FlashFeed

Full text

Dubai tuner Zeus Offroad turned a BMW M240i into a desert-runner.

The safari-style coupe gets a 3-inch lift kit and larger all-terrain tires.

It also benefits from aluminum bumpers, wide fenders and a roof rack.

When BMW rolled out its M2 Dakar digital concept as an April Fool’s gag in 2025, plenty of enthusiasts walked away wishing Munich would drop the joke and actually build it. A safari-spec sports car in the mold of the Porsche 911 Dakar and Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato had obvious appeal. BMW may have kept it in the realm of make-believe, but the aftermarket had other ideas.

var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]};

adpushup.que.push(function() {

if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){

adpushup.triggerAd("0f7e3106-c4d6-4db4-8135-c508879a76f8");

} else {

adpushup.triggerAd("82503191-e1d1-435a-874f-9c78a2a54a2f");

}

});

Dubai-based tuner Zeus Offroad turned that desert-running fantasy into something real, a rugged one-off built on the BMW M240i Coupe. Tuned to handle punishing desert terrain, it gives up its low-slung stance for the sake of trail capability .

More: ‘ World’s First Luxury V12 Italian Off-Roader’ Pretends The Lambo Rambo Never Existed

The aluminum bumpers front and rear are where the eye lands first, each one bringing an integrated skid plate and recovery points. Bolt-on fender extensions run into mud flaps that keep debris off the bodywork.

var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]};

adpushup.que.push(function() {

if (adpushup.config.platform === "DESKTOP"){

adpushup.triggerAd("ea4d4b5a-f8e5-4d5d-9d9a-53a3b956b6cd");

} else{

adpushup.triggerAd("44c0a4dc-e25b-4ba5-ac64-2c510461b92a");

}

});

Another cool touch is the Thule roof rack with LEDs and wind deflectors. Around the back, the custom treatment is rounded out by a bespoke central dual exhaust system that gives the lifted coupe a unique visual signature.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Zeus Offroad (@zeus_offroad)

The bigger change happens underneath. A 3-inch (76 mm) lift kit, riding on Flatout adjustable coilovers, opens up the ground clearance and suspension travel needed for fast runs across sand. Zeus also went down in wheel diameter, swapping the factory alloys for 17-inch rollers wrapped in chunky off-road rubber.

More: You’ve Never Seen A Lotus Elise Like This Before

Those tires will earn their keep in sand, since the donor BMW M240i sends power to the rear wheels only. Under the hood sits a turbocharged 3.0-liter six good for 382 hp (285 kW / 388 PS).

var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]};

adpushup.que.push(function() {

if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){

adpushup.triggerAd("bb7964e9-07de-4b06-a83e-ead35079d53c");

} else {

adpushup.triggerAd("9b1169d9-7a89-4971-a77f-1397f7588751");

}

});

What none of this costs is anyone’s guess, since Zeus Offroad stayed quiet on the price of a build almost certain to stay a one-off. The shop pulled the same trick on a Porsche Panamera not long ago, though most of what rolls out its doors starts life as a Cayenne .

var adpushup = window.adpushup = window.adpushup || {que:[]};

adpushup.que.push(function() {

if (adpushup.config.platform !== "DESKTOP"){

adpushup.triggerAd("bb7964e9-07de-4b06-a83e-ead35079d53c");

} else {

adpushup.triggerAd("9b1169d9-7a89-4971-a77f-1397f7588751");

}

});

The lifted BMW 240i by Zeus Offroad (above) compared to the fictional M2 Dakar (below).

Full text

It's been four years since the last mainline God of War game was released, but the megahit video game franchise has been anything but dormant in 2026. The action kicked off in February, when God of War: Sons of Sparta launched as a prequel to the entire series, adopting a 2D style and telling a story about Kratos and his brother Deimos in their younger years. Accompanying that as a 20th anniversary celebration was confirmation that the original three Ancient Greece-set games would be getting a modernized remake, though a date hasn't been set yet. Sony's State of Play presentation at the beginning of June then further reaffirmed that the Norse saga has more stories to tell when it revealed the much-anticipated next installment from Santa Monica Studios, God of War Laufey , following the journey of Kratos' late wife through the afterlife of the gods in a bold shake-up.

Full text

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius buried a vast collection of scrolls in ash and scorched them into solid black lumps. Now, without unrolling them, researchers have virtually read two of them —‬ and uncovered what may be a work by a well-known Stoic philosopher.

The breakthrough comes from the Vesuvius Challenge , an international research effort to digitally read the scrolls that were preserved when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by ash and pumice in A.D. 79. Papyrologists, who study and preserve the ancient manuscripts, announced June 25 that they had digitally unwrapped the surviving portion of one scroll, known as PHerc. 1667, revealing roughly 5 feet (1.5 meters) of continuous Greek text across 20 columns. Researchers also recovered more than 70 columns of text from a second scroll, PHerc. 172.

"For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible," Brent Seales , Vesuvius Challenge co-founder and a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, said in a statement . "Today ‪—‬ after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence , academic research and an innovation contest ‪—‬ we are finally able to read them."

Over the past few years, Seales and his team have used a synchrotron to essentially X-ray inside the scrolls and detect the ink ancient Romans used to write. The letters are then studied by papyrologists, who translate the text.

Part of PHerc. 1667 was physically opened in the 1980s, but overlapping layers obscured the writing so badly that the scroll was given a readability score of zero, Federica Nicolardi , a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, said in the statement.

The handwriting and text of PHerc. 1667 suggest the scroll dates to the second or third century B.C., making it one of the oldest scrolls in the Herculaneum collection. This early date means it could not have been authored by Philodemus of Gadara , the first-century-B.C. Epicurean philosopher whose writings dominated the Herculaneum library.

Experts think the text reads more like a Stoic treatise on ethics and human behavior, and it specifically mentions Aristocreon, the nephew and pupil of the influential Stoic philosopher Chrysippus . Very little of Chrysippus' own writing has survived, so if the attribution holds up, it would be a significant addition to the historical record of early Stoic thought.

RELATED STORIES

AI is deciphering a 2,000-year-old 'lost book' describing life after Alexander the Great

AI reveals scroll's lost text after it was scorched by Mount Vesuvius eruption 2,000 years ago

Plato's burial place finally revealed after AI deciphers ancient scroll carbonized in Mount Vesuvius eruption

In a separate discovery, researchers identified a new book title within scroll PHerc. 139. The end of the scroll references Philodemus' eighth book of "On Gods." While this treatise had previously been known to exist, the new discovery reveals the work extended across at least eight volumes. Experts plan to reexamine other texts in the Herculaneum collection for additional volumes that may belong to the same series.

More than 600 Herculaneum scrolls remain unopened. It's thought that the villa was once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar .

How much do you know about the Roman town destroyed by Mount Vesuvius? Find out by taking our Pompeii quiz!

Full text

The rise of robotics has long threatened human employment, with machines in manufacturing settings especially seemingly performing the work that people used to do. Take this to its logical conclusion, and it's not outside the realm of possibility to have a massive unemployment problem on your hands. So how do we deal with it? Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has a contentious idea.

Death, taxes and robots

There's an active (and ongoing) debate about how the rise of apparent job-stealing technology could be handled by policymakers.

Quote of the day

This article is part of TechRadar Pro's QOTD project to provide an insight into the minds of the brightest and most recognized figures in the technology industry today and in years gone by. Read the full series here .

This is a challenge to which Gates offered a solution nearly a decade ago, suggesting in an interview with QZ that a robot that performs a human's job should be taxed like its fleshy counterpart.

This, Gates argued at the time, could slow down the rapid speed of automation and be used to instigate exploration into other kinds of employment.

This is, of course, not a policy that everyone (especially much of the business world) agrees with. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR), for instance, decried the move and instead suggested further tax on profits to offset the impact of automation.

Tax-paying robots

Despite that, there are supporters of similar measures, including Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, who called for an AI tax proposal to build a multi-million-dollar worker fund. Andrew Yang, too, has called for a tax on automation and AI instead of a tax on humans.

Since 2017, the conversation has certainly moved on – with much of the conversation around automation based on software and digital tools like large language models (LLMs) rather than physical embodied AI robotics systems. That said , the robotics industry is growing fast . While AI is a key focus among policymakers, the conversation may well shift back to machines that we can see and feel.