years

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

by

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

by

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.

When Sora was released many assumed it was “the death of Hollywood.” Only two years, then Sora no longer exists

by

In February 2024, OpenAI published on X a string of AI-generated videos with his new model, Sora. Although today, after two years of progress, they even feel outdated, at the time the result was convincing enough for the media around the world to start headlines that Hollywood had a very serious problem. Two years later, Sora does not exist. Panic effect. The effect of this presentation with videos was immediate: MIT Technology Review, for example, described them as “impressive“, although warning that they had probably been chosen and were not representative of the output usual. That did not stop the narrative: for weeks, the dominant conversation in the specialized media was that film studios were facing an almost perfect replacement tool: synthetic actors, sets generated in seconds, automated post-production… The Hollywood unions, which they had signed agreements with the studios the previous year after a historic strike they put the issue back on the table. Two bombs. Sora’s story has two moments of media panic, separated by eighteen months. The first arrived in February 2024, with the presentation of the model described above. There was talk that Hollywood had a serious problem, that the almost perfect replacement tool already existed and that the studios were not prepared to face this threat. The second came with the launch of Sora 2 in September 2025with real faces inserted in videos generated by AI and with third-party intellectual property by default, unless the prompts expressly requested otherwise. All of this multiplied the volume and intensity of the alarm in Hollywood and the media. What was said In February 2024, coverage of Sora’s first model mixed amazement and alarm in similar proportions. Fortune commented that OpenAI had moved the generative AI battle directly to Hollywood. NBCNews asked filmmakers if this was the end of Hollywood, and some responded that it wasn’t yet. IndieWire He sensed that Sora could mean the apocalypse of cinema. The cycle of apocalyptic headlines with Sora 2 was much more intense. CNBC declared that the app was challenging Hollywood and causing panic in the film industry. deadline He said Hollywood was raw. LA Times He spoke of a battle that was worsening and a firestorm unleashed in the sector. slatewell, he talked about how AI was about to crush Hollywood as we had known it. What happened then. The panic increased in December 2025, when Disney, the most careful entertainment company in the world with its intellectual property, signed a three-year agreement with OpenAI: investment of 1 billion dollars and access to more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and ‘Star Wars’ so that Sora users could generate them in their videos. Disney+ would broadcast a curated selection of that content. It was the definitive legitimation, which has only lasted 90 days. OpenAI has closed Sora before a single dollar has changed hands. Property problems. Sora’s problems have not only been financial. The app has accumulated a long list of controversies: deepfakes of deceased public figuresmassive use of copyrighted characters without permission prior, and the appearance of external tools to remove watermarks that identified AI-generated content. In November 2025, CODA (Japanese association representing, among others, Studio Ghibli and Square Enix) sent a formal letter to OpenAI demanding that it stop using its intellectual property to train the model. The families of Robin Williams and George Carlin They publicly asked for it to be blocked generating videos with your images. Moderating generative video content at scale turned out to be much more complex than moderating text or image. The consequences of hype. Analyst Ed Zitron criticized this attitude of the media, stating that they did not cover the launch of Sora but rather they amplified their marketing. Saying that Sora was a real threat to Hollywood was, from the beginning, an extrapolation built on selected demos and clips of a few seconds. Thousands of audiovisual professionals spent months convinced that their industry was about to be replaced by a tool that, according to OpenAI’s own numbers, never found enough users willing to pay $200 a month for it. The hype cycle has real consequences: it inflates expectations that are not met, generates costly defensive decisions, and when the product closes, no one takes critical stock. Sora’s coverage is a textbook case of how uncritical amplification of tech demos can be confused with industry analysis, and the damage that attitude can do. Hollywood is still alive. The closure of Sora does not erase the generative video sector in one fell swoop: runwaywhich rejected an acquisition offer from Meta, currently leads the sector with its Gen-4.5 model, along with I see 3.1 from Google and Chinese models Kling and Seedance. These tools are absorbing the space that OpenAI abandons. Who no one absorbs is Hollywood. The film industry, with all your problems (reorganizations, box office decline, threat of streaming), remains a profitable business built on decades of well-established creation, distribution chains and franchises that no generative model can replicate with a prompt. The question is not whether AI will transform audiovisual production (it is already doing so, in post-production, pre-visualization and marketing content creation) but in what real time frames and under what viable economic models. For now, the market responds that generating photorealistic video on a massive scale is computationally very expensive and that consumer users are not willing to pay what it costs. Disney signing Sora wasn’t evidence that Hollywood was in danger. It was, rather, evidence that big studios want to be in the AI ​​conversation, not outside of it. In Xataka | Seedance’s strategy was to copy first, go viral later and back away later. Until Hollywood said “enough”

The United States had not manufactured its most critical uranium for 20 years. He has just resurrected his production with an old metallurgy trick

by

In the hills of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, lies a place that carries the weight of contemporary history in its foundation: the Y-12 National Security Complex. According to the files of the US Department of Energy (DOE)these facilities were born in 1943 as a vital cog in the Manhattan Project. However, for more than two decades, the halls of its most advanced nuclear processing sector had remained in a prolonged dormancy. Today, that industrial silence has been broken. The United States has just ended a long gap in its domestic processing capabilities. The milestone that marks this rebirth is as visual as it is forceful: the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has successfully manufactured its first “button” of purified enriched uranium, an achievement that opens a new era in the American nuclear deterrent. In short. From the NNSA have confirmed the restart of uranium purification at the Y-12 complex. It is not a sudden step; This achievement comes months after, in September 2025, the start of the project will be authorized electrorefining. This is the first authorization of its kind since the opening of the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility 15 years ago. More in depth. The new process allows installation slam the door definitively on the old Y-12 plants. For years, uranium processing depended on complex chemical treatments that were inefficient and, above all, posed greater risks for workers. The new era abandons these legacy systems in favor of much cleaner and safer technology. A strategic milestone. According to the statement from the NNSAthis purified uranium is a critical material that will support unavoidable national security missions, from the production of nuclear weapons to providing the fuel needed for the reactors of the United States Navy’s aircraft carriers and submarines. This effort is not a coincidence, but respond directly to the security and defense guidelines promoted under the mandate of President Donald Trump. Added to this military strategy is a pressing need for independence of resources. In November of last year, the US Geological Survey (USGS) added uranium to its final list of 60 critical minerals. This government directive has a clear objective: to shield the country against the risks of interruption in global supply chains. The “magic” of electrorefining. The secret behind this renaissance is called electrorefining. Although it may sound like science fiction, it is based on well-established commercial processes commonly used to purify everyday metals such as aluminum, titanium or copper. The method was originally developed by the prestigious Argonne National Laboratory and later perfected by the Y-12 development team itself. A simple process (at first glance). To understand how it works, the magazine Science Direct explains it in a simple way: The process uses an electrolytic cell where two electrodes are immersed in a chemical solution. One of them acts as an anode (where the impure recycled material is placed) and the other as a cathode. Through a controlled electrical reaction, metal ions travel to the cathode, where the pure metal is deposited, while the impurities fall to the bottom as an “anode sludge.” The result: An astonishing 99.9% purity. The format: An NNSA spokesperson He explained that the process It first generates “purified uranium crystals,” which are then melted in a furnace to create the compact, secure, high-purity uranium “buttons.” Additionally, Nikolai Sokov, senior researcher at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, explained that this innovative technology allows recovering and recycling uranium from various byproducts. Along the same lines, this method drastically reduces the waste generated compared to old chemical treatments. The weight of history: environmental debt. No story about the Y-12 complex would be complete without looking at its darker side. The background documents of the US Department of Energy rreveal the heavy inheritance of the Cold War. During the 1950s and 1960s, facilities used massive amounts of mercury for lithium separation. The ecological toll was devastating: an estimated 700,000 pounds (more than 317,000 kilos) of mercury were lost in the buildings and the surrounding environment. Today, to contrast technological advancement with the mistakes of the past, the top priority of the Environmental Management (EM) program at Y-12 is the cleanup of this mercury. He DOE informs that it is being built the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility. Scheduled for 2027, this plant will be capable of treating up to 3,000 gallons of water per minute. This vital infrastructure will allow older, more contaminated facilities (such as Alpha-2 by 2029 and Beta-1 by 2030) to be safely demolished without mercury ending up in the nearby Upper East Fork Poplar Creek. A process of metamorphosis. Audrey Beldio, NNSA Principal Deputy Administrator for Production Modernization, summed it up forcefully in the statements. project startup: “Electrorefining revolutionizes the processing of enriched uranium.” With uranium flowing again into Y-12, the United States is not just abandoning aging infrastructure. It is sending a clear message to the world: after twenty years of lethargy, the US nuclear sector has taken a leap towards a future where technological efficiency, the safety of its workers and the reliability of its arsenal are once again the spearhead of its defense policy. Image | HeUraniumC Xataka | While the West does not decide on nuclear, China already has a reactor 100 times more efficient than traditional ones

China has been patiently preparing for a major global energy crisis for years. And now it reaps its fruits

by

The Third Gulf War is here and the global oil market looks into the abyss. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has unleashed an unprecedented logistical panic and has catapulted the barrel of Brent well above $100. The panic is palpable throughout the Asian continent: The Philippines cuts working hours, Singapore sends its office workers to telework and Thailand intervenes in diesel prices in desperation. Just a few thousand kilometers away, China observes the global chaos with an almost insulting coldness. The Asian giant has not been saved by providence, but by millimetric planning. Just as centuries ago it built a vast stone infrastructure to stop nomadic invasions, Beijing has been building an invisible Great Wall for more than a decade to isolate itself from fossil volatility. The seed of this resistance must be found five years ago. In 2021, during a visit to an oil field, President Xi Jinping ruled that China should keep the “energy rice bowl” firmly in its own hands. According to The Economisttransferring this traditional metaphor (historically used to appeal to food sovereignty) to energy, made clear a state obsession: the country was going to prepare tirelessly for the worst possible scenario. Is patience a good bet? There are several popular proverbs and sayings that say that whoever waits, victory will be sweeter. In the case of China it is a pure and simple pragmatic and geostrategic application. As we analyze in Xatakathis shielding is the direct result of the strategy “Made in China 2025” designed a decade ago. The Chinese government understood that dependence on foreign oil and gas was its greatest military and economic vulnerability. Mass electrification was not an environmental whim, but a matter of national survival. Today, China generates more than a quarter of its electricity with sun and wind, rewriting the world order and dividing the board between the old “petrostates” and the new “electrostates.” But while that transition is complete, Beijing has not neglected the fossil economy. The Chinese model puts raw resilience before the efficiency of Western markets, As a column points out Five Days. The best example is what happened last year. While global markets debated an alleged oil oversupply, China took advantage of the low prices to spend $10 billion buying heavily sanctioned oil from Russia, Venezuela and Iran; a crude oil that, in reality, I did not need immediately. The result of this silent hoarding is that today China has massive Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR), estimated between 900 and 1.4 billion barrels. This mattress is enough to cover between 96 and 140 days of your internal demand without caring for a single drop from the outside. The shield in action This long-term preparation has allowed China to deploy an arsenal of almost immediate containment measures since the conflict in the Gulf broke out: Closing energy borders: The first lightning order from the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission was to demand from their state giants of refining (PetroChina, Sinopec, CNOOC) to immediately suspend gasoline and diesel exports to protect the supply of the domestic market. The “shadow fleet”: Despite the war and the blockade, oil continues to flow to China. Iran is exporting a daily average of 2.1 million barrels using a fleet of old oil tankers without tracking systems that operate outside the US financial system. Land alternatives: To completely avoid the vulnerable Strait of Hormuz, the Asian power is squeezing to the maximum the land pipelines that connect it directly with Russia and Kazakhstan. Renewable bestiality: This is your shield more impenetrable: The price of solar panels and electric cars does not rise when there is a war in the Persian Gulf. In July 2024, China reached its goal of 1,200 GW of wind and solar capacity, achieving it six years ahead of schedule. In addition, new energy vehicles have already exceeded 60% of total car sales in the country by the end of 2025. Megainfrastructures and market reform: To manage the intermittency of renewables, increased their storage capacity by batteries 75% in 2025. Furthermore, the political response does not stop, as detailed ChinaDailyhave announced that the National Energy Administration will launch urgent reforms ahead of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) to create a “unified national energy market” capable of managing the volatility of having so much green energy on the grid. The dominance of uranium: Faced with the need to fuel its 58 operational nuclear reactors and the 27 under construction, Beijing has budgeted about $16 billion for resource storage in 2026. This includes the exploitation of gigantic deposits in the Ordos Desert and the pioneering extraction of uranium from seawater. The small print However, China’s energy “rice bowl” still has cracks. To keep the system afloat, the country remains dependent on an immense, dirty safety net: the coal. In 2024, this mineral supplied 56% of its energy primary and, currently, they have more than 300 plants under construction. As emphasized a report of ChinaPower Projectdespite the pollution, the vast and abundant supply of coal offers Chinese policymakers a true final “safety net” against disruptions from other sources. But the real battle for survival is not only fought in the oil wells, but in the semiconductor laboratories. Although the country manufactured an astronomical 484 billion chips in 2024, still no access to the UVE lithography machines of the European company ASML. However, the Asian giant is finding cracks in the Western blockade. China already has two companies, SMIC and Huali Microelectronics, capable of producing advanced 7-nanometer chips using engineering techniques ‘multiple patterning’ using machines from previous generations. It is a more expensive and less efficient process, but it shows that sanctions only accelerate their quest for sovereignty. The next bottleneck to overcome is chemical. The country depends almost entirely on Japan (specifically from JSR Corporation) to obtain the hyper-specialized photoresist liquids needed in chip lithography. The new Chinese five-year plan has already set a five-year deadline to also break this Japanese monopoly. And while China weaves this net of absolute … Read more

Huawei has been plotting a plan for six years and now they are ready to dethrone the undethroned: NVIDIA

by

With the beginning of the technological war between the United States and China, Huawei was given a mission: to become the spearhead of Chinese technology companies. After a tough first few years that were like a pilgrimage through the desert, the Chinese company has come back strong. Not only has it regained leadership in China, but it has taken steps to become the lever of the industry. Yes a few days ago presented its supercomputernow it’s time for something more modest, but essential in the AI ​​career. An inference chip that, they claim, is more powerful than the NVIDIA alternative. Atlas 350. Within the framework of the Annual Partners Conference, the company has once again introduce the Atlas 350 platform (already advertisement at Huawei Connect 2025 last September). This is a card that uses the latest version of its processor Atlas 950PR and which, according to the company’s data, has an improvement in inference performance of 2.8 times compared to the competition. That competition It’s the H20 chip, a trimmed version which was the one that NVIDIA had permission to sell in China. It is a platform focused on rapid data movement, which makes it ideal for a high workload in tasks such as search recommendations, multimodal generation and use of large-scale language models. It is an accelerator, in short, a piece of hardware dedicated to a very specific task, and it is what it knows how to do well within a server. to the mess. To train AI, China has other weapons, some from Huawei itself, but this Atlas 350 is to meet that goal of the Chinese industry of making AI tools accessible and monetizable as soon as possible. In fact, at the event it was confirmed that there are already partners launching servers built with the Atlas 350 as its heart. And here is the real relevant data. Huawei is not just presenting things: it is presenting and announcing that it already has partners launching products with this new technology. Because the idea is that each new piece of hardware begins to be distributed and deployed as soon as possible among Chinese companies that are within the ambitious five-year plan for technological sovereignty. Essential. For months now, the company has been moving to position itself as the lever for the rest of the Chinese technology network with NPUs, dissipation hardware, standard cards for AI, motherboards and “other different forms of hardware to facilitate the development of customers and partners.” At the event, they highlighted that “although the first half of the era of artificial intelligence focused on computing power, the second will be defined by data.” And it is in that inference where Huawei wants provide all your infrastructure to become an indispensable piece of the ecosystem. Because China, within the great future plan, is fighting to become a power not only of the AI ​​that we know, but of the physical artificial intelligencerobots or 6G networksa field in which Huawei also leads. Enough? That’s the big question, and the answer may not depend as much on raw power as it does on the ecosystem. I’m not talking about the rich ecosystem that Huawei is building, but rather the ecosystem of tools. If everyone uses NVIDIA cards for training (in the inference we see that little by little everyone is waging war on their own), it is for them that the software and processes are optimized. And the most leading Chinese companies they want NVIDIA hardware to be on par with or surpass American rivals. This has been a soap opera with NVIDIA pressuring Trump to let it sell the H200s in China, achieving it after 25% tariff for those purchases and then China sending contradictory messages. On March 31 there will be a meeting in Beijing between Trump and Xi Jinping and it is expected that export controls – and the issue of NVIDIA – will be put on the table. And someone who is going to be watching that meeting carefully is Huawei. Because China is at a crossroads right now: it knows that Your companies order NVIDIA chipsbut at the same time the Government does not want them to leverage themselves using foreign technology that could leave them stranded again. Images | Huawei In Xataka | The looming bottleneck in AI is neither RAM nor gas: it’s that TSMC’s N3 node is absolutely saturated

Opening a company in a single visit to the administration sounds like utopia. In China it has been law for years

by

Bureaucracy is probably one of the few things on which there is almost absolute consensus: everyone hates her. Queuing from window to window, discovering that you are missing a photocopy, returning another day because the official who signs is not there… an administrative ordeal, but it doesn’t have to be like this: years ago, in China they set out to end the labyrinth of procedures with one objective: so that more companies can be created to be more competitive. One visit at most. The ‘one visit at most’ reform It was promoted in the province of Zhejiang in 2016 and today it has spread to more territories in the country. The central objective is to unify all the procedures into one, so that those who want to form a new company only have to go to the administration once, avoiding the “walk” through different windows. It does not only affect the creation of companies, but all types of procedures such as birth certificates, registration records, registrations for health insurance and health cards. In addition, there are many procedures that can be done electronically, it is what they call ‘zero visit’ and the idea is that over time more and more processes will be added to this list. How it was before. Before this reform the process was not only much more tedious, but also much slower. a businessman counted in CGNT To get a permit you had to go through a lot of procedures, the lines were very long and it took several weeks. And if everything went well, if a document was missing or there was an error, you would have to start over. Another businesswoman says that she sent the documentation online and when she went to do the process it took her only 15 minutes to get the permit. Land of entrepreneurship. That this reform has been promoted in Zhejiang is no coincidence. It is the province in which Hangzhou is located, the city that has become the reference technological hub for AI companies. Here you can find Alibaba, DeepSeek, Unitree or Deep Robotics. It is also where the Zhejiang Universitynicknamed “the Stanford of the East”, and where many of those who are today senior executives of technology companies have studied. The streamlining of bureaucracy is one of all the measures that the government has implemented and which also include very advantageous loans for entrepreneurs. One person companies. Recently We were talking about ‘one person companies’ or OCP and how the Chinese government is supporting this new entrepreneurship model. They are startups created by a single person with strong AI support, very much in the style of what he did Peter Steinberger with OpenClawwhich in turn has allowed many entrepreneurs to create their own solo companies. OCP communities are being created in cities like Suzhou, Wuhan offers special loans for ‘solopreneurs’ and in Shanghai they cover up to 300,000 yuan in computing expenses. How is it here? In Spain we also have our own agile business creation system called CIRCE. It works through the DUE (Single Electronic Document) that groups up to 25 administrative forms into one. Through CIRCE you can create or cease a company, whether it is a SL or a self-employed person, and it can take from one to ten days. Of course, for SLs it is still necessary to complete an in-person procedure at a notary office. Image | Studio4rt, Freepik In Xataka | For 60 years, a farmer with no idea about architecture built a cathedral from scratch in Madrid. The bureaucracy has closed it

Soda Stereo returns projecting a musician who died 12 years ago

by

On March 21, 2026, Charly Alberti and Zeta Bosio went up to the Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires next to screens that reproduced the voice and guitar of the deceased third vertex of the Soda Stereo triangle, Gustavo Cerati. They showed previous recordings of the musician, and they intended to go far beyond a simple hologram. A part of the public, from social networks, did not see it as something so revolutionary. What just happened with Soda Stereo is one more chapter (although, a particularly revealing one) in the industrialization of the posthumous concert. The ghost of Cerati. It was known when and where Soda Stereo returned, but it was not known how. On September 29, 2025, the announcement on networks was brief and deliberately ambiguous: “It is not a tribute. It is not a tribute. It is not a movie. It is Soda, live. Soda = Avant-garde.” The promise was that Gustavo Cerati, who died in 2014, would be on stage, although the word “hologram” was carefully avoided in the announcement. What the public found on March 21 at the Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires was something simpler and more complex at the same time: screens, depth effects and the voice and guitar recordings that Cerati left on the 1997 and 2007 tours. The figures. The tour already has, before finishing its first week, more than 500,000 tickets sold and 33 dates in Latin America and Spain, the last scheduled for September 24 in Madrid. What can be seen in the show is, behind a semi-transparent curtain, Cerati’s silhouette that gives way, song by song, to a clearer presence on the side screens: shots of his hands on the blue Jackson guitar, full-length images… A total of nineteen songs, with 3D glasses for two of them. Fan reaction. The reaction on networks was very polarized. A part of the audience was moved but another part, the loudest, described the show as “fraud” and “fantochada”. The argument for rejection, more than technical, was emotional: “Cerati always changed some arrangement live, made jokes, talked to the audience. “That’s not Cerati, it’s not live, it has no humanity.” pointed out a user. “Cerati” and “fraud” became trending topics among reviews of “the “technological prowess” is normalized by the third song. And then there is nothing left. It is one song after another (sometimes they are not even on stage). And the viewer feels as if they were watching a DVD with 15 thousand other people.” Everything to the millimeter. In the review he made The Nation of the concert, he said that the show “is not a recital. It is a show, calculated to the millimeter, with a script, without possibilities of spontaneity or improvisation.” And it is something that can be applied to what most great live concerts have become: every gesture of the artist, every speech between songs is extremely scripted. But in the case of Cerati, even more spontaneous moments (there is a moment in which he greets the other two members with “Hello, Zeta, Charly…”) are especially artificial, because they will always be repeated the same. Funeral precedents. This is not the first time that the music industry has resorted to this type of resources. When Tupac Shakur’s image appeared on the Coachella stage alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre in April 2012, the 90,000 attendees were left speechless. The video racked up 15 million views on YouTube in 48 hours and sales of the rapper’s catalog skyrocketed. Technically it was not a hologram, but an old trick from 19th century illusionism: a projection on a screen in front of the audience known as Pepper’s Ghost. Since then, spectral versions of Michael Jackson, Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston and Frank Zappa have graced the stage. They were all isolated events: the first time it was thought about extending it over time was the ABBA Voyage show in 2022: a permanent residence in London with a 3,000-seat venue built specifically for the show, with effects from Industrial Light & Magic and with the four members of the group actively participating in the motion capture process. ABBA Voyage had a turnover of more than one hundred million pounds in 2024 alone. Something more modest. The Soda Stereo show is inspired by the ABBA model, but in a reduced version, since the technology used is significantly more modest. There is an extra difference: ABBA Voyage works because its four members consciously decided how they wanted to be represented. With Soda Stereo, Cerati did not make any decisions about this project. Consent is exercised by whoever controls his image: Benito Cerati, son of the musician, who has defended the Soda Stereo initiative. The problem is that, according to fansCerati was known for exactly the opposite of this: improvisation, stage risk and unpredictability were always present in his concerts. In Xataka | Spotify killed the record and the industry pivoted to concerts. Netflix killed cinema and the industry was left with a “space crisis”

prohibit entry for 10,000 years with terrifying architecture

by

About 10,000 years ago, humans were just beginning to settle and leave the first paintings in caves. Curiously, today many of these messages remain a mystery. Even so, we have built infrastructures whose impact will last longer than the entire known history of civilization, posing an unprecedented challenge along the way: how to leave a mark that not only lasts, but is also understood within a future that is impossible to imagine. In 1980 they added a disturbing fact: And how to prevent them from entering? The origin of the problem. It all starts with an uncomfortable fact: the United States has been generating nuclear waste extremely dangerous (especially the so-called transuranic, coming from weapons and reactors) whose toxicity can last for thousands of years. To manage them, it was decided to bury them in deep geological repositories like the WIPPin New Mexico, a network of galleries excavated more than 600 meters underground in stable formations that have remained intact for millions of years. The plan is to permanently seal these facilities after decades of use and let them remain isolated for at least 10,000 years. The problem arises right after: once any human control disappears, how to prevent someone in the future from digging there without knowing that they are releasing an invisible and lethal danger? The answer. The solution could not be limited to a simple sign, because neither the current language nor the symbols are reliable in such a long term. That is why an approach was proposed even more radical: create a universal communication system capable of surviving the passage of time, aimed at both advanced societies and others that may have lost part of current scientific knowledge. WIPP The birth of “nuclear semiotics”. To address tremendous challenge, the US Department of Energy brought together experts from disciplines as disparate as linguistics, physics, anthropology or even science fiction, giving rise to a completely new field, one they called nuclear semiology. International panels analyzed not only how to convey the message, but also why A future civilization could decide to excavate that place: search for resources, scientific curiosity, archeology or simple ignorance. The conclusion was that the message it had to be redundantbe multi-layered and understandable without depending on a single cultural system. This is how one of the most disturbing texts never conceived by modern engineering, a warning that not only informs, but also try to persuade from the emotional side, something like a sign that says: “move around, there is nothing valuable here, only danger, and it is still very active thousands of years later.” Proposed pictogram to warn about the dangers of buried nuclear waste at the waste isolation pilot plant Architecture of fear. However, the real conceptual leap came later, when it was assumed that the message could not depend only on words or symbols. The solution was something tangible to humans, the architecturalor how to design a fearsome environment that instinctively conveys danger. Thus, proposals emerged such as landscapes of giant thornsoppressive black blocks or deformed terrain sought to activate a universal reaction of rejection, even without rational understanding. In its most realistic version, the project contemplated angular earth bermsgranite monuments, distributed markers and underground chambers with detailed information. In other words, architecture stopped being aesthetic or functional and became something like a primary language, almost biologicaldesigned to provoke an immediate emotional response to whoever is on the planet thousands of years from now (or whatever is left of it). Design of an information center in the waste isolation pilot plant Layered messages. The system that was devised then was not limited to a single type of warning, but rather combined multiple levels of information. From the initial visual impact (for example, a hostile landscape) to universal symbols such as sick human figures, through texts in several languages and buried technical files, all designed to offer different entry doors to the message depending on the visitor’s level of understanding. Not only that. Even if They proposed “time capsules” distributed in depth, durable materials such as granite or ceramics, and scientific references such as maps or periodic tables. The logic: that if one system fails, another can work, something like redundant communication designed to resist not only time, but also oblivion. The most extreme ideas. There is no doubt, the difficulty of the problem gave rise to proposals that were as fascinating as they were disturbing. It was suggested to create a “caste of priests of the atom” that transmitted knowledge through rituals for generations, or even genetically modified animals (the famous “radioactive cats”) so that change color in the presence of radiation, generating cultural myths that warned of danger. Other ideas of what further movies They included flowers with messages encoded in their DNA or satellite networks that issued warnings for millennia. Although many of these proposals never materialized, they reflect the extent to which the challenge forced us to think beyond traditional engineering, entering the realm of culture, narrative, and collective psychology. The big problem. A certain consensus was then reached: even if the message managed to survive, there was no guarantee that it would be obeyed. Historical examples such as tsunami stones in Japan show that warnings can last for centuries… and still be completely ignored. In fact, this precedent introduces an even more uncomfortable doubt: the problem, perhaps, is not only communicating, but convince to the one who interprets it. An imposing architectural structure may arouse curiosity rather than fear, and an ambiguous message could be interpreted as a sign of something valuable. Plus: human history is full of explorations of tombs, ruins and forbidden places, which turns any warning into a double-edged sword. A unique experiment. Be that as it may, and although there is still no definitive design that defines all our nuclear waste and is capable of deterring future civilizations, both the Sandia project and the WIPP repository represent the greatest conscious attempt of humanity to send a message to the deep (and unknown) future. … Read more

After years of absence, Aragón has reintroduced two Iberian lynxes. The question is whether it’s posturing or real help.

by

Aragón has become the first autonomous community in the northwest of the peninsula to seek to recover the Iberian lynx. And yes, it is a historical milestone that will go down in the annals of conservation manuals; But the question is another: does it make any sense (on an ecological, social or economic level) to continue putting lynxes where there have not been any for decades or are we in the middle of a political marketing operation that will be expensive? The answer is more complex than it seems. What has happened? On March 17, 2026, Jorge Azcón released the first two copies of Iberian lynx on a farm in Torrecilla de Valmadrid (Zaragoza). They are one year old, the female comes from Portugal and the male from Doñana. “The step taken today is a milestone in the recovery of biodiversity in the community,” explained the acting president. And it is, in a way, the general idea in almost all communities in Spain: the Iberian lynx has become our ‘panda bear’, an animal that we are fond of, a symbol of the country and a social aspiration. Does it make sense to reintroduce the lynx? For the lynx, yes. Although we have come a long way since 2002 (when there were just 94 lynxes confined in Andalusia), we have not yet reached “favorable conservation status.” That is, 3,500 specimens (now there are 2,401) and 750 reproductive females (there are 470). Since it started in 2019, the project LIFE LynxConnect has tried to put into practice a very simple idea: Having many lynxes is of no use if those lynxes are confined to just a couple of places. We needed diverse cores and we needed to connect them together. Above all, because climate change is also affecting the entire national territory. The north of the peninsula is increasingly dry and has larger populations of rabbits: therefore, it has become viable for there to be at least two towns (in Cuenca and Palencia) which are completely outside the recent historical distribution of the lynx. And for the areas where it is released? In the short term, it is also good news. In fact, the Aragon movement cannot be understood without a basic fact: the European funds that help these types of programs (920,000 euros in this case) expired this same year. In the medium or long term, it depends on many factors: fundamentally, because everything depends on the rabbits. Rabbits? What about rabbits? Rabbits represent between 80 and 90% of the lynx’s diet. In fact, these rodents are found in the base of the food chain of more than 30 species. The good news is that, as warned A few weeks ago, the Union of Farmers and Ranchers of Castilla la Mancha “the proliferation of rabbits is a problem that has been going on for ten years, they speak of a ‘plague’ that is threatening olive groves and pistachio and almond trees, and they demand that the populations of these animals be controlled.” The bad thing is that they are not where they should be. The history of Spanish rabbits is complex. Its decline is associated with myxomatosisfirst (mid-20th century); continue with the rabbit hemorrhagic disease in the 80s; and is complicated by the arrival in 2012 of a new variant (RHDV2) that affects populations just when they were beginning to recover. To all these health problems, we must add the changes in the landscape and the disappearance of boundaries, fallow lands and traditional shelters. And the result is that the rabbits have looked for a new home. Thus slopes and roadsides have become tremendously favorable habitats (and even in motion vectors) and areas with constant food (irrigation/crops) are natural attractors of these reduced populations. Farmers fear that the arrival of the lynx will not control the pest and, on the other hand, as it will tighten conservation regulations, it may cause rabbit populations to skyrocket. Are they right? It’s hard to say. But we are going to find out. Image | Jorge Azcón – Government of Aragon In Xataka | Spain, land of (threatened) rabbits: the species has gone from “pest” to being endangered

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.