Buffy

Peeking at some percale sheet sales? WIRED reviewer Nena Farrell really liked the long-staple Supima cotton sheets from Buffy, which are a good contender if you’re looking to stay cool at night. I also love my Buffy Breeze comforter, which is perfect for when the nights start to get a bit cooler and the fall temperatures roll around. The Lyocell material doesn’t make me feel like I’m roasting, yet it maintains a weightier feel than your average blanket. As part of Buffy’s Labor Day sales, you can take 20 percent off the entire site and 30 percent off of bedding sets, no code needed.

Coop Sleep Goods

I just kicked off testing pillows from Cool Sleep Goods, but early read: I really, really like them. If you’d like to test together and share your thoughts hypothetically, Labor Day’s a good time to stock up on some serious pillow inventory. Consider this a book club, but we only discuss sleep products—that would actually be my dream. Coop is offering 20 percent off its entire site, PLUS a free silk (!) pillowcase for orders over $150 and 40 percent off clearance (you still get the pillowcase if you spend over $150 here too!).

• Crescent pillow, not moon: Coop Crescent Pillow for $79 (20 percent off)—No Code Needed

Slumber Cloud

If you’re a hot sleeper, I can’t recommend these sheets enough, and they’re on sale right now. They feel like silky bamboo since they’re made with Tencel lyocell, but are added together with a proprietary blend of viscose designed to keep you cool. That blend includes phase change material, or PCM, to absorb heat. It’s added to the sheets as a gel, but even after dozens of uses and washes (as two hot sleepers, my husband and I always grab these sheets when I’m not testing something new!), it’s still holding up great and keeping us cool. Slumber Cloud also makes a cooling pillow that feels like a down alternative if you need more cooling in your bedroom. Both have a discount right now ahead of Labor Day. —Nena Farrell

The Company Store

I know it’s still very warm outside for many of us, especially as we hold onto these final dregs of summer. On the other hand, this is the time to plan ahead, which is why The Company Store’s sheet sale is perfect timing for Labor Day. WIRED’s sheets reviewer, Nena Farrell, is a big fan of this brand’s flannel sheets, so if you’re looking forward to cozy autumnal days, now’s the time to grab a set so you’re prepared. If you need some organizational help, the brand’s storage bags can also keep sheets tidy.

Bedsure

I’ve sung Bedsure’s cooling sheets‘ praises many times. And now I’m going to do it again: The brand’s temperature-regulating bamboo creates a cool, silky-feeling sleep space, and for how much I use them, they’ve held up very well. The brand’s GentleSoft sheets are already very affordable, but it’s always fun to find an even better deal for them.

Cozy Earth

Big, big fan of all things Cozy Earth. From sheets, pajamas, to even the bamboo body pillow, I’m collecting all the products they offer like Pokémon in my free time. The bamboo sheets are my coveted sheet set because they swaddle me in a feeling of cool, glorious silkiness. Sales are not as frequent with Cozy Earth, so it’s go time! Use our code WIRED to get 35 percent off the entire site.

Keeping it cozy: Cozy Earth bamboo sheet set for $208 (35 Percent Off)–No Code Needed

Brooklinen

Even though summer’s coming to a close, depending on where you live, the hot days aren’t over yet. Cooling sheets are a must for many to use year-round, and Brooklinen’s Classic Percale had a nice, crispy feel to them, according to WIRED Reviewer Nena Farrell. And right now, you can get 25 percent off the entire site.

Floating blue paddles dance on the waves that lap a dock in the Port of Los Angeles, silently converting the power of the sea into usable electricity.

This innovative installation may hold one of the keys to accelerating a transition away from fossil fuels that scientists say is necessary if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

“The project is very simple and easy,” Inna Braverman, co-founder of Israeli start-up Eco Wave Power, told AFP.

Looking a little like piano keys, the floaters rise and fall with each wave.

They are connected to hydraulic pistons that push a biodegradable fluid through pipes to a container filled with accumulators, which resemble large red scuba tanks.

When the pressure is released, it spins a turbine that generates electrical current.

If this pilot project convinces the California authorities, Braverman hopes to cover the entire 13-kilometer (eight-mile) breakwater protecting the port with hundreds of floaters that together would produce enough electricity to power 60,000 US homes.

Supporters of the technology say wave energy is an endlessly renewable and always reliable source of power.

Unlike solar power, which produces nothing at night, or wind power, which depends on the weather, the sea is always in motion.

And there is a lot of it.

Tough tech

The waves off the American West Coast could theoretically power 130 million homes—or supply around a third of the electricity used every year in the United States, according to the US Department of Energy.

However wave energy remains the poor relation of other, better-known renewables, and has not been successfully commercialized at a large-enough scale.

The history of the sector is full of company shipwrecks and projects sunk by the brutality of the high seas. Developing devices robust enough to withstand the fury of the waves, while transmitting electricity via underwater cables to the shore, has proven to be an impossible task so far.

“Ninety-nine percent of competitors chose to install in the middle of the ocean, where it’s super expensive, where it’s breaking down all the time, so they can’t really make projects work,” Braverman said.

With her retractable dock-mounted device, the entrepreneur believes she has found the answer.

“When the waves are too high for the system to handle, the floaters just rise to the upward position until the storm passes, so you have no damage.”

The design appeals to Krish Thiagarajan Sharman, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“The Achilles heel of wave energy is in the costs of maintenance and inspection,” he told AFP.

“So having a device close to shore, where you can walk on a breakwater and then inspect the device, makes a lot of sense.”

Sharman, who is not affiliated with the project and whose laboratory is testing various wave energy equipment, said projects tend to be suited to smaller-scale demands, like powering remote islands.

“This eight-mile breakwater, that’s not a common thing. It’s a rare opportunity, a rare location where such a long wavefront is available for producing power,” he said.

AI power demand

Braverman’s Eco Wave Power is already thinking ahead, having identified dozens more sites in the United States that could be suitable for similar projects.

The project predates Donald Trump’s administration, but even before the political environment in Washington turned against renewables, the company was already looking beyond the US.

In Israel, up to 100 homes in the port of Jaffa have been powered by waves since December.

By 2026, 1,000 homes in Porto, Portugal should be online, with installations also planned in Taiwan and India.

Braverman dreams of 20-megawatt projects, a critical capacity needed to offer electricity at rates that can compete with wind power.

And, she said, the installations will not harm the local wildlife.

“There’s zero environmental impact. We connect to existent man-made structures, which already disturb the environment.”

Promises like this resonate in California, where the Energy Commission highlighted in a recent report the potential of wave energy to help the state achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.

“The amount of energy that we’re consuming is only increasing with the age of AI and data centers,” said Jenny Krusoe, founder of AltaSea, an organization that helped fund the project.

“So the faster we can move this technology and have it down the coastline, the better for California.”

© 2025 AFP

The team members went through a process of incrementally determining what elements and molecules the bacterial strain could grow on. They already knew it could use oxygen, so they tested other combinations in the lab. When oxygen was absent, RSW1 could process hydrogen gas and elemental sulfur—chemicals it would find spewing from a volcanic vent—and create hydrogen sulfide as a product. Yet while the cells were technically alive in this state, they didn’t grow or replicate. They were making a small amount of energy—just enough to stay alive, nothing more. “The cell was just sitting there spinning its wheels without getting any real metabolic or biomass gain out of it,” Boyd said.

Then the team added oxygen back into the mix. As expected, the bacteria grew faster. But, to the researchers’ surprise, RSW1 also still produced hydrogen sulfide gas, as if it were anaerobically respiring. In fact, the bacteria seemed to be breathing both aerobically and anaerobically at once, and benefiting from the energy of both processes. This double respiration went further than the earlier reports: The cell wasn’t just producing sulfide in the presence of oxygen but was also performing both conflicting processes at the same time. Bacteria simply shouldn’t be able to do that.

“That set us down this path of ‘OK, what the heck’s really going on here?’” Boyd said.

Breathing Two Ways

RSW1 appears to have a hybrid metabolism, running an anaerobic sulfur-based mode at the same time it runs an aerobic one using oxygen.

“For an organism to be able to bridge both those metabolisms is very unique,” said Ranjani Murali, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the research. Normally when anaerobic organisms are exposed to oxygen, damaging molecules known as reactive oxygen compounds create stress, she said. “For that not to happen is really interesting.”

In the thermal spring Roadside West (left) in Yellowstone National Park, researchers isolated an unusual microbe from the gray-colored biofilm (right).

Photograph: Eric Boyd; Quanta Magazine

In the thermal spring Roadside West (left) in Yellowstone National Park, researchers isolated an unusual microbe from the gray-colored biofilm (right).Photograph: Eric Boyd; Quanta Magazine

Boyd’s team observed that the bacteria grew best when running both metabolisms simultaneously. It may be an advantage in its unique environment: Oxygen isn’t evenly distributed in hot springs like those where RSW1 lives. In constantly changing conditions, where you could be bathed in oxygen one moment only for it to disappear, hedging one’s metabolic bets might be a highly adaptive trait.

Other microbes have been observed breathing two ways at once: anaerobically with nitrate and aerobically with oxygen. But those processes use entirely different chemical pathways, and when paired together, they tend to present an energetic cost to the microbes. In contrast, RSW1’s hybrid sulfur/oxygen metabolism bolsters the cells instead of dragging them down.

This kind of dual respiration may have evaded detection until now because it was considered impossible. “You have really no reason to look” for something like this, Boyd said. Additionally, oxygen and sulfide react with each other quickly; unless you were watching for sulfide as a byproduct, you might miss it entirely, he added.

It’s possible, in fact, that microbes with dual metabolisms are widespread, Murali said. She pointed to the many habitats and organisms that exist at tenuous gradients between oxygen-rich and oxygen-free areas. One example is in submerged sediments, which can harbor cable bacteria. These elongated microbes orient themselves in such a way that one end of their bodies can use aerobic respiration in oxygenated water while the other end is buried deep in anoxic sediment and uses anaerobic respiration. Cable bacteria thrive in their precarious partition by physically separating their aerobic and anaerobic processes. But RSW1 appears to multitask while tumbling around in the roiling spring.

It’s still unknown how RSW1 bacteria manage to protect their anaerobic machinery from oxygen. Murali speculated that the cells might create chemical supercomplexes within themselves that can surround, isolate and “scavenge” oxygen, she said—using it up quickly once they encounter it so there is no chance for the gas to interfere with the sulfur-based breathing.

RSW1 and any other microbes that have dual metabolism make intriguing models for how microbial life may have evolved during the Great Oxygenation Event, Boyd said. “That must have been a quite chaotic time for microbes on the planet,” he said. As a slow drip of oxygen filtered into the atmosphere and sea, any life-form that could handle an occasional brush with the new, poisonous gas—or even use it to its energetic benefit—may have been at an advantage. In that time of transition, two metabolisms may have been better than one.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.