt Also in Cádizleaving thousands of victims) that unloaded violently in the lower part of the city. In less than an hour The water crashed into the Paseo Marítimo, where it surprised not a few Lisbon who had sought refuge in La Ribera. There is even more. The disaster was accompanied by fires that were probably aggravated by the overturned stoves and the vote candles lit for the deceased. Years ago the National Geographic Institute published A monograph in which the devastation generated by the flames, which lasted for five or six days. “As soon as it obscured, the entire city It seemed to shinewith such a bright light that could be read. You could say without exaggeration that there were fires in at least one hundred places at the same time “, Reverend Davy recountswho confirms that the fires lasted almost a week, “without interruption.” A tragedy and a change The result? Just a few years later Voltaire I pointed critically in his work Naive that the disaster had taken “three quarters” of Lisbon. Other sources They go further And they suggest that the tremors, the tsunami and the fire “almost completely” the Portuguese capital and knocked down around 12,000 homes. The balance is in any case bleak, just like the balance of victims. Depending on the source that is handled, there is talk of 10,000 Deaths, 30,000, 60,000 or even 90,000. A barbarity if one takes into account that at that time Lisbon would have between 200,000 and 300,000 inhabitants. Such was the debacle that is told that Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marqués de Pombalhe advised King José I be pragmatic: he played “rescue the living and bury the dead.” The 1755 disaster was not only felt in the balance of deaths, injured, missing and buildings, squares, roads and crumbled temples. In its way … Read more

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