Archaeologists have found a rare cold bath below the 18th-century Bath Assembly Rooms. The rooms, completed in 1771, were fashionable places of entertainment, conversation, dancing and gambling and cold baths were seen as good for people's health. The cold bath is in the centre of a suite of three rooms beneath one end of the ballroom. It has dressing rooms on either side. The excavation involved removing a later floor that had been installed over the cold bath and removing tonnes of rubble to reveal steps down into it. Bruce Eaton, of Wessex Archaeology, which oversaw the excavation, told the Guardian: “Although historical records indicated that there was a cold bath buried beneath the Bath Assembly Rooms, we had no idea what preservation of the bath would be like. “The building suffered damage at the hands of the Luftwaffe and the rooms were remodelled in the late 20th century but, after carefully excavating tonnes of concrete and rubble, we saw the original structure emerge in its entirety. “It’s tremendous to be able to piece together this rare archaeological evidence of an 18th-century cold bath with social historical accounts from the time.” Tatjana LeBoff, a project curator at the National Trust, said: “The cold bath at the assembly rooms is highly unusual. It is a rare, if not unique, surviving example, and possibly it was the only one ever built in an assembly room.” The trust was researching records, letters, diaries and other documents to discover more about the cold bath, she said. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Europe’s banks need to stop complaining that a new ESG rule will make them “look bad” and accept

The stock market will need more than positive macroeconomic conditions to drive it to 10,000, DataTrek Research says.

Sweden’s H2 Green Steel is in talks with governments in Canada to build a factory in northern Quebec,

Activist investor Nelson Peltz's Trian Fund Management has accumulated a stake worth more than $2.5 billion and is

The UK just moved a step closer to requiring companies to provide detailed statements on future carbon emissions

Elon Musk pleaded with X users on Sunday to try and stick to the facts, as the site and its billionaire owner come under heavy criticism for the spread of false information regarding the Israel-Hamas war. “As always, please try stay as close to the truth as possible, even for stuff you don’t like,” Mr Musk wrote on X. “This platform aspires to maximize signal/noise of the human collective.” Critics have been hammering Mr Musk for the proliferation of fake news on the site, arguing his attempts to loosen the reins on its content moderation have allowed bad actors and dubious sources to flourish. “This site is a cesspool of disinformation,” former Obama administration official and podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote on X in response to Mr Musk’s plea. “You have made it exponentially worse, and just this morning you recommended an account known to spread lies and antisemitism. Other than that, great job.” “This site is worse than useless during a breaking news story,” Aaron Kleinman, of the States Project political advocacy group, wrote recently in response to a thread collecting false information about the war in Israel and Gaza. “Actively harmful. Don’t log in if you want to be informed.” Dubious news stories have spread far and wide on the site formerly known as Twitter since the outbreak of war in Israel yesterday. A widely seen video, purporting to show a Hamas militant shooting down an Israeli helicopter, was really a clip from a video game, BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh reports. A Taliban spokesperson had to set the record straight after a false claim spread on social media that the group was seeking to join in the conflict, Pakistan bureau chief for WIONews Anas Mallick reports. And a widely shared clip of Israel reportedly bombing a Gazan office tower really was from fighting that occured in 2021. Critics of X allege that policy changes under Mr Musk have allowed such false information to spread more easily. Since taking over, Mr Musk has disbanded Twitter’s trust and safety team, reinstated (and at times vocally endorsed the content of) known extremists and far-right commentators, removed labels noting accounts associated with foreign governments, and allowed paid access to the verification feature, a designation on Twitter previously reserved for heads of states, celebrities, journalists, and other high-profile individuals who could see their credibility abused by imitators. The Independent has contacted X for comment. Read More Israel-Palestine conflict live: Fierce gun battles rage with Hamas militants as ‘over 700 Israelis killed’ Israel suffers bloodiest day in decades as fierce gunfights rage in streets against Hamas militants US regulators seek to compel Elon Musk to testify in their investigation of his Twitter acquisition

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Planet-like objects in the Orion Nebula have been revealed for the first time in images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The Orion Nebula, one of the brightest nebulae in the night sky, has long presented astronomers with an abundance of celestial objects to study. It is identifiable as the sword in the Orion constellation and is located 1,300 light-years from Earth. Astronomers managed to discover unprecedented details by capturing mosaics of the Orion Nebula in short and long wavelengths of light. Whilst searching for low-mass objects, astronomers Samuel G. Pearson - a European Space Agency research fellow at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands - and Mark J. McCaughrean - senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency - came across something they had never before seen. Their discovery appears to defy some fundamental astronomical theories: pairs of planet-like objects with masses between 0.6 and 13 times the mass of Jupiter. They have been dubbed Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs. "Although some of them are more massive than the planet Jupiter, they will be roughly the same size and only slightly large," said Pearson. The astronomers found 40 pairs of JuMBOs, and although they exist in pairs, the objects are typically about 200 astronomical units apart, or 200 times the distance between Earth and the sun. This means it can take between 20,000 and 80,000 years for the objects to complete an orbit around each other. McCaughrean and Pearson have written two research papers based on their discoveries in the Orion Nebula. The preliminary findings are available on a preprint site called arXiv whilst the studies have been submitted to academic journals for publication. But many questions about JuMBOs remain. "Scientists have been working on theories and models of star and planet formation for decades, but none of them have ever predicted that we would find pairs of super low mass objects floating alone in space - and we're seeing lots of them," Pearson said. "The main that we learn for this is that there is something fundamentally wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation, or both." Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Martin Quin Pollard and Ian Ransom HANGZHOU, China Subways were closed and security was tightened around Hangzhou's

Kenyan President William Ruto and the heads of two major finance and climate institutions said without a 10

Everybody hurts sometimes – even the most basic worms in the animal kingdom which have no eyes, spine or brain. That’s what scientists have found out about nematode species Caenorhabditis elegans, which possesses basic emotions such as fear. Researchers zapped the worms to see if they would display negative reactions, and the worms continued to “flee” at high speeds for minutes after. The scientists at Nagoya City University in Japan and Northeastern University in the US said the response shows a brain state which is comparable to fear in humans. "These properties have been recently regarded as essential features of emotion, suggesting that C. elegans response to electric shock may reflect a form of emotion, akin to fear," the researchers wrote. The findings are the most recent in a debate over which animals can experience primitive versions of our own emotions. Crayfish and bumblebees have all shown animals can have lasting positive and negative mental states. C. elegans is one of the most basic worms in the animal kingdom. At about 1mm in length it is also tiny and transparent, with no brain, sight or smell. Nonetheless, worms which sensed an electric current for 45 seconds “ran away” for more than two minutes. During this state, they ignored food which was placed nearby, instead scurrying at high speeds. This suggests that the emotional response could be triggered by different stimuli and that one stimulus could inhibit responses to others. When the shock was just five seconds long, the worms fled for a minute and a half before calming down. And when the researchers repeated the experiments with worms that were not to produce neuropeptides – which are the equivalent to human hormones – the worms stayed in a state of fear for longer. "Because the requirement of neuropeptide signaling [in worms] is reminiscent of neuropeptide regulation of fear in mammals including humans, the fear-like brain state may be regulated by evolutionarily conserved molecular mechanisms," the authors of the study wrote. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.