shoot

shoot down missiles for less than a million dollars

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A single advanced interceptor missile can cost more than dozens of drones of combined attack, and in Ukraine and Iran several have been launched to neutralize a single threat. This imbalance has led to situations where protecting a target becomes too much more expensive than attacking it. Therefore, in modern warfare, the key is no longer just who has the best weapons, but who can sustain their use without going bankrupt. The paradigm shift. For decades, intercepting a ballistic missile has been one of the most expensive operations in modern warfare, with systems like the patriot forcing the firing of two or three interceptors worth several million dollars each to ensure a kill. This model has worked in limited conflicts, but recent wars have shown its limits when the volume of threats grows massively. So much in Ukraine as in the Middle Eastair defense has become a cost battle where the attacker launches cheaply and the defender responds expensively. In that context, the idea of ​​shooting down missiles for less than a million dollars is not an incremental improvement, but a radical change in the rules of the game. Ukraine and logic. Since the 2022 invasion, Ukraine has developed a military industry based on economic efficiency, producing drones and missiles at a fraction of the cost of traditional Western systems. Companies like Fire Point They have transferred that philosophy to air defense, proposing a system capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at a much lower cost than the current one. The objective is quite clear: break the bottleneck of extremely expensive operators and systems, and allow a scalable defense in volume. This logic, moreover, comes directly from the battlefield, where survival depends on both effectiveness and cost per unit. The goal: below one million. The goal of intercepting a missile below the million dollar threshold It means attacking the core of the current strategic problem, where each defense costs more than the attack it tries to neutralize. Yes Ukraine achieve this milestone in 2027as indicated this week, would change the economic equation of air warfare, making it viable to respond to massive attacks without quickly depleting resources. Not only that. Even with somewhat lower success rates than systems like the Patriot, simply being able to launch more interceptors at a lower cost could make up that difference. In practice, it would mean that defense would cease to be a scarce resource and become something replicable on a large scale. The context: saturation and scarcity. Let us think that the war in Ukraine and the Iranian attacks in the Gulf have shown a common problem: the shortage of advanced systems and the impossibility of maintaining the rate of consumption. Patriot missiles They are limited, expensive and slow to produce, while threats (whether drones, missiles or swarms) can be manufactured and launched in large quantities. This imbalance has put powers with enormous military budgets in check, forcing them to prioritize objectives and accept vulnerabilities. In that scenario, a cheaper solution is not only desirable, but necessary to sustain any prolonged defense. The global implications. Here may be the real one crux of that announced advance. If Ukraine manages to develop this system, the impact would go far beyond the current front, generating a global demand between countries that cannot afford multi-billion dollar defense systems. This, a priori, would democratize access to air defense, allowing more actors to protect their space without depending exclusively on the United States or limited systems such as the European SAMP/T. Furthermore, it would alter the strategic balance, since it would reduce the effectiveness of attacks based on saturation and volume. In other words, it would make it much harder to win a war simply by launching more missiles. The new balance. Therefore, the real change is not only in the price, but in reversing the economic logic of the conflict, which indicates that defending is no longer more expensive than attacking. If that point is reach next yearmany current strategies would lose meaning, from the massive use of drones to saturation bombings. From that perspective, Ukraine would be on the verge of achieving something truly unprecedented in modern military history, redefining the relationship between cost and power in the war. And that, more than any specific weapon, aims to mark the future of conflicts. Image | Fire Point In Xataka | Ukraine is close to achieving a milestone that no one has achieved: building the largest drone industry without China’s help In Xataka | Thousands of cigarette butts are crossing into Russia without Ukraine being able to do anything. Their goal: to become missiles

It is not necessary to shoot down US fighters, it is enough to force them to take off

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In World War II, the Soviet Union produced more than 100,000 tanksmany of them technically inferior to the Germans, but enough to tip the balance of the conflict. Because sometimes in war, the deciding factor is not sophistication, but how many times you can repeat the same move. Win by forcing take off. The conflict with Iran has exposed an American paradox, another onemost uncomfortable: the largest military power in the world can destroy targets with unprecedented precision and speed, but it has enormous difficulties to support the defense against much simpler and cheaper threats. Because instead of trying to shoot down fighters or directly confront American air superiority, Iran has adopted a different logic, one much closer (or exactly the same) as which Ukraine has perfected in his war: overwhelm the system enemy. Each drone launched does not seek to impact so much as to force a response, to activate radars, to take off fighters, to, in short, consume resources. The key, therefore, is not the individual damage, but the accumulated wear and tear to which it is subjected. The mathematics of combat. It’s as simple as a matter of numbers. The core of this strategy is purely economic. Drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars require the use of million interceptors or to keep in the air airplanes whose operating cost per hour already far exceeds the value of the objective they pursue. The result is an exchange deeply unequal in financial terms, where each defense is a small major economic defeat. The image is crystal clear, because using elite technology to counter low-cost threats is equivalent to spending high-end resources on problems that, first, do not justify it, and second, they create an unsustainable dynamic in the long term, even for an army with the most monstrous budget like that of the Pentagon. The Ukrainian mirror. As we said before, the model does not emerge from nothing, but from experience accumulated in Ukrainewhere the mass production of cheap drones has completely changed the battlefield. There, the quantity has proven to have an own value in the face of technological quality, with thousands of drones operating daily and forcing the adversary to disperse its defense. In addition, constant evolution (with software improvements every few weeks) has turned these systems into increasingly useful tools. more autonomous and difficult to counteract, especially in environments where GPS or traditional communications stop working. A preparation error. It we have counted on other occasions. For years, Western defenses were designed with high-end threats such as ballistic missiles in mind, leaving simpler systems in the background. The result is that drones, smaller, slower and more difficult to detect, have found an unexpected crack. Radars need specific adjustments, fighters have difficulty intercepting them due to their speed and flight profile, and the available solutions are totally inefficient. in terms of cost. In this context, resorting to advanced fighters or missiles does not seem like a structural solution, but more of a patch which aggravates the problem. War of attrition underway. In summary, and although it is impossible to ignore the US budget for stretch a war, Iran has so far not needed to win in the traditional sense to alter the balance of the conflict. A simple one was enough calculation exerciseone based on maintaining the pace while forcing the United States and its allies to continue responding, to consume inventories, to stress their logistics and make a hole in your budget. It is a war that, for the moment, is not decided on the classic battlefield, but on the ability to sustain the effort. And in that field, mathematics plays a decisive role: If each response costs more than the attack, the final result depends not on who has better weapons, but on who can afford to continue using them for longer. The “Ukrainian mathematics” applied in Iran. Image | RawPixel In Xataka | We wonder if it is safe to fly now that there are more drones than Ryanair planes: the answer is an Ockham’s razor In Xataka | The weapon to liberate Hormuz has fled 6,000 km from the war. And that just means the US is preparing for what comes next.

China has a nuclear reactor 100 times more efficient than traditional ones. The trick is to shoot atoms with an accelerator

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China has had one goal in mind for some years: to have a voice in the nuclear race. In the weaponsyes, but also in energy. As Europe argues and the United States attempts to rejuvenate its critical infrastructure to meet AI needs, China has been on the accelerator for months. Recently they have not only approved 10 new reactorsbut they are one step away from turning on a new generation nuclear power plant to provide ‘green’ energy for 1,000 years. This is the CiADS system, or Throttle Actuated System. It is a type of reactor that China has been developing for more than 15 years and that promises to convert waste into energy. Their trick is to convert “garbage” into fuel, and it is a very interesting twist for nuclear energy. And even more so in a China that wants to dominate the atom and renewables as a basis for the development of another of the great ambitions of the country. Artificial intelligence. A twist to nuclear energy In a releasethe Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences gave some details of how this accelerator-driven nuclear reactor works. Uranium is still the fuel, but “reactor driven by an accelerator” is literal. Using a particle accelerator, protons are “shot” at a heavy metal target at a speed of 0.8 times that of light. This generates neutrons that drive a reactor that operates somewhat below the critical threshold to be self-sustaining. The reactor generates energy and this violent reaction causes the long-lived radioactive isotopes that are normally generated in a conventional nuclear power plant to transmute and become materials with a shorter life. As its managers explain in SCMPthe CiADS is a hybrid between a nuclear reactor and a particle accelerator. The main advantage is that greatly reduces the risk of uncontrolled reactionsbut it has another: you can reuse the radioisotopes that normally would be treated as nuclear waste to continue producing energy. Firing beams of protons through these accelerators to bombard the heavy metal makes the uranium-238 give way to a new nuclear fuel: plutonium-239. According to the state media Science and Technology Daily, it is basically turning waste into treasures. According to those responsible, this method is 100 times more efficient than conventional fission and would allow nuclear energy to be converted into “a source of green, safe and stable energy for 1,000 years”, ensuring part of the necessary energy supply for the future. Furthermore, since what would previously be long-lasting waste is reused, the resulting CiADS has a useful life of less than one thousandth compared to conventional waste. The CiADS under construction They are two birds with one stone: China is wildly expanding its nuclear capacity, but it is estimated that it does not have as much uranium of its own and would continue to depend on imports… or to fish it in the sea. With “100 times more efficient” plants, you can get more juice out of what you have. And then there’s the fact that nuclear waste is less dangerous. If everything goes as planned, China will have its first MW-scale CiADS in 2027. It will be then when we check if those theoretical promises achieved by scale prototypes are fulfilled. The CiADS comes at a time when China has emerged as a contradiction in energy matters. They carry years fighting pollution and emissions, but they burn coal. They are a powerhouse in renewables with megastructures and deserts covered by panels. But in the age of AI, it is precisely that coal and gas that is the fuel that allows us to satisfy the demand of data centers at the peak of training. With nuclear weapons, China seeks further reduce your CO2 footprintbut ensuring a future in which it must feed the population, artificial intelligence and a network of technology companies that are doing the most difficult: fighting Western companies without the technological resources of the West. Because right now China doesn’t have the chips or the AI, but yes the energy. And that investment in new generation nuclear plants and, above all, in nuclear fusionrepresents the foundation of what is to come. Everything, that is, if the CiADS works as expected. Images | Sahaza Delis, Tighef In Xataka | There is a global race to be the first to reach nuclear fusion. And Germany just gave it an optimistic date

The US has decided to shoot itself in the foot and destroy one of the best AI companies in the country

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Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published a few hours ago a statement in which he announced something unusual: the Department of Defense (DoD) has confirmed that “we have been designated as a risk to the national security supply chain” of the United States. This agency thus fulfills the threat it posed a few days ago and automatically turns Anthropic, one of the best AI companies in the country (if not the best) into a pariah company. What implications does that have? Many and all of them huge. I veto Anthropic. This designation prohibits Anthropic from doing business or developing projects for the US military. That is already serious, but it is not just the Pentagon, for example, that will not do it: any company that works with the Pentagon is also prohibited from using Anthropic’s AI services for any government project. We are facing a decision whose collateral effects could be terrible for Anthropic. The loss of revenue could be massive, and if other federal agencies follow the Pentagon’s lead, Anthropic could have a hard time defending its viability against its competitors. That designation is not immediate, and there will be a transition period six months for DoD to migrate to other vendors (like OpenAI). It had never been done with a national company. The ban on Anthropic is absolutely extraordinary, and that designation as a “supply chain risk” was a measure historically reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei. By applying this label to an American company, the DoD severs its commercial ties and marks the company with a stigma, a kind of “scarlet letter” that could scare away global investors and partners. ethical shock. The core of the conflict is not technical, but moral. Anthropic was born as a spin-off from OpenAI with the aim of avoid existential risks in the development of AI models, and the company has always positioned itself as a great defender of alignment with human values. Its CEO, Dario Amodei, insisted that its AI could not be used for mass surveillance or for the development of lethal autonomous weaponsbut that has collided head-on with the US government and military establishments, which wanted practically total access without restrictions, except those imposed by the US Constitution and laws. to the courts. Amodei has explained in its statement that it will fight the decision in court. His argument, he explains, is that statute 10 USC 3252 It is a tool of protection, not punishment. The defense will need to focus on showing that the Department of Defense did not use the least restrictive means to ensure security. If they succeed, they could invalidate the designation, although the reputational damage has already been done. The dilemma of sovereignty. Can a private company be above the Government? The Pentagon argues that no supplier can slip through the chain of command, and one thing is certain here: for an AI to have usage clauses that limit military operations is to cede national sovereignty to a private algorithm and the terms of service of a board of directors and a CEO who have not been democratically elected. The threat of extreme interventionism. This unusual measure could end up setting a precedent. If the government punishes companies that ask uncomfortable questions or place limits on the use of their technology, AI innovation could change its philosophy. Companies that want to survive would have to do so without questioning the orders out of pure fear of bankruptcy and bankruptcy. Transition period. There is, however, a period of six months granted for the transition and that seems to make it clear that the Pentagon still depends on Anthropic technology for current operations, as demonstrated by the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro or the current intelligence analysis of the conflict in Iran. It remains to be seen how events will evolve, but the outlook for Anthropic is certainly worrying. And for the rest of the companies too, if indeed justice rules in favor of the Department of Defense. Image | Anthropic | Xataka with Freepik In Xataka | Anthropic has become the Apple of our era and OpenAI our Microsoft: a story of love and hate

China surrounded an enclave with robots. Now they have been given a rifle to shoot at 100 meters, and the result points to an island

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China has been leaving increasingly explicit clues about how it imagines future conflicts. In 2025, PLA maneuvers included island assault exercises minors using ground robots and unmanned systems, a sign that Beijing is no longer testing only classic amphibious crossings, but scenarios where machines make way before soldiers. Those practices marked a clear direction: Combat automation was no longer a distant theory, but something China was beginning to test on the ground. Now he has amplified it. Drones with rifle. China has made a qualitative leap in the use of combat drones by demonstrating that a UAV armed with a standard assault rifle can be 100% right of his shots against a human target at 100 meters while remaining in hover. The system, developed by a Chinese company together with the PLA special operations academy, fired 20 times and placed half of the hits in a comparable radius. a shot to the heada result that makes it clear that these are no longer experimental platforms but rather precision weapons ready for real environments. Extra ball. It does not seem like a specific experiment or a laboratory demonstration: the team itself has explained that the only “imperfect” shot was due defective ammunitionnot the system, making this test an unmistakable sign of where Chinese combat power is headed. Taiwan and a problem. This progress cannot be understood without the Taiwan backdropone of the most urbanized territories on the planet, where any military operation would require fighting in dense megacities, full of civilians, underground infrastructure and narrow streets that neutralize many traditional advantages. For the PLA, the challenge is not just cross the seabut to dominate neighborhoods, subway stations and residential complexes where human infantry suffer enormous political and military costs. The Chinese response to this dilemma is neither doctrinal nor moral, but technical: dealing with urban warfare as an engineering problem which can be solved by delegating violence to machines capable of moving, identifying targets and shooting without fatigue or fear. A bet. In fact, recalled in The Diplomat that the essay of the armed drone fits into the third major phase of Chinese military modernization, the so-called “intelligentization,” which seeks to replace human decisions with distributed artificial intelligence systems. Having mechanized and digitized its forces, the PLA now aims to delegate key functions (detection, prioritization and attack) to algorithms that operate faster than any human chain of command. In this framework, a drone with a rifle is not a curiosity, but rather an elemental piece of an ecosystem where sensors, weapons and software act in a coordinated manner, reducing the role of the soldier. to a mere initial authorizer or, in the extreme, eliminating him from decision-making altogether. Swarms in alleys. There is much more, because the medium stood out documents and studies linked to Chinese military universities that reveal that the target is not individual drones, but autonomous swarms specifically designed for urban warfare. These systems are designed to operate at low altitudes, inside buildings, indoors and underground, even when communications are degraded or non-existent. Through simple rules and self-organization, swarms They could patrol areastrack people and execute attacks without receiving orders in real time, a solution that the PLA consider ideal to neutralize defenses in cities such as Taipei or Kaohsiung and to eliminate key objectives before external forces can intervene. The gray area of ​​legality. The technological bet is accompanied by a legal position deliberately ambiguous by Beijing on lethal autonomous weapons. As? Defining as unacceptable Only those systems that simultaneously meet a series of very strict criteria, China leaves itself a wide margin to develop weapons capable of killing without direct human supervision, as long as they can be stopped in theory or follow pre-programmed rules. This ambiguity, they say, contrasts with documented risks of AI in combat (identification errors, inability to interpret human intentions, data biases) and makes it easier for research to advance without clear regulatory brakes. The future that is being tested today. In short, the drone that shoot with surgical precision at 100 meters is not an anecdote, but tangible proof of where the Beijing strategy: move the war to the heart of the city and delegate it to machines. There is no doubt that if this model is applied in a conflict such as Taiwan, the combination of autonomous swarms, integrated light weapons and decisions without human intervention could multiply the risk for civilians and reduce the political thresholds for the use of force. From that prism, what is presented today as a technical experiment is, in reality, a most disturbing preview: that of an urban war where the alleys are no longer patrolled by soldiers, but by armed robots that will never ask questions. Image | Heeheemalu In Xataka | The biggest geopolitical risk on the planet is not Greenland. It’s a smaller island with a disturbing neighbor: Taiwan In Xataka | 200 drones in the hands of a single soldier: China is advancing very quickly in a type of war that seemed like science fiction

an AI that decides when to shoot has hidden where it is least expected

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In recent months, Ukraine has seen technological leaps that until very recently were more typical of the realm of science fiction. Of the machines capturing and taking prisoners went to drones attacking on his own in a matter of weeks or even the arrival of a “general AI” capable of converting soldiers in “invisibles”. The latest: a kind of cross between Terminator and Predator. From improvised anti-aircraft weapon to autonomous system. Yes, Ukraine has turned urgency into advanced military engineering by developing what they have called like Predatoran automated machine gun turret initially created for the Magura naval drones could face Russian helicopters and fighters that They patrolled the Black Seaa space where air pressure on Ukrainian operations increased after the success of unmanned attacks against the Russian Fleet. The Predator debuted in combat end of 2024when its sensors and target acquisition capabilities allowed two helicopters to be shot down using missiles fired from other naval drones, and months later it helped shoot down a Russian Su-30, demonstrating that an unmanned explosive vehicle could also provide anti-aircraft cover. A twist. Once the success of the machine was seen, Ukraine decided to “hide it” where it would be a surprise to the enemy. It turns out that integrating this turret into a maritime platform was a complex challenge which made it necessary to guarantee stability in adverse conditions, precision in a moving hull and compatibility with guidance processes that combine optical sensors, artificial intelligence and gyroscopic systems. The Predator turret equipped on a small tracked vehicle Naval technology adapted for drone warfare. Thus, although it was born for the sea, recent tests of the Predator have confirmed its usefulness in the dominant theater of modern warfare: the FPV drone combat loaded with explosives, responsible for a growing share of Ukrainian losses on the ground. With 7.62mm ammunition, optical sensors, gyroscopic stabilization and automatic detection alerts, the system can be mounted on track vehicles or in the bed of a pick-up, shooting on the move and following minimum targets of just a few centimeters at 100 meters. And more. Artificial intelligence allows the turret identify threats and present options to the operator, who maintains the final decision to avoid fratricidal fires, while the new versions incorporate laser rangefinders and precision improvements adapted to drones controlled by radio frequency or fiber optics. From Ukraine to NATO. The rapid industrialization of the Predator (more than thirty units built and a plan to produce a hundred a month in less than half a year, with a unit cost of less than $100,000 for the Ukrainian forces) makes this system one of the most agile developments of the Ukrainian military complex. In fact, its success has awakened the NATO interestwhich invited the company to an Innovation Challenge and put the system to the test at an evaluation event in France, where the manufacturer presented it remotely as a modular and immediately deployable solution to threats that evolve with weeks, not years, of margin. Additionally, UGV Robotics plans a larger caliber model, the Apex Predatorwith .50 ammunition and the ability to intervene against heavier aerial threats, aiming to turn these turrets into an exportable standard for Western allies. The new paradigm of Ukrainian defense. The story of this turret illustrates how Ukraine is integrating naval and land capabilities into the same combat ecosystem automation basedmodular sensors and systems capable of operating on unmanned platforms, a strategy driven by constant pressure from Russian drones and the need to protect both infantry and exposed vehicles. In this context, a design conceived so that an explosive drone would not be shot down from the air is now transformed into a ground defense against cheap and lethal swarms, making the Predator a symbol of Ukraine’s shift towards a distributed, adaptive defense focused on neutralizing asymmetric threats before they reach their objective. Image | UGV Robotics In Xataka | It’s not that the war in Ukraine has been gamified, it’s that there are now “hero points” to exchange for exclusive weapons In Xataka | In the midst of rearmament, Europe has realized an unimportant detail: it does not have enough bullets

A new threat has arrived in the skies of Europe. They are not drones or fighters, and the order is to shoot before you ask

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For weeks now, the European sky has has converted in a silent front of hybrid war: brief incursions, weak signals, ambiguous trajectories and objects that, without carrying clear flags, force airport closures, diversions of trade routes and military responses that consume resources and erode civil normality. The pattern is repeated from the Baltics to Central Europe and seems designed to measure the NATO reflexes. Now something else has arrived, and it’s not drones or fighter jets. Balloon waves. Lithuania has announced that will bring down any balloon that crosses from Belarus after detecting in one go 66 night intrusions and chain closures of Vilnius airport. The government described the phenomenon as hybrid attack and activated the closure of the eastern border, initially temporary but set to become indefinite, with minimal exceptions for diplomats and EU citizens in transit. The decision marks a turning point on NATO’s eastern flank, where violations of airspace by drones, balloons and Russian aircraft are increasing. have become recurring in recent weeks, from Estonia and Poland to Denmark, Norway and Germany, fueling the impression of a sustained campaign of provocations calibrated to measure reflexes, saturate defenses and erode political tolerance at the cost of deterrence. Nature and sign. The balloons (some weighing more than 50 kilos, also used for tobacco smuggling) are interpreted not only as a criminal economy but also as a cheap instrument. psychological warfare and technical rehearsal: they stretch the “gray zone” five kilometers inward, force airport closures, degrade logistics, strain the civil and military decision chain and expose the friction of activating rules of engagement against targets no classic military sign. Lithuania will involve NASAMS, RBS-70, Avengers and MANPADS in neutralization, despite stocks depleted by transfers to Ukraine and the intrinsic difficulty of shooting down balloons with low radar signature and low kinetic energy. The political message is deliberate: any permeability (even if it seems marginal) will be treated as a strategic precedent. Escalation in NATO. We said it at the beginning, the episode arrives after penetrations of Su-30, Il-78 and MiG-31 in the Baltics, and after the recording of swarms of drones over Poland, Denmark, Munich or the Baltic, with more than 170 flights disrupted in one week in Vilnius and almost 14,000 passengers affected. Reiteration converts the episodic in pattern: state actors exploit loopholes in regulations (civil balloons, meteorological assumptions, smuggling) to degrade the continuity of European civil aviation and test the elasticity of ROE and allied cohesion without crossing explicit thresholds of article 5. Lithuania, in fact, studies consultations under article 4and has hinted that the closure could extend to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, raising the economic-logistical vector of the pulse. Hybrid war as a framework. Vilnius is clearand describes the phenomenon as a psychological operation aimed at disrupting daily life, testing NATO-EU synchrony and normalizing aggression (of low lethality, of course) as noise permanent. The background signal (at no point is Moscow explicitly named) fits into the repertoire hybrid warfare: discreet sabotage, information manipulation, low signal intrusion, erosion of trust and critical infrastructure, in conjunction with the war in Ukraine and under the plausible protection of Belarus. Plus: the closure of borders is accompanied by tougher criminal penalties against smuggling and coordination with Poland and Latvia to shield the eastern edge as a strategic unit, given the calculation that firmness, the earlier, will define how much the enemy will dare later. Image | LITHUANIAN MINISTRY OF DEFENSE In Xataka | Europe has decided to take action against Moscow’s hybrid war. So Germany has started hunting for Russian drones In Xataka | The Spanish invention that simplifies the hunt for Europe’s biggest threat: how to detect the arrival of drones in a matter of seconds

Japan is so desperate for its bears that it will allow hunters to shoot them in cities. Problem: you run out of hunters

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Tuesday was not an easy day Numatain Gunma prefecture, north of Tokyo. Around seven thirty in the afternoon the police received the notice that a 1.4 meter bear He had sneaked into a supermarket with several dozen customers and destroyed the fish and sushi sections. He also injured two people, one in the parking lot and another inside the store. It is not an isolated case. Not anything exclusive to Numata. Japan has a serious problem of encounters with bears. To solve it, the authorities have decided to use their most experienced hunters, but they won’t make it easy either. There are less and less. What has happened? That Japan has a problem with encounters between bears and humans, episodes that in most cases result in scares or injuries, but that sometimes end with the worst outcomes. It’s not something newbut statistics show that the problem is far from being solved. CNS News assures that between April and September 108 people suffered injuries caused by bears, reflecting a similar rate to the year between March 2023 and 2024, when the Government recorded a record of 219 attacks. Is it that serious? Many of the encounters end in scares or injuries, but the Japanese media also talk about an all-time high number of deaths: seven, the highest number since records began in 2006. The people who have suffered attacks also include both locals and tourists from other countries. In fact, just a few days ago a Spaniard received the blow in the village of Shirakawa-goWorld Heritage Site. In Shiretokoanother place popular with tourists, the trails were closed after an attack in August. What is the reason? Better to talk about ‘reasons’, in plural. When analyzing the problem, a cocktail of causes is usually cited in which environmental issues are mixed with other social and demographic issues. At the end of the day the record of attacks arrives in full abandonment from rural areas and farmland and with a serious population decline that the country has been dragging on for several decades. There are those who include other causes in the equation, such as the effect of climate change on food availability or fluctuations in acorn and beechnut harvests, which cause food scarcity among the adult population. The truth is that Japan is losing inhabitantsis suffering a rural exodus, has seen the borders between populated centers and forests blur and the country has also seen a clear increase in the bear population. Yomiuri Shimbun ensures that the number of black bears has tripled since 2012, with tens of thousands of copies, to which are added the brown from Hokkaido. And how to solve it? The big question. A month ago the country took an important decision and not exempt from controversy: Amended its wildlife protection and management law to relax rules governing what hunters can and cannot do in densely populated neighborhoods. To be more precise, the new regulations allow municipalities to commission hunters to carry out “emergency hunts” for dangerous animals in inhabited areas. Until now, the general rule prohibited killing wild animals with weapons in public spaces. It could only be authorized (and exceptionally) by the police in cases of imminent danger. After the legislative changemunicipal governments may authorize hunts against brown or black bears in densely populated areas provided that certain requirements are met: first, it must be an emergency measure; second, there can be no room for other solutions; and third (and most importantly) it must be ensured that no stray bullet will end up harming a resident. The idea is that only authorized hunters intervene. End of the problem? Not quite. Japan has decided to rely on hunters to solve bear attacks, but the problem is that in the country (like in Spain) there are fewer and fewer hunters. The diary The Mainichi published on Thursday a extensive report in which he recalls that the number of licenses in force in Japan has been decreasing as the population has decreased, the fields have been abandoned and society has changed. If in 1976 there were 500,000 first-level permits approved, since 2012 the figure has always been below 100,000. Who will shoot the bears? In Japan, there is also debate about who will be able to kill bears in neighborhoods full of houses and people. The Government already has announced that the measure will be accompanied by training workshops to guarantee that the system works correctly, which also includes planning security measures, restricting access and evacuating residents. “Emergency shots” are not in any case the only solution that the country has on the table. On the trails of Fukushima, for example, they have installed devices with sensors that seek to scare away animals. The idea: that they emit an annoying buzzing sound that becomes more intense when the bears approach. Images | Suzi Kim (Unsplash) In Xataka | Wolf hunting throughout Spain depended on a red button that changes its status. And Europe has decided to press it

The semiconductors will shoot the price

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PWC has published in its report ‘Global semiconductor industry outlook 2026‘A projection: completely autonomous vehicles (level 5) will need five times more semiconductors than a traditional car. And its cost will multiply by ten. A current basic car (level 0) carries between 200 and 300 chips valued at about $ 500. They serve mainly for engine control, safety and infotainment systems. Nothing especially sophisticated. Why is it important. The semiconductor content of a car will multiply by ten when we reach full autonomy. From the current 500 dollars to more than $ 5,000 per vehicle. This jump will change the cost structure of the car industry and create a gigantic market for chips manufacturers. The climbing. Each level of autonomy shoot the needs: Level 1 and 2: driver assistance and automatic distance maintenance. The cost rises to about 800 dollars in chips. Level 3: Autonomous driving on highways without constant supervision. More than 1,000 semiconductors and about $ 2,000. Level 4: Autonomous operation in the city, limited to specific areas. The cost reaches $ 3,200. Level 5: Total autonomy in any climatic and traffic condition. More than $ 5,000 per vehicle. The context. The explosion in semiconductor content responds to the fact that autonomous vehicles must process large volumes of real -time data, and that translates into computing capacity, and more information collected from the environment. A level 3 car already needs more than 1,000 semiconductors to capture information around it, high performance computer chips (HPC) to process it, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and electronic control units to maneuver the vehicle. The most advanced designs will add chips for vehicle-a-all communication (V2X), exchanging data with the road and other cars. Meanwhile, the transition to the electric car continues to increase the demand for power semiconductors for investors and battery management. In detail. The architecture of an autonomous car is divided into technological layers, each with its own semiconductors: Sensors: radars, lidar sensors, cameras and ultrasound that capture the environment. Each type requires specialized chips to process its signal. Computing: High performance CPUS and GPUS that execute AI algorithms to interpret data and make decisions. Electrification: semiconductors of silicon carbide (sic) and of Gallium Nitruro (Gan) to manage electric power with greater efficiency. Connectivity: Chips for 5G communication, V2X and remote updates. Control: electronic units that translate decisions into mechanical actions. Image: Freepik, Xataka. Turning point. Level 4 vehicles will start commercially climbing around 2030, mainly in Robotaxis services In delimited urban areas or transportation hub-to-hub of goods. Level 5, capable of operating without a steering wheel in any condition, will arrive much later, perhaps even in the next decade but something later. This calendar gives time to the semiconductor industry to prepare, but also points out that the great ball is still seen. Yes, but. This projection assumes mass production and that technology will fulfill its safety promises. Nothing guaranteed. Technical difficulties, regulatory frameworks and social acceptance can slow down the deployment. Between the lines. Tesla, General Motors and Ford already design their own chips for central computers and ADAS systems. They seek control over critical technology and differentiation. Traditional semiconductor manufacturers (Infineon, NXP, STMICROELECTRONICS) will share market with these new competitors. In Xataka | I have tried a totally autonomous taxi. This is traveling without driver Outstanding image | GibblesMash Asdf

He has found a way to shoot China’s competitiveness in the face of the US

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Two days ago we told you something very interesting: the Chinese state medium Securities Times had revealed that Huawei was about to present a technological advance that pursued Reduce China dependence of HBM memory chips (High Bandwidth Memory) from abroad. According to this source Huawei was going to officially announce his technological milestone a few hours later, during the celebration in Shanghai (China) of the Applications Forum and Development of Financial Reasoning 2025. Huawei has fulfilled what was promised, although not as we had planned. In any case, before getting into flour it is important that we remember that Chinese memory chips manufacturers They are not producing solutions capable of competing with the most advanced memories manufactured by South Korean companies Samsung and SK Hynix, or the American Micron Technology. GPUs for Ia work side by side with HBM memory chips. In fact, its performance is largely conditioned by these memories. As the editors of SEMIANALYSISthe total bandwidth of the HBM3 memory chips that live with some of THE GPU FOR THE MOST ADVANCED Nvidia or AMD exceeds 819 GB/s, while DDR5 and GDDR6X memories reach much more modest 70.4 GB/Sy 96 GB/s. HBM3E memories and future HBM4 are even better. Chinese manufacturers of this type of chips do not yet produce this kind of memories, but it seems that Huawei will deeply alter this scenario. An algorithm expressly designed to accelerate inference in AI The filtration that occurred scarcely 48 hours suggested that probably what Huawei was going to present was a avant -garde packaging technology that, perhaps, would rival those used by SK Hynix, Samsung or Micron to produce their HBM3 and 3E memories. And it is that manufacturing these integrated circuits is complex because they require stacking several DRAM chips and implementing an interface between the XPU (Extended Processing Unit) or extended processing unit and extraordinarily dense HBM chips. As a button shows: in a HBM3E stack the XPU and the HBM memory are linked through more than 1,000 drivers. According to Huawei, the UCM algorithm is capable of drastically accelerating inference in the great AI models However, finally Huawei has presented a different technology: an advanced algorithm called UCM (Unified Cache Manager) that, according to this company, it is capable of drastically accelerate inference In the great models of artificial intelligence (AI). A relevant note: inference is broadly the computational process carried out by language models with the purpose of generating the responses that correspond to the requests they receive. To achieve its purpose, the UCM algorithm displays a very ingenious strategy: decide in what type of memory it is necessary to store each data taking as a fundamental indicator the latency requirements. In practice, this algorithm behaves as a gigantic cache that guarantees that each data will go to the right memory, including HBM3, with the purpose of minimizing latency during inference. If it is a very often used data, it will be stored in a very fast memory, such as HBM3. According to Huaweithis technology is able to reduce the latency of inference by 90%. Interestingly, this company plans to do the UCM Source Open Algorithm in September. More information | SCMP In Xataka | Nvidia has to deal with the absolute distrust of several US legislators. His plan in China is in danger In Xataka | The US wants to end the chips for the Chinese that are sold abroad. And China knows how to defend oneself

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