Cast iron skillets from the kitchen rarely meet bullets outside fiction. The team at Yee Yee Life set out to change that on their private range in Texas. They lined up fresh pans in a row and fired round after round to find out exactly how many it takes to stop each type of ammunition. Slow motion cameras rolled while safety gear stayed on and results stayed unpredictable.

The tests began with the lightest choice, a Ruger Mark IV sending a.22 long rifle bullets were placed directly into the first skillet. The bullet struck the curved surface, showering a silver mist outwards, leaving just a faint mark. However, none of the pans shattered, and the round was nothing near breaking through. Handgun rounds followed, with a Glock 19 firing a 9mm round into the center of the first pan. Fragments flew out the opposite side and bounced off the second skillet. While the margins of the second pan were severely damaged, the round remained intact; just one pan cracked under pressure.

The 1911, loaded with.45 ACP ammo, came next. This cartridge created a much wider hole in the first skillet, and a piece of the bullet lodged in the second pan without going completely through. To be fair, the damage appeared significant, yet it still required two pans to stop it. Then came magnum strength, which, combined with a.44 Magnum round, sent the first two pans flying cleanly, but only barely cleared the third, leaving a tiny bulge with no crack or exit evident. The round ended with three pans, which was the magic number.

A Desert Eagle chambered in .50 AE replicated the two-pan penetration approach, with the bullet escaping the second skillet and bouncing off the third while spinning rapidly. In tests using stainless steel pans, we saw the same round pass clear through the first three layers, but the cast iron ones proved to be much tougher. The hosts noticed this right away, as these pans were far more durable than their steel counterparts.

Shotgun slugs had a minor impact on the game, as one 12 gauge slug burst through the first three pans, leaving a trail of flames around the entry point and a wider hole on the third pan. Shrapnel flew everywhere, and a handful of pans were damaged because this round had significantly more penetrating power than the.44 Magnum or The.50 AE, but it took four pans to bring it to a stop.

Rifle bullets slipped into the mix, with an AR platform firing 5.56 NATO green tip ammo, striking little holes in the first two pans and ejecting clouds of dust and smoke as it approached the third, leaving a terrible divot and fracture. However, the round came to a sudden end with only two pans removed. It was over after three pans. Next up was an AK-47 chambered in 7.62×39 ammo, which easily cleared three pans before shattering apart on the fourth, sending pan parts and bullets flying everywhere. A gold SCAR in.308 followed the same course, striking three pans before coming to a standstill on the fourth. Then comes a bolt-action rifle.30-06 appeared and opened up, emitting smoke, sparks, and fire as it traveled through three pans before coming to a halt on the fourth tier. All three rounds ended with three pans pierced.

Then, in the big leagues, he used a.50 BMG rifle, his most powerful hitter. Nine brand new cast iron pans were lined up in a row, waiting to see what would happen, and it soared perfectly through, entering the first pan without a hitch and leaving a wonderful large hole in the second. By the third pan, it was turning slightly sideways, and by the fifth, it was still clearly on a roll. The sixth pan eventually halted it dead in its tracks. We must emphasize that no other round in the entire test progressed past the third pan. Five pans fell down, and six pans finally brought everything to a halt.

The French government revealed that a recent breach of its Tchap encrypted messaging platform affects the accounts of over 73,000 employees in the French public sector.

DINUM, the French government’s digital affairs directorate, disclosed on Monday that a threat actor gained access to the Tchap platform using a compromised user account and notified France’s data protection authority (CNIL) due to the potential exposure of personal data shared by some users.

While it initially shared almost no details about what was exposed and how many people were affected by this breach, the DINUM disclosed in a subsequent update that the attackers may have accessed information shared by around 9% of all registered users on the platform.

DINUM explained that while private conversations are encrypted and their content protected, the attacker was able to steal all the data shared in public chat rooms, which are not encrypted. This allowed them to collect the users’ names and email addresses, as well as their avatar images and the public sector organization they work for.

“Of the more than 825,000 registered agents, 73,467 agents would be affected by this incident, or less than 9% of registered users. These forums, by design, are open to all users and their messages are not encrypted. Officers’ private conversations remain protected,” it said.

“At this point, the account behind the malicious requests has been identified. It was immediately blocked in order to remove the attacker’s persistent access and allow in-depth analysis of the data he was able to access. Potentially exposed data from user accounts concerns at least: last name, first name, email address, belonging entity and avatar.”

Although DINUM has yet to attribute this breach, a threat actor claimed responsibility for the attack over the weekend and shared a sample of stolen files, saying they gained access to the platform following a social engineering attack.

​The threat actor claimed to have scraped nearly 650,000 messages and information from more than 73,000 accounts, including their email addresses, meeting links, organization information, as well as account and device metadata.

​They’ve also allegedly stolen over 13.5GB of documents and media files shared by public servants using the Tchap service, as well as hardcoded LDAP credentials leaked via a PowerShell script.

Developed by DINUM in collaboration with ANSSI (the French Cybersecurity Agency) in 2018, Tchap is a decentralized collaboration tool and instant messaging platform for the French public sector, based on the Matrix protocol.

After becoming the default app for work communications for all civil servants in early August 2025, Tchap has reached over 300,000 monthly users and now has over 500,000 downloads on Google’s Play Store.

In May, French authorities also arrested a 15-year-old suspected of selling data stolen in an April cyberattack on ANTS (Agence nationale des titres sécurisés), the country’s agency for issuing and managing official identity and registration documents.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

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Last week, President Donald Trump claimed a secret US mission had moved 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz while it was blockaded. The claim landed in an industry already consumed by the question of how much oil is actually getting out—and nobody, it turns out, can answer that with confidence.

“No one’s experienced this kind of disruption,” said Matt Stanley, head of market engagement at Kpler, the commodity intelligence and ship-tracking firm. The reason the numbers are so hard to pin down is what the industry calls the dark trade—vessels running without their AIS transponders on, moving at night, closer to the Omani border, sometimes with naval escort.

There are ways to detect portions of outgoing oil anyway. Different grades of crude can only originate from specific fields. The UAE’s Murban crude can be exported via Fujairah, outside the strait. Another type of crude, Upper Zakum, cannot. One oil market analyst noted that their team has seen Upper Zakum crude oil appear in other markets. Those sightings are happening, yet the scale remains unknown.

Stanley says it’s possible that 100 million barrels made it through the Strait of Hormuz since the first of May. “When you put into context, pre-conflict, it was about 20 million barrels a day that was going through, so five days worth of oil, in a normal traffic environment, and it’s taken over a month. 100 million barrels, it’s a good number, but it’s a relative drop in the ocean, literally, compared to previous traffic.”

Why Prices Haven’t Exploded Yet

The world’s most important oil chokepoint has been effectively shut for more than 100 days. World Trade Organization data shows a 95 percent reduction in crude oil shipments from Arabian Gulf ports and a 99 percent reduction in liquified natural gas carriers. The International Energy Agency has called it “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” Yet Brent crude sits at $87.55 per barrel—the lowest since before the conflict began.

This is because of buffers. China has approximately 1.3 billion barrels in storage, drawing it down at around a million barrels a day, Stanley says. “We see their demand, about 7 million barrels a day from May, June, and July. They were buying 12.5 million barrels a day in December.” The US, Brazil, and Canada have also stepped in to fill part of the void.

The three analysts interviewed agree that the oil market’s response has been robust. “The oil market responded to this outage significantly well in terms of cutting parts of demand,” says Iman Nasseri, managing director, Middle East of FGE NexantECA, an energy and chemical advisory company. “There is also a significant amount of stock that has come to market, but we doubt that they will continue to do that. We expect that by July [if the strait remains closed], things will change.”

The buffers will run out. One analyst said stocks are approaching what the industry calls operationally critical levels—where oil in storage and additional supply needs to be replenished. They added that the US, currently acting as a swing producer, faces its own deadline as the end of the year approaches, and the US will have to prioritize its own domestic production to accommodate people needing to heat their homes.

“People looking at October, you really think that it would be sorted out by the middle of August,” Stanley says. “That’s what I think the market is hoping for.”

Back Online

Global oil supply fell 10.1 million barrels per day in March, with OPEC+ production dropping by 9.4 million barrels per day month-on-month. The harder question is how much comes back, and when.

Analysis by S&P Global CERA estimates restart timelines of 10 weeks to seven months for fields shut down for two months. IEA executive director Fatih Birol has said more than 80 energy facilities have been damaged, and recovery “could take as long as two years.” The UAE’s national oil company estimates full Hormuz flows won’t resume until 2027.

I’m not surprised to discover that Suunto has given the Spark some protection against sweat and rain. The IP55 rating doesn’t extend to the charging case, which is reasonably compact and slim enough to slip into a pocket or running belt if you need to carry it with you.

Screenshot

Suunto provides two control methods, but neither are the type I like to see on earbuds built for exercise. There are touch panels placed on the outside of both buds, which I usually find to be fiddly to use when running or with sweaty hands. Even Suunto states that single-tap controls can be easily triggered by accident. Fortunately, the controls are well spread across the speaker units, and accidental triggers were rare. These touch controls can be tapped or held to skip back and forward a track. They can also adjust volume or play and pause audio. You can additionally use them to turn on metronome and workout tracking modes. That’s all great, but I would have liked them to also switch between EQ modes.

The head gesture controls aren’t as successful. This uses some pretty standard motion sensors found inside most smartwatches to register head nods or shakes to answer or reject a call or skip a track. I’ve used these on Suunto headphones previously, and my experience hasn’t been great. If you’re walking or sitting on a bike, they’re absolutely fine. When you run, your head naturally moves around a lot, and that does lead to accidentally setting off the controls. It quickly gets annoying.

Stellar Open-Ear Sound

Photograph: Michael Sawh

Bottom line, the Suunto Spark sound great. I’ve tested a lot of open-ear earbuds and headphones, and I’d put the Spark alongside the very best, including Shokz, Anker, and Bose.

Whether it’s the overall depth of the sound or versatility of the fit, I was impressed. They’re even great at not letting the wind cut through and drown out podcasts or calls. A big part of that strong performance lies with the available EQ modes, which (as mentioned) have to be enabled from the Suunto phone app. This is the same app used to set up Suunto’s watches. It’s not the prettiest, but the headphone section is pretty straightforward to get around.

There’s four EQ presets with an additional custom option, giving you greater control over the sound profile compared to other Suunto headphones. The switch to air conduction is what makes this possible. Air conduction works by placing speakers close to your ears and behaves a lot more like traditional earbuds. One of the chief benefits over bone conduction is the ability to offer much greater sound customization.

As is often the case, Apple has leaked its own hardware. Here are the signs that the folding iPhone and MacBook Pro with touchscreen are coming, and where they are.

The release of the first developer betas of macOS 27 Golden Gate, iOS 27, and others was followed by the inevitable deep dive into the changes. All to find out what Apple is planning for the future.

In Sunday’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman lays out multiple items that were found in the initial betas relating to inbound hardware. He refers to them as the first real evidence from Apple relating to the iPhone Fold and a MacBook with a touchscreen.

The changes, he insists, are made to support the new form factors.

iPhone Fold

For the iPhone Fold, Gurman first points to the iPhone Mirroring app included in macOS 27. The tool has been updated so it can be stretched wide enough for iPad-like layouts, like an opened iPhone Fold’s main display.

There were also a number of iPhone Fold code references in iOS 27, including mentions of “foldState” and “angleDegrees” and the number of hardware displays. This would directly tie into the iPhone Fold and determining how open or closed the device is.

The last bit of evidence Gurman talks about is the direction from Apple during the WWDC keynote. Developers should be taking a concept known as app adaptability into account, namely making the same app work on a variety of screen sizes.

This could be taken to mean accounting for differences between models and generations. It’s a more extreme concept when you consider the squarer display expected from the iPhone Fold.

Touchscreen MacBook

When it comes to the touch-enabled MacBook, Gurman starts off by pointing out how Sidecar now supports full touch input access across macOS from the iPad. This could really just be a much-needed improvement to how Sidecar functions, but it can be interpreted as a precursor to the supposed MacBook.

He also writes about the tweaks to the macOS user interface to support pull-to-refresh. This is a design idea more common to smartphones and tablets, but it does work with trackpads and mice, with touch support a future possibility.

For both of these points, it certainly plays into the idea of a touchscreen interface. It seems unlikely that Apple would build them into macOS just for a better Sidecar experience.

Lastly, he claims that the new pill-shaped Siri Search and Ask interface on the Mac is something that would work on a Dynamic Island-style interface. He believes that this could be coming as part of a future touch MacBook.

Expected evidence

Normally, when we talk about leakers, we discuss their track record and how much their claims line up with the reality of the situation. When it comes to Gurman, he has a pretty good level of accuracy when it comes to leaks and rumor sourcing, making him one of the top people in the Apple rumor mill.

This time around, it’s not really a piece detailing rumors, but instead collates known facts that have surfaced in the week of availability for the betas. He’s analyzing facts, and pinning the discoveries onto some well-rumored items.

Quite frankly, he is right to do so. Both are well-rumored pieces of kit that are still ever so out of reach of consumers.

When it comes to the touchscreen MacBook, it’s something that has surfaced regularly over the years. But there are rumors about a major MacBook Pro refresh on the horizon that could use it.

Back in February, Gurman insisted that the touchscreen models will arrive by the end of 2026, complete with OLED and using a Dynamic Island at the top center of the screen. Other leakers have also chimed in on the rumors, making a fall launch seem more likely.

As for the iPhone Fold, the general specifications for the model have been rumored for quite some time. It’s even reached the point that dummy units are being produced, which is usually an indicator of an impending launch.

With the iPhone Fold expected in the fall as part of Apple’s split launch strategy, the timing of the physical models is apt.

Ultimately, Apple’s operating systems are due to arrive in the fall alongside a bunch of hardware launches. This is business as usual for Apple, and it has been this way for years.

The company has a culture of secrecy that entails hiding as much as possible from prying eyes until launches happen. But it certainly can’t hide everything, especially when it needs to get developers prepared for those fall product announcements.

They are justifiable leaks. Not only utilitarian in preparing developers, but also helping to stir the pot and excite onlookers for what’s to come.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a fun one. It includes a soccer category for all of us watching the World Cup, and a category tied to the Pacific Northwest City where I live. If you’re struggling with the puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Think World Cup roles.

Green group hint: Emerald City.

Blue group hint: Not named Tom, but close.

Purple group hint: Fore!

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Soccer positions.

Green group: Seattle teams.

Blue group: Baseball Tims.

Purple group: Golf ____.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is soccer positions. The four answers are fullback, goalkeeper, midfielder and striker.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is Seattle teams. The four answers are Kraken, Reign, Seahawks and Storm.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is baseball Tims. The four answers are  Lincecum, Raines, Salmon and Wakefield.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is golf ____.  The four answers are course, polo, tee and umbrella.

After Sergi Bastardas’ decade at Amazon and floriculture startup Colvin, one thing always stood out  — the feeling that there wasn’t enough efficient “human infrastructure” to manage the workers behind the scenes. He took this feeling and, in 2025, alongside his co-founders Nacho Travesí and Antonio Melé, launched Orbio, an enterprise startup that helps businesses manage frontline workers — using AI agents, of course. 

On Monday, the company announced a $21 million Series A in a round led by Dawn Capital. The startup says its customers already include Poke and YUM! Brands (owners of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC), to onboard and manage their frontline employees. Bastardas said customers are progressing from using Orbio in pilot to now fully deploying the software. As an example, he said that at behavioral health provider The Stepping Stones Group, Orbio now runs the company’s full US operation, with 20% more candidates making it through to get hired

The Orbio agents (Maria, Daniel, and Claire) can interview candidates, assess fit, monitor employee output, and conduct daily check-ins throughout an employee’s work lifecycle. The goal is to help businesses run their workforces autonomously, Bastardas said, adding that businesses will be able to engage and support the frontline workforces while also delegating some workforce operations to AI agents. 

“Each agent generates data that feeds back into the others: onboarding signals inform recruiting quality; exit interviews reveal why employees leave, which recalibrates hiring criteria; engagement data identifies retention risks,” he continued. 

Orbio competes with several startups — such as Paradox, which helps automate recruiting, and WorkJam, which helps manage frontline employees. 

Bastardas considers Orbio’s biggest competitor to be the legacy approach, however, to how frontline workers are managed (especially in industries like healthcare, retail, and logistics) — a fragmented process that sometimes still involves spreadsheets and phone calls. All of this is changing rapidly, however, in the age of AI. Orbio has raised $26 million in funding to date from investors, including Visionaries and 2100 Ventures. Bastardas said the fresh capital will be used to hire and develop more AI agents. 

“This will be [a] transformation for businesses, but also the workforce,” Bastardas said. “The 2.7 billion people who keep healthcare, retail, logistics, and hospitality running, most of whom don’t have a corporate email address, have previously got nothing. This is their AI moment.” 

Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,400 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.