In a New York coffee shop, the concept of a blind date has taken an unexpected turn: the meeting is with an AI

Going to a coffee shop to have a blind date is already a somewhat peculiar situation. If the person waiting for you is also an AI, the matter borders on surrealism. A lukewarm experience. He tells it Ben Sherry at INCwho a few days ago went to the EVA Café in New York. There was a table with a single chair and a stand with a cell phone waiting for him, where he could choose between different AI avatars for his appointment. During his time at the EVA Café, he spoke with two avatars, a woman and then a man. The two agreed to praise her hair and the decoration of the place, but they were reluctant to answer deeper questions such as her political ideology. In Xataka "I can’t stop": the addiction to talking to AI is already here and there are even support groups to stop it EVA AI. It is the name of the app that organized the event and, indeed, it is a “friends” AIin the style of Replika either Character.ai. Its last commercial action has been a ‘pop-up coffee’ to “bring virtual romance to the real world.” The app’s sales manager told INC that her goal is to fight the stigma that exists towards relationships with AIs. The app, which has accumulated more than 5 million downloads in the Play Store, offers the possibility of starting a relationship with one of its different AI avatars, all with a clear inclination towards romance. You can start for free, but if you want to continue talking to your AI, you have to check out; This is the only way to unlock special functions such as sending images or the ability to make video calls. What he anticipated Her. EVA AI is not an isolated case. Thevirtual girlfriends They have been around for a long time, but with generative AI there has been a boom in this type of apps.More and more people are turning to this relational modelto the point that there are those cheats on his real partner with an AI. In case we had any doubt that the trend is real, Grok launched his virtual girlfriend Ani andChatGPT announced that it would launch ‘adult mode’ coming soon, functions that of course can only be used by users with a subscription. {“videoId”:”x9hhg44″,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”The TRUTH of AI – This is how ChatGPT 4, DALL-E or MIDJOURNEY works 🤖 🧠 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”, “tag”:”webedia-prod”, “duration”:”1173″} The goal is obvious. Regardless of psychosocial reasons that lead us to seek an intimate connection with a machine, the reason why companies like OpenAI or xAI are turning towards adult content is obvious: to generate money. The emotional connection is a way to increase users’ commitment to your service and by using a subscription as a gateway, they not only get them to spend more time in your app, but they also get them to pay for it. AI has a monetization problem and this is one of the ways to generate income. Emotional connection. It may seem like something recent to us, but the reality of humans has been connecting with machines since 1966, when the first chatbot was created. In this sense, AI has not changed anything, although it is normalizing it. Recently we have seen other examples of emotional connection with machines, such as when OpenAI crashed ChatGPT 4o and users were angry because they liked his warm and friendly tone. We have also seen it with the celebration of a symbolic funeral for Claude 3 Sonnetanother model that enjoyed great affection among the community. Image | Alexander Sinn in Unsplash In Xataka | Flirting on Tinder is exhausting. The solution of these apps is to skip the eternal chats and organize the appointment directly (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news In a New York coffee shop, the concept of a blind date has taken an unexpected turn: the meeting is with an AI was originally published in Xataka by Amparo Babiloni .

Meeting the energy demand of AI is leading to desperate measures. How to reuse old airplane turbines

The AI ​​race has put the electrical infrastructures of half the world in check. Data centers need more and more megawatts, and they need them now. But the energy industry does not play at the same pace, which explains why there are companies installing airplane engines next to these huge graphics card farms. Two options, two problems. When a company builds a new data center for AI, it has two options. The first is to connect to the electrical network, but according to IEEE Spectrumpermits to carry out interconnection can reach eight or even ten years in some regions. AI, however, advances in a matter of months, and cannot wait a decade. Hence, many companies, like Elon Musk’s xAIopt for option 2: build their own power plant on the site. This is not without problems either. Global demand for gas turbines has skyrocketed, and not just because of AI, but because of economic growth in Asia and the Middle East. Manufacturers such as GE Vernova or Siemens Energy have waiting lists of three to five years, and for larger models, the period is longer. As noted in a report by Public Powera new gas plant project commissioned today could begin operating in 2032. Aircraft engines as power plants. This bottleneck has caused, on the one hand, that turbine manufacturers rub their handsand on the other, that companies sharpen their ingenuity. And this is where aeronautical engineering and the reuse of aircraft turbines come into play. The concept of using aircraft engines to generate electricity is not new. They are known as aeroderivative turbines: they are smaller, lighter and easier to maintain than heavy industrial turbines. What is new is the scale and urgency with which this solution is being implemented. From a Boeing 747 to the data center. An American company called ProEnergy has become a protagonist of the trend with a simple plan: buy used jet engine cores, specifically the CF6-80C2 model of the iconic Boeing 747, and adapt them. These engines, after decades of service in the air, are disassembled, reviewed piece by piece and rebuilt for a second life on dry land. The result is the PE6000 unit, a gas turbine that, as detailed the popia companyis capable of generating 48 megawatts (MW) of electricity. A single one of these units can power a small or medium-sized data center, or a city of up to 40,000 homes. A bridging solution. The reality is that these converted aircraft engines are not the definitive solution, but rather what the industry bridges for the first years of operation of its data centers. “Both projects are designed to provide bridge power for five to seven years, which is when they hope to have interconnection to the grid,” says the CEO of ProEnergy. But business is good. The company has already sold 21 of these turbines for two projects, adding more than 1 gigawatt (GW) of capacity thanks to its speed of delivery. Companies can buy a turbine from ProEnergy by 2027 or wait a decade to build a conventional plant. Everyone wins. Except the environment. It is gas that ends up burning in order to have these data centers operational in record time. Image | ProEnergy In Xataka | If the question is “how does having a data center next to my house affect me”, in the US they already have an answer: 267% more expensive electricity

In 2015, the US revealed the meeting of two fighters with an “unknown object”. China has just presented it to the world

At the end of 2017 the New York Times launched One of that news that is remembered for what it could mean. A secret program of the Pentagon was revealed that was dedicated to investigating the threats raised by possible UFOs. And among all the information, the star news: the encounter of an unidentified object with two combat fighters (with video included). The origin of those strangers in the sky has never been confirmed. Until China has announced something. The echo of the “gimbal”. As we said, that object video called as “gimbal”, captured by A F/A-18 From the US Navy, he unleashed a global debate on inexplicable aerial phenomena and technologies beyond known military capacities. Today, almost a decade later, China, through the Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics, has presented A tracing of what we saw in those images, an experimental take -off and vertical landing drone (Vtol) whose design, surprisingly, reminds that of that mysterious artifact: a fuselage With elliptical wing in closed ring -shaped, reinforced by vertical stabilizers and four rotors located at the binding points. One of the Chinese Experimental Drones in Test Flight in Zhengzhou, Henan Province The Chinese revolution in Vtol. At first glance it seems A flying spindle more than a conventional aircraft or quadcopter. However, in that unorthodox form an engineering is hidden that combines the best of multi -reliable and fixed -wing systems: maneuvering capacity and vertical support to operate from ships, irregular land or even aquatic surfaces, and at the same time aerodynamic efficiency in horizontal flight, thanks to a wing whose slope of support curve overcomes In more than 100% to that of a straight wing. Radical aerodynamics. Beijing researchers have that the annular wing channels high pressure flows and delays the loss, which allows stable to fly At low speeds or high attack angles, key conditions for military recognition missions in complex environments. The horizontal stabilizer mounted at the ends avoids internal turbulence and improves control. Plus: Tunnel tests and test flights confirmed that the device maintains the adhered flow even in extreme conditionsvalidating computational models that predicted a leap in benefits. A close look at DRON VTOL Chino Purposes. Its robust modular structure allows, on paper, integrate Optical sensors, thermal cameras, rescue equipment or supply capsules, which makes it a multipurpose platform for both military missions (battlefield supervision, maritime surveillance) and For civil applications (Environmental analysis, rescue in difficult access areas, light emergency transport). Limitations and margin of improvement. The great challenge is still The aerodynamic draginherent to the geometry of the closed wing. In that sense, researchers They have underlined that work to refine the profile to reduce pressure resistance and optimize the support/resistance ratio. Plus: They seek to perfect control algorithms to minimize unnecessary corrections that generate induced drag, and also study “more stylized variants designed to operate from war ships”, which would multiply its strategic value in naval operations. Of speculation to the battlefield. Thus, what for much of the world was A ufological unknowns A decade ago, China has now translated it into a tangible system, the result of the convergence of academic research and, of course, military pressure to reach the next generation of drones. If in the cold war the boldest experiments were on paper, today engineering (and China goes in the top positions) manages to validate designs that were just a few years ago as pure fantasy. The similarity with the “gimbal” is casual or intentional, but the truth is that the drone opens a different aerodynamic languageone in which the borders between science fiction and military development are blurred. Image | Handout, Pentagon, Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics In Xataka | The Pentagon confirms the truth and shows for the first time three “secret” videos of alleged UFOs that had leaked In Xataka | The Pentagon has just published the study on the material found in 1947 from an alleged “extraterrestrial” ship

Bie million years ago symbiosis between two cells created a new kingdom in nature. We are trying to replicate the meeting

About one billion years ago an event happened that would change our planet forever. It was not the first time that an event of this Tupo was happening, in fact, when something similar happened millions of years before, the ban was opened to the appearance of complex life on earth. This time it was the time of the plants. All because one cell managed to swallow another. 1+1 = 1. A team of researchers He is trying to recreate In a laboratory the conditions that gave rise to the appearance of the unicellular organisms of which all past and present plants evolved. The project, baptized as 1+1 = 1, has an objective that goes beyond the study of the evolution of these organisms, could give rise to new tools to use both in biotechnology and medicine. A first radical change. To better understand the experiment, we must return to these two key moments in the evolutionary history of the Earth’s Vira. The first of the events that would mark these changes took about 2,000 million years ago, although the estimates vary. This change occurred when a simple, prokaryotic cell, swallowed another and turned it to its organelle. The engulmed cell had the ability to produce energy from chemical compounds, which became a useful tool for the “host” cell, which made it its private energy center, The mitochondria. Having such a source of energy was what allowed this cell to evolve, generate an independent nucleus and then give rise to complex life. Second act. About a billion years after the appearance of the first eukaryotic cells, the story was repeated again: one cell swallowed another and turned it into something of its own, another organelle. On this occasion, the swallowed cell was cyanobacteria, an organism capable of performing photosynthesis. When integrating into a eukaryotic cell, cyanobacteria went to become a chloroplastallowing his guest to enjoy the advantages of photosynthesis. This change gave way to a new kingdom of life, that of plants. From symbiosis to total union. The integration process between cells was slowly surely: first individual cells would have become a symbiotic relationship. A relationship that, over the years (millions, perhaps) would give rise to total integration. Replicate the process From beginning to end in laboratory it may not be feasible, so the work focuses on the first steps, in creating a “synthetic symbiosis” that allows us to investigate the processes that gave rise to the formation of complex cells. The team responsible for this project wants to observe the process closely, Replicating this synthetic relationship between two organisms in controlled conditions. The chosen microorganisms are a bacteria, Burstar Parameciumand a unicellular algae, Chlorella vulgaris. The relationship they seek to replicate the nature symbiosis, in which the bacteria acts as a algae host. New tools. To carry out the experiment, the team turned to microchips designed specifically for this, which allow studying cells closely maintaining control of light, temperature and nutrient availability in these cells. To “force” symbiosis, the team put the bacteria under stressful conditions and studied interactions with the other organism involved. Methodological details can be consulted In an article Posted in the magazine Lab on a chip. More common than it seems. We have proof of two occasions in which these advanced symbiosis changed the course of life, but the relationships between unicellular organisms that give rise to endosimbiosis do not seem to be something strange. In recent years We have seen similar cases discovered in nature, for example The case of the algae Braarudosphaera Bigelowiiwhich absorbed a newly discovered cyanobacteria called UCYN-A. In Xataka | Luca, this was the ancestral microorganism that all current living beings emerged Image | Witting et al. (2025), Forschungszentrum Jülich / Degleex Ganzorig

Aguirre sees the positive side of trying young people on the South American tour of Mexico

Before playing two games for South America, coach Javier Aguirre said that the result in both games would be the least important. The essential thing was to see the performance of the young players who received the opportunity in the absence of the usual starters who were not loaned by their clubs. In the matches against Internacional de Porto Alegre from Brazil and River Plate from Argentina, “Vasco” Aguire made 14 players debut with El Tri. One of them was Gilberto Mora, who became the youngest player to debut with the national team. The Tijuana midfielder is 16 years and three months old. Mexico defeated Inter 2-0 and then lost by the same score against River. “I leave with the feeling that the tour was worth it,” Aguirre said the day before. “You have to keep balance and draw conclusions. It’s good for me for the future. The objective of the tour was met. There are three or four players who really deserve a chance on the next occasions.” The veteran coach did not want to go into detail about who those players are who could fight for a place in the Nations League, where Mexico will have its next official match on March 20 against Canada. Who took advantage? Although he has few spotlights, recovery midfielder Elías Montiel is the next jewel of the Pachuca quarry and in both matches he showed why. At just 19 years old, the player became a starter for the Tuzos in the previous tournament and was one of the most outstanding in the last edition of the Intercontinental Cup. Aguirre summoned him for both matches and he was one of the few who repeated his lineup in both matches. The problem for Montiel is that in that position there is tough competition for ownership. Edson Álvarez (Fulham) and Luis Chávez (Dinamo Moscow), both with World Cup experience, usually occupy those positions. Luis Romo (Chivas) also fights for minutes. A similar case is that of Jorge Ruvalcaba, who excelled with a goal and several dangerous attempts against the Brazilians. The Pumas winger, with experience in Europe with Standard de Lieja, moves along the left wing, a sector where Julián Quiñones, Alexis Vega, César Huerta and Hirving Lozano fight to be starters. Of the rest, goalkeeper Raúl Rangel, full-back Jesús Gallardo and forward Guillermo Martínez, the only ones previously mentioned by Aguirre, fulfilled what was expected and will surely continue to be regular in the calls. What’s next? In Aguirre’s original plan, in addition to playing games outside of friendly environments such as the fields of the United States, it was contemplated to carry out “mini-cycles” of training with players from the local league. That idea was presented and approved by then-high commissioner Juan Carlos Rodriguez, who resigned from his position in December. After the little support shown by the clubs to release players for the South American tour, it is unlikely that they will want to release them for training sessions originally scheduled from Monday to Wednesday. If nothing changes, Aguirre will have to wait until mid-March to have a full team again before facing Canada in the Nations League.

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