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The San Fermín bulls fight against TikTok and against modern times. And the ‘Joker’ proves that they are losing

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He wanted to be the protagonist in the San Fermín running of the bulls and he has achieved it. At least for a few hours. He more or less complied with the dress code of scarf and red sash, espadrille, white shirt and pants. But he was dressed up like the Joker. Not in vain do they know him as the “Joker” of the bullswith his green hair and that crazy look. With millions of views on their networks, the arrest and proposed sanction was not due to a matter of bad taste, but rather for converting the confinement into content and skipping a couple of digits from the public ordinance of Pamplona. After climb onto a balcony and do everything the performance so much in the square As in the races, the Municipal Police reduced it and stopped him. The case summarizes a phenomenon that has been growing for years. The Sanfermines continue to be a centenary festival, already converted into a huge set for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Every morning, dozens of runners look for a viral image and, meanwhile, the Municipal Police continues with its technique of tightening control to prevent the race from becoming a (more) dangerous spectacle. Mobile phones are still prohibited. Smart glasses too. In fact, this creative apogee has even forced the type of surveillance to change. Years ago the problem was cell phones. The municipal police told us that smartphones are not confiscated, but that runners are “invited” to leave the course. But things have changed. The use of smart glasses capable of recording video from the runner’s point of view has put the entire police force on alert. In just three running of the bulls during San Fermín 2026, the Municipal Police seized 54 glasses recording within the tour. All of them failed to comply with article 11 of the Ordinance, which prohibits the use of any image or sound device without express authorization. The violation is considered serious and can result in fines of between 601 and 6,000 euros. Who is the Joker behind the mask. Just like ElPaís has documentedthe name of this white label Joker is Lacey Mrzena. He landed in Pamplona from Chicago (Illinois), already dyed green and with his face made up. He seems to love the DC Comics villain and calls himself Straighdroplace. The arrest occurred after touching the bulls, he defied the municipal officials and reoffended despite police warnings. The Police insist that the costume does not constitute no violation. What is punishable (and sanctioned) are the behaviors that put the safety of the rest of the runners at risk. What can or cannot be done in the 850 meters that separates a good handful of bulls from a hundred people running these days, from last July 6 to today, closing day, is perfectly indicated after years of reviews: clothing, objects or behaviors that make the race difficult must leave the course in order to maintain “the good order and security of the running of the bulls.” More and more expulsions and sanctions. The “Joker” is just one of many. The Local Civil Protection Board confirmed several complaints during the holidays for reasons such as calling the attention of the cattle by shouting, climbing on urban elements or recording while they ran without permission or license to do so. Any distraction can cause a chain fall among dozens of runners and that is where the real danger lies. These objects can be confiscated for hindering progress on the course, the runner can be expelled and disciplinary proceedings can be initiated. And, of course, if the person reoffends or disobeys the agents’ orders, they can end up detained and fined with sanctions that “depend on the criteria of dangerousness and people involved according to each case”, as explained to us from Udaltzaingoa. The algorithm rewards risk. With videos that, until replicatedexceed the average number of TikTok views, the conflict of violating the ordinance in Pamplona seems to be worth it to some. In recent years, videos have proliferated that seek to be increasingly spectacular at popular festivals or mass events, even using drones and editing the speed to resemble professional sports content. In San Fermín the incentive is evident. A video recorded just a few centimeters from a bull can accumulate millions of views in a matter of hours. The more extreme the scene seems, the greater its diffusion. That incentive clashes with the philosophy of confinement. The Joker is just the scapegoat for an event that many sign up for just to see it. “What is this about confinement?”” from within. A battle impossible to win. The Municipal Police recognizes that technology evolves faster than those controls that many skip in the bullfightas is the case of selectivity reviews, with new radio frequency detectors. Every year new recording devices appear that are smaller and harder to detect. Smart glasses are the latest example that previously preceded GoPro and similar cameras. Meanwhile, the authorities maintain the same message: running requires doing it without cameras, without cell phones and without elements that distract participants. Virality is no exception. The “Joker” will probably disappear when San Fermín ends and we will see him again next year. Because the phenomenon lends itself like a magnet to any massive party that serves as a global showcase. And because, in practice, it is extremely difficult to prevent someone from being willing to risk a fine—or worse—to get the perfect video. Images | Flickr (Jonan Basterra) / Own edition In Xataka | Pamplona has discovered the definitive trick to break the rule: running in San Fermín filming it with glasses. The Police have another opinion

Making a robotic hand is “100 times more difficult” than building the entire robot. These Chinese companies are determined to solve it

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China has achieved let your humanoid robots run, they fight and even that execute choreographies with astonishing precision. That was the easy part. The key for a humanoid to stop being a fairground attraction and become a useful product is not in its legs, balance or its “brain”, but in something much smaller and much more complicated than it seems: the hands. The challenge of the hands. The human hand has 27 bones, 34 muscles and countless nerve endings. Replicating this in metal and circuits is the biggest bottleneck facing modern robotics. sums it up well Guardian Zhou Yong, founder of LinkerBot, one of the most advanced Chinese startups in this field: manufacturing a robotic hand is “a hundred times more difficult” than manufacturing an entire humanoid. “The dexterity required by a hand is ten times greater than that of any other part of the body, but its volume is only one-tenth the volume,” Zhou says. That is, not only is it the most technically complex element, it is also the smallest. The Chinese advantage. Pan Yunzhe, founder of Wuji Technology, studied in the United States and considered setting up his robotic hands company there, but soon saw that it was unviable. He tells The Guardian that “It was practically impossible to manufacture hardware in the United States due to the enormous limitations of the supply chain.” And China has an unmatched supply chain: it is agile, it is sophisticated and, above all, it is cheaper. This gives them a key advantage in hardware and allows companies like Linkerbot to already manufacture 5,000 robotic hands per month, a figure impossible to match anywhere else in the world. The problem is the software. Making the hand is only half the job, you also have to make it move like a human hand and there is still a long way to go here. Nathan Lepora, professor of robotics and AI at the University of Bristol, sums it up: “the challenge of making these hands is already being solved,” but controlling them “is a completely different game… no one knows how to do it yet.” The scarcity of data is one of the big problems and it is that, while LLMs have been trained with the enormous amounts of data on the Internet, there is hardly any data on how a human hand moves and, above all, what it feels like when touching something. To try to overcome this obstacle, Wuji Technology is testing a glove packed with sensors that captures all the movements of the human hand in everyday tasks. Its founder admits that being able to capture “how a person moves and what they touch or feel” is an “extremely complex and unsolved” task. The robotics market. The Chinese robotic hands sector had a turnover of $7.4 billion last year, almost four times more than in 2024. LinkerBot, one of the leading startups, aspires to a valuation of $6 billion. The case of this startup is just one example of the robotics boom in China, where more than a million companies are already registered, 40% more than last year. This translates into brutal dominance: China already manufactures 90% of the world’s humanoid robots and it is the country with the most industrial robotsby much difference with the rest. Yes, but. Robotics is advancing by leaps and bounds, but there are voices calling for calm, and not just any voice, but that of the International Federation of Robotics. In your report published in September last year were clear: “True multipurpose humanoids are still far away.” We are going to continue seeing more and more amazing demonstrations, but from there until they are sold en masse and we can all have one at home that is truly capable, there is a way to go. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | We still don’t know if humanoid robots will be the next great technological revolution. Yes we know that China will lead it

Samsung earns 19 times more than a year ago. Investors have reacted by sinking the stock 7%

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Samsung has announced that its operating profit soared to 89.4 trillion won (58.4 billion dollars) in the second quarter of 2026. That represents 1,810% more than what it achieved last year, that is, it multiplied by 19 the figure it achieved in the same period of 2025. The curious thing is that this achievement has not been of much use in the short term, because its shares have plummeted 6.9% according to indicate on Nikkei Asia. What has happened? A magical quarter. The operating profit for the second quarter of 2025 was just 4.7 trillion won, a very modest figure that can be explained simply: although it may seem incredible now, at that time the memory industry was going through a major crisis that would soon be completely revolutionized with the rise of AI and AI data centers. What was achieved in this second quarter of 2026 nevertheless remains colossal, and in fact Samsung has exceeded the operating profit of its last three years in a single quarter. Blessed damn memories. While users suffer one of the worst crises in history to purchase or upgrade our devicessemiconductor companies They are living a golden age. According to Citi Research, average selling prices for DRAM and NAND are up 44% and 53% respectively… this quarter alone. The demand for AI is no longer limited only to HBM modules, but also to conventional memory used in mobile phones, computers or business servers. But stocks plummet. Despite these results, the actions they fell around 7% on the South Korean stock market in the last 24 hours. Analysts in Nikkei indicated that this was a classic “sell on the news.” Investors had been anticipating these results for months, and in fact Samsung shares had already multiplied their value by five in the last year. Fall and then rise again? What has happened when this maximum was confirmed is that many of these investors have preferred to take profits before the demand for AI is not sustainable and there is an excess of supply in the memory sector. That does not seem likely in the short term, and the manufacturers themselves have already made it clear that demand It will be much higher than the supply at least until 2028. It therefore does not seem likely that Samsung shares will fall for a prolonged period, and if everything goes as it seems, it is reasonable to think that they will in fact continue to rise. Beware: this is not financial advice, it is simply what the market predicts. Market correction. Other companies in the sector also suffered significant falls. In the same session SK Hynix, its great rival, fell 6.1% after collapsing 11.2%. The KOSPI index – something like South Korea’s IBEX 35 – fell 4.9% and the impact was also felt in Japan. There Koxia fell more than 12% and SoftBank more than 4%. Backdrop. The crash comes just as SpaceX enter on the prestigious Nasdaq 100 and when the IPO of SK Hynix in the US is also imminent (scheduled for July 10). Not only that: just a week ago South Korean President Lee Jae Myung presented a public-private investment plan with Samsung and SK Hynix to expand chip manufacturing capacity in the country. Said project will theoretically have a billion dollars of funds (in Nikkei they talk about 800,000 million, the figures they dance) and can further boost the leading role of its two great bastions in the world of semiconductors. In Xataka | Samsung had been the absolute king of technology in South Korea for decades: SK Hynix has just surpassed it

OpenAI lost $38.5 billion in 2025, almost eight times more than in 2024. It will still go public

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The well-known analyst Ed Zitron has leaked the audited financial statement of OpenAI for 2024 and 2025. The data is overwhelming and shows how the company, which lost $5 billion in 2024, lost almost eight times more in 2025: $38.5 billion. These colossal amounts do not seem to be an obstacle to the company’s new ambition: going public. It looks like a big hole… When analyzing the 2025 numbers, it is clear that OpenAI’s operating business is not the real cause of this hole in its accounts. Much of the net loss is due to the transition that the company made from an entity non-profit (non-profit) to a traditional business corporation (for-profit). By doing soUS tax regulations caused a loss of $41.55 billion due to changes in the value of convertible interests and stock options (warrants) that had been agreed with partners and investors. …but maybe it’s not. The fascinating thing about this situation is that although the data is worrying, it also contains a probable contradiction. OpenAI records this colossal loss of $41.55 billion not because business is bad, but precisely because it is worth much more than before. How do they explain in Financial Timesupon becoming a for-profithad to update all those “accounting promises” at a fair and reasonable value, which generated that notable negative impact on the balance sheet. The “real” loss. The leaked balance sheet explains that if this “technical” loss from revaluation and some other tax credits is discounted, the pure operating loss from its traditional commercial activity is around a much more acceptable figure and less than $8 billion. It is still a huge amount (in 2024, we repeat they lost 5.08 billion), but it changes the perspective. Investors still believe in OpenAI. These data may seem terrifying and should make investors flee. They are doing just the opposite because they firmly believe in the future of the company. A few months ago the company raised an absolutely astronomical investment round of 122 billion dollars to reach a valuation of $852 billion. At the moment the one that wins is Microsoft. The leak also shows who is currently the big financial winner of this AI fever: Microsoft. In 2025, OpenAI paid the Redmond giant a total of $17.2 billion to be able to use the computing capacity of its cloud infrastructure, Azure. The amount Microsoft paid OpenAI for licenses or services was ridiculous by comparison: $303 million. Source: Sherwood News. Revenue is growing. For investors, the metric that is sustaining optimism is the speed at which OpenAI has managed to grow its revenue. The company closed 2025 with consolidated revenues of 13.07 billion dollars, almost tripling the 3.7 billion in 2024. But what is really notable is the evolution of its annualized income (Annual Run Rate, ARR), which allows projecting what is expected to be earned at the end of the year. OpenAI started at a pace of $1 billion per quarter, and then accelerate and end up closing with a turnover of more than 2,000 million per month (per month!). The condemnation of everything free. OpenAI’s commercial strategy, however, may have been its great Achilles heel. The company has paid a high price for wanting to be the free AI of the end user. Keeping hundreds of millions of people querying for free on ChatGPT certainly has a huge impact on operating costs. That contrasts with Anthropic’s approach, which from the beginning focused on business users who pay in much greater proportion. This tactic has allowed the rival company to achieve something unusual: make money with AI. With small print, but they win it. And the IPO, what? The truth is that OpenAI has already sent the confidential documentation that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) needs to start the IPO process. That doesn’t necessarily mean such an IPO is near, but there’s a problem: Anthropic has taken the exact same step. If the company led by Dario Amodei comes forward in that appearance on Wall Street, it will be another reputational battle won just at the moment when OpenAI is generating the most doubts. In Xataka | Anthropic is at the most important moment in its history and has a warning: we must lift the AI ​​accelerator

“China sets the pace in technology, costs and development times. We have to learn from them”

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Company with problems, company that looks to China. Not so much to sell more cars in a very complicated market (that too), much more to see how to learn from them and get greater performance from their products. Survive by achieving wider profit margins by producing cheaper and faster. For Nissan, China holds the key. “We have to learn” “China shows us the future of the industry in terms of technology, cost competitiveness and development times. We have to learn from China and export its technical knowledge” This is what Iván Espinosa, CEO of Nissan, has expressed in statements Nikkei Asia. In an interview with the Japanese media, Espinosa has made it clear that Nissan needs to copy China if it wants to survive. The Japanese automaker is going through a very bad economic time and to get out of the hole it wants to look at its neighbor. https://www.xataka.com/movilidad/nissan-leaf-opiniones-primera-toma-contacto-fotos What’s wrong with Nissan? Nissan is going through one of the worst financial and reputational moments in its history. At the end of 2024, the company accepted that it had entered a stalemate from which it would be difficult to get out. Sales were declining, the US market (with its tariffs on Japanese cars) It got complicated, at home they didn’t get back on their feet and in China they were missing. Solution: lay off 9,000 employees. Those days, after a few days of rumors (and everything indicates that with the Japanese Government putting pressure), Nissan and Honda announced an agreement to unite their paths. The idea, it seemed, was that the second company would take over Nissan and take it under its umbrella. That idea was dissolved just a few months later.. We now know that Honda gave, for the first time in its history, losses in 2025 and that its strategy has focused on canceling its electrical projects. In March of last year, the Mexican Iván Espinosa took control of Nissan and has focused its future proposal on a new launch plan and the objective of recovering part of its prestige. Last year, the company continued to lose sales worldwide but the 13% drop in Japan is especially worrying. Reduce times. For Espinosa, one of Nissan’s big problems is in the development and production times of its models. Right now, he explains, the development of a car from when it is drawn on paper and given the go-ahead until it reaches the street is 55 months. Espinosa wants to reduce this to about 30 months. According to their calculations, these long developments prevent them from getting the economic performance they need from their cars and that is why they have proposed that the next Nissan Skyline, the return of a legendary model of the company, has set a deadline for its development of 26 months, they point out in Nikkei Asia. China has demonstrated an ability to develop, modify and produce in record time. Renault has also gone to China to learn how they work there and they presume that The Renault Twingo was developed in 20 months. From Chery they already made it clear that its high capacity to develop and produce in record time is key when it comes to prevailing over Western competitors. More and more notices. These statements by Espinosa demonstrate that traditional firms are doing everything possible to quickly adapt to China’s way of working. Some consultants have already pointed out Japanese brands that their obsession with perfection hinders them when it comes to producing faster and cheaper, which has been taken advantage of by Tesla and Chinese companies. Toyota also sent a similar message a few weeks ago. The company has detected that it is losing money because products with aesthetic defects are sometimes discarded even though these parts are fully functional and are never seen by vehicle customers. This weighs on their production costs but also on the time it takes to produce the car. More cars, more prestige. Account Nikkei Asia that Espinosa’s project involves launching new cars on the market that update the company’s range of products but, above all, it will be based on the search for its own identity with a clear intention of recovering the lost prestige. In fact, in recent weeks it has been rumored that Nissan could bring the latest Z to Europe (now only sold in Japan and the United States so as not to penalize the company’s emissions count) with the aim of attracting the public to the dealership and positioning it as a halo product. On the horizon is also the new Skyline and a future GT-R that has gone through all possible phases when it comes to defining it and moving it forward, from project it as an electric sports car to launch it again with a combustion engine. “We will provide more details in the future,” Espinosa said on this topic. The CEO of Nissan has even referred to the fact that “some of my predecessors only talked about finances all the time”, in a clear message that not everything can be done to save costs if you want to maintain the attractive image of the product. A move that diluted Nissan’s imagethat Stellantis ballast and an idea that Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota, has also rejected. Photo | nissan In Xataka | “We will not survive”: Toyota wants to add the turbo to match the pace of the Chinese brands

Antimatter has a property that has taken physicists decades to measure. CERN just did it a hundred times better than anyone else

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Antimatter is fascinating not only because of its essence; It is also due to the still enigmatic role he played in the origin of the universe. Scientists still do not have the necessary tools to understand with any precision the role of this form of matter in the formation of the cosmos and the mechanisms that govern the tenuous line that delimits the imbalance between matter and antimatter. Fortunately, what they do know are its constituent elements and some of its properties. Understand what is antimatter It’s not difficult. And we can observe it as an exotic type of matter that is made up of antiparticles, which are particles with the same mass and spin as the particles we are familiar with, but with the opposite electrical charge. In this way the antiparticle of the electron is the positron or antielectron. And the antiparticle of the proton is the antiproton. Antimatter has a surprising property: when it comes into direct contact with matter, both annihilate, releasing a large amount of energy in the form of high-energy photons, as well as other possible particle-antiparticle pairs. It is currently being studied in many of the most important research centers specialized in particle physics in the world with the hope that knowing it better will help us understand some of the mysteries of the cosmos that remain out of our reach. The hyperfine cleavage of antihydrogen has been revealed CERN’s antimatter factory produces this form of matter by firing high-energy protons from an adjacent synchrotron at a metal block. This process generates a cascade of secondary particles, and among them antiprotons arise. These latter particles can then be cooled to be used in the facility’s experiments. ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus or antihydrogen laser physics apparatus), which is one of them, is specialized in producing antihydrogen by fusing antiprotons with positrons. Researchers then use magnetic fields to trap the antihydrogen for further study. An antihydrogen atom is composed of an antiproton in its nucleus and a positron orbiting around it, in the same way that a hydrogen atom contains a proton around which an electron orbits. Deuterium and tritium, the two isotopes of hydrogen, also have one or two neutrons in the nucleus respectively. The researchers of the ALPHA experiment have achieved something amazing: have measured hyperfine division of the ground state of the antihydrogen atom with a precision of 4 parts per million, improving the previous result by two orders of magnitude. This milestone is very important because it allows very rigorous tests to be carried out in the field of quantum electrodynamics. Hyperfine splitting of the ground state of the antihydrogen atom is the small splitting of the lowest energy state of the atom due to the magnetic interaction between the antiproton and the positron. According to the fundamental symmetries of nature, this measurement should be identical to the equivalent effect observed in hydrogen. Be that as it may, this milestone is very important because it allows very rigorous tests to be carried out in the field of quantum electrodynamics, which is the most precise theory that explains the interactions that occur between charged particles and light. Jeffrey Hangst, the spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment, explains that “the hyperfine splitting of the ground state of hydrogen is the origin of the so-called 21 centimeter lineso prized by radio astronomers and researchers searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (…) When the antimatter factory was conceived in the 1990s, the hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen was one of the key measurement objectives justifying the construction of the facility.” “The current measurement represents the culmination of many years of effort,” Hangst pointed out. “We have pursued the precise determination of the hyperfine splitting of antihydrogen since we demonstrated how to trap antimatter atoms in 2010. And now another group in the antimatter factory, the ASACUSA collaboration, is also trying to study this very important transition. Their technique, if demonstrated, has the potential to achieve even greater precision.” Thanks to ALPHA’s high level of precision, the measurement of hyperfine cleavage is sensitive to the effects of the internal structure of the antiproton at the center of the antihydrogen atom. In any case, this result is a very important step in the effort to further explore the nature of antimatter. Image | CERN More information | CERN In Xataka | European science gets serious: EUROfusion and CERN will work together on nuclear fusion and new colliders

China is taking away all its scrap paying up to five times more

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The scene seems like something out of an industrial espionage thriller, but it takes place in broad daylight. As anticipated Financial TimesChinese buyers are making appointments in the parking lots of stores like Home Depot in the United States to discreetly purchase lots of scrap metal valued at more than $20,000. This is the front line of a silent war for global resources. According to this same media, Asian intermediaries are sweeping up American scrapyards and paying up to five times the usual price, snatching the material from local recyclers. The director of a recycling company in Texas sums it up bluntly: “it’s a secret war that no one talks about.” Why so much interest in residual remains? The answer lies in the metal that makes them up. As explained The Conversation, Tungsten – whose name means “heavy stone” in Swedish – has the highest melting point of all known metals, reaching 3,422 °C. Furthermore, its extreme hardness and resistance to thermal shocks make it an absolutely irreplaceable material for manufacturing everything from aerospace technology to armor-piercing military ammunition. Market strangulation. China currently controls almost 79% of global tungsten production. As detailed in an analysis by expert John Connortension erupted in February 2025, when Beijing tightened its export controls in retaliation for US tariffs, cutting its shipments to the West by a drastic 40%. The economic impact of this decision was devastating. The restriction caused a strangulation of the market and a brutal increase in prices, which shot up 557% to reach $2,250 per metric ton. The great paradox is that, while the global shortage of virgin tungsten is caused by Beijing’s quotas, it is China itself that hoards recycled American scrap—such as worn-out industrial drill bits—to take it back to Asia through third countries such as Canada or Dubai. Industry analysts warn of imminent danger: If China officially reopens its doors to direct imports of scrap metal, the result will be a disaster for supply in the rest of the world. The global board. Today, almost absolute control of these supply chains gives China immense commercial and geopolitical power. This dominant position allows Beijing to use critical technologies and materials—so-called “bottlenecks”—as a lever of international influence that it can pull at will. Faced with this drain on resources, the debate has reached the highest levels. The report of Financial Times collect voices within the recycling industry and the US Congress demanding an immediate ban on the export of tungsten scrap to China to protect national security. However, the United States faces a temporary impasse: the country currently lacks the processing capacity necessary to convert all that exported scrap into useful finished products for its industry. In search of extraction. As Connor explainsthe solution inevitably involves diplomacy and investment abroad. The expert points out that Kazakhstan, which has the largest reserves of tungsten outside China (estimated at about two million tons), has become the center of the US strategy, attracting government-backed investments to develop local mines. But the race is head to head and Beijing has not sat idly by. In fact, China has already moved ahead in the Central Asia region, having started commercial production at the gigantic Boguty mine in Kazakh territory. At the same time, new Western actors are trying to close the gap. The financial portal Trading View informs that companies such as the Canadian mining company Allied Critical Metals are committed to revitalizing historic European projects, such as Borralha in northern Portugal. The company has a clear objective: to start the production of tungsten concentrate before the end of 2026 to meet the urgent demand in the West. Industrial ingenuity versus dumping. The middle The Conversation provides a historical parallel extremely interesting: during World War II, faced with the critical shortage of molybdenum caused by attacks by German submarines on maritime convoys, engineers from the British company Vickers managed to innovate by recycling the metal directly from mining drill bits. Today, that same logic applies to tungsten, which has a very high recycling rate of 42% globally. In Western markets this figure shoots up to an impressive 70%, driven precisely by the need to compensate for Chinese dominance over the primary mineral. In addition to technical innovation, state protection strategies gain prominence. In March South Korean Sangdong mine opened; Once at full capacity, this facility could produce more than 80% of the world’s non-Chinese tungsten. The most notable thing about this project is that the Seoul government has established a guaranteed minimum price for the mineral, thus protecting the operation from possible practices of dumping. Flooding the market to artificially depress prices is a tactic China has used successfully in the past to bankrupt Western investors in the critical minerals sector. An imminent warning for the West. The clock is ticking and the consequences of inaction could be fatal. An imminent and dangerous reality stalks the West: the Third Gulf War has consumed munitions at a staggering rate and depleted US stockpiles of tungsten-dependent missiles such as the Patriot and THAAD systems. taking them to historic lows. Without a stable and massive supply to quickly replenish these arsenals, the US military risks a true military disaster should a larger conflict break out, such as a direct confrontation over Taiwan. As a final reflection, andThese restrictive tactics from Beijing should be read as a stern warning. The current tungsten crisis should force Western governments to wake up once and for all and “de-risk” (de-risk) urgently their supply chains. Only by building an independent industrial network can the Western world avoid making its security and economy dependent on the monopoly of a single country. Image | Unsplash Xataka | The US is withdrawing soldiers from Europe. His plan to reassure her is to leave something much more disturbing in front of Russia.

In atomized times, the Spanish generation Z is finding a strange refuge in ‘Los Serrano’ and ‘No one here lives’

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“I’m looking forward to the long weekend and finishing the season. The Serranos“A 15-year-old student I recently taught recognized me. Yes, 15 years. Possibly the combination of that phrase and that idea gives us a short circuit: we are talking about a series that ended in 2008; when she hadn’t even started kindergarten. I couldn’t contain myself and as someone who did grow up with Diego Serrano, the brush and the boom for Fran Perea, I had to ask him where that passion had come from. It came through clips on TikTok. That content of a few minutes and loose decontextualized fragments were not enough, and they turned something that began as a simple curiosity into a true marathon to know in detail what happened to Eva and Marcos, the most famous stepbrothers on TV in the 2000s. A fiction as iconic as that, but for generation millennialhad found its new primary audience in Generation Z. I was surprised, of course, but the idea stayed in the back of my head, like a specific issue to which I should not give more importance. Like when your friend tells you that she is pregnant and suddenly you start noticing people on the street and you discover something that we could almost classify as a baby epidemic; Shortly after, another teenage student, whom we will call Victoria, shows me her pending homework on her tablet. Between irregular verbs and vocabulary to learn, I look at the wallpaper: nothing less than ‘Santa Justa Klan‘, the fictional (and not so fictional) group that was formed in ‘Los Serrano’. At this point, I was already ‘mode’Queen’s Gambit‘, projecting theories on the ceiling about something so strange to understand and that he was also seeing everywhere. Just a few weeks ago, at the next table in a restaurant, a group of university girls revealed in their talk that this is not just about ‘The Serranos‘. To a certain extent, declaring yourself a fan of ‘There is no one who lives here‘It is understandable with the common thread that it has with an already veteran series, but still in broadcast, like ‘The one that is coming‘. The thing is that they start quoting ‘The boarding school’, ‘Physics or Chemistry‘, ‘The ship’ or ‘Paco’s men‘, debating passionately about how the revival Prime Video of the first one does not have one bit of the quality of the original. Once again, I could not contain myself, and I assailed them with my doubts about how they had arrived at these fictions so typical of my generation and not so much of theirs. The same pattern: discovery on social networks, the possibility of watching all seasons on platforms or even through those fragments, and the echo chamber that is created in classes and groups of friends. That week-by-week phenomenon effect that we’ve barely seen since ‘Game of Thrones‘, is being achieved organically in the middle classes of Spain. Some actors are still relevant today, and although it is difficult to think that all the youth have come to ‘El Barco’ by looking at the IMDb of Mario Casas or ‘El Internado’ doing the same with Ana de Armascould make sense in certain cases. None of that: it is the series itself is what hooks you so many years later. This is how Catalina, one of these girls, recognizes it: “I’m finishing The Boarding School; When I do it I plan to tell my little sister to start it.” The generational contrast is more than evident, and the lapidary phrase that unsettles an entire generation millennial who, like me, has grown up with ‘Three meters above the sky‘ and ‘SMS without fear of dreaming‘ is pronounced by Sara, to whom her friends were highly recommending ‘El Barco’: “Ah, but Mario Casas went out there? I had no idea.” From meme to marathon The furor over the story of Lucas and Sara from ‘Paco’s Men’ or the crazy theories that ‘El Internado’ sparked now do not begin on television, waiting week after week for a new chapter. Rather the opposite occurs; Like almost everything in recent years, it all starts with the mobile. If before you watched a series and then it was when the meme festival began on the networks, now the journey is the other way around, from the meme it goes to television. And whoever says meme says fancams or fragments of interviews that awaken interest in those fictions dosmileras. “I started watching the story of Teté and Guille in parts on TikTok and I couldn’t stop,” one of my students reminded me. So, the clip opens the door and the series does the rest, becoming almost an involuntary trailer. And, really, this fragmented and instant format is very much in line with the current consumption model. Everything has to be quick, that captures your attention in the first seconds and encourages you to consume something, of whatever nature. So it is no coincidence that the algorithm works as a perfect cultural programmer for generation Z, a tool that prioritizes the high emotional or humorous charge it has in the love drama of Lucas and Sara or in the phrases from Bethlehem to his greatest ally. This resurgence poses a very curious paradox: in the era of rapid consumption, these young people return to long, choral series designed to be watched without any rush. We are also talking about fictions that achieved audience figures that were unthinkable on current television (‘There is no one who lives here‘ either’ The Serranos‘ reached 7,000,000 spectators), so all the merit of their revival It cannot fall on social networks or on the virality of certain clips. In a sea of ​​platforms and on-demand content, available at any time, something unique and special must have that 2000s television imagery. One of the keys is probably the ID with the characters. Even today, many university students from Generation Z find in Belén or Emilio from ‘No one lives here’ that reflection of work … Read more

We believe that the refrigerator can handle everything, but reheating the same container several times is a feast for bacteria.

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Something that can be common in many homes, especially when all its inhabitants work daily, is cooking on the weekend for the rest of your life. This practice today is called “batch cooking“and logically it involves a very common practice: take a large container out of the refrigerator, heat it a little, let the rest cool down and put it back in the refrigerator. Everything changes. Although food may look and taste the same to the naked eye, at a microscopic level, each cooling and reheating cycle turns the container into a real amusement park for bacteria. The danger. To understand the problem of reheating the container several times, you must first know a basic concept in food safety, which is ‘danger zone‘. This is nothing more than a temperature range that goes from 5 ºC to 60 ºC, where the bacteria present in food multiply at a high speed. Regarding this, there are different studies that indicate that every time we take the container out of the refrigerator, it heats up and cools down again to consume it later; the food slowly passes through that “danger zone.” If done several times a week, minutes are adding up and hours in which microorganisms have free rein to proliferate. There is more. Although when we get sick we can automatically blame bacteria, the truth is that sometimes the pathology can be generated by thermostable toxins generated by bacteria such as Bacillus cereuswhich produce a characteristic gastroenteritis that many of us have been through. This means that, even if we cook a food and kill the bacteria, its virulence product is still there and causes illness when consumed. Even if it boils. More than one reheated. Different scientific models have studied what happens when cooked foods suffer what is called “temperature abuse.” Here the science suggests that the fluctuations from going from the refrigerator to the counter, heating and cooling again, trigger the microbial load and sink the sensory quality of the dish. The case of rice It has undoubtedly been one of the most listened to, especially because of the danger it entails. Here science indicates that each reheating and cooling cycle exponentially increases the microbiological risk if adequate temperatures are not reached and maintained. One of the big problems of rice it’s in the bacteria Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive cooking and germinate if the rice is left at room temperature. The issue here is the toxins it generates, which end up with very serious gastrointestinal poisoning, which makes it dangerous to reheat rice from one day to the next when it has not been stored correctly after preparation. The chemical problem. Beyond the safety of the food, it is also important to focus on the container that contains it, since the constant cycles of intense cold and extreme heat in the microwave can degrade plastics. With this, it is achieved that the migration of chemical compounds towards food, especially fatty foods. That is why the jump to glass containers can be very interesting to improve food safety at home. How to do it right. To avoid these gastric scares, it is best to divide the food into different containers that correspond to an individual portion, even if it means washing many more pots on a daily basis. Also, when cooking, you should not leave the pot on the counter all afternoon, but rather it is better to cool it quickly and quickly place it in the refrigerator within a maximum of two hours. The temperature at which we reheat is also important, highlighting the need to reach 70ºC throughout the food for a minimum of 15 seconds in order to reduce the risk of contagion. Images | freepik In Xataka | Against tupperware: more and more voices think that storing food in plastic is not a good idea

We would need to detonate Earth’s nuclear arsenal 130 times to release the energy that caused the Moon’s great cannons.

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The Moon has its own “Grand Canyon of the Colorado”, and doubly so. Only these two canyons were not caused by the slow erosion of a river like the Colorado: 15 minutes of destruction were enough to leave these two enormous scars on the surface of the Moon. 10 minutes of destruction. A 2025 study analyzed in detail two enormous geological strips located in the vicinity of the south pole of the Moon. The analysis has determined, among other conclusions, that they were formed by the impact of an asteroid or comet and that the impact was such that these canyons were formed in less than 15 minutes of destruction. Two large cannons. Their names are Schrödinger Valley and Planck Valley and they are two enormous geological strips that radiate in a straight line from a point located in the Schrödinger basin, near the lunar South Pole, not far from the place chosen by NASA to the return from humans to the Moon. The study has offered us new data on the magnitude and morphological characteristics of these two sores on the surface of our satellite. These two canyons have a length of 270 and 280 kilometers; and 2.7 and 3.5 kilometers deep, respectively. An immense force. In addition to analyzing the characteristics of these two strips, the study tried to characterize the impact that caused them. By studying the way in which these were excavated, they determined that the process lasted between 4.9 and 15 minutes in one of the cases and between 5.2 and 15.4 minutes in the other. That is, they only needed about 10 minutes so that the impact would destroy tons and tons of lunar rock. The impact would have been enormous. According to the team responsible for the study, the energy required to produce these cannons would have been 700 times greater than the energy released by the nuclear tests of China, the United States and the USSR, and 130 times greater than the energy in the world inventory of nuclear weapons. Details of the study, like this last one, were published in an article in the magazine Nature Communications. The best analogue of the Chicxulub crater. The impact would have occurred billions of years before the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth. However, the team responsible for the study maintains in their article that this lunar impact is the “best analog expression on the surface” of the Chicxulub crater. In Xataka | Earth has lost its minimoon, but it posed for a photo before leaving (and promised to return soon) In Xataka | ESA wants to take its ships into space with nuclear reactors: this is how the Rocketroll project works Image | NASA\SVS\Ernie T. Wright A version of this article was published in February 2025

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