Specialized grow lights that closely mimic the sun’s rays are a better solution, but you can get the same effect with special LEDs that are also brighter, cheaper and last far longer. These bulbs actually work best as a supplement to sunlight during the day; however, they’ll also provide enough light after dark to ensure that your plants get the 12 to 18 hours a day they need to thrive....
Robot vision The RoboMaster S1 ships completely disassembled and takes an hour or two of work before you can drive it around. That assembly process is part of what makes it an engineering toy right out of the box. The product draws its inspiration—and its name—from the RoboMaster robotics competitions that DJI has been putting on since 2013. Once together, the S1 works a lot like a ground-based drone. Drivers use a smartphone app to guide the vehicle by way of a live video feed that comes from an onboard camera....
One of the biggest differences between the two viral infections is how fast the sickness sets in, says Cynthia Benson, the assistant medical director of the emergency department at Overlook Medical Center in New Jersey. With a cold, someone might wake up with a bit of a sore throat and runny nose, and slowly start to feel worse over the course of a day or two. The flu, on the other hand, has a fast onset....
In a typical maze, the entrance leads to the exit. This one is different. Rules determine where and how you can move. You must follow this color order as you meander: red, green, yellow. You can pass through any dot as often as you want, but you must stay within the color pattern, and you can’t double back through the same dot twice in a row. (Hint: When you hit the yellow dot on the far right, head north....
Unfortunately, despite what some people think, you can’t really control what the search engine says. “Google is just reflecting the web,” says Vanessa Fox, a search engine optimization (SEO) expert and author of Marketing in the Age of Google. Fox should know—she used to work at the tech behemoth, and even helped launch some of the tools we’ll be talking about later. “If you want to get something taken off of Google,” she says, “you’re really thinking about removing it from the web entirely....
Leading with a headline-grabbing horsepower figure, the ZR1 delivers sharp, predictable handling, unjarring road feel and performance as barmy on pavement as on paper, all without artifice or intimidation. Yes, it’s a Corvette, and while that may confound anyone who assumes the badge signifies rough trade, the ZR1’s excellence won’t surprise anyone whose watched GM’s Corvette program evolve over the past decade. It isn’t the first Corvette to wear the ZR1 badge....
An expert in the industry’s occupational health hazards, Ceballos has worked with dry cleaners in Seattle, where 80 percent of operations are owned by Korean families, and visited Tide-branded brick and mortars in the midwest that offer 24-hour concierge fabric cleaning services. (“They’re very fancy!” she says.) Big or small, she knows each storefront serves the same core purpose: to take in well-loved fabrics, and return freshly-pressed linens, garments, and rugs free of stains....
In 1999, Hurricane Floyd contaminated the rivers, wells, and groundwater of rural eastern North Carolina in animal waste, much of it having escaped from loosely-regulated industrial hog farms. In 2016, during Hurricane Matthew, 14 such lagoons spilled over. Growers on industrial scale hog farms use massive, open-air lagoons the size of football fields to store hog waste while bacteria (which give the lagoons their dull pink color) break it down and turn it into fertilizer that can be sprayed onto fields....
Bring the makerspace into the comfort of your own home with this ANYCUBIC Kobra Go, on sale for $199.99, 38% off its $319.99 list price. One-touch leveling and printing make it easy to operate and great for those entering the world of 3D printing. The steel printing platform resists drops and abrasions while allowing you to remove your projects easily by simply bending the steel. Your project will be done way before the New Year thanks to this 3D printer’s 60-100 millimeters per second print speed....
For a lot of people, editing images with their phone just consists of slapping a filter on and posting the pic to social media. And while that was your only option about a decade ago, there are now some seriously powerful tools that equal anything you can use on your computer. The difference between photography and “phone-ography” has become meaningless. As you might have already imagined, shooting with a DSLR and editing on your computer works like a charm—but so does using your smartphone through the whole process....
Wild berries are a great introduction to foraging. Do you know about foraging? According to the latest research, many of the fruits and vegetables available in the supermarket once grew wild and unsupervised—and people used to go out of doors to harvest and eat them. Turns out, you can still do this, and berries are an easy way to get started. When berries are around, there tend to be lots of them, and the odds of getting sick from eating wild berries are fairly slim....
As the Director of Transportation of Montgomery Public Schools in Maryland, Watkins made waves with his decision to replace his district’s diesel school bus fleet with cleaner, electric models. Unbeknownst to him, the deal he struck up in February with Highland Electric Transportation to lease 326 buses over four years, and eventually replace the entire 1,422 bus fleet, turned out to be the single largest purchase of electric school buses in the US....
Unfortunately, this means no there is no respite in sight for the African elephant, and this has placed lots of pressure on elephant family groups, which are highly developed and complex social networks. However, despite near constant disruption and turnover within elephant families, the integrity of their social groups has remained surprisingly intact, revealing a hopeful bit of resiliency in an otherwise dismal situation. In Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve, researchers from Save the Elephants and Colorado State University studied female elephants and their family groups over a 16 year period....
With carbon emissions climbing, temperatures rising, and weather getting weirder all over, it can feel like the existential threat of our changing climate is impossible to stop. If the EPA isn’t protecting the planet, how do individual citizens stand a chance? But don’t let the scope of the problem get you down. Here are concrete things that you (yes, you!) can do to help make the world a better place:...
As humanity responds to the COVID-19 pandemic by canceling large events, working from home, self-quarantining, and locking down portions of countries where the virus has spread quickly, there’s a chance you might be stuck inside for a while. And you gotta eat. Canned food and other non-perishables are fine and all, but we’ve got two words that will absolutely change the game: Frozen. Soup. Beyond the fact that soups are like warm hugs for your insides, freezing them allows you to transform quick-spoiling produce into a long-lasting food supply that’s easy to reheat....
The specimen not only represents a new species, but it’s also the oldest crab to be found preserved in amber, the researchers reported on October 20 in Science Advances. The crab’s gills indicate that it was aquatic or amphibious, and that ancient crabs ventured onto land and freshwater environments earlier than the sparse fossil record has previously shown. “This is the first crab of the dinosaur era trapped in amber,” says Javier Luque, a paleobiologist at Harvard University and coauthor of the findings....
Scientists surveyed different patches of seafloor in the Gulf of California and saw that variations in temperature and oxygen levels had a huge impact on whether the fish community was thriving or sparse. In particular, the researchers found that one specific combination—warmer waters mixed with low oxygen levels—didn’t bode well for deep sea fish. This means that these creatures are likely to be vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, the researchers reported March 5 in Marine Ecology Progress Series....
Few elements have as large an impact on a motorcycle’s design as the exhaust system. From header to exit, the gently curving shapes help define some of our favorite bikes, but the shapes are far from purely aesthetic. Exhaust gas contains useful energy in the form of velocity, and smooth shapes minimize the loss of that energy. A piston’s full-throttle power stroke begins with combustion gas at roughly 1,000 psi a few degrees after top dead center....
Video mics generally come in two flavors: those that are designed to attach to a camera or a boom pole, and lavaliers, which are often wireless and are meant to clip on to the person speaking. Both have their pros and cons depending on the situation. The first type of mic is designed to pick up only the sounds coming from right in front of it while rejecting “off axis” sound like room echo or maybe the murmur of a crowd or ambient outdoor noises....
It’s a big move, because while software platforms can certain make AI research easier, more replicable, and more shareable, the whole process is nearly impossible without powerful computers. Today, Facebook announced that it is open sourcing the designs of its servers — which it claims run twice as fast as before. The new design, called Big Sur, calls for eight high-powered graphics processing units, or GPUs, amongst the other traditional parts of the computer like the central processing unit, or CPU, hard drive, and motherboard....
