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A good sleeping pad is all that separates your squishy flesh-and-blood body from the rigid dirt, rocks, and roots of the forest floor.. Guide Life’s 7.4-pound self-inflating sleeping pad expands to 3.5-inches thick, has a plush synthetic micro-suede top, water-resistant, TPU-coated nylon bottom, and comes in a storage sack that’s easy to lug. It is 30-inches wide and 78.5-inches long, so even taller campers can fit comfortably. $129. The water-resistant, 520-lumen Outdoor Life medium base camp lantern weighs just 9....

However, another area deserves attention: the US health care sector. In 2018, the GHG emissions of this $4.1 trillion sector reached 1,692 kilograms per capita, which is the highest rate among industrialized nations and about 25 percent of global health sector emissions. A 2020 study published in Health Affairs found the health care sector responsible for about 8.5 percent of the country’s total GHG emissions. Here’s how the medical community can play its role in climate change mitigation efforts by significantly reducing waste and carbon output....

However, experts caution that melatonin probably isn’t a good option for long-term insomnia. In very rare cases, the hormone can make children sick if they ingest too much. “It’s important, especially in kids, not to use melatonin until you’ve spoken with your pediatrician or your sleep doctor,” says M. Adeel Rishi, a pulmonology, sleep medicine, and critical care specialist in Indiana and vice chair of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Public Safety Committee....

The demonstration involved two small satellites, with one issuing to the other an instruction to move. Deep Space Industries says: Small satellites are, by definition, easier to launch than larger apparatus, and cheaper too. Working in swarms, small satellites can replicate the same effect. While humans have maneuvered satellites around each other for decades, in the past it’s required direct human control. Letting the machines reposition themselves, especially when it comes to busywork like “not colliding into each other,” is a pretty good use of robot brains....

In most parts of the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends masking indoors for everyone, including those who are fully vaccinated. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, made the announcement in a press conference on July 27. “This is not a decision that we or CDC have made lightly,” she said on Tuesday, adding, “We have mental health challenges in this country, we have a lot of continued sickness and death in this country....

What makes dogs special? Dogs aren’t stupid, but they’re also not the smartest animals on the block. Recent research tried to figure out just how canine intelligence actually ranks in the natural world, and their conclusions might surprise you. Poodle haircuts are more practical than they look The world’s most absurd and frou-frou looking hairstyle isn’t just an upper-class fashion statement. Here’s the truth about the fluff that makes poodles stand out in a crowd....

But according to a new paper by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester, my imagination wasn’t too far off. Online gold farming is big business; by some estimates, gold farming is a $1.4 billion industry that may employee up to one million people. Gold farms in Mexico, Russia, Eastern Europe, and most importantly China, which has about 85 percent of the market, have developed into sophisticated operations, with specialized characters, and employee/players, some tasked with playing the game to farm or collect virtual gold and goods, some specializing in advertising and hawking the goods online, and some devoted to “powerleveling”: jumping a customer’s character up levels quickly for a fee....

The company announced on August 30 its plans for an intercontinental hyperloop train with a top speed of over 2,300 miles per hour, or Mach 3. For comparison, Elon Musk’s initial proposal called for a 745 miles per hour hyperloop to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco. And the current fastest bullet trains, in Germany and China, have top speeds in the range of 180-215 miles per hour. What makes CASIC think this is possible?...

Sydney, July 1998. Lesley Hughes was nervous as she stepped up to the podium. The aging lecture hall at Macquarie University was packed to the rafters with seven hundred attendees from across the globe. Next to her on the stage sat professors from the University of Oxford, the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology (in Marburg, Germany), and Rutgers University, New Jersey. At least, thought Hughes, she would have the element of surprise on her side as she set her first slide on the overhead projector that afternoon on July 13, 1998....

With a 122-year history, Coleman remains one of the most reliable and well-known camping brands today. The company has equipment for all kinds of campers, from seasoned dirt lovers to green newcomers. The good news for both camps? Coleman has an entire tackle box worth of deals for Prime Day. Here are the Coleman camping deals worth pitching: Coleman PowerChill Hot/Cold Portable Thermoelectric Cooler, 40 Quart, Gray $73.33 (Was $169....

Back in 1996, a suspect was convicted of the murder soon after it took place. However, amid concerns that the wrong man was convicted, the police turned to a controversial technique known as familial searching, which searches a DNA database to look for close biological relatives to unknown DNA that was obtained at the crime scene. The technique looks for partial matches where both DNA share common alleles, or pieces of DNA....

But pandemics cannot rage forever, even if it might not feel that way right now. At some point, it’s likely that COVID-19 will eventually run out of easy targets to infect. When enough people become immune to an infectious disease, everyone in the population—whether we’re talking about a village, a city, or a country—has some protection from catching it, says Shane Crotty, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California....

Temperature checks are becoming a normal part of life in many places across the country, from your local gym to Disneyland, where, if your temperature is above 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, you won’t get in. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has even recommended that all businesses might check employee temperatures daily. But scientists say that this practice isn’t rooted in science—and might actually help COVID-19 keep spreading. “There’s never been any data to show that it’s prevented any transmissions [of COVID-19],” says Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research....

TikiTag’s kit comes with an RFID reader, plus 10 stick-on chips that transmit data over short-distance radio waves, just like the chips in electronic security badges and PayPass credit cards. When scanned by the reader or a reader-equipped cellphone (such as the Nokia 6212 Classic), each chip emits a unique signal. Software on a computer or phone looks up this ID in TikiTag’s online database, which stores your instructions for what program to trigger next....

Easier said than done. Aside from the unbreathable atmosphere and wonky gravity, the radiation on Mars could cause brain damage, cancer, and death. Our best bet for survival may be to hunker down in the protection of lava tubes—networks of tunnels created billions of years ago by molten rock. We can’t send rovers in for recon though. The pits can be 100 meters deep, and the thick walls (and lag time) make real-time radio communication impossible....

High-tailing around his property in the German-made contraption, Johnson would reportedly point the car downhill toward the Pedernales River, yelling to passengers that the brakes had gone—the car couldn’t stop. It was only when they hit the water, hearts in their mouths, that his guests learned the truth: Johnson’s little craft was built for rubble and waves. Between 1961 and 1968, Berlin mechanics built 3,878 Amphicars, which were gobbled up by aquaphilic Americans including LBJ....

And after Sandy devastated the East Coast in 2012, all eyes are on Joaquin, hoping that this storm doesn’t end up taking the same destructive path. New York City’s Emergency Managment team is on the phone with the National Hurricane Center and other agencies multiple times a day, tracking the storm’s progress. The city has made vast improvements to its infrastructure since Sandy hit, but no one really wants to endure a hurricane just to put them to the test....

1. Pay for the essentials up front If you know you just can’t live without a certain subscription—that space in the cloud to back-up your computer comes to mind—you might be able to save some money by paying for a year (or more) up front, rather than on a monthly basis. Backblaze, for example, costs $6 a month, or $60 for a year up front. You can even pay for two years up front for $100, which is a total of $34 in savings....

Elon Musk has completed his multibillion dollar purchase of Twitter, reports The New York Times. Musk addressed the sale by posting to the social media platform late last night. The news comes after a months’ long saga filled with promises, teases, reversals, and legal threats surrounding the world’s wealthiest man. Already the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, Musk now assumes de facto control of a chaotic social media platform recently revealed to have been hemorrhaging its most active and profitable users since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic....

Yesterday, Musk offered to buy all outstanding Twitter stock for $54.20 a share, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that he also posted to his Twitter account. His offer comes just weeks after he bought a 9.2 percent stake in the company, becoming its largest shareholder, and days after rejecting an invitation to join Twitter’s board of directors. “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe… However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form....