system

SPC was the mobile brand for seniors. Now it has a system that learns when your grandfather stops behaving as usual

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SPC has been digesting for a year the change that Teresa Acha-Orbea, its general director, described us at MWC 2025: going from a telephone manufacturer for seniors to a comprehensive technological services company. Again in Barcelona and again at the MWC, the company from Alava has presented the first product that materializes this transformation. It’s called Zeus Halo, and it’s a predictive telecare platform built around a hub domestic 5G with a 12-inch screen, four microphones and IoT connectivity to integrate sensors, activity bracelets and other home devices. It appears on the right in the image that heads these lines. The proposal is based on a demographic premise that defines our country today: Spain ages. According to INE projections, In 2030 almost a third of the population will be over 60 years oldand a growing portion of that group lives alone. Current telecare systems work reactively, waiting for something to happen before acting. Zeus Halo points in the opposite direction: the system learns the user’s behavior patterns. What time do you get up, how many times do you go to the bathroom, when do you leave the house… When these habits change abruptly, the device generates a preventive alert that reaches the smartphone of family members or caregivers, or directly to third-party telecare platforms. “If this person usually goes to the bathroom several times a day and suddenly they are only in the living room, something is happening,” explains Acha-Orbea in the stand of SPC in the Spanish Pavilion. It can also detect falls through the activity bracelet, monitor heart rate or temperature, and send alerts if the person leaves and does not return. The hardware does not require a router, or even that there is a WiFi network in the house, because the hub It carries a 5G SIM and covers all the sensors in the home, which eliminates a common installation barrier for this user profile. Compatible sensors include presence, door opening and smoke detectors, in addition to wearables. Cameras are technically possible, but SPC has decided not to incorporate them by default: “We all want to maintain our privacy, at least visually,” says Acha-Orbea. The second leg of Zeus Halo is the conversational agent. The platform includes a voice assistant that learns the user’s tastes and interests and maintains conversations adapted to them, with reminders for medication, medical appointments or birthdays that are delivered as voice calls instead of text messages, because “SMS are not usually read”, something that was already explained to us a year ago. The system can also organize secure video calls with family members through its own application, suggest activities inside and outside the home or connect Zeus Halo users with common interests. The unwanted loneliness of older people has been on the public agenda for years, The product will be launched before the end of the year in two modalities: ORa version for retail intended for families who want to install it in their parents’ or grandparents’ home And another institutional version for councils, municipal social services, residences, telecare and insurance companies that need to monitor their users proactively. SPC has clients such as CaixaBank or the Generalitat of Asturias in its portfolio, which gives it direct access to the type of organization it targets with the B2B version. The launch of Zeus Halo is accompanied by a brand repositioning. SPC launches logo, website (now in onspc.com) and a new definition of itself: “technology consultancy” that combines manufacturing, systems integration and consulting under the umbrella ‘human by design. The company, founded at the end of the eighties taking advantage of the liberalization of telecommunications, which for decades lived by selling landlines and mobile phones adapted for the elderly, today has 78 employees and headquarters in Vitoria, Lisbon and Shenzhen. It sells about 400,000 units per year of basic phones for seniors and about 30,000 adapted smartphones. It is, according to its own figures, the first Spanish brand in that niche with 50% of the national market. The transition that Zeus Halo embodies has not come for free. SPC has had to recruit software engineers and is setting up its own engineering in China to work directly with software manufacturers. chipsets. He 2G blackoutwhich forced the company to redesign its catalog a few years ago, turned out to be the lever that turned “dumb” devices into platforms capable of exchanging data. Zeus Halo is the next step in that same logic: a little hardware gadget that becomes the connected brain of the home. In Xataka | There is a good thing about having your grandchildren put in a hat: science suggests that it is a great shield against cognitive decline Featured image | Xataka

Apple has been setting up a health system parallel to public health for years. The question is whether public health will do something about it.

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I haven’t worn a watch of any kind on my wrist for years. Partly for convenience, partly for not having another device to distract myself with. The paradox is that I find it more and more advisable to wear or give a smartwatch, precisely because of the leap they have made in monitoring our health in recent years. The other day, Dr. Miguel Ángel Cobos Gil, a prestigious Spanish cardiologist, told us at a press event that “the Apple Watch provides more parameters than anyone admitted to a coronary unit.” It made me think: we already have very reliable medical technology in our pockets, on our wrists and even in our ears. And now what? A parallel system to saturated healthcare Healthcare in Spain has just concluded a few days of strike in which they demand improvements in a system with problems: saturated primary care, insufficient personnel, underfinancing or territorial fragmentation are just a few. Spain is not the only one like this. Countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy or Portugal are struggling with similar situations, and if we look at Latin America or Asia the photo even it gets more complicated. Doctor Miguel Ángel Cobos Gil at an Apple Health event in Madrid. It is no coincidence that Apple has spent years setting up a whole parallel health system through its best-selling devices. You can now take a medically approved EKG with Apple Watch In a few minutes, the iPhone notifies you if you have risk of falling when analyzing how you walkand AirPods are increasingly looking more like a smart sonotone. Apple is the one that is taking the most solid and visible steps, but it is not the only one. Samsung integrates teleconsultations, a game to detect Alzheimer’sbooking diagnostic tests and ordering medications at Samsung Health —starting with Indiawhich is no coincidence—; Huawei gives you ten health parameters in a single gesture with its Watch 5; Google bets on a medical coach with AI on top of Fitbit and Pixel Watch data. Almost the entire tech sector is looking at the same place. Useful technology to help us with our health is already here. The problem is how to make all that data that our devices give us use for something in a collapsed public system. Your doctor doesn’t have time to look at the data on your watch And now we have been in this house for ten years: We have a lot of information about preventing diseases and devices that can help us do so. However, there is still no effective system to address it. Cobos Gil summed it up bluntly: “urgent care works.” When something really goes wrong, the system responds. The problem is before, in that period of time where an asymptomatic disease could be detected and treated with a change in habits or a simple medication, but where the family doctor cannot dedicate fifteen minutes to you if he does not see something serious or actionable. Hypertension doesn’t hurt. Atrial fibrillation does not warn. Apple Watch possible hypertension alert system And this is exactly where technology comes in—or should come in—. A smartwatch does not sleep, has no waiting list and does not need you to go see it: it passively monitors whenever you wear it, accumulates months of data and notifies you when it detects an anomaly. Cobos Gil mentioned something that illustrates the difference well: a conventional cardiac holter monitor must be taken for about 24 or 48 hours, and many times it does not capture anything because the arrhythmia does not appear in that time window. With three months of data from the Apple Watch, he says he’s gotten diagnostic information he otherwise wouldn’t have had, and has even “had to anticoagulate patients who were cleared by a Holter monitor.” This gap is especially relevant for the older population, especially if they live alone. Spain is aging fast and a silent heart attack, a fall, or an arrhythmia that is accelerating are situations in which the time between the event and medical attention is everything, and in which not having a family member or caregiver nearby—the child in another city, the grandchildren in another country—creates a very vulnerable situation for these people. These are situations that happen. In Applesfera we have just told the case of a lady who suffered a fall due to an epileptic attack in Torremolinos and his Apple Watch helped everything end in a scare. The striking thing about this is that hospitals already do this type of monitoring in extreme cases. When a modern pacemaker or defibrillator is implanted, the hospital monitors the patient remotely and can intervene if something goes wrong. A watch like the Watch takes that logic from the hospital to home: it allows a son in Madrid to see in real time if his mother’s heart in a town in Teruel is beating strangely, or to receive an alert if she has fallen and hasn’t gotten up. It is not medicine of the future. It is medicine of the present waiting for the system to learn to incorporate it. The limit that no one has set Tim Cook at WWDC 24 What Apple, Samsung, Huawei or Google have built so far is the beginning. Apple has been working for years on non-invasive blood glucose monitoring —without being punctured, through optical spectroscopy—and the most solid rumors suggest that could come to the Apple Watch in 2027 or 2028. Before that, I’m pretty sure we’ll see an AI-powered medical assistant built into the Health app — known internally as Mulberry Project— trained with your real clinical data. Tim Cook has been repeating for years that the Apple’s greatest contribution to humanity will be in healthcare. What it doesn’t say is exactly how far. Because the question that these devices do not answer is one that seems very important to me: Where do they set the limit for themselves, and who sets it for them from the outside? Early detection of … Read more

Discord wanted to implement an age verification system. Until the world came crashing down on him

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Discord has backtracked on one of his most controversial plans of recent years. The messaging and voice platform, with more than 200 million active users, has slowed down your system of global age verification until the second half of 2026 after its initial announcement sparked a firestorm of criticism. When people have started leaving in droves and looking for other alternatives, the company has thought twice. Chaos. Discord announced a few weeks ago which would implement an age verification system to ensure that adult content only reached adult users. The idea was that all accounts would start with a “teen-appropriate” setting by default, unless they could prove they were of legal age. The problem: The communication was so horrible that a significant part of the community understood that the platform was going to ask everyone for facial scans and ID documents in order to continue using it. The result was chaos. Distrust. In October of last year, Discord confirmed that had suffered a security breach at one of its third-party providers. This exposed sensitive data, including photographs of identity documents, of approximately 70,000 users. That background was very fresh when the announcement of the new system came. Added to this was that among the partners who were being considered to implement the verification Person appeareda company with financial ties to Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, a company known for its contracts with US government immigration and surveillance agencies. And of course, for many users, this combination was simply unacceptable. What Discord says was really going to happen. In a release Posted on Tuesday, Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy stated that more than 90% of users would never have needed to verify anything, because most do not access age-restricted content or modify default security settings. In addition, it ensures that the platform already has internal systems capable of determining the age of majority of many users automatically, analyzing signals such as the age of the account, whether it has a linked payment method or the type of servers to which it belongs. According to Vishnevskiy, this system does not read messages or analyze the content posted by users. Recognizing mistakes, with nuances. “The way this landed led many of you to believe we were demanding facial scans and document uploads from everyone,” Vishnevskiy wrote. “That’s not what’s happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us that we failed at the most basic thing: clearly explaining what we’re doing and why.” That said, it is worth remembering what points out the media PC Gamer, since Discord did not make any of these concessions until after the avalanche of criticism. What changes now? The platform promises several things before relaunching the system globally. Among them, adding more verification options, including means of payment, publishing detailed information on its website about each third-party provider and their data practices, and requiring that any company that offers facial age estimation do so entirely on the user’s device, without sending biometric data to any server. On Persona, Discord confirms that it ran a limited test with them in the UK in January and decided not to continue, precisely because it didn’t meet that last requirement. A global address. Discord is not new, and it is happening in a much broader context. The United Kingdom, Australia and Brazil already have legislation that requires platforms to verify the age of their users to access adult content. Europe and several US states they go in the same direction. Discord argues that by building its own system, it can demonstrate to regulators that it is possible to verify age without collecting identity data. In countries where there is already a legal obligation, the system will remain active regardless of the global delay. Cover image | Discord and own assembly In Xataka | “We will not flood our ecosystem with soulless AI garbage.” We already know what Asha Sharma wants to do as CEO of Microsoft Gaming

A new “solar system” has just been discovered. There’s just one problem: it shouldn’t exist.

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Observations from NASA and the European Space Agency telescopes have made possible the discovery of a new exoplanetary system 116 light years from Earth. According to research by an international team led by the University of Warwick published in the journal Sciencethis new “solar system” has a peculiarity: its architecture contradicts the standard model of planetary formation. In short, based on the astrophysics we know, it should not exist. We do not know if it will force us to rewrite current theories, but we do know that we will urgently review them. The discovery. The LHS 1903 system is made up of four planets orbiting a red dwarf, the most common and longest-lived type of star in the universe. The question is how they are arranged: the innermost planet is rocky, the next two are gaseous and surprisingly, the outermost planet (LHS 1903 e) is also rocky. That planet shouldn’t be there. LHS 1903 e It is a large super-Earth (it has 1.7 times the radius of the Earth and 5.79 Earth masses, thus achieving a similar density) located on the periphery, but of course, it should not be in that position, according to current models. It is not a minor anomaly: it breaks the paradigm from the foundations. This provision contradicts the usual pattern that we see in all known planetary systems: the rocky planets (refractory materials) are in the hot zone and the gas giants in the outer cold zone, beyond the “snow line“, where ice makes it possible to grow large nuclei that capture hydrogen. The canonical example is our solar system: the rocky Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars orbit closer and the gaseous Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune orbit further away. Why is it important. According to theory, a planet as large as LHS 1903 e in that cold zone should have devoured gas until it became a giant like Jupiter. But there is another reading: that the formation model fails and is not the only recipe that explains how exoplanetary systems form. But as we mentioned above, red dwarfs are the most abundant stars in the galaxy and if the model fails in this system, it is plausible that it will not hit the mark in much of the cosmos either. There may be other “inverted” systems pending interpretation or that we have misinterpreted. A possible explanation. What the research team proposes is the gas-poor formation mechanism hypothesis. In short, the important thing is not so much where but when. Thus, the planets were formed one after another in the opposite order to our solar system, starting first with the innermost one and going outwards from there. When planets form, they consume the gas available in the disk that surrounds the star. LHS 1903 was formed last, when there was no more gas left, so it could no longer become the gas giant that might have been expected. As explains Lead researcher and University of Warwick professor Thomas Wilson: “It means that the outermost planet formed millions of years after the innermost one. And because it formed later, there really wasn’t enough gas and dust left in the disk to build this planet.” The research method. The data analyzed by the international team comes from the collaboration of NASA’s TESS telescopes and ESA’s CHEOPS exoplanet characterization satellite: the first detects planets with the in-transit method and the second studies them in depth, which allows it to obtain information such as size, mass and, from there, density. Among the alternative hypotheses considered is its birth from impacts between planets or the loss of its gaseous envelope, which they ended up discarding. Astrophysics has pending subjects. Beyond finding a clear mechanism, what seems evident is that observing this system of exoplanets opens up a range of possibilities about how planets form around stars that will last for years. Néstor Espinoza, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who was not involved in the study, explains it for CNN: “This system provides a very interesting piece of information that planetary formation models will try to explain for years, and I am sure that we will learn something new about the planetary formation process once they are compared to each other.” In Xataka | How the solar system was formed: for the Earth to be born, a star had to die first In Xataka | We have been deceived by the distances of the Solar System: the closest neighbor to Neptune is Mercury Cover | NASA Hubble Space Telescope

Deportivo has built a system to know how much the player they already have is worth

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A few years ago, the Depor A question was asked that seems obvious but that almost no one in Spanish football had taken seriously: is it possible to gather everything a club knows about its players in one place? Not the goals, not the assists, not what appears on Transfermarkt. All. From the vertical jump that a cadet records on a strength machine to the subjective assessment of a veteran scout after watching a game on a rainy Saturday in Becerreá, province of Lugo. From the history of injuries to the psychological alerts of a 14-year-old boy who has been angry for five training sessions. The answer was to build it themselves. The result is an internal platform without a commercial name. They call it, without much ceremony, “the Dash,” which functions as the club’s digital nervous system. Nacho Louriddirector of Deportivo’s analytical and sports technology department, describes him with an ambition that he does not hide: “I call him, maybe he is a little ambitious, like a ERP sporty”. Perhaps with a play on words. Nacho Lourid. Image: Deportivo de la Coruña. It’s not ambitious. It is exactly what it is. And the interesting thing is not the technology itself, but what it says about the real state of data analysis in professional football: that although clubs have embraced the data culture, the majority continue to work with fragmented information, dispersed between departments that sometimes do not speak to each other, with external tools designed for the scouting but not to understand his own players. What the market did not offer The starting point is a lack. Commercial football data platforms (Opta, Media Coach, Transfermarkt itself…) They are designed mostly for one thing: to help sign. They are tools of scoutingnot internal performance. They provide competition statistics, but they cannot integrate what happens within a club’s facilities: GPS data from training, medical records, anthropometric evaluations, the maturational status of a youth, psychologist reports… Signature of one of the players. Image provided. “What we never find is that these platforms are focused on performance,” explains Lourido. “Why? Because there is data that no external platform can have. It is our data, physical data, medical data, protected by law and collected by devices that we have internally.” What Deportivo wanted to measure was something that sounds simple but that in practice almost no one achieves: the actual performance of a player, decoupled from the result. A team can lose 0-1 and have played the best game of the season. A striker can score a goal and have had an alarmingly poor physical performance. Competition data alone does not distinguish between both scenarios. Everything a club knows, in one place The platform connects all the club’s sports professionals. Everyone: trainers, physical trainers, medical department, nutritionist, psychologist. Each one feeds the database from their plot. The GPS that the players carry during training automatically dumps. The competition data comes from providers such as Opta or Olocip. The scouts’ subjective evaluations are recorded through their own mobile application. The individualized rubrics of the youth coaches are added to the profile of each boy from the time he is a first-year junior. The result is a cumulative profile of each player that is not limited to what he does in games. When a technician or manager accesses the dashboard of a footballer, finds his performance in competition, but also his medical history, his physical evolution, his accumulated GPS data, the assessment of scouts and, in the case of the youth team, his career since the first years of training. “When someone goes to dashboard of a footballer and his performance profile, it is very clear in all areas how that footballer is doing. On a physical level, on a psychological level, on a competition level, his medical history, injuries, everything.“, summarizes Lourid. Detail of injuries of a youth player. Image provided. Image provided. The dashboards adapt to the user profile. The sports management sees a general panorama; the physical trainer, overload alerts; the youth coach, the maturational evolution of his players. It is the same database with many windows. Beyond xG The most striking thing is not the obvious metrics expected by anyone who reads the Brand day in and day out, but also the variables that the team of analysts has been cooking up: Game initiative, which combines circulation rhythm and territorial dominance. Construction efficiency, which measures not only whether the team reaches the rival area but how it arrives. Passes allowed by defensive action: how many touches the opponent gives before you steal the ball. A detail that says a lot: The platform contextualizes the data according to the moment of the partido. “The game plan is until you score the first goal or your rival scores it”, Lourid explains. The metrics distinguish between performance before and after the marker alters the dynamics. It is the type of detail that distinguishes a dashboard as such an Excel that has come to the fore. In the quarry, the platform detects invisible patterns without accumulated data. “We had recorded data on players who are in the first team, who when they were cadets gave data on professional footballers. Efforts above 30 km/h… and perhaps the kid was 15 years old.” The club measures biological versus chronological age to decide promotions. A kid who plays below his maturity level receives a “survivor” profile. And you are not penalized for it, you are simply protected. Image provided. Image provided. Image provided. An example of what Nacho commented in the training phase. A first-year cadet team (14/15 years old) and its players who are divided into four large groups based on their level of maturational development: “survivors”, “sufferers”, “competitors” and “leftovers”. Image provided. What the algorithm does not touch (on purpose) There is a decision that indicates the maturity of the system. The psychological data exists (the first team psychologist eats with the players, travels with them, is on the field…), but they do not feed the … Read more

AI needs electricity relentlessly. And that is returning the gas to the center of the system

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For years, big technology companies projected a clean image: data centers powered by renewables and commitments to climate neutrality. But the explosion of artificial intelligence is putting that narrative to the test. Electricity demand is growing at a rate that the grid cannot keep up with, and the fuel that is covering the gap is not the wind or the sun. It is natural gas. The contradiction is already visible in the numbers. Google and Microsoft consume around 24 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per year each, more than more than a hundred countries. And while they announce record clean energy contracts, their emissions continue to rise: Google has increased its emissions by 48% in the last five years and Microsoft by 31% since 2020. An independent analysis rated climate integrity of several technologies as “poor” or “very deficient” in the face of the energy boom of AI. The cloud is not ethereal. It’s physics. And for AI to work without interruptions, we are starting to burn more hydrocarbons. The electron fever. The phenomenon is not marginal. A report from the Open Energy Outlook initiative—led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and NC State— projects that electricity demand of data centers and crypto mining could grow by 350% between 2020 and 2030, going from representing 4% to 9% of total consumption in the United States. Goldman Sachs points in the same direction: Specific consumption of data centers could increase by 160% before the end of the decade. The pressure has already broken market balances. In December 2024, in the PJM region—which supplies 13 states in the eastern United States and has the highest density of data centers in the world—capacity prices went from $30 to $270 per MW-day in a single auction. The extra cost will end up affecting the bills of some 67 million customers. John Ketchum, CEO of NextEra Energy, described it as a “golden era of energy demand”, but warned of a physical limit: “the new electrons cannot reach the grid quickly enough.” And in that void between explosive demand and insufficient supply is where gas reappears. The tyranny of 24/7. If renewables are increasingly competitive, why not cover this demand with more wind and solar? The answer is technical. Artificial intelligence requires continuous, 24/7 supply. It cannot be turned off when the wind goes down or the sun goes down. As Manuel Losa, manager at Pictet Asset Management, explained, to the Financial Times: If demand grows and firm energy is needed 24 hours a day, “today, the only way to achieve this is with gas.” The problem is not the marginal cost of renewables, it is firmness. Without massive storage or reinforced grids, solar and wind generation cannot guarantee constant supply. And the deployment of new transmission lines is slow and contentious. Furthermore, traditional electrical planning assumed growth of 1-2% annually; Now there are areas with increases of 20-30% annually linked to data centers. The quickest solution today is to build or expand gas-fired generation. But even there there are limits. Gas turbines—critical equipment—have become a bottleneck. Just three years ago, Siemens Energy executives stated that the turbine market was “dead” in the face of renewable advancement. Today, the factories are overflowing. Global orders are expected to exceed 1,000 units this year, with the United States absorbing almost half. Delivery times can be extended up to five or even seven years in some cases. The bottleneck is no longer the chips. They are the turbines. So what happens with renewables? Renewables do not disappear. In fact, they continue to expand. Google has signed agreements to purchase nearly 1.2 gigawatts of new wind and solar energy in the United States from Clearway Energy. Big tech companies continue to sign clean energy contracts in multiple regions. However, the problem is temporary and structural. Purchasing renewable electricity does not guarantee that hourly consumption is supported by clean generation at that same time and place. In fact, there are solutions. Battery storage and grid upgrades can increase renewable integration. The Open Energy Outlook report shows which regions like Texas, with more investment in transmission, they manage to take better advantage of wind power to feed new demand. But deploying storage and hardening the network takes years, and AI is growing rapidly. For this reason, even companies traditionally focused on renewables are expanding their portfolio in gas, How did you have access? Financial Times. NextEra has announced plans to develop up to an additional 8 gigawatts of gas-fired generation. Clearway builds hybrid data center campuses combining renewables and combustion turbines. It is not an explicit abandonment of renewables. It is an emergency solution. But there is also nuclear. amazon tried to connect directly a data center to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant to ensure stable and clean supply. Federal regulators blocked the deal over potential effects on grid stability and the impact on other consumers. Furthermore, Google has signed an agreement with Kairos Power to develop seven small modular reactors (SMR), with the goal of adding 500 MW emissions-free by 2030. Microsoft and other companies are exploring similar deals. But even in the most optimistic scenario, new nuclear capacity will not be operational on a relevant scale before the end of the decade. AI needs electricity now. A clash of transitions. Five years ago, natural gas was presented as a retreating bridge fuel within the energy transition. Today it has become the structural support of artificial intelligence. A friction between two transitions that advance at different paces: the digital one, exponential; the energy, regulated and slow. As the Open Energy Outlook initiative warnsthe choice should not be between digital progress and network stability. But if energy planning doesn’t adapt more quickly—more transmission, more storage, better market design—the expansion of AI could mean more gas, more emissions, and higher bills. Artificial intelligence promises efficiency and intelligent decarbonization. But for now, its massive expansion is prolonging the life of the fossil generation. The digital future is advancing at full speed and the energy … Read more

We just found a planetary system that breaks the rules of the game with a planet where it should not be

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The universe has a curious habit: every time we think we have a perfect standard model for how things form, something comes along that forces us to rewrite the textbooks. At the moment, our solar system (like many others) seems to have a logical order with rocky planets like the Earth near the Sun and gas giants far away, but what just published the magazine Science It is the exception that confirms that the rules are meant to be broken. A new model. An international team, with strong Spanish participation from IEEC-CSIC and the IAChas discovered LHS 1903, a system 120 light years away which presents an “impossible” architecture according to traditional models: rocky, gaseous, gaseous and… rocky again. The importance of order. This study details the discovery of four exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf starwhich a priori does not seem anything out of the ordinary. But the focus is on how they are placed, as can be summarized in the following list: LHS 1903 b: an inner rocky planet. LHS 1903 c: a gaseous sub-Neptune. LHS 1903 d: another gaseous sub-Neptune. LHS 1903 e: an outer rocky planet. The normal thing in planetary formation is that the outer planets, when formed far from the heat of the star where ice and gas are abundant, accumulate enormous gaseous atmospheres like Jupiter or Neptune. This is why a rocky, bare planet, without a gaseous envelope, in the outermost orbit is an anomaly that has baffled astronomers. It’s like there are two Earths in locations where they shouldn’t be. How it has been seen. To confirm this strange system, a single telescope was not enough. The finding is the result of the combination of data from TESSNASA’s exoplanet hunter, and the satellite’s surgical precision Cheops of the European Space Agency (ESA). In this way, while TESS detects the general transit signals when a planet passes in front of the star, Cheops is able to refine those observations to determine the exact size. Combining all this with velocity measurements from ground-based observatories such as the Canary Islands telescope, the team was able to calculate the densities and confirm that planet ‘e’ is indeed a solitary rock on the outside. How is it possible? A priori, there are two theories to explain why a planet loses its gas and becomes rocky: photoevaporation and the internal heat of the planet. However, neither of these theories work for LHS 1903 e. As the most distant planet, it receives much less radiation than its inner gaseous brethren and is too cold to have lost its atmosphere on its own. In this way, if the planet did not lose its atmosphere a priori, the only logical explanation that the authors find is that it never had it. The study proposes a training model in a gas-depleted environment where the protoplanetary disk ((the cloud of gas and dust where the planets are born) did not form all the bodies at once. What happened, theoretically speaking, is that the inner planets formed first when there was a lot of gas and the outer planet formed later. He is left with the crumbs. By the time the last planet finished forming, the gas in the disk had already dissipated or been absorbed by its older brothers. In this way, it was formed from solid “leftovers”, with no gas available to build an atmosphere. This supports the theory of the “inside-out” formation, where the planets appear sequentially. It is a scenario that has rarely been confirmed with such observational clarity as until now in this system. Its importance. This discovery forces us to rethink the history of solar systems around red dwarfs, which are the most common stars in our galaxy. And we even thought that the position of a planet determined its destiny, but LHS 1903 teaches us that timing is just as important. The LHS 1903 system thus becomes a perfect laboratory: four planets, the same star, but completely different birth stories coexisting in a stable orbital balance. Images | THAT Images | There are satellites in space that need to be “towed.” And a company from Galicia has exactly what is needed

There are bales of straw hanging from the Thames bridges. It is not a coincidence, it is a centuries-old security system

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If you visit London, you may have seen that a huge bale of straw hangs from some bridges that cross the River Thames. Nobody has left it there by mistake, it is a signaling system that dates back to the 18th century. Notice to sailors. The reason for hanging a bale of straw from the bridges that cross the Thames comes from an old regulation of the port of London. Clause 36.2 of the statutes indicates that a straw bale must be hung “when the free height of an arch or the span of a bridge is reduced with respect to its usual limits”, that is, it is a signal so that no boat hits the bridge. Dubious effectiveness. When the law was first enforced it made sense to use some physical element as a warning that a bridge was lower than usual. At that time, the Thames was the main access route for goods to the city and it was very busyso it was necessary to use signage. What is striking is that it has been maintained over the centuries, especially considering that there are more effective methods to mark it, especially at night when the bullet may not be clearly visible. Recent cases. It is not a rarity, the system is applied religiously whenever there is any work that reduces the height of a bridge even a little. Happened in 2023 on the Millenium pedestrian bridgein 2024 in the East India Dock Road Bridgein 2025 in the Barnes Railway Bridge and in the Charing Cross Bridge. Those responsible for hanging the straw bale are the contractors who carry out the corresponding work. If they don’t, they face fines of up to £5,000. A very English custom. There are more quaint laws still in force in the United Kingdom, such as the one that states that certain species of fish are property of the crown (whales, dolphins or sturgeons) or the ‘Salmon Act’, which establishes as a crime the “suspicious handling of a salmon”, in reference to poaching. There are others that for whatever reason do not continue to apply, such as Licensing Act of 1872 that prohibited being drunk in a public place. Images | Wikipedia In Xataka | The pioneer of modern surgery today would be considered a danger: Robert Liston, “the fastest knife in London”

In 1792, before the telephone, a Frenchman invented the first telecommunications system in history: the optical telegraph.

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We live in full Digital Ageand sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that until the end of the 20th century anything similar to the Internet was pure science fiction. But it is not true, because already in the 19th century the telegraph began to allow us to disseminate information in real time, which has earned Morse’s invention the nickname of the Victorian Internet. optical telegraph. But before Morse invented the telegraph in 1832, there were other attempts to make information travel long distances almost in real time. One of them saw the light in 1792 at the hands of the French inventor Claude Chappe. It is about the optical telegrapha tower with two mobile arms that changed position depending on what was wanted to be communicated, and which today is considered the first practical telecommunications system. The origins. This type of communication medium was first devised in 1684 by the British scholar Robert Hooke, although he never put his theory into practice. In 1767 Sir Richard Lovell Edgeworth proposed a first design optical telegraph to transmit the results of a race, but it was not until Chappe developed his that they began to become popular. Claude Chappe and his brothers developed their communication system in 1792, and it was so successful in France that the country created a network of 556 stations that communicated an area of ​​4,800 kilometers. The system was promoted for commercial use, but Napoleon Bonaparte liked the idea and decided to use it to coordinate his troops over long distances. How it worked. The system was made up of a mast from which two mobile arms came out. At two meters long each, the arms were so large that they could be seen from great distances, and only two levers were needed to make them move. As we see in the image, the position of the arms would determine the number or letter that was wanted to be transmitted. The milestone. The first message with the French optical telegraph network was transmitted from Lille to Paris in 1794, and 22 towers were used to carry it across 230 kilometers. It was used for national communications until the 1850s, and the model was modified and used in other countries such as Sweden, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Spain of Charles IV. became famous. In France it enjoyed great popularity, and reached be described in works as important as “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas in 1844. But the same desire to quickly and effectively develop communications that drove and led Chappe’s invention to success also ended up being his undoing. In 1846 and after several failed attempts, Samuel Morse finally managed to convince France to replace it with his new electric telegraph, which could be used at night and in poor visibility. And it ended up prevailing despite the fact that many experts of the time predicted its failure due to the ease with which its lines could be cut, although that is another story. Images | Wikimedia (1, 2, 3 and 4)

the world’s first system to measure time on the Moon

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The Moon is close to going from being an occasional destination to a place where many things happen at the same time, and that forces us to rethink even the most basic bases of how we operate there. When several ships are maneuvering, when you want to land accurately or when thinking about a future navigation network, it is no longer enough to use Earth time and make corrections on the fly. Time becomes an operational tool, and any gap, no matter how small, begins to matter. That is the background of the step that China has just taken. The announcement comes from Nanjing and has a very practical objective. According to Global Timesa team at Purple Mountain Observatory has developed and published LTE440a software that allows you to directly compare the weather on the Moon with that on Earth without resorting to manual calculations. The system is based on a model that integrates lunar gravity and the movement of the satellite, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences presented it officially as a usable product last December, not just as an academic exercise, with an eye toward future operations in the lunar environment. Why time doesn’t run the same on the Moon. The gap that Chinese software is trying to solve is not a curiosity, but a direct consequence of physics. By having a lower gravity, the Moon makes its clocksand move forward about 56 microseconds a day with respect to those on Earth. This difference, imperceptible in the short term, accumulates and ends up introducing increasing errors if Earth time continues to be used as the only reference for missions that last months or even years. Landings and navigation at play. This gap, however small it may seem, has direct consequences when moving from theory to operation. Jonathan McDowellHarvard astronomer and quoted by the South China Morning Postexplained that differences of just one microsecond can become relevant in navigation systems, affecting calculations even on scales of one minute. What is LTE440. LTE440 calculates the relationship between the Moon’s coordinate time and the dynamic time of the solar system’s barycenter, an astronomical reference used to describe the motion of bodies. This correspondence is one of the necessary steps to later convert lunar time to Earth time in a traceable way. A model of the “Long March 10”, the launch system that China wants to use for its first manned mission to the Moon The international framework. The pressure to sort out this problem does not come only from China. In 2024, the International Astronomical Union adopted a broad framework for the Moon to have its own temporal reference, given the prospect of multiple missions operating at the same time. In that context, the Nanjing team’s work is presented as an engineering step that attempts to turn that general idea into a usable tool. Ambitious scope. The scientific article in Astronomy and Astrophysics maintains that The method remains on the order of a few tens of nanoseconds even according to their calculations when projected out to 1,000 years. On the other hand, this technical advance comes at a very specific moment in the Chinese space program. China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) maintains its goal to take astronauts to the Moon by 2030 and has already completed preliminary prototyping of the main systems, from the Long March-10 rocket to the Mengzhou spacecraft and the Lanyue lunar module. Images | Ganapathy Kumar | engin akyurt In Xataka | Poland and Spain are the European countries that have increased their contribution to space the most. For very different reasons

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