We introduce in this paper the concepts of rings characterized by minimal one-sided ideals and concern ourselves with rings containing an injective maximal left ideal. Some known results for idempotent reflexive rings and left HI rings can be extended to left MC2 rings. As applications, we are able to give some new characterizations of regular left self-injective rings with non-zero socle and extend some known results for strongly regular rings.

We prove that almost all natural numbers satisfying certain necessary congruence conditions can be written as the sum of two cubes of primes and two cubes of P2-numbers, where, as usual, we call a natural number a P2-number when it is a prime or the product of two primes. From this result we also deduce that every sufficiently large integer can be written as the sum of eight cubes of P2-numbers.