Tom Tom

Elon Musk floated a new political party on Friday after falling out with President Trump over the big, beautiful bill.

He launched a Thursday poll on the social platform X, which he owns, asking about whether or not the country needed a new faction for political nominees.

“The people have spoken. A new political party is needed in America to represent the 80% in the middle! And exactly 80% of people agree. This is fate,” Musk wrote, citing numbers from his survey.

He followed up with a potential name for the group, “The America Party.”

In recent days, Musk has railed against Trump for suggesting the United States increase its national debt by $4 trillion as proposed in the bill.

The tech giant said it “undermines” all the work he did at the Department of Government Efficiency, geared towards reducing government spending.

Florida Republican Rep. Jimmy Patronis cast doubt on Musk’s claim of creating “The America Party” in Friday comments, suggesting the two will be “hanging around again” shortly.

“Elon Musk is not gonna create a new political party,” Patronis told NewsNation’s Blake Burman during an appearance on “The Hill.”

“Trump knows that sometimes you’re going to have falling out with those that you trust, you like, that you’re friends with. It happens with us in DC all the time. So again. Mark my words. About a month from now, these guys will be hanging around again."

Nord Quantique has announced what it calls a breakthrough in quantum physics that will make quantum error correction a bit better. Errors are the top obstacle today preventing the industry from having usable quantum computers, since the individual qubits are prone to mistakes and degradation.

Typically, quantum computing companies address the error problem with redundancy. They add extra qubits to compensate for those that go off the rails. The problem is that the more qubits, the faster the errors multiply, and the more additional qubits the computer needs to compensate for.

Getting to a point where adding new qubits lowers the error rate is the break-even point, what some experts call the “escape velocity” for quantum computing. Several companies have claimed to reach this point, though, without seeing them build large-scale quantum computers there’s no way to really know for sure.

Nord Quantique claims to be one of the companies to have reached this point.

Their trick? To create a qubit that holds multiple photons inside, and then use the redundant photons for error correction. They claim that this reduces the need to have any extra qubits, making it possible to build large, usable, quantum computers.

According to quantum computing expert Bob Sutor, founder and CEO at Sutor Group Intelligence and Advisory, it takes, on average, 1,000 redundant qubits to error-correct one qubit.

The industry calls this “logical qubits” — so, on average, 1,000 physical qubits is equivalent to one usable, working logical qubit. In Nord Quantique’s approach, one physical qubit is the same as one logical qubit.

“It’s almost like turning the error correction problem inside out,” says Sutor. “Instead of having redundant qubits on the outside to create one good logical qubit, you’re focusing on the inside of the qubit.”

According to Sutor, quantum computers get interesting at around 100,000 qubits. At a ratio of 1,000-to-one, that will require 100 million physical qubits to accomplish. Today’s most advanced quantum computers have less than 1,200 qubits.

By reducing the ratio, quantum computers would need a thousand times fewer qubits, making them significantly easier to build and scale, while also requiring less power and computational error-correction overhead. Last year, Nord Quantique demonstrated that their multiple-photons-in-a-single-qubit approach was feasible, creating qubits with up to 30 photons inside.

The limitation then was that their error correcting photons were only able to compensate for two types of errors. In today’s announcement, they’ve figured out how to compensate for six types of errors, by adding an additional mode to the qubit. This makes the qubit more resilient and accurate, and opens the path to add even more error-correcting modes in the future.

According to Nord Quantique CEO Julien Camirand Lemyre, each qubit is about the size of a walnut. Since the company uses the superconducting approach to quantum computing, it still needs that giant chandelier to get the system cool enough, which takes about four-and-a-half square meters of floor space.

With the current technology, a single chandelier will be able to support more than 2,000 qubits, says Lemyre. So how close is the industry to seeing a working Nord Quantique quantum computer? Not that close.

Even though DARPA selected Nord Quantique for its quantum benchmarking initiative in April — one of fewer than 20 companies chosen — an actual computer is still years away. “We expect to have more than 100 logical qubits by 2029,” says Lemyre. “And then scaling from there to 2,000.”

That’s a long wait. But, according to Sutor, Nord Quantique technology could make an impact earlier. “It could be a technology that is ultimately adopted by other players,” he says.

Nord Quantique makes superconducting qubits, he says, just like IBM, Google, and Rigetti. That means its redundant-photons-in-a-qubit approach could be adopted by someone who is further along by swapping in the better qubit but keeping the rest of the architecture the same.

“You always have to ask with startups — are they going to be a great, big, huge company or is someone going to buy them?” he says. he new breakthrough does make their approach more attractive, he says — and shows that DARPA was right in picking the company for their initiative.

Nord Quantique’s news isn’t the only big recent announcement from a quantum computing company.

D-Wave, which uses an older and less flexible approach to quantum computing, announced record-high $15 million in revenues for the first quarter of this year, a 509% increase from this time last year, along with commercial deployments in the automotive, pharma, and defense verticals.

In general, over the first quarter of this year, private investment in quantum computing reached $1.2 billion, up 125% year-over-year, according to data from The Quantum Insider’s Intelligence Platform(More details: https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/04/25/quantum-startups-secure-1-billion-in-q1-as-commercial-race-accelerates).

Notable investments include $360 million in IonQ, $230 million in QuEra Computing, $170 million in Quantum Machines, $150 million in D-Wave Systems, and 100 million Euros in Alice & Bob.

Another significant announcement was that of a rack-mountable, silicon-based quantum computer. Equal1’s computer has its own built-in cooling system, weights 440 pounds, and only has six qubits. Still, at about the size of a GPU server, it can fit into a regular data center.

Finally, earlier this month, Cisco announced a quantum entanglement chip(More details: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3978702/cisco-unveils-prototype-quantum-networking-chip.html). The research prototype, developed in cooperation with University of California, Santa Barbara, generates pairs of entangled photons that instantly transmit quantum state between each other, regardless of the distance between them.

An acrid smell hangs over the town of Rodynske, Ukraine. A 250kg glide bomb has ripped through the town's main administrative building, and taken down three residential blocks...visiting a day after the bomb struck, but parts of the wreckage are still smoking. From the edges of the town we hear the sound of artillery fire, and of gunshots – Ukrainian soldiers shooting down drones.

Rodynske is about 15km (9 miles) north of the embattled city of Pokrovsk. Russia has been trying to capture it from the south since the autumn of last year, but Ukrainian forces have so far managed to stop Russian soldiers from marching in.

So Russia has changed tactics, moving instead to encircle the city, cutting off supply routes.

In the past two weeks, as hectic diplomatic efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Ukraine have failed, Russia has intensified its push, making its most significant advances since January.

You can find proof of that in Rodynske.

Within minutes of arriving in town, you can hear a Russian drone above us. Our team runs to the closest cover available – a tree.

We press up against it so the drone won't see us. Then there's the sound of a loud explosion – it's a second drone making impact nearby. The drone above us is still hovering. For a few more minutes, we hear the terrifying whirring sound of what's become the deadliest weapon of this war.

When we can't hear it any more we take the chance to run to hard cover in an abandoned building 100ft away.

From the shelter, we hear the drone again. It's possible it returned after seeing our movement.

That Rodynske is being swarmed by Russian drones is evidence that the attacks are coming from positions much closer than known Russian positions to the south of Pokrovsk. They were most likely coming from newly captured territory on a key road running from the east of Pokrovsk to Kostyantynivka.

After half an hour of waiting in the shelter, when we can't hear the drone anymore, we move quickly to our car parked under tree cover, and speed out of Rodynske. By the side of the highway we see smoke billowing and something burning – it's most likely a downed drone.

We drive to Bilytske, further away from the frontline. We see a row of houses destroyed by a missile strike overnight. One of them was Svitlana's home.

"It's getting worse and worse. Earlier, we could hear distant explosions, they were far away. But now our town is getting targeted – we're experiencing it ourselves," says the 61-year-old, as she picks up a few belongings from the wreckage of her home. Luckily Svitlana wasn't at home when the attack occurred.

"Go into the centre of the town, you'll see so much that is destroyed there. And the bakery and zoo have been destroyed too," she says.

At a safehouse just out of reach of drones, we meet soldiers of the artillery unit of the 5th Assault Brigade.

"You can feel the intensity of Russian assaults increasing. Rockets, mortars, drones, they're using everything they have to cut off supply routes going into the city," says Serhii.

His unit has been waiting for three days to deploy to their positions, waiting for cloud cover or high-speed winds to give them protection from drones.

In an ever-evolving conflict, soldiers have had to rapidly adapt to new threats posed by changing technology. And the latest threat comes from fibre optic drones. A spool of tens of kilometres of cable is fitted to the bottom of a drone and the physical fibre optic cord is attached to the controller held by the pilot.

"The video and control signal is transmitted to and from the drone through the cable, not through radio frequencies. This means it can't be jammed by electronic interceptors," says a soldier with the call sign Moderator, a drone engineer with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.

When drones began to be used in this war in a big way, both militaries fitted their vehicles with electronic warfare systems, which could neutralise drones. That protection has evaporated with the arrival of fibre optic drones, and in the deployment of these devices, Russia currently has the edge. Ukraine is trying to ramp up production.

"Russia started using fibre optic drones much before us, while we were still testing them. These drones can be used in places where we have to go lower than usual drones. We can even enter houses and look for targets inside," says Venia, a drone pilot with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.

"We've started joking that maybe we should carry scissors to cut the cord," says Serhii, the artillery man.

Fibre optic drones do have drawbacks – they are slower and the cable could get entangled in trees. But at the moment, their widespread use by Russia means that transporting soldiers to and from their positions can often be deadlier than the battlefield itself.

"When you enter a position, you don't know whether you've been spotted or not. And if you have been spotted, then you may already be living the last hours of your life," says Oles, Chief Sergeant of the reconnaissance unit of the 5th Assault Brigade.

This threat means that soldiers are spending longer and longer in their positions.

Oles and his men are in the infantry, serving in the trenches right at the very front of Ukraine's defence. It's rare for journalists these days to speak to infantrymen, as it's become too risky to go to these trenches. We meet Oles and Maksym in a rural home converted into a makeshift base, where the soldiers come to rest when they're not on deployment.

"The longest I spent at the position was 31 days, but I do know guys who have spent 90 and even 120 days there. Back before the drones arrived, the rotations could have been between 3 or 7 days at the position," says Maksym.

"War is blood, death, wet mud and a chill that spreads from head to toe. And this is how you spend every day. I remember one instance when we didn't sleep for three days, alert every minute. The Russians kept coming at us wave after wave. Even a minor lapse would have meant we were dead."
Oles says Russia's infantry has changed its tactics. "Earlier they attacked in groups. Now they only send one or two people at times. They also use motorcycles and in a few instances, quad bikes. Sometimes they slip through."

What this means is that the front lines in some parts are no longer conventional lines with the Ukrainians on one side and the Russians on the other, but more like pieces on a chessboard during play, where positions can be intertwined.

This also makes it harder to see advances made by either side.

Despite Russia's recent gains, it will not be quick or easy for it to take the whole of the Donetsk region, where Pokrovsk lies.

Ukraine has pushed back hard, but it needs a steady supply of weapons and ammunition to sustain the fight.

And as the war enters a fourth summer, Ukraine's manpower issues against a much bigger Russian army are also evident. Most of the soldiers we meet joined the military after the war began. They've had a few months of training, but have had to learn a lot on the job in the middle of a raging war.
Maksym worked for a drinks company before he joined the military. I asked how his family copes with his job.

"It's hard, it's really hard. My family really supports me. But I have a two-year-old son, and I don't get to see him much. I do video call him though, so everything is as fine as it could be under the circumstances," he trails off, eyes welling up with tears.

Maksym is a soldier fighting for his country, but he's also just a father missing his two-year-old boy.