map Archives - usatoday24

the map that shows who is in charge and who has been left out

July 26, 2026 by usatoday24

When AI arrived and we saw everything it could do, the first impression of many was that it was going to take away their jobs (and the truth is, some statements didn’t help either), although the reality at the moment is different: we work more and rest less. Knowing how to use AI has become another skill, one that can be essential depending on your job: being a waitress is not the same as being a secretary or being a plumber or journalist. But even if the profession matters and the deployments are more or less global (in fact, Europe often lags behind as a matter of legislation), AI has not reached the same level throughout the world. The Microsoft AI Diffusion Report that monitors the AI economy on a global scale (specifically, 100 countries) for the first quarter of 2026 collect a fact: 17.8% of the world’s working-age population uses it, but there are 10 countries that lead it and many that are behind. Of course: Microsoft’s report uses anonymized telemetry from its products. That is, if someone uses only ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude and never touches anything from Microsoft, they do not appear in the count. Microsoft tries to correct this bias with statistical adjustments, but it does not completely eliminate it. Microsoft’s report looks better with this infographic adaptation by Visual Capitalist what colors countries based on their use of AI: yellow tones for those places with high adoption and purple ones where it is little used. It is, in a nutshell, a quantitative snapshot of the actual use of generative AI tools. It is inevitable to associate the adoption of AI with labor productivity and competitiveness. Without going any further, Microsoft itself does it relating its real effects on employment: dev work in the US broke records in 2025, reaching 2.2 million, 8.5% more than the previous year. Obviously, this gap between the countries that use AI the most and those that use the least has as a background unequal access to this technology. In short: it is a more than perpetual digital divide and widens the inequalities that already exist. Which countries lead the use of AI Adoption of AI in the world by country. First quarter of 2026. Microsoft via Visual Capitalist Among the countries that lead the use of AI, one stands out: the United Arab Emirates, with 70% of its working-age population using artificial intelligence and growth that quadruples the world average rate. They are followed by Singapore (63%) and a group of highly digitalized countries, mostly European: Norway (49%), Ireland and France (48% each), Spain (44%), New Zealand (43%), and the United Kingdom, Netherlands (42%). Closing the top 10, Qatar tied with the Netherlands. The pattern is clear: they are moderately rich economies, with good internet connections and governments that have been investing in digital infrastructure for years. But the vast majority moves well below those figures and what better example than an a priori unexpected United States: it only has a 31% share despite being the cradle of almighty powers such as Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is one thing to build artificial intelligence and quite another to use it.. Here it depends more on having a homogeneous digital infrastructure, state adoption policies and territorial equality, factors where small states like the UAE or Singapore have structural advantages. In the queue are many countries from Africa, Central Asia and Latin America, with quotas of just one digit or little more: Venezuela 10%, Russia 10%, Morocco 12%, Bolivia 13%, among others. The digital divide between north and south, at its finest: the Global North reached 27.5% usage compared to only 15.4% in the Global South. AI is spreading, but in a heterogeneous way towards those who were already advanced in digitalization. However, it is worth remembering again that since it is based on Microsoft product telemetry, this indicator may underestimate real adoption in markets where other providers predominate: China deserves special mentionwhere the AI ecosystem has powerful local products such as Baidu, Alibaba, Deepseek or Moonshoot and his impressive Kimi K3. In Xataka | Who is really winning the AI race, in a graph that puts Google in trouble In Xataka | If the question is which of the big tech companies is winning the AI race, the answer is: none Cover | Visual Capitalist

This map shows you all the active fires in Spain in real time, and can alert you if there is one near your home

July 24, 2026 by usatoday24

We are going to tell you what it is and how it works firespain.esa website with which you can see all active fires in Spain. Thus, whether you are planning a trip you will be able to know if there is one at your destination, and if you have it close to home you will be able to receive warnings if it starts to be dangerous for you. We are going to start by explaining to you what exactly this website is, the data it offers and where it obtains its information from. Then we will tell you how to set up a notification to notify you when there is a fire approaching your house. What is IncendiosEspaña.es and where does it get the data from? firesespaña.es is a website that unifies and shows information on all fires on a map that are taking place in Spain. It shows them on a map where you can see the number of fires, active outbreaks, their location and even their severity. You will have them all on a map where you will be able to navigate as you wish, zooming in on the areas that interest you and clicking on the different icons to expand the information. There are icons that indicate confirmed fires, and there are others that indicate outbreaks. When you click on one of these icons you will obtain data such as the type of fires, the place where they are, the municipalities affected, and even start time and assigned resources. It will also give you other information such as its radius, radiative power (FRP), detection confidence level, road closures, wind, and more. And as for sources, the website obtains data from the emergency services of several autonomous communities, as well as heat photos detected by the NASA satellites FIRMS, EUMETSAT and Copernicus/EFFIS. This information is updated in near real time, every 5 minutes for utilities or 15 minutes for satellites. The website also has a left column where you can organize the data by selecting the time period you want to analyze or searching for populations. you also have a list of outbreaks by province with which you can navigate directly to those that interest you. How to configure alerts If you want to set up alerts To be notified if a fire appears near your house, you have to go to the bottom of the screen. When you close the cookies text, a message will appear inviting you to activate the alerts, and in it you must click on the button Activate alerts. This will take you to a web page where you simply have to enter your email, zip code and notification radius. Thus, if a fire appears and the town belonging to the zip code is within the warning radius that you have configured, an email will be sent to you with the alert and also telling you your risk level. In Xataka Basics | How to know where there are fires with Google Maps

The definitive map of Ulysses’ journey in ‘The Odyssey:’ Christopher Nolan’s film, explained interactively

July 17, 2026 by usatoday24

Today is the day. Today ‘The Odyssey’ premieres. Three years have passed since Nolan’s last breakthrough in traditional cinema, ‘Oppenheimer’. And this Homeric feat aspires to nothing less. The new pretty girl from Universal Pictures that uses the most advanced IMAX technology is already placed in the highest position in the career of a director, Christopher Nolan, author of gems such as ‘The Dark Knight’, ‘Memento’ or ‘Interstellar’, who has not surrendered to anything other than his personal vision. Because yes, to the complaints of resorting to white marble instead of classical polychrome, to that mania of making actors very sexy with studded leather and stylized helmets, comes the question of historical reconstruction. Can? Maybe. We have made our attempt and we have something more historically accurate: a map. But not just any one: a dynamic tour that includes the entire journey point by point and draws connections between facts and fictions. Let’s travel together through the great epic of the Mediterranean. We leave the editorial debate to authorities such as Vinzenz Brinkmann, Barry Strauss or Robin Lane Fox. When Homer wrote the Odyssey, probably between the years 750 and 700 BC. c.the map of the Mediterranean ended long before where Europe ends today. Beyond were the monsters, capricious gods, impossible islands and an ocean that no one dared to describe. Two thousand seven hundred years later, the big question remains the same: where did Odysseus really travel? And, why not ask, did it ever reach what is now Spain? The short answer is no. The long one is much more fascinating. We have the historiography of Strabo, Herodotus, Avienus, Pindar, Apollonius of Rhodes, Diodorus Siculus and Pliny the Elder. Their references explain why Gibraltar, Tartessos and southern Hispania ended up being incorporated into the Homeric imagination without Homer having ever mentioned them. That part is often overlooked but we want to review it thoroughly. Let’s travel to the key moment. It all started with a war that (maybe) did happen The Odyssey It starts when the Trojan War has already ended. Ulysses—or Odysseus, as you wish—tries to return to Ithaca after ten years of combat. This is the more or less approximate historical chronology so that we can situate ourselves: c. 1250-1180 BC. C.: possible Trojan War. c. 1170 BC C.: journey of Odysseus. c. 750-700 BC C.: Homer writes the Odyssey. 7th-6th centuries BC. C.: the Greeks arrive in Iberia. Today’s archaeologists rely on a real conflict. Excavations at Hisarlik in Türkiye have shown that Troy existed and that one of its cities It was destroyed around 1200-1180 BC. c., right at the end of the Bronze Age. It is difficult to know if Achilles, Hector or Ulysses existed, but the historical scenario is compatible with a great war between Aegean kingdoms. If that war inspired the poem, Ulysses’ journey would have occurred around 1170 BC. C. However, the story we know was written about four centuries later, when many of those memories had already been mixed with legends. Ten years wandering around the Mediterranean As any reader remembers, Ulysses’ journey begins in the ruins of Troy: “Talk to me, Muse, about that man of multiform genius who, after destroying the sacred city of Troy,” declaims the first verse of Canto I. Violently destroyed around 1180 BC. C., Troy VIIa It is the main candidate for having inspired the conflict, according to the German Heinrich Schliemann, who decided to search for the real place in 1871. From there he sails to Ismaro, the city of the cicones, on the present-day coast of Thrace. Then the lotus eaters arrive, whose fruit makes one forget the desire to return home; the island of the cyclops Polyphemus; the kingdom of Aeolus, guardian of the winds; the laestrygonians, anthropophagous giants; the island of Circe; the descent into Hades; the passage alongside the sirens; the strait guarded by Scylla and Charybdis; the island of the Sun, where his men sacrifice the sacred cattle of Helios; the island of Calypso, where he remains captive for seven years; the land of the Phaeacians and, finally, Ithaca, the small island in the Ionian Sea that some authors insist on not pairing with the Ithaca of the work. Perhaps it was Leucade, Kefalonia, Duliquio, or Corfu? It doesn’t matter to us. The reality is that Odysseus’ route is estimated between 3,800 (from 40º East, that is, Troy, to 6º West, Hades of Gibraltar) and 4,650 kilometers, in an area of more than five million km²perfectly navigable in a much wider sea. Of course, there are proposals for locations that even talk about Ireland, the Black Sea or the Azores. Or that the nymph Calypso kept Ulysses locked up on Parsley Island for seven years. What is clear, because the book says so, is that the journey takes ten years, twenty if we count from the departure to the return: when he returns, his son Telemachus is already an adult and barely retains memories of his father. I repeat it in the list, which is easier this way: Troy Ismaro (cicones) Country of the lotus eaters Cyclops Aeolus Laestrygonians Circe Hades Mermaids Scylla and Charybdis Trinacia Ogygia Esqueria Ithaca Many of these places can be related to real scenarios. The mermaids are usually located off the coast of Campania. Scylla and Charybdis are reminiscent of the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and Calabria. The island of Circe has been identified with Mount Circeo, south of Rome. Other episodes remain open because Homer never offers precise coordinates and whoever reads a specific point on his narrative map is because, too often, it is contaminated by some proximity bias. Your Mediterranean, more than an atlas, is a sandbox. Gibraltar was the true end of the world Even Spain is part of that playground. When Homer wrote the Odysseythe Greeks knew the western end of the Mediterranean, but little else. But between the 7th and 6th centuries BC. C. they began to sail further and founded colonies such as Emporion … Read more

Electric car sales in Europe, on a revealing map with a devastating peninsula. Spoiler: it is not the Ibérica

July 12, 2026 by usatoday24

If tomorrow your car breaks down and you have to buy a new one, the million dollar question is: Would it be a combustion car, a hybrid or an electric car? Obviously, there is also another respectable alternative that makes a lot of sense in the face of a future full of uncertainty and skyrocketing prices: bet on second hand (however, the question remains the same). Saying goodbye to old combustion and welcoming electricity (in any form) is a complex issue where factors such as tax policies, infrastructure and income come into play. The transition to electric has been here for a long time, but it is not advancing in the same way throughout the continent. The map you see below these lines represents the percentage of new electric car registrations in Europe in 2025which includes pure electric and plug-in. Another important consideration: it only collects new cars, not the existing fleet, that is another much more modest story where electric cars currently represent only around 5%. Its creation is the work of The World in Maps, an informative project specialized in cartographies and infographics. To prepare it, use the report Global EV Outlook 2026 from the International Energy Agency (IEA), published in 2026, that is, the world reference report on electric mobility. Electric cars (EV and PHEV) registered in 2025. AIE On the old continent, sales of electric cars (EV + PHEV) increased by 30% last year, above the global trend, which grew by 20% to exceed 20 million units. That is to say, if in the world one in four cars is electric, in Europe it is almost one in three. In fact, Europe has surpassed China as the fastest growing electric car market, with notable increases in Germany, Spain and Italy. But the colorful map suggests a very heterogeneous panorama on the continent and part of the blame lies with state policies: public support for electric vehicles, in the form of direct subsidies, tax incentives and tariff exemptions, has been progressively decreasing in the last decade as sales have increased, although Denmark, Norway and Turkey continue to have the most favorable scenarios due to their strong tax exemptions. A Europe at two speeds Electric Europe is made up of the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, where the highest quotas are concentrated: Norway (97%), Denmark (71%), Sweden (61%) and Iceland (62%). The recipe for success is a high per capita income, strong taxation on fossil fuels, historic exemptions for electricity and a highly developed charging network. Norway takes the cake, where fully electric cars reached a record share of 96% of all car sales in 2025, although from 2026 the tax advantages have been cut. The Europe of fuel comes from the east, with Russia (2%), Bosnia (5%), Romania and Bulgaria (6%) as markets where the electric car has barely penetrated, conditioned by lower purchasing power, scarce charging infrastructure and absence of relevant tax incentives. In fact, Croatia, Greece and much of the Balkans move in similar figures, between 5% and 15%. This ancient Europe lives under the restraint of increasingly strict EU regulations. These data matter because road transport is one of the major sources of emissions of carbon dioxide in Europe and the speed of electrification attacks it directly, stepping on the accelerator towards achieving the EU’s climate objectives. But it also has industrial implications: the automotive sector, a true historical bastion on the continent, is adapting and planning based on demand. The jump to electric also has its economic and geopolitical reading where one country leads the way: China. In Xataka | Europe’s passenger car industry, in a revealing map that makes it clear who is the real “engine” of the EU In Xataka | All the car plants in Europe (including the few battery-electric ones), on a map Cover | The World in maps

NASA’s map that brings together 25 years of clouds

July 11, 2026 by usatoday24

If we use typical clichés with European cities, Seville is the city of the sun and London is the city of rain and clouds, but some get the fame and others take the wool. If the question is where are there more clouds in Europe? NASA has been monitoring the old continent for more than 25 years and has the answer. Spoiler: a long list where, to no one’s surprise, there is also the United Kingdom. In 1999, NASA launched the Terra satellite, which incorporates the MODIS instrument (medium resolution imaging spectroradiometer). MODIS is, broadly speaking, a sensor that observes the Earth in 36 spectral bands, from the visible to the thermal infrared, which allows it to simultaneously capture temperature, water vapor, aerosols and cloud cover in one pass. Thanks to this combination of bands, MODIS generates cloud fraction products with spatial resolutions ranging from 250 meters to 1 kilometer depending on the channel used. With data from the year 2000 to 2025 and data released by NASA through its NASA Earth Observations, the Italian data expert and meteorologist Guido Cioni has created this map that solves the question at a glance. There is a clear pattern: northwestern Europe has the most cloud cover on the continent, while the southern Mediterranean enjoys the clearest skies. The United Kingdom is the country in Europe with the most clouds. Guido Cioni Beyond the anecdotal, cloudiness has its consequences: directly affects the solar radiation that reaches the earth’s surface, which takes its toll on solar energy production, agriculture, tourism and even health (the vitamin D level of the population). In fact, this map gives us a clue about renewables and why certain European regions depend more on photovoltaic energy and which on wind energy. The Europe of the clouds and the sunny Europe Cities such as Bergen in Norway or Glasgow in Scotland appear in intense red, consistent with their rainy climate and direct exposure to the inclement weather of the North Atlantic. The red is softer for Warsaw and Bucharest, two cities in the continental interior, precisely reflecting the continental climate with seasonal but less persistent cloudiness. On the other side of the coin, Seville and Turkish Antalya appear in blue, typical of dry Mediterranean and subtropical climates, and a little behind is Marseille. That north – south pattern makes sense: Northwestern Europe receives Atlantic storms almost without interruption. The moves are polar jet streamwhich pushes humid air and fronts towards the area and it is these fronts that generate clouds. In Norway, furthermore, the coastal mountains force that humid air to rise, so even more clouds form. Southern Europe experiences just the opposite: there the Azores anticycloneespecially in summer. That is an area of high pressure where the air tends to go down instead of up, and that leaves the skies clear. Of course, this map and its data have small print: Terra passes through each point on the planet only once a day (around 10:30 local solar time), so this data corresponds to a specific moment, not to a continuous measurement for 24 hours. The good news is that, in 25 years of records, variability and unusual phenomena are cushioned. Furthermore, it only records that specific cloudiness, not the rain: one area may have many high clouds with hardly any rain, and another may have less cloudiness in total but concentrate its rains in short and intense episodes. Finally, NASA explains that in polar areas, distinguishing clouds from snow is a limiting factor that the agency has corrected over time. In Xataka | The easiest way to understand global warming, in this climate map with data from 1940 In Xataka | This map reveals the exact ‘climate clone’ of your city (and the result is surprising) Cover | Gido Cioni

The fascinating migration route of humanity since its beginnings, on a striking map

July 11, 2026 by usatoday24

The map you see above these lines has a strange orientation and a curious coloration, but its meaning is essential for the human species: it summarizes at a glance that everyone comes from the same place and that it took us 200,000 years to get everywhere. Spoiler: in the long run, we all come from Africa. Our ancestors moved, the question is when, how and where. What is this mapto. These answers are synthesized by the map “A Walk Through Time“, the work of cartographer Jeff Blossom from the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, dates back to 2013 and is part of the National Geographic Out of Eden Walk project. For its preparation, he used data from National Geographic Maps and ESRI geospatial layers. The map uses a special projection to stretch the world map without any ocean cutting it (Dymaxion map or Fuller projection) and the colors follow the rainbow: red represents the oldest and magenta the most recent. That is, from 200,000 years ago in Africa to America about 10,000 years ago. The years that appear on the map are thousands of years before the present and indicate when humans arrived in each area. A Walk Through Time: Human Migration Throughout History. harvard Why is it important. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, which science has spent maintaining and demonstrating that all modern humans (Homo sapiens) descend from the same African population. For example, a button: almost 40 years ago Cann, Stoneking and Wilson analyzed mitochondrial DNA from 147 people from around the world and concluded that we all share a common African ancestor. The map is also important for political reasons: we live in a time when there are people who see migration as a threat. This map reminds us that moving is natural to our species. In fact, the sedentarization of human populations It is a relatively recent phenomenon. The origin. As in a video game, the “Start” is in East Africa, in the Great Rift Valley, the area of Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. There is the region with the highest concentration of ancient human fossils: the oldest remains of Homo sapiens come from the Omo Kibish sites (Ethiopia), which are about 195,000 years old. However, the oldest known human fossils come from Jebel Irhoud (Morocco), with 300,000 years behind it. For more than 130,000 years, humans lived inside Africa without leaving, or at least without leaving a record of it. The great journey of humanity. 60,000 years ago, something happened that invited humanity to leave Africa, perhaps climate, demographics, or both. The best-known route took the southern coast of Asia and reached Asia in less than 15,000 years. Europe was populated between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, leaving some of the first works of art in history, such as the paintings in the Chauvet cave (France, about 36,000 years ago) or Altamira (Spain, about 35,000 years ago). Evolutionarily speaking, in no time we covered Eurasia. The sites show that America was the last great conquest of humanity: the first crossed Beringia, between Siberia and Alaska, between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago. However, there are sites such as Chiquihuite Cave (Mexico) that suggest previous arrivals. The tip of South America is the furthest point that humanity has reached from Africa. And that white line? As a curiosity, the white line corresponds to the path of Paul Salopek, a journalist who it was proposed travel the 42,000 kilometers that separate the origin of the species from Tierra del Fuego. What the map doesn’t say. The map is a great simplification: there was no orderly migration that advances in such a clear and clean way through regions: there were multiple exitsreturns, mixtures with neanderthals and extinctions in the process. In short: everything is much more complex than this rainbow map. A good example is Australia: the map places it between 50,000 and 45,000 years before the present, but there are archaeological evidence from 65,000 years ago. The map does not stand out for its precision, but it serves to give us a glimpse of where we came from and how much it cost us to get here. In Xataka | The great demographic transformation of Spain: the surprising graph that summarizes 35 years of migration In Xataka | The two types of countries in the world, on a map: those that are becoming demographically extinct and those that are not Cover | Harvard, out of Eden

Every summer Spain is more of an oven. This map of AEMET records demonstrates it station by station

July 4, 2026 by usatoday24

Climate change is bringing increasingly hot summers and a rather hopeless consolation: increasingly it’s harder to remember a cool summer and the feeling that this torrid summer will be the coolest of our lives (this applies equally this summer to the previous one or next summer). And it’s not just sensations: there is data. Without going any further and according to AEMET datathe Spanish state has just experienced the most extreme heat wave ever recorded in the month of June with some days, June 22 and 23, 2026, which were the warmest of that month in Spain since at least 1950. +7.1 °C above usual values. Faced with this reality, someone has thought of marking the maximums recorded by the Spanish State Meteorological Agency on a map that reveals that the frequency and severity with which the temperature breaks records happens more and more often. And if the pattern holds, this historic June could be, in a few years, just a normal June. The dev and data analyst Adrian Maqueda has developed an interactive map from Spain showing each station in the AEMET network and the latest heat record that he has beaten. That there is a new record? (because unfortunately this summer it will surely happen again) Well, the map updates automatically. This system works with both maximum and minimum temperatures. The updated reading data and historical records come from AEMET’s OpenData. From here the readings are crossed to, in case of a new record, indicate it. The more recent the milestone, the more striking the color and the older the color, the more subdued. In this way it is intuitive to detect the thermal records on the map with the naked eye. Of course, it is not the same for a centennial station to set a record as for one that is only a few years old to do so. How hot it is (it doesn’t matter when you read this) Spain, in maximum temperatures Precisely what makes this map so valuable is how visual it is to verify that They are not isolated phenomena applicable to a specific areabut a pattern that covers the entire territory. And it happens more and more frequently: according to the Report on the State of the Climate in Spain 2025 According to AEMET, in Spain in the last decade 221 records for warm days have been broken and only 7 for cold days. Seen with perspective, the average temperature in Spain has gone up 1.75 °C since 1961 and The 12 warmest years in the historical series are all from the 21st century. The widespread and sustained increase in temperatures has direct consequences for health. In fact, the heat already kills us more than the cold. This trend is not exclusive to Spain: according to the World Meteorological Organizationheat waves in Europe are becoming more frequent, more intense and extending to regions that barely suffered from them before. And be careful because Europe is also the continent that comes out worst off. The Tama station (Cantabria) has just renewed its maximum Returning to the map, last week’s heat wave meant renewing a few of those orange circles to set records because of the network of 828 AEMET stations, 13 new maximum temperature records were recorded. For example, it is the case from Tama station (Liébana), in Cantabria: it reached 43.7 degrees on June 23, the highest temperature recorded in that community in any month of the year. The days were an oven, but the nights became tropical: in southern cities like Jaén or Segovia, the nighttime minimums exceeded 28 degrees. In Xataka | This map reveals the exact ‘climate clone’ of your city (and the result is surprising) In Xataka | The easiest way to understand global warming, in this climate map with data from 1940 Cover | Adrian Maqueda

The 48 “black flag” beaches that Spain has this summer, on a map

July 1, 2026 by usatoday24

Summer has its own rituals. And one of those more usually like to the town councils of the coastal areas is to boast of their ‘Blue Flags’the distinctive features that have identified the most comfortable sandy beaches and marinas for decades. In Spain, however, there is another much less comfortable recognition: the ‘Black Flags’banners of Ecologists in Action that point out the opposite. They basically serve to locate on the map the beaches most affected by pollution or poor environmental management. And we already know those of 2026. What has happened? That Ecologistas en Acción has just starred in one of the most uncomfortable moments of the year for coastal cities: the presentation from his ‘Black Flags’ report. Said like this, it may not seem like a big deal, but what the organization does is publicly point out the 48 beaches in the country (both in mainland Spain and the archipelagos, Ceuta and Melilla) that have received the worst results from their quality examination. It is interesting because its authors are dedicated to evaluating two aspects: pollution and the efficiency of environmental management. Are there many beaches? In Spain there are more than 3,500 beaches registered and the Ecologistas en Acción report includes only 48 black flags. It is a low figure. Especially if we take into account that there are 677 with blue badge. That does not mean that the vast majority of sandbanks are in optimal conditions. That there are only 48 ‘failures’ is explained by the NGO’s way of working: although its technicians analyze more than 8,000 km of coast, they limit themselves to giving two flags per province. One for dirt. The other due to mismanagement. “The report, as in previous years, includes the most serious environmental conditions on the Spanish coast, but not all. Unfortunately there could be many more flags that we award year after year,” explains the environmental organization. Their report is interesting for another reason: it is not a new study or a study that just came out of nowhere. It has been taking place since 2005 and its authors have included a “restoration proposal” for each specific case, a kind of diagnosis with which the NGO aspires to contribute to the recovery of the Spanish coast. Why are the beaches suspended? Each of the 48 black flags points to a specific problem, but in general the NGO groups them into eight categories. The most common (responsible for 14 distinctions) are “discharges, deficiencies in sanitation systems and serious purification problems.” Next in frequency are “affects to biodiversity”, causing another nine black flags, and urban developments and works that invade the maritime-terrestrial public domain, which has also caused eight black flags. In seven other cases the problem has been “chemical contamination.” The list is completed by beaches where there is “environmental degradation” caused by tourism and overcrowding, others where the NGO has registered “unnecessary or poorly managed works” and the accumulation of garbage, waste and microplastics. In a specific case, on the Santander coastal paththe flag was assigned for “damage to historical and cultural heritage.” Do we know anything else? Yes. In your report The NGO includes a slap on the wrist to the administrations of the coastal regions, to which it warns: “A good part of the coasts have been and continue to be subject to a continuous process of degradation.” “The regression of beaches, destruction of wetlands and dune systems, marine pollution, loss of biodiversity and increased vulnerability to storms and floods are some of the most visible consequences of a model that puts the coastline at the service of economic interests,” ditch. Images | Ecologists in Action In Xataka | Spain now has more pets than children. So more and more cities open their beaches to dogs in summer

This is how the map of comings and goings has changed

June 28, 2026 by usatoday24

The photography of migration in Spain has taken a turn in less than four decades: it has gone from being a state that exports people to becoming one of the main migratory destinations on the continent. Thus, in the Spanish state in 1990, more Spaniards lived outside (1.4 million) than inside. In 2024, that proportion has reversed: 8.9 million people born outside the state’s borders reside in Spain, while there are 1.6 million Spanish people in diaspora. A brutal structural change that has its explanation in economic, demographic and geopolitical transformations. This trend was reversed approximately in 1995 (1.3 million immigrants vs. 1.2 million emigrants), it has been growing and does not seem to be stopping. The Spanish state is one of those places doomed to severe demographic contraction because its replacement rate is in the red. According to the INEfertility in Spain is 1.12 children per woman, well below the established threshold of 2.1 by the OECD at Society at a Glance 2024. Migration is essential to maintain the welfare state. The graph you see below these lines is an interactive tool called “Where do migrants live, and where were they born?” which allows us to see, for any state in the world, where the people who live there without being born there come from and where the people born there who live outside go. Both flows are concentrated in a graph where it is possible to filter by sex and move in time from 1990 to 2024. An important detail: the map does not show how many people arrived in a specific year, but rather how much is there in total accumulated. That is to say, if in 2024 there are 1.1 million people of Moroccan origin in the Spanish state, that is the sum of decades of arrivals, not the arrival of a million people at once. Where immigrants in Spain were born, and where their emigrants lived in 2024. Our World In data This Sankey diagram interactive is the work of Our World in Data, a non-profit organization linked to the University of Oxford that is responsible for publishing data visually. The information on which these graphs of bilateral flows between states are based comes from the UN DESA International Migrant Stock 2024which publishes an exhaustive and rigorous count of people living outside their country of birth for 233 countries. For those countries where censuses have not been done recently, the numbers are an estimate and not a direct measurement. 35 years of migration, in a very complete graph Debates about migration are often full of wrong perceptions and even selective amnesia: Without going any further, many people in Spain forget that the Spanish state has historically been a land of emigration and, in fact, has been recently. This Harvard study shows that people in rich countries overestimate how many immigrants there are and the resources they consume, so having access to this information in such a clear and intuitive way is essential to change that perception, or at least, to combat it with data. But this visualization is also relevant because it helps to see Spain’s connection with other countries and why: People do not migrate at random, but follow already established networks. Where immigrants in Malaysia were born, and where their emigrants lived in 1990. Our World in data It was difficult for Spain to become a destinationbut when it did it came dizzyingly quickly: the economic growth of the 1990s and 2000s required a lot of labor that the state did not have. Thus, it has been one of the most rapid demographic changes of Europe in peacetime: according to the INE Migration Statisticsin 2023 the migration balance was more than 642,000 people, one of the highest in the last twenty years. In that time, Spain has faced the challenge of managing its borders, a bureaucracy that the graph does not show, just as it does not visualize another structural problem: integration and the real conditions in which these people live once inside. From 1990 to 2024 the graph has changed a lot. Almost 40 years ago there were more Spaniards abroad than foreigners inside and the few people who went to Spain to stay came mainly from France, Morocco and Germany. Spanish people in diaspora lived mainly in France and Argentina, a legacy of Francoism and exile. Between 1990 and 2005 the number of immigrants quintupled and countries such as Ecuador, Colombia and Romania emerged strongly as countries of origin. In 2024 the number of immigrants is 9 million people, with Morocco first, Colombia second and copper going to Venezuela, an origin that barely existed in the 90s. Where immigrants in Spain were born, and where their emigrants lived in 2005. Our World in data Although these interactive graphics allow us to know at a glance origins, destinations and accumulated quantities, they are insufficient to understand migration phenomena in depth. They do not distinguish between radically different profiles: a person refugee, a student, a temporary worker or an expat with an international contract they count equally in the stock, when their conditions, rights and vulnerabilities are incomparable. Nor do they include irregular migration, a particularly significant phenomenon in the Spanish state. And, above all, they reduce people to numbers, showing the result but not the causes. It is also worth remembering that this flow is not just about people: the remittances that they send to their countries of origin represent one of the largest movements of capital towards the global south, in many cases exceeding official development aid. In Xataka | The great Iberian divide: the map that divides Spain in two through its two large hydrographic basins In Xataka | The two types of countries in the world, on a map: those that are becoming demographically extinct and those that are not Cover | Our World in Data

the map of the 100 trials that explains everything

June 27, 2026 by usatoday24

In order for ChatGPT, Gemini or Meta AI to respond well to the enormous number of questions that their users ask every day, years before the companies behind them made a decision: to obtain data at all costs and from wherever. Books, newspaper articles, song lyrics, illustrations, source code. Its premise was clear: it was Better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. So today the courts are full of lawsuits, billions of dollars at stake and the AI business model in the dock. For years, piracy was a matter of individuals downloading movies. Now it is the largest companies in the world that have done something similar, but on a large scale and with technology that structurally violates it. What the judges decide will mark how artificial intelligence is built from now on. Just as you prepare better for an exam if, in addition to taking the class book, you go to the library and read recommended books and expand with other readings associated with the topic you are reviewing, the different research teams behind the great AI models. it occurred to them that with huge datasets and from varied sources the result was better. The problem is that that tremendous volume of data does not fall from the sky: They took it from the web, from digital libraries and from LibGen or Z-Library repositories. The usual defense of companies like OpenAI is fair use and text and data mining exceptions, ensuring that they use unlicensed data legitimately. So the courts go case by case. Whether or not training AI models with protected content is fair use is the most important copyright question the courts have faced. Depending on the result, companies face a dark future: the payment of licenses retroactively, cleaning databases and of course, changing how they collect your data from now on. And they have lawsuits to bore: more than 100 active complaints in June 2026, according to the graph. It is important to note that this chart refers only to United States courts. Furthermore, in Europe it is a different story. The old continent has more restrictive regulations: it requires deleting data after use and allows creators to reserve their rights. The AI Act requires publishing what data was used in training, something that companies have consistently avoided. The graphic in question is the work of David McCandless for Information is Beautiful and has been prepared using data from ChatGPTisEatingTheWorld.com, Wired reports and reference news. And his work is commendable: talking about litigation is not easy, but he has managed to synthesize it in a single graph to know who sues who in the world of AI. In the center are the technological companies in demand and on the outside, those who demand: from writers to media, platforms and artists. Each category is represented with a color and the larger the circle, the larger the company. There is also a disclaimer: to make the graph look better, when a plaintiff has several open lawsuits, only the main defendant’s lawsuit is shown. Come on, there are many more than we see. Who is suing who. Information is beautiful The map of conflicts On one side, the companies that built AI models, such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, NVIDIA and Perplexity, among others. To another, plaintiffs of all kinds who allege that their works were used without permission or compensation to train systems that have now become their competition. The bottom line is that all the major AI companies are receiving requests from almost all creative categories. Some great cases: Bartz vs. Anthropic. The company led by Dario Amodei agreed to pay $1.5 billion after it was shown that it had downloaded hundreds of thousands of books from unofficial repositories. The court validated the training as fair use, but not the way to achieve it. Kadrey vs. Goal. Mark Zuckerberg’s company won in the training part, but is still on trial for having distributed pirated content. New York Times vs. OpenAIstill in progress. The Times alleges that ChatGPT reproduces its articles almost verbatim, replacing the original source. Disney vs. Midjourneystill in progress: The big entertainment studios fight against the generation of images. Concord, BMG and Universal vs. Anthropicstill in progress. The big legendary record labels sue for reproducing protected lyrics. The US Copyright Office public In May 2025, a 108-page report concluded that there is no universal answer: determining whether the use of works to train AI is fair use requires analyzing each case separately. And not all companies are the same nor are all uses. What is clear is that this system of “asking for forgiveness instead of permission” has a price: Anthropic has shown that it can get away with paying $1.5 billion because its valuation is $183 billion. So the short answer is that today, it has been worth it. The underlying question is whether there will continue to be a flood of lawsuits or whether clearer rules will be established on the use of data and there will be someone with a firm hand and knowledge to apply them. In Xataka | Who is really winning the AI race, in a graph that puts Google in trouble In Xataka | AI is going to generate unprecedented wealth. The question everyone is starting to ask is who is going to stay with her?

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