recover

The Silver Route seemed like the perfect train for the Spanish west. They seek to recover it with one objective: forget about Madrid

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Cáceres and Salamanca are separated by just 200 kilometers but the journey takes seven hours in the best of cases and requires passing through Madrid. We talked, of course, about going by train. And the capitals of these two provinces represent one of the biggest railway holes that our country has. The situation is not unique in Spain (from Murcia to Granada you also have to go through Madrid) but perhaps it is more bloody because one day there was that option that structured the west of Spain. It was known as the Silver Route. Now, more than 40 years after its closure, there are those who continue fighting for its reopening. A line that was born sentenced From Seville to Gijón, passing through Mérida, Cáceres, Salamanca, León or Oviedo. The Silver Route It was designed as a railway corridor for passengers and goods away from the large Spanish economic centers. It was about finding an alternative so that not everything went through Madrid, Bilbao or Barcelona. And, curiously, its origin must be sought very far from these cities. It was in Paris in 1877 when the contract was signed to build a railway between Palazuelo (current Monfragüe station) and Astorga, they explain in The Extremadura Newspaper. The project was ambitious as it passed through a lot of unpopulated area in its attempt to connect the north of Extremadura with Salamanca, Zamora and León. Yet, the line went ahead in the last years of the 19th century. Between 1893 and 1896, the four sections that would end up forming the most representative axis of the line were inaugurated from south to north. This was the backbone of a road that connected to the south with the Mérida-Seville section and the Venta de Baños-Gijón in the north. Without a large city to drive it and without direct access to a large port, the line was falling into ostracism. First, because the State did not find sufficient reasons to modernize it and, at least, electrify it. And without investments, the tortuous path became less attractive for passengers and companies. The axis survived the Civil War but beforehand an investment had been requested that never arrived. In 1933, the iron bridges were replaced by steel ones but no major efforts were made. In the following years, they point out in the local mediaderailments and accidents multiplied due to lack of investment. For decades, once sentenced, the line remained open but in 1984 its definitive closure was confirmed. By then, the trains were barely running at 50 km/h, an average speed lower than that recorded during their opening. A train bus accident in 1981 in which a woman died put the finishing touches on a decision that began decades ago when no one wanted to invest in the western axis. Let it come back! Today, the connection between Cáceres and Seville, passing through Mérida, continues to exist, although it is a single-lane railway and is not electrified. The connection between Salamanca and Gijón is also maintained. But how you can see on this Adif mapa hole separates Cáceres and Salamanca. From Plasencia, you will see a green line leaving towards the north. In Salamanca, another leaves in a southerly direction. Are they projects to recover this train? No, they are Greenwaysconditioning of the old railway section to convert them into easy paths for walking, running or cycling. What some institutions have been demanding for years is that these Greenways are not the only vestige that remains from those days. In 2023, the city councils of Salamanca, Cáceres, Béjar, Plasencia Guijuelo and Hervás together with the Chambers of Commerce of those first three cities signed an institutional declaration demanding the return of the train. “Employment, creation of opportunities, logistical development, diversification of the productive system and stopping depopulation,” with these words they began a text to justify their demands. It pointed out some technical issues such as that the section between Plasencia and Salamanca has 4G network coverage on 90% of the route. But, above all, it was remembered that the new train could be an alternative route for the transport of goods in the western area, capable of connecting the Atlantic ports in the north with those in the south without passing through Madrid. This was the premise, in fact, with which the idea of ​​resurrecting the West Corridorunder the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. A project that, as they remember in the text, was not carried out. in the diary Today They collected information that the Gijón Chamber of Commerce put on the table in 2022 to defend this line: it could capture up to 625,000 journeys for goods which now carry trucks going up the A-66, also known as Vía de la Plata. Beyond unfulfilled promises (in addition to Zapatero, José María Aznar also promised to reopen the line after Felipe González closed it to passengers in 1984 and to goods well into the 90s), one of the biggest problems that this Western Corridor has is that it does not fall within the plans of the European Union as far as the railway is concerned. The Trans-European Transport Network ignores this and maintains that hole already mentioned between Cáceres and Salamanca and Salamanca and the south of Asturias if it is not passing through Valladolid. Regardless of whether we are talking about a passenger or freight network, the result is the same. That is why from the Corredor Oeste platform, together with the city councils and the rest of the local organizations, They have been organizing mobilizations and meetings to press and get the project taken to Europe. According to his calculations, it would hardly be necessary to invest 1.9 billion eurosvery far from what is being invested in other corridors such as the Mediterranean, which already exceed 8,000 million in investment. They also defend that the new Silver Route railway would be key to connecting the Atlantic Corridor, which does have European approval, with the Spanish south, offering a … Read more

Europe throws away 16 billion a year in electronic waste. Spain has just turned on the first oven in Europe to recover them

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Those cell phones, computers and small devices that are gathering dust in a drawer and ending up in a landfill contain valuable minerals such as copper, silver and platinum inside, which also end up there. Every year in the Spanish state almost 930,000 tons of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) are thrown away, which makes Spain the sixth state on the continent in generation of this type of waste. according to data from the UN E-waste Monitor by 2024. Of these, less than half is documented and recycled waste. In a context in which rare earths and critical minerals are a strategic resource of which Europe wants to achieve sovereignty, Spain has taken a step forward with a CSIC pilot plant pioneer in the old continent: a furnace capable of melting that electronic waste to extract valuable metals from it. The pioneer oven. A few days ago the National Center for Metallurgical Research of the CSIC inaugurated in Madrid the first European pilot plant capable of recovering critical metals from electronic waste using a submerged lance furnace, which exceeds 1,200 °C to melt electronic waste. The milestone was formalized with the first experimental casting of metals obtained directly from electronic waste and obtained materials such as copper, gold, silver and platinum in a clean and efficient way. In conventional furnaces, the heat comes from the outside, but in this case a metal lance is introduced that injects oxygen and fuel directly into the molten bath, which generates intense turbulence that mixes and homogenizes the material, accelerates chemical reactions and improves energy efficiency. Why is it important. Because every year Europe generates millions of tons of electronic waste containing copper, gold, silver, platinum and strategic minerals necessary for the energy transition and digitalization. A part of them is not recovered: it is lost or used outside the continent. The facility in question is an advance in advanced pyrometallurgy and the management of waste from electrical and electronic equipment that shows that it is possible to treat this waste in Europe, thus preventing the associated economic value from leaving the continent, which allows the raw materials to be reincorporated into the European production chain itself. In addition, it connects directly with the Critical Raw Materials Law of the European Union, which fixed that at least 25% of the critical raw materials consumed by the EU by 2030 must come from recycling. The EU is currently heavily dependent on imports of critical raw materials, often from a single supplier, which poses a serious geopolitical risk in the form of dependence on strategic sectors such as renewable energy, digitalisation and defence. Context. The generation of WEEE is out of control and breaking records. According to the UN international waste observatoryin 2022 the world generated 62 million tons, 82% more than in 2010, but less than in 2030, when the estimated figure is 82 million tons. Europe takes the cake: in 2022 it was the region with the highest volume of WEEE per inhabitant with 17.6 kg per person, of which only 7.3 kg were recovered. But that garbage is money: the UN E-Waste quantifies the economic value of those 62 million tons at 91 billion dollars a year. If of this global total of WEEE, 13 million tons of garbage per year They belong to Europe. Calculated proportionally, it would be equivalent to losing about 19,000 million dollars annually due to poorly managing these materials (about 16,340 million euros at the exchange rate). While we search for deposits and accelerate their exploitation in a sector dominated by China, we have a deposit pending to be exploited: the “urban” mine with WEEE recycling. The situation regarding WEEE in Europe in 2022. UN E-Waste 2024 How it works. He submerged lance furnace is based on the ISASMELT processso that the raw materials only need to be pre-mixed, there is no need for fine grinding or drying, which simplifies the feeding with materials as heterogeneous as WEEE. The separation of materials is based on the difference in densities: once the waste is melted, copper and precious metals such as gold or silver tend to sink to the bottom of the reactor due to their greater density, while the slag (which is non-metallic) floats on the surface, which makes extraction simple. The project has been possible thanks to a public-private collaboration between CENIM-CSIC and two companies, the European copper smelting giant Atlantic Copper and the metallurgical company Glencore Technology. Yes, but. The CENIM facility is a pilot plant, not an industrial plant, and this leap in pyrometallurgy is not exactly small: engineering issues must be resolved such as the management of the gases emitted in the process or the useful life of the furnace’s refractory materials, among others. And this project may find its political framework in the Critical Raw Materials Act, but this It’s more of a statement of intent. than anything else: it does not have a roadmap nor has it made available new funds to accelerate these initiatives. However, the biggest problem is not in the oven, but in recycling or the absence of this: 46% of WEEE and the critical materials it contains are lost before reaching any recycling facility, simply because collection is poor. There is little point in developing highly efficient recovery technology if electronic waste ends up mixed with organic waste in the brown container. Or if it is exported outside of Europe. The real bottleneck remains collection. In Xataka | Mortadelo and Filemón work for the CSIC: TIA agents explain the history of science to us with their comics In Xataka | The CSIC wants to create quantum solar energy capable of self-regulating its temperature. His inspiration: painting Cover | yasin hemmati and Nathan Cima

Claude has helped a man recover $400,000 worth of bitcoin he lost 11 years ago. Logged in and forgot password

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An X user named Cprkrn recently told of his odyssey with a (very) happy ending in X. In 2015 he bought five bitcoins (BTC) when the price was around $250. In a fit of university euphoria he decided that his password should be an anti-establishment manifesto and changed it to the phrase ““lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)”. The problem is that he did it completely stoned, and when he got up the next morning he realized that his money had disappeared. He then began an odyssey to try to remember that password. One with a happy ending. Eleven years of despair. For eleven years, those five bitcoins remained lost while their value continued to increase. Today its value is around $400,000, and our protagonist has not stopped seeing how this fortune had slipped through his fingers. To try to recover the password he tried everything, especially brute force attacks to try to guess the password with thousands of combinations. He looked through old folders that he had saved without success, and then something occurred to him: turn to Claude. Claude didn’t hack your wallet, he was just a spectacular detective. What Cprkrn ended up doing was ask Claude to analyze 1 GB of iCloud backups, old Apple notes, emails, and forgotten system files saved on a computer I had used in college. The challenge was not to “crack” the password, but to find the trace of how it could have been created. Order within chaos. What Claude did was organize all that data that was scattered to turn it into a perfect structured file that could be analyzed. After evaluating all the information, the AI ​​model realized that it was trying to open the wrong file. He located a file called wallet.dat from before the password change that caused the nightmare, and crossed it with a mnemonic phrase that the user had written down in an old notebook that he had discarded. That allowed that password to be reconstructed, and in less than an hour Cprkrn had recovered his fortune and regained access to your BTC wallet. Money safe. The first thing he did after discovering that password was move those bitcoins to another secure wallet to avoid problems: every conversation we have with Claude or other chatbots is recorded on the servers of those companies in plain text, so Cprkrn covered his back to prevent that information from being used to avoid scares. Blessed Darius. The joy of having recovered those five bitcoins led this user to publish a message on Twitter telling the whole adventure. In said message promised who would name his future son “Darío” in honor of Anthropic CEO, Darío Amodei. Needles in the haystack. History shows that great language models are extraordinary tools for finding needles in haystacks. Traditional tools helped, but AI’s ability to analyze information and find patterns is once again amazing. This anecdote is linked, for example, to recent rise of models like Claude Mythos Preview to find security vulnerabilities that seemed impossible to find. Again, everything is based on the ability of these models to “understand” the data provided to them, organize them and extract what is needed from them. Being a digital Diogenes has a reward. For years the recommended practice for those changing or upgrading equipment was “delete/format the old, start from scratch with the new.” This story changes the focus, because in the age of AI, messy data from 15 or 20 years ago is not digital garbage: it can be a treasure that helps us review our past and reveal data that we no longer remember. The story, however, contrasts with that of James Howells, who for years struggled to try to recover the hard drive with thousands of bitcoins that ended up in a landfill. He ended up giving up after the court’s refusal to give him permission to search for that hard drive. Image | Kanchanara In Xataka | The NYT claims to have found Satoshi Nakamoto and the evidence is as conclusive as ever: little or nothing

that the birds recover their original song

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Noise is an invisible pollutant, but its effects can be seen. To begin with, the natural soundstage changes, altering the behavior of animals and affects health of humans and other species. It is true that in cities noise pollution is usually overshadowed by other pollution such as air or water quality, but its consequences are equally tangible. At the beginning of this century, studies on urban birds They found that noise caused by human activity causes birds to sing at higher frequencies to avoid masking traffic, a source of low-frequency noise. What Paris has achieved. As collects the paper published in Oxford Academicthe French capital has been fighting noise for decades directly and indirectly, especially focused on traffic, which shows a transformation in its urban mobility: it has gone from having 250 kilometers of bicycle lanes in 2003 to 800 kilometers in 2023, recycling traditional traffic lanes, with sound-absorbing asphalt, lowering speed limits, the expansion of electric vehicles and the installation of acoustic chambers capable of detecting and fining the noisiest vehicles (the famous “Medusa radars“). The result is obvious: the government agency Bruitparif demonstrates that Paris is today approximately three decibels quieter than it was almost 20 years ago (since 2008). It may not seem like much, but it is worth remembering that the decibel scale is logarithmic and that in practice this reduction represents approximately half of the previous sound intensity. Why is it important. The WHO is clear: Noise is the second most harmful environmental stressor for health in Europe (behind air pollution) and prolonged exposure to it increases the risk of cardiac ischemia, hypertension and sleep disorders in humans. The European Environment Agency details in its 2025 report that noise contributes to 49,000 new cases of ischemic heart disease annually on the continent. The prestigious The Lancet states in this paper that nocturnal noise causes sleep fragmentation, which raises blood pressure and, in the long term, damages the endothelium. If we stick to birds and their song, it is something like human language: they are culturally transmitted from generation to generation and changes in song are also learned by individuals of the same species in the environment. But it goes beyond changing a sound: it affects your ability to attract a mate, warn of danger, defend your territory or simply communicate. And be careful because this also affects other species such as whales because of the noise of the boats either the bats. This other one study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B which analyzes 160 species of birds since 1990 found that noise significantly impacts communication, risk behaviors, feeding, aggression and physiology, with a clear negative effect on reproduction. Context. He Noise Prevention Plan in the Environment of Paris seeks to transform the French capital into a more livable city, becoming a living laboratory where urban planning and sensory planning combine to try to curb the impact of decades of acoustic degradation due to automobile dependency. For the study of Parisian birds, the great tit is the sentinel, using recordings of its songs both in the center of Paris and in the Fontainebleau forest as a wild reference. This observation is not new: already in 2006 a study showed that the chickadees that sing under the Eiffel Tower did so with a minimum frequency 400 Hz higher than those that sang in the Fontainebleau forest. This pattern has been replicated in other cities and species and the result is the same: it is common for birds to increase the minimum frequency of song in response to urban noise. The pending subject. Even though noise has decreased, Parisian tits continue to sing with significantly higher minimum frequencies than non-urban birds, and these frequencies have not decreased along with noise reduction. The explanation, according to the research teamis the cultural mechanism: young birds learn to sing by imitating the adults in their environment and for decades the only adults available to teach them sang high because it was the only way to make themselves heard. Now the city is quieter, but there are no teachers who sing gravely to learn. The habit persists even if the original cause has diminished. San Francisco in COVID-19 leads the way: during the pandemic background noise was reduced by about seven decibels and the white-crowned sparrow responded by singing at lower frequencies. Nature is speaking loud and clear: the reduction achieved by Paris is real but insufficient. In Xataka | China was the great polluter of the planet: now it is emerging as the first “electrostate” in history In Xataka | If the question is whether a skyscraper can be erased without demolishing it, Paris has the answer: yes, in exchange for a fortune Cover | Noureddine BOUABDALLAH and Alexander Kagan

One piece of information perfectly summarizes the book bubble in Spain: 95% of those published do not recover costs

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The Spanish publishing sector closed 2025 with historic figures: 76 million printed books sold and a turnover that was close to 1,250 million euros. A record. The cold water came a few weeks later, at the annual booksellers’ conference, where it was certified that almost half of the titles available on the shelves had sold absolutely nothing. Who says so. The data was presented by CEGAL, the Spanish Confederation of Guilds and Associations of Booksellers, in theXXVII Congress of Bookstores held in Valencia in February 2026and has been extracted from LibriRed, the confederation’s own tool, which monitors in real time the final sales in more than 1,000 independent bookstores and chains throughout the country. The figure includes novels, essays and comics, both new releases and catalog contents, but (importantly, we are talking about physical bookstores) Amazon and school textbooks are excluded. The specific data. They are that revealing: 13.2% of the titles sell a copy throughout the year. 19.4% do not exceed ten. Only 4.5% of the books that reach bookstores reach 100 copies sold, a threshold that often does not even cover the costs of a launch. In other words, 95.5% of the books available in Spanish bookstores do not have the slightest economic impact on the publishing industry, not to mention that they are directly deficient. In Xataka If you hate justified text, we have good news: you’re most likely right You bill more, you sell the same. This is the paradox that the CgK consultancy put on the table with its Book Market Data 2025 report: The sector reached close to €1,250 million in turnover in 2025, 4% more than the previous year, which represents a historical record. However, total units sold rose just 0.2%, and novelty units sold on average 2% less per title than in 2024. Further analysis of the report They spoke of a statistical illusion typical of inflationary markets, because what has actually grown is the average price of the book. And this benefits the large groups, with catalogs in high rotation. Why is this happening? In its analysis of the Cedal report, El País collected statements from editors such as Enrique Redel, from Impedimenta, who affirms that there are titles that are not published to sell, but to take up space on the shelves, especially by large groups. The strategy is to publish many titles assuming that most will fail, hoping that one or two best sellers compensate for the losses of the rest. More than 90,000 books are published each year in Spain, about 240 newspapers, and theReturn rates range between 30% and 40%. It is a feverish cycle of full-speed rotation, paradoxically inconsistent with the calmest of cultural activities. {“videoId”:”x7zmsee”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”11 WEBSITES to DOWNLOAD FREE EBOOKS for your KINDLE Xataka TV”, “tag”:”Kindle”, “duration”:”321″} Who can afford it. The two large publishing groups, Penguin Random House and Planeta, in whose shadow it has been for decades the Spanish industry, and which account for more than 40% of the copies sold in bookstores. Fleeing this suffocating single direction are independent bookstores, which offer more than twice the variety of titles than the large chains: more than 525,000 titles compared to 229,633. In this way, visibility is concentrated in a few titles that rotate for a longer period of time, while the rest are buried in excessive catalogs. Some reasons. When looking for factors that exacerbate this situation (the two large groups can suffocate the market with their continuous rotation, but there must be more compelling reasons for so few sales of so many titles), CEGAL points to self-publishing: publishing has been democratized, but the reader’s attention has not. A book without a publisher behind it, without distribution, without promotion and without prior prescription is born practically invisible to the market, and it is normal that many of these launches do not sell anything. ¿AI provides tools to multiply these throws effortlessly? The percentages skyrocket exponentially. In Xataka They are not your imagination: the best-selling books are increasingly simpler and contain less elaborate sentences The difference with other cultural media is in the abundance of second chances. A film that does not perform in theaters can recover the investment in streaming, where consumption already rivals that of theaters. The book that does not sell in its first weeks on the shelf returns to the publisher, returns to bookstores in negligible quantities and is often physically destroyed after months languishing in warehouses. Perhaps finding new ways of dissemination and renewed lives for books would be the solution to this veritable overdose of books without readers. Header | Photo ofBree AnneinUnsplash (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news One piece of information perfectly summarizes the book bubble in Spain: 95% of those published do not recover costs was originally published in Xataka by John Tones .

Steve Jobs preferred to recover them and bury them in a landfill

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In 1983, Apple launched Lisa, a revolutionary computer for its graphical interface and its innovative use of the mouse, both features ahead of their time. However, several factors worked against it and made it a commercial failure: its exorbitant price of 10,000 dollars (equivalent to about 30,000 euros today), its hardware failures and the tough competition with IBM… and with Apple’s own Macintosh model, much more affordable. So only 30,000 units were sold before Apple canceled production in 1985, leaving the company with a surplus of 7,000 copies stored without a clear destination. The visionary reseller who didn’t see Apple coming That’s where Bob Cook, founder of Sun Remarketing, a company specialized in reselling technology products, especially those from Apple, comes into the picture. After having achieved success reselling the Apple III, Cook decided to bet even bigger and acquired the remaining 7,000 Lisa at a bargain price with the intention of updating and relaunching them to the market as ‘Lisa Professional’. Thus, Cook and his team invested $200,000 in improvements to solve the Lisa’s problems. The floppy drive, RAM and hard drive were optimized, in addition to installing a more modern version of the Macintosh operating system. Everything was ready for a relaunch that promised to give new life to a computer condemned to oblivion. Today, the Apple Lisa is considered a collector’s item and a milestone in the history of personal computing. A drastic decision However, what seemed like a great deal turned into a nightmare for Cook. Apple had a clause in the sales contract which allowed him to recover the computers at any time, and he decided to activate it in 1989, just before the renewed ‘Lisa Professional’ hit the market. Cook couldn’t do anything to prevent it: preferred not to legally confront the powerful Cupertino company and saw his investment disappear in a few days. It is speculated that the company did not want these computers to compete with its new products, in addition to the fact that the image of a failed model recycled by third parties did not fit with its strict brand control policy. Apple did not limit itself only to recovering the Lisa, but also took an even more radical decision: he destroyed them and buried them at a landfill in Logan, Utah: the company even benefited financially from the destruction of the computers thanks to tax deductions for inventory depreciation. A technological burial that has gone down in history The case is reminiscent of the famous burial of cartridges of the Atari’s ‘ET the Extra-Terrestrial’ video gameanother famous failure of the technology industry. But, unlike this one, Apple’s decision generated criticism for the waste of technology which, with a better approach, could have been recycled instead of buried (and we complain today about the planned obsolescence…). On the other hand, there are still doubts about the exact number of computers that were destroyed: while some sources speak of 7,000 units, others leave open the possibility that some updated Lisas “escaped” the fate that the company had prepared for them. Image | Photomontage by Marcos Merino In Xataka | You can now emulate an old Mac from the 80s in your browser In Xataka | This impressive collection of classic computers is made of paper – and there are templates for you to assemble them too This article was originally published in Genbeta in February 2025 and is part of Genbeta’s “greatest hits” that we will discover here in the coming weeks.

We stopped watching traditional television because of advertising, but YouTube is willing to recover it with unstoppable ads

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A few days ago, YouTube users in smart TVs They began to notice something that many thought they had left behind forever: unskippable 90-second ads in the middle of forty-minute videos. YouTube had promised in March that non-skippables would be 30 seconds long, but the limit has tripled in a matter of weeks. You see the ads. On March 2, YouTube released a statement announcing the global arrival of 30-second non-skippable ads for those watching the platform on connected TVs. More people than ever are using YouTube in the living room, and advertisers want formats that look like traditional television. Only five weeks later, things began to change: this April 7, several users began to publish on the r/YouTube subreddit 90-second ad screenshots, triple the advertised maximum, which could not be omitted in any way. Some media They collected part of the reactions of the spectators, which ranged from fury to inevitable resignation. YouTube’s response. The platform assured that those 90-second ads were not intentional and that it was “investigating” what had happened. The same source published a survey in January in which 87% of more than 8,600 people questioned claimed to have received non-skippable ads lasting more than 30 seconds, and almost a third said they had seen them exceed two minutes. Paradoxically, in 2017 YouTube removed 30-second non-skippable ads considering them precisely “a relic of traditional television.” The accounts come out. YouTube generated 40.4 billion dollars in advertising revenue in 2025. A figure that exceeds the combined sum of Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which together earned 37.8 billion. The same firm went so far as to declare YouTube “the new king of all media” by estimate its total income at around 62,000 million a year. And it’s not just a matter of raw money: according to NielsenYouTube took over 12.7% of all television viewing time in the US in December 2025, compared to 9% for Netflix. The gap between the two has widened in recent months. More people watch YouTube on TVs than any other screen, and the AI ​​system Google uses to decide which ad format to show (including bumpers 6-second spots, 15-second spots, and the new 30-second non-skippable ones) now have data to decide when a viewer is comfortable enough to tolerate a long ad break. And if you don’t want ads… Anyone who wants to avoid ads has a way out: YouTube Premium, at 13.99 euros per month. There is no middle option, no setting that allows you to opt for shorter or less frequent ads. According to Google itselfthere is no setting to turn off the 30-second format without a paid subscription. The thing is that not even Premium is what it used to be: some service levels include certain types of ads. It is the same pattern that the greats followed streamers: Netflix launched its tier with advertising in 2022; Disney+ followed suit shortly after. “Pay more to see fewer ads” is no longer a promise of digital platforms, it is their business model. What differentiates YouTube from other streaming platforms is that it is not a paid service that has added a free tier with advertising; It is a free platform that has built an advertising business of such magnitude that it can now afford to behave as if it were traditional television. The 90-second ads are another test for Google to discover how far the user’s tolerance can go before they change services or agree to pay. In Xataka | YouTube knows it has a problem with AI “slop” for kids. It turns out that the main culprit is YouTube

Andalusia wants to recover the experience of its retired teachers, but sets one condition: that they do it for free

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The Junta de Andalucía has created a new figure in Spanish public education: emeritus collaborating teachers. The idea is that retired teachers They can rejoin training tasks in schools and institutes to share their experience with active teachers and students. The Board’s proposal It is collected under the Red Share Experience program and can mobilize up to 2,500 retirees a year throughout the community. There is a detail in this measure that has not gone unnoticed: the retired teachers who participate will do so completely voluntarily and will not charge anything, as indicated in the Decree 12/2026 It was approved by the Government Council on February 4, 2026 and has just come into force after its publication in the Official Gazette of the Junta de Andalucía. ​The objective: not to lose the experience. The Ministry of Educational Development and Vocational Training has presented This measure is considered “pioneer in Spain”, and its objective is to take advantage of the knowledge accumulated by teachers who have spent decades in the classrooms and put it at the service of centers that need it. In the standard, the Board defines the figure of emeritus collaborating teachers, retired teachers with a long teaching career who maintain their link with educational centers and carry out advisory, training and support tasks in complementary activities. The program has legal backing under the Andalusian Education Law of 2007, which in its article 23.4 already contemplated the possibility of retired teachers collaborating in libraries and support management teams. This new decree expands and regulates that framework for the first time. What requirements must be met to participate?. It is not enough to have been a teacher to participate in the project, a series of requirements are required. You must be retired for any reason other than permanent disability, be under 75 years of age when submitting the application and have worked for at least 15 years in public or subsidized non-university centers in Andalusia. Furthermore, you cannot have received a firm sanction for serious or very serious misconduct in the five years prior to retirement, nor have you been convicted of crimes against sexual freedom. A maximum limit of 2,500 places is set for the entire community for each annual call. a report of the UGT union of 2022 confirms that in Spain 34.5% of non-university teachers are over 50 years old, while in secondary school this percentage rises to 38.4%, which indicates that there will be a significant number of potential candidates for this project in the coming years. What they can do and what they are prohibited from doing. The decree that has just been published imposes a very clear red line from the beginning: the emeritus “will not occupy jobs or perform functions typical of active professors.” What they can do is accompany newly arrived teachersmentor intern students, energize the school library, organize talks and workshops, participate in innovation projects, guide students in their academic path or collaborate on the center’s social networks and publications, among other activities. However, although they do not receive a salary for their contribution, the emeritus do have some compensation. The Board guarantees them insurance that covers accidents, illness and civil liability. At the end of each course they will receive an official certification and will have free access to cultural institutions under the same conditions as active teachers. How and when to apply for a place. The program works through two methods of incorporation. On the one hand, there is the open route that allows retired teachers to present a project that any center in Andalusia can incorporate if interested. The concrete route, on the other hand, is designed for those who want to collaborate with a specific school or institute. In both cases, the project must fit into the center’s plan and have the prior approval of the Teaching Staff and the School Council. If there are more candidates than places available in a single center, the tiebreaker is resolved in order of seniority in that center or in the teaching staff. In Xataka | In Spain, those over 65 years of age are working like never before. It’s not passion for work: it’s for retirement age Image | Unsplash (Maxim Tolchinskiy)

There was a day when Spain was a reference on the roads of Europe. 13.4 billion need to be invested to recover its splendor

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Floods, landslides, fractures, potholes or, directly, sinkholes. What is happening with Spanish roads? Are we facing a real maintenance problem or are we simply facing an avalanche of information or viral videos fueled by railway accidents and doubts about their maintenance? These are the answers we have. The controversy. The roads are bad. Very badly. At least that is the popular sentiment on social networks and in much of the media. The potholes (or directly sinkholes) They are the main ones accused of an alleged lack of investment in the maintenance of Spanish roads. Since the Adamuz train accident (Córdoba) in which 46 people died on January 18, the state of infrastructure in Spain is in the spotlight. The Adamuz railway accident was followed by new accident in Rodalies (Catalonia) in which a trainee train driver died and 37 people were injured just 48 hours later. The focus was then placed on the condition of the roads and their maintenance But, as the weeks have passed, the controversy has moved to the roads. And in recent days there have been videos in which cars are counted that have suffered blowouts due to going over a large pothole and statements on social networks. Is there data?. According to the Association of Infrastructure Conservation and Exploitation Companies (ACEX)Spain has a deficit of 5 billion euros of investment in its roads, distributed as follows: Highways under the responsibility of the State: 2,000 million euros. Highways of the Autonomous Communities: 2,000 million euros. Provincial roads: 1,000 million euros. According to ACEX, Spain invested half that of neighboring countries between 2009 and 2017, with a clear impact of the economic crisis of 2008. Since 2022, the deficit with Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom has been reduced to 30% with the arrival of European funds. It must be noted, however, that ACEX is made up of large construction companies. Source: AEC Officials? More or less. It must be taken into account that the budget items for road maintenance are not only presented in the General State Budgets, they must then be executed by the corresponding administrations. However, the DGT validates the data provided by the Spanish Road Association (AEC). And they say that half of the road surface in Spain is in poor condition. The data is even long before the last rains and a winter that is especially punishing the pavement. In fact, although the report was presented in 2025, the information was collected in 2024 so there is no data after the first months of last year either. which were also especially rainy. The AEC is an association created in 1949 and is non-profit. In 1998, it was also declared a Public Utility Entity and has international recognition. According to their evaluations, Spanish roads are “at the worst moment in its history” and that 13,491 million euros are needed to repair all the roads that need some type of intervention and they are distributed as follows: 4,721 million euros in 26,000 km managed by the State. 8,770 million euros in 75,300 km managed by the regional and provincial governments. A creeping problem. The problem of investments in road maintenance in Spain is not new. According to data from the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) in a 2019 studyroads had absorbed the majority of infrastructure investments between 1985 and 2018, surpassed only by train investments between 2008 and 2012. Those days, from Europe it was supported that the quality of Spanish roads was much higher than average and among the best in Europe. However, investments had been declining for years and although they exceeded 1% of GDP in the 1990s, in 2018 they were below 0.5% of GDP. Of the total money invested, the AIReF report indicates, 35.98% corresponded to the State, 19.96% to the Autonomous Communities and 8.41% to local entities. Money received, for example, with European funds, is not taken into account. European entities, however, attributed this decline in investments to an infrastructure that was already established and in good condition. The OECD pointed out that Spanish roads were above average in quality and connectivity and were only behind in density. Are there solutions? European aid is what once again boosts investments in roads. From the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agency they collected that between 2022 and 2024 2,460 million euros would be mobilized, placing special emphasis on the maintenance of the roads but announcing that they foresee a study to analyze the financing channels, which once again gives rise to the constant background noise about the implementation of tolls. Furthermore, with the impetus of Europe, a project has been created to adapt Spanish infrastructures to the new climate reality, analyzing the interventions that must be carried out to readapt them to more extreme climates where aggressive weather episodes occur more frequently. Photo | Feranza In Xataka | Spain has dozens of unique abandoned roads. Now he wants to save them by turning them into “historic roads”

one that Hyundai and Kia want to recover

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There are several reasons why Porsche you are not finding the best results of its history in recent times. Some will point directly to its shameless commitment to the electric car. A bet that, right now, is being reversed but that has left us a product portfolio in which its best-selling car, the Porsche Macan, can only be purchased right now in electric versions. It is very likely that they themselves believe that the Porsche customer He doesn’t even want to hear about the electric car. And, no doubt, there will be a few who think this. But as they explained a few days ago in The Coches.net podcastnot all Porsche customers are the same. In fact, the brand itself is much more linked to the electric car than we might think. So much so that your first vehicleat the end of the 19th century, was moved by electricity. The one known as Porsche P1 It had an “octagonal electric motor” capable of developing a power of up to 3.7 kW (5 horsepower). Its maximum speed: 35 km/h. A missile compared to the 16 km/h reached by the vehicles of the benz family that were moved by a combustion engine and were produced just a few kilometers away. Semper Vivus, the first hybrid car from Porsche and in history Trusting in that technology, Ferdinand Porsche would continue to evolve the concept and in the year 1900 he stood in the Palace of Electricity at the Universal Exhibition in Paris with what was known as “Lohner-Porsche system”. This innovation integrated what were called “wheel hub motors.” These were installed on the front axle wheels. Yes, 125 years ago the creator of Porsche boasted completely electric front-wheel drive cars. We can ask for some other Valium. The company explains that these engines could generate 2.5 HP each and the top speed rose above 30 km/h. The system was perfected and presentedn three different sizes with increasing powers, with the aim of being able to test them in larger vehicles. Thus, the most advanced evolution incorporated wheels with 12 HP motors that pushed the cars for a maximum of 50 kilometers, with the energy accumulated in lead batteries. Even that same year, what is known as the world’s first electric competition vehicle was unveiled. Named “La Toujours Contente” (“Always Happy”), it was a vehicle with four wheel hub motors that could produce up to 14 HP of power each. It is also considered the first car with four-wheel drive. a century later As we already know, electric cars from the beginning of the 20th century did not have much further travel. At that time, lead batteries were very expensive and required maintenance that was almost prohibitive for most car owners’ already deep pockets. Besides, the rapid evolution of combustion engines They promoted this technology that quickly left the electric car behind. As one century passes since those early days of automotive history, the electric car He is going through his best days. Not only do we have among us vehicles with features unimaginable more than 100 years ago, we must also take into account the rapid evolution that we have experienced in the last decade, which generates a certain optimism about what cars we will find in another ten years. From that point of view, there are those who are betting on recovering what was once called a “wheel hub motor.” That is, including an electric motor in the wheel concept itself, with the aim of limiting power losses and controlling the amount of energy delivered down to the smallest detail. This allows a car to be more precise, faster and should be able to improve control over it. In Hybrids and Electrics They include a good number of proposals that are currently being developed. We have developments underway from Toyota or BMW that have opted for better dynamism but also from Hyundaiwho aspire to get a car with much greater interior space thanks to eliminating the engines located in the center of the axle, front or rear, it doesn’t matter. Companies like Protean Electric They are developing their own versions, with the intention of showing them to the big manufacturers and being able to stake advantage of their innovations in the future. The main advantage is that, according to their calculations, the efficiency is 97% so the losses in power delivery are minimal. These changes should be key to achieving electric beasts like the Renault Turbo 3E. But it is not only a question of improving dynamism with higher powers or a better distribution of engine torque, popularizing this system aims to revolutionize the concept of the car itself because we would gain much more interior space and the autonomy of the electric vehicle that fitted this technology would be improved, benefiting from said improvement in efficiency. In the face of revolutionary promises, physics prevails for the moment. And including a motor in the wheel also increases the unsprung mass. That is, the kilograms that are not directly supported by the suspension. When the unsprung mass increases, the problems grow exponentially because inertia multiplies the impact that its weight has on the dynamic behavior of the car. It is no coincidence that Hyundai’s proposal It also comes with a new air suspension to more closely control this increase in unsprung mass. Because your biggest problem It is not that it is more difficult to control that mass at high speed (which is also true), the problems are already apparent from the start, generating greater vibrations that are transmitted to the vehicle’s cabin before they can be filtered, worsening driving comfort. It must be added that although the efficiency of the system seems guaranteed… this does not always seem to be fulfilled. By installing motors in the wheels, cooling is more complex, so the temperature increases and the motors may lose efficiency. That is to say, yes, losses in power delivery are reduced but only if the engine is sufficiently well cooled … Read more

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