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While these involuntary blasts of intense nostalgia are the most obvious examples of the power of scent, the link between pungent odors and memories functions in subtle ways throughout our daily lives. These associations can even affect our habits and behaviors in ways most of us take for granted. If you understand how these associations form, though, you can intentionally use them to help you build new habits. Every habit begins with a cue....

But things are not so simple in the midst of a pandemic. Some states, like California and Florida, are suffering from strong infection surges and authorities are asking people to stay home. And even in places where stores are reopening due to low infection rates, there are a lot of people who still feel uncomfortable going out for anything non-essential, like clothes shopping. If either is your case, and you simply need to wear something other than those gray sweatpants, you’ll have to venture online....

It’s important to note that although the Meta-owned app began testing this feature earlier this year, not everyone has access to it yet. The easiest way to see if you have the power to sort chronologically is to go to the app’s home screen (the house icon) and look for a small downward arrow next to the Instagram name in the top left. If it’s there, you’re good to go....

You can also fully mill wood with only hand tools, though that takes a lot of time and practice to do well. One note to keep in mind is that the steps below show how to achieve perfectly milled wood using modern power tools. However, you don’t always need maximum precision in your wood, especially if you’re not gluing multiple pieces together or using complex joinery techniques. Consider my current project: a pair of floating shelves that just need to be close to flat and square....

The Google-owned video platform has added quite a few tricks you can use that go beyond simply clicking play, sitting back, and watching content unfold before your eyes. And there are different tricks you can use depending on what device you’re watching on.

Do your homework But first I have to make sure my plants will be welcome in my new home. The number of plant diseases and pests that no one wants in their neighborhood could fill encyclopedias, and risk mitigation is especially important for states that make a lot of money growing fruits and vegetables—they don’t want to risk their crop. Most common houseplants that you’ve grown inside for their entire lives should be fine, but you might have to leave your orange and lemon trees behind, even if they’re inside....

Ultimately, tapping or clicking that reset button can be scary, but your data should be fine as long as you consider the potential pitfalls and proceed carefully. Let us guide you. Resetting a device is about more than just getting a fresh start though: It can fix persistent bugs, get rid of unwanted apps and dangerous malware, and free up storage space on your device. Mostly, backups are common sense: Think about where you’ve stored your important files and make sure you have copies of them on another device, disk drive, or in the cloud before you start the reset process....

Disk space is always at a premium—especially as we amass more and more photos each year—so take every opportunity to free up as much as you can. All the popular cloud storage services let you free up local storage on your computer while keeping your files safely stored online—and it’s relatively easy to make use of them. It can be a little confusing at first, but here’s what’s happening: OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, and Google Drive are built to keep two identical folders—one in your computer and one in the cloud—in sync by default....

What makes cornstarch so useful? To fully realize cornstarch’s potential, you must understand it. At the most basic level, it’s a plant snack. Just like you might stuff granola bars into your coat pockets, plants stash away starch in case they get hungry later. “[Starch] is a food storage for the corn,” says Matthew Steffens, a food industry consultant and a food science lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Corn plants create starch from excess glucose and reserve it....

IARPA is the far-future research projects arm of America’s intelligence agencies, much like DARPA is for the Pentagon. The immediate applications of the tech aren’t always clear, so the agencies try and fund a bunch of blue-sky research to figure out where the technology is going to go. For example, here’s one of the four questions IARPA is asking people to answer: Looking at both brains and computers is a pretty good way to anticipate the future, and IARPA’s hardly the first to do it....

Over the millennia that we have lived with them, rats have proven themselves virtually impossible to expunge. They’re so adaptable that they can exploit and infest virtually every corner of our cities. They avoid traps and poisons and reproduce at such a staggering rate that extermination attempts usually end up being a game of whack-a-mole … or, rather, whack-a-rat. Is it any wonder that many cities seem to be plagued by rats?...

The throwback iMac Typically, a review like this would start with the technical specs. With the company’s new “let’s cram the M1 chip into every new Apple computer” approach; however, that really doesn’t make much sense. From a technical standpoint, you’ll find the same basic guts in the new MacBook Air, the new MacBook Pro, the Mac Mini, and even the upcoming iPad Pro. The real differences come from other things like form factor and design....

NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, captured the highest-resolution images ever taken of the solar corona during its brief journey last summer. It flew high into the Earth’s atmosphere aboard a sounding rocket, a type that is used for experiments, and then it parachuted back to Earth for recovery. This was much cheaper than launching a satellite; the whole mission was just $5 million. It was not without new technological advances, however–Hi-C’s 9....

“The development of a vaccine for a new pathogen typically takes many years and sometimes decades,” says Dan Barouch, the director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “The attempt to develop COVID-19 vaccines in a year is truly unprecedented in the history of vaccinology.” To date, more than 145 vaccine candidates for COVID-19 are currently under development in laboratories around the world....

Today, it’s also easy to locate university-affiliated labs at places such as Harvard and Stanford investigating their own interventions in the process of growing old. Since the National Institutes of Health established its Institute on Aging division in 1974, scientists have dedicated more and more resources to the challenge. Over the past dozen years, the NIA’s budget has doubled to more than $2 billion. Faloon predates them all. These days, the several ­hundred people who regularly attend events at the church are personal validation for Faloon, who thinks that anyone his age and younger, given the proper physiological tweaking, could live to a healthy age of 130....

“Sometimes, island species are transported by humans outside their native islands—either to a mainland continent or to another island—and manage to survive in the wild there, as the Bermuda cedar has done on Maui,” says Rosenblad, a research associate with the Sax Lab at Brown University’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology. He had never been to Bermuda, but suspected its climate was different from Maui’s. “Then it hit me: if my suspicion was correct, then this species, by succeeding in Maui’s climate, was effectively showing us its biological buffer that might help it survive future climate change,” Rosenblad says....

The three modern species of cassowaries reside on various Pacific islands, including New Guinea, where they’re prized for their meat, feathers, and bones. But how did ancient communities ever wrangle the fierce animals? Turns out, they may have brought them home with them. There are clues that as early as 18,000 years ago, humans in New Guinea were systematically harvesting cassowary eggs, new research shows. The paper, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, details how a team of anthropologists from the US, Australia, and New Zealand used ancient eggshell fragments found at rock shelters and a combination of 3D imaging, modeling, and morphological descriptions to determine how old this practice was....

That mental math is a delicious example of game theory: the study of how competitors strategize based on what they could do to win and what they guess their rivals might do. Experts in the field use calculus and other advanced math to model best tactics for each player. While an analyst might use it to break down actual contests—say, to determine if a pitcher should throw a curveball when there’s a runner waiting to steal home—the field helps to navigate many forms of conflict....

I checked my computer’s serial number and realized my 2014 MacBook Pro is now five years old, which seems ancient in the upgrade-everything-every-year era in which we live. I’m going to spend the weekend making memories with my elderly laptop, but you should spend your time here, catching up on the biggest tech stories from the week. Listen to the latest episode of the Techathlon Podcast Do you know the name of the secret project to develop the iPhone?...

Download the latest episode of the Last Week in Tech podcast Net Neutrality was officially repealed It’s been months in the making, but the Net Neutrality repeal officially went into effect on Monday, June 11. You can see what that means for you, and catch up on the continuing fight by clicking this link. Apple threw a moderately exciting developers conference We dedicated an entire podcast to Apple’s 2018 WWDC announcements and you can listen above if you want to dig into the details....