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Ruf built just 30 examples of the twin-turbocharged CTR3 and just seven Clubsports.

This CT3R Clubsport was displayed at the Geneva Motor Show back in 2018.

Matching the Oak Green Metallic exterior is eye-catching green tartan in the cabin.

There’s no shortage of options for anyone shopping in the multi-million-dollar supercar or hypercar bracket, but most buyers gravitate toward the familiar names. The Ruf CTR3 Clubsport rarely makes that first cut, which is a shame, because it stands among the most interesting cars in the segment and gets overlooked next to Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, and even Koenigsegg.

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You see, while Porsche pondered whether a mid-engined 911 belongs on the road one day, Ruf answered that question years ago and built the car to prove it.

Read: The Rarest Ruf 911 Ever Made Spent Decades In The Shadows. Now It’s Back

Ruf launched the CTR3 in 2012, building it around a bespoke billet-aluminum spaceframe supplied by Multimatic, the outfit behind the Ford GT, then wrapping it in a lightweight Kevlar-carbon-fiber composite. That spaceframe runs roughly 11 inches (27.9 cm) longer than a standard 911, which opens up the room needed to sit the flat-six ahead of the rear axle. The lineage traces to the 997-generation Porsche 911, but the mid-engine layout puts its stance closer to a 918 Spyder.

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Total production of the CTR3 was capped at just 30 units worldwide, of which only 7 are Clubsport versions like this. This car, heading to auction during Monterey Car Week , is the one Ruf presented at the Geneva Motor Show in 2018, and it was also the first CTR3 fitted with a PDK transmission rather than the outdated sequential gearboxes of earlier examples.

Germany’s Forgotten Supercar?

Jorge Guasso/RM Sotheby’s

This CT3R Clubsport is painted in Oak Green Metallic, which looks absolutely superb, as do the silver five-spoke wheels. There are plenty of exposed carbon fiber parts, including the front splitter, rear wing, and roof scoop.

Power comes from a twin-turbocharged 3.8-liter flat-six producing 766 hp. That’s enough to send the CTR3 Clubsport from zero to 60 mph (96 km/h) in three seconds flat and on to a top speed of 236 mph (380 km/h), helped along by a curb weight that sits just a hair over 3,000 lbs (1,360 kg).

Jorge Guasso/RM Sotheby’s

The interior gives you plenty to appreciate as well. It is clad mostly in black leather but has green-and-red tartan fabric on the seats, with quilted stitching. Other highlights include several carbon fiber accents, such as on the gauge cluster, as well as the black-and-green leather floor mats.

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RM Sotheby’s is handling the sale and expects the car to bring between $1.7 million and $1.9 million. Whether it clears that estimate depends on how many collectors recognize what Ruf built here. We’ll find out when the hammer falls during Monterey Car Week. Until then, you can check out the full listing here .

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Jorge Guasso/RM Sotheby’s

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First international meeting between two modern legends who may yet go on making history

As Mohamed Salah savoured the feeling of Egypt’s historic victory over Australia , the narrative had already moved on. The former Liverpool forward could not contain his delight after his scuffed penalty helped to seal a redemptive shootout triumph in Dallas for the Pharaohs on Friday.

“I decided last minute. I am more experienced than others and I wanted to give them confidence,” said Salah, who had missed in Egypt’s last two shootouts, including the World Cup qualifying playoff against Senegal four years ago.

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Scientists say they have built a "synthetic cell" that can eat, grow and divide in a way that's remarkably similar to living cells.

The research, released to the preprint database bioRxiv July 2, has not been peer-reviewed yet. It introduces SpudCell, a new type of artificial cell, and marks a striking step toward creating living cells from scratch. But for study co-author Kate Adamala , a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota, that's far from the most interesting part of the work.

"I do not believe [SpudCell] is alive," Adamala told Live Science. Instead, she describes the system as a framework that could generate "all the chemicals we need for our civilization with biology." The thought is that SpudCell could serve as a tiny factory, pumping out medicines, fertilizers, plastics or any number of other compounds.

The work's announcement has sparked some controversy, with some scientists seeing it as a ploy to gain media attention for the simultaneous launch of the author's nonprofit Biotic , which aims to raise money to further develop the SpudCell platform. Adamala does not take umbrage to that criticism, as she is keen to bring more attention and funding to her field. If a synthetic cell can be perfected, she thinks, it could help humanity generate chemicals without relying as heavily on petroleum products.

"I feel this incredible stressful urgency that if we don't get to work on it now, then we're going to run out of time," she said, referring to the climate crisis . "We need to highlight that bioengineering can offer a solution. That's why I'm doing it."

A synthetic cell and a big promise

According to the preprint, Adamala and her team produced a lifelike system that closely resembles a living cell. To do so, they combined 36 purified enzymes and a fatty membrane with a pared-back genome about 50 times smaller than that of an average bacterial cell. By mixing these human-made elements together, the scientists generated a cell that could feed, grow, and divide — so, in essence, they created a full cell cycle in a petri dish.

"We built a cell-like system that is fully chemically defined, so there are no unknown building blocks in it," Adamala said. "It's capable of doing things that people up until now used to think only natural living cells can do." They call the system "SpudCell" because it looks similar to a potato, The New York Times reported . The name is also a nod to the Sputnik satellite, per CNN .

The concept of recreating the cell cycle in a dish is not entirely new . The J. Craig Venter Institute's 2016 "minimal cell" paper flirted with the concept by stripping as many genes from a bacterium as possible to leave only a minimal cell that could still replicate. However, the new study is the first time scientists have achieved feeding, growing and division using a "bottom-up" approach.

The work marks "a great advancement," said Mauro Rinaldi , a lecturer in biotechnology and biochemistry at the University of Hull in the U.K. who was not involved in the work. "It moves the needle because one of the key things about cells is division."

But there are important caveats. For one, the cells cannot yet create their own energy as our cells do with mitochondria. They also rely on externally provided fats, sugars and enzymes. The cells cannot make their own ribosomes, the machinery that turns genetic instructions into working parts of the cell. That means it relies on proteins being delivered from the outside.

Left: A super-resolution image of SpudCell's liposomes with an encapsulated genome and active protein expression. Right: A SpudCell encapsulates a whole genome. The DNA of the genome and the synthetic cell membrane are stained with fluorescent dyes. (Image credit: Orion Venero, Adamala Lab) Another difference is that SpudCell's genome is spread out over bits of DNA called plasmids, rather than being neatly packaged in chromosomes. It does not possess the skeleton that cells typically use to neatly split DNA during cell division, so consequently, the division of SpudCell's DNA to its daughter cells can be somewhat haphazard.

"The description of the results leaves me with substantial technical questions regarding the nature and the robustness of the findings," said Cees Dekker , a biophysicist at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. "[Its] approach uses some ingenious engineering tricks as shortcuts to achieve complex functions such as growth, but a major challenge remains to create a truly autonomous cell that executes all these functions without external help," he said.

Dekker is among the scientists who would have preferred that the research made the news after being published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. "If these findings are solid, that great media attention is definitely warranted; if peer review would, however, reveal weaknesses or issues, all the current media reporting is premature," he argued.

From cell to manufacturing platform

Adamala sees SpudCell as a blank slate for engineering. "We believe that if we make a cell from scratch, that's fully engineerable," she said.

Cells have long been used to produce chemicals for human use. Millions of people use synthetic insulin made in bacteria and yeast cells, for example. But cells resist making chemicals that could be harmful to them, and through evolution, they've developed systems to prevent them from doing so. A SpudCell-like system could circumvent those natural hurdles, Adamala and her colleagues think.

That kind of platform could also be useful for making newer generations of medicines, such as those based on mRNA or peptides. These drugs use molecular building blocks, like amino acids or nucleotides, that have been chemically tweaked to make the molecules more stable or harder for the body to break down. SpudCell could be engineered to produce such modified components directly, rather than scientists having to synthesize them in traditional chemistry labs. This could potentially shorten development timelines and lower costs, the team thinks.

Adamala and her colleagues also envision the cells being used as easily shippable laboratories . They could be dried out, shipped, stored without refrigeration, and then activated on-site to make chemicals, vaccines or proteins when and where they are needed.

But there's still a long road ahead. For now, SpudCell is only a proof of principle, and many hurdles must be addressed before it could become an industrial platform.

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"[SpudCell] is not an engineering platform that can give you any useful product, but it's step one," Adamala said. "It's probably at least a couple of decades from now when we can actually scale it up to the point where we can replace all the petrochemicals with biology, but I do believe it's doable."

Adamala hopes the nonprofit Biotic will help funnel donations from philanthropists directly to research. "Biotic is a funding agency that is going to globally fund this work," she said.

While the technology is promising, "it needs to go through peer review," Rinaldi said. "I expect a lot of the hype and some of the terms that they're using to go away after a couple of years have passed."

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There’s a new show at the top of Prime Video ’s TV rankings: Laura Kittrell ’s prequel comedy Elle: From the World of Legally Blonde . Starring Lexi Minetree as a younger version of Legally Blonde ’s Elle Woods, the show follows the iconic character as a teenager in the 1990s, navigating life as a Seattle high school student, years before she arrived at Harvard Law School. While the series has had mixed reviews, audience reception has been brilliant. But if that’s not quite what you’re in the mood for, there are still plenty more options to check out on the platform. Without further ado, here’s a look at three great shows that we think you should binge on Prime Video this week.

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The redesigned Hyundai Tucson has been spied ahead of a possible debut this fall.

Crossover is expected to be slightly larger than before and sport a boxier design.

We can expect a new Pleos Connect infotainment system and upgraded powertrains.

Spy photographers snapped the facelifted Hyundai Santa Fe last week and now they’ve caught up with the redesigned Tucson. Testers were even nice enough to park the current model alongside its replacement.

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While the model is still heavily disguised, the fifth-generation crossover is going to be a radical departure from its predecessor. The edgy and overly fussy design will give way to a boxier shape that loosely echoes its larger counterparts.

More: Hyundai’s Best-Seller Is About To Get A Major Redesign

Camouflage hides a number of details, but we can see a rounded front fascia with a wide grille. It’s flanked by split lighting units as there are shapely LED daytime running lights above mid-mounted headlights. Further below, there’s a stylish intake with horizontal lines that angle upwards toward the center.

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Moving down the sides, we can see a flatter beltline and streamlined bodywork. They’re joined by a revamped greenhouse and a gently sloping roof. Designers also gave the crossover aerodynamically optimized wheels and more conventional wheel arches.

The rear end has been reimagined as the license plate recess moves from the liftgate to the bumper. We can also see new vertical taillights that appear to be connected by a slender illuminated strip. Below, the bumper incorporates slim reflectors and a less adventurous design.

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Spy shooters only managed to snag a handful of interior images, but we can see a slender digital instrument cluster and a new Pleos Connect infotainment system . The size of the latter remains up for debate, but the Elantra offers 12.9- and 14.6-inch setups, while the Grandeur has a massive 17-inch display.

Other highlights include a new steering wheel and a minimalist design. We can also expect new switchgear and higher quality materials.

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Powertrain details remain hazy, but we can likely expect improved hybrid and plug-in hybrid options. The former currently has a turbocharged 1.6-liter four-cylinder producing a combined output of 231 hp (172 kW / 234 PS) and 271 lb-ft (367 Nm) of torque. It enables the model to return up to 38 mpg city, 38 mpg highway, and 38 mpg combined.

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The plug-in hybrid uses the same engine, but adopts a larger 13.8 kWh battery pack and a beefier electric motor. This increases the output to 268 hp (200 kW / 272 PS), while also providing an electric-only range of 32 miles.

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