Millions

six companies, hundreds of millions of dollars and 25 missions to conquer the South Pole

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NASA has already launched phase 1 of construction of your moon base. They have not yet taken a new batch of humans to the Moon, but it is important to prepare the ground, which is why this Tuesday they announced the first steps they are taking to do so. And, as it could not be otherwise, it all starts with million-dollar hires. 6 companies in total. At the moment, NASA has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in hiring six companies that will be in charge of developing the technologies necessary to launch the first phase of the lunar base. The companies in question are Blue Origin, Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, Astrolab, Lunar Outpost and Firefly Aerospace. In general, in this first phase of construction of the lunar base it is expected to explore the south polar region, test various technologies and prepare surface operations. All of this will be carried out through 25 missions that will include 21 moon landings. Moon Base 1. To begin with, the first three missions are expected to launch this year. The first, Moon Base 1, will be carried out by Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos’ company will take its lander to the Moon Blue Moon Mark 1the “brother” of the Blue Moon Mark 2 that is preparing to become the human landing system for the Artemis missions. As payload will include the Stereoscopic Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies to study how thrusters interact with the lunar surface, and the Laser Retroreflective Array, which helps spacecraft in orbit determine a more precise location using reflected laser light. The mission will take place in autumn 2026 if all goes well. Since it will be the first to land in the Shackleton crater, where the base is to be built, it will also be in charge of checking the viability of lunar landings near the lunar base. Moon Base 2. The second mission, which will also travel to the Moon at the end of 2026, will be carried out by Astrobotic. It will send its Griffin lander to the Moon, loaded with 500 kg of instrumentation, including a rover to study the surface on which the base will be built and mature the mobility systems for future manned vehicles. Moon Base 3. The third mission to be sent in 2026 has been granted to Intuitive Machines. This company will take its Nova-C Trinity lunar module there, which will be in charge of studying lunar eddies and the behavior of materials under extreme conditions. Furthermore, this mission will not be 100% private, as it will include payloads from the European Space Agency and the Korean Institute of Astronomy and Space Sciences. Some of the models that NASA showed during the press conference Boogies to move around the Moon. So that future astronauts who travel to the lunar base can move around it, they want to take two manned lunar vehicles there. Said so that we can all understand each other, two boogie-type strollers, designed to move around the lunar surface, both with and without a crew. Its development has been entrusted to the companies Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, also as part of this first phase. Delimitation drones. The company Firefly Aerospace has been entrusted with taking the 4 Moonfall drones to the Moon, whose main mission will be to inspect the area in search of the best landing places for the astronauts. Although they will also have a much more peculiar mission. As explained At NASA’s press conference, its executive director of the lunar base program, Carlos García-Galan, these drones will also be stationed in the corners to delimit the perimeter of the lunar base. Next phases. This first phase will last until 2029. Then the next phase will begin, which will end in 2032. In this, the permanent infrastructure of the lunar base will begin to be built, including electrical installation. From then on, it will only be necessary to refine more and more details and little by little receive the astronauts of the Artemis missions of the future. Without a doubt, this is the beginning of a new era of space exploration. Image | POT In Xataka | We knew there was water on the Moon, but not why some craters were empty. Finally we have the answer

The Earth has had a traveling companion for millions of years and we don’t know where it came from, but there is a ship ready to give us answers

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The Earth does not travel alone around the sun. And not only because of the Moon, which logically always accompanies it, orbiting around it. It also has several traveling companions: objects, called co-orbitals, that take exactly the same time as our planet to make a complete revolution around the star. These objects are well known, but their origin is quite mysterious. There are astronomers who bet that they escaped from the asteroid belt. However, their silicate content suggests that they could be fragments of the Moon that jumped from its surface after the impact of a meteorite. Now, a team of scientists has assigned probabilities to each option, although for definitive proof of its origin we will have to wait a little longer. (469219) Kamo’oalewa. This is the name of one of the best-known coorbitals on Earth. It measures between 24 and 107 meters in diameter and the spectral analyzes that have been able to be carried out Telescopes such as the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) and the Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT) indicate that it is very rich in silicates, so it is likely that it comes from the Moon. In fact, the most accepted hypothesis so far indicates that it could have been formed during the impact that gave rise to the Giordano Bruno crater on our satellite. However, this new study, published in the journal Icarus, suggests that it is more likely that it is an asteroid escaped of the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Very unlikely. For an asteroid or a piece of the Moon to become co-orbital, they must not only escape from their place. Also They must have enough energy to be located in what is known as a quasi-satellite orbit. This, for a body the size of Kamo’oalewa, is highly unlikely. Quasi-what? A quasi-satellite has certain similarities with a satellite, but it is not the same. When we look at one of them from the planet it accompanies, in the direction of the Sun, it appears that it is in orbit around the planet, but in reality it rotates around the Sun itself. This, among other reasons, is due to the fact that is outside the Hill sphere of the planet. That is, the environment dominated by its gravity. Being outside of said orbit, it is influenced by the planet’s gravity, but above all, in this case, it is influenced by that of the Sun. Be that as it may, falling and staying in that orbit is complicated, as we have already seen and, above all, as these scientists have demonstrated. Win the asteroid option. These scientists have created models that simulate the trajectory of 12,000 synthetic particles launched from the lunar surface at different speeds and angles, following their orbits for millions of years. The goal was to see how many stabilized at co-orbital points with the Earth. In total they found 70 objects with a diameter greater than 10 meters capable of doing so. 70 out of 12,000! Now, when they repeated the procedure by swapping lunar particles for objects from the asteroid belt, they found more candidates. 1,600 in total. Tianwen-2 will return samples to answer the mystery in 2027 Tianwen-2 will have the key. The origin of coorbitals is so intriguing that China already has sent a ship to analyze the surface of one of them. Specifically from Kamo’oalewa himself. The Tianwen-2 mission left in May 2025 towards this object, with the aim of collecting at least 100 grams of samples and return them to Earth for analysis. It is already known that there are silicates, or at least it is suspected, but a deeper idea of ​​the composition is needed to understand the origin of this object. Orbit insertion is expected to occur next June if all goes well. Then he will spend a few months collecting samples to put them in a capsule, which will land back on Earth. already in 2027. Two options. If the analyzes of Tianwen-2 conclude that Kamo’oalewa came from the Moon, the lunar impact mechanics would have to be rethought, since it would be very rare for one of these fragments to have been able to reach its final location with what we know so far. On the other hand, if it is proven that it comes from an asteroid, it would be necessary to study where these silicates come from, since they are very unconventional for an object of these characteristics. Whatever is concluded, there will be a lot of fabric to cut, that is clear. ç Image | NASA |China News Service In Xataka | The Earth has moons that we don’t know about: exploring them is key to revealing the secrets of our solar system

In 2020, the Government quarantined millions of people. The question is whether he will be able to do it with the 14 Spaniards of the MV Hondius

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If Spain learned anything during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that when it comes to dealing with crises related to diseases, the borders between health, politics and law become blurred. With the hantavirus outbreak detected aboard the MV Hondius something similar happens. As the ship moves towards the Canary Islands, what began as a health alert turns into something more: reason for political dispute and a legal debate on how to treat the 14 Spaniards (asymptomatic) who travel on the ship. In the background there is a key question: What to do if the time comes, one of them refuses to undergo a quarantine? One word: hantavirus. Until a few days ago, the vast majority of Spaniards (Europeans, in general) did not know what hantavirus. And it’s normal. As remember According to the Ministry of Health, infections due to this virus are usually generated by contact with excrement or saliva of sick rodents and are “relatively uncommon worldwide.” In 2025 in America ‘only’ 229 cases in eight countries. The number of deaths rose to 59 due to the so-called “hantavirus pulmonary syndrome” (HPS). A bumpy ride. Things changed a few days ago, when the outbreak of a serious respiratory illness was reported on board the MV Hondius, a passenger ship that sailed on April 1 from Ushuaia (Argentina) to make a voyage through the South Atlantic with stops at points such as Nightingale Island, Santa Elena or Ascension Island, heading to Cape Verde. Just a few days after starting the voyage, one of the passengers, a Dutch septuagenarian, began to feel fever, diarrhea and headache. His health worsened alarmingly until he died after five days. The body remained on board the ship until April 24, when it disembarked in Saint Helena for repatriation. His wife, also Dutch and 69 years old, did it with him, who after showing similar symptoms ended up dying in a hospital in South Africa. A PCR confirmed the cause: hantavirus infection. Since then other passengers have shown similar discomfort. At the moment the outbreak has left, as far as is known, three deceased and at least another half dozen infected. On Sunday the ship arrived in Cape Verde, which “public safety”refused to moor in the capital. Next stop: Canary Islands. Now the ship continues its voyage towards where it was your final destination: Canary Islands. the ship sailed yesterday of Cape Verde after two key news events occurred. The first came around noon, when Tedros Ahdhanom, director general of the WHO, confirmed via X that the authorities had evacuated the three patients from the ship suspected of suffering from the disease. Their destination is Holland, where they will receive medical assistance. The second arrived from La Moncloawhich has confirmed Spain’s willingness to “meet the WHO’s request” to host the liner in the Canary Islands “once the evacuation of all symptomatic people is completed.” The Dutch shipping company Oceanwide Expeditions, responsible for the MV Hondius, assures that keeps monitored the situation on board the ship and in its last part, published this morning, it guarantees that “there are no people with symptoms on board.” And the controversy broke out. The announcement that the ship is sailing towards the Canary Islands, where it will probably arrive on sundaygenerated considerable debate. Moncloa’s initial plans called for the ship to arrive at the port of Granadilla de Abona, in Tenerife, where the workers soon arrived. threaten a blockade of the terminal. The reason? The staff denounced the lack of information and clear protocols on how they should act in the face of the viral outbreak. In the archipelago he also jumped the debate on whether the region has legal (or at least political) margin to reject the scale. With that backdrop, Health has confirmed today to the Canarian president, Fernando Clavijo, that the MV Hondius will not dock, “it will only anchor” so that passengers can evacuate with the help of boats. The idea is that they will be transferred to the airport, from where they will be repatriated to their respective countries. When the ship left Patagonia it had some 147 travelers of 23 nationalities. Who travels on board? That’s the key. The idea is that, once in the Canary Islands, the passengers are repatriated to their countries; but there are 14 who will not need that operation. The reason? They are Spanish. Specifically, there are 13 passengers and a crew member of Spanish nationality on board the MV Hondius who have opened another debate just as interesting. Once on land the plan goes through transport them on a plane military to the Torrejón de Ardoz air base and, from there, to the Gómez Ulla Defense Hospital. The idea is that they spend a quarantine period in individual rooms. How much exactly? Today it is difficult to know. It is known that the incubation period of the virus is around 45 days, but the question remains as to what day it should start counting. The outbreak probably arose between the 6th and the 28th. “They will remain cared for and will remain in quarantine for as long as the clinical protocols require,” guaranteed on Wednesday the Minister of Health, Mónica García. His department insists that, even if some of the Spanish passengers presented symptoms or had to attend to other patients, the risk for the population “it is considered very low”. The big question. The question that flies over In recent days the ministries of Health and Defense have been… What would happen if any of those 14 Spaniards are reluctant to undergo quarantine? Could they refuse? And in that case, would the State have tools to demand that period of controlled isolation from them, something reminiscent of what happened during the State of alarm of COVID-19? It is not a whimsical question if one takes into account that the Government already has recognized that the will of the patients will be key. In fact Mónica García has appealed directly to “common sense and responsibility” of Spanish … Read more

Every year Renfe dedicates millions and millions of euros to something that has little to do with transportation: cleaning graffiti

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In March 2023 Renfe did something very rare in the world of communication: he sent a press release full of graffiti to newsrooms across the country. Literally. The text was so smudged that you could barely read its content, beyond the headline, in which the operator lamented that “the graffiti vandalism” that occurs on trains generated a cost of 25 million of euros, in addition to affecting the flow of traffic with delays and cancellations of services. That marketing campaign served to arouse curiosity and raise awareness about the issue, but it does not seem to have solved the problem. In fact, the bill for graffiti removal just came a considerable jumpjoining others related to vandalism, such as wiring theft. What has happened? That despite all your attempts to tackle the problem, the campaigns awareness, the control of the authorities and the complaints launched by the workers, Renfe has not managed to free itself from a very special type of vandalism: that which is perpetrated with sprays and that attacks its wagons and locomotives. The operator already had warned in several occasions that graffiti on trains cost him 25 million euros annually, but the bill seems to have increased in recent years. at least like this has advanced it elEconomista.eswhich ensures that in 2025 spending will skyrocket to exceed 32.2 million euros. Has it increased that much? The economic newspaper assures that the railway operator has had to increase the efforts it dedicates to keeping its trains clean, going from around 25 million annually invested in recent years (the sum includes direct and indirect costs) to just over 32 million in 2025. The largest expense would be located in Catalonia, where recently The socialists presented a bill to increase fines for acts of vandalism that affect public transportation. According to The NewspaperIn 2023, cleaning trains in the region cost 11.6 million, about 32,000 euros per day. Is it something new? No. And that is precisely one of the keys to the problem. Three years ago, in his famous statement defaced, Renfe already denounced that “graffiti vandalism” on the trains was generating a cost of more than 25 million euros per year, a bill that, it warned, falls directly on citizens. It may seem like an exorbitant figure, but Renfe recalled that graffiti not only requires cleaning machinery, it also has less visible consequences that are equally (or even more) burdensome. “This figure includes, in addition to the cleaning itself, the indirect expenses derived from this scourge, such as investment in security, both for personnel and other technological systems,” scored Renfe in 2024. Graffiti also affects railway operations, so passengers suffer directly. Click on the image to go to the tweet. Does it affect that much? Yes. In her day the operator already warned that sometimes graffiti directly affects the service they provide, causing delays and leaving trains unusable. The reason? The company spoke of “lack of visibility or graffiti on safety elements that impede circulation”, in addition to “emergency braking to paint in the middle of a journey” or even the smell generated by aerosol paints. “It is very annoying to travelers.” The truth is that Renfe has not been the only one to report the problem. He has also done it by example the Government in Catalonia or the CGT union in Galicia, which in February regretted in X that the graffiti on a train was preventing Renfe from using it to resolve the saturation of the service between Vigo and A Coruña. How much is vandalized? Renfe calculates that if the entire area of ​​vandalized wagons and locomotives is added, in 2023 there will be around 80,000 m2. And not because that was a particularly bad year. It is an estimate very similar to that of 2022 and theEconomist points out that one year the 90,000 m2. To give a clearer idea of ​​what these levels of vandalism mean, in 2023 the operator I remembered that cleaning such a quantity of paint had required 15,000 hours of work and that the railway network had also been affected to the same extent. “The trains were stopped for 15,000 hours unscheduled due to graffiti removal,” insisted the company, which reminds that the damage could be even greater if surveillance were relaxed: in 2023 alone its security personnel thwarted almost 1,200 incursions by vandals to create graffiti. Is there no way to avoid it? If there is, in Spain we have not yet managed to find the key. And not for lack of efforts. In addition to toughen sanctions and carry out controls that not long ago allowed ‘hunting’ in Catalonia about a dozen of those involved in 115 graffiti on FGC, Renfe and Barcelona Metro machinery, Renfe has resorted to new forms of surveillance. Renfe already employs for example, drones to hunt down vandals who paint wagons or break into their facilities, which has led to a notable investment. Images | Renfe 1, 2 and Alvaro Galve (Flickr) Via | elEconomista.es In Xataka | Japan has a secret weapon to end vandalism in its streets that only affects teenagers: “The Mosquito”

Millions to protect a war frigate. A Bluetooth tracker worth a few euros has been enough to follow her in real time

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Protecting a warship costs a fortune. We are talking about sensors, protocols, personnel, weapons and a security chain designed to minimize any unnecessary exposure. That is why what has happened with the Zr.Ms. Evertsena frigate of the Netherlands Navy integrated into the battle group of the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. According to Omroep Gelderlandtheir position could be tracked in real time for hours with something much more mundane and cheaper: a simple Bluetooth tracker sent via military mail. The story does not begin with a technological gap or with a particularly complex maneuver, but with something much more earthly: a postcard. That was what the aforementioned medium used to introduce the tracker into Evertsen through the military mail service. The sources do not specify what device was used, beyond describing it as a low-cost tracker. It is easy to think of a Apple AirTagbut there is no indication that it was that specific model and the market offers many similar alternatives. How a minor failure left a frigate exposed The case gains another dimension when you look at what Evertsen’s mission was at that time. According to the source, the frigate was part of the group that escorted the Charles de Gaulle and its function was to help protect the aircraft carrier of possible air or missile threats. This task makes its location especially sensitive data within an ongoing military mission. In other words, it was not just about knowing where a ship was, but about being able to keep track of a relevant piece within a real operation. The really delicate thing about this episode is not only that a tracker managed to enter the military postal circuit, but what that suggests about certain procedures that continue to operate with a logic from other times. According to the media itself based on official videos from the ministry, the packages did go through X-rays, but the envelopes did not follow the same control. That combination opened enough of a gap to compromise the discretion of the deployment. We are not facing a spectacular failure, but rather an apparently minor vulnerability, but sufficient to allow the ship to be monitored. Once the initial filter was passed, the case stopped being a hypothesis and became a real follow-up. According to the reconstruction published by the Dutch media, the tracker signal made it possible to follow a path that went from Netherlands to Cretewith steps through Den Helder and Eindhoven airport before reaching the port of Heraklion. There, in addition, images from a camera fit that clue and showed the Evertsen moored at the dock. On March 27, once out of port, the frigate continued broadcasting its position for about 24 more hours: first it skirted the Cretan coast and then headed east, until the device stopped giving a signal near Cyprus. The official reaction came after publication and was, at least in part, corrective. The Dutch Ministry of Defense made changes following this incident and stopped allowing battery-powered greeting cards to be sent to Evertsen, as well as announcing a broader review of military mail guidelines. At the same time, the department held that the tracker was located while the correspondence on board was being sorted, once the frigate had already left the port. And although he admitted that the ship could be followed at sea, he assured that this did not constitute an operational risk. There is a quite obvious reading in closing this story. The frigate was still part of a military mission, protected within a much larger device, and yet a low-cost domestic object managed to open a tracking window for hours. Not because it replaced the big threats, but because it slipped through a minor seam that no one had fully adjusted. That’s what makes this episode especially revealing: remember that, in 2026, security doesn’t just depend on large systems. Images | Ein Dahmer | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | France was moving its aircraft carrier without revealing its location. Until a runner on board uploaded an activity to Strava

Houston, we have a problem with Outlook. Microsoft spends millions on AI, but Artemis II does not escape the failures of its email

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On April 2, we experienced a historic event for humanity: the mission Artemis II It successfully took off towards the moon after more than 50 years without orbiting near the Earth’s satellite. Although the takeoff was a success, the path to get here was not without problems: it already had to delay the first date launch and also the second. Even on the official day there were problems. In the previous hours it was necessary check an anomaly in a temperature sensor of a battery abort system and also appeared another incident in the flight termination system (the safety mechanism that makes it possible to destroy the rocket if it deviates from its trajectory and becomes a threat). When the Orion spacecraft was flying almost 150,000 kilometers from Earth according to FortuneCommander Reid Wiseman encountered a mundane problem faced by any mortal with a computer and Microsoft email: an Outlook crash. The incident. The launch of Artemis II could be followed live and in that live, approximately 13 hours and 15 minutes after the broadcast began there is a fragment where the problem appears: “I see that I have two Microsoft Outlook accounts, and neither one works. If you could connect remotely and check Optimus and those two Outlook accounts, that would be great.” At first, Wiseman had issues related to the Optimus software, but then he pointed out a more trivial concern: There were two instances of Outlook running on his personal computing device. As a curiosity, the live stream to follow the takeoff still available on YouTube. Why it is important. The Artemis II mission is historic and the stream has left for posterity its first hours of flight and this anecdote that constitutes what is probably the first Microsoft technical support ticket generated from space. Beyond the joke, the episode shows that today’s space exploration and its cutting-edge technology coexist with commercial productivity software and its common failures. When an agency standardizes its entire infrastructure on a single technological ecosystem, the problems of that ecosystem also become problems of the mission. Tap to go to the post There is a support ticket from the Moon. As with any standard corporate ticket, the user first reported the incident, the technical team took over remotely, and finally closed the case. Houston accepted the request for remote access to the commander’s device, identified in records as PCD 1, and about an hour later, Outlook was back up and running. After 14 hours and 20 minutes of broadcast, someone from mission control communication said: “We managed to open Outlook. It will appear as “offline”, as expected”, as pick up Tom’s Hardware. Why they use Outlook in space. That there is Microsoft software on board is not something casual or improvised: Microsoft is a strategic partner of NASA that provides everything from productivity software to cloud data infrastructure and artificial intelligence (NASA Earth Copilot), hardware and mixed reality and Minburn Technology Group is your partner for software support and maintenance. In fact and according to NASAthe personal devices of the astronauts on the Orion spacecraft are Microsoft Surface Pro and the software they run is Commercial Off-The-Shelf, That is, standard commercial software for everyday tasks like talking to your family or managing your photos and videos. Another thing is the spacecraft and main flight systems: these are powered by specialized radiation-resistant hardware and specialized software with rigorous maintenance. The bathroom was also broken. The Outlook failure was not the only technical problem in the first hours of the flight, as can be seen in the broadcast. About two hours after launch, a malfunction light came on in the ship’s waste management system: the urine extractor fan had jammed. This component is responsible for sucking urine into a collector, avoiding the uncomfortable and unhygienic effects of microgravity. NASA confirmed shortly after the toilet problem had been solved. In Xataka | NASA had been refusing to allow its astronauts to carry iPhones for decades. For Artemis II you have made a historic decision In Xataka | The Artemis II astronauts will carry out experiments in what will be their own study models Cover | POT and Ed Hardie

Millions invested in AI graphical improvements so people say it looks like an Instagram beauty filter

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Nvidia presented DLSS 5 at GTC 2026 as the greatest graphical advance that video games have experienced since the ray tracing. The reaction has been almost unanimous: the gaming community and industry professionals themselves have described it as a “slop AI filter.” The rejection has been so frontal and almost unanimous that Nvidia has had to come out to clarify how the technology works and what control developers really have over these visual improvements. What is DLSS 5. DLSS technology was born in 2019 as an intelligent upscaling system: the GPU renders at lower resolution and the AI ​​reconstructs each frame up to 4K with minimal quality penalty. With each iteration (DLSS 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5) the goal remained the same, but DLSS 5 breaks that logic. According to Nvidia’s own announcementwe are looking at a real-time neural rendering model that analyzes the color and motion vectors of each frame and generates lighting and photorealistic-looking materials on them. The system recognizes the semantics of the scene (skin, hair, fabrics, metals) and applies its own interpretation of how those elements should look under real physical lighting. Jensen Huang defined it with a phrase that well summarizes the ambition of this new iteration: “Twenty-five years after Nvidia invented the shader programmable, we are reinventing computer graphics.” Digital Foundrywhich had access to the technology before the announcement (and which has been heavily criticized for its glowing coverage), called it “the most amazing I’ve seen in my time at Digital Foundry” and pointed to genuinely notable improvements in environments from ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ or ‘Oblivion Remastered’. The faces, Juan, the faces. The problem is that the official demo video included sequences from ‘Resident Evil Requiem’, ‘Starfield’, ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ and ‘EA Sports FC’, and in all of them the system visibly altered the characters’ faces. The protagonist of ‘Requiem’, Grace Ashcroft, has been the most widespread example: more pronounced cheekbones, fuller lips and uniform skin tone. According to Kotakuthe effect seems to apply a TikTok beauty filter on characters with an artistic intention other than physical attractiveness, as is the case with Ashcroft. Another example is that of the ‘Starfield’ characters, which are not very detailed in themselves, and which gain facial resolution but lose all aesthetic coherence with the original design. In ‘Hogwarts Legacy‘, an old woman with gently modeled wrinkles begins to show off a deeply cracked face completely alien to what was seen in the game. Therefore, the dreaded term ‘AI slop‘ appeared on social networks in a matter of minutes. He Nvidia GeForce on X announcement post was buried by negative replies, which accumulated favs and RTs in much greater quantity than the original post. Also the comments of the Digital Foundry video They were almost unanimously negative. The answer. Given the volume of criticism, Nvidia published a statement on YouTube clarifying how the system works. According to the companydevelopers have complete artistic control over DLSS 5: they can adjust the intensity of the effect, the color grading and mask specific areas where they do not want the AI ​​to act (the company calls it “controllability”). The company also clarified that the technology is not a filter applied on top of the image, but rather takes the color and motion vectors of the game to generate its output, “anchored to the source 3D content.” Bethesda, one of the most active studios in the initial support (Todd Howard had appeared in the presentation video praising the results in ‘Starfield’) posted hours later a more nuanced response on the studio’s official account. There they stated that “our art teams will adjust the lighting and final effect to look the way we consider best for each game. Everything will be under the control of our artists and will be completely optional for players.” Two ways of looking at it. The disparity in reactions reflects two legitimate ways of evaluating the same technology. What a good part of the community and numerous media outlets have criticized is that the modifications make the characters more realistic but different from how they were designed by the game’s art team. For example, concept artist Jeff Talbot said that: “In each shot the artistic direction was removed to add meaningless ‘details’ (…) This is a garbage AI filter.” Poor optimization. a few weeks ago There began to be talk that the proliferation of tools of upscaling and AI has reduced the pressure on studios to optimize their games: when DLSS or FSR can more than compensate for performance issues, the incentives to polish the native engine disappear. There is already someone he says it bluntly: Some studios design their games from the beginning assuming that the upscaling It will fix what’s broken, rather than using it as a further improvement on an already solid foundation. With DLSS 5 that takes a qualitative leap, and the risk is not only aesthetic: it is work-related and creative. And then there’s an additional detail: the GTC demo required two GeForce RTX 5090s running in parallel (one to render the game, another to run the DLSS 5 neural model). Nvidia claims that the final launch, scheduled for fall 2026, will work with a single card, but the magnitude of the hardware raised questions about the actual requirements. If studios start designing with DLSS 5 as a safety net, what version of the game will the player without that GPU receive? Real video games. There is something that Nvidia seems to have not taken into account: people like video games because they look like video games. Imperfection has a human touch that is part of the product’s identity. Grace Ashcroft works as a character in ‘Requiem’ precisely because her appearance reflects exhaustion and vulnerability. DLSS 5’s AI makes it something that has been described as the result of applying Nvidia’s system to a character whose aesthetic is not designed to be photorealistic. The problem isn’t just that the result is aesthetically questionable: it’s that the entire premise is wrong. Nvidia assumes that “more … Read more

Pokémon Go brought millions of players to the streets. Millions of players who were actually training an AI

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In 2016 it came to the mobile market Pokémon Goa spinoff of the popular entertainment franchise with a very interesting premise: capture Pokémon in your city using your cell phone’s GPS. The game caught on very quickly and became a phenomenon. It’s been almost 10 years since that and Niantic, its developer, has taken advantage of all the data that millions of players have been giving them to guide delivery robots through the cities. Your first client: Coco Robotics. The business that no one saw coming. The amount of information that can be obtained from Pokémon Go is truly impressive, since millions of people have voluntarily traveled the world with their mobile phones in order to capture (digitally) this type of creatures. And each game leaves an invisible trace, since there are millions of photos of buildings, squares and streets labeled with very precise coordinates that would not have been possible without the information provided by its users when playing. Five hundred million people installed the app in its first 60 days, according to Brian McClendonCTO of Niantic Spatial. Eight years later, the game still has more than 100 million players in 2024, according to data from Scopely, the company that acquired Pokémon Go from Niantic that same year. The problem that GPS does not solve. GPS devices become a bit silly when they have to operate on sidewalks and much of the urban fabric that does not correspond to the road. Signals bounce between skyscrapers, tunnels and viaducts and the margin of error can be up to 50 meters, enough to place a robot on the wrong sidewalk or the next street. “The urban canyon is the worst place in the world for GPS,” affirms McClendon. Coco Robotics, a startup that operates nearly 1,000 delivery robots in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Helsinki, knows this well, as its devices operate precisely in those dense areas where the signal is never reliable. This is where Niantic Spatial comes in. In May 2024, Niantic separated its spatial and artificial intelligence division. created Niantic Spatial as an independent company. Its core product is a visual positioning system (VPS) trained with 30 billion urban images, capable of placing a device on the map with a precision of a few centimeters from a handful of photos of the environment. The key is that these images come from millions of points of interest in Pokémon Go and Login (the company’s pre-Pokémon Go AR game, released in 2013). In such popular games, players have for years been directed to photograph the same place from different angles, at different times and in different weather conditions. “We had over a million locations around the world where we can locate you to the nearest centimeter and, more importantly, know where you are looking,” explains McClendon. What this changes for robots. Coco Robotics has been the first partner to adopt this technology. Its robots, equipped with four cameras, will combine conventional GPS with Niantic Spatial’s VPS to position itself more accurately, especially in pickup areas in front of restaurants and in delivery to the customer’s door. According to Zach Rash, CEO of Coco, the goal is meet delivery times promised and not depend on margins of error that in practice mean arriving late or to the wrong place. The model already solves one of the most practical challenges of urban robotics: performing well where conventional systems fall short. Beyond the distribution. John Hanke, CEO of Niantic Spatial, talks about what he calls a living map: a hyper-updated simulation of the real world that updates as robots move through it and provide new data. The idea is not only that the maps are more accurate, but that they are designed for machines, not people. This involves adding descriptions of each element of the environment, its properties, its context. “This era is about building useful descriptions of the world for machines to understand,” says Hanke. In that sense, Niantic Spatial differs from other bets on world models, such as those of Google DeepMind or World Labswhich focus on generating virtual environments. Niantic Spatial wants to replicate the real world as it is. In Xataka | OpenClaw changed the rules of the AI ​​race. Technology companies already have their answer: copy it

China needed space to power millions of homes, so it built a mega solar plant in the open sea

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That China is building power plants As if there were no secret, it is not a secret. Without going any further, in the last four years it has been able to replicate the power of the United States, the largest electrical grid in the West. And a good part of the blame solar energy has it. In fact, in 2023 it installed more solar panels than the United States in all of history, as reported by Bloomberg. Solar energy requires space, so China is finding the most varied gaps, from the tibetan plateau to the open sea, where from the end of 2025 It is already connected to the electrical network a mega solar plant that breaks records. In China there are solar panels even in the soup. The largest offshore solar plant in the world. We are talking about the solar plant located off the coast of Kenli district in Dongying city, Shandong province. This engineering project is carried out by China Energy Investment Corporation (CHN Energy) and has a nominal capacity of 1 GW. As explains People’s Dailythe official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is China’s first gigawatt-level offshore photovoltaic project and currently the largest offshore solar installation in the world. This is what the Shandong plant looks like. Via: People’s Daily The context: why at sea. Because land space near its large coastal cities is a precious commodity. The Chinese government has a policy of red line to safeguard land used for agriculture and solve the line “Hu Huanyong Line“: while its great solar and wind potential is concentrated in the west, in the Gobi Desert and Inner Mongolia, the megacities and their most powerful industrial fabric are in the east. China is already developing parks of renewables in their deserts, but running Ultra High Voltage lines is very expensive, involves losses along the way and crosses complicated orography. The logical but technically infernal solution is to jump into the water. Until now, floating solar energy was limited to calm waters, such as what Germany is doing with its lakesbut China is another story. The open sea brings salt corrosion, typhoons and waves. Why is it important. Because China’s coastal provinces such as Shandong or Jiangsu constitute large centers of industrial consumption. Generating energy right there avoids those transportation losses of thousands of kilometers from the Gobi desert. If it works within the expected design parameters and the maintenance costs are affordable, it will be a good boost to take advantage of the coasts within the energy transition process from fossil to renewables. The panels are simply colossal. Via: X from People’s Daily A prodigious work of engineering. We are talking about an area of ​​more than 1,200 hectares where 2,934 enormous marine photovoltaic panels are located with standardized dimensions of 60 meters long and 35 meters wide. And they are not drifting panels: it is a large infrastructure designed to withstand extreme conditions ranging from storms to freezing water. In addition, it is hybridized: under the panels the project integrates fish farms, that is, producing electricity above and fish below. This type of combination is not new, as in Guizhou province there is a giant solar plant in whose basement mushrooms are grown. Shandong is aquavoltaic and Guizhou is agrivoltaic. Some numbers that make you dizzy. This installed power of 1 Gigawatt is similar to that of a modern nuclear reactor, so that according to estimates, it will be capable of producing 1,780 million kWh of energy that will be fed into the grid each year and thus supply 2.6 million homes in the region. approximately 60% of your demand. According to the estimates of the engineering company behind it, 1.3 million tons of carbon dioxide will no longer be emitted. In Xataka | Germany has had a crazy idea to solve one of the problems of renewables: covering a lake with solar panels In Xataka | The great myth of solar panels: producing them emits hundreds of times less than coal and gas Cover | People’s Daily

a new airport for millions of tourists

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It is not easy to get to Machu Picchu. And it makes sense. The Incas wanted the ancient citadel to be a safe, sheltered place, a bastion sheltered by the Eastern mountain range of southern Peru. The problem is that today Machu Picchu is no longer a remote town but one of the most powerful tourist attractions on the planet. Since 2007 it has been considered one of the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ and every year it receives hundreds of thousands of visitors, many arriving from other countries after connecting flights and traveling for hours by road or trail. For that to change in Peru they are building an airport that could shoot 200% the flow of visitors in the region. There are those who believe, however, that it will not come for free. And not only because of its cost in hard cash. Its detractors warn of the impact that the infrastructure will have on the environment. What has happened? That Peru is building a new and ambitious airport in the department of Cuzco, more specifically on the outskirts of Chinchero. The project is not entirely new. His works started around 2018 and, if they are fulfilled the latest forecasts from the Government, the terminal will begin operating between the end of 2027 and 2028. The key is in its location. The Chinchero-Cusco International Airport (AICC) will be in the vicinity of the Sacred Valley of the Incasto a few dozen kilometers in a straight line from Machu Picchu. Why’s that? The location of the AICC is not coincidental. Not far from there, in Cusco, the Velasco Astete airfieldwhich in 2025 mobilized slightly more five million of passengers. With the new Chinchero infrastructure, however, the Peruvian authorities want to go one step (or several) further. The objective is to serve between 8 and 12 million annual users and consolidate itself as a regional reference. “It’s a hub that has to be developed in the south, in such a way that, after Jorge Chávez (Lima airport), Cusco is the connection center of South America”, claims Paola Marím, head of the General Directorate of Civil Aeronautics of the Ministry of Transport and Communications. How will it affect tourism? A few days ago the BBC dedicated an article to the future airport in which it states that its objective is to attract 200% more visitors to the area, which would help boost the tourism sector, but would also aggravate the pressure that the Sacred Valley already suffers. That percentage (200%) is striking, but it is even more powerful when two pieces of information are remembered. First, in recent years the Alejandro Velasco Astete aerodrome has already seen its demand increase exponentially. Last October, the Peruvian Corporation of Airports and Commercial Aviation (Corpac) actually calculated that the terminal would close in 2025 with a “historical record” of passengers: more than five million of users, 28.4% more than before the pandemic. Is there more? Yes. The second piece of information that helps to understand the importance of the Chinchero airport is found a few dozen kilometers away, in Machu Picchu, a tourist hub that is already suffering the effects of touristification. Despite the Incas’ attempts to turn it into a remote citadel, today it is a tourist icon where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world pass through every year. According to the Andina Agency, only in October did it touch the 150,000 visitorswhich brought the forecast of closing 2025 with more than 1.5 million of tourists, thus exceeding pre-covid levels. That’s good, right? It depends on who you ask. In recent months Machu Picchu has been news precisely because of its saturation, a problem reminiscent of the one suffered by Mount Fuji (Japan), Giza (Egypt) or European tourist centers such as Florence either Amsterdam. Years ago the Inca citadel was close to sneak onto UNESCO’s list of endangered heritage. And that has not been the only wake-up call for the risks facing the site. In 2025, the General Comptroller’s Office warned of the “tourist overload” who suffers from Machu Picchu and just a few months ago New7Wornders warned to Peru that, if it does not correct the situation, the ancient Inca town could lose its label of “New Wonder of the World.” The truth is that the Government has made an effort to protect the citadel, reinforcing its security and the control and sale of tickets. Is it the only problem? No. Right now getting to Machu Picchu is not exactly easy. BBC reporter Alexandra Marvar remember that when he visited the citadel he had to get into a taxi, a train and finally a bus. And that was just the final stretch. Before, foreigners usually take two flights: one international, to Lima, and another national that takes them to Cusco. With the AICC that will change radically, but the project has generated controversy. And not only because of its tourist impact or the delays that has been accumulating. As remember Marvar There are operators, guides and indigenous communities who consider that the new airport is not a good idea. The reason: its probable cultural and environmental impact. In fact, the project is already altering areas such as Urquillos, where there are cornfields that are being sold and developed. Beyond the loss of identity, there is concern about how this increase in pressure will affect infrastructure or even the water supply. These are concerns that come from long ago (before the pandemic, signatures were collected to stop the project), but they are gaining strength as the works progress. Images | Google Earth, Cynthia Winward (Unsplash) and Jackie Hope (Unsplash) In Xataka | Japan has begun canceling festivals designed to attract tourists. The reason: they attract too many tourists

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