As summers become hotter, air conditioner sales are booming. If you’re looking to invest, here’s what to consider

When a heatwave struck the UK this week, Jon Connorton, a software developer, began monitoring temperatures inside his east Hampshire terrace house. With some rooms reaching close to 40C, it was time to deploy the air conditioner. “We just wheel it out in emergencies,” he said. “We were having trouble sleeping.”

Connorton and his wife have a portable air conditioner. These plug-in devices cool interior air by removing heat from it and blowing that heat outside, typically via a large hose slung from a window or door.

Government should fit solar panels to power air con units where vulnerable people live, say green advocates

As the country baked in record May temperatures, climate campaigners have said the UK government needs to urgently start installing air conditioning units in schools, care homes and places where vulnerable people live.

In 2022, when temperatures spiked above 40C (104F), about 3,000 people in Britain died of causes associated with heat. Studies show air conditioning can cut heat related deaths by 75%.

AcuRite must kill its customers’ favorite companion app due to “obsolete technology," VP of product development Jeff Bovee tells Ars Technica.

AcuRite, which makes smart weather-monitoring devices, announced this month that the My AcuRite iOS and Android app that has been around since 2016 won’t be available after May 30. After that date, device owners must use AcuRite NOW, which AcuRite released in June 2025, to control their gadgets.

The announcement has frustrated long-time AcuRite users, largely because the new app lacks some of its predecessors' capabilities. For example, AcuRite NOW doesn’t allow renaming multiple temperature sensors, organizing on-screen sensors, or reporting temperatures as anything other than whole numbers (AcuRite says it's working on adding some of these features).

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WASP-94A b is a hot, tidally locked gas giant orbiting close to one of the stars in a binary system roughly 690 light-years away from Earth. In a new Science study, scientists led by Sagnick Mukherjee, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, used the James Webb Space Telescope to learn what the weather looks like out there.

Tidal locking means that you no longer have day- and night-side temperature differences sweeping across the planet. “We wanted to understand the atmospheres of such planets,” Mukherjee says. “Are they static or dynamic? Do they have winds? Do they have clouds?” His team found that, on WASP-94A b, it’s cloudy in the morning, but the skies are clear in the evening. The fact that we didn’t know this already means we might have gotten the chemistry of this and many other exoplanets surprisingly wrong.

Averaged atmospheres

WASP-94A b has a mass slightly below half of Jupiter but has a diameter that’s over 70 percent wider. “This means the planet has low density, and its atmosphere extends further out into space, which makes it easier to observe,” Mukherjee explains. When astronomers study atmospheres like this, they usually rely on transmission spectroscopy. By analyzing the spectrum of light filtering through the planet’s atmosphere as it crosses in front of its star, they can figure out its chemical composition.

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