revolution

For the first time, Tokyo allows men to wear shorts to the office. And that is causing a revolution

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Noboru Watanabe is 53 years old, works as a civil servant in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and a few days ago His office colleagues saw his shins for the first time. The heat was pressing and Watanabe, like another handful of colleagues (few), decided to swallow his shame and skip the rigid code of etiquette that dictates that office workers must wear a shirt, jacket, tie and long pants. He didn’t do it just because. With his gesture he joined an initiative launched in April by the authorities to make the heatwave more bearable. There are those who are not so clear. calves in the air. It is not easy to combat extreme heat waves. In Spain there are institutions that have begun to distribute thermal bracelets among the workers who work on the street and in France have reached restrict alcohol so that emergency services can prioritize heat strokes. However, there are few initiatives as peculiar (and extravagant) as the one they have activated in Tokyo. There, in April, anticipating what was to come, the Metropolitan Government gave carte blanche his employees to come to the office in shorts. Not only that. With its measure, the Executive hope to set an example and that companies also relax their dress codes. Dating back to 2005. To understand the measure we have to go back to 2005, when the Ministry of the Environment launched a campaign called “Cool Biz” to promote energy savings. Its premise was simple: the strict Japanese etiquette code leads office workers to go to their jobs with a tie, jacket and long pants, which in turn forced companies to spend more money (and energy) on air conditioning to make their day more bearable. So… Why not change it? “It’s liberating”. As part of the campaign, the authorities agreed that the thermostats in public offices should set at 28ºC and they relaxed the dress code for their employees. Of course, not too much. The ‘flexibility’ was limited to jackets and ties, which became optional items of clothing. “There were complaints and resistance, but they soon realized that not wearing a suit and tie in 35ºC is liberating,” remember Sumie Kawakamiprofessor at Yamanashi Gakuin University. The idea was to set an example from the public to the private sector to control energy expenditure and pollution in the country. one step further. The great architect of that measure was Yuriko Koikethen Minister of the Environment and since 2016 governor of Tokyo. Hence, he has taken advantage of his new position to go one step further in the capital: in spring Koike publicly encouraged his administration officials to leave their long pants in the closet when the heat hits. The idea was the same: to make the heatwave more bearable without having to skyrocket the energy bill, an important objective if two keys are taken into account. And what are they? First, last year Japan experienced a summer of record temperaturesabove 40ºC, and begins to get used to supporting extreme heat waves. He even named them: kokushobi. The second key is that when Koike launched the measure, in April, the energy cost was a national concern, both in Japan and in much of the planet. It had been barely two months since the start of the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz had shot the price of oil, taking it to levels not seen for years. It is estimated that 90% of imports of oil that Japan receives arrive through that strategic maritime passage. The great enemy: taboo. However, ending a habit carried on for decades is not so easy. When the AFP agency visited the office government where Noboru Watanabe works, a week ago, he only saw five men wearing shorts. And that day they reached 34º. Among those brave few was Watanabe himself, who admits that at first he was embarrassed to walk among his colleagues showing his shins. The reporters of The New York Times they met with a similar panorama: They only saw 11 men wearing shorts, just 16% of a staff of 70 men. And the great debate began. The shorts perhaps they are more comfortable for the summer (Watanabe himself recognize that once the initial reservations are overcome, they are “comfortable” and even make you feel “younger”), but that doesn’t mean they convince everyone. In June The Japan Times public a column in which it was slipped that the Tokyo government may have gone “too far.” Other Asian media have collected testimonies from Japanese who do not quite accept the new Tokyo directive. “I’ve been to business meetings in Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines and people there don’t wear tights when it comes to something important,” explains a 56-year-old businessman. A new concept: Sune Hara. It’s not just a question of whether to go with shorts to a meeting is appropriate or not. In Japan, a new term has been coined that indicates a deeper debate: sune hara“bullying because of leg hair.” Its approach is very simple. Now that men can wear shorts, will they also experience the pressure that women feel to have perfect legs? Why does society expect a woman to spend time and money getting rid of hair but tolerate it in a man? Will women still be expected to wear long skirts or stockings in certain areas? “Wearing shorts in the workplace has started to gain acceptance, but will society accept women showing bare, stockingless, hairy legs (because women have hair on their legs too) in a business environment?” a user launched one recently on the Weekly Women’s Prime platform. “If it is acceptable to men, it stands to reason that women’s legs should also be accepted.” Images | Egor Myznik (Unsplash) and Fikri Rasyid (Unsplash) In Xataka | 30 years ago we laughed at China and Japan for their obsession with sun protection. Now we’re following your path

“All pollution can be sent into space to return to the state before the Industrial Revolution”

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Taking data centers to space. Although Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, it seems that the idea does not convince him too muchsome of the largest companies in the world have embarked on the race to fill low orbit with satellites. AWS with Blue Origin is there, Google is thereElon Musk says that he already has them with a simple Starlink update and even Nvidia, Eric Schmidt and Sam Altman They have an interest in the matter. The advantages of take these data centers to space They seem clear: without water consumption because they are cooled by the cold of space, without energy consumption because they are powered by inexhaustible solar energy and without taking up space. The astronomers They are not particularly enthusiasticbut it seems that the industry is moving in that direction and one of the most enthusiastic, Jeff Bezos, has left a curious message. By taking data centers into space, “we can make parks like Paris everywhere on Earth.” Playing this card is a dangerous thing. Improve the Earth by taking factories to space We have already discussed the objective: to have space computing power to support terrestrial computing thanks to a power that can scale by carrying more and more satellites that do not require investing in dissipation and power systems. With energy being a problem in some countries due to what these data centers consume, makes sense in the roadmap of these large companies. But Bezos, who has spoken at length about why they want to go to the Moon, why they want to turn the satellite into a gas station and how they plan to achieve the goal, has not been so specific when talking about constellations in low orbit or computing beyond the clouds. It has focused on two things: remembering why they are investing so much and launching a romantic message that clashes with what these data centers are causing on Earth. “We have to build the infrastructure for a constantly changing scenario,” says Bezos. “The price of the space race is very high and if you look back, before the Internet, there were very few actors. Two boys in a workshop could make a huge company. “We’re at that point in the space economy.” “We can make parks like Paris everywhere on Earth” The objective is to collect resources and materials on the Moon because, as he has admitted, “The Moon is a gift”but he has also commented that “many of the resources we need are in space.” And it does not refer so much to the regolith as to the aforementioned dissipation and infinite solar energy. “We are focusing a lot on that to exploit the space economy. It is infinite and it will happen,” he says. Now, he points out that they don’t know when it will happen because orbital computing will be a big step, but he did leave some… curious phrases. “Everything is better than 500 years ago, but we have more pollution on Earth than 500 years ago. If we send all that away, if we can send all the pollution from factories on Earth away from Earth, we can return to the state before the Industrial Revolution.” At this point, someone would ask, precisely, who are the ones that are generating the most pollution with the energy needs of their data centers and the need to return to coal In order to satisfy the demand, the private jet travel, what rockets pollute space, one’s own low orbit pollution with as many satellites or actions as promoting a fast consumer society that wastes so many resources. But, beyond that, it is not easy to send “all the pollution from Earth’s factories to space.” There are industries that are simply impossible to send to low orbit because, beyond the obvious logistical limitations, we are talking about a first-come, first-served space. And America is moving, but also ChinaIndia, Russia and Europe. The message that there are parks like in Paris anywhere in the world is powerful, of course, but start watering those parks in some countries. In Xataka | Data centers are real “heaters”. And they are settling in regions as hot as Aragón

Gemini Intelligence promises to be Google’s AI revolution. The problem is that almost no one will be able to use it.

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Updates have always been Android’s Achilles heel, but for several years we have seen how manufacturers are pushing to offer up to seven years of updates on your mobiles. It is good news for users and regulators. The problem is that AI threatens to introduce a new form of fragmentation: having an updated mobile phone no longer guarantees access to the most important functions, even if it is high-end. What has happened? A few days ago, during the Android Show, Google announced the new star feature coming to Android: Gemini Intelligence. We are no longer talking about specific functions, but rather about a layer of AI that covers everything, making the mobile phone act autonomously within the system and the apps. It sounds great, what doesn’t sound so good is the list of requirements. Hardware requirements. Google has detailed the minimum requirements for a mobile phone to run Gemini Intelligence and it is quite not encouraging. We are talking about devices with 12 GB of RAM and that mount recent “flagship” processors. These requirements directly leave out the majority of the current vehicle fleet, but also at the current time with the memory crisis raising pricesthe high-end is going to become even more unattainable. The real problem. If the RAM and the processor already leave out many mobile phones, the software requirements are even worse. This is where Google makes the real difference since, to run Gemini Intelligence, compatibility with Gemini Nano V3, the local language model for mobile phones, is necessary. If we look at the current compatibility list, it is no longer that it affects cheap phones, it is that it also leaves out phones like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 which was launched in the summer of 2025 and cost 2,109 euros, or the Xiaomi 17 Ultra which has just been launched for almost 1,500 euros. It is not clear that the list is definitive, since it is possible that there are changes because they allow it to be updated later, but for now the outlook is bleak: The list of devices compatible with Gemini Nano v2 and Gemini Nano v3. Image: Xatakamovil There is still more. The software requirements don’t end here. Google has also put several additional conditions for a device to have Gemini Intelligence. The device must receive at least five years of operating system updates and six years of security patches, in addition to meeting a series of quality requirements regarding stability, failure rate and multimedia, among others. The privilege of AI. “The best of Gemini in our most advanced devices” is the phrase we find in the Gemini Intelligence official websiteso Google already warns us from the beginning. That updates or more advanced functions reach the most expensive phones is something we are used to, but with AI we are seeing the bar rise even higher. Furthermore, it is not a specific function as it was ARCorewe are talking about the central axis of the proposal, a new way of interacting with the mobile that only a small percentage of users will be able to test, including those who have a Google Pixel. Cover image | Google In Xataka | Android 17 news: list with a summary of everything that will arrive in this version of the operating system

Evangelism has been leading a revolution in Madrid for years. Now he has turned the Metropolitan into a huge church

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evangelism build muscle in Madrid. The weekend tens of thousands of people gathered at the Riyadh Air Metropolitan stadium to participate in The Change 2026a Christian event that had its first edition in August 2023 at the Benfica da Luz stadium (Lisbon) and revolves around gospel, prayer and evangelization. The event is important not only for its content or participants, which includes the footballer Daniel Alves. It is above all because it connects with other manifestations recent and multitudinous Christianity. What matters, but even more so when and where. What is The Change 2026? A Christian macro event held this weekend in Madrid. Its highlight came on Saturday, when a massive event was organized at the Riyadh Air Metropolitano stadium (Atletico’s field) which, according to organizers’ calculations, was attended by more than 35,000 people. In the website from The Change details that the first event of these characteristics took place in 2023, in Lisbon, and has already attracted thousands of people. At its genesis is the Rodrigues Pereira Association, an organization promoted by the preacher of the same name. Tickets to the event were freealthough they required prior registration and the organization accepted donations. Why is it important? Its attendance data is interesting in itself, but if there is a reason that explains the curiosity that The Change has aroused (and the comments that it has generated in networks) is that it connects with other much broader trends. The main one, the celebration of massive religious events in Madrid. We had the best example beginning of 2026when the city hosted two events almost simultaneously that had thousands of attendees. He January 10 Vistalegre served as the setting for a concert by Kahuna Group Music, a Catholic group that brought together thousands of people. On the same dates, the Movistar Arena hosted the prayer meeting Callswhich had Alpha España among its organizers and had the evangelical group Hillsong as the opening act. They were not two isolated cases. In April some 85,000 people They participated again in the fourth edition of the Festival of the Resurrection, organized by the Catholic Association of Propagandists and which once again featured Hakuna. Catholics and/or evangelists? It is not a minor issue. The Change vindicate that their event “is not the fruit of a single organization”, but “the heartbeat of a united church, with the same feeling.” The Catholic Church, however, has distanced itself from the event held this Saturday at the Metropolitan. In fact, on March 12, the Archdiocese of Madrid sent a statement brief and firm in which he made it clear that it had nothing to do with The Change. “This initiative is being promoted in our diocese by people outside it, in collaboration with a priest and an association led by a Portuguese evangelical pastor,” pointed out the Madrid Catholic Church, which clarified in passing that it was only informed of the event “when it had already been called.” “Consequently, the Archdiocese of Madrid does not consider itself linked to this event and regrets the call for activities of this nature in its jurisdiction without the necessary coordination with diocesan pastoral care.” Is it an important detail? Yes. Because it connects with a broader phenomenon that transcends the event held this weekend at the Metropolitano. Beyond the rise of Christianity (a trend that studies do not always support: some suggest a growing interest in the spiritual, rather than in orthodoxy), The Change or Llamados show a change in the way of expressing faith. A shift that also pivots towards a form of collective prayer and celebration centered on pop music, rock, big screens and collective prayers, manifestations far from the liturgy of more traditional Catholicism. Is it something new? No. The change comes from years back and it has not been without debate. The Online School of Apologetics has published, for example a list of “twelve reasons why it is not good to listen to Protestant music” and in 2011 the website Religion in Freedom he was wondering Whether Catholics should take note of the evangelists’ use of music. All this, between the controversy by Hillsong. In recent days, voices uncomfortable with the Metropolitan event have also emerged. One of the clearest is Universitarios Católicos (almost 132,000 followers on X), which took advantage of the weekend event to remember the rise of evangelism in the Community of Madrid. “One of the consequences of mass immigration: the loss of our Catholic identity,” concludes. Religion in Freedom assures that, although on Saturday people linked to the Catholic Church or Charismatic Renewal of Madrid could be seen in the stadium, the vast majority of attendees were not linked to the Church of Rome. Specifically, the media estimates that if in the event held in 2023 in Lisbon Catholics represented 25% of the public, in the case of Madrid they were 10%. What was seen in The Change? The event revolved around gospel, corporate prayer and preaching. Among the participants, names stood out such as Rodrigues Pereira or Dani Alves, former footballer for FC Barcelona and the Brazilian national team sentenced to four and a half years in prison (sentence later revoked by the Superior Court of Justice) for a violation. From that same thing, from his experience in prison, Alves spoke before the thousands of people gathered at the Metropolitano. “I was in prison for 14 months, but there Christ set me free. I have lost everything, but by losing everything I found Jesus.” Is it just religion? No. It’s culture. And demographics. Events like Saturday’s may grab headlines, but they are rooted in a much more important… and silent reality: over the last few years, evangelism has been expanding throughout Madrid, coinciding with the increase in Latin American migration. The Observatory of Religious Pluralism in Spain recorded a few months ago 834 places dedicated to evangelical worship in the region, which made it the minority confession with the greatest presence, ahead of Muslims. The phenomenon, very visible in the polygons where new … Read more

The CEO of Nvidia believes that we are in a new industrial revolution where AI will not replace us: it will micromanage us

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Artificial intelligence has been available to users and companies for a few years now and we are at a point where they converge several ideas about AI and the future of work. There are several open fronts such as if AI will replace usif it will only be a tool or if, instead of freeing ourselves from the workload we carry, will add more to us. But the CEO of Nvidia, a Jensen Huang who has no trouble spilling his tongue, has another opinion. AI is going to micromanage us. Micromanager. A few days ago, Huang attended a talk at Stanford Business School. At these events, company CEOs usually leave motivational messages and talksbut I don’t know if in this case it would motivate someone who is looking for a job. During his panel, the Nvidia boss commented that, right now, “we are doing things faster, on a larger scale and we can think to do things we never imagined.” That part of the speech is fine, but he went on to note that “AI agents will harass you, micromanage you, and you will be busier than ever.” Like a good 1st century Roman baptisterywho wouldn’t like having an AI agent egging you on? Will create more jobs. Lately, Huang has chosen to blurt out headlines and vaguely elaborate. At the event, he also commented that these agents we have help us explore new avenues of work, do that work better and make it more profitable. He also addressed the great controversy, that of the supposed great replacement. On this, his opinion is that there will be some jobs that will be redundant because AI will be able to do the same as a human, but he considers that, in general, there will be humans with new jobs to adapt to. “I think we are going to create more jobs. There will be more people working at the end of this industrial revolution than at the beginning of it,” he says. Insecurity. It is curious that you compare it with the industrial revolution at a time when there is concern, above all, about the instability of the labor market. Huang ha commented that computer engineers are busier than ever and it makes sense, the problem is what happens next and what is happening with all those who are not dedicated to tasks strictly related to AI. In an article by Fortune published a few weeks ago, the issue of layoffs directly related to artificial intelligence was addressed. An example is Jerome Powell, president of the United States Federal Reserve, who warned that AI is quietly impacting the labor market as job creation is practically at zero. Another is that of Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, who believes that “entry-level” jobs will be reduced by half in the next 18 months. And then Microsoft’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, predicting that AI will cause many white-collar jobs to collapse in that same time frame. AND Meta is going to do without 8,000 employees as it transforms into an AI company. All this while, on short video networks there is a lot of content of young people saying that they have a university degree and are rejected at Target or McDonalds. The AGI has already arrived. Well no. HE esteem that, during 2025, some 55,000 people in the US will lose their jobs directly due to AI. It is only 4.5% of all layoffs, but a significant number that, if forecasts are met, will multiply by several figures over the coming months. For now, so far in 2026, esteem that technology companies have laid off 92,000 people, not all of them must be related to AI, but a scary number if we take into account that, during 2025, the total was 120,000 people. Just 28,000 less in just four months. But, beyond that, the prediction that an AI agent will not take our jobs, but rather will be a tiresome second boss, is not the only thing that Huang has commented recently without going much further. A few weeks ago, on Lex Fridman’s podcast, he already commented on things like that workers must be clear about the purpose of their work and that the tasks and tools they use to do it are related, but they are not the same. Also He commented that we had already arrived at the AGI (artificial general intelligence) giving an example that it has nothing to do with an AGI that, for now, remains theory. A black hole of money. Byan Catanzaro is the vice president of deep learning at Nvidia and has commented that AI currently costs more than human employees. “For my team, the cost of computing far exceeds that of employees.” It must be taken into account in this that AI is not an abstract entity: it is a huge investment in hardware, data centers and energy. According to the calculations According to Keith Lee, professor of AI and finance at the Swiss Institute of Artificial Intelligence, AI expenditures will be $5.2 trillion by 2030 in a conservative estimate and $7.9 trillion in a more aggressive one. But more interesting is what he comments about the fact that fixed subscriptions are not making money for companies because they do not cover operating costs. And that, at a time when companies like OpenAI and Anthropic should not take long to go public, is something to take into account because they will stop receiving millions from other private companies to have to respond to investors with their product and benefits. In Xataka | There are programmers from Meta and Microsoft competing to be the one who uses the most AI and wasting millions of dollars along the way

How the nutrition revolution has allowed human beings to lose two hours in the marathon

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“Today I had two slices of bread, honey and tea for breakfast” This was Sabastian Sawe’s brief response to the journalist who had answered what he had had for breakfast that morning. It wasn’t an elevator conversation. It was not pure curiosity among office colleagues before facing a day in front of the computer. Although the answer could very well have been the same. Sawe is not just anyone. Sawe is the fastest man on the planet when it comes to covering 42,195 meters. Sawe is, as of yesterday, the winner of the London Marathon, the recordman of distance and the first person to break down the mythical barrier of two hours in distance. A barrier that was considered unattainable just a handful of years ago. But to round off the accumulation of impossible things that were experienced yesterday in London, Sawe is not the only human to run at a sustained pace of 2’49″/km, repeating the effort up to 42 times and an agonizing and endless 195 metres. Yomif Kejelcha entered just 11 seconds later. Of course, he will have the more than deserved consolation of being the fastest debutant in the history of the distance. Jacob Kiplimo must have been astonished when he realized that the 120 minutes and 28 seconds it took him to cover that same distance had only been enough for him to be third when just two hours earlier they would have made him the new world record holder. All of them are the pure embodiment of a sport that has experienced a revolution in a handful of years. “Yomif didn’t have breakfast on race day,” Alfonso Beltrá, CEO of Holy mother. Beltrá is the founder of a Spanish sports nutrition company, which grew up in cycling but has pivoted to athletics. A few weeks ago, Beltrá himself defended on the Find Your Everest podcast that they were sure that they could be the ones to break the mythical barrier. High competition is the result of research and results that put the athlete in front of a challenge that ends up being decided by details. The differences are minimal and nutrition is what has ended up tipping the balance. A revolution to make the impossible possible Although neither Sawe nor Kejelcha ate a copious breakfast as the most undocumented logic dictates, neither of them stood at the starting line empty. Their stomachs were, but the important thing was that their glycogen stores were bursting with energy. “He doesn’t have breakfast at all on race day, we have a specific drink with 100 grams of carbohydrates that he finishes two hours before the race and another product that we will launch in three months. Then he warms up and six or seven minutes before leaving he drinks a gel with caffeine and 45 grams of carbohydrates,” Beltrán tells us about the Ethiopian athlete who ate 145 grams of carbohydrates before departure. “That’s why we skipped the kilometer five aid station, we couldn’t put in more,” he emphasizes. A very similar amount would have been handled by Sawe’s team. The Kenyan athlete took, in addition to the two slices of bread with honey, a Drink Mix 320 by Maurtena company that has revolutionized sports nutrition in recent years. This is equivalent to 80 grams of carbohydrates and added a Gel 100 that provides another 25 grams of carbohydrates. The total sum between energy drinks, gel and breakfast adds up to about 140-150 grams like Kejelcha. It is a figure similar to taking 200 grams of pasta before running. And then, the performance began. Kejelcha uses Santamadre gels diluted in the appropriate proportion of water to take them with bottles and facilitate ingestion. Sawe, for her part, opted for Maurten’s Drink Mix 160 drink at the first three aid stations (kilometers 5, 10 and 15). In the fourth (km 20) take a little less drink, about 130 ml, but take a gel with caffeine. And from here, at kilometers 25, 30, 35 and 40, 130 ml is prescribed but of the Drink Mix 320, which has a greater carbohydrate load. It is believed, however, that a drum fell. In total, Sawe’s intake remained at about 115 g/h of carbohydrates. Sabastian Sawe race protocol. Click on the image to go to the original post. The figure is very high and unthinkable just a few years ago. And, despite this, it pales in comparison to what was planned for Kejelcha. From Santamadre they explain to us that the final objective was to move around 140 gr/h of carbohydrates in this case. “It’s about keeping your deposits full for as long as possible, being aware that you will always be in deficit, losing more than you earn,” says Beltrá. In this case, they do confirm that the athlete had problems at kilometers 25 and 35, where he lost the bottles. “That coincides with the decline that they experienced at kilometer 41″, laments the CEO of Santamadre who, he emphasizes, for them a debut like this shows that “we don’t know their ceiling. When he arrived he was upset for losing the race, he asked us for forgiveness for losing the two bottles… he wasn’t aware of what he had done, nor did he know it when he hugged me at the finish line.” In this case, Kejelcha used Santamadre gels diluted in water. The limit is set, according to the Spanish company, by the athlete’s own stomach. “The protocol has to be personalized. We have controlled all the variables since we started working together, all meals, rest, body temperature, glycemic peaks… the nutritional strategy was studied to take into account the glycemic index of each moment,” Beltrá explains to us. Kejelcha was, in fact, the only athlete among the first finishers to use a different brand than Maurten. This brand revolutionized athletics with the sponsorship of Eliud Kipchoge and has been the leader in recent years thanks to its famous Hydrogel. With this gel, the brand managed to encapsulate … Read more

Our way of eating is experiencing a silent revolution that is already noticeable in the industry: “snackification”

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New times, new ways to eat. There was a time (not that long ago actually) when the concept “pecking” almost had a negative overtone. A “snack” was the concession that one made between breakfast and lunch or shortly before dinner to indulge in a culinary treat, something that was done exceptionally or knowing that it was not convenient for them. That is changing. As our habits transform, so does the way we organize our diet and how we understand snacks. It is no longer about eating snacks at the wrong time, but rather about considering the meals of the day in a different way. The shift is so clear that there are those who are already talking about snackfication. How many times do you eat a day? That question probably sounds like a platitude to many people. Three. Maybe five if we count the snack and a mid-morning sandwich, right? In 2015, the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) was interested in that same question (how many meals did Spaniards usually eat on a weekday) and discovered that, on average, we were around 3.57 intakes. To be more precise, half of those surveyed (50.4%) recognized three meals a day and another 26.1% extended it to four. Only 17.7% ate five or more meals, a figure in tune with that calculated by the Nestlé Observatory. Is it a still photo? No. As our way of life changes, so do traditional eating patterns that led us to limit ourselves to breakfast, lunch and lunch, adding (perhaps) a mid-morning snack and an afternoon snack. I explained it recently Expansion: instead of three blocks of meals we move to a more distributed intake made up of small quantities. More intakes, smaller portions. Why is it important? The phenomenon goes beyond simple “pecking” for several reasons. One of the main reasons is that these meals replace traditional meals (dinner, for example). Another key is that “pecking” or snack loses its negative nuance. It’s not about indulging in pastries and chips. The phenomenon is accompanied by a growing interest in healthy snacks. Manufacturers know this and often promote them by appealing to their functionality rather than the stomach. Is there data to support it? Yes. The first one is left by the International Food Information Council (IFIC), a Washington, DC-based organization focused on nutrition and food security. Their studies in the US reflect a clear tendency to replace central meals of the day with snacks. If in 2020 38% of those surveyed admitted this change towards smaller intakes, in 2024 they already represented 56%. The last indicator, from 2025, stands at 62%. Most do it occasionally, but the curve is revealing. Does the study say anything else? He notes that “for most Americans” snack consumption is already part of their “daily ritual.” “In 2025, 70% say they eat them at least once a day, which represents a decrease compared to 73% in 2024, but also the fourth consecutive year in which daily consumption of snacks exceeds 70%,” remember the reportwhich details that 12% of those who ‘sting’ daily do so at least three times. “Americans are replacing traditional meals with snacks and lighter meals, a change that continues to gain strength. In 2020, 38% reported having replaced meals with snacks or light foods. In 2024 that figure increased to 56% and in 2025 it stood at 62%,” points out the IFIC. The phenomenon is so clear that Food Navigator either BBC they talk about snackification. Is there data from Spain? We handle tracks. Although they do not address the topic directly and require combining several sources, they must be handled with some caution. In 2004 the INE published a report in which it stated that 58.4% of the population I used to eat three meals a day (breakfast, lunch and dinner), a percentage that shot up to 72% among those over 65 years of age. In 2022 Mapfre addressed that same issue again and found that on working days 38.7% We Spaniards eat three meals. Not only is this data lower than that published by the INE in 2004. It is also below the sum of those who eat four (29.9%) or five meals (23.2%). The photo changes on holidays, although there are still more people who eat four or five times. Graphic from the report “Food in post-pandemic 21st century society: food decision”, by Fundación Mapfre. What is it due to? There are many factors at play, such as recognize the consulting firm Circana, which breaks down a few when trying to explain the behavior of American households. One (fundamental) is that we eat more snacks and fewer leisurely meals for a simple matter of comfort. “Consumers are increasingly looking for ways to save time preparing meals,” highlights the firm, recalling that snacks are even gaining weight in main meals. It makes sense if we take into account that there are millions of people who almost never take a frying pan or saucepan to cook and every time we buy more dishes already prepared. Curiously, those who consume the most snacks (at least in the US) are not teenagers, but members of Generation 21% of consumption at home. The list also highlights the millennialswith 15% of the pie. When surveying the market, the firm found that the snacks that were most successful were the sweet and salty ones, not the healthy ones. Are there more factors? Yes. Cultural and dietary changes, changes in homes (some, like Juan Roig, believe that domestic kitchens are doomed), changes when shopping… Some analysts even slide the influence of the new weight loss drugs (GLP-1) and how they influence patients who consume increasingly smaller portions. What seems undeniable is that these changes in our diet are having an impact on the forecasts of companies dedicated to the production of snacks. Food Navigator assures that in 2025 the value of the global market of the snack industry will exceed 269 ​​billion of dollars and the forecast is that it will grow … Read more

The most profitable action of the AI ​​revolution in Spain is not a software company. It is a construction company

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We know Florentino Pérez ample by hire galactics and for his business successes, but a priori we would not easily relate him to the rise of AI. And by not doing so we would make a serious mistake, because the manager managed to see before anyone else that this was a huge opportunity… and he is taking advantage of it almost without us realizing it. what has happened. ACS is a construction company that doesn’t seem particularly fascinating. You lay bricks, asphalt and cement, but in 2025 the data tells a fascinating story. The company obtained a net profit of 950 million euros, 15% more than the previous year, and the engine of that growth was its American subsidiary, Turnerwhose contribution to the group’s results grew by 66.6% to 549 million euros. Turner doesn’t build flats or highways. Build data centers. And therein lies the crux of the matter. AI needs big construction companies. The transformation has not happened all at once. ACS has been betting on this niche for years with a simple but powerful thesis: AI requires enormous amounts of hardware, and that hardware needs equally huge buildings with cooling, energy and security. And ACS is dedicated to precisely that: to build large buildings. In Xataka Amazon is building an empire in Aragon: it has just paid 1.5 million to expand the electrical network to its fifth data center Florentino triumphs in the US. Turner arrived earlier and stronger. In 2025, ACS won several large-scale data center contracts, including the construction of a 902-megawatt center in Wisconsin as part of the Stargate program, and a stake in the $10 billion, one-megawatt Meta campus in Indiana. Those are conventional projects. They are cities whose inhabitants are servants for this new era of AI. Go for it all. As they point out in five daysdata centers generated more than 9 billion euros in sales during 2025, and ACS has already delivered more than 9 GW of capacity all over the world. That figure is extraordinary, especially considering that in all of Spain the installed capacity barely reaches 7 GW. The Spanish company that talks the least about AI has been silently one of its great beneficiaries for years. Very much in the style of Florentino Pérez, who usually maintains a relatively low profile and succeeds without making too much noise. Stocks on the rise. The market took a while to see it, but it has reacted forcefully. ACS shares have soared 115% in the last twelve months. Today they are close to 110 euros and mark historical highs while the construction sector advances (“only”) 20%. Group sales they reached 49,848 million euros, with the US and Canada contributing 63% of the total. ACS is in practice more of a North American technological infrastructure company than a Spanish construction company. It is listed on the Ibex and is chaired by one of the great football personalities, yes, but its current driving force is not here, but in the US and in the AI ​​fever. Build and Own. ACS is not limited to executing other people’s contracts: it also wants to be the owner of what it builds. In January 2026, the company completed an alliance with Global Infrastructure Partners, BlackRock subsidiaryto create a 50/50 joint venture to develop a global data center platform with an initial capacity of 1.7 GW. Already before had bought Dornanan Irish engineering company specialized in this type of infrastructure, for 436 million euros. ACS doesn’t just want to build AI data centers: it wants to own a piece of that infrastructure. The dollar as a great risk. One of the big problems with this project is the US currency. With more than 60% of its income in North America, each fall of the dollar against the euro is a setback for the Spanish multinational. The devaluation of the dollar is already greater than 10% after the last twelve months, and that has prevented Turner’s growth from being even greater. According to Renta 4 analysts, the “currency effect” subtracted more than five percentage points from the growth of net profit. And investors warn. Analysts themselves consider that the AI ​​market has already discounted a good part of future growth. At Bloomberg, the consensus is to maintain the stock with an average target price of 88 euros, which would imply a fall of 20% compared to current levels. This is what usually happens with good economic stories: when everyone knows them, they are no longer an opportunity. But at ACS they are optimistic. Although experts are cautious, at ACS they expect that spending on infrastructure quadruples from now to 2034. In fact, they expect that the benefits of 2026 will go even further than those of 2025 and exceed 1,000 million euros. If it achieves this, Florentino’s company will have completed one of the quietest and most profitable industrial transformations in the recent history of our country. {“videoId”:”x86aas4″,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”60% of the INTERNET passes through HERE: This is the LARGEST Data Processing Center in SPAIN”, “tag”:””, “duration”:”266″} Turner is ahead. According to Data Center MagazineTurner accumulated a backlog – a portfolio of confirmed orders – of $39 billion as of August 2025. It is the dominant construction company in this segment globally, although of course it has direct competitors such as DPR Construction, Holder, Skanska or AECOM. However, none have achieved the same concentration of contracts with the hyperscalers (Meta, Amazon and Microsoft). Turner has been building its reputation as a builder of this type of facility for more than a decade, and it is very difficult to replicate that advantage quickly. The irony of ACS and Spain. There is a geographical paradox in this success story: Spain and Europe have years debating on digital sovereignty, technological dependence and the need to build own infrastructure for not to be left out of the AI ​​revolution. While this debate is taking place, the Spanish company that is most building this infrastructure is doing so almost exclusively outside of Spain. As … Read more

why the next great revolution against cancer is to make it chronic

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If we ask someone what the goal of cancer medicine is, the answer is almost automatic: cure itmake it disappear or win the war against this devastating disease. However, in molecular biology laboratories and advanced oncology consultations, the verb is changing, since we no longer speak of “eradicating” at all costs, but to contain. An idea that may be quite shocking, but which is proposed as the future of medicine. The idea. Douglas Hanahan, one of the most influential figures in modern biology and one of the great responsible of the hallmarks of cancerwhich are the hallmarks that define a tumor, has put this idea on the table. In this case, it points to a concept that clashes with our intuition, but fits with scientific data: cancer without disease. The idea is provocative, since it suggests that histologically malignant tumors are possible living off of us without killing us or affecting our quality of life. The objective is no longer the total elimination of the enemy and becomes something more pragmatic: keeping it under biological and clinical control so that the patient dies with the cancer, but not from the cancer. There is no cure. In a recent interview and in your updates of the Hallmarks of Cancer 2022, Hanahan insists that the complexity of cancer makes a universal cure unlikely. Instead, it proposes to understand what specific capacities sustain the tumor, such as evasion of the immune system, inflammation, replicative immortality… to selectively block them. In this way, it is not about destroying the entire tissue, but about converting a lethal process into an indolent one. This is what Hanahan calls “adaptive resistance”, since we assume that the tumor will try to look for new escape routes, and we will change the therapeutic strategy to block them, maintaining the tumor ecosystem within safety margins. It already happens. All of this is not a futuristic theory, but rather it is already happening on two very different fronts: the tumors that we decide not to touch and the aggressive tumors that we have learned to stop. Not trying is sometimes the best. The most literal example of “cancer without disease” is found in the prostate and thyroid. Here, diagnostic technology has advanced so much that we detect tumors that, biologically, would never have caused problems. In the case of prostate canceralmost half of low-risk tumors now enter active surveillance protocols. In this way, instead of operating or radiating (with the risk of impotence and incontinence that entails), doctors begin to monitor the mass. And the data, after 20 years of follow-up in large groups of people, are quite clear: cancer-specific mortality in these well-selected groups is less than 1%. In the clinic. With all this, the idea is that it is better to live with a controlled cancer than to pay the physical price of curing it, although logically, if it goes too far out of containment, the most correct thing is to try to eradicate it with the tools we have. In the case of papillary thyroid cancer We also have this same situation, since overdiagnosis has led to stopping aggressive surgery in favor of observing tumors that the body keeps at bay on its own. The new chronicity. Where the paradigm changes most dramatically is in advanced or metastatic cancer. Twenty years ago, a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer or metastatic melanoma was almost invariably a short-term terminal sentence. Today, thanks to immunotherapy and targeted therapies, a new category of patient has been born: the “treatable but not curable.” With this strategy there are already different organizations, like the British NCRIwhich describe growing cohorts of patients living for years with the disease. In this case they have metastases, but they live a normal life with their jobs and trips while receiving chronic or intermittent treatments to contain the disease. But without staying on the road. Changing the rules. This new paradigm within oncology has forced changing the rules of the game in clinical trialssince the aim is no longer just for the tumor to disappear, but for prolonged stabilization. With regard to toxicity, the logic of “maximum tolerated dose” in chemotherapy (give medication until the patient can tolerate it) does not work if you are going to treat the patient for five years, since their quality of life with very aggressive chemotherapy will decrease each time. Right now, quality of life and low toxicity are prioritized with ‘milder’ medications to allow long-term treatment without major side effects. This is why cancer is beginning to resemble, in its management, diabetes or HIV: a chronic condition that requires lifelong medication, but that does not necessarily dictate the date of your death. Psychological problems. Logically, this model of ‘chronic cancer’ has its shadows. Medical literature warns, for example, that living with “dormant” or controlled cancer places an enormous mental burden on patients. Studies on active surveillance show that, for some patients, the anxiety of having a “ticking time bomb” inside worsens their quality of life more than the surgery itself. And each review consultation can mean a world to know if it has gone more or less. And more problems. In addition to this, you must know that not all of these diseases can become chronic, such as glioblastoma or pancreatic cancer, which continue to have an aggressive biology that, today, escapes this lazy control. But also, turning cancer into chronic is great news for the patient, but a titanic challenge for public health, since it implies treating more people, for more years, with very high-cost biological drugs. The summary. Hanahan’s “cancer without disease” is not giving up. It is accepting that, if we cannot eliminate the enemy, victory lies in keeping it at bay long enough for life to continue its course and even allow science to continue advancing. As mortality statistics suggest: more and more people are dying with cancer, but fewer people of cancer. And in that nuance lies an entire medical revolution. Images | National Cancer … Read more

The great revolution of GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 is not that they are smarter. It’s that they can improve themselves

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Last week, OpenAI and Anthropic simultaneously launched their new AI models specialized in programming: GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6. Beyond the improvements they represent in performance or speed, which are truly amazing, both companies also stated something that completely changes the rules of the game: AI models are actively participating in their own development. Or put another way: AI is improving itself. Why does this change matter?. Generative artificial intelligence tools are reaching a high level of efficiency and precision, becoming in a few years from being co-workers for simple and specific tasks to being able to be involved in a good part of a development. According to the technical documentation of OpenAI, GPT-5.3 Codex “was instrumental in its own creation,” being used to debug its training, manage its deployment, and diagnose evaluation results. On the other hand, it is worth highlighting the words of Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, who in his personal blog affirms that AI writes “much of the code” in his company and that the feedback loop between the current generation and the next “gains momentum month by month.” In detail. What this means in practice is that each new generation of AI helps build the next, more capable one, which in turn will build an even better version. Researchers call it the “intelligence explosion,” and those developing these systems believe the process has already begun. Amodei has declared publicly that we could be “just 1 or 2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.” Most people use free language models that are available to everyone and are moderately capable of certain tasks. But they are also very limited, and are not a good reflection of what a cutting-edge AI model is capable of today. In a brief session with 5.3-Codex I was able to draw this same conclusion, since the AI ​​tools that big technology companies use in their development are nothing like the most commercial ones that we have freely available in terms of capabilities. The code-first approach. Initial specialization in programming makes more sense than we think. And the idea of ​​companies like OpenAI, Anthropic or Google that their systems were exceptional by writing code before anything else is linked to the fact that developing AI requires enormous amounts of code. And if AI can write that code, it can help build its own evolution. “Making AI great at programming was the strategy that unlocked everything else. That’s why they did it first,” Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI, said in a publication that has given us something to talk about these days on social networks. Between the lines. The new models don’t just write code: they make decisions, iterate on their own work, test applications as a human developer would, and refine the result until they are satisfied. “I tell the AI ​​what I want to build. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then it opens the app, clicks the buttons, tests the features. If it doesn’t like something, it goes back and changes it on its own. Only when it decides it meets its own standards does it come back to me,” counted Shumer describing his experience with GPT-5.3 Codex. What changes with self-reference. Until now, each improvement depended on human teams spending months training models, adjusting parameters and correcting errors. Now, some of that work is performed by AI itself, accelerating development cycles. Just like share Shumer and referring to METR dataan organization that measures the ability of these systems to complete complex tasks autonomously, the time that an AI can work without human intervention doubles approximately every seven months, and there are already recent indications that that period could be reduced to four. And now what. If this trend continues, by 2027 we could see systems capable of working autonomously for weeks on entire projects. Amodei has spoken of models “substantially smarter than almost all humans in almost all tasks” by 2026 or 2027. These are not distant predictions, since the technical infrastructure for AI to contribute to its own improvement is already operational. And these capabilities are what are really turning the technology industry on its head. Cover image | OpenAI and Anthropic In Xataka | We have a problem with AI. Those who were most enthusiastic at the beginning are starting to get tired of it.

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