working

The Social Security reform has opened the door to working longer. Early retirement will remain half closed

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Social Security is pushing those who can continue working to delay their retirement as much as possible, but it resists modifying one of the most discussed rules of the system: the penalty in the pension of those who they retire earlyeven when they accumulate more than 40 years listed. The flexible retirement reform contemplated in the Royal Decree 416/2026 will come into force on August 28, launching the Government’s strategy to extend working life of workers and contain pension spending. What changes with the reform. The new flexible retirement regulation seeks to encourage more people to extend your working life as much as possible voluntarily and can make part of their pension compatible with a salary, something that current regulations did not allow. The idea is not to force anyone to continue working beyond the legal retirement age, but rather offer more incentives so that those who can and want to do so, keep working. The person who is already retired, instead of stopping working completely, can do so part-time. In exchange, they will receive a salary for their work and a supplement to the proportional part of the pension. In this way, someone retired can obtain a higher income while still active, and will receive 100% of their pension again when they stop working. That is, if someone retired receive a pension of 1,000 euros, and for working 32 hours a week (80% of a full day) they will pay you a salary of 1,000 euros, your pension will be cut in that proportion, but the sum of salary (1,000 euros) and pension (200 euros) will provide you with greater monthly income. The current regulations force you to choose between working or receiving the pension. Put obstacles to early retirement. The demographic pyramid in Spain, in which there are fewer and fewer young people to maintain the pension system and a longer life expectancy, has forced successive governments to take measures to maximize working life of employees to continue contributing. This has led to the extension of the retirement age, which has been progressively delayed since 2011 to go from 65 to 67 years in 2027. The other measure approved in the pension reform of 2024 to discourage early retirement is to apply some reducing coefficients to the retirement pension, so that the more you anticipate retirement, the less pension you receive in return. Contribute 40 years without reward. One of the problems posed by the application of reducing coefficients is that those workers who already exceed the maximum limit of years of contributions necessary to access ordinary retirement at age 65 (38 years and six months or more by 2027), will not be able to retire early. without penalizing themand end up getting paid a lower pension than other workers with fewer years of contributions. This group has already organized under the association Asjubi40 and different political groups with representation in Congress have carried out proposals to eliminate this grievance to workers with long contribution periods when they want to advance their retirements. As and how he published The Independentvoluntary early retirees bear an average reduction coefficient of 11.36% and receive an average pension of 2,002.58 euros per month, after retiring at an average age of 63 years and two months. In the case of involuntary early retirement, the average reduction rises to 18.9%, the average pension stands at 2,100.42 euros per month and the average retirement age drops to 61 years and ten months. The unaffordable cost of stopping working. The reason given by the Government for not eliminating these reducing coefficients It’s simple: removing those penalties would be expensive. The Executive estimates an additional cost of 3,358 million euros per year for Social Security if the reducing coefficients are eliminated for those who retire early after having contributed 40 years or more. Of that figure, 1,345 million would correspond to voluntary early retirement, and 2,013 million would correspond to those retired involuntarily, that is, those who have been affected by ERE, business closures, force majeure or other cases considered by the General Law of Social Security. Social Security cannot assume it. Although Spain is registering record numbers in terms of number of members. It closed 2025 with a budget deficit of 5.58 billion euros. Once again, we are facing a record to be treated of the smallest deficit of the last 14 years, as as highlighted The Confidential. But it is a deficit, after all. However, the incorporation of contributions such as the Intergenerational Equity Mechanism (MEI), has contributedIn 2026 alone, 1,162.23 million euros will be added to the Social Security Reserve Fund, which reached a total amount of 15,267 million euros last March. In Xataka | From the “Great Resignation” to the “Great Early Retirement”: the labor market loses the experience of those over 55 years of age Image | Pexels (Joaquin Carfagna)

It’s not AI, it’s working from home in your pajamas

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The data on productivity in the US brings to light a sustained increase that has even surprised the until now president of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, admitted his astonishment declaring that “I never thought I would see a time when we had five or six years of 2% productivity growth.” Given the rise of AI in recent years, many experts have attributed this productivity increase to AI. However, Nicholas Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford and one of the most recognized voices in teleworking research, holds that the most reasonable explanation does not go through AIbut it has more to do with teleworking. The professor defends that the change in model towards teleworking after the pandemic, has had more weight than many managers are willing to admit. The figures that attract attention. According to the data of the Bureau of Labor Statisticsequivalent to the INE in Spain, the productivity of the non-agricultural private sector in the US grew by 5.3% in 2020, 2% in 2021, fell 1.5% in 2022, rose 1.8% in 2023, advanced 3% in 2024 and grew again by 2.2% in 2025. For Bloom, this chronological pattern is a fairly clear sign of the relationship between productivity growth and the way it has been worked since the pandemic. The average growth of 2% in productivity from 2020 recorded in the data for the last five years contrasts with the scarce 1% that was recorded during much of the 2010 decade. This comparison is what reinforces Bloom’s argument that attributes the merit of the rebound in productivity to teleworking and not to AI, taking into account that the increase has been recorded since 2020 and not from 2022, when it was launched. ChatGPT. Why teleworking weighs so much. Bloom resume the productivity advantage of teleworking with some quite obvious arguments: teleworking implies less time wasted traveling, fewer office distractions and easier concentration. Added to this are two more effects, also very important, which are the creation of businesses and the entry of more people into the labor market. decoupling talent hiring to a certain geographic location. In other words, teleworking not only changes where you work from, but also gives access to a broader hiring market and saves costs to the get rid of offices. The economist defend That this mix is ​​what explains why productivity figures have not only withstood the impact of a global crisis, but have also improved. The stubborn return to the office. While Bloom points out that “teleworking is correlated with greater productivity growth,” large companies have done nothing but put pressure on their workforces. to get them back to the office full time. The economist recognizes that the justification has a certain basis: more collaboration, better decisions and more learning for young employees. However, he questions the idea that you have to be there every day to get those benefits. According to your work leading a team of researchers, a hybrid model Two days in person and three days remotely is more efficient, because it leaves collaboration for the moments when it really adds value and transfers tasks that require a greater capacity for concentration to home. AI has yet to prove itself. As and as pointed out Fortunealthough the productivity data of recent years cannot be attributed to AI because it has not yet been widely implemented in companies, it cannot be ruled out that it could have a considerable impact in the future. According to published Reuterssome economists are beginning to see signs of improvement in productivity that could be linked to the automation provided by AI, although they are still perceived moderately and do not justify the increase of the last five years. And therein lies the key to the supposed great productive miracle of the United States, which, ironically, could have less to do with algorithms and much more to do with people. working from the couchwith coffee on the side and without having to lose half life from jam to jam on the way to work. In Xataka | Teleworking will experience a second youth, at a very specific moment: when the boomers retire Image | Unsplash (Flipsnack)

Sleeping four hours and working is equivalent to going to the office with six too many beers. Unless you have a ‘superpower’

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You’ve probably heard of businessmen, politicians or geniuses who claim to sleep just four hours and wake up refreshed with the ability to be very productive throughout the day. This is something that for medicine was simply a disguised sleep deprivation that would take its toll sooner or later; However, the most recent research suggests that it is possible to sleep this amount of time without consequences. Although it is better not to imitate them. Short sleepers. Here science has identified a condition called “familial natural short sleep”, which means that people who ‘suffer’ from it not only sleep little by choice, but their brain appears to perform nighttime maintenance tasks much more efficiently. That is why their restful sleep lasts much less than for other mortals. genetics is the great person responsible for this ‘skill’ and science has not ceased in its attempts to identify the targets that exist in the genome. One of them is genes DEC2 and ADRB1which were the first genes associated with this ability, since it was observed that members of the same family shared these mutations and slept for about six hours without negative effects. But these were not unique, since researchers have recently seen how a variant of the gene SIK3 reinforces the idea that the need for sleep is not a behavioral quirk, but rather an inheritable biological trait. For these people, sleeping 4 or 5 hours is not a sacrifice, but rather it is their natural state. Their cognitive performance is not affected and they do not experience the daytime sleepiness that would engulf anyone else. False productivity. This is exceptional, since for 99% of the population, between 7 and 9 hours of sleep are needed to have good cognitive performance throughout the day. In this situation, when we sleep four hours constantly without having this genetic advantage, we enter a state of chronic deprivation. And it is not something secondary, since the dangerous thing is that the human brain is terrible at evaluating how much damage it is suffering from lack of sleep, having the idea that “we are fine” when we are not. In fact, evidence shows that being awake for 17 to 24 hours produces cognitive impairment similar to having a blood alcohol level of 0.05% to 0.10%. In colloquial terms, trying to perform after sleeping four hours is comparable to trying to work on a night’s break where several beers have been drunk. And it is a sensation that some of us have experienced with clouded judgment and unstable emotional control. The danger. Sleeping little not only makes us think slower, but it is also known that there is a direct relationship between short sleep and high blood pressure, obesity and type 2 diabetes. In addition, during sleep it activates its ‘cleaning’ mechanisms to eliminate, for example, the beta-amyloid protein that is linked to Alzheimer’s. That is why interrupting this cleansing is not the best way to have an efficient nervous system. Don’t sell us productivity. At a time when there are many videos on social networks that suggest that sleeping a lot is a waste of time because it reduces our productivity on a daily basis, it is easy to fall into the practices of getting up at five in the morning and sleeping a few hours. But the reality is that if we weigh having good health or sleeping little to have more time to work, health logically weighs more. That is why the message we are left with is that, if we are not genetically “prepared” to sleep so little, it is best to avoid it as much as possible. Images | gpointstudio in Magnific In Xataka | If you fall asleep in less than five minutes, you don’t have a “superpower”: it’s a warning signal from your brain

the largest streaming music service is not working

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It’s Tuesday afternoon. You probably just finished the work day and are on your way home. Good time to listen to your favorite music, right? Well, if you are trying to do it with Spotify, we have to tell you no: it is not a matter of your mobile phone or your Internet connection. The largest streaming music platform on the planet is down. She has been my companion Amparo Babiloni who gave the alert. Your app has stopped responding when trying to play music online, while songs included in playlists downloaded for offline listening continue to work. So this drop can be an especially annoying problem if you don’t have a Premium plan or if you haven’t previously downloaded music to your device. 27 SPOTIFY TRICKS – Control all your MUSIC like no one else! Spotify also has a web player, a practical option if you don’t want, or can’t, use its application, available on computers, televisions, consoles and, of course, mobile phones. In our case, when trying to access the service from the browser, we have encountered the message “Error 503 first byte timeout”. For now, Spotify has not offered an official explanation for the crash, although the error message gives you an idea of ​​what may be happening. The warning appears when the server receives the request, but takes too long to return the first response. In other words: it is usually related to temporary saturation, a partial outage, maintenance tasks or an internal server failure. If we look at Downdetectoranother good way to follow in real time what is happening with popular services, we see that the problems with Spotify began around 5:52 p.m. this Tuesday and were growing rapidly. After 6:00 p.m., there were already hundreds of reports from users indicating problems with the service. In development. Images | Spotify + Nano Bana | Screenshot In Xataka | What is Cloudflare, how it works and why a crash or block causes half the Internet to fail

His parents built the Chinese economic miracle by working 12 hours a day. Their children have decided not to work almost at all

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Working twelve hours a day, six days a week, was common in Chinese companies, especially in the technology sector. It is what is known as day 996 and fortunately, the government banned it in 2021. They did not expect that that same year a new concept called Tang Ping and it means just the opposite: doing the minimum to survive. Lay down on the couch. Its literal translation is ‘lie flat’, but we like the creative translation better. Tang Ping It is a social phenomenon that arises as a rejection of the culture of overwork and endless days that barely leave time to sleep. A person who follows a lifestyle Tang Ping He works the minimum necessary to survive and does not have great ambitions; He doesn’t want to buy a car or a house, he spends little on food and he doesn’t want to get married or have children. The latter has not been any fun in Beijing. National security concern. We have talked about the birth rate crisis that China is going through and how the government is doing literally everything for get young people married and have children, so this movement goes against everything they are promoting. The government’s discourse on this trend has taken on a more severe tone. Last April, They published an official warning in which they stated that it is an “ideological infiltration” financed by “hostile anti-China forces” with the aim of “eroding the minds of Chinese youth.” They have turned a lifestyle into a political act that must be repressed. The safety net. They count in Baiguan News that, to understand the rise of this trend, two social mechanisms must be understood. The first is that the parents of these young people were born in the 60s and 70s, so their professional career grew along with the economic development of the country and they are currently the richest demographic group in the country. This means that if their children have financial problems, they can provide support. The second factor is deflation, which is making everything cheaper. In China it is possible to eat for just 1 or 2 dollars in exchange, which makes it viable to live while spending very little money. If we add that youth unemployment is at 16.9% and job opportunities are shrinking, it is the perfect breeding ground for lying down. The generational contrast. The parents of these young people grew up in poverty and, if they worked 72 hours a week, it was not out of pleasure, but out of pure necessity and fear of continuing to be poor. That fear was the engine of Chinese economic growth and allowed the next generation to grow in the abundance that their parents built. The difference is that these young people do not feel that raising the country depends on them, nor do they feel the fear that drove their parents, and many have decided to put their well-being before their professional career. Image | HANVIN CHEONGUnsplash In Xataka | We have been talking about “day 996” in Chinese companies for years. The reality is more complex: “day 323”

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron are already working on DDR6 while memory prices continue to skyrocket

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The market is going through an unprecedented component crisis. In 2020, a perfect storm caused there to be no chips, but it was known that the storm would pass sooner rather than later. The problem is that the storm of current NAND chip crisis It doesn’t look like it’s going to give us a break in the short term. All memory manufacturers have focused on creating chips for artificial intelligence platformsbut in the meantime, they continue developing DDR6 memories. It will take a long time for consumers to be able to taste them. In short. DDR5 memory has not had a normal life cycle in the consumer market. It was expensive and, when prices began to drop, AI hyperscalers arrived to take over everything available. This is how we have reached a situation in which just 32 GB exceeds the 400 euros: all production is focused on hyperscalers and there are no ‘pills’ for consumption. However, that doesn’t mean that DDR5 has done poorly, not at all. Samsung or SK Hynix they are breaking records and, for them, things are working out great. That is why, together with Micron, they are starting to prepare the ground for the new technology: DDR6 memories. Last year JEDEC (the consortium that is responsible for standardizing DDR, LPDDR and NAND microelectronics) already detailed the standard LPDDR6 and it seems that the fringes are being polished for DDR6. Now, as we read in Wccftechthe big three of memory They are warming up for the near future with their new generation. Performance leap. These new memories will not only be faster. It talks about speeds minimum of 8,800 MT/s according to that JEDEC standard, but can reach up to 17,600 MT/s as the technology develops. They would practically double the performance of DDR5 and the trident of the RAM it takes a few months working together with Intel, AMD and Nvidia in the prototype validation processes. But it’s not just about pure speed, but about architecture. About 2×32-bit DDR5 RAM we would pass to a 4×24-bit subchannel architecture. It is something that brings challenges when it comes to managing temperatures and consumption, but also presents a clear advantage: improved parallelism and greater use of bandwidth. Plate change. For players, that is going to be a little problem, since an architecture change usually entails a board change. And, if the rumors and leaks are true, that plate change will be assured. The reason is that there are sources that they point that CAMM2 is going to gain a lot of weight with DDR6, especially in laptops and compact computers, and could gradually displace the traditional DIMM in certain segments. If this doesn’t tell you anything, visualize how RAM is mounted on a current motherboard. These are modules that are mounted perpendicular to the plate, something that has been around for years and that, although it has been functional for a long time, presents friction when you want to reach certain speeds. On the contrary, we have M.2 SSDs that are mounted in parallel, just like the LPDDR memory of laptops. Precisely, this is what these DDR6 tablets would be like, so manufacturers would have to redesign their boards to adapt either from the front or by adding the connectors to the back of the plate. Context. You probably have two questions in mind: how much DDR6 memory will cost and why the rush. We cannot answer the first question, but for the second question we can guess where the shots are going. We have commented that DDR6 RAM will come hand in hand with a notable improvement in bandwidth, and that is something that the artificial intelligence industry is desperately looking for. Until now, there were many powerful GPUs in data centers to train AI models, but in the era of Agentic AIwhat is needed is equipment more similar to a traditional PC. This is why Intel and AMD sand they are moving to mass-produce their professional processors again, and that is where DDR6 memory would make perfect sense thanks to that improvement in bandwidth. For inference, it’s great. It is already being tested with an arrival on the market for 2028 or 2029, but it will be the hyperscalers who monopolize all DDR6 memory production. Only when the voracity of data centers calms down will the modules begin to reach the mass consumer market. The translation is that Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung are already working on it, but to be able to build a desktop PC with DDR6 there are several years ahead. In the meantime, I’d say we can settle for DDR5, but looking at the prices… Image | Luan Gjokaj (edited) In Xataka | The RAM crisis is destroying all of Valve’s plans with its Steam Machine

The countdown begins for companies to cut their working hours

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May 1 was celebrated as Labor Day, but Mexico did much more than that on that day full of symbolism: it began its path towards reduction of working hours of 40 hours with the entry into force of the law regulating the length of the day labor. The change promoted by President Claudia Sheinbaum’s party does not represent a sudden change, but with the entry into force of the reform secondary working day opens an adaptation process for companies to modify the organization of their working hours to the new regulations. From 48 to 40 hours in four steps. Mexico part of one of the work days longest in the world according to dOECD data. The current legal limit is 48 hours per week, a ceiling that has not moved since 1917. However, the reform seeks to lower it in stages until it reaches 40 hours per week: on January 1, 2027 the maximum limit will be 46 hours; It will drop to 44 hours a week in 2028, to 42 in 2029 and, finally, it will be set at 40 hours a week by 2030. Every year, two hours less. The first step expires on January 1, 2027, which leaves companies room until that date to reorganize shifts, contracts and processes. All this without the workers see their salaries or benefits reduced current, something that itself Federal Labor Law expressly prohibits. The duties that the reform brings. The publication of the labor reform Mexican not only activated the calendar. The new legislation establishes as an employer’s obligation to keep an electronic record of the working day, which in Mexico is popularly known as a time clock. That obligation comes into force on January 1, 2027 and It is not a simple procedure. The Ministry of Labor and Social Security (STPS) will have access to this data to verify that the working hours are truly respected. Penalties for not having the registration in order they are already set and range between 29,327 and 586,550 pesos (between 1,431 euros and 28,624 euros at the exchange rate), equivalent to between 250 and 5,000 times the Unit of Measurement and Update. In addition, the STPS must develop mechanisms to collect and evaluate data on how the reduction in working hours is applied. Most companies have not yet moved. The diagnosis of the real state of preparation of companies is not encouraging. The data from a study from EY published by Yucatan Diary with 165 companies in Mexico reveals that 72.7% are in what the analysts themselves call “tactical paralysis”: they know the details of the change of day, they have followed it closely, but they have not yet taken any concrete steps towards its application. Only 18% of companies consider that they are really prepared to apply the new labor regulations. As explained Yeshua Gómez, associate partner of People Advisory Services at EY México to Expansion“companies are not waiting because they do not understand the reform. They are waiting because they do not know how much it will cost them to implement it.” 85% identify cost as the main obstacle to starting to take action, while 71% recognize that they regularly depend on overtime to sustain their daily operations. For these companies, the challenge is not to spend 48 to 46 hours on paper, but to do it from real days that already frequently exceed the 48-hour limit. More limited working hours, but with more overtime. The reform has also modified the definition of the working day, establishing the daytime workday at a maximum of eight hours, the nighttime workday at seven hours, and the mixed workday could reach seven and a half hours. The only (and important) exception to this rule is that the day could be extended due to extraordinary circumstances. This overtime, on the other hand, is also gradually extended: up to 9 hours during 2026 and 2027, 10 hours in 2028, 11 hours for 2029 and a maximum of 12 hours for 2030. The objective is that the transition to the change in working hours does not suddenly hit the sectors most dependent on extra work, and to offer them tools to optimize the working day of their employees, even if it is at the cost of pay up to three times more expensive every extra hour. In Xataka | Mexico has an ambitious plan to be the tenth economy in the world and that involves technology: semiconductors Image | Unsplash (Jesus Herrera, Kaden Taylor)

chatbot is not working and Anthropic says it is investigating an issue

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This afternoon may not be the best time to leave any task in the hands of Anthropic’s AI. Most of the services of the company led by Dario Amodei are giving global failures this Tuesday. Everything points to a general decline, with two clear exceptions: Claude for Government and Claude Console, the management platform aimed at developers and companies. The details are visible on the Anthropic status page. claude.aithe gateway to the chatbot both in its web version and in the desktop and mobile apps, is completely out of service. We have been able to verify it: when trying to use it, the macOS application displays a clear message, “You cannot connect to Claude,” and invites you to check the Internet connection. They are also registering API problemsthe path that allows professional clients, such as developers and companies, to integrate Anthropic services into their own applications. This is the case of those who use it to power customer service chatbots or to access models such as Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7 in Perplexity. On this front, the drop is partial: everything points to higher error rates or intermittent failures for some users. Claude Code It is also not spared and is experiencing a partial decline. The impact can be significant: it is one of the most established agentic AI tools on the market. Its adoption in developer workflows is increasing, so any failure can have direct consequences on the productivity of many people. For now It is not clear what caused the incidentalthough we do know that Anthropic teams are working to resolve it. The company itself has been updating the situation on its status page, which allows us to reconstruct a brief chronology of the events. April 28, 2026, 17:41 UTC (19:41 Spanish peninsular time). Anthropic detects the problem and begins the investigation. April 28, 2026, 17:51 UTC (19:51 Spanish peninsular time). Confirms bugs in the API, claude.ai and the login system. April 28, 2026, 18:33 UTC (20:33 Spanish peninsular time). It indicates that it is continuing to work to resolve the incident. For now, we just have to wait for the incident to be resolved. Claude chatbot users can use alternatives as ChatGPT, Gemini or Grok. The problem is evident: when the Anthropic service does not work, access is lost to key elements such as conversation history, projects and other associated data. We will update this article as soon as there is news. Images | Screenshot In Xataka | Kimi Code is eight times cheaper than Claude Code and does 75% of your work. The question is whether it is enough

chatbot is not working and OpenAI says it is investigating an issue

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If you are a user of ChatGPT and this afternoon you wanted to ask the chatbot something, you’ve probably been left without an answer – it’s time to use your brain again. It is that the famous service powered by artificial intelligence (IA) has been giving errors for several minutes. OpenAI, for its part, has launched an investigation to understand the origins of the problem. The outage entered the scene around 4:00 p.m., preventing users from around the world from using ChatGPT normally. As we can see in the screenshot, the chatbot refused to respond, offering error messages such as ‘Hmm… something seems to have gone wrong’, which in Spanish means ‘Mmm… something seems to have gone wrong’. In development. Images | Solen Feyissa In Xataka | What is Cloudflare, how it works and why a crash or block causes half the Internet to fail

Ships have been damaging the oceans with noise for centuries. Germany is working on silent propellers to solve it

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Every time a boat crosses the seas, it is accompanied by a continuous noise underwater: that of the propellers that propel it. The noise problem of propellers in marine ecosystems is identified academically since 2004, but its reason for being is even older: the first time they analyzed its cause It was in 1893. What there is no solution to that disturbing low-frequency sound that spreads for kilometers, disturbing fish, cetaceans and other marine living beings. And its reason for being is even older: the first time cavitation was analyzed was in 1893. A team from the Kiel University of Applied Sciences has set out to remedy it with its project MinKav. Brief notes on cavitation. To understand the problem, we must first see what happens to the blades of a propeller when they rotate at high speed. With their movement, the blades generate a pressure difference between their faces. Thus, on the back side the pressure drops so much that the water changes state, going from liquid to gas. More specifically, thousands of small vapor bubbles. The problem is when these bubbles leave that low pressure zone: they then implode violently, returning to the liquid state, which causes pressure waves that are transmitted at high speed through the water. If the waves collide with a surface, they can deteriorate it considerably. The phenomenon of cavitation is accompanied by vibration and noise, as if it were gravel falling on a machine. This sound is broadband, with low frequency components capable of traveling long distances. Why is it important. Of all possible aquatic pollution, human-caused acoustics are the least mainstream, but their effects are documented. A couple of concrete examples of the importance of sound for aquatic species: whales They use sound to communicate, orient themselves and huntthe fish for such essential tasks how to detect predators or spawning and crustaceans are sensitive to vibration in the background. To get an idea of ​​the magnitude of the problem, according to the International Chamber of Navigation There are approximately 50,000 merchant ships operating continuously around the planet and they all emit that sound. It is not something specific. And the research team adds a twist: a propeller with less cavitation is not only less noisy, it can also potentially be more efficient (cavitation is wasted mechanical energy). Less noise and fewer emissions. The discovery. The HAW Kiel team has identified when the problem originates: the sound peak does not occur when the bubble forms, but right at the end of the collapse. And its intensity depends directly on the speed at which this collapse occurs. The faster you go, the stronger the blow. Illustration of human, marine animal and environmental sound sources in the marine environment, with proportional sound waves. National Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration How are they doing it. The experiments are being carried out at the Naval Hydrodynamics Laboratory of the German university, in a kind of aquarium with a miniature propeller, so that they can reproduce the flow conditions around the propeller. Equipped with underwater microphones and high-speed cameras, they have determined where and when that noise peak occurs. The next step is computer simulations to experiment with designing different propeller geometries to reduce noise without sacrificing performance, efficiency or durability. The most obvious solution, lowering the rpm, is not an option: a commercial boat cannot afford to go slower. Pending subjects. However, MinKav started in January of this year, will last three years and have a budget of 390,000 euros, modest for a problem of global scale. Even if MinKav were to come to fruition, it would have to go from the laboratory to scale-up on a commercial ship. In Xataka | A Spaniard has patented a mast that transforms wind and waves into electricity: his invention challenges diesel in boats In Xataka | A “roomba” to clean rivers: the ship that the Three Gorges Dam has launched in China Cover | Pexels

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