SirCozyCrow5 hours agoThe sound track is PEAK! I loved playing this, and my partner who normally doesn't play games like this one had a good time as well. I enjoyed the learning curve and I can't wait to play the harder difficulties.Here's a video I made, my partner jumped in for a few minutes as well.Replyso funReplyDrew.a.Chain1 day ago(+1)Very addictive!ReplyTrashpanda1191 day ago(+1)love the playstyle and the art style definitly fun to play plus the music is the cherry on topReplyAhoOppai1 day ago(+1)really fun game cant wait for the full gameReplyDin Xavier coding1 day agoI chose the laser eye. How do I turn the attack around? Can I even do that?Replyoverboy1 day agoHey, the laser eye gets a random direction at the start of each wave, it's one of the specificities of this attack ;)ReplyFort Kenmei1 day agoGameplay and Critique ;)Replyoverboy1 day ago(+1)Thanks a lot for the awesome video and the feedback! :)ReplyTLGaby2 days agoJust to know browser progress keep getting reset.Replyoverboy1 day ago (2 edits) (+1)Thanks for the report! Could it be due to some of your browser settings?Unfortunately, browser-based games can't always guarantee reliable local saves due to how browsers handle storage.To avoid this in the future, I recommend trying the downloadable version of the demo,  it provides a more stable environment for saving progress. :)Replyepic.Replyoleekconder2 days ago (1 edit) (+1)Very nice. Spent couple hours easy=) UPD: And some moreReplyMaximusR3 days agoes un juego que ya jugue en su momento cuando tenias menos cosas y ahora que esta actualizado quisiera grabarlo otra vezReplyEPIClove the spiders ♥ReplynineGardens3 days ago (1 edit) (+2)Okay so.... tried out a few things, and some Dev suggestions to report: Bigfoot is such a cool idea, and running around at that speed with like.... all THAT going on just gave me motion sickness.Summoner is hysterical fun. All hail spiders. Tomatoe's are pretty fun too.The Adept is so cool in theory, but... once you have the right build is a bit of a "standing still simulator"  Also, if you have totoms or other turrets, there's very much the question each round of "Will my circle spawn NEAR the totoms (instant win), or far from them (oh no)"   I kind of wonder if the mage circle should like... fizzle out after 20 seconds and appear somewhere else. Just... something to give a bit more dynamism, and to make the original spawn point less critical.Okay: added thoughts:Watering psycotic tomatoes feels great.Being a malevolent spider with 8 arms feels amazing. Feels very good and natural."Orbital" is one of the greatest and most fun abilities in the game.  I would take this even without the damage boost.Lots of fun, but also very silly. Good job.Replydave99993 days agowith some size you can kick the totems around to reposition them towards your circle, it benefits them too, adept can choose the wand at the start and with it you have no sustain problem anyway whatever build you want to set upReplynineGardens3 days agoOh damn- only just found out you can kick the totems!Okay, yeah in this case all is well. Or at least.... I still think a moving circle could be cool, but the fact that you can move your totems over to where the circle is makes things much better.Replyjust get enough amount+size and they hit everything, bounce is overkill ReplyLost track of time 10 hours in and still hooked. Absolutely love it! Can't wait for the full releaseReplyDriftedVoid4 days agoPretty good! ReplyIndyot4 days agoIt's a pretty addictive game, congrats! I lowkey missed a bit of satisfaction on the weapons though.ReplyCongrats on the game! I really like the weapons that you interact with which gives it a fun spin. (i.e. the spike ball)Reply1Soultaken4 days agoAnyone know good combos for the items? (I just pick randomly.)Replydave99994 days ago (1 edit) (+2)lasers plus amount+adept some arcane for basic dmg (its instable to setup and only overboy starts with one) totems +amount+ bounce+adept optional size and arcane you can stand still in the endall shovels with crit, strength their extra souls help you snowball hard and easy probably the most straightforward and stable very good build you can beat the game with nearly anything its well balanced but this one is very strong and easy (realized in the end that all size was wasted on this) soul flask, more chests are near always must pick, the high luck value ones give you better items the free reroll is a must pick, lightning dagger is somewhat unique as it  can carry you the entire early game even if you do not get enough element damage (I understand that the more gimmicky things like pets and kickables give the game versatility but to min max they are not that competative)Replydave99998 days agounderestimated totems Replylimey8 days agoi like how you made like MULTITUDES of updates on this so like as soon as i check my feed its just thisReplydave99998 days ago (1 edit) (+1)my best run so far,  there s a hidden mechanic that  makes weapons  you have more likely to drop?Replyoverboy8 days ago(+2)Lmao, awesome — looks like a really fun build to play! Yeah, Shop RNG uses a lot of hidden tricks to help you find relevant attacks, while still allowing unrelated ones to appear. That way, you can discover unique builds and experiment freely!Replyoverboy8 days ago (1 edit) Thank you so much for the incredible reception of the web demo on Itch, and to everyone who wishlisted the game! Many of the changes—along with much more to come in future updates—are directly based on your feedback here and on the game’s Discord. I’m also excited to announce that the game will release on Steam on 8 July 2025! Demo - Update 35 (06 June 2025)Singleplayer UI: Level Up Upgrade Phase and Chest Pickup Phase UI now display the items and attacks inventories (useful to check the scaling of current equipped attacks for example) Singleplayer Shop: subtle animation while selecting a Buy Button Many Balancing tweaks Balancing: nerfed Life Steal in various ways (lower values gained from items) Balancing: nerfed Knockback in various ways (lower values gained, higher item rarity, lower max applied value) Balancing: too much items enhancing HP Max were put in the Demo, this means it was easier to get a lot of HP and to survive in the Demo due to higher ratio of items providing HP Added a subtle duration during which the player can still pickup Souls even if they’re slurped by the Soul Portal Fine tuned the color of some weapons to improve the visibility Balancing: Ballista don’t double their projectiles based on amount anymore (only number of ballistas scales with amount) If Player HP is Full and HP Max > 20, the player can’t be one-shot Bugfix: in-game achievement pop up could be displayed below other UI elements while it should always be above everything else Potential Bugfix for a rare bug happening in Multiplayer shop where player2 Shop sections wasn’t displayed at allRework the save system in preparation for upcoming features ReplyxHELLO_WORLDx10 days agocontracts on the gameReplydave999910 days agoelijah_ap10 days agoLove the art style, upgrades, controls, etc. Balance might be the only thing off about this. If you were to add anything, I would want to see more variety in the stages, similar to Vampire Survivor. Otherwise- really great.ReplyThank you so much! I’ll keep working on the balance with each update, and I appreciate the suggestion on stage variety!ReplyNetsmile10 days agoTorch IV has a problem rounding numbers in the stats hover over display. Other levels of torches workReplyoverboy10 days ago (1 edit) Thanks, I'll fix this displayed rounding number issue soon!ReplySkeppartorsk10 days agoFor now I'd say it's fun, but lacking a bit in balance. I absolutely suck at brotatolikes. But find this one easy, so it's probably undertuned as far as difficulty is concerned. The power and availability of HP and regen items, makes you just literally not care if you get hit. Then the relatively strong armor on top and you're just too tanky for anything to feasibly ever kill you.Replyoverboy10 days ago (1 edit) (+1)Thanks for the feedback! Sounds like tanky builds might be a bit too forgiving right now, i'll do some balancing changesReplySkeppartorsk9 days ago (2 edits) Life steal has similar issues too. There's also the standard issue with knockback in these kinds of games. The lack of any enemy resistance/diminishing returns, means it's way too easy to get enough knockback that enemies cannot touch you anymore. Ranged attacks are too few and far between to worry about with the current levels of sustain. Meaning you can just Stand Still and Kill way too realiably. Edit: Lategame with 6x Wands I'm getting so much screen shake it's triggering simulation sickness. It was due to having Pierce + Bounce. The screen shake from my projectiles bouncing off the edge of the map.Replyoverboy8 days ago (2 edits) (+1)thanks for your feedback, it will help for the game balancing!For now I try to avoid diminishing returns by design to make sure each feature and stat is super easy to understand because I dislike when roguelike gets too opaque, I prefer that the player fully and easily undestand each of its choices, but yeah that involves a good balance to find!In future updates, Life Steal will become harder to get, Knockback will be capped at lower maximum applied values.Regarding the overall difficulty, the full version has 3 extra level of difficulties, and based on some feedbacks i have from beta testers, the balance between the 5 difficulty modes seem to be close to what i'm aiming for (minus some issues like you pointed out, and of course some balancing required on specific builds and items)There is already an option to disable screenshakes ;)Edit: Would you be interested to join the beta-test of the full game? If so please join the Discord and ping me in DM ;)ReplySkeppartorsk8 days ago (4 edits) I did notice that you could turn off screen shake entirely. But admittedly a lot of the visceral feel of the combat goes away when you fully disable the screen shake. But when you have too many Leeroy/knockback projectiles/bouncing projectiles. It just reaches the point where simulation sickness sets in. Wish there was something like an intensity setting, or a way for it to cap out at how often a screen shake can get triggered. I agree on the opaque thing. But I was more thinking something akin to how CC Diminishing Returns works in WoW. Where 1st hit = full value, 2nd hit within 10s = half value, 3rd hit = 1/4 value. Then 10s of immunity before it resets. That way you still get knockback when you pick knockback. But you can't just perma nail enemies against the wall. Edit: Also there's a wording issue (or a bug) with how multiple pentagrams work. If you have adept pentagram and the item pentagram the wording is "when you stand inside a pentagram" But the item one gives the 20% damage ONLY and the adept one gives the adept bonuses ONLY. The wording would mean that both pentagrams should give adept bonus AND 20% damage bonus.Edit2: I'd suggest reformatting Grimorius tooltip so that the -10% armor is above the "on level up"portion. The indentation difference between the +1% speed and -10% armor is small enough that I read it as losing 10% armor on every level up.Replyoverboy8 days agoThanks a lot for the interesting insights!I nerfed HP, Lifesteal and Knockback using various techniques in the last update, along with many other changes.Just tested Pentagram/Adept and it works as expected: the 2 effects stack correctly as the wording impliedI reformatted Grimorius tooltip as you suggested ;)ReplyView more in threadBad Piggy11 days agoVery cool in it's current state. I love how much it really emphasises movement like how some active abilities need to be grabbed from around the arena to do themThat said, I think enemy projectiles could honestly stand out more. I could hardly see them at times in all the chaos.Still, I think this is a pretty solid base right now, and as always, you have a beautiful visual style, though I feel like the game suffers a little from how busy it can get. Great stuff so far thoughReplyThanks Bad Piggy! Really glad you’re enjoying the mechanics. I appreciate the feedback on projectile visibility and how busy things can get. I’ll definitely look into ways to improve those aspects. Really grateful for the kind words and thoughtful feedback!ReplyLeoLohandro11 days agoA copy of the brotato), but still fun.Replyoverboy11 days ago (2 edits) (+1)Hey thanks a lot! Yes this game is a Brotato-like with many twists and new innovative mechanics, such as:- Equippable Boss Patterns (active skills you can trigger by picking orbs on the map)- Minion Summoning- Growing Plant Minions with a watercan- Amount and Size stats - Physics-Based Weapons – like chained spikeballs- Kickable stuff (you can even play soccer with your minions or other co-op players)- Playable character merge feature (get the effect of 2 different characters or more at the same time)- Dozens and dozens of unique effects (turning enemies into Sheep, or Golden Statues, or both?)I'm aiming for something like The Binding of Isaac meets Brotato — a deep, replayable experience full of chaotic synergies and wild builds that feel totally unique each run, with all the "being a boss fantasy and humor" deeply included in the mechanics and content :)Reply

IBM and Roche are teaming up on an AI solution to a challenge faced by millions worldwide: the relentless daily grind of diabetes management. Their new brainchild, the Accu-Chek SmartGuide Predict app, provides AI-powered glucose forecasting capabilities to users. The app doesn’t just track where your glucose levels are—it tells you where they’re heading. Imagine having a weather forecast, but for your blood sugar. That’s essentially what IBM and Roche are creating.AI-powered diabetes managementThe app works alongside Roche’s continuous glucose monitoring sensor, crunching the numbers in real-time to offer predictive insights that can help users stay ahead of potentially dangerous blood sugar swings.What caught my eye were the three standout features that address very specific worries diabetics face. The “Glucose Predict” function visualises where your glucose might be heading over the next two hours—giving you that crucial window to make adjustments before things go south.For those who live with the anxiety of hypoglycaemia (when blood sugar plummets to dangerous levels), the “Low Glucose Predict” feature acts like an early warning system, flagging potential lows up to half an hour before they might occur. That’s enough time to take corrective action.Perhaps most reassuring is the “Night Low Predict” feature, which estimates your risk of overnight hypoglycaemia—often the most frightening prospect for diabetes patients. Before tucking in for the night, the AI-powered diabetes management app gives you a heads-up about whether you might need that bedtime snack. This feature should bring peace of mind to countless households.“By harnessing the power of AI-enabled predictive technology, Roche’s Accu-Chek SmartGuide Predict App can help empower people with diabetes to take proactive measures to manage their disease,” says Moritz Hartmann, Head of Roche Information Solutions.How AI is speeding up diabetes researchIt’s not just patients benefiting from this partnership. The companies have developed a rather clever research tool using IBM’s watsonx AI platform that’s transforming how clinical study data gets analysed.Anyone who’s been involved in clinical research knows the mind-numbing tedium of manual data analysis. IBM and Roche’s tool does the heavy lifting—digitising, translating, and categorising all that anonymised clinical data, then connecting the dots between glucose monitoring data and participants’ daily activities.The result? Researchers can spot meaningful patterns and correlations in a fraction of the time it would normally take. This behind-the-scenes innovation might do more to advance diabetes care and management in the long run than the app itself.What makes this collaboration particularly interesting is how it brings together two different worlds. You’ve got IBM’s computing prowess and AI know-how pairing up with Roche’s decades of healthcare and diabetes expertise.”Our long-standing partnership with IBM underscores the potential of cross-industry innovation in addressing unmet healthcare needs and bringing significant advancements to patients faster,” says Hartmann.“Using cutting-edge technology such as AI and machine learning helps us to accelerate time to market and to improve therapy outcomes at the same time.”Christian Keller, General Manager of IBM Switzerland, added: “The collaboration with Roche underlines the potential of AI when it’s implemented with a clear goal—assisting patients in managing their diabetes.“With our technology and consulting expertise we can offer a trusted, customised, and secure technical environment that is essential to enable innovation in healthcare.”What this means for the future of healthcare techHaving covered healthcare tech for years, I’ve seen plenty of promising innovations fizzle out. However, this IBM-Roche partnership feels promising—perhaps because it’s addressing such a specific, well-defined problem with a thoughtful, targeted application of AI.For the estimated 590 million people (or 1 in 9 of the adult population) worldwide living with diabetes, the shift from reactive to predictive management could be gamechanging. It’s not about replacing human judgment, but enhancing it with timely, actionable insights.The app’s currently only available in Switzerland, which seems a sensible approach—test, refine, and perfect before wider deployment. Healthcare professionals will be keeping tabs on this Swiss rollout to see if it delivers on its promise.If successful, this collaboration could serve as a blueprint for how tech giants and pharma companies might work together on other chronic conditions. Imagine similar predictive approaches for heart disease, asthma, or Parkinson’s.For now, though, the focus is squarely on using AI to improve diabetes management and helping people sleep a little easier at night—quite literally, in the case of that clever nocturnal prediction feature. And honestly, that’s a worthwhile enough goal on its own.(Photo by Alexander Grey)Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan and nearby US bases, and over the course of a few hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific force before it can even begin to fight back.  Maybe it sounds like a new Michael Bay movie, but it’s the scenario that keeps the chief technology officer of the US Army up at night. “I’m hesitant to say it out loud so I don’t manifest it,” says Alex Miller, a longtime Army intelligence official who became the CTO to the Army’s chief of staff in 2023. Even if World War III doesn’t break out in the South China Sea, every US military installation around the world is vulnerable to the same tactics—as are the militaries of every other country around the world. The proliferation of cheap drones means just about any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm could wreak havoc, no expensive jets or massive missile installations required.  While the US has precision missiles that can shoot these drones down, they don’t always succeed: A drone attack killed three US soldiers and injured dozens more at a base in the Jordanian desert last year. And each American missile costs orders of magnitude more than its targets, which limits their supply; countering thousand-dollar drones with missiles that cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars per shot can only work for so long, even with a defense budget that could reach a trillion dollars next year. The US armed forces are now hunting for a solution—and they want it fast. Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into other drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling guns that simply shoot drones out of the sky; electronic approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking tools; and lasers that melt holes clear through a target’s side. Then there are the microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you heated them up.  That’s where Epirus comes in.  When I went to visit the HQ of this 185-person startup in Torrance, California, earlier this year, I got a behind-the-scenes look at its massive microwave, called Leonidas, which the US Army is already betting on as a cutting-edge anti-drone weapon. The Army awarded Epirus a $66 million contract in early 2023, topped that up with another $17 million last fall, and is currently deploying a handful of the systems for testing with US troops in the Middle East and the Pacific. (The Army won’t get into specifics on the location of the weapons in the Middle East but published a report of a live-fire test in the Philippines in early May.)  Up close, the Leonidas that Epirus built for the Army looks like a two-foot-thick slab of metal the size of a garage door stuck on a swivel mount. Pop the back cover, and you can see that the slab is filled with dozens of individual microwave amplifier units in a grid. Each is about the size of a safe-deposit box and built around a chip made of gallium nitride, a semiconductor that can survive much higher voltages and temperatures than the typical silicon.  Leonidas sits on top of a trailer that a standard-issue Army truck can tow, and when it is powered on, the company’s software tells the grid of amps and antennas to shape the electromagnetic waves they’re blasting out with a phased array, precisely overlapping the microwave signals to mold the energy into a focused beam. Instead of needing to physically point a gun or parabolic dish at each of a thousand incoming drones, the Leonidas can flick between them at the speed of software. The Leonidas contains dozens of microwave amplifier units and can pivot to direct waves at incoming swarms of drones.EPIRUS Of course, this isn’t magic—there are practical limits on how much damage one array can do, and at what range—but the total effect could be described as an electromagnetic pulse emitter, a death ray for electronics, or a force field that could set up a protective barrier around military installations and drop drones the way a bug zapper fizzles a mob of mosquitoes. I walked through the nonclassified sections of the Leonidas factory floor, where a cluster of engineers working on weaponeering—the military term for figuring out exactly how much of a weapon, be it high explosive or microwave beam, is necessary to achieve a desired effect—ran tests in a warren of smaller anechoic rooms. Inside, they shot individual microwave units at a broad range of commercial and military drones, cycling through waveforms and power levels to try to find the signal that could fry each one with maximum efficiency.  On a live video feed from inside one of these foam-padded rooms, I watched a quadcopter drone spin its propellers and then, once the microwave emitter turned on, instantly stop short—first the propeller on the front left and then the rest. A drone hit with a Leonidas beam doesn’t explode—it just falls. Compared with the blast of a missile or the sizzle of a laser, it doesn’t look like much. But it could force enemies to come up with costlier ways of attacking that reduce the advantage of the drone swarm, and it could get around the inherent limitations of purely electronic or strictly physical defense systems. It could save lives. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery, a tall guy with sparkplug energy and a rapid-fire southern Illinois twang, doesn’t shy away from talking big about his product. As he told me during my visit, Leonidas is intended to lead a last stand, like the Spartan from whom the microwave takes its name—in this case, against hordes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. While the actual range of the Leonidas system is kept secret, Lowery says the Army is looking for a solution that can reliably stop drones within a few kilometers. He told me, “They would like our system to be the owner of that final layer—to get any squeakers, any leakers, anything like that.” Now that they’ve told the world they “invented a force field,” Lowery added, the focus is on manufacturing at scale—before the drone swarms really start to descend or a nation with a major military decides to launch a new war. Before, in other words, Miller’s nightmare scenario becomes reality.  Why zap? Miller remembers well when the danger of small weaponized drones first appeared on his radar. Reports of Islamic State fighters strapping grenades to the bottom of commercial DJI Phantom quadcopters first emerged in late 2016 during the Battle of Mosul. “I went, ‘Oh, this is going to be bad,’ because basically it’s an airborne IED at that point,” he says. He’s tracked the danger as it’s built steadily since then, with advances in machine vision, AI coordination software, and suicide drone tactics only accelerating.  Then the war in Ukraine showed the world that cheap technology has fundamentally changed how warfare happens. We have watched in high-definition video how a cheap, off-the-shelf drone modified to carry a small bomb can be piloted directly into a faraway truck, tank, or group of troops to devastating effect. And larger suicide drones, also known as “loitering munitions,” can be produced for just tens of thousands of dollars and launched in massive salvos to hit soft targets or overwhelm more advanced military defenses through sheer numbers.  As a result, Miller, along with large swaths of the Pentagon and DC policy circles, believes that the current US arsenal for defending against these weapons is just too expensive and the tools in too short supply to truly match the threat. Just look at Yemen, a poor country where the Houthi military group has been under constant attack for the past decade. Armed with this new low-tech arsenal, in the past 18 months the rebel group has been able to bomb cargo ships and effectively disrupt global shipping in the Red Sea—part of an effort to apply pressure on Israel to stop its war in Gaza. The Houthis have also used missiles, suicide drones, and even drone boats to launch powerful attacks on US Navy ships sent to stop them. The most successful defense tech firm selling anti-drone weapons to the US military right now is Anduril, the company started by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, and a crew of cofounders from Oculus and defense data giant Palantir. In just the past few months, the Marines have chosen Anduril for counter-drone contracts that could be worth nearly $850 million over the next decade, and the company has been working with Special Operations Command since 2022 on a counter-drone contract that could be worth nearly a billion dollars over a similar time frame. It’s unclear from the contracts what, exactly, Anduril is selling to each organization, but its weapons include electronic warfare jammers, jet-powered drone bombs, and propeller-driven Anvil drones designed to simply smash into enemy drones. In this arsenal, the cheapest way to stop a swarm of drones is electronic warfare: jamming the GPS or radio signals used to pilot the machines. But the intense drone battles in Ukraine have advanced the art of jamming and counter-jamming close to the point of stalemate. As a result, a new state of the art is emerging: unjammable drones that operate autonomously by using onboard processors to navigate via internal maps and computer vision, or even drones connected with 20-kilometer-long filaments of fiber-optic cable for tethered control. But unjammable doesn’t mean unzappable. Instead of using the scrambling method of a jammer, which employs an antenna to block the drone’s connection to a pilot or remote guidance system, the Leonidas microwave beam hits a drone body broadside. The energy finds its way into something electrical, whether the central flight controller or a tiny wire controlling a flap on a wing, to short-circuit whatever’s available. (The company also says that this targeted hit of energy allows birds and other wildlife to continue to move safely.) Tyler Miller, a senior systems engineer on Epirus’s weaponeering team, told me that they never know exactly which part of the target drone is going to go down first, but they’ve reliably seen the microwave signal get in somewhere to overload a circuit. “Based on the geometry and the way the wires are laid out,” he said, one of those wires is going to be the best path in. “Sometimes if we rotate the drone 90 degrees, you have a different motor go down first,” he added. The team has even tried wrapping target drones in copper tape, which would theoretically provide shielding, only to find that the microwave still finds a way in through moving propeller shafts or antennas that need to remain exposed for the drone to fly.  EPIRUS Leonidas also has an edge when it comes to downing a mass of drones at once. Physically hitting a drone out of the sky or lighting it up with a laser can be effective in situations where electronic warfare fails, but anti-drone drones can only take out one at a time, and lasers need to precisely aim and shoot. Epirus’s microwaves can damage everything in a roughly 60-degree arc from the Leonidas emitter simultaneously and keep on zapping and zapping; directed energy systems like this one never run out of ammo. As for cost, each Army Leonidas unit currently runs in the “low eight figures,” Lowery told me. Defense contract pricing can be opaque, but Epirus delivered four units for its $66 million initial contract, giving a back-of-napkin price around $16.5 million each. For comparison, Stinger missiles from Raytheon, which soldiers shoot at enemy aircraft or drones from a shoulder-mounted launcher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, meaning the Leonidas could start costing less (and keep shooting) after it downs the first wave of a swarm. Raytheon’s radar, reversed Epirus is part of a new wave of venture-capital-backed defense companies trying to change the way weapons are created—and the way the Pentagon buys them. The largest defense companies, firms like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, typically develop new weapons in response to research grants and cost-plus contracts, in which the US Department of Defense guarantees a certain profit margin to firms building products that match their laundry list of technical specifications. These programs have kept the military supplied with cutting-edge weapons for decades, but the results may be exquisite pieces of military machinery delivered years late and billions of dollars over budget. Rather than building to minutely detailed specs, the new crop of military contractors aim to produce products on a quick time frame to solve a problem and then fine-tune them as they pitch to the military. The model, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and dozens of other smaller startups into the business of war as venture capital piles tens of billions of dollars into defense. Like Anduril, Epirus has direct Palantir roots; it was cofounded by Joe Lonsdale, who also cofounded Palantir, and John Tenet, Lonsdale’s colleague at the time at his venture fund, 8VC. (Tenet, the son of former CIA director George Tenet, may have inspired the company’s name—the elder Tenet’s parents were born in the Epirus region in the northwest of Greece. But the company more often says it’s a reference to the pseudo-mythological Epirus Bow from the 2011 fantasy action movie Immortals, which never runs out of arrows.)  While Epirus is doing business in the new mode, its roots are in the old—specifically in Raytheon, a pioneer in the field of microwave technology. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like those found in old radios. But the company became synonymous with electronic defense during World War II, when Bush spun up a lab to develop early microwave radar technology invented by the British into a workable product, and Raytheon then began mass-producing microwave tubes—known as magnetrons—for the US war effort. By the end of the war in 1945, Raytheon was making 80% of the magnetrons powering Allied radar across the world. From padded foam chambers at the Epirus HQ, Leonidas devices can be safely tested on drones.EPIRUS Large tubes remained the best way to emit high-power microwaves for more than half a century, handily outperforming silicon-based solid-state amplifiers. They’re still around—the microwave on your kitchen counter runs on a vacuum tube magnetron. But tubes have downsides: They’re hot, they’re big, and they require upkeep. (In fact, the other microwave drone zapper currently in the Pentagon pipeline, the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, or THOR, still relies on a physical vacuum tube. It’s reported to be effective at downing drones in tests but takes up a whole shipping container and needs a dish antenna to zap its targets.) By the 2000s, new methods of building solid-state amplifiers out of materials like gallium nitride started to mature and were able to handle more power than silicon without melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a project at Raytheon called Next Generation Jammer—geared specifically toward designing a new way to make high-powered microwaves that work at extremely long distances. Lowery, the Epirus CEO, began his career working on nuclear reactors on Navy aircraft carriers before he became the chief engineer for Next Generation Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his team worked on a system that relied on many of the same fundamentals that now power the Leonidas—using the same type of amplifier material and antenna setup to fry the electronics of a small target at much closer range rather than disrupting the radar of a target hundreds of miles away.  The similarity is not a coincidence: Two engineers from Next Generation Jammer helped launch Epirus in 2018. Lowery—who by then was working at the augmented-reality startup RealWear, which makes industrial smart glasses—joined Epirus in 2021 to run product development and was asked to take the top spot as CEO in 2023, as Leonidas became a fully formed machine. Much of the founding team has since departed for other projects, but Raytheon still runs through the company’s collective CV: ex-Raytheon radar engineer Matt Markel started in January as the new CTO, and Epirus’s chief engineer for defense, its VP of engineering, its VP of operations, and a number of employees all have Raytheon roots as well. Markel tells me that the Epirus way of working wouldn’t have flown at one of the big defense contractors: “They never would have tried spinning off the technology into a new application without a contract lined up.” The Epirus engineers saw the use case, raised money to start building Leonidas, and already had prototypes in the works before any military branch started awarding money to work on the project. Waiting for the starting gun On the wall of Lowery’s office are two mementos from testing days at an Army proving ground: a trophy wing from a larger drone, signed by the whole testing team, and a framed photo documenting the Leonidas’s carnage—a stack of dozens of inoperative drones piled up in a heap.  Despite what seems to have been an impressive test show, it’s still impossible from the outside to determine whether Epirus’s tech is ready to fully deliver if the swarms descend.  The Army would not comment specifically on the efficacy of any new weapons in testing or early deployment, including the Leonidas system. A spokesperson for the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, which is the subsection responsible for contracting with Epirus to date, would only say in a statement that it is “committed to developing and fielding innovative Directed Energy solutions to address evolving threats.”  But various high-ranking officers appear to be giving Epirus a public vote of confidence. The three-star general who runs RCCTO and oversaw the Leonidas testing last summer told Breaking Defense that “the system actually worked very well,” even if there was work to be done on “how the weapon system fits into the larger kill chain.” And when former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, then the service’s highest-ranking civilian, gave a parting interview this past January, she mentioned Epirus in all but name, citing “one company” that is “using high-powered microwaves to basically be able to kill swarms of drones.” She called that kind of capability “critical for the Army.”  The Army isn’t the only branch interested in the microwave weapon. On Epirus’s factory floor when I visited, alongside the big beige Leonidases commissioned by the Army, engineers were building a smaller expeditionary version for the Marines, painted green, which it delivered in late April. Videos show that when it put some of its microwave emitters on a dock and tested them out for the Navy last summer, the microwaves left their targets dead in the water—successfully frying the circuits of outboard motors like the ones propelling Houthi drone boats.  Epirus is also currently working on an even smaller version of the Leonidas that can mount on top of the Army’s Stryker combat vehicles, and it’s testing out attaching a single microwave unit to a small airborne drone, which could work as a highly focused zapper to disable cars, data centers, or single enemy drones.  Epirus’s microwave technology is also being tested in devices smaller than the traditional Leonidas. EPIRUS While neither the Army nor the Navy has yet to announce a contract to start buying Epirus’s systems at scale, the company and its investors are actively preparing for the big orders to start rolling in. It raised $250 million in a funding round in early March to get ready to make as many Leonidases as possible in the coming years, adding to the more than $300 million it’s raised since opening its doors in 2018. “If you invent a force field that works,” Lowery boasts, “you really get a lot of attention.” The task for Epirus now, assuming that its main customers pull the trigger and start buying more Leonidases, is ramping up production while advancing the tech in its systems. Then there are the more prosaic problems of staffing, assembly, and testing at scale. For future generations, Lowery told me, the goal is refining the antenna design and integrating higher-powered microwave amplifiers to push the output into the tens of kilowatts, allowing for increased range and efficacy.  While this could be made harder by Trump’s global trade war, Lowery says he’s not worried about their supply chain; while China produces 98% of the world’s gallium, according to the US Geological Survey, and has choked off exports to the US, Epirus’s chip supplier uses recycled gallium from Japan.  The other outside challenge may be that Epirus isn’t the only company building a drone zapper. One of China’s state-owned defense companies has been working on its own anti-drone high-powered microwave weapon called the Hurricane, which it displayed at a major military show in late 2024.  It may be a sign that anti-electronics force fields will become common among the world’s militaries—and if so, the future of war is unlikely to go back to the status quo ante, and it might zag in a different direction yet again. But military planners believe it’s crucial for the US not to be left behind. So if it works as promised, Epirus could very well change the way that war will play out in the coming decade.  While Miller, the Army CTO, can’t speak directly to Epirus or any specific system, he will say that he believes anti-drone measures are going to have to become ubiquitous for US soldiers. “Counter-UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] unfortunately is going to be like counter-IED,” he says. “It’s going to be every soldier’s job to think about UAS threats the same way it was to think about IEDs.”  And, he adds, it’s his job and his colleagues’ to make sure that tech so effective it works like “almost magic” is in the hands of the average rifleman. To that end, Lowery told me, Epirus is designing the Leonidas control system to work simply for troops, allowing them to identify a cluster of targets and start zapping with just a click of a button—but only extensive use in the field can prove that out. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery sees the Leonidas as providing a last line of defense against UAVs.EPIRUS In the not-too-distant future, Lowery says, this could mean setting up along the US-Mexico border. But the grandest vision for Epirus’s tech that he says he’s heard is for a city-scale Leonidas along the lines of a ballistic missile defense radar system called PAVE PAWS, which takes up an entire 105-foot-tall building and can detect distant nuclear missile launches. The US set up four in the 1980s, and Taiwan currently has one up on a mountain south of Taipei. Fill a similar-size building full of microwave emitters, and the beam could reach out “10 or 15 miles,” Lowery told me, with one sitting sentinel over Taipei in the north and another over Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan. Riffing in Greek mythological mode, Lowery said of drones, “I call all these mischief makers. Whether they’re doing drugs or guns across the border or they’re flying over Langley [or] they’re spying on F-35s, they’re all like Icarus. You remember Icarus, with his wax wings? Flying all around—‘Nobody’s going to touch me, nobody’s going to ever hurt me.’” “We built one hell of a wax-wing melter.”  Sam Dean is a reporter focusing on business, tech, and defense. He is writing a book about the recent history of Silicon Valley returning to work with the Pentagon for Viking Press and covering the defense tech industry for a number of publications. Previously, he was a business reporter at the Los Angeles Times. This piece has been updated to clarify that Alex Miller is a civilian intelligence official. 

This review contains spoilers for season 2, episode 7 of Doctor Who, “Wish World.”For long-time Doctor Who fans, the return of a villain like The Rani might sound like an event. It certainly felt like one last week, when she turned up with theatrical flair in the mid-credits sting of “The Interstellar Song Contest” – a neat surprise, powered by Archie Panjabi’s steely presence and a dash of proper mystery. But in this week’s “Wish World”? That spark dies on arrival. Her comeback is just another awkward throwback in an episode that doesn’t know how to handle its past, let alone make the present feel like it matters.“Wish World” represents the worst instincts of Doctor Who’s Disney era dialled up: glossy, confused, and screaming for attention. It’s a limp cocktail of shameless lore dumping, shallow storytelling, and a truly baffling sense of self-satisfaction. It spends a tiresome 45 minutes of build-up to just point at old names like a magician revealing a bent spoon, hoping the gesture alone is enough to amaze. The Rani’s return should feel seismic. It’s been 38 years since the evil Time Lord made her last onscreen appearance – 32 if you count her face-off against all the then-living Doctors and the cast of EastEnders in a charity special. That’s a long time, and in theory, this ought to carry the same weight as The Master crashing back into things in 2007’s “Utopia”. That twist didn’t just rely on nostalgia; it weaponised it, using it to amplify character and raise the stakes. Instead, now, we get a Rani written like a stock villain with a backstory cribbed from a half-read wiki page. There’s no sense of danger, no theatrical flair, no mystique. Just a few arch lines, a plot that barely scans, and a breadcrumb trail to yet another dusty Time Lord pulled from the show’s attic: Omega. It’s a name that’ll light up a handful of Reddit threads, sure, but it lands with a shrug for the vast majority who haven’t been revisiting “The Three Doctors” on BritBox. Which is, to be clear, mostly everyone.What’s baffling isn’t just the lack of payoff, it’s how proudly this outing squanders every opportunity to deliver one. “Wish World” relies entirely on prior recognition, but never lifts a finger to earn that investment in the here and now. It’s obsessed with nods, references, and several meandering mystery boxes, but utterly uninterested in what any of it means. This is fan service at its most vacant, a frustrating mess that treats characters like mere collectibles that get pulled from a shelf when you’re having a fancy dinner party. It’s not quite the sludgy CG necromancy of The Flash, but it’s cut from the same cloth: a hollow echo chamber of reveals with no buildup, and a premise that promises tension but fizzles into a joyless trudge through stiff dialogue and characters who feel barely sketched in. Conrad pops up again with all the charisma of a queue at the post office, Ruby is inexplicably present but does almost nothing, and even Belinda, usually a bright spot, is reduced to exposition and reaction shots. The whole plot moves like it's dragging a piano through quicksand, slowly collapsing under the weight of its pointless name-dropping bore fest of script."Wish World" has the promise of tension but fizzles into a joyless trudge through stiff dialogue and characters who feel barely sketched in.“With only one episode left, the finale now has to perform miracles: justify this mess, tie the threads together, and inject meaning where there's currently none. Doctor Who used to remix its past into something alive, urgent, and new; here, it just gawks at its own reflection, hoping a few barely recognisable names will do all the heavy lifting. Once upon a time, Russell T Davies brought heart and clarity to a show left for dead, reviving it with enough energy and emotional force to make it essential playground currency across Britain. Now, it feels like he’s coasting. This isn’t Doctor Who with something to say, it’s a desperate exposition dump, stitched together from scraps of nostalgia and noise. Worst of all, it expects that to be enough.

The thousands of sprawling acres in rural northeast Louisiana had gone unwanted for nearly two decades. Louisiana authorities bought the land in Richland Parish in 2006 to promote economic development in one of the poorest regions in the state. For years, they marketed the former agricultural fields as the Franklin Farm mega site, first to auto manufacturers (no takers) and after that to other industries that might want to occupy more than a thousand acres just off the interstate. This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s series “Power Hungry: AI and our energy future,” on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial-intelligence revolution. So it’s no wonder that state and local politicians were exuberant when Meta showed up. In December, the company announced plans to build a massive $10 billion data center for training its artificial-intelligence models at the site, with operations to begin in 2028. “A game changer,” declared Governor Jeff Landry, citing 5,000 construction jobs and 500 jobs at the data center that are expected to be created and calling it the largest private capital investment in the state’s history. From a rural backwater to the heart of the booming AI revolution! The AI data center also promises to transform the state’s energy future. Stretching in length for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity, requiring two gigawatts for computation alone (the electricity for cooling and other building needs will add to that). When it’s up and running, it will be the equivalent of suddenly adding a decent-size city to the region’s grid—one that never sleeps and needs a steady, uninterrupted flow of electricity. To power the data center, Entergy aims to spend $3.2 billion to build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts and upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand. In its filing to the state’s power regulatory agency, Entergy acknowledged that natural-gas plants “emit significant amounts of CO2” but said the energy source was the only affordable choice given the need to quickly meet the 24-7 electricity demand from the huge data center. Meta said it will work with Entergy to eventually bring online at least 1.5 gigawatts of new renewables, including solar, but that it had not yet decided which specific projects to fund or when those investments will be made. Meanwhile, the new natural-gas plants, which are scheduled to be up and running starting in 2028 and will have a typical lifetime of around 30 years, will further lock in the state’s commitment to the fossil fuel. The development has sparked interest from the US Congress; last week, Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works issued a letter to Meta that called out the company's plan to power its data center with “new and unabated natural gas generation” and said its promises to offset the resulting emissions "by funding carbon capture and a solar project are vague and offer little reassurance.” The choice of natural gas as the go-to solution to meet the growing demand for power from AI is not unique to Louisiana. The fossil fuel is already the country’s chief source of electricity generation, and large natural-gas plants are being built around the country to feed electricity to new and planned AI data centers. While some climate advocates have hoped that cleaner renewable power would soon overtake it, the booming power demand from data centers is all but wiping out any prospect that the US will wean itself off natural gas anytime soon. The reality on the ground is that natural gas is “the default” to meet the exploding power demand from AI data centers, says David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and co-director of its Deep Decarbonization Project. “The natural-gas plant is the thing that you know how to build, you know what it’s going to cost (more or less), and you know how to scale it and get it approved,” says Victor. “Even for [AI] companies that want to have low emissions profiles and who are big pushers of low or zero carbon, they won’t have a choice but to use gas.” The preference for natural gas is particularly pronounced in the American South, where plans for multiple large gas-fired plants are in the works in states such as Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Utilities in those states alone are planning some 20 gigawatts of new natural-gas power plants over the next 15 years, according to a recent report. And much of the new demand—particularly in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia—is coming from data centers; in those 3 states data centers account for around 65 to 85% of projected load growth. “It’s a long-term commitment in absolutely the wrong direction,” says Greg Buppert, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. If all the proposed gas plants get built in the South over the next 15 years, he says, “we’ll just have to accept that we won’t meet emissions reduction goals.” But even as it looks more and more likely that natural gas will remain a sizable part of our energy future, questions abound over just what its continued dominance will look like. For one thing, no one is sure exactly how much electricity AI data centers will need in the future and how large an appetite companies will have for natural gas. Demand for AI could fizzle. Or AI companies could make a concerted effort to shift to renewable energy or nuclear power. Such possibilities mean that the US could be on a path to overbuild natural-gas capacity, which would leave regions saddled with unneeded and polluting fossil-fuel dinosaurs—and residents footing soaring electricity bills to pay off today’s investments. The good news is that such risks could likely be managed over the next few years, if—and it’s a big if—AI companies are more transparent about how flexible they can be in their seemingly insatiable energy demands. The reign of natural gas Natural gas in the US is cheap and abundant these days. Two decades ago, huge reserves were found in shale deposits scattered across the country. In 2008, as fracking started to make it possible to extract large quantities of the gas from shale, natural gas was selling for $13 per million Btu (a measure of thermal energy); last year, it averaged just $2.21, the lowest annual price (adjusting for inflation) ever reported, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Around 2016, natural gas overtook coal as the main fuel for electricity generation in the US. And today—despite the rapid rise of solar and wind power, and well-deserved enthusiasm for the falling price of such renewables—natural gas is still king, accounting for around 40% of electricity generated in the US. In Louisiana, which is also a big producer, that share is some 72%, according to a recent audit. Natural gas burns much cleaner than coal, producing roughly half as much carbon dioxide. In the early days of the gas revolution, many environmental activists and progressive politicians touted it as a valuable “bridge” to renewables and other sources of clean energy. And by some calculations, natural gas has fulfilled that promise. The power sector has been one of the few success stories in lowering US emissions, thanks to its use of natural gas as a replacement for coal.   But natural gas still produces a lot of carbon dioxide when it is burned in conventionally equipped power plants. And fracking causes local air and water pollution. Perhaps most worrisome, drilling and pipelines are releasing substantial amounts of methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, both accidentally and by intentional venting. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and the emissions are a growing concern to climate scientists, albeit one that’s difficult to quantify. Still, carbon emissions from the power sector will likely continue to drop as coal is further squeezed out and more renewables get built, according to the Rhodium Group, a research consultancy. But Rhodium also projects that if electricity demand from data centers remains high and natural-gas prices low, the fossil fuel will remain the dominant source of power generation at least through 2035 and the transition to cleaner electricity will be much delayed. Rhodium estimates that the continued reign of natural gas will lead to an additional 278 million metric tons of annual US carbon emissions by 2035 (roughly equivalent to the emissions from a large US state such as Florida), relative to a future in which the use of fossil fuel gradually winds down. Our addiction to natural gas, however, doesn’t have to be a total climate disaster, at least over the longer term. Large AI companies could use their vast leverage to insist that utilities install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) at power plants and use natural gas sourced with limited methane emissions. Entergy, for one, says its new gas turbines will be able to incorporate CCS through future upgrades. And Meta says it will help to fund the installation of CCS equipment at one of Entergy’s existing natural-gas power plants in southern Louisiana to help prove out the technology.   But the transition to clean natural gas is a hope that will take decades to realize. Meanwhile, utilities across the country are facing a more imminent and practical challenge: how to meet the sudden demand for gigawatts more power in the next few years without inadvertently building far too much capacity. For many, adding more natural-gas power plants might seem like the safe bet. But what if the explosion in AI demand doesn’t show up? Times of stress AI companies tout the need for massive, power-hungry data centers. But estimates for just how much energy it will actually take to train and run AI models vary wildly. And the technology keeps changing, sometimes seemingly overnight. DeepSeek, the new Chinese model that debuted in January, may or may not signal a future of new energy-efficient AI, but it certainly raises the possibility that such advances are possible. Maybe we will find ways to use far more energy-efficient hardware. Or maybe the AI revolution will peter out and many of the massive data centers that companies think they’ll need will never get built. There are already signs that too many have been constructed in China and clues that it might be beginning to happen in the US.  Despite the uncertainty, power providers have the task of drawing up long-term plans for investments to accommodate projected demand. Too little capacity and their customers face blackouts; too much and those customers face outsize electricity bills to fund investments in unneeded power. There could be a way to lessen the risk of overbuilding natural-gas power, however. Plenty of power is available on average around the country and on most regional grids. Most utilities typically use only about 53% of their available capacity on average during the year, according to a Duke study. The problem is that utilities must be prepared for the few hours when demand spikes—say, because of severe winter weather or a summer heat wave. The soaring demand from AI data centers is prompting many power providers to plan new capacity to make sure they have plenty of what Tyler Norris, a fellow at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, and his colleagues call “headroom,” to meet any spikes in demand. But after analyzing data from power systems across the country, Norris and his coauthors found that if large AI facilities cut back their electricity use during hours of peak demand, many regional power grids could accommodate those AI customers without adding new generation capacity. Even a moderate level of flexibility would make a huge difference. The Duke researchers estimate that if data centers cut their electricity use by roughly half for just a few hours during the year, it will allow utilities to handle some additional 76 gigawatts of new demand. That means power providers could effectively absorb the 65 or so additional gigawatts that, according to some predictions, data centers will likely need by 2029. “The prevailing assumption is that data centers are 100% inflexible,” says Norris. That is, that they need to run at full power all the time. But Norris says AI data centers, particularly ones that are training large foundation models (such as Meta’s facility in Richland Parish), can avoid running at full capacity or shift their computation loads to other data centers around the country—or even ramp up their own backup power—during times when a grid is under stress. The increased flexibility could allow companies to get AI data centers up and running faster, without waiting for new power plants and upgrades to transmission lines—which can take years to get approved and built. It could also, Norris noted in testimony to the US Congress in early March, provide at least a short-term reprieve on the rush to build more natural-gas power, buying time for utilities to develop and plan for cleaner technologies such as advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal. It could, he testified, prevent “a hasty overbuild of natural-gas infrastructure.” AI companies have expressed some interest in their ability to shift around demand for power. But there are still plenty of technology questions around how to make it happen. Late last year, EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute), a nonprofit R&D group, started a three-year collaboration with power providers, grid operators, and AI companies including Meta and Google, to figure it out. “The potential is very large,” says David Porter, the EPRI vice president who runs the project, but we must show it works “beyond just something on a piece of paper or a computer screen.” Porter estimates that there are typically 80 to 90 hours a year when a local grid is under stress and it would help for a data center to reduce its energy use. But, he says, AI data centers still need to figure out how to throttle back at those times, and grid operators need to learn how to suddenly subtract and then add back hundreds of megawatts of electricity without disrupting their systems. “There’s still a lot of work to be done so that it’s seamless for the continuous operation of the data centers and seamless for the continuous operation of the grid,” he says. Footing the bill Ultimately, getting AI data centers to be more flexible in their power demands will require more than a technological fix. It will require a shift in how AI companies work with utilities and local communities, providing them with more information and insights into actual electricity needs. And it will take aggressive regulators to make sure utilities are rigorously evaluating the power requirements of data centers rather than just reflexively building more natural-gas plants. “The most important climate policymakers in the country right now are not in Washington. They’re in state capitals, and these are public utility commissioners,” says Costa Samaras, the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. In Louisiana, those policymakers are the elected officials at the Louisiana Public Service Commission, who are expected to rule later this year on Entergy’s proposed new gas plants and grid upgrades. The LPSC commissioners will decide whether Entergy’s arguments about the huge energy requirements of Meta’s data center and need for full 24/7 power leave no alternative to natural gas.  In the application it filed last fall with LPSC, Entergy said natural-gas power was essential for it to meet demand “throughout the day and night.” Teaming up solar power with battery storage could work “in theory” but would be “prohibitively costly.” Entergy also ruled out nuclear, saying it would take too long and cost too much. Others are not satisfied with the utility’s judgment. In February, the New Orleans–based Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed a motion with the Louisiana regulators arguing that Entergy did not do a rigorous market evaluation of its options, as required by the commission’s rules. Part of the problem, the groups said, is that Entergy relied on “unsubstantiated assertions” from Meta on its load needs and timeline. “Entergy is saying [Meta] needs around-the-clock power,” says Paul Arbaje, an analyst for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But we’re just being asked to take [Entergy’s] word for it. Regulators need to be asking tough questions and not just assume that these data centers need to be operated at essentially full capacity all the time.” And, he suggests, if the utility had “started to poke holes at the assumptions that are sometimes taken as a given,” it “would have found other cleaner options.”       In an email response to MIT Technology Review, Entergy said that it has discussed the operational aspects of the facility with Meta, but "as with all customers, Entergy Louisiana will not discuss sensitive matters on behalf of their customers.” In a letter filed with the state’s regulators in early April, Meta said Entergy’s understanding of its energy needs is, in fact, accurate. The February motion also raised concern over who will end up paying for the new gas plants. Entergy says Meta has signed a 15-year supply contract for the electricity that is meant to help cover the costs of building and running the power plants but didn't respond to requests by MIT Technology Review for further details of the deal, including what happens if Meta wants to terminate the contract early. Meta referred MIT Technology Review’s questions about the contract to Entergy but says its policy is to cover the full cost that utilities incur to serve its data centers, including grid upgrades. It also says it is spending over $200 million to support the Richland Parish data centers with new infrastructure, including roads and water systems.  Not everyone is convinced. The Alliance for Affordable Energy, which works on behalf of Louisiana residents, says that the large investments in new gas turbines could mean future rate hikes, in a state where residents already have high electricity bills and suffer from one of country’s most unreliable grids. Of special concern is what happens after the 15 years. “Our biggest long-term concern is that in 15 years, residential ratepayers [and] small businesses in Louisiana will be left holding the bag for three large gas generators,” says Logan Burke, the alliance’s executive director. Indeed, consumers across the country have good reasons to fear that their electricity bills will go up as utilities look to meet the increased demand from AI data centers by building new generation capacity. In a paper posted in March, researchers at Harvard Law School argued that utilities “are now forcing the public to pay for infrastructure designed to supply a handful of exceedingly wealthy corporations.” The Harvard authors write, “Utilities tell [public utility commissions] what they want to hear: that the deals for Big Tech isolate data center energy costs from other ratepayers’ bills and won’t increase consumers’ power prices.” But the complexity of the utilities’ payment data and lack of transparency in the accounting, they say, make verifying this claim “all but impossible.” The boom in AI data centers is making Big Tech a player in our energy infrastructure and electricity future in a way unimaginable just a few years ago. At their best, AI companies could greatly facilitate the move to cleaner energy by acting as reliable and well-paying customers that provide funding that utilities can use to invest in a more robust and flexible electricity grid. This change can happen without burdening other electricity customers with additional risks and costs. But it will take AI companies committed to that vision. And it will take state regulators who ask tough questions and don’t get carried away by the potential investments being dangled by AI companies. Huge new AI data centers like the one in Richland Parish could in fact be a huge economic boon by providing new jobs, but residents deserve transparency and input into the negotiations. This is, after all, public infrastructure. Meta may come and go, but Louisiana's residents will have to live with—and possibly pay for—the changes in the decades to come.

Recent research reveals that, contrary to popular belief, dating in 2025 isn’t all that different to ... More how it was “back in the day.”getty Life today looks nothing like it did five, ten or twenty years ago. The world has changed in ways we couldn’t have imagined back then. Naturally, our love lives haven’t been immune to these changes either. Yet, despite these sweeping societal shifts, has dating itself evolved all that much? This is the question researcher Brian Ogolsky and his team set out to explore in a January 2025 study published in Personal Relationships. The rise of dating apps, the influence of social media, society’s ever-evolving attitudes toward marriage, commitment and sex — considering them all, you might expect the answer to be a resounding yes. According to the study, there are four distinct stages that define how modern romantic relationships tend to unfold. And, surprisingly, they’re not as different from the past as you might think. 1. ‘Flirtationship’ Ogolsky and his team examined college students’ love lives, a decade apart: 126 students in 2012, and 133 students in 2022. Their survey asked a single open-ended question: “Describe, in order, what you believe are the phases of a typical romantic relationship.” After comparing the answers, it was clear that — in both 2012 and 2022 — a similar pattern emerged amongst the participants. The first stage, unanimously, was what Ogolsky and his co-authors called a “flirtationship,” which the participants described in largely similar ways. One student described it as the stage where two potential partners search for “common interests which will be the base of the relationship.” Another encapsulated it as feeling “attracted to what the other looks like” and wanting “to know more.” Perhaps the most apt description of all was from the student who explained, “One of you has expressed blatant or intended interest. You know you like each other, and this is where it ends if one doesn’t reciprocate flirtation.” Despite the countless ways technology has changed how we meet and interact, the essence of this first stage hasn’t budged. This is likely because the need to assess compatibility is foundational to how we form relationships of any kind. Before we attach, we observe. We pay attention to the small cues, and send out a few of our own. This process isn’t new, and no swipe-based interface or algorithm can bypass it entirely. While apps and digital communication have certainly created new avenues for flirtation, they haven’t eliminated the uncertainty or vulnerability that comes with it. In fact, participants in both 2012 and 2022 noted that the flirtationship phase often unfolds online. You might chat for days, exchange memes, build anticipation — but you will still need to consider whether the attraction is mutual, or whether it’ll even translate offline. Even with more tools at our disposal, it’s human nature to test out whether it’s something worth pursuing. The packaging may have changed, but the psychology hasn’t. 2. Relationship Potential The researchers labeled the second stage of romantic progression as “relationship potential.” As the name suggests, the participants defined this as a stage of exploration — particularly in terms of romantic compatibility. For instance, one participant typified this stage as “spending time together/dating.” Similarly, another described it as “meeting and going to places together to learn more about each other.” Overall, one participant’s description encapsulated it best: “Things get a bit more serious, you want to get a bit more romantic and go out on dates. This could be one to two dates every few weeks with a few lunch dates in between.” This is where we move from “I think I like you” to “I want to understand who you are.” There’s still ambiguity — the potential for things to fizzle — but with the addition of effort. You go on dates, talk more deeply and start mentally placing the person in the context of your own life. What’s notable is that, even in an era where casual encounters and instant gratification are more accessible than ever, people still crave this slow, evaluative period. The effort to get to know each other hasn’t been automated, and it’s not something you can outsource to a well-written bio or curated photo grid. Digital platforms might facilitate contact, but they can’t (and shouldn’t) replace the experience of actively building comfort and trust. We may be quicker to connect today, but we’re still cautious when it comes to investing emotionally. The deliberateness of this stage speaks to the enduring human need to “figure it out,” so to speak. 3. In A Relationship The third stage of romantic progression, both a decade ago and today, is defined by exclusivity. This “in a relationship” stage, as described by the students, encompasses a sense of being official. One participant explained that this is the phase where two people begin “Labeling one’s relationship status as ‘in a relationship’ with a partner.” Another participant noted that, at this stage, “Flirting or hooking up with someone else would be cheating.” Beyond the official label itself, the participants also associated this stage with larger romantic milestones — such as exchanging “I love yous,” meeting each others’ friends and family, as well as becoming both emotionally and physically intimate. Even as social norms around relationships have grown more flexible, this stage has remained consistent. Polyamory, casual dating and relationship anarchy are more visible and more widely discussed than they were a decade ago. Yet, the majority of participants still pointed to exclusivity as a defining marker. It’s clear that, while the options have expanded, most people still value a clear, unambiguous declaration of commitment — likely due the stability that this stage offers. This isn’t necessarily because it marks the end of romantic exploration, but more so because it introduces a sense of structure and expectation. This is the very clarity that guides us through everything else to come. 4. Commitment … Or Bust Participants associated the fourth and final phase with decision-making. Namely, the choice between large declarations of commitment — like moving in together, getting engaged or getting married — or ultimately terminating the relationship. “No one is perfect. Everyone has flaws,” explained one participant. “The goal is to find someone whose flaws you can love or at least tolerate without excess frustration. After being together for a while, it is impossible to keep up a 350% perfect act. You can either accept your partner for who they are or realize you need to break up. You see them for who they are and either still love it or start to hate it.” As Ogolsky and his co-authors explain, this isn’t an exact continuation of the previous stages, but rather a crossroad. By this point, the façade has been lifted. You know how your partner handles stress, whether your values align and what long-term sacrifices each of you are willing (or unwilling) to make. What you’re deciding now isn’t whether you love each other, but whether you can sustainably continue to love each other. Whether commitment is marriage, cohabitation or simply a private agreement to stay together long-term, the need to decide remains. Societal progress over the last decade may have changed what these commitments look like, but it hasn’t eliminated the need to either build a future — or consciously walk away from one. Has the façade been lifted in your relationship yet? Take this science-backed test to learn more: Authenticity In Relationships Scale

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the Pandemic Housing Boom, housing demand surged rapidly amid ultralow interest rates, stimulus, and the remote work boom—which increased demand for space and unlocked “WFH arbitrage” as high earners were able to keep their income from a job in say, NYC or L.A., and buy in say Austin or Tampa. Federal Reserve researchers estimate “new construction would have had to increase by roughly 300% to absorb the pandemic-era surge in demand.” Unlike housing demand, housing stock supply isn’t as elastic and can’t ramp up as quickly. As a result, the heightened pandemic era demand drained the market of active inventory and overheated home prices, with U.S. home prices rising a staggering 43.2% between March 2020 and June 2022. While many commentators view active inventory and months of supply simply as measures of “supply,” ResiClub sees them more as proxies for the supply-demand equilibrium. Because housing demand is more elastic than housing stock, large swings in active inventory or months of supply are usually driven by shifts in demand. For example, during the Pandemic Housing Boom, surging demand caused homes to sell faster—pushing active inventory down, even as new listings remained steady. Conversely, in recent years, weakening demand has led to slower sales, causing active inventory to rise—even as new listings fell below trend. Indeed, during the ravenous housing demand at the height of the Pandemic Housing Boom in April 2022, almost the entire country was at least -50% below pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels. BROWN = Active housing inventory for sale in April 2022 was BELOW pre-pandemic 2019 levels GREEN = Active housing inventory for sale in April 2022 was ABOVE pre-pandemic 2019 levels Of course, now it’s a different picture: National active inventory is on a multiyear rise. Not long after mortgage rates spiked in 2022—causing affordability to reflect the reality of the sharp home price increases during the Pandemic Housing Boom—and return-to-office gained a bit of momentum, national demand in the for-sale market pulled back and the Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out. Initially, in the second half of 2022, that housing demand pullback triggered a “fever breaking” in a number of markets—particularly in rate-sensitive West Coast housing markets and in pandemic boomtowns like Austin and Boise—causing active inventory to spike and pushing those markets into correction-mode in the second half of 2022. Heading into 2023, many of those same Western and pandemic boomtown markets (excluding Austin) stabilized, as the spring seasonal demand—coupled with still-tight active inventory levels—was enough to temporarily firm up the market. For a bit, national active inventory stopped rising year-over-year. However, that period of national inventory stabilization didn’t last. Amid still slumped housing demand, national active inventory began to rise again—and we’re now in the midst of an 18-month streak of year-over-year increases in national active listings. Where active inventory/months of supply has risen the most, homebuyers have gained the most leverage. Generally speaking, housing markets where inventory (i.e., active listings) has returned to pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced weaker home price growth (or outright declines) over the past 34 months. Conversely, housing markets where inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced stronger home price growth over the past 34 months. BROWN = Active housing inventory for sale in April 2025 was BELOW pre-pandemic 2019 levels GREEN = Active housing inventory for sale in April 2025 was ABOVE pre-pandemic 2019 levels As ResiClub has closely documented, that picture varies significantly across the country: much of the Northeast and Midwest remain below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels, while many parts of the Mountain West and Gulf regions have bounced back. Many of the softest housing markets, where homebuyers have gained leverage, are located in Gulf Coast and Mountain West regions. These areas were among the nation’s top pandemic boomtowns, having experienced significant home price growth during the Pandemic Housing Boom, which stretched housing fundamentals far beyond local income levels. When pandemic-fueled domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates spiked, markets like Cape Coral, Florida, and San Antonio, Texas, faced challenges as they had to rely on local incomes to sustain frothy home prices. The housing market softening in these areas was further accelerated by higher levels of new home supply in the pipeline across the Sun Belt. Builders in these regions are often willing to reduce prices or make other affordability adjustments to maintain sales in a shifted environment. These adjustments in the new construction market also create a cooling effect on the resale market, as some buyers who might have opted for an existing home shift their focus to new homes where deals are still available. In contrast, many Northeast and Midwest markets were less reliant on pandemic migration and have less new home construction in progress. With lower exposure to that domestic migration pullback demand shock—and fewer builders doing big affordability adjustments to move product—active inventory in these Midwest and Northeast regions has remained relatively tight—with home sellers retaining more power relative to their peers in the Gulf and Mountain West regions. While national active inventory at the end of April 2025 was still -16% below pre-pandemic April 2019, ResiClub expects national active inventory to surpass pre-pandemic 2019 levels later this year. Big picture: The housing market is still undergoing a process of normalization following the surge in housing demand during the Pandemic Housing Boom, when home prices went up too fast, too quickly. To date, that normalization process has pushed some markets—including Austin (mid-2022-present), Las Vegas (second half of 2022), Phoenix (second half of 2022), San Francisco (second half of 2022), Boise (mid-2022–2023), Punta Gorda (2022–present), Cape Coral (2023–present), and Tampa (2024–present)—into correction-mode. In some other areas, so far, it has caused home price growth to stall out. Meanwhile, some markets still remain tight and have only seen a deceleration in home price growth from the highs of the Pandemic Housing Boom. ResiClub PRO members can access my latest monthly inventory analysis (+800 metros and +3,000 counties) here, and my latest monthly home price analysis (+800 metros and +3,000 counties) here.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning carries the weight of a meaningful farewell but lacks the courage to commit. The eighth film in the series begins with a sincere American president (Angela Bassett) entreating IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to take one last mission to save the world. This time, he must defeat a scheming AI called the Entity, which is hell-bent on wiping humans off the face of the earth through computer hacking and nuclear war. As fans have come to expect of this espionage franchise, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning will deliver globe-trekking, tense twists, jaw-dropping action sequences that make grown-ups feel like kids again, the unrelenting star power of Tom Cruise, and a sentimental belief in the righteousness of one noble man playing by his own rules. But amid these treasures, The Final Reckoning is a film at war with itself. Rather than a fitting send-off to a film series rich in stunts and thrills, it feels like an exquisite corpse of warring artistic goals that is incredible to behold, but never really comes together. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning delivers a plot that refuses to make sense. Ethan is still on the mission from Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.not to capture this AI wonder and hand it over to any government. He wants to destroy it, even though stern American counselors to the president insist that killing the Entity would mean destroying cyberspace. How? Despite much, much exposition dropping in brow-furrowing war room scenes, that's never remotely clear. You May Also Like Actually, the script by Christopher McQuarrie (who also directs) and Erik Jendresen makes a lot of declarations about the Entity's intentions, powers, and drawbacks without giving much sense of how any of it is possible. This has the effect of making the movie feel less like a sci-fi espionage thriller and more like flat-out fantasy adventure. The Entity becomes effectively an evil spirit that must be captured to end its reign of terror and its influence on the power-hungry or weak-minded. Final Reckoning even offers a doomsday cult devoted to the Entity to unfurl a thin thread. At 2 hours and 49 minutes, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning takes off running with the plot line from Dead Reckoning, but runs it into the ground by losing sense of what made audiences so excited about the last installment. This fuzzy focus on AI as some vague but almost inescapable demon makes many of the decisions by Ethan and his crew hard to follow if not impossible. Worse yet, McQuarrie and Jendresen's overstuffed plot forces too many of Ethan's allies into a dull box, where they become tools of the plot over engaging characters. Tom Cruise is in top form, but Hayley Atwell is criminally misused in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Cruise is a producer and star of this movie, and that's clear even without the title card announcing "A Tom Cruise Production." In Final Reckoning, he is an American action star in full, able to drop a powerful glower to underscore a dramatic moment better than any orchestra swell. He can perform a complicated and astonishing stunt with seeming ease. And truly, no one in cinema history can run as intensely as Cruise; his every speedy step seems to propel the iconic Mission: Impossible theme. At 62, his latest mission pulls him into the depths of the ocean and into a sky-high dogfight. Whether pummeling cronies with his bare hands or leaping from one in-flight plane to another, Cruise (and his stunt team) make Ethan a one-of-a-kind hero, capable of anything, yet able to express keenly his own morality through a powerful glance. This works even amid Final Reckoning's meandering plotting. Unfortunately, all the Ethan-centered heroics leave little room for his expansive crew to shine. Reprising their roles as IMF agents Luther Stickell and Benji Dunn, Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg have little screen time, but solid impact. They've mastered the art of making the most of these brotherly supporting roles. But more recent additions — like Hayley Atwell as pickpocket turned agent Grace and Pom Klementieff as assassin turned ally Paris — have achingly little to do. Mashable Top Stories Stay connected with the hottest stories of the day and the latest entertainment news. Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newsletter By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! Klementieff gets a fun opening fight scene and a tender sequence in the third act. But frankly, that finale feels in conflict with her chilly character, as everywhere in between her dialogue is the same one-note joke of being apathetic, in French. Atwell, who was established as Cruise's next love interest in Dead Reckoning, becomes an unrecognizable nag in Final Reckoning. Her spirited banter and self-assurance has been swapped for tedious dialogue filled with worry or bizarrely out-of-character proclamations, like that Ethan should take over Entity and effectively rule the world! A collection of critically heralded actors, from Academy-Award winner Bassett to Emmy-winner Nick Offerman to Morales, Hannah Waddingham, Shea Whigham, and Janet McTeer, are similarly underused in scenes that involve a lot of furrowed brow-talking, but too little logic. Their intensity might have better sold the absurdity if McQuarrie didn't linger so long in these preposterous war room discussions. Tramell Tillman steals Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The underwhelming dialogue, which veers from exposition dumping to near-religious proclamations, proves a stumbling block for much of the Final Reckoning ensemble. Even Cruise struggles with comically dramatic lines like, "We can deceive the Lord of Lies!" But Severance star Tramell Tillman strides where others stumble. It's not that he gets better dialogue. Many of his lines are unremarkable, like, "Oh, OK" in response to some intense Ethan declaration. But Tillman builds a world with his curious delivery. Playing a smooth submarine captain, Tillman delivers every line as if he is welcoming Ethan into an exclusive resort. There's an almost seductive attitude to Tillman's captain, who moves suavely in the tight confines of the submarine and addresses his crew with a magnanimous warmth. As if he had not a concern in the world, he oozes charisma, which is reflected by his invitingly smirking crewmate Kodiak, played by Love Lies Bleeding's Katy O'Brian. Together they weave an underwater world of camaraderie and personality that had me wishing Ethan would abandon his mission and just hang out there for a spell. This series has offered scads of compelling characters. But I was sad to see the plot plunge away from this submarine crew so soon. I'd follow Tillman's captain anywhere, just because of the beguiling way he says "OK." Related Stories Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is bloated but very fun. The final hour of Final Reckoning is jam-packed with suspense as action sequences between Ethan and his crew are cut across each other. Editor Eddie Hamilton masterfully creates tension while underlying how everything in the impossible plan to defeat the Entity must come together in "the blink of an eye." When the action scenes are hitting as they should, it's hard to imagine anything better to experience in a theater than a Mission: Impossible movie. Even Cruise's old-school sincerity is contagious, as Ethan throws his life on the line one more time for life, liberty, and an idealized American way. Very likely, you'll walk out of the cinema with a rush and joy, marveling over the stunts and heroics. But if you linger on the details of Final Reckoning, you begin to notice plot holes and dangling threads. You may get hung up on the tonal shifts that feel less like a flowing dance — as they did in Dead Reckoning — and more like a frenzied battle between ideas. In some ways, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning feels like the final chapter. Ethan's colleagues praise him so intensely that several scenes feel like a premature eulogy for the still (ass-)kicking agent. The title and the snarling threats of the antagonist Gabriel — who promises a "final reckoning" — suggest this is Ethan's last mission, should he choose to accept it. Cruise's drive to top himself with not one but two absolutely bonkers action set pieces feels like an encore before he retires the character for good. Plus, a reprisal of a character long forgotten in the franchise is not only a welcome surprise, but also suggests this story is coming to a comforting close. (Cheers to Rolf Saxon and Lucy Tulugarjuk, who are splendid scene partners.) However, McQuarrie also refuses to shut doors that seem to be closing. Without giving away third-act spoilers, I can say Final Reckoning pulls its punches, seemingly to allow for a IMF story to continue. Yet what might make for a happy ending isn't satisfyingly resolved either. Rather than providing a sense of resolution, McQuarrie ends the film with a sequence meant to speak to enduring connection, but it feels jarringly isolating because of how disjointedly it is presented. Essentially, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning feels like the filmmakers were both trying to make this the final movie in a successful franchise — and also leaving the door open for more. In waffling over that, they deliver a final chapter that is in turns thrilling and frustrating. Rather than going out with a bang, Mission: Impossible may go out with the fizzled whimper of a message self-destructing in a tape deck. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens exclusively in theaters on May 23. Topics Film

Quitting both booze and dating apps has made Bella Falk happier. Bella Falk 2025-05-14T00:14:01Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Drinking used to help Bella Falk, 46, get through bad dates. She decided to quit both booze and dating apps. She's happier making the most of what she has rather than worrying about what she doesn't. When my ex-partner moved out, among his parting words were: "You're amazing. You'll meet someone else in no time."But as anyone who's braved the world of dating apps will know, meeting someone you really like, who likes you back enough to show up reliably and not ghost you after a couple of months, is soul-crushingly hard. At least, it has been for me.Getting matches wasn't a problem, but surviving the tedious small talk without dying of boredom or the conversation fizzling out before we'd arranged to meet seemed next to impossible. But if by some miracle we did make it to an in-person date, what did we do? Of course, we went for a drink.Relying on a drink or twoGoing for a drink was the default first date. It's cheaper than a meal, quick, and low-pressure, and avoids the potential torture of enduring a three-course dinner with someone who turns out to be duller than a six-hour delay at an airport. I would grab a casual wine after work, and if there was no spark or the guy turned out to be 10 years older than his profile pictures (yes, this happened), I would make my excuses after a glass or two.Not only was drinking helpful, but it was often expected. While there is talk that the younger generation is less interested in alcohol, many of my peers still see teetotallers as boring and no fun, hardly the impression you want to give when you're just getting to know someone. First dates are hard. I relied on booze to make them easier. If there was no spark, wine made me chattier and able to fill the awkward silences. If the guy was a bit creepy, it made me brave enough to face the awkward goodbye and leave early. On the rare occasions when I did meet someone I fancied, having alcohol in my system gave me the courage I needed to flirt, instead of blushing and running away like a nervous teenager. The author relied on alcohol to make first dates easier. Bella Falk Ditching dating apps and boozeBut as years passed by, the whole routine became a Sisyphean cycle of hope and disappointment. I would wake up with a mild hangover and another story to amuse my coupled-up friends. I tried coffee dates, but the concept didn't really work in London, where I live. Many people live out of town, so it makes sense to grab a drink at the end of the working day. And I had no desire to do full hair and makeup and drag myself downtown on a Saturday.So, a year and a half ago, I quit. Not just the booze, but the dating apps too. As a travel writer and photographer, the author spends a lot of time abroad. Bella Falk Life is betterSearching for "The One" had become a full-time job. Hours of swiping and tedious chitchat, for it to either fizzle out or end in an excruciating evening wishing I was back home watching Netflix in my PJs. It was an emotional roller coaster, especially when I met someone I liked, allowed myself to get my hopes up, and then ended up dumped or ghosted.I realized it wasn't being single that made me miserable. It was the constant effort of trying not to be single. The apps were taking up so much of my time — I must have spent days of my life chatting to people I never even met. The number of words I'd typed into Bumble, I could have written a novel — and then at least I'd have had something to show for it all, apart from RSI in my thumbs.Without the apps and the booze, I'm sleeping better, I'm healthier, and most importantly, my mental health has improved. I haven't cried in over a year (it used to be a fairly regular occurrence — always caused by a man). When I think about downloading the apps again, I feel that sick dread in my stomach, usually only reserved for my triennial smear test.Now I focus on enjoying life and making the best of what I do have, instead of worrying about what I don't. I'm a travel writer and photographer, so I'm abroad a lot, exploring the world and having incredible experiences. When I'm home, I go out with friends, attend networking events, or pitch for my next trip. If I do meet someone, it'll be because we've met through shared interests and have already decided we like each other before we go on an actual date. Maybe I'll even agree to dinner. Recommended video