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150 years ago, Spain made a unique decision in the world. Ouigo and Iryo believe that Renfe uses it to get them out of the market

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They have no rolling stock. And the worst of all (for them) is that they are not going to have it. Ouigo, Iryo and a third rolling stock company have raised their voices before the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) to make it clear that the current system with two gauges of track reduces their competitiveness in our country compared to Renfe. And it doesn’t seem like it’s going to change in the short term. What has happened? The CNMC has published a document with the name “Report on technical barriers to the provision of railway services”. It sets out the challenges and interventions that Spain should carry out in the coming years. It specifies that the Spanish railway system has the obligation to improve interoperability with its neighboring countries, both to facilitate the flow of passengers and goods. But there is a drawback: the track widths. And this inconvenience has a very relevant economic impact. They complain. In the document the different postures are collected of those involved. And it states that “Ouigo, Iryo and a rolling stock manufacturer (which is not specified) warn that the uncertainty regarding the schedule and details of the Gauge Migration Plan, as well as the unification of the electrification system and the implementation of the ERTMS signaling system, makes decision-making on strategic investments difficult, and they ask that the Gauge Migration Plan be prepared and published as soon as possible.” In short: the two operators and the rolling stock manufacturer complain that Adif does not have a clear plan as to whether the Iberian high-speed track gauges are going to adapt to European standards, which move in standard gauge. The same happens with the unification of the electrification system and the definitive implementation of the ERTMS system. And they defend themselves. The position of Adif and Renfe is set out in the same document. Both companies “point out that incorporating gauge change technology in the rolling stock and infrastructure is less expensive and entails fewer interruptions in traffic than the migration of the infrastructure. On the other hand, both the AESF and the DG of the Railway Sector indicate that, in addition to Talgo, there is a second manufacturer of variable gauge rolling stock for high speed, CAF, although they admit that it is currently only approved to operate at 250 km/h.” In short: neither Renfe nor Adif They believe that adapting to the standard width is economically profitable given the high economic impact. The bottleneck. What Ouigo and Iryo defend is that the current situation and the commitment to trains with wide gauge technology leaves them behind. They have two reasons to maintain this. CAF can supply trains with this technology but they are only approved to travel at a maximum of 250 km/h. Talgo is the only company with this technology with approval to circulate up to 350 km/h. They are known as Talgo AVRIL but their production is committed to Renfe. And the results are not satisfactory either.. Beyond these two manufacturers, no one seems to want to get involved in the production of trains capable of changing tracks between standard and Iberian gauge. And the fact is that their production means meeting a demand that is still a niche or a rarity in the world railway system. Very juicy. The reluctance of Adif and Renfe is not strange either. For Adif it would mean a huge investment that has to be able to make profitable with the rest of the operators when the vast majority of current corridors in Spain already operate with standard gauge. For its part, Renfe does not want to let go of this trick either. Right now, the high speed to Galicia needs trains that are capable of moving between the Iberian gauge and the standard gauge if you do not want to transfer and the Spanish company is the only one that has the trains for this. The Galician corridor has also emerged as one of the most profitable. Travel has grown so much that it has made airlines retreat and now that they have to liberalize the line, maintaining the current situation guarantees that they will continue to be the only ones that will be able to offer this trip without transfers, which is a clear competitive advantage. Photo | Falk2 In Xataka | “Whoever wants to come, should invest”: Ouigo wanted to enter the Madrid-Galicia AVE but now sees it as impossible before 2030

China has been pushing the boundaries of engineering for years. Its gigantic high-speed tunnel boring machine has just given another example

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China has been developing large infrastructures and its own machinery to execute them for years, with projects that tend to stand out for their size and the technical control they require. It is not just about building more, but about doing so under increasingly demanding conditions. This pattern is repeated in very different areas, from energy to scientific research, and also in transport infrastructure. Under this logic, the appearance of new machines and projects is not an exception, but rather the continuation of a clear trend that now adds a new chapter with the “Linghang” tunnel boring machine. The advance. “Linghang” has completed the section under the Yangtze Riverwith a continuous excavation of just over 11 kilometers, according to CCTV. The machine began its journey on April 29, 2024 from Chongming Island, in Shanghai, and after 23 months of work, it completed the underwater section of the river, surpassed the south dam and came ashore in Taicang, in Jiangsu province. The movement is not minor: it involves completing the section under the watercourse, one of the key points of the work, and leaving the project one step away from its next milestone. What’s behind. The operation is integrated into the tunnel Chongming-Taicanga key work within the Shanghai-Nanjing section of the Shanghai-Chongqing-Chengdu high-speed corridor. With a total length of 14.25 kilometers, this infrastructure brings together several technical milestones, including the world’s longest single head excavation distance in a high-speed tunnel, with 11.32 kilometers, and a maximum depth of 89 meters under the Yangtze. The design contemplates the passage of trains at 350 km/h even in the underground section. The machine inside. The tunnel boring machine used in this project has unusual dimensions even within this type of work: it measures about 148 meters in length and weighs around 4,000 tons. according to Global Times. It is equipped with an intelligent control system called I-TBM, designed to automatically manage a large part of the excavation process, from internal pressure to the forward position or the exit of the material. Added to this are elements such as high-pressure seals, a long-lasting main bearing and a cutting head prepared to withstand demanding conditions under the river. A project that is not an isolated case. In recent years, the country has built facilities such as the Three Gorges Dam, the FAST telescope either the EAST reactorprojects that, although they belong to different areas, share the same base: scale, technical control and own development. In this context, this type of machinery is best understood not as a specific milestone, but as one more piece within a sustained line of work. A close reference. In Spain, the Mayrit tunnel boring machine, currently in use in the expansion of line 11 of the Madrid Metrooffers a useful point of comparison to understand the magnitude of this type of machinery. Measuring about 98 meters in length, weighing around 1,500 tons and with a diameter close to 9 meters, it is a large piece of equipment within the European context. Images | CCTV In Xataka | Czechia wanted to build a highway and found a problem: an intact 2,000-year-old Celtic city

an intact Celtic city 2,000 years old

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It seemed like the perfect location to build a highway. One of those in which the citizens of the Czech Republic want drive at 150 km/h. But when the bulldozers arrived, the workers realized something: someone was already there. Specifically, some citizens who had built their houses and businesses there 2,000 years before. What has happened? He East Bohemian Museum next to the University of Hradec Kralovehave found a 2,000-year-old city where a highway was planned. This has been confirmed by the museum itself, which in a statement also explains that the settlement was especially rich, taking into account the enormous amount of jewels and coins found. The road is the D35 highwaywhich is under construction in the east of the country. When completed, the road will add two milestones to the history of Czech infrastructure. The highway will be the second longest in the country and will contain the longest tunnel in the Czech Republic. The intention is to provide relief to the current D1 highway, which is currently saturated with cars and trucks. They were already there. 2,000 years ago, specifically. In the preliminary phase of excavating the land through which the road was to pass, archaeologists have found a “unique site in Bohemia”, according to the museum itself. This is a key city in the area. It is believed that its commercial and economic impact reached other nearby regions since it was located in the famous Amber Route. According to their calculations, the city would extend 25 hectares and they believe that its maximum splendor was reached in the 2nd century BC. Data that they have been able to extract from the enormous amount of metal objects such as coins, ceramics and remains of homes that have been found in the excavation. What was the city like? According to experts, such as those consulted by Live Sciencethe city developed in the La Tène era, that is, the final phase of the Iron Age. It must have been one of the most important cities in the area since productive structures and evidence that luxury ceramics were manufactured there have also been found at the site. Experts say that the city had to be a place of passage on long-distance journeys, which is why it was very important for all the settlements in the Middle Danube region and southern Germany. Two structures have also been found that could be one or two sanctuaries. Intact. One of the good news, they assure from the museumis that archaeologists have highlighted the good condition of the findings found. In fact, they point out that these have not been victims of illegal irrigation or those who search for treasures with metal detectors. This has made it possible to find a first layer with an unusually high density of objects. This has allowed the recovery of 22,000 bags with all types of finds, which places it as one of the most important excavations in the area. And now? Now in the Czech Republic they will have to look for an alternative to the road. The city found is located within the Litomyšl–Janov section, a particularly delicate section due to the number of urban agglomerations in the area. In fact, state entities point out that it has been difficult to reach an agreement with nearby cities. Finally, the section will have numerous bridges and a ring road has been designed next to the city of Litomyšl with the aim of reducing the traffic that currently circulates through this city. If there are no new surprises, the highway should be completed in 2029. Photo | Ministry of Transport of the Czech Republic and East Bohemian Museum In Xataka | Until 2020, Spain had the most praised roads in Europe. Now it has something else: a hole of 13,000 million euros

Japan has been cloning the same mouse continuously for 20 years. In the 58th generation, biology has said “enough”

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When we talk about cloning living beings, many of us may think of the famous experiment. with Dolly the sheep. But he was not the only one, since in Japan a biologist has spent the last two decades taking life to its most extreme limit, since since 2005 his team has set itself a major challenge: serially cloning mice from a single original female donor. 20 years and more than 1,000 mice later, the experiment has collided with biology. A collapse. The results of this great cloning experiment were published recently in Nature and reveal the definitive collapse of the genetic line in generation number 58. A very important finding that not only demonstrates that the continued asexual reproduction of mammals is unsustainable, but also shows us why evolution opted so strongly for sexual reproduction and the constant renewal of DNA in our species. His story. The experiment by Japanese researcher Wakayama is a milestone in reproductive biology. In 2013, the team had already managed to clone up to 25 generations, as was then published in Cell Stem Cell; yesHowever, what seemed like a theoretically infinite process began to show serious cracks from generation 25-27. As the generations progressed, birth rates began to plummet, to the point where we are now, where he points out in his latest article that the incessant accumulation of genetic mutations was a constant. Here it was seen how the animals began to have serious genetic alterations with complete losses of chromosomes with a probability three times higher than natural sexual reproduction. Its consequences. That an animal sees its genetic material altered is not harmless, because these alterations were seen to directly affect embryonic development and the placenta, making each new generation more difficult to obtain than the previous one. But the critical point came in generation 58 of the mice, where the model finally collapsed. And the culprit of this collapse was none other than these genetic alterations, which curiously did not alter the physique of the individuals, who seemed completely healthy, but the weight of the genetic damage made it impossible to continue the chain. The impressions. From the Spanish countryside, Lluís Montoliu, CSIC researcher, has qualified this “heroic” experiment, since it suggests that this test would be impossible to do in Europe due to ethical standards and animal welfare that exist. But he sees it as important, since it proves the evolutionary superiority of sexual reproduction. The other side of the coin. Big questions arise here, since if serial cloning fails due to DNA fragmentation and damage… How is biology protected when it uses sexual reproduction? Here the answer is to have a constant renewal of the interior of our cells. Paradoxically, while science shows that copying the same DNA over and over again leads to genetic disaster, new clinical studies on human fertility are revealing that, to maintain the highest quality in male genetic material, frequent renewal is key. But in addition, it also makes it clear that we are still quite far from being able to clone humans to have two identical people, because in the end it is something that can go really wrong. Images | digitale.de In Xataka | A team of experts wants to resurrect extinct bison. There are many reasons to be skeptical

Spain has been looking for a way to make mass tourism more digestible for years. The US threatens to do the job for her

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In 2025, Spain was left with the desire to reach the 100 million tourists foreigners. Now a cloud on the other side of the Atlantic threatens to move that milestone further away also in 2026. In a turbulent scenario, conditioned by the warthe brent barrel climbing and domestic politics, more and more Americans are rethinking their trips abroad. This is suggested by at least one report from the consulting firm Cirium, which has detected a “puncture” both in flight reservations between Europe and the US and (and here is the key) from the US to Europe. The data is relevant because the flow of Americans connects with other fronts that affect Spain, such as the demand of the tourism sector or the housing. A percentage: 11.2%. The data has advanced it USA Today. In a chronicle on tourism and international travel patterns, the newspaper slips a couple of data from the consulting firm Cirium that leave a clear reading: the demand for transatlantic flights is suffering. And quite obviously. According to their analysis, reservations from Europe to the United States have experienced a year-on-year decrease (July 2025-July 2026) of 15.34%. In the opposite direction, from the United States to Europe, a drop of 11.19% has also been recorded. Country of origin Tourists (2025) AVERAGE expenditure per tourist € (2025) United Kingdom 19,084,423 1,240 France 12,767,491 908 Germany 12,050,833 1,317 Italy 5,704,989 956 Netherlands 5,007,641 1,423 USA 4,456,665 2,297 Portugal 3,383,482 602 The alarms go off. The falls are striking, but they are even more shocking when compared to measurements that the consultancy managed at the beginning of the year. The outlook they drew at that time was also negative and predicted falls, but not so abrupt. Europe-US reserves pointed to a decline of 14.22% and US-Europe reserves of 7.27%. The reading is clear: travel forecasts have worsened, especially those of Americans. Why is it important? That the US has lost appeal among foreign tourists is no surprise. In 2025, after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the trade and immigration war with which his mandate began, there began to be talk of a tourist boycott to the country of the stars and stripes. In 2026 the outlook is not simple either. The US has the powerful claim of the World Cup (it is the host along with Mexico and Canada), but the year has still started losing travelers and Oxford Economics estimates that, despite the ‘FIFA effect’, 2026 will close with a discreet growth tourism of 3.9%. What is striking about Cirium’s analysis is that the flow of tourists does not seem to be suffering only in the ‘USA direction’. Demand also pushes in the opposite direction, from Americans themselves, who are less interested in crossing the pond to visit Europe. USA Today cites two cases: reservations to Frankfurt have been reduced by 26.8% and those to London by 11.31%. Half surprise. The truth is that Cirium’s data only confirms the forecasts released several months ago by YouGov, which in December published a study in which he already warned that Americans would face their international vacations with some “caution” in 2026. The report left out some percentages for reflection. For example, 60% of those surveyed admitted that they never traveled abroad for pleasure, something that is largely explained by the cost of flying. Another interesting fact is that 43% admit to having traveled less abroad during the last year. But… And why is that? There is no single answer. When talking about the decline in demand in December, YouGov slid two factors why Americans pack less now. First, due to “economic uncertainty”, a reason cited by almost a third (28%) of those surveyed. Second, due to the increased cost of travel, something that 18% complained about. Since then the picture has become more complex. Added to the uncertainty are geopolitical tensions and the conflict in the Middle East, which, remember USA Todaybeyond the rise in oil prices, has “revived fears of terrorism.” The newspaper recalls that messages like the one left not long ago by Jeh Johnson, former Secretary of Homeland Security, about the security risks derived from the war in Iran weigh on US travelers. There would be another factor influencing Americans’ flight plans. The prolonged government shutdown from the end of 2025 has increased the burden on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which partly translates into long lines at the country’s airports. Now we add the changes to the airport map caused by the war in Iran, the foreseeable increase in the cost of transportation and flight cancellation due to increased costs. Does Spain care? Yes. The US is not only a world power. It also represents an important fishing ground for tourists and expats interested in spending time in our country. According to data from the INE, last year Spain received 96.8 million of foreign visitors. Of them some 4.4 million (almost 5%) came from the US, making it one of the main foreign markets. Its average expenditure per person is also high: 2,297 euros in 2025, above the average (1,392) and nations like Germany. Its weight is relevant if Spain wants to reach the goal of 100 million visitors. It is also felt in another market closely connected to tourism: housing. Both through vacation rentals and the expatswhich in recent years have set their sights on the European market due to their attractiveness. In fact there are experts who they already warn that there are areas like Mallorca that are arousing more and more appetite among Americans looking for luxury homes. Image | Martijn Vonk (Unsplash) In Xataka | China stripped Japan of its tourists in hopes of causing an economic hole. Nothing could be further from reality

For 15 years a couple lived in a house inside Disneyland. None of the visitors noticed

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When we talk about amusement parks, Disney is king. Although in recent years we have seen amazing ideas (such as the spectacular Japan’s Super Nintendo World), the Disneylands continue to have a lot of pull. In fact, some parks continue to be updated with corners like the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge that, after five years of constructionopened as the largest expansion in the park’s history. There are also additions such as Avengers Campus or Tomorrowland. Being so huge, it is normal that stories of all kinds are found in its magical corners (sometimes they don’t turn out well if you do not pay the corresponding extra), and one of those stories It is that of the couple who lived for more than 15 years in their own house within the park. It is about the marriage between Owen and Dolly Pope and his house was on the park land even before the park itself was built. Disneyland began construction in 1954 and opened in 1955, but the story begins long before that. Owen and Dolly were married in 1935 and worked performing horse shows throughout California. In 1950, Harper Goff, one of Disney’s leading artists at the time, saw the couple in one of these shows and recommended Walt – Disney – go see them. At that time, Disney was passing a bad time. They were in the middle of a financial crisis and the company saw that it had to diversify. For this reason, they began to consider entering other businesses, amusement parks being one of them. Therefore, the idea of ​​creating Disneyland was already on Disney’s mind and, after seeing the show, he arranged to have lunch with the Popes. At first, they thought that what he wanted was to hire them for a movie, but what arose were plans to build a park and Disney wanted the Popes to perform their shows there, also managing the activities with the horses. In 1951, the couple moved to Disney’s studios in Burbank, being the only ones who, along with the military who occupied the studios during World War II, lived inside them. This is what the house would look like inside when the Popes lived there. They lived in a caravan inside the studios while Owen built stables, but one day they were given the choice of a house inside the park. It was located where the Big Thunder Ranch area was later built, one of the wings of the park focused on the ‘Wild West’ theme, and they began living there three days before the park opened. Making room for a galaxy far, far away Evidently, they did not live because of the good will of Disney, but because they were in charge of maintaining everything related to the horse shows and activities with both horses and ponies. Apart from this, Disney staff visited regularly to ask how they could improve the shows and what people wanted to see, so it was a very important part of park management. With brutal financial results, Disney began to explore the idea of ​​opening theme parks in other parts of the world, Florida being one of them. So, while Walt Disney World was being built on the other side of the United States, Owen built harnesses or tackle for the horses in the new park, but from his home in the Californian park. In 1971, Dolly and Owen moved to Florida to oversee construction of the Fort Wilderness Resort area of ​​the new park, and with everything in place, in 1975 they both retired. They were the first cast members to retire. What happened to the house? Well, the story has a crumb because. It is not a decorated house, since the Pope They lived there like anyone does in our homes, but their work was much closer and they could walk. The funny thing is that thousands of visitors passed by his house every day without knowing that… well, that it was a normal, ordinary house. However, it was abandoned after the move to Florida and was not used again except for some staff meetings. There came a time when a set showing how the Popes lived was put up and could be visited at certain times, but it was time to build the Star Wars megapark. The Pope house and stables. Image of Dadlogic The area today, with the Star Wars expansion and the approximate location of the Pope house Disney has the ability to make everything a commercial product or have appeal and did not demolish the Pope housebut the transfer to an area near the park that is publicly accessible, but on Disneyland property. On its façade you can see an identifying plaque that tells its history and where the Pope’s house and stables used to be, we now have the parking lot of the Millennium Falcon. Images | Disney and Google Maps In Xataka | Drugs, betrayals and trusts: the bizarre story behind Walt Disney’s billionaire inheritance

After 10 years in prison for not revealing where 500 gold coins are, the world’s greatest treasure hunter is now free to go after them

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Right off the bat, the name of Tommy Thompson It may not sound familiar to you at all. Besides ocean engineer and inventor, he is one of the greatest treasure hunters in the world, a profession that inevitably evokes Indiana Jones and a life of cinema. And well, Thompson has it: a few days ago he was released from prison after serving 10 years of his sentence. The crime? Do not reveal where 500 gold coins from a famous sunken ship are (among other things). The discovery. In 1988 Tommy Thompson and his team, the Columbus-America Discovery Group, they found the remains of the steamboat SS Central America at a depth of 8,000 feet in the Atlantic, about 200 miles east of Charleston, South Carolina. To achieve this, they used Bayesian search theory and a remotely operated vehicle. The SS Central America was known as the “Gold Ship” for something: how much gold it transported. How much? good question. The gold ship. To give some context, it was the time of the gold rush and the mission of the ship was to transport that valuable metal from the new San Francisco Mint to increase the reserves for the banks of the eastern United States. He never did. On September 3, 1857, while operating on the Panama route, it sank off the coast of South Carolina when it was involved in a category 2 hurricane. The ship carried 477 passengers, 101 crew members and much, much gold. In fact, its sinking was one of the triggers for the panic of 1857. I don’t have the accounts. Gary Kinder spent a decade studying the event to write his “Ship of Gold”, where details which was carrying 3 tons of gold and possibly a similar amount of passengers (undisclosed and therefore unquantifiable) and it was also rumored that there was another 15 tons of gold in a secret army shipment. However, a US Department of Defense document declassified in 1971 reported that the official cargo was 11.2 tons of gold (not including personal or secret gold). The American naval history magazine, the closest source to the discovery, It does not give a figure in weight but a value: The gold consigned to New York banks was equivalent to 40 million dollars at the time. In general, the figure of 30,000 pounds of gold (about 14,000 kg) is also relatively widespread. But what was on the boat is one thing and what they found is another. Or they said find. Bob Evans, chief scientist of the expedition (and another one that followed in 2014). from the hand of Odyssey), account for the Seattle Times that in 1988 they found two tons of gold. The legal conflict. Much of that gold was later sold to a trading company for about $50 million. as reported by Reuters. But according to those 161 investors who financed $12.7 million for the expedition, they never reaped the benefits. So In 2005 they filed a lawsuit for breach of contract and concealment of assets. Thompson first secluded himself in Florida, then disappeared and lived under a false identity. He was finally arrested in 2015. The case reached a dead end: the judge in the case ordered him to reveal the whereabouts of 500 missing gold coins, but the engineer He claimed not to know where they are. He was declared in contempt, which is why he has served a decade in prison. The liberation. Today Tommy Thompson is 73 years old and a few days ago regained his freedom because, according to the judge, keeping him imprisoned does not work. CBS News picks up the opinion of civil law experts who explain that it is very unusual for a sentence for civil contempt to last so long. He has neither revealed where the coins are nor has he settled the debt with his investors. Meanwhile, the treasure of the SS Central America continues to feed the myth: in 2022 was auctioned one of the largest bars on the ship, 866 ounces (almost 27 kg), reaching a price of 2.16 million dollars. In Xataka | I dedicate myself to digging with a metal detector and I have more than 4 million followers on YouTube In Xataka | A man from Osaka left 21 gold bars at the doors of City Hall. I only had one requirement: renew the pipes Cover | Olga ga and Zlaťáky.cz

The damage to the oil and gas industry will take years to repair

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The Third Gulf War is here, and while financial markets cling to the hope of a quick resolution, the physical reality tells a much darker story. The world is currently facing the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. As detailed The New York Timesbased on the analyzes of energy expert Jason Bordoff, the de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has taken about 20 million barrels per day off the board, which represents 20% of world consumption. To put this in perspective, the International Energy Agency (IEA) recalls that the historic Arab embargo of 1973 “barely” withdrew 4.5 million barrels per day. The logistical, political and infrastructure damage that Operation Epic Fury has unleashed in the Persian Gulf is so profound that, regardless of what is signed in the dispatches, it will take years to return to normality. The new global funnel. Even if the war ended today and the Strait were 100% reopened, untangling the monumental logjam would take months. As Rory Johnston, oil market researcher, explains, to the magazine New Statesman“we are talking about two to three months just to renormalize the global system.” Oil tankers are piled up on both sides of the strait, and a sudden restart would cause a collapse at unloading terminals, reminiscent of the worst bottlenecks of the Covid-19 pandemic. It won’t be suddenly. To this we must add a key factor: the ships will not sail again the day peace is signed. Maritime insurers will require months of proof that the Strait is safe before returning to cover oil tankers without imposing unaffordable premiums. But the situation is even more complex. As detailed in a recent analysis by my colleague Miguel Jorge in Xatakathe dynamics of the Strait have drastically mutated. Iran has turned this artery into a kind of maritime “VIP discotheque.” It is no longer a free international transit route, but rather a selective access system where Tehran decides who passes. While US allies and Israel are banned, countries like Spain – which refused to participate in the military coalition – have received “passes” for their ships. The root of the problem. If the recovery will be so slow it is, fundamentally, because the infrastructure is burning. Unlike previous conflicts, Iran’s strategy is based on an asymmetric war that seeks to destroy the energy pillars of its neighbors. The most devastating example is found in Qatar, where the Iranian drone attack on the Ras Laffan facilities—the largest Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export plant in the world— has caused damage which will take between three and five years to repair. Furthermore, we must add temporary closures in Saudi refineries like Ras Tanura that guarantee long-term disruption. The domino effect has already reached the earth. Given the impossibility of removing the crude oil by sea, the storage tanks are bursting. Iraq has been forced to close wells and cut production by 70% simply because there is nowhere to put the oil. This is what is known in the industry as “locked-in” oil, and reactivating all that stopped machinery requires weeks of complex technical work. The specter of chronic inflation. The impact of this paralysis goes far beyond the gasoline pump and will condition the economy for the next five years. As he warns The Economistthe sustained rise in energy prices threatens to entrench global inflation, quickly pushing it to an unbearable 5% or 6%. This means that the cost of living, interest rates and commodity prices will be marked by this crisis for years, slowing down any attempt at real recovery. Added to this is a silent time bomb: food. Not only crude oil transits through the Strait of Hormuz, but a third of the world’s fertilizers. If global agriculture runs out of this vital input, we face a global food crisis that will distort harvests and supermarket prices in the coming seasons. On the threshold of $200 per barrel. If the blockade persists, economic pain will be inevitable. Macquarie Group analysts warn in Bloomberg that if the conflict extends until June, the price of crude oil could reach a whopping 200 dollars. The objective of this extreme price is none other than to force the “demand destruction“: that it be so expensive that people and industries simply stop consuming. The most pessimistic voices warn of an economic catastrophe. Larry Fink, the CEO of the financial giant BlackRock, warned in an interview with the BBC that if the barrel settles at $150, the world will plunge into a “severe and deep recession.” And the consequences are already visible, as jet fuel in Asia has already exceeded $200. Meanwhile, magazines as Fortune report that Goldman Sachs has raised the probability of a recession in the US to 30%. The Wall Street mirage and useless patches. It is fascinating and terrifying to observe the disconnection between physical reality and financial markets. Wall Street lives “spellbound” by algorithms and verbal intervention (jawboning) by Donald Trump. All it takes is a tweet from the American president announcing vague peace plans—quickly denied by Iran—for the stock markets to rise and the price of a barrel to drop momentarily. Investors blindly trust the phenomenon WAD (“Trump Always Chickens Out”), believing that the president will back down before sinking the economy. But tweets don’t fill the tanks. To try to mitigate the blow, the International Energy Agency has coordinated the historic release of 400 million barrels of its strategic reserves. It sounds like a lot, but as the experts consulted by Al Jazeerathat amount barely covers 20 days of the oil that has stopped flowing through Hormuz. It’s a band-aid for an arterial bleed. In fact, such is the desperation of the West that the US administration has gone so far as to temporarily lift sanctions on Russiaallowing it to sell its crude oil on the open market in order to try to relieve the pumps. The big silent winner. While the West is suffocating with inflation and supply problems, just a few … Read more

A user has been powering his house with 1,000 laptop batteries and solar panels for 10 years. Others are already trying to copy the idea

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Second Life Storage is one of those places that seems to belong to another era. In the era of Reddit and Discord, this is a forum, one dedicated to a single topic: batteries. One of its users is Glubux, and it has been sharing progress on a most curious DIY project for years: a house powered by more than 1,000 batteries. The key is that they are recycled laptop batteries. And he has created a school. Glubux Powerwall. On November 9, 2019, Glubux opened a forum entry in which he shared some photos and detailed his project: he had started collecting laptop batteries years ago, he had collected about 650 and was doing tests to check stability, performance and possibilities. Little by little he was sharing news such as the packs – cells – that he was creating with dozens of interconnected batteries with a great objective: to power the house with standard lithium batteries. These cells are not created by chance: after dissecting each laptop battery, it classifies the units by capacity and rebuilds them into stable modules. This is how it started in 2017 | Photo: Glubux The idea was to create a large system that would work together like a conventional battery, but using those recycled ‘batteries’. He tried it and ended up connecting several packs to the home power. Less than a month later, Glubux commented that it had even successfully connected a vacuum cleaner for a total of 1,200 W of power and that there were no symptoms of heating. It was time to move on. This is how it was in 2024 | Photo: Glubux The shed. But of course, if batteries have taught us anything, it is that handling them is complicated and dangerous if something goes wrong. No matter how much care we take, something so homemade is likely to fail at some point, which could start a major fire. Having something like this inside the house is crazy, so Glubux created a very small shed on his plot, but enough to house the growing collection of more than 1,000 batteries. Last year we already commented that the latest of their reports was that none had shown signs of deterioration (such as swelling) and, after eight years, they had not had to change any cells. Now, his house was running on solar panels that sent power to homemade recycled battery cells. Photo: Glubux Feeding… everything. After expanding the solar installation (24 panels with 440 W), the storage capacity increased to 56 kWh and the system, which operates at 24 volts to feed A 3 kVA converter can power the house with its lights and appliances without problem. But it is not the only thing, since it also charges both a Tesla and an electric Nissan. Creating school. Glubux hasn’t participated in his thread for a while, but that doesn’t mean he’s dead. Other users have been sharing their adventures when creating similar systems. Some were even more veteran and had more batteries, and the most interesting thing is that they have created a space in which advice is given about the cells, the capacity of each of the cells or how to join batteries so that the systems are stable. Other similar projects | Photo: Daniel88 Not so homemade. These projects are almost as exciting as finding yourself in 2026 a furo so rudimentary that it still has an active community, but it must be said that powering the house with a wall of conventional batteries is not so exotic. In fact, Panasonic recently said it was reaching the limit of its capacity to produce battery cells for data centers. These are cells very similar to those of the Glubux project although, obviously, initially created to power systems such as data center racks. They are still systems made up of packs made up of hundreds of ‘batteries’. And now I can only wonder if Glubux’s silence is because it is building its own data center next to the shed. Images | Glubux, Daniel88

Someone has passed ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ to an AI text detector. He said he is an AI

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Tools to detect text generated by AI They systematically fail when analyzing great literary works. The biblical Genesis, the US Constitution, ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ are identified by these detectors as creations of machines. The reason has a perverse logic: what algorithms interpret as AI writing is actually good writing. Robot Bible. The tools for detect AI generated text They have been accumulating absurd verdicts for months. You just have to submit ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel García Márquez to one of these systems and you will obtain that 100% of the novel has artificial origin. The biblical Genesis or the North American Constitution do not fare better: the ZeroGPT tool rates the first text with a 88.2% chance of being AI writing and the second, as written by AI at 96.21%. Experiments with ‘Harry Potter’ or the lyrics of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ show similar results. The pattern is so consistent that it goes beyond the anecdote: these tools have an underlying problem. Good bad. The irony is that AI-generated text detectors were designed to identify writing done by machines. However, they end up pointing out exactly the opposite: texts that exhibit greater stylistic care, greater internal coherence, and greater mastery of narrative rhythm are considered unlikely to have been made by humans. That is, writing well, in technical terms, is similar to writing as a language model. How it works. To understand why this happens You also have to understand how these tools work. Most are based on two main indicators. The first is perplexity (perplexity): how predictable the choice of words in a text is. If each word follows the previous one in an expected way, perplexity is low. If the text jumps unpredictably between registers, vocabulary, and syntactic structures, perplexity is high. The second indicator is the burst (burstiness): the variation in the length of the sentences. Humans alternate long paragraphs with very short sentences, while language models tend to produce sentences of more uniform length. A well-constructed text (precise vocabulary, clear structure, uniform rhythm) has low perplexity by design. Like García Márquez, who chooses the exact words in his texts, with almost surgeon-like precision. The Genesis has an almost hypnotic narrative cadence, deliberate, without noise, like a song with balanced meter. “Writing well” is a very complex concept, but it can mean, among other things, being predictable in the most virtuous sense: that the reader understands the text effortlessly. And that, for a detector trained in distinguishing “what a language model would do”, sets off alarm bells. It’s the same. What complicates the problem is that generative AI models have been trained, precisely, with quality human writing. ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini produce fluent, coherent, low-perplexity texts because they learned from millions of human texts that also had those characteristics. Detecting writing done by an AI and differentiating it from good human writing is an almost impossible task for these algorithms. Another way to fail. These criteria can take multiple forms. For example: a study on the performance of seven popular detectors when analyzing newspaper essays. TOEFL (official English exam for non-English speakers) in front of essays by American high school students. The results: 61.22% of essays written by non-native students were marked as generated by AI. In 20% of the cases, the seven detectors agreed on the erroneous diagnosis. The native student texts passed without problems. The explanation is the same mechanics of perplexity: someone who writes in their second language uses a more limited vocabulary, simpler structures and fewer grammatical variations. It doesn’t write badly, but its tools are more limited, and AI detectors systematically penalize writers with less command of the language. The team that carried out the study recommended avoiding using these tools in evaluation contexts, especially when international students are involved. In Spain, an episode of this type took place: In 2024, the Australian Catholic University opened files to nearly 6,000 students using Turnitin, the most widespread screening platform in universities. Many of them had not used AI at any time. Force the machine. Edward Tian, ​​CEO of GPTZero (one of the reference detectors, with more than eight million users) openly acknowledged that many tools in the sector adjust their thresholds to intentionally generate more false positiveswith the aim of not passing through texts generated by AI even if that means wrongly pointing out a human text. Tian talks about how GPTZero fights to avoid this proliferation of false positives, but the adulteration of the results is there as a clear problem. The last case. The publisher Hachette has just canceled the publication in the United Kingdom and the United States of ‘Shy Girl‘, a novel that the Pangram tool has detected as 78% generated by AI. The author denies having used the tool. Whatever the truth in that specific case, the episode illustrates the factual power that these tools are acquiring: they can destroy publishing contracts and put humans under suspicion before there is any definitive proof on the subject. In Xataka | OpenAI has an AI-written text detector that works almost perfectly. And he doesn’t want to put it on the market.

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