I recently returned from visiting family in America and was struck by how hot I felt back home in London, despite the temperatures being lower. Partly, this was down to humidity: London is sticky in summer, while Utah, where my uncle lives, is very dry.
But it’s also down to the buildings. My brick house absorbs and retains heat while every building I went to in America was either well ventilated or had air conditioning blasting away.
That contrast got me thinking: as the UK warms, can it keep its homes and workplaces comfortable without relying solely on air-con?
They looked at the coming demand for cooling using the concept of “cooling degree days,” which essentially assesses how often people will need to take extra measures, like switching the air-conditioning on, to keep themselves cool.
They found countries like Nigeria and Chad will see the biggest absolute rise in cooling degree days. “A clear indication that Africa is shouldering the burden of a problem it did not create,” they note.
But they also found that countries in northern latitudes will face the greatest relative increase in uncomfortably hot days.
“Of the top ten countries with the most significant relative change in cooling degree days as global warming exceeds 1.5°C and reaches 2°C, eight are located in northern Europe.”
It gets worse. “Buildings in the northern hemisphere,” they write, “are primarily designed to withstand cold seasons by maximizing solar gains and minimizing ventilation—like greenhouses.”
The solution seems obvious: let’s all get air-con.
Coal-powered air-con?
But Mehri Khosravi says it isn’t that simple. An energy researcher at the University of East London, she warns that:
“Cooling requires huge amounts of energy at the exact moments when demand is already high. In 2022 and 2023, the UK had to briefly restart a coal power plant to keep the lights—and the air conditioners—on.”
In winter, she says, we rightly focus on better insulation to reduce heating demand, as “it’s a lot harder to warm a house than it is to stop heat escaping in the first place.”
So how do we stop a northern European brick house from heating up in the first place?
Khosravi suggests we look to southern Europe for inspiration, where 35°C summers were common long before climate change. Her suggestions include shading and shutters to block sunlight before it enters a building, natural ventilation to let heat escape in cooler hours, and reflective or light-colored buildings that reflect sunlight.
It’s hard to imagine Scarborough being turned into Santorini any time soon. But while we wait to adapt our buildings for the new normal, Khosravi says we should adapt our behavior too.
In Spain, the hottest hours are for siestas. Outdoor activities are paused, and people are more active in the mornings and evenings. Culturally, they understand that keeping curtains closed during the day and opening windows at night can prevent homes from overheating.
In the UK, heat is still culturally framed as “good weather”. Sunny weekends trigger beach trips, barbecues and more outdoor activity, even when it’s dangerously hot. This mismatch between perception and risk is a major public health challenge. Smarter cooling
Perhaps there are smarter ways to cool down. Academics in Australia recently published research suggesting a “fan first” approach, even when air-conditioning is installed.
“The approach is simple,” they write: “use electric fans as your first cooling strategy, and only turn on air conditioning when the indoor temperature exceeds 27°C.”
These fans use only a tiny fraction of the electricity used to run air conditioning, but “can make you feel up to 4°C cooler.” In their research, the Australian team increased an office’s air conditioning set-point from 24 to 26.5°C, with supplementary air movement from desk and ceiling fans. This “reduced energy consumption by 32%, without compromising thermal comfort.”
Air conditioning doesn’t have to mean the typical rows of humming white boxes. Heat pumps—already central to Britain’s low-carbon heating plans—can also keep homes cool in summer.
Essentially, they’re able to act like reversible air conditioners: in winter, they draw warmth into a building, and in summer they can run in reverse to push heat out.
Crucially, they do so with far greater efficiency than traditional systems. Theresa Pistochini, an engineer at UC Davis in California, points out that heat pumps can be “anywhere from 200% to 400% efficient,” meaning they move more than twice as much energy (heat) than the energy required to operate them.
Her analysis found that “buying a heat pump today will reduce global-warming impact in almost all geographical locations.”
For households, this could mean one appliance that covers both heating and cooling, slashes energy bills, and avoids the climate-damaging lock-in of conventional air conditioning. For policymakers, heat pumps may offer a way to meet surging cooling demand without blowing the carbon budget.
But heat pumps aren’t a perfect fix. Installation is costly, many older homes will still need upgrades, and there aren’t enough trained engineers. They’ll need further support if they’re to become a mainstream alternative to air-con.
Nonetheless, together with simple measures like fans and shutters, heat pumps point to a smarter approach to cooling. And it could be made even more sustainable if paired with clean energy from rooftop solar.
Homes equipped with solar panels can generate electricity during the hottest parts of the day—exactly when air conditioners or heat pumps are working hardest.
Tom Rogers and colleagues at Nottingham Trent University say solar will play a “pivotal role” in “addressing summer cooling demand and enhancing climate resilience.” They analyzed satellite images to estimate that rooftop solar could provide “nearly one third” of the city’s electricity demand.
The UK is warming, and staying comfortable in hotter summers is a must. But there’s more than one way to cool down. Simple measures like fans, efficient heat pumps and rooftop solar—combined with smarter building design and passive cooling—could keep homes safe, energy use low and emissions in check.
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No doubt looking to find some breathing space after the hubbub of Watches and Wonders last week, TAG Heuer has dropped an update to its 2025 revamped collection of the brand’s iconic plastic-cased 1980s watch, the “Formula 1.”
The five new pieces are called the “pastel collection” by TAG, and all are built on the same solar-powered Formula 1 Solargraph 38 mm that launched in March last year. Two models feature a sandblasted stainless steel case, while the remaining three have cases made from TAG’s proprietary bio-polamide plastic, Polylight.
It’s these Polylight versions that, for WIRED, are the stars of the new mini collection. Coming in pastel blue, beige, and pink, and sporting case-matching rubber straps and bidirectional-rotating Polylight bezels, they reference classic F1 designs that made the line iconic in the first place.
The new Polylight beige.
Courtesy of TAG Heuer
The “pastel green” steel F1 Solargraphs.
Courtesy of TAG Heuer
The stainless steel models have a 3-link sandblasted steel bracelet and either a “pastel green” or “lavender blue” dial with matching Polylight bezels. The dials on both watches also see eight diamonds replace the circular hour markers. TAG says these models add “a touch of refinement for those seeking sophistication,” but considering these “luxury” F1s will retail at $2,800, as opposed to the already punchy $1,950 full Polylight versions, our pick is most definitely the plastic pieces.
Not only do these blue, beige, and pink versions pleasingly hark back to vintage F1 designs—though now 38 mm in size instead of the original 35 mm—but also, just like all F1 Solargraphs, they come equipped with screw-down crowns and casebacks, making for 100 meters of water resistance and ensuring these will serve well as dive and sports watches. My recommendation? Go for the pink, it looks superb on the wrist. The beige is a very close second.
Pretty in pink: The new Polylight pink F1 is limited to 1,110 pieces for the 110th anniversary of the Indy 500.
Now, there’s another class of high-end gaming laptop that focuses more on performance than being thin or portable. The Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 10 is one of my favorites in this class, featuring a beautiful white chassis and glossy OLED display. Unlike some OLED displays, the Legion 7i’s screen can be cranked up to over 1,000 nits of brightness. The result is some really splendid HDR performance that brings games to life. HDR is a powerful way of improving the visuals of your games without a performance cost. The Legion 7i Gen 10 is one of the very best in this regard.
It’s still fairly thin at 0.7 inches thick too, while a lot of the ports are found on the back. It’s the definition of a “clean” gaming laptop. It’s no slouch when it comes to performance either, offering either the RTX 5070 Ti or RTX 5080 for graphics.
Cheap Gaming Laptops That Are Worth It
No gaming laptops worth buying are actually cheap. High-refresh rate displays and discrete graphics will always make them more expensive than standard laptops. But as you get closer to $1,000, there is one laptop I always come back to: the Lenovo LOQ 15. Pronounced “Lock,” this Lenovo subbrand is known for cutting the fluff and focusing on giving gamers the performance they need at an affordable price. No laptop does that better than the LOQ 15. Many laptop manufacturers sell their RTX 5060 configurations for hundreds of dollars more. In reality, if you’re shopping around $1,000, there’s no reason to not buy the LOQ 15. Just do it.
If you do want to save some extra cash, there is another option that is cheaper than the LOQ 15 with a few compromises in key areas. The Acer Nitro V 16 is that laptop, which comes with an RTX 5050. This was as affordable as $600 at one point last year—before prices on laptops have risen due to the ongoing memory shortage—but it remains the only laptop cheaper than the Lenovo LOQ 15 that’s actually worth it. It’s fairly powerful for the RTX 5050, and while the screen is pretty shoddy, it’s not a bad-looking laptop. The one big caveat is that the 135-watt power supply it comes with doesn’t deliver quite enough power to keep it charged in Performance mode. Read more about this issue in my review, as it’s important to know about if you’re planning to buy it.
There are other cheap gaming laptops out there I’ve tested, such as the MSI Cyborg A15, but either the Acer Nitro V 16 or Lenovo LOQ 15 are better, cheaper options. You will also find lots of gaming laptops under $1,000 that use older graphics cards, such as the RTX 4050 or 3050. In general, I’d recommend staying away from these. They’re only one or two generations back, but remember: Nvidia only releases new laptop graphics cards every couple of years. So, an RTX 4050 laptop may be well over two years old already, and an RTX 3050 is over five years old. Not only do you get worse graphics performance, these laptops are much more likely to need to be replaced sooner.
Experimental Stuff
One of the exciting things about the world of gaming laptops right now is the experimentation. While clamshell gaming laptops with a conventional Nvidia GPU are the most standard way to go, there’s a few different ways to take your PC games on the go that stretch the boundaries. You might consider a gaming handheld, for example, like the Steam Deck or Xbox Ally X. These handhelds have their fans, and while you can’t also do your homework on these devices, they’re great on couches, trains, and planes.
The Sans Institute, one of the world’s pre-eminent cyber security certification and training bodies, is to play a key role in the annual Nato Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) Locked Shields exercise, held in Tallinn, Estonia, through the provision of a fully functional power generation system that participating teams will attempt to defend during the game.
This year marks the 16th running of the Locked Shields live fire security defence exercise, which unites blue teams from across Nato’s 32 member states, as well as other allies and observers.
This year, however, Sans has been entrusted with the task of building a genuine, operational cyber range, as opposed to creating a simulation. It is using real industrial control systems (ICSs) and physical equipment that 16 teams of defenders will have to protect while under live cyber attack, with the decisions they make having an immediate physical impact on a national-scale power grid.
Nato and Sans said the aim of the game is to close the gap between sandboxed, classroom-based cyber security training and real-world operational readiness, which, amid the cyber dimension to the energy crisis precipitated by the war in Iran and spillover from the ongoing war in Ukraine, has never been more important.
“We are putting teams in an environment where cyber decisions directly impact physical operations,” said Felix Schallock, who leads the initiative at the Sans Institute. “If you lose visibility, if you lose control, the power generation can be affected. That’s the reality operators face every day. That’s what we’re training for.”
Nato CCDCOE director Tõnis Saar added: “Locked Shields is a technically advanced exercise that challenges participants to defend the critical infrastructure systems modern societies depend on. As much of this critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector, strong public-private collaboration is essential. Industry partners such as Sans Institute play a vital role in making the exercise as realistic and impactful as possible.”
Hybrid architecture
The Sans Institute’s cyber range comprises close to 70 physical ICS devices, with programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs), operator and engineering workstations, 100 virtual machines (VMs) and interconnected systems within the wider CCDCOE environment, all supported by live network infrastructure, the whole forming a hybrid information and operational technology (IT/OT) architecture.
During the exercise, blue teamers will be set the task of defending the “energy provider” while coming under sustained attack from opposing red teams.
The goal is to effectively demonstrate how maintaining a reliable generation system isn’t some metric on a scorecard, but rather the core mission, so success will entail more than just spotting and arresting threats – it will also demand operational discipline, maintaining uninterrupted power generation, preserving comms between IT and OT networks, guaranteeing visibility and control of ICS technology, and avoiding any destabilising disruptions.
The people defending our critical infrastructure deserve training that takes the threat as seriously as they do James Lyne, Sans Institute
Actions will be visible, rippling through the systems in real time, so participants won’t just see alerts, they will see turbines being throttled, breakers being opened or closed, and generation capacity being affected. As such, failure will be immediate and visible – missteps will degrade system performance, disrupt or halt power generation, or simulate national-level consequences.
Tim Conway, Sans Institute fellow and ICS curriculum lead, explained: “We’re showing teams how to defend infrastructure that can’t simply be rebooted or patched on the fly. You have to think like an operator, not just a defender. That mindset shift is what makes this environment so powerful.”
Sans Institute CEO James Lyne expressed great pride in what the Sans team has built for Locked Shields this year. “The scenarios these critical initiatives prepare for are playing out in the world – national espionage, cyber integrated to kinetic attacks and warfare, and retaliation attacks,” he said.
“Throw in AI or machine speed attackers and the need for defenders to adapt, and you have the most disruptive period in cyber security in 20 years. We are privileged to help our allies be ready and continuously improving to secure the future. The people defending our critical infrastructure deserve training that takes the threat as seriously as they do,” he added.
Schallock said the exercise was about preparing teams for protecting the systems that matter most. “Cyber security training must reflect the environment defenders are protecting. We’re not just teaching cyber security, we’re showing how to defend a nation’s infrastructure when it counts.”
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