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The Blood of Dawnwalker is the product of lives spent worshipping RPGs. Its developer, Rebel Wolves, was co-founded by a cohort of CD Projekt Red veterans – writers, artists and directors with credits including The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077. After spending four hours with The Blood of Dawnwalker , sucking blood and coming to grips with being a vampire in an open-world RPG, I caught up with game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz and environment artist Adam Payet to learn more about the personal tastes driving their studio's debut.

Tomaszkiewicz, best known for directing The Witcher 3, found his way to the genre as a means of stepping out from the real world. "My father was a surgeon, but also an alcoholic. It was really hard in our childhood, and video games were my escape," he tells me. "I started from the Spectrum [computer] and I'd rewrite games from the magazines. Then I had an Atari and the NGPC games, and I also played pen and paper RPGs."

Meanwhile, Payet fell in love with the first Baldur's Gate and the rest was history. "In terms of [Tomaszkiewicz's]personal and family-related background, it's a very similar story to me, weirdly," he says. While Tomaszkiewicz channeled his passion for RPGs into CD Projekt Red over the years, moving from The Witcher trilogy's story and game design to lead quest designer and ultimately game director, Payet was inspired by Minecraft to broach game development during the COVID-19 pandemic. "I was taken by the fact there was a world I could shape as well as explore," he recalls. "At one point I got frustrated that it's all cubes, so I started learning software to make my own things."

Salem's Gate

(Image credit: Rebel Wolves) Futures past

(Image credit: Rebel Wolves) As The Blood of Dawnwalker reveals a modern-day twist, devs confirm our choices in the vampire RPG will carry into a "saga" of sequels

Although I spent four hours playing The Blood of Dawnwalker , it took a fraction of that time to lose myself in its setting. It's something I discuss in my hands-on preview, but the speed at which Rebel Wolves makes you care about its 14th century world is remarkable. So much has happened here before Coen's story begins – war and the Black Plague have left their mark on Vale Sangora, their effects visible in dilapidated villages and looming stone watchtowers. Some of the threads I pull at during exploration, from folktales mentioned in passing to wall paintings in an ancient tomb, hint at lore stretching back hundreds of years.

Main antagonist Brencis has been sucking blood since the Roman Empire's rule, and as freshly-turned progeny Coen fights his sire's rule in Vale Sangora, the ancient vampire and his court can retaliate by issuing edicts and wielding their influence against him across the open-world. In tandem with The Blood of Dawnwalker's time-as-a-currency mechanic, in which quests and side activities nudge the clock hands forward, the world feels truly dynamic – I'm desperate to run amok, but equally feel like I've just started a good book.

(Image credit: Rebel Wolves) It makes it so much easier to build a world when you know its history

Adam Payet, environment artist

Having played my fair share of slow-burn RPGs, I don't take The Blood of Dawnwalker's immediate magnetism for granted. Pressed on how it's achieved, Tomaszkiewicz points to the team's "years of experience" working with "the best in the industry" – which, he adds, includes Rebel Wolves in its current iteration. "We put our heart and soul into [our] games," says Tomaszkiewicz. "We fight a lot while we're doing it, and there's a lot of complaining about the stuff we don't like, so we try to make it better and better. This way, with a lot of iteration, we are where we are."

Joining The Blood of Dawnwalker's development at a later date, Payet's introduction to Vale Sangora mirrors my literary impressions more directly. In his first week at Rebel Wolves, he was asked to read the game's hefty "lore bible" and told that the game's world "is huge not necessarily in terms of physicality, but in terms of lore."

"All of that has been painstakingly researched and written so that what you see in the game is just the tip of the iceberg," he adds. "But the iceberg does exist, and that lends credibility. It makes it so much easier to build a world when you know its history."

What's in a name?

(Image credit: Rebel Wolves) We want to have our own identity

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, game director

The RPG genre has worn many hats over the years. Tabletop RPGs hitch their wagons to raw imagination and remain timeless for it, and while video games initially sought to replicate that as authentically as possible – often with mechanically dense isometric titles and some of the best tactical RPGs to date – years of lighter third-person adventures and action RPGs have broadened their horizons further. Even now, we see the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Baldur's Gate 3 find mainstream success by building upon the genre's earliest philosophies and mechanics.

With the term 'RPG' now standing for so much, I ask the pair whether they feel a core identity remains or if player taste has fragmented too much for an umbrella term.

Payet brings up a recent conversation within Rebel Wolves. "We miss when genre wasn't a thing, back in the '90s or early 2000s. When you bought a game pre-YouTube, pre-[online] games media, all you had was the title and a blurb of text on the back. Three screenshots, and you didn't know anything until you opened the booklet!"

"It wasn't like 'Oh, that's an RPG', or 'that's a roguelike', or Metroidvania, or whatever," he adds. "It was just: it's a game – go do the thing! Not being constrained by a label of this or that genre made it so people went out with crazy ideas."

(Image credit: Rebel Wolves) "For me, the core will always be the same," says Tomaszkiewicz. "The clue is [in the name] – to get into the role."

The director likens shifting norms and features to "branches" of the genre, and in doing so, speaks to the ambition that marks The Blood of Dawnwalker as one to watch. "I hope that we created our own [RPG] branch," he says. "With this narrative sandbox, this particular combat, and day and night creating other ways to experience the game, this is the branch we want to develop. We want to have our own identity."

One more bite?

The Blood of Dawnwalker preview

The Blood of Dawnwalker's pen-and-paper inspirations

Interview: The Blood of Dawnwalker's lead quest designer

5 ways The Blood of Dawnwalker impresses

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A constellation of cubesats fitted with special detectors could sniff out nuclear weapons hidden on satellites launched by adversary nations, according to a new study.

In 2024, rumors began to swirl in military circles that Russia might be developing a space-borne nuclear weapon . At that time, two years into the war in Ukraine, Russia was well aware of how big a lifeline SpaceX's Starlink broadband constellation had been for the Ukrainians. Starlink has not only provided connectivity to ravaged cities and frontline troops but also helped Ukrainians counter-attack the Russian invaders more effectively.

Drones fitted with Starlink terminals could reach much more distant targets than those controlled via conventional radio links. As the Starlink signal is almost impossible to disrupt by jamming , the idea that Russia might consider wiping the megaconstellation out by brute force didn't seem impossible.

Researchers know that a nuclear detonation in orbit would flood the space around Earth with fast, energetic electrons. These particles would destroy most unhardened satellites within range, which would extend to orbits even hundreds of miles away from the explosion.

"It would make the low Earth orbit and very low Earth orbit — where the Starlink satellites are, where many reconnaissance and communications satellites are, and where the International Space Station is — uninhabitable for a long period of time," Areg Danagoulian, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the new paper describing the proposed detection method, told Space.com.

"We would essentially not only lose the satellites in those orbits, we would lose those orbits for a few years," he added.

Humankind has already seen the effects of a nuclear explosion in space. In 1962, the U.S. detonated a 1.4-megaton hydrogen bomb at an altitude of 240 miles (400 kilometers) above the Pacific Ocean. Radiation from the explosion, known as the Starfish Prime test, destroyed one-third of all satellites in orbit at that time. Admittedly, there weren't that many up there — fewer than 100 — but the impact was far-reaching.

Today, a nuclear detonation in space would be a catastrophe. It would knock out internet-beaming constellations such as Starlink and Amazon Leo , as well as hundreds of Earth-observing satellites that keep an eye on the activity of adversary nations, the changing climate and areas struck by natural disasters.

Photograph of an aurora caused by the Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test explosion on July 9, 1962. (Image credit: Public Domain) No reliable way currently exists to detect and defuse a nuclear bomb in space. Danagoulian proposes a constellation of small "9U" cubesats , each one about the size of a large shoebox and each carrying a special detector capable of sensing radiation emitted by unexploded nulear bombs.

He explores a scenario in which Russia launches a suspected space nuke into an orbit with an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 km). That number is not random. In 2022, Russia's Kosmos 2553 satellite, orbiting at that exact altitude, triggered suspicions it might be testing components for a future orbital nuclear weapon.

Russia claims the satellite just observes Earth. At that altitude, the satellite passes through the Van Allen belt , a region of intense cosmic radiation trapped by Earth's magnetic field. Most of the belt stretches between altitudes of around 600 miles (1,000 km) to tens of thousands of miles, but in some areas the radiation can reach much closer to Earth's surface.

The interaction between the fissile material inside the nuke and the energetic particles from the radiation belt would create distinct signatures, Danagoulian said, which could help confirm whether a suspicious satellite carries a nuke or not.

"The thermonuclear weapon would contain a significant amount of uranium," Danagoulian said. "The high-energy protons [in the uranium] would break up when another proton is coming in and shred the nuclei. That would knock out a large number of neutrons. This interaction turns that device into a very intense neutron source that otherwise would not be there."

The process is known as proton-induced neutron spallation, which essentially means the ejection of fragments from material triggered by impacts of protons.

Two figures from the 2008 "Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack" illustrating the effects of a high-altitude nuclear explosion in Earth's atmosphere and how Earth's natural radiation belts can trap radiation released by nuclear detonations in or near space. (Image credit: U.S. Dept. of Defense) The detector satellite Danagoulian proposes would have to be able to get quite close to the suspect spacecraft — a few kilometers. The inspector spacecraft would carry a sensor combining two types of detectors. At the heart of the device is a neutron scintillator, which detects all incoming neutrons and protons. Around it is a "cage of diamond" detector that detects only neutrons — not protons. Such a set-up helps filter out the particles present in the environment naturally, said Danagoulian. In addition, by using two "planes of neutron detectors," the sensor can determine the direction from which the neutrons arrived.

"If the external diamond detector triggers and gives a signal, you can ignore the particle, because it's most likely a proton and not a neutron," said Danagoulian. "Once you identify those neutrons, by having those two detections, you can back project and find out where the neutron came from."

Danagoulian says such a nuke sniffer would have to be launched into an orbit aligned with that of the suspicious satellite and creep up as close as 2.5 miles (4 km) from it. It would then take about a week to gather enough measurements to confirm whether the object is hiding a nuke or not. A constellation of 10 such satellites could reduce the process to mere hours, Danagoulian said.

If a nuke were detected, the military could then try to jam the satellite's communications link from the ground, making it impossible for the adversary to remotely detonate the bomb. There is currently no technology available to safely defuse a nuclear weapon in space.

The United Nations Outer Space Treaty , which provides the legal foundation for humankind's use of outer space, bans the use of nuclear weapons in orbit. However, the treaty has no means to ensure compliance.

Other approaches to nuke detection in space have been explored, including maneuverable X-ray satellites, but those would be quite a bit more complex and expensive.

Danagoulian also suggests that high-grade radiation hardening could improve satellites' chances of surviving a nuclear winter in space.

The paper was published online in the journal Nature today (July 8).

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Bitcoin Magazine

CFTC Chair Says Clarity Act Is ‘So Close’ As August Deadline Nears

Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Michael Selig said the Clarity Act remains within reach, days after Congress missed its July 4 target to pass the crypto market-structure bill. “We’re so close. We have to get this done,” Selig told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.

Some analysts give the measure even odds of passage before the August 7 recess.

The bill would divide oversight of digital assets between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, a split the industry has sought for years. The House passed the legislation last summer. The Senate has yet to hold a floor vote.

Selig, a Trump appointee confirmed in December , backed the Clarity Act effort as a matter of national competitiveness. He backed the effort as a matter of national competitiveness.

“It’s critical that we have a federal standard for crypto assets,” he said, pointing to a patchwork of state laws that, in his account, has hurt U.S. business. He described the goal as certainty, clarity, and consumer protection, and called the measure bipartisan. “We have to get it across the line,” he said.

Asked about the holdup, Selig pointed to scope. Democrats have pressed for ethics language addressing President Trump, his family, and their crypto ventures, a demand he characterized as a distraction.

“There’s a little bit of creep into ethics and other issues, and they’re just derailing the real opportunity to have a bipartisan bill,” he said.

Democrats have framed the Clarity Act provisions as consumer protection. The bill has also drawn disputes over illicit-finance rules and over a reopened piece of the GENIUS Act , the stablecoin law, that concerns whether exchanges may pay yield on stablecoin balances.

Senator Cynthia Lummis, who leads the Senate Banking Committee’s digital assets subcommittee, has said negotiators aim to release bill text and hold a vote this month.

The committee advanced the measure in a 15-9 vote , with two Democrats joining Republicans. Lawmakers have warned that a failure to act before the recess could delay the next opening for years.

Selig on prediction markets, Iran beyond Clarity Act

Bartiromo also asked Selig about prediction markets, where Kalshi and Polymarket processed a combined $24 billion in volume over the past year.

Selig said the CFTC has proposed rules for the sector and has sued nine states in a fight over jurisdiction. On markets during the U.S. strikes on Iran near the Strait of Hormuz, he said crypto held its ground and served as a hedge, while the agency worked to keep oil and derivatives markets orderly.

For now, the Clarity Act’s fate rests on released text, a Senate vote, and a calendar that leaves a few weeks before the August recess.

This post CFTC Chair Says Clarity Act Is ‘So Close’ As August Deadline Nears first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman .

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The Google Photos app on Android is being updated with a new navigation button layout.

The new bottom bar is visually smaller and persistent across different views in the Photos app.

This version has been available on iOS since early 2026, but is new for Android users.

Early this year, Google rolled out a nice little UI tweak for Google Photos . The app’s bottom navigation bar was redesigned in a February update, making it more compact and allowing more of your photos to show through. At the time, that update only hit the iOS version of Photos — but now, it’s rolling out broadly on Android, too.

The redesigned bottom bar is now available for many users on Android, as spotted by 9to5Google . We’re seeing it on our own phones here at Android Authority, too.

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The brain's memory center may come "prewired," rather than being built from scratch after birth, a new study in mice finds.

The research, published in April in the journal Nature Communications , offers a new perspective on a long-standing question in neuroscience: Does the brain begin as a blank slate and build memories by adding connections through experience, or does it come with built-in wiring? The new research focused on the hippocampus , a seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain that's essential for forming memories.

Rather than supporting either theory directly, the research points to the latter idea but adds a significant twist.

The researchers focused on a region of the hippocampus called cornu ammonis 3 (CA3), which plays a central role in storing and recalling memories. A trait known as plasticity enables neurons within CA3 to continuously strengthen and weaken their connections and thus strengthen or weaken different memories.

The team examined mouse brain tissue collected shortly after birth, during adolescence or during adulthood. They found that early in life, hippocampal networks are densely wired, with many neurons hyperconnected in a seemingly random pattern. As the brain matures, these haphazard networks become sparser yet more structured as connections are pruned. This pruning begins soon after birth, with significant declines in connectivity by adolescence.

The finding discounts the idea that the hippocampus starts out as a blank slate, or "tabula rasa."

"We find, in a nutshell, that the system is not a tabula rasa, as we thought originally, where you can just write information and then at some point, this information fills the system," said study co-author Peter Jonas , a neuroscientist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. "Rather, it starts out as a tabula plena [full slate] and then becomes more sparser and specifically connected."​​

This pattern may help to explain why we remember so little from infancy .

Memories are thought to be stored within networks of neurons that fire together, representing specific experiences. In a young brain, however, these connections between neurons, called synapses, behave differently, the study suggests. In young brain tissue, a single input could cause a neuron to fire, the team found, while in mature networks, neurons typically require multiple inputs to fire.

In very young mice, neurons in a region of the hippocampus called CA3 form a dense, highly interconnected network (yellow), with connections that are largely random. (Image credit: Jake Watson / ISTA) Jonas said the team was surprised by not only the early pruning of connections but also how strong those early connections were. "You might think that early in development, you have poor synapses and weak synapses, but we found the opposite," he told Live Science.

This excitability comes at a cost, however: When neurons are activated too easily, different experiences can trigger overlapping patterns of activity. If that overlap is too great, the brain may struggle to distinguish one memory from another. Instead of forming distinct networks, it may generate broader, less-specific memories. In other words, the system is very active but not very precise.

This imprecision may affect behavior, too. For example, rodent studies show that young animals learn to fear an area of a cage where they received a mild shock, freezing when they return to it. But unlike adults, who freeze at that exact location, young animals also have this response in similar environments — so the memory is there, but it's not precise.

As mice mature, the network within CA3 becomes sparser but more organized (blue) with pruning refining the once-dense web of neural connections. (Image credit: Jake Watson / ISTA) As the brain matures, neurons become more selective and require multiple inputs to fire. The result is more distinct, separate networks that translate to specific and stable memories. So in regard to the inability to recall early childhood, it may be that our earliest memories are too poorly defined to be retained in the long term.

The findings are consistent with a growing body of research on how memory develops, said Hauður Freyja Ólafsdóttir, an assistant professor at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

"It's exciting on multiple fronts," Ólafsdóttir, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "There is plenty of developmental psychology work that suggests that memory becomes more specific with age. And so it's kind of interesting that now, at the circuit level, we're also seeing that the connectivity patterns are becoming sparser."

So what drives brain wiring before birth? That dense, early connectivity may result from a genetically programmed developmental process. Then, after birth, experience refines the wiring, Jonas suggested.

The findings do not rule out the possibility that experiences before birth leave lasting traces in the brain. But Ólafsdóttir thinks those early forms of learning rely on different neural systems than mature hippocampal circuits.

"I'm not disputing that they're there and that they have influence," she said, referencing prenatal experiences. "They leave a trace, let's say, in our brain and probably in our psychology even." But those traces may not resemble the detailed memories formed later in life.

Related stories

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'As if a shudder ran from its brain to its body': The neuroscientists that learned to control memories in rodents

When asked whether the connections that form before birth represent true memories or are just a byproduct of prenatal development, Jonas said, "The latter is more likely."

The "full slate" may give the brain a crucial head start by enabling neurons to quickly link different types of information, such as sights, sounds and smells. If the brain began as a blank slate, neurons might be too sparsely connected to find each other, making early communication difficult, the study authors think.

By starting with an overconnected network, the hippocampus may ensure that the necessary wiring is already in place, Jonas theorized.

This article was first published May 6, 2026.

See how much you know about the most complex organ in the human body with our brain quiz!

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Less than three years after it went live on Steam, Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis is calling it quits. Square Enix said in an end-of-service announcement that the sale of Red Crystal in-game currency has already been halted, and the game itself will be taken offline on October 6.

Square Enix apologized for any disappointment in its shutdown announcement, saying that it has "worked to provide the best possible experience for our players" since the game went live in 2023. However, for reasons unspecified, "we have determined that it will be difficult to continue doing so and have made the decision to end service."

A tepid response to the game may be a big part of the issue. Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis holds a "mixed" rating on Steam , and its player numbers have been in a slow, bumpy, but overall steady decline since it launched on that platform. Android and iOS versions of the game have considerably better ratings, but player numbers aren't known.

PC Gamer Final Fantasy fan Mollie Taylor described Ever Crisis as "a retelling of Final Fantasy 7's overarching story, offering the narrative from the original game, the movie Advent Children, and spin-off games Before Crisis, Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus," which seems to me like a lot of Final Fantasy. She seemed a little bit dubious about its gacha game mechanics, though (or maybe just tired of it as a concept), and that can be seen in the Steam reviews too, many of which complain about its monetization and relentless grind.

In-game events will continue to run until Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis shuts down—Square Enix dropped a final roadmap leading into the closure that you can check out below. It also makes clear that once the servers close, it is over: "To protect users' personal information, account information will be deleted once all procedures associated with the end of the service have been completed."

(Image credit: Square Enix)