Month: May 2021

Enlarge / Tim Cook speaks during an event at Lane Technical College Prep High School in Chicago on Tuesday, March 27, 2018. (credit: Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Tim Cook will on Friday be confronted with allegations that Apple is operating an illegal monopoly, in a high-stakes case brought by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, where the verdict could have far-reaching consequences for 1 billion iPhone users and thousands of developers.

Cook will be among the final witnesses in the month-long trial, scheduled to end on Monday, in which Epic argues that Apple abuses its allegedly dominant position by forcing developers to distribute applications through the App Store, where it takes a commission of 15–30 percent.

Apple expelled Fortnite from its App Store last year when Epic tried to get around the fees by giving the game’s players a zero-commission way to make in-app purchases.

(credit: Pawlowicz and Downum 2021)

Real archaeological fieldwork is seldom as exciting as it looks in the movies. You tend to get fewer reanimated mummies, deadly booby traps, and dramatic shootouts with Nazis. Instead, you'll see pieces of broken pottery—a lot of them. Potsherds are ubiquitous at archaeological sites, and that's true for pretty much every culture since people invented pottery. In the US Southwest in particular, museums have collected sherds by the tens of thousands.

Although all those broken bits may not look like much at first glance, they’re often the key to piecing together the past.

“[Potsherds] provide archaeologists with critical information about the time a site was occupied, the cultural group with which it was associated, and other groups with whom they interacted,” said Northern Arizona University archaeologist Chris Downum, who co-authored a new study with Leszek Pawlowicz.