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Smart glasses for police seemed like science fiction. Some Chinese agents have already started using them

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The image is powerful because it is easy to visualize: a police officer walks down a street in Tianjin, looks around, and connected glasses return useful information in real time. What until not so long ago could have sounded like science fiction is beginning to have much more earthly applications, from ordering traffic to helping locate a lost person. In this city in northern China, according to China Dailytechnology is already part of some police tasks. And that’s the interesting thing: we are not just talking about a futuristic promise, but about a use that is beginning to hit the streets. Smart glasses for police. The key is that we are not just talking about glasses placed on an agent’s face, but about a system designed to be integrated into police routine. They are officially presented as a development of the local public security system, with national software and hardware, and places them in three areas of use: traffic, patrols and urban management. It is a very immediate effectiveness-oriented approach. An invisible screen for the agent. The device works as a layer of information added to police work. It can recognize text, interpret voice commands and provide responses from a connected platform, with the camera as an entry point to identify elements of the environment. In practice, this allows identity checks to be carried out or information associated with a person to be searched without leaving the scene. The source presents it as a responsive improvement, although such a tool also opens up obvious questions about surveillance and privacy. The glasses on the ground. Zhao Baoxin, an officer at the Jiefang Road police station in Heping district, told the aforementioned media that during a patrol they found an elderly man at an intersection who could not express himself clearly or indicate his name or address. According to his version, the glasses made it possible to quickly identify him and, in about 20 minutes, contact his family so he could return home. Traffic as a daily test. Another of the uses described brings the technology down to a very recognizable scene: the entrance and exit of a school. In that case, parents can pre-register their license plates through a mini-program developed with the participation of the public security system, and that information is linked to the platform consulted by the glasses. Thus, agents identify authorized vehicles, order short stops and divert other cars during peak congestion hours. It is efficient on paper, but it also normalizes automated license plate reading. What the numbers say. Sun Yinghua, agent in the science, technology and IT area of ​​the Municipal Public Security Bureau, places the recognition accuracy above 95% and speaks of results in milliseconds. They also explain that the design also seeks comfort: they weigh about 40 grams and offer a first-person perspective that avoids the framing changes typical of a body camera when the agent leans or turns. The autonomy, however, is 1.5 or 2 hours of continuous use. It hasn’t come out of nowhere. Police glasses with facial recognition had already appeared in China years ago. In 2018, SCMP counted that were being used at Zhengzhou East station during Chunyun, the huge Lunar New Year travel period, to locate fugitives and detect cases of identity fraud. What we see now seems less like a one-off test and more like a piece within an ecosystem: China Daily cites uses in different areas of the country, coordination with drones in large operations and plans to connect the glasses with robotic dogs, intelligent police vehicles, humanoid robots and other terminals. Efficiency gains ground, but so do questions about surveillance. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | The metaverse wasn’t dead, it was on a spree. And Meta wants it to flood Instagram and Facebook

‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ has started off on the wrong foot

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Seven years after ‘The Rise of Skywalker‘, ‘Star Wars‘ returns to theaters with ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’, the first film in the franchise since 2019. The reception of the first critics and even the first screenings for fans is being, at best, very lukewarm. Right now, Disney needs a smash hit to revitalize the franchise, and early viewers seem to be simply shrugging their shoulders. Lazy notes. With nearly 120 reviews counted before its May 22 premiere, ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ it stands at around 60% on Rotten Tomatoes. That score places it in the same range as ‘Attack of the Clones’ (62%), although still above what is considered the great fiascos of the franchise: ‘The Phantom Menace’ from the prequel trilogy and ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ from the Disney era. Of course, as always on Rotten Tomatoes, opinions are debatable, but it is significant that a film that was going to function as a oxygen tank for the franchise has such a lukewarm reception. What do they say? All the reviews agree on common points: the film is entertaining, but it does not justify a return to the cinema of the saga. Or in other words: we are facing an extended episode of the series. There is talk of a nostalgic walkof the most boring installment of the franchisethat the film is essentially two episodes from the spliced ​​series. One of the most noted problems is that his commercial hook, Pedro Pascal, has ended up turning against the series: the Mandalorian never takes off his helmet, and most of the action scenes are performed by a stuntman. Why Disney needs the Mandalorian. Disney comes from a complicated 2025 at the box officewith the failures of ‘Snow White’ and ‘Elio’, and Marvel’s proposals (”Captain America: Brave New World’, ‘Thunderbolts’ and ‘Fantastic Four’) performing less than expected. According to experts, the excess of series and movies designed for Disney+ has eroded the cultural value of Marvel, Star Wars and Pixarwhich has led to falls such as loss of 700,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2025. Resurrect ‘Star Wars’. The strategy is now very clear: fewer films, more impact. Marvel’s imminent releases are the new Spider-Man movie (in co-production with Sony) and the long-awaited return of the Avengers. ‘Star Wars’ is betting on this ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu’ (2026) and ‘Starfighter’ (2027), starring Ryan Gosling and directed by Shawn Levy. For now, perhaps, the strategy has been frustrated (although the box office may respond as Disney hopes, in a new chapter of the renewed divorce between critics and public: After all, ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ grossed more than a billion; and there are cases of films like ‘The Last Jedi’, loved by critics, hated by fans). The key problem with ‘The Mandalorian’. When Grogu was still Baby Yodaconquered the internet at a very specific moment: with the inauguration of Disney+, in the days around the pandemic. But the phenomenon was not repeated neither in successive seasons nor in series like ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ or ‘Ahsoka’. The franchise has been trying to disassociate itself from the Skywalker family for years, and ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ could be a good solid step, although the film’s plot revolves around Jabba the Hutt’s son. That is, the surnames in the usual tiny galaxy. Another sign that the franchise does not know how to expand without resorting to the usual tropes. Given what we have seen, ‘Starfighter’ has an even more relevant challenge before it than performing at the box office. In Xataka | Disney needs to solve the biggest crisis in ‘Star Wars’ history. And he’s held on to Baby Yoda to get it

Big tech had ambitious climate goals. Then the AI ​​came and started devouring them

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There was a time when technology seemed to have found a comfortable way to tell its climate future. The big companies talked about “clean energy”net zero emissions, increasingly efficient operations and commitments dated to 2030 or 2040. It was an attractive story because it coexisted with our daily use of the internet, services and applications. Generative AI, however, has complicated that picture: not only does it bring more smart services, it also requires more infrastructure, more electricity, and climate pressure that is much more difficult to square with the promises those same companies made just a few years ago. The most recent movement comes from Microsoft. Bloomberg has published that the company would be considering delaying or even abandoning one of its most ambitious energy goals, at a time when the race for AI requires increasingly more computing capacity. Tell OpenAI or Anthropic. This case does not appear in a vacuum: other large technology companies are also facing increasingly visible challenges to fit their climate commitments with the expansion of their data centers. The question is no longer just what they promised, but what happens when those promises collide with the actual scale of AI. The companies did not reach these commitments in a single way nor did they promise exactly the same thing. Some focused on the purchase of renewable energy, others on zero-carbon electricity, others on net-zero emissions, and others on eliminating more carbon than they generate. There were also different reasons for doing so: regulatory pressure, investor expectations, reputation and a fairly widespread conviction that digital infrastructure could grow. without triggering its climate impact. What interests us here is not to review all those promises, but to follow some of the most ambitious ones and see how they are holding up to the AI ​​race that is unfolding before our eyes. Climate promises in the face of expanding data centers As we say, the fundamental change is that many of these commitments were formulated before generative AI became an absolute priority for the industry. Until then, the growth of data centers was already a challenge, but it could be projected with a more gradual logic. The new race has altered that pace: training models, deploying them in massive products, and answering large-scale queries requires computing power that grows very quickly. What once seemed like a difficult but manageable roadmap now faces a different dynamic. Microsoft was one of the companies that formulated one of the most demanding goals. In July 2021 he announced his 100/100/0 commitment, a way of saying that by 2030 he wanted match 100% of your electricity consumption100% of the time, with zero-carbon energy purchases. The nuance matters: it was not just about offsetting annual consumption with renewables, but about getting closer to an hour-by-hour correspondence. Furthermore, the company proposed doing so in the same electrical networks from which it took that energy. Now that commitment is under obvious pressure. The aforementioned economic media indicated that the Redmond company is studying delaying or even abandoning it, according to anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter, while seeking to clear obstacles to powering its data centers. Microsoft has not confirmed that change and its director of sustainability, Melanie Nakagawa, maintained that the company remains committed to its environmental goals. He also left an insight that sets the tone for the official response: any adjustment would be part of a review of approach, not a change in long-term ambition. Google also set a powerful goal. In 2021, the Mountain View company set the goal to achieve net zero emissions across its operations and value chain by 2030, including its consumer hardware products. To achieve this, he proposed reduce 50% its absolute emissions compared to 2019, not only those generated directly by the company, but also those linked to its activity and its supply chain. What it could not reduce, according to its roadmap, it would compensate by removing carbon from the atmosphere through natural and technological solutions. The current situation shows how difficult it is to put this roadmap into practice. In its 2025 environmental reportGoogle points out that in 2024 its emissions were 11.5 million tons of CO2 equivalent. That is 11% more than the previous year and 51% above its 2019 base. The nuance is important: they did not increase 51% in one year, but rather compared to the starting point chosen by the company. The report itself also recognizes that integrating more AI into its products can complicate the reduction of emissions due to the greater demand for computing and technical infrastructure. Amazon also presented a high-ambition climate pledge. In September 2019the e-commerce giant announced together with Global Optimism The Climate Pledge, a commitment to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040ten years before the horizon set by the Paris Agreement. The company founded by Jeff Bezos became the first signatory of that initiative, which called for measuring and reporting emissions on a regular basis, applying decarbonization strategies and neutralizing remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent and socially beneficial compensations. Amazon’s situation shows that these promises already had gray areas even before AI was at the center of the debate. In September 2023, Data Center Dynamics published that the Science Based Targets initiative had removed the Amazon commitment from its panel and placed it in the “expired commitment” category. The reason, according to the media, was that both parties were unable to agree on a sufficiently significant emissions target. Amazon responded that the requirements had changed and that it would continue to look for credible third-party validators. In this sense, general photography goes in the same direction. The US Department of Energy estimates that the Data centers consumed around 4.4% of the country’s electricity in 2023 and could be between 6.7% and 12% in 2028. The International Energy Agency also projects a relevant leap on a global scale: from about 415 TWh in 2024 to about 945 TWh in 2030. Not all of this growth can be attributed solely to AI, … Read more

We thought we were 8 billion people on the entire planet. Until some researchers started crunching the numbers

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In November 2022, the UN celebrated that we were now 8 billion humans on Earth. They are estimates, of course, but beyond the figure, the really interesting thing is that in 2023 we do not reach the replacement rate and that humanity will reach its peak at the end of the century to, inevitably, start to fall. But… to what extent can we trust these accounts? It is something that has been on the table for some time and, according to a study of 2025, we have made a mistake in counting. So much so that we have left several hundred million people behind. Can we trust the numbers? “Calculating the number of people on the planet is an inexact science.” That was demographer Jakub Bijak’s comment to BBC in mid-2024, just when the World Population Prospects study. Something scientific is something exact, but the researcher also commented that the only thing you can be sure of when predicting population figures is the lack of certainty. That, be careful, does not mean that demographers take figures out of thin air. “It is a difficult thing based on our experience, knowledge and every piece of information we have access to,” said Toshiko Kanera, an expert in demographic forecasts. Demographers draw on the data and trends of each country since 1950, but… what if it had not been counted correctly? We are missing millions. In a 2025 study published in Natureresearchers at Aalto University in Finland show how the data sets handled by demographers “profoundly and systematically” underestimate population figures around the world. The serious thing is that we would be talking about hundreds of millions more people living on Earth. Example of the tools that demographers use in their analysis. Each one corresponds to a different bias Rural areas. Josias Láng-Ritter is one of the researchers in charge of the study and points to the accounts carried out in a specific segment: that of rural population. “For the first time, our study provides evidence that a significant proportion of the rural population could be missing from global population data sets,” he notes. As we say, we are not talking about a few million, but billions. “Depending on the data set used, rural populations have been underestimated between 53% and 84% in the period studied. The results are notable, since these data sets have been used in thousands of studies and have widely supported decision making, but their accuracy has not been systematically evaluated,” comments the researcher. The map shows the location of the 307 rural areas analyzed in the study. The populations reported in the graph were found to be underestimated by between 53% and 84% | Aalto University Biases. Attempts to review this data are not new, but previous research has focused on specific countries or urban areas. Researchers from Aalto University wanted to give a more global picture by comparing the five most used population data sets worldwide. They have used maps that divide the planet into high-resolution grids and have taken something very specific as a reference: resettlement figures from more than 300 rural dam projects in 35 countries. Why this bias of the dams? Because when a dam is builtthe population that lives in the area that will be flooded is relocated and accurate resettlement data is usually available. Comparing that population data from 1975 to 2010, the researchers found that the 2010 maps were more accurate, but still left out between 32% and 77% of the rural population. Between 2015 and 2020 the data sets were updated, but demographers continue to believe that underestimation of the rural population continues to exist and is a problem that persists in all regions of the world. Consequences. And we are talking about a problem whose resolution is complex. According to the researchers, no matter how much the data is reviewed, it is a structural problem. Governments do not have the resources to collect accurate data in these rural regions, there is a huge discrepancy between the real population and that reported on the population maps used to carry out demographic studies and that influences decision making. Average percentage of rural population underestimated (red and orange) and overestimated (blue) | Aalto University And it’s important. Current estimates place 43% of the 8.2 billion inhabitants of the world in rural areas -about 3,526 million people- and if we take into account that it is a percentage that has been underestimated between 53% and 84%, we are not talking about a small population, precisely. And it is essential to know exactly how many we are for a simple reason: the redistribution of resources. No data. The lack of accurate demographic records can affect political decision-making. Ritter gives the example of social decisions. “In many countries, there may not be enough data available at the national level, so they rely on global population maps to support their decisions: Do we need a paved road or a hospital? How much medicine is needed in a specific area? How many people could be affected by natural disasters like earthquakes or floods?” he says. Doing quick math, in the best scenario – that of 53% deviation in the rural population – we would be talking about 1,869 million people who would not have been counted. In the worst case, in that of the 84% not registered, we would talk about 2,962 million people. In the Nature study, they give the example of Paraguay, which in the 2012 census may have left out a quarter of the population. Reviewing the methods. In the team’s analysis, there are countries that fare better than others. They point to Finland as an example of reliable data, even in rural regions, because they began keeping digital records of the population 30 years ago. However, in countries where this thorough digital registration has taken longer to be implemented due to crises of any kind, the differences between the real population and the estimated one can be significant. “To provide rural communities … Read more

Memory prices have started to fall in some markets. There is still a long way to go to close the AI ​​crisis

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There is a scene that repeats itself every time the market gives a truce, even if it is minimal: it is enough for the price of a key component to begin to fall for the feeling that the worst is over. This is exactly what is happening now with DDR5 memory. In recent weeks falls have been recorded in the retail channel of several markets, and that has reactivated an inevitable question among those who have been following the evolution of prices for months: whether we are facing the beginning of the end of the memory crisis or simply a one-time adjustment. An extended pressure. To understand what we are seeing now, it is advisable to broaden the focus and look at the recent path of the market. The rise in memory prices It has not only hit the user who wants to update their equipment, but also manufacturers, distributors and assemblers, in a context marked by supply and demand tensions that have been conditioning purchases and strategies for months. Therefore, we are facing a pressure scenario that has ended up affecting a good part of the hardware market. Where and how much prices are falling. Beyond perception, what there is right now is a measurable change in some shop windows. TrendForce aims to clear declines in the retail channel in several regions. In Europe, the German market recorded a monthly drop of 7.2% in March 2026, while in the United States there have been discounts of more than 20% on specific 32 GB DDR5 kits. The most striking case is China, where 16 GB modules have fallen between 25% and 30% from the peaks at the beginning of the year. A correction. Behind this adjustment there is a much more earthly explanation than it might seem. According to the analysis firm and the industry sources it cites, the main factor is less traction in consumption after months of high prices, which has led many buyers to delay decisions and distributors to accelerate the release of inventory. Added to this is a common lag between the spot market and contracts, which can take between one and two months to translate into actual shipments. The noise around TurboQuant. In parallel with this correction, an element has appeared that has fueled the debate in the market. TurboQuanta compression algorithm from Google, has been interpreted in some recent coverage as a sign that the pressure on RAM could relax. However, the most prudent readings They point in another direction, pointing out that this is an incremental improvement and not a change capable of alone altering structural demand, especially in memory for servers and loads linked to artificial intelligence, which remains high. End of the crisis? All this fits into an idea that the sector itself repeats quite clearly. From Taiwan-based memory manufacturers, contract prices have remained stable despite volatility in the retail channel, and demand in segments such as servers, DRAM and HBM remains strong, partly supported by multi-year agreements with large customers. In this context, the current correction is interpreted as a specific adjustment, not as a sufficient turnaround to consider the current episode of tension resolved. Caution and more caution. What we are seeing in some markets is a temporary relief for the consumer, yes, but everything indicates that it is a correction within a cycle still stressed by underlying factors that have not disappeared. The most optimistic forecasts speak of a progressive normalization towards the end of 2026 in some segments, while others place it even further. With this scenario, ending the memory crisis would be getting ahead of events that, for now, are still far from being confirmed. Images | Andrey Matveev In Xataka | AI urgently needs memory, so Samsung and SK are going to inject $1 billion into China

Singapore is the hidden “heart” of the Internet and global telecommunications. It all started with a tree from there.

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We live in a connected and globalized world where (almost) everything is in the cloud and available through the internet. Although these connections seem invisible to the eye, they are not: submarine cables are responsible for of 97% of intercontinental traffic. If you take a look at the world submarine cables mapyou will see that there are areas that are true deserts and others that are tangles. One of the most congested points is precisely in Singapore. That the enclave is on the maritime route between Europe, the Middle East and East Asia partly explains why: geography is a historically compelling reason. However, the real trigger was a very curious Scottish doctor and a tree native to the Malay Peninsula. The impressive Singapore node. That Singapore is Asia’s great connectivity hub is a reality: it unites East Asia, South Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and Europe. But it is not only a busy area, it is among the large exchangers that keep the world connected through their interconnection density and operational resilience. Approximately 30 active cables and many others in imminent deployment converge in just 720 square kilometers of territory, according to TeleGeography. To prevent your seabed from becoming a tangle of cables, the deployment is restricted to three specific areas awarded in strict order of arrival eight landing stations. On the Equinix campus is the Singapore Internet Exchange (SGIX), a point where traffic is literally exchanged between hundreds of operators throughout Asia at a very short physical distance, which translates into ultra-low latency. In addition, its redundant capacity is such that when other critical routes fail, it is capable of absorbing traffic diversions, as happened during the Red Sea crisis in 2022. That tangle of cables is Singapore. Submarinecablemap Context: geography as state policy. Singapore’s reality as a first-rate hub is largely to blame for its strategic location: it is at the southern end of the Malaysian peninsula, where the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea meet. In the Strait of Malacca, right where it becomes the Strait of Singapore, its narrowest point is only 2.8 kilometers wide and there are areas where the depth around 25 meters. over there 80,000 ships pass through each year. Its position is key, but there is a milestone that marked everything: in 1819 the British East India Company obtained the right to establish a trading post over there. Since then, the Strait of Malacca has been a usual suspect in international trade: it is where much of the world’s oil (even more so than Hormuz, which is currently raging with the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran). Is one of China’s doors to the world. And also the area through which any cable that connects the West with East Asia passes. Many ships, many cables and little space constitute a potential recipe for disaster, which your government conscientiously manages and continues to promote vigorously. favorable regulatory conditions to attract more wiring. The material that started submarine cables. We have made a small flashback to the 19th century with the British East India Company that we now return to. When in 1822 the Scottish surgeon William Montgomerie was in Singapore precisely at the service of the East India Company, something caught his attention: the handles of parang (a type of machete) were made of a material that looked like plastic wood. Of course, unlike wood, this material did not splinter, was resistant to impacts, molded to the workers’ hands and was immune to water. A marvel, come on. A material with properties that he had never seen in his life, so he sent a sample to London for exhibition at the Society of Arts. There were no wires in Montgomerie’s head, what he had in mind were surgical instruments. In 1845 the Society awarded him an award and engineers began to work with this prodigious substance. Illustration of the Palaquium gutta. Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen – (1883) Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen in naturgetreuen Abbildungen mit kurz erläuterndem. Plastic before the plastic boom. Gutta-percha is the dried sap of trees native to the Malay Archipelago such as the Palaquium gutta, a natural latex that becomes rigid when cooled and has waterproof, saltwater-resistant and electrically insulating properties. Taking into account that Bakelite did not arrive until 1907in the 19th century it was the only material with that magnificent combination of properties, ideal for insulating an electric cable at the bottom of the sea. At that time there was no fiber optics, but there was telegraph. The rapid industrialization of gutta-percha. British engineering stepped on the accelerator and by 1851 we already had the first submarine cable with gutta-percha crossing the English Channel, led by the brothers Jacob and John Watkins Brett. The “nervous system” of the British Empire It grew at dizzying speed: by 1866 it had 15,000 nautical miles and by 1900 it reached 200,000 nautical miles. Singapore was already on the wiring map thanks to London’s connection to Hong Kong through India and the Strait of Malacca, laid by the British-Indian Submarine Telegraph Company. That stretch of coast where the cable reached in 1871 is where the Meta or Google cables pass today for identical geographical reasons as they do now, a century and a half later. The environmental drama. We have already seen that in the West there was a real furor over gutta-percha, the obtaining of which had small print: unlike rubber, it was not enough to bleed the tree, it had to be cut, removed the bark and boiled. An adult tree produced between one and seven kilos. For the first attempt at a transatlantic cable, which dates back to 1858, it required an enormous amount: for 2,500 nautical miles in length (4,630 km) 300 tons were needed. Only two years after Montgomery introduced gutta-percha to the old continent, Tomas Oxley estimated that the 412 tons exported to Europe had caused the felling of 69,000 trees. He Palaquium gutta disappeared from Singapore by 1857 and much … Read more

China has started a battle against the US and Japan that no one is talking about. And it is crucial to winning the chip war

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In the semiconductor war that the US and China are fighting Companies that specialize in the manufacture of photolithography equipment tend to attract attention, such as ASML; those that design the chips, such as NVIDIA or AMD; and the companies that produce them, such as TSMC or Samsung. However, in this complex network there are other much less known companies that also play an essential role in the integrated circuit industry. One of them is the Japanese company JSR Corporation. This entity is one of the industrial strongholds of Japan. And it is because it supplies its photoresist liquids to most of the semiconductor manufacturers that produce cutting-edge chips, helping to sustain Japan’s leadership in a very important area that usually goes unnoticed: that of the manufacture of advanced materials to produce integrated circuits. For China to have its own advanced photoresist liquids in your path to total independence of its chip industry is crucial, so its plan involves break Japan’s monopoly in no more than five years. China prepares to intimidate Japan The photolithography equipment designed and produced by ASML is responsible, very roughly, for transferring the geometric pattern described by the mask with great precision to the surface of the silicon wafer. In this area we can observe the pattern as the “drawing” that delimits the distribution of the transistors, the connections and the other elements that make up an integrated circuit. Before transferring the geometric pattern to the wafer, it is necessary to pour a liquid capable of absorbing light and preserving the pattern on it. However, before reaching this very important step, it is necessary to subject the wafers to a process known as deposition. It usually involves equipment manufactured by Tokyo Electron or Applied Materials. Its purpose is prepare silicon wafers for the transfer of the geometric pattern by depositing a very thin layer of material on them. Depending on the type of chip being manufactured, it will be necessary to use one material or another. One of the most used deposition techniques is known as oxidation, and consists of taking advantage of the ability of silicon to form a very thin layer of oxide when reacting with water. Its purpose is to protect the transistors and other chip components from external contamination. However, before transferring the geometric pattern to the wafer using lithography equipment, it is necessary to pour a liquid capable of absorbing light and preserving the pattern on it. This is the function of the photoresist fluid. During the last two decades, all companies specialized in the production of photoresist materials have been Japanese. In fact, Japan has since then the monopoly of this marketwhich is currently led by JSR Corporation. For the US, one of its main allies should lead this market not a problembut the possibility of China developing the capacity to produce its own advanced photoresist materials on its path to cutting-edge chip manufacturing is an issue. The Chinese government knows that photoresist production is a critical bottleneck, which is why its latest five-year plan has set out to resolve it. Xuzhou B&C Chemical, which is one of the leading photoresist materials manufacturers in China, anticipates that in at most five years will have the capacity to produce large-scale advanced KrF photoresists (Krypton Fluoride) and ArF (Argon Fluoride). Precisely this last material is commonly used in nodes equipped with deep ultraviolet (UVP) lithography equipment. However, the great challenge facing China is the development of photoresists suitable for the production of integrated circuits in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) nodes. We will see what achievements it achieves over the next five years. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | SCMP In Xataka | Japan takes the lead with nuclear fusion and sets an extremely ambitious date: the 2030s

NVIDIA has lost hope in China, which is why it has started manufacturing its own next-generation GPUs for AI

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NVIDIA faces this 2026 a crucial year. They have become one of the largest strategic investors in the AI ​​ecosystem with dozens of billion-dollar investments in other companies, models, infrastructure and robotics. But, in the end, they are a company that supplies chips and, so far, the H200 They set the tone. According to a report by Financial Timesthat’s over. NVIDIA just ordered TSMC to start mass manufacturing Vera Rubinits next-generation hardware for AI. The reason? They have lost all faith in China. In short. With the entire AI industry looking to the future, and NVIDIA that has its Vera Rubin on the starting grid, it was strange that the company continued to invest so much in keeping TSMC working on a chip as old as the H200. Although it has been around for a while, it has positioned itself as unbeatable in the industry due to its price/power ratio, so these are the chips on which it has been built. the AI ​​empire. However, time passes and NVIDIA needs to move. Data centers need more power, new models are more demanding and the spearhead of the software sector – such as OpenAI either Google– have demanded new solutions. According to two sources consulted by the financial media, and close to NVIDIA’s plans, the company has grown tired of “waiting in limbo” and has begun to accelerate the delivery and deployment of Vera Rubin. Yoncomparable. As it could not be otherwise, TSMC is going to be in charge. The Taiwanese foundry would have already been asked to begin diversifying the production line to begin manufacturing the new chips. And if you’re wondering why it’s not enough for Google or OpenAI to simply buy more H200, the answer is because the chips have nothing to do with it. H200 is a more classic GPU for a data center. It is the configuration that AI and computing companies on these servers have been working with for years. Vera Rubin, however, is a paradigm shift made up of new CPUs, new GPUs and designed so that everything works as a single rack-scale accelerator. It has not only more power, but also the latest software and hardware additions from NVIDIA and something very important: incredible bandwidth. The higher the bandwidth on such a system, the more simultaneous data it can handle. This implies greater efficiency when training, but also a lower cost in inference. It is not an update, it is a platform change designed for models with trillions of parameters. Qgoose faith in China. To put it more simply, if the H200 is like a “super powerful graphics card”, Vera Rubin is like a mini data center in itself. And if you’re wondering why they didn’t start production sooner, the reason is… China. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, has been ‘fighting’ with Washington for months to open their arms in the trade and technology war maintained by the US and China. Trump ended up agreeing and Huang commented earlier this year that they had returned to “turn on” all production lines to supply the very high Chinese demand. The problem is that that demand did not arrive. At least, It was not as high as Huang expected. In the presentation of results, NVIDIA’s financial director commented a few days ago that “although small quantities of H200 for Chinese customers were approved by the US government, we have not yet generated any income. And we do not know if imports to China will be allowed.” We already told the problem: The US was leaving for NVIDIA to sell its graphics, butThe Chinese government did not seem so convinced. Your main Big Tech They were demanding NVIDIA solutionsarguing that they need them to keep up with what their American rivals are doing, but the ball was in the court of the Government and Customs. China is promoting AI that is different from that of the US, more focused on low costs and rapid acceptance by the client, and at the same time want to build your own hardware network with companies like SMIC or a Huawei that you already have your supercomputer for AI. complicated swerve. From the Financial Times they point out that the president of China, Xi Jinping, and the president of the United States will meet at the end of March to discuss export controls. The problem is that, according to their sources, even if the barrier is lifted completely and not just for certain companies and China can buy H200s en masse, turning TSMC’s ship around so that it starts producing H200s again would be complicated. It is not as simple as pressing a button and going from producing one thing to another. If this situation occurs, “NVIDIA would take up to three months to reallocate or add capacity to the supply chain to produce H200.” One of Vera Rubin’s PCBs Rebound winner. What is clear here is that NVIDIA is not going to lose from the operation. Huang already argued that the United States could not miss the opportunity to take a slice of a multi-billion dollar market (because the US let the cards be sold… with a 25% tariff), but whether it is the Chinese or the Western industry, it is from NVIDIA that they continue to buy the H200 and, ‘shortly’, the Vera Rubin. And the rebound winner in this operation is Samsung. Of the three companies that manufacture memory (and that have catapulted the RAM and SSD crisis we are in), Samsung is the one that has completed its new generation HBM4 memory. It is the one that has passed the high standards of NVIDIA and the one that is already being mass manufactured to be able to integrate into Vera Rubin systems. Everyone attentive. As we said, NVIDIA has to the entire industry at his feet. Google, xAI and Meta are working on their own chips, but together with Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, OpenAI, Mistral and Anthropic they are some of the companies that they … Read more

I have tried all the browsers with AI on the market and the one that works best is the one that started the worst: Dia

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I started using Arc in the summer of 2024. I was slow to get into it (I had tried it before and found it too capricious, too determined to teach me how to sail when I already knew) but when I arrived, I really arrived. Vertical tabs. The spaces. The way he organized the digital day without me having to think about it too much. Arc to me was not just a browser: it was a work environment. And then The Browser Company Dia announced. I remember it with some annoyance. Josh Miller, the company’s CEO, uploaded a video talking about “something new,” and Arc was in “minimal maintenance,” a euphemism for not saying the word “abandonment.” The Arc community complained, rightly so, and I joined the discontent. They had built something great and threw it overboard at the first opportunity to pursue the AI ​​chimera. Still, I tried Dia as soon as I could and wrote about it: You opened Dia and saw Chrome. Chrome with better typography, Chrome with more careful animations, but Chrome nonetheless. No split tabs, no gaps, no anything that had made Arc great. Just a chatbot in the sidebar. I closed it and went back to Arc, which continued to work despite the abandonment warnings, until I started trying other AI-based browsers. Months passed and Dia was updated, week by week, with a striking cadence. And at some point I started to notice something: the things I missed were coming backsometimes even improved. First the vertical tabs, which Arc had popularized and which Chrome has just announced that it will also adopt, something that says a lot about who sets the pace in browser design. Then the groups of eyelashes, with that aesthetic care that has always been a trademark of the house and now goes further than before. Other browsers already have this feature, but “not like this.” Recently, the split viewwhich I have been using for years in Arc and which is one of those functions that, once you have it, you don’t understand how you navigated without it: Simultaneous view of several tabs in a single window. Split tab view to display multiple tabs in a single window. Image: Xataka. Tab groups have even partly replaced my use of favorites. You can create them by hand or see how they are automatically grouped and renamed when you open multiple tabs from the same place. Its design and user experience are fantastic. Image: Xataka. The set favorites are still there. Tabs in the sidebar also ended up coming to Dia. And between both blocks, the groups of tabs. Image: Xataka. There is a pattern in The Browser Company that you should have already learned with Arc: they release something that seems incomplete, almost “psché”, and then they improve it until you can’t put it down anymore. It took me two tries to fall in love with Arc. Something similar has happened with Dia, only the process has been longer and the reconciliation more gradual. And that boss now has to live with a new owner, because since September This company was bought by Atlassianwhich wants to make Dia the reference for working with AI. Nothing has changed at the moment on a day-to-day basis (pun intended) of the browser. What Dia has done smartly (and differently than Arc) is start almost from scratch and give up all the weirdness. Arc asked you to adapt to it, to learn its logic, to assume its curve. And Dia does exactly the opposite: she is very Chromiumvery familiar, very little foreign to anyone coming from Chrome and not as rigid as Arc. That takes a toll: some of Arc’s more radical ideas have been lost in the transition, but it also means it doesn’t create as much friction for the average user. You open Dia and browse. There is no twenty-minute tutorial on how to think about tabs, which is something that penalized the growth of Arc: those of us who used it loved it, but many people left when they saw that they did not understand the proposal. The weight is what catches my attention the most on the negative side: it’s around gigabyte, which is an outrage for a browser. And there is no mobile version yet. That hurts more, because it means the experience is split between devices, and the consistency Arc was trying to offer across platforms doesn’t yet exist on Dia. I hope they don’t take long. In theory it will arrive this year. Regarding AI, it is not what I use the most. Of course I use Claude or Gemini, I mean Dia’s chatbot sidebar. It’s not something I used on Dia nor have I used much on Neon, Atlas or Comet, the other three that I’ve tested in some depth. The chat in the sidebar is a good complement, I can ask it something about the tab I have open, ask it to summarize several at once, respond with context of what I am reading; but it is not the focus of my browsing experience. All three browsers conveyed at their launch that AI would change everything, and reality is more modest– It’s useful, sometimes very useful, but it doesn’t transform your workflow in the same way that a good tab design does. At least in my experience. I have tested more browsers that leverage AI for their value proposition. And they all have their strong points: Comet It is very fast and efficient searching for information in real time. Atlas is very capable when you need to systematically extract data from multiple pages, but none have the level of care in the experience that Dia has. Opera Neon is a browser built from the ground up for the AI ​​era, with much more than a well-placed chatbot. But it’s not just that they work. Dia feels good. There is something in the design, in the animations, in how the groups of tabs are constructed, that remains … Read more

Magnetic maps had been marking something strange under Antarctica for centuries. So we’ve started drilling to find it

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For years, magnetic maps of East Antarctica have shown something strange about the region from Princess Elizabeth Land: a large amplitude linear magnetic anomaly under kilometers of ice that runs along the coast parallel to the margin of the continent. It was something that satellites and planes could detect, but no one knew exactly what rock was producing it until now. Discovering it. If the problem is that this anomaly was under a large amount of ice, a team of researchers within the framework of a Russian-Chinese cooperation He has done the most logical thing to find what was happening: start drilling. What they have found after putting a large drill to work is not only a magnetic rock that gave that peculiar pattern, but it is the geological “scar” of an ancient island arc that collided with the continent almost 1,000 years ago, when the supercontinent was forming. Rodinia. A challenge. The study that includes this discovery focuses mainly on the Rayner tectonic province, an area that is geologically critical because it is considered a “mobile belt.” That is, it is a collision zone where ancient blocks of crust were crushed against each other. The problem with Antarctic geology is that almost everything they are interested in is buried, and in this case the team had to cross 541 meters of ice to be able to reach the rock that interested them. What did they find? What they took from the bottom of Antarctica was not common granite as can occur in other areas, but rather the core recovered is a mafic granulite. Something that is very important, since granulites are metamorphic rocks that have suffered infernal temperatures and pressures. After power analyze this rock So interesting, it was seen that this was what was causing the linear anomalies seen from space. And as we say, it is not a very normal stone, since it is rich in ferromagnetic minerals, capable of altering the magnetic field locally. Investigating Rodinia. Once with the sample in hand, the team applied geochemistry techniques and dating to be able to counterbalance these data with everything that was known in previous research. What was seen is that there was a great violent history behind it, since it was known that the rock was originally born as magma about 970 million years ago. From its birth, that rock was pushed into the depths and “cooked.” The data indicate that it was subjected to temperatures between 650 and 790 ºC and pressures equivalent to depths of 15 to 18 kilometers. In this way, the researchers’ conclusion is that this rock was part of a volcanic arc of islands like those of Japan. But the most interesting thing is that this arc was not originally in Antarctica, but was forcibly “stuck” against the ancient continent during a massive collision that gave rise to the formation of Rodinia. The Indian connection. To understand the magnitude of the find, you have to look beyond Antarctica, as geologists have long suspected that the Rayner Province in Antarctica and the Eastern Ghats Province in India They are twins separated at birth. And the new data reinforces this theory, since the conditions of “high temperature” metamorphism found in this drilling are almost identical to those documented in India. This leads us to conclude that 900 million years ago, the east coast of India and this part of Antarctica were joined, forming a huge mountain range created by the collision of tectonic plates. Images | 66 north In Xataka | In the United States there is an incredible river that does what seems impossible: defy the laws of gravity

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