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Snapchat invented the format that dominates the Internet. 15 years later it is still unable to make it profitable

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Evan Spiegel this week sent a memo to your employees announcing that Snap is going to lay off about 1,000 people16% of the entire workforce, in addition to canceling 300 vacant positions that had yet to be filled. Snap thus hopes to save more than $500 million in annualized costs starting in the second half of this year, although the cut is expensive in the short term, since it will have to pay between $95 and $130 million in compensation. Nevertheless, the stock rose 7% in response to the layoffs. The markets have been asking for them for a long time. Why is it important. Snap’s is not a “normal” failure story. It’s much more interesting than that. It’s the story of a company that forever changed how we communicate online and yet has failed to build a profitable business on it. In 2025 it lost 460 million dollars, although it is true that in 2024 it lost more and in 2023 even more. He has spent his 15 years of life in that dynamic. It still hasn’t closed a single complete year on a positive note. The context. His paradox begins in 2013, when he launched Stories: photos and videos that lasted 24 hours, published before disappearing. A format that is common today but at that time groundbreaking. A format that freed people from the pressure of permanence, of the trail. In August 2016, Instagram launched exactly the same thing, with the same name, and with much bigger muscle behind it. Within two months, Instagram had 100 million Stories users. It had taken Snapchat four years to reach that number. A year later it had already surpassed Snapchat. Yes, but. The problem was not that they were copied. The problem was that Meta, TikTok and YouTube adopted the format with an advantage that Snap never had: data. Meta and Google know who we are, what we buy, what interests us. Snap knows much less. That’s why their advertising converts worse, and advertisers pay less for it. A vicious circle. The coup de grace was Transparency Tracking AppApple’s privacy policy released in 2021, which sank tracking-based advertising models. Meta also sufferedbut Meta had the scale and ecosystem to absorb the impact. Not Snap, so its stock went from touching $83 to trading today around $6. A drop of more than 90% from its highs, in less than five years. However, Snap has 946 million active monthly users, grows 12% in year-over-year revenue and has one of the youngest audiences on all platforms. The most coveted demographic for fashion and entertainment brands. It has cutting-edge augmented reality technology and also has Snapchat+, your paid subscription, which is growing well. That is the contradiction that a thousand layoffs do not resolve: Cutting costs improves margins, but alone does not truly monetize a platform with almost a billion users when its audience is young and difficult to convert, and its competitors have ten times more resources. There is also an activist fund in the capital, Irenic Capital Management with 2.5%, which has been pushing for months exactly in this direction: cuts. And now what. Spiegel speaks at memo to concentrate investments where monetization already works. That is, give up on markets that are difficult to grow and profitable (Spain has every chance to be one of them) and focus on more powerful ones, presumably in the style of the United States or the United Kingdom. Give up growth in search of sustainability. Snap has been trying to solve an equation that others have solved at their expense for 15 years. These layoffs are bought time to keep trying. Featured image | Shutter Speed In Xataka | Snapchat introduced its own version of ChatGPT in its app. Nothing has gone, nothing good

A streamer shared out-of-print movies. Now Enrique Cerezo wants him to go to prison for two years and pay 870,000 euros

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In October 2021, five riot police equipped with shields, tactical shotguns and a battering ram burst into the home of a YouTuber from Burgos known as “El Feo”. They were not looking for weapons, drugs or criminals who had committed blood crimes, but hard drives with movies. Films out of circulation, that no one offered almost anywhere on the Internet and whose exploitation rights remained in legal limbo until that moment. David against Goliath. With that assault, the judicial process begins, which culminated on April 9 with the trial in Burgos against El Feo, the nickname of the person responsible for the YouTube channel. The Cursed and the now closed Zoowoman website. The private prosecution, headed by EGEDA (the entity for managing the rights of audiovisual producers that Enrique Cerezo has chaired since 1998), requests two and a half years in prison and compensation that the parties estimate between 850,000 and 870,000 euros. No profit motive. Zoowoman was a platform without advertising, subscription or any type of business model. Its purpose was to rescue and make available to the public out-of-print audiovisual works, films whose production companies had disappeared or that had erratic or zero commercial distribution. Zoowoman functioned as a collective repository of links: the community’s own users shared access to films hosted on external servers such as MEGA or archive.org, without the files residing on the web. Sister website. La Filmoteca Maldita, the associated YouTube channel that is currently still active, functions as an archive of essays that provide historical context and cultural readings of genre and cult cinema. It includes nearly 4,000 film analyzes (according to data provided by El Feo’s defense), which is pertinent when approaching its intentions as a cultural disseminator, rather than as a mere exploiter. Several of these videos, as well as the often unfindable films that resided in Zoowoman, have been used as teaching material in universities such as UNAM, the University of Buenos Aires or the University of Medellín, as Feo himself states in a video where he explains his case. The legal argument. The prosecution cannot claim direct profit from El Feo because Zoowoman did not generate income, so it relies on the reform of the Penal Code of 2015which expanded the definition of piracy to include “indirect economic benefit.” Under this interpretation, offering free movies can be considered a “hook” to attract followers to the main channel and reinforce the reputation of the creator and generate income through other means, which would constitute criminally relevant profit even if there is no money involved. The police investigation estimated the alleged indirect profit obtained in this way at around 12,000 euros. The defendant defended himself by explaining that this amount is equivalent to his total income as streamer during its first four years of activity, and that the messages that the agents interpreted as codes from a piracy network were donations from its community (“for your birthday”, “so that you can have a drink”), consistent with the crowdfunding model of any independent creator. In January 2025, before the trial was to take place, the prosecution tried to reach an agreement: if he pleaded guilty and paid 100,000 euros, the sentence would be reduced to one year in prison. El Feo rejected him. Who sues? Enrique Cerezo, apart from presiding over the plaintiff entity, is the owner of Video Mercury Films, the distributor that controls between 70 and 80% of all Spanish cinema, with a catalog of more than 7,000 titles. He is also the president of Atlético de Madrid and the promoter of FlixOléthe platform streaming launched in 2020 with the intention of disseminating Spanish cinema from all eras, much of it out of print or not seen for decades. The complaint that ended the 2021 raid occurred shortly after the launch of FlixOlé, whose catalog largely coincided with that distributed by Zoowoman. The logic, described by the accused himself, is that Zoowoman offered for free what the new platform charged in a subscription. Cerezo has not made public statements about the case. EGEDA acts as a private prosecutor on behalf of the producers whose rights it manages, which includes films in the Video Mercury catalogue. This is not the first time that EGEDA has embarked on complaints of this type: in 2017 it denounced WebTV device distributors and in 2022, to 17 websites that they spread content without permissionamong which was Zoowoman. Beyond the trial. If the thesis of indirect profit prospers, any free cultural dissemination channel that builds an audience could potentially be prosecuted under the same legal umbrella. There are international precedents that point in the same direction. In the United States, the case of Hachette against Internet Archive, resolved in 2024 with a defeat of the digital archive, demonstrated that courts tend to prioritize the rights of the owner over arguments of cultural access, even when the model is non-profit. The legal question. Spain has a regime for orphan works (transposed from a European directive in 2014 and developed by Royal Decree in 2016) but its use is reserved exclusively for public cultural institutions such as museums, libraries or film libraries. An individual or an independent digital creator cannot rely on it, which leaves precisely the type of initiative that Zoowoman represents without legal coverage and which is called into question from the very moment Cerezo creates FlixOlé so that these films are no longer inaccessible. Image | House of America In Xataka | AI has been built by plundering the content of the Internet. Now there are people who want to charge for allowing it

Boeing has surpassed Airbus after years behind. That doesn’t mean I’ve regained control.

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The rivalry between Boeing and Airbus has been marking the pulse of commercial aviation for decades, but it cannot always be summarized in a simple classification. Sometimes, a piece of information seems to announce a change of era and, when we look closer, what appears is something much less resounding. That’s just what happens with the first quarter of 2026: Boeing has managed to overcome to Airbus in deliveries, yes, but it is worth looking at what is behind that advantage before reading it as proof that the American manufacturer has left its problems behind. The photography. The start of 2026 is based on a clear difference in deliveries: Boeing placed 143 commercial aircraft in the hands of its customers between January and March, compared to 114 for Airbus. The data has weight in itself because it puts an end to a long period in which Airbus had remained ahead of Boeing in deliveries. In practice, the American giant supported this result especially in the 737, with 114 units delivered, while Airbus once again concentrated the bulk of its activity in the A320 family, with 81 aircraft. The Airbus bottleneck. If we want to understand why Airbus has been left behind at the start of 2026, the focus is not so much on a drop in demand as on a supply problem. According to Reutersthe European manufacturer has a traffic jam linked to Pratt & Whitney, one of its engine suppliers, immersed in the correction of around 1,200 units affected by a manufacturing defect. While that process is still underway, the production of new engines slows down and Airbus can advance the manufacturing of those planes, but not always complete delivery at the expected pace until those systems arrive. Reality, in context.. That Boeing has closed this quarter ahead, in any case, does not mean that it has resolved the core of its problems. Let us remember that the manufacturer comes from years marked by the 737 MAX crisis, triggered by the accidents of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302in which 346 people died, and for the subsequent stoppage of that program. Added to this are more recent difficulties: Boeing already warned last month that 737 production will slow while it addresses certain wiring issues. Before this long cycle change, Boeing’s position on deliveries was very different. In January 2018, Boeing reported that it had closed 2017 with 763 commercial aircraft delivered, a record for the industry at the time and its sixth consecutive year leading this field. That year also left 912 net orders valued at $134.8 billion at list prices and a portfolio of 5,864 aircraft. Seen from today, that starting point helps to better measure to what extent the balance between both manufacturers changed in very few years. The context is not so far away: It is worth remembering that this rivalry left another very significant milestone in October 2025, when the Airbus A320 became the most delivered aircraft in history by surpassing the Boeing 737. That was not just a symbolic matter: it reflected the extent to which the problems of the 737 MAX had altered Boeing’s trajectory and the extent to which Airbus had managed to keep up with the A320neo family. The next industrial duel: If we project our gaze a little, the board also begins to move at another very specific point: the future entry on the scene of the 777X. Boeing plans to deliver it in 2027 as a late competitor to the A350, after accumulating delays that are already part of the program’s recent history. For Boeing, this arrival could be important because it would open a new opportunity to rebalance forces in the long haul. But Airbus also continues to move forward. Images | Tienko Dima | Jan Rosolino In Xataka | Commercial aviation is based on very old aircraft. The Iran war is going to make it even worse

Unless you are 170,000 years old, in the next few days you will be able to see a comet that you have never seen before

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In April, astronomy lovers have an annual meeting with the lyrid star shower. However, this year the observation of C/2025 R3 is also added, a comet that last visited the inner solar system 170,000 years ago. Prepare to observe. Although the comet has been visible in our skies for several days, it can currently only be seen with binoculars or small telescopes. However, it is expected that after its perihelion (closest point to the Sun), which will take place on April 19, it can be seen with the naked eye. Between April 20 and 24, if all goes well, could reach magnitude 3. This is a measurement that indicates greater brightness as it descends. That is, a comet of magnitude 3 will be brighter than one of magnitude 5. Better in the morning (in the northern hemisphere). If you are in the northern hemisphere, the best time to see this comet will be very late at night. Or early in the morning, depending on how you look at it. Your best visibility will be achieved around 2 hours before the sun rises. In fact, the sun is the main problem, since its best observation time could be April 25, but the Sun will already be too close to allow its visibility properly. in the southern hemisphere. In the other half of the planet, the comet will be seen in the evening, in the late afternoon. While in the north optimal visibility ends on April 25, in the south it is just when it will start to look better. It will continue like this until almost the entire month of May. Of course, it doesn’t matter which hemisphere you are in. It is essential to stay away from light pollution and look for the darkest skies possible. Where to look. The point in the sky on which to rest your eyes (or binoculars) It depends on the day you choose to try to see the comet. For example, on April 19 it will cross from the constellation of Pegasus to that of Pisces. Later, on April 24, it will walk alongside Aries, and then move on to Cetus on April 25. From here, there will no longer be visibility in the northern hemisphere, but in the south you will be able to see the comet on April 29 leaving Cetus towards Taurus, on May 1 through Eridanus, from May 7 to 8 through the Witch’s Head Nebula and on May 8 through the constellation of Orion. The Orion Nebula will also meet it, between May 10 and 12. The comet will then pass between the border of Orion and the Unicorn on May 16. Finally, between May 23 and 25 it will be in the Red Rectangle Nebula, but already with a magnitude of 9, which indicates an extremely weak brightness. A special shine. In reality, the brightness of a comet cannot be predicted exactly. In fact, depending on which source we turn to, we may read different magnitude values ​​for the one we will see these days. When we talk about magnitude 3, we are referring to the calculation in the best scenario. It could be somewhat weaker, although the truth is that C/2025 R3 has a peculiarity that makes it very special: forward dispersion. This is a phenomenon where sunlight passes through the comet’s dust at the perfect angle so that most of that light is directed towards Earth. Therefore, it is a fairly bright comet, although that desired 3 may not be reached. Red-handed for Pan-STARRS. This comet was discovered on September 8, 2025 through observations with the Pan-STARRS telescope, located in Haleakala, Hawaii. At that moment he was passing Andromeda. Its status as a comet was confirmed with another observation on September 17. Since then, it has attracted the attention of many astronomers, both professional and amateur. Without a doubt, it is worth going out and looking for it. We cannot wait 170,000 more years. Images | Dimitrios Katevainis (Wikimedia Commons) In Xataka | China has created the largest kite in the world with a very clear objective: to make its energy extremely cheaper.

If anyone thinks that gambling is a modern vice, we just found a game of chance that is more than 12,000 years old

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We are so used to locating the origins of gambling in the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean (in the Babylonian temples, on the Roman gaming tables) that it is difficult to imagine another scenario. But a study published this month in the magazine ‘American Antiquity‘ changes everything: the oldest known dice do not come from the Old World, but from the western plains of North America, and are at least 12,000 years old. They date back to nothing less than the Pleistocene. Old dice. With his study, archaeologist Robert J. Madden has shown that Native Americans made and used dice at least 12,000 years ago, during the last centuries of the Ice Age. That makes them the oldest known games of chance, more than 6,000 years ahead of the earliest documented dice in Europe. What was believed? Mainstream history placed the origin of dice in the complex societies of the Near East and Eastern Europe, approximately 5,500 years ago. Madden’s findings they relocate that starting point to another continent and to another completely different type of society: groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers of the western Great Plains of North America. Neither palaces, nor cities, nor written culture: games of chance in Pleistocene camps. What are these dice like? Prehistoric Native American dice do not look like the cubes we know. They are known as binary lots: flat, two-sided pieces, made of bone or wood, designed to be thrown on a surface. The result depended on how many marked faces were left face up; Players counted points with small rods and whoever reached an agreed upon number first won. More like a coin toss than the six possible outcomes on a die, but just as useful for generating random outcomes. Why was there confusion? The problem was classification. When archaeologists found pieces of this type, they simply labeled them as “game pieces.” There was no systematic criterion to identify them as given. madden corrected that way of seeing it developing a morphological test based on a catalog that the ethnographer Stewart Culin published in 1907, ‘Games of the North American Indians’, where he documented 293 historical sets of indigenous dice from more than 130 towns. With that framework applied to the published archaeological record from across the continent, he identified more than 600 additional dice. Where were they? The oldest dice come from three sites in the Folsom culture: Agate Basin (Wyoming), Lindenmeier (Colorado) and Blackwater Draw (New Mexico). It is believed that these pieces They are between 12,800 and 12,200 years old. Lindenmeier, north of Fort Collins, has 14 different artifacts that meet the criteria, leading some archaeologists to speculate that it was a large seasonal congregation site for dispersed groups. The density of material found there points to something more than a temporary camp. What is most striking is the continuity. These objects appear in deposits from all major periods of North American prehistory, without detectable interruption from the late Pleistocene until after European contact. A 12,000-year-old tradition that still works: Madden himself found tutorials on YouTube where native groups explain how to play versions of the same games from two millennia ago. How to play. Possibly, these dice were used in games that we can connect with what we tell about the patollithe Mesoamerican board game of the Mayans and Aztecs: that was also a game of chance with a deep ritual dimension, found in the archaeological works of the Mayan Train. The social and religious function of the game seems to have been constant in very different pre-Columbian cultures. Madden describes these games as “social technologies of integration”: neutral spaces, governed by shared rules, where groups with little or no prior contact could interact, exchange goods and information, and build alliances. The religious dimension is equally documented. Numerous native oral traditions describe dice as a sacred activity: the gods themselves participate, and in some cosmologies the creation of human beings is the result of a cosmic game. Image | Robert J. Madden

Ten years ago, Bnext was the great hope of fintech. They ended up crashing

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Founded in 2016 by Guillermo Vicandi, Bnext It was born as a fintech alternative to traditional banking. In fact, their visible heads assured that it was not a bank, despite offering an account and card. The growth was as fast as the fall. After the collapse of its cryptocurrency, The app announced its closure on April 13. What was Bnext. It was not a bank, that’s what its creators constantly said. It was an electronic money entity (EDE) alternative to traditional banking. In practice, it offered what a bank offers: account, card, loans, insurance, currency purchases, investment plans. The difference was the model: Bnext always acted as an intermediary, connecting the user with the best products on the market through a single app. No offices, no paper, no queues. The golden age. In 2019, Bnext was one of the most visible projects on the Spanish fintech scene. became the fintech that grew the most in Spainwith more than 156,000 registered users and more than 100,000 active clients holding a Bnext VISA. Your second round of financing It closed with 22 million eurosthe highest figure seen in Spain (in 2019) since the Valencian Hawkers raised 55 million euros. That same year, they partnered with giants like MyInvestor to offer financial products. The stumble. Bnext’s first setback comes a year later, in 2021, after its landing in Latin America. Its partner, Cacao Paycard, did not obtain authorization to operate from the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV), which translated into a fine of 2.6 million Mexican pesos (about 150,000 euros at the current exchange rate) to Bnext for misleading communication. There was no plan B. Bnext had to cease operations in Mexico, close all its accounts and lose more than 230,000 clients who had trusted the company prior to the sanctions. Meanwhile. In Spain, alternatives like Revolut were growing like wildfire, and Bnext was beginning to run out of oxygen. In 2021, they decided to ally with Algorand, a blockchain firm that became one of the company’s main shareholders. After the alliance they announced their own token: B3X. The play didn’t go well. On March 1, 2022, it was launched to the public with a starting price of two euro cents. Today it cannot even operate from the app, since the service has been dismantled. Its price before the debacle: 0.00006 US cents. What happens to Bnext users. Bnext accounts and cards have already been canceled and the product is no longer marketed. No payments, transfers or receipts can be uploaded. Payroll cannot be received The balance of the account may be requested during a repayment period of 20 years Cryptocurrency management is referred to Onyze… via email User data will be deleted in accordance with the GDPR You will no longer have access to the marketplace services Bnext was once the great hope of Spanish fintech. Now rest in peace. What will become of the company. The company gives the finishing touch to its app, but does not completely cease its operations. “The fintech business and market has changed considerably, and with this, we have had to pivot our value proposition. After several years offering products to the end consumer and in an increasingly competitive environment and with more complex regulation, we have decided to take a step towards the future, focusing on helping companies launch their own payment products.” Guillermo Vicandi, CEO of Bnext. Bnext closes as a neobank, but pivots towards financial infrastructure services. In Xataka | Europe had been asking for a big hit on the table for some time. Revolut just gave it a huge valuation

Mexicans have been harassed by banks and financiers over the phone for years. Justice has just stopped their feet

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In Mexico, debt collection by telephone has been part of the background noise for many people for years. Insistent calls, messages at odd hours and contacts that cross the line of reason have turned collection into one of those abuses that are often suffered before even understanding who should be responsible for them. For a long time, the pressure was concentrated on the office that dials or writes. But behind this harassment there is more than just an unknown number on the other end of the line: there is also a financial institution that hired him. The key resolution. The underlying novelty is not minor. On January 15, 2026, the Plenary Session of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) closed the door to one of the arguments with which some financial entities sought to release sanctions linked to their reports on collection offices. The ruling confirmed the validity of the framework that allows the CONDUSEF fine them when they fail to comply with these information obligations. According to the SCJN statement, in addition, there is a time limit to act: the authority has a maximum of 180 calendar days, counted from the expiration of the period granted for the hearing guarantee, to issue and notify the corresponding resolution. What this does change. The scope of the ruling goes beyond a technical discussion between courts and financial entities. The responsibility does not end with the firm that engages in improper practices, but can also reach the financial institution that hired it if it fails to comply with its reporting duties to the CONDUSEF. In other words, the entity can no longer hide so easily that the harassment was carried out by a third party. If you failed to report what the law requires, you may also be sanctioned. The origin of the fight. To understand why this case ended up in the Supreme Court, you have to go back to October 14, 2022. That day it was published in the DOF the Provision on Records before CONDUSEF, which established new obligations for financial institutions in their relationship with collection offices. Among other things, the rule obliged them to register these third parties with the Registry of Collection Offices and to submit reports on user complaints. The fines that came later were born precisely from that previous framework. The route the banks took. After the fines for non-compliance with these reports began, several financial entities chose to fight the matter in court. These resources moved between 2023 and 2025 until they ended up in the Amparo in Review 323/2025. In the case reviewed by the Supreme Court, the SCJN itself explained that the sanctioned entity alleged that the rules did not make it clear who was obliged to provide the information and that there were no clear time limits to sanction it. That was, in essence, the defense with which he tried to overturn the punishment. The Plenary’s response. The Supreme Court rejected the idea that these rules left financial institutions on uncertain ground. He assured that the framework that regulates reports on collection dispatches is clear and coherent, because it identifies the obligated subjects, establishes the charges that must be met and allows for precisely locating when there is non-compliance. For this reason, it concluded that the principles of typicity, reservation of law and legal certainty invoked by the entity that promoted the protection were not violated. What changes from now on. Rather than inaugurating a new rule, this ruling consolidates one that already existed and that had been challenged by financial entities. The difference is important, because based on this criterion it is much more difficult to maintain that there was not enough clarity to comply or to be sanctioned. In practical terms, the decision strengthens the position of CONDUSEF and makes it clearer that financial entities can also be administratively sanctioned when they fail to comply with the information obligations provided for by the regulation. Images | pvproductions (Freepik) In Xataka | Mexico has an ambitious plan to be the tenth economy in the world and that involves technology: semiconductors

A fan secretly recorded 10,000 concerts over 40 years with a dictaphone. Internet Archive is digitizing everything

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For four decades, Chicago club owners would see a guy with deep pockets walk in and turn a blind eye. Aadam Jacobs didn’t sell anything or bother: he simply recorded. Every week, several concerts. Every year, hundreds of tapes. Forty years later, that absurd and methodical habit is one of the most valuable and unique sound files of rock history. Who is it. Jacobs, who is now 59 years old, began recording concerts in 1984 with a dictaphone-style device that his grandmother lent him. He was 17 years old and was already recording songs from the radio when he realized he could do the same live, simply hiding a recorder in a pocket when entering the room. Jacobs does not consider himself an obsessive archivist, but simply a music fan. His reasoning was simple: if he went to several concerts a week anyway, why not document them? More and better. Over time the equipment improved: from the Sony cassette it went to DAT (digital audio tape) and from there to solid state digital recorders, although in the first years he admits that he used quite mediocre material because I didn’t have money for anything else. At first, the venue owners tried to stop him from recording, but over time he became a regular figure on the Chicago music scene and many began to let him in for free. A profile of him in the ‘Chicago Reader’ in 2004 he described it as one of the city’s cultural institutions. What’s in the boxes. What has happened with the Aadam Jacobs Collection, which is the name that has ended up being given to all of their recordings, is especially valuable to fans of indie and punk rock from the 1980s and early 2000s, when the scene hit the big time. mainstream thanks to nirvanazo. The catalog includes early performances by REM, The Cure, Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth and Björk. There are also rarities, like a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions, or a 1990 performance by cult group Phish. The star: Nirvana. Nirvana’s recording from 1989, when the group was completely unknown, may be the most interesting of all, taken two and a half years before the release of ‘Nevermind’. But there are also hundreds of performances by smaller groups that have no other sound documentation of their career. Engineers reviewing the recordings acknowledge some surprise at the good quality of many of the recordings, especially given that Jacobs was not using professional equipment. How it started. After appearing in a 2023 documentary, the Internet Archive contacted Jacobs to propose preserving the collection in its live music collection (Live Music Archive), since analog tapes have a limited lifespan. Gradual demagnetization, fungus and mechanical deterioration of coil mechanisms mean that the risks of loss increase with each passing year. Internet Archive volunteer Brian Emerick travels to Jacobs’ house once a month and picks up 10 to 20 boxes, each containing 50 to 100 tapes. He transfers the analog recordings to digital files, which he then sends to other volunteers for mixing and mastering. Emerick estimates that it has digitized approximately 5,500 performances since the end of 2024, and that the project will still take several years to complete. An exception. Jacobs’ tapes have survived through a mix of personal obsession and luck, which has ended up leading them to a repository where they will remain for posterity. He smartphone has democratized concert recording, to the point where it is practically impossible for a live show not to have its corresponding digitalization. But democratizing is not preserving: most of that material ends up buried in forgotten backups or online platforms that change their terms of service frequently. Jacobs was methodical despite his amateur status, and that is what has saved this true musical treasure. In Xataka | The first chorus decides everything: streaming is making today’s songs much simpler

We have been banishing the humble traditional salt shaker from the table for years. Now we have realized that it is a mistake

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For decades, problems such as goiter, hypothyroidism, and childhood cognitive deficits linked to a lack of iodine in the body seemed to be a thing of the past in developed countries. All this was a success of the advances that were seen in public health from the 20th century onwards by targeting the need to add iodine to salt of table that we all consume. But now in many countries there is a significant deficiency in iodine that can lead to the appearance of serious diseases. The culprits. Ironically, new health and wellness trends, as we are seeing a huge boom in non-iodized “gourmet” salts that seem very cool, but they do not have the iodine that is supplemented to classic salt and that we need in our diet. The map of a deficit. According to data from the WHO itself in Europe and the Iodine Global Network, mild iodine deficiency persists and is spreading in countries where it was believed to be an eradicated problem. To give us an idea, in the UK Recent data suggest that women of childbearing age have gone from having sufficient levels to being classified as having mild deficiency. If we continue investigating, in Australia the problem has been reappearing for years despite fortification attempts, while in the United States, recent reviews published indicate that the deficit is growing again despite the historical iodization of salt, linked to new dietary patterns. The ‘gourmet’ culprit. Historically, common table salt has been our primary vehicle for consuming dietary iodine. But in recent years we have seen a trend appear for this product, such as Himalayan pink saltflaked sea salt or kosher salt. The problem with these options, in addition to being much more expensive, is that they are perceived as very healthy alternatives. The problem is that they are almost never iodized, and that is why their increasing consumption in order to improve health is ultimately causing the opposite. There is more. In addition to the salt problem, it must also be kept in mind that in many countries cow’s milk has traditionally been the main source of iodine in the diet due to livestock supplementation and milking disinfectants. But its consumption is falling radically. This is in addition to a general transition towards vegan or flexitarian diets that has increased the consumption of vegetable drinks that, although they are reinforced with calcium or vitamin B12, are not fortified with this iodine. Its consequences. That there is an iodine deficiency is not nonsense, since iodine is the fundamental fuel of the thyroid gland and is vital for neurological development, and that is why the European Food Safety Authority establishes that an adult needs 150 micrograms of iodine per day, a figure that rises to 200 µg in pregnant women. If we focus on pregnant women, having a deficit can have fatal consequences with problems in fetal cognitive development or even drops in IQ. The cases. An analysis published in 2019 estimates that there are currently 81.4 million cases of deficiency in women of reproductive age and, although since 1990 the global prevalence has decreased enormously thanks to universal iodization, the problem now presents a dichotomy: it affects regions with a low human development index such as sub-Saharan Africa due to lack of resources, and rich countries due to modern dietary decisions. The solution. Here the WHO demands that prevention policies be reinforced through specific legislation, promoting universal iodization of all salts, both those for direct consumption and those used in processed foods and bakery. In addition, the need to require or encourage vegetable drinks to be systematically fortified with iodine is pointed out, matching the nutritional profile of cow’s milk. In this way, we return to the original idea of ​​introducing iodine into common table salt, so now it is time to supplement the new foods that appear on the market. Images | Jonathan Cooper Melissa DiRocco In Xataka | If you fall asleep in less than five minutes, you don’t have a “superpower”: it’s a warning signal from your brain

We knew that olive trees were very old trees, what we did not imagine was that they reached 4,000 years of age.

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The olive tree is undoubtedly one of the most iconic trees in the Mediterranean basin. Olive groves have populated the fields of southern Europe and the Levant since time immemorial, but such is the longevity of this species that the history of some of these trees also dates back to, at least, antiquity. An example of this is the Vouves olive treelocated on the Greek island of Crete. Conservative estimates put it on this tree about 2,000 years. This would imply that in his life he could be a silent witness to events such as the division of the Roman Empire, the fall of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and, of course, the birth of contemporary Greece. The most extensive estimates estimate that this tree could reach 4,000 years old. This would not only make it a contemporary of figures such as Pythagoras, Aristotle or Alexander the Great but would also imply that this plant was born in Minoan Crete and was Witness the collapse of the Late Bronze Ageone of the most intriguing events that occurred at the dawn of history as we understand it. But perhaps the most surprising detail of all this is that the Vouves olive tree continues to bear fruit. This has led many to ask, how is this possible? What makes this specimen and its species in general so long-lived? The olive tree (Olea europaea) has a life expectancy that, although it does not reach millennia, does exceed several centuries. It is estimated that the life expectancy of trees of this species around five centuriesalthough there is some debate about it. In this sense, a study published in 2021 in the magazine Dendrochronologyestimated that the majority of “monumental olive trees” had maximum ages ranging between 300 and 500 years. Estimating the age of an olive tree is difficult. We noted at the beginning that estimates of the age of this ancient tree ranged between 2,000 and 4,000 years, a very wide range precisely because of the difficulty involved in calculating the age of these trees. Dendrochronology is based on using the growth rings of tree trunks to estimate their age: how many rings, how many years. Counting rings in a felled specimen is simple, but doing it in a living tree and doing it in an olive tree is another story. The trunks of the olive trees grow irregularly, which implies an apparently chaotic pattern in the rings inside, making counting especially difficult, as I pointed out. a study published in 2013 in the magazine PLOS One. Its curious growth could be related to its longevity. According to Scott Travers, a biologist at Rutgers University, in an article for Forbesone of the “secrets” behind longevity of these trees is in vegetative or clonal reproduction. That is, in the fact that this tree is made up of various cuttings that start from the same root. This, adds Travers, allows this type of plants to survive extreme conditions, including fires, cuts and similar incidents. Another survival trick Travers continues explainingis in the biochemistry of the tree, which offers mechanisms that allow it to repair damaged tissues, as well as defend itself against pathogenic organisms. The same oil that we humans use is used by the tree that gives it to us through its fruits. The elderly around us Spain also has ancient olive trees, although if we want to find a tree that competes in age with the Vouves olive tree, we have to go to Portugal. It would be an olive tree located in Abrantesin the center of Portugal. According to a study carried out by the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD), Mouchao would be the tree that would hold this record with an age that would be around 3,350 years old. Spain also has ancient olive trees and among them all stands out. Arion’s Fargea tree that we can find in the province of Tarragona. The estimated age of this olive tree It is more than 1,700 years old. This implies that this ancient tree would have been planted in the time of Emperor Constantine I. Olive trees are not the only ancient tree species in our environment. Cedars, sequoias and even Canarian dragon trees can also reach ages that would make the biblical Methuselah pale. Olive trees are trees with a long life expectancy but they do not usually fill the lists of the longest living trees on the planet. The two longest-lived non-cloned trees known are two pines called Prometheus and Methuselahwhose ages are estimated to be over 4,000 years old. Both belong (or belonged in the case of Prometheus) to the species Pinus longaevathe “long-lived pine” so this fact is not entirely surprising. When Prometheus was cut, the botanists who analyzed it counted more than 4,800 rings, so they estimated its age to be about 4,900 years. Estimates indicate that Methuselah has also surpassed by decades the 4,800 year old mark. If we include clonal organisms we can find older trees. For example, the Pando forestconsidered the largest living organism on the planet, composed of thousands of cuttings from the same clonal tree, could have about 80,000 years old according to some estimates. In Xataka | A retiree planted a tree in 2003 in one of the most dangerous areas of Sao Paulo. Today it is an amazing “jungle” of the city In Xataka | We have found the oldest tree in the EU and it has been installed for 1,500 years in a very special place: Teide Image | Eric Nagle, CC BY-SA 4.0 This article was originally published in Xataka in April 2025.

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