Google has avoided the worst-case scenario in the pivotal search antitrust case brought by the US Department of Justice. DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google doesn’t have to give up the Chrome browser to mitigate its illegal monopoly in online search. The court will only require a handful of modest behavioral remedies, forcing Google to release some search data to competitors and limit its ability to make exclusive distribution deals.
More than a year ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) secured a major victory when Google was found to have violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The remedy phase took place earlier this year, with the DOJ calling for Google to divest the market-leading Chrome browser. That was the most notable element of the government’s proposed remedies, but it also wanted to explore a spin-off of Android, force Google to share search technology, and severely limit the distribution deals Google is permitted to sign.
Mehta has decided on a much narrower set of remedies. While there will be some changes to search distribution, Google gets to hold onto Chrome. The government contended that Google’s dominance in Chrome was key to its search lock-in, but Google claimed no other company could hope to operate Chrome and Chromium like it does. Mehta has decided that Google’s use of Chrome as a vehicle for search is not illegal in itself, though. “Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divesture (sic) of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints,” the ruling reads.
Credit: Aurich Lawson
Google’s proposed remedies were, unsurprisingly, much more modest. Google fully opposed the government’s Chrome penalties, but it was willing to accept some limits to its search deals and allow Android OEMs to choose app preloads. That’s essentially what Mehta has ruled. Under the court’s ruling, Google will still be permitted to pay for search placement—those multi-billion-dollar arrangements with Apple and Mozilla can continue. However, Google cannot require any of its partners to distribute Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini. That means Google cannot, for example, make access to the Play Store contingent on bundling its other apps on phones.
Despite its lack of upgradeable system memory, Framework has tried to make its Framework Desktop a welcoming platform for upgraders and modders, releasing 3D-printable versions of a few case parts and generally sticking to standard-sized parts and standard connectors.
Often, it’s independent creators who are making the weirdest and most interesting mods for Framework’s devices, but PC cooling company Noctua has just announced what amounts to a fairly major cooling upgrade for the Framework Desktop, at least for anyone with access to a 3D printer. By printing a new fan duct and a custom side panel, Noctua managed to lower the noise levels of the Framework Desktop’s default cooling fan by between five and seven decibels, without replacing or modifying any other components.
The key is apparently the design of the fan grill, which Noctua also used to reduce noise levels in the Noctua edition of this 1600 W Seasonic power supply. The grill has a distinctive spiral pattern that allows the fan to move similar amounts of air at lower rotation speeds, which is where the noise reduction comes from.
According to Noctua’s post about the Seasonic power supply, the grill was designed with the specific geometry of the NF-A12x25 fan’s blades in mind: “the grill’s radial struts are angled and swept against the sense of rotation of the fan and the sweep of its blades, which helps to avoid situations where the leading edges of the fan blades are parallel or almost parallel to the grill struts, which would cause a high pressure pulse followed by a sudden drop in pressure when the blade moves out of the overlapping position.”
The grill for the Framework Desktop’s fan is slightly smaller to conform with safety standards, but the idea is the same. Noctua also paired the side panel grill with a redesigned funnel-shaped fan duct to improve airflow further.
Some cooling mods make more sense than others
A tweaked fan duct (replacing the default, also-Noctua-designed version) is also required to see the improvements. Credit: Noctua
Noctua had a couple of other interesting notes on the Framework Desktop’s cooling system for people looking to make the system run cooler or quieter. First, Noctua noticed some temperature improvements when adding an 80 mm exhaust fan to the front of the system—this is supported but it isn’t the default cooling configuration—but found that the extra noise it added was disproportionate to the cooling benefit it provided. Adding a newer NF-A12x25 G2 fan to the system instead of the default NF-A12x25 did make the desktop run a bit quieter, but because the G2 fan maxes out at 1,800 RPM rather than 2,400 RPM, it had trouble keeping the system cool under load.
WARSAW, Indiana—The Blank Slate pickup scratches a particular itch for some, fulfilling the desire for an EV powertrain without all the bells and whistles associated with a modern vehicle. Gone is the infotainment screen, the lane-keeping assistance, and, for those concerned about surveillance, a modem. Instead, it’s an unpainted modular pickup and can be configured post-production into nearly anything the owner wants. Oh, and it’s cheap.
This Old Factory
For decades, the RR Donnelley & Sons printing plant in Warsaw, Indiana, pumped out catalogs. Glossy shopping books from JCPenney, Sears, and—my personal favorite—Radio Shack left the plant and were shipped all over the country to eager shoppers looking for their next mail-order delight. Then the Internet broke all of that.
The last employees clocked out in 2023.
A room formerly used in the printing process is filled with locals, elected officials, and journalists. The plan is to use this room in the future as a customer center and potentially a delivery location. The company is toying with the idea of allowing customers to take delivery of their pickups at the factory. No word on whether that would eliminate the delivery fee.
Slate Auto CEO Chris Barman addresses the attendees at the factory open day. Credit: Roberto Baldwin
For now, it’s a meeting place, a way for Slate to meet with an audience at its factory. A chance in a post-EV tax incentive world to remind people that its vehicle is coming to market in “the mid twenties,” which is likely in the upper portion of that spread. ($27,500 seems like a good guess.)
Slate CEO Chris Barman took the stage and reiterated the company’s plan to start production at the 1.4 million square-foot (130,000 m2) site beginning in the fourth quarter of 2026. Barman noted that, unlike traditional pickups built with up to 6,000 parts, the Slate will be assembled with just 600 parts. Also, there’s no need for a paint shop or large stamping. The size of the facility is relatively small for vehicle assembly, but it’s apparently perfect for Slate.
One of the world’s foremost climate models now faces funding threats.
Credit: Jonathan Kitchen/Getty Images
Credit: Jonathan Kitchen/Getty Images
In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz was running weather simulations on an early computer system when he realized that a small rounding difference led to extremely divergent weather predictions. He later called this idea the butterfly effect to communicate that small changes in initial conditions, like a butterfly flapping its wings in Nepal, could produce wildly different outcomes, like rain in New York.
But better understanding those initial conditions and how the biological world couples with the atmospheric one can provide better predictions about the future of the planet—from where umbrellas may be most needed in a given season to where electricity needs might sap the grid.
Today, computers are much more powerful than when Lorenz was working, and scientists use a special kind of simulation that accounts for physics, chemistry, biology, and water cycles to try to grasp the past and predict the future. These simulations, called Earth system models, or ESMs, attempt to consider the planet as a system made up of components that nudge and shove each other. Scientists first developed physical climate models in the 1960s and 1970s, and became better at integrating atmospheric and ocean models in subsequent years. As both environmental knowledge and computing power increased, they began to sprinkle in the other variables, leading to current-day ESMs.
“It’s coupling together usually an atmosphere model, an ocean model, a sea ice model, land model, together to get a full picture of a physical system,” said David Lawrence, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory, which he noted was recently changed to the CGD Laboratory to remove the word climate. The models also move beyond the planet’s physical components, including chemistry and biology.
In doing so, ESMs can find surprising conclusions. In 2023, for instance, the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM, which was built by the Department of Energy, found that in the simulation, the shapes of cavities in Antarctic ice significantly affect tides many miles away, along the North American coast. That hemisphere-separated connection is just one example of how including an unexpected variable can affect a real-world outcome, and just one of many examples to emerge from E3SM.
E3SM is one of the world’s premier Earth system models, one DOE has worked on for more than a decade, led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. But as part of budget and programmatic cuts being proposed under the administration of President Donald Trump, E3SM and Earth system research are under threat: The model’s website has been scrubbed of some information, and proposed federal budgets have terminated its future use for climate-related activities—one of its core functions—though it’s unclear how exactly that will play out. Outside researchers could, of course, use the model to study any research questions they desire, provided they could get funding.
E3SM is much finer-grained than most such models, providing more tailored and accurate results over a given region. It’s used to predict extreme events, like floods, and unlike most other models, to understand how the climate interacts with the power system—like how that extreme weather may tax the grid or cause it to falter. Both kinds of studies matter to humans living their lives, in addition to weather wonks.
DOE has already announced about $100 million in funding between 2018 and 2022, according to publicly available statements Undark located, to enhance and improve the model. That sum doesn’t include the resources that would have gone into its initial development. Those more recent investments may now be in question. “There’s nothing definitive,” said Lawrence. But the agency’s proposed budget would decrease both funding and capability.
Meanwhile, experts say that funding cuts could mean modeling abilities migrate overseas, some science may never be realized, and expertise could be lost.
With that toss-off of talent, said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, countries like China may catch up to the US “It would have been very hard for them to have a more respected scientific organization or scientific system than the US did,” Dessler said. “Our research universities are really the envy of the world, and our government labs are the envy of the world.”
But they won’t be, he said, if the country loses the expertise of those who work in them.
E3SM scientists want to understand how Earth changes over time and how much conditions vary within long-term projections—like, say, how average temperature may creep up over time, but extremely low temperatures blast Colorado nevertheless. Eventually, these scientists hope to incorporate enough chemistry, physics, and biology to create a “digital twin” of the planet—modeling Earth in a way true to its real form.
That’s a lofty goal, especially since reaching even the current, less twin-like stage took scientists more than 10 years of software development and tweaking. “The models are very big in terms of how much code there is,” said Lawrence, the earth system scientist at NCAR. (Through a spokesperson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose scientists lead the model’s development, declined to comment for this story. “We aren’t able to offer interviews about E3SM at this time,” lab spokesperson Jeremy Thomas wrote in an email; he did not respond to an emailed question about why.)
Lawrence, though, knows this, as head of a similar project, called the Community Earth System Model, an early version of which served as a basis for E3SM.
Around 30 years ago, scientists at NCAR began working on the community model building on an existing foundation at the agency. In building the community model, they collaborated with DOE researchers, and the agency co-sponsored the model. Later, though, DOE decided to pursue slightly different research priorities, according to Lawrence.
One of those priorities, which they started pursuing in 2014 with the official launch of the project, involved taking advantage of powerful computers. The agency, in addition to studying climate and energy, is also in charge of nuclear weapons. It possesses some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to simulate those weapons’ inner workings and do science on the side.
DOE, true to its name, also wanted to focus on energy issues. Understanding the planet’s weather and water machinations is critical for, say, knowing how to cool power stations, or when temperatures might tax the grid. NCAR scientists were less focused on energy and didn’t have the same computational bite, according to Lawrence.
And so the two groups split. After around a decade of development, E3SM scientists achieved their main goal in 2023: a terrestrial simulation built for an exascale supercomputer (“exascale” means the supercomputer can do a quintillion calculations per second—millions of times faster than a laptop). After a review planned for later this year, the project is slated to begin its fourth iteration in 2026.
E3SM has been useful to DOE researchers but also to independent ones, who use the model to answer their own burning questions. Environmental researcher Yi Yao, for instance, used E3SM to understand how irrigation affects not just the planet but the people on it. “It’s very important to know that the human activities are altering the system, and it may cause some catastrophic consequences,” said Yao, a postdoc at ETH Zurich who, along with co-authors, published his study’s findings in Nature Communications.
Irrigation, he found, contributes to “moist heat”—essentially, humidity, natural and human-caused. “Farmers who were working in the field, their health—their life even—can be endangered by the moist heat,” he said, not something their employers generally forecast for when irrigating and planning operations. Irrigation, in fact, has been proposed as a strategy for managing heat, by cooling surface temperature, something his study shows wouldn’t be effective.
Importantly, Yao’s work compared results from a variety of ESMs. That’s common practice in the field, and part of why having multiple models is important. “Obviously the physics of the world, the biology of the world, the chemistry of the world, there’s just one version of it,” explained Lawrence. “But how you represent that is so complex that there is no one answer.” Interpolating between different answers helps scientists learn more than they might from a single model alone.
Other scientists have recently used E3SM to find that rising average temperatures can turn farmlands into carbon creators instead of carbon sinks, that intense rains push nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico, and that Pacific hurricanes that first speed west but then turn tail northward decrease the number of forest fires in the American southwest.
But beyond big climatic questions, Earth system models like E3SM are also useful on a more practical level. That’s especially true as scientists work to make them more reliable over time, “so you can really use them for making all sorts of decisions, whether it’s what you’re going to do for your summer vacation to how are you going to deal with sea-level rise in your region,” said Lawrence. How useful and available American ESMs will be in the coming years, though, is a question of money and its disappearance. Overall, climate research at DOE has been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. In the skinny budget request for the department’s Office of Science, the administration noted that “the Budget reduces funding for climate change and Green New Scam research,” referencing the proposed Green New Deal, with a cut of more than $1 billion to the DOE’s Office of Science.
According to the DOE’s recent budget request, though, E3SM will continue to exist, but seemingly without one of its primary raisons d’etre. “Any Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) activities involving climate are terminated,” reads the 2025 budget request, although it is unclear how a climate model can skirt around the climate.
“I do not know to what extent we can say that a topic has nothing to do with climate,” said Yao in an email. “Considering that atmosphere is one important component of the Earth System, it would be very difficult to fully exclude climate.” He did note, though, that some studies are not dedicated to the impacts of climate change but, say, to ecological applications or hydrology. “I do not think it is appropriate to call them having nothing to do with climate but in these cases, they are not used for climate predictions,” he wrote.
The document earmarks “investments on further refinement of the science serving administration priorities,” and details technology that will be used to advance the model, like AI and more powerful computers. It doesn’t specify what goals that AI might serve, beyond enabling higher resolution.
An example of a high-resolution E3SM earth system model simulating the strongest hurricanes with surface winds exceeding 150 mph. This simulation shows how the surface temperature of the ocean evolves as a hurricane moves across the Atlantic and how the resultant cold wake affects the intensity of the next hurricane. Credit: LLNL
In 2026, the proposed budget decreases DOE funding for Earth and environmental system modeling from around $110 million to $30 million. “Funding will be consolidated under this subprogram to focus on supporting the administration’s highest priority research,” the document notes. It does not specify what those priorities are.
Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation’s budget request notes that its funding of NCAR, which oversees the lab Lawrence works for, will “curtail but continue to support research to refine weather and Earth system models and to better understand the evolution of wildland fires.” The federal government terminated a grant supporting an update to the model, although much of the work was already completed.
And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proposed a funding decrease of around 25 percent, with many of the cuts related to climate change. For many experts in the field, the future of this research can feel unpredictable, like the weather itself.
These cuts have scientists worried globally. In Europe, where Yao is based, what will become of the American ESMs is of great concern. “This is the topic of every lunch table here,” he said.
“It’s quite sad,” he added, “because the USA has always been a leader in the field.”
But it’s hard for US scientists to lead if they can’t describe their work, as some government guidance now forbids certain key terms. Indeed, according to a May report from a local newspaper, an internal publication from Lawrence Livermore noted that the laboratory “has been directed to reword or remove specific words and phrases from all external-facing media, web pages and public-facing communications.” Those terms included “climate change.” When asked by email about the report, Jeremy Thomas, a public information officer for Lawrence Livermore wrote, “We can’t comment on The Independent’s reporting.”
In the view of Dessler, the Texas-based professor, these cuts aren’t just climate-change denial on a scientific basis. “There’s a push to get rid of science that can be used to regulate,” he said—whether that has to do with pesticides or carbon.
But even if the models are curtailed in the US, options may exist to keep them sailing—by, for instance, duplicating their capabilities elsewhere. That has happened on the data side before: In the previous Trump administration, people feared the government would delete climate data, so people like John Baez, an emeritus mathematician at the University of California, Riverside who is now working at the University of Edinburgh, backed it up. In the current administration, others have leaped into action, creating archives like the Safeguarding Research & Culture project, which has collected a variety of datasets and publications—from satellite observations of coral reefs to space telescope observations of distant planets—and made sure they’re public and available.
Scientists could theoretically do something similar for ESMs. “You can reestablish that model,” Baez said. “So if some European government decides to take on responsibility for this exascale model, I can imagine that being done.” However, noted Lawrence, to be useful, a model needs to be accompanied by staff with the relevant scientific and technical expertise to run it.
To think that other countries could gather all those ingredients at once might be optimistic. “It’s not like this is the only responsibility that’s something being dropped in the lap of other countries,” said Baez, “and whether they will have the funds and the energy to pursue all of these, it’s actually unlikely.”
Dessler said that if E3SM disappears, or isn’t supported, people could use CESM, which has the same technological origins. Beyond that, said Dessler, other ESMs exist. And they’re still plenty advanced even if they’re not exascale.
To Dessler, the potential obsolescence of any given model is not the issue. “I think the much bigger problem is they’re just going to zero out the work being done at DOE on climate,” he said.
And that zeroing includes people. “What’s really chilling, I think, is the loss of human capital,” he said.
“You cannot generate a scientist out of thin air,” he continued. “It takes years to produce a scientist, and to produce a senior scientist takes decades. And so if you don’t have any senior scientists, you’re screwed for a very long time.”
To understand how that changing variable will affect the planet would likely require a model even more powerful than an ESM.
Since it’s hard to predict where this is all going, it’s likely to Microsoft’s long-term advantage to develop its own models.
It’s also possible Microsoft has introduced these models to address use cases or queries that OpenAI isn’t focused on. We’re seeing a gradual shift in the AI landscape toward models that are more specialized for certain tasks, rather than general, all-purpose models that are meant to be all things to all people.
These new models follow that somewhat, as Microsoft AI lead Mustafa Suleyman said in a podcast with The Verge that the goal here is “to create something that works extremely well for the consumer… my focus is on building models that really work for the consumer companion.”
As such, it makes sense that we’re going to see these models rolling out in Copilot, which is Microsoft’s consumer-oriented AI chatbot product. Of MAI-1-preview, the Microsoft AI blog post specifies, “this model is designed to provide powerful capabilities to consumers seeking to benefit from models that specialize in following instructions and providing helpful responses to everyday queries.”
So, yes, MAI-1-preview has a target audience in mind, but it’s still a general-purpose model since Copilot is a general-purpose tool.
MAI-Voice-1 is already being used in Microsoft’s Copilot Daily and Podcasts features. There’s also a Copilot Labs interface that you can visit right now to play around with it, giving it prompts or scripts and customizing what kind of voice or delivery you want to hear.
MA1-1-preview is in public testing on LMArena and will be rolled out to “certain text use cases within Copilot over the coming weeks.”
Microsoft’s fifth major iteration of Windows 11 is nearing its release to the general public—the Windows Insider team announced today that Windows 11 25H2 was being put into its Release Preview Channel, the final stop for most updates before they become available to everyone. That’s around two months after the first Windows builds with the 25H2 label were released to the other preview channels.
Putting a new yearly Windows update in the Release Preview channel is analogous to the “release to manufacturing” (RTM) phase of years past, back when updates shipped on physical media that needed to be manufactured. Build numbers for this version of Windows start with 26200, rather than 24H2’s 26100.
The 25H2 update doesn’t do a lot in and of itself, other than reset the clock for Microsoft’s security updates (each yearly release gets two years of security patches). Microsoft says that last year’s 24H2 update and this year’s 25H2 update “use a shared servicing branch,” which mostly means that there aren’t big under-the-hood differences between the two. Installing the 25H2 update on a PC may enable some features on your 24H2 PC that had already been installed but had been disabled by default.
Microsoft says that installing the 25H2 update removes PowerShell 2.0 and the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line tool (both previously deprecated), and that it allows IT administrators to automatically remove some preinstalled Windows apps from the Microsoft Store via Group Policy. But Microsoft hasn’t said much about major, user-facing new features that are unique to the 25H2 update. The 23H2 update from two years ago was a similarly quiet add-on for Windows 11 22H2.
I don’t usually get too excited about user-submitted designs on the Lego Ideas website, especially when those ideas would require negotiating a license with another company—user-generated designs need to reach 10,000 supporters before Lego considers them for production, two pretty high bars to clear even without factoring in some other brand’s conditions and requests.
But I’m both intrigued and impressed by this Lego version of Apple’s old Bondi Blue G3 iMac that has been making the rounds today. Submitted by a user named terauma, the 700-plus-piece set comes complete with keyboard, hockey-puck mouse, a classic Mac OS boot screen, and cathode ray tubes and circuit boards visible through the set’s transparent blue casing (like the original iMac, it may cause controversy by excluding a floppy disk drive). The design has already reached 5,000 supporters, and it has 320 days left to reach the 10,000-supporter benchmark required to be reviewed by Lego.
With its personality-forward aesthetics and Jony Ive-led design, the original iMac was the first step down the path that led to blockbuster products like the iPod and iPhone. It was the company’s first all-new Mac design after CEO Steve Jobs returned to the company in the late ’90s, and while it lacked some features included in contemporary PCs, its tightly integrated design and ease of setup helped it stand out against the beige desktop PCs of the day. Today’s colorful Apple Silicon iMacs are clearly inspired by the original design.
Google is advising users of the Salesloft Drift AI chat agent to consider all security tokens connected to the platform compromised following the discovery that unknown attackers used some of the credentials to access email from Google Workspace accounts.
In response, Google has revoked the tokens that were used in the breaches and disabled integration between the Salesloft Drift agent and all Workspace accounts as it investigates further. The company has also notified all affected account holders of the compromise.
Scope expanded
The discovery, reported Thursday in an advisory update, indicates that a Salesloft Drift breach it reported on Tuesday is broader than previously known. Prior to the update, members of the Google Threat Intelligence Group said the compromised tokens were limited to Salesloft Drift integrations with Salesforce. The compromise of the Workspace accounts prompted Google to change that assessment.
“Based on new information identified by GTIG, the scope of this compromise is not exclusive to the Salesforce integration with Salesloft Drift and impacts other integrations,” Thursday’s update stated. “We now advise all Salesloft Drift customers to treat any and all authentication tokens stored in or connected to the Drift platform as potentially compromised.”
On Thursday, Salesloft’s security guidance page made no reference to the new information and instead continued to indicate that the breach affected only Drift integrations with Salesforce. Company representatives didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking confirmation of the Google finding.
This led a Mexican-European research collaboration to get interested in finding DNA from elsewhere in the Columbian mammoth’s range, which extended down into Central America. The researchers focused on the Basin of Mexico, which is well south of where any woolly mammoths were likely to be found. While the warmer terrain generally tends to degrade DNA more quickly, the team had a couple of things working in its favor. To begin with, there were a lot of bones. The Basin of Mexico has been heavily built up over the centuries, and a lot of mammoth remains have been discovered, including over 100 individuals during the construction of Mexico City’s international airport.
In addition, the team focused entirely on the mitochondrial genome. In contrast to the two sets of chromosomes in each cell, a typical cell might have hundreds of mitochondria, each of which could have dozens of copies of its genome. So, while the much smaller mitochondria don’t provide as much detail about ancestry, they’re at least likely to survive at high enough levels to provide something to work with.
And indeed they did. Altogether, the researchers obtained 61 new mitochondrial genomes from the mammoths of Mexico from the 83 samples they tested. Of these, 28 were considered high enough quality to perform an analysis.
Off on their own
By building a family tree using this genetic data, along with that from other Columbian and woolly mammoth samples, the researchers could potentially determine how different populations were related. And one thing became very clear almost immediately: They were in a very weird location on that tree.
To begin with, all of them clustered together in a single block, although there were three distinct groupings within that block. But the placement of that block within the larger family tree was notably strange. To begin with, there were woolly mammoths on either side of it, suggesting the lineage was an offshoot of woolly mammoths. That would make sense if all Columbian mammoths clustered together with the Mexican ones. But they don’t. Some Columbian mammoths from much farther north are actually more closely related to woolly mammoths than they are to the Mexican mammoths.
In July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dramatically, but quietly, scaled back a food safety surveillance system, cutting active tracking from eight top foodborne infections down to just two, according to a report by NBC News.
The Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet)—a network of surveillance sites that spans 10 states and covers about 54 million Americans (16 percent of the US population)—previously included active monitoring for eight infections from pathogens. Those include Campylobacter, Cyclospora, Listeria, Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia.
Now the network is only monitoring for STEC and Salmonella.
A list of talking points the CDC sent the Connecticut health department (which is part of FoodNet) suggested that a lack of funding is behind the scaleback. “Funding has not kept pace with the resources required to maintain the continuation of FoodNet surveillance for all eight pathogens,” the CDC document said, according to NBC. The Trump administration has made brutal cuts to federal agencies, including the CDC, which has lost hundreds of employees this year.
A CDC spokesperson told the outlet that “Although FoodNet will narrow its focus to Salmonella and STEC, it will maintain both its infrastructure and the quality it has come to represent. Narrowing FoodNet’s reporting requirements and associated activities will allow FoodNet staff to prioritize core activities.”
A graph visualizing the growing crowdfunding for Star Citizen from 2012 (top) through 2022 (bottom).
A graph visualizing the growing crowdfunding for Star Citizen from 2012 (top) through 2022 (bottom). Credit: Reddit / Rainbowles
Of course, the development of Grand Theft Auto VI has happened completely behind closed doors, with developer Rockstar and publisher Take Two only occasionally offering tiny drops of information to a desperate press and fan base. By contrast, Roberts Space Industries has issued regular, incredibly detailed information dumps on the drawn-out development progress for Star Citizen and Squadron 42, even when that kind of openness has contributed to the public appearance of internal dysfunction.
The massive, ongoing crowdfunding that powers the open development structure “allows us to do things without imposing the framework of a typical video game studio,” Roberts told La Presse. “The players who fund us expect the best game, period. We don’t have to streamline, cut jobs, or change our business model.”
That pre-launch development cycle must eventually end, of course, and the La Presse report suggests that the full 1.0 release of Star Citizen is “now promised” for “2027 or 2028.” While we’d love to believe that, the history of Star Citizen development thus far (and the lack of any provided sourcing for the claim) makes us more than a little skeptical.
“The underlying issue here is whether US missile defense should remain focused on the threat from rogue states and… accidental launches, and explicitly refrain from countering missile threats from China or Russia,” DesJarlais said. He called the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction “outdated.”
President Donald Trump speaks alongside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office at the White House on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. President Trump announced his plans for the Golden Dome, a national ballistic and cruise missile defense system. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Moulton’s amendment on nuclear deterrence failed to pass the committee in a voice vote, as did another Moulton proposal that would have tapped the brakes on developing space-based interceptors.
But one of Moulton’s amendments did make it through the committee. This amendment, if reconciled with the Senate, would prohibit the Pentagon from developing a privatized or subscription-based missile defense intercept capability. The amendment says the US military can own and operate such a system.
Ultimately, the House Armed Services Committee voted 55–2 to send the NDAA to a vote on the House floor. Then, lawmakers must hash out the differences between the House version of the NDAA with a bill written in the Senate before sending the final text to the White House for President Trump to sign into law.
More questions than answers
The White House says the missile shield will cost $175 billion over the next three years. But that’s just to start. A network of space-based missile sensors and interceptors, as prescribed in Trump’s executive order, will eventually number thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit. The Congressional Budget Office reported in May that the Golden Dome program may ultimately cost up to $542 billion over 20 years.
The problem with all of the Golden Dome cost estimates is that the Pentagon has not settled on an architecture. We know the system will consist of a global network of satellites with sensors to detect and track missile launches, plus numerous interceptors in orbit to take out targets in space and during their “boost phase” when they’re moving relatively slowly through the atmosphere.
The Pentagon will order more sea- and ground-based interceptors to destroy missiles, drones, and aircraft as they near their targets within the United States. All of these weapons must be interconnected with a sophisticated command and control network that doesn’t yet exist.
Will Golden Dome’s space-based interceptors use kinetic kill vehicles to physically destroy missiles targeting the United States? Or will the interceptors rely on directed energy weapons like lasers or microwave signals to disable their targets? How many interceptors are actually needed?
These are all questions without answers. Despite the lack of detail, congressional Republicans approved $25 billion for the Pentagon to get started on the Golden Dome program as part of the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill passed Congress with a party-line vote last month.
Israel’s Iron Dome aerial defense system intercepts a rocket launched from the Gaza Strip on May 11, 2021. Credit: Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images
Moulton earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and master’s degrees in business and public administration from Harvard University. He served as a Marine Corps platoon leader in Iraq and was part of the first company of Marines to reach Baghdad during the US invasion of 2003. Moulton ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 but withdrew from the race before the first primary contest.
The text of our interview with Moulton is published below. It is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Ars: One of your amendments that passed committee would prevent the DoD from using a subscription or pay-for-service model for the Golden Dome. What prompted you to write that amendment?
Moulton: There were some rumors we heard that this is a model that the administration was pursuing, and there was reporting in mid-April suggesting that SpaceX was partnering with Anduril and Palantir to offer this kind of subscription service where, basically, the government would pay to access the technology rather than own the system. This isn’t an attack on any of these companies or anything. It’s a reassertion of the fundamental belief that these are responsibilities of our government. The decision to engage an intercontinental ballistic missile is a decision that the government must make, not some contractors working at one of these companies.
Ars: Basically, the argument you’re making is that war-fighting should be done by the government and the armed forces, not by contractors or private companies, right?
Moulton: That’s right, and it’s a fundamental belief that I’ve had for a long time. I was completely against contractors in Iraq when I was serving there as a younger Marine, but I can’t think of a place where this is more important than when you’re talking about nuclear weapons.
Ars: One of the amendments that you proposed, but didn’t pass, was intended to reaffirm the nation’s strategy of nuclear deterrence. What was the purpose of this amendment?
Moulton: Let’s just start by saying this is fundamentally why we have to have a theory that forms a foundation for spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Golden Dome has no clear design, no real cost estimate, and no one has explained how this protects or enhances strategic stability. And there’s a lot of evidence that it would make strategic stability worse because our adversaries would no longer have confidence in Mutual Assured Destruction, and that makes them potentially much more likely to initiate a strike or overreact quickly to some sort of confrontation that has the potential to go nuclear.
In the case of the Russians, it means they could activate their nuclear weapon in space and just take out our Golden Dome interceptors if they think we might get into a nuclear exchange. I mean, all these things are horrific consequences.
Like I said in our hearing, there are two explanations for Golden Dome. The first is that every nuclear theorist for the last 75 years was wrong, and thank God, Donald Trump came around and set us right because in his first administration and every Democratic and Republican administration, we’ve all been wrong—and really the future of nuclear deterrence is nuclear defeat through defense and not Mutually Assured Destruction.
The other explanation, of course, is that Donald Trump decided he wants the golden version of something his friend has. You can tell me which one’s more likely, but literally no one has been able to explain the theory of the case. It’s dangerous, it’s wasteful… It might be incredibly dangerous. I’m happy to be convinced that Golden Dome is the right solution. I’m happy to have people explain why this makes sense and it’s a worthwhile investment, but literally nobody has been able to do that. If the Russians attack us… we know that this system is not going to be 100 percent effective. To me, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t want to gamble on… which major city or two we lose in a scenario like that. I want to prevent a nuclear war from happening.
Several Chinese DF-5B intercontinental ballistic missiles, each capable of delivering up to 10 independently maneuverable nuclear warheads, are seen during a parade in Beijing on September 3, 2015. Credit: Xinhua/Pan Xu via Getty Images
Ars: What would be the way that an administration should propose something like the Golden Dome? Not through an executive order? What process would you like to see?
Moulton: As a result of a strategic review and backed up by a lot of serious theory and analysis. The administration proposes a new solution and has hearings about it in front of Congress, where they are unafraid of answering tough questions. This administration is a bunch of cowards who can who refuse to answer tough questions in Congress because they know they can’t back up their president’s proposals.
Ars: I’m actually a little surprised we haven’t seen any sort of architecture yet. It’s been six months, and the administration has already missed a few of Trump’s deadlines for selecting an architecture.
Moulton: It’s hard to develop an architecture for something that doesn’t make sense.
Ars: I’ve heard from several retired military officials who think something like the Golden Dome is a good idea, but they are disappointed in the way the Trump administration has approached it. They say the White House hasn’t stated the case for it, and that risks politicizing something they view as important for national security.
Moulton: One idea I’ve had is that the advent of directed energy weapons (such as lasers and microwave weapons) could flip the cost curve and actually make defense cheaper than offense, whereas in the past, it’s always been cheaper to develop more offensive capabilities rather than the defensive means to shoot at them.
And this is why the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in the early 1970s was so effective, because there was this massive arms race where we were constantly just creating a new offensive weapon to get around whatever defenses our adversary proposed. The reason why everyone would just quickly produce a new offensive weapon before that treaty was put into place is because it was easy to do.
My point is that I’ve even thrown them this bone, and I’m saying, ‘Here, maybe that’s your reason, right?” And they just look at me dumbfounded because obviously none of them are thinking about this. They’re just trying to be lackeys for the president, and they don’t recognize how dangerous that is.
Ars: I’ve heard from a chorus of retired and even current active duty military leaders say the same thing about directed energy weapons. You essentially can use one platform in space take take numerous laser shots at a missile instead of expending multiple interceptors for one kill.
Moulton: Yes, that’s basically the theory of the case. Now, my hunch is that if you actually did the serious analysis, you would determine that it still decreases state strategic stability. So in terms of the overall safety and security of the United States, whether it’s directed energy weapons or kinetic interceptors, it’s still a very bad plan.
But I’m even throwing that out there to try to help them out here. “Maybe this is how you want to make your case.” And they just look at me like deer in the headlights because, obviously, they’re not thinking about the national security of the United States.
Ars: I also wanted to ask about the Space Force’s push to develop weapons to use against other satellites in orbit. They call these counter-space capabilities. They could be using directed energy, jamming, robotic arms, anti-satellite missiles. This could take many different forms, and the Space Force, for the first time, is talking more openly about these issues. Are these kinds of weapons necessary, in your view, or are they too destabilizing?
Moulton: I certainly wish we could go back to a time when the Russians and Chinese were not developing space weapons—or were not weaponizing space, I should say, because that was the international agreement. But the reality of the world we live in today is that our adversaries are violating that agreement. We have to be prepared to defend the United States.
Ars: Are there any other space policy issues on your radar or things you have concerns about?
Moulton: There’s a lot. There’s so much going on with space, and that’s the reason I chose this subcommittee, even though people would expect me to serve on the subcommittee dealing with the Marine Corps, because I just think space is incredibly important. We’re dealing with everything from promotion policy in the Space Force to acquisition reform to rules of engagement, and anything in between. There’s an awful lot going on there, but I do think that one of the most important things to talk about right now is how dangerous the Golden Dome could be.
