Noisy, energy-hungry, and dangerous — if there’s one thing small town Americans have quickly learned, it’s that a new data center is a seriously unwelcome neighbor. First announced in December of 2024, construction on Meta’s new Hyperion data center is already well underway. With a price tag of $27 billion, the massive project has an expected computing capacity of five gigawatts, enough to power over a million US homes. Assuming the project’s convoluted financial situation doesn’t force Meta to adjust its plans, it will be the largest data center in the world when it comes online in 2030. Sure to be a noisy, resource-guzzling behemoth, the massive installation is already giving one Louisiana town less than a mile away a brutal preview of its final form. As reported by the Louisiana Illuminator, construction on Hyperion has contributed to a massive rise in traffic in the rural town of Holly Ridge. Each day, the local outlet reports, thousands of heavy construction rigs barrel up and down the town’s once-quiet streets, contributing to a 600 percent increase in crashes. Compared to just nine auto accidents in all of 2024, local police have responded to 64 crashes between January and mid-September of 2025…
A collaboration between the groups of Professor Mónica H. Pérez-Temprano at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) and Professor Anat Milo at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has uncovered how the characteristics of specific substrates require certain reaction conditions that determine the course of a chemical reaction, in the context of C–H deuteration reactions.
Globalization, migration, climate change and war—nation states are currently under huge pressure on many fronts. Understanding the forces that initially drove the emergence of states across the world may help explain why.