You don't need to Ernest Shackleton yourself to reap the benefits of cold plunging. A calm, controlled ice bath is key. Depending on your disposition, a minute in an ice bath can feel like agony or ecstasy. Perhaps you wince at the thought of stepping foot in an ice bath, or maybe you're an experienced cold plunger who can't get enough of the endorphin-releasing sensation. There are many ways to access cold water therapy from having a cold shower, to submerging your body in a dedicated cold plunge pool.

Modern laundry detergents work better in cold water. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. You may wash your clothes with hot water--many people do. That could be a mistake. Modern washing machines, and modern laundry detergent, are designed to work well at cold temperatures.

As demand for artificial intelligence technology boosts construction and proposed construction of data centers around the world, those computers require not just electricity and land, but also a significant amount of water. Data centers use water directly, with cooling water pumped through pipes in and around the computer equipment. They also use water indirectly, through the water required to produce the electricity to power the facility. The amount of water used to produce electricity increases dramatically when the source is fossil fuels compared with solar or wind. A 2024 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons (64 billion liters) of water directly through cooling, and projects that by 2028, those figures could double - or even quadruple.

We introduce Venn Diagram (VD) Prompting, an innovative prompting technique which allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to combine and synthesize information across complex, diverse and long-context documents in knowledge-intensive question-answering tasks. Generating answers from multiple documents involves numerous steps to extract relevant and unique information and amalgamate it into a cohesive response. To improve the quality of the final answer, multiple LLM calls or pretrained models are used to perform different tasks such as summarization, reorganization and customization. The approach covered in the paper focuses on replacing the multi-step strategy via a single LLM call using VD prompting. Our proposed technique also aims to eliminate the inherent position bias in the LLMs, enhancing consistency in answers by removing sensitivity to the sequence of input information. It overcomes the challenge of inconsistency traditionally associated with varying input sequences. We also explore the practical applications of the VD prompt based on our examination of the prompt's outcomes. In the experiments performed on four public benchmark question-answering datasets, VD prompting continually matches or surpasses the performance of a meticulously crafted instruction prompt which adheres to optimal guidelines and practices.

The world's most patient mom may be a deep-sea octopus that tends her eggs for nearly 4.5 years. But now, there may be a new contender for her throne. Scientists have caught a rare glimpse of another deep-sea dweller that may also spend four or more years nursing its eggs, and it does it in an even more unusual place: on hydrothermal vents, where hot water spews from the ocean floor. It's called the Pacific white skate (Bathyraja spinosissima), a bone-white, bug-eyed relative of sharks that can live almost two miles (2,900 meters) underwater. Deep-sea skates, which are shark relatives that resemble rays, lay large eggs that can take years to hatch in cold water.

This is the moment the makers of a Russian robot claim it saved a girl from being crushed - but is everything as it seems? Footage from Perm Polytechnic University, in central Russia, shows Promobot - a'self-teaching' robot - stopping a set of shelves from falling on a little girl after she tried to climb on them. Oleg Kivokurtsev, one of the creators of the robot, claims his machine carried out the manoeuvre all by itself - but his team have been accused of fakery in the past. There have been multiple bizarre incidents involving his creation - including two apparent escape attempts from its testing facility, and another time it started spouting profound answers to a question. While nobody has conclusively disproved the claims, prominent tech websites including Atlas Obscura and BGR have both poured cold water on the Promobot, while many have simply ignored it.

The sunny beaches of summer are already losing their popularity, as increasingly chilly waters drive vacationers to less frigid pursuits. Cold water has long challenged humans, who have no natural defenses against a wintry marine environment. Beavers and sea otters, on the other hand, thrive in cold water, despite lacking the insulating blubber that protects other marine mammals. The secret is in their fur, where warm air is trapped among the hairs in their thick pelts, keeping them warm even as they dodge ice floes. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, inspired by this evolutionary strategy, have created synthetic pelts modeled after the mechanism through which beavers warm themselves.