Plus: The Pentagon has struck sweeping AI deals for classified work. Week one of the Musk v. Altman trial: what it was like in the room Two of the most powerful figures in AI--Sam Altman and Elon Musk--are in the middle of a landmark legal showdown, with Musk alleging he was misled about OpenAI becoming a for-profit company. Our reporter Michelle Kim, who also happens to be a lawyer, has been in court each day, and has broken down the first week's key moments in her latest report . In a new Q&A, she also reveals what it was like in the room, the new details that have emerged about how Musk and OpenAI operate--and what we can expect from this week's proceedings. Find out what she's discovered so far, and if you want to keep up with MIT Technology Review's ongoing coverage of the Musk v. Altman trial, follow @techreview or @michelletomkim on X. Faster than many realize, AI is becoming the primary interface through which we form beliefs and participate in democratic self-governance. This shift could further strain already fragile institutions, but it could also help address problems like polarization and declining civic engagement.

In 1990, three former Apple employees launched a company that epitomized the Silicon Valley dream. What they invented looked like an iPhone--more than a decade earlier. The device never came to be. Imagine a tech company so visionary that it can take an public. A "concept IPO," they called it. Picture the three founders, all former Apple employees, two of whom--software engineers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson--were already Silicon Valley legends for their work creating the Apple Macintosh. Atkinson's prolific inventions included the double click and the drop down menu.

Nine people have died in an explosion at a coal mine in Colombia in the latest fatal accident to hit the country's mining sector. Emergency workers said they had rescued six miners from the shafts in Sutatausa, north of the capital, Bogotá. Colombia's national mining agency said a build-up of gases was thought to have caused the explosion at 16:00 (21:00 GMT) on Monday. It also published a list of recommendations it said it had made to the mine's operators after an inspection less than a month ago, in which it had warned of a potentially dangerous gas build-up. Many mines in Colombia are operated informally and without proper safety standards.

ROV specialist Phil Parisi is documenting nearly 100 underwater targets in Seattle's Lake Union, calling the urban lake a "shipwreck city" hiding a century of maritime history.

Will A.I. Make College Obsolete? More and more people may decide that its stamp of approval isn't worth the cost. A few weeks ago, while I was dealing with taxes, it occurred to me that the money my wife and I were putting away in a college fund for our children might be better used somewhere else. This wasn't a novel musing, but it felt particularly pressing as I watched my account balance go down, a portion of its resources funnelled into something that can't be touched for at least the next nine years. When my nine-year-old daughter graduates from high school, in 2035, I asked myself, will the landscape of higher education look the way that it does now?

Armed with some Python and a white-hot sense of injustice, one medical student spent six months trying to figure out whether an algorithm trashed his job application. It was mid-October, peak leaf-peeping season in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Chad Markey was on a rare break between clinical rotations during his last year of medical school. He should have been inhaling Green Mountain air and gossiping with his Dartmouth classmates about life after graduation. In a few months, they'd all be going their separate ways to start residency training at hospitals around the country. Instead, Markey was alone in his apartment, deep down a rabbit hole, preparing to go to war. He'd wake each morning, eat breakfast, open his laptop at the kitchen table or settle into the tan armchair with the good back support, and start coding . Some days, he wouldn't notice the sun had gone down until one of his roommates came home and asked why the lights weren't on. For days, Markey had been scrolling through a Discord group about medical residency, a font of crowdsourced knowledge where students report back to their peers on every stage of the application and selection process. He'd watched as other students, lots of them, posted about the interview invitations they'd received.

What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' Russian air attacks kill five at Ukraine's Naftogaz gas facilities At least five people have been killed in Russian air strikes on Ukrainian state-run gas facilities in the Poltava and Kharkiv regions, officials said, a day after Kyiv and Moscow announced unilateral ceasefires to take effect later this week. Three employees and two rescue workers were killed and 37 people were wounded in the overnight missile and drone barrage, Serhiy Koretskyi, the CEO of Ukraine's state energy company Naftogaz said on Tuesday. This was a combined strike involving UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and ballistic missiles," said Koretskyi. He added that the attack cut gas supply to nearly 3,500 customers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian authorities had shown "utter cynicism" by announcing a ceasefire and then launching missile and drone attacks on his country. "Russia could cease fire at any moment, and this would stop the war and our responses.

How well do you know Iran? The United Arab Emirates has said its air defences intercepted ballistic and cruise missiles fired from Iran, while a fire was reported at an oil facility in Fujairah after a suspected drone attack. Tehran has not officially commented. Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, along with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the European Union, have condemned the suspected Iranian strike on the UAE. The incident comes as tensions rise, with United States President Donald Trump warning Iran would be "blown off the face of the earth" if US Navy ships are targeted in the Strait of Hormuz.

Science Archaeology Prehistoric child's finger bone, bear tooth pendant, and more discovered in Spanish cave Nestled in the Pyrenees Mountains, the high-altitude cave may have been an ancient mining camp and burial ground. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Cave 338 is located at 7,332 feet (2,235 meters) above sea level in the Núria Valley (Queralbs, Ripollès). Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Life at high altitudes is unforgiving.

AI's hottest private companies have booming crypto shadow market Crypto platforms are offering trades tied to the most valuable private artificial intelligence companies on earth -- such as Anthropic -- that ordinary investors have almost no other way to access. The race to sell retail investors a piece of the artificial intelligence boom has gone mainstream -- closed-end funds, interval funds, special-purpose vehicles (SPVs). Now, crypto platforms are offering trades tied to the most valuable private AI companies on earth -- ones ordinary investors have almost no other way to access. The result is a new frontier in the financialization of private markets: crypto infrastructure, once the domain of digital token speculation, being redeployed to give traders a way to bet on Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX -- in real time, 24 hours a day, with leverage. Ventuals and PreStocks, two crypto venues riding that shift, have seen their trading activity -- measured by open interest and market value combined -- surge more than threefold since the start of the year to last month.