TLDR 2021-11-16

Apple is secretly buying ads for apps on its platform to drive customers to use its in-app subscription service instead of the developer's website for subscriptions, giving Apple its 15% or 30% cut. The ads appear without developer consent and Google won't delete them. Apple's ad purchasing is creating more competition for ads, which is driving up the cost of ads for other developers. Its anti-competitive behavior is likely to prompt more antitrust scrutiny.

Twitter's new API is ready to come out of early access. The upgrade will provide more freedom to developers to build third-party Twitter clients. Twitter has removed restrictions from its Developer Policy to make it easier for developers to compete with Twitter in ways that the company didn't allow before. The company aims to let developers drive the future of innovation on Twitter, making its platform decentralized and becoming more of a communications protocol than a social network.

The Benthic Rover II is a robot that is designed to prowl the ocean floor to search for clues on how the deep ocean processes carbon. It is serviced and dropped into the water off the coast of Southern California once a year, transmitting its data to a floating glider that travels on the ocean surface near the rover. The rover helped scientists realize that the ocean floor was not sequestering away as much carbon as previously thought. Having more rovers would help scientists further understand what is happening in other areas to form a more complete picture, but the rovers are expensive and difficult to operate and maintain.

A team of researchers has found a new mineral about 900 kilometers below the Earth's surface. Davemaoite is made of calcium, silicon, and oxygen. Its existence has been long hypothesized, but the mineral requires extreme pressures to exist, so it is difficult to find. The discovered sample was found inside a diamond, which kept it from changing structure as it traveled to the Earth's outer layers. Davemaoite is estimated to make up five to seven percent of the Earth's lower mantle and likely plays an important role in the overall heat levels of the Earth's interior.

UnoCSS is an instant, on-demand Atomic CSS engine inspired by Windi CSS, Tailwind CSS, and Twind. It is fully customizable, fast, and compact, and it features shortcuts, an Attributify Mode, an inspector, CSS scoping, and more. An online playground is available.

React-Location is a router for client-side React applications. It features asynchronous routing, a deeply integrated search params API, route filtering and ranking, and more. A sandbox example is available on the main website.

ConstitutionDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization created to pool funds together to buy a first print of the US constitution. The print, of which 13 out of the original 500 copies remain, will be auctioned off on November 18. It is expected to fetch up to $20 million. The DAO plans to find a safe place to store the document, such as the Smithsonian. A link to the ConstitutionDAO website, which has a live tracker of how much they have raised, is available in the article.

SLJ900/32 is a bridge construction machine that lifts, carries, and sets prefabricated track sections to build bridges fast. It is being used by China for the country’s Belt and Road initiative, which aims to create land and sea routes to link about 70 countries. The machines have a lifespan of about four years and can lay up to 1,000 bridge spans. A video of one of the machines laying a section of a bridge is available in the article.