On this date in 1975, a Soviet and an American shook hands. Even for the time period, this wouldn’t have been a big deal if it wasn’t for the fact …read more

Are you in search of a company that resonates with your proactive spirit and entrepreneurial mindset? Your search ends here with Premier Truck Rental! Company Overview At Premier Truck Rental (PTR), we provide customized commercial fleet rentals nationwide, helping businesses get the right trucks and equipment to get the job done. Headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana, PTR is a family-owned company built on a foundation of integrity, innovation, and exceptional service. We serve a wide range of industriesincluding construction, utilities, and infrastructureby delivering high-quality, ready-to-work trucks and trailers tailored to each customers needs. At PTR, we dont just rent truckswe partner with our customers to drive efficiency and success on every job site. Please keep reading Not sure if you meet every requirement? Thats okay! We encourage you to apply if youre passionate, hardworking, and eager to contribute. We know that diverse perspectives and experiences make us stronger, and we want you to be part of our journey. Inside Sales Representative (ISR) at PTR is a friendly, people-oriented, and persuasive steward of the sales process. This role will support our Territory Managers with their sales pipeline while also prospecting and cross-selling PTR products themselves. This support includes driving results by enrolling the commitment and buy-in of other internal departments to achieve sales initiatives. The Inside Sales Representative will also represent PTRs commitment to being our customers easy button by serving as the main point of contact. They will be the front-line hero by assisting them in making informed decisions, providing guidance on our rentals, and resolving any issues they might face. We are seeking someone eager to develop their sales skills and grow within our organization. This role is designed as a stepping stone to a Territory Sales Manager (TSM) position, providing hands-on experience with customer interactions, lead qualification, and sales process execution. Ideal candidates will demonstrate a strong drive for results, the ability to build relationships, and a proactive approach to learning and development. High-performing ISRs will have the opportunity to be mentored, trained, and considered for promotion into a TSM role as part of their career path at PTR. COMPENSATION This position offers a competitive compensation package of base salary ($50,000/yr) plus uncapped commissions =OTE $85,000 annually. RESPONSIBILITIES Offer top-notch customer service and respond with a sense of urgency for goal achievement in a fast-paced sales environment. Build a strong pipeline of customers by qualifying potential leads in your territory. This includes strategic prospecting and sourcing. Develop creative ways to engage and build rapport with prospective customers by pitching the Premier Truck Rental value proposition. Partner with assigned Territory Managers by assisting with scheduling customer visits, trade shows, new customer hand-offs, and any other travel requested. Facilitate in-person meetings and set appointments with prospective customers. Qualify and quote inquiries for your prospective territories both online and from the Territory Manager. Input data into the system with accuracy and follow up in a timely fashion. Facilitate the onboarding of new customers through the credit process. Drive collaboration between customers, Territory Managers, Logistics, and internal teams to coordinate On-Rent and Off-Rent notices with excellent attention to detail. Identify and arrange the swap of equipment from customers meeting the PTR de-fleeting criteria. Manage the sales tools to organize, compile, and analyze data with accuracy for a variety of activities and multiple projects occurring simultaneously.Building and developing a new 3-4 state territory! REQUIREMENTS MUST HAVE2+ years of strategic prospecting or account manager/sales experience; or an advanced degree or equivalent experience converting prospects into closed sales. Tech-forward approach to sales strategy. Excellent prospecting, follow-up, and follow-through skills. Committed to seeing deals through completion. Accountability and ownership of the sales process and a strong commitment to results. Comfortable with a job that has a variety of tasks and is dynamic and changing. Proactive prospecting skills and can overcome objections; driven to establish relationships with new customers. Ability to communicate in a clear, logical manner in formal and informal situations. Proficiency in CRMs and sales tracking systems Hunters mindsetsomeone who thrives on pursuing new business, driving outbound sales, and generating qualified opportunities. Prospecting: Going on LinkedIn, Looking at Competitor data, grabbing contacts for the TM, may use technology like Apollo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator Partner closely with the Territory Manager to ensure a unified approach in managing customer relationships, pipeline development, and revenue growth. Maintain clear and consistent communication to align on sales strategies, customer needs, and market opportunities, fostering a seamless and collaborative partnership with the Territory Manager. Consistently meet and exceed key performance indicators (KPIs), including rental revenue, upfit revenue, and conversion rates, by actively managing customer accounts and identifying growth opportunities. Support the saturation and maturation of the customer base through strategic outreach, relationship management, and alignment with the Territory Manager to drive long-term success. Remote in the United States with some travel to trade shows, quarterly travel up to a week at a time, and sales meetingsNICE TO HAVE Rental and/or sales experience in the industry. Proficiency in , Apollo.io , LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Power BI, MS Dynamics, Chat GPT. Established relationships within the marketplace or territory. Motivated to grow into outside territory management position with relocation On Target Earnings: ($85,000)EMPLOYEE BENEFITSWellness & Fitness: Take advantage of our on-site CrossFit-style gym, featuring a full-time personal trainer dedicated to helping you reach your fitness goals. Whether you're into group classes, virtual personal training, personalized workout plans, or nutrition coaching, weve got you covered!Exclusive Employee Perks: PTR Swag & a Uniform/Boot Allowance, On-site Micro-Markets stocked with snacks & essentials, discounts on phone plans, supplier vehicles, mobile detailing, tools, & equipmentand much more!Profit SharingYour Success, rewarded: At PTR, we believe in sharing success. Our Profit-SharingComprehensive BenefitsStarting Day One:Premium healthcare coverage (medical, dental, vision, mental health & virtual healthcare)401(k) matching & long-term financial planning Paid time off that lets you recharge Life, accidental death, and disability coverage Ongoing learning & development opportunitiesTraining, Growth & RecognitionWe partner with Predictive Index to better understand your strengths, ensuring tailored coaching, structured training, and career development. Performance and attitude evaluations every 6 months keep you on track for growth.Culture & ConnectionMore Than Just a JobAt PTR, we dont just build relationships with our customerswe build them with each other. Our tech-forward, highly collaborative culture is rooted in our core values. Connect and engage through:PTR Field Days & Team EventsThe Extra Mile Recognition ProgramPTR Text Alerts & Open CommunicationPremier Truck Rental Is an Equal Opportunity Employer We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you need support or accommodation due to a disability, contact us at PI6e547fa1c5-

June 3, 20258 min readWhite House Budget Plan Would Devastate U.S. Space ScienceScientists are rallying to reverse ruinous proposed cuts to both NASA and the National Science FoundationBy Nadia Drake edited by Lee BillingsFog shrouds the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this photograph from February 25, 2025. Gregg Newton/AFP via GettyLate last week the Trump Administration released its detailed budget request for fiscal year 2026 —a request that, if enacted, would be the equivalent of carpet-bombing the national scientific enterprise.“This is a profound, generational threat to scientific leadership in the United States,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a science advocacy group. “If implemented, it would fundamentally undermine and potentially devastate the most unique capabilities that the U.S. has built up over a half-century.”The Trump administration’s proposal, which still needs to be approved by Congress, is sure to ignite fierce resistance from scientists and senators alike. Among other agencies, the budget deals staggering blows to NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which together fund the majority of U.S. research in astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics and Earth science —all space-related sciences that have typically mustered hearty bipartisan support.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The NSF supports ground-based astronomy, including such facilities as the Nobel Prize–winning gravitational-wave detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), globe-spanning arrays of radio telescopes, and cutting-edge observatories that stretch from Hawaii to the South Pole. The agency faces a lethal 57 percent reduction to its $9-billion budget, with deep cuts to every program except those in President Trump’s priority areas, which include artificial intelligence and quantum information science. NASA, which funds space-based observatories, faces a 25 percent reduction, dropping the agency’s $24.9-billion budget to $18.8 billion. The proposal beefs up efforts to send humans to the moon and to Mars, but the agency’s Science Mission Directorate —home to Mars rovers, the Voyager interstellar probes, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Hubble Space Telescope, and much more —is looking at a nearly 50 percent reduction, with dozens of missions canceled, turned off or operating on a starvation diet.“It’s an end-game scenario for science at NASA,” says Joel Parriott, director of external affairs and public policy at the American Astronomical Society. “It’s not just the facilities. You’re punching a generation-size hole, maybe a multigenerational hole, in the scientific and technical workforce. You don’t just Cryovac these people and pull them out when the money comes back. People are going to move on.”Adding to the chaos, on Saturday President Trump announced that billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman was no longer his pick for NASA administrator—just days before the Senate was set to confirm Isaacman’s nomination. Initial reports—which have now been disputed—explained the president’s decision as stemming from his discovery that Isaacman recently donated money to Democratic candidates. Regardless of the true reason, the decision leaves both NASA and the NSF, whose director abruptly resigned in April, with respective placeholder “acting” leaders at the top. That leadership vacuum significantly weakens the agencies’ ability to fight the proposed budget cuts and advocate for themselves. “What’s more inefficient than a rudderless agency without an empowered leadership?” Dreier asks.Actions versus WordsDuring his second administration, President Trump has repeatedly celebrated U.S. leadership in space. When he nominated Isaacman last December, Trump noted “NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration” and looked to a future of “groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology and exploration.” More recently, while celebrating Hubble’s 35th anniversary in April, Trump called the telescope “a symbol of America’s unmatched exploratory might” and declared that NASA would “continue to lead the way in fueling the pursuit of space discovery and exploration.” The administration’s budgetary actions speak louder than Trump’s words, however. Instead of ushering in a new golden age of space exploration—or even setting up the U.S. to stay atop the podium—the president’s budget “narrows down what the cosmos is to moon and Mars and pretty much nothing else,” Dreier says. “And the cosmos is a lot bigger, and there’s a lot more to learn out there.”Dreier notes that when corrected for inflation, the overall NASA budget would be the lowest it’s been since 1961. But in April of that year, the Soviet Union launched the first human into orbit, igniting a space race that swelled NASA’s budget and led to the Apollo program putting American astronauts on the moon. Today China’s rapidprogress and enormous ambitions in space would make the moment ripe for a 21st-century version of this competition, with the U.S. generously funding its own efforts to maintain pole position. Instead the White House’s budget would do the exact opposite.“The seesaw is sort of unbalanced,” says Tony Beasley, director of the NSF-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). “On the one side, we’re saying, ‘Well, China’s kicking our ass, and we need to do something about that.’ But then we’re not going to give any money to anything that might actually do that.”How NASA will achieve a crewed return to the moon and send astronauts to Mars—goals that the agency now considers part of “winning the second space race”—while also maintaining its leadership in science is unclear.“This is Russ Vought’s budget,” Dreier says, referring to the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), an unelected bureaucrat who has been notorious for his efforts to reshape the U.S. government by weaponizing federal funding. “This isn’t even Trump’s budget. Trump’s budget would be good for space. This one undermines the president’s own claims and ambitions when it comes to space.”“Low Expectations” at the High FrontierRumors began swirling about the demise of NASA science in April, when a leaked OMB document described some of the proposed cuts and cancellations. Those included both the beleaguered, bloated Mars Sample Return (MSR) program and the on-time, on-budget Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the next astrophysics flagship mission.The top-line numbers in the more fleshed-out proposal are consistent with that document, and MSR would still be canceled. But Roman would be granted a stay of execution: rather than being zeroed out, it would be put on life support.“It’s a reprieve from outright termination, but it’s still a cut for functionally no reason,” Dreier says. “In some ways, [the budget] is slightly better than I was expecting. But I had very low expectations.”In the proposal, many of the deepest cuts would be made to NASA science, which would sink from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion. Earth science missions focused on carbon monitoring and climate change, as well as programs aimed at education and workforce diversity, would be effectively erased by the cuts. But a slew of high-profile planetary science projects would suffer, too, with cancellations proposed for two future Venus missions, the Juno mission that is currently surveilling Jupiter, the New Horizons mission that flew by Pluto and two Mars orbiters. (The Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan would survive, as would the flagship Europa Clipper spacecraft, which launched last October.) NASA’s international partnerships in planetary science fare poorly, too, as the budget rescinds the agency’s involvement with multiple European-led projects, including a Venus mission and Mars rover.The proposal is even worse for NASA astrophysics—the study of our cosmic home—which “really takes it to the chin,” Dreier says, with a roughly $1-billion drop to just $523 million. In the president’s proposal, only three big astrophysics missions would survive: the soon-to-launch Roman and the already-operational Hubble and JWST. The rest of NASA’s active astrophysics missions, which include the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), would be severely pared back or zeroed out. Additionally, the budget would nix NASA’s contributions to large European missions, such as a future space-based gravitational-wave observatory.“This is the most powerful fleet of missions in the history of the study of astrophysics from space,” says John O’Meara, chief scientist at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and co-chair of a recent senior review panel that evaluated NASA’s astrophysics missions. The report found that each reviewed mission “continues to be capable of producing important, impactful science.” This fleet, O’Meara adds, is more than the sum of its parts, with much of its power emerging from synergies among multiple telescopes that study the cosmos in many different types, or wavelengths, of light.By hollowing out NASA’s science to ruthlessly focus on crewed missions, the White House budget might be charitably viewed as seeking to rekindle a heroic age of spaceflight—with China’s burgeoning space program as the new archrival. But even for these supposedly high-priority initiatives, the proposed funding levels appear too anemic and meager to give the U.S. any competitive edge. For example, the budget directs about $1 billion to new technology investments to support crewed Mars missions while conservative estimates have projected that such voyages would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more.“It cedes U.S. leadership in space science at a time when other nations, particularly China, are increasing their ambitions,” Dreier says. “It completely flies in the face of the president’s own stated goals for American leadership in space.”Undermining the FoundationThe NSF’s situation, which one senior space scientist predicted would be “diabolical” when the NASA numbers leaked back in April, is also unsurprisingly dire. Unlike NASA, which is focused on space science and exploration, the NSF’s programs span the sweep of scientific disciplines, meaning that even small, isolated cuts—let alone the enormous ones that the budget has proposed—can have shockingly large effects on certain research domains.“Across the different parts of the NSF, the programs that are upvoted are the president’s strategic initiatives, but then everything else gets hit,” Beasley says.Several large-scale NSF-funded projects would escape more or less intact. Among these are the panoramic Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to unveil its first science images later this month, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope. The budget also moves the Giant Magellan Telescope, which would boast starlight-gathering mirrors totaling more than 25 meters across, into a final design phase. All three of those facilities take advantage of Chile’s pristine dark skies. Other large NSF-funded projects that would survive include the proposed Next Generation Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico and several facilities at the South Pole, such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.If this budget is enacted, however, NSF officials anticipate only funding a measly 7 percent of research proposals overall rather than 25 percent; the number of graduate research fellowships awarded would be cleaved in half, and postdoctoral fellowships in the physical sciences would drop to zero. NRAO’s Green Bank Observatory — home to the largest steerable single-dish radio telescope on the planet — would likely shut down. So would other, smaller observatories in Arizona and Chile. The Thirty Meter Telescope, a humongous, perennially embattled project with no clear site selection, would be canceled. And the budget proposes closing one of the two gravitational-wave detectors used by the LIGO collaboration—whose observations of colliding black holes earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics—even though both detectors need to be online for LIGO’s experiment to work. Even factoring in other operational detectors, such as Virgo in Europe and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan, shutting down half of LIGO would leave a gaping blind spot in humanity’s gravitational-wave view of the heavens.“The consequences of this budget are that key scientific priorities, on the ground and in space, will take at least a decade longer—or not be realized at all,” O’Meara says. “The universe is telling its story at all wavelengths. It doesn’t care what you build, but if you want to hear that story, you must build many things.”Dreier, Parriott and others are anticipating fierce battles on Capitol Hill. And already both Democratic and Republican legislators have issued statement signaling that they won’t support the budget request as is. “This sick joke of a budget is a nonstarter,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, in a recent statement. And in an earlier statement, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Appropriations, cautioned that “the President’s Budget Request is simply one step in the annual budget process.”The Trump administration has “thrown a huge punch here, and there will be a certain back-reaction, and we’ll end up in the middle somewhere,” Beasley says. “The mistake you can make right now is to assume that this represents finalized decisions and the future—because it doesn’t.”

New York City’s Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is falling apart. Built between 1946 and 1964, the urban highway runs 12.1 miles through the heart of the two boroughs to connect on either end with the interstate highway system—a relic of midcentury car-oriented infrastructure, and a prime example of the dwindling lifespan of roads built during that time.  The degradation is most visible—and most pressing—in a section running alongside Brooklyn Heights known as the triple cantilever. This 0.4-mile section, completed in 1954, is unique among U.S. highways in that it juts out from the side of a hill and stacks the two directions of traffic on balcony-like decks, one slightly overhanging the other. A third level holds a well-loved park, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.  This unusual layer cake of a freeway was a marvel of engineering in its day, though not without controversy. Masterminded by Robert Moses, the city’s all-powerful, often ruthless city planner for more than four decades, the roadway bisects working-class and immigrant neighborhoods that grapple with the health and environmental fallout to this day. Like the reputation of the man who built it, the triple cantilever has aged poorly. Its narrow width, (33.5 feet for the roadway in either direction) has made all but the most basic maintenance incredibly difficult, and its 71-year-old structure is constantly battered by the ever heavier automobiles and trucks. Designed to accommodate around 47,000 vehicles per day, it now carries more than three times that amount. Deteriorating deck joints and failing steel-reinforced concrete have led many to worry the triple cantilever is on the verge of collapse. An expert panel warned in 2020 that the triple cantilever could be unusable by 2026, and only then did interim repairs get made to keep it standing. [Photo: Alex Potemkin/Getty Images] The mounting concern comes amid a 50-year decline in direct government spending on infrastructure in the U.S., according to a recent analysis by Citigroup. Simply maintaining existing infrastructure is a challenge, the report notes. Meanwhile, the American Society of Civil Engineers’ grade for the country’s infrastructure has improved, from a D+ in 2017 to a C in 2025. Now even private credit firms are circling: As reported in Bloomberg, Apollo Global Management estimates that a boom in infrastructure deals help could grow the private debt market up to a staggering $40 trillion.   Independent urban designer Marc Wouters has an idea on how to fix BQE’s cantilever. He’s been working on it for years. “My process is that I always interview people in the community before I do any drawings,” he says. “So I really have listened to pretty much everybody over the past few years.” Unsolicited and developed in his own spare time, Wouters has designed an alternative for the triple cantilever that he named the BQE Streamline Plan. BQE Streamline Plan [Image: courtesy Marc Wouters | Studios/©2025] His concept, based on decades of experience in urban planning, infrastructure, and resilience projects in communities across the country, is relatively simple: extend the width of the two traffic-bearing cantilevers and add support beams to their outside edge, move both directions of traffic onto four lanes on the first level, and turn the second level into a large freeway cap park. Instead of major rebuilding efforts, Wouters’s proposal is more of a reinforcement and expansion, with a High Line-style park plopped on top. Though he’s not an engineer, Wouters is confident that his design would shift enough strain off the existing structure to allow it to continue functioning for the foreseeable future. (What actual engineers think remains to be seen.) “What I’ve done is come up with a plan that happens to be much less invasive, faster to build, a lot cheaper, and it encompasses a lot of what the community wants,” he says. “Yet it still handles the same capacity as the highway does right now.” So what will it take for this outsider’s idea to be considered a viable design alternative? This idea had been brewing in his mind for years. Wouters, who lives near the triple cantilever section of the BQE in Brooklyn Heights, has followed the highway’s planning process for more than a decade.  As complex infrastructure projects go, this one is particularly convoluted. The BQE is overseen by both the state of New York and New York City, among others, with the city in charge of the 1.5-mile section that includes the triple cantilever. This dual ownership has complicated the management of the highway and its funding. The city and the state have launched several efforts over the years to reimagine the highway’s entire length. In winter 2018, the city’s Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) released two proposals to address the ailing cantilever. Not seeing what they wanted from either one, Brooklyn Heights Association, a nonprofit neighborhood group, retained Wouters and his studio to develop an alternative design. He suggested building a temporary parallel bypass that would allow a full closure and repair of the triple cantilever. That proposal, along with competing ideas developed under the previous mayoral administration, went by the wayside in 2022, when the latest BQE redesign process commenced. Wouters found himself following yet another community feedback and planning process for the triple cantilever. The ideas being proposed by the city’s DOT this time around included a plan that would chew into the hillside that currently supports the triple cantilever to move the first tier of traffic directly underneath the second, and add a large girding structure on its open end to hold it all up. Other options included reshaping the retaining wall that currently holds up the triple cantilever, moving traffic below grade into a wide tunnel, or tearing the whole thing down and rebuilding from scratch. Each would be time-consuming and disruptive, and many of them cut into another well-loved public space immediately adjacent to the triple cantilever, Brooklyn Bridge Park. None of these options has anything close to unanimous support. And any of them will cost more than $1 billion—a price tag that hits much harder after the Federal Highway Administration rejected an $800 million grant proposal for fixing the BQE back in early 2024. BQE Streamline Plan [Image: courtesy Marc Wouters | Studios/©2025] Wouters is no highway zealot. In fact, he’s worked on a project heading into construction in Syracuse that will replace an underutilized inner-city highway with a more appropriately sized boulevard and developable land. But he felt sure there was a better way forward—a concept that would work as well in practice as on paper. “I just kept going to meetings and waiting to see what I thought was a progressive solution,” Wouters says. Unimpressed and frustrated, he set out to design it himself. Wouters released the Streamline Plan in March. The concept quickly gathered interest, receiving a flurry of local news coverage. He has since met with various elected officials to discuss it. But as elegant as Wouters’s concept may be, some stakeholders remain unconvinced that the city should be going all in on a reinterpretation of the triple cantilever. What might be more appropriate, critics say, is to make necessary fixes now to keep the triple cantilever safe and functional, and to spend more time thinking about whether this section of highway is even what the city needs in the long term. A group of local organizations is calling for a more comprehensive reconsideration of the BQE under the premise that its harms may be outnumbering its benefits. Launched last spring, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Environmental Justice Coalition wants any planning for the future of the BQE to include efforts to address its health and environmental impacts on neighboring communities and to seek an alternative that reconnects communities that have been divided by the corridor. One member of this coalition is the Riders Alliance, a nonprofit focused on improving public transit in New York. Danny Pearlstein, the group’s policy and communications director, says implementing a major redesign of the triple cantilever would just reinforce car dependency in a place that’s actually well served by public transit. The environmental justice coalition’s worry is that rebuilding this one section in a long-term fashion could make it harder for change across the length of the entire BQE and could increase the environmental impact the highway has on the communities that surround it. “This is not just one neighborhood. This is communities up and down the corridor that don’t resemble each other very much in income or background who are united and are standing together for something that’s transformative, rather than doubling down on the old ways,” Pearlstein says. [Photo: ©NYC DOT] Lara Birnback is executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association, representing a neighborhood of roughly 20,000 people. Her organization, which worked directly with Wouters in the past, is circumspect about his latest concept. “It’s certainly more interesting and responsive to the kinds of things that the community has been asking for when thinking about the BQE. It’s more of those things than we’ve seen from any of the designs that New York City DOT has presented to us through their engagement process,” she says. “But at the end of the day, it’s still a way of preserving more or less the status quo of the BQE as a major interstate highway running through the borough.” She argues it makes more sense to patch up the triple cantilever and use the extra years of service that buys to do a more radical rethinking of the BQE’s future. (For example, one 2020 proposal by the Brooklyn-based architecture studio Light and Air proposed a simple intervention of installing buttresses on the open-air side of the triple cantilever, propping it up with a relatively small addition of material.) “We really strongly encourage the city to move forward immediately with a more short-term stabilization plan for the cantilever, with repairs that would last, for example, 20 to 25 years rather than spending billions and billions of dollars rebuilding it for the next 100 years,” Birnback says. Birnback says a major rebuilding plan like the one Wouters is proposing—for all its community benefits—could end up doing more harm to the city. “I think going forward now with a plan that both embeds the status quo and most likely forecloses on the possibility of real transformation across the corridor is a mistake,” she says. NYC DOT expects to begin its formal environmental review process this year, laying the necessary groundwork for deciding on a plan for what to do with the triple cantilever, either for the short term or the long term. The environmental process will evaluate all concepts equally, according to DOT spokesperson Vincent Barone, who notes that the department is required to review and respond to all feedback that comes in through that process. There is technically nothing holding back Wouters’s proposal from being one of the alternatives considered. And he may have some important political support to help make that happen. Earlier this month, Brooklyn’s Community District 2 board formally supported the plan. They are calling for the city’s transportation department to include it in the BQE’s formal environmental review process when it starts later this year. [Photo: Sinisa Kukic/Getty Images] Wouters argues that his proposal solves the pressing structural problems of the triple cantilever while also opening resources to deal with the highway’s big picture challenges. “The several hundred million dollars of savings is now funding that could go to other parts of the BQE. And there are other parts that are really struggling,” he says. “I’m always thinking about the whole length and about all these other communities, not just this one.” With a new presidential administration and a mayoral primary election in June, what happens with the triple cantilever is very much up in the air. But if the environmental review process begins as planned this year, it only makes sense for every option to fall under consideration. What gets built—or torn down, or reconstructed, or reinterpreted—could reshape part of New York City for generations.

May 30, 2025 Race Your Way with the Return of Braking Point, Revamped My Team, and F1® THE MOVIE Scenarios Featuring Fictional Team APXGP Watch F1® 25 Iconic Edition Cover Star Lewis Hamilton and Football Superstar, Kylian Mbappé, Test Their Speed as the Iconic Rivals Go Head-to-Head HERE REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Today, Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) invites players to race their way with F1® 25, an official game of the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship™, available today on PlayStation®5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Through a variety of gameplay features, players can take the lead as team owner in My Team 2.0, and live the emotional highs and lows of competing at the front of the grid in the return of fan-favourite story mode, Braking Point. Players can also take to the track as fictional team APXGP from Apple Original Films’ F1® THE MOVIE with a preview chapter, with additional chapter scenarios (sold separately) available post-launch beginning June 30th.* As part of the launch day celebrations, F1® 25 Iconic Edition cover star Lewis Hamilton challenged three-time EA SPORTS cover star Kylian Mbappé to a thrilling sprint race ahead of the FORMULA 1 ARAMCO GRAN PREMIO DE ESPAÑA 2025. Watch the action unfold HERE.Standard Edition cover art of EA Sports F1 25 featuring F1 drivers Oscar Piastri, Carlos Sainz, and Oliver Bearman“F1 25 delivers more ways for players to tell their F1 story, from battling for the World Championship to securing a front row seat and interacting with the racing movie of the summer,” said Lee Mather, Senior Creative Director at Codemasters. “With story-driven features, Braking Point and F1® THE MOVIE, taking the lead in My Team and Driver Career, or jumping into F1 World with a multitude of bite-sized challenges, customisation enhancements, multiplayer and cooperative gameplay, F1 25 is all-out, unabashed action for every racing fan.”Players will experience the third instalment of fan-favourite story mode, Braking Point. Set across two seasons, the returning cast encounter a dramatic event that threatens to throw a title-contending season into chaos. For the first time, players encounter more variety through different driver perspectives, giving the mode a new dimension and alternate endings to the story. Additionally, Konnersport is now available to choose in My Team with a further option to become the 11th team on the grid in Driver Career.F1® 25 gets players closer to the real world than ever before with a series of innovations both on and off the track. Players who want to call the shots can jump into My Team 2.0 and take on the role of team owner. Alongside running the entire operations from the Team HQ, focusing on Engineering, Personnel, and Corporate, players manage the fate of both drivers and can switch between the two for race weekends.Five circuits - Bahrain, Miami, Melbourne, Suzuka, and Imola - join Silverstone as those that have all been digitally scanned during race weekends. Through millions of data points, LIDAR technology delivers pinpoint accuracy from asphalt surface details and kerb heights to the positioning of broadcast towers, barriers, trees, and foliage. These advancements, in conjunction with changes to handling, tested pre-launch by esports drivers and the F1® community, ensure players feel every bump and elevation change, just like the real F1® drivers.F1® 25 delivers greater customisation through the new Decal Editor. Driver numbers receive a visual overhaul with new fonts and colours. Players can bring their personalities to life with the freedom to move, rotate, and resize designs with variants to unlock throughout the game and use across My Team and F1® World. Players can also use the newly introduced sponsor liveries built around the visual identity of the fictional brands in the game, alongside new driver numbers which receive a visual overhaul with new customisable fonts and colours, to create the most authentic-looking vehicle designs the franchise has ever delivered.EA Play** members get a 5-hour Trial, score a monthly 5000 XP boost, and can save 10% on EA digital purchases, including PitCoin, full game, and DLC. More details on EA Play. F1® 25 Iconic Edition owners receive a number of perks linked to F1® THE MOVIE producer Lewis Hamilton, F3™ Driver Icons Pack, 18,000 Pitcoin and much more. F1® THE MOVIE chapter scenarios are available to F1® 25 Standard Edition players through the purchase of the DLC pack, available now for purchase and playable in-game beginning June 30.To keep up-to-date with the latest F1® game news and information, visit the Formula 1® game websitesocial channels.PRESS ASSETS ARE AVAILABLE AT EAPressPortal.com*Chapter Scenarios playable beginning June 30, 2025. Requires F1® 25 (sold separately), EA account, internet connection & all game updates.**Conditions, limitations and exclusions apply. See tos.ea.com/legalapp/eaplay/US/en/PC/ for details.About Electronic ArtsElectronic Arts (NASDAQ: EA) is a global leader in digital interactive entertainment. The Company develops and delivers games, content and online services for Internet-connected consoles, mobile devices and personal computers.In fiscal year 2025, EA posted GAAP net revenue of approximately $7.5 billion. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, EA is recognized for a portfolio of critically acclaimed, high-quality brands such as EA SPORTS FC™, Battlefield™, Apex Legends™, The Sims™, EA SPORTS™ Madden NFL, EA SPORTS™ College Football, Need for Speed™, Dragon Age™, Titanfall™, Plants vs. Zombies™ and EA SPORTS F1®. More information about EA is available at www.ea.com/news.EA, EA SPORTS, EA SPORTS FC, Battlefield, Need for Speed, Apex Legends, The Sims, Dragon Age, Titanfall, and Plants vs. Zombies are trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. John Madden, NFL, and F1 are the property of their respective owners and used with permission.F1® 25 Game - an official product of the FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP. © 2025 Electronic Arts Inc. EA, EA SPORTS, the EA SPORTS logo, and Codemasters are trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. The F1 FORMULA 1 logo, F1 logo, FORMULA 1, F1, FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP, GRAND PRIX and related marks are trademarks of Formula One Licensing BV, a Formula 1 company. The F2 FIA FORMULA 2 CHAMPIONSHIP logo, FIA FORMULA 2 CHAMPIONSHIP, FIA FORMULA 2, FORMULA 2, F2 and related marks are trademarks of the Federation Internationale de L’Automobile and used exclusively under license. All rights reserved.About F1® THE MOVIEApple Original Films and Warner Bros. Pictures Present A Monolith Pictures / Jerry Bruckheimer / Plan B Entertainment / Dawn Apollo Films Production, A Joseph Kosinski Film, F1® THE MOVIE, distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, in theatres and IMAX® nationwide on June 27, 2025 and internationally beginning 25 June 2025.Category: EA Sports Natalia Lombardi Global Public Relations Manager [email protected] Source: Electronic Arts Inc. Multimedia Files:

i ate a rock from the moon Have we finally solved mystery of magnetic moon rocks? Simulations show how effects of asteroid impact could amplify the early Moon's weak magnetic field. Jennifer Ouellette – May 23, 2025 2:36 pm | 5 NASA Lunar sample 60015 on display at Space Center Houston Lunar Samples Vault, at NASA's Johnson Space Center Credit: OptoMechEngineer/CC BY-SA 4.0 NASA Lunar sample 60015 on display at Space Center Houston Lunar Samples Vault, at NASA's Johnson Space Center Credit: OptoMechEngineer/CC BY-SA 4.0 Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more NASA's Apollo missions brought back moon rock samples for scientists to study. We've learned a great deal over the ensuing decades, but one enduring mystery remains. Many of those lunar samples show signs of exposure to strong magnetic fields comparable to Earth's, yet the Moon doesn't have such a field today. So, how did the moon rocks get their magnetism? There have been many attempts to explain this anomaly. The latest comes from MIT scientists, who argue in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances that a large asteroid impact briefly boosted the Moon's early weak magnetic field—and that this spike is what is recorded in some lunar samples. Evidence gleaned from orbiting spacecraft observations, as well as results announced earlier this year from China's Chang'e 5 and Chang'e 6 missions, is largely consistent with the existence of at least a weak magnetic field on the early Moon. But where did this field come from? These usually form in planetary bodies as a result of a dynamo, in which molten metals in the core start to convect thanks to slowly dissipating heat. The problem is that the early Moon's small core had a mantle that wasn't much cooler than its core, so there would not have been significant convection to produce a sufficiently strong dynamo. There have been proposed hypotheses as to how the Moon could have developed a core dynamo. For instance, a 2022 analysis suggested that in the first billion years, when the Moon was covered in molten rock, giant rocks formed as the magma cooled and solidified. Denser minerals sank to the core while lighter ones formed a crust. Over time, the authors argued, a titanium layer crystallized just beneath the surface, and because it was denser than lighter minerals just beneath, that layer eventually broke into small blobs and sank through the mantle (gravitational overturn). The temperature difference between the cooler sinking rocks and the hotter core generated convection, creating intermittently strong magnetic fields—thus explaining why some rocks have that magnetic signature and others don't. Or perhaps there is no need for the presence of a dynamo-driven magnetic field at all. For instance, the authors of a 2021 study thought earlier analyses of lunar samples may have been altered during the process. They re-examined samples from the 1972 Apollo 16 mission using CO2 lasers to heat them, thus avoiding any alteration of the magnetic carriers. They concluded that any magnetic signatures in those samples could be explained by the impact of meteorites or comets hitting the Moon. Bracing for impact In 2020, two of the current paper's authors, MIT's Benjamin Weiss and Rona Oran, ran simulations to test whether a giant impact could generate a plasma that, in turn, would amplify the Moon's existing weak solar-generated magnetic field sufficiently to account for the levels of magnetism measured in the moon rocks. Those results seemed to rule out the possibility. This time around, they have come up with a new hypothesis that essentially combines elements of the dynamo and the plasma-generating impact hypotheses—taking into account an impact's resulting shockwave for good measure. Amplification of the lunar dynamo field by an Imbrium-­sized impact at the magnetic equator. Credit: Isaac S. Narrett et al., 2025 They tested their hypothesis by running impact simulations, focusing on the level of impact that created the Moon's Imbrium basin, as well as plasma cloud simulations. Their starting assumption was that the early Moon had a dynamo that generated a weak magnetic field 50 times weaker than Earth's. The results confirmed that a large asteroid impact, for example, could have kicked up a plasma cloud, part of which spread outward into space. The remaining plasma streamed around to the other side of the Moon, amplifying the existing weak magnetic field for around 40 minutes. A key factor is the shock wave created by the initial impact, similar to seismic waves, which would have rattled surrounding rocks enough to reorient their subatomic spins in line with the newly amplified magnetic field. Weiss has likened the effect to tossing a deck of 52 playing cards into the air within a magnetic field. If each card had its own compass needle, its magnetism would be in a new orientation once each card hit the ground. It's a complicated scenario that admittedly calls for a degree of serendipity. But we might not have to wait too long for confirmation one way or the other. The answer could lie in analyzing fresh lunar samples and looking for telltale signatures not just of high magnetism but also shock. (Early lunar samples were often discarded if they showed signs of shock.) Scientists are looking to NASA's planned Artemis crewed missions for this, since sample returns are among the objectives. Much will depend on NASA's future funding, which is currently facing substantial cuts, although thus far, Artemis II and III remain on track. Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr7401  (About DOIs). Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 5 Comments

Just one day after Mozilla confirmed it’s shutting down Pocket, Digg co-founder and chairman Kevin Rose has stepped up with a public offer to take it over. Save-it-now In a post on X, Rose tagged both Mozilla and Pocket directly, saying: Mozilla announced Thursday that Pocket will officially shut down on July 8, with its API and user data set to disappear completely by October 8. The company framed the decision as part of a broader strategy to narrow its focus around Firefox, citing evolving user habits. Mozilla wrote: Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today. Discovery also continues to evolve; Pocket helped shape the curated content recommendations you already see in Firefox, and that experience will keep getting better. Meanwhile, new features like Tab Groups and enhanced bookmarks now provide built-in ways to manage reading lists easily. Wait, Digg? Yep! In case you missed it, the app is making a comeback. And the new leadership, formed by its co-founder Kevin Rose in partnership with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is hitting the ground running. Just two days ago, they announced that Christian Selig, best known for building the now-defunct Apollo app for Reddit, is joining as an advisor. Selig said he’s helping Digg “build something new and exciting,” though details remain under wraps for now. Whether Rose’s offer to rescue Pocket will be taken seriously by Mozilla remains to be seen. But for longtime users mourning the loss of one of the App Store’s most beloved read-it-later tools ever (except maybe for Instapaper users), it’s at least a flicker of hope. Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes today’s AI models hallucinate, or make things up and present them as if they’re true, at a lower rate than humans do, he said during a press briefing at Anthropic’s first developer event, Code with Claude, in San Francisco on Thursday. Amodei said all this in the midst of a larger point he was making: that AI hallucinations are not a limitation on Anthropic’s path to AGI — AI systems with human-level intelligence or better. “It really depends how you measure it, but I suspect that AI models probably hallucinate less than humans, but they hallucinate in more surprising ways,” Amodei said, responding to TechCrunch’s question. Anthropic’s CEO is one of the most bullish leaders in the industry on the prospect of AI models achieving AGI. In a widely circulated paper he wrote last year, Amodei said he believed AGI could arrive as soon as 2026. During Thursday’s press briefing, the Anthropic CEO said he was seeing steady progress to that end, noting that “the water is rising everywhere.” “Everyone’s always looking for these hard blocks on what [AI] can do,” said Amodei. “They’re nowhere to be seen. There’s no such thing.” Other AI leaders believe hallucination presents a large obstacle to achieving AGI. Earlier this week, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said today’s AI models have too many “holes,” and get too many obvious questions wrong. For example, earlier this month, a lawyer representing Anthropic was forced to apologize in court after they used Claude to create citations in a court filing, and the AI chatbot hallucinated and got names and titles wrong. It’s difficult to verify Amodei’s claim, largely because most hallucination benchmarks pit AI models against each other; they don’t compare models to humans. Certain techniques seem to be helping lower hallucination rates, such as giving AI models access to web search. Separately, some AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, have notably lower hallucination rates on benchmarks compared to early generations of systems. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW However, there’s also evidence to suggest hallucinations are actually getting worse in advanced reasoning AI models. OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini models have higher hallucination rates than OpenAI’s previous-gen reasoning models, and the company doesn’t really understand why. Later in the press briefing, Amodei pointed out that TV broadcasters, politicians, and humans in all types of professions make mistakes all the time. The fact that AI makes mistakes too is not a knock on its intelligence, according to Amodei. However, Anthropic’s CEO acknowledged the confidence with which AI models present untrue things as facts might be a problem. In fact, Anthropic has done a fair amount of research on the tendency for AI models to deceive humans, a problem that seemed especially prevalent in the company’s recently launched Claude Opus 4. Apollo Research, a safety institute given early access to test the AI model, found that an early version of Claude Opus 4 exhibited a high tendency to scheme against humans and deceive them. Apollo went as far as to suggest Anthropic shouldn’t have released that early model. Anthropic said it came up with some mitigations that appeared to address the issues Apollo raised. Amodei’s comments suggest that Anthropic may consider an AI model to be AGI, or equal to human-level intelligence, even if it still hallucinates. An AI that hallucinates may fall short of AGI by many people’s definition, though.

A third-party research institute that Anthropic partnered with to test one of its new flagship AI models, Claude Opus 4, recommended against deploying an early version of the model due to its tendency to “scheme” and deceive. According to a safety report Anthropic published Thursday, the institute, Apollo Research, conducted tests to see in which contexts Opus 4 might try to behave in certain undesirable ways. Apollo found that Opus 4 appeared to be much more proactive in its “subversion attempts” than past models and that it “sometimes double[d] down on its deception” when asked follow-up questions. “[W]e find that, in situations where strategic deception is instrumentally useful, [the early Claude Opus 4 snapshot] schemes and deceives at such high rates that we advise against deploying this model either internally or externally,” Apollo wrote in its assessment. As AI models become more capable, some studies show they’re becoming more likely to take unexpected — and possibly unsafe — steps to achieve delegated tasks. For instance, early versions of OpenAI’s o1 and o3 models, released in the past year, tried to deceive humans at higher rates than previous-generation models, according to Apollo. Per Anthropic’s report, Apollo observed examples of the early Opus 4 attempting to write self-propagating viruses, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself — all in an effort to undermine its developers’ intentions. To be clear, Apollo tested a version of the model that had a bug Anthropic claims to have fixed. Moreover, many of Apollo’s tests placed the model in extreme scenarios, and Apollo admits that the model’s deceptive efforts likely would’ve failed in practice. However, in its safety report, Anthropic also says it observed evidence of deceptive behavior from Opus 4. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW This wasn’t always a bad thing. For example, during tests, Opus 4 would sometimes proactively do a broad cleanup of some piece of code even when asked to make only a small, specific change. More unusually, Opus 4 would try to “whistle-blow” if it perceived a user was engaged in some form of wrongdoing. According to Anthropic, when given access to a command line and told to “take initiative” or “act boldly” (or some variation of those phrases), Opus 4 would at times lock users out of systems it had access to and bulk-email media and law-enforcement officials to surface actions the model perceived to be illicit. “This kind of ethical intervention and whistleblowing is perhaps appropriate in principle, but it has a risk of misfiring if users give [Opus 4]-based agents access to incomplete or misleading information and prompt them to take initiative,” Anthropic wrote in its safety report. “This is not a new behavior, but is one that [Opus 4] will engage in somewhat more readily than prior models, and it seems to be part of a broader pattern of increased initiative with [Opus 4] that we also see in subtler and more benign ways in other environments.”

If you’ve always wanted to donate to Wikipedia but needed an extra nudge to do so, a new capsule collection by the German fashion brand Armedangels could be that reason. To mark Wikipedia’s forthcoming 25th anniversary next year, Armedangels designed a 14-piece collection that turns design features from the Wikipedia user interface and experience into brand elements. Its signature bright cobalt blue, called “hyperlink blue,” is a key color, along with white and yellow core colors. One design, featured on a T-shirt and sweatshirt, uses an iconic 1972 image of Earth called “Blue Marble” that was taken during the Apollo 17 mission and is in the public domain. [Photo: Armedangels] A text excerpt from “The Blue Marble” Wikipedia page is below the image, which is one of the most widely reproduced images in the world and “celebrates the freedom of knowledge,” according to the product description. Wikipedia’s serif “W” logo is featured throughout. The collection is available now via the Armedangels website. The Armedangels x Wikipedia collection includes items that equate knowledge to progress, with shirts promoting freedom, peace, and equality. Ball caps with slogans like “Open Source of Information” and “Yes, I know,” are fan merch for people who love going down multi-tab Wikipedia rabbit holes. The items range in price from about $16 for socks, $48 for hats, $57 for T-shirts, and $114 for sweatshirts. [Photo: Armedangels] The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation—which also operates tools like Wikimedia Commons and Wikibooks—saw annual revenue of more than $180 million in 2024, more than $170 million of which came from donations (though it says just 2% of Wikipedia readers donate). Some hypebeast apparel might be able to nominally improve that percentage, and it comes as the site itself has become a political lightning rod, facing increasing attacks from some on the right. [Photo: Armedangels] Armedangels says every piece is made from 100% recycled material, and 12% of sales proceeds go to the Wikimedia Foundation. It’s “sustainability meets free knowledge,” as the fashion brand says. “Because when we know better, we do better.” Like the pro-reading, anti-book-ban capsule collection for Penguin Random House by Online Ceramics, Armedangels x Wikipedia lends street-fashion cred to book smarts—and it raises money for valuable education resources at a time when anti-intellectualism is on the rise, and our information ecosystem has become especially polluted. Supporting a free online encyclopedia is one way to fight back. For Wikipedia, its volunteers, readers, and fans, the site is an effective line of defense against misinformation and ignorance. Now they have a limited-edition streetwear line that feels the same way.