Marta Torres Briegas

Reducing the impact of its business on the environment is one of the strategic goals of BBVA in the fight against climate change and in driving sustainable development. To meet this challenge, BBVA has 15 buildings that have received the renowned LEED Gold and Platinum certificates as sustainable and efficient constructions that respect the environment.

New modes of communication have transformed the way news is delivered. Thanks to the Internet, access to information has never been so fast. Each minute more than 3.5 million Google searches are made, Facebook is accessed 900,000 times, and 156 million emails are sent. The compulsion to be informed every minute of the day has provoked a surge in so-called “fake news.”

Travelling is one of the greatest pleasures in life. Visiting new cities, learning about new cultures and other languages is a dream for many. But travelling across the globe is not as easy as it seems. Fortunately, paintings have the power of taking us to other places and eras. BBVA Collection has set out to bring all corners of the world together, so that we can have them at hand’s reach.

The Italian director Ettore Scola once said that movies are a painted mirror. Dramas, comedies and adventures of all kinds have been presented on the big screen for decades. But the imagination of film directors when creating science fiction has taken them even further, to a once-distant future that we’ve finally reached. Many screenplays were written about the present we now live in, but how accurate were their predictions?

It´s already been proven that music is a balm for the soul, but research increasingly shows that it´s also a powerful medicine for the mind. When sounds reach the ear, a series of stimulants begin to travel over the neuronal connections and the brain releases dopamine, the same chemical substance that produces pleasure from food, drugs or sex. However, music does much more than this.

Year 2049. Three decades have passed since Richard Deckard began hunting down and retiring Nexus 6 models. The Wallace Corporation has built an empire on the ruins of Tyrell Corp, designing a new generation of replicants, more obliging and integrated in society.  Through the implementation of memories, the new models have an emotional foundation that makes them more stable than their predecessors, much more similar to humans.

We know there are planets of a size similar to the Earth and at a distance from their sun that make them inhabitable. It´s also possible that there are vestiges of life on Mars, in the ice-covered oceans covered of Europa - a satellite of Jupiter - or on Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn. Sending spaceships manned by robots to study the solar system, recreating the conditions of life on Mars inside a mine, or trying to reproduce a living organism in a laboratory – as Dan Brown relates in his latest bestseller – are some of the scientific experiments that are now being performed to solve the enigma of the origin of life.

The development of new technologies as a means to alleviate workloads is part of the day to day running of businesses. Increasingly, robots, artificial intelligence, and computer algorithms are taking over humans in the execution of mechanical tasks. However, many theoreticians are wary of the consequences this development will bring upon the workplace. Darrel M. West discusses the impact of these emerging technologies on society in the book 'The Next Step. Exponential Life', which can be downloaded for free from the BBVA OpenMind project website.

Spanish tennis star Garbiñe Muguruza has achieved one of her lifelong dreams: she has become the top-ranked tennis player in the world.  The title became hers after Karolina Plisková of the Czech Republic was defeated by CoCo Vandewehe of the United States (7-6 (4) y 6-3) in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open on Sept 6. Garbiñe will be officially crowned the world’s number one tennis player when the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) publishes its updated ranking on Sept. 11.

Climate change is one of the greatest problems facing humanity. Abrupt temperature changes, famine, disease and floods are all evidence that changes in the climate are not a myth. The consequences could get worse if we do not manage to reduce the greenhouse effect, as Matthew Liao warns in his book The Next Step: Exponential Life. It can be downloaded at no charge  on BBVA’s website for the OpenMind project.

Machines started by offering us recommendations on what to read, and now they’re capable of writing poetry, stories and even screenplays. Computers have gone from tools to help human creators to becoming creative entities themselves, explains Ramón López de Mántaras in the book “The Next Step: Exponential Life”, which can be downloaded at no charge on BBVA OpenMind’s website.

Just as they do every summer, the streets of Paris, New York and Madrid prepare to be discovered by visitors and to enliven their imagination. Who hasn´t dreamed at one time or another of strolling through their favorite city two hundred years ago and living its history in first person? There´s no need to go on dreaming. Thanks to the BBVA Collection, we can go around the world and revisit the past.

Every summer, in early July, the Grand-Place in Brussels returns to the 16th century and receives the Court of Charles V. For three days, the centre of Brussels becomes the home of period costumes, jousting on horseback, and crossbow tournaments in celebration of the Ommegang Festivities.