In a crowded field full of online survival sims, Dune: Awakening is kicking up storm. The adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novels lets players build bases, rid sand worms, and smash Ornithopters into one another. That last part has become a problem, and the developers are already looking into a fix. Suggested Reading10 Minutes From The Last Of Us Part II’s Roguelike Mode Share SubtitlesOffEnglishview videoSuggested Reading10 Minutes From The Last Of Us Part II’s Roguelike Mode Share SubtitlesOffEnglishDune’s Ornithopters are helicopters shaped like dragonflies. In Dune: Awakening, they’re one of the many vehicles players can build that serve as both a resource and an end-goal of sorts. They require a lot of equipment and resources to craft if you’re playing solo, which is why most of them belong to players working in groups. It turns out that they’re pretty indestructible too, making them lethal weapons for ramming enemy players with in PVP. Reddit user Bombe18 shared his run-in with Dune: Awakening’s man-made scourge in a recent clip that blew up on the subreddit showing him repeatedly being accosted by multiple Ornithopters. Shooting at them does nothing. They’re unscathed by constantly smashing into the ground on top of him. At one point, he tries to wall-jump off a ledge and stab one. “Yeah sorry about this,” wrote game director Joel Bylos. “We have people working on fixing the goomba stomping ASAP.”Players have been debating the role of Ornithopters in Dune: Awakening since its beta tests last year. On the one hand, they’re a lot of fun and a cool reward for players to build toward. On the other, they sort of trivialize trying to travel around the desert and survive, the two things the game is supposed to be about. They can also shoot missiles, completely dominating the ground game. Now that’s real desert power. In terms of stopping players from griefing one another with Ornithopters, there are a few different suggestions. Some players just want the vehicles not to be able to be used as weapons at all. Others want them isolated to specific PVP areas. Another solution is to make it easier to destroy them. “Seems like they should just make guns deal more damage to them,” wrote one player. “They’d think twice about doing this if their orni could get wrecked by gunfire.” Another wrote, “Make Deep Desert crashes do significant damage. Two crashes or something past a certain physics threshold should disable the vehicle.”However the developers decide to address the recent outbreak of Ornithopter “goomba stomping,” Dune: Awakening is having a great launch so far. Out earlier this week on PC, it’s nearing a 90 percent positive rating on Steam with almost 20,000 reviews. The concurrent player-count is very healthy, too, peaking at just under 150,000 heading into the weekend. Unfortunately, console players will have to wait a bit to build Ornithropters of their own. A PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S release isn’t planned until sometime in 2026. .

On November 4, 2003, a doctor gave Jon Gluck some of the worst news imaginable: He had cancer — one that later tests would reveal as multiple myeloma, a severe blood and bone marrow cancer. Jon was told he might have as little as 18 months to live. He was 38, a thriving magazine editor in New York with a 7-month-old daughter whose third birthday, he suddenly realized, he might never see.“The moment after I was told I had cancer, I just said ‘no, no, no,’” Jon told me in an interview just last week. “This cannot be true.”Living in remissionThe fact that Jon is still here, talking to me in 2025, tells you that things didn’t go the way the medical data would have predicted on that November morning. He has lived with his cancer, through waves of remission and recurrence, for more than 20 years, an experience he chronicles with grace and wit in his new book An Exercise in Uncertainty. That 7-month-old daughter is now in college.RelatedWhy do so many young people suddenly have cancer?You could say Jon has beaten the odds, and he’s well aware that chance played some role in his survival. (“Did you know that ‘Glück’ is German for ‘luck’?” he writes in the book, noting his good fortune that a random spill on the ice is what sent him to the doctor in the first place, enabling them to catch his cancer early.) Cancer is still a terrible health threat, one that is responsible for 1 in 6 deaths around the world, killing nearly 10 million people a year globally and over 600,000 people a year in the US. But Jon’s story and his survival demonstrate something that is too often missed: We’ve turned the tide in the war against cancer. The age-adjusted death rate in the US for cancer has declined by about a third since 1991, meaning people of a given age have about a third lower risk of dying from cancer than people of the same age more than three decades ago. That adds up to over 4 million fewer cancer deaths over that time period. Thanks to breakthroughs in treatments like autologous stem-cell harvesting and CAR-T therapy — breakthroughs Jon himself benefited from, often just in time — cancer isn’t the death sentence it once was.Our World in DataGetting better all the timeThere’s no doubt that just as the rise of smoking in the 20th century led to a major increase in cancer deaths, the equally sharp decline of tobacco use eventually led to a delayed decrease. Smoking is one of the most potent carcinogens in the world, and at the peak in the early 1960s, around 12 cigarettes were being sold per adult per day in the US. Take away the cigarettes and — after a delay of a couple of decades — lung cancer deaths drop in turn along with other non-cancer smoking-related deaths.But as Saloni Dattani wrote in a great piece earlier this year, even before the decline of smoking, death rates from non-lung cancers in the stomach and colon had begun to fall. Just as notably, death rates for childhood cancers — which for obvious reasons are not connected to smoking and tend to be caused by genetic mutations — have fallen significantly as well, declining sixfold since 1950. In the 1960s, for example, only around 10 percent of children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia survived more than five years. Today it’s more than 90 percent. And the five-year survival rate for all cancers has risen from 49 percent in the mid-1970s to 69 percent in 2019. We’ve made strikes against the toughest of cancers, like Jon’s multiple myeloma. Around when Jon was diagnosed, the five-year survival rate was just 34 percent. Today it’s as high as 62 percent, and more and more people like Jon are living for decades. “There has been a revolution in cancer survival,” Jon told me. “Some illnesses now have far more successful therapies than others, but the gains are real.”Three cancer revolutions The dramatic bend in the curve of cancer deaths didn’t happen by accident — it’s the compound interest of three revolutions.While anti-smoking policy has been the single biggest lifesaver, other interventions have helped reduce people’s cancer risk. One of the biggest successes is the HPV vaccine. A study last year found that death rates of cervical cancer — which can be caused by HPV infections — in US women ages 20–39 had dropped 62 percent from 2012 to 2021, thanks largely to the spread of the vaccine. Other cancers have been linked to infections, and there is strong research indicating that vaccination can have positive effects on reducing cancer incidence. The next revolution is better and earlier screening. It’s generally true that the earlier cancer is caught, the better the chances of survival, as Jon’s own story shows. According to one study, incidences of late-stage colorectal cancer in Americans over 50 declined by a third between 2000 and 2010 in large part because rates of colonoscopies almost tripled in that same time period. And newer screening methods, often employing AI or using blood-based tests, could make preliminary screening simpler, less invasive and therefore more readily available. If 20th-century screening was about finding physical evidence of something wrong — the lump in the breast — 21st-century screening aims to find cancer before symptoms even arise.Most exciting of all are frontier developments in treating cancer, much of which can be tracked through Jon’s own experience. From drugs like lenalidomide and bortezomib in the 2000s, which helped double median myeloma survival, to the spread of monoclonal antibodies, real breakthroughs in treatments have meaningfully extended people’s lives — not just by months, but years.Perhaps the most promising development is CAR-T therapy, a form of immunotherapy. Rather than attempting to kill the cancer directly, immunotherapies turn a patient’s own T-cells into guided missiles. In a recent study of 97 patients with multiple myeloma, many of whom were facing hospice care, a third of those who received CAR-T therapy had no detectable cancer five years later. It was the kind of result that doctors rarely see. “CAR-T is mind-blowing — very science-fiction futuristic,” Jon told me. He underwent his own course of treatment with it in mid-2023 and writes that the experience, which put his cancer into a remission he’s still in, left him feeling “physically and metaphysically new.”A welcome uncertaintyWhile there are still more battles to be won in the war on cancer, and there are certain areas — like the rising rates of gastrointestinal cancers among younger people — where the story isn’t getting better, the future of cancer treatment is improving. For cancer patients like Jon, that can mean a new challenge — enduring the essential uncertainty that comes with living under a disease that’s controllable but which could always come back. But it sure beats the alternative.“I’ve come to trust so completely in my doctors and in these new developments,” he said. “I try to remain cautiously optimistic that my future will be much like the last 20 years.” And that’s more than he or anyone else could have hoped for nearly 22 years ago. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!See More: Health

Frontline Protocol – Tactical PvE Strategy Wishlist on Steam and join Playtest for free Hi everyone! I'm an indie developer working on Frontline Protocol, a real-time strategy game with a unique blend of rts, deckbuilding and auto battler mechanics, and a strong focus on cooperative PvE gameplay. This isn't your typical RTS: Instead of controlling units directly, players influence the battlefield by playing cards. Every card you deploy brings instant effects – from spawning units, constructing buildings, placing towers, to launching tactical actions. Positioning, timing, and smart synergy between your three active decks is key. Key Features Card-based RTS Control your army through over 300 cards: infantry, vehicles, towers, buildings, and powerful action cards.1–4 online Multiplayer PvE Co-op Jump into online Multiplayer battles with up to 3 friends. Share spawners, coordinate strategies, and specialize your decks for roles like defense, eco, support, or frontline pressure.Auto Battler Dynamics Once deployed, your units act autonomously – but their effectiveness depends on your deck structure, map control, and team coordination.Meta Progression Earn Booster Credits and unlock card packs containing new units, action cards, and some items. Permanently improve select cards, invest skill points for meta-progression, and shape your long-term strategy. Create new specialized decks like infantry only, anti vehicle, eco buildings or what you want.Mission System Take on dynamic PvE missions with modifiers like time limits or card restrictions. Complete them to earn Mission Coins and unlock exclusive tactical rewards from mission booster packs.Special OrderAdd extra difficulty and earn rare rewards. Special Orders can be activated by the host to increase mission difficulty for all players – by limiting income, increasing enemy spawns or something else. The entire team receives a special loot if they succeed under these conditions. Deployment PlansStrategically boost rewards during missions. Deployment Plans are one-time tactical items drawn from mission booster packs. Use them during missions to gain extra Player EXP, Card EXP, or bonus loot – either per map or at mission completion. Choosing the right plan at the right time can multiply your rewards. Stats: Genre: Real-Time Strategy meets Deckbuilder and Auto Battler Online Multiplayer: Cooperative PvE for 1–4 players Card-Based Tactics: Spawn units, fire missiles, deploy towers, build economy Multi-Deck System: Play with up to three customizable decks simultaneously Booster Packs: Unlock new units, new action cards, and items 300+ Cards: Infantry, vehicles, support units, towers, buildings, and special actions Shared Resources: Teamwide synergy through buildings and spawner sharing Deck Progression: Permanently upgrade cards and build long-term strategies Skill Tree: Earn XP and unlock passive bonuses like faster income or extra hand size Missions & Objectives: Take on randomly generated missions with bonus rewards Built for Co-op: Game design encourages collaboration and tactical communication No Paywalls: All content unlockable through gameplay only Dynamic Enemy Scaling: AI becomes stronger the longer you wait – pressure guaranteed Replay Value: Constant deck experimentation, randomized missions, and tactical depth Get more: Steam Page: Frontline Protocol on Steam Official Website: www.frontlineprotocol.com

Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan and nearby US bases, and over the course of a few hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific force before it can even begin to fight back.  Maybe it sounds like a new Michael Bay movie, but it’s the scenario that keeps the chief technology officer of the US Army up at night. “I’m hesitant to say it out loud so I don’t manifest it,” says Alex Miller, a longtime Army intelligence official who became the CTO to the Army’s chief of staff in 2023. Even if World War III doesn’t break out in the South China Sea, every US military installation around the world is vulnerable to the same tactics—as are the militaries of every other country around the world. The proliferation of cheap drones means just about any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm could wreak havoc, no expensive jets or massive missile installations required.  While the US has precision missiles that can shoot these drones down, they don’t always succeed: A drone attack killed three US soldiers and injured dozens more at a base in the Jordanian desert last year. And each American missile costs orders of magnitude more than its targets, which limits their supply; countering thousand-dollar drones with missiles that cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars per shot can only work for so long, even with a defense budget that could reach a trillion dollars next year. The US armed forces are now hunting for a solution—and they want it fast. Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into other drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling guns that simply shoot drones out of the sky; electronic approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking tools; and lasers that melt holes clear through a target’s side. Then there are the microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you heated them up.  That’s where Epirus comes in.  When I went to visit the HQ of this 185-person startup in Torrance, California, earlier this year, I got a behind-the-scenes look at its massive microwave, called Leonidas, which the US Army is already betting on as a cutting-edge anti-drone weapon. The Army awarded Epirus a $66 million contract in early 2023, topped that up with another $17 million last fall, and is currently deploying a handful of the systems for testing with US troops in the Middle East and the Pacific. (The Army won’t get into specifics on the location of the weapons in the Middle East but published a report of a live-fire test in the Philippines in early May.)  Up close, the Leonidas that Epirus built for the Army looks like a two-foot-thick slab of metal the size of a garage door stuck on a swivel mount. Pop the back cover, and you can see that the slab is filled with dozens of individual microwave amplifier units in a grid. Each is about the size of a safe-deposit box and built around a chip made of gallium nitride, a semiconductor that can survive much higher voltages and temperatures than the typical silicon.  Leonidas sits on top of a trailer that a standard-issue Army truck can tow, and when it is powered on, the company’s software tells the grid of amps and antennas to shape the electromagnetic waves they’re blasting out with a phased array, precisely overlapping the microwave signals to mold the energy into a focused beam. Instead of needing to physically point a gun or parabolic dish at each of a thousand incoming drones, the Leonidas can flick between them at the speed of software. The Leonidas contains dozens of microwave amplifier units and can pivot to direct waves at incoming swarms of drones.EPIRUS Of course, this isn’t magic—there are practical limits on how much damage one array can do, and at what range—but the total effect could be described as an electromagnetic pulse emitter, a death ray for electronics, or a force field that could set up a protective barrier around military installations and drop drones the way a bug zapper fizzles a mob of mosquitoes. I walked through the nonclassified sections of the Leonidas factory floor, where a cluster of engineers working on weaponeering—the military term for figuring out exactly how much of a weapon, be it high explosive or microwave beam, is necessary to achieve a desired effect—ran tests in a warren of smaller anechoic rooms. Inside, they shot individual microwave units at a broad range of commercial and military drones, cycling through waveforms and power levels to try to find the signal that could fry each one with maximum efficiency.  On a live video feed from inside one of these foam-padded rooms, I watched a quadcopter drone spin its propellers and then, once the microwave emitter turned on, instantly stop short—first the propeller on the front left and then the rest. A drone hit with a Leonidas beam doesn’t explode—it just falls. Compared with the blast of a missile or the sizzle of a laser, it doesn’t look like much. But it could force enemies to come up with costlier ways of attacking that reduce the advantage of the drone swarm, and it could get around the inherent limitations of purely electronic or strictly physical defense systems. It could save lives. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery, a tall guy with sparkplug energy and a rapid-fire southern Illinois twang, doesn’t shy away from talking big about his product. As he told me during my visit, Leonidas is intended to lead a last stand, like the Spartan from whom the microwave takes its name—in this case, against hordes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. While the actual range of the Leonidas system is kept secret, Lowery says the Army is looking for a solution that can reliably stop drones within a few kilometers. He told me, “They would like our system to be the owner of that final layer—to get any squeakers, any leakers, anything like that.” Now that they’ve told the world they “invented a force field,” Lowery added, the focus is on manufacturing at scale—before the drone swarms really start to descend or a nation with a major military decides to launch a new war. Before, in other words, Miller’s nightmare scenario becomes reality.  Why zap? Miller remembers well when the danger of small weaponized drones first appeared on his radar. Reports of Islamic State fighters strapping grenades to the bottom of commercial DJI Phantom quadcopters first emerged in late 2016 during the Battle of Mosul. “I went, ‘Oh, this is going to be bad,’ because basically it’s an airborne IED at that point,” he says. He’s tracked the danger as it’s built steadily since then, with advances in machine vision, AI coordination software, and suicide drone tactics only accelerating.  Then the war in Ukraine showed the world that cheap technology has fundamentally changed how warfare happens. We have watched in high-definition video how a cheap, off-the-shelf drone modified to carry a small bomb can be piloted directly into a faraway truck, tank, or group of troops to devastating effect. And larger suicide drones, also known as “loitering munitions,” can be produced for just tens of thousands of dollars and launched in massive salvos to hit soft targets or overwhelm more advanced military defenses through sheer numbers.  As a result, Miller, along with large swaths of the Pentagon and DC policy circles, believes that the current US arsenal for defending against these weapons is just too expensive and the tools in too short supply to truly match the threat. Just look at Yemen, a poor country where the Houthi military group has been under constant attack for the past decade. Armed with this new low-tech arsenal, in the past 18 months the rebel group has been able to bomb cargo ships and effectively disrupt global shipping in the Red Sea—part of an effort to apply pressure on Israel to stop its war in Gaza. The Houthis have also used missiles, suicide drones, and even drone boats to launch powerful attacks on US Navy ships sent to stop them. The most successful defense tech firm selling anti-drone weapons to the US military right now is Anduril, the company started by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, and a crew of cofounders from Oculus and defense data giant Palantir. In just the past few months, the Marines have chosen Anduril for counter-drone contracts that could be worth nearly $850 million over the next decade, and the company has been working with Special Operations Command since 2022 on a counter-drone contract that could be worth nearly a billion dollars over a similar time frame. It’s unclear from the contracts what, exactly, Anduril is selling to each organization, but its weapons include electronic warfare jammers, jet-powered drone bombs, and propeller-driven Anvil drones designed to simply smash into enemy drones. In this arsenal, the cheapest way to stop a swarm of drones is electronic warfare: jamming the GPS or radio signals used to pilot the machines. But the intense drone battles in Ukraine have advanced the art of jamming and counter-jamming close to the point of stalemate. As a result, a new state of the art is emerging: unjammable drones that operate autonomously by using onboard processors to navigate via internal maps and computer vision, or even drones connected with 20-kilometer-long filaments of fiber-optic cable for tethered control. But unjammable doesn’t mean unzappable. Instead of using the scrambling method of a jammer, which employs an antenna to block the drone’s connection to a pilot or remote guidance system, the Leonidas microwave beam hits a drone body broadside. The energy finds its way into something electrical, whether the central flight controller or a tiny wire controlling a flap on a wing, to short-circuit whatever’s available. (The company also says that this targeted hit of energy allows birds and other wildlife to continue to move safely.) Tyler Miller, a senior systems engineer on Epirus’s weaponeering team, told me that they never know exactly which part of the target drone is going to go down first, but they’ve reliably seen the microwave signal get in somewhere to overload a circuit. “Based on the geometry and the way the wires are laid out,” he said, one of those wires is going to be the best path in. “Sometimes if we rotate the drone 90 degrees, you have a different motor go down first,” he added. The team has even tried wrapping target drones in copper tape, which would theoretically provide shielding, only to find that the microwave still finds a way in through moving propeller shafts or antennas that need to remain exposed for the drone to fly.  EPIRUS Leonidas also has an edge when it comes to downing a mass of drones at once. Physically hitting a drone out of the sky or lighting it up with a laser can be effective in situations where electronic warfare fails, but anti-drone drones can only take out one at a time, and lasers need to precisely aim and shoot. Epirus’s microwaves can damage everything in a roughly 60-degree arc from the Leonidas emitter simultaneously and keep on zapping and zapping; directed energy systems like this one never run out of ammo. As for cost, each Army Leonidas unit currently runs in the “low eight figures,” Lowery told me. Defense contract pricing can be opaque, but Epirus delivered four units for its $66 million initial contract, giving a back-of-napkin price around $16.5 million each. For comparison, Stinger missiles from Raytheon, which soldiers shoot at enemy aircraft or drones from a shoulder-mounted launcher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, meaning the Leonidas could start costing less (and keep shooting) after it downs the first wave of a swarm. Raytheon’s radar, reversed Epirus is part of a new wave of venture-capital-backed defense companies trying to change the way weapons are created—and the way the Pentagon buys them. The largest defense companies, firms like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, typically develop new weapons in response to research grants and cost-plus contracts, in which the US Department of Defense guarantees a certain profit margin to firms building products that match their laundry list of technical specifications. These programs have kept the military supplied with cutting-edge weapons for decades, but the results may be exquisite pieces of military machinery delivered years late and billions of dollars over budget. Rather than building to minutely detailed specs, the new crop of military contractors aim to produce products on a quick time frame to solve a problem and then fine-tune them as they pitch to the military. The model, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and dozens of other smaller startups into the business of war as venture capital piles tens of billions of dollars into defense. Like Anduril, Epirus has direct Palantir roots; it was cofounded by Joe Lonsdale, who also cofounded Palantir, and John Tenet, Lonsdale’s colleague at the time at his venture fund, 8VC. (Tenet, the son of former CIA director George Tenet, may have inspired the company’s name—the elder Tenet’s parents were born in the Epirus region in the northwest of Greece. But the company more often says it’s a reference to the pseudo-mythological Epirus Bow from the 2011 fantasy action movie Immortals, which never runs out of arrows.)  While Epirus is doing business in the new mode, its roots are in the old—specifically in Raytheon, a pioneer in the field of microwave technology. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like those found in old radios. But the company became synonymous with electronic defense during World War II, when Bush spun up a lab to develop early microwave radar technology invented by the British into a workable product, and Raytheon then began mass-producing microwave tubes—known as magnetrons—for the US war effort. By the end of the war in 1945, Raytheon was making 80% of the magnetrons powering Allied radar across the world. From padded foam chambers at the Epirus HQ, Leonidas devices can be safely tested on drones.EPIRUS Large tubes remained the best way to emit high-power microwaves for more than half a century, handily outperforming silicon-based solid-state amplifiers. They’re still around—the microwave on your kitchen counter runs on a vacuum tube magnetron. But tubes have downsides: They’re hot, they’re big, and they require upkeep. (In fact, the other microwave drone zapper currently in the Pentagon pipeline, the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, or THOR, still relies on a physical vacuum tube. It’s reported to be effective at downing drones in tests but takes up a whole shipping container and needs a dish antenna to zap its targets.) By the 2000s, new methods of building solid-state amplifiers out of materials like gallium nitride started to mature and were able to handle more power than silicon without melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a project at Raytheon called Next Generation Jammer—geared specifically toward designing a new way to make high-powered microwaves that work at extremely long distances. Lowery, the Epirus CEO, began his career working on nuclear reactors on Navy aircraft carriers before he became the chief engineer for Next Generation Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his team worked on a system that relied on many of the same fundamentals that now power the Leonidas—using the same type of amplifier material and antenna setup to fry the electronics of a small target at much closer range rather than disrupting the radar of a target hundreds of miles away.  The similarity is not a coincidence: Two engineers from Next Generation Jammer helped launch Epirus in 2018. Lowery—who by then was working at the augmented-reality startup RealWear, which makes industrial smart glasses—joined Epirus in 2021 to run product development and was asked to take the top spot as CEO in 2023, as Leonidas became a fully formed machine. Much of the founding team has since departed for other projects, but Raytheon still runs through the company’s collective CV: ex-Raytheon radar engineer Matt Markel started in January as the new CTO, and Epirus’s chief engineer for defense, its VP of engineering, its VP of operations, and a number of employees all have Raytheon roots as well. Markel tells me that the Epirus way of working wouldn’t have flown at one of the big defense contractors: “They never would have tried spinning off the technology into a new application without a contract lined up.” The Epirus engineers saw the use case, raised money to start building Leonidas, and already had prototypes in the works before any military branch started awarding money to work on the project. Waiting for the starting gun On the wall of Lowery’s office are two mementos from testing days at an Army proving ground: a trophy wing from a larger drone, signed by the whole testing team, and a framed photo documenting the Leonidas’s carnage—a stack of dozens of inoperative drones piled up in a heap.  Despite what seems to have been an impressive test show, it’s still impossible from the outside to determine whether Epirus’s tech is ready to fully deliver if the swarms descend.  The Army would not comment specifically on the efficacy of any new weapons in testing or early deployment, including the Leonidas system. A spokesperson for the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, which is the subsection responsible for contracting with Epirus to date, would only say in a statement that it is “committed to developing and fielding innovative Directed Energy solutions to address evolving threats.”  But various high-ranking officers appear to be giving Epirus a public vote of confidence. The three-star general who runs RCCTO and oversaw the Leonidas testing last summer told Breaking Defense that “the system actually worked very well,” even if there was work to be done on “how the weapon system fits into the larger kill chain.” And when former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, then the service’s highest-ranking civilian, gave a parting interview this past January, she mentioned Epirus in all but name, citing “one company” that is “using high-powered microwaves to basically be able to kill swarms of drones.” She called that kind of capability “critical for the Army.”  The Army isn’t the only branch interested in the microwave weapon. On Epirus’s factory floor when I visited, alongside the big beige Leonidases commissioned by the Army, engineers were building a smaller expeditionary version for the Marines, painted green, which it delivered in late April. Videos show that when it put some of its microwave emitters on a dock and tested them out for the Navy last summer, the microwaves left their targets dead in the water—successfully frying the circuits of outboard motors like the ones propelling Houthi drone boats.  Epirus is also currently working on an even smaller version of the Leonidas that can mount on top of the Army’s Stryker combat vehicles, and it’s testing out attaching a single microwave unit to a small airborne drone, which could work as a highly focused zapper to disable cars, data centers, or single enemy drones.  Epirus’s microwave technology is also being tested in devices smaller than the traditional Leonidas. EPIRUS While neither the Army nor the Navy has yet to announce a contract to start buying Epirus’s systems at scale, the company and its investors are actively preparing for the big orders to start rolling in. It raised $250 million in a funding round in early March to get ready to make as many Leonidases as possible in the coming years, adding to the more than $300 million it’s raised since opening its doors in 2018. “If you invent a force field that works,” Lowery boasts, “you really get a lot of attention.” The task for Epirus now, assuming that its main customers pull the trigger and start buying more Leonidases, is ramping up production while advancing the tech in its systems. Then there are the more prosaic problems of staffing, assembly, and testing at scale. For future generations, Lowery told me, the goal is refining the antenna design and integrating higher-powered microwave amplifiers to push the output into the tens of kilowatts, allowing for increased range and efficacy.  While this could be made harder by Trump’s global trade war, Lowery says he’s not worried about their supply chain; while China produces 98% of the world’s gallium, according to the US Geological Survey, and has choked off exports to the US, Epirus’s chip supplier uses recycled gallium from Japan.  The other outside challenge may be that Epirus isn’t the only company building a drone zapper. One of China’s state-owned defense companies has been working on its own anti-drone high-powered microwave weapon called the Hurricane, which it displayed at a major military show in late 2024.  It may be a sign that anti-electronics force fields will become common among the world’s militaries—and if so, the future of war is unlikely to go back to the status quo ante, and it might zag in a different direction yet again. But military planners believe it’s crucial for the US not to be left behind. So if it works as promised, Epirus could very well change the way that war will play out in the coming decade.  While Miller, the Army CTO, can’t speak directly to Epirus or any specific system, he will say that he believes anti-drone measures are going to have to become ubiquitous for US soldiers. “Counter-UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] unfortunately is going to be like counter-IED,” he says. “It’s going to be every soldier’s job to think about UAS threats the same way it was to think about IEDs.”  And, he adds, it’s his job and his colleagues’ to make sure that tech so effective it works like “almost magic” is in the hands of the average rifleman. To that end, Lowery told me, Epirus is designing the Leonidas control system to work simply for troops, allowing them to identify a cluster of targets and start zapping with just a click of a button—but only extensive use in the field can prove that out. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery sees the Leonidas as providing a last line of defense against UAVs.EPIRUS In the not-too-distant future, Lowery says, this could mean setting up along the US-Mexico border. But the grandest vision for Epirus’s tech that he says he’s heard is for a city-scale Leonidas along the lines of a ballistic missile defense radar system called PAVE PAWS, which takes up an entire 105-foot-tall building and can detect distant nuclear missile launches. The US set up four in the 1980s, and Taiwan currently has one up on a mountain south of Taipei. Fill a similar-size building full of microwave emitters, and the beam could reach out “10 or 15 miles,” Lowery told me, with one sitting sentinel over Taipei in the north and another over Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan. Riffing in Greek mythological mode, Lowery said of drones, “I call all these mischief makers. Whether they’re doing drugs or guns across the border or they’re flying over Langley [or] they’re spying on F-35s, they’re all like Icarus. You remember Icarus, with his wax wings? Flying all around—‘Nobody’s going to touch me, nobody’s going to ever hurt me.’” “We built one hell of a wax-wing melter.”  Sam Dean is a reporter focusing on business, tech, and defense. He is writing a book about the recent history of Silicon Valley returning to work with the Pentagon for Viking Press and covering the defense tech industry for a number of publications. Previously, he was a business reporter at the Los Angeles Times. This piece has been updated to clarify that Alex Miller is a civilian intelligence official. 

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This giant microwave may change the future of war Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan and nearby US bases, and over the course of a few hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific force before it can even begin to fight back.The proliferation of cheap drones means just about any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm could wreak havoc, no expensive jets or massive missile installations required.The US armed forces are now hunting for a solution—and they want it fast. Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse.  And one of these is microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you heated them up. Read the full story. —Sam Dean This article is part of the Big Story series: MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting that takes a deep look at the technologies that are coming next and what they will mean for us and the world we live in. Check out the rest of them here. What will power AI’s growth? Last week we published Power Hungry, a series that takes a hard look at the expected energy demands of AI. Last week in this newsletter, I broke down its centerpiece, an analysis I did with my colleague James O’Donnell.But this week, I want to talk about another story that I also wrote for that package, which focused on nuclear energy. As I discovered, building new nuclear plants isn’t so simple or so fast. And as my colleague David Rotman lays out in his story, the AI boom could wind up relying on another energy source: fossil fuels. So what’s going to power AI? Read the full story. —Casey Crownhart This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Elon Musk is leaving his role in the Trump administration To focus on rebuilding the damaged brand reputations of Tesla and SpaceX. (Axios)+ Musk has complained that DOGE has become a government scapegoat. (WP $)+ Tesla shareholders have asked its board to lay out a succession plan. (CNN)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review) 2 The US will start revoking the visas of Chinese studentsIncluding those studying in what the US government deems “critical fields.” (Politico)+ It’s also ordered US chip software suppliers to stop selling to China. (FT $) 3 The US is storing the DNA of migrant childrenIt’s been uploaded into a criminal database to track them as they age. (Wired $)+ The US wants to use facial recognition to identify migrant children as they age. (MIT Technology Review) 4 RFK Jr is threatening to ban federal scientists from top journalsInstead, they may be forced to publish in state-run alternatives. (The Hill)+ He accused major medical journals of being funded by Big Pharma. (Stat) 5 India and Pakistan are locked in disinformation warfareFalse reports and doctored images are circulating online. (The Guardian)+ Fact checkers are working around the clock to debunk fake news. (Reuters) 6 How North Korea is infiltrating remote jobs in the USWith the help of regular Americans. (WSJ $) 7 This Discord community is creating its own hair-growth drugsMen are going to extreme lengths to reverse their hair loss. (404 Media) 8 Inside YouTube’s quest to dominate your living room It wants to move away from controversial clips and into prestige TV. (Bloomberg $) 9 Sergey Brin threatens AI models with physical violenceThe Google co-founder insists that it produces better results. (The Register) 10 It must be nice to be a moving day influencer They reap all of the benefits, with none of the stress. (NY Mag $) Quote of the day “I studied in the US because I loved what America is about: it’s open, inclusive and diverse. Now my students and I feel slapped in the face by Trump’s policy.” —Cathy Tu, a Chinese AI researcher, tells the Washington Post why many of her students are already applying to universities outside the US after the Trump administration announced a crackdown on visas for Chinese students. One more thing The second wave of AI coding is hereAsk people building generative AI what generative AI is good for right now—what they’re really fired up about—and many will tell you: coding.Everyone from established AI giants to buzzy startups is promising to take coding assistants to the next level. Instead of providing developers with a kind of supercharged autocomplete, this next generation can prototype, test, and debug code for you. The upshot is that developers could essentially turn into managers, who may spend more time reviewing and correcting code written by a model than writing it from scratch themselves.But there’s more. Many of the people building generative coding assistants think that they could be a fast track to artificial general intelligence, the hypothetical superhuman technology that a number of top firms claim to have in their sights. Read the full story. —Will Douglas Heaven We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + If you’ve ever dreamed of owning a piece of cinematic history, more than 400 of David Lynch’s personal items are going up for auction.+ How accurate are those Hollywood films based on true stories? Let’s find out.+ Rest in peace Chicago Mike: the legendary hype man to Kool & the Gang.+ How to fully trust in one another.

JointForcer: Final Assault 3.2 – DUPLEX adds space battles, capital ships, and real-terrain maps to this free tactical air/naval combat game. Fly over 50 aircraft, command drones, and build missions with full control. New features include strategic ramming, improved physics, massive warships, and true 3D warfare. Play solo or multiplayer – all free. Posted by karolgrodecki on May 18th, 2025 JOINTFORCER: FINAL ASSAULT 3.2 DUPLEX EDITION – OFFICIAL PRESENTATION 1. What Is JOINTFORCER? Welcome to JointForcer: Final Assault 3.2 DUPLEX, an air & naval combat game blending arcade action, tactical planning, and strategic execution. You can play solo or multiplayer, with full mission customization. MULTI/SINGLE PLAYER ARCADE SHOOTER + AIR NAVAL SPACE COMBAT SIM + MISSION SANDBOX If you can't imagine what that means—think of an action RPG, but with airplanes, helicopters, and experimental aircraft. Choose your main weapon, two special abilities (missile pods 1 & 2), radar (like skill range), armor, and structure (self-explanatory). Then jump into a team-based dogfight deathmatch with players or highly customizable AI. From light and agile fighters to heavy bombers with powerful weapons, all the way up to capital vessels capable of spawning their own fleet. 🚨 It’s completely FREE! 🚨 -> DOWNLOAD <- With the latest Titan Mangusta (DUPLEX 3.2) patch – we’re taking the fight into space. Yes, you heard that right: space battles are now part of the experience. For those who prefer more realistic setup, there new desert missions, and something special: maps based on REAL geographical data. There is mini world map, map of United Kingdom, Europe, also Black Sea with Ukraine and Persian Gulf / Middle East maps. 2. Capital Ships – New Gameplay Tier Each faction now has access to a new class of capital ships: REBELS: Heavy Airships EAST: DD-Class Destroyers WEST: BC-Class Battlecruiser These colossal machines are easy targets, but incredibly resilient. They introduce a new kind of gameplay: Strong hull, but easy to hit Capable of dealing massive firepower Great for base assault/defense or command center missions Can RAM smaller ships :))) 3. Aircraft Collision Rework – Smarter Physics Previously, two aircraft crashing into each other in space would cause both to explode. Now: Damage is based on opponent’s hull strength. Small fighters will no longer explode capital ships Large vessels can now strategically ram opponents in close combat Encourages a new level of tactical creativity 4. New Terrain-Based Maps – Earth Gets Real We’re introducing a new map system using real-world geographical data. 🗺️ Maps include: MiniWorld (Europe-centric scaled terrain) Persian Gulf [This is height-map used to create Persian Gulf region. From left upper corner you can recognize characteristic 'shoe' - Italy, then going to centre you will see Middle East region and Suez Canal. ] Suez Canal Other large-scale coastal zones North Poland (including Russian Enclave) Features: No roads or infrastructure — pure terrain and water Ideal for sniping/hunting (large maps) Intense dogfighting (small maps) [this real-map project will be developed further with better quality and more real regions - feel free to suggest your picks!] 5. Over 50 Aircraft to Command We’ve packed the game with a huge selection of aerial machines: Fighters: F-16, F-18, EuroFighter, MiG-29, Su-33, Attack planes: SU-25, A-10 Tank Killer Multirole: SU-30, SU-33 Bombers: 🚨 New: SU-24, B-1B for the WEST [in-game codename Strategic Bomber SB-1 OPPENHEIMER] Frigates, Nuclear bombers, Capital Ships. Multiple 'what-if' experimental vessels, like DD Chrushtchev - EAST Destroyer. Finally you can use space vessels in their 'true' environment and take them into space batlle 6. Reskins, Improvements, & Bug Fixes Visual improvements on several models New effects for capital ship exhaust and heat Bug where drones spawned directly into the host vessel: FIXED Now spawn from rear sections of airships for safe deployment 7. Space Combat Expanded We’ve added multiple space maps, including: Derelict Stations Asteroid Fields Megacity Shells Combat in space is no longer flat. Up, down, left, and right lose all meaning. This is true 3D warfare – prepare for the next level. 8. Arsenal of Destruction Customize your aircraft with a deep and satisfying loadout system: Cannons, bombs, missiles (heat-seekers, dumbfire, ballistic) Radars, countermeasures, defence systems Armor mods and airframe upgrades Adjust for weight, speed, range, and role. 9. Mission Planning – Your Way You control the mission architecture: Factions (EAST / WEST / REBELS) Custom squadrons (Fighter, Bomber, Support) AI difficulty from flying target to combat aces World speed and general hull strength allow to bend rules to your like - from one shot kills to long time air&naval battles Over 25 biomes: Europe Mongolia Indo-China Middle East Oceanic + Island Zones + REALISTIC NEW MISSION MAP PACKS IN POTENTIAL CONFLICT ZONES WITH FUTURISTIC BATTLE BASES 10. Unique Features 🪂 [IMPROVED!] Ejection System Escape mid-flight Fight in escape pod of your choice 🤖 Drones & Support Fighters Light fighters spawn 1–2 UAVs Capital ships can launch up to 16 drones ⚔️ Vertical & Horizontal Combat From sea-skimming interceptors to orbit duels Battles span full vertical space 11. Strategy Meets Accessibility Whether you’re a tactician or a trigger-happy pilot: Quick-play skirmishes Full scenario missions Great for all skill levels 12. New Combat Philosophy – Especially for Rebels REBELS now fight: In open-top hovercraft Blending flesh and metal – ships are grown from biomass Believe their vessels are alive They defend the freedom of: Thought Science Speech Exploration Their strategy? Be like water: “Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo” ("The drop hollows the stone not by force, but by falling often") Use wit, adaptability, and human skill to win. Their capital ships are like beasts. Their pilots ride on top, in suits or gas masks, feeling the air. From the skies of Earth to the void of space – they are the last free people. 🎧 Final Notes & Extras 💻 Official Links: 🛰️ Teasing Future Features/Roadmap: Naval Destroyers and landing crafts Airships Quality Flight Improvement - Adding/Implementing new animations for flight control/immersion Adding flora, grass, trees, etc, - everything has to be considered vs game size and frame rate Fly Free. Burn Bright. Download JointForcer Now.

US President Donald Trump (left), accompanied by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (right), announces the Golden Dome missile defense shieldCHRIS KLEPONIS/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock US President Donald Trump has proposed a defence project, called the Golden Dome, to intercept any incoming hypersonic, ballistic and advanced cruise missiles that threaten the country. “Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space,” said Trump during the White House announcement on 20 May. But such a thorough interception system may not be possible. Some experts also warn that, even if it works, the Golden Dome would take at least a decade to build, cost more than half a trillion dollars – and accelerate the global nuclear arms race and the weaponisation of space.Advertisement What is the Golden Dome? The project’s name is inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome system, which uses ground-based missiles to intercept incoming rockets and artillery fired from relatively short distances. But the Golden Dome would need to defend a far larger area – the land mass of the contiguous US alone is more than 350 times the size of Israel – from a wider variety of sophisticated missiles. According to Trump and his officials, the system should be able to counter ballistic missiles that could be launched from the other side of the world, advanced cruise missiles that fly on flatter trajectories at lower altitudes and hypersonic missiles that can fly and manoeuvre at speeds exceeding Mach 5, five times the speed of sound. These missiles can carry either nuclear warheads or conventional explosive warheads. Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox. Sign up to newsletter To detect and intercept the threats, the Golden Dome will use both “space-based sensors and air and missile defense”, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a statement. That implies an umbrella system of “Golden Domes” with different technologies countering different threats, says David Burbach at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, who shared some comments with New Scientist in a personal capacity. However, not all of these defences exist. For instance, the Golden Dome would supposedly use space-based interceptor missiles in low Earth orbit, an unprecedented technological feat that has never been demonstrated before, says Thomas González Roberts at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. A similar idea, nicknamed Star Wars, was originally proposed by US President Ronald Reagan in his Strategic Defense Initiative during the cold war. In fact, Trump has described the Golden Dome as an effort to complete “the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago”. How will the Golden Dome work? Missile defence experts describe the challenge of intercepting long-range nuclear missiles as being like “hitting a bullet with a bullet, in the dark” because “the targets are small, not emitting any radio or infrared signals, and fast moving”, says Burbach. “One thing to keep in mind is that even optimistic technical experts admit 100 per cent interception is unlikely.” The US already has a system of ground-based interceptor missiles, primarily based in Alaska. They can shoot down “a couple dozen incoming warheads at best”, says Burbach. He also pointed out that Russia and China are developing countermeasures to make it harder to detect and intercept their missiles. “Stopping subsonic cruise missiles or short-range ballistic missiles launched from just outside US borders would use established technology, but it could be expensive to deploy enough of those defensive systems to cover the whole country,” says Burbach. “The real challenge will be Golden Dome’s aim to stop large numbers of intercontinental missiles – President Trump said ‘100 per cent’ of them – such as an attack from China or Russia.” Trump’s claim that the Golden Dome would defend against missile strikes from the other side of the world or even from space implies it would require a “dense constellation of likely low-Earth orbiting, space-based missile interceptors that could deorbit and strike a missile within minutes of it launching” from anywhere, says Roberts. “The number of satellites you would need is bigger than any constellation that’s ever been launched,” he says. Currently, the largest constellation consists of around 7000 Starlink satellites operated by SpaceX. How much will the Golden Dome cost? Trump proposed a budget of $175 billion for the Golden Dome, although that funding has not yet been approved by the US Congress. And the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal agency, estimated that a space-based interceptor system like Golden Dome could cost as much as $542 billion. “It’s unclear what expenditures are included in the $175 billion figure,” says Patrycja Bazylczyk at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a think tank in Washington DC. Trump also claimed the Golden Dome would be “fully operational” by the end of his second term in office in early 2029, although experts doubt that is possible. “The three-year timeline is aggressive – this initiative is likely to span at least a decade, if not more,” says Bazylczyk. Much of the timeline may depend upon how many existing military systems it uses. “Significant progress is feasible in the near term, including fielding new interceptors, over-the-horizon radars, space-based sensors and technology demonstrations,” says Bazylczyk. But there are major limitations to how quickly the US could launch the potentially thousands of satellites required for Golden Dome – to say nothing of developing the space-based interceptor technologies. “I think you’d be very hard-pressed to find a launch cadence that could support a large constellation going up in just three years,” says Roberts. “SpaceX launches more things more often than anyone in the history of space operations, and the ask here is to crack open that ceiling even further.” “I think it is almost impossible a system could be ‘fully operational’ in the sense of ‘stop 100 per cent of a missile attack’ that quickly,” says Burbach. “Reaching even a small-scale operational capability that soon would be very difficult.” Will Golden Dome make the US safer? There is already an ongoing arms race between the US, China and Russia, with all three countries modernising and expanding their nuclear arsenals, as well as developing space-based systems to support their militaries. If the Golden Dome system can improve US air and missile defences, it could “change the strategic calculus” by reducing the confidence of any missile-armed adversary, deterring them from launching attacks in the first place, says Bazylczyk. On the other hand, the Golden Dome has the “potential to contribute to instability” by “signalling to your nuclear adversaries that you simply don’t trust them”, says Roberts. China’s foreign ministry responded to Trump’s announcement by saying the Golden Dome carries “strong offensive implications” and raises the risks of an arms race in space. A Kremlin spokesperson suggested the Golden Dome plans could lead to resumption of nuclear arms control discussions between Russia and the US. To counter this system, China and Russia might try to “destroy or disable US satellites”, says Burbach. Both countries already have missiles capable of shooting down satellites, and they could also try to electronically jam or hack US satellite systems, he says. In February 2024, the US government warned that Russia had plans to launch a space weapon capable of disabling or destroying satellites, possibly using a nuclear explosion. These countries could also bulk up their missile arsenals and possibly develop more manoeuvrable weapons that also use decoys, says Burbach. He pointed out that Russia has already started developing weapons less vulnerable to space-based interception, such as intercontinental nuclear torpedoes that travel underwater. Topics: