spectacular

A Chinese driver bought a spectacular electric SUV to travel to Europe. Everything was perfect until he reached the border

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Fabio Belmone is Volata di Peluca. At the beginning of last year he went viral when he posted that he was going to Tokyo. So far, everything is normal. Another millennial going to Japan. What made Fabio Belmone’s trip special is that he planned to reach the Japanese capital by car. 25,000 kilometers and 80 days later, the account Volata di Peluca confirmed that it had arrived in Japan. But perhaps the most curious thing about the trip is that, in addition to crossing all of Europe and Asia, the car chosen was a Fiat Marea. The only thing he could afford with 900 euros, he explained to The Vanguard. “I have crossed two continents, but my car can’t enter Barcelona,” he said in the interview. And perhaps, precisely because of that, because the car was tremendously analog, the adventure was able to reach its destination. Because in any country they could fix it. And, above all, because it wasn’t a car that was going to stop for crossing a border. The owner of this Zeekr 9X cannot say the same, explain our French colleagues from L’Automobile. At least he’s not standing still That transcontinental journey is having its particular replica from China. Mr. Liu is a Chinese driver who wants to repeat Fabio Belmone’s adventure in reverse. From Europe to China. Of course, aboard a Zeekr 9X, one of the most luxurious SUVs in the country. He Zeekr 9X It is a car that costs, in direct exchange, just over 61,000 euros. That means that in the Asian country it is one of the most luxurious options you can buy since manufacturers have filled their cars with technology at ridiculous prices. In this case we are talking about an extended range electric vehicle (a particular version of a plug-in hybrid) that in China it reaches 1,300 HP of power. The car, in fact, has just arrived in Europe although reduced in power, with an 897 HP version. But beyond the power figures, what is truly interesting about this car is inside, with six seats (or rather six seats), this huge SUV can become a rolling living room. Heated, ventilated and massaged seats that can be faced until they become a kind of hammock, 32 speakers spread throughout the cabin, two consecutive 16-inch screens to manage the infotainment system and even a third 17-inch screen that slides from the roof so that the rear passengers can enjoy it while they are driving. Inside the Zeekr 9X The experience of traveling in the car goes far beyond traveling through countries because, unlike with the Marea, the beauty is on the inside. Mr. Liu must have been thinking something similar when he began the trip. But a few thousand kilometers later, upon crossing the first border, the dream turned into a nightmare. Suddenly, your Zeekr 9X hood a multitude of functions. All software functions fell apart when it crossed the border into Kazakhstan. The loading ports and access to the warehouse also did the same. The reason was simple: the car, using GPS, had detected that the border had been crossed. They explain in CarNewsChina that the driver could not find a way to continue his journey for 30 hours. The reason, they explain from the specialized media, is in the vehicle’s anti-theft system. Automatically, the car detects through GPS positioning whether it is in China or beyond the borders. In the latter case, the vehicle repeatedly sends warnings but if it continues moving it blocks the vast majority of the functions. The system is activated by default in the car. The company has recognized in the Chinese media National Business Daily that, indeed, most of the car’s systems were blocked but that the vehicle can continue moving. To unlock the gas tank and charging socket you have to press and hold some specific buttons. This information, according to the company, should be known to the owner. What they explain however in CarNewsChina is that Mr. Liu knew about the blocking system before leaving China so went to a dealer. To avoid theft or illegal exports, what they do at the point of sale is certify the validity of some documents such as the driving license or the purchase contract. At that moment and after knowing the client’s intentions, they should have deactivated the anti-theft system with GPS positioning but they did not do so and it was not clear to the driver what he should do if this situation arose. But this time, what the software takes away from you, the software gives you. With an activation code, the brand was able to update the car via OTA and unlock the anti-theft systems, leaving the car ready to be used again. Photo | In Xataka | China wants to throw the door on the European electric car. Zeekr is your argument in the premium segment

Telecinco hits rock bottom in the most spectacular way in a black summer, and signs the day with the lowest audience in its history

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Thursday, July 2, should have been just another day of the summer after-dinner meal. And like a domestic thriller TV movie, it became the worst in Telecinco’s 36-year history. The stars have aligned in the negative to reach the disastrous milestone, since not only is it the icing on the cake of a collapse in audiences that has been brewing for years, but the stratospheric audiences of the World Cup mean that, for the moment, Telecinco is going to have a very difficult time raising its head. Not six. Telecinco closed on July 2 with 5.97% screen share: the worst daily data in the chain since records exist. That same afternoon, Spain beat Austria 3-0 in the round of 32 of the World Cup 2026 and brought more than nine million viewers to La 1, which closed the day with 26.7% share and 63.7% during the match itself. The golden minute arrived at 10:51 p.m., with 10,447,000 people watching Spain advance to the round of 16. Not just football. As we said a few days ago, not only football is to blame: it is that Mediaset’s entire summer plan to recover audience is leaking: that same day ‘Love… or whatever arises!’ it signed a minimum with 5.1% and 439,000 viewers; ‘Summer moves’ fell to 5.8% and 431,000; and that collapse also dragged down ‘El Diario de Jorge’ (7.4%) and ‘Allá tú’ (7.6%). Even the prime time suffered the blow: the series ‘She, damn soul’ scored its minimum number of viewers in its third episode. However, ‘First Dates’ surpassed a repeat of ‘El Hormiguero’, which corroborates Carlos Sobera’s dating show as one of Mediaset’s most reliable assets. Because it was already coming off an ominous June: the month closed with an 8.3% share, the worst June in the history of the network and also the worst month in the regular season, even ahead of the previous negative record, 8.4% in December 2025. Not even heavyweights like the final of ‘Survivors’ or the outcome of ‘Temptation Island’ managed to reverse the figure. Downhill and without brakes. Since the chain he let Paolo Vasile go to reinvent himselfdid not find a substitute for the formats that sustained its leadership, such as ‘save me‘, which also went through its own via crucis. The 2025-2026 season closed with an 8.9% average quota, the worst in its history and the fifth consecutive record to set a new low. He contrast with La 1 It is especially striking: in five years, the public channel has gone from 8.8% to 12.1%, while Telecinco has done the opposite, from 13.1% to 8.9%. Great summer plan. ‘Love…or whatever comes up!’ It debuted on June 22 with 6.8% and 632,000 viewers. ‘The Peace Show’ started with 7.8% and 638,000. ‘Summer moves’ premiered with 7%. None of the three has exceeded 8% since then. Meanwhile, Antena 3 maintains the after-dinner atmosphere with ‘Sueños de libertad’ above 14% on average and La 1 exploits the World Cup to lead a month of June that had been belonging to Atresmedia for 22 months. The figures are unequivocal: it is not that people have stopped watching traditional television. It is a specific problem for Mediaset. The last puff. The fourth piece of the plan remains: ‘From Monday to Friday’, presented by Santi Acosta and Beatriz Archidona, two faces that already lead ‘From Friday’ in prime time on Fridays for three seasons. The program inherits the slot from ‘Jorge’s Diary’ from 6:15 p.m. adds a team of 16 collaborators in which faces from the extinct ‘Sálvame’ coexist (Lydia Lozano, Karmele Marchante, Rosa Benito, Terelu Campos, Antonio Rossi), which points to a timid attempt to recover what was the last great success of Mediaset’s afternoons. His only problem: he faces, in his debut, nothing less than an afternoon of warming up for a game in Spain. In Xataka | Telecinco has ‘El Rosco’ but does not have ‘Pasapalabra’. Antena 3 has ‘Pasapalabra’ but does not have ‘El Rosco’

The first sub-1nm chip is here. It was manufactured by IBM and it is spectacular

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It has been a long time since we witnessed a milestone like this. Innovations in the field of semiconductor manufacturing they happen constantlybut what IBM has just announced is a monumental achievement: it has managed to produce the world’s first chip with subnanometer technology. This simply means that it has been manufactured on a 0.7 nm (or 7 angstroms) node, which has allowed this company’s engineers to pack almost 100 billion transistors into a surface the size of a fingernail. Crossing the nanometer barrier is not just a matter of numbers. For decades, the integrated circuit industry has evolved under the logic of Moore’s Law. The problem is that this principle has been losing force as transistors approach the dimensions of the atoms themselves. Quantum physics is relentless: each further reduction is an almost unsolvable problem. Reaching 0.7 nm means that IBM has found a way out of that alley. And it has done so not by further miniaturizing transistors according to conventional designs, but by completely reinventing how they are built. This new chip offers up to 50% more performance. Or 70% more energy efficiency if we compare it with 2nm integrated circuits from IBM itself. These two metrics represent the extremes of a spectrum that designers can adjust depending on the application these semiconductors are intended for. For workloads of artificial intelligence (generative AI), cloud infrastructure or next-generation devices, this flexibility is not a minor detail: it is exactly what differentiates a viable chip from a disruptive one. Stack to scale The most important innovation of IBM’s 0.7nm integrated circuit is the technology nanostackwhich we can translate into Spanish as ‘nanostacking’. This is the industry’s first three-dimensional architecture based on stacked nanosheets, and has been developed entirely by IBM. To understand what it means, we are interested in remembering that the previous generation of frontier technology, nanosheets, represented a very important conceptual leap compared to FinFET transistors: instead of a transistor with a vertical fin, nanosheets have several horizontal sheets of silicon stacked and wrapped around the control gate, which improves electrical performance in a smaller space. Nanostack goes one step further: it stacks and staggers entire transistors in three dimensions, thus taking advantage of 3D sequential integration to insert more logic in less surface. What differentiates this architecture from a mere exercise in miniaturization is that each stacked layer can incorporate combinations of different materials, allowing the performance and energy efficiency of each transistor to be optimized independently. Not all transistors on a chip need to behave the same. Some prioritize speed, and others prioritize energy savings Or put another way: not all transistors on a chip need to behave the same. Some prioritize speed, and others prioritize energy savings. Nanostack makes it possible to fine-tune that balance layer by layer, something that planar architectures (or even conventional nanosheets) do not allow with the same granularity. IBM also presented results at the VLSI 2026 conference that demonstrate a 40% improvement in SRAM scaling thanks to this architecture, enabling the manufacturing of semiconductors capable of handling the bandwidth demands of the most demanding AI workloads. Experimental validation of the architecture nanostack It is based on three essential pillars: the ultra-thin dielectric link in CMOS integration, the demonstration of dual-channel engineering capability and the functional operation of a CMOS inverter with expected switching performance. This last point is especially important: a functional CMOS inverter is, in practice, the most basic logic unit of any digital circuit. That nanostack Running it with the expected metrics confirms that this architecture is not just a promising lab result; It is a technology that can be physically built and translated into real computing. IBM and its partners (Lam Research, Tokyo Electron and SCREEN Semiconductor Solutions) have long been working on manufacturing tools and processes with High NA extreme ultraviolet lithography of ASML at its facilities in Albany (New York). Anderon is a quantum chip manufacturing company independent of IBM However, traveling the path that separates the laboratory from the factories requires a lot of time. IBM estimates a production horizon of between three and five years for the first commercial adoption of the technology nanostack in the sub-nanometer node, with a schedule that projects at least a decade of additional scaling. On the other hand, this company has just announced Anderon, a quantum chip manufacturing company independent of IBM that will combine its experience in quantum computing and semiconductors to manufacture quantum wafers on an industrial scale. Be that as it may, with the 7 angstrom node IBM not only demonstrates that the era of subnanometer scaling is physically possible: It also claims its role as a reference laboratory in an industry that has been searching for a way out of the limits of silicon for years. Image | IBM In Xataka | An unexpected salvation for the end user emerges from the memory market debacle: Chinese chips In Xataka | China needs to develop a new type of chips immune to US sanctions. And your scientists have just achieved it

PcComponentes plummets the price (to a historic low) of this Motorola mobile with 256 GB and spectacular screen

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Finding the perfect balance in the telephone mid-range is not an easy task. Many brands sacrifice design to offer power, or vice versa. However, Motorola has been proving for some time that you can have it all in a slim, lightweight body. If you are looking to renew your old smartphone without leaving your salary, PcComponentes has this Motorola Edge 70 Fusion 5G at historical minimum price: 324.99 euros. Motorola edge 70 fusion 5G 8GB 256GB 6.78″ Black Snapdragon processor The price could vary. We earn commission from these links A mobile with a cinema screen and balanced power The first thing that enters the eyes of this Motorola Edge 70 Fusion It is its aesthetic section. Inheriting the design lines of its older brothers, this device relies on an extremely thin body, softened edges and a 6.78 inch pOLED curved screen with Full HD+ resolution. But this mobile phone is not just a pretty face, it also has a 120Hz refresh ratewhich guarantees absolute fluidity when scrolling on social networks or playing games. Additionally, the screen is compatible with HDR10+so you can enjoy Netflix series and movies with the best color interpretation. Inside, there is a processor Snapdragon 7s Gen 3accompanied by 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB internal storagemore than enough space to forget about constantly deleting photos, videos or apps. In the photographic section, Motorola has not messed around with infill sensors for this model. We find a 50 MP high resolution main camera signed by Sony and supported by Artificial Intelligence to capture clear night shots, and an ultra wide angle that more than meets the requirements in landscapes and group photos. Although if there is something in which it also stands out compared to its rivals, it is its layer of customization: MyUX. With it, Motorola offers a cleaner, purer and more fluid Android experience, without bloatware (pre-installed junk apps) and with smart gestures that facilitate daily use (for example, shake your phone to turn on the flashlight). Its huge battery with capacity of 7,000 mAh It is another of its hallmarks. Although it not only stands out for this number, but also for its 68 W Turbo Power fast charging technology. This is perfect for those who want to charge their smartphone quickly before leaving the house, while getting dressed and having breakfast, for example. ⚡ IN SUMMARY: offer for the motorola edge 70 fusion smartphone ✅ THE BEST Design and ergonomics: It is an extremely thin, light and aesthetic phone. The curved screen and the rear finishes make it look like an 800 euro mobile phone instead of a mid-range one. pOLED screen: It is clear that Motorola panels are superb. The 120 Hz refresh rate combined with pOLED technology offers vibrant colors, pure blacks and excellent brightness for outdoors. ❌ THE WORST Fair power for gaming: The processor is designed for energy efficiency and everyday fluidity (social networks, multitasking, streaming). If you are looking for a mobile phone to play extremely demanding titles in 3D graphics at a competitive level, you will notice that it lacks a little oomph. Curved screen fragility: Visually it is beautiful, but curved screens are more prone to breaking in case of side falls and finding a good tempered glass protector that fits perfectly is more complicated. 💡 BUY IT IF… You prioritize design and comfort. If you hate cell phones that look like heavy bricks in your pocket and you are looking for something elegant, slim and that attracts attention, this is your cell phone. ⛔ DON’T BUY IT IF… The camera is your only measure when buying a mobile phone and you usually take a lot of photos in dark interiors or at parties at night, a Google Pixel from the “A” series will give you better results in photographic processing. Accessories that may interest you for this mobile FDHYFGDY Magnetic Case for Motorola Edge 70 Fusion The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Motorola Moto Buds: Wireless headphones The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Pepu Ricca (Xataka) and Motorola In Xataka | The best mobile phones, we have tested them and here are their analyzes In Xataka | Best wireless headphones. Which one to buy and 21 models from 15 euros to 470 euros

the spectacular technology that finally turns fencing into a spectacle

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The tip of a foil in a professional fencing competition moves faster than the human eye can follow, and that limitation has condemned the sport to a secondary role in broadcasts for decades. A Japanese studio has been working since 2012 on an answer that combines 4K cameras, deep learning and augmented reality. This April 25, it debuts in its first professional competition, in Los Angeles. It’s difficult to follow. Fencing has rules like right of way in foil and saber, used to determine who wins the point when both fencers touch the opponent’s body at the same time, forcing the spectator to follow movements of the weapon in fractions of a second. According to the Rhizomatiks official technical documentationthe tip of the weapon takes up just a few pixels even captured in 4K, and the blade deforms so much when flexing that classic image processing methods cannot follow it clearly. How it works. This visualization system is called Fencing Visualized and is born from an alliance between the Japanese studio Rhizomatiksdirected by Daito Manabe (known for collaborations with Björk, Perfume and the closing ceremony of Rio 2016), the agency Dentsu Lab Tokyo and the fencer Yuki Ota, the first Japanese Olympic medalist in the discipline. The idea germinated from previous work with dancers in which the team used motion capture and high-speed cameras to draw graphics on the bodies on stage. The official phase began in 2013 and the concept already appeared in Tokyo’s bid video for the 2020 Games. Early versions of the system depended on retroreflective markers attached to the weapon: In 2014 it was tested live during the Yuki Ota Cup and in 2017 the balls were replaced with reflective tapes so as not to hinder the shooter. From reflective markers to deep learning. The technical leap has come now, when the team has worked to introduce the system in official competitions without interfering with the athletes’ competition equipment, mainly weapons. Therefore, in 2016 they rewrote motion detection with the help of deep learning. According to the engineer Kye Shimizuthe solution is a multistage network based on YOLO v3, fed by 24 4K cameras on both sides of the track, and whose results are crossed to estimate the position of the tip. This new version without physical markers debuted as an exhibition at the 71st Japan National Championships in 2018 and was seen in official competition a year later. The next milestone was Tokyo 2020, where the technology was deployed on site during the Games. That time at the Olympic Games is, in fact, what has allowed it to be sold to other competitions. Money. The American premiere on April 25 responds to a commercial logic adopted by the World Fencing League (WFL) that organizes the event, a professional league founded at the end of 2025 by three-time Olympian Miles Chamley-Watson. The competition brings together twelve athletes in mixed teams with a total distribution of $100,000 in prizes. The WFL itself describes the installation as a system of blade tracking with AI intended to make new viewers understand the action instantly. In other words: the league is interested in ensuring that, as a television show for all audiences, each round is understood intuitively, without knowing the regulations. More visions of the future. Fencing Visualized It is not an isolated case: There are systems like Hawk-Eye in tennis and cricket, Second Spectrum as the official optical tracking provider for the NBA and Premier League, or semi-automated offside in football. But the tiny tip of a saber is a more demanding problem than tracking a ball. On the other hand, this vision of the future also fits into the trend that the IOC has been promoting for years with Alibaba Cloud and Intel, and which turned Paris 2024 into the first end-to-end 8K broadcast with multi-camera 3D replay. The Los Angeles 2028 Games are a good space for this system to be integrated into the audiovisual dissemination of this sport. In Xataka | We have been living with robots for years that beat us at chess. Now we have robots that beat us at tennis

The entire ocean floor of the Earth, in a spectacular 3D interactive map that reveals 50,000 unknown underwater mountains

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Although we are already looking other planets in the universe (especially interesting are the potentially habitable ones), the reality is that the old Earth still has a few hidden secrets left. Without going any further, the seabed continues to delight us with new species at this point in the film. NASA knows this and that is why in December 2022 it launched a satellite into space with a mission: to achieve topography of surface waters and oceans. Hence its name, SWOT. Already the first year managed to map the ocean floor in more detail than in the last 30 years and is now available in full. It is, in short, the most detailed marine gravity map in history. What he has “seen” is not just the ground, but subtle variations in the height of the sea surface. These variations reveal the existence of thousands of underwater mountains, trenches and faults, invisible to conventional satellites. To prepare this map, NASA has used state-of-the-art phase coherence interferometry, which has made it possible to measure the two-dimensional height of sea level with high precision. Historically, sonar has been used to measure the seabed, but we have only managed to map less than 30% (with the Seabed 2030 project) with this technique. On the other hand, standard satellites offered a resolution well below the achieved spatial resolution, close to 8 kilometers. This exhaustive map of the ocean floor goes beyond satisfying geographical curiosity, the impact of this cartography It is evident in: Biodiversity. Underwater mountains are oases of life and knowing where they are is essential. Safety in navigation, allowing the identification of underwater peaks that may constitute a risk for vessels. Climate change. These types of structures are directly related to ocean currents, responsible for transporting heat. If we do not know the relief, we cannot predict how the sea will warm. The map of the seabed with a level of detail never seen before With this vertical gravitational gradient map, NASA has developed a 3D model through which you can move and zoom through all the depths of the seas and oceans of the Earth. Individual abyssal hills measuring 200 – 300 kilometers in length can be seen along with other small seamounts and tectonic structures, previously hidden. In fact, abyssal hills are the most common landform underwater (in the southern Indian Ocean they can be seen, for example). NASA explains that they are formed by normal faults along the axes of the oceanic ridges. From them, plate reconstruction studies are being carried out. Also in the visualization you can see seamounts located west of Central America, which are actually underwater volcanoes formed by magmatic intrusions through the oceanic crust. Their importance is crucial as they modify ocean circulation, influence the distribution of nutrients and constitute key points of biodiversity. The high-resolution mapping reveals some 50,000 previously unknown seamounts approximately one kilometer high. Tap to go to NASA’s 3D model of the seafloor. Via: NASA/JPL The topography of surface waters and oceans from SWOT also shows great clarity in the continental margins, highlighting the high latitude areas, with tectonic structures buried under sediments and ice. Thus, it allows observing submarine canyons that transport sediment from the mainland to the deep sea along the South American continental shelf, as well as ancient mid-ocean ridges hidden under the ice in the Weddell Sea. In Xataka | Astronomers have stitched together 10,000 images from the Webb telescope to make the largest map of the universe. Something doesn’t fit In Xataka | This is the impressive interactive map to see the Earth in 4K live from space and monitor satellites Cover | POT

The dramatic retreat of a glacier in the Arctic has just revealed a spectacular “graveyard” of prehistoric whales

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The Arctic is is melting at a dizzying rateas we have repeated on many occasions, and in doing so, it is giving us back time capsules that had been under the ice for millennia. The last of these findings seems to be taken from a fiction novel, since it has revealed an authentic prehistoric cemetery of whales that has come to light after the fracture of a glacier in less than two decades. How it looked. This is where the expedition of the Arctic and Antarctic Institute of Russia (AARI) intervenes, which had as its original objective the study of permafrost in the region. However, upon arriving at the area, the researchers found a big surprise. As detailed by the researcher himself Nikita Demidov, satellite images and measurements on site confirmed that a large local glacier had split dramatically in a period of less than 20 years. And this fracture exposed a marine terrace hidden under the ice, revealing an unusual concentration of whale skeletons. And the best thing is that, thanks to being buried under the ice, have been preserved in an exceptional way. What were they doing there? In reality, the presence of this “cemetery” is not a coincidence, but experts point out that these remains are the key to understanding extreme paleographic events. Specifically, they indicate the existence of very rapid changes in sea level that occurred thousands of years ago. And the truth is that behind this there is a large amount of bibliography. A study published in 1995 already analyzed the postglacial emergence in the western area of ​​Franz Josef Land, using radiocarbon dating dating back to 10,400 years ago. The warm-up. The rapid decline observed by Demidov fits perfectly with recent scientific literature, since a study published this same 2025 in it Journal of Glaciology on the balance of glacier masses in the archipelago between 1991 and 2022 empirically confirms the acceleration of melting linked to climate change. You have to wait. Despite the spectacular nature of the images and the dissemination of the news through the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, the scientific community calls for caution. Currently, the origin of the data is an institutional statement from AARI itself and if we search scientific databases, there is no academic article that has been reviewed that specifically details this finding. And the next step for Demidov and his team will be to analyze the remains in the laboratory, date the bones precisely and publish their conclusions so that the international scientific community can evaluate them. Until then, the whale cemetery on Wilczek Island remains a monumental and silent witness to the abrupt changes of the Earth; both those that occurred millennia ago, and those that we are causing today. Images | Pascale Amez In Xataka | In the remote Svalbard archipelago there is something that confuses and fascinates scientists in equal measure: a glacier that “beats”

MG, Omoda and BYD close a spectacular 2025 and are among the best sellers

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It was the last days of March 2023 when we traveled to the north of Madrid to attend the BYD launch. “Europe has had its eyes closed for a long time”they told us from the company. That felt like the arrival of the first Chinese brand to our country, the one that came to confront Tesla in the electric car. At that time, MG was already selling thousands of units in our country and there were minority alternatives but the arrival of a manufacturer that was approaching two million cars sold It was already more serious. Months later Chery would arrivewith Omoda and Jaecoo, but also Ebrounder the arm. Along the way, other minority brands such as Lynk&Co or Xpeng have also been bringing new models to the market. But the bulk of Chinese sales and impact in our country is concentrated in the three companies we have listed. MG is completely established in our country, BYD has completed its second full year (with a change of direction included) and Omoda, Jaecoo and Ebro have now established their offer. And the result has been very good for them. More models and more sales If the year of Chinese brands in Spain has been characterized by something, it is because have put more points of sale on the streetmore cars in those points of sale and, above all, more cars in the garages of your potential customers. At the end of 2025, in Spain the main Chinese brands have obtained the following results: MG: 45,163 units (growth of 46.78%) BYD: 25,556 units (growth of 373.87%) Omoda: 13,963 units (growth of 79.33%) Jaecoo: 9,728 units (growth of 785.17%) Ebro: 12,459 units (growth of 44396.43%, they only had one car available at the end of 2024) Are very striking data due to several factors: MG sold more cars in Spain than Citroën (34,286 units), with which it competes on price. And it sold more cars than classics like Ford (29,065 units), Nissan (34,711 units), Opel (26,549) or Skoda (42,387 units). BYD only sells plug-in hybrid and electric cars so its potential customer market is much smaller Omoda, Jaecoo and Ebro are three brands of the Chery Group but each of them competes with three or four cars that, in addition, can be stepped on in price but not in positioning. If the sales of the Chery Group are added, they exceed 35,000 units. Brand by brand If we focus on the approach of each of these companies, we must take into account that MG already has a wide range of vehicles but is managing to attract customers in one of the most complicated markets: that of the cheapest cars on the market. Almost half of the sales of the best positioned one are accumulated by the MG ZS, one of the most affordable options on the market that for just over 20,000 euros delivers the ECO sticker so sought after in a Spain with growing low-emission zones. This has been the first year with its hybrid version working at full capacity and that has been noticed. The same has happened with the MG3which accumulates more than 9,000 units and is its second best-selling car. He good result The MG ZS among hybrids can be seen on the list of best sellers. And, of the non-plug-in hybrids, the Chinese SUV is in seventh position, surpassed by a Peugeot 2008 that has accumulated just five more registrations and in a field where Toyota clearly dominates (three of the four best-selling cars in this segment are its). MG’s third big best-seller is a good example of where the strength of Chinese brands lies. The MG EHS is a plug-in hybrid that, again, conquers by price. It has managed to become the second best-selling plug-in hybrid of the year, surpassing a Toyota C-HR that could be the great favorite. But no one is offering as much size and equipment at a lower price among plug-ins than the Chinese brands. That’s why the BYD Seal U has been the best-selling plug-in hybrid. As we said in our testcosts the same as the Toyota C-HR powered by this technology but for a family it can be much more interesting. The BYD SUV is not the only Chinese one that sneaks into the plug-in hybrid. The Jaecoo 7 also has its market share, a model that has also focused on offering extensive equipment at a reasonable price, which has allowed it to position itself as the sixth best-selling vehicle of this type in our country. The appearance of all of them and the Omoda 9 and the Ebro S700 among the best sellers of December, it gives us a preview of 2026 where everything indicates that The plug-in hybrid is the other great asset of Chinese models for next year (after the entry range). In that low range, the Chery group has already begun to make room for itself with the Omoda 5 but hopes to hit the table with its hybrid version. The car not only has an ECO label, The SHS-H version is a hybrid with all the letters and a particular touch. Attractive price, a design that is being liked and extensive equipment are its great assets for next year. And if we look at BYD, the result can also be underlined as excellent. Surviving with electric cars exclusively was becoming difficult to grow quickly and they have put all their efforts into action. They tested the BYD Seal U DM-i and found that they have a gap among plug-in hybrids. Maybe your Signal 6 DM-ias a family sedan, has it more complicated but the BYD Atto 2 DM-i It is priced to be the most attractive option on the market right now. Despite everything, the company is the first of the mortals after Tesla. Elon Musk’s people continue to dominate the electric market in our country with an iron fist, where the autonomy/price ratio continues to outweigh the rest of the values. Of course, the … Read more

Reopening nuclear power plants sounds very spectacular, but Google has a plan B in case it’s not enough: solar energy

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Data centers for are insatiable monsters those who are responsible for them must feed. OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Anthropic and Google are burning money riding colossal data centers for training and management of artificial intelligence. But these installations are not expensive to set up: they are also expensive to maintain. They require a considerable amount of energy to functionand Google has just received a ‘shot’ of renewables. All thanks to a direct connection to the largest system in the United States. Renewables to power AI. Google and TotalEnergies have just signed a agreement of energy purchases for 15 years. The contract stipulates that the energy company will deliver 1.5 TWh of electricity from its Montpelier solar plant, in Ohio, to Google. The plant is still under construction and they estimate that it will have a capacity of 49 MW, but the most important thing is that it will be connected directly to the electricity system. PJM. It is the largest network operator in the United States. It covers 13 states and data centers are representing a relevant portion of the operator’s pie: in its last annual auction, the load of these facilities PJM capacity sale triggered at 7.3 billion dollars, 82% more. Astronomical needs. In the statement from TotalEnergies, the company that this agreement illustrates its ability to meet the growing energy demands of the major technology companies. The problem is that it is not enough. If we focus on Google, the consumption of its data centers was 30.8 million megawatt hours of electricity. The company has been focused on AI for years, but the recent ‘boom’ has made it double what its centers consumed in 2020 (14.4 million MWh). Currently, data centers are estimated to account for 95.8% of Google’s total electricity budget. But it’s not just Google: the International Energy Agency esteem that global data centers consumed 415 TWh last year, representing approximately 1.5% of global electricity consumption. It seems little put in percentage, but Spain consumed in 2024 231,808 GWh, or 231 TWh, in 2024. The data centers of a handful of companies alone consumed twice as much as an entire country. And the estimate is that this data center consumption will double by 2030, reaching 945 TWh. Renewables are not enough. Now, although renewables are a support for the total energy required by data centerssolar and wind power have two limitations: intermittency and variability. Generation depends on weather conditions and time of day, meaning it fluctuates dramatically even throughout the same day. This instability clashes head-on with the high reliability and availability requirements of data centers. These are installations that must operate continuously and cannot assume cuts or Unforeseeable drops in supplysince AI or cloud storage would suffer the consequences. These renewables require backup batteries, but it is complicated and expensive to have such a large number of batteries just to power data centers. Pulling the gas and looking at the nuclear. That’s where other sources come into play. On the one hand, nuclear. In October 2024, Google signed the world’s first corporate agreement to acquire nuclear energy from SMR reactors. The first will come into operation in 230 and it is expected that, together, they will be able to satisfy the technology company with 500 MW of capacity by 2035. On the other hand, natural gas. In October of this year, the Broadwing Energy Center project began, a new natural gas power plant that will have a capacity of 400 MW and is scheduled to come into play at the end of 2029. Decarbonization and pressure. And the big question is… doesn’t the use of gas for AI clash with the technology companies’ objectives of achieving decarbonization percentages for both 2030 and 2050? We have already seen that oil companies have been getting off the renewables bandwagon because they have seen that fossil fuels are still relevant in the technology industry, but in the case of Google, they rely on the fact that projects like the Broadwing Energy Center They will have CCS systems. This means that it will have carbon capture system that will be able to permanently “sequester” 90% of the emissions. It means burying the problem, literally, since the CO₂ will be stored a mile underground. In 2020, before the AI ​​boom, the company established the goal of operating with carbon-free energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week by 2030. It will be interesting to see how they plan to offset these emissions thanks to renewables, but the IAE estimates that the demand for data centers will not stop growing in the short term and that adds another problem: a increased pressure on the electrical grid which is added as another element to manage. Because the big underlying problem is that the demand for energy is growing at a faster rate than the capacity to generate new electricity, and it is something that has an impact on companies’ bills, but also in homes. Images | Unsplash, Google Data Center In Xataka | China does not have a spending problem with AI. What it has is a huge income gap compared to its main rival

Galapagos tomatoes are ‘evolving in reverse’. And that is spectacular news.

by

The Galapagos Islands They are the living laboratory of evolution. It was there that Charles Darwin observed the differences in finches that cemented his famous theory of natural selection and that laid new foundations for the evolution of the human species. Now, almost 200 years later, these islands are back in the news, but for a surprising reason: a species of wild tomato seems to be turning the evolutionary clock. But the most important thing of all is that this involution in vegetation opens the door for us to understand how small changes can give us a wide range of possibilities in human pharmacology. The discovery. A new study published in Nature Communications has discovered that, while evolution followed its “normal” course on the oldest islands of the archipelago, the tomatoes on the younger, more hostile islands have “devolved.” And they are actively recovering a chemical trait that their ancestors lost millions of years ago, something that doesn’t seem too logical. And it is not logical because we all have in mind that changes are always for the better to adapt to a specific environment. But these plants are giving us a completely different perspective than what Darwin saidalthough it has important applications especially in pharmacology. A chemical twist. The study of ‘involution’ focuses on the steroidal alkaloids (SGAs), powerful compounds that plants of the Solanaceae family (such as tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants) use as a natural defense. These compounds have a key characteristic: chirality. This means that a molecule can exist in two forms which are mirror images each other, as if it were our left and right hand, or even a reflection of ourselves in a mirror. The two ways are the following: The modern “tomato type”: mainly produces the 25S isomer. The ancestral “eggplant type”: produces the 25R isomer. In this way, the study is seeing that although years ago it was normal to produce 25R, it was later changed to producing 25S. Now, evolution is taking off again to return to the most ancient. Behind this is an enzyme called GAME8 that has dictated what type of chemical defense each plant produces. In fact, the researchers showed that by modifying just eight amino acids of the tomato GAME8 enzyme, they could stop it from producing its 25S compound and make exclusively the ancestral 25R. It is literally an evolutionary switch. Evolution in ‘reverse’. This is where the plot thickens. The researchers analyzed the Solanum cheesmaniaea wild tomato endemic to the Galapagos. And what they found challenges the idea of ​​linear evolution: On older islands, such as St. Kitts, tomatoes almost exclusively produce the ‘modern’ 25S isomer. On more modern islands like Isabela, tomatoes have changed and accumulate high levels of the ‘ancestral’ 25R isomer. It’s not that these plants were “left behind.” The data suggest that their immediate ancestors produced 25S, but the unique environmental pressures of younger islands have favored mutations in their enzyme. GAME8 that they have made it return to produce the ancestral compound 25R. It is a clear case of reverse evolution. Because. Younger islands are more arid and hostile environments, and science suggests that this ‘ancient’ chemical cocktail could offer better protection against pathogens or herbivores specific to that inhospitable environment, or even help the plant in different soil conditions. The important thing. Beyond being a botanical curiosity, chirality is a fundamental concept in pharmacy. One isomer of a drug may be therapeutic, while its mirror ‘twin’ may be harmless or, in infamous cases such as thalidomide, tragically toxic. Understanding how nature has managed to make a single enzyme (GAME8) change its product from 25S to 25R through a few mutations is a great advance for biotechnology. We could, in theory, use this knowledge to engineer crops with specific alkaloid profiles, creating more resistant plants or, conversely, eliminating anti-nutritional compounds. Images | Airplane CP In Xataka | The skull that changes everything: a million-year-old fossil suggests that ‘Homo sapiens’ did not come from Africa

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