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We’ve picked some of our favorite herb garden systems for your kitchen. The AeroGarden is an incredibly easy way to grow fresh herbs right on your kitchen countertop. 40 Watt LED grow lights help herbs grow strong and bushy, without sunlight or placement concerns. Seeds are grown in water—avoiding the mess of soil—and watered through filling up a removable bowl at the bottom. A touch screen tells you how much water is left in the trough, making vacations easy to prepare for....

Best overall: E-Cloth Reusable Microfiber Cleaning ClothsBest for cars: Chemical Guys Professional Grade Microfiber TowelsBest for electronics: MagicFiber Microfiber Cleaning ClothsBest for kitchens: Zwipes 735 Microfiber Towel Cleaning ClothsBest for glasses: Koala Kloth Glasses Cleaning Cloth How we picked the microfiber cleaning cloths Our curated selection was developed based on several years of experience testing and reviewing home products as well as extensive research. We weighed a number of practical considerations when making our recommendations, including the makeup of the fabric itself and its durability....

Most Americans are using umbrellas wrong. At least that’s true if you consider the personal canopy’s origin story. The first umbrellas, which date back thousands of years, were not meant to protect against precipitation, but to fend off the sun. Yes, they were sun umbrellas: parasols. The idea that they could also keep us dry didn’t arise until about 500 years ago. In the centuries since—given that being wet strikes many folks as less pleasant than being hot—the shields became more popular with the masses in the rain as opposed to in the sun....

Vaccines, masks, and boosters have brought back some sense of normalcy this holiday season. Some got to see their families for the first time in two years this Thanksgiving and were probably planning a similar gathering for the end-of-year festivities. But then omicron happened and there may be some who are not so sure about traveling or attending a crowded home anymore. If that’s you, at least know these new complications haven’t canceled gift-giving....

Best overall: Roborock S7MaxV Ultra Robot Vacuum and Sonic Mop Best for pet hair: Bissell Crosswave Cordless MaxBest for floors and carpet: Roborock S7+ Robot Vacuum and MopBest with steam: Bissell Symphony Pet Steam Mop Best handheld: Black+Decker Dustbuster Wet/Dry Handheld Vacuum Best budget: Tineco iFloor3 How we picked the best vacuum-mop combos As a freelance journalist for over 10 years, I’ve reviewed home and tech products for publications including CNN Underscored, NBC News Select, Popular Mechanics, Architectural Digest, Tom’s Guide, The Daily Beast, USA Today’s Reviewed, Apartment Therapy, The Spruce, and Bob Vila....

The original Mavic could see in front and beneath itself, but the new Mavic 2 can now sense possible catastrophe-causing objects from any direction. Here’s a rundown of the sensors and their tasks. Front The two “eyes” on the front of the craft provide most of the guidance in concert with information from the main imaging camera you’ll use to shoot pictures and videos. The optical sensors are similar, but DJI says it has refined the system that interprets the data they capture....

This year we turn much of our focus toward a bold blueprint for the city of the future. Check out our interactive tour of a future green megalopolis, the 10 most audacious engineering solutions for saving the planet, as well as the most problematic cities, industries, and projects looming on the horizon. The Good News And the Bad News

Living at Superior’s southern edge, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC) manages close to 19 miles of its shoreline. They rely on it for tourism revenue, drinking water, and fish for the tribal hatchery. A full lake is good news for KBIC, but if the levels spill over, it could spell danger for the residents’ subsistence. This precarious balance shifted toward disaster during the 2018 Father’s Day flood, when more than seven inches of rain pounded the area in just three hours....

That’s on the fast side of predictions about the timeline—in late August, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told NPR that he didn’t expect approval until the end of the year—and it’s welcome news for parents in their first weeks of school. But we still have little firsthand information about how well the vaccine worked, and what side effects may look like. “I can’t honestly say anything besides, ‘sounds promising, but it’s a press release,’” wrote Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Research Organization in Saskatchewan, on Twitter in response to inquiries....

Blood vessels Method: 3-D printer When: 5 years Gabor Forgacs, a tissue engineer at the University of Missouri, is making blood-vessel networks by culturing three types of vessel cells and loading them into a fridge-size bioprinter. This machine prints out the cells to build capillaries in preprogrammed patterns. Liver Method: Grown using stem cells from umbilical-cord blood When: 15–25 years Colin McGuckin has made silver-dollar-size, functional “mini livers.” They aren’t large enough to do a full body’s worth of work, because livers have hard-to-replicate ducts with specialized cells....

Athletes in the U.S. suffer from 3.8 million sports-related concussions a year. In our January issue, we discussed the possibility of a helmet that could save football. The first part of the NFL/GE partnership will provide at least $30 million to develop better imaging equipment tailored toward detecting head trauma. The second half of the project sets aside $20 million an innovation challenge for new and improved safety equipment. The most promising ideas from the challenge would be financed and brought to market....

Splashdowns Mercury, NASA’s first manned spaceflight program, is what you might call a crash program. The largely automated capsule launched on a missile was the quick and dirty way to get a man into space before the Soviet Union, not a sophisticated spacecraft that could lend itself to more complicated long-term programs. Having the spacecraft splashdown was an equally simplistic solution. Rather than work out the details of piloting through the atmosphere from space, engineers opted to take advantage of the Mercury spacecraft’s blunt bottomed shape that, paired with a heat shield, would protect it from the searing heat of reentry before it splashed down in the wide expanse of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans....

To contrast the slipshod action-adventure science that we are subjected to in Armageddon, we’ve included a clip from the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey which, despite the relatively incomprehensible final 30 minutes, is not only a visually beautiful film but stunning in its efforts to incorporate some beautifully accurate physics into the action. It is worth mentioning that, aside from the occasional musical soundtrack, the film is one of the only “space movies” I’ve ever seen that actually portrays the absence of sound in the vacuum of space....

In a study published last month in Nature Communications researchers found that the secret behind the easy swimming of jellyfish is suction. Instead of using its muscles to push water out of the way, a jellyfish moves its body to create an area of low pressure in the water around it. The difference in pressure creates suction, pulling the jellyfish through the water. The characteristic is also shared by other organisms like lampreys....

Queen Mary, University of London

If you’re currently involved in activism or journalism or another sensitive field, this is the right time to start making the switch to an encrypted means of communication. Even if you’re not, people you know may be, and giving them the option to keep their communications with you secure is a good thing to do. It won’t cost you anything—except for maybe using funny stickers during your conversations—and it could prove extremely valuable down the road as it shields you from snooping advertisers or increasingly blurry restrictions on government investigations....

The Scripps Ocean Atmosphere Research Simulator, or SOARS, mimics the interaction of water, weather, salinity, chemistry and microbial marine life at the sea surface in a laboratory setting. Designed by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, this miniature biome can generate sizable waves, create hurricane-force winds, control air and water temperature to replicate polar and tropical conditions, and churn up phytoplankton blooms with a wide array of species....

What you won’t find inside those stylish, tubular bodies, however, is Alexa. Unlike the Blast and the UE Megablast that arrived late last year. Instead of voice control, the Boom 3 added a single programmable button, and in some ways, that’s just better than a full-on digital assistant. What is the UE Megaboom 3? The $150 Boom 3 and the $200 Megaboom 3 are portable, battery-powered speakers that are waterproof and shaped in such a way that they throw sound in every direction....

The government will also be hiring for a Federal Highway Administration cyber coordinator position, and will dedicate $100 million to handling cybersecurity incidents the Department of Homeland Security deems “significant.” The White House announced that this bill would “make our communities safer and our infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of climate change and cyber-attacks.” However, cyber experts acknowledge that America is years behind countries like Russia or China. “It would have been great had we done this over a decade ago,” says Theresa Payton, CEO and chief advisor for cybersecurity consulting firm Fortalice Solutions....

That may sound like basic video game stuff—the equivalent of playing Call of Duty or Fortnite against a friend in another location—but before this month, that capability didn’t exist for F-35 simulators. Previously, the four rigs at Nellis could mimic a four-ship exercise in a virtual flight with each other—like playing Mario Kart with a person sitting next to you—but now they’re capable of flying, in real time, with other simulators for other aircraft in far-flung places....