valuable

Anthropic just surpassed OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI startup

by

Anthropic is no longer the eternal second fiddle. The company that was always in the shadow of OpenAI has become the main protagonist of this segment in recent months. Its growth is so spectacular that in its latest round of financing it has managed to surpass OpenAI’s valuation. It is an extraordinary milestone, especially for one reason: both hope to go public before the end of the year, and here Anthropic has the upper hand (again). Overtaking on the right. The company founded by the Amodei brothers has raised a colossal financing round of 65 billion dollarsand with it Anthropic’s valuation becomes 965,000 million post money. It is a financial achievement that suddenly destroys OpenAI’s valuation, which is currently stuck at $730 billion. This latest round comes just three months after Anthropic will raise 30,000 million of dollars, cccadadasdsas in an agreement that placed its valuation at 350,000 million dollars. The growth is simply amazing. Anthropic is the coolest company. The valuation reflects a compelling reality: Anthropic is (much) more fashionable than OpenAI. The company has taken great advantage of recent controversies to increase its popularity, and its brand image has been greatly reinforced because it is the company that everyone is talking about. What happened to the Pentagon first and what has happened with the encyclical Magnificent Humanitas of the Pope then they show it. And the one with the best models (seems) to have. OpenAI seemed to be ahead in the AI ​​race with models leading the way. That changed with the arrival of Claude Code and Claude Opus 4.5. Since then, Anthropic’s advances have been striking, and although the differences are small, the popular perception is that Claude Opus is now the model that leads in performance. This has just been confirmed in benchmarks with the recent release of Claude Opus 4.8but above all with Claude Mythos Previewthe model that has been put the world of cybersecurity upside down. They already make money. A few days ago, surprising news leaked: Anthropic could close the second quarter of the year with an operating profit of 559 million dollars. He would make money when the rest of his rivals lose a lot. The projected annual turnover has managed to exceed $47 billion this month, five times more than the amount estimated at the beginning of the year. The reason: the overwhelming success of Anthropic models in companies. That’s where the money isand the company has known how to 1) detect and 2) take advantage of it before anyone else. Memory manufacturers enter the round. The financing round is led by venture capital firms such as Greenoaks, Sequoia, Altimeter and Dragoneer, but this time there are other protagonists. These are the semiconductor firms Samsung, Micron and SK Hynixwho have also participated and who have taken advantage of their current privileged position to also bet on the success of Anthropic. It’s a win-win: they bet on the current winning horse, and Anthropic manages to strengthen relationships with the companies that right now they control one of the big bottlenecks of the AI ​​industry: memory chips. The IPO is imminent. This surprise meteoric intensifies the pressure on OpenAI and further encourages (if that was possible) that other race, which is the IPO of both these two companies and SpaceX. We are in a year that will be remembered for three stratospheric IPOs, but these latest achievements by Anthropic have made the company led by Dario Amodei now the main protagonist in the technology segment. Image | Fortune Brainstorm Tech In Xataka | The surprise of the new Claude Opus 4.8 is not that it is (a little) better. The surprise is the “I only know that I know nothing”

Chile has one of the most valuable skies on Earth. Renewables are putting it on the ropes

by

Chile has a diamond of 105,000 km². The Atacama Desert is one of the most important in the world due to its extreme aridity. That is why it is key to study the adaptability of fauna and flora to very harsh conditions of drought and salinity, but it is also a gem for space observation and renewable energies. But there are mixtures that do not work, and Atacama is the example of how one of the best natural laboratories for the energy transition and one of the best places to look at the universe They don’t combine well. Spoiler: the astronomers have won. For now. The Atacama battery. It is not the first time that two disciplines collide in the Atacama Desert. Due to its conditions, this desert has become in the country’s renewable battery. Not only solar energy projects are triumphing, but also wind turbine parks. And as important as this: one of its salt flats hides one of the most important lithium reserves in the world. This is vital to build batteries for the energy transition of cars, for example, but the price is being too high: we are destroying biodiversity. In parallel to this battle, another has been fought: that of a huge renewable energy project to create green hydrogen that came into conflict with one of the most important observatories in the world: the Paranal Observatory of the European Astral Observatory. The threat of INNA. The American AES Corporation, together with the Chilean subsidiary AES Andes, was preparing the construction of a photovoltaic park of more than 3,000 hectares, wind turbines and refining facilities to produce green hydrogen and ammonia. He green hydrogen It is one of the pending energy accounts and it is positive, but there was a problem: it would be only 10 kilometers from the observatory. Astronomers shouted in the sky pointing that the microvibrations of the installation, the dust and, above all, the light pollution would disturb the daily work in facilities that are located in a privileged location, precisely because they are in the middle of nowhere. This facility is of global importance because it houses the Very Large Telescope (one of the most powerful in the world) and will have both the Extremely Large Telescope such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory. The thing about telescope names is one thing. Scientists working at the observatory They agreed to sign an open letter in which they pointed out that the construction of the facilities would seriously endanger the missions that were carried out there, describing the program as “an imminent threat” to humanity’s ability to investigate the cosmos. Victory. After months of fighting, the astronomers won. It was at the beginning of this year when AES Andes advertisement that he would abandon the project, noting that he would focus on other facilities, but mentioning that INNA was “fully compatible with the activities of the region.” It was no longer a fight just for the Paranal Observatory due because there are about 30 astronomical sites in the area, many of them internationaland its importance is what it is because, apart from zero light pollution, it is estimated that there are more than 300 nights each year without rain or clouds that interfere with scientific work. Yes, but. The problem is that one thing is the interests of astronomers and researchers of the universe and another is the priority of energy companies… and even of the country itself. Researchers point out that there is increasing pressure to convert the Atacama Desert into that aforementioned ‘stack’ of Chile, and INNA has not been the only threat that the observatories have experienced. In 1955, a major solar station operated by the Smithsonian Institution of the United States was forced to close due to mining expansion in the area. Unda-Sanzana, director of the Astronomy Center at the University of Antofagasta, points out that “we have had 70 years to learn from history and avoid repeating those same mistakes,” lamenting how close they have come to reliving the situation. And the problem is that things they haven’t changed too much. This victory has been suffered, but astronomers point out that Chilean sky preservation laws remain lax and outdated, so this should be remedied instead of fighting each battle individually. Image | G. Hüdepohl/ESO In Xataka | The Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on the planet. And right there a bunch of “crazies” are trying to get water out of the fog.

In the 13th century, some monks destroyed a valuable manuscript of the Bible. We just recovered 42 of your pages

by

The one of ‘Codex H’ It’s an ironic story. Despite its enormous value, in the 13th century the monks of the Great Laura Monastery (Greece) They decided to dismantle it to reuse their materials in other works. Parchment was scarce and it was time to recycle, even if it was at the cost of destroying a manuscript that was already more than 400 years old at that time. Historians have always considered its content lost. Now, with the help of science, they have rescued more than 40 pages. And they are a real treasure. What is the ‘H Code’? A 6th century manuscript especially valuable for its content. Beyond its age, its heritage value or as a curiosity, the work is interesting because it offers us a copy of the Letters of Saint Paul made only a few centuries after the apostle himself wrote them. That is, the codex was written in Greek a few centuries after (VI) Paul of Tarsus wrote his epistles in the 1st AD. It may seem like a long time, but to scholars who study the New Testament it offers a valuable treasure: a clue to how those epistles were organized in the Early Middle Ages. The ‘Codex H’ also has another peculiarity: it is the oldest sample of the known as “Euthalian Apparatus”a system of divisions and annotations of the New Testament. And what happened to him? That the work ended up dismantled. Literally. In the 13th century, parchment was a scarce commodity, so in the Monastery of the Great Laura, on Mount Athos (Greece), they decided to sacrifice the manuscript to take advantage of your materials. Their idea was to use parchment to bind and create endpapers for other works, so they inked their pages again. This explains why researchers have found fragments of the work scattered throughout libraries in Italy, Greece, Russia, Ukraine and France. Other pages never appeared and were considered lost forever. And it wasn’t like that? Not quite. The monks of the 13th century may have recycled the parchment to make endpapers and bind other manuscripts, but that does not mean that the original pages (and their content) had been lost. Not at least when examined with the help of science of the 21st century. “We knew that, at some point, the manuscript was re-inked. The chemicals in the new ink caused ‘shift’ damage to the facing pages, creating a mirror image of the text on the opposite sheet, sometimes leaving traces of several pages, barely visible, but very clear with the help of the latest imaging techniques,” explains Garrick Allenprofessor at the University of Glasgow and one of the experts who have studied the codex. What exactly have they done? With the collaboration of the Electronic Library of Ancient Manuscripts (EMEL), the researchers used multispectral imaging and processed the preserved pages in search of “ghost” texts. The term may sound strange, but it basically allows experts to get the most out of a folio, looking for traces that allow them to reconstruct other pages that are no longer physically preserved. To guarantee historical accuracy, the team led by Professor Allen collaborated with experts from Paris who, thanks to radiocarbon dating, confirmed that the material they were working with was parchment from the 6th century. What did they find? Neither more nor less than 42 pages lost (so far) from ‘Codex H’. And that is much more important than it may seem at first glance. The recovered texts are fragments of the Letters of Saint Paul, writings that were already known and do not represent any historical novelty in themselves. What is really interesting is not so much his sentences but everything that surrounds them. What does that mean? That those 42 pages provide an enormous amount of information to researchers on issues such as the way the scribes worked, how they related to Paul’s work, how they organized them and (of course) how they reused the materials when the codices aged. Does it give you that much information? The University of Glasgow stands out especially how the 42 pages of the codex help us better understand the changes that the New Testament has undergone. “They offer a unique perspective on how it has evolved and been interpreted over the centuries,” notes the institution before stopping specifically at the “list of chapters.” “These pages contain the oldest known examples of chapter lists from Paul’s Letters, which differ drastically from how we divide these letters today,” they need in Glasgow. The Greek codex also provides information about how 6th-century scribes corrected, annotated, and interacted with the epistles of Saint Paul with whom they worked. Images | University of Glasgow In Xataka | The Bible has always been the most sacred book. Young Christians are filling it with post-its, underlines and cute covers

In 1985 the most valuable company in the world had 400,000 employees. In 2026 the most valuable company in the world will have 40,000 employees

by

36,000 employees. Is the approximate number of the template of what, today, is the most valuable company in the world: NVIDIA. It may seem like a lot of employees, but the figure takes on another dimension when we compare it to what was the most valuable company in the world, IBM, which once had a whopping 400,000 employees on its payroll in 1985. More inhabitants than many cities The IBM of the 80s needed a veritable army of employees to function. It reached its peak in 1985, with a total of 405,000 employees hired all over the world, a figure that exceeds the population of cities such as Alicante, Bilbao or Córdoba. Currently, large technology companies have enormous staff, but all of them are very far from what IBM was (except for Amazon which due to its global retail business, has a much larger staff). According to bullfincher datathis is the number of employees of the big tech: Alphabet (Google): 190,000 Microsoft: 228,000 Apple: 166,000 Goal: 78,000 NVIDIA: 36,000 The case of NVIDIA draws attention, which with only 36,000 employees stands out as the most valuable company of the moment. Right now its market capitalization is 4 trillion dollarsalthough reached 5 billion at the end of last year. And what about the money? But let’s get to the important thing: How much money did IBM generate with that workforce? They count in The Chip Letter that, in 1985, IBM brought in 50,000 million dollars, which adjusted for inflation it would be about 150 billion dollars. Let’s see how it looks compared to what big technology companies entered in 2025: Alphabet: 402.8 billion Microsoft: 281.7 billion Apple: 416,000 million Goal: 200,000 million NVIDIA: 130 billion (2024) IBM was a true giant in its time, but even adjusting for inflation, its income pales compared to what big technology companies earn today. The only exception is NVIDIA, which has not yet reported its results for 2025, so the figure is that of 2024. Still, if we compare the volume of employees, NVIDIA makes each employee much more profitable. We talk about $3.61 million per employee compared to $370,000 per employee in the case of IBM, almost ten times more profitable. Productivity has skyrocketed How have companies managed to maximize profitability per employee? The key is in digitalization and how it has boosted productivity. Already in 2013 there was talk that technology had made Productivity will increase by 480% since the 70s. If we go to the specific case of IBM and NVIDIA, the first was mainly dedicated to the manufacture of mainframe computers or mainframesa process that in itself was much more laborious, at a time when manufacturing more meant having more employees on production lines. NVIDIA is a company fablessmeaning that those who manufacture their GPUs are other companies like TSMC, and they also do it with much faster and more efficient automated processes. This leaves its 36,000 employees “free” to focus on chip design and architecture, allowing them to scale faster and with much less labor. However, there is something in which no technology company manages to surpass what IBM once was: its degree of transversal dominance. He kept around the 70% market share mainframes, But it was also a leader in minicomputers, microcomputers and the software that accompanied them, from databases to compilers. Image | Apple (edited with Gemini) In Xataka | Company CEOs say AI is saving them a day of work a week. Employees say otherwise

Alphabet has just overtaken Apple as the most valuable company in the world. The reason is in AI

by

Alphabet closed Wednesday with a valuation of $3.88 billion, above Apple’s $3.84 billion. Your actions they have risen 2% while Apple’s have fallen 4% in five days. Why is it important. This advance reflects the financial consequences of two opposing strategies in the AI ​​race: Alphabet has bet big and Apple has hesitated. And the market is already punishing indecision. The contrast. Alphabet presented in November ironwoodits seventh generation of TPU chips as an alternative to NVIDIA, and in December it launched Gemini 3 with an excellent welcome. Meanwhile, Apple keeps postponing its “new Siri” until in a few months. The difference in development capacity and distribution speed is noticeable: Alphabet’s stock rose 65% in 2025, its best year since 2009. Apple’s barely grew 9%, below the 16.4% of the S&P 500. Between the lines. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, has been able to translate the high demand for AI infrastructure into gigantic contracts. On the October earnings call with analysts and investors said that Google Cloud had signed more deals over $1 billion in the first three quarters of 2025 than in 2023 and 2024 combined. Apple, on the other hand, remains caught in uncertainty over when and how it will integrate AI into its consumer products. The new Siri has become entrenched, left victims along the way and has positioned Apple as a company that was caught on the wrong foot by the rise of generative AI, without taking risks. Decisive moment. This reversal of positions marks the end of an era in which Apple dominated due to the inertia of the iPhone and the beginning of another in which anyone who does not have a clear and convincing AI strategy risks being left behind, no matter how iconic their logo may be. The market never pays for the past. In Xataka | In the midst of the RAM memory crisis, Samsung takes a leap with its HBM4 memory. It does not imply good news for the pocket Featured image | Rubaitul Azad

Researchers find a piece of ice from six million years ago. What is really valuable is the air trapped inside

by

A team of scientists has achieved something extraordinary in the frozen Allan Hills, east of Antarctica: extracting 6-million-year-old ice samples, the oldest ever directly dated. Trapped inside are air bubbles that date back to Earth’s Miocene atmosphere, when our planet was much warmer and sea level considerably higher than today. A time capsule in the form of ice. The discovery, published in the journal PNAS on October 28 and led by Sarah Shackleton of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and John Higgins of Princeton University, more than doubles the age of the oldest known ice so far, which dated to about 2.7 million years ago. “Ice cores are like time machines that allow scientists to take a look at what our planet was like in the past,” explains Shackleton. “The Allan Hills cores help us travel much further back than we thought possible.” How they found it. Between 2019 and 2023, the Center for the Exploration of Older Ice (COLDEX) team drilled between 100 and 200 meters deep into the ice sheet in the Allan Hills region, located about 2,000 meters above sea level. Just like they count From the Middle Space, this area is especially valuable because the topography of the terrain and ice flow patterns allow extremely old ice to be preserved closer to the surface, unlike the Antarctic interior where it would be necessary to drill more than 2,000 meters to reach similar ages. Dating. The researchers They determined the age of the ice measuring the radioactive decay of argon isotopes present in trapped air bubbles. This method allows ice to be dated directly, without the need to examine the rocks or soil around it. The result: 6 million years, a time when the Earth was home to now extinct creatures such as saber-toothed tigers, arctic rhinos and the first mammoths. Cooling. Analysis of oxygen isotopes in the cores revealed that the Allan Hills region has cooled approximately 12 ºC during the last 6 million years. It is the first direct evidence that quantifies how much the Antarctic climate has cooled since that ancient warm period. Ed Brook, director of COLDEX and paleoclimatologist at Oregon State University, stands out that “the team has built a library of what we call ‘climate snapshots’ about six times older than any previously reported ice core data.” Why does it matter? While Antarctica and the Earth as a whole have progressively cooled for millennia, humans are now rapidly increasing global temperatures by release large amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Studying these bubbles of ancient air will allow scientists to reconstruct past greenhouse gas concentrations and ocean heat levels, which could give us clues to what natural factors have contributed to the climate. climate change throughout the entire history of our planet. Surviving extreme conditions. “We are still discovering the exact conditions that allow such ancient ice to survive so close to the surface,” points out Shackleton. “Along with the topography, it’s likely a mix of strong winds and intense cold. The wind blows fresh snow and the cold slows the ice almost to a stop. That makes Allan Hills one of the best places in the world to find shallow old ice, and one of the toughest to spend a season in the field,” he continued. Next steps. The COLDEX team plans to return to Allan Hills in the coming months to carry out more drilling. They hope to recover even older samples and produce a more detailed record of Earth’s ancient atmosphere. “Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered in Allan Hills, we have also designed a new comprehensive long-term study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to carry out between 2026 and 2031,” concludes Brook. Images | COLDEX In Xataka | What are sixth generation fires: the megafires that create their own weather

Microsoft has never been so valuable throughout its history. And he has never been so close to the abyss

by

The first computer of Satya NadellaCEO of Microsoft, was a VAX manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (Dec) in the late 1970s. That machine excited him in such a way that Nadella was clear about her future: she wanted to devote himself to computer science. More than that: I wanted to devote yourself to computer science and work for DEC. That could not be. The concept of microordoring the company was based on its own architecture, called Virtual Address Extension (hence Vax), but that technology ended up being crushed by which it would succeed at that time: the RISC architecture. The company tried to survive, but ended up being acquired in 1998 by Compaq and, a few years later, disappearing. The lesson that Nadella learned with Dec By the time the debacle started, Nadella had moved. After a brief period in Sun Microsystems, he began working in Microsoft in 1992 and was climbing positions until it ended becoming the company’s CEO in 2014. The funny thing is that now That past with Dec pursues him. This was recently confirmed at a meeting with Microsoft employees in which it confessed something important: “Our sector is full of practical cases of companies that were in their day and that simply disappeared. There is one in particular that persecutes me, called Dec.” In fact, he explained how “some of the people who contributed to Windows NT came from a DEC laboratory that was closed.” The Microsoft CEO thus answered an employee’s question about the moral situation in the company, which according to indicate in The Verge It is in historical minimums. Not in vain Microsoft has just suffered a massive round of layoffs with 9,000 affected employees. The curious thing, Nadella admitted, is that after 51 years in the market some metrics indicate that Microsoft is at its best. This shows Its stock market capitalization is around four billion dollars and places the Redmond company like the second or third —Intercambia positions with Apple, Nvidia remains unstoppable – company of the world in relevance. “But at the same time, when I think of the degree of difficulty that awaits us, to be able to navigate a changing industry, a changing technological sector and a changing economy, we have a very hard job ahead.” And they certainly have it. What happens if the software doesn’t matter when you are the largest company in the software world The main external threat for Microsoft is not that IA improves existing software products. It is to make them irrelevant. Nadella himself admitted it to saying at that meeting with employees that “all the categories we could have loved for 40 years may not matter.” Days later he talked about all this in a post on the official Microsoft blog. He titled it “Recomproming us with our why, ours what and ours“. The implications of paradigm shift are colossal for world software giant: Office and Windows: Traditionally its great sources of income, the productivity suite and its operating system can end up having no place in our world. If an AI agent can end up managing all office tasks, creating documents, analyzing data and coordinating the work without the need for the Office suite or even a traditional operating system interface, the base of the Microsoft business would be eroded. We would no longer use an application to do the job. We would say to an AI to do it, how is it starting to happen. Competitors without ties: The new AI companies are not weighed by the legacy of an office suite or a 40 -year -old operating system. These startups can design lighter, fast and totally native solutions in the AI ​​era. For Nadella it makes no sense “to be in love with what we create in the past.” The situation for Microsoft is certainly disturbing. Despite its multimillionaire investment in OpenAi, The relationship has evolved To turn both companies into uncomfortable allies that are sought their own B plans Like softbank, Nvidia or Oracle. For Microsoft, things have not gone so well: it has injected billions to end depending on the technology of another company that is also becoming direct competitor. He has bazas in his favor as his gigantic Azure infrastructure, but not even that ensures survival. The Microsoft’s pressure to reinvent itself It is huge. He already achieved it after the failure in the segments of Internet search engines, social networks or finally mobile phones, but now the black clouds appear again with the AI ​​boom. The funny thing is that Microsoft was the Big Tech that adopted the AI ​​paradigm shift with the necessary intensity. His bet – especially, by OpenAi – was extraordinary, but for them the threat is not that of a company that ignores the change, but that of one that perhaps made the wrong bets. At the moment it does not have a competitive foundational model, and that co -driver overload has not just set in the market. What will Nadella and your company do to react? You move, Microsoft. In Xataka | The marriage between Openai and Microsoft is broken at times. The problem is that both are still needing

The US wants to give up bringing the most valuable samples collected on Mars. Lockheed promises to do it for less than half

by

Since February 2021, The Rover Perseverance patiently travels the Jezero crateran old river basin on the surface of Mars. Over there, where millions of years ago the water flowedNASA Robot It has been collecting fragments of rock and Martian dust With a very specific objective: Find signs of past life. It is not any mission. Is, According to NASA itselfthe first step of an ambitious plan to bring intact samples from another planet. For more than three years, Perseverance has done his job in silence and the samples that Now rest inside of small sealed tubes, carefully deposited on the Martian surface or stored aboard the Rover itself. From space, bread crumbs would look like a trace drawn through a desert planet, hoping to be collected. A truncated promise The plan, known as Mars Sample ReturnI had to send another ship to Mars, launch from there a rocket with the samples and return them to the Earth for analysis in laboratories. But the project began to crumble. An independent review raised the cost estimated until 11,000 million dollars and delayed the possible return of the samples until 2040. In May, the new US administration presented its first budget draft: proposes to cut 24 % of NASA’s financing and cancel Mars Sample Return for considering it an exorbitant cost program. The plan must still go through Congress, but marks a clear turn: the menions manned to deep space are prioritized, such as Artemisand the projects with great budget and scarce immediate return are frozen. With the current budget cut and without guarantees of continuity, NASA decided to reexamine its options. As explained by the former administrator Bill Nelsontwo more viable alternative routes were being evaluated: one that takes advantage of the “Sky Crane” type landing system used successfully in the Curiosity and Perseverance Rovers, and another that opens the door to new proposals from the private sector. Lockheed Martin’s letter Amid the budget uncertainty, one of the great space contractors in the United States has decided to move file. Lockheed Martin, with half a century of experience in missions to Mars, has presented NASA a proposal to execute the Mars Return mission with a radically different approach: for less than 3,000 million dollars and under a fixed price contract. The change is not less. Faced with the traditional model, full of budgetary risks and with multiple public actors involved, Lockheed promises a simpler architecture. Its proposal includes a more compact landing module, based on the ship Insight that already touched Martiano soil in 2018a lighter and lighter ascent vehicle – designed to be the first to take off from another planet – and a system of re -entry to the land derived from missions such as Genesis, Stardust and Osiris-Rex. It is a commitment goes beyond engineering. Being a “Firm-Fixed Price” contract, Lockheed Martin is responsible for absorb any possible extra cost. That is, if something is complicated, the invoice does not rise. According to the company itself, that model has already proven effective in other scientific missions of deep space, where they even managed to return part of the NASA not used budget. The message is clear: if NASA wants to save its most ambitious mission without spending, Lockheed Martin is ready to lead it. Bringing back about thirty small tubes could help us answer one of humanity’s great questions. Was Mars ever inhabited? Scientists do not seek fossils or complex structures. They look for subtle indications that can only be analyzed with the level of precision allowed by land laboratories. And for that, the samples that Perseverance has collected are not any rock. They have been selected one by one depending on their location, their age, their composition and their geological context. Are, In Nasa’s own wordsthe most likely material to contain a Martian “biofirm.” But the value of these samples goes beyond the biological. They can reveal how the wet marte of 3.5 billion years ago was, how its climate evolved, why it became an arid and inhospitable planet, and how the geological, atmospheric and chemical processes interacted for millennia. They will also tell us what resources could take advantage of future manned missions: where it is safer to land, what materials are usable, what areas have risks. Images | Lockheed Martin In Xataka | NASA locked four volunteers one year simulating their life on Mars. What did not miss: an entire PS4 Games Library

Japan cannot afford your most valuable company in the chips industry. And is mired in debts

by

JSR Corporation is a company extraordinarily valuable for Japanalthough not in a strictly economic sense. And this company constitutes with Tokyo Electron, RapidusCanon and Nikon The spearhead of the Japanese chips industry. Japan needs them. It necessarily needs these companies to be competitive if you want to recover the relevance that it had decades ago in the already flourishing semiconductor industry. At the end of the 80s Japan dominated the integrated circuit industry With an overwhelming forcefulness. Nec, Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Matsushita and other Japanese companies monopolized in 1988 no less than 50% of the chip industry. However, today none of these companies is positioned among the leaders of a sector dominated with iron fist by Taiwanese, American, Dutch, South Korean and German companies. Despite its world leadership JSR Corporation is spending trouble This company has something that the other companies that I have mentioned in the first paragraph of this article lack: it holds the monopoly of a crucial sector of the chips industry. This is actually what makes it so valuable to Japan beyond its economic results. And it is that JSR specializes in the production of photorers. Photolithography teams that Design and produce ASML They are responsible, very broadly, to transfer the geometric pattern described by the mask with a lot of precision to the surface of the silicon wafer. In this area we can observe the pattern as the “drawing” that delimits the distribution of transistors, connections and other elements that make up an integrated circuit. However, before reaching this important step it is necessary A process known as deposition. Equipment manufactured by Tokyo Electron either Apply materials. Its purpose is to prepare silicon wafers for the transfer of the geometric pattern by depositing a fine material of material on them. During the last two decades all companies specialized in the production of photorestoning materials have been Japanese Depending on the type of chip that is being manufactured it will be necessary to use one material or another. One of the most used deposition techniques is known as oxidation, and consists of taking advantage of the silicon’s ability to form a fine oxide layer when reacting with water. Its purpose is to protect transistors and other components of external pollution chips. However, before carrying out the transfer of the geometric pattern to the wafer using a lithography equipment it is necessary to pour a liquid capable of absorbing the light and preserving the pattern. This is the function of the photorersista fluid. During the last two decades all companies specialized in the production of photorers have been Japanese. In fact, Japan since then has the monopoly of this market, which It is currently led by JSR Corporation. This company supplies its photorestoning liquids to most semiconductor manufacturers with which we are familiar, such as TSMC, Intel, Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Technology or Texas Instruments, among many others. The surprising thing is that despite the domain it exerts on the market of photorers, JSR is not going well. In 2024 the investment company Japan Investment Corp. bought it for 6,000 million dollars with the purpose of consolidating its growth, but has closed the last fiscal year in March 2025 with losses of 1,450 million dollars. This bad result has had consequences. The company’s board of directors has been completely replaced as the most responsible for an economic result that is not at all in line with the position that this company holds in the market. However, analysts say that the problem does not reside in the photorriving business; JSR’s bad economic results have been triggered by their subsidiary specialized in The development and manufacture of biopharmaceutical and medical diagnosis products. The new directive dome plans to sell a part of this division to the Japanese company Tokuyama Corp. for approximately 570 million dollars with the purpose of cleaning up its accounts. We will see what happens, but what does not admit discussion is that JSR has a leading role in Japan ambitions linked to the semiconductor industry. More information | Reuters In Xataka | Japan has taken the carrier to dominate the chips industry. Prepare a 325,000 million dollar plan

Nuclear power plants have a very valuable resource so as not to collapse if electricity fails: the “flex” strategy

by

The refrigeration system of The reactors of nuclear centrals It has a fundamental purpose: to guarantee that Fuel bars will remain at all times within Its operating temperatures range. If this parameter increases excessively they could melt and trigger a serious accident. To avoid it Conventional nuclear reactorslike those we have in Spanish nuclear plants, have a triple cooling circuit. The primary circuit consists of the vessel that contains the fuel bars and a deposit known as heat exchanger. The hot water from the vessel circulates between both deposits thanks to the action of a pump, so that it cools in the exchanger before returning to the vessel. This circuit is closed. In addition, the heat exchanger acts as a steam generator, so a second circuit is responsible for introducing the cold water inside that, when coming into contact with the hot water of the primary circuit enters boiling. From there the necessary steam proceeds to transfer to the turbine the kinetic energy that will make it possible to obtain electricity thanks to the action of the alternator. Once the fluid crosses the turbine the water steam is cooled and condenses inside an additional tank to promote the appearance of water in the liquid state that will be introduced again in the heat exchangerthus giving rise to a second closed circuit known as secondary circuit. Again a pump is responsible for the water to circulate between the condensation tank and the heat exchanger. So far we have described two different closed circuits, the primary and the secondary, but we have left a loose end. In order for the water vapor of the secondary circuit to be condensed inside the condensation tank it is necessary to introduce in the latter cold water. And to do so it is necessary to resort to a third circuit known as external cooling circuit. The water of this last installation comes from the sea or from a river near the nuclear power plant, hence it is necessary to accommodate this type of centrals near one of these two natural resources. In modern nuclear centrals flexibility and redundancy are everything As we have just verified, so that the water that acts as a refrigerant element circulates correctly inside the primary and secondary circuits the action of at least two pumps is necessary, one for each circuit. And, of course, the pumps need electricity to function, like many other elements of the nuclear reactor, such as the pressor, the external cooling circuit pumps or the safety injection pumps. We explain everything in more detail in the article that we dedicate to The control rooms of nuclear centrals. Portable equipment allows all these functions to be performed without having to depend on exterior power supply After Fukushima The safety of all the world’s nuclear power plants was reinforced. They underwent very important stress tests during which all the central parameters were reviewed, especially those that were related to what had happened in Fukushim Baskets on the electricity grid. And once everything was reviewed, the incorporation of a series of measures to mitigate and prevent such accidents was standardized worldwide. This strategy is known as “flex”, which is the flexibility apocope. Nuclear centrals have been designed to Prevent Design Base accidents. This philosophy consists in thinking about what can happen with the purpose of implementing security measures to mitigate them in case they occur. What happens is that in practice, of course, there are accidents that you can not have planned, so in addition to the security systems prior to Fukushima, a series of portable equipment that allow all those functions from outside without having to depend on exterior power supply have been incorporated. They are totally portable and autonomous equipment that are already incorporated into all nuclear plants, and that can also be transported from one central to another in case of need via helicopter or through the military emergency unit (UME). In addition, there are also A central warehouse in Technatom Madrid where there are portable equipment that could be transferred in two or three hours to any Spanish nuclear power plant. As we have just seen, the redundancy of the equipment is also a crucial strategy in nuclear facilities. However, there is another resource that is even more important: The security culture. The training of all people who work in a nuclear power plant is individualized and permanent throughout their professional career. In Xataka | China and Russia have an extremely ambitious plan: in 2028 they will build a nuclear power plant on the moon In Xataka | This nuclear reactor is different from everyone else. It has been expressly designed for data centers

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.