3D Artist Mbee showed this creative setup.

The H2O Audio Tri Pro headset keeps the tunes going in the pool, and have a snug fit to stay in place while you swim.

In 2025, it’s very difficult not to see gambling advertised everywhere. It’s on billboards and sports broadcasts. It’s on podcasts and printed on the turnbuckle of AEW’s pay-per-view shows. And it’s on app stores, where you can find the FanDuel and DraftKings sportsbooks, alongside glitzy digital slot machines. These apps all have the highest age ratings possible on Apple’s App Store and Google Play. But earlier this year, a different kind of app nearly disappeared from the Play Store entirely.Luck Be A Landlord is a roguelite deckbuilder from solo developer Dan DiIorio. DiIorio got word from Google in January 2025 that Luck Be A Landlord was about to be pulled, globally, because DiIorio had not disclosed the game’s “gambling themes” in its rating.In Luck Be a Landlord, the player takes spins on a pixel art slot machine to earn coins to pay their ever-increasing rent — a nightmare gamification of our day-to-day grind to remain housed. On app stores, it’s a one-time purchase of $4.99, and it’s $9.99 on Steam. On the Play Store page, developer Dan DiIorio notes, “This game does not contain any real-world currency gambling or microtransactions.”And it doesn’t. But for Google, that didn’t matter. First, the game was removed from the storefront in a slew of countries that have strict gambling laws. Then, at the beginning of 2025, Google told Dilorio that Luck Be A Landlord would be pulled globally because of its rating discrepancy, as it “does not take into account references to gambling (including real or simulated gambling)”.DiIorio had gone through this song and dance before — previously, when the game was blocked, he would send back a message saying “hey, the game doesn’t have gambling,” and then Google would send back a screenshot of the game and assert that, in fact, it had.DiIorio didn’t agree, but this time they decided that the risk of Landlord getting taken down permanently was too great. They’re a solo developer, and Luck Be a Landlord had just had its highest 30-day revenue since release. So, they filled out the form confirming that Luck Be A Landlord has “gambling themes,” and are currently hoping that this will be the end of it.This is a situation that sucks for an indie dev to be in, and over email DiIorio told Polygon it was “very frustrating.”“I think it can negatively affect indie developers if they fall outside the norm, which indies often do,” they wrote. “It also makes me afraid to explore mechanics like this further. It stifles creativity, and that’s really upsetting.”In late 2024, the hit game Balatro was in a similar position. It had won numerous awards, and made $1,000,000 in its first week on mobile platforms. And then overnight, the PEGI ratings board declared that the game deserved an adult rating.The ESRB had already rated it E10+ in the US, noting it has gambling themes. And the game was already out in Europe, making its overnight ratings change a surprise. Publisher PlayStack said the rating was given because Balatro has “prominent gambling imagery and material that instructs about gambling.”Balatro is basically Luck Be A Landlord’s little cousin. Developer LocalThunk was inspired by watching streams of Luck Be A Landlord, and seeing the way DiIorio had implemented deck-building into his slot machine. And like Luck Be A Landlord, Balatro is a one-time purchase, with no microtransactions.But the PEGI board noted that because the game uses poker hands, the skills the player learns in Balatro could translate to real-world poker.In its write-up, GameSpot noted that the same thing happened to a game called Sunshine Shuffle. It was temporarily banned from the Nintendo eShop, and also from the entire country of South Korea. Unlike Balatro, Sunshine Shuffle actually is a poker game, except you’re playing Texas Hold ‘Em — again for no real money — with cute animals (who are bank robbers).It’s common sense that children shouldn’t be able to access apps that allow them to gamble. But none of these games contain actual gambling — or do they?Where do we draw the line? Is it gambling to play any game that is also played in casinos, like poker or blackjack? Is it gambling to play a game that evokes the aesthetics of a casino, like cards, chips, dice, or slot machines? Is it gambling to wager or earn fictional money?Gaming has always been a lightning rod for controversy. Sex, violence, misogyny, addiction — you name it, video games have been accused of perpetrating or encouraging it. But gambling is gaming’s original sin. And it’s the one we still can’t get a grip on.The original link between gambling and gamingGetty ImagesThe association between video games and gambling all goes back to pinball. Back in the ’30s and ’40s, politicians targeted pinball machines for promoting gambling. Early pinball machines were less skill-based (they didn’t have flippers), and some gave cash payouts, so the comparison wasn’t unfair. Famously, mob-hating New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia banned pinball in the city, and appeared in a newsreel dumping pinball and slot machines into the Long Island Sound. Pinball machines spent some time relegated to the back rooms of sex shops and dive bars. But after some lobbying, the laws relaxed.By the 1970s, pinball manufacturers were also making video games, and the machines were side-by-side in arcades. Arcade machines, like pinball, took small coin payments, repeatedly, for short rounds of play. The disreputable funk of pinball basically rubbed off onto video games.Ever since video games rocked onto the scene, concerned and sometimes uneducated parties have been asking if they’re dangerous. And in general, studies have shown that they’re not. The same can’t be said about gambling — the practice of putting real money down to bet on an outcome.It’s a golden age for gambling2025 in the USA is a great time for gambling, which has been really profitable for gambling companies — to the tune of $66.5 billion dollars of revenue in 2023.To put this number in perspective, the American Gaming Association, which is the casino industry’s trade group and has nothing to do with video games, reports that 2022’s gambling revenue was $60.5 billion. It went up $6 billion in a year.And this increase isn’t just because of sportsbooks, although sports betting is a huge part of it. Online casinos and brick-and-mortar casinos are both earning more, and as a lot of people have pointed out, gambling is being normalized to a pretty disturbing degree.Much like with alcohol, for a small percentage of people, gambling can tip from occasional leisure activity into addiction. The people who are most at risk are, by and large, already vulnerable: researchers at the Yale School of Medicine found that 96% of problem gamblers are also wrestling with other disorders, such as “substance use, impulse-control disorders, mood disorders, and anxiety disorders.”Even if you’re not in that group, there are still good reasons to be wary of gambling. People tend to underestimate their own vulnerability to things they know are dangerous for others. Someone else might bet beyond their means. But I would simply know when to stop.Maybe you do! But being blithely confident about it can make it hard to notice if you do develop a problem. Or if you already have one.Addiction changes the way your brain works. When you’re addicted to something, your participation in it becomes compulsive, at the expense of other interests and responsibilities. Someone might turn to their addiction to self-soothe when depressed or anxious. And speaking of those feelings, people who are depressed and anxious are already more vulnerable to addiction. Given the entire state of the world right now, this predisposition shines an ugly light on the numbers touted by the AGA. Is it good that the industry is reporting $6 billion in additional earnings, when the economy feels so frail, when the stock market is ping ponging through highs and lows daily, when daily expenses are rising? It doesn’t feel good. In 2024, the YouTuber Drew Gooden turned his critical eye to online gambling. One of the main points he makes in his excellent video is that gambling is more accessible than ever. It’s on all our phones, and betting companies are using decades of well-honed app design and behavioral studies to manipulate users to spend and spend.Meanwhile, advertising on podcasts, billboards, TV, radio, and websites – it’s literally everywhere — tells you that this is fun, and you don’t even need to know what you’re doing, and you’re probably one bet away from winning back those losses.Where does Luck Be a Landlord come into this?So, are there gambling themes in Luck Be A Landlord? The game’s slot machine is represented in simple pixel art. You pay one coin to use it, and among the more traditional slot machine symbols are silly ones like a snail that only pays out after 4 spins.When I started playing it, my primary emotion wasn’t necessarily elation at winning coins — it was stress and disbelief when, in the third round of the game, the landlord increased my rent by 100%. What the hell.I don’t doubt that getting better at it would produce dopamine thrills akin to gambling — or playing any video game. But it’s supposed to be difficult, because that’s the joke. If you beat the game you unlock more difficulty modes where, as you keep paying rent, your landlord gets furious, and starts throwing made-up rules at you: previously rare symbols will give you less of a payout, and the very mechanics of the slot machine change.It’s a manifestation of the golden rule of casinos, and all of capitalism writ large: the odds are stacked against you. The house always wins. There is luck involved, to be sure, but because Luck Be A Landlord is a deck-builder, knowing the different ways you can design your slot machine to maximize payouts is a skill! You have some influence over it, unlike a real slot machine. The synergies that I’ve seen high-level players create are completely nuts, and obviously based on a deep understanding of the strategies the game allows.IMAGE: TrampolineTales via PolygonBalatro and Luck Be a Landlord both distance themselves from casino gambling again in the way they treat money. In Landlord, the money you earn is gold coins, not any currency we recognize. And the payouts aren’t actually that big. By the end of the core game, the rent money you’re struggling and scraping to earn… is 777 coins. In the post-game endless mode, payouts can get massive. But the thing is, to get this far, you can’t rely on chance. You have to be very good at Luck Be a Landlord.And in Balatro, the numbers that get big are your points. The actual dollar payments in a round of Balatro are small. These aren’t games about earning wads and wads of cash. So, do these count as “gambling themes”?We’ll come back to that question later. First, I want to talk about a closer analog to what we colloquially consider gambling: loot boxes and gacha games.Random rewards: from Overwatch to the rise of gachaRecently, I did something that I haven’t done in a really long time: I thought about Overwatch. I used to play Overwatch with my friends, and I absolutely made a habit of dropping 20 bucks here or there for a bunch of seasonal loot boxes. This was never a problem behavior for me, but in hindsight, it does sting that over a couple of years, I dropped maybe $150 on cosmetics for a game that now I primarily associate with squandered potential.Loot boxes grew out of free-to-play mobile games, where they’re the primary method of monetization. In something like Overwatch, they functioned as a way to earn additional revenue in an ongoing game, once the player had already dropped 40 bucks to buy it.More often than not, loot boxes are a random selection of skins and other cosmetics, but games like Star Wars: Battlefront 2 were famously criticized for launching with loot crates that essentially made it pay-to-win – if you bought enough of them and got lucky.It’s not unprecedented to associate loot boxes with gambling. A 2021 study published in Addictive Behaviors showed that players who self-reported as problem gamblers also tended to spend more on loot boxes, and another study done in the UK found a similar correlation with young adults.While Overwatch certainly wasn’t the first game to feature cosmetic loot boxes or microtransactions, it’s a reference point for me, and it also got attention worldwide. In 2018, Overwatch was investigated by the Belgian Gaming Commission, which found it “in violation of gambling legislation” alongside FIFA 18 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Belgium’s response was to ban the sale of loot boxes without a gambling license. Having a paid random rewards mechanic in a game is a criminal offense there. But not really. A 2023 study showed that 82% of iPhone games sold on the App Store in Belgium still use random paid monetization, as do around 80% of games that are rated 12+. The ban wasn’t effectively enforced, if at all, and the study recommends that a blanket ban wouldn’t actually be a practical solution anyway.Overwatch was rated T for Teen by the ESRB, and 12 by PEGI. When it first came out, its loot boxes were divisive. Since the mechanic came from F2P mobile games, which are often seen as predatory, people balked at seeing it in a big action game from a multi-million dollar publisher.At the time, the rebuttal was, “Well, at least it’s just cosmetics.” Nobody needs to buy loot boxes to be good at Overwatch.A lot has changed since 2016. Now we have a deeper understanding of how these mechanics are designed to manipulate players, even if they don’t affect gameplay. But also, they’ve been normalized. While there will always be people expressing disappointment when a AAA game has a paid random loot mechanic, it is no longer shocking.And if anything, these mechanics have only become more prevalent, thanks to the growth of gacha games. Gacha is short for “gachapon,” the Japanese capsule machines where you pay to receive one of a selection of random toys. Getty ImagesIn gacha games, players pay — not necessarily real money, but we’ll get to that — for a chance to get something. Maybe it’s a character, or a special weapon, or some gear — it depends on the game. Whatever it is, within that context, it’s desirable — and unlike the cosmetics of Overwatch, gacha pulls often do impact the gameplay.For example, in Infinity Nikki, you can pull for clothing items in these limited-time events. You have a chance to get pieces of a five-star outfit. But you also might pull one of a set of four-star items, or a permanent three-star piece. Of course, if you want all ten pieces of the five-star outfit, you have to do multiple pulls, each costing a handful of limited resources that you can earn in-game or purchase with money.Gacha was a fixture of mobile gaming for a long time, but in recent years, we’ve seen it go AAA, and global. MiHoYo’s Genshin Impact did a lot of that work when it came out worldwide on consoles and PC alongside its mobile release. Genshin and its successors are massive AAA games of a scale that, for your Nintendos and Ubisofts, would necessitate selling a bajillion copies to be a success. And they’re free.Genshin is an action game, whose playstyle changes depending on what character you’re playing — characters you get from gacha pulls, of course. In Zenless Zone Zero, the characters you can pull have different combo patterns, do different kinds of damage, and just feel different to play. And whereas in an early mobile gacha game like Love Nikki Dress UP! Queen the world was rudimentary, its modern descendant Infinity Nikki is, like Genshin, Breath of the Wild-esque. It is a massive open world, with collectibles and physics puzzles, platforming challenges, and a surprisingly involved storyline. Genshin Impact was the subject of an interesting study where researchers asked young adults in Hong Kong to self-report on their gacha spending habits. They found that, like with gambling, players who are not feeling good tend to spend more. “Young adult gacha gamers experiencing greater stress and anxiety tend to spend more on gacha purchases, have more motives for gacha purchases, and participate in more gambling activities,” they wrote. “This group is at a particularly higher risk of becoming problem gamblers.”One thing that is important to note is that Genshin Impact came out in 2020. The study was self-reported, and it was done during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time when people were experiencing a lot of stress, and also fewer options to relieve that stress. We were all stuck inside gaming.But the fact that stress can make people more likely to spend money on gacha shows that while the gacha model isn’t necessarily harmful to everyone, it is exploitative to everyone. Since I started writing this story, another self-reported study came out in Japan, where 18.8% of people in their 20s say they’ve spent money on gacha rather than on things like food or rent.Following Genshin Impact’s release, MiHoYo put out Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero. All are shiny, big-budget games that are free to play, but dangle the lure of making just one purchase in front of the player. Maybe you could drop five bucks on a handful of in-game currency to get one more pull. Or maybe just this month you’ll get the second tier of rewards on the game’s equivalent of a Battle Pass. The game is free, after all — but haven’t you enjoyed at least ten dollars’ worth of gameplay? Image: HoyoverseI spent most of my December throwing myself into Infinity Nikki. I had been so stressed, and the game was so soothing. I logged in daily to fulfill my daily wishes and earn my XP, diamonds, Threads of Purity, and bling. I accumulated massive amounts of resources. I haven’t spent money on the game. I’m trying not to, and so far, it’s been pretty easy. I’ve been super happy with how much stuff I can get for free, and how much I can do! I actually feel really good about that — which is what I said to my boyfriend, and he replied, “Yeah, that’s the point. That’s how they get you.”And he’s right. Currently, Infinity Nikki players are embroiled in a war with developer Infold, after Infold introduced yet another currency type with deep ties to Nikki’s gacha system. Every one of these gacha games has its own tangled system of overlapping currencies. Some can only be used on gacha pulls. Some can only be used to upgrade items. Many of them can be purchased with human money.Image: InFold Games/Papergames via PolygonAll of this adds up. According to Sensor Towers’ data, Genshin Impact earned over 36 million dollars on mobile alone in a single month of 2024. I don’t know what Dan DiIorio’s peak monthly revenue for Luck Be A Landlord was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that.A lot of the spending guardrails we see in games like these are actually the result of regulations in other territories, especially China, where gacha has been a big deal for a lot longer. For example, gacha games have a daily limit on loot boxes, with the number clearly displayed, and a system collectively called “pity,” where getting the banner item is guaranteed after a certain number of pulls. Lastly, developers have to be clear about what the odds are. When I log in to spend the Revelation Crystals I’ve spent weeks hoarding in my F2P Infinity Nikki experience, I know that I have a 1.5% chance of pulling a 5-star piece, and that the odds can go up to 6.06%, and that I am guaranteed to get one within 20 pulls, because of the pity system.So, these odds are awful. But it is not as merciless as sitting down at a Vegas slot machine, an experience best described as “oh… that’s it?”There’s not a huge philosophical difference between buying a pack of loot boxes in Overwatch, a pull in Genshin Impact, or even a booster of Pokémon cards. You put in money, you get back randomized stuff that may or may not be what you want. In the dictionary definition, it’s a gamble. But unlike the slot machine, it’s not like you’re trying to win money by doing it, unless you’re selling those Pokémon cards, which is a topic for another time.But since even a game where you don’t get anything, like Balatro or Luck Be A Landlord, can come under fire for promoting gambling to kids, it would seem appropriate for app stores and ratings boards to take a similarly hardline stance with gacha.Instead, all these games are rated T for Teen by the ESRB, and PEGI 12 in the EU.The ESRB ratings for these games note that they contain in-game purchases, including random items. Honkai: Star Rail’s rating specifically calls out a slot machine mechanic, where players spend tokens to win a prize. But other than calling out Honkai’s slot machine, app stores are not slapping Genshin or Nikki with an 18+ rating. Meanwhile, Balatro had a PEGI rating of 18 until a successful appeal in February 2025, and Luck Be a Landlord is still 17+ on Apple’s App Store.Nobody knows what they’re doingWhen I started researching this piece, I felt very strongly that it was absurd that Luck Be A Landlord and Balatro had age ratings this high.I still believe that the way both devs have been treated by ratings boards is bad. Threatening an indie dev with a significant loss of income by pulling their game is bad, not giving them a way to defend themself or help them understand why it’s happening is even worse. It’s an extension of the general way that too-big-to-fail companies like Google treat all their customers.DiIorio told me that while it felt like a human being had at least looked at Luck Be A Landlord to make the determination that it contained gambling themes, the emails he was getting were automatic, and he doesn’t have a contact at Google to ask why this happened or how he can avoid it in the future — an experience that will be familiar to anyone who has ever needed Google support. But what’s changed for me is that I’m not actually sure anymore that games that don’t have gambling should be completely let off the hook for evoking gambling.Exposing teens to simulated gambling without financial stakes could spark an interest in the real thing later on, according to a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It’s the same reason you can’t mosey down to the drug store to buy candy cigarettes. Multiple studies were done that showed kids who ate candy cigarettes were more likely to take up smoking (of course, the candy is still available — just without the “cigarette” branding.)So while I still think rating something like Balatro 18+ is nuts, I also think that describing it appropriately might be reasonable. As a game, it’s completely divorced from literally any kind of play you would find in a casino — but I can see the concern that the thrill of flashy numbers and the shiny cards might encourage young players to try their hand at poker in a real casino, where a real house can take their money.Maybe what’s more important than doling out high age ratings is helping people think about how media can affect us. In the same way that, when I was 12 and obsessed with The Matrix, my parents gently made sure that I knew that none of the violence was real and you can’t actually cartwheel through a hail of bullets in real life. Thanks, mom and dad!But that’s an answer that’s a lot more abstract and difficult to implement than a big red 18+ banner. When it comes to gacha, I think we’re even less equipped to talk about these game mechanics, and I’m certain they’re not being age-rated appropriately. On the one hand, like I said earlier, gacha exploits the player’s desire for stuff that they are heavily manipulated to buy with real money. On the other hand, I think it’s worth acknowledging that there is a difference between gacha and casino gambling.Problem gamblers aren’t satisfied by winning — the thing they’re addicted to is playing, and the risk that comes with it. In gacha games, players do report satisfaction when they achieve the prize they set out to get. And yes, in the game’s next season, the developer will be dangling a shiny new prize in front of them with the goal of starting the cycle over. But I think it’s fair to make the distinction, while still being highly critical of the model.And right now, there is close to no incentive for app stores to crack down on gacha in any way. They get a cut of in-app purchases. Back in 2023, miHoYo tried a couple of times to set up payment systems that circumvented Apple’s 30% cut of in-app spending. Both times, it was thwarted by Apple, whose App Store generated $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2022.According to Apple itself, 90% of that money did not include any commission to Apple. Fortunately for Apple, ten percent of a trillion dollars is still one hundred billion dollars, which I would also like to have in my bank account. Apple has zero reason to curb spending on games that have been earning millions of dollars every month for years.And despite the popularity of Luck Be A Landlord and Balatro’s massive App Store success, these games will never be as lucrative. They’re one-time purchases, and they don’t have microtransactions. To add insult to injury, like most popular games, Luck Be A Landlord has a lot of clones. And from what I can tell, it doesn’t look like any of them have been made to indicate that their games contain the dreaded “gambling themes” that Google was so worried about in Landlord.In particular, a game called SpinCraft: Roguelike from Sneaky Panda Games raised $6 million in seed funding for “inventing the Luck-Puzzler genre,” which it introduced in 2022, while Luck Be A Landlord went into early access in 2021.It’s free-to-play, has ads and in-app purchases, looks like Fisher Price made a slot machine, and it’s rated E for everyone, with no mention of gambling imagery in its rating. I reached out to the developers to ask if they had also been contacted by the Play Store to disclose that their game has gambling themes, but I haven’t heard back.Borrowing mechanics in games is as old as time, and it’s something I in no way want to imply shouldn’t happen because copyright is the killer of invention — but I think we can all agree that the system is broken.There is no consistency in how games with random chance are treated. We still do not know how to talk about gambling, or gambling themes, and at the end of the day, the results of this are the same: the house always wins.See More:

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.

Nearly two decades ago, scientists made an alarming discovery in upstate New York: Bats, the world’s only flying mammal, were becoming infected with a new, deadly fungal disease that, in some cases, could wipe out an entire colony in a matter of months. Since then, the disease — later called white-nose syndrome — has spread across much of the country, utterly decimating North American bats that hibernate in caves and killing over 90 percent of three bat species. According to some scientists, WNS has caused “the most precipitous wildlife decline in the past century in North America.” These declines have clear consequences for human populations — for you, even if you don’t like bats or visit caves. Bats eat insect pests, such as moths and beetles. And as they decline, farmers need to spray more pesticides. Scientists have linked the loss of bats in the US to an increase in insecticide use on farmland and, remarkably, to a rise in infant deaths. Insecticide chemicals are known to harm the health of newborns. The only reason we know any of this is because of a somewhat obscure government program in the US Geological Survey (USGS), an agency nested within the Interior Department. That program, known as the Ecosystems Mission Area (EMA), is the biological research division of Interior. Among other functions, it monitors environmental contaminants, the spread of invasive species, and the health of the nation’s wildlife, including bees, birds, and bats.White-nose syndrome, a fungal disease, has caused massive declines in a handful of bat species, including the tricolored bat, shown here in flight. J. Scott Altenbach/Bat Conservation InternationalThe Ecosystems Mission Area, which has around 1,200 employees, produces the premier science revealing how animals and ecosystems that Americans rely on are changing and what we can do to keep them intact — or risk our own health and economy. This program is now at an imminent risk of disappearing.Send us a confidential tipAre you a current or former federal employee with knowledge about the Trump administration’s attacks on wildlife protections? Reach out to Vox environmental correspondent Benji Jones on Signal at benji.90 or at benji.jones@vox.com or at benjijones@protonmail.com.In the White House’s 2026 budget request, the Trump administration asked Congress to slash funding for EMA by about 90 percent, from $293 million in 2025 to $29 million next year. Such cuts are also in line with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy roadmap, which calls for the government to “abolish” Interior’s Biological Resources Division, an outdated name for the Ecosystems Mission Area.Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also reportedly trying to fire government employees in the Ecosystems Mission Area, though a federal judge has so far blocked those efforts. Eliminating biological research is not good. In fact, it’s very bad.For a decade now, EMA’s North American Bat Monitoring Program, or NABat, has been gathering and analyzing data on bats and the threats they face. NABat produces research using data from hundreds of partner organizations showing not only how white-nose syndrome is spreading — which scientists are using to develop and deploy vaccines — but also how bats are affected by wind turbines, another known threat. Energy companies can and do use this research to develop safer technologies and avoid delays caused by wildlife regulations, such as the Endangered Species Act. The irony, an Interior Department employee told me, is that NABat makes wildlife management more efficient. It also helps reveal where declines are occurring before they become severe, potentially helping avoid the need to grant certain species federal protection — something the Trump administration would seem to want. The employee, who’s familiar with Interior’s bat-monitoring efforts, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. A northern long-eared bat with white-nose syndrome. Steve Taylor/University of IllinoisA dead bat infected with white-nose syndrome under UV light. USGS“If they want to create efficiencies in the government, they should ask us,” another Interior employee told Vox. “The damage that can be done by one administration takes decades to rebuild.”In response to a request for comment, an Interior Department spokesperson told Vox that “USGS remains committed to its congressional mandate as the science arm of the Department of the Interior.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment. In a Senate appropriations hearing last week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum refused to commit to maintaining funding for EMA.“There’s no question that they don’t know what EMA does,” said a third Interior employee, who has knowledge of the Ecosystems Mission Area.Ultimately, it’s not clear why the administration has targeted Interior’s biological research. EMA does, however, do climate science, such as studying how plants and animals are responding to rising temperatures. That’s apparently a no-go for the Trump administration. It also gathers information that sometimes indicates that certain species need federal protections, which come with regulations (also a no-go for President Donald Trump’s agenda).What’s especially frustrating for environmental advocates is that NABat, now 10 years old, is starting to hit its stride.“We should be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of this very successful program that started from scratch and built this robust, vibrant community of people all collecting data,” said Winifred Frick, the chief scientist at Bat Conservation International, an environmental group. “We have 10 years of momentum, and so to cut it off now sort of wastes all that investment. That feels like a tremendous loss.” Meanwhile, the cost of maintaining the program is less than 1 percent of Interior’s overall budget.The government’s wildlife monitoring programs are “jewels of the country,” said Hollis Woodard, an associate professor of entomology at University of California Riverside who works with USGS on bee monitoring. “These birds and bats perform services for us that are important for our day-to-day lives. Literally everything I value, including food, comes down to keeping an eye on these populations. The idea that we’re just going to wipe them out is just terrifying.”Update, June 2, 12:58 pm ET: This article was originally published on May 29, 2025, and has been updated to include newly public details on the 2026 White House budget request.See More:

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth, Senior EditorJune 2, 20255 Min ReadJG Photography via Alamy Stock PhotoProviding services to steel mills and mines around the world can call for real-world, heavy lifting. So when Phoenix Global decided it was time for digital transformation as new leadership took the helm, it needed a fresh plan to embrace the cloud.Jeff Suellentrop, chief information and technology officer for Phoenix Global, says the company works with some 17 steel mill sites in the US and abroad, offering slag remediation and metals recovery. “We operate all the heavy equipment, large loaders, dump trucks and basically all the heavy equipment in the steel mill,” he says. “We help process the byproduct of slags.”Slag is the byproduct of steelmaking, in which impurities are removed from the metal. Suellentrop says his company works with slag to help reclaim precious metals to return to the steelmaking process. The part of the byproduct not returned to steelmaking gets crushed and sold to construction and other industrial agencies. “It’s a very renewable process,” he says.Removing the Weight of Legacy TechServicing steel mills is Phoenix Global’s main business, Suellentrop says, with contracts that can last from five through 20 years. “It’s a fairly unique business, fairly complex compared to traditional order-to-cash type of process.Related:That includes very large asset purchases at the onset with tens of millions of dollars spent on equipment to initiate a contract, he says. “We manage all that equipment, all the personnel, and we also maintenance all that equipment.”This all requires a fairly long selling process, with each site built independently. Phoenix Global had a legacy ERP system in place, Suellentrop says, but the unique needs of the sites led to fragmented data that was not very integrated. “Our goal was to get what we call activity-based management, near real-time activity-based management,” he says.The company wanted to start fresh, jettison all the tech debt, and process debt to have a fully integrated, modernized organization. “We’ve replaced every technology in the company in the last two years,” Suellentrop says.Unfettered by the CloudThe core of that change, he says, was cloud-based SAP ERP software, for all of Phoenix Global’s finance, purchasing, processing tech, supply chain, contract management, plans, and telematics. Phoenix Global tapped Syntax Systems to transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.Suellentrop says his company is still deploying SAP at its sites, working toward 100% deployment, which will include mobile assets such as connecting loaders and dump trucks. “You can imagine all the telematics data, hours, fuel consumption,” he says. The system includes connecting some 1,700 associates around the world, integrating data, inventory, and managing maintenance shops through SAP. “We’ve taken out all of the hand offs; it’s all automated," Suellentrop says. “We’ve literally taken days out of the turn-around time and driven up utilization of the equipment, saved millions of dollars on inventory.”Related:Maintenance, for example, has been streamlined to let technicians work directly through SAP to order repair parts that would be available that same day. “It’s a fairly high volume of data when it comes to all the information around the assets, asset maintenance, and then obviously tracking of all the different activities and resources,” he says. “Our goal with activity-based management basically is to see near real-time P&L by site to allow us to make near real-time decisions which help us service our customer better.”In prior years, Phoenix Global saw spot implementations of new solutions for certain needs. After Suellentrop joined the company in March 2023, he was asked to architect the complete digital overhaul and digital transformation for the company. “I’m responsible, from the executive team, for that digital transformation and beginning this activity-based management,” he says. “Digital to me is really delivering it at the speed of business and creating a force multiplier. We literally changed every technology, jettisoned almost all of the legacy processes, and displaced them with best practices.”Related:That allowed Phoenix Global to get rid of unintegrated and poor processes, Suellentrop says, and leapfrog to best practices. “More importantly, it allowed us to standardize the whole data set,” he says, which meant not much data grooming was needed, quickening its use with AI. “We basically took out a whole challenge with deploying AI.”New Leadership, New StrategySuellentrop joined Phoenix Global as it emerged from a reorganization, which he says gave the company the chance to start fresh with a new leadership team that had a goal of driving improvements across the board. That included the adoption of AI and a reimagining of the business model. “The steel industry has not embraced digital quite at the pace of some other industries,” he says.The transformation plan aimed for increased safety, profitability, and efficiency. “We went into this with very distinct outcomes, how we saw this business running in the future, and then we basically align the technology to deliver those outcomes,” Suellentrop says. “I can’t stress the importance of that enough, because we had a very clear vision from the leadership team … it takes immense sponsorship, obviously, to jettison all old processes and go to best practices.”That type of change management, he says, included telling staff that processes they followed day to day, perhaps for as long as 15 years, would change. This included digitizing everything, Suellentrop says, including analog records, even for operators driving trucks. “We got rid of all the paper and pencils,” he says. “We’ve deployed tablets; we automated so they didn’t have to enter some things. We want to minimize the human data entry.”Maintenance technicians now use tablets, he says, which allows them to manage work orders, order parts, and plan their workloads.Phoenix Global plans to finish deploying the new system and operating model in the US this year with international sites to follow in 2026, Suellentrop says. “We’re doing financial planning. We have several new AI value-adders that we’re layering on this year in the plants that are deployed … we can hyper tune our processes and our profitability because we’ve got a much higher level of detail.”About the AuthorJoao-Pierre S. RuthSenior EditorJoao-Pierre S. Ruth covers tech policy, including ethics, privacy, legislation, and risk; fintech; code strategy; and cloud & edge computing for InformationWeek. He has been a journalist for more than 25 years, reporting on business and technology first in New Jersey, then covering the New York tech startup community, and later as a freelancer for such outlets as TheStreet, Investopedia, and Street Fight.See more from Joao-Pierre S. RuthWebinarsMore WebinarsReportsMore ReportsNever Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.SIGN-UPYou May Also Like

A new central staircase leads to a contemporary basement free of Hausmannian flourishes. Batiik Studio signals the shift with a mix of contemporary materials: a white resin banister curls onto a silvery travertine platform sourced from Artefacts, while bespoke cherry wood shelving rises along the wall. A Rosanna Lefeuvre painting completes the picture. Without erasing the flamboyant bones of the home, Benichou and Jallet skirted around them, crafting wall panels for select sections—like a single stretch in the living room, or a wall behind the primary bedroom’s headboard—that protect and sometimes curve around moldings, scaling back the grandeur. Sculptural by nature and rendered in white, each new plane—some smooth and matte, some textured like the surface of a painting—runs along decorative stretches of molding like a veil, creating clean and contemporary surfaces for hanging art.With Haussmannian details to spare throughout the apartment, the new walls aren’t permanent (future owners can remove them, revealing the original walls again), but eclipse key sections where moldings are almost oppressive. The edited version, a more artful form of White-Out, adds a new contemporary layer that gives the home, and the owners’ art, room to breathe.Clad in white materials that match the walls and with no overhead storage, the cooking area virtually disappears. “The client didn’t want the kitchen to look like a kitchen,” adds Benichou, nodding to the sculptural island. A minimal, travertine Garnier & Linker Lipari task light hangs over granite countertops sourced from Paris’s Artefacts. Vintage Scandinavian stools add texture along with a mixed-media artwork by Eva Jospin, and a Batiik Studio–designed wooden door leads to a new work kitchen (to hide any mess). Batiik Studio designed a one-of-a-kind dining table that breaks into two pieces, depending on how many guests are over (the fixed smaller piece creates space along the wall for things like sculptures and flowers when not in use). With boulder-like legs and a curving shape, it adds complexity against the room’s rectangular symmetry. Frédéric Pellenq chairs from Kolkhoze and a vintage Louis Poulsen Artichoke light enhance the contrast. Beyond the walls, new horizontal surfaces make space for sculptural pieces. In the living room, a faceted fireplace in gray-toned travertine adds sharp geometry to the ornate space. Jutting out on either side and along the mantle are plinth-like surfaces for objects tall and small. In the kitchen’s dining area, Benichou and Jallet flexed their talent for bespoke furniture, creating a dramatic ceramic-topped wooden table that swoops into the center of the room—a stage for rotating sculptures and dinner parties alike.The apartment’s modern basement was, literally, a whole different story. There were no ornate moldings with which to compete, no historic charms to challenge. And so it was a blank slate for Benichou and Jallet to do what they do best: create.With only a small window in the crafts room, using white across all surfaces—even bespoke storage and a resin floor—made the space as bright as possible. A vintage wooden table paired with vintage Pierre Chapo stools atop a beige Toulemonde Bochart Lion rug give warmth to the pristine palette.

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth, Senior EditorJune 2, 20255 Min ReadJG Photography via Alamy Stock PhotoProviding services to steel mills and mines around the world can call for real-world, heavy lifting. So when Phoenix Global decided it was time for digital transformation as new leadership took the helm, it needed a fresh plan to embrace the cloud.Jeff Suellentrop, chief information and technology officer for Phoenix Global, says the company works with some 17 steel mill sites in the US and abroad, offering slag remediation and metals recovery. “We operate all the heavy equipment, large loaders, dump trucks and basically all the heavy equipment in the steel mill,” he says. “We help process the byproduct of slags.”Slag is the byproduct of steelmaking, in which impurities are removed from the metal. Suellentrop says his company works with slag to help reclaim precious metals to return to the steelmaking process. The part of the byproduct not returned to steelmaking gets crushed and sold to construction and other industrial agencies. “It’s a very renewable process,” he says.Removing the Weight of Legacy TechServicing steel mills is Phoenix Global’s main business, Suellentrop says, with contracts that can last from five through 20 years. “It’s a fairly unique business, fairly complex compared to traditional order-to-cash type of process.Related:That includes very large asset purchases at the onset with tens of millions of dollars spent on equipment to initiate a contract, he says. “We manage all that equipment, all the personnel, and we also maintenance all that equipment.”This all requires a fairly long selling process, with each site built independently. Phoenix Global had a legacy ERP system in place, Suellentrop says, but the unique needs of the sites led to fragmented data that was not very integrated. “Our goal was to get what we call activity-based management, near real-time activity-based management,” he says.The company wanted to start fresh, jettison all the tech debt, and process debt to have a fully integrated, modernized organization. “We’ve replaced every technology in the company in the last two years,” Suellentrop says.Unfettered by the CloudThe core of that change, he says, was cloud-based SAP ERP software, for all of Phoenix Global’s finance, purchasing, processing tech, supply chain, contract management, plans, and telematics. Phoenix Global tapped Syntax Systems to transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.Suellentrop says his company is still deploying SAP at its sites, working toward 100% deployment, which will include mobile assets such as connecting loaders and dump trucks. “You can imagine all the telematics data, hours, fuel consumption,” he says. The system includes connecting some 1,700 associates around the world, integrating data, inventory, and managing maintenance shops through SAP. “We’ve taken out all of the hand offs; it’s all automated," Suellentrop says. “We’ve literally taken days out of the turn-around time and driven up utilization of the equipment, saved millions of dollars on inventory.”Related:Maintenance, for example, has been streamlined to let technicians work directly through SAP to order repair parts that would be available that same day. “It’s a fairly high volume of data when it comes to all the information around the assets, asset maintenance, and then obviously tracking of all the different activities and resources,” he says. “Our goal with activity-based management basically is to see near real-time P&L by site to allow us to make near real-time decisions which help us service our customer better.”In prior years, Phoenix Global saw spot implementations of new solutions for certain needs. After Suellentrop joined the company in March 2023, he was asked to architect the complete digital overhaul and digital transformation for the company. “I’m responsible, from the executive team, for that digital transformation and beginning this activity-based management,” he says. “Digital to me is really delivering it at the speed of business and creating a force multiplier. We literally changed every technology, jettisoned almost all of the legacy processes, and displaced them with best practices.”Related:That allowed Phoenix Global to get rid of unintegrated and poor processes, Suellentrop says, and leapfrog to best practices. “More importantly, it allowed us to standardize the whole data set,” he says, which meant not much data grooming was needed, quickening its use with AI. “We basically took out a whole challenge with deploying AI.”New Leadership, New StrategySuellentrop joined Phoenix Global as it emerged from a reorganization, which he says gave the company the chance to start fresh with a new leadership team that had a goal of driving improvements across the board. That included the adoption of AI and a reimagining of the business model. “The steel industry has not embraced digital quite at the pace of some other industries,” he says.The transformation plan aimed for increased safety, profitability, and efficiency. “We went into this with very distinct outcomes, how we saw this business running in the future, and then we basically align the technology to deliver those outcomes,” Suellentrop says. “I can’t stress the importance of that enough, because we had a very clear vision from the leadership team … it takes immense sponsorship, obviously, to jettison all old processes and go to best practices.”That type of change management, he says, included telling staff that processes they followed day to day, perhaps for as long as 15 years, would change. This included digitizing everything, Suellentrop says, including analog records, even for operators driving trucks. “We got rid of all the paper and pencils,” he says. “We’ve deployed tablets; we automated so they didn’t have to enter some things. We want to minimize the human data entry.”Maintenance technicians now use tablets, he says, which allows them to manage work orders, order parts, and plan their workloads.Phoenix Global plans to finish deploying the new system and operating model in the US this year with international sites to follow in 2026, Suellentrop says. “We’re doing financial planning. We have several new AI value-adders that we’re layering on this year in the plants that are deployed … we can hyper tune our processes and our profitability because we’ve got a much higher level of detail.”About the AuthorJoao-Pierre S. RuthSenior EditorJoao-Pierre S. Ruth covers tech policy, including ethics, privacy, legislation, and risk; fintech; code strategy; and cloud & edge computing for InformationWeek. He has been a journalist for more than 25 years, reporting on business and technology first in New Jersey, then covering the New York tech startup community, and later as a freelancer for such outlets as TheStreet, Investopedia, and Street Fight.See more from Joao-Pierre S. RuthWebinarsMore WebinarsReportsMore ReportsNever Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.SIGN-UPYou May Also Like

Facing huge fines, Apple on Monday began a legal challenge to the European Commission’s “unreasonable” demand that it open up its platforms to rivals, arguing any such move threatens the foundations of its platforms with a costly process that also undercuts its ability to serve customers. The company is, in a word, furious. It argued that it has cooperated with the Commission’s demands under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and points to the investments it has already made in complying with that act. What Apple said “At Apple, we design our technology to work seamlessly together, so it can deliver the unique experience our users love and expect from our products,” the company said in a statement. “The EU’s interoperability requirements threaten that foundation, while creating a process that is unreasonable, costly, and stifles innovation. These requirements will also hand data-hungry companies’ sensitive information, which poses massive privacy and security risks to our EU users.” The company also noted that there is a real risk that people’s most sensitive information could be accessed, partially because it becomes so much harder to defend. These attempts are already taking place, Apple said. “Companies have already requested our users’ most sensitive data — from the content of their notifications to a full history of every stored Wi-Fi network on their device — giving them the ability to access personal information that even Apple doesn’t see. In the end, these deeply flawed rules that only target Apple — and no other company will severely limit our ability to deliver innovative products and features to Europe, leading to an inferior user experience for our European customers. We are appealing these decisions on their behalf, and in order to preserve the high-quality experience our European customers expect.” A one-sided approach What seems to really upset Apple is that some aspects of the demands mean the company will effectively be forced to hand its innovations out to businesses with which it is in direct competition — at no charge. That means Apple does not get to draw the full benefits of its work and makes it far more difficult to introduce products in Europe. What makes matters worse is that while Apple is being forced to open up in ways that advantage competitors, quite literally at its expense, it is not being given the opportunity to do the same back. Apple is the only company that these demands have been made of, meaning it is being forced to give its intellectual property away to others who do not need to play by the same rules. Some data hungry companies are already attempting to exploit the DMA to gain unfettered access to sensitive customer data. All the while, Apple is left alone and isolated in its quest to ensure user privacy consistent with GDPR regulation. It’s attempts to protect privacy are about protecting customers. Compliance? We are compliant While critics will continue to sneer and jeer at the company in their quest to rid the world of the “Apple Tax” only the world’s largest developers actually pay, Apple would argue that it has been making serious efforts to comply with the DMA. The company has opened up a portal developers can use to request additional interoperability with hardware and software features inside iPhones and iPads. Apple consistently opens up API access to iPhone, including opening up SMS messaging to RCS, HomeKit features and messaging services support. It has also put in place numerous other enhancements in response to the DMA, and while the warning messages it places when using third-party stores may be stark, this makes them no less true. Europe seems to want customers to use third-party stores with no warning at all that this is what is going on, which seems weird. Malicious regulatory compliance There is a degree to which much of the situation seems to reflect political, rather than economic or moral pressures. The fact that Europe is using Apple as a high profile example, while also refusing to be totally transparent about what it wants before levying any fines, suggests that the Commission is not so much deciding on facts as implementing a political decision using a set of laws that seem designed almost solely to punish one company. That’s the kind of malicious regulatory compliance Apple is furious about — a compliance regime that will now be tested in the courts. Will it make a difference?  Who knows? But the existential battle will decide the future of technology in Europe, and if the market is worth doing business in when compared to the cost of doing so. It will also determine the future of Apple, which will use its considerable resources to find some way to change the nature of the game. One group it seems unlikely to help will be those of Apple’s European customers who are happy and accustomed to the Apple ecosystem, and don’t particularly want to use third-party services, as Apple’s right to offer that “pure Apple” experience seems a likely sacrifice to Europe’s politically-driven zeal. That is, unless cooler heads do curtail the Commission’s attacks. You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Quite literally "blink and you'll miss it."