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The most valuable company in the world has no interest in investing in the data center fever

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Big Tech is investing absolute fortunes in data centers. Almost all of them seem to want to be prepared to meet the colossal demand for computing capacity for AI tasks. And yet, there is a curious and surprising exception. Money, money and more money. The big technology companies have put all the meat on the grill with billion-dollar investment plans in data centers throughout 2025. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft jointly invested more than $416 billion in capex during 2025, 66% more than the $251 billion in 2024. Google reached $91.5 billion, marking a new all-time high; Meta’s investment reached 72.2 billion dollars and Microsoft reached 118 billion. By 2026, the climb continues: Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are jointly committing about 725,000 million dollars in AI infrastructure in 2026, 77% more than in 2025, and analysts already project that the figure will exceed one billion in 2027. To give us a slight idea of ​​what that figure means, it is higher than Sweden GDP in 2025 (662,000 million), that of Israel (610,000 million) and that of Singapore (574,000 million). Apple. However, at Apple things are very different, and its Capex for 2025 remained the same. almost flat compared to 2024 with a total investment of 12,715 million dollars. It is a notable figure, of course, but it is far from the 20 billion dollars that Apple plans to invest in 2026. And she is the one with the most money. It is also interesting to compare the investment that these companies will make with respect to their market capitalization. Amazon is the biggest bet here: its capex is equivalent to approximately 7.63% of its current market capitalization, followed by Microsoft, with 6.67%. Further behind appears Alphabet, with around 4.49%, and Meta, with around 3.04%; In contrast, Apple, which remains the most valuable company in the world, has a capex of only 0.29% of its market value. Wall Street rules. The decisions of these companies seem to be greatly influenced by the behavior of the stock markets. The presentation of financial results and short-term forecasts has caused a kind of contagious effect: if we do not invest a fortune in data centers, shareholders are going to punish us a lot, Big Tech seem to have said with those colossal figures. The big beneficiary is NVIDIA. Meanwhile, it is likely that the big beneficiary of these colossal investments will be NVIDIA, which will be the one that will receive a good part of that money if everything continues the current trend. There will undoubtedly be other beneficiaries in this area, but NVIDIA’s Capex is comparatively ridiculous, both with respect to those companies and compared to its current market capitalization ($4.75 billion). Apple is going at a different pace with AI. The Cupertino firm clearly seems to have a very different strategy than its rivals in this segment. Google and Apple subscribed a collaboration for which the next generation of its assistant that will be based on Gemini models and Google cloud technology to power future Apple Intelligence featuresincluding a more personalized Siri. The final deployment came at WWDC 2026: Apple presented “Siri AI”, a remake of the assistant integrated with its Apple Intelligence system developed in collaboration with Google’s Gemini models. The feeling, even internally, is that at Apple they are clear followers and that is not going to change at the moment. A version of this article was published in February 2025. Image | Unsplash (Bangyu Wang) In Xataka | Is Tim Cook the Ballmer of Apple and is Nadella the Jobs of Microsoft?

The future tallest tower in the world has grown again. His biggest obstacle was not in the concrete

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Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates shared a regional agenda and a particularly close relationship between their leaders for years. Over time, this cooperation began to coexist with an increasingly visible rivalry: both compete to attract investment, gain regional influence and develop economies less dependent on crude oil. If we want to observe that race without resorting to macroeconomic figures, just look at its urban horizons. He Burj Khalifa it turned Dubai into a world reference; A project called to surpass that mark began to rise on the Saudi coast. That project is Jeddah Tower and, after years in detention, it has regained height. The new contract to complete construction It was signed on October 2, 2024but the return of the works also began to be seen on the ground when the structure officially surpassed 100 floors and 400 meters on April 20, 2026. The most recent update from Thornton Tomasetti, published on June 18placed it close to the 104th floor. The work is progressing again; What we have to understand now is why he stopped doing it for so long. The scale helps to understand why the project seemed capable of getting bogged down for purely technical reasons. Jeddah Tower was designed to exceed one kilometer in height and reach 157 plantsleaving behind the 828 meters of the Burj Khalifa. To support it, the engineers proposed a five-meter-thick foundation slab supported on 270 piles, some sunk up to 105 meters. Above, a network of interconnected concrete walls must distribute the building’s loads and limit the effects of wind without resorting to a conventional structure of columns and large beams. Jeddah Tower construction status in May 2026 The project had begun long before Saudi Arabia presented Vision 2030. The tower was announced in 2011 and work started in 2013 with a clear ambition: to build the tallest building in the world in Jeddah and turn it into the center of a new urban development. During its first stage, the structure reached 63 of the planned 157 floors before being stopped. Its revival can now be read in the context of Saudi diversification, but the project was conceived five years before the kingdom presented its major economic transformation program. Jeddah Tower construction status in May 2026 The stoppage came in the midst of a business and financial crisis that affected two fundamental actors of the project. In 2017, Saudi anti-corruption campaign led to arrest of Alwaleed bin Talal, linked to the promoter through Kingdom Holding, and of Bakr bin Laden, then president of Saudi Binladin Group. The contractor was also going through financial difficulties and construction ended up halted in 2018. Jeddah Tower construction status in May 2026 The return needed more than just new announcements and calendars on paper. The completion of the skyscraper was once again in the hands of Saudi Binladin Group, the same contractor that had participated in its first stage, with a planned period of 42 months. If completed without further delays, work should be completed around April 2028, although there is no firm opening date yet. The decisive test came later: the pace of construction was maintained throughout 2025 and into 2026. After years of uncertainty, the project has gotten underway again. Growing back doesn’t mean being close to done. Although the cladding of the façade and the first mechanical, electrical and plumbing installations are already underway, Much of that work still needs to be completed.in addition to the elevators, security systems, finishes and all the necessary tests before opening the building. Until then, the Burj Khalifa will officially continue to hold the world record. Saudi Arabia has already shown that it can return the tower to activity; The next challenge will be to maintain financing and finish the work. Images | Thornton Tomasetti | Saudi Binladin Group In Xataka | In Italy they were promised happiness with a new Roman amphitheater from the 4th century. Until it was discovered that it was a “fake” concrete

The US built the most powerful army in the world. Now there are those who point out its Achilles heel: cyberwar

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Few countries have a military mix comparable to that of the United States: ground, naval, air and space forces, industrial capacity and the means to operate far from their borders. However, recent conflicts have made it clear that the superiority no longer depends solely of airplanes, ships or battle tanks. In Ukraine, drones have acquired a prominence that forces us to review tactics and defenses. Meanwhile, Cyberattacks have established themselves as another tool of confrontation. And that’s where some experts believe the American structure is starting to show problems. A commission assembled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in collaboration with the Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0s project, has tried to answer this question and its diagnosis is not very reassuring. In a recently published reportits authors maintain that the current design of US cyber forces is insufficient to deter, compete and combat in this domain. They do not claim that the Pentagon lacks specialists, units or operational capacity. The problem, according to the study, is deeper: no organization concentrates the responsibility of consistently recruiting, training and equipping the personnel needed by the United States Cyber ​​Command. It is no secret that measuring military power requires more than counting soldiers, ships or planes. The most visible data comes from SIPRI: in 2025, the United States remained by far the biggest military spender in the worldwith 954 billion dollars and 33% of the global total, compared to the 336 billion estimated for China. This data does not measure military power on its own, but it fits with other analyses, like those of GAO and Brookingswhich continue to describe the US as a dominant force due to its combination of capabilities, deployment, logistics and alliances. The domain for which no branch of the United States Armed Forces was designed There appears the anomaly that focuses the report. The United States has created military services with central responsibilities associated with the large traditional domains of combat, including the space branch since 2019. Cyberspace, on the other hand, continues without its own branch. The commission maintains that, for this reason, there is also no single authority responsible for creating the necessary forces to operate in that area. Responsibilities are distributed among different services, all involved in the mission, but none obliged to place it ahead of their traditional tasks. This dispersion translates, according to the report, into different approaches among the Department’s five military services to recruit, train and develop those who make up the cyber forces. Each one applies their own criteria access, career plans, educational systems and compensation models, which, according to the commission, produce unequal and inefficient results. Katherine Sutton, civilian cyber policy officer and senior cyber advisor at the Pentagon, acknowledged before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 28, 2026 the “significant difficulties” in recruiting profiles with the appropriate skills, retaining the most experienced operators in the face of better-paid opportunities in the private sector and offering specialized training with sufficient agility. Now, the Pentagon has not stood still. The report acknowledges that it has attempted to correct part of the problem with CYBERCOM 2.0an initiative announced in 2025 to reinforce the role of Cyber ​​Command in talent, training and capacity development. But the commission considers that this type of reform does not resolve the underlying issue: the absence of a military branch dedicated to generating forces for cyberspace. In other words, it is not just discussing who commands the operations, but who stably builds the personnel, preparation and tools that those operations need. The United States Cyber ​​Command, known as USCYBERCOMhas the official mission of directing, synchronizing and coordinating operations in cyberspace to defend and promote national interests, according to its own institutional description. According to the commission, the problem is that in practice it also ends up carrying part of the “service-type” functions that it should provide. personnel, preparation and capabilities. The authors see there a design problem that is reminiscent of the model corrected by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986which reorganized the Pentagon and better delineated the difference between building the force and employing it in operations. And what do they suggest? Well, the study works on the hypothesis of creating a military branch dedicated to cyberspace and develops how it should be organized if Washington were to make that decision. This Cyber ​​Force would have a defined mission: organize, train and equip the personnel in charge of offensive and defensive operations, while USCYBERCOM would retain the responsibility of employing them. The proposal does not seek to absorb all of the Pentagon’s technology or take charge of each of its computer networks. The other branches would continue to manage the systems linked to their own missions, but they would stop separately generating a capability that requires common criteria, careers and priorities. The paradox is difficult to ignore. The United States retains the most powerful military force in the world, but the report warns that has not yet developed a structure specifically designed to generate its capabilities in cyberspace. Erica Lonergan, lead author of the study and professor at Columbia University, and Mark Montgomery, commissioner of the report, retired rear admiral and head of cyber and technology at the FDD, They later transferred that conclusion to a forum in Defense News: If the digital environment has already become a war domain, it should have a branch ready to fight in it. Images | US Army Cyber ​​Command | Wyoming National Guard In Xataka | For years Russia accustomed its citizens to a distant war. Thousands of gas stations have just broken that illusion

For centuries, sailors around the world died from scurvy. Everyone except the Basques

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A 16th-century sailor did not fear shipwrecks—or storms or pirates—as much as he feared a certain silent illness. It wiped out entire crews, it took months to kill you and the medicine of the time couldn’t explain it. The gums softened until they bled and the teeth fell out. Old wounds, already healed, were reopening. The skin would become covered in purple spots and, eventually, the heart would fail. Exactly: we are talking about scurvy, the severe deficiency of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) that caused more deaths than all naval combat and shipwrecks combined. A condition from which the Basque whalers were saved. But to tell it well you have to allow me to take a couple of steps back. Specifically, six centuries ago. How much scurvy killed. The figures are difficult to sustain because they are difficult to believe. When Vasco da Gama completed the first voyage to India in 1498, he said an unknown illness had claimed half of his crew. “The plague of the sea,” they called it, and they believed that it was contagious, that drinking coffee minimized the effects, that eating fireflies provided relief, and, the most amazed, that it was a divine punishment for the sins on board. It is 1740. Commodore George Anson sets sail from Portsmouth at the head of eight Royal Navy ships with almost 2,000 men. The mission: attack Spanish possessions in the Pacific. Four years later, in 1744, he returned to England with 188 survivors, 10%. The rest died of scurvy. The expedition is classified as a victory because they captured a Spanish galleon loaded with silver. And the Basques, where were they? The Basques had been in the North Atlantic for centuries when Anson set sail. The whalers left the Bay of Biscay, each time with better tools. There are records from the 8th and 9th centuries, although its great era begins in the 13th. When the whales disappeared from the Cantabrian Sea, the Basque whalers followed their trail north: Iceland, Greenland. Then Newfoundland. There are historians, among them García Camino and Orella Unzuéthe guardian of the Basque language A. Irigaray or the researcher Robert Loture, who place the arrival of the Basques on the American continent in 1375, more than a century before Columbus. There is no conclusive archaeological evidence of that date, but there is evidence of its consolidated presence in the 15th and 16th centuries. Canadian researcher Selma Barkham spent decades in the archives of Oñati and Tolosa documenting contracts, insurance and crew lists. The curious thing about it all is, why didn’t these die on the high seas? The fact is that towards the middle of the 16th century the Basques controlled the world market for whale oil, the oil of the time, the ingenuity that illuminated the houses of Europe. One hundred ships sailed to Newfoundland each year. Red Bay, in Canadian Labrador—which the Basques called Butus or Buytes—, it was their base of operations. And in that bay, in October 1565a storm sank the ship San Juan, that mythical Basque whaler which several centuries later was rebuilt. The ship carried a thousand barrels of whale oil in the hold. There were no casualties and the crew returned home. The boat? At the bottom of the sea for four centuries. Cider? Did someone say cider? But without pouring. In 1978, Canadian archaeologists from Parcs Canada found the wreck of the San Juan. And it was like a time capsule. Every plank of the hull, the cargo, the crew’s personal belongings, an entire whaling boat, everything was there. Let us keep in mind that the San Juan ship is the best researched 16th century ship in the world. And among the remains, barrels appeared, many barrels. Some of whale oil… and many others of cider and txakoli. The whalers, through insurers, always detailed their contracts well and everything stipulated was recorded due to the very dangerous nature of the matter. And it is known that sailors were entitled to between two and three liters of sagardoa – Basque cider – per day. According to Xabier Agote, president of the Albaola association, up to 50,000 liters of cider could be carried on such an expedition. Because the water on the high seas was corrupted: wine was for the officers and cider, cheaper, was the crew’s drink. Saving lives with grapes and apples. Popular history lies a little. There is more reasons. It has a certain logic: the Basques drank cider, they did not die of scurvy, so cider protected them. The Basque doctor Vicente Lardizabal already suggested in 1720 in his book ‘Political-medical considerations on the health of sailors‘—where detailed diets are dictated—that some vitamin deficiency was the origin of the disease. He didn’t connect it to the cider, but he was on the right track. On May 20, 1747, Scottish physician James Lind divided twelve scurvy-stricken sailors into six groups aboard HMS Salisbury. He administered a different treatment to each couple: vitriolic elixir, vinegar, sea water, a purgative mixture, oranges and lemon and, here is the key, cider. A daily quart of cider for one of the groups. Only the two sailors who took citrus improved visibly. Those who drank cider did not improve. Lind published his results in 1753 in A Treatise of the Scurvythe first controlled clinical trial in the history of medicine. Cider was in the experiment, but it didn’t work. Cider is fruit juice, yes, the problem is chemistry. Basque cider is fermented cider and the fermentation destroys vitamin C. The researcher Daniel Zulaika published the following article in the Bulletin of the Royal Basque Society of Friends of the Country in 2020: Cider did not prevent scurvy on ocean crossings. The nutritional composition tables made it clear that the amount of vitamin C in fermented cider is zero. So why didn’t the Basques die of scurvy? For a more prosaic reason: scurvy takes time to kill and the first symptoms appear after four to six weeks in the … Read more

“The world doesn’t realize how much the AI ​​industry depends on scientists in China” Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

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When someone as important to technology as Jensen Huang speaks, the bread rises. The CEO of Nvidia is a person who, although he is not known for giving headlines as controversial as his colleague Elon Musk, does say interesting and important things to understand the sector. At the beginning of the year he sat with Time to chat at length about the AI: whether or not it is a bubble, its impact or who is winning this race. In that interview China appeared and the commercial dispute that your company has with the Asian giant. There he made something clear: the world needs China more than the other way around. An example: his armyChina is achieving technological independence while its American counterpart increasingly resorts to Chinese imports. Thank China. When it comes to AI, Huang is clear: the providential weight of Chinese talent in the research and development of artificial intelligence. The CEO of Nvidia affirms that much of the world’s progress in artificial intelligence depends on Chinese researchers, and that the interdependence between the economies of China and the United States is greater than the public perceives. And he sums it up like this: “The idea that the United States can disengage from China is wrong.” Why it is important. Because the position of the boss of the most valuable company in the world, who is also American, collides with the toughest wing of the White House, which every now and then comes with new restrictions on the export of chips to China. If the industry’s reference supplier depends on symbiosis instead of separation, it is a warning to sailors for those who promote those obstacles in the form of laws that seek to limit Chinese access to the most advanced processors. Context. Note that this was not the first time that Jensen Huang argued for Chinese supremacy in AI. Already in May of last year at the Washington Forum claimed that 50% of the world’s Artificial Intelligence researchers are Chinese and that this data should influence “how we think about the game” of technological competition. Months later, in an interview with Citadel Securities collected by Fortuneinsisted that it is a mistake not to let these researchers build AI on American technology and that those policies that seek to harm China often also harm the United States. In detail. In that same interview Huang also made it clear that Taiwan will continue to be the centerpiece of AI chip manufacturing, despite the noise and interest from the White House in relocate production to the United States. In fact, in other interviews he has already clarified that manufacturing in America does not mean abandoning Taiwan, but rather spreading the risk. A complement. After all, You cannot abandon its highly refined production chain overnight as Trump intends. The small print. Jensen Huang has repeated the same speech on several occasions and scenarios, but as CEO of Nvidia we cannot lose sight of a reality: the commercial interest of his company. The Asian giant’s market share was enormous before export controls began, going from 95% to 0%. So Nvidia is the main one interested in defending openness. On the other hand, and although that 50% is real and matches different measurements Regarding talent in AI, this weight measures origin or training, not where these scientists work or what banner they have for the advances they achieve, since there is a large number who carry out their work in American universities and companies. In Xataka | “We chose the wrong technology”: Jensen Huang returns to Japan to acknowledge his debt to Sega 30 years later In Xataka | Jensen Huang enters the Samsung salary controversy: “Workers should earn as much as possible” Cover | Wikipedia and Gary Lerude on Flickr

It is one of the most enigmatic books in the world and it was written by a schizophrenic who never left the asylum.

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In 1921, a Swiss psychiatrist published a book with a title that sounded like a contradiction: one of his inmates, a mentally ill patient, was an artist. And from that oxymoron an entire discipline was founded. The man in question, Adolf Wölfli, never knew it: he had been locked up in the Waldau asylum for more than two decades when he was labeled, and he would die there without knowing that André Breton would place his work among the three or four most important of the 20th century. Who was it? Wölfli was born on February 29, 1864 near Bern and died on November 6, 1930 in the aforementioned Waldau psychiatric clinic, where he entered in 1895 after being convicted of sexual assault on minors. There he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and he also remained there for thirty-five years, without ever going out on the street again. He almost always worked in a cell of just seven square meters: the result There were 1,460 drawings, 1,560 collages and some 25,000 pages of writings with all kinds of creations, from texts to invented music, and all often bound by himself. The obrón The autobiographical fantasy that started his legend, ‘Von der Wiege bis zum Graab’ (‘From the cradle to the grave’), takes up just over 3,000 of those pages and was created between 1908 and 1912. Then came the geographical and algebraic notebooks (1912-1916), the song and dance notebooks (1917-1922, about 7,000 pages) and the dance and march album notebooks (1924-1928). He even created a funeral march that he left unfinished when he died. To the heavens In that narrative he promoted himself in stages: first he was the boy Doufi, then the Knight Adolf, then the Emperor Adolf and finally, Saint Adolf II. Each drawing also incorporated its own musical notation, with a staff of six lines instead of five, which Wölfli interpreted by rolling up a sheet of paper. He did not simply improvise: he also made small pieces that he called “bread art”, expressly designed to sell to doctors and visitors. The good doctor. None of this would have come out of Waldau without Walter Morgenthaler. The doctor arrived at the hospital in 1907 and, unlike his colleagues, did not treat Wölfli’s graphic impulse as a symptom that had to be contained, but as a production that would give free rein to many aspects of his illness. In 1921 he published ‘Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler’ (‘A mentally ill person as an artist’), a monograph that took Wölfli out of clinical anonymity and turned his work into an object of interest for two very different circles of thinkers: psychiatry and the artistic avant-garde. Brute art. Jean Dubuffet discovered Wölfli’s work in 1945 and called him “the great Wölfli”, according to herself. foundation that manages his legacy. Three years later, Dubuffet and Breton founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, thus creating the label that would bring together artists with no academic training or intention to exhibit. In 1965, in the catalog for a surrealist exhibition in Paris, Breton described Wölfli’s work as one of the three or four most important of the century. The definitive accolade came in 1972: the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann brought his drawings and writings to the influential art exhibition Document 5 of Kassel, along with a reconstruction of his cell. There are those who compare today the whole of his work with ‘In the Realms of the Unreal’, the equally excessive manuscript by the American Henry Darger. Both Wölfli and Darger unintentionally earned a space in history: someone outside of them decided, after their death or imprisonment, that it deserved to be contemplated as an artistic work. Since then, there have been exhibitions about Wölfli, some huge, like the one in Japan in 2017, which included the collective efforts of three museums. Where is. A good part of Wölfli’s 25,000 pages are still distributed among archives and private collections, as well as in partial catalogs published since the 1970s. The foundation maintains an open inventory and continues to incorporate pieces that reappear at auctions or donations. He also continues to receive inquiries from private collectors who locate loose sheets and want to confirm their provenance within the original notebooks. With no expected closing date for this documentation work, each piece that appears forces us to rewrite, even if just a little, the map of what Wölfli managed to produce in those seven square meters. A whole world. In Xataka | Someone has discovered the biggest mystery of Rembrandt’s work: why a Muslim ended up becoming an old Dutchman

A Galician helped make the metric system used throughout the world. Spain left him lying

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Today we measure a room in meters, weigh coffee in grams and calculate distance in kilometers. And we assume that things work like stars fall. For centuries, each kingdom and sometimes each guild used its own unit of measurement. The cubit of Castile was not like the cubit of Aragon. The Galician vara had nothing to do with the Castilian vara. Commerce was chaos and we better not talk about science. Someone had to put order. And among those who did it, there was a Galician farmer from Lalín who, according to what they say, had a sublime head. His name was Pedro Xosé Rodríguez González. History remembers him as the “Mathematician Rodríguez”, or the Mathematician of Bermés, after the parish of Lalín where he was born on October 25, 1770. He was the seventh child of a family of farmers from Pontevedra. Without money, without contacts, with the options that destiny reserved for the children of the Galician land of the 18th century: the countryside, emigration or the Church. How does a peasant child come to redefine the way of measuring the world? Studious and without a cassock. His uncle, a well-read ecclesiastic, paid for his studies at the College of Humanities of Monforte de Lemos. From there he went to Santiago de Compostela at the age of 17, receiving a scholarship from the Colegio de los Jerónimos. There he studied grammar, Latin, philosophy, theology, subjects that opened doors to the priesthood. But the young man preferred math, studying self-taught, because the cassock did not fit among his concerns. In 1798 he was already a substitute professor of sublime mathematics at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Santiago. “Sublime“because it was literally the name of the degree: in the 18th and 19th centuries, the subjects of differential and integral calculus were grouped under this curious seal. In two years he won the chair by competitive examination. The court that examined him sent the following words to King Charles IV: “Rodríguez is one of those geniuses who from rare to rare forms the providence for sublime knowledge.” What a letter of introduction, great praise and confirmation that not even the Spanish Academy knew very well what to do with Galician. What does a genius do in Spain in 1803. Well, ask for permission to go to Paris and continue learning. Rodríguez asked for it, got it and arrived in the French capital at the age of 33. There he entered the circle of the best scientists in Europe. He studied astronomy and mathematics under the tutelage of Jean-Baptiste Biot (we owe him knowledge about the polarization of light, meteorites, magnetic fields, etc.). He established a relationship with Pierre-Simon Laplace, who would end up becoming president of the Academy. That network was decisive. In 1806, the Spanish government appointed him commissioner in an international expedition led by François Aragó and Biot himself. The mission was to extend the measurement of the Paris meridian arc, already drawn between Dunkirk and Barcelona, ​​to the island of Formentera. The reason was deeper: that measurement would be the basis for establishing the exact length of the meter. The ten millionth part of the quadrant of the meridian passing through Paris. A measure taken from nature, not from any king’s span, by the way. The Mediterranean is getting complicated. Now comes the part about the war, the espionage and an episode that seems straight out of an adventure novel. The team was going well, it formed geodesic triangle number 17, with vertices at the peaks of Camp Vell in Ibiza, La Mola in Formentera and La Mola del Esclop in Mallorca. It was the first time that a large geodesic triangle was measured over the sea. But in 1808, with Napoleon’s troops on the peninsula and the war of independence underway, scientists launching light signals from mountain peaks became immediate suspects. Aragó, who was French, stayed in Mallorca to close the last triangle. The islanders said he was a spy. A Spanish member of the expedition ran to tell him. Aragó disguised himself as a peasant, went down the mountain and was about to capture him. He ended up detained in the Bellver castle, in the cell that Jovellanos occupied days before. Rodríguez maneuvered to help him out. The episode cost months of lost work. At least, measurement data was saved. Is the Earth round or not? Neither round nor quite. In 1809, Rodríguez traveled to England on a government assignment: to examine British scientific establishments. What he did there was correct one of the most prestigious geographers of his time. Lieutenant Colonel William Mudge claimed, with his calculations of the Greenwich meridian, that the Earth was flattened at the Equator. Isaac Newton had said it the other way around decades before: flattening is at the poles. Rodríguez took Mudge’s observations, recalculated them with Delambre’s method and found a latitude error at the Arbury Hill station, Northamptonshire. Mudge’s error was demonstrable and Newton was right. On June 4, 1812, the communication was presented to the Royal Society of London under the title ‘Observations on the measurement of three degrees of the meridian’. His friend José de Mendoza y Ríos, a Spanish sailor and member of the institution, read it. It is probably Rodríguez’s most important individual contribution to science: empirically demonstrating, and with greater accuracy than any other mathematician, the true shape of the Earth. From there he went to Göttingen to study crystallography under the supervision of the mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner. There he met another star of the time: Carl Friedrich Gauss. In Paris, in 1817, the father of modern crystallography, René Haüy, gave him a collection of 1,024 crystallographic models carved in wood. That collection is today in the Natural History Museum of the University of Santiago de Compostela. And it’s amazing. A grave without a name. And we come to an ending that should make us ashamed. Tsar Alexander I offered him the direction of the Saint Petersburg Astronomical … Read more

We believed that “you don’t live anywhere like Spain.” This world ranking of quality of life does not have the same opinion

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“Where is it better to live?” The question is, obviously, subjective no matter how you look at it. But in the case that concerns us even more: the The Wharton School’s 2026 Best Countries Index takes as a basis How citizens around the world perceive the quality of life in different countries. That is, it is a study of brand perception and reputation (brand = country) that classifies the states that are considered to offer the highest quality of life in the world. This index classifies 85 countries according to 73 attributes grouped into such varied categories that range from entrepreneurship or openness to business to power or cultural influence through the generic “quality of life” and in its preparation more than 15,000 people from 33 countries have been surveyed. The report is almost 100 pages long, but Visual Capitalist has summarized it in a much more condensed and visual graph. Although the report has no trace of parameters such as GDP, investment in infrastructure, education or health, the brand image has its point: it makes the country more attractive for investment or tourism. For example, a button: the United Arab Emirates has gone from 17th place in 2024 to 10th place in 2026. Investing in improvements to its airport or the 2022 World Cup pays off. Simply put, having a country appear to have a high quality of life helps foreign investment or talent. Obviously, cultural biases and geopolitics also play a role. What countries seems who have a better quality of life The perceived quality of life. Visual Capitalist with data from the Wharton School The list is dominated by Europe, with 20 of the top 30 positions occupied by states from the old continent and the Nordic countries at the top. As a curiosity, Canada sneaks into the bronze and you have to look much further down to find its neighbor the United States: it is in 27th place, the last of the G7 economies and surpassed by Australia, Singapore, Japan, the Arab Emirates or China, which is just above. At the bottom of the table are Ukraine, Iran and Lebanon, places devastated by war or sanctions. The maxim “As in Spain you don’t live anywhere” seems to have its weight more within the Spanish state than outside: Spain scores with a 56.7 out of 100 scored by Sweden, placing it in 19th place out of the 30 best, immediately after Poland and just before France. It is far from the Nordic countries, but presiding over the Mediterranean countries. The lifestyle scores worse than the solidity of northern Europe. And despite this, Spain attracted almost 100 million tourists per year past, according to INE data. In any case, it is worth remembering that this is an index of perception and not real living conditions, so stereotypes and biases outweigh the daily experience of those who live there. Furthermore, the sample is relatively small to evaluate over 85 countries. In Xataka | Longevity experts are clear: “120 minutes of strength per week is associated with lower mortality” In Xataka | The largest expat platform in the world has chosen its three favorite cities to live. And they are all Spanish Cover | Visual Capitalist

China wants the world to pay for lithium at its price. And it’s not that easy

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China has taken a definitive step towards the internationalization of its raw materials markets: this month has opened foreign investors its lithium futures contract on the Guangzhou Futures Exchange (GFEX). This measure comes after similar openings in iron ore and oil, and is part of the Chinese Government’s ambition to strengthen your influence on global prices of raw materials and expand the international use of the renminbi (RMB). Futures are contracts that set today the price at which a commodity will be bought or sold at a future date, regardless of what its market price is at that moment. This contract is not an anecdotal movement. In the last year, the GFEX has traded 120 million lots of lithium carbonate, an essential material in lithium-iron-phosphate batteries (LFP) that equip a good part of current electric vehicles. China processes around 60% of the world’s lithium and it is by far the largest battery market on the planet. In this context, its physical weight in the supply chain is undeniable. However, converting that industrial weight into real financial power is much more complicated. Chinese capital controls mean that the vast majority of futures trading, despite its enormous liquidity, is domestic in nature. It is primarily domestic speculators and not global commercial participants who set these prices. A recurring speculative fever Volatility is the first obstacle. Last year the closure of a CATL mine was enough to unleash a real speculative fever in the GFEX contract. In fact, on July 6, 2025, the daily volume fell to 174,787 lots, just 35% of the annual average, an example of how quickly interest deflates once the initial frenzy passes. This stock exchange has had to intervene on several occasions to stop similar episodes. In July 2025 he imposed a daily limit of 3,000 lots in new positions for those who were not members of a futures society. In November he went further: he tightened commissions and position limits, and prices plummeted immediately. The clearest precedent dates back to 2016, when Chinese retail money poured so heavily into steel rod futures that the volume traded in a single day exceeded the negotiated total on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. China opened its crude oil contract on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange using this same rhetoric in 2018 Another important note: adding to this regulatory volatility is the problem of financial plumbing. Foreign operators can now deposit margins in dollars, but with a 5% discountso only $95 out of every $100 counts as collateral. All trading and settlement is still done in RMB, and repatriating those profits is not easy. China opened its crude oil contract in the Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE, for its acronym in English) using this same rhetoric in 2018. And although achieved considerable foreign participationcompanies still have to simultaneously manage price risk, RMB/USD exchange rate risk and capital repatriation risk; three exposures that on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) or the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) would be reduced to one. The result is that as long as these futures remain subject to political intervention and capital controls, they will predictably continue to function as an essential reference for the market, but not as the authentic benchmark against which the rest of the world can manage its risk. Image | freepik More information | Volt Insight In Xataka | ASML has had an exclusive monopoly on the very complex photolithography machines for years. China is close to breaking it

Argentina is clear that Argentina had to give away Argentina’s fourth World Cup. And no one in Argentina is very clear why.

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“Let’s forget about everything. Let’s just play. Let’s just think about playing, people” With these words Leo Messi tried to raise the morale of his teammates before taking the Met Life Stadium field on July 19. In the scene you can see Enzo Fernández crying and Lisandro Martínez also congested. The video cuts off. It is, probably, the first video that begins to unleash the madness. The first one after Spain’s victory against Argentina to proclaim herself as World Champion is used to begin to suspect that something has happened, that something strange has escaped us. That the World Cup final is rigged. Why, by whom and how is something for which no one has an answer. What is certain is that some Argentine fans, YouTubers and certain press have combusted. “There is no doubt, they gave him the order to lose” “There is no doubt that the Argentine National Team was given the order that it had to lose. As a psychologist, I am trained to see and hear what was not said. And in Sunday’s game I saw strange things. They treated us like fools and put on a show” This time the words are an Argentine fan who claims to be a psychologist, an expert in gestural language and “not to talk about conspiracy theories.” He does not understand that “strange injuries” occurred or the approach and changes of Lionel Scaloni, Argentine coach. Click on the image to go to the original tweet The reason for this fan was clear: Fifa had to crown a 19-year-old world champion (Lamine Yamal) because that sells more than a champion Argentina “with a Messi who has already earned money and who is coming to an end.” The idea that Argentina could not win this World Cup because it played with Messi is somewhat funny because it has its counterpart in all the theories that pointed out that, precisely, Argentina had to win because it was Messi’s last World Cupthe best story for a competition that has shone for its individuality and for its own American commercialism. What we can praise about the previous video is the calmness with which the fan speaks. “I have no proof but I also have no doubt that they sent us to die in the final”assures this other fan who links the final lost by Argentina with the end of Italy 90a competition in which Argentina lost against West Germany when it arrived as World champion after Mexico 86. Of that match, Diego Armando Maradona said that Grondona, then president of the AFA (Argentine Football Association), had already warned them that they had no chance of winning the final because the designated referee was Mexican. “We were dedicated,” Maradona repeated in this interview. Comparisons with that final have been repeated for the obvious bridges that can be built between both games: Argentina competing against a European team after becoming champion and its star playing, supposedly, his last game with the national team (Maradona would return for United States ’94). But the accusations of fixing have been growing and slowly getting out of hand: “Everything that was predicted on the cover of The Economist magazine came true. We live in a simulation, everything is timed. I don’t know if they have a time machine. If they also know how to manipulate the energy of the mind worldwide so that what they want to happen happens…” For example this video from another fan in which he proposes “we continue feigning dementia, accepting that everything is written and we live in a simulation.” Click on the image to go to the original tweet For this other fanit is clear that “they were squeezed” because there were snipers in the stadium. Reasons are not known but This talk show does put them on the table: It was all a plan by Florentino Pérez, Atlético de Madrid, Giani Infantino, Donald Trump and the United Kingdom. The basis on which this theory is based is that Argentine players who play in Europe were threatened with losing the final. “They robbed us again (…) they turned us around and the best player told his teammates. The guy who headbutted England (Lautaro Martínez, who did not play in the final), the most important goal from the hand of God or the greatest goal in history (the two that Diego Armando Maradona scored against England in Mexico 86)… was he banned from playing? (…) No one will ever tell the secrets of football. Neither Messi nor Chiqui Tapia (president of the AFA). Do you know why? Because they were squeezed. And this is going to cost me dearly. Yesterday they squeezed Argentina like with the Malvinas, like with wealth, like the hectares sold in Bariloche. Yesterday it was sold to the Argentine team and it was not sold by the Argentines, nor by Chiqui Tapia, nor by Messi, nor by Scaloni, nor by the players. Because we put ‘the Malvinas are Argentine’ on a flag that two Argentine blacks took who if they weren’t footballers they would have to leave their lives in the Malvinas. Let them tell it to me however they want Click on the image to go to the original tweet One of the ideas that has been repeated the most in recent days is that Argentina lost because the designated referee was European. A decision that had its controversy before the final (It was even rumored that an Iranian referee would whistle the match) However, in this other gathering Another reason was pointed out why Argentina would have had to let itself lose. Eduardo Feinmann, well-known journalist in the country for his controversial interventions on politicsrejected the idea floated by one of the members that Argentina had sold the final in exchange for the FBI not arresting Chiqui Tapia. And the AFA is being investigated for an alleged diversion of money to two associations that operated in the United States. Click on the image to go to the original … Read more

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