worlds

China manufactures 90% of the world’s humanoid robots and the reason is not its industrial policy: it is crossing the street

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On Chinese New Year, 16 Unitree humanoid robots danced a folk dance before almost a billion viewers. The West reacted as always: some with panic, others with disdain, others with an undisguised admiration that sometimes tends to concoct theories with more clichés regarding China than real analysis. None of those answers is entirely true and that blindness has a cost. The context. China manufactures about 90% of the humanoid robots sold in the world. In 2025, about 13,000 units were shipped, with Chinese companies (AgiBot, Unitree, UBTech…) dominating the ranking by volume, according to Omdia data collected by Bloomberg. Tesla, with all its brand reputation and all its industrial apparatus, internally deployed around 800 units of the Optimus that same year. The figure. He Unitree G1 It costs $13,500. He Tesla Optimus will exceed 20,000. That gap is the difference between being able to iterate ten times with the same budget or staying at one. Between the lines. The story circulating in the West has two versions, equally lazy: The first: all this is the five-year plan, the hand of the State, industrial policy made robot. The second, reserved for the most condescending: it is because they copy. Neither of them explains what is really happening. China’s advantage in robotics does not come from the Communist Party. It comes from the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze Delta: the two densest manufacturing ecosystems on the planet. Motors, actuators, sensors, custom PCBs… everything is available within walking distance. Is what it describes Rui Xuan engineer who has worked in robotics startups in China and Silicon Valley. When Unitree wants to test a new joint design, it crosses the street and comes back with the right component. A team in San Francisco has to wait weeks to receive the same component from China. The background. That difference in iteration speed changes everything in hardware engineering. It stops being a problem of talent, because Chinese and American engineers are equally capable, and becomes a problem of infrastructure. Breaking a robot, learning, replacing it, and trying again: that’s what builds cumulative technical advantage. If breaking a robot costs three weeks of logistics, learning stops and times become longer. Yes, but. China does have state support, and it is completely legitimate to point this out. The government has injected a lot of money into that sector and has set production targets. But it’s not that Silicon Valley is an impoverished region: it has more capital, investors with more experience and resources, and more decades of experience financing high-risk bets. If this were a war to see who has the fattest checkbook, the United States would win handily. But it is not. Furthermore, Chinese state money comes with strings attached: it is classified as “state asset” and founders assume personal liability if the company fails. That pushes capital toward politically safe bets, not necessarily toward the most innovative ones. The question. Can the West make up ground in robotics? Yes, but not like he’s trying. Attracting foreign talent helps on the margin, but does not solve the underlying problem. The equalization involves building local supply chains capable of delivering a spare part in two days, not two weeks. And that is not an immigration or R&D problem. It is an industrial-based problem, and solving it takes many years of work. And of thankless work, from which those who arrive later may reap the fruits. Until then we are going to see many more viral videos of Chinese robots doing pirouettes with increasing naturalness. And it’s because they’ve built the best environment in the world to break things and try again. In engineering, that explains almost everything. Featured image | CCTV In Xataka | Folding clothes or taking apart LEGOs has always been a tedious task. Xiaomi’s new AI for robots has put an end to it

Europe wants to manufacture 20% of the world’s semiconductors by 2030. It has just taken the first step

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43,000 million euros. That is the figure that the European Commission set to achieve something that is currently out of reach: technological sovereignty regarding semiconductors. With the ‘Chips Act‘, Europe seeks to position itself as a power in a semiconductor production segment dominated by Asia with Taiwan at the head. Now, and after years of dreaming, Europe inaugurates the first installation: the FAMES Pilot Line. The objective is not conservative. By 2030, the Old Continent wants produce 20% of integrated circuits of the world. We have an ace up our sleeve called ASMLthe global spearhead in terms of manufacturing of advanced photolithography equipment refers. The Dutch are the ones who produce the machines that buy foundries like TSMC o Intel to manufacture the most advanced chips on the market. But there is a problem: we have the machine that makes the chips, but we don’t have someone to make chips. That is what the project wants to change, and with FAMESthe European Union Chip Law lays the first brick to be more relevant. It’s not going to be easy at all. FAMES, the spearhead of Europe’s Chips Law Unlike a private company, FAMES is something much more European: a collaboration between countries and institutions. It represents a new example of public-private collaboration like the one we are seeing in parallel in the european space race. And the pilot program is located at the CEA-Leti facilities in the French town of Grenoble. With an initiative of 830 million euros contributed by both the European Commission and the participating states, FAMES brings together 11 organizations belonging to eight countries and, after two years of preparation, has presented favorable technical results to begin developing advanced semiconductor technologies. The organizations and countries of the FAMES Consortium FAMES, with 830 million in financing, is the first of the five pilot lines that will be inaugurated under this Chips Law initiative, and the CEA-Leti plant has been expanded with about 2,000 new square meters destined to clean room. It is an extremely clean area isolated from the outside, with strictly controlled temperature and humidity conditions and optimal conditions for manufacturing semiconductors. CEA-Leti already had 12,000 square meters of clean room, so the expansion under the Chips Law is considerable. And the big question: what will they do in this pilot program? Well, something known as Fully Depleted Silicon-on-Insulator, or FD-SOI. This is a manufacturing process in which a thin insulating layer (less than 10 nanometers) is placed under the transistors so that the chips operate at lower voltages. And the goal is to create 10 and 7 nanometer processors. FD-SOI Thus, they consume between 30 and 40% less energy without losing performance, making them more efficient. That efficiency and delivery of energy to the chips is something that everyone is trying to improve, from an Intel that already has its most cutting-edge technologies ready in this sense to a TSMC that is preparing its response by the end of 2026. That Europe is developing its solution now seems demoralizing, but it must be taken into account that, for decades, the technology of the Old Continent has depended on external manufacturing, so advancing this manufacturing process at this time is not bad news. But well, in the end, FAMES represents the first platform in which some advanced technologies for the manufacture of semiconductors will begin to mature and, together with the rest of the pilot lines, the objective is to transfer these advances and knowledge to the industry and, obviously, to a final product. We will see if the 2030 goal is reached, but Europe itself is not very optimistic about the matter. Europe thinks that Europe will fail in its objective At the beginning of last year, we already said that the European Court of Auditors itself believed that the European Chip Law would be a failurepointing out unlikely which would be if they achieved the goal of building 20% ​​of the planet’s semiconductors by 2030. And… they are not misguided. Europe is seeking its technological independence while inviting entities like TSMC to its soil, but the two main technological centers are also moving. The United States is attracting talent to its territory, with TSMC buying more land to open a megafactory and Intel as a banner in the American foundry. China is not standing idly by and, following a Western veto, its semiconductor industry has made unthinkable advances with old ASML machines while companies like SMIC either Huawei develop your own solutions to create advanced chips and be able to shield itself from American technology. And beyond countries, private companies such as Intel itself, TSMC, Samsung, GlobalFoundries or Texas Instruments are also moving, installing new cutting-edge plants both inside and outside the United States, a country that is determined to invest what is necessary to achieve leadership. In the end, getting 20% ​​of the world’s chips is a tremendously ambitious goal and Europe is very far away in this industrybut you have to start somewhere and FAMES represents that first stone on the path of the European semiconductor initiative. Images | Intel (edited), FAMES 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

Tesla has revolutionized the industry with a 9,000-ton Giga Press. China has responded with the world’s largest

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Tesla has revolutionized car production. He has done it with the help of his Giga Press, a huge assembler capable of producing huge parts of the chassis to save time and money. In their race to lower costs, numerous brands have ordered their own. And a Chinese manufacturer has the largest in the world. What is a Giga Press? A Giga Press It is a machine capable of producing huge parts of a car chassis in a single process. Until now, those huge pieces have been (and continue to be for most manufacturers) assembled separately, slowly taking shape like a 10,000-piece puzzle. What is achieved with a Giga Press is to reduce the number of those pieces that have to be assembled. That is to say, simplify the puzzle. This is achieved with a huge press into which the material is injected to produce the part and the mold is pressed with great force to obtain the desired final part. Why is it so important? With the Giga Press, Tesla has managed to save time and money in the production of their vehicles. By simplifying the process, you can produce much more in less time and, therefore, amortize the investment more quickly. In fact, one’s own Tesla trusts in new evolutions to be able to reduce hypotheticals but also there are not a few companies that have ordered theirs with a view to achieving these same results. The largest in the world, of course, is in China. 16,000 tons. This is the figure that the Giga Press that Dongfeng has in its facilities in Wuhan (China) manages to apply, as reported in Car News China. This company has been working since last January with a new machine capable of casting parts with a pressure never before seen in the industry. The machine, they explain in the middle, has been designed, developed and produced entirely in China by LK Machinery which also provides these machines to other companies like XPeng. To give us an idea, Tesla’s Giga Press are capable of assembling parts with 9,000 tons of pressure. In this case, Dongfeng will dedicate the pressing to parts of battery casings of their electric cars. They assure that the machine will improve the rigidity of the assembly and the protection of the energy accumulator. Each piece moves forward every 135 seconds. And it’s not the only one. In parallel, Dongfeng will also have another press, this one capable of applying 10,000 tons of pressure. In this case it has a moving part and a stationary mold. The latter is filled with molten steel at a temperature of 720ºC and the moving part is placed on it. From there, pressure is applied until the new piece is shaped. The objective between both presses is to produce up to 600,000 pieces annually to incorporate into your cars. For now, in the first phase, up to 200,000 pieces will be counted and the objective is to gradually scale production until reaching the desired cruising speed. Both machines are the result of a clear commitment to this type of machines in China in recent years. Already in 2021, InsideEVs It stated that local manufacturers were looking for their own and, above all, that Tesla had managed to locate the supply of its suppliers in China so the materials used in the Shanghai machine did not have to be imported from third countries. It has its problems. Although the mass pressing of parts has revolutionized the industry and many manufacturers have sought their own machines, the truth is that this type of production It also has its negative side. And millions of copies are needed to amortize the set and get economic return on a very important investment. This also requires maintaining a design for a long time because any variation in the part forces the production line to stop for too long until the desired original mold is found. That “slave” design of the brand itself is one of the problems that Tesla has encountered, which is that it cannot launch cars on the market with new variations beyond small aesthetic touches. Photo | LK Machinery In Xataka | Tesla was supposed to be a company that sold cars. And the problem is that it is stopping selling them at full speed

Genie 3 is awesome at creating worlds for video games. But the problem with video games was never creating worlds

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Genie 3 has been with us since August and its previous versions since long beforebut this weekend its fame has exploded because Google has taught us how to generate interactive 3D environments simply by writing a phrase. And in seconds, Genie 3 materializes a forest, or a city, or a cave, or whatever you want. And there you can move, or jump, or fly. Technically it is brilliant. However, There is nothing there that makes us think that it is going to bring down video game development.. It will make it easier, in any case, but it does not pose a threat to him. Because The bottleneck of video games has never been generating polygons. The difficult part of creating a good game is not creating a world in which a character can walk or fly. The hard part is creating a world where you, I, and all the other players want to keep walking or flying. That difference between space and experience is what separates a demo like the ones we have seen of Genie 3 – a video to be amazed by for a few seconds – from a video game that we are going to dedicate hours to. Or at least a few minutes. Several video game companies fell around 10% after this announcement of Genie 3, but none as much as Unity, which has fallen 20%. It is a sign that There are Unity investors who don’t understand what makes a company like Unity valuable.. Unity is not Unity because it renders polygons but because of the invisible infrastructure it sells: making the physics the same on all the devices on which its games are played, creating collision systems that do not fail, maintaining debugging that explain why your game crashes in frame 47,293. Genie 3 generates impressive landscapes, but it can’t explain why your character is traversing the ground in that particular corner of the map. From the outside, what is visible seems to be the great work to be done with a game. The graphics, the models, the environments… But any developer knows that create assets is the, quote-heavy, “easy” part. The bad thing is what takes years of accumulated effort: Design clashes with enemies that are complex but fair, calibrate progression curves, write dialogue that serves much more than conveying an idea (such as revealing a character) without stopping the action for it. That is, build complex systems that consolidate the narrative and engage the player, interacting in emergent ways. Genie 3 doesn’t touch any of that. There is one limitation that perfectly sums up the distance between what Genie 3 does and what a video game demands: spatial memory. The generated worlds they tend to forget themselvesand that is why a ladder that you saw a while ago is no longer there, and not because someone has taken it. If you go back, possibly the model regenerates it, perhaps in another place, perhaps with another geometry. In a video game, just the opposite is needed: a persistent state where each action has consequences. A tree you cut down has to stay down. Spatial consistency is the basis of a digital world. And that is not solved by updating the model to make it a little more capable. It is something inherent to generative systems: they live in an eternal present, without real memory of frames previous. This doesn’t mean that Genie 3 is useless. We insist: it is beastly. But for something else. For rapid prototyping, to elevate conceptual art to something interactive. Those types of scenarios. Maybe even for a indie Show the investor what your game will be like without settling for a PowerPoint. And that is valuable. It will change dynamics and lower costs. But It is one more tool in the entire process, not a replacement for any process.. Google is going to solve a problem in the world of video games, but it has the most difficult ones left: making those worlds matter something and making the mechanics satisfactory. May we remember the stories they tell and may the players progress. Ultimately, the soul of a game. That is hardly designed with a prompt. That is designed, iterated, and polished for a long time by people who know about intentionality. Now AI can create the canvas, but that has never been the hardest thing about painting. Featured image | Google In Xataka | What’s happening with Ubisoft: after canceling six games and adjusting its structure, this is the plan of the great French studio

Japan has attempted to power up the world’s largest nuclear power plant. It only lasted a few hours

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The nuclear debate, which Japan thought closed, returns to the scene. The recent authorization to reactivate Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, the largest atomic plant in the world, has set off alarms: citizen distrust, the shadow of Fukushima and doubts have surfaced about whether TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) is the right company to lead the country’s new energy stage. Fifteen years of waiting for a reboot that didn’t even last a day. In Niigata, reactor number 6 went from complete silence to emergency shutdown in less than 24 hours. The failure, located in critical safety systems, has turned the great revival energetic of Japan in a lesson in technical fragility. A slow giant. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa had not produced a single kilowatt since 2012. That closure was not an isolated event, but the shock wave of Fukushima in 2011, which put all reactors of similar design in the spotlight. But for TEPCO, this complex of seven units and more than 8,000 MW is much more than energy: it is its financial lifeline. According to Japan Forward estimatesthe electricity company needs these reactors to inject some 100,000 million yen annually into its coffers, essential oxygen to pay the endless bill for the dismantling of Fukushima Daiichi. The Japanese Government, under the command of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, has positioned this reopening as a strategic pillar. The objective is ambitious, in saying that nuclear energy represent 20% of the energy mix by 2040. This energy is needed to power new AI data centers and semiconductor factories, thus reducing dependence on imported fossil fuels, made more expensive by the fall of the yen and current geopolitics. Chronicle of a fleeting reboot. The reactivation process of reactor No. 6 was marked by setbacks even before it began. The restart, initially scheduled for Tuesday, January 20, had to be postponed one day after it was detected that an alarm designed to warn of the accidental removal of control rods did not work during the tests, as reported by The Japan Times. After correcting this error, operations formally began on Wednesday at 7:02 pm. At 8:28 pm, the reactor reached the “critical state” (sustained nuclear fission). However, the celebration in TEPCO’s control rooms – where staff tensely monitored screens – was short-lived. At 12:28 a.m. Thursday, just 16 hours after the start, an alarm sounded again. This time it indicated a failure in the engine control panel that operates one of the reactor control rods (the devices that regulate or stop the nuclear reaction). TEPCO attempted to replace electrical components and inverters, but the anomaly persisted. Given the uncertainty, the company announced a “planned temporary shutdown” to reinsert the control rods and stop the fission, a process that concluded Friday morning. “We do not assume that the investigation will be resolved in one or two days; at this time we cannot say how many days it will take,” admitted Takeyuki Inagaki, director of the plant, at a press conference. Security under suspicion. Although TEPCO maintains that the reactor remains under control and without leaks to the outside, the incident has served to poke into a wound that was never closed. It is not just the present that is worrying, but a tarnished record: just five years ago, the Financial Times I already put the focus on the plant after a security scandal where an employee circumvented access controls using a foreign identification, revealing the fragility of its surveillance systems. However, distrust does not only fall on TEPCO. The Japanese nuclear sector is experiencing a systemic credibility crisis. Earlier this month, Chubu Electric admitted to manipulating seismic data to minimize the impact of potential earthquakes at its Hamaoka plant, leading the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) to describe the act as “scandalous” and to suspend its security review after a decade of paperwork. A divided society in Niigata. Outside the plant and at TEPCO headquarters, protesters like Yumiko Abe, 73, express their indignation: “Electricity is for Tokyo, but we in Kashiwazaki run the risk. It doesn’t make sense.” The figures support this discomfort. According to surveys cited by South China Morning Postabout 60% of Niigata residents oppose the restart. Furthermore, 70% of citizens fear that TEPCO will not be able to manage an emergency based on its history. On the other hand, prominent seismologists warn in the Financial Times that the plant is located near an area of ​​very high seismic risk where a large earthquake could cause billions of dollars in damage. The future of the atom in Japan. The path to full operation of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is once again up in the air. While TEPCO makes cost cuts of 3.1 trillion yen To fund the decommissioning of Fukushima, the NRA has promised strict on-site inspections to verify corrective actions following this latest failure. Experts like Dr. Florentine Koppenborg suggest that this “nuclear renaissance” It could be just a “drop in the ocean” as security costs have skyrocketed and public trust remains at rock bottom. Japan is at an energy crossroads: the urgency to decarbonize and feed its technology industry collides head-on with the memory of a disaster that, 15 years later, is still very present. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa giant has shown that, in nuclear energy, the distance between strategic success and technical failure is measured in the sound of a single alarm. Image | IAEA Imagebank Xataka | Here is news that will surely reassure you: Europe’s largest nuclear power plant is running on diesel generators

It is widely known that Orson Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ caused a social panic. It is less known that it is a lie

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In my years of training as a journalist I remember how they told us to study the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. My Radio and Television Information teacher told us that it was an exemplary event that could help us in the future practice of the profession to evaluate the responsibility of the media and to understand the mechanisms by which the so-called “fourth estate” could influence the social reality we serve. What perhaps the teachers who transmitted that information to me did not think is that they were right in what they had told me, but for a twofold and partially wrong reason. The legend of War of the Worlds The story is well known: HG Wells, a widely known science fiction writer at the time, had a story titled The War of the Worldsthrough which aliens would come to Earth to conquer humanity. A beginner but ambitious young man named Orson Welles decided to adapt the script to the radio format, giving it a newsreel structure for his television program. Mercury Theater on the Air on CBS and that he would read with other colleagues on the night of October 30, 1938, on Halloween Eve. The broadcast, the reading of this work, lasted an hour in which the aura of truthfulness was maintained except in three momentsone at the very beginning, another 40 minutes into the recording and another at 55. They indicated that it was a dramatization. For the rest, the fiction of that Martian invasion that was taking place in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, remained live. The myth, the documentaries and reports about the case and the journalism classes I attended said that Welles, the hired actors and the sound montages were so believable (and the audiences so naive) that within minutes of them starting to simulate a supposed alien attack the streets of the country were filled with hysterical and shocked masses. Panic attacks, people stockpiling supplies, collapsed police services and who knows what else. We assume that the people who did not hear those warnings were able to connect to the program after the warning and listened to the program without knowing that it was fake. And why wouldn’t we think like that? The newspapers of October 31 had carried the story to the foreground: “False war bulletin spreads terror throughout the country”, “Radio play terrifies the nation”, “Radio listeners panic, they confuse a war drama as a real chronicle”. These are some of the headlines that could be read about an event that, as it was said later, caused rivers of ink to flow in the form of more than 12,000 articles in newspapers throughout the United States. The reality is that, as a series of experts have reflected on different occasions, this interpretation largely falls into the realm of fake news. To support it here we use, above all, the study of professionals and experts from Princeton University, from the work of scholar David Miller in his essay Introduction to Collective Behaviorfrom the book Getting it Wrong by W Joseph Campbellfrom the work of sociologist Robert E. Bartholomew and from what journalists Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow have collected for Slate. What events did occur The broadcast did cause some effects. We know that some Grover’s Mill locals, believing their town’s water tower had been transformed into a “giant Martian war machine,” fired guns at the water tank. There was at least one woman who sued Welles and his team for causing her a panic attack and one man received direct compensation from the future film director who paid for the shoes that a listener said he had given up to pay for the train ticket he needed to escape the alien catastrophe. It is also true that calls to hospitals increased from people telling them where they could go to get donate bloodand police stations in the New Jersey area were also called, but most who did this were looking to find out if it was a false alarm. They wanted confirmation that it was a joke, but they also called to protest about this program that could be deceiving people or to congratulate them on that great special on that Night of the Dead. But nothing more. All of them came together to serve the approach that the written press wanted to give: that the CBS program had caused mass hysteria, that the radio was lying and deceiving its listeners and that they had created a major problem. And the lies that were published The rumor that people were being treated for shock in New Jersey hospitals was false, as the Princeton Radio office later revealed. The news that a man had died of a heart attack because of the program, as reported by the Washington Post, was also not true. People didn’t jump out of the windows either. In general, hundreds of articlesmany with supposed witness accounts, witnessed chaos that, in truth, had not been such. I remembered Some time later in his memoirs Ben Gross, radio director of the New York Daily News, that in truth the streets of New York They were half empty. It would also later be known that CBS had disconnected the Welles broadcast in different local affiliates in the country to show regional bulletins that, they assumed, would interest their audience more than a little play by Martians. The biggest scandal of all, the audience figures. It was said that more than a million people had listened to the program, when it could not be true. In fact, most people were listening to the NBC rival to ventriloquist Edgar Bergin’s popular radio show. And with most people we are talking about a 2% audience for the NBC show, as demonstrated by an independent survey that was done simultaneously with the broadcast. There is no doubt that in popular culture the idea that The War of the Worlds was a a before and afterthat the phenomenon must have been … Read more

the world’s first system to measure time on the Moon

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The Moon is close to going from being an occasional destination to a place where many things happen at the same time, and that forces us to rethink even the most basic bases of how we operate there. When several ships are maneuvering, when you want to land accurately or when thinking about a future navigation network, it is no longer enough to use Earth time and make corrections on the fly. Time becomes an operational tool, and any gap, no matter how small, begins to matter. That is the background of the step that China has just taken. The announcement comes from Nanjing and has a very practical objective. According to Global Timesa team at Purple Mountain Observatory has developed and published LTE440a software that allows you to directly compare the weather on the Moon with that on Earth without resorting to manual calculations. The system is based on a model that integrates lunar gravity and the movement of the satellite, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences presented it officially as a usable product last December, not just as an academic exercise, with an eye toward future operations in the lunar environment. Why time doesn’t run the same on the Moon. The gap that Chinese software is trying to solve is not a curiosity, but a direct consequence of physics. By having a lower gravity, the Moon makes its clocksand move forward about 56 microseconds a day with respect to those on Earth. This difference, imperceptible in the short term, accumulates and ends up introducing increasing errors if Earth time continues to be used as the only reference for missions that last months or even years. Landings and navigation at play. This gap, however small it may seem, has direct consequences when moving from theory to operation. Jonathan McDowellHarvard astronomer and quoted by the South China Morning Postexplained that differences of just one microsecond can become relevant in navigation systems, affecting calculations even on scales of one minute. What is LTE440. LTE440 calculates the relationship between the Moon’s coordinate time and the dynamic time of the solar system’s barycenter, an astronomical reference used to describe the motion of bodies. This correspondence is one of the necessary steps to later convert lunar time to Earth time in a traceable way. A model of the “Long March 10”, the launch system that China wants to use for its first manned mission to the Moon The international framework. The pressure to sort out this problem does not come only from China. In 2024, the International Astronomical Union adopted a broad framework for the Moon to have its own temporal reference, given the prospect of multiple missions operating at the same time. In that context, the Nanjing team’s work is presented as an engineering step that attempts to turn that general idea into a usable tool. Ambitious scope. The scientific article in Astronomy and Astrophysics maintains that The method remains on the order of a few tens of nanoseconds even according to their calculations when projected out to 1,000 years. On the other hand, this technical advance comes at a very specific moment in the Chinese space program. China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) maintains its goal to take astronauts to the Moon by 2030 and has already completed preliminary prototyping of the main systems, from the Long March-10 rocket to the Mengzhou spacecraft and the Lanyue lunar module. Images | Ganapathy Kumar | engin akyurt In Xataka | Poland and Spain are the European countries that have increased their contribution to space the most. For very different reasons

Wallpaper TV returns to become the world’s thinnest ‘wireless’ TV

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During these days the CES is being held in Las Vegas, and therefore we will find a good number of new developments from multiple manufacturers to face this 2026. In the case of LG, among all the announcements it has prepared, it has surprised us with the return of one of its most iconic televisions: the Wallpaper OLED. This line was discontinued in 2020, but now the Korean company has presented at this fair the LG OLED evo W6a renewed model that recovers the concept of an ultra-thin screen. The best part is that it is also a wireless TV. Super fine and with improvements According to the company, the television offers a thickness of only 9 millimeters. In addition, the screen attaches magnetically and remains completely attached to the wall from edge to edge thanks to a renewed support. It is true that the previous model, the W7 of 2017was even thinner at just 2.57mm thick. However, this increase in thickness has an explanation: the additional space has been used to house the wireless receivers and the cooling technology necessary for the system to operate. To put it in perspective, we are still talking about a thickness that is lower than that of most current smartphones. Goodbye to cables (but not all of them) The main problem with the original model was the need to have a thick flat cable connected to the screen and a sound bar Dolby Atmos mandatory that housed all the connections. Since the sound bar was mandatory, users who wanted better sound and wanted to invest in better sound equipment had to also have the mandatory sound bar connected to the cables, which made the whole set impractical. LG has solved this weak point with the Zero Connect Box, an independent box that manages all entries video, audio and peripherals, transmitting everything wirelessly to the screen. In fact, it is the same technology used in your first wireless television which we saw years ago. According to LG, this hub can be placed up to 10 meters away from the TV. Of course, you will still need a cable: the power supply. Image and performance improvements Image: LG The W6 incorporates LG’s new Hyper Radiant Color technology, which promises improvements in black level, color reproduction and brightness. LG assures that this model reaches luminance levels up to 3.9 times higher to a conventional OLED panel, thanks to Brightness Booster Ultra technology. Another interesting detail is that we are talking about the first television to achieve the ‘Reflection Free Premium’ certification from Intertek laboratories. Since it is a television that is practically attached to the wall, the issue of reflections is important and LG claims that it is the panel with the lowest reflectance in its entire rangewhich means that it will not end up becoming just another mirror in our living room. On the other hand, the brain of the television is the new Alpha 11 AI Gen3 processor, whose neural processing unit is, according to LG, 5.6 times more powerful than previous versions. Also ready to play The most gamers also have their space in the W6. And the television is compatible with Refresh rates up to 165 Hz in 4K resolutionin addition to having compatibility NVIDIA G-Sync and FreeSync Premium from AMD. LG also promises a pixel response time of 0.1 milliseconds. And if you’re not using the TV, you can invest part of your electricity bill on a digital wall with the Gallery+ function, which according to LG allows you to display more than 4,500 images. The company assures that in this collection we will find everything from cinematographic moments to video game scenes, also including personal collections or even images generated by AI. Price and availability The LG OLED evo W6 will be Available in 77 and 83 inch sizes. LG has not yet revealed the price or the exact launch date, although everything indicates that it will be placed in the ultra-premium segment. For reference, the previous model cost up to $20,000, so it would not be strange to see similar figures. We will have to wait to find out more information about it. Cover image | LG In Xataka | TCL has entered the television market by doing what seemed impossible: democratizing the Mini-LED

a third of the world’s data centers are in a single country

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Currently there are more than 11,000 data centers operating worldwidewhich is said soon. Seeing the huge investment by technology companies, The figure is going to grow exponentially in the coming years. Now, thanks to the interactive map of Data Center Map We know where they are. An overwhelming majority of them are in the northern hemisphere, with one country accounting for almost a third of the total. United States rules USA To no one’s surprise, the country with the largest number of data centers is the United States. Considering that the major cloud infrastructure companies are American, this is also not surprising. In total they have 4,303 data centers spread throughout the territory, but not on a regular basis: there are regions in which the concentration is brutal. In the state of Virginia alone there are a whopping 668 data centers, which is more than Germany, the second country on the list with 494 centers. The weather too We already know that data centers consume a lot of energy and much of it goes into cooling their components. The hotter it is outside, the more it will cost to cool it and therefore the more energy is consumed, as well as water. According to the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers, The ideal temperature for a data center is between 18 and 27 degrees Celsius. Location has a notable impact on electricity and water expenses, which is why technology companies usually choose places with lower temperatures to set up their infrastructure. The south also wants its piece of the pie Indonesia It is striking that, despite the temperature recommendation, there are many data centers in countries where heat is a problem. Rest of World has done an extensive analysis about this phenomenon and estimates that at least 600 facilities are operating in areas outside the optimal range. In fact, following the list of countries with the highest number of data centers, we see that Indonesia is in third place with 184 facilities, followed by Brazil with 196. Both have a average temperature of more than 26 degrees, which means that for much of the year temperatures exceed that threshold. Singapore A striking case is that of Singapore, where the average temperature is more than 28 degrees. It has 78 data centers, a low figure compared to those we have mentioned, but they are concentrated in a very small area, which makes it one of the countries with a higher data center density. Other countries where demand for data centers is increasing are IndiaVietnam and the Philippines, all of them with quite hot climates. The heat challenge Why build in such hot areas? For many countries, data being within their own borders is more important than optimal operating temperature. The risk that arises is that, with the temperatures increasing year after yearwhat is now a manageable situation can become a difficult problem to solve, especially in areas such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East. They say in Rest of World that precisely in Singapore there is an initiative in which more than 20 technology companies and universities participate with one objective: to develop a refrigeration system Specific for humid and hot climates. The most common cooling system is air, but in these areas it is most effective to use a hybrid cooling system that uses air when possible and water when it is hotter. In some areas with extreme temperatures such as the United Arab Emirates, they are even considering build them underground. In China they are testing an even more radical solution: build a data center under the sea. Image | ChatGPT, with data from Data Center Map In Xataka | Aragón is not afraid of AI: it has just approved three more new mega data centers in full commitment to renewables

Migingo is a tin rock where 500 people live. It is also the center of the world’s smallest war

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Curious islands in the world there are several. Like Migingo… not so many, because we are talking about a geographical anomaly. It is a tiny rock formation that emerges in the lake victoria and in which it is difficult to find a millimeter that is not covered by a uralite shanty. There are about 500 people living in this space smaller than a football field, but apart from this situation, Migingo It is something much more. It is the scene of Africa’s smallest war. Kowloon 2. Okay, that’s an exaggeration because In Kowloon there were 1.9 million inhabitants per square kilometerbut in Migingo there is not much privacy either. The island is rocky and has an area of ​​about 2,000 m². It is estimated that the population density is about 65,000 people per km², but it is really difficult to make calculations because it depends a lot on the sources. In 2009 it was said that the island had a population of 131 people, but it has also been lying at 500 people (creating a much higher density of 250,000 per km²), and up to more than 1,000 people. There are no basic services, but there is a casino, four bars, several brothels and a pharmacy. Something is something and the question is… how did it get to this situation. two fishermen. It all started in 1991, when two Kenyan fishermen landed on the island. It is very close to a larger island, called Usingo, and at that time everything was covered by weeds. The receding of the lake’s waters left more of the land visible, and fishermen began to arrive and settle. The reason is that it was easier to operate directly from the island than to go to its vicinity every day in search of prey. In the 1950s, the Nile Perch was introduced to the lake. It is an invasive and predatory species that destroyed the local fauna, but transformed the region’s economy. An estimated one million metric tons were exported annually in 2006 and, by then, the industry had a commercial value of $250 million to Uganda. That is to say: this fish was the second economic engine of the country, only behind coffee. And Migingo is located in a strategic point as it is very close to some of the most important deep water points of the lake, and where there are the most fish. Pirates. Something I haven’t said is that Migingo belongs to Kenya. It is located within what the country considers its territory according to the colonial boundaries of 1926. But there is a problem: those banks rich in Nile perch are in Ugandan territory. The fishermen of Migingo go a few meters into the fishing territory of the neighboring country every morning, and we already know what happens when one country steps on another’s resources. There is reports which indicate that the boats unloaded more than 100 kilos of fish a day, generating profits in one day between three or four times more than what a Kenyan or Ugandan generates in a good month. Word spread and attracted the most undesirable: pirates who landed with assault rifles, threatening the few who lived on the island, stealing the fish, the gear or the menhaden motors. The locals called for help, and Uganda was the first to respond. Uganda comes into play. The logical thing would have been for Kenya to respond, since the island is theirs, but in 2004, those who arrived were Ugandan authorities and police. They saw that money was moving there and the maritime police planted two flags: theirs and that of Uganda. The reports of 2009 indicate that the authorities were not much better than the pirates. Fees for Kenyan fishermen to get to the island, taxes, fines, kidnappings, torture and claims of people disappearing and never returning. The island’s population (mostly Kenyans, but also Ugandans) asked Kenya for help. And, now, Kenya responded. The smallest war in the world. Following popular pressure, politicians were forced to act. In April 2009, a Kenyan official arrived, accompanied by a dozen police officers, and declared that the land belonged to his country. He brought down the Ugandan flag and raised the Kenyan flag. One day later, Uganda shipment 60 marines and the region was on the brink of armed conflict. Since then, the situation has eased somewhat, but the flags continue to fly in a disputed territory that has nothing to do with land, but with fish. There is nothing around Migingo, while in nearby Ugandan waters the production is extraordinary. Complicated. This conflict has been studied as if it were an example, or a test, of the resolution of postcolonial conflicts, when Europe divided up Africa with square and bevel. The problem is that it’s not getting anywhere. Kenya and Uganda formed a committee to sort things out, but it was abruptly dissolved after failing to reach an agreement on the mound. And most recently, in November 2025, the residents of Minigno they asked both governments to give some response. Meanwhile, human rights associations continue alerting regarding acts of slavery to which Kenyan citizens are supposedly subjected by the Ugandan authorities, the island still lacks basic services such as a sewage treatment plant or proper waste management and everything is dumped directly into the lake. And, although it has suggested a form of government based on a condominium scheme in which both exercise joint sovereignty, nothing has been achieved. Images | Google Earth In Xataka | This is life on the most remote inhabited island on Earth: the improbable story of Tristan da Cunha

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