Through the heat haze, airplane tails rose from the desert. As I steered off the interstate toward Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, I got my first view of a corpse in full: a stark-white Boeing 747, its wings sheared off, its passenger doors open to the dust and wind, a rickety set of airstairs inviting no one aboard. The plane was a memory, a ruin, but its swooping, humped nose was still striking'a visage that signaled the freedom of movement in the Jet Age. I was arriving at this desolate site north of Tucson, where airplanes go to die, to mourn the 747, the original jumbo jet'a.k.a. the Whale, the Longreach, the Sky Cruiser, the Mother of All Airliners, the Queen of the Skies. For 50 years, the aircraft was the principal host of Important Journeys: a young student's trip to study abroad in Paris, a first-generation American's pilgrimage to their ancestral home in Hungary, an Iranian family fleeing the 1979 revolution. Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful. Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values....
A microcosm within. A field of lupines in bloom appears to enclose the Milky Way in this fish-eye perspective from New Zealand. The surreal shot, by Alvin Wu, was one of 25 selected images in the ninth Milky Way Photographer of the Year contest, which was founded in Spain. Compared with Hubble's first shot of the nebula, taken in 1997, the new shot reveals subtle changes in the cloud of gas and dust ' such as the expansion of a jet of plasma known to be ejected periodically by a still-forming star (at the top left of the cloud). This demonstrates how even objects of literally astronomical size can evolve over just a few decades. Martian flight tests. Helicopter blades rotate at 240 metres per second ' faster than what would be the speed of sound on Mars ' inside a chamber that replicates the conditions on the red planet. Ingenuity, a helicopter that NASA operated from 2021 to 2024 as part of its Mars 2020 mission, was the first aircraft of any kind to fly on another celestial body. But it was not able to carry a payload, except for simple sensors and cameras. After the success of Ingenuity, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are designing helicopters that can carry heavier instruments, fly for longer periods of time and perhaps even assist future astronauts travelling to Mars....
In 1960, Washington watched aghast as Fidel Castro's post-Revolution government seized companies and assets it viewed as the spoils of vanquished U.S. imperialism. Among the biggest prizes were two plants that sat above some of the largest nickel and cobalt deposits in the world. The United States had acquired one of them to secure a strategic supply of nickel for armor plating and aircraft engines during World War II. But the revolutionaries lacked know-how, and soon, the operations were struggling. 'Cuban Mining Industry Virtually Destroyed in First Two Years of Castro Regime,' read a January 1961 New York Times headline, 'PITS ARE CLOSED, FACTORIES SILENT.' The Cuban regime turned to its Cold War patron, as it did for so much else in its early years. Soviet engineers and mining specialists retooled the Nicaro plant and the Moa Bay nickel complex into pillars of the island's economy and icons of Cuban sovereignty, funding power plants and social programs. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Castro sought a replacement savior closer to home in a 1994 deal with Sherritt International, a Canadian nickel and cobalt miner and refiner. Cuba provided the ore and labor. Sherritt brought capital, refining technology, and access to global markets....
At least according to Hark, an AI lab building models and hardware for an AI personal assistant, which said on Thursday that it had raised that much in a Series A round that values it at $6 billion post-money. The mega-round was led by Parkway Venture Capital and included Nvidia, Align Ventures, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Intel Capital, Prime Movers Lab, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Tamarack Global. (Phew!) Perhaps what's most notable about the fundraise is how little Hark has revealed about what it is building. Founder and CEO, Brett Adcock, also the entrepreneur behind robotics company Figure.AI and electric aircraft builder Archer, launched Hark in late 2025 with $100 million of his own money to develop an agentic AI system that serves as a universal interface with the digital world. Hark expects to release its first multimodal models this summer, which it says will power a personal AI platform that works with existing products and services. The company expects to follow that with hardware devices built specifically for those systems....
