years

The US has been looking from space for years at a huge brown ribbon in the Atlantic that goes from Mexico to Africa that should not be there

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The blue planet looks very different from space. We have internalized things like that the Chinese Wall is seen and it is not true: what is appreciated They are the greenhouses of Almería. Or a great old man desknown as the Great Dam of Zimbabwe. And for a few years now, NASA satellites they have been registering the presence of a brown stripe that extends across the Atlantic Ocean. It’s not a big brown island or a continent, but it looks like it. What is that “brown continent”. It is a mass of brown algae that, according to research from the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and Florida Atlantic University in whose last record It weighed 37.5 million tons and surpasses the 8,000 kilometers in length, more than from New York to Madrid. And it has a name: the Great Sargassum Belt. Context. He pelagic sargassum It is a seaweed that historically has always lived confined to the Sargasso Sea. However, since 2011 NASA has been documenting its expansion into the open sea until what it is now: a brown strip that by the end of 2024 left the Gulf of Mexico and spread until it reached the coasts of West Africa. This phenomenon is actually a huge accumulation of algae that reappears almost every year with one exception: 2013. The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is bigger than ever: evolution documented by NASA Why is it important. Because this stratospheric mass of algae is not only spectacular from a visual point of view: it has repercussions on the marine ecosystem, destroys beaches and even contributes to accelerating climate change. It is also an ecological alarm signal for the Atlantic. According to Dr. Brian Lapointelead author of the review of changes in pelagic sargassum and professor at FAU Harbor Branch, explains that it even caused the emergency shutdown of a Florida nuclear power plant in 1991. Why are they growing like foam?. Lapointe and his team have been investigating the evolution since the 1980s and have found that the nitrogen content in brown algae has increased by 55% between 1980 and 2020; the nitrogen/phosphorus ratio also increased by 50%. This change has occurred because brown algae no longer only feed on natural nutrients from the ocean, but also receive nitrogen and phosphorus from land thanks to human activity, such as agricultural runoff or wastewater discharge. The result is uncontrolled growth. Sargassum is transported by ocean currents, especially in floods from the Amazon, towards the Atlantic. There it thrives thanks to that extra supply of nutrients. An unaesthetic and harmful stain. Brown algae per se are not harmful and in fact, they serve as habitat for different species. However, its enormous presence has altered the ecosystem. Upon reaching the coasts, they begin to decompose, thus releasing hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas that damages coral reefs, reduces the oxygen present and emits greenhouse gases. What can we do. In short: stop feeding them. After this exhaustive monitoring, the research team warns that humans should reduce nutrient runoff from the coast since, if this continues, more Great Sargassum Belts could appear throughout the ocean. In Xataka | The brutal floods facing Portugal and western Spain, seen from space In Xataka | A 2.5 billion-year-old geological wonder: Zimbabwe’s Great Dam seen by NASA from space Cover | POT

50 years ago, an inventor introduced the first water engine. He was Spanish, a visionary and a complete fraud

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“Of my patent, the license for Spain is transferred free of charge to the State for the benefit of all Spaniards.” Loud and clear, this is what Arturo Estévez Varela, the inventor of the water engine and, without a doubt, a great Spaniard. At least that’s what they must have thought. NODE viewerswhich in the early years of the 1970s included the words of this man from Extremadura. “That died with my father and we haven’t bothered to move it either,” said Arturo Estévez Jr. in a report for RTVE in 2009. Perhaps due to lack of knowledge or, probably, due to having too much knowledge. Knowledge that the invention, in reality, was completely unrealizable and that the patents shown to the journalist from the public entity have no value. But who was that man in a suit who drank from a jug before filling the tank of a motorcycle with water and made it work? Behind the name of Arturo Estévez Varela there was an inventor, an enormous visionary and, why not say it, also a scammer. Before his water engine, this Extremadura native born in Valle de la Serena (a small town of just over 1,000 inhabitants in the province of Badajoz) had already devised a chicken roaster with infrared and the “wing plane”, a device that allowed rockets to be recovered. Space X in Franco’s Spain. Arturo Estévez Varela in a demonstration of his invention With four liters of water, 900 kilometers of autonomy But if Arturo, who perhaps at this point we should start calling Don Arturo, became famous for something, it was for his water engine. An invention that, according to what he said, allowed you to travel by car 900 kilometers with just four liters of water. Statements included in the press of the time. It was October 1970 and, evidently, it seemed like magic. How did good old Don Arturo get a motorcycle he was taking around Spain running? Yes, with water, but also with hydrogen. Water was only one of the pillars of his invention. The third was hydrogen. And the second, a mystery. Town to town and city to city, Don Arturo traveled throughout Spain, generating a stir as he went, capturing the attention of the press and, as we have seen, also of the NODO. What this Extremaduran inventor did not reveal was what was hidden in that substance that, together with water, allowed the combustion engine of his motorcycle to work. In theory, the water reacted with a mineral that Arturo did not want to reveal. This reaction produced hydrogen which, when burned in the combustion engine, made the motorcycle work. That is, the procedure was similar to that have tried in Toyota. It is not a motor fuel cellis a combustion engine that burns hydrogen, a much more inefficient process. If we consult different sources on the Internet, many agree that the Francoism came to order a technical report to check if what that unknown inventor said was true. Obviously, everything was left in water, yes, but borage. missing These same sources end their story at the same point. Don Arturo was tireless in making himself heard, in convincing people and strangers that his invention worked and that it was the solution to many of Spain’s problems. However, it disappears. Nothing else was heard of him and the fables begin. Since the Franco regime tried to hide the invention until the oil companies decided to silence it. It seems that the secret, however, was not so secret. In this blog They recover a large part of press clippings from the time. Shortly after making himself known and without being listened to by the Government, Don Arturo managed to get someone to trust him. That someone was José Carrera Rey, a businessman who bought half of the rights to the invention at a price of six million pesetas. It is at that moment that Don Arturo loses track of him. José Carrera Rey then discovers that he has in his hands an invention that is useless. What it doesn’t have are six million pesetas and he doesn’t have a partner either. In desperation he denounces Don Arturo but nothing is heard from Don Arturo again. Only an indictment, in 1974, for an alleged crime of fraud, managed to get Don Arturo to appear in court. However, in December 1977 the magistrates were clear: Justice matters were already going very slowly in Spain and Don Arturo had not committed any crime of fraud because he believed in his invention, so there was no type of deception. Due to the dates on which the Spanish Television report was recorded and what his son says, Don Arturo died on the border of the 80s and 90s and took his secret to the grave. A secret which, according to the scientists who have studied the case, was boron. He boron It is a chemical element that, in reaction with water, produces hydrogen that, even, can become inflamed due to the enormous heat released. Hence, Don Arturo always warned that his “secret mineral” and water had to be mixed in controlled quantities. As collected The Vanguard last summer, the water engine, therefore, is perfectly functionalbut very little useful. To obtain 5 kg of hydrogen, with which a fuel cell Toyota Mirai (more efficient than burning hydrogen) travels about 600 kilometers, 45 liters of water and 19 kg of boron are needed. The problem is, basically, the 68,000 euros that 19 kg of boron would cost, according to what was reported in the Catalan newspaper. Was it functional? Of course, but, at its side, the first liter of synthetic and emissions-neutral fuel at 2,800 euros It no longer seems so expensive to us. Image | Commons In Xataka | The 194 kilometers that changed the history of the automobile have a first and last name: Bertha Benz In Xataka | The history of the first traffic light in Spain, installed in 1926: six lights … Read more

Ben Affleck had been secretly setting up an AI company for filmmakers for four years. Netflix just got it

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Netflix has acquired InterPositivethe post-production AI tools company that Ben Affleck founded in 2022 and that was quietly developing tools. Its 16 employees go to work for the platform and the actor and director takes on advisory roles. The operation occurs just a week after Netflix will abandon the bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. What InterPositive is NOT. It is worth starting with what InterPositive does not do: it does not generate movies from a prompt of text. It’s not soraor anything similar. InterPositive starts from the already shot material of a series or movie (in any production, what is known as the dailiesthe raw footage that is recorded each day) and trains a specific AI model according to the characteristics of each production. This model then allows manipulate material during post-production: correct color, relight shots, add visual effects, reframe shots or redo shots that were not filmed. The company’s first model, for example, was trained to understand what Affleck calls “visual logic and editorial consistency”, respecting the real conditions of a shoot: the model solved common problems such as missing shots, details in the backgrounds that need to be corrected, incorrect lighting… All oriented towards filming techniques, not the actors’ performances. AI yes, but with nuances. At a conference in 2024, Affleck argued that AI “will eliminate the most laborious, least creative and most expensive aspects of filmmaking,” reducing barriers to entry. His stance is born from a specific concern for preserving what he calls “judgment”: the ability to make creative decisions that are only built with decades of experience. Affleck spoke to Netflix executives from InterPositive for the first time last fall, and acknowledged initially feeling “scared” at the idea of ​​computers playing a central role in production. Netflix, in favor. The acquisition fits into a strategy that Netflix has been defining with some consistency since 2024. At that time, the Argentine ‘El Eternauta’ included the first AI-generated scene in the final footagea sequence that was completed ten times faster than it would have been possible to do it with conventional effects. In ‘Happy Gilmore 2’ they used AI to digitally rejuvenate actors, and in ‘Pedro Páramo’ as well, with a total budget equivalent to what the visual effects of ‘The Irishman’ alone cost five years earlier. That timing Well. It’s very curiousand it is not clear if it means anything, that the purchase of InterPositive is announced just a week after Netflix withdrew from the bidding for the studios and streaming from Warner Bros. Discovery. Netflix saved, in the words of its financial director, “2.8 billion dollars.” The acquisition of InterPositive, although certainly of much smaller dimensions (although nothing is known about figures), indicates where it can direct part of those resources: basically, its own production. Disney, on the other side. Meanwhile, one of Netflix’s biggest competitors, Disney, has signed a three-year license agreement with OpenAI which allows Sora users to create short videos with more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. One billion dollars of investment that goes in the opposite direction to what Netflix intends, which is to make its own productions cheaper. Regardless of the position of each player in this game, Hollywood experiments more and more openly with AI in all phases of production, from pre-production to visual effects. A new landscape is opening up for film production and Affleck’s company is just one of the first chapters. In Xataka | ‘Critterz’ will be much more than the first AI-animated film: welcome to the new era of machine-made cinema

We have been observing the snow of the northern hemisphere from space for 40 years. The conclusions of the latest major study are devastating

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As some older people around us say: winter is already it’s not what it was. As we move forward in the decade, scientific data paints an increasingly clear and disturbing picture of the amount of snow that has accumulated in some parts of our planet. And the images seem to leave no room for doubt, since they suggest that snow coverage in the northern hemisphere is constantly reducing, altering the seasonal cycles that govern our climate. The data. The last job we have had access to was published in January of this same year, and the conclusion they have drawn is quite devastating when pointing out that 24% of the regions of the northern hemisphere show a significant decline in the presence of snow, compared to a mere 9% that has registered an increase in its amount. How it looked. To reach these conclusions, researchers have not limited themselves to looking at the thermometer. They have turned to a gigantic high-resolution database that brings together historical data since 1980 with information on both snow and ice. Mathematical model. But the real advance in this case lies in the use of advanced statistics. And, expanding on previous research from 2023, they have applied a two-state Markov chain model, which in simple terms is a mathematical model that allows analyzing the spatial and temporal probabilities of snow persisting or disappearing in specific grids on Earth over decades. That is why we are facing one of the most rigorous methodologies that currently exist to understand snow trends, eliminating the “noise” of the precipitation that is coming in the coming months. Early spring. But… Where exactly is the snow disappearing? The Markov model reveals that the decline is not uniform, but there is an alarming pattern that directly affects our side of the globe: spring melt is coming forward dramatically in Europe and Central Asia. Right now we are seeing snow melting earlier, shortening winter temperatures and directly altering the water cycle, which is vital for agriculture and ecosystems during the warmer months. The consequences. But it is not something new, since previous works already warned of this loss of snow, which is a decline that not only affects water reserves, but also the ability of the Earth’s surface to reflect solar radiation. Something that is not nonsense, since less snow means more exposed dark land, greater heat absorption and, consequently, an increase in regional temperatures. A consensus. In addition to this study, in 2025, research was also published that analyzed possible biases in climate records. NOAA historicalconfirming that the decline in snow during autumn and winter is a real phenomenon and not an erroneous measurement. But it does not stop there, since the last Arctic bulletin painted a very extreme scenario, since, although there was above-average snowfall until May 2025, the decline during June was so rapid and abrupt that snow coverage was reduced to half of what it was 60 years ago. A mixed and volatile pattern that shows a climate system under stress. Images | Mathieu Odin In Xataka | Under the Canary Islands rests a 1,625 meter volcano: it has now begun to show signs of life after ten years of vigil

In the Iraq War, Spain was left “alone” supporting the United States. 23 years later, she has been left alone refusing to help him

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If a Spaniard from March 2003 could take a look at the press today (03/04/2026) it is most likely that he would not understand anything. And not because of the lack of context, references or the (logical) change of political leaders. Probably what would catch your attention is the 180º turn in the geopolitical chessboard that concerns the US and Europe. Let’s remember. In 2003 José María Aznar he posed smiling together with George W. Bush and Tony Blair to confirm itself as one of the great supporters of the US in the Iraq war. Today the opposite happens. Spain has become almost the loose European verse for his rejection of Trump’s offensive in Iran. It seems like a simple historical curiosity, but it says a lot about how Europe, the US and their relationship have changed over the last two decades. Trump’s anger. This is not the first time that Donald Trump publicly displayed his lack of harmony with Moncloa. In October, in full tug-of-war over the percentage of GDP that should be allocated to defense, the Republican came to suggest that Spain should be “expelled” from NATO. Rarely, however, has the US leader spoken out with the emphatic (and angry) expression he used yesterday when talking about the negative of Pedro Sánchez’s Government to have the US army use the Morón and Rota bases to attack Iran. “Spain has been terrible”. In the threatening tone that has become the hallmark of his second term, Trump made it clear that he does not take no for an answer. “Spain has been terrible,” started . “In fact I have told Scott (Bressent, Treasury Secretary) to cut all relations with her. Spain said we cannot use their bases. We could if we wanted to. Nobody is going to tell us no. But we don’t have to. They have been unfriendly.” In case there were any doubts, the Republican threatened with cutting “everything that has to do with Spain” and pronounced the cursed word: “Embargo.” He didn’t go much further, but neither that nor the fact that other previous announcements have fallen on deaf ears has prevented his words from causing an earthquake. Especially among the sectors that would have it worst if Washington decided to move forward and “cut off trade” with Spain, an otherwise complex scenario since trade policy does not depend on Madrid, but on the European Union. “No to war”. The problem is not only that Spain has refused to allow the US to use the bases in Rota and Morón to bomb Iran. Probably what has raised the most blisters in Washington is that Sánchez has clearly positioned himself against the actions of the US and Israel in the Middle East. did it yesterday and he has done it again this morning with a deliberately emphatic message: “Spain’s position is the same as in Ukraine or Gaza. No to war.” During his speech, Sánchez even recalled the Iraq war, which left (he denounced) “a more insecure world.” His position also has an internal reading: the ‘no to war’ of 2003 was a shock for the PSOE. One club, three positions. Sánchez’s position is not only important for what he says, but also for where and especially when he says it. His speech clashes with that of other European leaders who have been much more understanding of the US and Israeli attacks on Iran. In fact, just a few days ago their counterparts from France, the United Kingdom and Germany they have closed ranks with Trump. On Sunday the three powers (E3) released a statement in which they demanded that Tehran stop its “attacks” and they advanced their willingness to coordinate with the United States. “We will take measures to defend our interests and those of our allies in the region, potentially with necessary and proportionate defensive actions to destroy Iran’s ability to fire missiles and drones,” states the joint writing by Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz. It should be remembered that on Sunday a French naval base in Abu Dhabi suffered an attack with drones and on Monday another drone impact against the British RAF facilities in Cyprus. Tehran has also hit bases with German troops. Madrid’s position thus clearly differs from that of Paris, London and Berlin. Also from that of the community club, which has opted for a more ambiguous position. Although the European Commission has not been slow to guarantee its “full” solidarity with its members in a veiled support for Spain in the face of Trump’s threats, the truth is that Brussels maintains a very different tone from that of Sánchez. On Monday Von der Leyen claimed that “diplomacy” is “the only solution” to the open crisis in Iran and, although he condemned Tehran’s attacks on Middle Eastern neighbors, he did not mention the bombings launched by the US and Israel. Just 23 years later… This morning Sánchez not only insisted on his “no to war.” He also wanted draw a parallel with what happened in 2003 when the Government of Spain, then headed by Aznar, decided to clearly support the US deployment in Iraq, distancing of its European partners. “The world has been here before. 23 years ago another US administration led us to an unjust war. The Iraq war generated a drastic increase in terrorism, a serious immigration and economic crisis. That was the gift of the Azores trio, a more insecure world and a worse life,” Sánchez claimed. Ironies of history, the socialist refers to the famous photo taken just 23 years ago, in March 2003, in the Azores and in which Bush, Blair and Aznar pose smiling. Have things changed that much? The truth is that yes. And not only because where Bush, Blair and Aznar sat 23 years ago, today Trump, Starmer and Sánchez sit (respectively). The most relevant change affects the roles and dealings with Washington. In 2003, the invasion of Iraq caused a fracture of Europe into two blocks well differentiated. One, against … Read more

The Earth turned on its great geological engine billions of years earlier than we estimate. We know it from a microscopic crystal

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For a long time, textbooks They have painted the primitive Earth like a ball of infernal and static magma, being a “lid” of inert rock where life or complex geological movement was impossible. Specifically, it was thought that the plate tectonicsthe engine that shapes the continents and recycles our planet’s nutrients, had taken much longer to start. However, we were wrong. How he did it. Science, in a recent article, has just put on the table the definitive evidence that indicates that the Earth began to move much earlier than we believed: at least 3.3 billion years ago, and most likely, more than 4 billion ago. And the key is not in the gigantic mountains under our feet, but in small fragments of glass smaller than a grain of sand. And if we want to travel in geological time, you have to go to jack hillsin Western Australia, where the oldest known fragments of terrestrial rock are found. The protagonists of this story are zircon crystals, extremely resistant minerals that act as authentic geological hard drives. The interesting thing is that, when they form, they trap isotopes and tiny amounts of other elements inside that tell us exactly what the environment was like at the time of their crystallization. The results. According to detailed analysis that collects Natureand supported by key works such as those published in the prestigious magazine PNASthese S-type zircons hide unmistakable geochemical signatures. Specifically, they reveal that, instead of a static and dead Earth’s crust, subduction processes already existed. That is, the oceanic crust was already colliding and sinking under other plates, melting back into the Earth’s mantle. A double life. But researchers have not limited themselves to looking at a specific era, but have traced the proportions of trace elements such as uranium, niobium or scandium in different zircons from Australia, Greenland and South Africa. Here they observed that during the Eoarchean, the Earth did not have a single geological behavior. Instead, it had two tectonic regimes. The first of these, known as a ‘stagnant lid’ with areas of crust dominated by plumes of oceanic magma that simply pushed upwards. On the other hand, it also had the ‘moving lid’ zone, which were active zones where volcanic arcs were already forming and there was subduction, very similar to modern plate tectonics, recycling the Earth’s crust. But there is more. As if that were not enough, other published studies in Science and Geology have contributed even more pieces to the puzzle, such as the transform faults in the Pilbara Craton of Australia that show horizontal movements 3,000 million years ago, and even inclusions of fresh water in zircons from more than 4,000 million years ago, which suggests that there were already emerging continents interacting with the atmosphere and the water cycle. It changes everything. Knowing that plate tectonics started so early is not a mere geological whim, since tectonics is the Earth’s thermostat: it regulates the carbon cycle, releases fundamental gases into the atmosphere and creates the necessary environments for the chemical breeding ground. In this way, if more than 4,000 million years ago our planet was already recycling its crust, having primitive continents and fresh water, it means that the conditions for life to emerge occurred much earlier than what science books dictated. Once again, the Earth shows us that, from its most remote beginnings, it has always been a living world. Images | Javier Miranda In Xataka | There are scientists deliberately causing earthquakes in the Alps and they have a good reason for it

A teenager in Mexico created a Hombres G fan website in 1998, with the band already separated. 9 years later they filled Las Ventas

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In 1998, Mexican Francisco Romero was 15 years old, had a new computer and a school assignment to complete. Looking for the best grade, he created a website about his favorite group: Hombres G, a Spanish band that by then was already dissolved. What began as an academic exercise ended up becoming the band’s first digital fan community, with thousands of members spread around the world. And it was also the trigger that convinced David Summers and his team to return to the stage. How it all started. In 1998, having internet at home in Mexico was not common: just a marginal fraction (2-3%) of the Mexican population had access to the network under these conditions. Even so, Francisco Romero, a teenager who had just gotten his first computer, embarked on completing a school project in which students were asked to create a web page. Romero chose the Hombres G as the subject of his project. He had arrived at the Madrid group, which had already been dissolved for five years, through friends from high school. And since finding documentation about the band was difficult (there were only two pages about Hombres G on the internet), he decided to create a community. Meeting point. The web, as Romero himself explainswas titled Club ‘We’re still crazy… so what?’, in reference to ‘We’re crazy… or what?’ title of one of the group’s first albums. The success was immediate: in its first five months, it received hundreds of requests from Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Peru and Japan (in times before algorithms and search engines crashed). They wrote to him, above all, from fans who had not had a space to talk about the band for years, to which they had not stopped listening since the last album they had released in 1993, ‘Bikini history‘. The contact. At the end of 2000an anonymous user left him a complimentary message on the page, to which Romero responded politely. Three days later, another message arrived from the same sender, who turned out to be one of the band’s two guitarists: “Please don’t give out my email, I’m Dani Mezquita.” Later they established telephone contact, which ended up leading to more frequent conversations. The significant fact: Mezquita was then working as marketing director at DRO East West, the Warner Music label that released almost all of the band’s albums. From his position he had noticed something: at the end of 2000, a compilation of Hombres G was the third best-selling album in Mexico at that time. A group without activity, without tour, without active label, without a single public appearance in years. That is, they had an active and completely underserved fan base. With these data on the table, and as told in the documentary ‘The Best Years of Our Life’ (released in theaters scheduled for April 30), the members met and proposed a modest return, with three or four concerts in Mexico. It gets out of hand. From there the expectation skyrockets. The reunification tour ended adding 70 performances during 2002 and 2003including a concert in Las Ventas before 20,000 people and several cities in Latin America and the United States. The album that accompanied the comeback, ‘Dangerous Together’, was initially released only in America, which says a lot about where the weight of the comeback was leaning. When he arrived in Spain he ended up obtaining the Platinum Record. In gratitude for Romero’s importance in this return, he has continued working continuously with the band from Mexico. And so we come to the present: on April 25, 2025, Men G performed before more than 60,000 people at the GNP Seguros Stadium in Mexico City. All within the framework of a tour titled ‘Thank you, Mexico Tour’. A name that makes it clear to what extent the very survival of the group is owed to a modest student from the city. In Xataka | Three millennia of pop: the oldest song in the world is 3,400 years old and we can still hear it

more than 600 km/h on a line that has accumulated years of delays

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In 2015, a seven-car prototype in Japan made us dream with the tremendous speeds that the trains of the future would have, with the Japanese country as the main standard bearer. The L0 Series train reached 603 km/h on the Yamanashi test line, becoming the fastest manned railway vehicle ever recorded at the time. More than a decade later, that record still standsalthough the promise of its commercial use has yet to materialize. And the line that is supposed to bring it to travelers accumulates years of delays. magnetic levitation. The L0 Series works via superconducting magnetic levitation, using powerful magnets along the track and in the train that interact to lift the vehicle on the track, completely eliminating physical contact with the tracks. Without friction, without mechanical noise, without wear, and with heart-stopping speeds. The system is known as SCMaglev and uses an electrodynamic suspension, different from that used in the Shanghai maglev. Japan National Railways began researching this type of propulsion in 1962 with a clear objective: to connect Tokyo and Osaka in one hour. They have had that dream for more than six decades. Chūō Shinkansen. This is the maglev line under construction between Tokyo and Nagoya, with plans to extend it to Osaka. The idea is that it will be established between Shinagawa and Nagoya stations, with stops in Sagamihara, Kōfu, Iida and Nakatsugawa. The line is not intended to replace the legendary Tokaido Shinkansen, but it will exist to offer travelers a much faster alternative. The line would connect Tokyo and Nagoya in 40 minutes and, later, Tokyo and Osaka in 67 minutes, at a maximum speed of 505 km/h. Today the fastest Nozomi (Japan’s fastest high-speed train service) takes around two and a half hours between the two cities. With Chūō Shinkansen, the idea is that approximately 90% of the 286-kilometer route to Nagoya passes through tunnels, instead of following the coast, as the Tokaido does. This decision is also the root of much of their problems. ORa prefecture and a river. The main obstacle was that the then governor of Shizuoka, Kawakatsu Heita, denied permission to drill one of the tunnels under the Japanese Southern Alps for environmental reasons. The argument was that the impact studies had been carried out with little rigor and that the excavations could affect the bed of the Oi River. The section in question affected just 8.9 kilometers of tunnel within Shizuoka, but it was enough to block the entire project for years. Without that section, the rest of the work could not be completed. However, the current governor of the region, Yasutomo Suzuki, authorized the geotechnical inspection prior, but the works are still in progress. A calendar full of delays. In 2024, JR Central president Shunsuke Niwa publicly ruled out opening in 2027 and targeted 2034 as the new minimum date. But the story doesn’t end there. Last October, JR Central postponed the arrival to 2035. Construction costs have already skyrocketed by more than 50% to 11 trillion yen (about 61 billion euros), according to RailTech. The section to Osaka, for its part, It would not arrive until 2037 at best. The threat from China. In July of last year, during the World High Speed ​​Congress held in Beijing, the state-owned CRRC presented a maglev prototype Designed to reach 600 km/h. The train runs on rubber wheels at low speed and switches to magnetic levitation when exceeding 150 km/h. The Asia Times shares that it will still take a long time to put it into commercial use, and that market demand, rather than technology, is the main obstacle. But there is more: the T-Flight project from the state company CASIC, which combines magnetic levitation with hyperloop-style vacuum tubes, has already reached 623 km/h in tests in 2024, with the goal of exceeding 1,000 km/h soon. China has also, for years, the only commercial maglev in the world that operates regularly: the Shanghai Maglev, which circulates at 430 km/h. Cover image | Maglev.net In Xataka | The Mayan Train has become a nightmare for Mexico: what seemed like a great plan has run into justice

reproduce an Arabic design from a thousand years ago

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Luxury car manufacturers know that some of their millionaire customers They are going to make special requests to customize your cars. In fact, at Rolls-Royce they are these “whims” are so common They have even had to expand their customization workshop. However, there are requests that exceed any expectations. Rolls-Royce just presented he Phantom Arabesquea unique car in the world that reached its owner from the Middle East after five years of hard work in the brand’s workshops. It’s not that it took them five years to make it: it’s that they took that long just to perfect a completely new technique just to decorate the hood. The most curious thing is that the design that decorates the hood is more than a thousand years old. An Arabic design transferred to metal The result of five years of testing and development by Rolls-Royce is the first laser-engraved bonnet in the history of the brand, and of motorsport. In fact, it is such an innovative process that the brand has patented it. The reason for such a deployment of R&D is a client’s request from the Middle East who asked the brand to decorate the hood of their new Phantom with a design present in Arab architecture for more than a thousand years. Inspiration comes from mashrabiyaa classic element of Middle Eastern architecture that consists of a carved wooden lattice placed on windows and facades whose function is triple: to provide privacy, let in light and allow air circulation to cool the buildings naturally. A solution as elegant as it is functional, developed centuries ago and which today appears laser engraved on the hood of one of the most exclusive cars in the world. This Phantom Extended was ordered through the Dubai Private Office, one of five “private offices” that Rolls-Royce maintains in strategic luxury destinations. In the Rolls-Royce statement, the project’s chief designer, Michelle Lusby, explains that the objective went beyond the visual. “Mashrabiya is one of the Middle East’s most well-known and enduring design languages. For the Phantom Arabesque, we were inspired not only by its beauty, but also by the privacy, light and airflow it creates. Our goal was to interpret those qualities in ways that felt both culturally rooted and unmistakably Rolls-Royce.” Five years shooting lasers at a hood The hood design of this exclusive unit It is not a simple paintingbut has been subjected to a technical process as elaborate and precise as the design of the Arab lattices itself. First, a dark paint is applied to the hood, several layers of clear varnish are sealed, which will serve as a base for the work of art. It is then finished with a lighter top coat. The laser is fired on this last layer, reproducing the mashrabiya pattern at a depth of between 145 and 190 microns. Enough to affect this last layer of paint and showing the dark tone of the underlying paint. The effect is a surface with a three-dimensional texture that changes its appearance depending on how the light hits it and that can also be perceived by touch since, in fact, the design is sculpted on the paint. The technique is inspired by sgraffito (sgraffito) Italian, an artistic practice of revealing contrasting layers of color by precisely removing the upper surface. Adapting it to the body of a Rolls-Royce and giving it the precision required by a design as complex as that of arabesque architecture, required five years of work by the brand’s Exterior Surfaces Center, where new materials and paints are developed and then used. on such exclusive orders like those of this Phamtom Arabesque. Tobias Sicheneder, general manager of that department, sums it up: “laser engraving allows us to create a surface that is both technically precise and visually alive. The Phantom Arabesque is the first example of a technique that opens up completely new creative possibilities for future customers.” The mashrabiya pattern is not limited to the hood: it also appears on the illuminated door sills, which reproduce a cross section of the engraved design, and hand-embroidered in black on the leather of the front and rear headrests Without a doubt, a unique piece as well as its price will have been unique. In Xataka | Rolls-Royce wanted to make its Specter more scoundrel and sporty: the result is a limited edition that costs $490,000 Image | Rolls-Royce

Telecinco audiences have been in free fall for four years and their recovery has come with an unexpected format: blind weddings

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He success of ‘Married at First Sight’ on Telecinco and the more than 410 million dollars generated by ‘Love Is Blind’ on Netflix show that realities Romantic and friendly blind weddings are no longer entertainment to watch on the sly and feel guilty. Now they generate very profitable franchises and, in the case of Mediaset, a welcome boost of oxygen to their disastrous audiences. Getting married without knowing each other: the origins. Well, the origins are the traditional weddings of convenience, but let’s talk about TV. In 2013, the Danish public channel DR3 broadcast the first episode of ‘Gift ved første blik’, where a panel of experts in psychology and compatibility paired strangers who would meet for the first time at the altar, getting legally married before starting to live together. The success in his country was immediate and generated the ‘Married at First Sight’ franchise, which has had 35 different versions before reaching Spain, where it was already seen in 2015 on Antena 3. In 2026 it reached a new version on Telecinco. The hearings. The result in terms of audience has been very stimulating for the Mediaset channel, after months of trying with launches and schedule changes that have not quite worked out. The premiere recorded a 13.9% audience share and nearly 947,000 viewers, leading its time slot, with a devastating 22.2% in the age group of 25 to 44 years. The following weeks consolidated and even improved those numbers, reaching 14.2%. 44% of viewers who saw the premiere repeated in the second broadcast, which indicates a level of loyalty that Telecinco needs like breathing. For this reason, it has already announced the renewal for a second season. We already know the context: Telecinco is going through a very serious audience crisisclosed 2025 with a 9.4% average annual share (the worst result in its history), which may end up impacting its advertising revenue. That is why in 2026 Mediaset is adopting a conservative policy, returning to its realities classics and experimenting just enough with programs like this one, new but with proven formulas. Blind dates. Meanwhile, Netflix finds success with a very similar format: ‘Love Is Blind’, which the platform premiered in 2020. In it there were no experts who matched the contestants, but rather a group of single men and another group of single women who got to know each other on dates without seeing each other physically, until couples were formed and we saw them becoming intimate in coexistence. Thirty million households watched it in the first four weeks of broadcast. The franchise has already spread to eleven countries, from Brazil to Japan. The figures for ‘Love Is Blind’. The data analysis company Parrot Analytics has estimated that he reality has generated more than $410 million in global subscriber revenue since its premiere. The secret of these stratospheric figures (and other realities platform romances like ‘Jugando con fuego’) is in its structure: fixed format, rotating casting with each season. It’s like a fictional franchise, but at a much faster pace, because each season is produced before the previous one ends. The cost of between 100,000 and 500,000 dollars per episode makes these programs much more attractive to platforms than fiction. When Netflix saw what it had on its hands (‘Love Is Blind’ remained among Netflix’s ten most viewed titles in the United States for 86 days in 2022) it did not put all its eggs in the same basket: it diversified the bet into different countries, each with its regional peculiarities, which multiplies income without doing so proportionally to the cost because, for example, the advertising is done. Furthermore, unlike the binge watching Common on Netflix, episodes are released weekly, which keeps the conversation going on networks. A historic format. They are not the first programs of this type: ‘Blind Date’, on ABC in 1949, when there were hardly any televisions in American homes, and ‘The Dating Game’ in the sixties They exploited similar starting points. What ‘Married at First Sight’ brought was the panel of experts that gave a pseudoscientific excuse to the fooling around between strangers and the inevitable marital quarrels. But what makes them a financial triumph is the economics of their production, which has turned Netflix’s proposal into one of the most profitable ideas in the history of the platform. In Xataka | Spotify and Netflix join forces, entering unexplored territory that has nothing to do with music, movies or series

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