Posts

Arthur C. Clark famously said that any sufficiently ­advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That certainly applies to face shields, goggles, and glasses that automatically darken. That sorcery has existed for decades, but it has been refined and is more widely available now than ever. This change of lens shade as light increases is called photochromism, and it depends on a reversible chemical reaction that takes place when a material embedded in glass or plastic is exposed to certain wavelengths of light....

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, America is facing a crisis that could see more than twenty million people become homeless in just a few months. Those who study eviction say this unprecedented event will have devastating public health consequences—particularly as it unfolds in the midst of another national hardship. “The United States is facing an eviction crisis of proportions that we have never seen in our history,” says Emily Benfer, a law professor at Wake Forest University....

Summer heat can be brutal on outdoorsmen and women. But what happens when we have to deal with both the heat and the hard work of a survival situation? We typically worry about the dangers of hypothermia in outdoor emergencies, but heat-related problems can be killers too. Heat stroke is the most dangerous foe, but dehydration, hyponatremia, and sun burn can also take their toll on a beleaguered survivor. Thankfully, there are plenty of strategies you can use to beat the heat....

Google Chrome Google’s browser comes with a strong first line of defense: the ability to mute specific tabs. When a page starts playing sound, a little speaker icon will appear on that page’s tab, next to the “X” on the right. If you see that icon, right-click on the tab and choose Mute Site. This will immediately shut up the page and turn the noisy icon into a silent speaker with a line through it....

Unlike the early days on the so-called clock app, there are now three good options for navigating your TikTok watch history, and the one you use will generally depend on how recently you watched a lost video. How to undo a refreshed For You page (iOS only) This is the best way to go right back to the clip you last watched and recover very recently viewed TikToks, as tapping Undo will take you back to the previous bucket of videos, ordered exactly as they were....

Resolution is just a number I used to visit my in-laws and watch a myriad of shows on what I assumed was just a cheap relic of a bygone era. Then I realized I’d only ever watched TV through their cable box, so when I popped in a Blu-ray, I marveled at how capable the set actually was. Sources like cable, streaming, and discs all offer varying levels of picture quality....

Gelato is a totem. Yes, it’s a dessert, but at this point in the collective American unconscious, it’s also an idea. An aspiration. Gelato is the sophisticated European answer to everything crassly American. More pure. More worldly, yet too good for this world. Gelato is everywhere now, but the mystique remains. The idea of the perfect gelato experience still feels rare. And actually making it? Unattainable. I admit to being a perpetrator of this magical thinking....

Microwave Cheese “Danish” Makes about 12 cakes Ingredients 9 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon / 150 grams whole milk 5 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons / 24 grams egg white powder 7 ounces / 200 grams cream cheese 1⁄4 cup / 75 grams Lyle’s Golden Syrup 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons / 25 grams all-purpose flour 1⁄4 teaspoon / 1.5 grams fine sea salt 1⁄4 cup / 10 grams finely ground freeze-dried strawberries, for dusting the cakes (optional)...

Lately I’ve experimented with another solution: reinventing how I use these sites. This doesn’t require you to delete your profiles and avoid social media entirely—changing your focus and doing a little cleanup to the list of people and accounts you follow can be enough to do the trick. But with today’s political tensions, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the stress of comparing your life to your friends’—not to mention overall concern about privacy and online security—social media feels more toxic than ever....

In the South, where seas are rising fastest and hurricanes are intensifying, much of that work has already begun. Those efforts hold clues for how future strategies might take shape across the country. Buffering the nation’s coastlines, experts warn, will require thinking beyond conventional barriers like levees. “We can’t afford to turn our entire East Coast into downtown New Orleans. Imagine what the cost of that would be,” says Pippa Brashear, who leads resilience planning at SCAPE, a landscape architecture firm behind engineered oyster reefs being installed off NYC’s Staten Island....

One common method for repairing larger cracks is to simply cut them out of your piece and glue the wood back together. This makes the repair all but invisible. Another method, insetting something called a bow tie into your furniture, can turn a split into an aesthetic accent, and highlight the natural beauty of the wood. Warning: DIY projects can be dangerous, even for the most experienced makers. Before proceeding with this or any other project on our site, ensure you have all necessary safety gear and know how to use it properly....

Learn about infographic design. visual.ly

Share your location on Google Maps Google Maps has had a location-sharing feature for a few years now, and you can access it on your cell phone or through the website. The only requirement is that the people you share with must have Google accounts and be able to use Google Maps. In addition to figuring out where to meet up, apps like these can let you track your kids without telling every stranger where they are....

If you’re one of the approximately 328 million people who have received robocalls this year, know you can fight back with the help of your carrier, built-in options on your phone, or third-party apps. Unfortunately, robocalls and spam calls are a serious problem for many of us, meaning we waste precious minutes fending off incoming calls we’re absolutely not interested in. Get a little help from your carrier AT&T was the first network to turn on automatic fraud blocking and spam call alerts for new users, and today it’s available to all users....

How the Discover Tab works The aforementioned compass icon is nestled right between the app’s home button and the plus icon that lets you create a post (it’s not available on the web). Tap it and you’ll see an array of photo and video posts Reddit thinks you’ll enjoy based on communities you’re a part of or have spent a lot of time lurking. “We’re ushering in a new era of discovery on Reddit, with images and video top of mind,” Reddit’s director of product for content and communities, Jason Costa, said in a statement that coincided with the feature’s late-February rollout....

How to turn on the Windows clipboard history First, open the Settings app on your computer. Under System, you’ll find a section called Clipboard. Toggle the switch on to turn on the clipboard history. There are all sorts of clipboard managers you can download, but Windows users don’t need to, as the two latest editions of the operating system have one built in. The catch: it’s not that easy to find....

Watching the number change over the course of a fire can give you a sense of how the emergency response is going. Still, it’s not always clear what containment means. A fire can remain mostly, but not entirely, contained for weeks—or it can spread in bad conditions, causing the containment percentage to fall. Popular Science spoke to Sean Triplett, the tools and technology lead at the National Interagency Fire Center, which coordinates wildfire responses across the country, to break down the key statistic....

Besides the name of the fictional home of the Flintstones, bedrock is a hard, tightly-packed layer of rock that makes up the bulk of the earth’s crust. A typical cross section of the land beneath our feet might include grass, soil, sand, and gravel, but bedrock provides a solid foundation for all that to sit on. Riverbeds can also be made out of bedrock, though there are certain types of rivers—called alluvial rivers—that have sediment bottoms....

“Much of the work on climate change and fisheries is forecast into the future,” says study author Chris Free, now at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Free did the research with Rutgers when he was a postdoc. He and his colleagues wanted to figure out what changes had already taken place, both to gain a better understanding of historical climate change and to better forecast what trends may emerge when we look back at today....

The town of Mailuu Suu was intimately tied to the extraction of nuclear material in the Soviet Union, which meant that the town was unlisted on maps, closed to outsiders, and officially logged only as “Mailbox 200.” In the Cold War climate, where espionage was essential for superpowers tracking and estimating the size of nuclear weapons arsenals, this made some degree of sense. It also meant that the protective geography of the town, in a river valley in a region prone to landslides and earthquakes, helped keep residents in place, even as it led to risky decisions like burying waste nearby the village....