Spanish

Two neobanks without offices are putting Spanish banks in trouble. And the worst for the IBEX is yet to come

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Revolut accumulates 6 million customers in Spain. Trade Republic has doubled its own in ten months. When Revolut grants mortgages, we will talk about a war that escalates. Why is it important. It is not common for actors outside the system to appear in a sector as large and historic as banking (without a network of branches or lobby nor the level of advertising of the large ones) and achieve a scale comparable to that of medium-sized entities, in a very short time. They have also done so by attracting younger clients with a greater propensity to operate: exactly the profile that generates the most commissions and that is most difficult for traditional banks to recover. The context. Spain has been a seemingly impenetrable financial market for years: highly banked, highly concentrated after the 2008 crisis and dominated by four or five entities that control the majority of the retail business. The digital commitment of big banks (Imagin from CaixaBank or Openbank from Santander) is working well, but the essence of the matter has not changed: they are subsidiary brands that do not threaten the core business of their parent companies. Revolut and Trade Republic, on the other hand, are independent entities with no internal conflict to resolve. In figures: More than 6 million Revolut customers in Spain at the end of 2025, with a penetration of 13% of the population, close to ING and ahead of Banco Sabadell. 3,990 million euros in total Revolut deposits in Spain according to the Bank of Spainwith a growth of 74% in 2025. 2 million Trade Republic clients in Spain, doubled in just ten months, with a projection of reach 3 million before the end of 2026. Spain is already Revolut’s second largest market in the EU, and the third globally, only behind the United Kingdom and France. The two sides of the same phenomenon. Revolut and Trade Republic attack different but complementary flanks. Revolut is going after the everyday bank: checking account, card, currency exchange, savings, personal loans, soon business credit… and considerable success when it comes to positioning itself as a card for travel or online purchases. Trade Republic goes for savings and retail investing: ETFs, stocks, cryptocurrencies and a 2.75% APR interest-bearing account with no balance limit. Together they cover practically the entire banking customer value chain retail. What used to require two or three banking relationships now fits into two applications. Between the lines. The most revealing data about Trade Republic is the speed at which they are growing: one million new users in less than a year, a rate that exceeds that which the entity itself registered in Germany during its initial expansion. It is a sign that in Spain there is a latent demand for alternatives that traditional banking has never fully satisfied, especially among the group of savers under forty years of age. The average age of the Trade Republic customer is around 35 years old. They are exactly the clients that IBEX banks need for their next decade. Yes, but. Growing customers is not the same as capturing their money. Revolut has 13% penetration in Spain but barely 0.25% of the system’s total deposits, according to a Citi analysis collected by The World. Only 1% of payrolls reach Revolut. Most of its users use it as a secondary bank: for trips, for specific payments or to park some savings with better remuneration than their usual bank. Trade Republic has not yet published its deposit figures in Spain. Traditional banking has been using this argument as a shield for some time: having many clients with a low average balance is not a business model, it is an acquisition model. The real test will come with the credit. The decisive moment. The big unknown (and the biggest threat to conventional banking) is the mortgage. Revolut has confirmed that it plans to launch it in Spain between 2026 and 2027. The model you have announced is completely digital, without negotiation: an offer. Take it or leave it. Ignacio Zunzunegui, Revolut’s growth director for southern Europe, said this in an interview with The World: “You could press a button and start being much more aggressive with credit.” If that works, Revolut stops being “your other bank” and becomes the first, as happened to ING in the first decade of the century. The mortgage is the product that anchors a client for decades, the one that generates the deepest relationship and the greatest income over time. It is the last moat that protects traditional banking. Meanwhile, its CEO has confirmed that Revolut will not go public before 2028: a company with almost 2,000 million euros of profit that prefers to remain unlisted publicly while it consolidates markets. Featured image | Sophie DupauTrade Republic In Xataka | Revolut wants more than your savings: it’s going after Spanish millionaires

Forgetting dreams when waking up seemed like an unimportant anecdote. A Spanish macro-study has linked it to Alzheimer’s

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Today, one of the great challenges that modern neurology has with the Alzheimer’s It is not just treating it, but detecting it before it shows its face, since right now there are several therapeutic options that manage to stop the progression of the disease. That is why our effort is to find biomarkers that warn patients that something is happening, and the last one is related to dreams. Spanish research. Based on the Vallecas project and promoted by the Reina Sofía Foundation or the CEIN Foundationand who has pointed out how not remembering dreams can be a risk marker for Alzheimer’s very premature. But to reach this conclusion, researchers have had to analyze a cohort of 1,049 people cognitively healthy older adults, who have been closely followed for a period of up to 10 years. In the end we are talking about a large amount of information that has intersected with the genetics and lifestyle of all patients, and even with the moment in which the first molecular markers of Alzheimer’s began to appear. The dreams. At first glance it might seem like an anecdotal correlation that what happens with our dreams has some relationship with Alzheimer’s, but the reality is that it has a very solid neurobiological basis. And to understand it we have to go to what is known as the default neural network, which is a set of brain regions that are activated when our mind is at rest, wandering or precisely dreaming. Scientific evidence accumulated in recent years has shown that the default neural network is highly vulnerable to Alzheimer’s pathology and is, in fact, one of the first areas to suffer structural and functional damage. In this way, if this network begins to fail in the earliest phases of the disease, it is logical to think that functions associated with it, such as the consolidation and memory of dreams, will be diminished. They have gone further. One of the most interesting points of this Spanish study is that it was not based solely on patient surveys, which may have reduced reliability. Here the researchers looked for important biomarkers, such as the presence of the APOE ε4 allele, which is a genetic variant that predisposes one to suffer from the sporadic form of the disease. In addition, they also analyzed the tau-217 protein, which today is one of the blood markers that indicates a possible Alzheimer’s disease in the early stages of the disease. And only with a blood sample. That is why these results now gain greater strength when it comes to relating the problem to dreams and Alzheimer’s. A paradigm shift. Don’t be scared if you woke up this morning without remembering what you dreamed, since this is completely normal and depends on many factors such as stress, the sleep phase in which we wake up or even age. Here the researchers only point to a sustained pattern of loss of dream memory in older people who, so far, do not have any obvious cognitive problems. That is why this discovery is purely clinical and preventive, since scanning the entire population is unfeasible due to cost and risks. However, asking a patient in consultation about their sleeping habits and their ability to remember what they dream about is free and non-invasive. But logically this has to be accompanied by an effective screening system to be able to diagnose the disease even before the first serious symptoms appear. Images | Slaapwijsheid.nl Robina Weermeijer In Xataka | Dementia is devastating largely because it arrives without warning: some researchers already predict it seven years in the future

More and more Spanish bars refuse to let you pay at the table. Its objective is very simple: greater rotation

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“To pay, at the cashier.” It doesn’t matter if you live in the very center of Madrid, the most touristy area of ​​Barcelona, ​​next to Malagueta, in Vigo or a remote town in Bierzo, it is most likely that at some point in the last few months you have heard that phrase when you ask a waiter to please charge you. To pay for the coffee you just had, you must get up and go to the checkout yourself. Or what is the same, you do not have the option of being charged at the table. It seems like a minor issue, but this decision is not accidental: it responds to a logic that seeks to speed up the rotation in the premises and get the most out of them. “Excuse me, can I have the bill?” In Spain there are some 87,000 restaurants and food stalls, almost 163,400 drinking establishments and 270,200 “food and beverage services”, according to INE datawhich gives a pretty clear idea about how we live in Spain: we like (a lot) to go out for coffees, beers and tapas. Therefore, no matter what region you live in, chances are that in recent months you have sat at a table in a bar or restaurant. And that’s also why you’ve probably noticed that it’s becoming more and more common that when you want to pay and ask for the bill, answer the same: “To pay, at the cashier.” Unraveling the mystery. The question is obvious. Why the hell are they asking us to pay at the cashier? Are we not hindering the passage of other customers like this? Does it have any advantages over the option of paying the bill directly at the table? The mystery was cleared up a few months ago Jairosanbor, a tiktoker that usually publishes on his account videos related to the world of hospitality. And the answer is quite simple: although several factors come into play, everything is limited to a simple question of rotation in the premises. In other words, make a business profitable and get the most out of it. Time and agility. The logic is simple. If the customer receives the bill at their table, pays and the waiter charges them, even having to return to the bar to get change, a process is lengthened that could be simplified if the payment is made at the cashier. It may be a matter of minutes, but over the course of an entire day, a week, a month or a year (even more) that time can translate into higher turnover. More rotation. More clients. Higher income. “A little trick”. “What you get is that the customer gets up without any problem and leaves you the table free so that someone else can automatically sit down. If you had him here waiting for you to bring him the bill, charge him, he leaves and comes, in the end more time is wasted,” comments Jairposanbor in his TikTok video, of just 30 sure. “It’s a little trick for the rotation.” Personnel issue? The “little trick”, as the hotelier defines it, may seem simple, but it has given rise to a good number of articles about the themein the pressand some debate in the comments of the video. There are those who relate it, for example, to the greater or lesser availability of waiters in the establishment. “Another trick: add more staff and if the customer leaves happy that they don’t have to wait, they’ll probably come back,” comment a user. Another adds that charging cash may increase turnover and profitability of the establishment, but it can have a negative effect: it places more workload on the employee behind the bar. Cash vs card. They would come into play more keys. For example, although it is increasingly common for restaurants or cafes to allow payment by card, especially in large chains, in those cases in which the business only accepts cash, the “collection at the counter” rule simplifies the process quite a bit. No picking up cashround trips between the bar and the table to look for change or for the money to ultimately pass through several hands within the business. Useful, not infallible. Of course the tactic can be useful, but it is by no means infallible. First because, as some users also comment on TikTok, there are customers who do not like being sent to the bar to pay for their drinks. Second, because rotation is not 100% guaranteed either. As another remembers tiktokerthe trick fails when there is more than one person at the table, only one gets up to pay and then returns to his seat to continue chatting. A sector in change. César Sánchez-Ballesterospresident of the Tourism and Hospitality Federation of the province of Pontevedra, Feproturprovides some extra keys. Tricks like the one shared by Jairoposanbor seek greater optimization, but that is not the only way that hoteliers follow to achieve it. For years the group has opted for new strategies, such as online reservations, letters with QR codeapps that allow you to make orders and pay… Until reaching extreme examples such as experiments of McDonald’s in the US, with stores where there is hardly any interaction with staff. Of orders, payments… and personnel. “We see more and more examples of optimization,” comments Sánchez-Ballesteros, who remembers in any case that the client always has the last word, as has been made clear in the comments of TikTok: he is the one who decides what compensates him, what practices he considers good, what bothers him or the services he is not willing to give up. Against this backdrop, there is another factor that conditions work in restaurants and bars: the shortage of qualified personnel, which further reinforces the urgency that businesses have when it comes to polishing internal processes. It’s nothing new. For years the hospitality industry has been pointing out on a recurring basis the shortage of professionals, a deficit that becomes especially visible in times of … Read more

A Spanish startup is building the map of the Earth that AI needs: Xoople

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Xoople has closed a Series B round of 130 million dollars led by Nazca Capital and with the participation of MCH Private Equity, CDTI, Buenavista Equity Partners and Endeavor Catalyst. With the financing accumulated so far, 225 million dollars, the Madrid startup presents its candidacy for unicorn and becomes one of the most peculiar bets in the European space ecosystem. Why is it important. More than a round, this capital injection is the validation of a model that almost no one in the startup ecosystem has the stomach to execute: seven years building technology without going to market, without growth metrics to show to investors and with hardly any noise. Xoople has opted to be infrastructure before product, and that places it in a different category than almost any European space startup. The context. The company, founded in 2019 and based in Tres Cantos (Madrid), has developed its own constellation of satellites combined with an AI data processing platform called EarthAI. The goal is to become what its founders call the “Earth system of record” for the era of agentic AI: scientifically accurate geospatial data, ready to train models and feed autonomous workflows in enterprises. The comparison with Google Earth is superficial because what Xoople builds is data infrastructure, not visualization. In detail. He agreement signed with L3Harris Technologiesone of the largest aerospace defense contractors in the United States, is the piece that elevates the proposal. Its sensors, designed with defensive-grade technology and adapted for commercial use, promise to capture a volume of data two orders of magnitude greater than current monitoring systems. Marketing has started this year with clients in preview private between government agencies and companies of the Fortune 500. Between the lines. The investment pattern of this round says as much as the number. The CDTI has been in the capital of Xoople for some time and has it classified as a Strategic Company, the largest investment of your Innvierte program. That Nazca Capital, the most active fund in the Ibero-American ecosystem, leads the Series B together with MCH Private Equity is a sign that private capital already sees in Xoople something more than a technological promise. The milestone must also be read in terms of ecosystem: just a month ago, PLD Space closed 180 million euros of Series C. The Spanish space sector is no longer anecdotal. The big question. Xoople’s model requires its customers to rely on critical data infrastructure built by a startup. In sectors such as defense, climate management or urban infrastructure, this institutional trust threshold is a bottleneck, even more so than technology. The waiting list in preview private that the problem is being resolved. But climbing from a waiting list to long-term contracts with governments and global corporations is the leap he has yet to prove. Featured image | Javier Miranda In Xataka | We have a problem with the future of GPS: $16 billion later, it’s an absolute disaster

Someone has taken more than 12,000 Spanish laws and converted them to source code. It is a real gem to search for legislation

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If you have ever prepared for competitive exams and are looking for the legislation that you have to prepare for or need to consult a law for any management, you will have already realized that the Official State Gazette is a pain. (also applies to regional versions) to find out what is current and what has changed: transpositions, various PDFs, annexes and cross references that make you go crazy. You are not alone: ​​sooner or later it has happened to everyone. Until now you only had two alternatives: consult with someone who did know about the subject to clear your doubts or resort to artificial intelligence to then carefully check that nothing is left out. To the computer engineer Enrique Lopez It must have happened to him too and he took action on the matter. The project. Is called Legalize and it is in a few words a digital repository of state and regional legislation available on GitHub, as if it were a computer project. Thus, it has translated more than 12,000 regulations in force in the state (both state and regional), each one into a Markdown file with plain text on which you can search for what interests you. In addition, each of the laws are grouped in folders based on their jurisdiction. In short: one law, one file, one folder, one jurisdiction. The organization follows the standard ELI (European Legislation Identifier). As the project’s GitHub explains, all content comes from the BOE Consolidated Legislation APIthe text of the legislation is public domain. What Legalize-es provides is structure, version control and metadata. What has changed about this law. But the laws have their drafts, consolidated texts and subsequent reforms, so sometimes being clear about what is in force and what is not is an odyssey. So you added each reform as a commit, with the actual publication date. This way, even if you have no idea about laws, you can see what exactly has changed in the regulations: in red is what is deleted and in green is what is added. We see it better with an example, that of Royal Decree-Law 8/2010: Royal Decree-Law 8/2010 Why is it important. Beyond the practicality of access of this format, the true relevance is that anyone can know what has changed in a law without tricks or cardboard. It is true that the BOE is public, but it is far from friendly. On the other hand, when a law is reformed, it is easy to lose sight of previous regulations. With this format it is easy to know what has changed and when. Context. In a state like Spain where the normative production report of the CEOE for 2024 (the last one released) lists 719 regulations, being up to date with regulations that affect matters as important as taxes or retirement is an arduous task. The digitization of current legal regulations is a pending issue that this project addresses as a civic hack: using technology to simplify and clarify what the administration hinders. How it works. The core of legalize-es is the automation of legislative data through a pipeline, that is, with a “robot” that periodically monitors the BOE’s Consolidated Legislation API. The system extracts the text from the official PDF and cleans it of strange formats, leaving it in plain text. Once processed, the law is integrated into a Git version control system where each reform does not overwrite the previous one, but is saved as a new layer to allow access to the history of changes, which allows traceability. In Xataka | The “ChatGPT for lawyers” exists, it was born in Spain and has just reached a milestone: becoming a unicorn Cover | Flickr

the symbol of the Spanish electric car boom faces a difficult horizon

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In its day, Wallbox was one of the great hopes for him electric car in Spain. A symbol with unicorn aspirations with Spanish capital, listed in New York and a simple initial purpose: to sell electric chargers. A purpose that gradually escalated to end up focusing on the comprehensive management of domestic energy. The problem? Since last year the company has a value less than that of your debthas laid off a third of its staff and urgently needs a financial boost. One who doesn’t know where to find. The situation. At the beginning of this month, Wallbox activated the pre-bankruptcy process. The company owes nearly 170 million euros to entities such as Banco Santander, BBVA, CaixaBank, or the Official Credit Institute. The pre-bankruptcy status prevents creditors from executing their debts, so this shield is a small temporary ball to negotiate debt and reach agreements. Dates? Evolution of the Wallbox share. Javier Lacort. The hope. Wallbox closed the 2025 fiscal year with losses worth 103.19 million euros, 32% less than in 2024. The company reduced its labor and operating costs by 25%, managing to stop the debacle in its adjusted EBITDA. What happened. In 2021, Wallbox was listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a valuation of more than 1 billion. Four years later, the company was worth 37 million. The company has been adding year-on-year losses that have plummeted its stock. It has reached a price below the dollar The situation led to massive layoffs and cost reduction plans Since 2024, the company has focused the strategy on reduce operating losses and get creditors to sign a new financing plan. According to Wallbox, 85% of them support the plan but HSBC, one of the giants behind the financing, is reticent about the new roadmap. Buying time. Wallbox is buying time with its pre-bankruptcy request, trying to refinance the 170 million debt. Although the situation is critical, all is not lost. The company is managing to cut net losses and affirms that its strategy is aimed at “a more efficient, resilient and future-ready organization.” We have until summer to check it out. Image | Wallbox In Xataka | Install an electric car charger at home: how much does it cost and steps to follow

how a relay in Gipuzkoa saved Europe while the Spanish system died of success

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Next April 28 it will be exactly one year of the biggest collapse in our recent history: the great blackout that turned the Iberian Peninsula black and left 55 million people in Spain and Portugal without electricity supply for 12 hours. Almost twelve months later, we finally have the official autopsy. The final report. The European Network of Electricity Transmission System Operators (ENTSO-E) has made public the long-awaited final report. Throughout 472 pages, the panel of experts dissects an unprecedented event to the millisecond. The document, which warns from its preamble that it does not seek to assign legal responsibilities but rather to learn from mistakes, reveals a chilling diagnosis: the blackout was the perfect storm caused by the rigidity of new technologies, manual ineffectiveness in the face of a millisecond crisis and an infrastructure incapable of keeping pace with the energy transition. The anatomy of collapse. To understand the ruling, you have to look south. According to the European report, at 12:03 p.m. on April 28 a local vibration was recorded of 0.63 Hz caused by instability in the electronic converters of renewable plants. Minutes later, at 12:19, the swing was amplified, affecting the entire continent. Technical research points to what could be defined as “operational blindness.” The report notes that much of the renewable generation in Spain operated under a “fixed power factor.” That is, the solar and wind plants were blind to the needs of the grid; they could not absorb reactive energy dynamically. When the voltage rose, these plants were simply taken offline for safety. When they stopped generating electricity, their reactive absorption also suddenly stopped, causing a rebound effect that triggered the voltage in an uncontrolled manner. Furthermore, while the crisis required millisecond reflexes, the control of reactances (the machines that absorb excess voltage) was carried out manually. Operators needed vital minutes to assess the situation. The blackout that could have been avoided. The European report not only acts as a notary for what failed, but also puts on the table what should have happened. By diving into the technical simulations of the ENTSO-E document, sector experts such as Joaquín Coronado have drawn a devastating conclusion: The collapse of the Spanish electrical system was not inevitable, but the result of ineffective management of voltage control by the System Operator (Red Eléctrica). The European analysis is blunt. In his simulation of sensitivity (named Analysis 7), the report concludes that if the connection of the reactances – such as the Caparacena shunt reactor at 400 kV – had been automated instead of depending on the slow human factor, the voltage rise would have been limited and the cascade effect avoided. In addition, ENTSO-E simulates alternative scenarios that show that electrical zero would have been stopped cold with measures that should already be operational: an increase in reactive power margins, the requirement that conventional generators absorb more voltage, or the use of the eight new synchronous capacitors that were already planned in the 2021-2026 planning. Without this automated reactive power reserve or dynamic support, the network was orphaned at the worst possible moment. The rescue from Gipuzkoa. The continental disaster was avoided thanks to Gipuzkoa. At 12:33, the high voltage substation in the Osinaga neighborhood of Hernani detected that the Spanish chaos threatened to drag down all of Europe. In milliseconds, the protection relay out-of-step (out of step) decapitated the connection with the French Argia substation. This “shot” left Spain in the dark, but it shielded the continental network. Barely ten minutes later, Hernani became the rescue route, allowing France to inject energy to resurrect the peninsular system from top to bottom (Top-Down). The structural problem of the market. The targeting of clean energy in the moments before the blackout has raised eyebrows, but the sector defends itself by pointing directly to regulatory inaction. In an interview for XatakaHéctor de Lama, technical director of UNEF (the photovoltaic employers’ association), is blunt: “A plant, no matter how large, cannot cause a blackout. Many other factors must come together.” De Lama explains that the current inverters installed in Spain meet very high European technical requirements, but places the structural problem on the roof of the Ministry (MITECO) and the CNMC for not financially incentivizing renewables to provide security services to the grid. “The current remuneration of €1/MVArh is not enough to encourage renewables to provide this service (voltage control) when we are paying combined cycle plants between 100 and 200 times more for the same thing,” details De Lama. The UNEF expert also recalls a historical administrative negligence that took its toll on us on April 28: while Portugal approved regulations to take advantage of the voltage control of its renewables in 2019, Spain took years to implement vital mechanisms such as Operation Procedure 7.4. We were playing with the rules of the past in the face of a crisis of the future. “A gold mine without a road.” This diagnosis fits with the voices of the industry. During the VI Economic Forum of elDiario.esPatxi Calleja, director of regulation at Iberdrola Spain, defined the national system as “a gold mine without a road.” We have enormous cheap generation capacity, but the electricity grid is the great limitation due to lack of investment compared to our European neighbors. And this green shield also has cracks. As we already analyzed in Xatakathe very high renewable penetration shields us from geopolitical crises (such as the increase in gas prices due to the war in Iran) during daylight hours, plummeting prices to zero. However, as soon as the sun goes down, the lack of mass battery storage sends us back to square one, leaving us at the mercy of combined cycles and fossil volatility. The war without quarter. While technicians analyze the ENTSO-E simulations that point to operational failures, a fierce battle is being waged in the offices. The president of Redeia (parent company of Red Eléctrica), Beatriz Corredor, has used the Brussels report in her appearances in the Senate to entrench herself … Read more

A year ago, the blackout caused the Spanish data network to collapse. The CNMC believes it has the solution

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In April 2025 Spain suffered a zero energy of which, precisely now, we are going to begin to pay some of its consequences. I remember quite clearly being cut off, not being able to call or send messages via data connection. However, when I changed locations and arrived at my relatives’ houses, some of them could do it. The fall of telecommunications It was uneven in Spainand the CNMC has published a document with preventive measures in case a similar situation occurs again. What happened. The energy blackout that left Spain plunged into darkness resulted in a large part of the population being cut off from communication. However, some operators They managed to keep their mobile network active for hours. Backup generators, generating sets moved to each area, backup systems… The challenge for operators to maintain coverage in Spanish territory was a titanic challenge, quite dependent on internal logistics, the state of the reserve batteries (some of them run on fuel), and the network infrastructure itself They were variables that influenced such unequal conditions to be experienced. A single network. In its statement, the CNMC proposes that the four giants of the Spanish territory put roaming plans at the service of the population in emergency cases. The experience of other countries shows that it is viable to incorporate roaming plans between operators in case of emergency. In this way, in areas where this was necessary due to the unavailability of service in an operator’s mobile network, the networks could be prepared to quickly enable the basic telecommunications services of the affected users through roaming in the networks of other operators. According to the regulator, this is an “ideal measure to strengthen resilience”, but it is not so easy to apply. Yes, but. What the CNMC proposes is a cross-roaming service between Telefónica, Vodafone and MásOrange, something that requires coordination and agreement between the three giants. The best example is Sweden where, after two years of preparation, any mobile phone can connect to any operator. Go deeper. In addition to this proposal, the CNMC requests the mandatory nature of the alert system HANDLE in those cars with DAB+ radio receivers (the evolution of FM radio). Although DAB+ works via antenna (like AM and FM radio), its signal is digitally encoded. The ASA system allows you to automatically activate a DAB+ radio connected to power, being able to quickly launch alerts. At the moment, there is a distance from proposal to fact. In Xataka | Europe has a million reasons to fear an increase in the price of electricity. Spain has something else: renewables

a Spanish company is the key piece

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Europe has embarked on the adventure of technological sovereignty. It is pointing to several fields at the same time, being the space sovereignty one of them. Pursuing this objective, the European Defense Agency -EDA- has just awarded a research contract to an aerospace consortium with the aim of creating a military satellite Optimized for very low Earth orbit. And the Spanish Sener will be the one to lead that space A-Team. In short. The EDA contract is for 15.65 million euros and the objective is as mentioned: to create the first European military satellite concept especially used for VLEO space. Spain, France, Luxembourg, Portugal and Slovenia are the countries that are financing the project baptized as VLEO-DEF, and the Spanish Sener will have the task of leading 16 other companies belonging to those five countries. This is not the first time we have talked about Sener Aeroespacial. It is the subsidiary of the SENER group and is one of the Spanish companies who participates in the ambitious rearmament plan of the European Union. It has more than 4,000 employees and its experience covers space, guidance, control and unmanned systems. Very low Earth orbit. Before seeing what the satellite will do, let’s see what very low Earth orbit is. Call too VLEOis the orbital strip that is between 150 and 400 km altitude. It is the lower end of low orbit and, although it may not seem like it, it is actually very close to the Earth’s surface. This brings key benefits such as the ability to capture images with much greater detail, a better signal-to-noise ratio in optical and radio frequency sensors and, above all, very low latency. After all, it is closer than other satellites and the signal must travel a shorter distance. However, it is not a comfortable strip. The atmosphere at that height generates very intense friction and there is an aggressive chemical environment. This implies that the satellites are not “floating”, but rather require almost continuous propulsion. And, in addition, the materials must be very resistant to resist corrosion and, basically, not disintegrate after a short time. VLEO‑DEF. And the idea, precisely, is that. The consortium must find a way to develop a military satellite specifically designed to operate at around 250-350 kilometers altitude in a sustainable manner. The duration of the project will be 36 months and the 17 companies will have to find the key to the technologies that allow the future construction of satellites to operate in VLEO. Because, although this field is very interesting for scientific and observation research, in the military spectrum, flying at that distance from the Earth seems very interesting to achieve what we have mentioned: a much clearer and more detailed observation of the territory. And it is important because we constantly see that they “keep an eye” on what neighboring countries are doing, which has allowed us to know some Chinese operations or the North Korean military ship disaster. Sovereignty. If the program comes to fruition, such an observation satellite can provide key data in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions by being capable of offering much faster communication between the satellite and military commands. With VLEO-DEF, the ultimate goal is to pave the way for future VLEO satellite constellations for border security, protection and intelligence, all within the aforementioned sovereignty. The Ukrainian War and the gas cut by Russia, the case of Greenland with the United States and blackmail of the American president have awakened in the EU that idea that they should start to fend for themselves in fields where they previously delegated to the allies. That is why rearmament began, but also the search for energy alternatives, rare earth, defense programs with European AI and cconstruction of data centers and semiconductor factories. And in all these programs, Spain is emerging as a key partner with space programs, chip development, renewable matrix and with projects for data centers. In Xataka | “Elon Musk can monopolize everything,” warns Arianespace, which has been launching all of Europe’s satellites for 40 years

Predicting dementia seven years in advance seemed impossible. An AI with Spanish participation has just achieved it

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The diagnosis of the neurodegenerative diseases You face a problem at the time the diagnosis is made, since in many cases it is diagnosed when the symptoms are already evident and this makes the brain damage irreversible. But… What if we could peer into the future of the brain years before the disease shows its face? This is precisely what a Spanish team has done with a new biomarker. The study. The future of medicine involves making increasingly earlier diagnoses so that the success of treatments is much greater, and now in a recent published article in Science Report The door opens for this to be a reality in dementia. To get here, what the researchers propose, where have you participated Rubén Armañanzas, from the DATAI Institute of the University of Navarra, is the use of a test such as the electroencephalogram together with artificial intelligence to develop a biomarker capable of predicting the risk of dementia with up to seven years in advance. Your methodology. To understand the magnitude of this advance, we must look at the population on which the study was carried out, which are people with subjective cognitive impairment. These are patients who go to the doctor because they notice that their memory is failing, but when they undergo standard cognitive tests, the results are completely normal, so they cannot be given a clear diagnosis even though it seems that something is not right. Until now, medicine found a blind spot in this phase as there was no way to know if these ‘complaints’ in memory were the prelude to Alzheimer’s or simply confusion. But now, the study with 88 older adults with this situation has shown that the brain emits alarm signals long before psychological tests detected them. You just had to know how to ‘read’ them. A new method. Here the research has unified different metrics to be able to read these warning signs. The first thing of all is to use an electroencephalogram to measure brain activity, which is a cheap, quick and non-invasive test. From here, the BrainScope technology platform analyzes this data by looking for 14 specific features related to neuronal connectivity and brain wave behavior. Once these characteristics are ‘found’, an AI algorithm comes in that processes the patterns and determines whether the patient analyzed can progress towards mild cognitive impairment or dementia such as Alzheimer’s. And the results are spectacular, since it has demonstrated outstanding precision when separating patients who develop the disease from those who do not. The future. The great value of this biomarker is not only technological, but also clinical, since the most reliable current tests to predict pathologies such as Alzheimer’s require painful lumbar punctures or scans that are not cheap. A system based on EEG and AI could be easily integrated into primary care clinical protocols or routine neurological consultations as it does not have a very high cost and, above all, is not invasive. The important thing here is to detect neurodegeneration in the earliest phases in order to gain golden time so that new drugs can act at the beginning of the disease and gain years of quality of life. Images | Robina Weermeijer In Xataka | We have a new “theory of everything” to understand Alzheimer’s. Its key is in some small granules

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