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The entire global electricity grid, in an impressive interactive map that shows the evolution of the energy transition

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There are few infrastructures as complex and essential to living in the world as we know it as the electrical grid, which in practice for most mortals is reduced to touching a switch or connecting a plug to the socket and it works. Behind the world’s electrical infrastructure there is a huge conglomerate of equipment, careful planning and uses that are changing (among other things, due to the now so famous data centers). It is not the only thing that is being transformed: the energy transition is making it possible for those resources that once supplied the electrical grid to give way to renewable energies. But not all countries in the world have the same density of electrical networks or the same sources, because in fact there are real black holes in this very complete world map of the electrical network. Is called OpenGridWorks and is an interactive map of the entire world’s electrical infrastructure, from a small solar plant to the great lines that cross continents. And we already told you that it attracts attention not only for the beauty of the chromatic compositions, but also for practical purposes: from planning an engineering project to analyzing energy policy. Opengridworks This map is actually a web platform for geospatial visualization of electrical infrastructure. All its data comes from OpenStreetMap, the world’s largest open, collaborative geographic database, maintained by volunteers and experts on an ongoing basis. This guarantees global coverage, constant updating and completely free access. But for network and infrastructure data it uses information from Global Energy Monitor or the United States Energy Information Administration, among others. Its purpose is to show, in a clear and interactive way, where electricity is generated, how it travels through the grid and where consumption is concentrated. It is worth stopping at the layers and all the information it shows because as we warned you before it is very complete, so if you leave all the options activated you will find yourself in a mess. If you move on the map and get closer, you will be able to see information such as: What technology provides the energy in the form of a colored bubble: blue for hydroelectric, red for thermal, yellow for solar, green for wind and purple for nuclear. The size of each bubble represents the installed capacity in MW Transmission lines are drawn thicker the higher their voltage (from 100 kV to 765 kV) and substations appear as nodes where these lines converge. Data centers also appear in the shape of a white diamond as they are points of intensive consumption. On the other hand, easement strips (ROW) appear as shaded areas around lines and facilities. Opengridworks But you will also be able to see additional information when you hover the pointer over any of the points. An example: when touching the Montes de Cierzo wind farm in Tudela, we will see that it is in operation and the energy it provides. What the global electrical map reveals about the energy transition Playing with the zoom and scrolling you quickly discover that there are areas of saturation and others that are a desert of infrastructure. From an engineering point of view, the map allows you to search for the closest interconnection point for a new project or detect nodes whose failure would leave regions without supply. Beyond engineering, it is an energy policy tool: it highlights the electrification gaps in developing countries, shows the real progress of renewables compared to fossil fuels, and allows the resilience of different national networks to be compared. AND abysmal differences are observed. Opengridworks The densest networks They are concentrated in the United States, central Europe and China, while sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia show very poor coverage that reveals an electrical blackout. In South America, the areas with the most infrastructure are on the Atlantic coast, although there are also some timid points on the Pacific coast. However, inside we barely find more than a fade to black. The colors of energy sources also change on the map, still dominated by thermal generation, although in Western Europe and China the advance of solar and wind power is a reality already perfectly visible. This map also reveals curiosities such as that nuclear plants always appear next to rivers or coasts due to cooling needs and hydroelectric plants are concentrated in the large river systems of the world. The data centers are also not placed at random, but are clustered near large transmission nodes to ensure supply. In Xataka | How much electricity each country on the map produces with renewable energy, displayed on a graph In Xataka | The amount of nuclear energy generated by each country, detailed in this interactive map Cover | OpenGrid Works

This map shows what the Earth will be like in 250 million years. If it comes true, Spain will be very lucky

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About 200 million years ago, the last supercontinent began to break up. The division of Pangea It gave way, very little by little, to the current geological composition. But what was separated will come together again. The continents keep movingcrashing into each other, and one theory suggests that it will be within 250 million years when another supercontinent will emerge. We have named it as Pangea Ultimaand the truth is that it will not matter exactly which countries we have as neighbors. Pangea Ultima. plate tectonics It is curious because they continue to move one under the other, and that is what has led to the theory of continental drift. These movements are studied to understand the past, as well as to decipher the future, and one of those scholars is Christopher Scotese. This American geographer is the creator of the PALEOMAP Projectwhich seeks to show not only how the elements have moved these last 1,000 million years, but is also attributed the prediction of that future supercontinent. and Scotese elaborated this map: What is it that has inspired the one who opens this article: Curious neighbors. According to this, within about 50 million years North America would have rotated so much that Alaska would be at a subtropical latitude and Eurasia would also rotate, but in the opposite direction, making Britain closer to the North Pole. Africa will move closer to Europe and Arabia, both the Red Sea and the Mediterranean will disappear and, within 100 million years, the Atlantic will begin to shrink. It will be in 150 million years when the Atlantic will disappear as a result of being sucked in by the American continent, bringing America and that block composed of Eurasia and Africa much closer. And the culmination will occur within 200 million years when this new supercontinent is formed, with the Indian Ocean as a central sea and a curious neighborhood mix. According to this model, Latin America would be more or less the same, but with African neighbors to the east. Cuba would be attached to the United States, Greenland would be next to Canada (bad luck, Trump) and Spain would continue to border France and Portugal, but also with Italy, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. England would also be close to France and Korea would be in a curious sandwich between Japan and China. It will make exactly the same. But the truth is that it doesn’t matter what your new neighbors seem to you, not because, obviously, you won’t be there to suffer them, but because humanity may have become extinct by then. Not because we sometimes put effort into it, but because the conditions will not be the most ideal for the life of mammals. In a study Published in Nature, researchers predicted that 92% of the Earth would be uninhabitable for mammals. The reason is that, in a simulation of the climate of this new supercontinent, it is estimated that the temperatures of a large part of Pangea Ultima will be more than 40ºC, but in addition the amounts of CO₂ will make the life of mammals… complicated. Due to the number of collisions between plates, there will be great volcanic activity that will increase the CO₂ emissions into the atmospherea, not only warming the planet, but also encouraging the levels of this CO₂ to double the current levels. In addition, the Sun will be 2.5% brighter at that time because its nuclear fusion rate will have increased and this is something that will also contribute to making the planet drier. Spain not so bad. It’s not a very encouraging outlook, to be honest, since plant life will also experience mass extinction, but researchers point out that conditions may not be so bad in all parts of the new world. Thus, those closest to the top of the North Pole could have cooler conditions that facilitate better adaptation to life. And Spain, Portugal, Morocco or England are in that scenario. It is also possible that we become specialists in desert environments, becoming nocturnal animals in something similar to what was seen in ‘Dune‘. Alexander Farnsworth, one of the researchers who have simulated the climate conditions of that future, also analyzed From the most serious point of view, how life makes its way in the climate of Arrakis and points to this parallelism with the Earth in 250 million years. one more. Is this what the Earth will look like in 250 million years? Namely, but there are several hypotheses formulated in recent decades that, in one way or another, point to the existence of that supercontinent. One is Novopangeawhere the Pacific will close. another is Auricawith the closure of both the Atlantic and the Pacific. And another model is Amasiawith the union between Asia and America. And it doesn’t matter the model, they are still similar to the last Pangea and, after this new supercontinent, the estimate is that the Atlantic will open again, separating the countries and beginning a new cycle of rupture. What will happen to life? Well, it will make its way, as the great Jeff Goldblum already said in ‘jurassic park‘, because mass extinctions… there have been several. Image | Coffee In Xataka | The Earth has moons that we don’t know about: exploring them is key to revealing the secrets of our solar system In Xataka | This map is a journey through time: this is how the Earth has evolved for 750 million years A version of this article was published in 2025

Science finally shows that they hunted the largest beasts of their time

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The classic image of neanderthal as a brute hominid with no intelligence and that barely survived by scavenging what other predators left behind, it is increasingly being left behind as we make new discoveries. Precisely, we now know that 125,000 years ago, our evolutionary cousins They were Europe’s apex predators, capable of organizing to take down the most formidable land creature of their time: the straight-tusked elephant. A beast that doubled the size of today’s African elephants and reached 13 tons in weight. The mystery of the spear. To reach this conclusion we have not traveled back in time, but rather we have gone to Leringen in Germany. Here in 1948 archaeologists found a skeleton of the straight-tusked elephant, with a 2.4 meter yew spear stuck between the ribs. A priori it seemed like the definitive proof or, as some anthropologists have called it, the smoking gun of Neanderthal hunting. However, scientific skepticism prevailed: was it a coordinated attack or did a group of opportunistic Neanderthals find an elephant trapped in the mud and finish it off? This is where a great debate has been generated that has now been closed in 2026 with the publication of a new scientific article. What have they done? Here the researchers have basically focused on the skeletal remains of the animal that was found, and the objective was to find the details of the hunting process. What they saw was that the cut marks and damage to the bones did not correspond to a simple opportunistic shot, but to a frontal and tactical attack. In this way, experts point out that the Lehringen spear is no longer an anomaly or a happy coincidence, but rather irrefutable proof of systematic hunting behavior. The context. In addition to what has now been known, in the past researchers demonstrated that the hunt for these titans was not an isolated event, but rather a systematic and recurring practice. The problem that was seen is that shooting down a 13-ton elephant raises the obvious question: what do you do with so much meat before it rots? This is where the classic perception of the Neanderthal falls apart. An elephant of that size provided enough calories to feed 100 people for a month, and processing that amount of meat and fat required three basic points: Groups of people larger than previously believed, which break with the idea of ​​small nomadic bands of 20 individuals. Settle in a specific area when you have plenty of food. Master fire and techniques, such as drying meat so that it can last for a long time. A new image. With all this research, the truth is that the textbooks have to be rewritten, since you can see how Neanderthals had the cognitive ability to plan, the communication necessary to coordinate mass ambushes, and the social structure to process and store tons of food. Images | Wikipedia Generation with AI In Xataka | The great mystery of sex between Neanderthals and Sapiens: genetics suggest that Neanderthal males preferred human women

A study shows that we pay more attention to doctors if they are rude and arrogant

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Lovers of medical series may have a reference in their mind, such as Gregory Housea brilliant but insufferable doctor noted for his sheer arrogance. Fiction here taught us that we forgave him for his bad manners simply because he was a genius who saved lives, although now we may wonder what would happen in real life:we would put up with a doctor like that? science wanted to respond to this, pointing out that as patients we would not only tolerate it, but that we would pay much more attention to it than to a kind doctor. A paradigm shift. Although it may seem absurd, the doctor-patient relationship is something that It’s about cultivating from your own career of medicine in their first courses in order to achieve greater empathy and closeness to the patient. Something that, beyond the good manners that one should have, also serves as another diagnostic tool. But the fact that as patients we are much more obedient to a somewhat borderline doctor is something that has surprised, and that is why it has been dubbed the ‘Doctor House effect’. Here the objective was unravel a mystery of human communication: How a lack of civility affects our ability to be persuaded when it comes to our health. The experiment. To test our impression with these doctors, the team conducted three experiments with almost 200 participants. The premise here was quite simple, as it focused on evaluating how people reacted to different types of health advice, playing with variables such as the experience of the person giving the advice or the politeness of the person speaking. The results. These They have attracted the attention of a large part of the communitysince it breaks what doctors have been instilled in since their careers. What was seen is that, when the advice came from an expert in the field, the use of very arrogant language turned out to be much more persuasive than an affable and polite tone. In other words, acting like Dr. House was working much better than he imagined. But curiously, this study shows that there is a double standard. In this case, if the person giving the advice was not an expert authority figure, the exact opposite happened: using arrogant language destroyed credibility, with courtesy being the only way to persuade the patient to follow the most appropriate medical advice. Because Are we attracted to being talked down to? This is the question we may be asking ourselves right now, and science suggests that the key does not lie in a strange clinical masochism, but in expectations and how we manage care. Here we must understand that in our modern society there is an unwritten social contract that dictates that we must be kind and polite, especially in environments like a doctor’s office. But when a health expert abruptly breaks that rule and constantly swaggers at us, our brain goes into a state of alert. And this “unexpected rudeness” acts as a switch to capture a massive amount of our cognitive attention. The scene is clear in this situation: when we are surprised by a doctor’s borderlineness when we did not expect it, we process his message much more deeply. And the impact is so strong that persuasion works regardless of the initial relevance we gave to the topic being discussed or the biases with which it was arrived at. Not so fast. Obviously, the conclusions of this 2026 study are not a carte blanche for health professionals to start insulting us in our next medical check-up, but it does teach us a lesson about human communication and how sometimes not everything is as we think in an idyllic mind. In Xataka | Spending all day scrolling on Instagram or TikTok has a very specific effect on your brain: it dwarfs

AI solves equations and chops code, but continues to crash with PDFs: the explanation shows its limits

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It’s probably happened to you. You upload a PDF to an artificial intelligence chatbot in the hope that it will summarize a report, extract a table or find a specific piece of information for you in a matter of seconds. And, sometimes, he succeeds. But other times, the result is disconcerting: mixed columns, footnotes embedded in the middle of the text, tables converted into an illegible block or answers that do not faithfully reflect what the document says. The paradox is evident. Systems that already demonstrate clear advances in mathematics and programming They keep stumbling upon something as everyday as a PDF. And there is more than a simple punctual failure. Change of mentality. Although for us it is a document with well-defined paragraphs, titles and tables, for the system that processes it the situation may be very different. PDF is, first and foremost, a way to visually describe how a page should be rendered. And when a chatbot like Gemini either ChatGPT If you try to work with it, you do not always access an ordered structure, but rather a set of graphical instructions that you must first reconstruct before you can respond coherently. And that difference is better understood when we look at how a PDF “saves” information. How you actually organize information. Unlike a web page, where the content follows a logical order defined in the code, a PDF can store text as independent fragments placed at specific positions on the page. Many times, the file retains coordinates and placement instructions, but not necessarily explicit relationships between one sentence and the next. This implies that the order in which the text “appears” when extracted does not always coincide with the order in which we read it. If your document includes multiple columns, tables, or overlapping elements, the system must figure out how they fit together. And that deduction is not always trivial. {“videoId”:”x9hhg44″,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”The TRUTH of AI – This is how ChatGPT 4, DALL-E or MIDJOURNEY works 🤖 🧠 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”, “tag”:”webedia-prod”, “duration”:”1173″} What happens with HTML. On a web page, the content is organized in an explicit hierarchy– There are tags that indicate what a title is, what a paragraph is, what a table is, and how those elements relate to each other. This structure is part of the file itself and makes it easier for other systems to read, index and process it. In a PDF, as we have seen, that semantic layer may not exist or be clearly defined. Therefore, in practice, extracting information from a website tends to be a more predictable process, while doing it from a PDF is more complicated. So what about OCR? It is the first solution that comes to mind. If the problem is that the text is not well structured or even “drawn” like an image, optical character recognition should convert it into something machine readable. And in part it does. OCR has been used for decades to transform images of words into text, but converting an image to text is not the same as reconstructing the logic of the document. When there are varied elements, the system can recognize each word without knowing exactly how they fit together. The result is not a failure in reading characters, but in the organization of information. In Xataka Dario Amodei founded Anthropic because OpenAI didn’t take the risks of AI seriously. Now you are going to give in to those risks Why don’t we abandon PDF? The answer is more pragmatic than technological. As reported by The Verge citing the person responsible for the PDF Associationthe format became established precisely because it allows a document to look the same today as it would in ten or twenty years, regardless of the device or software with which it is opened. A web page can change depending on the browser, an editable sheet can be modified or overwritten, but a PDF maintains its appearance and visual integrity. That stability is precisely what lawyers, engineers, public administrations and any organization that must maintain reliable records need. The challenge is not to replace the format, but to learn to interpret it better. Images | Xataka with Nano Bana In Xataka | Three AIs clashed in ‘War Games’. 95% of them resorted to nuclear weapons and none ever surrendered (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news AI solves equations and chops code, but continues to crash with PDFs: the explanation shows its limits was originally published in Xataka by Javier Marquez .

China’s drone shows in 2026 are nothing like we’ve seen before

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Without being me the viral Uruguayan lady from TikTok who thought they were something paranormal, it must be admitted that some drone shows leave people speechless. Spoiler: the one in Barcelona, ​​with all due respect, was not that big of a deal. Especially if we compare it to what China is doing. From a technical point of view, drones evolve the compositions of classic fireworks, but the Asian giant stands out for its handling of this device in every sense: on a military level, making it shoot with surgical precision from 100 meters away or 200 units are carried out by a single soldieror in the playful. And as an example, some of their shows from recent months that show that China plays in another league. Note: To enjoy the audiovisual content more, we recommend that you set the videos to the highest quality possible. China’s big coup in authority over drone shows came with the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China: to date, the records for the number of units controlled by a single team (do not confuse with that of Ras Al Khaimahthat of the largest aerial image of a phoenix made by drones) there were around 5,000 drones, but for the occasion more than 10,000 units (10,179, specifically) crossed the sky, controlled by a single computer, forming figures as culturally iconic as a red dragon crossing the bay of Shenzhen. That they are capable of emulate the dragon’s scales or how it executes a complete turn It’s amazing, but the evolution of drone shows in the country has been such that it has already become outdated… and has dropped to bronze in the Guinness Book of Records. And as an example, what better than to see what he did at the beginning of February of this year as a rehearsal for the next Chinese New Year (the Spring Festival) in Heifei (Anhui): more than 20,000 drones tracing three-dimensional figures with such complexity and density of light that it almost seems solid. And it’s just a test, hence it doesn’t count for records. Tap to go to the X/Twitter post Tap to go to the X/Twitter post Weeks before, the China Science and Technology Innovation Gala also took place in Heifei, where they recreated the Anhui Opera and a historical event: the arrival of the four opera companies to Beijing for Emperor Qianlong’s 80th birthday. It would be the birth of what is known today as Peking opera. The important thing here was not so much the number of drones, but rather the artistic fusion. Nevertheless, according to the China Global Television Network10,000 drones illuminated the sky with iconic images of Chinese opera sharing performance with human and robot performers in a curious mix of tradition and innovation. China Science and Technology Innovation Gala. CGTN In Heifei they have taken a liking to drone exhibitions and last fall there were another more modest (by Chinese standards) of “only” 1,024 units to celebrate the upcoming science and technology exhibition, as CGTN explains. On this occasion, more than something artistic or record-breaking, its approach was purely scientific and technical, with the drones forming robotic or DNA structures. There may be few drones, but the fluidity of the transitions is notable. 8th World Voice Expo. CGTN To welcome 2026, the city of Chongqing hosted a show Of “only” 8,000 units on the Yangtze River they formed figures like a dragon, the essential countdown and the galloping horse (because this Chinese New Year will be the year of the horse) in a spectacle that played with air, land and water. Also in Guangzhou They celebrated the end of the 15th National Games of China and the arrival of 2026 at the same time with the massive deployment of more than a thousand drones over the Pearl River to reproduce sports figures or the mascots of the games from the countdown of the year. The number of drones may be lower than in other events, but the quality is striking: the representation of fluidly moving silhouettes is striking. Going back to the records, Guinness still boasts it Liuyang city, Hunan province. In fact, the company High Great he managed to beat it twice in October 2025: on the one hand, it managed to have 15,947 drones synchronized from a single computer (the largest number to date) and not only created figures, but launched “cyber fireworks” (there were real pyrotechnics loaded into the devices). How many? 7,496 units, the largest number of fires launched from drones. Coincidentally, that city is known as the “world capital of pyrotechnics” and the milestone took place at the Liuyang Fireworks Festival, showing that drones do not come to replace fires, but to complement them. The fusion seems like magic. Given China’s rapid pace with drones, that record has its hours numbered. Nevertheless, today the Guinness silver It is displayed at the DAMODA exhibition in July 2025 in Heyuan (Guangdong), where 11,198 drones created enormous figures over Lake Wanlvhu representing the evolution of the area in recent decades. Behind these records are companies like High Great and Damoda and beyond getting headlines, there is a real technical challenge behind: Keeping thousands of devices in the air without colliding and with a latency of milliseconds requires extremely high GPS precision and computing power that is not available to everyone. In Xataka | The Vatican drone show was commissioned by an unexpected businessman: Elon Musk’s brother In Xataka | Climbing Everest in person costs 50,000 euros. Uploading it in 4K from the sofa at home is now free Cover | High Great

We thought measles was history. The data shows that we were very wrong

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For years, measles seemed like a disease of the past in much of the developed world thanks to mass vaccination campaigns who had managed to corner the virus until turning the outbreaks into anecdotes. However, everything is changing as the WHO itself points out either the US CDC by drawing a very different scenario: measles has returned and it has done so with unusual force. The return What began as an “immunity gap” after the pandemic has become in a worrying statistical trend. From the Mediterranean to the United States, and with an echo in Spain, the figures for 2024 and what we have for 2025 confirm a global rebound that tests herd immunity. The global ‘leap’. To understand the magnitude of the problem, you have to look at the raw numbers that the WHO itself offers ussince it makes us see that we are not facing a standard seasonal rebound, but rather it is a very important change in trend. In this case the European Region The WHO has registered 127,350 cases in 2024, a figure that not only doubles the records of 2023, but also marks the all-time high since 1997. In depth. If we break them down, we can see that in Europe cases have increased by 47% compared to pre-pandemic levels and in the Eastern Mediterranean the increase is 86% compared to 2019. In the case of the European Union, ECDC documents more than 35,000 cases in 2024, which increases ten times the previous year. The severity lies not only in the contagion, but in the consequences: more than half of these cases in Europe have required hospitalization. And this leads to greater pressure on care. In the United States. If in Europe there is a lot of concern about this issue, in the North American country, since the growth is vertical. The CDC itself has set off alarms after observing how cases have multiplied by five in a matter of months. In this way, while approximately between 285 and 300 cases were reported in all of 2024, projections and partial data for 2025 place the figure above 1,500 affected. This paints a very clear picture: 92% of infections occur among people who have not been vaccinated, with outbreaks concentrating in communities with low immunization. The case of Spain. If we focus on our country The truth is that we have remained free of endemic measles since 2017. This means that the virus does not constantly circulate freely within our borders. However, globalization is causing a change in photography. Official data indicates that while in 2023 only 14 cases were recorded, in 2204 they increased to 229 cases and in 2025 the forecast points to almost 400. Its origin. The Ministry of Health and the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (AEP) point out that the majority are imported cases (mainly from Morocco and Romania) that find “small gaps” to spread. Although there are active outbreaks in communities such as Andalusia, the Basque Country and Catalonia, the virus enters from outside and lights the fuse in non-immunized groups. The mathematics. Measles is one of the most contagious viruses that exists, and to keep it at bay through herd immunity, the WHO establishes a fairly strict safety threshold: 95% of the population must have both doses of the vaccine. This is something where Spain is doing quite well, since the first dose has a coverage of 96-97%, while the second drops to 91-93%. But this difference between having one or two doses is very important. That margin of two or three percentage points below the recommended 95%, added to the anti-vaccine movements and delays in post-COVID vaccination, is the crack through which the virus is sneaking in. Although the general population is protected, there are enough “pockets” of vulnerable population for an imported case to generate a local outbreak. Images | Wikipedia Fusion Medical Animation In Xataka | The myth of 37º: it is increasingly clear to us that there is no “normal” body temperature

There is a Europe that is suffocating to pay for housing and another that lives in peace. And this map shows the differences

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Beyond the political ups and downs, corruption, unemployment, the war in Ukraine, or the (increasingly) convulsive scenario of international geopolitics, from time to time The CIS reminds us that there is a much more everyday problem that keeps us Spaniards up at night: access to housing. At the end of 2025 39.9% of those surveyed by the organization pointed out housing as “the main problem” facing the country. And it is normal if you take into account the mismatch between supply and demand, the pressure that carries out tourist rentals and (above all) the sharp rise in prices of recent years. Every time we talk about the residential market, however, the same question arises: beyond the exact cost of the square meter (m2), calculated by the General Council of Notaries, the executive or portals like IdealisticHow “unaffordable” is accommodation in Spain? What economic effort does it require from families? Is it more or less than what other European households must assume? Getting perspective Type of housing (in m2) available spending 40% of monthly income. ESPON, the program who is dedicated to studying cohesion of the EU, has published a series of maps that help answer these questions in a quick, direct and, above all, visual way. To prepare them, two parameters have been basically set: the prices of the real estate market for sales and rentals and the income data published by Eurostat. Everything divided by regions. By crossing them the organism has been able to carry out two calculations. The first is to estimate what type of housing (in m2) a person who allocates 40% of their income to this purpose can rent in each EU region. The second is what percentage of their rent that same tenant should dedicate if they wanted a 100 m2 house. Percentage of monthly income necessary to rent a 100 m2 home. ESPON does not stop there. He has also transferred those same questions to the buying and selling market residential. That is, what type of housing could a person willing to invest 40% of their annual income for an entire decade afford? And how many years would you have to endure that same budgetary effort if you wanted to buy a 100 m2 apartment? In both cases the maps are similar and they leave behind a series of conclusions, such as the profound differences that exist within the same country. “Regions containing and surrounding capital cities such as Paris, Berlin, Lisbon and Madrid tend to be less affordable compared to the rest of the nation. Additionally, coastal regions tend to be less affordable, which is also clearly seen in the Netherlands and Germany, Portugal, Spain and France.” Available housing (m2) investing 40% of the income for 10 years. Years necessary to buy a 100 m2 home investing 40% of the income. For example, while a Madrid resident willing to invest 40% of his annual income in housing would need between 20 and 25 years To pay for a 100 m2 house, a resident of the province of Teruel would need at most ten years of effort. In Barcelona it would need around 20-25 years while on the other side of the peninsula, in Pontevedra, between 15 and 20 years would be enough. The worst part in Spain is Malaga, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands, where ESPON calculates that on average a buyer would need to invest 40% of their annual income for more than three and a half decades. A very similar effort would have to be endured by the inhabitants of the Algarve, Setúbal, part of the Paris area, Monaco, Corsica or different points spread across Eastern Europe, where ESPON itself recognizes that “quite unaffordable” areas are concentrated. If we talk about the rental market, the panorama It’s not very different. A Madrid resident who would like to rent a 100 m2 apartment would need to dedicate (on average) between 80 and 90% of their income to it. The situation is worse in coastal points, such as Barcelona, ​​Huelva, Malaga and Eastern European regions. In the provinces of Zamora or Huesca they would be enough between 30 and 40%which is closer to the debt ceiling level than recommend assuming the experts. Images | Quique Olivar (Unsplash) and ESPON In Xataka | It is not a country for Spaniards: Madrid and Catalonia are losing national population while gaining foreign population

The latest Stranger Things deepfake is so amazing that it shows that reality is beginning to be optional

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This week, a Brazilian content creator named ederxavier3d published an amazing video on his Instagram account. In it they appeared several of the protagonists of the series ‘Stranger Things’ making just the gestures and expressions that he made in the lower window. He explained that he had achieved it in a simple way and thanks to the new Kling 2.6 and its characteristic Motion Control. This option allows the movements we make in a video to be transferred to any real or fictitious person, regardless of the style in which they are represented (it can be a comic book character) with an amazing result. And in the case of the Brazilian creator’s video it can be clearly seen: these videos could perfectly pass for real in almost all cases. It is true that if you look closely you can sense that something is wrong, but only because the video has been shared making it clear that it was created with AI. This video has once again awakened a debate that has been linked to this type of deepfakes for some time. Justine Moore, partner at investment firm a16z, explained that “we are not prepared for how quickly (video) production flows are going to change with AI. Some of the latest video models have immediate implications for Hollywood. Endless character swaps at negligible costs.” How the story has changed. In April 2023 we proposed a little game to all of you who read us: Would you be able to distinguish a real image from one generated by AI? At that time, AI was already achieving remarkable results—the image of the Pope with the coat proved it—but the feeling was that we could still tell whether an image had been created with an AI or not. With the video things were even clearer.because at that time AI video generation I was in diapers. Three years later things are very different, and there are several AI platforms (I see 3, Sora 2Kling, Runway) that generate videos that anyone could easily confuse without problems. Tell Will Smith. ederxavier3d’s video also demonstrates this, and in fact something unique happened with it: there were rumors that the Stranger Things characters had actually recorded those appearances and the creator had imitated their movements, and then rumors appeared that denied that this was true and that suggested that from the beginning the videos were nothing more than what they seemed: deepfakes created with AI. A priori everything would suggest that this is the case: the Kling 2.6 feature is not at all new and other platforms allow our movements and gestures – and even our voice – to be transferred to a character generated by AI. The problem is that At this point it is almost impossible to distinguish whether that person who appears on the screen is real or not. This technology is extraordinarily striking and causes that “wow effect” that AI companies so seek, but despite the creative options it offers, the risks here seem especially notable. The identity theft It is now easier to achieve than ever, and that will probably mean that we will see many more dangerous cases. It is enough to remind the employee that transferred 25 million dollars believing that the person who told him via videoconference was his real boss. It is not clear how, for example, Hollywood studios will react to this technology, but for now some are already taking action on the matter to try to protect themselves. The best example is Matthew McConaughey, who these days has “patented himself” to have one more legal resource (which we are not sure is necessary) to protect yourself against possible videos impersonating you. The implications are enormous, and we are entering an era in which something disturbing is going to happen: We will not be able to trust what we see on a screen. In Xataka | “Hello, I’m your grandson and I need $3,000”: there are already scams on the elderly with voices generated by AI

Oasiz’s bankruptcy shows its limits

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Today the expression “retail apocalypse” It may sound like science fiction to us, but there was a time (not so long ago) in which it seemed a sentence imminent for traditional commerce. His logic was very simple: if people could buy whatever they wanted from whoever they wanted and from wherever they wanted with a ‘click’, why would they go to traditional shopping areas, with the costs that that entails? time has shown that neither e-commerce Neither COVID-19 has taken away our pleasure in going to shopping centers, but that does not mean that they do not seek to reinvent themselves. And in this attempt two clear strategies can be seen: gradually becoming ‘urban theme parks’ and spaces that pamper luxury and exclusivity. New times, new models. Today the ghost of “retail apocalypse” seems scared away (in reality the phenomenon always was more linked to the US than Spain, where the market is less saturated), but that does not mean that the shopping centers of 2026 can continue living with the model that popularized them 30, 20 or 10 years ago. After all, if we can buy anything on AliExpress or Amazon, why go to the nearest shopping center? If we can watch movies on Prime or Netflix, why are we going to take the car, eat a traffic jam and then fight in the parking lot to go to the movies? Who goes to the mall? The million dollar question. The sector has studies that detail the user profile who go to their centers: how much time they spend there, where they move from, the weight of foreigners, how far their “area of ​​influence” extends… A wide range of data in which one in particular stands out: customers spend more time where, in addition to food, clothing, appliances or any other merchandise, they offer us experiences. Beyond customer loyalty to their reference shopping center or the proximity factor, users seem particularly willing to spend time in the so-called “experience centers”those that have a differentiated offer and are sold as places to “live experiences.” With the watch in your hand. The above may sound like theory, but it is perfectly measured. a study published in 2024 by CBRE shows that, although we spend an average of 56 minutes in shopping centers in general, when we talk about “experience” areas, that figure shoots up to 71 or even 100. Double the time we invest in “convenience centers”, those that basically rely on supermarkets and focus on food. The report It also detected that the “Family&Fun” centers, aimed primarily at families, have a higher customer loyalty rate than the rest of the facilities. They are no longer just warehouses in which to shop or have a drink, they are living spaces where we make memories. What does that mean? That people no longer only go to shopping centers to buy some shoes, watch TV for the living room or fill the refrigerator. We can do this through other channels, even without leaving home, with our mobile phone. What we are looking for is the differentiating factor, an experience or a plus that compensates for traveling to the venue. It’s worth the effort for us. It allows the centers to retain their attractiveness as spaces in which to “have a good time” with friends or family, the value that made them popular in the 20th century. “More and more customers are looking for experiences and entertainment in shopping centers. Many are integrating experiences into retail to attract more users,” explained already in 2021 a manager of the La Vaguada Shopping Center. He is not the only one who thinks this way. In 2024 Diego Ramos published on LinkedIn a column who came to a similar conclusion: merchandise is no longer enough for us, now we want experiences, “socializing, having fun, creating memories.” Changing the anchor. In his opinion, entertainment parks have become “the new anchor” of shopping centers. If before these venues boasted the presence of large chains (Fnac, Mediamarkt, Ikea) as their star dish, today they advertise other hooks: surf pools or diving, zip lines, climbing walls, skateparks, ice rinks, wind tunnels, escape rooms… “Visitors expect to live experiences, it is not enough for them to just buy, that is why they have the digital market,” they comment from Caleido to elEconomista. It is the same philosophy that once led shopping centers to go from having little more than hypermarkets to including cinemas and bowling alleys… only multiplied by a thousand. Theme parks and luxury. The result is a kind of urban theme parks of which examples abound, both of complexes in progress and of others planned: X Madrid, Oasiz (Madrid), Breogán Park (A Coruña), Infinity Valencia either Nasas Madridto name a few. Other commercial spaces also opt for another way of offering a plus to the user: exclusivity, luxury. This is the case, for example, of LaFinca Grand Caféwhich is advertised as a space with “premium services” and “haute cuisine”, or McArthurGlen Designer Outelt Málagawhich opened its doors several years ago with premium brands. The bet on exclusivity it’s not new either (it is nothing that has not been seen in spaces such as Las Roazas Village, La Roca Village, L’illa Diagonal or Galerías Canalejas), but it also helps some shopping centers to find their differentiated place. Not only that. It also allows them to make it easier for them when it comes to capturing a certain customer profile, visitors who come to Spain to practice “shopping tourism”a profile in which Americans and Chinese stand out. The sword of Damocles. It may seem like an unimportant issue, but getting the strategy right is key in a sector that is undergoing transformation and increasingly competitive. Shopping centers may not have survived the “retail apocalypse” and continue to attract thousands of users (their employers estimate that during the first half of 2025 their sales increased by 6% and customer traffic by 3.4%), but success is not guaranteed. Not at all. That even … Read more

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