Tech
‘People Are So Proud of This’: How River and Lake Water Is Cooling Buildings
“In the old days, it was more like a luxury project,” says Deo de Klerk, team lead for heating and cooling solutions at the Dutch energy firm Eneco. Today, his company’s clients increasingly ask for district cooling as well as district heating systems. Eneco has 33 heating and cooling projects under construction. In Rotterdam, Netherlands, one of the company’s installations helps to cool buildings, including apartment blocks, police offices, a theater and restaurants, using water from the River Meuse.
It’s not hard to see why cooling technologies are getting more popular. A few years ago, Nayral moved out of Paris. She remembers the heat waves. “My routine during the weekend was to go to the parks,” she says. Nayral would sit there well into the evening—reading Les Misérables, no less—waiting for her apartment to cool down. Recently, she has increasingly found herself spending time in shopping malls, where air-conditioning is plentiful, in order to make it through searing hot French summers. This year, unprecedented heat waves hit France and other countries in Europe.
The city of Paris is now desperate to help its denizens find cool refuges during spells of extreme heat. A key component of Parisian climate adaptation plans is the river-supplied cooling network, the pipes for which currently cover a distance of 100 kilometers, though this is due to expand to 245 km by 2042. While around 800 buildings are served by the network today, those in charge aim to supply 3,000 buildings by that future date.
Systems such as Paris’ do not pump river water around properties. Rather, a loop of pipework brings river water into facilities where it soaks up warmth from a separate, closed loop of water that connects to buildings. That heat transfer is possible thanks to devices called heat exchangers. When cooled water in the separate loop later arrives at buildings, more heat exchangers allow it to cool down fluid in pipes that feed air-conditioning devices in individual rooms. Essentially, heat from, say, a packed conference room or tourist-filled art gallery is gradually transferred—pipe by pipe—to a river or lake.
The efficiency of Paris’ system varies throughout the year, but even at the height of summer, when the Seine is warm, the coefficient of performance (COP)—how many kilowatt-hours of cooling energy you get for every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed by the system—does not dip much below 4. In the winter, when offices, museums, and hospitals still require some air-conditioning, the COP can be as high as 15, much higher than conventional air-conditioning systems. “It is absolutely magnificent,” boasts Nayral.
But those summer temperatures are increasingly a concern. This summer, the Seine briefly exceeded 27 degrees Celsius (81 degrees Fahrenheit), says Nayral. How can that cool anything? The answer is chiller devices, which help to provide additional cooling for the water that circulates around buildings. Instead of blowing out hot air, those devices can expel their heat into the Seine via the river loop. The opportunity to keep doing this is narrowing, though—because Fraîcheur de Paris is not allowed to return water to the Seine at temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius, for environmental reasons. At present, that means the river can accommodate only a few additional degrees of heat on the hottest days. Future, stronger heat waves could evaporate more of that overhead.
Tech
Top Vimeo Promo Codes and Discounts This Month in 2025
Remember Vimeo? You probably don’t use it to browse videos the way you might with some other services. But if you landed on this page, there’s a good chance you use it to host your professional portfolio. Or assets for your business. Or your short films. Vimeo has tools other video hosting services simply don’t have, like AI editing tools, on-demand content selling, customizable embeds, and collaborative editing features. And best of all: There are no ads. WIRED has rotating Vimeo promo codes to help you save.
Get 10% Off Annual Plans With This Vimeo Promo Code
No matter what you need for your business or career, when it comes to video, Vimeo’s got multiple plans to suit. And luckily, right now, you can save with a Vimeo promo code—even on the annual plans, which already include 40% in savings. Just use Vimeo coupon code GETVIMEO10 to save 10% on your membership plan.
The Easiest Way to Save 40% on Your Vimeo Plan
Vimeo has a few different membership plans that you can save on. No matter which you go with, the easiest way to save a lot is with an annual membership, which has automatic 40% savings compared to paying monthly. And yes, you can even stack promo codes with the annual billing options.
More on Vimeo Pricing and Membership Plans
So what tier do you need? The Starter plan starts at $12 per month (billed annually) or $20 per month (billed monthly). It comes with 100 gigabytes of storage, plus boosted privacy controls, custom video players, custom URLs, and automatic closed captioning.
Boost your plan to Standard for $25 per month (billed annually) or $41 per month (billed monthly) to upgrade to 2 terabytes of storage, 5 “seats” (which are collaborative team member spots), a brand kit, a teleprompter, text-based video editing, AI script generation, and engagement and social analytics.
Finally, there’s the Advanced plan, which costs $75 per month (billed annually) or $125 per month (billed monthly). You’ll get 10 “seats”, 7 terabytes of storage, AI-generated chapters and text summaries, live chat and poll options, plus streaming and live broadcast capabilities.
Use a Vimeo Coupon Code to Get Savings on Vimeo on Demand
Vimeo on Demand is a new way to stream and download movies online. Through Vimeo on Demand, you can rent, buy and subscribe to the best original films, documentaries and series directly from your favorite small business video creators, including The Talent and Wild Magic.
Vimeo Enterprise Solutions 2025
You may have not heard about Vimeo Enterprise, but it’s probably the most essential program for content creators, videographers, and digital media in the workplace in general. From meeting recordings and AI-driven video creation to compliance and distribution, Vimeo Enterprise helps centralize and manage video workflows.
Does Vimeo Have a Free Trial?
While Vimeo doesn’t have a free trial of its paid plans, it does have a free plan with some basic features. Additionally, paid plans can be canceled anytime–within 14 days for an annual subscription, or 3 days for a monthly subscription. You’ll get a full refund if you decide to cancel within the respective timeframes.
Tech
WIRED Roundup: DOGE Isn’t Dead, Facebook Dating Is Real, and Amazon’s AI Ambitions
Leah Feiger: So it’s a really good question actually, and it’s one that I’ve thought about for quite some time. I think if it’s not annoying, I want to read this quote from Scott Kupor, the director of OPM and the former managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, to be clear, just to remind everyone where people are coming from in this current administration. He posted this on X late last month, and this was part of Reuter’s reporting. So he posts, “The truth is, DOGE may not have centralized leadership under USDS anymore, but the principles of DOGE remain alive and well, deregulation, eliminating fraud, waste and abuse, reshaping the federal workforce, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” Which is the exact same, the thing that they’ve been saying this entire time, but it’s all smoke and mirrors, right? It’s like, oh no, no, well, DOGE doesn’t exactly exist anymore. There’s no Elon Musk character leading it, which Elon Musk himself said on the podcast with Joe Rogan last month as well. He’s like, “Yeah, once I left, they weren’t able to pick on anyone, but don’t worry, DOGE is still there.” So it feels wild to watch people fall for this and go like, “DOGE is gone now.” And I’m like, they’re literally telling us that it’s not.
Zoë Schiffer: I think one thing that does feel honestly true is that it is harder and harder to differentiate where DOGE stops and the Trump administration begins because they have infiltrated so many different parts of government and the DOGE ethos, what you’re talking about, deregulation, cost cuttings, zero-based budgeting, those have really become kind of table stakes for the admin, right?
Leah Feiger: I think that’s such a good point. And honestly, by the end of Elon Musk’s reign, something that kept coming up wasn’t necessarily that the Trump administration didn’t agree with DOGE’s ethos at all. It was that they didn’t really agree with how Musk was going about it. They didn’t like that he was stepping on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and having fights outside of the Oval Office. That was bad optics and that also wasn’t helping the Trump administration even look like they were on top of it.
Tech
Horses, the Most Controversial Game of the Year, Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype
The debate over Horses’ delisting is emblematic of a bigger fight that’s taken place this year, when platforms such as Steam and Itch.io yanked down “NSFW” and “porn” games in July. Developers, players, and trade organizations have continued to be vocal about developers’ creative rights to make games that deal with adult content.
“Developers shouldn’t have to compromise their creative vision, but we also have to acknowledge that games exist within capitalist structures where access to platforms determines livelihood,” says Jakin Vela, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, a nonprofit supporting game developers. “The key is informed decision-making and understanding what each platform allows, what risks exist, and whether your artistic goals outweigh those risks.”
Still, Vela says, these removals have exposed the fragility of developers’ economic security. “We should be concerned whenever a system allows a creator’s livelihood to be cut off without transparency or recourse,” he says. The video game industry is highly consolidated, with a handful of platforms controlling access to the vast majority of players. “That imbalance creates a structural issue, not necessarily because platforms enforce rules, but because there are so few viable alternatives.”
Santa Ragione’s future should not hinge on its ability to exist on Steam or any other platform. A bad project should not spell the end of a developer who is, for all the criticisms I have of its game, trying to say something. That part of this story may still yet have a happy, or at least a survivable, ending. The Streisand effect is paying off for Horses. On the digital distribution platform GOG, where it’s still available, the game is a top-seller.
Horses needs to be defended against censorship. It is also a bad game that should be examined as such. But while the conversation around Horses is still stalling out about why the game is allowed to exist, or how it’s not that offensive, the better question is why we really care about it at all—and why, as players, we feel so reluctant to talk about its failings like any other piece of media.
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