Standard modular construction was given a softened appearance with the addition of residential wood truss roofs and the introduction of shorter modules in select locations to create courtyards. Photo by doublespace photography PROJECT Durham Modular Transitional Housing, Beaverton, Ontario ARCHITECT Montgomery Sisam Architects Inc. In cities, homelessness can be painfully visible, in the form of encampments or people sleeping rough. But in rural areas, people experiencing homelessness are often hidden away. It’s this largely invisible but clearly present need that led to the construction of Beaverton Heights, a 47-unit transitional housing residence about 100 kilometres from Toronto that serves the northern part of the Regional Municipality of Durham. The region had run a pilot project for transitional housing in Durham during the Covid pandemic, out of a summer camp property—so when provincial and federal funding became available for modular, rapidly delivered transitional housing, they were quick to apply. Montgomery Sisam Architects is no stranger to modular supportive housing, or to the site, for that matter. 15 years ago, they designed Lakeview Manor, a 200-bed long-term care facility for the region, on an adjoining parcel of land. At the time that they took on Beaverton Heights, they had completed two modular supportive housing projects for the City of Toronto. (They have since completed four more.)  The initial Toronto projects were done on a massively compressed timeline—a mere eight months from design to the move-in date for the first, and nine months for the second. “So we knew that’s as tight as you can crunch it—and that’s with all the stars aligned,” says Montgomery Sisam principal Daniel Ling.  As transitional housing, the Beaverton facility is designed to help residents overcome their barriers to housing. To achieve this, the program not only includes residential units, but communal spaces, including a double-height dining room and lounge that occupy the western half of the project. This part of the complex can also be used independently, such as for community activities and health supports. To create the needed volume, Montgomery Sisam decided to prefabricate the community structure in steel: the entire west half of the project was constructed and assembled in a factory to ensure that it would fit together as intended, then disassembled and reassembled on site. The double-height community space includes a reading room, terrace, administrative areas, and communal dining room served by a full commercial kitchen. The building can also be used for community-wide functions, such as medical clinics. A cluster of columns marks the area where the dining area’s eight steel modular units join together. Photo by Tom Ridout For both the steel community structure and its wood residential counterpart, the prefabrication process was extensive, and included the in-factory installation of plumbing, electrical and mechanical systems, interior and exterior finishes, and even furnishings in each module. “Basically, just remove the plastic from the mattress and take the microwave from the box that’s already in the unit,” says Jacek Sochacki, manager of facilities design, construction, and asset management at the works department of the Regional Municipality of Durham. Within the building, the most extensive on-site work was in the hallways, where the modules met: building systems needed to connect up, and flooring and finishes needed to be completed over the joints after the modules were installed. One of the most surprising aspects of the project is how un-modular it looks. Montgomery Sisam’s previous experience with modular construction allowed them to find leeway in the process—small tweaks that would change the look of the project, without affecting the construction cost. The long site allowed the architects to use a single module as a glazed hallway, connecting the two buildings, and creating generous courtyards on its two sides. In two other areas, shorter modules are specified to transform the massing of the building. The resulting cut-outs serve as an entry forecourt and as a dining terrace. Instead of flat roofs, the team used residential trusses—“the same wood trusses you would see in subdivisions,” says Ling—to create sloped roof forms. From the outside, the windows of the residential units are slightly recessed behind a frame of wood cladding, adding further dimension to the façade.  Photo by doublespace photography Since it was a design-build process, all of these decisions were vetted through the builder for their cost effectiveness. “It wasn’t hard to convince them, we’re going to use some shorter modules—you are going to build less there,” recalls Ling. “These are things that actually don’t cost a lot of money.” The resulting massing is intentionally lower towards the front of the property, where the community space faces residential neighbours, and doubles to four storeys towards the back. As you approach the project, the courtyards and cut-outs give it the appearance of smaller discrete masses, rather than a single volume. Topping the project is the region’s largest solar panel array, which provides 35 to 40 percent of the all-electric building’s energy needs. Modular construction aided in airtightness and performance—in its first months of operation, it delivered an EUI of 102 kWh/m2/year.   Balancing between independence and community was an important principle for the program, and for the design. To this end, each studio is designed to function as a self-sufficient dwelling, with its own kitchen, full washroom, and heat pump with independent temperature control. Small spatial nudges—like daylight at both ends of corridors, seating nooks with built-in benches throughout the project, and generous common rooms—aim to coax residents outside of their units. The property is bracketed by the dining area at the front, and an outdoor basketball court at the rear. A long storage shed holds some of the facility’s mechanical equipment along with bikes—an easy way to get into town for residents who may not have cars.  Located between the residences and the community building, a semi-private courtyard offers a quiet place for clients to rest or socialize with others. Photo by doublespace photography The building looks so good that, had the finishes be chosen for luxury rather than durability, it could easily pass as a family resort. But is that too nice? Often, government-funded buildings—especially for a stigmatized program such as transitional housing—come under criticism if they appear to be too fancy.  I put this to Sochacki, who replies: “There’s this misnomer that if the building looks good or unique, it costs a lot of money. I think we proved that it doesn’t.” Apart from a wood surround for the fireplace, the components of the building are utilitarian and basic, he says. “It’s just like: how do you make the most out of common materials? It costs us exactly the same, but we’re doing things that are actually nice.” Screenshot That niceness is not just a perk, but essential to the core purpose of helping people experiencing homelessness to make their way back into society. “Making it nice is important,” says Sochacki. “Nice lighting, nice windows, nice places to sit, nice spaces that people enjoy being at—because that’s what’s going to make the difference.”  “If you build a place that people just want to spend all their time in their room and they don’t come out, that’s not going to help them with transitioning back to a sustainable, permanent housing lifestyle,” he adds. “You’ve got to create a place where they feel welcome and that they want to spend time in—they want to meet other people and they want to get the support, because there’s a place and space for it, and it’s successful for them to get the support.” A terrace adjoins the reading lounge and dining area, inviting outdoor barbecues and gatherings in warm weather. The cut-out was created by using a shorter module in this section of the building, minimizing the impact to construction costs and logistics. Photo by Tom Ridout CLIENT Regional Municipality of Durham | ARCHITECT TEAM Daniel Ling (FRAIC), Enda McDonagh, Kevin Hutchinson, Sonja Storey-Fleming, Mateusz Nowacki, Zheng Li, Grace Chang, Jake Pauls Wolf, Mustafa Munawar, Paul Kurti, William Tink, Victoria Ngai, Kavitha Jayakrishnan, Max Veneracion, Megan Lowes | STRUCTURAL/MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Design Works Engineering | LANDSCAPE Baker Turner | INTERIORS Montgomery Sisam Architects | CONTRACTOR NRB Modular Solutions | CIVIL Design Works Engineering | CODE Vortex Fire | FOOD SERVICES Kaizen Foodservice Planning & Design | ENERGY MODELlING Design Work Engineering | SPECIFICATIONS DGS Consulting Services | AREA 3,550 m2 | COMPLETION October 2024 ENERGY USE INTENSITY (operational) 101.98 kWh/m2/year   As appeared in the June 2025 issue of Canadian Architect magazine  The post Invisible Need, Visible Care: Beaverton Heights, Beaverton, Ontario appeared first on Canadian Architect.

When the computer or phone you’re using right now blinks its last blink and you drop it off for recycling, do you know what happens? At the recycling center, powerful magnets will pull out steel. Spinning drums will toss aluminum into bins. Copper wires will get neatly bundled up for resale. But as the conveyor belt keeps rolling, tiny specks of valuable, lesser-known materials such as gallium, indium, and tantalum will be left behind. Those tiny specks are critical materials. They’re essential for building new technology, and they’re in short supply in the U.S. They could be reused, but there’s a problem: Current recycling methods make recovering critical minerals from e-waste too costly or hazardous, so many recyclers simply skip them. Sadly, most of these hard-to-recycle materials end up buried in landfills or get mixed into products like cement. But it doesn’t have to be this way. New technology is starting to make a difference. As demand for these critical materials keeps growing, discarded electronics can become valuable resources. My colleagues and I at West Virginia University are developing a new technology to change how we recycle. Instead of using toxic chemicals, our approach uses electricity, making it safer, cleaner, and more affordable to recover critical materials from electronics. How much e-waste are we talking about? Americans generated about 2.7 million tons of electronic waste in 2018, according to the latest federal data. Including uncounted electronics, the U.S. recycles only about 15% of its total e-waste, suggests a survey by the United Nations. Even worse, nearly half the electronics that people in Northern America sent to recycling centers end up shipped overseas. They often land in scrapyards, where workers may use dangerous methods like burning or leaching with harsh chemicals to pull out valuable metals. These practices can harm both the environment and workers’ health. That’s why the Environmental Protection Agency restricts these methods in the U.S. The tiny specks matter Critical minerals are in most of the technology around you. Every phone screen has a super-thin layer of a material called indium tin oxide. LEDs glow because of a metal called gallium. Tantalum stores energy in tiny electronic parts called capacitors. All of these materials are flagged as “high risk” on the U.S. Department of Energy’s critical materials list. That means the U.S. relies heavily on these materials for important technologies, but their supply could easily be disrupted by conflicts, trade disputes, or shortages. Right now, just a few countries, including China, control most of the mining, processing, and recovery of these materials, making the U.S. vulnerable if those countries decide to limit exports or raise prices. These materials aren’t cheap, either. For example, the U.S. Geological Survey reports that gallium was priced between $220 to $500 per kilogram in 2024. That’s 50 times more expensive than common metals like copper, at $9.48 per kilogram in 2024. Revolutionizing recycling with microwaves At West Virginia University’s Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering, I and materials scientist Edward Sabolsky asked a simple question: Could we find a way to heat only specific parts of electronic waste to recover these valuable materials? If we could focus the heat on just the tiny specks of critical minerals, we might be able to recycle them easily and efficiently. The solution we found: microwaves. This equipment isn’t very different from the microwave ovens you use to heat food at home, just bigger and more powerful. The basic science is the same: Electromagnetic waves cause electrons to oscillate, creating heat. In our approach, though, we’re not heating water molecules like you do when cooking. Instead, we heat carbon, the black residue that collects around a candle flame or car tailpipe. Carbon heats up much faster in a microwave than water does. But don’t try this at home; your kitchen microwave wasn’t designed for such high temperatures. In our recycling method, we first shred the electronic waste, mix it with materials called fluxes that trap impurities, and then heat the mixture with microwaves. The microwaves rapidly heat the carbon that comes from the plastics and adhesives in the e-waste. This causes the carbon to react with the tiny specks of critical materials. The result: a tiny piece of pure, sponge-like metal about the size of a grain of rice. This metal can then be easily separated from leftover waste using filters. So far, in our laboratory tests, we have successfully recovered about 80% of the gallium, indium, and tantalum from e-waste, at purities between 95% and 97%. We have also demonstrated how it can be integrated with existing recycling processes. Why the Department of Defense is interested Our recycling technology got its start with help from a program funded by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Many important technologies, from radar systems to nuclear reactors, depend on these special materials. While the Department of Defense uses less of them than the commercial market, they are a national security concern. We’re planning to launch larger pilot projects next to test the method on smartphone circuit boards, LED lighting parts, and server cards from data centers. These tests will help us fine-tune the design for a bigger system that can recycle tons of e-waste per hour instead of just a few pounds. That could mean producing up to 50 pounds of these critical minerals per hour from every ton of e-waste processed. If the technology works as expected, we believe this approach could help meet the nation’s demand for critical materials. How to make e-waste recycling common One way e-waste recycling could become more common is if Congress held electronics companies responsible for recycling their products and recovering the critical materials inside. Closing loopholes that allow companies to ship e-waste overseas, instead of processing it safely in the U.S., could also help build a reserve of recovered critical minerals. But the biggest change may come from simple economics. Once technology becomes available to recover these tiny but valuable specks of critical materials quickly and affordably, the U.S. can transform domestic recycling and take a big step toward solving its shortage of critical materials. Terence Musho is an associate professor of engineering at West Virginia University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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. 

May 30, 20256 min readInside the Lifesaving Power of Doppler Weather RadarDoppler radar is one of the most revolutionary and lifesaving tools of modern meteorology, which has experts worried about outages because of recent staffing cuts and conspiracy theoriesBy Andrea Thompson edited by Dean Visser Mfotophile/Getty ImagesOutside every National Weather Service (NWS) office around the U.S. stands what looks like an enormous white soccer ball, perched atop metal scaffolding several stories high. These somewhat plain spheres look as ho-hum as a town water tower, but tucked inside each is one of modern meteorology’s most revolutionary and lifesaving tools: Doppler radar.The national network of 160 high-resolution radars, installed in 1988 and updated in 2012, sends out microwave pulses that bounce off raindrops or other precipitation to help forecasters see what is falling and how much—providing crucial early information about events ranging from flash floods to blizzards. And the network is especially irreplaceable when it comes to spotting tornadoes; it has substantially lengthened warning times and reduced deaths. Doppler radar has “really revolutionized how we’ve been able to issue warnings,” says Ryan Hanrahan, chief meteorologist of the NBC Connecticut StormTracker team.But now meteorologists and emergency managers are increasingly worried about what might happen if any of these radars go offline, whether because of cuts to the NWS made by the Trump administration or threats from groups that espouse conspiracy theories about the radars being used to control the weather. “Losing radar capabilities would “take us back in time by four decades,” says Jana Houser, a tornado researcher at the Ohio State University. If they go down, “there’s no way we’re going to be effective at storm warnings.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.How Doppler radars workThe NWS installations form a network called the Next Generation Weather Radar, or NEXRAD. Inside each giant white sphere is a device that looks like a larger version of a home satellite TV dish, with a transmitter that emits pulses in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Those pulses bounce off raindrops, snowflakes, hailstones—what meteorologists collectively call hydrometeors—and back to the dish antenna. (The pulses also sometimes bounce off bats, birds and even moving trains, which yield characteristic radar patterns that experts can usually identify.)Amanda MontañezThe power of the returning signals lets experts create a picture of size, shape and intensity of any precipitation—and this is what you see on a phone app’s radar map or a TV broadcast.But NEXRAD can do much, much more than show how hard it’s raining. Within its sphere, each unit rotates and scans up and down through the sky, helping forecasters see what is happening at multiple levels of a storm system. These vertical profiles can show, for example, whether a tornado is forming or a storm is creating a downburst—a rapid downward blast of wind. “Doppler radar basically allows us to see in the clouds,” Hanrahan says.And then there’s the “Doppler” part itself. The name refers to a phenomenon that’s familiar to many, thanks to the electromagnetic waves’ acoustic counterpart. We’ve all experienced this, often most obviously when we hear an emergency vehicle siren pass nearby: the pitch increases as the car gets closer and decreases as it moves away. Similarly, the returning radar bounce from a rain droplet or piece of tornadic debris that is moving toward the emitter will have a shorter wavelength than the pulse that was sent out, and the signal from an object moving away from the radar will have a longer wavelength. This allows the radar to efficiently distinguish the tight circulation of a tornado.These two images show how dual-polarization helps NWS forecasters detect a tornado that is producing damage. The left image shows how the Doppler radar can detect rotation. Between the two yellow arrows, the red color indicates outbound wind, while the green color indicate inbound wind, relative to the location of the radar. The right image shows how dual-polarization information helps detect debris picked up by the tornado.NOAAThe nation’s radar system was upgraded in 2012 to include what is called dual polarization. This means the signal has both vertically and horizontally oriented wavelengths, providing information about precipitation in more than one dimension. “A drizzle droplet is almost perfectly spherical, so it returns the same amount of power in the horizontal and in the vertical,” Hanrahan says, whereas giant drops look almost like “hamburger buns” and so send back more power in the horizontal than the vertical.Are Doppler radars dangerous? Can they affect the weather?Doppler radars do not pose any danger to people, wildlife or structures—and they cannot affect the weather.Along the electromagnetic spectrum, it is the portions with shorter wavelengths such as gamma rays and ultraviolet radiation that can readily damage the human body—because their wavelengths are the right size to interact with and damage DNA or our cells. Doppler radars emit pulses in wavelengths about the size of a baseball.Amanda MontañezBeing hit by extremely concentrated microwave radiation could be harmful; this is why microwave ovens have mesh screens that keep the rays from escaping. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to stand directly in front of a radar microwave beam. Military radar technicians found this out years ago when working on radars under operation, University of California, Los Angeles, climate scientist Daniel Swain said during one of his regular YouTube talks. They “had experiences like the candy bar in their pocket instantly melting and then feeling their skin getting really hot,” he said.Similar to how a microwave oven works, when the microwave signal from a radar hits a hydrometeor, the water molecules vibrate and so generate heat because of friction and reradiate some of the received energy, says Cynthia Fay, who serves as a focal point for the National Weather Service’s Radar Operations Center. But “microwave radiation is really not very powerful, and the whole point is that if you stand more than a couple dozen feet away from the dome it's not even really going to affect your body, let alone the global atmosphere,” Swain adds.At the radar’s antenna, the average power is about 23.5 megawatts (MW) of energy, Fay says. (A weak or moderate thunderstorm may generate about 18 MW in about an hour.) But the energy from the radar signal dissipates very rapidly with distance: at just one kilometer from the radar, the power is 0.0000019 MW, and at the radar’s maximum range of 460 kilometers, it is 8.8 x 10–12 MW, Fay says. “Once you’re miles away, it’s just really not a dangerous amount” of energy, Swain said in his video.A supercell thunderstorm that produced an F4 tornado near Meriden, KS, in May 1960, as seen from the WSR-3 radar in Topeka (left). A supercell thunderstorm that produced an EF5 tornado in Moore, OK, in May 2013, as seen from a modern Doppler weather radar near Oklahoma City (right).NOAAAnd Doppler radars spend most of their time listening for returns. According to the NWS, for every hour of operation, a radar may spend as little as seven seconds sending out pulses.The idea that Doppler radar can control or affect the weather is “a long-standing conspiracy [theory] that has existed really for decades but has kind of accelerated in recent years,” Swain said in his video. It has resurfaced recently with threats to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration radar system from an antigovernment militia group, as first reported by CNN. The Washington Post reported that the group’s founder said that its members were carrying out “attack simulations” on sites in order to later destroy the radars,—which the group believes are “weather weapons,” according to an internal NOAA e-mail. NOAA has advised radar technicians at the NWS’s offices to exercise caution and work in teams when going out to service radars—and to notify local law enforcement of any suspicious activity.“NOAA is aware of recent threats against NEXRAD weather radar sites and is working with local and other authorities in monitoring the situation closely,” wrote a NWS spokesperson in response to a request for comment from Scientific American.What happens if weather radars go offline?NOAA’s radars have been on duty for 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year since 1988 (with brief downtimes for maintenance and upgrades). “It’s amazing what workhorses these radars have been,” Hanrahan says.The image on the left shows a reflectivity radar image of a supercell thunderstorm that produced several tornadoes on April 19, 2023, near Oklahoma City, OK. The hook shape present often indicates rotation within the storm. The image on the right show velocity information that corresponds to the reflectivity image. Very strong inbound winds (green colors) are next to very strong outbound winds (bright red/yellow colors). This very strong inbound/outbound “couplet” indicates the very strong rotation of a tornado.NOAABut they do require that periodic maintenance because of all the large moving parts needed to operate them. And with Trump administration cuts to NOAA staffing and freezes on some spending, “we just got rid of a lot of the radar maintenance technicians, and we got rid of the budget to repair a lot of these sites,” Swain said in his video. “Most of these are functioning fine right now. The question is: What happens once they go down, once they need a repair?”It is this outage possibility that most worries weather experts, particularly if the breakdowns occur during any kind of severe weather. “Radars are key instruments in issuing tornado warnings,” the Ohio State University’s Houser says. “If a radar goes down, we’re basically down as to what the larger picture is.”And for much of the country—particularly in the West—there is little to no overlap in the areas that each radar covers, meaning other sites would not be able to step in if a neighboring radar is out. Hanrahan says the information provided by the radars is irreplaceable, and the 2012 upgrades mean “we don’t even need to have eyes on a tornado now to know that it’s happening. It’s something that I think we take for granted now.”

Remote-controlled robots could one day build giant solar farms in space, according to a recent trial in the UK. British startup Space Solar conducted the test at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s (UKAEA) facilities on the University of Oxford’s Culham Campus, which hosts several fusion research initiatives. The company used two remotely operated robotic arms to assemble a section of the support structure for its future solar power satellite. The device aims to beam the Sun’s energy from space to Earth.  According to Space Solar, the trial proved that robotics can assemble gigawatt-scale solar power satellites. Sam Adlen, the startup’s co-CEO, said the demonstration opens the door to all manner of in-space infrastructure projects.    “This is a milestone not just for our satellite architecture, but for the future of large-scale structures in space, from data centres to energy infrastructure,” he said. As part of its plans to build a working fusion reactor, UKAEA is developing robots for extreme industrial environments, such as maintaining future fusion power plants. The trial shows that those same machines may also show promise for cosmic applications.  Professor Rob Buckingham, executive director of UKAEA, said building fusion reactors and structures in space shared some common challenges, such as remoteness, radiation, and extreme temperatures. The demo suggests that fusion-hardened robotics could help automate the complex task of assembling vast solar farms in orbit.    A solar revolution in space? Space Solar plans to capture the Sun’s energy in space, using huge satellites equipped with solar arrays that are several kilometres long and around 20 metres wide. The probes would capture the energy via microwaves and wirelessly transmit it to dedicated receiver stations on Earth, which would convert the energy into electricity.    By 2029, Space Solar plans to commission its first 30MW demonstrator system, which would be capable of powering around 1000 homes. By the early 2030s,  the startup plans to deploy its first gigawatt-scale solar space farm. The UK Space Agency has provided grant funding for the development of the startup’s first satellite. Solar panels are theoretically capable of gathering far more energy in space than on Earth because, unhindered by the atmosphere, the intensity of sunlight is much greater. They could also beam energy from orbit 24/7, regardless of the weather on the ground.  However, space-based solar power faces many challenges. It’s currently far more expensive than ground-based solar systems — the initial development of a gigawatt-scale prototype could cost €15bn–€20bn. Then there are the potential environmental impacts. Installing a satellite of that scale could involve hundreds of separate rocket launches, contributing to atmospheric pollution.  Nevertheless, the European Space Agency (ESA), NASA, and several startups in the UK, US, China, and Japan are all working to make space-based solar a reality. Story by Siôn Geschwindt Siôn is a freelance science and technology reporter, specialising in climate and energy. From nuclear fusion breakthroughs to electric vehic (show all) Siôn is a freelance science and technology reporter, specialising in climate and energy. From nuclear fusion breakthroughs to electric vehicles, he's happiest sourcing a scoop, investigating the impact of emerging technologies, and even putting them to the test. He has five years of journalism experience and holds a dual degree in media and environmental science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. When he's not writing, you can probably find Siôn out hiking, surfing, playing the drums or catering to his moderate caffeine addiction. You can contact him at: sion.geschwindt [at] protonmail [dot] com Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week. Also tagged with

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.

Imagine traveling internationally without middle seats, popping ears, or TSA checkpoints. Imagine bringing four suitcases for free, and picture ever-changing views out the window throughout the journey.That's the reality on the Amtrak Cascades train, which runs through the Pacific Northwest and has coach and business-class seating.I recently rode it from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Seattle. My $50 train coach experience was far more enjoyable than any basic economy flight I've booked — and it turned out to be cheaper than airfare. My ticket to ride the Amtrak train from Vancouver to Seattle was less than half the price of flying. The reporter booked a coach-class ticket. Joey Hadden/Business Insider When I planned my trip from Vancouver to Seattle, I looked at train and flight prices. About a month before my trip, basic economy airfare was about $150 on airlines like Delta and United, among others. So I was shocked when I saw that an Amtrak train cost only $50 in coach.Sure, it was four hours long, compared to the roughly one-hour flight time, but I love trains. And since sustainability experts say traveling by train is more sustainable than flying, especially for short distances, I was certain of my decision to go with Amtrak. I arrived at Pacific Central Station at 5:45 a.m. for my 7 a.m. train to Seattle. Pacific Central Station is seen on a spring morning. Joey Hadden/Business Insider An email from Amtrak suggested arriving at least one hour before departure since we were crossing the US-Canada border during the trip.I filled out a customs declaration form inside the station and stood in the coach line to board after business-class passengers. Before getting to the platform, there was a brief customs stop, but no security checkpoints like you'd find in an airport. Before boarding, I dropped off my free checked bag at the back of the train. Passengers bring checked bags to the back of the train. Joey Hadden/Business Insider Coach cars were toward the front of the train, but a crew member directed me to the back first to drop off my checked bag.According to Amtrak Cascades, each passenger can check up to two bags at no charge and two more for $20 each.Passengers can also bring one personal item and two carry-on bags in the train car, as overhead bin space and a luggage rack are inside each.To recap, that's up to four suitcases for free — more than I've ever experienced on a flight.I had just one suitcase and a backpack, but this could save a lot for a traveling family or a heavy packer. Seating in the coach cars was first-come, first-served, and there were no middle seats. Inside a coach car on an Amtrak train. Joey Hadden/Business Insider Two sets of two seats were on either side of the train, so no one would get stuck in the middle.I grabbed a seat in an empty row and had the entire ride to myself. The seats felt larger and more comfortable than economy flight seats. The reporter's backpack in an empty row of seats. Joey Hadden/Business Insider I settled into my seat at 6:35 a.m., and the train departed right on time. I immediately noticed the seats were bigger and cushier than any basic economy flight seats I've experienced. I also had more legroom than I've had on most flights.The seats reclined and had power outlets, overhead reading lights, and tray tables. The bathrooms were more than twice the size of any I've seen on a plane. Inside the train bathroom. Joey Hadden/Business Insider Each car had two restrooms. Unlike on a plane, where there is only enough floor space for my two feet, these bathrooms were large enough for me to move around in.There were also two power outlets. I imagined travelers could comfortably conduct their morning routines in there, from brushing their teeth to doing their hair. After departure, I headed to the café car. Snacks were behind the counter in the café car. Joey Hadden/Business Insider By the time we departed, I'd already been awake for over two hours. So I was more than ready for breakfast.Unlike on a flight, no attendants passed by offering free snacks and beverages. Instead, Amtrak trains have a café car selling various snacks, from chips and candy to muffins and cookies. They also had salads and microwaved meals like breakfast sandwiches and Cup Noodles. For $8, I got a breakfast sandwich and a bottle of water. The reporter ate breakfast at her seat. Joey Hadden/Business Insider I brought my meal back to my seat and used the tray table in front of me.I wasn't expecting my microwaved sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich to be very tasty, but it wasn't too bad for a meal heated up in a sealed plastic bag. It didn't taste as good as the breakfast sandwiches I've had in Amtrak's dining cars on overnight trains, but it filled me up and was more satisfying than any meal I've had in the air. Once I fueled up, I stared out the window at the passing views through British Columbia. Views of British Columbia from the rails. Joey Hadden/Business Insider Even as a frequent flyer, I still find the views from an airplane when ascending and descending pretty surreal. But the view doesn't change once in the air, save for sunsets, sunrises, and passing clouds.That's not the case on a train. Instead, passengers see change through rural towns, cities, and natural environments throughout their journey.I love getting a glimpse of these in-between places. Seeing farms, shorelines, and clusters of houses in British Columbia made me ponder what it would be like to live in the Canadian province. Once we hit the border, the train stopped for about 30 minutes. The train stops at the US border. Joey Hadden/Business Insider During the half-hour the train was stopped at the US border, passengers weren't allowed to use the café car or bathrooms, and patrol agents boarded to check passports and take a declaration form filled out at Pacific Central Station in Vancouver. They also asked international passengers about where they were going, why they were going there, and how long they planned to stay. I spent the rest of the journey working on my laptop, thanks to free WiFi. The reporter used WiFI on the Amtrak train. Joey Hadden/Business Insider I had access to complimentary WiFi throughout the journey. And since my trip was three hours longer than a flight would have been, I appreciated being able to use the time productively. The train arrived on time at 11:40 a.m. Inside King Street Station in Seattle. Joey Hadden/Business Insider I headed into Seattle's King Street Station to the baggage claim belt and waited about 10 minutes for my suitcase to arrive.Even though the train trip was longer than a flight, it was much less stressful than air travel. The ease of navigating a train station compared to an airport, a more comfortable seat, and a lower price point made it worth the long-haul ride.

The Fairfax by Dragon Tiny Homes is a budget-friendly tiny house designed for simplicity and flexibility. At just 16 feet (4.8 meters) long, it’s best suited for use as a cozy vacation retreat or a guest house rather than a primary family home. Built on a double-axle trailer, the Fairfax features a sturdy steel frame with cement board siding for durability. Inside, you’ll find 135 square feet (12.5 square meters) of living space with a shiplap finish, all thoughtfully arranged on a single level. Despite its compact size, the one-floor layout makes it easy to move around and maximizes functionality for a comfortable, efficient small-space living experience. Designer: Dragon Tiny Homes The Fairfax is notably more compact than most other tiny houses, such as Baluchon’s Cardabelle, making it ideal for those who are truly committed to downsizing or need a flexible space for specific uses. Dragon Tiny Homes refers to it as a hotel room on wheels, suggesting that it’s best used as a guest house, a home office, or a short-term rental like an Airbnb, rather than as a full-time residence. The entrance leads directly into the small kitchen area, which is extremely streamlined. It features a simple sink and a quartz countertop, with cabinetry designed to discreetly store a portable stove or microwave that can be brought out when needed. This approach keeps the space clean and functional, allowing users to prepare meals without cluttering the living area. Overall, Fairfax’s minimal layout makes it both practical and comfortable for shorter stays or as a flexible addition to a property. The living and sleeping area is located just off the kitchen. The model shown features a double bed and a chair, but for longer stays, a sofa bed or a Murphy drop-down bed could provide greater versatility. Large windows let in plenty of natural light, making the compact space feel brighter and more open. This simple layout ensures the area remains functional and comfortable, whether used for relaxation, work, or as a guest room. The thoughtful use of glazing and flexible furniture options helps maximize comfort and usability in Fairfax’s limited footprint. The Fairfax also features a compact bathroom, accessible through a small sliding door. Inside, you’ll find a shower and a standard flushing toilet. It’s uncertain if there’s space for a separate sink, but a combined toilet and sink unit, similar to what’s used in the Bellbird by Unplgd Tiny Homes, could be an efficient solution. This layout keeps the bathroom functional while saving space. For those interested in a minimalist, budget-friendly tiny home, the Fairfax is currently available for purchase at US$37,950, offering an affordable entry point into small-space living or a flexible addition to any property. The post Budget-Friendly Tiny Home Offers Compact Living For Airbnb, Office, Or Retreat first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Double Duo tiny house takes a different approach by using two shipping containers instead of just one. This design choice creates more floorspace, allowing for a spacious interior with a generous living area, two bedrooms, and two bathrooms. Built by Custom Container Living, the Double Duo is made from two 40-foot (12.2-meter) containers, offering a total of 640 square feet (almost 60 square meters) of living space. The exterior can be left with its original container finish for an industrial look or partially clad in wood for added warmth. This setup provides flexibility in both appearance and layout, making it a practical and comfortable home. Designer: Custom Container Living Entering the Double Duo, you step directly into a living room that feels noticeably more open than most container homes. There’s plenty of space for a full-sized sofa, a coffee table, an entertainment center, and even a large TV, making it ideal for relaxing or hosting friends. Adjacent to the living area is a well-appointed kitchen, especially for a tiny house made from shipping containers. It features a double sink, a fridge/freezer, an oven with a four-burner propane stove, and a microwave. Optional upgrades include a dishwasher and a stacked washer/dryer. Generous cabinetry provides ample storage, making the space both practical and comfortable for daily living. The main bathroom in the Double Duo is designed with comfort and functionality in mind. It features a combined bath and shower, a standard flushing toilet, and a vanity sink, offering all the essentials you need in a compact space. One of the highlights of this bathroom is its direct access to the adjacent bedroom, making nighttime routines more convenient. The bedroom itself is equipped with a double bed and built-in storage, providing a cozy and organized place to rest. Thanks to the home’s single-floor layout, there’s generous headroom throughout, allowing you to stand upright and move around with ease—a notable benefit in the world of tiny houses, where lofts and low ceilings are common. This thoughtful design ensures the space feels comfortable and accessible, enhancing the overall living experience. On the other end of the Double Duo, you’ll find a second bedroom that also benefits from ample headroom and features a comfortable double bed along with a spacious walk-in closet. Attached to this bedroom is a private en-suite bathroom, complete with a shower, double sink, and toilet, providing added convenience and privacy. The Double Duo receives its power through a standard RV-style hookup, and interior temperatures are managed by a Mitsubishi mini-split air conditioning system, ensuring year-round comfort. Unlike some tiny homes, it isn’t trailer-mounted, so it must be delivered to your chosen site by truck. Currently, this well-appointed container home is available for purchase at a price of US$139,000. The post This Tiny Home Offers 640 Sq Ft of Luxury Living In Two Shipping Containers first appeared on Yanko Design.