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“It is the person who deserves respect, and very often despite their opinions”

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People like to feel comfortable. That is a universal truth. And if there is something comfortable and comfortable in this world, at least for our brains, it is clinging to a good topic. Not only does it save us from thinking about things, it also creates a soft intellectual cushion on which to settle. “The clichés portray us because they are the symptoms of common beliefs,” reasons the philosopher Aurelio Arteta (Sangüesa, 1945), professor at the University of the Basque Country (UPV), who years ago dissected in one of his essays one of the most deeply rooted and apparently unquestionable commonplaces in our society: Are all opinions really equally respectable? That brings us to other, equally important questions: What does it mean? ‘respect an opinion’? Do we behave in an intolerant way if we question it? And what deserves respect, the idea itself or the person behind it? “Confront them, don’t juxtapose them” “Let’s say that all opinions are respectable. If they were, we would not have to argue our own opinions or dare to question those of others. They would all be worth the same, which in the end means that none of them are worth anything. The degree of truth of each one would not matter, because the only thing that counts is the right to express opinions without any reply,” argued In an interview granted and The Spanish in 2012, after the publication of ‘So many silly clichés’. For the Navarrese philosopher the key is to maintain a position open and tolerantbut starting from a crucial premise: respect does not exclude debate and is not incompatible with maintaining a critical approach. On the contrary. “Respecting opinions means confronting them with each other, not juxtaposing them and preserving them from clashing. Ultimately, it is the person who deserves respect, and very often despite their opinions,” abounds Arteta. “Of course many will still respond indignantly: ‘But you’re not trying to convince me!’ As if persuading with reasons were the same as use impositions. “That’s as far as the stupidity of the environment goes.” Taking that stance is not easy. It requires an effort: thinking, reasoning and taking the risk involved in starting a confrontation of ideas that, if necessary, can force us to rethink our own convictions. It is not a minor issue because clichés often also serve as social glue. “By repeating the clichés we also seek to fit in with the group, to blend into it, to be one of our own, to dress in the current fashion. In short, not to be left alone and out in the open,” duck the professor of Philosophy. Aurelio Arteta is not the only one who has raised his voice to remind us what intellectual and respectful respect really consists of. knock down old clichés and hackneyed phrases like the one that says ‘I respect your ideas, but I don’t share them’. He did something similar in his day José Antonio Marinaphilosopher and essayist, who emphasized in another interview What the rights to freedom of expression and thought protect is “the people”, “not the content of the opinion”. “That opinion can be stupid, aggressive… No, each opinion must have its source of legitimation. If it is a mathematical opinion, mathematics; if it is a geographical opinion, geographical criteria. To a person who tells me that the earth is flat, I say: ‘I am not going to put you in jail for that because you are free to express your opinion, but I am not going to give you a professorship in Geography.’ Our tendency to turn ideas into untouchable constructs actually connects with our nature and something that the psychologist Arie Kruglanski defined as the need for cognitive closure: Humans do not like uncertainty and that leads us to quickly establish beliefs or, if necessary, demand that they be respected to keep them untouchable and not force us to revise our way of seeing the world. Images | Carlos Torres (Unsplash) Via | Trends In Xataka | Henry David Thoreau, philosopher, “in my house I had three chairs, one for solitude, another for friendship, and the third for society.”

A teacher suspected that his students had cheated with AI. He took the exam in person and his grades dropped by half.

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In December 2025, a shooting on the campus of Brown University caused the death of two people. One of them had just introduced herself to one of the professors at that university, the Spanish Robert Serrano. The tragedy made Serrano, an economics professor at said institution, make a decision that would later have a unique ramification: the growing role of AI in academic teaching. Exams from home. That event made Serrano decided to change the evaluation method of its spring 2026 course. The always demanding ECON 1170 would allow take-home exams in both the midterms and the final exam. The subject, with a reputation for being “a bone”, normally attracted few (but extraordinary) students, and Serrano once had classes of 8 students. This spring, upon learning of the new testing method, 86 enrolled. Brilliant students looking for shortcuts. Brown University is part of the prestigious Ivy League, a group of private universities in the northeastern United States. All of them are famous for their theoretical academic excellence and social elitism, and also theoretically those who access it are brilliant students. The thing is that these students tend to be especially ambitious and competitive, and that is where AI comes in: it is an attractive shortcut to overcome the overload of assignments and exams. Too many outstanding. In the midterm exam on March 5, the average grade was absolutely extraordinary: 96 out of 100. In fact, 40 of the 86 students obtained a perfect score of 100 out of 100. These grades were, as Serrano said, surprising because the average grades in previous courses ranged between 65 and 80 points out of 100, “and this exam was more difficult than the ones I took in the past because doing it at home is an opportunity to pose a greater challenge to the class, since you give students unlimited time. Something doesn’t add upto. It wasn’t just that the notes didn’t add up: it was that some of the answers, even though they were correct, were strange. According to Serrano “they had a very convoluted style.” What Serrano then did with his teaching team was try to answer those same questions with ChatGT. There they discovered that the answers were very similar to those they had seen in the exams. In-person exams. With that suspicion already created in Serrano, the professor decided to take the final exam in person. He notified all his students by email: if the distribution of grades in the final was similar to that of the midterm, he would consider the latter valid. Otherwise, it would annul those grades and what would really weigh in the final grade would be the result of the final exam. This notice had an immediate effect: 18 students abandoned the course suddenly, and another nine did not even show up at the end. Of those 27 students who failed the subject, 22 had gotten a perfect 100 on the midterm. The note collapses. Once the remaining students took the final exam, the results spoke for themselves. The average grade plummeted to 48 out of 100, half of what it had been when students were allowed to take the exam from home. The conclusion was clear. The University removes iron. Serrano went blind at age 17 due to retinal dystrophy and still graduated from Harvard. He had no intention of just letting this go, and although he reported it to the Brow administration, the institution’s response was rather lukewarm. Reporting the situation to the media. To make the problem known, he began talking to media outlets such as TheChronicle, The Country either Inside Higher Ed. In this last medium you can see how the students’ grades dropped: of the 59 who appeared, half passed, but only four got 80 out of 100 or more, and only 17 surpassed 60 points. It was then that the academic committee suggested Serrano file an individual complaint for each suspicious student, something he described as “ridiculous.” The dean pointed out that students who cheat “almost never do so from a malicious place,” but rather due to specific pressure. It is not an isolated case. What happened in Brown is not an extraordinary event. The arrival of AI in university classrooms has transformed evaluation methods themselves. in Princeton They just ended a 133-year-old tradition why teachers left the classroom during final exams, since they trusted the honor code signed by the students. A former chair of that Princeton honor committee acknowledged that “there is a feeling that people cheat on homework exams and that people just use ChatGPT,” and the more people believe they cheat, the more they are encouraged to cheat. Image | Magnificent In Xataka | “We exploit the weaknesses of AI”: teachers’ lonely struggle to reinvent homework and exams

There is only one person in Star Trek history who has played herself, and the scene remains legendary

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The android Data needed the three most brilliant scientists in history for a game of poker on the holodeck, and the chosen ones were Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The first two had been dead for decades (or centuries). The third was fifty-one years old and had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but he had expressed his desire to appear in the series to Paramount bosses. When was it? On June 21, 1993, the finale of the sixth season of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’. The first ninety seconds of the episode, titled ‘Descent, Part 1’, contain something that It hasn’t happened again. in more than fifty years of franchise: a real person, with a first and last name, playing himself. It was Stephen Hawking. How it started. Hawking visited the offices of Paramount Pictures in 1991 to present a documentary about his life directed by Errol Morris. Rick Berman, executive producer of the series, discovered during the visit that Hawking was a trekkie declared and offered him a tour of the sets of ‘The New Generation’. And once on the set, the scientist made an unusual request: that he be taken out of his wheelchair (something unusual) so he could sit in the captain’s chair. Once installed, he commented to his host Leonard Nimoy (Spock in the original series) that the seat was considerably more comfortable and powerful than his chair. He then asked if there was any chance of appearing on the show. The producers took note. Hawking would return to Los Angeles a few months later, and a filming window was available. All that was left was to know what the hell a theoretical physicist with ALS was going to do in an episode of a science fiction series without it coming off as parody, or even condescending. To do. The scriptwriters decided that the most appropriate thing was a scene in the holodeck, probably accompanied by the android Data. From there, it was time to build a scene that justified the presence of the most famous scientist in the world. Executive producer Michael Piller came up with the idea that solved it all: a poker game. The Enterprise holodeck allowed any historical figure to be recreated with precision, and the lucky ones were Newton, dead since 1727, and Einstein, since 1955. And Hawking, also dead in the fiction of the series, but capable of playing himself. To construct the physics joke that opens the scene, screenwriter Ronald D. Moore called his partner Naren Shankar, a doctor in applied physics and future showrunner of ‘CSI’. Shankar designed the Mercury perihelion joke (a phenomenon that Newtonian mechanics is unable to explain), and proposed the comic dynamic between the three scientists, with Hawking and Einstein mocking Newton. April 8. Hawking filmed his appearance April 8, 1993. Brent Spiner, who played Data and usually had no problem bringing the android’s emotional coldness to life, was nervous. The actor later described that moment as “probably my favorite moment in my entire experience doing Star Trek.” The scene that was filmed that day ended up lasting less than two minutes. In it, after joking about the possible apocryphal quality of the story of Newton and the apple, Hawking wins the hand, and Einstein argues that the odds of that victory could not have been improved even by quantum fluctuations. Hawking replies (with seconds): “Wrong again, Albert.” A historic cameo. It was not the first time that ‘Star Trek’ played with historical figures: we had even seen Abraham Lincoln fighting alongside Kirk and Spock. But Hawking is still, todaythe only real person to have played herself in any series or film in the ‘Star Trek’ universe. Furthermore, that cameo came at a particular time for the franchise: the audience for the sixth season of ‘The Next Generation’ was beginning to experience a gradual decline and ‘Deep Space Nine’ premiered that year. The franchise was expanding and the public was divided, but there was time for a cameo that was almost a declaration of intent. Moore claims that Hawking had helped build, with his work on black holes and cosmology, the type of scientific imaginary that ‘Star Trek’ had been playing with for decades. That he wanted to appear on the show, that he didn’t disdain science fiction but rather enjoyed it, functioned as a kind of circular validation. That’s why there is one last icing on the cake in the chapter: in the future that the episode imagines, it is revealed that Data holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. That same chair was held by Hawking between 1979 and 2009, and before him, Newton between 1669 and 1702. The three would end up sitting at a poker table in a future imagined in 1993. In Xataka | The complex? intergalactic politics: why there are those who say that Star Trek is communist and Star Wars is capitalist

“If a person over 70 years of age walks 20–30 minutes five days a week, benefits are already obtained”

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In 1965, a Japanese company launched a pedometer on the market called Manpo-Kei. That is, a “10,000 step meter.” That is the first time in history that the idea of ​​10,000 steps appears and, for years, many have wondered where that figure came from. The answer is, according to Japanese researchersfrom nowhere: they chose that number because in Japanese (万) is similar to a man who walks. That is, the most repeated advice about walking was born in a marketing meeting and not in a laboratory. Therefore, it is essentially a lie. Especially if you are over 70 years old. 70 years? What happens to those over 70 years of age? Not only has it dismantled the myth of 10,000 steps, it has shown that older people are capable of “capturing” the benefits with many fewer steps (around 6,000). Hence some coaches, as Rafael Hidalgoensure that it is enough to walk half an hour five days a week to obtain the cardiovascular, mobility and well-being bonus. and it’s true: at these ages there is a non-linear dose-response. Walking more does not bring more benefits. It is also true that, after 70, walking is not enough. The trend we fight against. Sedentary lifestyle in Spain is greater the older the person is. If we look the National and European Health Surveys (1987-2020) The highest prevalence of this sedentary lifestyle occurs among those over 65 years of age. In fact, if we analyze the data in detail we see that, even in those people who do not have limiting pathologies, there are high rates of sedentary lifestyle and overweight that lead to a poor perception of health. The bottom line is that it is something relatively easy to solve. Beyond accumulating steps. After 70, the goal cannot be adding steps. Or not only that. Any training or physical activity plan must optimize one thing: remain functional. That’s why, The WHO asks those over 65 years of age several linked activities: balance exercises, strength exercises at moderate intensity three times a week and 150 minutes a week of aerobic activity. Combine these types of exercises reduces the risk of falls by up to 23% (which are one of the main problems as we age). Additionally, as far as we know, it has positive impacts on mobility, mood, and sleep quality. Image | Age Cymru In Xataka | The trap of walking for the sake of walking: “Japanese walks” are much more effective than your daily hour-long walk

A dating app has started giving it away so its users can meet in person

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Dating apps are on the decline. After the pandemic boomapps like Tinder they have been losing users. It doesn’t help that the apps are plagued by bots and? we are increasingly lazy to flirtbut now there is a new problem: everything is so expensive that dating has become a luxury, especially for the youngest. In this context, an app has had a rather risky idea. The promotion. They tell it in Wired. There is a dating app that is raffling off cards worth $500 in gas for those who download the app and tag three friends. Their slogan is: “Dating shouldn’t have to compete with the price of filling up with gas.” The app in question is BLK, a dating app for black people that was launched in the US, although it has expanded to other countries such as the United Kingdom. BLK belongs to Match Group, where we also find other apps like Tinder or Hinge, and was born as a response to the racism and prejudice that black people suffer when using these types of apps. The price of gasoline. The price of gasoline in the US, where they launched this campaign, reached a peak last Memorial Day, according to AAA data. A gallon reached $4.56, an increase of $1.30 compared to the same period last year. If we convert it to liters it is around 1.22 dollars, which may not seem like much. looking at the prices we manage on this side of the Atlanticbut it is the highest price in the US in the last four years. The reason is what we already know: the blockade of Hormuz due to the Iran war. And gasoline has not been the only thing that has risen, food and other prices are also rising. essential goods. Looking for a partner is expensive. According to a Montreal bank studythe cost of going on a date in the US and Canada has increased by 12.5% ​​in 2026. The average expense, including prior personal care and gasoline, is $189. This has caused the frequency of dating to decrease and almost half of singles (47%) consider that flirting is not worth it. Furthermore, 50% of Generation Z and 40% of millennials consider that the cost of dating significantly affects their finances and prevents them from achieving their financial goals. Quotes low-cost. The most traditional dating culture in the US is what is known as “wining and dining”, that is, going out to dinner and drinking in elegant places, with the aim of impressing the other person; This is why the cost of appointments is so high. Given this scenario, there are more and more people who are choosing to stop dating directly, but others opt for other types of cheapest plans like going on a picnic or going for a walk. Soft-socializing. That preference for cheaper plans fits into the fphenomenon of soft-socializing, which we could translate as “soft socialization” and which generation Z has made fashionable. It consists of meeting other people, but without the pressure of organizing something very intense or very expensive: for example, meeting at home to do a puzzle, participating in a book club or watching a movie together. For many young people, it is a way to continue socializing without assuming the costs of traditional leisure. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | Goodbye Tinder, hello Strava: running clubs have become the favorite dating app of Generation Z

A Renfe train was left without air conditioning at 40ºC. 1,056 days later, an affected person has just collected her money

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How much would you fight for the refund of 31.90 euros? Macarena LE, a resident of a town in Teruel, is clear: three years, if necessary. And that is how long it has been behind Renfe for it to refund the price of a ticket between Zaragoza and Barcelona. The reason? The car’s air conditioning. Evident, due to the non-existent air conditioning of the car. What has happened? A Renfe user named Macarena LE, a member of Facua, has gotten the money back for a train ticket she took three years ago. The company had promised that it would do so with each and every one of the people who took that train, but the money never appeared in the user’s bank account. a little odyssey. Despite telling them that they would return the money to the passengers, the amount never arrived so after a few weeks, the affected person filed a claim, they explain in Facua. With no news about it after three months, he decided to put himself in the hands of the legal service of the consumer defense association. Once reaching this point, the association filed a new claim. To this complaint, Renfe responded that it gave the order to return the money but it still did not arrive. After another four months, Facua files a new complaint and Renfe assures him that it has tried to refund the money but that the procedure has been rejected on two occasions. At that moment, Renfe instructs Macarena LE to receive the money through a payment platform. This method also being impossible and the months accumulating, Facua sends a third claim to Renfe in which they simply ask it to deposit the money into the bank account of the affected person, attaching the document that proves its ownership. Three years after taking that train, the associate has ended up receiving her 31.90 euros. A trip… complicated. And, once seated, they assure in Facua that the conductor informed the passengers that the air conditioning was broken and that their travel money would be refunded in compensation for the inconvenience caused. But the journey between Zaragoza and Barcelona had an added problem: July 18 with departure at 3:52 p.m. and arrival at 5:20 p.m. That day maximum temperatures of 44 degrees were reported. Obviously, the heat must have been oppressive inside and the affected person claims that they had to drink water constantly to get through the trip in the best possible way. The expected quality. Due to the numerous claims filed by Facua, and beyond the fact that the money was not returned until three years later, Renfe never fought not to return the money. Instead they admitted that they would send the money back for “not having offered the service with the quality levels” expected. However, the fulfillment of the procedure itself does not seem to have had the expected quality either. And Facua pointed out to Renfe that they were failing to comply with article 21.3 of the Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007, of November 16according to which: “Employers must respond to the claims received in the shortest possible time and, in any case, within a maximum period of one month from the presentation of the claim.”. When Facua presented this second claim in which this regulatory text was recalled, Renfe had not given a response or paid the corresponding money for four months. What if it happens to me? That Renfe has returned the money to a passenger sets a precedent but does not automatically lead the company to return the money in the event of an air conditioning breakdown. In its rules, Renfe states that the traveler has the right to receive compensation for the cancellation of the trip, for its interruption, for a lack or deficiency in the service provided on board or for delay, but it makes it clear that such compensation will not be carried out if: The reason is an extraordinary circumstance unrelated to railway operation, such as extreme weather events (a storm that leaves a train without heating in winter, for example) or natural disasters. Nor if the breakdown or problem was caused by the behavior of the traveler. Nor if it is the damage caused by a third party outside the railway company that causes the incident (people on the track, copper theft, sabotage… etc.) That is to say, the mere absence of air conditioning does not automatically imply that the passenger’s money will be returned. What has happened will have to be taken into account to decide whether the company is obliged to act in this way. Photo | Nelson Silva In Xataka | The Madrid Cercanías have become a nest of problems and delays: their solution is new “megatrains”

Russia is the great missing person in the AI ​​race. He has neither chips nor talent, and his great ally only gives him the leftovers

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What’s happening with AI in Russia? The artificial intelligence race has as absolute protagonists to the US and China, and it’s surprising that a power like Russia does not seem to be advancing in this type of field. The truth is that he is doing it, but his situation in this area is worrying. Russia does have AI models. Although they are hardly talked about, there are several AI models that are developed by Russian companies and that, above all, are totally oriented towards their citizens. The country does not have access to Western models such as ChatGPT or Claude, but it does have access to these alternatives: GigaChat: is probably the most advanced Russian model. It is developed by the financial institution Sberbank, and It is available via web although to use it it is necessary to have an account in said entity. Yandex Alice: the company that has already offered a search engine in the image and likeness of Google for years also has its own artificial intelligence model, called Alice AI. It is possible to use from its official website in both English and Russian (Spanish is not supported) like a traditional chatbot. MTS AI – one of the largest telecom operators in Russia also has its own model, MTS AImore aimed at companies and developers with its Cotype models that recently support the ability to create agents for enterprise applications. behind. The veto of chips and advanced technology from the US has been one of the factors that has caused these models to be clearly behind the latest frontier models from companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic. He proves it launched three months ago from GigaChat-3.1-Ultra-702B, an open weights model derived from DeepSeek 702B A36B. In the published benchmarks, the performance of this model is at the level of DeepSeek v3 (launched in December 2024) or Qwen3-235B (launched in April 2025). This model is for example available at Hugging Face. China is your natural ally. China and Russia have long maintained a geopolitical alliance that has an impact in various areas. The curious thing is that in this case that impact is being felt less than one would expect. Russian AI models are based on Chinese open models, but at the moment it seems that These are somewhat old versions which they later adapt to Russian. And as happens with Chinese models, which censor certain topics, Russian models apply that same filtering to avoid sensitive issues. Without chips there is no AI. The big problem Russia faces is the same one China faces, but amplified. They don’t have access to advanced Nvidia chips to train their models, so they have looked Shortcuts to bypass trade restrictions and be able to develop those models. Russia, get in line. Sberbank, for example, is trying to get access to Chinese AI chips like the Huawei Ascend 950 for your projects, but there are two problems here. The first is that these chips are aimed at model inference, not their training. The second, that at the moment those who have priority access to these chips are the Chinese companies themselves, which are reserving large quantities for their future projects. ByteDance, Tencent or Alibaba have placed important orders that leave Russia in a complicated situation. Russian chips in the (distant) future. These problems of access to specialized chips could be solved if Russia manages to boost its semiconductor industry. Baikal Electronics has been working on alternatives to x86 chips from Intel and AMD for some time, but also promise develop AI chips in 2029 or 2030. Once again, commercial and technological vetoes mean that in both scenarios the company’s proposals cannot compete with the latest advances of its Western competitors, at least for now. Industrial and military use. Russian LLM developments not only try to present an option for Russian citizens, but also for military applications. The war with Ukraine has actually revealed how Russia is using the well-known AI miniPCs Nvidia Jetson for its Shahed missiles. Russia has it very difficult. The current situation in Russia makes it difficult for the country to present notable alternatives to the most advanced AI models of the US or China (or even Europe). The war with Ukraine also caused an exodus of talent and Russian engineers, although companies like Sber have tried to boost campaigns to attract talent in the university environment. All of this adds to Russia’s difficult access to the most advanced hardware and software and its dependence on an ally like China that is prioritizing its own AI companies. In Xataka | Russia already has its own multi-core CPUs for AI. What it doesn’t have yet is the most important thing: its GPU

what you need and how to make an appointment to make it in person in 2026

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We are going to explain to you what you need and how file your income tax return in person. After the possibility of making the declaration of the Income 2025 through the Internet and by phonehe Income calendar 2025 It now takes us to its final phase. It is called Income 2025 because it is to report to the Treasury for the last fiscal year, but it is what we do in 2026. In this article we are going to explain the process to make your declaration in person, telling you the requirements to do so and the dates with the deadlines you have to do it. Dates for the in-person declaration If you want to do your 2025 income tax return in personyou can do it from June 1 to June 30. These are the dates on which you will be able to request your appointment at the established telephone numbers. When you make an appointment, They will tell you the center you should go to on the day and date that has been established for your declaration. There, when you go, a person from the administration will help you make the declaration. Request an appointment for your in-person statement The fastest way to request your appointment is call by phone to request it. You will be able to do this with numbers 901121224 and 915357326in which an automated system is used to request an appointment at any time. If you want to be attended to by a person instead of an answering machine, you can use telephones 901 22 33 44 and 91 553 00 71. But for this, you must remember that they will only serve you from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Monday to Fridayand if the lines are very busy it could take them a while to serve you. You can also make an appointment through the websiteon the web headquarters.agenciatributaria.gob.es/Sede/cita-previa-renta.html. In it, you will need to identify yourself with your NIF/NIE or electronic ID, electronic certificate, Cl@ve PIN or reference number. Once you identify yourself, you can choose a day and time to go to the office indicated to you. And finally, you can also make an appointment through the application of the Tax Agency is available on Android via Google Playand on your iPhone via the App Store. Within the application, enter the section Rentclick on Income 2025and there you will see the option to request an appointment through this app. Requirements for the in-person declaration If you want to file your income tax return in person, you need to meet a series of requirements. In addition to complying with them, you must also have the following information accessible in order to process the declaration. First of all, you must have documentation about your personal situation. This is a bit ambiguous and can vary in each case, but they will always ask for your original ID or a photocopy of everyone who appears on your declaration as your family unit. It is also important to know the IBAN of your bank account, and how cadastral references of all properties of your property, where you rent, or other circumstances. You will also be asked any supporting document that could give the right to regional deductions or other tax benefits. For example, if you rent, you will have to bring the landlord’s NIF, as well as documents with the amounts paid for the rent. If you bought a primary residence with a loan extension, then you will have to bring the pending balances of the original loan, insurance receipts if you have a mortgage, or proof of donations you have made. There will also be other types of documents that you may be asked for if you have received different types of income or income during the year 2025, and they do not appear in your tax data. These documents can be quite a few, and They always depend on each situation. You can find a list with all on this web page. In Xataka Basics | Income Guide 2025: calendar, previous steps and how to prepare for the 2026 declaration

Who is Johny Srouji and why this great unknown has just become the second most powerful person at Apple

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For those who have been following Apple for a long time, Johny Srouji is no stranger. For the rest of the world yes, but after the appointment of John Ternus as CEO of Applethis Israeli engineer has become the second most powerful person in the company. The question is obvious: who is Johny Srouji? Who is Srouji and why does he matter?. Born in Haifa, Israel, in 1964 to a middle-class Christian Arab family, Srouji studied computer science at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) and graduated Summa Cum Laude in both his engineering and master’s degrees. He worked at Intel and IBM before Apple hired him in 2008 with a very clear assignment: to design the company’s first chips. He did much more than that. The revolution made chip. That first chip designed by Srouji was the Apple A4, which debuted in 2010 in the original iPad and the iPhone 4. From there, Srouji forged one of the most prestigious hardware careers in the recent history of the technology industry. The A7 of 2013 was the first SoC in using 64-bit architecture, and then there would come the revolution of the Apple M1 with which the company definitively got rid of dependence on Intel in its Macs. But his work goes beyond. His official title until now was senior vice president of hardware technologies, but it did not reflect the real scope of his work. Srouji not only led the chip design. Also that of batteries, cameras, storage controllers, sensors, displays, cellular modems and other critical components of the entire family of Apple devices. Almost everything that makes these products work the way they do is largely due to the work of Srouji and his team. With the new position, his responsibility expands and he will now control the entire cycle: not only the hardware itself, but also the physical design. It’s a colossal challenge, but if anyone seems prepared to take it on, it’s Srouji. He was about to leave. In December 2025 Bloombeg reported that Srouji had informed Tim Cook that he was seriously considering leave Apple in the near future. Two days later, Srouji himself published a message to his team denying the newsbut the damage was done. For Apple to lose Srouji would have been a disaster, and it is very likely that this new position is in part Apple’s response to that alarm signal. Textbook talent retention, but raised to maximum power. New position, new structure. In it internal communication that Srouji has sent to team employees, the engineer detailed how he will organize the division into five areas: Hardware engineering: led by Tom Marieb, an Intel veteran who joined Apple in 2019. Siilicio: it will be directed by Sri Santhanam, a manager with a long career at Apple Advanced Technologies: Supervised by Zongjian Chen Platform architecture: led by Tim Millet Program management: will be managed by Donny Nordhues In that message, Srouji acknowledges that this “represents a significant change” but believes it will work thanks to the entire team. It seems that you are very clear about how you want to work with your team. A fusion with a lot of historical sense. The reunification of hardware engineering and the hardware technologies division under the same leader is not entirely new. It is the structure that Apple had for years under the direction of Bob Mansfield, former head of hardware. until 2013 and? then he took charge of the failed Project TitanApple’s car. That’s when those two areas were divided, something that allowed both Ternus and Srouji to progress in their domains, but also caused some structural tensions between teams that had to collaborate. Bringing them back together is a clear commitment to strengthening that collaboration. The great cover-up of Ternus’s appointment. It is normal that the vast majority of headlines go to Ternus, who will decide the future of the company from now on, but Apple is above all a hardware company. That Srouji now becomes his leader makes this engineer a person with enormous power within the company. The change is promising in terms of promoting that facet of the product that both he and Ternus dominate, and without a doubt interesting times await us at Apple. Image | Apple In Xataka | John Ternus, vice president of Apple: “The iPhone Air had been in development for years, but we had to say ‘no’ until now”

In 1954, Ann Elizabeth Hodges was hit by a rock. And thus he became the only person who has had a meteorite fall on him.

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Let’s say you’re on your couch enjoying a quiet afternoon. Suddenly, an infernal sound wakes you up just a moment before you see how a rock violently destroys your bookshelf, your old “vintage” radio and bounces towards you. It will take you a little longer to realize that the rock has passed through the ceiling before hitting you. And as strange as this story may seem, it is totally true. It was a clear afternoon in 1954 when a meteor struck Ann Elizabeth Hodges. The woman was lucky and only received a huge bruise on his waist. But he could have experienced a consequence as tragic as that of his poor radio. After all, we are talking about a piece of rock that fell at hundreds of kilometers per hour, burning on its frictional path towards the surface of this small planet. Ann ended up in the hospital but not because of the blow, but because of a small nervous breakdown caused by the huge crowd that came to see what had happened. Let us remember that in the 1950s, the Cold War was in full swing and conspiracy theorists did not miss an opportunity to see Soviet planes fly over (and explode) in American skies. So, after the sighting of the meteorite, a small host of curious people gathered around the Hodges house. And here began the adventures of the famous Sylacauga meteorite, whose name is due to the Alabama town where it fell. The fragment that hit Ann was called “Hodges meteorite“, while the complete meteorite, which broke into three about nineteen kilometers above the surface, it was much larger, probably almost half a meter. After the commotion, the assistance to Mrs. Hodges and the uncertainty, the United States Air Force sent a team to collect the remains of the meteorite. The stone’s fame rose incandescently over the next few days, continuing until a couple of years later. The media and residents of the entire region echoed the impact and there were those who wanted to buy the meteorite. For his part, Eugene Hodges, Ann’s husband, hired a lawyer to recover the rock from the hands of the State. At the same time, finding out about the mess, Bertie Guy, the landlord of the house, claimed ownership of the stone, much to the chagrin of the Hodges, with the intention of covering the repairs that the meteorite had cost her. The stress caused by all this diatribe and as attention on the meteorite faded, along with the potential buyersthey pushed Ann to donate the Sylacauga meteorite fragment to the Alabama Museum of Natural History. But Ann, according to the chronicle, never stopped being afraid of something falling through her ceiling again. Other “lucky” people in the history of extraterrestrial impacts Anna E. Hodges is the first and only person (at least reliably) to have been injured by a meteorite. But it is not the only case related to an extraterrestrial rock described in our history. Luckily for the rest, none of them have been hurt, if we can believe their version. Let’s go back to August 1992, in Mbale, Uganda. A boy was heading to the village when a fireball thundered in the sky. Shortly after, a pebble hit the top of a banana and fell on his head. According to reports, a huge meteorite weighing almost a ton would have exploded fourteen kilometers from the surface, disintegrating. Did the fragment belong to that meteorite? We will never know for sure. This is what happens with hundreds of other testimonies that ensure the impact of a meteorite: unlike the Sylacauga meteorite, there is no evidence or analysis that demonstrates the origin of these rocks. That does not mean that there are, as we said, dozens and dozens of stories about meteorites (many of them with tragic endings). An example can be found in the 2016 Indian story in which it was stated that a bus driver had killed by space rock impactafter an explosion was heard. NASA, however, confirmed that this was not possible since the incident did not coincide with any detected or predicted astronomical event. The protagonists of other documented cases have had much luckier in which the meteorite passed very closely, without hitting them. We are talking, for example, about Michelle Knapp, whose Chevrolet was pierced by a meteorite to his surprise, in 1992. Not so long ago, in 2004, an alien rock happily entered through the roof of the Archer family home in Auckland, New Zealand. The rock just bounced and she remained lying, expectant, on the floor of her living room. If you want to join the club of those “hit by a meteorite” you better be patient. Just like calculation an engineer at the German Aerospace Center named Christian Gritzner, a while ago, the chance of this happening is 174 million. To do this, it calculated the surface area we occupy, our average life expectancy and the habitable surface area. That, added to the calculations of meteorites that fall per year, provided the result we were talking about. Fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite It is estimated that up to 10,000 tons of material interstellar crashes to Earth every year. It is not a trivial number. Why aren’t stories of meteorites falling on us more frequent? The first and most important reason, without a doubt, is the fact that almost everyone does it at sea. After all, water occupies most of the earth’s surface. On the other hand, a large amount of this material disintegrates in its fall, leaving a faint trail of dust and gas. As we mentioned, there are many testimonies collected in the press and reports from people who have had a supposed meteorite fall on them. In fact, many of the versions date back a long time, even from other times when “the stars fell from the sky.” But we can assure you that Ann Hodges’ case is unique and special. Nobody would want a monster like the … Read more

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