Bathing can change the primates' parasites and gut microbes. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. When the temperatures plunge and snow falls, it's understandable to envy a snow monkey soaking in a steaming hot spring. Officially called Japanese macaques (), the primates are well known for taking advantage of the warm waters during snowy winters. While the hot water helps keep their bodies toasty in parts of Japan that can be covered with feet of snow for months at a time, there may be more to this unique behavior than meets the eye.

A lazy Sunday project, here is a meandering log of my interactions with an intelligent chat application created on Character.AI which simulates the experience of a WWI adventure game. We select chat bot personalities to engage from a visual catalog. They range from games to talking with historical figures like Freud or Socrates or contemporary personalities like Elon Musk and Tony Stark. They include psychologists, motivation and relationship coaches, anime and pokemon characters, language tutors, etc. Users can also build their own personalized chat bots with custom prompts and example text to tilt the AI different directions. The underlying technology is based on large language models, (LLMs) which are spreading across the web like wildfire. LLMs generate text that rivals humans for many tasks and can carry on conversations while remembering the context of the discussion. This tech is still in its infancy.

We played a test build of Monster Hunter World Iceborne prior to release. From Barioth to hot spring Palico pals, here's what we learned. Itching to see some "Monster Hunter World: Iceborne" content before the game's official release on Sept. 6? We recently had a chance to play and record video of the first few hours of the full game-length "Iceborne" expansion during a visit to Capcom's U.S. headquarters in San Francisco a few days ago. The test build we tried out remains a work in progress and we weren't allowed to show equipment loadouts, new jewels and mods or go too in-depth about monster weaknesses for spoiler reasons.

It's been five years since NASA ended the Spirit rover's mission, but now, researchers say the robot may have discovered traces of life during its Mars investigation. A team of geoscientists has discovered that silica deposits from a region on the red planet dubbed'Home Plate' closely resemble those that form in Chilean hot springs at El Tatio. On Earth, these complex finger-like structures arise from a combination of biological and non-biological activity, suggesting a similar process may have taken place on Mars. The researchers compared opaline silica structures found at Home Plate (on left) with those from hot spring discharge channels at El Tatio (on right). The silica deposits on Mars were discovered after Spirit's right front wheel failed in 2007, forcing the robot to drag it across the ground like a plow near Home Plate, an eroded deposit of volcanic ash.