lost

The big problem with putting robots everywhere is that they get lost. An engineer from Elche believes she has the solution

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It is no surprise that we see more and more robots in our daily lives: in a restaurant bringing orders to the table, in the field as a seasonal workermaking him courier delivery competition…and that’s not to mention its applications in automation on an industrial scale. Robots don’t need to rest, they don’t have labor rights, and they don’t complain. But they get lost. And that is a real, very common problem for which a research team from the Miguel Hernández University of Elche has found solution. The context. Autonomous robots need to know where they are to function and that does not always happen: when the location reference is lost, either because someone moves it, it is turned off or the environment changes without warning, the robot is unable to recover its position. Something as normal as running out of battery can be a technical drama. This phenomenon is not something isolated, in fact it even has a name in robotics: the “kidnapped robot problem“. Although we see more and more robots everywhere, this incident is a pending issue that has not been resolved in a robust way for decades. Without going any further, because resorting to GPS is something that can fail in settings such as indoors or near tall buildings. As deepens Míriam Máximolead author of the article: “It is a classic problem and very difficult to solve, especially in large environments.” The solution. What the team from the University of Elche has implemented is MCL-DLF, the acronym for Monte Carlo Localization – Deep Local Feature, a system that combines two technologies: on the one hand, a 3D LiDAR that emits laser pulses to draw a three-dimensional map of the environment similar to that of robot vacuum cleaners. On the other hand, an artificial intelligence that learns which elements of the environment are most useful for orientation. Why is it important. Because having a reliable location system is essential for any robotic deployment in real life: autonomous vehicles, delivery and logistics, assistance… its presence may be increasingly common, but it is still tremendously dependent on supervision: knowing where it is is essential for it to operate safely. The implemented method also introduces an important change: it is independent, in that it does not require external infrastructure to function like GPS, so its base is more robust and versatile in the face of different use scenarios in the real world. How it works. Its approach is hierarchical, so it first recognizes large structures and then fine details, similar to how people do. When you arrive at an unknown place, first you keep the essentials: what neighborhood you are in, for example. Then you look for more specific references to refine further. Furthermore, the system does not play everything on one card: it maintains several position hypotheses simultaneously and discards or refines them as the sensor captures more information. Tests carried out for months on the university campus with different lighting conditions, vegetation or simply the weather have shown more consistency than conventional methods. A good start with pending subjects. Beyond its promising results, the most striking thing about this research is its commitment to sensory autonomy: it does not depend on networks of beacons or GPS, but on its own sensors. This makes it a potentially more versatile system. However, it faces the great historical challenge of robot placement: how fragile it is in the face of changing environments. It is true that they have tested it in different conditions, but it has been within the campus: making the leap to more complex and constantly changing environments is their litmus test, in addition to additional validation in extreme conditions. Finally, before an eventual real commercial deployment, we will have to see how it integrates with other navigation systems and its computational cost. In Xataka | Tesla has been building the Optimus for years. China has just presented itself with fifteen companies and factories already set up In Xataka | We already have so many “humanoid” robots that it is difficult to differentiate one from the other. This graph fixes it Cover | Enchanted Tools

Researchers have discovered “lost continents” from 4 billion years ago

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The idea we have of the early Earth involves a huge ball of incandescent magma and conditions incompatible with life. The problem? That there are no rocks from 4.3 billion years ago to confirm this consolidated theory. What we do have are some microscopic crystals called zircons. And zircons are telling a different story, according to this study by a research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. published in Nature. What zircon says. Regarding the behavior of the Earth’s surface, geology valued two ideas for that period known as Hadean: that there was a plate tectonics where one plate sinks under another or that the Earth had a kind of stagnant lid, a rigid and hot surface where heat only escaped through large columns of magma. Well, neither one nor the other, both: zircons leave evidence of an Earth that already had oceans, liquid water and a crust that alternated both systems. John Valley, the University of Wisconsin-Madison geoscientist who leads the study explains that “There were about 800 million years of Earth’s history in which the surface was already habitable, although we have no fossil evidence and we do not know when life first emerged.” Why it is important. Because they determine that the Earth did not choose a single model, but rather that both processes took place at the same time in different places. Of course, it was not a stable plate tectonics like the one that exists today, but rather it had violent and short episodes of sliding of the edges of one plate under another (subduction) that coexisted with large jets of magma that rose from the interior of the Earth. This discovery is key to understanding how the Earth’s surface moved, the formation of continents and life. On the one hand, without tectonics, the felsic continental crust that floats on the mantle and makes up the lands on which we live would not exist. On the other hand, plate tectonics regulates the climate and recycles nutrients, so knowing when it started working helps understand when the Earth became a place compatible with life. How they analyzed it. The John Valley team analyzed the popular zircons from Jack Hills (Western Australia). These sand-sized minerals are a kind of time capsule, housing the only direct record of Earth’s first 500 million years. They were looking for chemical “fingerprints” that would reveal where and how they were formed, for which they used technology WiscSIMS high resolution. They then compared the results of the analysis with other zirconiums from the Hadic Eon found in Barberton (South Africa). Each one told a different story. Surprises in the “DNA” of the mineral. 47% of oceanic zircons had high levels of Uranium compared to Niobium, indicating that they formed in subduction zones where ocean water sinks into the mantle. On the other hand, the South African zircons show that they were born from virgin rock from the planet’s interior, confirming the classic ‘stagnant lid’ theory by which the Earth’s first solid surface was rigid and immobile. Or what is the same: while in Australia the crust sank and created protocontinents, in what is now South Africa the Earth behaved differently, with a rigid and stagnant crust. That is, the early Earth was a mosaic of tectonic styles. The Earth did not go from being hell to what it is today overnight, but rather it was a hybrid process and generated the necessary conditions for life sooner than we thought. In Xataka | We know it as “the red planet”, but 3.37 billion years ago Mars was almost as blue as Earth In Xataka | 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, summarized in a spectacular video map Cover | Tomáš Malík and Javier Miranda

A dog was lost in 2021 in the United States. Five years later it has appeared 3,700 kilometers from his home

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In recent years we have seen how the algorithm has taken over Christmasand Netflix to the head of the film industry competes to offer the most emotional miracle of the year, stories designed to reconcile us with chance, hope and those impossible endings. But this time, the story that best fits that mold does not come from a script or a streaming platform, but from real life, far from the screens and without special effects. The loss. The story has been collected by US media this weekend. Apparently, during almost five yearsPatricia Orozco lived with an unanswered question. Since Choco, the dachshund mix dog that he had adopted in 2016, disappeared in May 2021, his memory remained present in our daily lives. The uncertainty was constant: if he was still alive, if someone cared for him, if he had suffered. After months of posters, calls to shelters and no clues, the disappearance turned into mourning and a silent renunciation of having a dog again, as if accepting another company meant admitting that Choco would not return. The impossible message. Everything changed with an unexpected message from a microchip company. Choco had appeared, but not near Sacramento, where Orozco lived, but rather more than 3,700 kilometersin Lincoln, Michigan. At first, the woman thought it was Lincoln, California, just half an hour from her home. Surprise turned to disbelief when he realized that his dog had crossed practically the entire United States without anyone knowing how or when. Choco had been found tied to a fence in front of to a shelterand the photos confirmed what seemed like a mistake: it was him. The problem of bringing him back. The initial joy gave way to logistical anguish. With two small children, one of them barely four months old, Orozco saw no way to travel to pick him up. A message on social networks It activated an unexpected chain of solidarity. Volunteers, protectors and anonymous people began to look for solutions, from affordable flights to km donations (miles in USA). The possibility of someone traveling in his place took shape when Penny Scotta volunteer accustomed to complicated rescues, offered to make the trip. Orozco with his dog Choco, almost five years after he disappeared from his home in May 2021 A silent journey. The Washington Post told that Choco’s return was a small aerial odyssey. Scott flew from California to Detroit with stops and delays, picked up the dog thanks to the help of local volunteers and crossed the country again with the. A missed connection forced him to spend almost fourteen hours at the Chicago airport, where Choco, calm and docile, walked on his leash among travelers without a single complaint. For those who accompanied him, that behavior seemed to confirm that, despite everything, he was still the same calm and affectionate dog. The mystery of time. In the background of this most “Christmas” story, the great question: Nobody knows how the hell Choco ended up in Michigan or who he lived with during that time. The only thing that is clear is that he traveled through an entire country, far from the sunny climate that he had always known and that, according to its ownerI hated to leave. Now, at eleven years old, the dog had aged, but he had not lost his curious and affectionate character, the same one that led him to run away every time he found an open door. Return home. Finally, on December 3rd Choco came back to Sacramento. The reunion was immediate and left no doubt: when he got out of the car, he walked directly towards Patricia, as if he had never left. The same home from which he escaped years ago became his refuge again, yes, now withwith more precautions: a double door and the determination not to repeat history. For Orozco, the moment was unreal, a mixture of disbelief and relief that he still finds difficult to assimilate. A network and an idea. Beyond the happy ending, the story left a clear lesson. The microchip was the key piece that allowed us to close a circle that seemed broken forever, but so was the network of people who, without knowing each other, decided to act. Rescuers, donors and volunteers demonstrated that even after years and thousands of kilometers, a loss can be transformed into a reunion. For Patricia Orozco, there are not enough words to describe it: what happened, insistcan only be called “Christmas miracle”. A story with a happy ending that could be perpetuated on the big screen. The story of Choco and Orozco has all the ingredients to make the next Christmas list… in the home of the algorithms. Image | PexelsHelping Paws and Claws In Xataka | In 2019, Iberia lost a dog before flying. Now the European Justice says that it is worth the same as a suitcase In Xataka | The science behind your dog being able to find you 12 years after being lost

We lost a robot under Antarctica for eight months. He’s back with disturbing facts about the Denman Glacier

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On planet Earth there are still many mysteries that we do not know, especially those that hide in the deep sea where It is very difficult for us humans to reach due to the high pressures that exist. That is why science is committed to send robots to explore this area, although the last one we sent stopped sending signals for months, something that would undoubtedly indicate the worst. But the reality has been very different. The exploration. The mission led for the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership Its objective was to study the ice shelves of Denman and Shackleton of which we really knew little. To do this, they used a float Argo standard that modify their buoyancy to sink, take measurements and rise to the surface again. But in this case there was a big problem: under the ice platform there is no surface, only a ceiling of ice hundreds of meters thick that prevented this robot from rising again, remaining adrift, dragged by the waves. sea ​​currents. We expected the worst. This robot stopped emitting signals about what it was doing in the depths, and was already considered ‘dead’ by the researchers. But now it has resurfaced after eight months of being in this situation. And the good news is that even if it didn’t emit signals, the robot continued working and created 200 profiles, going up and down every five days, collecting data that no human had ever seen. Sailing blindly. The question is obligatory: how do we know where the robot was if it did not have GPS under the ice? To do this, the researchers used an ingenious reverse engineering technique described in the study: every time the robot tried to go up to the surface to transmit, collided with the surface and recorded the pressure at the moment of impact. Something that can be related to the depth at which it was found. When recovering data after its reappearance in open waters, scientists compared those impact points with satellite maps indicating the thickness of the ice in the area. In this way, it was like solving a 3D maze: if the robot crashed 300 meters deep, it had to be at a point where the ice is 300 meters thick. Thus they reconstructed their erratic trajectory of almost 300 kilometers. What we know. Until now we had the idea that East Antarctica was always a ‘stable’ and cold area because, unlike the West, it thaws very slowly. But now we have data that makes us doubt this a lot. In the case of the Shackleton platform we know that it is a cold fortress with a cavity under the ice that is filled with very cold water that protects it from melting from below. If we talk about Denman Glacier We can now relate it to a danger zone, as an intrusion of ‘warm’ water was found flowing towards the base of the glacier. Why it is important. Denman Glacier It’s not just any harmless thing.but it has enough ice to raise global sea level by 1.5 meters. In this way, if the water is warm it will be able to cause this glacier to end up melting and this will undoubtedly be a big problem for the coasts of our planet. Now all that remains is to monitor this area, which can now be categorized as dangerous due to the risks that the planet may finally have if this is something that ends up being confirmed. Images | henrique setim AOML In Xataka | We have been trying to figure out what Antarctica would be like without ice since 1950. We just discovered it

Calling without warning has gone from being normal to being rude. And in that change we have lost something

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“It seems rude to me to call the cell phone without warning. If it’s not an emergency (and it’s not my parents) don’t call me, we have WhatsApp for something.” This tweet from @thaissotillo It went viral a few days ago and generated responses of all colors, but with the feeling that it is a generational issue: at some point, for those born especially in the late 90s onwards, telephone calls – the most basic gesture of a telephone – have become a violation of social protocol. The generational issue does not explain much: the interesting thing is not what the girl prefers, but why an unannounced call now feels like an intrusion. A WhatsApp message gives you time. You read, you think, you decide, you write, you erase, you rewrite. You decide if it is better for you to sound warmer or more edge. Ten extra seconds to build a better version of yourself. A call takes that possibility away from you. It forces you to be youno editing, now. That’s why it’s uncomfortable. “It’s another way to avoid direct confrontation,” he explains. Alexandra de Pedrogeneral health psychologist. “An awkward conversation always becomes less awkward when I have time to process what I want to say and how.” we have built tode to a way of life about the right to edit ourselves before being seen. De Pedro says that many people pass their important conversations through the AI ​​filter: “Write this to me, but in a more assertive way.” We lose the ability for direct communication while we gain resources to avoid it. But there is something else. The call doesn’t just demand that you be yourself. Demand that you be now. We live in an asynchronous world. We work with people in four time zones, we watch series when we want, we answer emails between meetings. Everything can wait for me to be ready. The call shatters that illusion. It is a demand for synchronicity. It is a way of telling us “we speak now or we don’t speak.” And that, in a culture where procrastination is an earned right, feels obscene. That’s why voicemails have taken over: They transfer the call experience to something asynchronous, to have time to think about the answers. “Young people have understood that being accessible is not the same as being available,” says De Pedro. “They practice setting limits more. But you can also go overboard and We are moving towards a society that is a little more individualistic.“. Exceptions tell part of the story. Your parents may call you without warning. Not because they are from another generation, but because the family still operates under a previous code: that of automatic availability. You can interrupt me because you are my father. The rest of the world lost that privilege. Now you have to write first, raise the issue, wait for confirmation. Only then, perhaps, call. The direct call is read as arrogance. We have changed the semantics of what it means to respect others. Before it was “I give you my attention when you ask for it.” Now it’s “don’t ask me for attention without prior permission.” We say that we gain efficiency, that WhatsApp avoids unnecessary interruptions. But what we have really done is build a wall around our emotional availability. “It has to do with postponing everything uncomfortable,” says the psychologist. “Much lower tolerance for frustration, for uncomfortable sensations. If I find it uncomfortable to answer a friend, it’s annoying, because it costs me more and I put it off.” The phone call was the last vestige of an ancient social contract: we accepted that others might need us in real time, without warning, without the possibility of postponement. That contract was broken. Now we all live behind a perpetual mailbox. We respond when it suits us, not when they need us. We feel freer, more owners of our time, more protected. What we do not feel is what we have lost: the habit of tolerating the discomfort of appearing unprepared, of improvising closeness, of accepting that the other has the right to alter our day. The phone is still in our pocket. But it’s not to talk anymore. It is to decide when, how and with whom we want to appear to be speaking. In Xataka | AI is transforming the relationship we have with our own ideas: we no longer create, we just “edit” ourselves Featured image | Xataka

Huawei lost to Google, Qualcomm and TSMC. What he didn’t lose was something more important: his reputation.

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Last week were the Xataka Awards 2025. Stella Li, global vice president of BYD, took the Xataka Legend. He Galaxy S25 Ultra It swept the super high range. Freepik was crowned as best Spanish technology company. It was a night of proper names, drinks and conversations with readers. But There is a prize that, for those of us who spend a lot of time in Xatakaas workers or as readers, has a special weight. Not because of its glamour, but because of what it represents. The Community Award is not decided by any jury. There are no internal debates. You, the readers, decide with your votes. It is the device that you liked the most, without filters. In fact, it is the only one that is not delivered by any employee of the house, but rather by members of the community who represent it on stage. In the image that heads this article, three of them with Cristina Isidoro, PR Manager of Huawei in Spain, who collected the award. Because this year he won it Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro. And when I saw the result, I smiled slightly: it was more than just a reward for a well-made smartwatch. It was pure symbolism. Look at the historical list of winners of this award: Almost all, Chinese devices or devices with a Chinese soul that share a pattern: focus on value for money, practical innovation, and in some cases, arriving wanting to break molds. But among all of them, Huawei is the only one that did not arrive yesterday promising a lot for little. It is the only one that was already in the world elite, disputing the throne with Samsung and in fact about to snatch it awaybefore the United States decided to use it as a pawn in its trade war. Because Huawei has not conquered the perception of premium quality by offering more gigabytes for fewer euros. It conquered it by being, for years, simply a great option. He P20 Pro It was the first mobile phone with a triple camera that really worked. The Mate 20 Pro was an unapologetic technical beast compared to the high-end greats. Their MateBook laptops have been worthy rivals of the Surface. And their GT watches already stood out for batteries that lasted weeks when Apple asked for a charger every night. They weren’t cheap. They were good. And that difference, in the technology market, is abysmal. Then 2019 arrived. EntityList. American veto. Goodbye Google, goodbye Qualcomm, goodbye TSMC. Sales outside China plummeted and the Western narrative was unanimous: Huawei was dead. Without the Google ecosystem, without access to the supply chain, it was impossible to survive in this business. But no one explained to them that it was impossible. Instead of giving up, they built their own universe. HarmonyOS on more than a billion devices. Kirin Chips own, then Ascend for AI. Huawei Cloud growing in Asia, Africa and Latin America. They didn’t beg to go back to Google Play like we might perhaps have expected them to do. They simply built another entire ecosystem. Without one word higher than another. At the beginning of the month I was in China and was able to try several of their devices, including some that just left there. The premium feel is real. And something that we do have here, the GT 6 Pro, is not a gadget 150 euros that promises too much and falls halfway. It is a watch in the 400 euro range that performs very well. and the community of Xataka has passed sentence with his prize. That doesn’t happen by chance. Xiaomi shines in value for money. Realme and Oppo play there. Nothing has its aesthetic indie. But Huawei is the only Chinese brand that, when you mention it, the European consumer automatically thinks of “serious quality”, without the asterisks that others have. And she did it right after they tried to destroy her. The Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro is a great watch. But winning the 2025 Community Award means something else: It is the recognition of the only Chinese brand that has come out of the perception low cost without giving up its origin. It is the prize that, in a way, China had been pursuing for decades. Respect without conditions. And it has been won by a company that they tried to annihilate. Sometimes vetoes don’t kill. They forge legacies. Featured image | Xataka In Xataka | The LG OLED Signature AI T4 is the best television of the year for a simple reason: we are saying goodbye to the black monolith

Oracle signed a 300 billion agreement with OpenAI. Two months later it has lost 315,000 million in the stock market

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Since Oracle announced its $300 billion deal with OpenAI On September 10, its shares have lost $315 billion in market capitalization, as they have stated since Financial Times. The technology company He has bet everything on a single card: Become the premier infrastructure provider for the world’s most valuable AI lab. Investors are not convinced. The most expensive bet in its history. Oracle has tied its future to OpenAI in an unprecedented way in the technology industry. According to estimates At Jefferies, 58% of its future order book comes from a single customer: OpenAI. To put it in perspective, Microsoft has just 39% concentration with its largest customer, and Amazon 16%. Oracle has gotten into a mess and its business diversification has become a critical dependency on OpenAI. The plan is ambitious but risky. Oracle’s strategy is to reach $166 billion in cloud computing revenue by 2030, according to counted the company last month. To achieve this, its investment budget in the current fiscal year ending in May amounts to $35 billion. The analysts wait that this annual expenditure will stabilize around 80,000 million in 2029. But here’s the problem: Starting in 2027, most of that revenue would come from OpenAI, according to the calculations from RBC Capital Markets. That is, Oracle is not just building massive infrastructure, it is building massive infrastructure for a single tenant that has yet to prove its long-term commercial viability. The numbers don’t add up yet. Oracle’s net debt already stands at 2.5 times its ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), more than double what it was in 2021, and is expected to almost double again by 2030. Its free cash flow is also expected to remain negative for five consecutive years, according to the forecasts collected by Bloomberg. The company is financing with debt a gigantic server farm with the hope that OpenAI will generate enough revenue to justify the investment. Meanwhile, as has shared Financial Times, investors are so restless that the cost of insuring against a potential Oracle default is at a three-year high. The contagion effect of OpenAI. Oracle is not the only company that has suffered after announcing agreements with OpenAI. Broadcom and Amazon too have seen their shares fallwhile NVIDIA has barely moved since its investment agreement in September. A few months ago, any type of association with OpenAI caused prices to rise, considering himself the King Midas of AI. The most notable case was AMD’s in Octoberwhen its shares rose 24% after announcing a chip deal that included company warrants. That halo effect seems to have completely faded. Between the lines. The initial theory was that OpenAI was in a frantic race to catch up. general artificial intelligence (AGI) and that Oracle was the only company capable of scaling the necessary computing capacity at the required speed. Oracle promised the lowest upfront costs and the fastest path to revenue generation because it acted as a data center tenant, not an owner. Now investors are sending the signal that partnering with OpenAI is no longer a guarantee of success. The alternative reality is less rosy: Oracle doesn’t have as much operating profit as its competitors to burn on R&D, so it’s betting everything to keep its only big customer in exchange for a promissory note. Amazon, Microsoft and Meta can afford to spend between 70,000 and 130,000 million a year in infrastructure. Oracle is juggling financials to keep pace. And now what. Oracle has until mid-2026 to prove that your Abilene data center in Texas, with capacity for more than 400,000 GPUs and 1.4 gigawatts of power, can generate the promised returns. Meanwhile, the market has spoken and is awaiting evidence that this partnership will bear the promised fruits. Cover image | Oracle and OpenAI In Xataka | As if there weren’t enough AI companies, Jeff Bezos has just returned from the shadows to build another one, according to the NYT

Spain has lost 142,000 businesses in 10 years

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Spain has lost 142,024 businesses in the last ten years, going from 767,317 establishments to 625,293, according to data reported by The World. There are 39 net daily closures. One in every five businesses that disappear in the country is a store. The business has a mortality rate of 8.4%, higher than the national average of 7.8%. The facts. 68% of the closed businesses were self-employed without employees. Another 31% had between one and four workers. That is, 99% had less than five employees. Aragon, Galicia, Castilla y León and the Basque Country have lost almost a quarter of their stores. Yes, but. While small businesses collapse, large chains continue to grow. Mercadona invoiced 38.4 billion in 2023, 7% more than the previous year. The paradox is evident: Spain today has 85,527 more companies than a decade ago, when we were just emerging from the crisis, but the local commercial fabric is disintegrating. Between the lines. It’s not just that the consumer prefers the convenience of the supermarket. The problem is structural: Small businesses competed with exhausting hours and tiny margins against chains that negotiated prices with suppliers on a national scale. The shopkeeper who opened from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and made a living from his store can no longer sustain that model when a large supermarket sells cheaper, has a greater variety of products and closes at 9:30 p.m. The pressure doesn’t just come from the consumer. Suppliers have also changed the game: they prefer one large buyer who simplifies distribution over hundreds of small, dispersed customers. Local commerce has lost strength in both sales and purchases. The contrast. There is one exception visible on the streets: the convenience stores run mainly by Chinese and Pakistani merchants yes they have proliferated. They maintain the model of endless days that Spanish self-employed people can no longer sustain: open from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, without fresh but with all the basics. They have filled the gap left by the traditional grocer, but with a different equation: Intensive family work. Very tight margins. And a model that only works if the whole family is behind the counter. It is the last stronghold of classic local commerce, but it reinforces the thesis: only those who accept conditions that an average Spanish self-employed person can no longer or do not want to assume survive survive. The money trail. The cost inflation has finished off the sector: electricity, rents, minimum wages and social contributions have risen while sales prices could barely move. A self-employed person pays more to keep his premises open than he can make by selling. The figures confirm it: only 41.9% of companies born in 2018 were still active in 2023. The first year of life is lethal, with survival rates of 78.5% or lower. Rising pressure. Added to the historical problems is now the tourism: Tourist apartments have skyrocketed commercial rentals in central areas, expelling businesses that cannot compete with Airbnb hostels and apartments. María José Landaburu, from UATAE, sums it up: “If a self-employed person cannot rent premises in their neighborhood, if a business closes because its rent has tripled, that is expulsion.” Main loser? The self-employed business. Lorenzo Amor, from ATA, warns that they are “in free fall” and with them “the social cohesion generated by the businesses of our towns and cities” disappears. The shopkeeper model, sustained for decades by endless hours and tight profitability, is becoming exhausted. The big chains have won by a landslide. In Xataka | The shadow companies that are making gold with Mercadona: the silent success of Familia Martínez or Profand Featured image | Richard Melick, Mercadona

Paris Hilton lost her dog, so she cloned it

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Paris Hilton lost her dog, so she cloned him not once, but twice. And he is not the only public figure who has done so. Barbra Streisand was one of the first to clone petsbut the cases of Javier Milei or the American football player Tom Brady are also known. That’s how it is the pet cloning market. A nail clone pulls out another nail The loss of a pet is a very painful experiencefor many people as hard as losing a family member. Science is already looking for ways to extend the life of dogsbut at the moment living as long as humans seems far away. Nor you can make your dog or cat live foreverbut if you have money you can resort to cloning. This is what Barbra Streisand did when her dog Samantha died in 2017. And if one clone was not enough, she asked for two to be made. Paris Hilton also resorted to cloning after her chihuahua Diamond was lost in 2022. Like Streisand, she also cloned her twice. If we look only at the number of clones, Javier Milei, current president of Argentina, has gone too far. In 2017 he cloned his English mastiff Conan not one, but five timesalthough one of the puppies died shortly after. The most recent case involved Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who confessed in the magazine People Magazine that his current dog Junie is a clone of Lua, his previous dog who died in 2023. ELON MUSK VS JEFF BEZOS: STAR WARS Personality is not cloned There are several companies that are dedicated to cloning pets. The most famous is the American Travel Petswho was in charge of making clones for Paris Hilton, Barbra Streisand and Javier Milei. Tom Brady did it through the startup Colossal Biosciencesdedicated to “de-extinction.” And be careful, because In Marbella there is also a clinic that is dedicated to cloning dogs and cats. The cover of the Viagen website The process begins with the pet tissue collectionwhich should be done either while the pet is still alive or immediately after its death. Using these cells, they create embryos that are implanted in a surrogate mother. The resulting animals are genetically identical to the original, but that does not mean they will behave the same. Barbra Streisand admitted in an interview in Varietythat The clones had different personalities to that of his dog Samantha. On its website, Viagen says the result “shares your dog’s DNA and often the same intelligence, temperament and appearance.” Emphasis on that “often.” How much does this cost You’ve probably been wondering since you read the headline. Travel Cobra $50,000 to clone dogs or cats and $85,000 in the case of horses. These are high figures for most people, but a few years ago it cost twice as much. There are no figures, but in this report from The Atlantic They assured that companies like Viagen they have a waiting list and thousands of clones of pets, but also horses or cattle, have already been produced. A striking example is that of polo player Adolfo Cambiasowho has more than 100 clones of his best mare. Although feasible, animal cloning raises ethical questions, mainly about the well-being of the animals involved in the processboth the clones themselves and the mothers in whom they implant the embryos. It is well known that purebred females, both dogs and cats, are often exploited and subjected to continuous pregnancies and then sell the puppies. The difference here is that they create clones from implanted embryos. On the other hand, there is the question of purchasing animals, in this case clones, when the shelters are saturated with animals waiting for an adoption. Only in Spain it is estimated that 33 pets are abandoned per hour. Finally, a personal contribution, it will be a year soon since my kitten Piñón died. We had a very special bond and his loss was very traumatic because he was still very young. I miss it as if it were the first day, but it would never occur to me to put my grief above the well-being of other animals. Image | Paris Hilton, Instagram In Xataka | We have been thinking for years that cats are exquisite eaters. They actually have neophobia

8 kilometers of ice have been lost in two months and researchers only agree on one thing: it is something to worry about

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Predict their future the antarctic glaciers It is undoubtedly a great challenge for science, but the most important thing above all is to know How will it affect global sea level?. The worst of all is that the latest news we have at our disposal is not at all positive, since the Hektoria glacier It has retreated 8 km in just two months, which is an unprecedented speed in the modern era. Where we start from. Normally, the retreat of glaciers It is measured in hundreds of meters per year. It is one of the clearest metrics we have to be able to ‘measure’ global warming, and that is why now what a team from the University of Colorado Boulder has just recorded on the Hektoria glacier, on the eastern peninsula of Antarctica, plays in a completely different league. The measurement. In just two months during 2023, the Hektoria lost almost half of its mass. In total, 8 kilometers of ice disappeared. A speed of collapse that has never been seen in modern history and that, according to the authors of the study, is more typical of the end of the last ice age. Something that doesn’t add up in this case. Hektoria is relatively small by Antarctic standards (about 300 km², less than the city of Malaga), but its collapse was so sudden that it left researchers stunned. A coincidence. Ironically, the research team wasn’t even studying Hektoria. They were analyzing satellite and remote sensing data for another project when Ochwat realized that the glacier had essentially disappeared from the images. The measurements. This is where technology comes into play. The team had to combine data from multiple satellites to understand what had happened and, above all, how quickly he did it. “If we only had one image every three months, we couldn’t say that the glacier lost two and a half kilometers in two days,” explains Ochwat. In this case, by combining images from different satellites you can fill in the time gaps and confirm with evidence in hand how quickly the ice has been melting. But the key was not only in the images. They also used seismic instruments that have the ability to detect a series of “glacial earthquakes” that occurred exactly during the period of rapid melting. And these earthquakes are not measured for the sake of it, but to confirm something crucial: the glacier was anchored to the bedrock (and not floating) just before breaking. This is fundamental both for science and for the entire planet, since ice that is floating (such as an ice shelf) does not raise sea level when it melts, any more than an ice cube does in a glass of water. But ice that rests on land (or anchored to a seabed) and falls into the sea does contribute to the global rise in sea level by increasing its volume. Your Achilles heel. The collapse was not due to simple superficial melting. The cause was topographic, since many Antarctic glaciers rest on deep canyons or underwater mountains. The Hektoria, however, had the misfortune of resting on an “ice plain”: an area of ​​bedrock that was exceptionally flat and below sea level. This flat topography caused a gigantic section of the glacier to begin floating all at once, rather than gradually. The moment the glacier lost its anchorage to the ground (its “line of support”), it was exposed to the forces of the ocean, and therefore everything began to advance very quickly. The process was brutal, since it all began with the warmest ocean water that seeped underneath and began to open cracks from the bottom of the glacier upwards. At the same time, the glacier already had cracks on the surface. Eventually, the lower and upper cracks met and the glacier literally disintegrated. A warning for future glaciers. The Hektoria case is a first-rate warning. Scientists know that there are numerous glaciers in Antarctica that also rest on these types of ice plains. Until now, it was thought that their collapses would be centuries-long processes. Hektoria shows that they can be months, which should set us off due to the implications it would have on sea level. And while the collapse of a small glacier like Hektoria won’t dramatically change global sea level, it alone does demonstrate that a rapid collapse mechanism, until now theoretical or believed to be typical of past geological eras, is perfectly possible today. If this same mechanism is activated in much larger glaciers, sea level rise could accelerate very considerably and much sooner than expected. Images | Cassie Matias In Xataka | When glaciers melt, bodies appear: archaeologists are recovering them in a time trial

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