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The past two years have provided an especially dire preview of what may come if we don’t. In 2019, wildfires flared in southern California and eastern Australia, destroying homes and habitats. And already 2020 has seen more fires Down Under, massive flooding in the Southeast, and Antarctic temps hitting close to 70 degrees Fahrenheit in February—accelerating melting and pushing up sea levels worldwide. In the US, 2019’s proposed Green New Deal, the brainchild of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) and Edward Markey (MA), presented the most ambitious climate blueprint to ever cross lawmakers’ desks....

What are you eating and/or cooking for Thanksgiving? I’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner at home with my wife and some friends, a small gathering of orphaned New York transplants. I’ve been brining a turkey this last week in a three percent salt solution with some onions, garlic, sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, carrots, celery, and sugar. We’ll take the legs off and do a turkey pot pie with a biscuit topping. We’re going to put the breast into a roulade....

What are you eating and/or fermenting for Thanksgiving? This will be my first Thanksgiving back home in Eugene, Oregon in two years, so I’m pretty excited. I spend most of my time living in intentional communities, and we make really big Thanksgiving meals with all locally-sourced ingredients. I bring the ferment with some sauerkraut and ciders. This year I made a sauerkraut with green and red cabbage, carrots, green onion, and watermelon radish....

But, the US is far from the only place experiencing extreme dryness. Countries like China are also struggling, as well as parts of Europe and Africa. China has turned to cloud seeding as a potential solution to its drought problems. It’s also being more regularly utilized in the United Arab Emirates. Cloud seeding is more or less a technological way to make it rain, even when the weather is anything but rainy....

The pharaoh Hatshepsut accomplished many feats in her reign over Egypt some 3,500 years ago. One of few women rulers then or now, she concentrated power against incredible odds. She built temples and obelisks of unprecedented size, technical skill, and number. And, the story goes, her explorers, skilled in botanical espionage, secured the empire its first myrrh tree. Myrrh and its cousin frankincense are known to Americans today, if at all, through the Biblical account of the wise men....

But three years ago, while working at a childcare referral agency in North Carolina, Hernandez read an article about “gentle parenting”—a discipline embodying everything she believed, but had never known existed. “The basic idea is that parents should be aware of their child’s developmental stage, and divorce [their] own ego from what’s happening,” she explains. “It’s about not taking behaviors personally, and nurturing children to become who they want to be, instead of how we’d like to see them....

Over the last 150 years, the editors of Popular Science have published 1,747 issues, countless web articles, hundreds of videos, and more in our continuing effort to answer that charge: To as perfectly as we can organize the world of scientific inquiry and innovation for curious everyday people as best we can. Or, as Youmans put it, for whoever cares “how opinion is changing, what old ideas are perishing, and what new ones are rising into acceptance....

Featured in the latest season of NASA’s Unexplained Files on the Science Channel, a clip from the episode (above, featuring an uncredited me) went viral over the weekend and suddenly everyone’s curious about this never-berfore-heard eerie space music. But what really happened on the far side of the Moon that day in 1969? Well, nothing as mysterious as you might hope. A quick read of the transcript (after the video) tells what the episode clip doesn’t....

Between smartphones and tracking technologies, every trip to the store will be quick, efficient, and a heck of a lot smarter than it is today. Some retailers will even be able to anticipate your individual needs and take care of them for you. To get the inside scoop, we talk to Indiana University’s Ray Burke, who studies how customers think and behave. And we hear from Scott Emmons, who heads up innovation for Neiman Marcus, about the high-tech mirrors and tablets they’re bringing to their stores....

It is an impressive achievement, one that comes after billions of dollars spent on the program. It is not a sign that the United States is in any position to deploy a missile defense system that can stop a real ICBM under realistic conditions. That goal is still likely years if not decades away. What happened today? The test was run by several groups within the Department of Defense, primarily the Missile Defense Agency and the U....

You’ll need to be a bit more patient for the Orionids than the Perseid meteor showers require. There will be significantly less meteors per hour, with about 10 to 20, compared to as many as 100. “The Orionids will probably show weaker activity than usual this year,” Bill Cooke of the NASA Meteoroid Environments Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said in a NASA release. “Bits of comet dust hitting the atmosphere will probably give us about a dozen meteors per hour....

by accurat. Check out our data visualization blog. visual.ly

The thrust of the forthcoming study is that single women who are ovulating are supposedly more likely to vote for Barack Obama, while women who are married or in committed relationships are more likely to vote for Mitt Romney. That’s by a pretty wide margin, too, the study suggests: as much as 26 percent. (The full study, “The Fluctuating Female Vote: Politcs, Religion, and the Ovulatory Cycle,” is available here under “Selected Works....

The satellites are 22,300 miles up, which puts them higher than most satellites, but that number’s key: any higher or lower and they’d move faster or slower than the Earth spins, putting them out of their carefully crafted orbit. NASA

But measles is still technically eliminated in the United States. The disease was declared eliminated, after an effective vaccination program, in 2000—a public health designation which means a certain ailment has stopped actively spreading within one geographic area. However, eliminated doesn’t suggest the infectious agent is gone forever. “Even if you eliminate the disease in one area, it’s still around in other areas, so there’s always the threat it can be imported,” says James Goodson, epidemiologist and senior measles scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)....

“I’m talking to my Australian counterparts in general about the [Next Generation Air Dominance] family of systems and how they might be able to participate,” Breaking Defense reports Kendall saying. In that context, Kendall continues, the Ghost Bat “could serve ‘as a risk reduction mechanism’ for NGAD’s drone capability.” Next Generation Air Dominance is a long-in-development Air Force program and concept for designing aircraft that will fight in the skies of the 21st century....

Raytheon describes its directed energy weapon as a 50 kilowatt-class high-energy laser. The company worked with defense contractor KBR’s subsidiary Kord to integrate that laser on a Stryker combat vehicle. Strykers are eight-wheeled armored transports, operated by a crew of two and with room for 9 troops to ride inside. The body of the vehicle is flexible enough that the US Army has adapted it for a variety of roles, including as the base platform for an array of already existing anti-air weapons....

The Saildrone Explorer looks like a windsurfer without a human clinging onto it. With a 23-foot-long body and standing at 16 feet tall, the Explorer is mostly sail. It draws electrical power from the sun and propulsive power from the wind. Under sail power, the drone travels between 2 and 7 mph. These vehicles can sail for long distances and durations, with the company claiming that the drones can operate for up to 12 months on a mission before it needs to come ashore for maintenance....

Fact: There’s a right and wrong time to eat wild oysters By Sara Kiley Watson According to some, oyster season only truly happens when the months of the year have an “R” in them. While the validity of that is contested, it apparently has some deeply seeded roots in the native populations of the southeastern US. The first part of this myth is based on pretty simple science—oysters in the summer tend to be in their youth phase....

FireMe! mines Twitter (either your personal account or Twitter as a whole) for incriminating work-related tweets. So go to the site’s homepage, and you’ll see a public shaming of people tweeting things like: “My boss is an idiot,” and “I hate my job.” There’s also subcategories you can look at. “Horrible Bosses,” (standard hate) “Sexual Intercourse,” (just use of the F-word, pretty much) and “Potential Killers” (people hopefully kidding about shooting their bosses) are included....