world

The fastest private plane in the world is now ready to fly, covering non-stop intercontinental routes and less jet lag

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Few aircraft projects raise as much expectation as that of the Bombardier Global 8000 because he who It will be the fastest civil aircraft in the world since the Concorde It has some characteristics that leave people open-mouthed and others, such as the promise of ending jet lag, that arouse some skepticism. And furthermore, it is rigorously complying with its roadmap to go from becoming an ambitious prototype in testing to being a certified commercial reality: a few days ago completed its international certification process and can now operate without restrictions in the European sky. He Bombardier Global 8000 breaks records. In its test flights, one of its aircraft reached a Mach speed of 0.941, even exceeding Mach 1.0 (Mach. 1.015) in a dive, making it the first aircraft within its commercial people transportation category to break the sound barrier in a controlled and sustainable manner. And also, in the fastest civil jet in active service. However, his certified maximum operating cruising speed is Mach 0.95, exceeding its own expectations and leaving behind others like the Gulfstream G700 or the Dassault Falcon 10X. This is possible thanks to its engines GE Passport and its aerodynamics. Its propulsion system is optimized for a high bypass ratio and thermal efficiency, enabling long flights. Its wings have a design Smooth Flĕx Wing critical: it is a variable profile structure that optimizes lift both when flying at low speed and at cruising speed. This minimizes resistance and improves stability against turbulence. With intercontinental capacity. Precisely its surname 8000 comes from its autonomy: it is capable of flying 8,000 nautical miles, about 15,000 kilometers. Again, its engines and design are largely to blame. If we take into account its range and speed, in practice it means that it is practically capable of linking two cities in the world without the need for stopovers. It is no longer that it can connect New York with Hong Kong, it is that compared to the traditional commercial flight it could save almost two hours. Goodbye to damn jet lag? As if flying from one end of the planet to another non-stop and in less time was not enough, the Bombardier Global 8000 promises minimize jet lag through pressurization and systems engineering. Go ahead something: the jet lag It’s not just lack of sleep and jet lag, it’s also an effect of air pressure. While a standard commercial airliner maintains cabin pressure equivalent to 6,000 – 8,000 feet, the Global 8000 maintains it at only 2,900 feet (about 880 meters) even when flying 41,000 feet. This means more oxygen in the blood of people traveling, so fatigue is reduced. Likewise, it integrates the Soleil System LED circadian lighting based on the dynamic position of the sun depending on the destination. A most exclusive aircraft. This aircraft does not skimp on details to optimize flight or comfort. Thus, it has a HEPA filtration system that renews the cabin air in less than 90 seconds, it has very comfortable a priori Bombardier patented Nuage seats with zero gravity position, four private suites with king-size beds and there is no shortage of shower on board. Beyond its innovations and luxuries, it has something essential from a practicality point of view: its design allows it to operate in small airports and even on wet and bad runways, so it can land or take off in up to 2,050 airports. According to Bombardier, this marks the difference with the competition. The interior of one of its exclusive suites ready to fly. As we mentioned in the intro, the Bombardier Global 8000 already has everything to fly. After the envelope validation phase which took place between 2021 and 2023 where the company verified that elements such as the wing and the stabilizers supported transonic shock waves without losing structural integrity, they moved on to the testing and certification phase. First Transport Canada, then the FAA American and a couple of weeks ago, the European, which opens the doors to accepting deliveries in the United States and Europe. However, the first customers of the launch have already begun to receive their units from 2025. By the way, those who own the previous model, the Global 7500, you can upgrade it to the new Global 8000. In Xataka | The largest plane in the world has just broken its record for flight hours: its real mission is even more ambitious In Xataka | The whale of the skies says goodbye: the Airbus Beluga ST retires after years transporting other aircraft parts Cover and images | Bombardier

US sanctions are collapsing China’s factories. It’s bad news for the rest of the world

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The US has intensified in recent years its tariff policy against China. Under the shield of “national security reasons,” the Trump administration has attempted to isolate China from essential components to create cutting-edge technology. The play didn’t go too welland China is at its best moment of national production. So much so that the capacity of its factories is reaching the limit. There are those who warned. Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, warned at the beginning of February in his statements. He pointed out that the US blockade is only achieving the opposite effect, driving giants like Huawei to develop silently and accelerating the race for China to obtain the capacity to make three nanometer chips. SMIC confirmed it. He SMIC report corresponding to the fourth quarter of 2025 is a perfect summary of China’s efforts to one day end up leading the semiconductor race. China doesn’t just want to make chips for mobile phones: it wants to dominate the semiconductors that support AI, cars, telecommunications, industry, energy and defense: because whoever controls these chips controls technological power. The key data. That SMIC’s profits have grown by 39% in the last year is quite revealing, but that the capacity of its factories has risen to 93.5% is even more so. In other words, the Chinese company is practically at the limit of its production capacity, having to satisfy the demanding demands of both the government and local companies. How does this affect me?. Among the key sectors that China wants to lead is AI. And this one needs many, many chips. So much so that SMIC has warned that the demand for them is being so enormous that the rest of the consumer electronics orders are being compromised. This ends up translating into delays in supply, price increases and something that we have been warning about for months: basic components such as RAM, SSD memories and so on. They are going to be more expensive than ever. Without help from anyone. China, without access to ASML’s most advanced machines, is achieving alternative routes for your manufacturing processes. Although some of its manufacturers are still in collaboration with giants like TSMC (case of Xiaomi with “its” XRing 01 chip, manufactured by TSCM in 3nm), the plan is to be completely self-sufficient. Something that they will end up achieving, sooner or later. In Xataka |

ASML CEO knows the whole world depends on her

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The European Union has announced the inauguration of a new research center dedicated to the development and manufacturing of semiconductors. The project, called NanoIC, wants to become one of the fundamental pillars of the European Chips Act program. 2.5 billion euros on the table. The total budget is 2.5 billion euros, of which 700 million come from EU funds. Another 700 million will come from regional and national governments, and the rest will put ASML on the table and other industrial partners. What is Imec. In reality the project is an expansion of the Imec facilities at its headquarters in Leuven, near Brussels. This body does not manufacture commercial chips, but is the “laboratory” in which rival companies such as Intel, Samsung or TSMC collaborate to define the chips of the future. clean rooms. This is a new clean room (“cleanroom“) of 2,000 square meters which will among other things house ASML’s new next-generation High NA EUV scanner which is expected to arrive in mid-March. The total area of ​​Imec’s clean rooms amounts to 12,000 square meters and the company claims that this makes it a central part of the Chips Act strategy. Imec will soon build another 4,000 square meter clean room on the aforementioned Leuven campus. Everyone loves ASML. ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet highlighted the leading role that your company has managed to achieve thanks to its semiconductor manufacturing machines, the only ones in the world capable of producing the most advanced chips today. As he said, these are the machines “that everyone would like to have.” China sighs (for now). He is right: today the US is a key trade ally but does not have comparable technology of its own, and China has been trying to develop extreme ultraviolet machines for some time. but for now he is still behind in that race. Obviously Europe depends on the US and China in many other areas, but ASML is certainly a clear technological asset for European interests. Inverse dependency. The vice president of the European Commission, Henna Virkkunen, indicated in a interview with Politico that “it is true that we have some of the key technologies, such as ASML, that everyone is dependent on globally.” He explained, of course, that the EU has no plans to turn that into a weapon for potential negotiations, “but it is important to realize that we have those strengths that others do not have.” Changing the story. These statements undoubtedly seek to counteract the idea that Europe depends totally on American technology, demonstrating that the old continent also has its own levers to negotiate. Digital sovereignty. The EU is expected to prepare a second Chips Act which should be presented at the end of March and which would clearly differ from the first. Instead of an emergency response to a project that will turn Europe into a competitive region at a technological level. But. The initiative is striking, but it also has important challenges. We are looking at a research center and that means that its size and budget cannot be compared with those investments in data centers made by large US technology companies. But in addition to that parameter there is another even more relevant one: that of talent. Europe must train and attract enough engineers to operate these centers and develop that work there and not in companies or centers that compete in other regions, including of course the US and China. In Xataka | We already know what the chips that will arrive until 2039 will be like. The machine that will allow them to be manufactured is close

We have been waiting for years for 8K TVs to take over the world. It is evident that we are going to sit and wait

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In the 80s you guessed that Indiana Jones had a four-day beard, but that’s all. You couldn’t really see it, because on your VHS tapes it was more of a shadow than anything else. Those of us who have gray hair are lucky (or unlucky) to have lived in past times in which image resolution It was something arcane and mysterious. I was content with the video quality of the VHS tapes of ‘The Goonies’ or ‘Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark’ and I was happy with my C64 and its 320×200 pixels and those matches of ‘Match Day II’ with my brother in which we both enjoyed (and fought) as if we were playing the last game. FIFA EA Sports FC. Then, of course, everything improved and we began to realize that the resolution was important. We discovered that DVDs and their 720×576 resolution (in the PAL system used in Spain, in the US the NTSC only reached 720 x480) was like seeing the future until that future became the past with the arrival of HD Ready (720p) and especially Full HD (1080p) resolutions. Suddenly it was absolutely obvious that Harrison Ford hadn’t shaved.

The Spain we know is not prepared for today’s world

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“The worst thing has been the explosions, we thought the houses were going to collapse.” María José Díaz, from Diario Sur, spent last night talking to the neighbors from Grazalema that have been relocated to Ronda. That phrase perfectly sums up the terror that ran through the people of Cadiz. The evacuation of Grazalema. It has rained a lot in the mountains of Cádiz, that is not new. And they are not onlyalmost 600 l/m² on the rainiest dayis that in recent weeks more than 2,000 l/m² have been accumulated. That is what has turned the streets of the town into a continuous river. That is what has caused water to flow from the floors of the houses, from the baseboards, from the wall sockets. That is what has finally caused the ‘explosions’ (the noises or cracks) that at first seemed like storms, but were quickly identified as hydroseisms. Grazalema is in an environment of karst limestone rock. This suggests that beneath the ground there is a whole network of microcavities, conduits and small sinkholes. When the system becomes saturated and the water table rises, water can escape everywhere. So he has done it. What is reported in the press is calling ‘hydrosisms’ They can be understood as the response of the soil to that enormous amount of water. In Grazalema, the creaks are interpreted more as a form of rearrangement of the terrain. It may seem strange, but there is clear evidence of the process (also in Spain). Why has it been evacuated? A priori, the evacuation makes technical sense (the state of the clogged aquifer is being studied), but also psychological (the situation among the population – as evidenced by testimonies – was becoming a nightmare). What lessons can we learn from all this? As González Alemán recalled, we can’t say for sure that all this has something to do with climate change. It will have to be studied in detail, but what is certain is that yes has assumed (is assuming) a stress test of the water infrastructures of Andalusia and, by extension, of Spain. And that should lead us to reflect on the enormous urban reconversion that will have to be undertaken if this follows what the trends indicate. It is not just towns like Grazalema, nor the coasts of the country. It is not only the buildings built in flood zones, nor the retaining walls that appear insufficient. It is the system as a whole. A system that it is not clear that we can change in time. Image | Heparin1985 In Xataka | If the question is how the Andalusian water system is holding up all this water, we have an answer: they are going to evacuate Grazalema completely

Google has smelled blood with AI, so it has decided to spend more in 2026 than the GDP of 158 countries in the world

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New year, new budgets. Big tech companies are beginning to detail their roadmap for 2026 and the trend is clear: spend even more on AI. a few days ago, Goal announced that the planned capex (capital expenditure) rose to 135,000 million dollars and Microsoft too pointed to a similar figure. Alphabet (Google) just told everyone to “hold my hands.” May the rhythm not stop. The bomb was announced during the last results conference. Alphabet plans to spend between $175 and $185 billion, doubling 2025 capex, which was $91.4 billion, and almost quadrupling 2024 spending (52.5 billion). To put it in context, it is more than the GDP of Morocco, Kuwait, Bulgaria and up to 158 countries. At the same time, the company announced record results, surpassing 400 billion in revenue for the first time. The net profit stood at 132,000 million. Vertigo. That’s what investors seem to have felt. They count in Financial Times that, in the hours following the news, Alphabet shares fell 7% after the capex announcement, but then the fall was reduced to -1.5%. Microsoft experienced a similar response after its earnings call a few days ago, it is the response of investors to these exorbitant figures. However, as long as the results are good, it seems that the scare will not last long. Everything’s fine. They count in Fortune that Pichai assured that this year’s capital expenditure is “a look at the future” and justified his strategy by highlighting that the demand for his cloud services and DeepMind (Gemini) is extraordinary, so the investment must also be. He also announced that AI searches now surpass traditional searches and that Google Search’s business has grown 17% compared to last year. Additionally, the order book for its cloud has increased by 55% during the last quarter. It still won’t be enough. The CEO of Alphabet admitted that, despite the record results, there are insurmountable bottlenecks such as computing capacity, problems in the chip supply chain and energy limitations. These restrictions make it take a long time to get a data center up and running, or in other words, it was preparing investors not to expect an immediate return. Gemini, full out. The Google chatbot is in its sweet moment. The viral success of Nano Banana, Gemini 3 sweeping its competition in benchmarks and Apple choosing him as the new brain for the new Siri They have given a boost in popularity to Gemini, which already has more than 750 million users. OpenAI is still ahead with ChatGPT, but Google is closing the gap and Altman’s people have reacted going into panic mode. He moat of Gemini. Benchmarks are fine, but there is something much more important. During the conference, Pichai announced that they had reduced Gemini’s service costs by 78% “through model optimizations, efficiency and utilization improvements.” It is no longer that its AI is surpassing its competition, it is that it is cheaper and there OpenAI does have a problem. With its advertising businesses, the cloud and more revenue, Google has plenty of room to skyrocket its capex. In Xataka | OpenAI’s entire financial strategy depended on achieving a monopoly with ChatGPT: the opposite is happening Image | Wikipedia

The world is amazed by Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot). It turns out that China had already invented it almost a year ago

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The phenomenon of the end of January has been Molbotformerly known as Clawdbot. It is one of the AI agents most powerful of the moment, to the point that it warns of its own risks even before being installed. An agent who seemed to have no competitor and to be one of a kind. We were wrong. TARS-1.5. Although it has not made as much noise, in April 2025 it was launched UI-TARS-1.5an open source multimodal agent capable of performing all types of tasks within desktop environments. UI-TARS-1.5 is a multimodal agent designed to interact with the digital world through graphical interfaces, using the screen, mouse and keyboard. It came into the hands of Bytedance, a company behind giants like TikTok and one of the main players in the development of artificial intelligence in China. The difference. 1.5 is an AI agent designed to use a computer as a person would do. See the screen, identify visual elements and act using mouse and keyboard. Unlike Moltbot, it does not execute code or commands directly on the system, but rather interacts with the PC from the outside, at the interface level. It’s safer by design, because you can’t break the system by running arbitrary code. In addition, it reasons before each action, which reduces errors accumulated in long tasks. UI-TARS does not control your computer. He uses it. Moltbot does not use your computer. He controls it. What can you do? UI-TARS interacts “talking” with your computer. It is capable of executing tasks in our interface by analyzing what is in it. Serves as a programming assistant. It can behave like a human to test apps. It works as a tutor to perform complex tasks. You can manage desktop tasks and PC management. Why is it important. The new war for AI will not focus exclusively on models like Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude: the next step is to achieve a local AI capable of acting like a human, but with certain security guarantees. Moltbot, UI-TARS, Kimmi K2.5 (also Chinese)… Although agentic AI sounds distant, the war to make it part of our daily lives has been brewing for years. Image | Xataka In Xataka | Studying with AI without thinking teaches nothing: these tips can help you take advantage of it and really learn

The world had been in love with US technology for 25 years. We are finally unhooking

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We have been living within a digital ecosystem designed in the United States for more than two decades. Big technology companies not only built the dominant social networks, but also built a network of services around them without real substitutes. From Europe we have been talking for years about technological sovereignty and a possible disengagement – even if it is partial. There are more and more proposals, but at the moment it is more of a wish than reality. Difficult, but not impossible. Become completely independent from American technology In software it is complicated, but feasible. Our colleague Jose told it just a few days ago, leaving aside giants like Google, WhatsAppAmazon, or Instagram. The changes made something very clear: the United States has taken over the great pillars of daily technological life: Internet searches Sending messages online shopping Social networks Email accounts Operating systems The dependence is total, and assuming it is uncomfortable. Countries like France have banned to its officials the use of American platforms such as Zoom and Teamsto promote a video conferencing platform developed in France and under the name Visio. The objective is clear: reduce dependence on foreign technology, minimize costs and achieve a communication standard under European legal control. The UpScrolled case. Behind him TikTok ownership changewhich went from being mainly in Chinese hands to being under the lap of large American companies, the use of social networks like Upscrolledan app founded by the Palestinian Issam Hijazi as a challenge to big technology companies. During the last week of January, Upscrolled was the most downloaded social network above Threads, WhatsApp and TikTok in the United States App Store. A paradigmatic case in which Americans themselves opt for alternatives outside their country. The Proton case. Although less recent, the proton case It is one of the most ambitious in the last five years. From being protagonists only for ProtonMail (end-to-end encryption by default, European jurisdiction and independence from the Big Tech model), to a whole suite with calendar, VPN and storage alternatives. According to the company, its apps already have more than 100 million users. Good number, but far from more than 100 thousand millions of users who have Google services. The distance remains enormous, and explains why technological disengagement continues to be, for the moment, more of a political and cultural gesture than an everyday reality. Prepared for the worst. At the end of January, the Wall Street Journal reported a scenario starring even more tension. The Greenland case has been the flame necessary to finish lighting the fuseand the main managers of European strategic sectors want to move both their systems and data to local centers. Thinking about a 100% European software ecosystem does not seem entirely realistic. But imagining a scenario in which the dependency is not complete sounds a little better. Image | Xataka In Xataka | We criticize the EU a lot with its obsession with regulating Big Tech. There are at least two examples that justify this obsession

that of a world without nuclear weapons control

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During the sixties, at the height of the cold warthe United States and the Soviet Union accumulated nuclear weapons without clear limits, trapped in a logic of absolute distrust marked by crises such as that of the missiles in Cuba and by the certainty that a miscalculation could trigger a global catastrophe. It was in that atmosphere of fear when they began to assume that continuing to add warheads did not make the world safer, thus laying the foundations for the first major nuclear control agreement. Today we are four days away from ending to that pact. The end of nuclear control. Yes, because on Thursday of this week New START expiresthe last treaty that legally limited the deployed nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia, ending more than fifty years of agreements, inspections and transparency mechanisms that had drastically reduced the number of nuclear warheads since the peak of the Cold War. The agreement, signed in 2010 and extended in 2021, established a cap of 1,550 warheads strategic by country and allowed for data exchanges and on-site inspections designed to avoid dangerous misunderstandings. Its disappearance not only eliminates formal limits, but also the verification system that gave true value to the treaty, in a context marked by the war in Ukraine, unilateral suspension Russian inspections and a climate of mistrust that has not been seen for decades. Indifference and risks. The most striking thing about the end of New START is the little political reaction in Washington, where debate has been minimal even as the world enters an era no nuclear restrictions for the first time since the sixties. The Trump administration has let the treaty die without a clear position, while pressure grows within the security apparatus to increase the number of nuclear weapons rather than reduce them. This emptiness contrasts with the warnings of experts and with the symbolism of the Doomsday Clocknews the last few days because has approached more than ever at midnight, a true reflection of the fear of an uncontrolled arms race that could involve not only Russia and the United States, but also the third party “in contention”: China. Russia, China and a dilemma. If we do a futurology exercise and everything follows the expected course, starting on Thursday and without the treaty, the United States, for example, could return to “load” multiple warheads on missiles that today carry only one, a practice abandoned to comply with New START, while Russia retains the capability to do it quickly because it never stopped deploying missiles with multiple warheads. At this point, many analysts warn that Moscow could react faster than Washington in an escalation scenario, while Beijing continues expanding your arsenal at a pace not seen since the Cold War, although still far from the figures of the two superpowers that started it all. The combination of mistrust, new weapons not covered by previous agreements and emerging systems such as underwater nuclear drones or exotic missiles aggravates the feeling of entering unknown strategic terrain. An opportunity that closes. Despite everything, there is still a small window to avoid the worst scenario, since Russia has hinted that could continue to voluntarily respect the limits and former negotiators defend that accepting a temporary extension with restored inspections would be a pragmatic and cheap gesture to save time. Beyond the technique, the collapse by New START It symbolizes something deeper: the erosion of the idea that nuclear stability is better managed by rules, communication and transparency than by arms accumulation. Whether this moment marks just a blip or the beginning of a new normal will depend on immediate political decisionsalthough the consensus among experts is crystal clear: without some type of control, the world enters a more dangerous, more disturbing, more opaque phase and, of course, with less room for error. Image | Steve Jurvetson In Xataka | The countries with the most nuclear bombs in 2025, gathered in this graph with two protagonists: China and India In Xataka | In 1950 two scientists wondered if a 10 gigaton nuclear bomb was possible. Your results are hidden under lock and key

AEMET prepares for “the highest hydrometeorological impacts in the world”

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As said Kevin Killeen“February is the worst month of the year, but it is an honest month.” And February 2026 is no exception in its honesty: the models gave historic rainfall throughout the Atlantic coast and the south of the peninsula and the rainfall is already here. The jet stream is going to pass over us so “constant and uniform” throughout the week. But it is not just the “concatenation of storms generated” by this, it is that “they are going to be fed with high moisture content” that comes directly from the Gulf of Mexico. What would have been excellent news three years ago has become a huge problem: this succession of storms arrives at a time when the soil cannot absorb even one more drop. A truly exceptional accumulation. To land the data, the latest models accumulated dan for this week of more than 100-150mm and up to 300 in areas of Galicia, Extremadura and Andalusia. In the case of Andalusia, in fact, the situation will be very complicated due to the extension of the Guadalquivir valley and the composition of its soil. More than 200mm are expected at the head of the river and a homogeneous average of 100mm in the basin. That, added to the fact that “The soil is clay and its use is agricultural.“, the filtration is very scarce. This has turned the flooding of the rivers and streams in the Guadalquivir basin and adjacent areas (such as the Guadalete or the Mediterranean basins of Granada) into a ticking bomb. “The highest hydrometeorological impacts in the world”. As Martín León explainedis not a figure of speech, it is an enormous risk: the highest impacts in the world are expected. In fact, as the hours pass, the predictions they seem to get worse and floods, overflows and landslides seem inevitable. The first symptoms of flooding, in fact, have already been detected in Andalusia via satellite. How normal is this? To emphasize that we are not facing a normal situation, it is enough to take a look at the ECMWF EFIthe index that measures how extreme the atmospheric phenomena are: the entire south-southwest of the peninsula is in red, the highest level. Rain on wet. But, as I say, that is not the main problem. The main problem is that, after these days of heavy rain, the soil is extremely saturatedthe reservoirs are being forced to drain and the system’s retention capacity is at minimum levels. In mountain areas, water it’s starting to flow directly from the ground. To this we can add that the Pyrenees and the rest of the northern mountains they have a historic snow pack. We are, as all models show, in the middle of a perfect storm. This means that the Hydrographic Confederations will have a lot of work and the problems have only just begun. Special attention will have to be paid to rivers, streams and areas at risk of land displacement. Complicated hours are approaching and any precaution will be insufficient. Image | WXCharts In Xataka | Spain is preparing for a “festival” of storms in February: with more rain than normal and hardly any cold

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