WIRED

You’d think cold plunging would be a straightforward task. Strip down to your swim suit, take a controlled breath, and calmly get into the freezing water to see how long you can last. But as with any wellness trend that purports to offer myriad physical benefits, there are important caveats to consider.

The experts suggest that launching yourself into a cold plunge pool at the right time can make all the difference to how you feel and how effectively you work out. It can also change, depending on what…

This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As President Donald Trump sees it, environmental regulations that attempt to improve efficiency and address climate change only make products more expensive and perform worse. He has long blamed efficiency regulations for his frustrations with things like toilets and showerheads. He began his second term in office to “unleash prosperity through deregulation.”

But there’s at least one big way that American…

The only smartphone manufacturer with a 10/10 iFixit repairability score is finally bringing its products to the US, but it isn’t starting with its phones. Netherlands-based Fairphone announced this week that it will mark its expansion into the US with the Fairbuds XL, its repairable over-ear headphones. It’ll be available on Amazon later this month.

Fairphone says it achieved 61 percent revenue growth in the third quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, though this is likely attributed to…

My iPhone Wallet stores theater and transit tickets and all of my credit and debit cards, and it lets me sashay like a boss through my gym’s turnstile. The tech works flawlessly, requiring only my proximity or the merest tilt of the device toward my face. Biometric goodness means I have few worries about security, even accessing my bank accounts.

So … why am I still opening my EV with a key?

OK, it’s more than just a metal key; it’s a passive electronic fob with proximity-based radio signaling,…

Some US tech giants are abandoning their decade-long practice of publishing statistics about the gender and racial makeup of their workforce. Google, which helped pioneer the release of annual diversity, equity, and inclusion reports, has no plans to disclose the information this year, according to four employees familiar with the discussions internally. Microsoft and Meta also will not be publishing diversity reports and data this year, spokespeople for the companies confirmed to WIRED.

The broad loss…

The most talked-about TV show in the country right now, South Park, is on Paramount+. Don’t you want to know what got Trump in such a tizzy?

Stream the much buzzed-about South Park, fan-favorite Yellowstone, original series MobLand, and rebooted crime drama Dexter & Dexter on Paramount+. The streaming network has a bingeable TV series for almost everyone. And whether you want to remember Lindsay Lohan’s old face in the classic Mean Girls flick, or wonder just how many more sequels Tom Cruise has left…

Under the hood, the system features appropriately high-end specs, including an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V CPU, 32 GB of RAM, a 1-terabyte solid state drive for storage, not to mention graphics courtesy of a mobile Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 GPU. This is one of the most decked-out laptops I’ve tested to date, and performance was solid, though surprisingly and disappointingly not even close to record-breaking on any benchmark I threw at it (including productivity and AI tasks).

Results were generally in line…

Compare Our Top Shower Filter Systems

Honorable Mention Shower Filters

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Filterbaby Diamond Series Shower Filter for $113: This inline filter was able to reduce total chlorine levels to undetectable amounts, one of few filters on the market able to do so—and the fact that it’s an inline filter means you’ll be able to keep your existing showerhead and just slot this filter in between the pipe and your showerhead. That said, it’s a bulky filter, which means your showerhead will…

As the U.S. government shutdown stretches into its second month, agency leaders at the Social Security Administration (SSA) are becoming increasingly worried about how the key government department, which provides benefits to roughly 70 million Americans, will continue to operate.

WIRED obtained meeting notes from a Thursday SSA call for the administration’s field offices, where over a thousand managers from around the country spoke with field operations chief Andy Sriubas about the acute and damaging…