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“If you’re still awake twenty minutes after going to bed, get up.”

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Going to bed and starting to toss and turn while watching all the early morning hours pass by on the clock is something that may be familiar to more than one person. Right now, the truth is that the simple act of closing your eyes tightly and thinking about falling asleep doesn’t work too muchbut it further increases anxiety and frustration due to not being able to be rested the next day. But here the experts suggest that it is better to get up. A simple rule. Beyond breathing techniques and treating a blank mind, we have a good ally with us: the “20 minute rule.” A practice that, far from being viral advice on social networks, the truth is that it has scientific support behind it that indicates that the best strategy against the inability to fall asleep is to get up. Its operation. To understand it, we must first descend to the substrate of associative learning, where the human brain is, above all, an optimizer of environmental patterns. In this way, when a healthy person goes to bed, the central nervous system interprets the physical stimulus of the mattress, pillow and darkness as a signal to initiate a transition to sleep. However, if we spend long periods awake in bed experiencing anxiety or having the same idea running through our minds all the time, the pattern becomes corrupted. Here the brain already associates the bed with frustration, and the bedroom stops being a parasympathetic sanctuary and becomes a way to activate our body. Your defender He is currently Dr. Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. And it is so important that he includes it as another piece of advice in one of his published books titled ‘why we sleep’ that says the following: Don’t stay awake in bed. If you’re still awake twenty minutes after going to bed, or if you start to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy. The anxiety of not being able to sleep can make it harder to fall asleep. What must be done. To follow the rule, it is important to get up and, logically, not turn on all the lights in the house, but rather use dim lights and, under no circumstances, look at screens such as television since it can activate us more. The ideal here would be to read a somewhat monotonous book (or in the case of students, notes), do breathing exercises or mechanical hobbies. From here you should return to bed only and exclusively when you feel sleepy again to try to sleep again. The guides say it too and, more specifically, the Clinical Practice Guide on Insomnia in Primary Care which specifically points to the following advice for patients: If it’s been 30 minutes since you went to bed and you’re still not sleeping, get out of bed, go to another room, and do something that doesn’t activate you too much, like reading a magazine or watching TV, for example. When you feel sleepy again, go back to your bedroom. The goal is for you to associate your bed with falling asleep as quickly as possible. Images | Magnificent In Xataka | We thought insomnia was just not being able to sleep. Now we know that there are five different disorders

charges in four minutes and 6,000 hours of stability to forget about lithium

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I think we all dream of that moment: connecting our cell phone to the power and having it go from 0 to 100% in the time it takes to make a coffee, without the battery suffering any long-term damage or losing capacity over the months. This still sounds like science fiction, but it is what a team of researchers in China has just proposed and they have achieved it. In short. A consortium of scientists from Southeast University, HiNa Battery Technology and Yangzhou University has developed a new quasi-solid electrolyte (QSE) designed specifically for sodium metal batteries. The results of your research, published in the scientific journal Nano-Micro Lettersshow how they have achieved ultra-fast charging (equivalent to filling the battery in about four minutes, at a rate of 15C) while retaining 90% of its capacity after 2,000 high-speed charge and discharge cycles (3C). Sodium has just hit the table compared to lithium. More in depth. To understand the magnitude of this finding, you have to look at the current market. sodium batteries They have been capturing the attention of the industry for some time because sodium is a material infinitely cheaper and more abundant on Earth than lithium, which makes it possible to avoid global supply chain bottlenecks and price volatility. Until now, however, sodium’s big Achilles’ heel was the “equivalent trade-off”: if you wanted fast charging, you drastically sacrificed battery life and safety. This was due to the slow transport of sodium ions and the instability of the interfaces within the stack. This new advance makes a symmetrical sodium cell operate stably for 6,000 hours uninterrupted without failures related to short circuits. For the end user, this translates into a near future where electric vehicles and electronic devices will be much more affordable, safer and have charging times that will completely eliminate the famous “range anxiety.” The science behind the milestone. Researchers have dubbed this solution “dual intertwined mediator engineering.” In simple terms, they have completely redesigned the highway on which the ions travel inside the battery, eliminating traffic jams and reinforcing shoulders, without losing the physical-chemical rigor of the process. In conventional electrolytes, sodium moves clumsily, achieving a transfer number (the metric that defines how efficiently and freely ions move) of just between 0.4 and 0.7. The new electrolyte, called Sn-FB QSE, achieves an almost perfect index of 0.94. This indicates “single-ion conduction”: sodium travels individually and directly, without dragging heavy elements in its path. To achieve this, they have used two main chemical protagonists that act as a team: The releaser (DFOB⁻ Salt): At the molecular level, this salt weakens the strong coordination interaction between the sodium ions and the polymer network of the electrolyte. By removing this chemical “glue”, the sodium is freed. Molecular dynamics simulations show that ion diffusion reaches 16.8 Ų ns⁻¹, about six times faster than in traditional liquid electrolytes. The builder shield (Tin ions, Sn²⁺): During charging, the Sn²⁺ is first reduced at the anode. This creates a protective film (scientifically known as Solid-Electrolyte Interface or SEI) rich in a sodium-tin alloy. This layer acts as a mold that homogenizes the electric field, forcing the sodium to deposit flat and uniformly. Goodbye to the dreaded “dendrites”, those needle-shaped metal structures that pierce the battery and cause short circuits. Additionally, the dual effect is completed at the other end of the stack. While tin protects the anode, DFOB⁻ is sacrificially oxidized at the cathode to form another extremely robust, inorganic protective layer (CEI) just 14 nm thick. This thin film stops the degradation of the electrolyte in its tracks at high voltages, guaranteeing the longevity of the battery. From the laboratory to the real world. Often, these discoveries remain in tiny laboratory “button batteries” that never see the light of day. But the most promising thing about this research is its scalability and practical application. The researchers constructed flexible, pressure-free “pouch cells.” In a video demonstration, they managed to use one of these batteries to charge a smartphone continuously, even while repeatedly bending and manipulating it with their hands, demonstrating exceptional flexibility and resilience. Added to this is that the electrolyte remains stable up to 4.7 volts, opening the door to pairing it with even more powerful materials in the future. And most importantly for the industry: this approach is fully compatible with current manufacturing methods and could even be extended to lithium and potassium metal batteries. The future knocks at the door. Charging your phone in four minutes without destroying the battery in a few months has always been the Holy Grail of consumer electronics. With materials engineering innovations such as this quasi-solid electrolyte, sodium is no longer “the cheap brother” to position itself as a very high-performance technology. Although there is still a way to go to see these batteries on commercial shelves, this discovery makes it clear that the future of portable energy involves abandoning exclusive dependence on lithium. The era of accidentally plugging in your cell phone and having battery power for the entire day is a big step closer to being our daily routine. Image | Unsplash Xataka | Switzerland is digging a pit 27 meters deep and longer than two football fields: all for a giant battery

Walking 20 minutes a day after age 55 is very good. The secret of healthy maturity is to do it much earlier

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An increasingly repeated idea is that, to have a quality retirementyou have to keep moving throughout maturity and with adequate physical activity. The problem is that many times people wait until they are 55 years old to start taking care of themselves and in many cases because they already have a metabolic disease. And this should make us aware that the sooner we start taking care of ourselves, the better. Walk It has been crowned as the star exercise for older adults, and the scientific evidence that supports it is overwhelming. A study from the year 2023 points out that walking 30 minutes a day for 5 days a week reduces the risk of age-related diseases, although it is especially emphasized that it must be done at a high speed and that requires some effort for the body and not as a simple walk. If this is done, we will be significantly reducing the risk of suffering from cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes, but also protects against dementia. And if that were not enough, a review conducted this year with 180,000 participants demonstrated an 18% to 30% reduction in mortality from all causes with moderate levels of physical activity. In figures. It’s not that Olympic records need to be broken, but simply taking 5,694 steps a day is associated with a 13% lower risk of mortality from all causes. And as we have said before, if it is done a speed high, a greater benefit is achieved. When to start. If the benefits in middle age are so incredible, why does science demand that we start much earlier? The answer lies in sarcopenia, which is the process of loss of muscle mass that we face when we begin to age without doing any type of strength exercise. And that is why the deadline of 30 years is set to begin to remedy it. Because? From this age onwards, it has been seen that between 3% and 5% of muscle mass is lost per decade. according to the NIHand other studies suggest that this figure can be between 3% and 8% per decade after age 30. AND from 60 years old the rate of decline becomes even greater. With all this information, it is estimated that right now between 10% and 20% of older adults suffer from sarcopenia, and lack of exercise is the main factor that worsens this progressive muscle loss. The recipe. The WHO here is very clear in its guidelines and, curiously, it does not make reductions upon reaching retirement, so it does not understand a specific age from which you must exercise no matter what, but rather it points out that you should always do it. That is why their recommendations are exactly the same for adults from 18 to 64 years old as for those over 65 years old: relativize. Between 150 and 300 minutes a week of moderate aerobic activity (such as walking), or between 75 and 150 minutes of vigorous intensity. Furthermore, the WHO asks to incorporate muscle group strengthening exercises at least two days a week for all adults. In the specific case of adults over 65 years of age, the only difference is that activities that improve balance must be added to the general recommendations three or more days per week to avoid fatal falls. Images | Emma Simpson In Xataka | There’s a reason why working out for an hour a day at the gym doesn’t give you results. And that reason is evolution In Trends | The trainers agree: “From the age of 55, you should walk every day for at least 20 minutes, preferring stairs, doing gentle stretches and working on balance.”

15 billion minutes watched, modest budget and no stars in the cast

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No Hollywood stars in the cast. No epic battles or expanded universes. With a budget that, by current industry standards, can be described as modest. ‘The Pitt‘has just become the most watched series on global streaming. A production about hospital emergencies in Pittsburgh that does not fit into any of the models that the industry has been perfecting for a decade. And that surprise factor may be one of the reasons for its success. The figures. The second season closed its broadcast very recently with more than 15 billion minutes watchedaccording to Nielsen metrics. On April 16, its season finale attracted 9.7 million viewers in its opening weekend alone, the best result in the series’ two-year life. According to Warner, the season averaged 15.4 million viewers per episode50% more than the first. We can compare with other successful series: in the week of March 30 to April 5, ‘The Pitt’ topped the Nielsen ranking with 1.16 billion minutes, becoming the only one of the top ten to surpass the billion barrier. ‘The Boys’, which concludes its run on Prime Video this year, came second with 889 million. ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, with decades of accumulated catalog and also a medical theme, appeared fourth in the general ranking. The secret of his success. The series was created by R. Scott Gemmill, with Noah Wyle and John Wells as executive producers: the same team that gave us ‘ER’ on NBC for years. And they have learned a lot from that experience: ‘The Pitt’ follows the 15-hour shift in the Emergency Department in real time, with one episode per hour on call. There are no time jumps, multiple scenarios, or subplots that drag on for seasons without resolving. And while other HBO productions like ‘The Last of Us‘ either ‘The House of the Dragon‘ show budgets of between 15 and 20 million dollars per episode, ‘The Pitt’ is pulling with just over 4 million per chapter. The cast’s salary model reflects that same economic philosophy: the nine main actors with a permanent contract earn between $35,000 and $50,000 per episode, amounts in the low-mid range of the sector that, however, represented attractive treatment for unknown actors at a time of contraction in the television market. The awards. In 2025, the series won five Emmy Awards, including Best Drama, becoming the first medical series to win. since ‘Emergency’ won it in 1996. Wyle won for leading actor and Katherine LaNasa won for supporting actress, in a ceremony in which the series defeated ‘Severance’, despite the fact that it had a bag of 27 nominations. How it looks. Another point that distinguishes the series from its competitors and that has done a lot for its success is its programming strategy: fifteen episodes per season, weekly broadcast and annual return every January. The first season premiered in January 2025, the second in January 2026. The third will try to reach January 2027. HBO CEO Casey Bloys has already spoken of ‘The Pitt’ as the equivalent of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, a procedural that may be active for decades. It seems too ambitious, but everything points in that direction: the weekly rhythm has allowed both to build fan loyalty and facilitate late additions of audiences with the season started, something that the TV series binge-watching Netflix type they don’t get. The dramatic structure also moves in that direction: the series has no problems incorporating and eliminating characters, even of great importance (as happens in a real ER) so that the cast and conflicts do not stagnate. ‘The Pitt’ doesn’t invent anything. And maybe that’s the mother of the lamb. Its cadence of weekly cases is typical of 1990s television and its cast is full of very little-known faces, so that nothing distracts us from the plots, which pile up in each episode at a frenetic pace. It is impossible to know if we are witnessing a broader trend, the return of a way of making television that was thought to be forgotten, or whether ‘The Pitt’ is going to be an isolated triumph. In any case, it is a refreshing slap in the face to series that mechanically stretch out for ten episodes what should be solved in one of fifty minutes. In Xataka | The big problem with the ‘Harry Potter’ series for HBO is also its main hook: it is identical to the movies

Madonna, Shakira and BTS are going to perform at halftime of the World Cup final. But the regulations only allow it to be 15 minutes

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For years, Gianni Infantino watched with envy the spectacle of American football breaks. This year, the president of FIFA is going to have what he has been wanting for years: the final of the July 19 World Cup in New Jersey will have the first halftime show from the history of the tournamentwith none other than Madonna, Shakira and BTS as headliners. A decision clearly conceived from the point of view of not stopping to think about the differences between soccer and American football. Elmo tells you. The most watched event on the planet debuts, 96 years after its first edition, a concept that American football has been perfecting for decades. The advertisement came in video form with Chris Martin of Coldplay, Elmo, Gustavo, Miss Piggy and other Muppets to break the news, that at one point they made a call with BTS. The tone was curiously lighthearted for the announcement of an event that handles astronomical figures. Good causes. The production of the event is carried out by the NGO Global Citizenfor which Chris Martin and Coldplay’s manager Phil Harvey are creative curators. The show is linked to the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fundan initiative that wants to raise 100 million dollars to expand access to education and soccer for children around the world, and which has already raised more than 30 million. One dollar from every ticket sold is donated to the fund. There are no precedents. No World Cup final had ever included a half-time show. There are ceremonies (opening, closing, before the opening whistle), but the break was always to rest (and the corresponding commercial break). The Qatar 2022 final, between Argentina and France, had a closing ceremony before the start of the match, with performances by Gims and Ozuna, but no shows in between. What changes. The scale, without a doubt. The 2022 final reached an average live audience of 571 million viewers worldwide, with more than 1.4 billion people watching at least one minute of the match. The 2024 Super Bowl brought together, in comparison, an average of 123.7 million viewers in the United States and about 62.5 million internationally. The platform that FIFA offers to artists who appear in the intermission has no comparison with any other. The problem. The laws of the game established by the IFAB, the international body that regulates football, set the break at a maximum of 15 minutes. A rule that few people notice, but that has a physical reason, which the ESPN analyst explained Gabriele Marcotti: Professional soccer players are conditioned for that maximum recovery interval. Extending it carries real risks of players getting cold or stiff. In the Super Bowl, the break is usually extended to 30 minutes, because the NFL sport includes regular breaks and players are accustomed to long timeouts. According to FIFA has confirmedthe show is planned to last 11 minutes, which in theory would keep it within the regulatory limit. However, it wouldn’t be entirely strange to see the IFAB modify its rules to accommodate the spectacle. But then… who thinks about the players? Little risk. On the other hand, the choice of Madonna, Shakira and BTS is a safe bet. All three have more than proven experience in mass events of this caliber. Madonna’s performance at the 2012 Super Bowl set the audience record for the halftime show with 114 million viewers, a figure that Bruno Mars would surpass two years later. The 2020 show, starring Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, attracted 103 million viewers. Shakira is also already linked to the World Cup thanks to the release of two official anthems: ‘Dai Dai’ in 2026 with the Nigerian Burna Boy, and ‘Waka Waka’ in 2010. BTS, for its part, arrives in the moment of greatest visibility for the band since the group interrupted its activity to complete mandatory military service in South Korea. Your album’ARIRANG’published in March 2026, debuted with record on US chartswhich makes this concert especially suitable for the band. Since April, the group has also been immersed in a world tour. Header | Julio Gómez Braojos

Marvel just gave 48 minutes of unfiltered violence to its most extreme character and you can watch it today on Disney+

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Frank Castle, better known as the Punisher (or The Punisher if you’re an old-school comic reader), hasn’t had his own series for seven years. Since Netflix canceled ‘The Punisher’ in 2019, the character has survived on the margins of the MCU until ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ rescued him in 2025. Now Marvel has opted for a different format with him in ‘The Punisher: One Last Kill’. It is not a series or a movie, but 48 minutes of a borderline antihero, co-directed by Jon Bernthal himself and with a level of violence that Disney+ never allowed before. ‘The Punisher: One Last Kill’ comes with the “Marvel Television Special Presentation” label, a format that the studio premiered in October 2022 with ‘The curse of the werewolf‘. The format is a kind of laboratory: projects of between 45 and 60 minutes that function as self-contained stories without the pressure of sustaining a series for several weeks. Both ‘The Curse of the Werewolf’ and the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas special worked as cult pieces, and with Punisher, Marvel has taken the experiment to the extreme, because its adult rating is the first on the platform for a Marvel Studios project. Here we will see how an unexpected force drags Frank Castle back into battle. The Punisher believes he has eliminated the Gnucci crime family, the last link to his family’s murderers, and the surviving matriarch, Ma Gnucci, comes to him not to negotiate but to settle scores. The first half of the episode focuses on visions that haunt Castle; the second is a real-time action sequence inside an apartment building reminiscent of ‘The Raid’. The idea for the series arose during the filming of the first season of ‘Daredevil: Born Again’. Bernthal asked the director for permission to develop something centered on Frank Castle. The two had previously collaborated, and that gave Disney confidence to have Bernthal co-write the script and serve as executive producer. Shot on real locations in Queens and Brooklyn, the photography is by Robert Elswit (Oscar winner for ‘Wells of Ambition’), a firm that visually elevates this bet far above a typical television film. In Xataka | 12 premieres this week on Netflix, including the return of one of the platform’s most successful franchises

Spain wants 90% of the people on this map to have an AVE station 30 minutes away. There is small print

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The Ministry of Transport and Urban Mobility wants to turn the train into one of the great mobility axes of our country. To this end, the objective has been proposed to promote the use of high speed in the west of the Iberian Peninsula. The project has a clear headline: an AVE station half an hour away for 90% of the inhabitants of the Atlantic corridor. What has been announced? 9% of the population of the Atlantic Corridor will have access to a high-speed station within half an hour in 2030. This is the conclusion reached by the Territorial accessibility analysis carried out by the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobilitythrough the Office of the Commissioner of the Atlantic Corridor. If the plans are fulfilled, the Ministry assures that in less than five years a total of 62 high-speed stations will be ready, spread across 28 provinces and 11 autonomous communities. The jump will have to be substantial because right now there are 33 stations available with high-speed service distributed in 8 autonomous communities and 19 provinces. What is the Atlantic Corridor? Within the mobility of the European Union, the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) defines nine major corridors to define your roadmap and investments. These corridors are large spaces through which a very important part of the citizens of the European Union and their goods move. In the different corridors, therefore, all mobility nodes are taken into account, from ports and airports to railways and roads. In the case of the Atlantic Corridor we are talking about a set of communication nodes that link the south of Germany with Paris and the entire west coast of France with Spain (on its western slope) and Portugal, culminating in the Cádiz area. In these moments, the Atlantic Corridor as it passes through our country offers the following data: 5,400 kilometers of railway tracks 2,900 kilometers of roads Nine seaports Five international airports Nine intermodal stations Four cross-border crossings with Portugal or France And it is linked to 13 autonomous communities and 40 provinces By train. Among the infrastructures designed to facilitate movement through all these places is the train. And, specifically, the boost to high speed that the European Union wants to give to encourage the use of this means of transport instead of the plane. These investments, according to the Ministry of Transport, will have to be completed before December 31, 2030 and represent an investment of 3,123 million euros. It must be taken into account that the European Union has been demanding better connectivity by train from Spain and Portugal than should crystallize with a Madrid-Lisbon in 2030. But It won’t be until 2034 when this line is completely a high-speed route. What does it imply? In order to achieve the milestone set by the European Union, it will be necessary for Spain to complete the “Basque Y”, the high-speed project that has been underway for more than 20 years to provide the region with a qualitative leap in railway connections. that seem not to arrive. Additionally, the entire project will need to be completed to connect Spain with Portugal through Extremaduraa journey in which, at the moment, it is not always possible to travel at high speed. And it will also be necessary to bring high speed to Huelva. 90% with small print. The big headline, as we said, is that 90% of the population of the Atlantic Corridor will have a high-speed station less than half an hour from their home… as long as such a station exists in their province. Here is the headline’s trick, if the province does not have a high-speed station, the percentage drops drastically in some cases. For example, in the press release no reference is made to Salamancaone of the conflicting points when talking about high speed in the Atlantic Corridor. The European Union roadmap marks a connection between the Spanish city and Porto but there is little progress in this regard. Another of the region’s usual demands is also discarded: recover the Vía de la Plata railway. The truth is that this project is neither here nor expected. Other data must also be taken carefully. The Ministry of Transport says that 100% of the inhabitants of the Basque Country will have access to a high-speed train station… but in this case less than an hour away and not 30 minutes. La Rioja will also make a qualitative leap, from the current 14% to 99% although no high-speed train stops in the region. These data lead us to the fact that, in 2030, 70% of the population of the Atlantic Corridor will have a high-speed station less than an hour from their home. The Ministry of Transport puts this number at 26.8 million people. Some controversies. However, having a high-speed line close to home does not mean that we have a high-speed train that is always accessible. Spain, the second country with the most high-speed roads in the world (second only to China), is a good example of how a poorly studied growth ended with high speed stations with very little traffic. Nor does living in a provincial capital guarantee that the train always stops. A paradigmatic example of this is Zamorawhere they fight so that more high-speed trains that cover the Galician corridor stop at their stop. And sometimes, The best solution is to offer high-speed stations in the middle of nowhereas a link between large populations. Increasing the number of high-speed stations does not automatically mean having ample schedules to take a high-speed train. However, this shouldn’t be bad in and of itself. A good example is Japan’s dense high-speed network where there are trains that stop exceptionally between origin and destination and others that dot their journey with more or fewer stops. Of course, there the density of passage in the number of trains facilitates mobility and the connection between “fast” trains and those that stop more frequently. Photo | Adif In Xataka | High speed in Madrid … Read more

15 minutes of work a week and then warm up the chair. Leyla Kazim spent a year without giving a damn and no one noticed

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Leyla Kazim has taken chair warming very far. Writer and presenter for the BBC, a few weeks ago she told it on her Substack A Day Well Spent his experiment, a sort of ‘The Fiaca‘ by Talesnik applied to the world of work as Marisa executed with mastery in ‘The discontent‘the sharp debut feature of the brilliant Beatriz Serrano, but elevated to maximum power: a year without hitting the water in a London technology company. Nothing happened. Neither conflict nor dismissal nor discovery, unlike the ghost official of Cádiz who spent six years without going to work: it was the worker herself who took her knives things and closed the door from the outside, evidencing in a crude and documented way the structural cracks of large corporations and office positions. A real experiment on bullshit jobs and face-to-face work. Let Rita work. In 2013, Kazim spent an entire year doing absolutely no work for the London-based tech company where she was employed. Nobody noticed. In 2014 he left the office permanently voluntarily: neither reprimands nor dismissals were appropriate. His trick? He spent as little time as possible fulfilling his contractual obligations, doing so at a level competent enough not to raise suspicions. The mechanism was quite simple: he spent 15 minutes a week preparing for meetings where he showed fictitious progress and meanwhile spent the hours with an open Excel sheet. Neither budgets nor calculations for projects: he planned his personal trips. She made her efforts, but in other tasks, the most important: those dedicated to herself. Why is it important. The case of Leyla Kazim is not an isolated anecdote: this YouGov poll put on the table that 37% of British adult workers believe that their work contributes nothing to the world. And this has consequences: there are investigations from the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham who point out a relationship between the sense of purpose in employment and psychological well-being. Come on, if you think that your work is useless, you’ll burn out sooner. On the other hand, it exposes business control systems: if a corporation is unable to detect that one of its employees has not worked for twelve months, something is wrong: the performance metrics it uses, whatever they may be, do not work. Context. Kazim’s experiment is a practical application of bullshit jobs, or shit jobsa concept coined by anthropologist David Graeber. His thesis is as simple as it is uncomfortable: between 37% and 40% of workers in rich countries feel that their work is worthless. In this sense, automation has been part of the problem: according to Graeber, instead of freeing us from repetitive tasks, it has led to the creation of empty jobs. The consequences are twofold. For the person who works, psychological deterioration: it is difficult to get up every morning knowing that what you are going to do does not matter. For the company and the economy it represents a waste of talent and money. But the most revealing thing about Graeber’s theory is precisely what the writer has done: those who occupy these positions know it perfectly well and yet they pretend that they don’t. They keep up appearances because the system demands it. Added to this phenomenon is the in-personismthat cultural mechanism that allows shitty jobs to go unnoticed: it doesn’t matter about productivity, the important thing is to be in your chair all the hours that your workday marks. Since 1998, it has been studied and defined as “the tendency to remain at work beyond the time necessary for effective performance.” When a company measures visibility instead of results, in-person attendance becomes the norm: just what protected and masked Leyla Kazim for a year. In detail. Kazim masterfully exploited both phenomena: on the one hand, a job with functions so diffuse that reducing it to the minimum essential did not generate any imbalance (what Graeber calls box ticker tasks) and on the other, he took advantage of the company’s face-to-face culture. It is worth remembering that there are work environments that consciously or unconsciously perceive better and reward those who arrive earlier and leave later. In fact, has been proven that there are managers who show a predilection for in-person workers compared to remote ones due to proximity bias. As long as she had Excel open, kept her schedule, and attended meetings, the lack of effort went unnoticed. What he learned. The now BBC presenter’s conclusion is that modern office work is something of a play. Once you accept that your work has no real purpose and understand the rules of the game, you have a better chance of winning, which in this context means spending as little time as possible on contractual obligations. Of course, he issues a warning: his experiment is neither universal nor does he recommend it. Having a shitty job with diffuse tasks and wrong performance metrics is not the same as having someone whose job, even if it is shit, consumes their health or their room for maneuver is tight. On the other hand, let’s remember that even this perception of having a shitty job ends up taking its toll on psychological well-being. In Xataka | We believed that AI was going to take our jobs. At the moment he has started whispering to your boss who he should fire In Xataka | Spain has become accustomed to something abnormal in the rest of Europe: working with unsustainable stress levels Cover | Vitaly Gariev

A young man has solved a mathematical problem that lasted 60 years in 80 minutes with ChatGPT. That’s the least interesting thing about the story.

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He is 23 years old, his name is Liam Price and he has no advanced mathematical training. Even so, a few days ago he opened the Erdös problem websitepicked one at random and pasted it into ChatGPT. I didn’t know the history of the problem or who had tried it before. What he received back seemed like a good solution, and after consulting with a friend who was studying mathematics, the two realized they might be on to something special. A few hours later Terence Tao, one of the most renowned mathematicians in the world, confirmed that problem #1196 of Erdös, a conjecture about primitive sets of integers that had not been solved since 1966, had a solution. I had found her GPT-5.4 Pro in just 80 minutes. Not like that. This problem analyzed a question about the behavior of a particular mathematical sum on primitive sets, that is, sets of integers where none divides the other, when those numbers become very large. Jared Lichtman, a Stanford mathematician, had spent years on the problem and had made partial progress, but he and those who had tried before were starting from the same starting point that seemed like the right path. A novel idea. GPT-5.4 used another starting point. He stayed in the airmetic terrain and used a special function called von Mangoldt functiona classic tool of number theory known for its connections to prime numbers and Riemann zeta function. No one had thought about that approach to the problem, and as Lichtman explained when talking about the OpenAI model solution, “The LLM took a completely different route.” The achievement is real, but with nuances. Litchman praised the proposed solution by GPT-5.4, but there is one detail that has been omitted in many comments on this event: the raw output of ChatGPT was, in the words of this mathematician, “pretty poor.” This solution made it necessary for several experts to interpret it, detail it and extract from it the underlying idea that allowed the conjecture to be solved. Price didn’t know he had the solution until his friend read it, and he wasn’t sure until Tao confirmed it. The official repository of AI contributions to Erdös problemsmaintained by Tao himself on GitHub, classify the result as a solution generated in human-AI collaboration, not as a solution developed solely by AI. The distinction is important. A previous scandal. A few weeks ago Sebastien Bubeck, a researcher at OpenAI, posted on X that GPT-5 had “solved” several Erdös problems. That publication exceeded 100,000 views, but the mathematical community and also that surrounding the AI ​​industry criticized that statement. Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, called that statement “shameful.” What had actually happened is that the model I had found solutions to already solved problems on the web. Bubeck finished deleting the original tweet and tried to back down, but all this raised doubts about the validity of the application of AI to solve mathematical problems. AI and the mathematical success rate. Terence Tao and Nat Sothanaphan maintain the aforementioned record of all AI contributions to Erdös problems on GitHub. Each of the entries in that list or table is classified with a traffic light: green for complete solution, yellow for partial progress, and red for failure. In the category of completely AI-generated solutions with no known prior literature there are three green, fourteen yellow, and eight red traffic lights. However, the repository itself adds a unique comment: those who try to use AI to solve these problems and fail do not usually report it, so it is likely that AI has been applied “silently” to a large number of these problems without success, and those attempts do not appear in any table. There is a clear bias here because only successes generate headlines. Trying to measure what matters. In February 2026, eleven mathematicians created the initiative “First Proof“. In it they included ten mathematical problems that arose naturally in their research projects. For each one they included encrypted answers uploaded to a verification site, and they gave the AI ​​systems a week to try to solve those problems that had never appeared in any training data set. Preliminary results indicate that today AI models cannot overcome that barrier autonomously, and what happens is that there are still limits to what AI can really contribute in mathematics. But then, is there a revolution or not? Terence Tao offered a clear explanation as to why GPT-5.4 had succeeded where others had failed for 60 years. What had happened was what he described as a collective blockage of the mathematical community, because everyone started from the same origin because it was “the natural one”, the one marked by tradition. The AI ​​didn’t know that was the “correct” way to start, and that ignorance turned out to be an advantage. It’s not that the AI ​​was smarter, it’s that it had no biases about how to approach the problem. Now it remains to be seen if this novel way of trying to solve problems in unorthodox ways works. This will confirm whether what happened with Erdös’s problem number 1196 was an isolated case or whether a 23-year-old boy has managed to change our vision of how to tackle mathematical problems. Image | Universal Pictures In Xataka | There is a mathematically perfect way to cut a ham and cheese sandwich and it has been discussed since 1938.

a battery that charges in six minutes

by

CATL, literally the largest Chinese battery company in the world, has just presented its new technologies at its Tech Day, and has left us some very interesting gems, including its new ultra-fast charging batteries. And the manufacturer has managed to develop a battery capable of charging the car in just over six minuteswith an autonomy that far exceeds current limits. The Achilles heel of the electric. The biggest psychological barrier for anyone considering buying an electric car remains the same: how long it takes to charge and how far it goes on a charge. CATL has been trying to eliminate this problem at its roots through innovation for years. What it has presented now has possibly been the biggest leap that the company has taken on both fronts at the same time. What you have presented. The company has announced two technologies main. The first is the third generation of its Shenxing battery, made of chemical LFP (lithium-ferrophosphate), which manages to charge from 10% to 98% in 6 minutes and 27 seconds. In just 3 minutes and 44 seconds it reaches 80%. The company claims that even at temperatures of -30°C, the battery can be charged from 20% to 98% in just 9 minutes. The key to these magnificent figures is the world’s lowest internal resistance for ultra-fast charging: 0.25 milliohms, half the industry average. On the other hand, there is the new version of its Qilin condensed battery, aimed at long-haul vehicles, which reaches 1,500 kilometers of autonomy on a single charge, according to affirms the company. That is more or less equivalent to going from Madrid to Paris without recharging, and on paper you would still have autonomy. The previous version reached 1,000 km. How is it compared to BYD. CATL’s main rival in the global electric vehicle battery market is BYD, and there is so much competition between both companies that they are pushing the pace of innovation to an unprecedented level. Just a few days ago we were in Paris at the European presentation of Denza, where BYD showed the capabilities of its Blade Battery 2.0capable of charging from 10% to 97% in 9 minutes. On paper, CATL’s new Shenxing improves that time significantly, achieving practically the same load in just over 6 minutes. In extreme cold conditions, the difference is also in favor of CATL: 9 minutes compared to the 12 minutes needed by the BYD system for similar loads at -30 °C. But hey, regardless of the manufacturer, the truth is that the figures being achieved today are quite spectacular. Together, both companies control more than half of the global electric car battery market. According to data From SNE Research, CATL closed 2025 with 39.2% of the global market, while BYD occupied second place with 16.4%. Other technologies. CATL has also announced relevant developments on other fronts. presented the second generation of its Freevoy hybrid battery, which mixes LFP and NCM chemistry at the powder level for extended range hybrid vehicles (EREV). This battery allows up to 600 km of pure electric range with ultra-fast charging as standard. By the end of this year, in addition, the company has promised to begin mass production of sodium-ion batteries, a technology that reduces dependence on lithium, cobalt and nickel. Charging points. In infrastructure, which is perhaps the part that most interests the consumer, CATL has announced which will build 100,000 battery charging and changing points in China before the end of 2028, in collaboration with several car manufacturers in the country. As usual, in Europe we have to wait. Mass adoption and infrastructure is one of the fundamental steps for the end customer to opt for an electric vehicle. In Spain we have plenty of charging pointsbut according to latest Anfac barometeronly 4% of the available charging points reach 250 kW of power or more, the threshold necessary to access this type of ultra-fast charging. In fact, BYD needs 1,500 kW of power, and they plan to bring about 3,000 points in Europe by 2026. So yes, there is still some way to go in this. Cover image | Zaptec In Xataka | Xiaomi or Xpeng car factories are so advanced that they have become the favorite destination of Chinese schools

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