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This indie has been returned 55,000 times due to Steam’s restrictive policies

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270,000 copies sold and 55,000 returns are not very logical figures for a single game. Does a bestseller (on the margins of the independent circuit) and an extraordinary number of returns make sense in the same title? The two figures did not add up to Mateo Covic and he exposed a problem that mainly affects independent developers: you cannot make games that are too short. The game. ‘Paddle Paddle Paddle’ is a cooperative physics and platform game that Covic signs under the name Zoroarts, and is his second commercial title after ‘Makis Adventure’, from 2023. Published by Assemble Entertainment, It went on sale on July 25, 2025 for $4.99. Covic, 23, built it alone in just four months; It takes just over three hours to complete if played slowly. But many players don’t play leisurely. The complaint. On July 5, Covic published in X that his game accumulated more than 55,000 refunds: 21% of all sales, despite the fact that the 90% of the reviews were positive. “This should not be possible,” he wrote. But it is: the Steam refund policy allows you to return any game played less than two hours and purchased less than fourteen days ago, without having to give any verifiable reason. System failure. The policy is not intended, as she herself acknowledges, “as a way to get free games,” and using it this way can result in the loss of the right to request future refunds. But the two-hour limit is the same whether the game lasts six or sixty: it does not correspond to the actual length of each title. In the European Union, in fact, the legal right of withdrawal in distance purchases expressly excludes digital content once the download begins with the consent of the buyer, so this consumer protection comes from Steam’s commercial policy. It’s not the first time. In its day we already had How a studio built an entire game around all of this: a survival of terror that turned the return into a challenge, rewarding anyone who finished it before the limit with the possibility of recovering the money. And Valve has already touched the refund policy to prevent an early access title from being played indefinitely and return it just before launch. With Covic the other side of the same problem appears, finished and enjoyed games that are returned anyway. And in this way the temptation is generated to stretch a game just to exceed two hours. Short genres have been defending their length for years as a design decision, not as a defect. If the economic penalty for being short grows, the pressure to stuff development with padding grows with it, and that precisely harms games that make a point of their brevity. Nuances. Days after his tweet, Covic sat down to crunch the numbers, and qualified his initial anger: 20% refunds are common among games of the type to which ‘Paddle Paddle Paddle’ belongs, and 10% is the general average on Steam. With 270,000 copies sold, its 55,000 returns are not that far from that range. He also recognized that the real driver of sales was the bargain price, with a 40% discount, not the refund policy: at less than three dollars, people bought without a second thought. That doesn’t stop Covic from thinking the system is flawed: Steam doesn’t check the reasons for each return, and he, as a developer, would find it helpful to see returns labeled “too difficult.” Of the nearly 826,000 gross dollars that the game generated, 158,000 were lost directly in returns (before subtracting the Steam commission, the distribution with the publisher and German taxes that are around 42%). And yet, none of this made him consider artificially extending his games. For speaking. The post where Covic expressed his complaints went viral: he received very hostile messages, and a good part of that response translated into protest reviews. Many understood his complaint as an attack on returns in general, something that he himself has denied. Now, in the game file, the historical set of reviews remains Very Positive (88% out of 1,414 reviews), but the most recent ones have fallen to Mixed (57% out of 69). In any case, their proposal that Valve include an estimated departure time next to the price, and removing “too short” as a valid reason for refund once that time has passed, are still very reasonable requests so that the indie scene continues to evolve at its own pace, and not at that of the AAAs. In Xataka | This game dared to go on sale the same day as ‘Silksong’. The only thing he managed to do was attract 12 players in his debut

Tokyo has four times the population of Madrid and traffic jams are non-existent. The secret is called Shako Shomeisho

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Spain has an extension of 506,030 square kilometers and 48.35 million people live there. Japan has an area of 377,974 square kilometers where 124.5 million people live. In the city of Madrid it is estimated that they live 3.23 million peoplewhile in Tokyo a total of 14.22 million people. The difference is even more striking if we take into account population density. In Madrid there are 5,265.91 inhabitants/km², while in Tokyo it rises to 6,501.58 inhabitants/km². Which of the two cities is hell to drive? If you cast an eye on photographs of Japanese citiesyou may have noticed that there are many, many people walking and on public transport. But how many cars do you see on the street? The answer is simple: very few. If we attend to the 2021 dataSpain had 29,875,896 million cars in use, while in Japan there were 76,702,773 cars. How can it be that a country with a much smaller surface area and that is on its way to tripling our population? don’t be a car hell If it has a density of cars per person very similar to ours (629 cars/1,000 inhabitants for Spain compared to 609 cars/1,000 inhabitants for Japan)? They have achieved this, of course, by forcibly limiting the number of cars that can be owned in large cities where, logically, a greater number of cars should accumulate. As? The secret is Shako Shomeisho Although the car density per inhabitant is very similar to that of Spain, the truth is that it plummets if we focus on large cities. In Japan it is estimated that each household owns 1.06 cars of the total. That figure plummets to 0.32 vehicles per household in Tokyo. The big Japanese city is, in fact, the rich city where cars are used the least. According to Deloitteonly 12% of daily trips in Tokyo are made by car, while 17% are made by bicycle. Figures that cannot be understood without two express prohibitions: that of parking on the street and that of buying a car… without space to park it. And a little luck. Andre Sorensen, professor of urban planning at the University of Toronto, says that part of Tokyo’s success in achieving this low vehicle density begins with a coincidence. At the beginning of the 20th centuryonly 15% of Japanese lived in cities. That figure is now 91%. Tokyo (above) and Rotterdam (below) two examples of cities rebuilt after World War II. Source: Google Maps The explosion came with the end of World War II. The cities were devastated and the growth in Tokyo was so chaotic that buildings began to grow uncontrollably, one close to the other. You can compare with photographs from Google Maps how Tokyo grew, completely uncontrolled with countless tiny plots, and how Rotterdam grew, with planning studied to combine green areas in residential areas. Sorensen explains that this population explosion caused the flourishing of narrow streets that made it difficult for vehicles to pass through and store them. The wave of workers to the cities forced the institutions they will turn to public transport and in 1957 the first measure was taken to harshly regulate car use in cities. And, in turn, a good reason to discourage its use. Since then, a law has been applied that prevents parking cars on the street. What is common in any European city is strictly prohibited in Japan. The fine is also not nonsense. They apply penalties of up to 200,000 yen for leaving the car parked irregularly, which entails a fine of more than 1,200 euros. Just a few years later, in 1962, the Shako Shomeisho. This name refers to the certificate that the buyer of a car must present when purchasing the vehicle. This guarantees that that person has a place to park the car. That is, you have a parking space where you can park your car every night. If you do not have a garage space, you will be prohibited from buying a car. Kei Cars, like this Daihatsu Copen, do not need to have a parking certificate except in Tokyo and Osaka This Shako Shomeisho does not apply to Kei Carssmall Japanese cars that measure less than 3.4 meters in length, 1.48 meters wide and 2.0 meters high and with engines less than 660 cc that cannot exceed 64 HP of power. The problem is that street parking options are minimal and parking in a public parking lot is very expensive. Shako Shomeisho the price of land has skyrocketed of the parking lots. In fact, the expensive thing is not buying a car, the expensive thing is getting the chance to buy a car. Is something similar to what happens in Singapore with a subtle difference: there are spaces available to park cars in Tokyo that sell for more than one million euros and the advertisements themselves already reflect the performance that can be obtained by allowing the rental of vehicles by the hour. And it must be taken into account that not all parking spaces are valid. The garage where the car is stored must be less than two kilometers from the habitual residence and to obtain the certificate it must be possible to corroborate this with plans or, even, the entrance and exit measurements of the garage are required. If the car is too big, the buyer may have problems getting the certificate approved by the authorities and may not have anywhere to park it… or rent it. The solution can go through rent the garages But there are neighborhoods where monthly rents can easily go above 500 euros (about 77,000 yen). In some very specific places in the most expensive neighborhoods, the spaces They are quoted with rents above 700 euros (110,000 yen). As it could not be otherwise, houses for sale are offered with skyrocketing prices when the combination “downtown” and “parking space” go hand in hand. With offers that exceed 3.5 million euros (550 million yen) for 130 m2 houses… And with space … Read more

dates, times, fights, performances and how to watch the boxing event of youtubers and influencers online for free

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We are going to give you all the information about the imminent Year VI Eveningwhich will take place this weekend. The tickets already flew out months ago, but in addition to giving you all the information we will also tell you how to watch it for free online in their official broadcasts. Let’s start the article by reviewing the dates and times of the event. Then, we will tell you the list of ten fights that will take place during The Year VI Evening, as well as the performances that will take place between them. To finish, we will tell you where you will be able to see everything for free and online. Event dates and times The event will take place this Saturday, July 25, but the day before there will be a preview with the weigh-in. Here you have the dates, times and everything that is going to happen in each of the two appointments that make up The Evening of the Year VI. July 24 at 7:30 p.m. – Weigh-in: The event will begin tomorrow, Friday, July 24, 2026 with the weighing of the participants in The Evening of the Year. It is a kind of preview in which each combatant will weigh in, face-to-face with his opponent and make his last public statements before the event. The weighing will begin to be broadcast at 7:30 p.m. Spanish peninsular time. Saturday, July 25 at 7:00 p.m. – Year VI Evening: And this Saturday, July 25, The Evening of the Year will take place. This is the main event, with all the fights announced, and special performances. The Year VI Evening will begin at 7:00 p.m. Spanish peninsular time, when a preview will be held with some interviews. This event will last around seven hours, until 2 AM Spanish peninsular time, and the first fight will be at 7:45 p.m., and the last one will begin at 1:30 AM. Fights of The Evening of the Year VI Now we are going to tell you the list of all fights that will take place during the Year VI Evening. It is a very balanced evening between men’s and women’s fights, and these are the names and the confrontations that we will be able to see in the ring. First Combat: Fabiana Sevillano vs la Parce. Second Combat: Clers vs Natalia. Third Combat: Edu Aguirre vs Gastón Edul. Fourth Combat: Marta Díaz vs Tati. Fifth Combat: Viruzz vs Gero Arias. Sixth Combat: Alondrissa vs Angie Velasco. Seventh Combat: Kidd Keo vs Lit Killah. Eighth Combat: Rivers vs RoRo. Ninth Combat: Plex vs Fernanfloo. Tenth Combat: TheGrefg vs Illojuan. Performances from The Year VI Evening Between the combats we will have various musical performanceswhich are the following. They will be musical shows that will take place periodically to liven up the evening. Yandel Anuel Bad Gyal Juanes La Pantera and Lucho RK In addition to this, you should know that both artists and fighters will bring guests. Not all, but some, both to make the musical performances more special and so that the fights have a little more entertainment. Where can you watch events for free? Both the weighing and The Year VI Evening can be seen for free and online on the official channels of Ibai Llanosthe famous content creator who is also the organizer of the event. These are the three channels where it will be broadcast in full and open: In Xataka Basics | Twitch Parent’s Guide: What it is, how it works, and how to protect young people’s privacy

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.

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