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Volkswagen’s aggressive ID. Unyx 09 is gearing up for launch.

Chinese documents reveal the sporty sedan will offer nearly 500 hp.

The model is larger than the ID.7 and offered with RWD and AWD.

At the Beijing Auto Show earlier this year, Volkswagen unveiled a slew of new models including the ID. Unyx 09. The car was developed with Xpeng, but the company didn’t say much about it other than sales would begin later this year.

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With a launch approaching, the 09 has been detailed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. There will be two variants and the base model will have a rear-mounted motor developing 308 hp (230 kW / 313 PS).

More: VW Storms Beijing With Two New ID Models And A Jetta Crossover Concept

Customers will also be able to get an all-wheel drive variant, which adds a 188 hp (140 kW / 190 PS) front motor into the mix. This means we can expect a combined maximum output of 496 hp (370 kW / 503 PS).

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Both have a top speed of 124 mph (200 km/h) and a lithium iron phosphate battery sourced from CATL. Since the powertrains appear to be shared with the ID. Unyx 08 , it’s possible the 09 could have 82 and 95 kWh options.

Since we’ve already seen the car before, we’ll briefly note it’s a looker with an aggressive design that makes the ID.7 look like it runs on Ambien. The menacing front end features split lighting units and a subtle shark nose design.

The sporty styling continues further back with blacked out A-pillars, muscular bodywork, and a gently sloping roofline. They’re joined by a panoramic glass roof and 20- or 21-inch wheels.

At the rear, there are slender taillights with a red Volkswagen logo in the middle. We can also see a wide trunk and a black bumper with an integrated diffuser.

The ID. Unyx 09 measures 200 inches (5,081 mm) long, 78 inches (1,980 mm) wide, and 59.4-60 inches (1,509-1,526) tall. The model also has a wheelbase that spans 119.3 inches (3,030 mm). Customers can also expect curb weights of 4,866 lbs (2,207 kg) and 5,086 lbs (2,307 kg).

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To put those numbers into perspective, the model is 4.7 inches (119 mm) longer than the ID.7 and has an extra 2.5 inches (64 mm) between the wheels.

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Laura Fryer, a veteran of the video game industry and one of the founding members of the original Xbox project, is sounding the alarm amidst the industry's shift toward all-digital games.

Fryer recently uploaded a new video to her YouTube channel in which she warns specifically against PlayStation's recent announcement that it's ending production of physical game discs starting in 2028 . She uses a story about her family's Rock Band tradition to make a point about the impermanence of digital-only games, explaining that she once spent "hundreds of dollars on Rock Band songs" only to lose them over a licensing issue. After her original Xbox died and was replaced by a newer model, she was unable to download the songs on her working console because they had been delisted. "Eventually, we just gave up," Fryer says, tragically. "We gave up on our favorite family game."

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you've shared a similar experience with digital games over the years. Publishers have offered fully digital versions of games for decades now, and most purchases made on PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox storefronts don't come with any sort of physical token guaranteeing permanent ownership, but with PlayStation moving away from physical discs altogether, it's likely situations like Fryer's will become much more commonplace in the next console generation.

Fryer says her Rock Band story isn't just a "one-off technical glitch," but "the blueprint for what Sony is planning next. "So when people ask me what I think about Sony's recent announcement that they're going all digital, that's all I can think about."

Fryer also wades into the debate about physical's market share compared to digital , which some analysts say is as low as 10% physical vs 90% digital, but Fryer argues that the inclusion of digital-only games in those comparisons makes "digital look way more dominant than it actually is."

She also points to an old promotional video in which then-president of SIE Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida hypes up the PS4's ability to read offline discs when Xbox One's pre-launch plan was to make all games require an internet connection. These days, of course, things are different, with GTA 6 , arguably the biggest game of the century, essentially going all digital. This, in Fryer's view, opened the floodgates.

"Sony waited for Rockstar to make the first move, take the heat, and now they're going all-in to make this the new normal," she says.

Fryer also makes the convincing argument that PlayStation going discless isn't just about reducing production costs for new games and hardware, claiming that it's also about erasing the second-hand market and re-gaining complete control over its ecosystem. "All the major players; Sony, Microsoft, even Hollywood; they're all aligned here. Digital kills the used market and it stops the old library from competing with new games on the next console," she says.

Ultimately, Fryer says a digital future is likely "inevitable" due to convenience, but says even a company as trusted by gamers as Valve is prone to leadership changes that could potentially result in digital libraries like the ones on Steam becoming just as vulnerable as song collections on Rock Band.

"I admit, most of my Steam library is digital too, because I trust they won't pull the games," Fryer says. "But I worry about that, because platforms depend on good leadership. Gabe Newell will not run Steam forever, and we've seen from Xbox how fast priorities can shift when you get new leadership," she adds, seemingly referring to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's big "reset."

Wrapping up her argument against a digital-only marketplace, Fryer goes full circle with what she calls her "Rock Band warning:

"Digital is convenient until someone else decides you've had enough, and there are some games and movies where I will never have enough," she says. "Physical gives you real ownership, right? And in my case, physical would've protected those irreplaceable memories."

GamesRadar's Dustin agrees: PlayStation killing discs is bad for everyone, whether you care about physical games or not

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There are some obvious big picture issues that stand between us and useful quantum computing. Issues like whether we can make enough high-quality hardware qubits to connect into the error-corrected logical qubits we need, and how we generate the states needed to perform universal computation on those logical qubits. But there are also many less prominent challenges that will need to be solved before we can perform calculations.

One of those challenges, which only affects some types of hardware, is calibration. For devices we manufacture, like superconducting qubits, there are always subtle variations among individual qubits. (This is not true when we use something like an atom to hold the qubit, but the lasers that control them can drift.) As a result, this hardware is put through a process called calibration, where we test different frequencies and amplitudes of the microwave pulses that control them to find the combination that produces the lowest error rates, and then save those settings for use in calculations.

However, you can't perform the typical calibration process while e you're doing calculations, which means drift becomes an issue for long and complicated algorithms. Google, though, has figured out that it's possible to do calibration using the same data that's used for error correction.

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September is expected to be an unprecedented month for massive video games. Just about every studio has rushed to get their latest titles out of the way of Grand Theft Auto VI , which is shaping up to be the biggest media release of the year and is bound to dominate the conversation once it drops in November. Capcom's Onimusha: Way of the Sword , Nintendo's Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave , Remedy's Control Resonant , and Konami and Annapurna's Silent Hill: Townfall represent just some of the notable launches due for September, with more set to follow in October. Smack in the middle of the month, on September 15, however, is a game that could arguably be the most anticipated of the bunch — Marvel's Wolverine .

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Navy orders first 50 Blackbeard hypersonic missiles for $23.4 million total

Each Blackbeard missile reportedly costs under $300,000 once full production begins

Castelion has received three separate Navy funding rounds since February 2026

A California defense startup is now selling hypersonic missiles priced like a luxury vehicle rather than a mansion, marking a shift in weapons pricing.

Castelion's Blackbeard missile travels in excess of Mach 5 and reportedly costs under $300,000 per completed round, a fraction of typical hypersonic pricing.

The pricing became real on June 16 2026, when the US Navy ordered the first 50 production rounds for $23.4 million.

The Navy's first real purchase

The order also covers 50 shipping and storage containers, running primarily through Castelion's sprawling New Mexico factory campus.

It is the third Navy payment in five months, following $50 million in February to push Blackbeard from prototype toward operational use.

In April 2026, the Navy committed a further $105 million specifically to integrate Blackbeard onto the F/A-18 and to run the carrier-suitability testing required before any missile can operate safely from a carrier deck.

According to Bryon Hargis, CEO and co-founder of Castelion, the funding reflects the Navy's commitment to "advancing affordable, manufacturable long-range strike capability."

Castelion was founded by former SpaceX engineers and has already completed more than two dozen flight tests within three years.

One of those flight tests took place at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah during the latter part of 2025.

Castelion has also partnered with uncrewed-boat maker Saronic to demonstrate launching Blackbeard missiles from a robotic surface vessel at sea.

If testing continues to succeed, the eventual plan is to purchase Blackbeard missiles by the thousand rather than by the dozen.

In May 2026, the company signed a framework agreement with the Department of War covering multi-year production of roughly 500 weapons annually.

Cheaper parts from unrelated industries

The affordability behind Blackbeard rests heavily on components borrowed from several industries far removed from traditional aerospace manufacturing methods and vendors.

Chief Operating Officer Sean Pitt said the company uses automotive-grade Field-Programmable Gate Arrays originally built for driver assistance systems and electric vehicles.

These automotive processors cost roughly one-tenth as much as aerospace equivalents and arrive about six times faster, Pitt said.

Castelion has also replaced aerospace-grade metal tubing with precision-machined tubes originally designed for fracking operations in the oil and gas sector.

These tubes withstand heat and pressure levels comparable to rocket motor requirements, yet come from many more vendors at lower prices.

Rival startup Anduril has adopted a similar approach, using pharmaceutical-industry mixing technology to process rocket motor propellant far faster than legacy methods.

Castelion, recently valued at nearly $3 billion, has secured Pentagon contracts covering more than 500 hypersonic weapons under current agreements.

Via Defense News

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Head coach says ‘you can’t avoid focusing’ on the forward, who has form against Tuchel’s sides, before the World Cup quarter-final

The way that Thomas Tuchel remembers it, he was the only choice for the award. He had led Chelsea to Champions League glory in 2020-21 so when the German publication Sport Bild named its coach of the season, it had to give it to him. “Yeah, there was no way out,” the England head coach says, with a smile. “Because if Jürgen Klopp won at the same time the Charity Shield they give it to him …”

The line is delivered in trademark style: deadpan, apart from the twinkle in his eye and it is especially funny to imagine Klopp’s reaction when he reads it. What happened next for Tuchel was less of a laughing matter. As a part of the deal, he gave an interview to Sport Bild and during it he joked about how he would have “no problem” bringing Erling Haaland to Chelsea and playing him up front with Romelu Lukaku.

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