mistake

“In inheritances it is a mistake not to ask for the deceased’s life insurance certificates”

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When a family member dies, the pain of loss is joined by an avalanche of legal and administrative procedures that must be fulfilled in a certain order. Therefore, between the mourning and the paperwork, there is a document that runs a serious risk of not being processed: the application for life insurance certificates. This certificate indicates whether the deceased had contracted any type of life insurance. This, which at first glance may seem obvious, can be a procedure that involves the loss of thousands of euros. for the heirs for not claiming compensation from the insurers. The failure that, surprisingly, is very common. As Manuel Hernández García, lawyer and director of Vilches Abogados, said, in a video from his YouTube channel, not requesting this life insurance certificate is one of the most common mistakes in inheritances. “On many occasions, families do not request life insurance certificates,” recalls the lawyer. The curious fact is that “insurance companies have an obligation to transmit this information about the deceased’s life insurance to state agencies.” That is, insurers are obliged to communicate in which insurance policies a specific person appears as a beneficiary, but they are not obliged to notify the heirs directly. A simple procedure but not for the impatient. The file in which all life insurance beneficiaries are collected is called the Registry of Death Coverage Insurance Contracts. It was created by Law 20/2005 and today it is managed by the Ministry of Justice. Anyone interested can request the insurance certificate and it includes the name and surname and what policies the deceased had in force. However, and this is one of the reasons why this certificate is often left behind in the inheritance process, it cannot be requested until after fifteen business days since death. Any attempt to apply earlier will result in your automatic denial. The procedure is done through the form 790 and can be processed online, by mail or in person, with the death certificate at hand. The registry responds within a maximum of seven business days. Some death insurance policies include administrative coverage in which they are responsible for requesting this certificate. Five years, not one more. We come to one of the most delicate parts of the process since insurance companies are obliged to indicate in that certificate what insurance each deceased has, but not to notify the heirs who are beneficiaries of it. As indicated by the insurer Aegonhe article 23 of the Insurance Contract Law establishes that heirs have a maximum period of five years from death to claim life insurance. After that time, the money simply remains in the hands of the insurer. Sure, how sure? The key is that much of that “forgotten” money does not come from life insurance policies themselves, but from “invisible” policies included in third-party services. Credit cards, banking and financial loan services, home insurance, vehicle insurance, which in addition to offering the main coverage, also allocate part of the coverage to insuring the service provider. According to the last Social Insurance Report, In Spain, 22 million people have taken out risk life insurance and many people are unaware that they have this coverage. Notaries as a last resort. The Registry creation life insurance also imposed an additional obligation for notaries, who must include the certificate from the Insurance Registry of the deceased before the award of the inheritance and must warn the heirs if there is any policy that covers said death so that it is recorded. In Xataka | Lawyers and notaries agree: “When making a will it is wise to leave specific assets to each child and the home to only one” Image | Vilches lawyersUnsplash (Romain Dancre)

“Recording an eclipse with your cell phone is a mistake, we are going to miss the show”

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Solar eclipses have gone through many phases throughout history. First they became objects of worship or spreaders of panic, depending on the civilization we are talking about. Later, once their origin was better understood, they became a very specific but extremely useful tool for astronomers, as it was the only way they could study the solar corona. Nowadays, no one (or almost no one) fears eclipses and scientists have tools that can replace them when studying the corona. However, they have not stopped being special. Now we have entered a new phase. A stage in which society enjoys them Instead of fearing them, scientists witness from the outside how the love of heaven that one day led them to choose their profession arises in other people. I have talked about this and much more with David Galadiastronomer, professor at the University of Córdoba and member of the Scientific and Advisory Commission of the Trio of Eclipses. The end of an era For a long time, solar eclipses have been used to study qualities of the Sun or Moon that are not normally measurable or visible. A solar eclipse was even used to prove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. However, possibly those that stand out the most are the studies on the solar crown. That is, the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere. It is composed mostly of plasma, an ionized gas, whose atoms have gained or lost electrons, acquiring an electrical charge. This moving gas is what makes up the solar winds. It is also in the corona that coronal mass ejections are formed, which serve as the origin of geomagnetic storms. For all this, studying the solar corona is essential for scientists. However, there is a problem. The center of the Sun is so bright and it has such a dim glow that normally cannot be seen with conventional observation instruments. There is only one exception: a total solar eclipse. When the Moon completely covers the Sun, its brightness can no longer hide the solar corona from us and it suddenly appears in the sky. For decades, scientists had a few minutes with each eclipse to study it. Nowadays, fortunately, it is no longer necessary, since there are coronagraphsinstruments that have the ability to artificially “eclipse” both the Sun and other stars, revealing what we normally cannot see. However, there are still a few qualities that can only be studied in eclipses. “Coronographs cover not only the solar disk, but must also cover, due to unavoidable design needs, the chromosphere and the lowest part of the solar corona,” explains Galadí. “However, these regions can be observed well during a total solar eclipse.” On the other hand, “the coronagraph removes light from the solar photosphere, but does not reduce the brightness of the overall sky, so the outermost and faintest parts of the corona are also lost using these instruments.” Therefore, today we know the Sun and the Moon much better. The theory of general relativity continues to be constantly tested with new discoveries in the field of astronomy. And yes, you can study the solar corona without having to see a solar eclipse. However, these instruments prevent us from seeing it with the same clarity that we see it when the Moon completely eclipses the Sun. “Here we have the only two residues of heliophysics for which eclipses are still useful: the study of the link between the solar photosphere and the middle corona through the chromosphere and the lower corona, and to analyze the outermost coronal regions”. Now, in the future solar eclipses will not be necessary even for that; Well, there are already two missions underway aimed at solving the problem. “The observation of the external corona from space, with coronagraphs on artificial satellites, such as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) of the European Space Agency in collaboration with NASA, avoids all the disadvantages due to the Earth’s atmosphere and its brightness,” says the astronomer from the University of Córdoba. “In addition, we have great technological innovations such as those of the mission Proba-3 (also from ESA), which are already allowing us to study the chromosphere and the lower corona from space, precisely by creating artificial eclipses.” Does all this mean that scientists will no longer have anything to study during a solar eclipse? Perhaps for astronomers there will come a time when they can focus only on looking at the sky and enjoying themselves. For other scientistssuch as those specialized in animal behavioralthough some studies had already been published previously, the real party begins now. “In animal ethology it is interesting study behavior when a sudden night occurs, uncoupled from other circadian rhythms,” says Galadí. “The behaviors of species when ‘turning off’ the Sun suddenly can only be due to the change in ambient light and temperature, but not to other external or internal factors.” The solar eclipse is now for society This August 12, 2026, there will be thousands or even millions of people who will travel or look for the best places near their homes to view the solar eclipse. These astronomical phenomena have become milestones that transcend far beyond science. It is time for society to enjoy them. David Galadí is clear about it: “Total solar eclipses are no longer science, or have almost ceased to be science, but they continue to constitute great natural spectacles with enormous potential to surprise people.” This can occur at many levels. “They have power as a source of artistic inspiration, tourist resourcean inexhaustible source of didactic or informative applications, and the ability to awaken vocations.” In fact, the latter is something in which he himself sees himself reflected. “Great astronomical events mark people, I myself am a product of the astronomical fever of Halley’s comet in the eighties.” In Spain we have a great opportunity, because It is not a single eclipse. Next year we will have another total solar eclipse and in 2028 an annular eclipse, which will provide new opportunities to enjoy them … Read more

Inheriting shoes seems like a great idea to save. Biomechanics and podiatrists are very clear that it is a mistake

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In many families it is quite common to see how the older brother or sister grows and leaves some sneakers or boots that look practically new without being able to use them. Here the logic indicates that they can pass it on to the younger brother so that they can take advantage of the money that has been spent and not throw away something that a priori is completely functional. However, what on paper seems like an impeccable financial decision collides head-on with children’s biomechanics and podiatric health. A custom mold. The key to the problem is not in the exterior appearance of the shoe, but in its interior and in the sole. As explained Podiatrist Rebeca Prieto Riaño in a recent article in eldiario.es, an already worn shoe tends to be “molded” to the gait pattern of the first child. Here you have to understand that each person has a unique way of walking and distributing weight. With continued use, the shoe suffers from specific wear zones that end up acting like small invisible wedges, and when a second child puts on that shoe, their foot is forced to adapt to a shape and inclinations that are not their own. It’s a problem. This can significantly alter your stride, favoring everything from biomechanical problems to tendon and muscle injuries, as well as classic blisters or chafing due to inadequate support. It is a recommendation. Although there are no clinical trials today, direct evidence comes, above all, from clinical guidelines and the consensus of specialists like the document Children’s Footwear Advice of the Suffolk Podiatry Paediatrics. But we do have different biomechanical studies that show that footwear modifies the parameters of children’s gait, including speed, step length, ankle and knee ranges of motion, and impact pattern. The biomechanics. Specifically, we see it in a meta-analysis published in 2011 that already concluded that shoes irremediably affect children’s gait. Added to this are more recent experimental works, such as a study published in Gait & Posture in 2023, which demonstrate how asymmetric shoe heights induce reactive changes in gait kinematics and muscle activation. It goes further. In addition to the mechanics of gait, there is a dermatological factor to take into account, since pediatric podiatry guides advise against second-hand footwear due to the risk of infections. Sharing closed shoes that have accumulated sweat and humidity greatly facilitates the transmission of skin pathogens, especially dermatophytes, which are the fungi that cause athlete’s foot. The cotton test. Does this mean we should automatically throw away any shoe our oldest child outgrows? Not necessarily, since experts in children’s orthopedics and podiatry establish footwear that has had residual use as an exception. For example, shoes for a wedding that were worn one afternoon, or wellies that the child wore three times before his foot grew, can be inherited. The essential condition is that there are no signs of adaptation to the previous step. In Xataka | Walking almost barefoot is the new wellness trend: this is how barefoot has arrived everywhere

Peter Thiel believes that the Holy See is making a big mistake

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Peter Thiel doesn’t usually bite his tongue, and he didn’t do so a few days ago at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The investor and co-founder of Palantir and PayPal He participated in a talk in which he accused Pope Leo XIV of being (unknowingly) at the service of the Chinese Communist Party. The reason: his last encyclical, Magnificent Humanitas. Thiel’s argument. In this text the Pope advocated regulate AI to avoid misuse of technology. For Thiel, although this message may resonate with people around the world concerned about AI, it will hardly have a similar effect in China, where the Catholic religion is a minority. The Pope is “working for the Chinese communists”. For Thiel, this means that the encyclical only stops one of the two major sides in the race for AI, and leaves Beijing free to continue advancing without any type of moral brake. Conclusion, according to this magnate: the Pope “is working for the Chinese communists.” This comes from afar. A few months ago, in March, Thiel already offered a series of private lectures on the Antichrist. As it turned out later, this event bothered the Vatican so much that two Catholic universities they had to go out to clarify who had not participated in its organization. For the tycoon, the Antichrist might not be a person, but a world government who takes power promising to protect humanity from existential threats like AI. Thiel didn’t stop there. In addition to this accusation about the Pope, Thiel also warned that a “democratic-socialist coup d’état” is taking place in the United States. Without any evidence, he accused Anthropic (which he called “woke liberal”) that it would use its models to manipulate the 2028 elections in favor of Democrats. Interested speech. But this investor and entrepreneur has its own “agenda” and a few ideas quite pilgrims. He was one of Donald Trump’s first supporters in Silicon Valley, and as pointed out on CNN, he also helped boost the political career of the US vice president, J.D. Vance. The latter worked at Mithrill Capital, the investment firm co-founded by Thiel himself, before making the leap into politics. Image | Gage Skidmore | Catholic Church England and Wales In Xataka | If things go wrong for me, it’s because of the politicians; If I do well, it is thanks to me: the bias that damages democracy

Showering with cold water before sleeping in a heat wave seems like the best idea. Science warns that it is a big mistake

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Heat waves are already with us and in many places in recent days we have seen how they has far exceeded 40 ºC in many parts of our country. But the problem is not only that it is difficult to leave the house, but that sleeping becomes practically impossible for many peoplehaving a very fragmented sleep with different awakenings or even suffering from insomnia due to not being able to fall asleep. A solution. Faced with this great problem, common sense and desperation push us to get under the shower to be able to cool our body as much as possible just before entering bed to at least be a little cooler and try to fall asleep. But the problem here is that showering activates our body and can have a quite different effect than what we are looking for, making it very difficult to fall asleep. The mechanism of sleep. Something that we must keep in mind is that for our brain to understand that it is time to sleep, it needs a very specific physiological signal, which is the drop in the body’s core temperature. But when we take a shower of ice water, we get instant relief on the skin, but we cause our blood vessels to constrict so that our blood does not drop below its precious 36-37 ºC. In other words, the blood vessels They close to protect the internal heat of the body by sending less blood to our skin. The result. Although we get very fresh skin, a few minutes after getting out of the shower, the body experiences a rebound effect, retaining central heat and remaining in a state of alert because for the body there is a threat to which it has had to respond. On the other hand, warm or hot water does just the opposite, since, according to the group of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, hot water stimulates the thermoregulatory system, causing blood to travel from the inner core of the body to the extremities. This facilitates a massive dissipation of body heat once we leave the bathroom, and that subsequent drop in core temperature is the biological switch that induces sleep. The warm water. Knowing all this, we can conclude that we should not use hot or cold water when showering, but that the middle ground is what we should look for. This is what an exhaustive review published in the journal points out. Sleep Medicine, where it was analyzed thousands of data to reach the conclusion that the optimal water temperature to improve sleep quality is between 40 and 42.5 ºC. But in a context of great heat like the one we are experiencing, experts clarify that the ideal is to look for the point of warm water, since the objective is not to roast ourselves, but to relax the blood vessels to promote heat loss from inside the body. The time. Showering and immediately getting into bed (or getting on top of the sheets) doesn’t work at all, since the body needs time to cool down. This same study we were referring to showed that the optimal time to take this shower is between 1 and 2 hours before going to bed. And best of all, it is something that has been shown to reduce the time it takes to fall asleep. These data are reinforced by a large-scale observational study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, where, after analyzing more than 1,000 adultsresearchers confirmed that bathing between 61 and 180 minutes before going to bed is directly associated with faster falling asleep, thanks to physiological changes that are related to body heat. Images | Slaap In Xataka | An expert clarifies the main mistake of sleeping with air conditioning: “It is totally unnatural and we rest worse”

In the 16th century someone decided that Da Vinci’s notebooks had to be dismembered. It took us 400 years to solve their mistake.

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Upon his death, in 1519, Leonardo da Vinci He left more than just paintings and frescoes that crown him as one of the great references of Renaissance painting. Just as (or even more) important to understanding the depth of his genius are his personal notebooks, full of notesillustrations, graphics… come from his own handwriting and sprinkled with his characteristic mirror writing. By chance of history, in the 16th century this bibliographical treasure suffered a ‘act of editorial vandalism’ that has conditioned the way we understand Leonardo. Until now. An unfortunate legacy. The name of Francesco Melzi Maybe it doesn’t tell you much. And it’s normal. Melzi was an Italian painter of the 16th century whose memory has been eclipsed for posterity by geniuses of the stature of Michelangelo, Raphael Sanzio and Leonardo Da Vinci, of whom he was a disciple. However, Melzi does stand out for something, a role that has conditioned our way of understanding the author of ‘La Mona Lisa’: upon Leonardo’s death, Melzi became his executor, responsible for looking after his manuscripts. That enormous legacy made up of hundreds and hundreds of manuscript sheets ended up in the hands of Pompeo Leoni (1533-1608), a sculptor from Arezzo, in Tuscany, who one day decided to dismember Leonardo’s notebooks. The result was disastrous, although to be honest Leoni’s objective was not to destroy the notebooks, but to ‘reorganize’ them following an arbitrary criterion. And what was the result? Basically Leoni dedicated himself to separating, classifying and putting together sheets of Leonardo’s notebooks and loose pages in a whimsical way. Based on what he considered best. The result was that many of the annotations that Da Vinci had recorded in the same set of manuscripts between the mid-1470s and his death in 1519 were divided into two different codices. In one, the largest, Leoni included all material (drawings and writings) of a technical or scientific nature. The second, smaller codex was reserved for material that in his opinion had an artistic and figurative character. From Italy to England. Leoni’s ‘attack’ did not end there. At the beginning of the 17th century his son-in-law, Polidoro Calchi, decided to get rid of the material he had inherited from the sculptor, which caused Da Vinci’s old notebooks to end up scattered around the world, separated by hundreds of kilometers. The first codex, that of technical annotations, today known as Codex Atlanticusended up in the hands of Count Galeazzo Arconati, who in turn donated it in 1637 to the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana. The second codex traveled even further. Around 1620 he ended up in England and half a century later was integrated in the Royal Collection at Windsor. Righted the wrong. More than four centuries later that capricious dismemberment of Da Vinci’s annotations has been amended at last. At least in part. A few days ago the Italian embassy in the United Kingdom, the Ministry of Culture and representatives of the Galileo Museum, the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana and the Royal Collection Trust presented in London a new tool named ‘Leonardotheka 2.0’. The name gives a clue to its approach: it is nothing more nor less than an immense ‘library’ digital of Da Vinci’s legacy, a resource that allows many of the manuscripts of the Renaissance genius to be consulted in an accessible and agile way. The Galileo Museum slide that from now on, whoever wishes will be able to explore the material by accessing the archives independently or with cross searches, in addition to “the results of more than 200 years of research” on Da Vinci’s career and work. 3,500 pages. Beyond that advantage, what is really important about Leonardotheka 2.0. is that, as remember The authorities of Florence have gathered around 3,500 manuscript pages by Leonardo that in some cases had been separated since the end of the 16th century. It is a virtual union, not a physical one, but it is still a milestone and helps to right the mistake made centuries ago by Pompeo Leoni. In total, the digital library brings together the 1,119 folios of the Codex Atlanticus and 550 pages from the Royal Collection of Windsor. Some sources specify that it is about one third of Da Vinci’s entire surviving legacy, which also includes the codices preserved in Madrid. Is it that important? Regardless of what it may mean for researchers, Leonardotheka 2.0 is important for several reasons. The main one is that it has allowed us, in words of the Galileo Museum, “reconstruct the original state of Leonardo’s manuscript legacy before Leoni’s disastrous intervention” in the 16th century. And that is not a minor detail. Although the separation between art and science might make sense to Leoni, the truth is that goes against of the Renaissance mentality that Leonardo embodied. “It offers a new perspective on his thinking, vision and working methods,” they underline from Florence. “The platform highlights the connection between scientific studies and the figurative drawings of the Tuscan genius.” Beyond Leonardo. “This project not only helps to recover the complexity of Leonardo’s work in its original form, but also contributes to the new interpretation, in development for several years, of this crucial period in European history. Using digital tools designed to analyze the original texts, Leonardotheka 2.0 will make this challenge possible,” highlights Michele Ciliberto, from the National Institute of Renaissance Studies. Filling gaps. The second reason why the project is so important is that it has allowed us to recover pieces that had been damaged when the notebooks were dismembered in the 16th century. To be more precise, those responsible for the Leonardotheka they assure who have been able to “reconstruct” 50 manuscripts “thanks to the insertion of fragments preserved in Windsor within the pages of Codex Atlanticus, restoring their original context.” One of the reconstructions carried out by the experts has made it possible to “reconcile” the drawing of a horse preserved in the British collection with a note on an equestrian monument preserved in the Codex Atlanticus. “The restored folio probably … Read more

I thought that in 2026 I could buy a cheap cell phone without worrying about anything. big mistake

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I have spent half my life being especially critical when analyzing phones and, on the only occasion that I have decided to stop being so, I have hit a wall. We are in 2026, a year in which one might think that at this point in the game practically any phone newly launched on the market must work well. Mistake, big mistake. So I want to tell you how the component crisis in the technology sector and, to be honest, a certain apathy on the part of manufacturers, continues to make choosing an affordable mobile phone complex in 2026. Either we look closely at what we buy, or it may turn out to be a failure. The objectives. A mobile to send and receive WhatsAppsliterally. I wanted a phone whose main use was to manage communication with clients in one of my projects and, taking advantage of the fact that I had a new purchase, use it as GPS when I ride a motorcycle. The demands were minimal, there were practically no requirements other than that the cell phone worked decently. The expectation was not high either: I know that a low-end mobile phone does not work like a high-end one, not even like a mid-range one. I was just looking for something functional and simple. The search. I started the search, with phones over 100 euros. For that price it was practically impossible to access basic phones like the LITTLE M7which at least has a Snapdragon 685 (a processor, mind you, from 2023), so I had to continue lowering the bar. I ended up finding a 199 euro phone on sale for 89 euros on Aliexpress. One with 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB of internal memory… and a Helium G100 Ultra. the drama. The Helio G100 Ultra is an entry-level processor launched in 2024, relatively modern, and should have enough capacity to run basic applications. That’s what I thought. It’s been a while since I’ve tried an entry-level model. I thought that in 2026 things would be a little better, and I couldn’t be more wrong Almost two seconds to open the camera, lag in the launcher with the mobile newly configured, constant freezes and a performance that, after having tried other cheap mobile phones of a similar price (without offer), was simply unacceptable. And no, I’m not going to tell you the model so as not to draw blood, but it is one of the most popular mobile phones in Spain. Blind. One of the supposed advantages that it has brought us the semiconductor race is all about performance. For some time now, in certain ranges, my recommendations when asked which mobile phone to buy for The same does not happen with the entry ranges. Processors like Helium G99Helio G100, and even some Snapdragon 600 series (or Gen 6) are still barely moving basic apps. And the worrying thing is not how the phone performs right out of the box (which already performs poorly), it is how it will perform in a few years with some hardware degradation, system and app updates. big horse. At this point in the game there is something that is very clear to me, something that I have always defended: the processor It is much more important than we can think as average users. It is the heart of our mobile: The Gross Performance Manager The person in charge of the modem who will make us have better or worse coverage The element behind photo quality and camera performance The one that allows the final audio quality to be better or worse The one that helps to manage energy consumption more or less efficiently And here, even though the chip race continues at its pace, the high-end processors from a few years ago are noticeably superior to the entry-level ones. So between that high end of 2024 full of chicha and that newly released entry range… I’m clear about what I should have done. Image | Xataka In Xataka | Best mobile phones in quality price. Which one to buy based on use and nine recommended models

An Air Canada pilot has been flying for 16 years without making a single mistake. And they have arrested him for one detail: he did not have a license

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Almost 20 years goes a long way, whether you are an airplane pilot or not. But if you are also one, you will have had time to accumulate almost a thousand international flights, take the controls of different types of aircraft and accumulate good money. It is the summary that Geoffrey Wall could make of his life when, once retired, he told this to his grandchildren or, who knows, told it to all of us in a book. One more story. Tasteless, without substance. But Geoffrey Wall may say otherwise. Yes, you can tell that He flew airplanes for decadeswho took the controls of the best-known commercial airplanes on more than 900 occasions and who accumulated millions of euros taking hundreds of lives from one place to another through the clouds. But he will also be able to tell how he managed to trick his airline into flying planes for 16 years without the relevant license to do so. Everything good, except for one small detail Because the future doesn’t look good for Geoffrey Wall. They count in cnn that the police knocked on his door and he was arrested. The reason: Air Canada notified authorities that one of its pilots was flying with a false license. Not only that, he had been doing it from 2009 until last year. The deception was discovered during a routine check. Nobody had reported irregularities in the controls, no aircraft had been put at risk. But in 2025, during a review of its documentation, it was found that there were some anomalies. By then, the pilot had been flying airplanes within the company for 27 years. However, the company points out that Wall began flying fraudulently starting in 2009. Then, the pilot was promoted to captain and was able to take command of the aircraft and direct operations. The small detail is that he falsified the ATPL-A, the highest level pilot’s license. At a press conference to explain what happened, Deputy Chief Nick Milinovich, of the Peel Regional Police (southern Ontario, Canada), pointed out that “It’s very similar to a doctor who is licensed to practice family medicine but is performing brain surgery in his office.” And he once again emphasized the importance of having the appropriate licenses to perform a job. Especially if in that job you have taken thousands of people through the air. The authorities have explained that the pilot left his job in 2025, just before “Project Icarus”, as the police work has been called internally, started rolling last January. months later They have managed to prove the falsification of the documents and on June 1 they arrested the pilot. However, Air Canada emphasizes that its pilots pass tests regularly and that at no time were passengers put in danger. They emphasize that Geoffrey Wall amply demonstrated his abilities to pilot the Boeing 767, 777 and 787 to which he had access during the last 16 years. During that time it is estimated that Wall earned more than two million dollars with his salary but will now have to face seven criminal charges, including fraud for money earned without a license and falsification of documents. In addition, it has already been fined by Transport Canada, the Canadian Government department in charge of ensuring compliance with all mobility regulations in the country. Photo | David Shypers In Xataka | Without a pilot or help from the ground: this is how the University of Munich has achieved the completely autonomous landing of a plane

Comparing Apple’s AI to ChatGPT or Claude is a mistake. Apple is not playing that game

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to whom They rule out Apple in the AI ​​raceeye. The company may have arrived late and it certainly may have little to show today, but its evolution over the last three years reveals three interesting things. The first, that Apple does have its own AI models. The second, that they are very far in performance from the best of OpenAI and Claude. Third, that may not matter at all. Three years of evolution. The trajectory of the technical documents shared by Apple in recent years reveals a series of more than relevant changes. In 2024 its initial proposal was limited to small models of about 3,000 million parameters (3B) specialized in solving basic tasks like generating Genmojis or text summaries. In 2025 the company launched its MLX framework to the developer community to facilitate the integration and use of local models. Now, in 2026, They propose a hybrid infrastructure based on a basic principle: Simple requests: they run in small local models on the device, you don’t even need an internet connection Complex requests: the system delegates the task to be processed in the cloud privately through Private Cloud Compute A (maybe) great idea: NAND can help. The most relevant milestone of Apple’s new approach lies in the design of its AFM 3 Core Advanced model. In today’s mobile phones we have a big bottleneck with the execution of capable (large) AI models because these devices have a very limited amount of memory (12 GB on some iPhones). To be able to fit a model with 20,000 million parameters (20B), Apple has decided to store that model in the internal SSD unit, not in memory. In the AFM 3 Core Advanced model the “experts” are in the mobile’s SSD. They are preselected and loaded into RAM to be used dynamically, optimizing model execution. Experts by prompt, not by token. It then activates a series of pruning techniques (Instruction-Following Pruning, or IFP) to activate only between 1,000 and 4,000 million parameters in a sparse manner (sparse), somewhat similar to what is done in models with Mixture-of-Experts architecture. But Apple selects these experts at the beginning of each prompt, not token by token, which allows it to avoid the slow bandwidth of the mobile’s NAND storage compared to its RAM memory. Privacy by flag. If for something Apple’s approach stood out from the beginning It was for his privacy.which is implicit when using local models. But if the request is complex, the system redirects it to the AI ​​models in Apple’s cloud, the Private Cloud Compute (PCC). Unlike other platforms and infrastructures such as those of OpenAI or Anthropic, conversations with Apple’s AI are encrypted and are totally private according to the company: this data is not shared with third parties (because not even Apple can see it) and it is not used to train its models. Five models with the help of Gemini. Although Apple is obsessed with total control of its products, this time had to give in and ally with Google so that their Gemini models could “show” Apple the way. The result is a third generation of models that are developed in collaboration with the Mountain View firm. We have five models in total: AFM 3 Core: 3B parameter dense model AFM 3 Core Advanced: sparse model of 20B parameters with activation of 1B to 4B parameters depending on the task AFM 3 Cloud: a powerful but also efficient and fast model that runs on the Apple cloud. ADM 3 Cloud (Image): for generating and editing images, the heart of both these options and the new Image Playground AFM 3 Cloud Pro– Apple’s most powerful cloud model is for autonomous agents. It has been trained with Google TPUs and runs on Nvidia GPUs within Google Cloud infrastructure Performance, an unknown. Unlike what other companies usually do when they present their models, Apple has not published metrics on known benchmarks. Instead, it shows “human preference” metrics in which it compares user satisfaction when using its models versus competing models. The comparisons are also with previous versions of these models, which does not clarify much what can be expected from them. But they are not in the race for the best model. In 2025 yes there was comparison with open weight models of that time (Qwen-3-4B locally, GPT-4o or Llama 4 Scout in the cloud) and then they seemed to be at a good level in reference to those options. Expect them to be behind the most recent models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google itself, and it’s unclear how they compare to the new Chinese open weights models. One thing seems clear: Apple is not very interested in having its own Mythos, at least for now. Your objective is different. Apple models from 2026 are “preferred” more than those from 2025. Logical, but also useless when it comes to understanding how good these models are compared to the competition. But integration is important. Apple’s big ace to compensate for this difference in capacity is that its models have full access to the user’s OS, apps and hardware. AFM models are integrated with iPhone camera sensors, notification history or local app permissions. This allows useful tasks to be carried out that an LLM that is “disconnected” from the hardware will hardly be able to replicate. Here the integration of the models with the hardware and software of the device is (or wants to be) fundamental. Beware of mediocrity. This approach focused on integration and privacy is especially striking and differentiating from its competitors, but there are risks. Among others, the product is limited by its functional capabilities compared to the competition. If local models do not solve and cloud models also do not behave reliably, Apple runs the risk of having an AI that is secure and private but technically mediocre in its responses. Siri has already been criticized for being especially stupid: Siri AI must precisely eradicate that perception. In Xataka | Apple has designed Siri AI so … Read more

The biggest mistake you can make the night before the Selectivity exam is not leaving a topic unlooked at: it is not sleeping

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When we think of a student during exam time or of a candidate who is preparing very intensely for an exam that will offer him job stability, we automatically think of the classic image of being up early in the morning studying hundreds of underlined pages. Here it seems that sleeping becomes a minor issue due to the fact of studying and cramming hundreds of pages. But the reality is that study without sleeping It’s like wasting time, even though it may seem otherwise. The science. Here the science has a lot to sayand a robust body of evidence suggests that putting aside studying and getting into bed for 7 or 8 hours of sleep is by far the smartest decision you can make before an exam or during preparation. And something they don’t teach us is that studying is only half of the learning and memorization process that occurs in our brain, since the other half occurs while we are asleep in order to ingrain knowledge. In the brain. To understand why sleep is non-negotiable for students, we have to look at what happens inside our heads when we sleep. At these moments we may think that the brain is in a state of lethargy or shutdown, but the truth is that it is a period of frenetic activity at the neuronal level. We found one of the proofs in a published article in Neuron which suggests that the sleeping brain is biologically optimized for memory consolidation. Something very important, because during the day the brain acts like a true sponge, capturing a large amount of information quickly but volatile, which far exceeds the limit of its capacity to retain it. Transferring it to the hard drive. All this knowledge that we try to acquire in one afternoon has to be consolidated so that we can later remember it in the exam. This is where sleep comes in, which is where a hippocampal-cortical transferwhich allows the information acquired during wakefulness to be reactivated and transferred to the cerebral cortex, which is where the information is stored long-term. In Nature We found a fascinating article that detailed how neurons repeat at full speed the information learned during the first phase of sleep. This phase prepares the ground so that, during REM sleep, in the second half of sleep, synaptic connections are stabilized and strengthened to integrate all the information. But if we skip hours of sleep, or reduce it to 3-4 hours to be more efficient, this process is interrupted. The disaster of sleep deprivation. The penalty for not sleeping is severe, since if you decide to spend the night sleepless to review “a couple more topics”, you should know that the price you have to pay is a 40% reduction in learning capacity, in addition to an increase in memory losses and a plummet in concentration. And what these losses ultimately generate are temporary memory gaps, which is the typical situation in which we remain “blank” looking at the exam sheet without knowing what to write, although you remember having read it hours before. This is why a student with few hours of sleep shows much slower response times, is confused when making decisions, and suffers a radical worsening of attention. In surveys. In 2023, a study carried out with 640 students of the Autonomous University of Madrid during their exam period pointed out that 61.3% of those surveyed already sensed that their performance would improve if they slept more. From here, the researchers confirmed a direct and positive association between sleep quality and academic performance. Furthermore, they discovered that the “sleep debt” accumulated during the week took a very high toll, being associated with worse performance perceived by the students themselves. The perfect dose. Here the recommendation that we must keep in mind is that of the WHO or the National Sleep Foundation, which suggests that young adults should sleep between 7 and 8 hours a day, and even increase to 9 hours for students with great cognitive stress, such as opponents. Images | Ministry of Health In Xataka | If you wake up tired on a regular basis, your rest is fragmented. The good news is that science knows how to fix it

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