developed

PLD Space, one step away from becoming the company that has developed an orbital rocket the fastest

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Whether in the Elche factory, on a test bench at Teruel airport or on the launch pad under construction in French Guiana, PLD Space is abuzz. The company advances one milestone per week and he tells us why: the Miura 5 rocket is practically ready at the design level. “I would tell you that it is 99%,” says Raúl Torres, CEO of the company, in an interview with Xataka. Candidate to become the Europe’s first private orbital rocketthe Miura 5 is about to finish the Critical Design Review (CDR) and take shape for the first time. “Now we are finishing the QM1 qualification models and starting the QM2, which means that shortly, and I’ll leave it there, we are going to have a first teachable Miura 5,” he reveals for the first time. This first fully integrated model will not fly, but will allow PLD to close engineering fronts and carry out key tests before the end of the year. If everything goes according to plan, the rocket chosen to take off will begin assembly in January. “The idea would be that in May we would be in Guyana to start doing the combined tests with the French space agency CNES,” confirms Torres, adjusting the schedule that originally pointed to a launch at the end of 2025. It is not an unexpected adjustment, but it was pending official confirmation since Chris Larmour, founder of Orbex, PLD’s British competitor, 1,000 euros were bet with Raúl Torres that the Miura 5 would not fly in 2025. Raúl accepted the bet. Will he pay Larmour now? “We have invited him to come sign the rocket at the end of the year, we are waiting for him to answer us,” says Torres. “I would like Orbex to also invite me at the end of the year to sign their rocket. Mine is going to sign it, so I only have to pay half of the bet.” Works in Guayana, lighting in Teruel If the Miura 5 flies in early 2026, PLD Space will be one of the fastest companies to have developed an orbital launcher, which is even more impressive considering the Spanish company’s financing compared to several of its competitors. But PLD Space is not starting from scratch. The successful launch of the Miura 1 suborbital rocket in October 2023 was the graduation of a team that now faces a higher challenge. “Miura 1 has been like primary school, ESO and high school, and now we are at university,” explains Torres. “That is why we have developed Miura 5 so quickly, because we have gone one step ahead with many developments.” Technologies such as the stage power system, cryogenic protections or the welding techniques of the Miura 5 are a direct inheritance from its little brother. However, “university” brings new and more complicated subjects. The most obvious technological leap is in the Miura 5 engines. The five TEPREL-C of the first stage and the vacuum-optimized TEPREL-C of the second They are beasts of another categoryespecially due to the introduction of turbopumps. PLD has developed most of the critical components in-house, such as liquid oxygen and kerosene valves. Combustion chambers are manufactured by electroplating copper and nickel, turbopump housings are 3D printed, and high-precision rotating components are machined. The objective is to achieve a production rate that allows one engine to be manufactured every two weeks in the Elche warehouse. PLD Space passed a fundamental milestone on October 6 with the first static ignition of a fully integrated TEPREL-C Vac in its facilities at Teruel airport. With 75 kN of thrust, it is one of the most powerful vacuum engines ever powered by a private company in Europe. But the real muscle of the rocket will be in the five TEPREL-C engines responsible for takeoff. Each one has 190 kN of thrust, almost double than its competitors. When will we see the first roar of a Miura 5 with the TEPREL-C fully integrated? “In one quarter you should expect the long and qualification tests of both the first and second stages, and also the restart test of both engines,” Torres told Xataka. To validate each component, PLD Space has also deployed new infrastructure at the Teruel airport. The T3 bench has been the protagonist of the static and compression tests of the rocket structures. Valves and gas generators are tested on bench T6. Bench T7 will be used for qualification of first stage Teprel-C engines and second stage long duration ignitions. The T9 bench will be used to test the separation between the first and second stages. Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic, PLD Space construction in French Guiana has begun. PLD has become the first New Space company to begin construction of its own launch base at the Guyana Space Center. “It is very likely that Miura 5 will be before Kourou’s works,” says Torres. The first structures of the launch pad They are being built in Spain. The rocket should arrive in South America in May. Advances in reuse since flight 1 Inspired by SpaceX, PLD does not conceive of a modern launcher without reuse. And their plan for the Miura 5 is to start collecting landing data from the first flight. If it achieves stage separation on its debut launch, the rocket will perform a maneuver boostback like that of the Falcon 9. “In flight one mission, in the test flight that we will do next year, we are going to try to re-enter the stage,” confirms Torres. After separation, the rocket will turn around and turn on its central engine for a few seconds to brake. “The booster will be ready to re-enter. We don’t want to miss the slightest opportunity to collect data.” And he talks about data because he does not expect to recover the rocket. “Evidently, it’s not going to happen the first time.” The first flight won’t even have a parachute. The main objective is to survive reentry from a hypersonic speed at Mach … Read more

A company has developed a head that gestures like a human

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When we think of a convincing humanoid, we imagine him looking into our eyes, blinking and accompanying the words with gestures that give context. Robotics advances at a good pace and there are machines that Solve acrobatics with solvencybut they still transmit more mechanics than humanity. What is missing for interaction to flow is the gesture that completes the message. In recent months, ads and tests in China have started exploring that layer. From muscle to the face. For a long time, the bar was to get a robot to move autonomy and exceed resistance tests. That chapter begins to be resolved with increasingly solid models in the mechanical plane. What is now raised is another challenge: reproducing the nonverbal communication that people take for granted. From a gesture of approval to a surprise reaction, they are signs that open the door to a real dialogue between humans and machines. A head that gestures. The Chinese company Aheadform has shown a prototype that materializes this transition. In a video broadcast on YouTube You see a robotic head that blinks, nods and follows the environment with a surprisingly convincing look. The company, founded in 2024, Explain on your website that its objective is to achieve more natural interactions between people and machines. To do this, it seeks to integrate advanced language models with realistic facial expressions that allow to respond in real time. Under the ‘skin: To make the prototype look alive engines Brushlesssmall silent devices capable of coordinating precise movements. The model, baptized as Origin M1, integrates up to 25 of these actuators that control the different expressions. In their pupils, cameras are hidden that allow registering what happens around, while microphones and speakers facilitate real -time interaction. The combination of these elements explains subtle movements and response capacity. Integration of a robotic head of Aheadform into an experimental body The company ensures that the usefulness of these developments will go beyond the simple technical demonstration. It projects scenarios such as customer service, teaching or health care, where trust is also built with gestures and expressions. The approach is that a robot that smiles or nods more close than one with a neutral face. For now, these are declared intentions: the models are not commercially available. Academic support. Behind the video there is also peer reviewed research. In Science Robotics, in 2024Yuhang Hu and several collaborators presented a robot capable of predicting and reproducing human expressions as they occurred. The study provided evidence that real -time facial recognition and synchronized mechanical response are possible. It does not confirm that the current prototype is the same study system, but is consistent with the orientation that the company describes. Aheadform works in robotic heads with pupils that hide cameras An effort that goes further. China’s will to place humanoid robotics in the front line is a reality. It is not only about heads capable of gesturing, but also public exhibitions where complete bodies are tested. In the CMG World Robot Contest Series held in Hangzhou, for example, Four Unitree G1 starred in fighting Kickboxing Transmitted by TV. These humanoids showed coordination and agility, in a staging that reinforced the narrative of a country determined to lead the sector. The most recent closure of this agenda was the Half Marathon of Beijing, in which 21 robots toured a circuit parallel to that of human corridors. The organization highlighted the uniqueness of the event, but the implementation showed limitations: permanent technical assistance, battery replacement and route separation. Images | Aheadform In Xataka | Goal has begun to show its game in robotics. What you are looking for is clear: to be the Android of the robots thanks to the software

They have developed their own language

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New York and rats is a long story. Also disgusting. But above all it is a struggle without barracks for trying to end a plague that does not stop reproducing from God knows when. Last year the photo was, if possible, a little more tremendous: they were no longer rats, They were super -trarates and a notice for the rest of large cities. In 2025 a red line was reached: they were growing at 300% And nobody had the slightest idea of ​​how to avoid it. Now we have a clue: it turns out that they have their own language. An unexpected emblem. From its origins as new Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, New York has accumulated iconic symbols that identify it in the collective imaginary: the “I ❤ NY” shirts, the pizza, Broadway. But he has also lived with a much less glamorous companion and persistently associated with his identity: The damn rats. It is calculated that today Three million are arounda figure equivalent to a third of the human population of the city, and that are an inseparable part of the urban ecosystem. That ubiquitous character makes them object of study privileged to understand how animal life adapts to the city and how the limits between the human and the wild blur in large urban concentrations. An innovative study. Thus, a team of scientists from New York and Germany it was proposed to analyze the behavior of the Rattus norvegicus New York using avant -garde technologies. Namely: artificial intelligence to identify movement patterns, thermal cameras to follow ultrasonic displacements and recordings to capture their vocalizations. The objective was to verify to what extent these urban rats differed from the profiles described in general studies on the species. The results, published in The Biorxiv platformthey have shown that rats modulate their “language” dynamically, adjusting their ultrasonic chillidos to The intensity of ambient noise that surrounds them. On the surface, in parks and sidewalks, they communicated with less power, while in the bustle of the subway the intensity of their vocalizations shot to be heard among the rumble of trains and crowds. An adapted language. Thanks to deep neuronal networks that allowed to analyze spectrograms and measure acoustic differences, the researchers verified that the vocalizations of New York rats They were of shorter duration and were outside the frequency ranges typically described for the species in other contexts. It was, in short, own languageborn of the need to be heard in a deafening metropolis. One of the researchers, Emily Mackevicius, He related an example Revealing: In the full step of an ambulance, the ultrasonic squeaky of rodents appeared in the spectrogram above the siren, inaudible shouts for the human ear but effective in their universe. The rats, in other words, had learned to raise your voice about the noise of the city. Amazing (or acongojante). Social dynamics. Plus: the Video observations They also contributed keys to the social life of rodents. Young specimens, even in learning of fodder strategies, They moved in a groupin contrast to adults, more lonely. This difference suggests a flexible social structure adapted to experience and the need for protection. The researchers They underline That, beyond the usual cartoon of the New York rodent as a plague, its behavior reveals complex cognitive and social dynamics that deserve to be understood in their own ecological context. The biology of cities. He Rat study New York points to a broader challenge: understanding the biology of urban environments as an essential field of research for the future. If by 2050 almost seven out of ten people They will live in citiesthe interaction with species adapted to these habitats will be, if it fits, more and more intense. Animals that survive and thrive in the city, from rats to pigeons, foxes or mapaches, are not mere uncomfortable companions, but actors of a shared ecosystem. The finding that New York rodents have developed own languageadjusted to the noise of the metropolis, not only illuminates its ability to adapt, but also raises a most disturbing mirror: the city itself molds the voices and behaviors of those who inhabit it, humans and animals equally, in a continuous biological experiment that defines the present and anticipates the future of urban life. Image | G. Scott Segler, Caruba In Xataka | Rats are growing to 300% in some cities in the world. And the problem is that we have no idea how to avoid it In Xataka | NEW YORK LIVES A PLAGA OF SUPERRATES. It is a notice for the rest of the big cities

Overcoming our brain when making the purchase is not easy. Some researchers have developed a tool to achieve it

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“Codazo theory.” It’s how we could translate Anglo -Saxon expression, “Nudge Theory”, Which refers to the study of actions focused on giving us A “little push” Towards a specific decision. The concept is especially used in the context of the behavioral economy, That place where the economy is mixed with psychology. We know that companies often resort to these “pushcins” to lead us to purchases that generate more benefits but can we use this tool to improve health? Digital tool. The answer is yes, and there are many researchers who work to develop this type of tools. The last It has been developed By a team of Duke-Nus Medical School and it is a digital tool that aims to facilitate the task of choosing healthier products in our purchase on-line. An imperfect system. Choosing healthier food products is not always easy. Yes, we can always make sure that our purchase car is full of fruits, vegetables and other basic foods to cook at home, but this option is not always realistic. Labeling systems such as Nutriscore They can help us choose better, but they have Important limitations. The first is that evaluating the healthy of a product in a simple index is not always easy and sometimes leads us to important inconsistencies. The second, that this index must compete with marketing strategies that seek to buy a product, regardless of how healthy or ceases to be. Beyond labeling. To exceed these limitations, Duke-Nus’s team designed a digital tool destined to facilitate a purchase on-line better informed at nutritional level. This tool complemented the information available on the Internet purchase page, adding additional information. This additional information included a traffic light based on the index Nutriscore of products, complemented with other tools. First, the page ordered the products based on this index, first showing the healthiest products instead of doing it alphabetically. Second, the tool incorporated the follow -up of the products in the purchase car, indicating what proportion of food was labeled as green, yellow or red. Third, the digital tool also showed healthy alternatives (with similar prices and characteristics) to selected products. Studying alternatives. The team tested the tool through an experiment. They asked a group of participants to make three purchases on-line over three to six weeks. Some of the participants used this tool, while others used the conventional portal. The team observed that the purchase cars of the people of the intervention group scored better in the nutritional index. They also contained less calories, less fat in total and less saturated fats, less sugar and less salt. The details of the study were published In an article In the magazine American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Public health issue. By will or necessity, there are many people who seek to eat healthier, and that begins in a healthier purchase. Achieving it for oneself is not easy, but it is not to help these people without falling into prohibitions and Tax Methods. Here is like the behavior economy and Nudge Theory They can help us: the same tool often used to take us to more advantageous options for sellers can also be used to improve the health of consumers who wish to improve their diet. In Xataka | The three expert tricks so that they do not lead you with food labeling, according to one of the country’s biggest specialists Image | Lothar Boris Piltz

We are very close to having a “ozempic in pill.” His main competitor has developed it

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The success of drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy either Zepbound He has unleashed a career in pharmaceutical laboratories around the world. These are based on compounds originally devised as treatments against type 2 diabetes but have devastated as weight loss formulas. Orforglipron. The American pharmaceutical has successfully overcome The third phase of your clinical trials. As the company explains, this formula is the first drug in its class to pass this test, the first oral agonist of LPG-1 receptors of a small molecule that can be consumed without restrictions on water or food consumption. GLP-1 agonist. Orforglipron, such as the semaglutida on which Ozempic and Wegovy are based, is an agonist of the peptide receptors similar to glucagon-1 (LPG-1), that is, it is based on a molecule that emulates this hormone that produces our body. LPG-1 is a peptide that is released in our body when we eat and transmits the message that we have eaten two recipients for two different purposes. On the one hand, this message transmits to the pancreas so that it begins to segregate the insulin that our body will require to metabolize the sugar consumed. Hence, this type of compound is used in patients with type 2 diabetes. The second message is transmitted to the brain, which interprets it as a feeling of satiety. Achieve The Achieve-1 trial, framed in the Achieve program, was carried out with the objective of evaluating the safety and efficacy of Orforglipron, contrasting its administration with the administration of a placebo in adults with type 2 diabetes and inappropriate glycemic control. The experiment also studied different dosages in the participants. The responsible team observed that, after 40 weeks, the average blood glucose levels They differ satisfactorily between the experimental group and the control group. The study also showed a reduction in the body mass of those who consumed the drug. “It is a pleasure to see that our last medicine (…) meets our expectations of safety and tolerability, glycemic control and weight loss, and we are waiting for additional readings of the data throughout this year,” indicated in a press release David A. Ricks, President and CEO of Lilly. The details of these clinical trials will be presented in the scientific sessions of the ADA (American Diabetes Association), as well as in a magazine in an article reviewed by pairs. Adverse effects. One of the most important purposes of clinical trials is the detection of possible adverse effects with which to evaluate whether the drug involves any important risk and if its possible adverse effects are compensated or not by their medical benefit. The side effects detected are not very different from those already found in treatments such as Ozempic. The most common adverse effects were gastrointestinal and “generally between soft and moderate in severity”: diarrhea, nausea, dyspepsia vomiting (indigestion or empacho) or constipation. Those responsible for the study indicated that no hepatic security problems were detected. A key step. Overcoming this third phase of clinical trials is a fundamental step for the arrival of the drug to pharmacies but does not imply its immediate approval. The final green light will have to give it the regulatory agencies of pharmacological products such as the US FDA or the European EMA. In Xataka | Ozempic will soon become a thing of the past: this is what we know about the new generation of drugs for weight loss Image | JESHOTS.com

135,000 years ago, humans had developed a key component of universal culture: language

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A way of thinking about thousands of languages ​​spoken by humanity is visualizing them as branches of a tree, thus drawing The evolution of these languages over time. If we move forward in time, we will see the diversification of some languages ​​and the death of others. If we invest the time needle we can see the branch or the common trunk that joins some languages ​​with others. For example, if we draw the history of Galician and Romanian, we will see in Latin the common origin of these languages ​​spoken in remote areas of Europe. We can do the same exercise looking for the common trunk between Latin and the Swedish. For this we would have to go to prehistoric times, to a common trunk we call protoindoeuropeo And what would have been spoken Around 5,000 years. However, this does not serve to unite all the languages ​​spoken by humanity in the same tree. We do not know of a link that one languages ​​native to the Americas, the languages ​​of Asia and Oceania or the African languages ​​with the protoindeuropean. We do not even need to leave Europe to find languages ​​without known relationship: we can draw the common origin of the Finn and Hungarian, but we cannot unite these languages ​​to the Indo -European trunk. That leaves us with two possibilities. The first is that perhaps humans began to speak time after beginning the migratory movements that would lead us to adapt to life in various territories, which would imply that several native languages ​​arose independently. That is, there are several independent trees. The second indicates that this common trunk exists, but changes in languages ​​and the absence of written testimony and time have erased all trace of this native language in the known, alive or dead languages. All languages ​​have a common trunk, but perhaps we never find out their characteristics. The question of the original language can be presented as the problem of the egg and the chicken: what happened first, the appearance of speech or geographical disintegration of the human species? The interconnection between language and expansion of humanity is not mere curiosity because answering a question can help us Date more accurately Two of the key events in human evolution. A recent study He analyzed the issue through a review of scientific literature published in the last 18 years. The work examined 15 genetic studies that through different methodologies They tried to answer the question of when the populations of H. sapiensThey began to break down and lose contact with each other. The 15 works included three based on the chromosome information and, the patrilinerally inherited chromosome; Three focused on mitochondrial DNA, inherited matrilinerally; and the rest studied the set of human chromosomes. The team made a meta -analysis, a quantitative study based on the results compiled in the compiled works, to obtain a new estimate of the last era in which in which All humanity shared spaces In the same region. The estimate indicated that this happened about 135,000 years ago. The team concludes from this data that human language had to have an origin prior to this original diaspora. They start from the idea that, if language had not existed in this origin, we should have found any human society without language or, at least, with a radically different communicative form from what we know as speaks. The details of the study were Published in an article In the magazineFrontiers in Psychology. An evolution in several phases But what exactly is speech? According to Explain the team itselfprevious studies had already pointed out that Other hominid speciesprevious to sapiens They had the ability to speak. The nuance is that this does not guarantee the existence of a language, however simple it is. The issue for the team is not when humans, H. sapiens Or other species, they began to emit sounds, but when they began to develop the language “as we know it”, that is, “combining vocabulary and grammar in a system”, a system capable of generating an indefinite amount of expressions based on their own rules. “Human language is quantitatively different because there are two things, words and syntax, which work at the same time to create this Very complex system”, explained in a press release Shigeru Miyagawa, study co -author. “No other animal has a corresponding structure in its communication system. And that gives us the ability to generate very sophisticated thoughts and communicate them with others.” Miyagawa and his team also refer to the archaeological record to support their conclusions. As they explain, the archaeological record that has left us evidence of the existence of the type of complex thought that supports the language, evidence that date back 100,000 years ago in time. The team refers to this to artifacts that denote a “symbolic activity”, such as objects in objects or the decorative use of the ocher, a pigment. We have known for a long time that H. sapiens It has not been the only human species capable of reaching these levels of abstraction. It is perhaps that is why The debate To what extent species like Neanderthals H. Neanderthalensis They could have developed speech or even language Be far from setting up. In your articleThe team indicates that, although the “complex behaviors” such as burials and body decoration They can also be associated with these species, ours would have been the only one to have systematized them throughout the population. In Xataka | We just found the lost link of human evolution: the first bone toolbox Image | Pxhere / Chivi1085

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