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The big problem with nuclear energy has always been its waste. Russia can now recycle them up to five times

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A nuclear reactor operating for 60 years using a closed system of three circulating fuel loads, subjected to cleaning processes and specific recharges in each cycle. What until recently seemed like an unattainable technical utopia for the energy industry is the reality that Russia’s latest technological breakthrough points to. The historic Achilles heel of nuclear fission—radioactive waste—is about to take a radical turn to become an almost inexhaustible resource. The magnitude of the test. The press release of Atom Media explains that Unit 1 of the Balakovo nuclear power plant (operated by Rosatom’s energy division) has just made history. They have successfully removed the last three lead test assemblies from an innovative fuel dubbed REMIX. These groups have completed three operating cycles of 18 months each. We are talking about 54 months performing at maximum capacity in a Russian commercial reactor type VVER-1000, thus exhausting its standard useful life. This puts the finishing touch to a demanding pilot program which started at the end of 2021 when the first six experimental rods were introduced into the reactor core. The resounding success. The most impressive thing about this milestone is not just that the fuel works, but where it works. Unlike other experiments designed for new generation fast reactors, REMIX fuel can be used in light water thermal reactors already operating massively around the planet. And without the need to modify its design or add costly security measures. The rehearsal went flawlessly. Yuri Ryzhkov, deputy chief engineer of the Balakovo power plant, detailed: “After each cycle, the fuel rods and structural elements were inspected using the television camera of the refueling machine. No deviations were detected during operation; neutron, physical and service characteristics remained within the design limits.” The science behind REMIX. But what exactly is this material? REMIX comes from Regenerated Mixture (Regenerated Mixture). Instead of using the usual natural enriched uranium, Russian scientists have created a matrix pellet that mixes regenerated uranium and plutonium (both recovered from already spent and reprocessed nuclear fuel), seasoned with some fresh enriched uranium. The technical key to the process is in the proportion: it maintains a very low level of plutonium, up to 1.5%. Thanks to this exact formulation, its neutron spectrum is practically identical to that of standard fuel. For practical purposes, the reactor core behaves the same and does not even “notice” the difference. The cleaning process. It is the circular economy taken to the atomic extreme. The magazine World Nuclear Newyes explains that this recycling cycle can be repeated up to five times. With each pass, the industry reprocesses the material to separate the useful uranium and plutonium from the fission products, which constitute the true radioactive waste. This useless waste is extracted and vitrified (encapsulated in glass) to be permanently and safely buried in geological deposits, while the useful fuel mixture is reintroduced into the reactor. The vision of the balanced cycle. Now it’s time for the laboratory and certification phase, where the irradiated material, now resting in cooling pools, will travel to the Atomic Reactor Research Institute in Dimitrovgrad for exhaustive analysis. Alexander Ugryumov, Vice President of R&D at TVEL (Rosatom’s fuel subsidiary), He announced that after these studies They will be able to bring the product to the market. The next evolutionary step will be to test mixtures with depleted uranium and up to 5% plutonium. All this is part of what Rosatom has called the “Balanced Nuclear Fuel Cycle” (NFC). The goal is to drastically reduce the volume and danger of radioactive waste, solving the historic problem of long-term storage for future generations and guaranteeing a truly sustainable production system. An impact on a global scale. Although the technical success is undeniable and the operational milestone in a commercial reactor is demonstrated, the mass adoption of this technology on a global level will largely depend on the commercialization costs and the economic viability of large-scale reprocessing; factors that the industry must demonstrate after the current qualification phase. However, if Rosatom manages to market REMIX at competitive prices, the global energy situation could take an unprecedented turn. We are not talking about a niche experiment. The data provided by Atom Media illustrate this magnitude: TVEL currently supplies fuel to more than 70 power reactors in 15 countries. Today, one in six reactors in the world operates with its technology. Moving from a linear “use and bury” industry to a closed loop where nuclear resources have multiple lives would not only dramatically expand the planet’s energy reserves, but could forever redefine the ecological viability of nuclear energy. Image | atom Xataka | The US has to make a crucial decision in Iran: exit without destroying its nuclear capabilities or a terrestrial “armaggedon”

The first “autonomous” car in history dates back to 1958 and had a peculiar problem: it smelled like fish

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Nowadays, and with few exceptions such as Cybertruckautomobile design is moved by very clear trends. However, in the 1950s and in the midst of the space age, the sky was the limit. Some examples are the amazing General Motors Firebird Ihe Zündapp Janus that you don’t know if it comes or goes or the refrigerator with wheels called BMW Isetta. At that time was born the Golden Sahara IIa car truly ahead of its time. It was so far ahead that it brought driving assistance and full connectivity (of what there was). It is, in short, the grandfather of today’s smart car. A crazy repair idea. If I say George Barris you may not know who I’m talking about, but if I reveal that he is the creator of the Batmobile things change. Well, back in 1953 the car designer had a car accident with his Lincoln Capri: crashed into a hay truck and as a result, the top of the vehicle was destroyed. Probably many of us would have taken the car to the workshop or scrapyard based on the mechanic’s bill, but Barris invested a whopping $5,000 and what was left of his battered Capri (which had a 200 horsepower V8 engine) was built into the Golden Sahara. Be careful, to give you an idea of ​​the inverted grassland: in the 50s the luxurious Cadillac Eldorado It cost $7,750.. Clean slate in the form of an ultra-futuristic car. Equipment from another era. At a time when FM radio was an extra, Barris himself tells its most differential design elements: hand-molded steel panels, vertical design headlights installed in fenders and bullet-type bumpers, fins integrated into the fenders, lounge-type seat with bar furniture on the sides, a removable bubble dome for the roof. Kontinent Media …and paint of with sardines The streamlined design was finished with a two-tone 24-karat gold finish (hence its name) instead of the classic chrome and a paint that shone like a diamond. Barris was looking for a finish never seen before, so he came up with a natural way to achieve a pearlescent touch before that type of paint became popular: with fish scales. As explained the designer in an interview with Jonnie King for his “Hall of Fame Legends” series: “So Shirley and I went to the fishmonger, and I remember that the fish looked very pearly. I had the fishmongers turn all the sardines so that their bellies could be seen until I found the one with the gold. We took it, removed the scales, put it in a jar, took it to the store and mixed it with a natural cellulose clearcoat and toner lacquers. Then I gave it a base of matte white and I sprayed it on top, and it turned out a spectacular pearly gold. The only problem was that it was very difficult to smell because it smelled like fish.” An even more extravagant Golden Sahara II. In 1954 the first Golden Sahara was born and from ’56 to ’58 Barris teamed up with Jim Street and Bob Metz to give it a twist until they found the Golden Sahara II. For this second generation, Goodyear added Translucent and luminous tires to replace the conventional white band tires of the time. It is just the tip of the iceberg of a car that is surprising both on the outside and (especially) on the inside. But Metz also gave it a good facelift and modified the windshield, hood and roof of the vehicle, he put quad headlights and rear fins. And it went from having a radio and steering wheel to truly futuristic technology: with panels on the upper part of the dashboard where it housed a television, tape recorder and even a refrigerator for its bar. It is said that the total cost of the Sahara exceeded $75,000 of the time. Under the hood: ahead of its time. Jim Rote’s electronics It was what made the difference compared to the cars of that era and brought it closer to ours. The steering wheel gave way to a fighter-style central joystick and implemented voice control for tasks such as opening the doors or starting the engine. Likewise, it integrated proximity sensors in two antennas on the front bumper, so that it could brake autonomously. What happened to him. In his days of wine and roses he went to fairs like the Petersen Motorama (his debut), he appeared in ‘cinderfella‘ (1960) with Jerry Lewis, Ed Winn and Judith Anderson and also in the competition ‘I’ve got a secret‘, in 1962. But in the 60s it disappeared from the front page and was relegated to ostracism for half a century, until it returned in style and restored in the Geneva Motor Show of 2019 from the hand of Goodyear. In Xataka | Make your old stickerless car a historic vehicle. A shortcut to circulate through Madrid without fines that does not always work In Xataka | The Bugatti Veyron was a unique car. And we say “was” because Bugatti has decided to betray him with nostalgia Cover | Matti Blume

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

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

You can live without paying Google for more storage. The problem is not space, but Gmail

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I know firsthand that the offers that Google launches for your One plan cheaper are attractive. Paying a couple of euros a month so that the company does not bother you with warnings that you have little storage left is perfectly valid and you immediately get 100 GB so you can use it however you want. However, although it may not seem like a big deal, it ends up being a small “phantom expense” that we can easily avoid if we change our spending habits a little. cloud storage. In the vast majority of cases, the main culprit that causes us to have consumed almost all of the 15 GB that Google makes available to us for free is email. And the good thing is that they exist ways to almost immediately empty our inbox and have that free storage back. Below these lines we indicate some recommendations that will help you. 10 GOOGLE APPS THAT COULD HAVE SUCCESSFUL The problem is in your inbox If you check what takes up the most space in your Google account, it is quite likely that you will be surprised: Gmail is usually the biggest storage hog. Other times, it is also Google Photos that gives the most trouble with this, but in the case of Gmail, emails with attachments accumulate for years, and most of them are perfectly expendable: automatic notifications, old invoices, newsletters that you never read, etc. If your work depends to a certain extent on being very aware of the email, as happens to me, you find thousands of emails of press releases, presentations and, in short, material that arrives, takes up space and you don’t open it again. The good thing is that Google gives you very specific tools to locate those emails that we do not need and delete them in bulk. Between that and some tips to filter your inbox, you will be able to empty a very important part of the free storage that Google gives you in a simple way. The starting point: Google’s storage manager Before you get to work with Gmail, there’s one place worth going first: Google’s storage manager, accessible directly from this website. You can also get to it by clicking on the storage tab in Drive and clicking on “Free up space”, an option included in the Drive, Photos or Gmail app. This page shows how much space you have occupied and offers two key sections: one with personalized suggestions to free up space (such as deleting spam emails, large files or heavy attachments, indicating how much can be gained in each case) and another with shortcuts to the specific management of Drive, Gmail and Google Photos. It’s a good way to get a general idea of ​​the picture before acting: at a glance you can see which service is consuming the most and where to start cleaning. How to find and delete what matters most in Gmail If you’ve noticed that Gmail is taking up quite a bit of your cloud storage, the next step is to take action. After having deleted the emails that the Google One system itself suggested in the previous step, you can continue on your own using advanced filters that Gmail offers you, going for the heaviest emails first. To do this you can start by writing in the Gmail search engine ‘larger:15MB‘ (without the quotes) and so you will see all the emails that exceed that size. You can adjust the number depending on what you want to find: larger:5MB, larger:10MBor whatever value you prefer. It is a quick way to identify the messages that take up the most space with minimal effort. It is one thing to identify them, and quite another to know if they are really important to you or not. Going one by one is a bit of a hassle, but for example it helps me a lot to know if the email is from a long time ago or not. That’s why I also use date filters. This way, if what you want is to go also old, the command before:YYYY/MM/DD shows messages sent or received before a certain date. You can even combine both commands to locate old and heavy emails at the same time. Another very practical option is to search directly by attachments. Wearing has:attachment larger:10M All emails with attachments larger than 10 MB appear in the search bar. If you want to tune more, filename:.pdf larger:5M specifically locates emails with PDF attachments that weigh more than that amount, and older_than:2y has:attachment Filter out those that have attachments and have been in your tray for more than two years. Attached files (photos, PDFs, videos, documents) are usually responsible for the storage filling up much faster than expected. Search your keywords Beyond the commands that Gmail offers you, you can also use searches that serve you personally. In my case, for example, when I have a long list of press releases that I have already read, I simply type ‘ndp’ or ‘press release’ in the search engine and I will easily have a whole long list of press releases waiting to be deleted. Then you just need to pull the trigger. Once you have identified all the emails you want to delete, click on the selection square in the upper left corner to mark them all, click on ‘Select all conversations that match this search‘ so you can mark them all and not just the first 50, and then pull the trigger. If you know exactly what you DON’T want to delete, you can move it to its own label or mark it as featured before mass deleting the rest. That way you don’t risk losing anything important. Don’t forget to empty the trash When you have identified and deleted all the emails, you will have to pay a visit to the trash. And the emails that you have deleted do not disappear immediately: they are sent to the trash, where stay for 30 … Read more

China says it has built its largest data center. And confirms that your problem is precisely in the chips

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China has just turned on its new technological pride in Shenzhen: an AI cluster with 14,000 petaflops built entirely with Huawei Ascend 910C chips. the city has presented it as the first scale computing center with 10,000 cards with completely national technology. It is an undeniable milestone, but if we give it context, an alarm signal and a dose of reality. Why is it important. The Shenzhen cluster, with all its rhetoric of technological sovereignty, represents about 1% of the capacity of the largest US data center in operation today. In other words: China has built, with great institutional effort, what OpenAI already had available to train GPT-4 in 2022. The gap is not a question of ambition (China has it) or capital (it also has it) or energy (of course, he also has it). It’s a chip issue. What are they capable of manufacturing and in what volume today. Between the lines. The Shenzhen government statement highlights energy efficiency metrics and occupancy rates of 92%. It’s really good data. But the selection of indicators (the cherry picking) says a lot so it is omitted: there are no direct comparisons with the clusters of NVIDIA H100 that colonize the data centers of Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Posting only what you have is also a way of not publishing what you lack. The context. At this point no one doubts that China does not lack electricity, not even engineersnor money to build large-scale AI infrastructure. What is still missing, despite the advances, are the chips. Export restrictions imposed by Trump They have cut off access to advanced semiconductors from NVIDIA and TSMCand that has forced China to accelerate its own ecosystem. Huawei has responded with the Ascend 910Ca capable chip but that still has performance limitations and, above all, volume production. If wafers were not in short supply, this data center would be a hundred times larger. Yes, but. Can China close that four-year gap before it gets even bigger? The answer depends almost entirely on how much its domestic semiconductor industry manages to scale, and whether or not Western sanctions manage to stifle that process. At the moment, in Shenzhen they are celebrating an achievement as undeniable as it turns out that in the eyes of Silicon Valley they are still in 2022. Featured image | Huawei In Xataka | Memory prices have started to fall in some markets. There is still a long way to go to close the AI ​​crisis

Microsoft’s problem is not having lost a quarter of its value in three months. It’s just that he’s been wrong for a long time.

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It seems like not so long ago when many celebrated Microsoft’s commitment to Azure. The decision of Satya Nadella Focusing on cloud computing soon began to translate into good financial results, propelling the Redmond company to achieve record revenue figures. But there was something more relevant in that movement: the realization that it could generate enormous benefits beyond Windows. That strategy, started in 2014ended up marking a before and after that became especially visible in 2019, when the firm reached for the first time a market capitalization of one trillion dollars. However, not even the most long-term oriented strategists, like Nadella, are free from errors. Microsoft has been chaining questionable decisions for some time that have ended up having a direct impact on its quarterly results. Specifically, the company has lost almost a quarter of its value in just three months. To put it in context, we are talking about its largest quarterly drop since the 2008 financial crisis. A decline of this magnitude, logically, does not go unnoticed. From cloud leadership to a strategy under pressure If we want to understand why the story has gone wrong, we have to start with the most obvious: the market has reacted harshly and, above all, selectively. In the first quarter of 2026, Microsoft lost about 23% of its stock market value, according to CNBCwhile the Nasdaq lost around 7%. It is not a minor movement, among other things because we are talking about a drop of a magnitude that has not been seen in almost two decades. This gap compared to the rest of the sector begins to point out problems that go beyond the general context. For a time, the commitment to OpenAI was seen as one of Microsoft’s great strategic successes, and it is not difficult to understand why. The company has invested around 13 billion dollarss to integrate this technology into Azure and into products like Copilot, which allowed it to place itself in a very advantageous position in the race of the artificial intelligence. However, with the passage of time we have also begun to see the other side of that decision: a very high technological dependence and a growing pressure to justify that deployment. As the months have passed, that close relationship has also quietly begun to change. Although Azure remains a key partner for OpenAI, the company led by Sam Altman has started to open your infrastructure to other actors to sustain the growth of its models, which increasingly require more computing capacity and energy. This does not break the alliance, but it does change its meaning, because Microsoft no longer concentrates with the same clarity all the strategic advantage that it had achieved in the first phases of the agreement. If we go down to the field of the product, where all these bets should materialize, the case of Copilot is especially illustrative. Microsoft has tried to make this assistant the axis of its new value propositionintegrating it into Microsoft 365 and a good part of its ecosystem, but the adoption It is not going at the expected pace. According to The Information, almost no one uses Copilot. What we have seen is that bringing artificial intelligence to the daily life of companies is more complex than it seemed on paper. Added to all this is a tension that is not always seen, but is very present in the backroom of this race: that of how to distribute resources in an environment of growing demand. Microsoft is investing massively in infrastructure to sustain the rise of AI, but at the same time it has to decide how it allocates that capacity between Azure and its own services. In January, CFO Amy Hood came to point out that Azure’s growth in the December quarter would have been even greater if the company had allocated more chips to the cloud instead of distributing some of that capacity among services like Copilot. Attrition is not limited to artificial intelligence, and that should also be taken into account. Also this year we have seen notable drops in income and in various areas of the Xbox ecosystemin a context also marked by previous price increases in Game Pass and on the consoles. It may seem like a minor front next to Azure or Microsoft 365, but it helps complete the picture of a company that has been opening too many flanks at the same time. What we have seen is that even in areas where it had a consolidated position, Microsoft is finding it more difficult to keep pace. Put all these pieces together, and what begins to emerge is an increasingly evident disconnect between Microsoft’s operational strength and the way the market is valuing its strategy. The company remains the fourth most valuable on the planetcontinues to grow, with revenue up close to 17% year-on-year in its last reported quarter and with Azure advancing 39% in the December quarter, but that strength is not translating to its price or valuation. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana 2 In Xataka | The ghost of IBM: Satya Nadella’s great challenge is to prevent Microsoft from becoming a technological fossil

CEO Toyota believes his extreme perfectionism is a problem

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Japan is an extremely peculiar country. It is for many reasons in the eyes of a European. One of them is the mixture of humility at work and absolute dedication to the company to achieve a common objective that materializes in designing and producing the best possible products. The contrast is more complicated to understand if possible in the automobile industry. Toyota is considered the mother of what we know today as “toyotism”. A formula to work in a chain with a very limited stock. That is, without a safety net that allows unforeseen events to be handled with a warehouse large enough to support production until the problem is solved. This is achieved, of course, by building a chain that is oiled with the precision of a Swiss watch. But also with the certainty that what goes on the market is the best version of what each worker has in hand. Toyota revolutionized automobile assembly line production by giving the workers themselves the power to stop production if any failure was detected. It is a way of working that can only be carried out when, when developing the parts and design of an entire car, you work with the firmness of philosophy Kaizen. This Japanese word defines the pursuit of perfection through continuous improvement. This allows each modified part in the process of producing a new car to have the support of years of experience behind it. This way of working has been a competitive advantage until now has made Toyota the largest car manufacturer of the world. The company was, in 2025, the world’s largest automobile producer, with more than 11 million units manufactured. Volkswagen is second and remained at 9 million units manufactured. It is the result of production measured to the millimeter and reliability earned by hard work. That philosophy kaizen which Mazda or Toyota boast has allowed the latter to always be at the top of the reliability rankings, a value when it comes to putting millions and millions of units on the market. But this way of working has its drawbacks when you have to make agile decisions. China is the train to follow “If things don’t change, we won’t survive.” The phrase is from Koij Sato, CEO of Toyota, and is especially relevant because, as we pointed out, it comes from the head of the world’s leading brand. The message was sent to 489 suppliers with the aim of making them understand the importance of improving competitiveness against Chinese companies, they state in Automotive News. According to AutoblogToyota’s quality standards have been so strict that parts have been returned with small resin wrinkles that had no impact on a vehicle’s dynamics or reliability. The same thing was happening with thousands of wire harnesses that would have been returned because they showed minor signs of discoloration. Small aesthetic defects that buyers did not even notice because they are hidden inside the vehicle itself. Now Sato has asked its suppliers to be more flexible to save money on production and be more agile. The message launched by the company’s CEO is not coincidental. Months ago, a consulting firm specialized in reverse engineering I already alerted Toyota that their electric cars were designed as combustion vehicles and that penalized them when producing them. The problem is that, according to this company, producing an electric car is so different from a combustion car that it is almost equivalent to two different products even though both have four wheels and a steering wheel. They pointed out, for example, that Toyota used steel bars and reinforcements in the steering column or to hold the dashboard, thinking about reducing vibrations. However, Chinese manufacturers and Tesla choose to increased use of plastics because those vibrations are almost non-existent in an electric car. This allows them to produce cheaper and faster. And get lighter cars. “The average customer doesn’t even see these parts,” explained Shoji Nishihara, purchasing manager for Toyota’s vehicle development department, in statements reported by forumelectriccars. The final goal is complicated. The company aims to improve competitiveness by reducing production times and making the final quality of its products more flexible. A complicated balance if we want to continue being the reference in terms of reliability. For now, Toyota believes that its perfectionism was already bordering on healthy. Photo | toyota In Xataka | The legend of the Toyota Supra, one of the legendary Japanese sports cars: the fusion of illegal racing and the Kaizen philosophy

The problem for the US is not that China is mass-producing a new hypersonic missile. It costs the same as a Tesla

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The most advanced military systems have had something in common: exorbitant prices and limited production, with weapons that can take years to manufacture and cost millions per unit. It happens that there is a less known fact that is beginning to change everything: today it is possible to build technology capable of traveling more than 1,000 kilometers in minutes using components derived from the civil industry. And China is in the lead. What a car costs. It we count in November of last year. China has introduced a quiet but profound change in modern warfare: a hypersonic missile, the YKJ-1000capable of reaching speeds of up to Mach 7 and traveling more than 1,000 kilometers for a price around at $99,000that is, equivalent to that of a high-end car like a Tesla Model It is not a trivial fact, although it may seem anecdotal, it is actually the core of the problem you have right now. United States in Iranbecause it completely breaks the traditional logic of military balance: for the first time, an extremely advanced weapon allows to be exclusive and expensive to become something potentially massive, accessible and replicable on a large scale. It’s not the technology, it’s the cost. Because the challenge for the United States is not that China has developed a new hypersonic missile, but that it has done so extremely cheap. While intercepting a threat can cost millions per attempt (with systems like Patriot, SM-6 or THAAD), destroying that missile costs dozens of times more to manufacture it. This creates a brutal asymmetry where the attacker always wins financially, forcing the defender to spend disproportionate amounts just to stay safe. In this scenario, defending yourself is no longer sustainable, especially in the face of massive attacks. Mass production. Unlike traditional programs, this missile is not a limited or experimental piece, but rather a product designed to be manufactured in large quantities. using civil materialscommercial supply chains and components already available on the market. China has not only reduced the cost, but has industrialized productionallowing us to imagine scenarios where hundreds or thousands of these systems can be rapidly deployed, saturating any existing defense without the need for absolute precision. Invisible launchers. The change is not limited to the missile itself, but how it unfolds– Can be launched from platforms hidden in shipping containers, trucks or common industrial facilities, integrating into global civil infrastructures. This virtually eliminates any predictability on the origin of the attack, expanding the scope of the threat to any point within its operational radius. In other words, war no longer has defined fronts and begins to depend more on a diffuse network where the attacker can appear anywhere without prior notice. The swarm effect. Added to this logic is the parallel development of advanced drones like the TM-300capable of flying at high speed, with stealth capacity and also designed for mass production. In that light, the combination of cheap missiles and swarming drones creates a scenario in which even sophisticated defenses can be overcome. simply by volumenot because of technological superiority. It is not necessary for all attacks to be successful: it is enough for some to do so to generate a disproportionate strategic impact. Change of era. If you like, all this points to a structural transformation: one where the advantage is no longer in having the most advanced weapons, but in being able to produce them faster and cheaper that the opponent can defend himself. The central idea, as we saw in Ukraine and now in Iranis clearly imposed: the problem for the United States is not that China is mass manufacturing a new hypersonic missile, but that it is doing so at a ridiculously low costaltering the balance between attack and defense and opening the door to a war where quantity and price can prevail over technology and sophistication. Image | x In Xataka | China is sending drones to an island 100 km from Taiwan. The problem is that Japan and the US are filling it with missiles In Xataka | China has drawn a very clear red line to Japan: being an ally of the United States is good, supporting Taiwan is bad.

AI chatbots are more flattering than humans giving personal advice. And that’s a problem

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Before, to create your echo chamber you could only follow like-minded people on networks, now you can create your own personalized echo chamber with an AI. A Stanford study has thoroughly analyzed the excessive adulation of LLMs and the result is clear: if you want to be told what you want to hear, it is better to talk to the AI ​​​​than with a person. The study. The Researchers analyzed eleven language models, among which were the most popular ones like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or DeepSeek, and they fed them with data sets about personal dilemmas. In addition, they included 2,000 prompts taken from the Reddit community. Approximately one-third of all scenarios included harmful or outright illegal behavior. Then, they compared the LLM responses with human responses to see who tends to agree with the user more. In a second part of the study, they recruited 2,400 participants and had them chat with flattering and non-flattering language models. We like to be proven right. Chatbots tend to be much more flattering than a human when giving personal advice, but not only that, people generally prefer these types of responses. The models endorsed the user’s position 49% more than humans in general dilemmas and endorsed harmful behavior 47% more. In the second experiment, people who chatted with different models considered the sycophantic model more trustworthy and preferable. Furthermore, she came away more convinced that she was right and less willing to apologize or repair the conflict. Why is it a problem. According to the authors, LLMs can reinforce egocentrism and make people more morally dogmatic. According to Myra Cheng, co-author of the study, “By default, AI advice does not tell people that they are wrong or give them a reality check (…) I worry that people will lose the ability to deal with difficult social situations.” In addition, there is another worrying fact and that is that users perceived the models as equally objective, which suggests a lack of critical vision to be able to distinguish a flattering AI from a non-flattering one. AI is not a person. It is obvious, but the reality is that every day we address AI chatbots as if they were one. Thank him and ask him for things please It is a harmless symptom of our mania for anthropoformize everything. However, when We use AI as a substitute for a psychologist or when we establish intimate relationships with a chatbotthat’s where we start to step in swampy terrain. The authors of the study consider it urgent that companies introduce safeguards to reduce the excessive complacency of LLMs and advise avoiding using them as a substitute for a person to deal with personal conflicts. The counterpoint. There are voices that argue that AI is not generating these echo chambers, at least not with as much intensity as we have seen with social networks. According to John Burn-Murdoch in Financial Timeslanguage models tend to raise consensus with experts and generate more moderate opinions than networks. Their argument is that the economic architecture of networks rewards inflammatory and polarizing content, while chatbots compete to offer reliable answers to users who use them to make important decisions. It is not just an opinion, it has also done an experiment in which it has simulated thousands of political conversations between users with extreme positions and several of the main chatbots on the market. Based on electoral surveys and data on the use of these tools, it measures how positions would move if a part of the citizenry used AI to inform themselves. The author concludes that, on average, the models tend to push the most radical ones towards more temperate positions closer to the expert consensus, also validating many fewer conspiracy theories than those that routinely circulate on social networks. In Xataka | AIs have become accompanying tools against loneliness. For some researchers it is “junk food” Image | Zulfugar Karimov in Unsplash

Iran has made energy a problem again. The United Kingdom believes it has found a solution in solar panels

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There are issues that we believe are resolved until reality reminds us that they are not. Energy is one of them. We have been talking about for years solar panelsof self-consumption and of alternatives to fossil fuelsbut in many cases they remained a rather gradual, almost optional decision. That has changed. The rise in energy prices linked to the conflict in Iran has brought the problem back to the forefront and forced several governments to react. The United Kingdom has decided to act. The specific measure. What the British Government has put on the table is not a generic promise, but a plan to try bring so-called plug-in solar panels to stores in “the coming months.” To make it possible, the Government is working with Amazon, Lidl and the manufacturer EcoFlow. There is also an interesting nuance here: we are talking about an American e-commerce giant and a very recognizable supermarket chain in Europe. What makes them different. At this point, it is worth stopping for a moment on what exactly we are talking about. These plug-in solar panels do not work like a traditional photovoltaic installation, which usually requires construction, permits, and the intervention of a professional. The idea here is much simpler: smaller devices that can be placed on balconies, walls or gardens and connected directly to the home electrical network. According to the British Government, this approach would allow them to be used without the need for an electrician, as long as technical and safety standards are adapted. The context. It is no longer a secret that the conflict in Iran has hit one of the most sensitive points of the global energy system, the Strait of Hormuzthrough which a relevant part of the world’s oil circulates. When that flow is threatened, prices react quickly, and that is just what has happened. In a few days, crude oil and gas have risen sharply and that impact ends up reaching Europe in the form of more expensive fuels and higher bills, which has forced several governments to act. The European mirror. If we leave the United Kingdom, what we see is a map of quite diverse responses to the same problem. Rising energy prices have forced action, but each country is doing it in its own way. Spain has opted for a broad package of aid and tax cuts, valued at around 5,000 million euroswhile Germany has focused on regulating the behavior of gas stations and Portugal has applied fiscal adjustments more specific about fuels. Faced with these measures, more focused on cushioning the immediate blow, the British movement introduces another approach, facilitating access to alternatives such as solar energy to reduce dependence in the medium term. Images | Caspar Rae In Xataka | Europe has a million reasons to fear an increase in the price of electricity. Spain has something else: renewables

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