This reconstructed image of a fresco from the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete shows three Minoan women with their hair in ponytails. “The Curve of the World” throws a spotlight on Minoan seafarers. (Credit: Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Long before Homer wrote the Odyssey, Minoan seafarers were plying the trade routes of the Mediterranean and spinning stories of adventure — but when it comes to imagination on an outlandish scale, the late science-fiction author Vonda N. McIntyre’s tale about a transoceanic Minoan odyssey just might have awed even Homer.
McIntyre finished the manuscript for her final book, “The Curve of the World,” less than two weeks before she died of pancreatic cancer in 2019. Since then, a team of writers and editors assembled by Clarion West — the Seattle-based literary nonprofit that McIntyre founded in 1971 — has been working to get the novel in shape for publication.
Nisi Shawl, an award-winning science-fiction and fantasy writer, admits to “fan-girling” during the editing process. “The sheer joy of the prose, the sensual array of delights that are offered, every bit of the way, the writing is just so pleasurable,” Shawl says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.
McIntyre was arguably best known for her novelizations of three “Star Trek” movies, plus two books based on the original TV series, a “Star Wars” novel and a totally original “Starfarers” book series. One of her award-winning novels, “The Moon and the Sun,” was adapted for a movie that was titled “The King’s Daughter” and released after her death.
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“The Moon and the Sun” blended history, fantasy, science fiction and romance in an alternate-universe version of 17th-century France under the reign of Louis XIV. “The Curve of the World” follows a similar trajectory — but set in the Bronze Age, about 3,600 years ago.
In a sense, the tale is complementary to Homer’s Odyssey, which is getting the Hollywood treatment this summer in a movie starring Matt Damon as Odysseus. “It’s a side-by-side emergence of a literal hero’s journey and a literal heroine’s journey,” Shawl says.
McIntyre’s main character is a woman, not a man. She’s a diplomat, not a warrior. And her odyssey is the reverse of Odysseus’ homeward voyage. The long and winding trip begins at home, on the island of Crete, and goes far beyond the Mediterranean Sea to the Americas.
Along the way, the Minoan crew encounters Nordic pirates on the high seas, hunter-gatherers on North America’s Atlantic Coast and a bloodthirsty society in ancient Mesoamerica that keeps its mummified ruler around long after death. Perhaps the most outlandish stretch in McIntyre’s tale has the crew crossing over to the Pacific side of the Americas and sailing up to, of all places, Puget Sound.
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Vonda McIntyre (left) finished the manuscript for “The Curve of the World” less than two weeks before her death in 2019. Nisi Shawl (right) is part of a team of writers and editors who prepared the manuscript for publication. (Credits: Clarion West for McIntyre and Shawl photos; Ruby Rae Jones / Aqueduct Press for book cover illustration)
The Minoans encounter a strange new world where the inhabitants live in longhouses, weave the fur of woolly dogs into their blankets, and feast on cedar-planked salmon. But it’s no utopia: The visitors become entangled in intertribal conflicts as well as natural threats that are all too familiar to the Pacific Northwest’s modern-day residents.
Although the Minoans were skilled travelers and traders, they weren’t as skilled as they’re portrayed to be in McIntyre’s novel. “While I’d love to believe some intrepid Minoans crossed the Pacific using the stars, unfortunately the archaeological evidence for anything beyond the Mediterranean remains extremely limited,” Alessandro Berio, a Brazilian archaeoastronomer who has studied the Minoans extensively, said in an email.
“The Minoans, generally considered Europe’s first advanced maritime civilization, established the earliest large-scale trade network in the Mediterranean. Archaeological material has been recovered throughout Egypt, the Levant and Anatolia,” Berio said. But he added that clear evidence for Mediterranean navigators venturing beyond the Mediterranean itself “only appears later, during the Phoenician period.”
That’s the difference between the sort of history that Berio studies and the fiction-flavored history that was McIntyre’s specialty. Shawl is a practitioner of that type of history as well: Shawl’s best-known novel, “Everfair,” describes a steampunk world in which socialists and missionaries unite to foster an independent nation in the Belgian Congo at the dawn of the 20th century.
“I’m starting to come to the conclusion that ‘alternate history’ is probably a misnomer, because sometimes it’s sort of like a veering away from the history we know, right?” Shawl says. “Sometimes it’s a hidden history, something that happened within the interstices of the history that we know. And sometimes it’s just straight-up a different version, a different perspective.”
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McIntyre was known for highlighting different perspectives when it came to gender and sexual diversity. There’s plenty of that in “The Curve of the World.” For example, one of the characters smoothly switches between acting as a man or a woman, depending on the circumstance.
Shawl found the novel’s main character, a trader and emissary named Iakinthu, to have a particularly interesting perspective on the cultures she encounters. “She was not being, like, traditionally aggressive, but she was not giving way, either,” Shawl says. “She was very much, ‘You got to do you, but when it comes to our interactions, you do me.’ I really want to study how Vonda portrayed her doing that, because I think it will be helpful in modern times.”
In the book’s acknowledgments, McIntyre provided a cautionary note about real Minoan history vs. her alternate “Idaean” history: “Do not try to match the Idaean timeline to ours because your head will explode,” she wrote.
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“My head did explode,” Shawl admits. “My head exploded because I was trying to hold together all the different layers of reality that she was carving up and serving. Other people have told me of earlier incidents where they were like, ‘Is this how it really could have happened? Is this what did happen? What is Vonda doing?’
“Well, she’s just being great, that’s all,” Shawl said.
Clarion West is presenting a virtual book launch party for “The Curve of the World” at 11 a.m. PT Saturday. Follow the link from this webpage to RSVP and get the Zoom link for the event. Shawl and two other book editors — Debbie Notkin and L. Timmel Duchamp — will read from the book and discuss the project. Kath Wilham also participated in the editing process.
Clarion West is also presenting a “Curve of the World” reading and conversation with Shawl and Theo Downes-Le Guin — the literary executor for author Ursula K. Le Guin’s estate — at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle at 7 p.m. PT on July 16. Follow the link from this webpage to RSVP and get in-person or virtual tickets.
Mixtapes used to be a way that we cultivated a personal selection of music for our own enjoyment, or to give as gifts to those we wanted to impress with a personal touch. These days, we’d typically try that with a playlist, but it’s less romantic despite also being more ephemeral. Songs fall off streaming services all the time, and few of us have the exact same subscriptions as those we’re trying to flirt with. Thus, [Hunter Irving] whipped up a more lasting solution for this modern age.
The concept is simple—it’s a collection of songs that are packaged together in a easily portable format that won’t disappear because of corporate bureaucratic nonsense. [Hunter] has termed their project Mixapps—because it’s a method of sharing music based around Progressive Web Apps (PWA). To create a custom mix, you start by running a Python script, which will then let you add tracks and reorder them as you desire. From there, you run a second script that builds the web app for you.
You can then upload the prepared app directory to a web host to share it with anyone you like. They can then save the PWA to the home screen of their mobile device, where it will live happily ever after. There’s no need to keep hosting the app online or for the user to remain connected to the Internet; everything is self contained on their device. If you’re curious, there’s a demo you can check out online.
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It’s worth noting that there are intellectual property concerns to be had as with any form of music sharing, but what else is new? We’ve explored the magic of mixtapes in the past, anyway, to be sure. If you’re finding new ways to trade music and playlists, romantically or platonically, don’t hesitate to let us know.
Faraday Future raised $25M in convertible notes for its robotics pivot. Half is locked in investor-controlled accounts.
Faraday Future announced on Thursday that it has raised $25 million through convertible promissory notes, bringing its total financing over the past two months to $70 million. The company says the capital is sufficient to fund Phase 1 of its robotics business plan through the end of 2026. The stock, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker FFAI, closed below $1 per share and is currently under a Nasdaq deficiency notice for failing to maintain the minimum bid price requirement.
The structure of the raise warrants attention. Of the $25 million, only $12.5 million goes directly into the company’s operating account. The remaining $12.5 million is deposited into control accounts held by the investors, and will be released to Faraday Future only upon satisfaction of certain undisclosed conditions. The press release describes “institutional investors’ confidence” in the company’s prospects but does not name any of the investors. The shares underlying the convertible notes are unregistered and subject to trading restrictions. The company’s own risk factors, filed with the SEC, acknowledge that it currently lacks sufficient share capital to execute its strategy and that obtaining stockholder approval for additional shares could result in “substantial additional dilution.”
Faraday Future is pivoting from electric vehicles to what it calls “Embodied AI,” positioning itself as a physical AI company that delivers both humanoid and bionic robots. The company says it shipped 68 robots as of 30 April, with a full-year target of 1,500 units across four product lines aimed at education, security inspection, reception and guided tours, performance, and university research. Its Q1 2026 financial results reported that the robotics business achieved positive gross margins and generated ecosystem revenue, though the company did not disclose the total revenue figure in its press release.
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The company also signed an MOU with RobotShop, a Canadian robotics e-commerce platform, as its first distribution partner for the robotics line. An MOU is a non-binding agreement and does not represent a committed order.
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The corporate history is relevant context. Faraday Future was founded in 2014 by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting, who has been at the centre of multiple financial controversies. The company went public via SPAC merger in 2021, after which the SEC launched an investigation into matters related to the PIPE and SPAC transactions. Wells Notices were issued to the company and certain executives. The SEC concluded its investigation in March 2026 with no enforcement action, which the company described as removing a “major historical overhang.” Separately, a special committee of independent directors had conducted its own investigation beginning in October 2021.
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The EV side of the business has struggled to reach meaningful scale. Faraday Future’s FF 91, a luxury electric vehicle priced above $300,000, has been delivered in very small numbers since its 2023 launch. The company is now developing what it calls “EAI automotive robots,” essentially AI-enhanced vehicles, alongside its humanoid and bionic robot product lines.
The humanoid robotics market is attracting serious capital in 2026. Morgan Stanley doubled its forecast for China’s humanoid robot sales to 28,000 units this year. Unitree is filing for a $7 billion IPO after outselling Tesla on humanoid robots. 1X is shipping its NEO humanoid to US homes at $20,000 per unit. Mind Robotics, Rivian’s spinoff, raised $1 billion in under a year at a $3.4 billion valuation. In that context, Faraday Future’s $70 million in convertible debt financing, half of it conditional, positions the company at the very margins of a market being defined by companies with orders of magnitude more capital, more credible production capabilities, and more established technology.
The company’s own SEC filings list risk factors that include its “reliance on a single OEM for most of its robotics products,” competition from companies “with far superior experience, funding and name recognition,” the possibility that it may not maintain its Nasdaq listing, and the fact that its strategy requires stockholder approval for additional share issuance that could be substantially dilutive.
Faraday Future says it now has the room, for the first time in years, to shift financing decisions from “liquidity-driven to capital-structure-driven.” That framing reflects a company that has historically raised money on whatever terms it could get, when it could get them. Whether $70 million in convertible notes, with conditions attached, represents a genuine strategic inflection or another chapter in a long series of optimistic announcements followed by operational difficulty, is a question the market has been asking about Faraday Future for the better part of a decade.
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Goldman Sachs projects 50,000 to 100,000 humanoid robots shipped globally in 2026. Faraday Future’s target of 1,500 units would represent a fraction of that market, but even that modest target requires execution from a company that has consistently struggled to deliver on its production commitments. The robotics pivot may be real. The capital may be sufficient for Phase 1. But the gap between announcement and delivery is where Faraday Future’s story has historically broken down.
Chelsea will take on Manchester City at Wembley Stadium in the 145th FA Cup final on Saturday, with Calum McFarlane’s Blues standing in the way of the Cityzens claiming a rare domestic cup double.
After a hugely disappointing season, which saw Enzo Maresca and his successor, Liam Rosenior, both sacked due to the Blues’ poor form, interim Chelsea head coach McFarlane has the opportunity to restore some pride and claim some silverware. The West Londoners have won just once since McFarlane took charge last month — a semifinal win in this competition against Leeds — with defensive weaknesses remaining an issue for the Blues.
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City, meanwhile, comes into this final on something of a high after a 3-0 demolition of Crystal Palace in midweek — a result that keeps the pressure on English Premier League leaders Arsenal. That win also means a clean sweep of domestic honors remains in play for Pep Guardiola’s team, who lifted the English Football League Cup back in March.
Chelsea takes on Manchester City at Wembley Stadium in North London on Saturday, May 16. Kickoff is set for 3 p.m. BST in the UK, which is 10 a.m. ET or 7 a.m. PT in the US and Canada, and 2 a.m. AEST on Sunday in Australia.
Chelsea will be hoping to end a 13-game winless run against Man City in today’s final.
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Livestream Chelsea vs. Man City in the US
This year’s FA Cup final will be available to watch live in the US on ESPN2 and stream via the network’s ESPN Select and ESPN Unlimited streaming packages. ESPN Plus, which carries the FA Cup, was essentially rebranded as ESPN Select and is the cheaper option at $13 a month. ESPN2 is available on live TV streaming services such as Fubo or YouTube TV.
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ESPN’s streaming platforms changed in 2025. The sports network now offers two tiers with its new direct-to-consumer setup: ESPN Select and ESPN Unlimited. ESPN Select is essentially what ESPN Plus used to be, with the same content available to subscribers, including FA Cup soccer, for $13 a month. If you want full access to ESPN’s networks and services, such as ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPNews and ESPN Deportes, as well as all of ESPN Select’s (which is all of ESPN Plus’) content, then ESPN Unlimited is the way to go. It costs $30 a month.
Livestream Chelsea vs. Man City in the UK for free
Saturday’s showpiece final will be available to watch for free on BBC1 and BBC iPlayer, with coverage kicking off at 2 p.m. BST.
Viewers in the UK also have a second option for watching the final, with the game also being shown on pay-TV channel TNT Sports 1.
You’ll be able to watch the game online for free via the network’s on-demand streaming service, BBC iPlayer.
With an app that’s available for Android and Apple mobile devices, as well as a vast array of smart TVs and streaming boxes, all you need is a valid UK TV license to stream the game.
You can access TNT Sports via Sky Q, Virgin Media and EE TV as part of a TV package.
Alternatively, TNT Sports has a new streaming home with the launch of HBO Max in the UK. It costs £31 either way and comes in a package that includes Discovery Plus’ library of documentary content.
A bundle including HBO Max’s entertainment plan alongside TNT Sports currently costs £31 per month.
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Livestream Chelsea vs. Man City in Canada
Canadian soccer fans looking to watch this FA Cup fixture can catch all the action live via Sportsnet.
Sportsnet
Sportsnet is available via most cable operators, but cord-cutters can subscribe to the standalone streaming service Sportsnet Plus instead, with prices starting at CA$30 per month or CA$250 per year for the standard plan.
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Livestream Chelsea vs. Man City in Australia
Soccer fans in Australia can watch FA Cup matches live on the streaming service Stan Sport.
Stan
Stan Sport will set you back AU$20 a month, on top of a Stan subscription, which starts at AU$12. It is worth noting the streaming service is offering a seven-day free trial. On top of select FA Cup matches, a subscription gives you access to Premier League, Champions League and Europa League action, along with international rugby and Formula E.
1080p, 1440p, 4K Tested Forza Horizon 6 is one of the best-looking racing games yet, but max settings and RT can crush modern GPUs. We tested 47 graphics cards to see what it really takes to run well.
Editor’s note: If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945, is an excellent choice. That was the moment when human beings first unleashed the power of the nucleus in an immense, blinding ball of fire above a gloomy stretch of desert in the Jornada del Muerto basin in New Mexico. Emily Seyl’s Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test (The University of Chicago Press) offers hundreds of startlingly vivid photographs of the Manhattan Project that emerged from a 20-year restoration effort. This excerpt and the accompanying photos record the massive effort to capture the awesome detonation of “the Gadget.”
In the North 10,000 photography bunker, Berlyn Brixner was listening to the countdown on a loudspeaker, his head inside a turret loaded with cameras and film. He was one of the only people instructed to look toward the blast—through his welder’s glasses—ready to follow the path of the fireball as it launched into the sky. The two Mitchell movie cameras at his station would deliver the best footage to come of the Trinity test, used by Los Alamos scientists to make some of the first measurements of the effects of a nuclear explosion.
When the detonators fired, the cameras captured what Brixner could not have seen—the very first light of a violent, silent sea of energy unfurling into the basin. As 32 blocks of high explosives erupted all together, their incredible force surged inward toward the sleeping plutonium core, compressing the dense sphere of metal instantaneously from all sides and bringing its atoms impossibly close together. A carefully timed burst of neutrons sowed momentary, uncontrolled chaos, and then, as quickly as it began, the fission chain reaction ended. Footage from a high-speed Fastax camera in Brixner’s bunker, shot through a thick glass porthole, shows a translucent orb bursting through the darkness less than a hundredth of a second after detonation, as a rush of heat, light, and matter blew apart the Gadget.
When the brightness faded enough for witnesses to make out ground zero, they saw a wall of dust rise up around a brilliant, shape-shifting, multicolored ball of flames—forming a fiery cloud that shot into the sky atop a twisting stream of debris. The camera footage tells a story no less dramatic but hundreds of times more intricate, preserving the moment for scientists to return to again and again to measure and describe the behavior of the fireball and other visible effects with exacting detail. On balance, the photography effort was a huge success, despite only 11 of the 52 cameras producing satisfactory images. By arranging those cameras at intentionally staggered distances, complementary angles, and with a broad spectrum of frame rates and focal lengths, the Spectrographic and Photographic Measurements Group was able to piece together a remarkably complete picture of their subject.
On 12 July 1945, Herbert Lehr, a U.S. Army sergeant and electrical engineer assigned to Los Alamos, delivered the plutonium core to the McDonald ranch house, where the bomb was assembled. Los Alamos National Laboratory
According to the group’s leader, Julian Mack, the more than 100,000 frames that were captured still “give no idea of the brightness, or of time and space scales.” Mack attributed fortune, as much as foresight, to the photographic record that was made, especially during the earliest phase of the blast. Indeed, the explosion was several times more powerful than predicted, and the intensity of its effects overwhelmed many of the cameras and diagnostic instruments. The human observers were similarly overcome. “The shot was truly awe-inspiring,” said Norris Bradbury, the physicist who would succeed Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos. “Most experiences in life can be comprehended by prior experiences, but the atom bomb did not fit into any preconception possessed by anybody. The most startling feature was the intense light.”
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Norris Bradbury, the physicist responsible for the final assembly of the Gadget, stands next to the partially assembled bomb at the top of the shot tower. The cables on the outside of the bomb would transmit the signals to trigger the synchronized detonations of conventional explosives, which would then create the inward-directed shock wave that would compress the bomb’s plutonium core. Bradbury would go on to succeed Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos on 17 October 1945.Los Alamos National Laboratory
It is a common sentiment that words and even pictures pale in comparison to the experience of the explosion. Even so, soldiers, scientists, and many other witnesses have added their firsthand accounts—often absorbing and poetic—to complement the trove of hard data collected during the test shot. They describe an intense and blinding brightness that filled the basin with daytime; an ominous, darkening cloud rearing its head in eerie silence; the wait for the invisible wave rushing out from the heart of the Gadget; and the mighty roar that arrived at last, in a thunder, and seemed never to leave. Physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi, watching from 20 miles away, remembered, “It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you.”
James Chadwick, head of the British contingent of scientists who joined the Manhattan Project, later said, “Although I had lived through this moment in my imagination many times during the past few years and everything happened almost as I had pictured it, the reality was shattering.”
The blast, captured with an assortment of high-speed and motion-picture cameras, shows the fireball expanding between 25 milliseconds and 60 seconds, by which time the mushroom cloud is over 3 kilometers high.Los Alamos National Laboratory
And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.”
The project comes from ComputerBase forum member AssassinWarlord, who started with a Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC and an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT with a dead GPU. Read Entire Article Source link
Apple is reportedly preparing a major Apple Card signup push that would effectively give new customers free AirPods Pro 3, a sharp shift in strategy as Chase prepares to take over the troubled program from Goldman Sachs.
Apple has largely avoided the large signup bonuses commonly used across the credit card industry. Early Apple Card marketing focused on privacy features, Daily Cash rewards, Wallet integration, spending transparency, and the titanium physical card.
Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman claimed on May 15 that Apple plans to launch a promotion in retail stores during the week of May 18. Under the rumored offer, customers who sign up for a new Apple Card and purchase AirPods Pro 3 would receive $249 in cash back, effectively offsetting the full retail price of the earbuds.
Neither Apple nor JPMorgan Chase has publicly confirmed the promotion. Still, the reported offer would represent one of the largest public Apple Card signup incentives since the credit card launched in 2019.
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There have been bonuses for referrals that go to the new cardholder, but they’re usually around $75 and max out at $200 with several conditions. The new, more aggressive offer could represent a shift in strategy.
Apple Card is entering a new phase under Chase
Apple confirmed in January 2026 that JPMorgan Chase would take over the Apple Card portfolio over the next 24 months. The move ends a partnership that became increasingly difficult for Goldman Sachs to sustain after years of losses and operational problems tied to the card business.
Reports tied to the transition said Goldman sold roughly $20 billion in Apple Card balances at a significant discount after delinquency rates climbed higher than expected.
Analyst estimates during Apple Card’s early rollout suggested Goldman Sachs spent roughly $350 to acquire each new customer. The AirPods Pro 3 promotion would still represent a substantial acquisition cost, though potentially lower than the figures associated with the original launch period.
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Apple wouldn’t necessarily absorb the full $249 retail cost internally. A banking partner such as Chase could also cover part of the promotion cost in exchange for acquiring long-term Apple Card customers.
Apple Card
Credit card issuers routinely spend hundreds of dollars upfront to win new customers. Banks can justify that cost when interchange fees, interest charges, subscriptions, and long-term retention produce more revenue over several years.
Apple Stores are becoming customer acquisition channels
The reported promotion would also expand the role of Apple’s retail stores beyond hardware sales and technical support.
Apple Stores already function as onboarding centers for services including AppleCare, iCloud+, Apple One, and device financing. A large-scale Apple Card signup campaign tied to hardware would push the stores further into functioning as customer acquisition channels.
The timing also fits Apple’s larger business strategy. Smartphone growth has slowed globally, and Apple has leaned more heavily on recurring services revenue and ecosystem retention to support long-term growth.
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Products including Apple Card, Apple Pay, high-yield savings accounts, and installment financing now play a larger role in Apple’s services growth strategy. The company will likely lean onto more aggressive customer acquisition promotions in the future, at least, if this rumor proves true.
Replit has released its first iPhone app update in four months after resolving an App Store review dispute with Apple over how AI-generated apps can be previewed and developed on iOS.
CEO Amjad Masad said on May 15 that Replit had “worked things out with Apple” and published its first iPhone app update in four months. The update brings Replit Agent 4 to mobile users, along with support for parallel agents, team collaboration through merge flows, and project viewing across workspaces.
The update follows a dispute that began after Apple reportedly pushed back on new versions of the App Store app in March. Reporting around the conflict said Apple objected to how Replit let users preview AI-built apps on iPhone, an area tied to Apple’s long-standing restrictions around downloaded and dynamically executed code.
Replit belongs to a fast-growing category of “vibe coding” tools that let users describe software in plain language and have AI generate the code. Desktop versions of those tools resemble modern cloud development environments where users can build, test, and modify apps through conversational prompts.
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Running the same workflow on an iPhone raises a tougher App Store question because the app can create interface layouts, preview software behavior, and deploy projects from a mobile device. Apple has historically restricted apps that change functionality after review to prevent unreviewed software from effectively operating inside another App Store app.
Replit is testing the edge of Apple’s App Store rules
Apple has not explained what changed between the March App Store dispute and Replit’s newly approved update. Replit CEO Amjad Masad said the companies “worked things out” after four months without updates.
Neither company explained whether Replit changed how the app previews AI-generated software on iPhone. Apple isn’t blocking AI coding tools outright, and the company continues adding AI-assisted development features to Xcode.
We worked things out with Apple, and just published our app for the first time in 4 months.
Thanks to all our customers and creators who helped out.
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It’s been a journey, but we never give up and stay winning!
Developers already use a wide range of AI tools to build software for Apple’s platforms, including iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. Instead, Apple’s concern appears to center on where AI-assisted development starts resembling its own runtime environment inside iOS.
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Chatbots that explain code fit comfortably inside the App Store, though apps that generate, preview, and package software from an iPhone create a much harder review and security problem.
Replit’s update also arrives as the company tries to pull users from other vibe coding platforms. A promotion tied to the release lets users import projects from Lovable, Base44, and V0 into Replit, then use Replit Agent to turn them into mobile apps.
Apple needs AI developers without losing platform control
The Replit dispute highlights the position Apple faces as AI agents move from experimental tools into real software development workflows. Apple wants developers building AI-powered apps for iOS and iPadOS, though the App Store review system was originally designed around static apps approved before reaching users.
AI coding tools disrupt that model by generating software continuously, quickly changing projects, and giving nontechnical users a way to build apps without Xcode or a Mac. Apple’s review process becomes much harder to manage when software behavior can evolve rapidly after an app reaches users.
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Apple has strong reasons to be cautious because an iPhone app that behaves like an unreviewed software environment creates obvious security, moderation, and platform control concerns. Overly rigid enforcement of older App Store rules could also make iOS less welcoming to one of the fastest-growing software categories in years.
Replit’s latest update carries more significance than a routine App Store release because it suggests Apple is still willing to allow AI coding apps on iPhone under certain conditions. WWDC begins June 8, and AI agents are expected to become a larger part of Apple’s developer strategy.
As states seek out much-needed supplies of clean, reliable energy, some are looking to an unconventional source: abandoned oil and gas wells harnessed for geothermal heat.
Millions of inactive wells are littered across the United States, the relics of earlier eras of fossil fuel production. A large number of the sites have no official owner, and many are still polluting groundwater and leaking heat-trapping methane. The country has barely scratched the surface in dealing with this problem.
Policymakers in both Republican- and Democratic-led states are exploring whether these sites could instead be converted into new wells for producing geothermal energy. The holes are already drilled in the ground, after all. And regions with widespread oil and gas development have rich subsurface data that geothermal firms need in order to determine where and how to build their carbon-free systems.
The concept is relatively new and largely untested, though scientists and startups are working to change that. States are also laying the groundwork for action by lifting regulatory hurdles and launching in-depth studies.
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In Oklahoma, the state Senate is considering a bill that would create a process for companies to buy abandoned oil and gas wells and repurpose them for geothermal energy or underground energy storage. Oklahoma has identified over 20,000 such wells, and state regulators estimate that it would take 235 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to plug all of them. Fixing a single old well can cost anywhere from $75,000 to $150,000 or more, by some calculations, depending on where it’s located and how complicated it is to clean up.
The Well Repurposing Act, which passed Oklahoma’s House in March, is modeled after a similar law that New Mexico adopted last year to address its 2,000-plus orphan wells.
The Oklahoma bill “recognizes that these wells are a liability, and that there may be a way to turn them into some sort of revenue generation and give them value,” said Dave Tragethon, communications director for the nonprofit Well Done Foundation, which works to find and cap abandoned oil and gas wells nationwide. “And if there’s value, that means there’s more of a willingness to address them and more of an opportunity to raise funding.”
In Alabama, legislators passed a law last month that allows the state to approve and regulate the conversion of oil and gas wells to tap alternative energy resources like geothermal. North Dakota adopted a bill last year requiring a legislative council to study the feasibility of using nonproductive wells to generate geothermal power. And in Colorado, state agencies just launched a technical study to evaluate the potential of repurposing old wells for geothermal development and carbon capture and sequestration.
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These efforts reflect the growing bipartisan support for geothermal energy, which has largely remained unscathed by the Trump administration’s efforts to block renewable energy projects. The energy resource has the potential to help meet the nation’s soaring energy demand while also slashing planet-warming emissions from electricity and heating.
Converting Wells Is Enticing but Complicated
Geothermal systems work by circulating fluids underground to capture naturally occurring heat, which can then be used to drive turbines for generating electricity or to directly warm the air and water in buildings. The industry is gaining momentum thanks to recent advances in drilling methods and technologies that are making it technically possible or financially viable to access geothermal energy in more places.
Many of those breakthroughs have come from the oil and gas industry, whose skilled workforce of drilling engineers and geoscientists, and deep corporate pockets, have helped launch startups and deploy cutting-edge systems. However, most of that expertise and funding is being poured into building new projects—not figuring out how to retool leaky wells left behind by earlier generations.
Many Michelin tires built for sports bikes today have 2CT stamped onto the sidewall. And if you’ve ever wondered what that means, it actually does stand for something — it isn’t one of those machine-generated model codes. 2CT stands for Two Compound Technology, and it’s Michelin’s exclusive shorthand that conveys the tire is made up of two different rubber recipes. This is not the only useful feature on a Michelin tire, but it’s one of the more telling ones.
It’s not like these two compounds are ground into paste and distributed equally around the tire, though. One of them is actually limited to just the middle strip, while the other takes up the rest. The middle of a motorcycle tire takes the brunt of regular riding, since bikes obviously spend most of their time rolling in straight lines. But when you lean into a corner, especially at high speeds, that’s when the shoulders come into play. Because of this, both sections end up wearing at very different rates, so it makes sense to build them out of different materials to match the different conditions they are subject to.
That’s exactly what Michelin did. They tossed a harder compound into the middle, one that favors longevity and high wear resistance. Meanwhile, the shoulders got a more supple compound, reportedly 20% softer than the center, with the goal of maximizing mechanical grip around corners. The exact differences in materials between the two hasn’t been officially revealed, though the tire in its entirety uses silica-infused rubber, aramid fibers, and radial construction.
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How 2CT came to be
2CT tires get a lot more interesting for racing enthusiasts once you dig into their history. These were initially designed for Michelin’s racing program way back in 1994. At the time, they weren’t officially labeled 2CT yet, and were simply referred to as dual-compound tires. From there, the tire took a good decade to filter down into road-legal designs consumers could buy. The first consumer-oriented model, the Power Race, was launched in 2005, and was the first tire to wear the 2CT badge. But even then, it was strictly track-focused.
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Four years later, motorcyclists were finall treated to the first proper road-going tire to use the 2CT badge. This was the Pilot Power 2CT, which dropped in 2009 and is still in production today.
One quirk worth flagging about this line is that while the Pilot Power 2CT was the first to feature the 2CT branding, the meaning of 2CT has since expanded. Today, it’s evolved from a specific model identifier into a universal label for all tires from the company using the same technology. So 2CT now also shows up on scooter rubber and ADV tires, like is the Anakee Adventure 2, an 80/20 adventure-touring tire built for riders who also go off-road occassionally.
There’s another newer and upgraded version worth mentioning called 2CT+, which was first introduced on the Power RS tire back in early 2017. It packs a harder layer of rubber underneath the soft shoulder compound, in order to offer a firmer ride for the everyday street rider. Today, Michelin Pilot Power 2CT tires typically cost between $147 and $195 per tire and can be picked up both individually and in sets. Beyond Michelin, most major motorcycle tire brands offer their own dual-compound options now, although Michelin will forever be recognized for getting there first.
Reprinted with permission from 
On 12 July 1945, Herbert Lehr, a U.S. Army sergeant and electrical engineer assigned to Los Alamos, delivered the 
Norris Bradbury, the physicist responsible for the final assembly of the Gadget, stands next to the partially assembled bomb at the top of the shot tower. The cables on the outside of the bomb would transmit the signals to trigger the synchronized detonations of conventional explosives, which would then create the inward-directed shock wave that would compress the bomb’s plutonium core. Bradbury would go on to succeed Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos on 17 October 1945.Los Alamos National Laboratory
The blast, captured with an assortment of high-speed and motion-picture cameras, shows the fireball expanding between 25 milliseconds and 60 seconds, by which time the mushroom cloud is over 3 kilometers high.Los Alamos National Laboratory
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