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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

Spain has started its most ambitious defense program. It is not a tank or a drone, it is the brain to control Europe’s troops

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Spain built its land defense looking outward, integrating into foreign programs and adapting doctrines from when the tank symbolized power, deterrence and industrial sovereignty. From joining NATO in 1982 to the missions in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army was accumulating operational experience, but always with one constant: the key technology came from outside. Today, the debate no longer revolves around how many vehicles you have, but rather What role do you want to play? now that the war changes again. From cannon to code. The Ukrainian experience has finished burying the idea of ​​the battle tank as an isolated and self-sufficient platform, pushing Spain to rethink its land doctrine from the roots. Instead of investing in more armor and weight, the Ministry of Defense has opted for a conceptual leap: prioritizing information, connectivity and speed of decision as key factors of survival in a “transparent” battlefield, saturated with sensors, drones and smart munitions. In that context PAMOV is bornnot as a new tank or a combat drone, but as the nervous system that must govern all those that come after. PAMOV, the brain. The Superior Ground Combat System program, awarded to Indraseeks to define the digital architecture of the future Spanish armored combat beyond 2040. We are talking about an initial investment around the 45 million euros and a strong R&D component, one whose objective is not yet to manufacture platforms, but design and mature subsystems that will allow the integration of manned and unmanned vehicles, sensors, weapons and command and control into a single cooperative tactical network. The tank, therefore, stops being the physical center of combat and becomes just another node within a distributed “system of systems.” INDRA The tactical cloud. One of the pillars of PAMOV is the creation of a combat tactical cloud capable of fusing in real time information from on-board sensors, aerial and ground drones and external sources. As? Through artificial intelligencethe system detects, classifies and prioritizes threats, reducing crew cognitive overload and accelerating decision-making in high-pressure environments. The 360 degree visionsupported by AI and augmented reality, allows you to “see through” the armor and regain freedom of maneuver against the proliferation of drones and loitering munitions. Less tons, more platforms. Plus: the lessons of Ukraine have highlighted the limits of the continued growth in weight of battle tanks, some already close to 80 tons, with enormous logistics costs and restrictions of mobility. In this sense, Indra’s approach is committed to distribute capabilities between multiple lighter platforms, many of them unmanned, that operate in tandem with the main tank. Here are names that are common today in the Ukrainian war, such as UGVs and UASwho would advance ahead “taking on the most exposed missions and acting as extenders of ISTAR capability“, in addition to (obviously) reducing human risks. Modularity and weapons of tomorrow. The PAMOV is conceived as an open architecturemodular and scalable, one capable of being integrated into different present and future vehicles. This allows on paper to progressively incorporate new technologies, from advanced active protection systems to directed energy weapons and, in more distant phases, even future hypersonic systems without having to redesign the entire platform. Hence, it is emphasized that the key is not in the specific weapon, but in the system being able to govern, coordinate and exploit it within the tactical network at the right time. Technological sovereignty. The concept is going to be repeated more and more in the old continent. In the case of Spain, with a 95% of national developments and the participation of SMEs, startups, universities and technology centers spread across several autonomous communities, PAMOV is presented as a strategic commitment for the country. As we remembered yesterday, the nation seeks to stop being just a simple buyer or late integrator to become technology provider criticism in European programs like MARS and, in the long term, the MGCSseeking to be on par with France and Germany. The final objective is that the Spanish contribution to the European car of the future is not only steel, but intelligence that governs it. Another way to fight. Finally, and if you will, beyond technology, the impact of PAMOV points above all to doctrinal. For the Army it means moving from individual platforms to cooperative networkschange the way we command, train and operate, and prepare for high-intensity scenarios with fewer personnel and greater dependence on software. From that perspective, the future Spanish battle tank will not be defined by its caliber or its weight, but by its capacity. to connect systemsdominate the information and decide faster than the opponent. Image | Rheinmetall Defense, Oscar in the middleIndra In Xataka | Spain has been a weapons exporting power for decades. Now he has made a decision: keep them In Xataka | Ukraine has found what it needed in an unexpected ally. Spain had the missing piece against the shahed drones

Productivity had become an obsession. Until leisure has started to give better results at work

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The constant pressure to perform to the maximum has marked work life for a long time, leaving rest almost forgotten. A recent study shows how reserving well-planned leisure time changes the perception of daily routines and contributes to improved performance at work. Experts have verified that organize free time actively through crafts or other forms of abstraction brings improvements to creativity and motivation in your work tasks. This finding questions the belief that only by working non-stop can we achieve good work results. Let the brain create things. A group of researchers from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands investigated on the effects of creative craft-based entertainment during employees’ leisure time. The result of the experiment was not an improvement in the morale and motivation of the employees who participated in the study, but rather it contributed to these employees offering a more creative response in solving the problems that arose at work. Improvements in daily work life. The workers who participated in the study felt that, by exercising new manual skills, they better appreciated the processes of their crafts, making them gain value. The curious thing is that the change was bigger in the workplace than in his personal life, even though it was his leisure time. “We were surprised to see that crafts had a greater impact at work than in personal life. We expected similar benefits in both areas,” explains Professor George Michaelides, from UEA Norwich Business School. Curiously, the group that noticed this improvement the most was the one formed by the most senior employeesthose over 61 years of age. The explanation for this phenomenon is found in cognitive aptitude, a brain condition that is activated during learning processes. Gymnastics for the brain. Just as they collect the studies of Professors Gilkey and Kilts, of the schools of medicine and business at Emory University, carry out various creative activities that require a motor and cognitive combinationlike playing the guitar, juggling or learning a new language, helps expand the neural system and makes it more communicative. That is, the development of new skills through crafts was improving the “physical fitness” of the employees’ cognitive system, and the results were more visible in those more prone to cognitive decline and memory deterioration due to age. Keep “fit“Cognitive aptitude improves performance in decision making and problem solving, as well as in the generation of new ideas. The capacity for abstraction. One of the keys to the use of crafts or pleasurable leisure activities is that they act as a natural stress reducer and depressive symptoms. “Hobbies are already known to be good for well-being. But our study shows that hobbies not only make you happier, they can also help you feel more fulfilled and creative at work. This goes beyond simply relaxing or having fun (like watching Netflix non-stop) and turns hobbies into something that helps people grow,” says Dr. Paraskevas Petrou, the lead author of the study. Beyond the cognitive improvement derived from the development of the neural system, a study from Cardiff University found that the use of crafts or repetitive activities, how to knitinduces the brain into a state of full attention that increases abstract thinking activity by up to 25%, which contributes to the generation of new ideas and improves problem solving. In Xataka | Feeling overwhelmed at work is normal, but it is not ideal: six techniques to avoid it and be much more productive Image | Unsplash (Elena Mozhvilo)

Japan has a problem with bear attacks in its cities. So they have started eating them

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If it is true that every crisis hides an opportunity, in Japan they have taken it to a new dimension. For some time now, the country of the rising sun has been dealing with a serious problem of bear attacks on humans, which has left more than a dozen victims since last spring. The authorities have been searching for some time the way to solve itbut there are those who have already found a way to benefit from it: the psychosis due to encounters with plantigrades is coming accompanied by what seems to be a growing interest in their meat. In Japan the (gastronomic) taste for these animals it’s not newbut there are hoteliers who they assure that demand is growing so much that they are unable to satisfy it. And they are clear about the reason: the news about attacks. Beware of the bears. Japan has long grappled with a serious problem birth rate, a trend that comes accompanied by the abandonment of rural areas and farmlands. That’s nothing new. Nor anything that Spain (and many other countries) has experienced firsthand. What is curious is the effect that this population decline is causing, combined with other factors, such as climate change, fluctuations in harvests and the increase in the populations of certain wild animals: an ‘epidemic’ of human bear attacks. One figure: 13 dead. With more bears prowling through the mountains, when acorns are scarce, the animals choose to approach towns and cities… with the risk that this implies. Sometimes his encounters with humans remain just that, scares, like what happened in october when a 1.4 m specimen sneaked into a supermarket in Numata. Other times the outcome is more tragic. According to the Government, between April and November 13 people died by claws and bites from these animals. To them are added 230 injured. It is the worst balance since the country began studying the phenomenon in 2006. Is the problem that serious? Yes. The figures are eloquent. And not only those of attacks, injuries and deaths. The japanese press (even the international) has been echoing the increase in sightings of bears, the increase in captured specimens and the problem that these animals are beginning to represent, which has led companies to look for ways to protect their employees and administrations to consider strategies to address the problem. Proof of how desperate the Government is is that it has approved emergency hunts and even has turned to the army. 13 deaths may not be a high number in a country of almost 123 million of inhabitants, but it is high enough to set off alarms, especially in certain regions. There are basically two species in the country: Asian black bears and brown bears, which can be found in Hokkaido and whose population has skyrocketed in the last three decades, reaching 11,500 individuals. according to The Japan Times. A delicious threat. All of the above was more or less known. In recent weeks local media such as The Mainichi, The Asashi Shimbun, NHK World Japan However, they have published articles that suggest something else: that in the midst of a wave of attacks, the Japanese seem to be rediscovering the pleasure of a good slice of grilled bear. a few days ago The Japan Times He even spoke with the owners of a restaurant located in a mountainous area of ​​Saitama who say they are having difficulty meeting the growing demand for meat. “With the increase in news about bears, the number of customers who want to eat their meat has increased,” explains to the newspaper the head of the business, Koji Suzuki. His wife confirms that they have even been forced to turn away clients. Another Sapporo restaurant presume also of the success of their “bear soup” and in Aomori there is a population that is promoting wild bear meat as a local gastronomic specialty. Those who promote the use of bear meat from the sector claim that it is a local and they insist in the usefulness of using the meat of slaughtered animals. Is it something new? Yes. And no. As Suzuki and Katsushiko Kakuta, a restaurant manager in Aomori, explain, bear meat seems to be arousing special interest among the Japanese, but for them it is not a new product. Does five years in Nishimeya (Aomori) they even opened a center to process meat from wild bears captured in the Shirakami-Sanchi mountains. And in 2023 in Akita they installed neither more nor less than a vending machine which sells 250 g of fresh meat from bears caught by hunters in the region for 2,200 yen. “Most say it’s delicious”. Kiyoshi Fujimoto, Sapporo chef, confesses that, in your opinion“now there are more people” interested in his bear meat-based recipe. What’s more, he assures that “most people who try it say it’s delicious.” The truth is that in Japan not only attacks and victims have increased. The captures of animals have also done so, which has forced the authorities to face the challenge of what to do with their corpses. Chosun remember that, although there are restaurants in the country that serve their meat, the law is restrictive on the consumption of slaughtered bears, so many end up incinerated. Images |Lucas Law (Unsplash), Adam Kolmacka (Unsplash) and Suzi Kim (Unsplash) In Xataka | A Japanese restaurant has taken its obsession with fresh fish to the extreme: it lets you catch it yourself

The US has just started live-fire exercises with its nuclear aircraft carrier. And it has done so in the waters claimed by China

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Since the end of the Cold War, the naval presence has been one of the pillars of the United States’ strategic balance in the Asia-Pacific, an architecture designed to guarantee open trade routes and deter unilateral changes to the status quo. However, the rise of Beijing as a maritime power and the transformation of the South China Sea into one of the most disputed spaces of the planet have turned each naval movement into something more than a simple military routine, loading it with readings of all kinds. That’s why Washington’s latest move is so important. A deployment with high strategic value. The deployment of the nuclear supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln At the end of November it occurred with a almost total discretionwithout official statements from the Pentagon or public indications about its area of ​​operations, a common practice when the US Navy wants to preserve freedom of strategic maneuver. This silence coincided with a moment loaded with internal symbolism, as Abraham Lincoln took over from USS Nimitzthe dean of the fleet, who returned to the United States after completing his last operational mission before beginning a long process of retirement and recycling. The handover is not a simple exchange of platforms, but rather a visualization of how Washington maintains its global presence seamlessly while orderly renewing the core of its naval power. Guam as a logistics anchor. It we have counted before. The battle group’s stopover in Guam reinforced the island’s role as one of the less visible pillars, but more decisive of US military architecture in the Indo-Pacific. Guam works like an advanced node from which prolonged operations are sustained, large units are resupplied and forces deployed thousands of kilometers from the continental territory are coordinated. That Abraham Lincoln was the second aircraft carrier to visit the island in a few weeks stressed the importance of this enclave at a time when the USS George Washingtonthe only aircraft carrier permanently based in Japan, remains out of commission for maintenance, demonstrating that asset rotation does not imply a real reduction in presence, but rather a carefully calculated redeployment. The “routine” in the South China Sea. The subsequent entry of the Abraham Lincoln into the South China Sea is part of an American strategy long term based on the normalization of its naval presence in waters that Beijing considers its own. Washington is not looking for a specific gesture or a spectacular demonstration, but for something more subtle and persistent: to operate regularly to prevent absence from consolidating territorial claims through deeds. By presenting these activities as routine, the United States intends reduce capacity of China to define the narrative, keeping open sea lanes that are essential for global trade and regional strategic balance. Demonstration of capabilities without escalation. During its recent activity, the combat group has integrated live fire exercisesresupply operations at sea and flights of the F-35Cthe fifth-generation shipborne fighter, composing a complete picture of its operational capability without resorting to explicit political messages. Added to this are tests of defensive systems like the Phalanx and the escort of Arleigh Burke destroyerscapable of operating in anti-aircraft, anti-submarine and land attack missions. The package conveys a clear signal of preparedness and self-reliance, one based on observable facts rather than public statements, and designed to deter without provoking unnecessary escalation. Strategic persistence against Beijing. With more than four decades of service, a profound mid-life modernization, and a track record that ranges from humanitarian evacuations to high-intensity conflicts, Abraham Lincoln represents the material continuity of American naval strategy. His presence against China It does not respond to a specific crisis or a specific situation, but to a structural logic that defines the Indo-Pacific like a central theater for the United States. In a context of growing competition and transition of the international order, the underlying message is that Washington has no intention of withdrawing or giving up operational space, and that its naval power will continue to be a constant, visible and functional factor in the region for the coming years. Image | US Navy In Xataka | The US has detected a naval advantage over China. The catapult of the Beijing aircraft carriers comes with a “factory” failure In Xataka | The US faced its invincible aircraft carrier with a tiny Swedish submarine. The zasca was anthological for years

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