Born to run

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. A sure-fire tip to make any steak delicious, a new forest is gobbling up carbon, and prepare to have your mind blown because new Van Halen music is on the way  🤘

But first our weekly poll!

It’s pretty hard to make a ribeye steak taste bad, but it turns out it’s also pretty easy to make a more affordable cut like flank or hanger taste just like a ribeye.

“I spent three years early in my career in an apprenticeship where French cuisine was emphasized as the foundation of our work,” said Rick Yockachonis, chef of Olivine, an Italian-influenced restaurant in Auburn, Alabama. “From that training comes one of the most fundamental and quietly important concepts in classical cooking: nappe.”

Nappe is a French cuisine technique in which the chef slowly adds cold butter to a pan sauce to alter its viscosity and texture.

According Theo Adley, the head chef and owner of Marigold Lyons in Lyons, Colorado, for nappe to be effective, the sauce should be “not totally fluid or completely gelled, able to be poured as well as having enough viscosity to enrobe, both glossy and rich.”

The technique is applicable once the steak is seared and the beef’s natural juices start flowing into the pan to provide the base of the stock. Add shallots, herbs, and red wine, and then slowly add bits of cold butter; the temperature is important to keep the reduction’s “warm coating-like” consistency, rather than a less-desirable greasy finish.

According to Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch, enterprise software is at risk of nearly being wiped out by what AI is already capable of doing.

He spoke with CNBC on Wednesday, just days removed from a massive sell-off of software stocks driven by investors spooked by the complexity of Anthropic’s Cowork product, which acts as an automated AI agent for enterprise companies.

An ETF comprised of multiple major software as a service (SaaS) companies—including Microsoft and Salesforce—is down 20% in 2026 alone.

“I would say more than half of what’s currently being bought by IT in terms of SaaS is going to shift to AI,” Mensch told CNBC at the India Accelerates event at he AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India. “AI is making us able to develop software at the speed of light.”

He spoke of how simple it’s already become for companies to shift where they focus their enterprise level resources, phasing out SaaS and increasingly relying on AI-driven platforms.

“The replatforming is a big opportunity for us, because we now have more than 100 enterprise customers coming to us also with that will of maybe changing and replatforming their IT system, so maybe getting rid of certain things that they bought 20 years ago, and that is starting to be a bit expensive,” Mensch said. “They see AI as a way to replatform the thing so that it becomes more efficient and less costly.”

The Taklamakan Desert in northwest China is one of the most brutal landscapes on earth. It’s tucked away behind the Himalayas to its southeast, the Pamirs to its southeast, and two more massive mountains to the west, shielding it from practically any moisture.

It’s also further from an ocean than any other point on the planet.

In 1978, China launched it Three-North Shelter Belt program, and between then and 2024, 66 billion trees were planted in an effort to shield the nearby agricultural lands from sandstorms emanating from the earthbound hellscape.

According to NASA, the trees that now sit around the desert are acting as a massive carbon-capturing ring that’s reduced the average parts-per-million content of carbon in the region from 419 to 416.

Called the “Green Great Wall,” it’s also increased rainfall levels by a few millimeters, and improved the photosynthesis capabilities of some adjacent vegetation.

“We found, for the first time, that human-led intervention can effectively enhance carbon sequestration in even the most extreme arid landscapes, demonstrating the potential to transform a desert into a carbon sink and halt desertification,” study co-author Yuk Yung, a professor of planetary science at Caltech and a senior research scientist in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Live Science.

Eddie Van Halen passed away five years ago, but the impact the guitarist left on the music industry is immortal, and his own music is, too.

According to brother and drummer Alex, unreleased Van Halen songs are being worked on in the studio that could yield a new album from beyond virtuoso’s grave.

"I've been fortunate enough to have Steve Lukather, who was a good friend of Ed's, and we're working on putting a record together," Alex previously said during an interview with the YouTube channel KazaGastao.

That music was indeed leftover from demos recorded by Eddie and the band when the guitarist was still alive and Van Halen was still active.

"Many people have asked, what about releasing unreleased stuff?' Well, we're not gonna release it in its embryonic form because it wouldn't make any sense," Alex said. "It has to be of the quality and the level of where we left it. Not just to say, 'Hey, here's some music that we made. If you like it, that's great.' No, It has to be the quality that we expect."

He said the demos are made up of "recordings that were going to be the next [Van Halen] record, and that were stopped because [Eddie Van Halen] didn't live that long. The drums are already recorded. The drums, the guitar and the bass are already in there."

The bass lines were recorded by Eddie’s son Wolfgang, and though a vocalist hasn’t been named, it doesn’t sound likely that David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar will be involved.

It’s Friday and you know what that means! Time for trivia à la carte. It’s a little of this, a little of that, and a whole lotta fun.

Give today’s trivia a try and you might just win a $25 e-gift card.