Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Street Fighter Review: Momoa Leads Epic 2026 Reboot

Round one. Fight.

On October 16, Paramount Pictures brings Street Fighter back to the big screen, and this time the people making it clearly grew up feeding quarters into the arcade cabinet. Directed by Kitao Sakurai, produced by Legendary Entertainment with Capcom, the film is the third live-action take on the fighting game series, and it looks determined to be the first one that feels like the game.

The roster

The cast list reads like someone rage-drafted their dream character select screen. Andrew Koji, the breakout star of Warrior, plays Ryu. Noah Centineo plays Ken Masters. Callina Liang plays Chun-Li, the Interpol agent who recruits the estranged fighters for the next World Warrior Tournament. Around them: Jason Momoa as Blanka, Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i as Akuma, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as Balrog, Cody Rhodes as Guile, David Dastmalchian as M. Bison, Orville Peck as Vega, Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim, Olivier Richters as Zangief, Hirooki Goto as E. Honda, Mel Jarnson as Cammy, Rayna Vallandingham as Juli, plus Eric Andre, Andrew Schulz, Kyle Mooney and Alexander Volkanovski in supporting roles.

The story is set in 1993, the year Street Fighter II owned every arcade in America. Ryu and Ken, once brothers in training, are pulled back into combat by Chun-Li for a tournament that turns out to be a brutal clash of fists, fate and fury. Behind the spectacle sits a deadly conspiracy tied to their past. If they do not face it, it is game over.

Why this reboot has a real shot

Two things separate this from the 1994 and 2009 attempts, and both are encouraging. First, the director. Sakurai made Bad Trip, the hidden-camera comedy that proved he can stage chaos with a straight face and an athlete’s timing. A Street Fighter movie needs exactly that: total commitment to the absurd, played without a wink.

Second, the fidelity. The teaser that debuted at The Game Awards played like a lineup of statement poses, each fighter introduced the way the arcade game introduced them. One sequence recreates the famous car-smashing bonus round, sedan and all. Another has Rhodes’ Guile hitting Vega with a leaping kick that sends him through a wall. The film leans on music, crowd noise and color-saturated lighting rather than exposition. That is a director who understands the assignment: this is not prestige drama, it is Saturday night.

The 1993 setting is smart too. It lets the film live in the era when these characters were mythology, before irony got its hands on them. And the production has real muscle behind it: Mary Parent producing, Ken Seng shooting, music by Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson. The film wrapped in Australia late last year, and everything since has suggested confidence.

The tournament movie formula

Tournament movies live or die on casting, and this cast is a fever dream in the best way. Momoa as Blanka is inspired. Roman Reigns has the physical presence to make Akuma terrifying. Dastmalchian, one of the great character actors working, will chew every scene as Bison. And Rhodes and 50 Cent bring the kind of larger-than-life charisma the games always promised.

The risk, of course, is bloat. Seventeen fighters is a lot of screen time to share in 120 minutes. But the premise is built for it: a tournament is a machine for introducing characters fast and making you care faster. Sakurai’s job is to keep the fights legible and the stakes human. If he does, this could be the rare video game movie that plays to the faithful and the curious alike.

What to watch for

Watch the Game Awards teaser again and notice what is not there: no grim origin story, no apology for the source material, no attempt to make this respectable or important. Just ring lights, pyrotechnics and a cast that looks thrilled to be there. Sometimes the best version of a movie is the one that trusts the fun.

Make it a fight night. Stock up on NYC’s best hot chicken beforehand, and if you need something with real heat for the post-movie debate, these spicy tofu spots will do the job. Street Fighter opens October 16. The arena is truly waiting. Hadouken.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Flow Engineering Lands $50M to Give AI Agents CAD Tools

AI rewrote how software gets built. Code practically writes itself now, and iteration cycles at the best companies have collapsed from weeks to hours. Hardware, meanwhile, has been watching from the sidelines, still doing things the slow way: months of coordination, manual verification, engineers chasing changes across a dozen disconnected tools.

Flow Engineering wants to end that asymmetry. The San Francisco startup announced on September 30 that it has raised $50 million in Series B funding at a $750 million valuation, and its pitch is simple: bring software-like iteration speeds to hardware development. The round was co-led by Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners and Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, with Sequoia Capital, which led the Series A, participating alongside Human Capital, Evantic, SV Angel, Odyssey, and EQT. The individual checks are a story in themselves: Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, Mercedes-Benz CIO Jonas von Malottki, Formula 1 champion Nico Rosberg, and Roelof Botha, who invested personally and joined the board.

The problem is plumbing, not intelligence

Here’s what makes Flow interesting, and it’s not the AI hype. The bottleneck in hardware development isn’t that engineers lack smart tools. It’s that a single design change ripples across mechanical, electrical, and software systems, and the data about those systems lives in disconnected tools: requirements in one place, CAD drawings in another, simulation results somewhere else, test data in a fourth.

An AI agent can’t reason across a design it can’t see. That’s the architectural insight. Flow’s platform connects requirements, CAD, simulation, code, and test data into one living system of record, and then lets AI agents continuously analyze engineering changes, identify downstream impacts, and verify that requirements and test coverage still hold, in seconds, across the tools teams already use.

Think of it like version control for physical things. Software got fast when Git gave every change a history, a branch, and a review process. Hardware never got that layer. Flow is building it: review, branching, and evaluation capabilities for engineering data, plus an AI harness that lets frontier models work securely with sensitive design information.

The customer list is the proof

Flow is three years old and already names customers that read like a who’s-who of ambitious hardware: Anduril, Rivian, Joby Aviation, Stoke Space, Intuitive Machines, Pacific Fusion, Astranis, Radiant Industries, plus General Motors PPU and RV Tech, the Rivian-Volkswagen joint venture.

That’s not a pilot list. Those are companies building rockets, electric aircraft, autonomous defense systems, and next-generation vehicles, putting Flow’s agents to work in live hardware programs. When the people designing spacecraft trust your platform with their iteration cycles, you’ve cleared a bar that slideware can’t fake.

The use of funds tells you where this goes next. Flow plans to build out the AI harness for secure work with sensitive engineering data, expand review and evaluation capabilities, pursue FedRAMP authorization, and grow its engineering and sales teams. FedRAMP is the tell: that’s the certification for selling to the US federal government, and it signals serious ambitions in defense and regulated industries. The goal, in the company’s words, is to reduce hardware iteration cycles from months to days. Ambitious? Sure. But the trajectory from “weeks to hours” in software suggests the direction is right.

Why hardware speed matters to everyone

It’s easy to file this under enterprise software and move on. Don’t. The speed of hardware iteration is the speed of the physical world getting better.

Every month shaved off a design cycle is a month sooner that a better battery, a safer aircraft, a cheaper rocket, or a more efficient grid component reaches the real world. Software ate the world by getting fast. The physical world has been waiting for its turn, held back not by physics but by process. If AI agents can take over the verification drudgery, the coordination overhead, the endless impact analysis that eats engineering calendars, then human engineers get to do the part they’re actually good at: the creative leaps.

There’s a deeper point about where AI creates value. The last two years were about AI writing and talking. The next phase is AI doing: working with tools, checking its own work, operating inside real workflows. Flow’s bet is that the highest-leverage place for that shift is the most complex, most coordination-heavy work humans do, which is building physical systems. The unglamorous plumbing, requirements traceability, change propagation, turns out to be the unlock.

What to watch

The FedRAMP timeline. Getting authorized for federal work is slow and expensive, but it opens the biggest hardware customer on earth. Watch whether Flow lands defense contracts in the next year. That’s the real validation.

Whether “months to days” holds up. The company’s stated goal is bold, and one analyst has already noted the announcement measures adoption rather than proven output. Fair. The customer list is impressive, but the industry will want case studies with numbers: this program shipped X weeks faster.

The competitive response. The big CAD and PLM incumbents aren’t standing still. The question is whether a startup built AI-native from day one can outmaneuver decades of entrenched tooling. History says the native player usually wins the new paradigm, but incumbents have the distribution.

The talent signal. When Thomas Wolf, the Hugging Face co-founder, writes a personal check into a hardware company, pay attention. The smartest people in AI are following the agents into the physical world. That’s where the next decade of interesting problems lives.

The takeaway

Software got its AI revolution first because software was already digital, already versioned, already fast. Hardware is harder: atoms don’t branch and merge. Flow Engineering just raised $50 million on the thesis that they can, or at least that AI agents can make it feel that way.

Faster hardware cycles mean everything physical improves sooner: the planes, the cars, the robots, the power grid. That’s a future worth building quickly. And the investors, from Sequoia to a Formula 1 champion, are betting that the company connecting CAD files to AI agents is the one holding the stopwatch.

If you’re in New York and want to see ambitious engineering up close in the meantime, the city’s 2026 holiday tree and lights celebrations are worth saving the dates for. And for a lower-tech but equally impressive feat of design, NYC’s best breakfast sandwiches remain undefeated.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Geothermal Breakthrough: Fervo’s Cape Station Goes Live

Geothermal energy has always been the quiet kid in the clean-energy classroom: reliable, carbon-free, and almost entirely ignored next to solar and wind. This week it got a lot louder. Fervo Energy announced that its Cape Station plant in Beaver County, Utah, has reached commercial operation, the first greenfield enhanced geothermal development anywhere in the world to do so. The plant’s first block is producing 33 megawatts of net power and is already selling electricity under a power purchase agreement.

What “enhanced” actually means

Classic geothermal only works where nature did the plumbing: volcanic hotspots like Iceland or California’s Geysers, where heat, water, and permeable rock all happen to coincide. Enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, refuse to wait for luck. Engineers drill deep wells, fracture hot dry rock, and circulate water through the cracks to harvest heat that exists almost everywhere, miles beneath our feet.

Fervo’s twist is borrowed from the shale revolution: horizontal drilling and fiber-optic sensing, refined over decades in oil and gas, aimed at heat instead of hydrocarbons. The result is a power source with solar’s cleanliness and none of its intermittency. Geothermal runs 24 hours a day, in any weather, which makes grid operators very happy indeed.

The numbers behind Cape Station are striking. The first block synchronized to the grid on September 24 and declared commercial operation just six days later, a day ahead of its contractual date. Fervo built and commissioned the facility in 23 months, remarkable for a first-of-its-kind project, and the company says it is targeting an 18-month build for future blocks as lessons compound.

Why this milestone matters

Energy nerds have talked about EGS potential for decades, usually with a wistful “someday.” The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that enhanced geothermal could eventually supply a double-digit share of American electricity. But potential doesn’t keep the lights on; operating plants do. Cape Station is the proof that the drilling economics, the reservoir engineering, and the financing can all line up at once.

“No team has ever built a project like this anywhere in the world, and we did it ahead of schedule,” said CEO and co-founder Tim Latimer. In an industry where big infrastructure projects routinely slip by years, finishing early is its own kind of headline.

The always-on problem it solves

To appreciate what 33 megawatts of geothermal means, consider the grid’s hardest problem. Solar floods the system at noon and vanishes at dusk; wind blows when it wants to. Grid planners call the missing piece “firm” power, electricity that shows up on demand, and until now the clean options were basically limited to hydro dams and very large batteries. Geothermal is firm power that can be built in far more places than a dam.

That matters more every year because demand is climbing again after two decades of flat U.S. electricity use. Data centers, electric vehicles, and heat pumps are all pulling load upward at once. A resource that runs at 90-plus percent capacity factor, rain or shine, is exactly the kind of backbone a renewables-heavy grid needs. Fervo’s pipeline, if it scales the way the company plans, could put gigawatts of that backbone on the map within a few years.

The heat beneath our feet

There is a pleasing symmetry in geothermal’s rise. Humanity spent a century and a half drilling the planet for things to burn. Now the same rigs, the same crews, and much of the same know-how are being pointed at the heat that has been sitting there all along, untouched. It is the rare energy transition story that doesn’t require abandoning old skills, just redirecting them. Geologists who once mapped oil reservoirs are now mapping heat; roughnecks who ran casing for gas wells are running it for steam.

What should the rest of us take from this? Mostly, that the clean-energy menu is getting longer. Solar and wind have carried the transition so far, and batteries are filling the gaps, but a grid that runs on sunshine alone still needs a backbone for cloudy weeks. Geothermal can be that backbone in far more places than anyone used to think.

And if the idea of harnessing the Earth’s inner furnace makes you crave heat of a more immediate kind, the city has you covered. New York’s spicy tofu spots and hot chicken joints deliver their own controlled burns, no drilling required. Some heat you generate. Some heat you just enjoy.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Other Mommy Review: Chastain’s Chilling Halloween Horror

“Can I go inside your heart?”

That is the question at the center of Other Mommy, and if it does not chill you a little, read it again slowly. Universal Pictures releases the film exclusively in theaters on October 9, and horror fans have already crowned it the Halloween season’s best bet. After watching the trailer, it is not hard to see why.

The setup

The film is adapted from Josh Malerman’s bestselling 2024 novel Incidents Around the House. Malerman wrote Bird Box, so he knows how to find the soft spot in a reader’s chest and press on it. The story follows Bela, a young girl played by Arabella Olivia Clark, who forms a bond with a supernatural entity inside her home. The entity looks uncannily like her own mother. It keeps asking to get inside her heart. What begins as an unusual friendship turns sinister as Bela realizes the presence she welcomed may be hunting her family.

Jessica Chastain plays both roles: Bela’s protective mother and the thing wearing her face. It is a dual performance built on small, awful details. Chastain has described finding the character’s unblinking smile and shaping every physical choice around what the entity would offer a lonely child: the mother Bela wishes she had. Jay Duplass plays her father, Daddo. The supporting cast includes Dichen Lachman as a paranormal scientist, Arian Moayed as a family friend, and screen legend Karen Allen, of Raiders of the Lost Ark fame, as Bela’s grandmother.

The team behind the dread

Director Rob Savage made his name with Host, the lockdown horror film shot entirely over video call, then proved he could go big-studio with The Boogeyman. He knows how to build dread out of nothing and how to spend a budget. Producer James Wan, the architect of Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring, backs the film through his Blumhouse and Atomic Monster banner. The screenplay comes from WGA Award winner Nathan Elston.

Savage recently told Entertainment Weekly the film contains around 50 jump scares, then immediately complicated his own count: a great scare, he argued, does not need the classic quiet-quiet-loud formula. What he promises instead is dread, set pieces and a deep paranoia where the audience can never quite tell whether they are looking at Mommy or Other Mommy, or whether any grown-up in the frame can be trusted. For a 93-minute horror film, that is a tight, mean machine.

Why it might actually get you

The trailer did something unusual. It played before The Odyssey in theaters and went properly viral, with audiences reporting genuine unease. That matters. Trailers are engineered to startle; this one reportedly left people sitting in the dark feeling wrong. The second trailer shows restraint too, holding back how the entity actually operates. In an era when marketing routinely spoils the third act, that discipline is encouraging.

There is also the Malerman factor. Incidents Around the House is told from a child’s perspective, and the novel’s power comes from the gap between what Bela understands and what the reader does. If the film keeps even half of that, it will be the rare horror movie that works as a drama too. Chastain does not do paycheck roles. She picked this one.

The scares, on paper

Savage’s recent interviews suggest a director thinking hard about craft, not just shocks. He talks about building scares without the classic quiet-quiet-loud formula, about dread as a sustained pressure rather than a series of pops. The final trailer hints at set pieces with real imagination: one sequence has the entity hunting Bela through an indoor play park, galloping down twisting slides before cornering the child in an endless ball pit. A ball pit. The most innocent place on earth, turned into a trap. That is the kind of image that lodges in your head and stays there.

The film’s best trick may be its ambiguity. Chastain herself has leaned into the question of whether Bela is seeing a monster or a darker side of her own mother. A horror film that keeps you guessing about reality for 93 minutes, led by an Oscar winner playing against herself, is exactly what October is for.

Plan your scare night

Horror this good deserves a full evening. Brave one of the 20 haunted houses in and around NYC to warm up, catch Other Mommy on October 9, and then cleanse your palate with something cheerful, like the city’s 2026 holiday tree and lights celebrations. Just remember the question. Can I go inside your heart? Answer carefully.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: ElevenLabs Hits $22B Valuation, Launches Voice Model v4

Everyone spent the last two years arguing about which chatbot would win. Meanwhile, ElevenLabs went and proved the interface that actually matters is the one people have been using since Alexander Graham Bell: the phone call.

On September 30, the London-based AI voice company completed a $300 million employee tender offer that values it at $22 billion, twice the $11 billion valuation it carried after its $500 million Series D in February. That’s a doubling in seven months. The tender was co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price, with participation from existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed and new investors including EQT and Goldman Sachs.

And the same week, the company launched Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo, new text-to-speech models that natively speak, listen, and translate across more than 90 languages used by over 5.5 billion people, at sub-100-millisecond latency. Valuation doubling plus a flagship model launch in one week: that’s a company announcing it intends to own the category.

The number that explains the valuation

Forget the $22 billion for a second. The number that does the explaining is 15 million.

ElevenLabs says its voice agents now handle more than 15 million conversations every week, three times the level in February. And these aren’t demos. The agents are doing real enterprise work: processing refunds, renewing insurance policies, booking appointments. The client list includes Stripe, Deutsche Telekom, DoorDash’s SevenRooms, the insurer Admiral, and the sovereign governments of Ukraine and Greece.

That’s the tell. Chatbots got the headlines, but voice agents got the jobs. There’s a reason: for all the talk about conversational AI, the overwhelming majority of customer interactions at real businesses still happen by voice. The call center is the largest interface in commerce, and it runs on humans having the same conversations thousands of times a day. AI that can hold those conversations naturally, in 90-plus languages, with human-sounding expression, doesn’t need a market to be invented. The market is a phone line.

“We’re already seeing rapid adoption of expressive voice agents by enterprises and governments, who are deploying them in service of consumers and citizens,” said co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski. Founded in 2022 by Staniszewski and CTO Piotr Dabkowski, the company has gone from text-to-speech startup to one of Europe’s most valuable startups in four years. The velocity is the story.

Why voice is winning the agent race

There’s a thesis hiding in this valuation, and it’s worth spelling out: chat was the training wheels; voice is the vehicle.

Text chatbots had to teach users a new behavior. Voice agents meet users where they already are. Nobody needs onboarding to have a phone conversation. The elderly customer renewing an insurance policy, the traveler rebooking a flight, the citizen calling a government service line: they all already know how to talk. The AI just has to be good enough at listening and responding that the caller doesn’t notice the difference.

That last part is where the v4 models matter. Sub-100-millisecond latency is the threshold where conversation stops feeling like a walkie-talkie exchange and starts feeling like a person. Expressive speech, the pauses, the emphasis, the warmth, is what makes callers stay on the line instead of mashing zero for a human. ElevenLabs built its name on voice quality back when it was just a text-to-speech tool; now that quality is the moat around the agent business.

The multi-language angle is underrated too. Ninety languages spoken by 5.5 billion people means a single deployment can serve a global customer base without the traditional call-center model of staffing language queues. For governments and multinationals, that’s transformative. Ukraine and Greece using AI voice agents for citizen services is the kind of deployment that would have sounded like science fiction five years ago.

The tender offer tells its own story

One detail worth pausing on: this wasn’t a fundraise. A tender offer lets employees and existing shareholders sell stock to investors, providing liquidity without necessarily raising new capital for the company. The company didn’t need the money. Its people got paid.

That’s a retention weapon in the AI talent war. At $22 billion, with Goldman Sachs and T. Rowe Price buying in, ElevenLabs employees just got a very tangible reason to stay. In a market where top voice-AI researchers can name their price, keeping the team that built the thing is as important as any model release. The v4 launch the same week makes the message complete: we’re winning, we’re shipping, and we’re taking care of our people.

It’s also a signal about where smart money thinks the agent economy is going. The biggest AI investments of 2026 have flowed to agent developers as businesses race to automate customer service and back-office work. Voice is where that automation meets the customer directly. A $22 billion bet says the phone call is not a legacy channel to be replaced. It’s the channel to be upgraded.

What this means for the rest of us

A few practical readouts.

Expect to talk to AI more, and notice it less. Fifteen million conversations a week is still a rounding error against global call volume, but the growth rate is the thing. At 3x in seven months, the crossover point where a meaningful share of routine calls are AI-handled is closer than most people think. The good news: done well, it means no more hold music for a refund.

Voice quality is now a competitive dimension. If you’re building anything customer-facing with AI, the voice matters as much as the brain. The companies winning in this space compete on latency and expressiveness, not just accuracy. Users forgive a slightly wrong answer delivered warmly faster than a correct one delivered like a robot.

The “AI takes jobs” framing misses the point here. The calls being automated are the ones nobody wanted to staff: repetitive, high-volume, emotionally draining. The humans move up to the exceptions, the edge cases, the moments that actually need judgment. That’s been the pattern with every automation wave, and voice AI looks like it’s following the script.

Watch the government angle. Sovereign deployments in Ukraine and Greece are the leading edge of AI in public services. Multilingual, always-available, consistent: it’s a strong pitch for citizen services. Expect more governments to follow, and expect the procurement debates to be lively.

The bigger picture

The chatbot era taught the industry that people will talk to AI. The voice era is teaching it something more valuable: people will talk to AI the way they talk to people, about the boring stuff that keeps businesses running. Refunds. Renewals. Appointments. Fifteen million times a week.

ElevenLabs doubled its valuation in seven months because it found the biggest, most familiar interface in the world and made AI fluent in it. The phone call survived the internet, the smartphone, and the chatbot. Now it’s getting an upgrade.

If all this talk of conversation has you craving the real, unscripted kind, here’s what’s on around New York this week, from jazz nights to night markets. And if you’re the type who does their best thinking over something spicy, the city’s hottest chicken spots are ready when you are.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: First Radio Signal Detected Directly From an Exoplanet

Somewhere 63 light-years from Earth, a giant planet is putting on a light show so powerful we can hear it. Astronomers have, for the first time, traced a radio signal directly to an exoplanet rather than its star: repeating bursts of auroral radio emission from Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant roughly a dozen times Jupiter’s mass. The detection, made with South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope array, was reported this week and is already being called a landmark in observational astronomy.

How they caught it

Finding radio waves from an exoplanet is a needle-in-a-haystack problem with a twist: the needle and the haystack both glow. Stars are loud in radio. The team, led by graduate student Kevin Ortiz Ceballos of the Center for Astrophysics (Harvard and Smithsonian) with colleagues at the University of Oregon, had to prove the bursts came from the planet and not from Beta Pictoris itself.

Their calibration trick was elegant. Across four observing sessions in 2025 and 2026, they lined up their radio images against distant quasars, objects so far away they barely appear to move, using them as fixed pins on the sky. With that grid in place, the emission sat squarely on the planet. The signal carried strong circular polarization, the calling card of electron cyclotron maser emission, the same physics behind auroral radio bursts at Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth. In plain terms: this is a northern-lights broadcast from another world.

A magnetic field, measured from 63 light-years away

Here is the part that made astronomers sit up. The highest-frequency emission the team recorded implies a magnetic field of at least 1,250 gauss at the emitting region. Earth’s surface field is about half a gauss. Jupiter, the heavyweight of our solar system, tops out around 4 to 14 gauss depending on where you measure. Beta Pictoris b dwarfs them both by a staggering margin.

That number matters because magnetic fields are planetary armor. They deflect the charged particle streams pouring off a star, shielding the atmosphere from being stripped away over billions of years. When astronomers eventually hunt for habitable worlds, a magnetic field reading could become one of the first boxes they check. This is the first time anyone has measured one directly on a planet beyond our solar system.

The system itself is a beauty: Beta Pictoris b is only about 23 million years old, a baby by cosmic standards, still warm from its formation. The star hosts at least two more planets and a broad disk of gas and dust that may one day settle into a Kuiper Belt of its own. Its star is magnetically quiet, which is precisely what made the planet’s own signal stand out.

A fair note on the science

The paper has not yet completed peer review; it was posted as a preprint on September 15. That is worth saying plainly. Preprints are how fast-moving astronomy works these days, but the findings will face scrutiny before they enter the textbooks. The team’s calibration against quasars and the four separate observing sessions give the result real weight, and independent teams will surely try to reproduce it with other arrays.

What this unlocks

The practical payoff goes beyond one planet. If auroral radio emission can be picked up across dozens of light-years, astronomers suddenly have a new way to take a distant world’s vital signs. Magnetic fields, rotation periods, even hints about atmospheric composition could, in principle, be read from the radio dial. Teams are already talking about aiming the same technique at other young, massive exoplanets, and at the ultracool dwarf stars that sit on the blurry line between stars and planets.

There is a broader lesson in the method, too. The detection hinged on patience: four observing sessions spread across two years, and a calibration scheme clever enough to tell planet from star. Breakthroughs in astronomy increasingly look like this, not a single eureka night but a slow accumulation of careful measurements until the signal stands up and introduces itself.

Why this one feels different

Astronomy has given us a decade of firsts: first image of a black hole’s shadow, first gravitational waves, first atmospheric chemistry on distant worlds. But there is something unusually intimate about this one. We are not looking at Beta Pictoris b. We are listening to it. A magnetosphere flexing, auroras crackling at the poles of a world no human will ever visit, and the physics is the same physics that paints green curtains across Arctic skies. Stand under a dark sky sometime this fall (the city’s holiday lights season is about to begin, and Radio City’s own light show returns before long, but the real show is the one that never turns off) and remember: the universe is humming. Now, for the first time, we’ve picked out one voice in the choir and traced it home.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Digger Review: Tom Cruise’s Wild New Comedy Arrives Oct 2

Tomorrow, October 2, Tom Cruise stops running. He starts digging.

Digger, Alejandro G. Inarritu’s satirical black comedy for Warner Bros., opens in theaters and IMAX this Friday, and it might be the strangest big swing a major studio has taken in years. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, described as the most powerful man in the world: an aging oil tycoon who sets off on a frantic mission to prove he can save humanity from the very disaster his drilling unleashed. The tagline says it all. A comedy of catastrophic proportions.

If that sounds like a lot, good. It is supposed to.

The setup

The film is a Legendary Pictures production, directed by Inarritu from a screenplay he wrote with Oscar winners Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolas Giacobone, his Birdman collaborators, plus Sabina Berman. The story is credited to Berman, Inarritu and Jez Butterworth. It runs 129 minutes, cost somewhere between $160 and $180 million, and was shot entirely in VistaVision, the wide, lush format Inarritu favors.

The premise reads like a dare. The richest man alive breaks the planet, then demands credit for trying to fix it. Around him orbits an ensemble that most directors would trade a kidney for: Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Huller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons, with Emma D’Arcy, Sophie Wilde, Robert John Burke and Burn Gorman in support. Behind the camera, the cavalry is just as stacked: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, editors Stephen Mirrione and Conor O’Neill, production designer Dennis Gassner, composer Cosmo Sheldrake. Count the Oscars in that paragraph and you will run out of fingers.

Why this one is fascinating

This is Cruise’s first film under the Warner Bros. deal he signed in January 2026, and his first real collaboration with the studio since Edge of Tomorrow more than a decade ago. It is also Inarritu’s first English-language feature since The Revenant. Two heavyweights, both overdue for a new chapter, choosing to make a wild comedy about an oil baron trying to outrun his own mess. Nobody saw this coming, which is exactly the point.

Inarritu has described the shoot as joyful chaos. At Cannes he called it “insane” and said Cruise made him laugh every day, praising a comic range he had never seen from the star. A poster designed by artist Ed Ruscha was recently celebrated at LACMA. The studio is treating this like an event, not a release.

Early reactions are genuinely divided, and Warner Bros. is leaning into it. A new ad runs contradictory pull quotes side by side: masterpiece next to unpleasant, brilliant next to baffling, tied together with the line “Same film, different truth.” You can read that as marketing spin or as honesty. Either way, it takes confidence to sell a movie this way.

A comedy built like an epic

The craft here deserves its own paragraph. Inarritu shot the film over six months in the United Kingdom, entirely in VistaVision, a format that gives the image a depth and grain modern digital rarely manages. Lubezki’s involvement alone guarantees it will look like nothing else in the multiplex this fall. Even the marketing has an art-house streak: the key poster was designed by renowned American artist Ed Ruscha and was recently celebrated at LACMA, which is not a sentence you usually write about a Tom Cruise vehicle.

Cruise himself looks unrecognizable in the materials released so far: paunchy, weathered, clutching a decrepit cat on the poster. For a star whose brand is control, letting himself look this undone is the boldest special effect in the movie.

Should you go?

Here is the case for yes. Studios do not make $170 million original comedies anymore. They make sequels, and prequels, and sequels to prequels. When one of the last true movie stars and one of the great living directors decide to spend that kind of money on something nobody asked for, the only correct response is curiosity. The worst version of this movie is still more interesting than the safest franchise entry of the year.

See it big if you can. Lubezki shooting VistaVision is reason enough, and whatever you think of the satire, you will not be bored. Cruise, famously, does not do bored.

Make a day of it. Grab one of NYC’s best breakfast sandwiches before the show, then argue about the ending over hot chicken after. Digger opens October 2 in theaters and IMAX. Go decide for yourself.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Armadin Raises $255.5M at $2.5B for Agentic AI Security

There is a particular kind of founder who only needs a name. Kevin Mandia is one of them. The man who built Mandiant into the firm governments called when things went badly, and who sold it to Google, has a new company. And investors just handed it a quarter of a billion dollars to teach AI to think like a hacker, in defense of the good guys.

Armadin announced on October 1 that it has raised $255.5 million in Series B funding at a valuation of more than $2.5 billion. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, with new money from Bain Capital Ventures and Redpoint, plus a deep bench of returning backers: Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, In-Q-Tel, 8VC, and Ballistic Ventures. Total funding now sits at $445 million, for a company that only emerged from stealth seven months ago.

The core idea: fight AI with AI

Let’s be honest about the problem first, because it’s the kind of thing that usually gets framed with doom. Frontier AI models have compressed the time between a vulnerability being disclosed and a working exploit appearing. What used to take attackers weeks can now take hours. The old defenses, a penetration test twice a year and a scanner that spits out a list of findings, were built for a slower world.

Armadin’s answer is an inversion that feels obvious once you hear it: deploy an autonomous swarm of specialized AI agents that reason like a skilled adversary. Not a scanner that flags individual issues in isolation, but agents that chain individually low-severity weaknesses into full, validated attack paths. The company’s description of a kill chain is worth quoting in plain terms: it can run from unauthenticated remote code execution at the perimeter, through lateral movement inside the network, to full cloud compromise. The point is the chain, not the links. Scanners score each finding on its own and miss how they connect. Attackers don’t.

This is the part that should make security teams sit up. Armadin says security teams get to see the exact attack paths an adversary would use in production, with the blast radius of each mapped out, and can cut those paths before anyone exploits them. In other words: you get to watch the heist in rehearsal and lock the doors it would have used.

Why this raise matters right now

Two things make the timing notable. First, seven months after emerging from stealth, the company says it’s already running agentic attack campaigns in production for Fortune 500 enterprises and government customers. That is a very fast path from stealth to production, and it suggests the demand side is urgent. Enterprises aren’t buying a vision here; they’re buying capacity.

Second, the money flooding into AI-native defense is becoming one of the defining investment themes of 2026. Investors have been pouring capital into early-stage startups building protections against AI-driven cyberattacks all year. A $255.5 million Series B at a $2.5B-plus valuation is among the largest raises the category has ever seen, and the investor list reads like a vote of confidence in both the founder and the thesis.

Mandia’s pedigree is doing real work here. He has sold a security company to Google before, and he has been on the receiving end of the nastiest incident-response calls in the industry. When he says periodic testing can’t keep pace anymore, it lands differently than when a first-time founder says it. The track record is the pitch.

The “good-guy red team” model

Zoom out and Armadin represents a structural shift in how security gets bought. The traditional model is expertise-as-a-service: hire a red team for a few weeks, get a report, fix what you can, repeat next year. It’s episodic, expensive, and the attackers don’t take semesters off.

The agentic model is expertise-as-software: the adversary simulation never stops. The swarm keeps probing, keeps chaining findings, keeps updating the map of how an attacker would actually get in. For a Fortune 500 company with cloud estates that change daily, continuous is the only honest answer. Your infrastructure doesn’t pause between pen tests. Why should your testing?

There is a nuance worth holding onto. These systems are powerful, and power in security tooling always raises the dual-use question. But the framing here is firmly defensive: the agents find the paths, the security team closes them. The company exists to make the defense faster than the offense. In a year when AI safety has been a constant drumbeat, a well-capitalized defense-first company is good news for everyone who isn’t an attacker.

What to watch next

Three things will determine whether this raise is remembered as a landmark or just a big number.

Proof of production value. The Fortune 500 claim is the one to watch. If Armadin can show that continuous agentic testing measurably shrinks the window of exposure, competitors will have to match the model, and the whole pen-testing industry reorganizes around it.

The talent magnet effect. $445 million in total funding, a Mandia-led company, and a mission that reads like a spy novel: this is a recruiting machine. In a security talent market that has been brutally tight for years, that matters. The best defenders are going where the hardest problems are.

Pricing the defense premium. Right now, agentic security is enterprise-only by economics. The question is how fast the model gets cheap enough for the mid-market companies that are actually the softest targets. The sooner that happens, the bigger the dent in the attack economy.

The takeaway

Strip away the funding theatrics and the story is simple. The same AI advances that made attacks faster are now being aimed at defense, by one of the most credible security founders alive, with a quarter-billion dollars of fresh fuel. The attackers have had the momentum. This is the market voting, loudly, that the defenders are catching up.

If you’re in New York this week and security talk over dinner sounds fun (it is, trust me), there’s a full lineup of things to do across the city to pair with the conversation. And if the funding news has you dreaming of your own security startup, fuel up properly first: NYC’s best breakfast sandwiches are a fine place to sketch a pitch deck.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Rapamycin Boosts Brain Blood Flow in Alzheimer’s Risk Group

For the 25 million or so people worldwide who carry the APOE4 gene variant, the statistics have always felt like a sentence handed down early. Carry one copy of the variant and your lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s climbs roughly threefold; carry two and it climbs much higher. Yet the disease itself may not show up for decades. A new study out this week suggests that window, the long quiet stretch between risk and illness, might be exactly where medicine should aim.

Researchers at the University of Missouri gave a small group of healthy middle-aged adults a low daily dose of rapamycin, a drug long used to prevent organ transplant rejection, for four weeks. The twist: only the nine participants who carried APOE4 showed the benefit. Their cerebral blood flow rose by more than 15 percent across multiple brain regions. The fourteen non-carriers saw no significant change.

What the trial actually measured

Ai-Ling Lin, a professor in the School of Medicine and an investigator at the university’s Roy Blunt NextGen Precision Health building, designed the study around a simple observation. People with APOE4 tend to show reduced blood flow in certain brain regions years, sometimes decades, before memory problems appear. Dimmed circulation has long been treated as an early warning sign. Lin’s question was whether it could also be an early treatment target.

The participants, all between 45 and 65 and cognitively normal, took one milligram of rapamycin daily. Along with the blood-flow gains, the APOE4 group showed calmer inflammatory markers and healthier metabolic profiles, with minimal side effects. The paper, published in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism, frames the result as a proof of precision medicine: the right drug, for the right biology, at the right time.

Why blood flow matters more than we thought

Alzheimer’s research spent years fixated on amyloid plaques, the sticky protein clumps found in patients’ brains. Billions went into clearing them, with underwhelming results. Blood flow was the boring cousin of the field, harder to measure, less dramatic to describe.

That is changing. The brain burns roughly a fifth of the body’s energy despite weighing about three pounds, and it has no meaningful fuel reserve. When its plumbing underperforms, neurons starve in slow motion. Lin’s earlier mouse studies showed rapamycin could slow brain aging and restore circulation in APOE4 mice; the human data now rhymes with it. Improved flow means better waste clearance, better nutrient delivery, and a blood-brain barrier under less strain.

Rapamycin itself is no newcomer. Discovered in soil bacteria on Easter Island, it has been prescribed for decades. Repurposing an approved drug with a known safety profile is far faster than building a new molecule from scratch, which is part of why geroscientists have watched this class of compounds so closely. Lin’s group is already thinking about the next questions: how long the blood-flow gains persist after the four weeks end, whether the effect scales with dose, and, eventually, whether better plumbing actually translates into sharper memory years down the line. Those are the right questions, asked in the right order.

A stroll through one of the city’s many lively street fairs won’t replace medicine, but staying socially and physically active is exactly the kind of low-tech brain support the science keeps endorsing.

What comes next

Let’s keep the excitement honest. Twenty-three people is a pilot study, not a prescription. Four weeks is a blink. The trial measured blood flow and biomarkers, not memory scores or dementia rates, and those outcomes will need years of follow-up in much larger groups. Nobody should ask their doctor for rapamycin off-label on the strength of one paper, and Lin herself frames the work as a starting point, not a finish line.

Still, the direction is genuinely new. Instead of waiting for damage and trying to reverse it, the field is learning to spot the earliest wobble in the system and steady it. Genotype-specific responses, drugs matched to a person’s biology rather than their diagnosis, represent the kind of medicine Alzheimer’s prevention has been missing. And there is something quietly hopeful about the timing: the intervention worked best in healthy people who had no symptoms at all. Prevention, it turns out, may begin long before anyone thinks they are sick.

Small steps, taken early, have a way of adding up. A brisk morning walk, a real breakfast instead of a skipped one (the city’s breakfast sandwich game is stronger than ever), a conversation that keeps your mind turning, all of it feeds the same three-pound engine this study is trying to protect. Medicine may soon have one more tool for the job. The rest of the work is ours.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Treasure Island: Ridley Scott’s 2027 Pirate Epic Preview

Some release dates are routine calendar housekeeping. Then Sony drops Ridley Scott and Hugh Jackman on a pirate movie and suddenly the whole industry is paying attention. This week the studio confirmed that its new take on Treasure Island will hit theaters on November 11, 2027, anchoring a late-year one-two punch alongside the newly dated 24 Jump Street.

It is the newest major announcement on the board, and frankly the most interesting one. Scott, at 88, keeps choosing projects like a man with half his career ahead of him. Jackman keeps picking roles that dare people to underestimate him. Put them together on Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel and you get the kind of old-school movie event that doesn’t come around often anymore.

What Sony actually confirmed

The details that are locked in: Scott directs and produces. Jackman leads the cast. The screenplay comes from Jack Thorne, who co-created Netflix’s acclaimed Adolescence and wrote the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The cast also includes Hugh Grant and Adolescence breakout Owen Cooper, whose roles have not been specified yet.

The story is the one every schoolkid knows. A young boy finds a map to a legendary buried treasure, sets out on a perilous sea voyage, and ends up locked in a battle of wits with the charismatic, treacherous Long John Silver. Different outlets disagree on exactly which pirate Jackman is playing, with some naming Silver and others Blackbeard, so we will wait for Sony’s official word on that. What is certain is that this is a serious, grown-up treatment. Forget the felt pirates. The Muppets had their turn.

Why this pairing matters

Scott does not make small pictures, and he does not make them for long. His filmography is a wall of epics: Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Napoleon. He shoots fast, he builds worlds you can smell, and he has a particular gift for making history feel like it is happening right now, with dirt under its fingernails.

Jackman, for his part, has spent the back half of his career proving range is not a rumor. Wolverine made him a star; The Greatest Showman made him a song-and-dance man; Logan made him an actor critics had to take seriously. A pirate role under Scott’s direction gives him a stage big enough for all of it. He has played a pirate before, in 2015’s Pan, but that was a cartoon villain in a cartoon movie. This sounds like something else entirely.

And then there is Thorne. Hiring the man who wrote Adolescence, one of the most talked-about television events of 2025, tells you Sony wants this to be a character piece with a pulse, not a theme-park ride with sails. The best pirate stories were always about greed and loyalty wearing costumes. Thorne knows how to write that.

The pirate competition

Here is the wrinkle. Scott’s Treasure Island will not be the only version in town. A six-part series starring Hayley Atwell, with David Oyelowo as Long John Silver, is headed to streaming this October via MGM+ and Paramount+. That puts more than a year between the two adaptations, and honestly, the contrast could help both. Television does the slow burn. Scott does the spectacle. Audiences who binge the series in October will be primed for the big screen version in November 2027.

It is also worth noting the calendar company Sony is keeping. 24 Jump Street lands December 10, 2027, with Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum and Ice Cube reportedly returning and Rodney Rothman directing. Two wildly different films, one month apart: pirate epic, then self-aware comedy sequel. That is a studio with confidence.

The bottom line

We are more than a year out, and plenty can change. Productions shift, dates move, casts evolve. But the bones of this are strong: a master director, a star at the height of his powers, a writer with genuine literary chops, and one of the great adventure stories ever written. If you only follow one 2027 release date, make it this one.

Until November 2027, there are plenty of adventures closer to home. This week’s lineup of books, jazz, salsa and night markets will keep any explorer busy, and the city’s 2026 holiday tree and lights celebrations are already on the calendar. Yo ho ho, indeed.