machine

With 3,500 tons and 15 meters in diameter, China already has the largest tunnel boring machine in the world for high-speed trains

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China has just introduced Jiaoping No.1, the world’s largest earth pressure balance (EPB) TBM designed specifically for high-speed railway tunnels. According to counted recently reported by the state broadcaster CGTN, it is a 3,500-ton colossus with an excavation diameter of 14.57 meters, capable of also using artificial intelligence to monitor, adjust and correct breakdowns while drilling underground, all under extreme underground conditions. We tell you everything. What exactly is it. An earth pressure balance tunnel boring machine is a type of machine that excavates the ground while supporting it at the same time. The rotating head (cutting head) tears off material from the front, which accumulates in a closed chamber just behind. This accumulated earth acts as a “plug” and compensates for the natural pressure of the soil and water, preventing the excavation face from collapsing or the surface land from sinking. For soft soils or urban areas, it is a widely used method and we have seen it other times, like in Madrid with ‘Mayrit’ for transform L11. Why size matters. The larger the tunnel, the more complex and heavier the equipment needed to excavate it, and the more difficult it is to keep such a large excavation face stable. The latest one presented in China is almost 15 meters in diameter and specializes in high-speed lines, so it exceeds a considerable technical ceiling. It is a diameter comparable to that of the largest Chinese underwater tunnel boring machines, like the Dinghaiwhich has an identical maximum excavation diameter (14.57 meters) for the Jintang underwater tunnel. What AI does. According to the media, Jiaoping No.1 incorporates AI to monitor drilling in real time, adjust parameters and detect failures autonomously. And it is something that we see more and more in machinery of this caliber, since in recent projects such as the yangtze river tunnel between Chongming and Taicang, the Linghang TBM employs, according to Interesting Engineeringan intelligent control system capable of automatically regulating pressure, anticipating ground conditions using data and self-guiding during progress. Independence of the West. As has happened in many other sectors, China has gone from depending almost completely on foreign technology to dominating the world market in just a few years. Until a decade ago, German and Japanese manufacturers controlled the vast majority of this market. The turning point came in 2017, when China presented its first domestically manufactured 15-meter class TBM. Today the situation is very different. And according to data from People’s Daily, Chinese-made tunnel boring machines They hold close to 70% of the global market. Behind these teams are usually large state groups such as China Railway Engineering Equipment Group (CREG), the largest manufacturer in the country, or China Railway Construction Heavy Industry. What is all this for? The ultimate goal of these machines is to allow high-speed trains to cross rivers, seas and mountains at 350 km/h inside tunnels, something that a decade ago was a much greater challenge. Projects like the Yangtze Undersea Tunnel seek to drastically cut travel times between large cities and boost the economy of entire regions. And a tunnel boring machine like the Jiaoping No.1 makes its way however it wants. Cover image | Modern China In Xataka | Spain and Morocco have been dreaming of a tunnel under the Strait for 40 years. The great enemy of the project is called Umbral de Camarinal

To move the cutting head of the ‘Monica’ tunnel boring machine, a 152-wheel truck was needed. It’s the key to Australia’s ‘water battery’

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Transporting a gigantic tunnel boring machine to the work point is no small feat, and Madrid has a few things to say about this. However, in Cooma, a small town in the Australian state of New South Wales, they seem to have gotten the hang of it. And the colossal piece of steel crossed its streets at a snail’s pace on a 152 wheel truck. The cargo was part of Snowy 2.0one of the largest energy storage projects in the world. What is it about?. The piece was the central block of the cutting head of the tunnel boring machine named Monica. According to Snowy Hydro, the public company behind the project, this component weighs more than 137 tons and measures seven meters wide. The head is the part that really matters in a tunnel boring machine, since it is the rotating disc that faces the rock and crushes it as it moves. Media deployment. Monica’s head is too big to transport in one piece, so it had to be divided into five parts. Still, just moving the center block required months of preparation. The entire transport reached 73 meters in length, and was moved at night facing the last stretch along the Snowy Mountains Highway, heading to the Marica site, north of Kiandra, where the machine would be assembled. A colossal engineering project. This move was just one piece of a much larger puzzle. The company indicates that in the previous weeks more than 140 large loads were delivered to Marica from the port of Port Kembla, south of Sydney. The tunnel boring machines do not arrive assembled, as they are transported in sections (head, drive system, shields, support platforms) and are assembled on site. In fact, last October, the transport of Monica’s motor system (a component about 207 tons and eight meters wide) brought more than 1,500 people to Cooma, in what Snowy Hydro called one of the largest loads ever transported by road in New South Wales. What is all this for? Snowy 2.0 is, in essence, a gigantic water battery. The project will connect the Tantangara and Talbingo reservoirs through some 27 kilometers of tunnels and an underground power station. The idea is to generate electricity by turbineing water when demand is high and, in times of surplus solar and wind energy, pump it back uphill for reuse. The company assures that it will have a capacity of 2,200 megawatts and enough stored energy to supply about three million homes for a week. Start-up. Last February, Snowy Hydro announced that Monica had been commissioned and would be responsible for excavating the section of the tunnel that crosses the Long Plain fault zone, a geologically complicated area. Designed by the German firm Herrenknecht, the machine advances at one end of the tunnel while another tunnel boring machine, Florence, does so at the opposite. The idea is that both are underground before being dismantled. For those dates the project exceeded 70% execution. Snowy 2.0 has not been without controversy with news of cost overruns and delays, and completion is now scheduled for December 2028. Images | Snowy Hydro In Xataka | Canada is going to debut the residential skyscraper with the most floors in all of North America: it has 12 sides and 351 meters high

a plane, a ship and a missile launcher in one machine

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In the middle of the Cold War, American spy satellites detected a Soviet machine in the Caspian Sea so enormous and strange that CIA analysts thought for months that it could be a photographic error. That experimental creature, named after as “Caspian Sea Monster”ended up becoming one of the military projects most disconcerting never seen on the water. The return of the monster. For decades, Soviet ekranoplanes seemed like a technological extravagance impossible to repeat: gigantic machines that they mixed concepts of plane, ship and missile platform in an absurd hybrid even by Cold War standards. They flew skimming the sea at enormous speed, partially escaping radar and taking advantage of the so-called “ground effect” to move as if they were suspended over the water. The most famous, as we said, was the Caspian Sea Monstera military creature born in the sixties that seemed straight out of a Soviet science fiction novel and that ended up becoming one of the strangest military experiments ever built. Now China is resurrecting that idea with the call “Bohai Sea Monster”an aircraft that combines features of a seaplane, amphibious vehicle, military transport and possible missile launcher, recovering a concept that seemed buried near the end of the USSR. China and an obsession. The new images of the Bohai Sea Monster show that Beijing is not working on a simple experimental or maritime rescue device. Supports appear under the wings compatible with weaponspossibly torpedoes or anti-ship missiles, while the configuration of the device confirms that it is a vehicle specifically designed to operate at very low altitudes above the water. The detail is important because it completely changes the initial perception of the project: it stops looking like a strange seaplane and becomes a potential offensive platform. In essence, China is trying to unite several capabilities into a single machine: the mobility of an aircraft, the maritime persistence of a ship, and the strike capability of a military aircraft. The result is exactly the type hybrid concept that fascinated Soviets and Americans for decades and that now re-emerges in the 21st century. Designed for the Pacific. Chinese interest in this type of vehicle makes a lot of sense within a hypothetical conflict in the Pacific. Ekranoplanes can scroll quickly between archipelagos, forward bases and coasts without relying on traditional landing strips, something especially useful in the South China Sea or in a scenario around Taiwan. When flying just a few meters above the water, there are partially hidden below the radar horizon and are much more difficult to detect than a conventional aircraft. Additionally, they can transport cargo, troops, sensors or weapons while operating in areas where a ship would be slow and vulnerable and where an aircraft would need infrastructure. China appears to be exploring precisely that space in between: a machine capable of resupplying artificial islands, supporting amphibious landings, launching drones or attacking enemy ships without behaving entirely like a ship or a conventional aircraft. Mon Class The Soviet shadow. The entire program inevitably reminds us of the large soviet ekranoplanes of the Cold War, especially to Mon-classwhich carried anti-ship missiles on the fuselage and was conceived as an ultra-fast naval attack platform. The USSR dedicated enormous resources to these vehicles because they offered very specific advantages over NATO: speed greater than that of ships, lower radar visibility and ability to operate over enormous maritime distances. The problem was that they were also complex devices, vulnerable to bad weather and difficult to maintain. After the Soviet collapse, almost all of these projects disappeared and the concept was reduced to a historical curiosity. However, China seems to have concluded that current technology (better sensors, materials, digital navigation and drones) can turn that old idea into a reality. something much more viable than it was half a century ago. Much more than a simple prototype. Another of the keys to the Bohai Sea Monster is that it probably not the definitive modelbut a smaller technological “demo” intended to validate the concept before building much larger versions. The pictures show a relatively compact device, but several analysts believe that the ultimate goal could be a platform for much larger sizepossibly equipped with more powerful engines, greater autonomy and a considerable military load. That would fit with China’s usual strategy of revealing ambiguous prototypes that appear experimental until, years later, they end up becoming fully operational systems. The fact that the project appears precisely when the United States canceled the Liberty Lifter of DARPA is also revealing: while Washington abandoned its modern attempt to create a logistical ekranoplane, Beijing seems determined to explore exactly that path. The new military logic. The Bohai Sea Monster also fits into a transformation much broader of the Chinese armed forces. Beijing has been developing platforms for years that mix traditional categories and break the classic divisions between ship, plane, missile and drone. Their new military doctrines seek saturate the Pacific with systems that are cheap, fast, difficult to detect and capable of operating from multiple domains at the same time. In that context, an armed ekranoplane stops seeming like an oddity and begins to make sense as a piece of a broader strategy based on extreme mobility, distributed warfare and control of disputed maritime spaces. The fascinating thing is that China is not only recovering a technology forgotten of the cold war: It is trying to adapt it to a scenario where sensors, missiles and drones have completely changed the way of fighting at sea. Image | x, Vyacheslav Bukharov In Xataka | China has been designing the future of its hypersonic fighters and missiles for 30 years: an engine for all speeds In Xataka | China created the C919 to stand up to Airbus and Boeing. And we already have data to know if it is being successful

Festivals turned food trucks into a money-printing machine. Now they have a problem: Ozempic

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During the marathon days of the past Coachellaone of the most important music festivals in the world where, paradoxically, music is the least important thing, an image caused a certain sensation on social networks: the total absence of lines at the food stalls. To the plethora of content generated by the festival, a showcase for social networks where only the show by Niece Carpenter and the revival by Justin Bieber caught some attention strictly musically, we had to add the “get ready with me” on Instagram and the usual parade of looks themed, generally quite unsuitable for the Californian desert. In the background a silent revolution was brewing. Because within this hyperaesthetic ecosystem there was a shadow. In the videos of many influencers and tiktokers We were able to observe a scene repeated day after day: non-existent queues to get food (even when it’s free), facing crowded lines to buy sunglasses or other accessories. For many, the reason was obvious: Ozempic. We can interpret it from irony or, on the contrary, as a clear cultural symptom that is deeper and difficult to ignore. Because, if something seems evident, it is that, in a festival where consuming aesthetics is much more important than consuming food, the Ozempic era has found its best showcase. Less hunger = less business Anyone who’s been to a festival, especially in recent times, knows what it’s like. Until recently we went with our eyes closed and our wallets open, assuming that, in addition to the increasing price of admission, we had to pay absurd amounts for a cold burger or a pad thai stale at Michelin star price. We got into the game and no one was surprised by the exorbitant prices, those 20 euros on average per plate were part of the ritual of the festival experience; but something has started to change at Coachella. To get an idea of ​​the importance of this change: the economic volume of its gastronomic industry covers more than 100 positions. Ozempic and derivatives are completely redefining the cultural codes of the last decade. Starting from the basis that each person does with their body what they consider, it is true that we were already noticing in red carpets and derivatives that curves are beginning to go out of fashion; with bloody examples because they are carried out by former standard-bearers of the movement curvy. Actresses and artists like Rebel Wilson, Barbie Ferreira either Meghan Trainor show a change in their figure that advances from photocall in photocall. Little by little this permeates society; and also leaves a side effect that someone may consider unexpected. It is not only transforming bodies but also habits and, among them, our relationship with food in spaces of mass leisure. This change in the psychological relationship that we establish with food and the hunger-suppressing effect means that this character is eliminated from the equation. hedonist and impulsive. If the desire for food ceases to exist, the key turn occurs. For years festivals were governed by a simple rule: the economic margin is not so much in the entrance, but rather in everything that happens inside. In this mechanism, food is a key element with these inflated prices, encouraging impulsive decisions in marathon days that invite consumption. This is where Ozempic has broken the model at Coachella, fully attacking that impulse. In this showcase where it seems that eating is “annoying,” a drug that controls hunger is not useful, but rather more than consistent with the environment. And yes, Coachella may not be the Cruilla or the Arenal Soundbut on a large scale what is at stake is not only what the companies can bill food trucks. What is relevant is something deeper: in an environment where excess was part of the festival attraction, a model is now beginning to prevail where control, especially of the body and image, redefines spaces designed for the opposite. Ozempic and the end of hunger The impact of this medication is such that we are no longer talking about a health phenomenon, but rather a cultural phenomenon. What began as a diabetes medication, later converted into a weight loss solution, is no longer the beauty secret of the celebrities. The pharmacological equivalent of “drinking a lot of water and sleeping eight hours” has spread with universal consumption, and with this it not only transforms bodies with their corresponding physical consequencesalso behaviors. What began as a resource for the elite is now heading towards a more affordable distribution and on a large scale. Because we are not talking about a diet, but about something much more radical, deactivating one of the most basic impulses of human behavior on a large scale, and the data begins to reflect that change. At a global level, about 46 million of people already use these medications. In the United States, the number of people without diabetes who start treatment with these drugs has grown more than 700% in just four years. Today, around 12% of adults use them, with annual growth close to 30%. This impact does not remain only in the body and, if we transfer it to the context at hand, we see that it is directly reflected in consumption; These users spend 31% less on food and drink, especially on everything associated with whim and impulse (snacks, chocolate, etc.). In Spain the trend points in the same direction, approximately 6% of households are already consumers of these treatments, thus representing an expense of 5.4 billion euros annually in food and beverages. And, again, the most relevant thing is not what you spend, but on what: this hedonistic consumption falls and basic and functional products increase. With these numbers it is logical that the conversation of “surely he has lost weight thanks to Ozempic” does not die, but it is no longer limited to celebrities like Oprah, Kelly Clarkson or the native Ibai Llanos. The same statement now slips and extends to much closer environments such as the office, the … Read more

The time since 1940 has changed a lot. We finally have a time machine to see it on an interactive map

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I was born on a Monday in September at noon and, obeying the tradition of the San Miguel summer, the weather was mild and sunny even though October was just around the corner. I know this because my mother has told me a lot of times, but today I also just confirmed it. And be careful, finding out the weather of a day in the 80s was not a priori as easy as knowing what it was last year: it normally involved resorting to scientific databases or finding paper records, which are already old. The good news is that there is a free tool, accessible from any browser and moderately intuitive so that anyone can know what the weather was like on any day (and any time!) from today until 1940, from your date of birth to your wedding or a trip. The not so good news is that it is the best test to see how time is changing due to climate change. His name is Weather Replay and in a few words it works like a meteorological time machine in the form of a weather visualization web application. Behind this website there are two top-level European projects: on the one hand Copernicus Climate Change Serviceintegrated into the EU space program and with the aim of offering rigorous climate data available to everyone. On the other hand, ECMWF, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, the world reference body for numerical weather prediction. Weather Replay Home Screen The climate time machine starts in 1940 The first screen says roughly what it does: you choose a date and time, use the box at the bottom left to write a location and from there you can see a 48-hour animation where the atmospheric conditions of that specific moment are reproduced: temperature, wind, precipitation, pressure and a few other variables. Everything is very visual and available in a few seconds, without installing anything or registering. Layers are a key element to learn more information. Weather Replay Although there is an initial tutorial that may be interesting to follow, the buttons and their function and the legend are easy to understand and despite its simple appearance, it is quite powerful and with practical options to only have what interests us such as zooming, modifying colors and levels or layers. An especially interesting function is being able to compare the time on two specific dates. Swipe left and right to see what the weather was like on two days from 1940 to today. Weather Replay Under the hood of this comprehensive interactive map is ERA5, the ECMWF global atmospheric reanalysis that continuously reconstructs the state of the atmosphere using real data from satellites, sounding balloons, ocean buoys and weather stations with high-resolution numerical models. Thus, it covers the entire Earth with a mesh of about 31 kilometers and 137 vertical layers up to 80 kilometers in altitude. Despite the huge amount of data it handles, the simulations and management are agile thanks to the fact that it is in the cloud DANA Floods of 2024. Weather Replay Beyond tinkering and satisfying curiosity, this tool means that anyone has access to 80 years of atmospheric data in an intuitive and graphic way to see with your own eyes how phenomena have evolved such as heat waves, extreme rain events or wind patterns in the regions you know best. In short: that everyone can see climate change. At a teaching or journalistic level, it constitutes a magnificent resource to contextualize meteorology. For example, reproducing how the tragic Valencia DANA of 2024 began. In Xataka | This is how rain has changed in Spain in the last 30 years, on maps: the result is clear, alarming and there is no turning back In Xataka | The temperature your city will have in 2080, simulated on this disturbing interactive map Cover | Weather Replay

the IMEC chip laboratory has manufactured the first qubit with ASML’s High-NA machine

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Manufacture a qubit, the physical device that implements the minimum unit of information in the quantum computersit is not at all a piece of cake. There are several types: superconductors, ion traps, neutral atoms or ions implanted in macromolecules, among other variants. Not all of them are equally complexbut all are difficult to produce and manipulate. In fact, the ideal is to be able to manufacture them on a large scale in order to make possible the arrival of quantum machines equipped with many more qubits than the current ones. The first step in this direction was taken by Intel and QuTech, the research institute specialized in quantum computing that belongs to the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands. At the end of March 2024 they announced that they had managed to produce the first qubit industrially and using the same processes and technology that is currently used for manufacture semiconductors. However, it is now IMEC (Interuniversity Microelectronics Center), the most experienced laboratory in the development of new integration and nanotechnology technologies that we have in Europe, which has signed a very important milestone: has managed to manufacture a qubit using extreme ultraviolet (UVE) and high aperture (High-NA) photolithography equipment from ASML. Currently this is integrated circuit manufacturing machine most advanced that exists. Caressing the dream of industrial manufacturing of qubits for quantum machines IMEC’s ​​main laboratory resides in Leuven, Belgium and has collaborated closely with ASML for more than four decades. Thanks to this collaboration you have access to the most advanced lithography equipment of the Netherlands company. The qubit produced using ASML’s High-NA equipment is a silicon quantum dot spin type. These qubits are very interesting because they are considered the most promising candidates for industrial scaling. In fact, as IMEC assuresthey are known as “the qubits of industry.” IMEC has shown that the manufacturing of these qubits is largely compatible with the production of CMOS chips The really relevant news is that IMEC has demonstrated that the manufacturing of these qubits is largely compatible with the production of integrated circuits using CMOS technology (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor or complementary metal oxide semiconductor). And therefore it is possible manufacture them in conventional semiconductor plants. An important note: CMOS is the transistor manufacturing technology behind virtually all modern chips. Sofie Beyne, the director of this project at IMEC, maintains that “We can leverage decades of semiconductor innovation and repurpose the entire silicon scale-up ecosystem, taking quantum devices beyond laboratory experiments into large-scale, fabricatable systems. This is where silicon-based qubits have a clear advantage.” Experts who research in the field of quantum computing they are convinced that having machines with millions of qubits will lead to the arrival of error correction technology, which is the holy grail of these computers. Broadly speaking, silicon quantum dot spin qubits confine an electron within a silicon nanostructure, so that the spin state of the trapped electron is used to store quantum information. This architecture requires that the spaces between the different doors be minimal in order to reduce environmental noise and minimize errors. Be that as it may, what is really important is that IMEC has managed to manufacture a network of qubits with spaces of just 6 nm. Thanks to the nanoscale of this component, millions of qubits could theoretically be integrated into a single chip. Image | IMEC More information | IMEC In Xataka | China has reached one of the holy grails of quantum physics. So says Peter Zoller, father of quantum computers

A simple router is a machine capable of identifying humans with almost 100% accuracy. Or so these researchers say

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Using WiFi networks as a technology to track people is a twist in the script that not all of us saw coming. He Karlsruher Institute for Technologyone of the strongest research institutions in Germany, assures close to 100% accuracy when recognizing people without any type of camera and using it. What exactly happened. The KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) team published a paper with a promising headline: “Ordinary WiFi can identify people with almost perfect accuracy”. And this is achieved thanks to something that routers have been doing for recent years: beamforming feedback information. How the hell does this work?. To understand what it is about beamforming You must first understand how the devices emit signals. routers. In their first generations, routers emitted in all directions, just like a light bulb emits light in that way. With the most modern versions of WiFi, the way the signal is transmitted has improved. Routers began to concentrate the signal towards where the receiving device is, like a flashlight instead of a light bulb. Beanformig. That is called beamformingto form a concentrated beam and received by another device. But to aim well, the router needs to know where to point, and it is the connected devices themselves—your cell phone, your laptop—that send that information to the router continuously. Basically, they are constantly telling the router “hey, I’m here.” That message is the BFI, beamforming feedback information. And what is this for?. Now you know that your router sends information to your gadgets and that your gadgets send information to the router. When the devices send information to the router, they describe how the signal arrives, and interference along the way is recorded. Among them, human beings. Our body partially absorbs WiFi waves, reflects them, deflects them and alters how they reach the mobile phone or router. The researchers used that signal data to train models of artificial intelligencein order to detect patterns that would allow humans to be detected. They fed the system with thousands of examples associated with different people until the model learned to detect those wave changes associated with human presence. The system is not capable of visually recognizing anything in the environment, but it manages to have information about when a human is present in the environment. The caution. According to the researchers, “this technology turns each router into a potential means of surveillance.” “If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without realizing it and be recognized later, for example, by public authorities or companies.” The reality? It would be necessary for cybercriminals to develop a system identical or similar to that of the KIT to achieve a human video surveillance system through WiFi signals. The nuance. Under laboratory conditions, with 197 participants and in controlled environments, the system was close to 100% accuracy. But in the real world, it would be necessary to train a new model with data from hundreds of people in different spaces. The model is not a ready-to-deploy technology or a real threat – nor is it intended to be applied – but the research reveals how simple a priori data sets can be trained as a surveillance tool. In Xataka | There is a booming job in the era of artificial intelligence: cybersecurity expert

memory no longer wants to live in each machine

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For many of us, memory shortage It may first sound like a problem close to domestic consumption: RAM modules, components and devices conditioned by an increasingly stressed demand. But the phenomenon that The Next Platform describes also points to the other end of the chain. It reaches the large technology companies that train, deploy and offer artificial intelligence models in data centers. The cloud is not an abstraction, and its appetite for memory is forcing us to think about something that until recently seemed unintuitive: perhaps each machine should not depend only on the RAM it has inside. Memory changes places. The underlying idea is to transfer to memory a logic that is already familiar to us with storage. Today, data can live on the computer itself, on another machine on the network, or on a shared system accessed by several servers. The next generation of servers could treat RAM in a similar way: keep a portion local to each machine, but bring a much larger portion to large external systems capable of distributing capacity according to the need of the moment. From there comes what some call “memory godbox”: a large box or cluster of memory that is no longer tied to a single machine. The CXL moment. For years, Compute Express Link has advanced slowly, almost as a promise for more flexible architectures. The technology was introduced several years ago, but current memory pressures are giving it a much more favorable context. CXL provides a coherent interface to communicate processors, memory, accelerators and other peripherals, relying on PCIe. The final idea is simple to tell, although complex to execute: separating resources without breaking the feeling that they work together. CXL didn’t arrive all at once. It was first used to expand the memory of a server using modules connected to compatible PCIe slots. Then, with CXL 2.0, pooling appearedthat is, the possibility of pooling memory in a common pool and assigning it to different machines as needed. The limit was that that memory could be reallocated, but not truly shared between two systems working on the same data. CXL 3.0 It is the point at which that frontier begins to move, because it introduces broader topologies and shared memory between machines, although with certain technical limitations. The underlying problem. According to The Next Platform, AI does not fall short only because of a lack of calculation, but also because of a lack of memory. The HBM that accompanies the GPUs is very fast and is designed to power these chips at high speed, but its capacity is limited and its cost is high. In training, the big challenge is usually processing enormous amounts of data to build the model. In inference, however, we talk about something else: using that already trained model to respond to a request. The memory of the conversation. Each response from a language model is built little by little, token by token. In order not to recalculate everything above at each step, the systems save a type of working memory called KV cache. The Next Platform explains that previous attention vectors are preserved there, which help the model to continue taking into account the context while generating the response. The problem is that in services with many users, this cache can grow to occupy enormous amounts of memory, even more than the model itself. It’s not just theory anymore. This idea no longer lives only in technical documents or architectural promises. The Register mentions Panmnesia, Liqid and UnifabriX as companies working on systems to take memory off the server and make it available to multiple machines. Some do it with CXL switches, others with large reserves of DDR5 that can be distributed among different hosts. The Next Platform adds the case of Enfabrica and its Emfasys system, designed for inference and capable, according to the media, of reaching 18 TB of DDR5 per memory server and 144 TB in a full rack. The conclusion is simple: the industry is not only looking for more memory, it is looking to place it in another way so that AI can take better advantage of it. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | The ‘Chinese Netflix’ has designed a plan for AI to generate the majority of its content within five years. It sounds risky

A gigantic tunnel boring machine 16 meters in diameter is devouring the sea floor under Genoa. It is your solution against traffic

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Under the port of Genoa, the largest in Italy, there is a machine that aims to devour the sea floor meter by meter. And it does so from the bowels of the earth, 45 meters deep and without interrupting the traffic that passes above it every day. The key is a 16 meter diameter tunnel boring machine that is drilling into the seabed like butter. This is how Italy is solving one of its most entrenched mobility problems, and in the process building the first underwater tunnel of the history of the country. A problem that has been unsolved for decades. Genoa is a city trapped between the Mediterranean Sea and the foothills of the Apennines. It has no room to grow. Its historic center is a labyrinth of narrow streets, and east-west traffic has always been a headache. The solution adopted in the 1960s was to build a gigantic elevated highway, the Sopraelevata Aldo Moro, which crosses the city like a concrete scar. for her About 80,000 vehicles pass through each daybut at a high price: it blocks the view of the sea, generates constant noise and, for many citizens, is a barrier that separates the city from its own port. Its demolition has been stalled for years because no one knows what to do with that traffic in the meantime. Tragedy. The tunnel project was born from an agreement between Autostrade per l’Italia, the Italian Ministry of Transport and local administrations as compensation to the city after the collapse of the Morandi bridge in 2018. That collapse, which claimed 43 lives, left Genoa without one of its main accesses and put the highway concessionaire company under the spotlight. As part of the repair agreement, signed in October 2021, Autostrade per l’Italia, the Liguria Region, the Western Ligure Sea Port System Authority and the Municipality of Genoa agreed to build this underwater tunnel. It is, in practice, the great work of compensation for a city that suffered a tragedy. What is being built. The total route is 4.2 kilometers, of which 3.4 run under the sea floor. It will consist of two separate galleries, one in each direction, each 16 meters in diameter, and will reach a maximum depth of 45 meters below sea level. When completed, it is expected to be Italy’s first underwater tunnel, the largest in Europe (with pardon is being built between Germany and Denmark) and the fourth largest in the world by diameter. Next to nothing. The key: a Hydroshield TBM. Excavating under an active port without interrupting its activity is a monumental challenge. The solution is a TBM tunnel boring machine (Tunnel Boring Machine) Hydroshield type. Each of the two main galleries will be constructed by mechanized excavation with a Hydroshield type back-pressure armored TBM milling cutter, with an excavation diameter of approximately 16 meters. Why this type and not another? In a Hydroshield TBM, the balance in the excavation chamber is maintained through the pressure of water or bentonite slurrywhich stabilizes the excavation face. The extracted material is mixed with these sludge and transported to the surface through pipes. It is the ideal technology for unstable terrain with the presence of water: it allows you to continue drilling without the sea floor crumbling and without the sea entering the gallery. The port above is still working. The gallery measures 15.4 meters in diameter on the outside, but the useful space for circulation is somewhat less, 14.3 meters, because the walls are considerably thick. These walls are built by assembling prefabricated pieces of concrete, as if they were the staves of a giant barrel, joined together with screws and sealed with rubber gaskets so that water does not enter. As if that were not enough, an additional layer of concrete is added inside that further reinforces the impermeability, especially in the sections that are just below the port. The result is a practically airtight tube capable of withstanding the pressure of the sea on its walls. lto logistics of the work. You can’t just place a tunnel boring machine on the seabed and run it. First you have to prepare the ground. The tunnel boring machine was thrown from an attack pit in the San Benigno areaon the west side of the city. To free up that space, Autostrade first had to move a port railway line that ran through there. The railway route, about 700 meters long, has been moved about 70 meters to the south with respect to its previous position, running parallel to the port sopraelevata until passing under it in its final section. Deadlines. Preparation works started in 2023, and work began in March 2024. However, the full tender for the construction of the two main galleries was not approved until January 2026. The specifications set a period of 75 months to complete the entire work. According to the latest Autostrade documents, the TBM will complete excavation work in October 2030, with full completion of the work planned for 2031. Budget. The project started from a budget of 700 million euros, although the mayor of Genoa, Silvia Salis, confirmed that Autostrade now places the cost at more than 1,129 million euros. An escalation of costs that, according to the original agreement between the parties, is covered by a mechanism linked to national highway tolls. Transformation. When the tunnel is completed, it will allow the creation of new green areas (10 hectares, distributed in three public parks) and pedestrian routes that reconnect the city center with the sea. In the San Benigno area, on the new railway gallery already in use, the Lantern Park will be built, which will connect that sector with the city’s historic lighthouse through a bicycle and pedestrian path. In Xataka | Mexico touches the sky with a new and elegant skyscraper of 484 meters and 99 floors: it will be the tallest in all of Latin America

A US company claims it can build a cutting-edge lithography machine. ASML says not even remotely

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Substrate is not just another startup. It was founded in 2022 by brothers James and Oliver Proud, and is backed by Peter Thiel (he co-founded PayPal and is one of the largest investors in Silicon Valley). Despite having existed for only four years, it has raised more than 100 million dollars and has been valued at more than 1 billion. This very successful start-up is based on a promise: the Proud brothers claim that they can build photolithography equipment as advanced as the most sophisticated they have. the Dutch company ASML. Currently this firm from the Netherlands is the only one capable of manufacturing the machines extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) that are used to produce cutting-edge semiconductors, which has placed it in an effective monopoly position in the global semiconductor industry. In the current scenario of confrontation with China, the US is interested in having a national company capable of manufacturing cutting-edge lithography equipment. This is Substrate’s trump card. However, we have reasonable grounds for reluctantly taking up the promise of the Proud brothers. “No one is coming for us” Christophe Fouquet, the general director of ASML, assures that no company on the planet is in a position to compete with them. During a conversation with Connie Loizos, an editor at TechCrunch, Fouquet has argued that “the challenges of lithography are many. Being able to make an image is a starting point, but that image must be produced in large quantities, at very low cost, at high speed and with nanometric precision.” It makes sense. “We had to solve only one problem: obtaining extreme ultraviolet light. And that alone took us 20 years” “I always say that the only reason ASML was able to build an EUV machine is because 80% of it already existed from prior knowledge and products developed over time. We had to solve just one problem: getting the extreme ultraviolet light. And that alone took us 20 years. When starting from scratch, the challenge is enormous. I have heard many statements. And I have seen some images. But we got our first image with EUV technology 30 years ago, and even then we need 20 more years of hard work to turn it into a manufacturing system,” points out the head of ASML. It is clear that Christophe Fouquet trusts his technology. And in your product. However, the starting point of Substrate is different from that of ASML. This American startup uses a particle accelerator as a light source for an X-ray lithography tool instead of using extreme ultraviolet light like ASML. According to the Proud brothers Their technology allows them to manufacture a silicon wafer at an order of magnitude lower cost than with ASML’s EUV approach. Be that as it may, there is another fundamental difference between the ASML and Substrate strategies. And instead of supplying machines to chip manufacturers, as ASML does, Substrate wants to establish its own network of semiconductor production plants equipped with its photolithography machines. Furthermore, its plan is very ambitious: it aims to produce cutting-edge integrated circuits on a large scale in 2028. It sounds daring, no doubt, but time, as always, will put everything in its place. Image | ASML More information | TechCrunch In Xataka | TSMC has made the chip industry’s most intriguing decision: not to use ASML’s most advanced machines

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