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For those of you not in the know, the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line is a service by the Butterball turkey company that’s been answering people’s Thanksgiving-related questions since 1981. It is just as charming as it sounds. Around 50 people sit in a room and literally just help anxious Americans—10,000 of whom call on Thanksgiving itself—have a happy holiday. Mostly those callers ask questions about the bird itself, but you can also ask them about your mashed potatoes or your green bean casserole....

In August 1919, for example, the cutter Bear, one of the forerunners of today’s Coast Guard, was en route to remote villages north of Nome, in modern-day Alaska, carrying supplies and people when it ran into heavy ice. The crew had no choice but to stop and wait for the winds to shift. “Stopped, dropped kedge [secondary anchor] to await an easterly shift of the wind, to clear sea of ice for further progress to the northward and eastward,” the Bear’s navigator wrote....

Let’s face it: We’ve all found liquified lettuce in our veggie drawers. Don’t fret. It’s arguably impossible to consume 100 percent of the food we buy. But a healthy reminder of the effect food waste has on the environment might help us all to be more conscious of the amount of food we eat—and don’t eat. Consumer food waste varies extensively depending on the area. In South and Southeast Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that only around 5 percent of total wastage comes from consumers....

The latest satellite in the navigation system, a third-gen craft (known as BeiDou-3) now in a geostationary orbit, lifted off earlier this month from the Xichang Center in southwestern China. The system’s final satellite, scheduled for launch in May, will give it full global capability. At that point, China’s completed system will rival America’s GPS, Russia’s GLONASS, and Europe’s Galileo. BeiDou is representative of China’s push to build and offer commercial alternatives to Western tech platforms, from servers and 5G equipment from Huawei, for example, to satellites....

But their arrival is often far from loudly announced. New invasive neighbors can be sneaky and don’t necessarily set off alarms when they quietly set up residence somewhere, and oftentimes it’s normal people who spot a strange new plant or critter in their backyard. As recently as last year, the infamous “murder hornet,” scientifically known as the Asian giant hornet, was spotted by a Washington resident on their front porch....

The movie gets right to the point fast. Lawrence, a doctoral student, and DiCaprio, a professor, discover that a world-ending comet from the Oort Cloud, which is at the edge of our solar system, is headed straight for Earth (a not-so-subtle metaphor for our dramatically changing climate). The government gets involved; they’re whisked off to D.C. but are met with politicians and White House staffers who aren’t all that worried....

These deals can come and go quickly, especially if you’re looking for the most popular Queen-sized offerings, so we’ll update this list periodically to add new links and kill those that have gone out of stock. The best Black Friday mattress deals for 2021 Casper Wave Hybrid mattress $1,886 (Was $2,695) Casper Wave Hybrid mattress CHECK PRICE Casper’s flagship mattress isn’t cheap, but it’s under big discount here on Black Friday....

Save up to 50 percent on power tools at Home Depot, get up to 69 percent off items from Black+Decker, and enjoy deep discounts on Craftsman tools. And you can get 15 percent off at Ace Hardware with the code HOLIDAY2. Here are more power tool deals on Cyber Monday. Home Depot Cyber Monday power tool deals RIDGID 18V Cordless 10-Tool Combo Kit $389 (Was $699) Give someone the gift of building with this comprehensive tool set from Ridgid....

For DARPA, the military’s blue sky projects wing, teaching robots to walk on new terrain means embracing learning like a toddler. Learning to walk starts with a lot of failure, but by learning how to adjust to failure, robots could tackle wholly new environments based on intuition alone. This is the domain of Machine Common Sense, a DARPA initiative about developing a kind of AI that allows robots, first in simulation and then in the real world, to emulate a toddler’s ability to understand, interact with, and navigate through the world....

FACT: You used to be able to die “by planet” By Sara Chodosh I’ve spent more time than most looking at death statistics. It’s kind of an occupational hazard of being both a health/science person and a data person. I am generally used to them being both quite depressing and pretty mundane—in the modern era in the US the vast majority of deaths are from cancer and heart disease, followed by accidents and respiratory issues....

A study published today in the journal AGU Advances shows that the asteroid also triggered a monstrous tsunami with mile-high waves that scoured the ocean floor thousands of miles from the impact site in Mexico. A team of researchers built the a first global simulation of the Chicxulub impact tsunami to be published in a peer-reviewed journal and reviewed the geological record at over 100 sites around the world to determine the tsunami’s path and power....

With a $800 base price, it sits comfortably between the adorable, consumer-oriented, $500 Spark and the more-powerful, $1000 Mavic Pro, which was introduced back in 2016. Despite how close all these models are in price, they’re quite different, so you have some considering to do before you make your pick. What is it? By now, the form factor of a drone like this should be pretty familiar—four blades, a couple antennas, a whole pile of sensors, and a controller that links up with your phone to command the whole thing....

Some researchers believe that male hormones vary with the seasons. A 2003 study found that the testosterone levels of men in one Norwegian town bottomed out in summer and reached a high in late fall. A study of Danish men found similar seasonal variations (on a slightly different schedule). If these rhythms are real, they might have to do with sun exposure, summer workouts, or winter weight-gain. But studies done in sunny San Diego and snowy Boston failed to replicate the Scandinavian findings....

The benefits of being outside are obvious to anyone who’s tried it. Recent laboratory science has attempted to quantify this sense of bliss. Studies show that being immersed in nature is associated with reduced stress and anxiety, better sleep, and lowered blood pressure and heartrate. It can reduce your risk of developing obesity, diabetes, and asthma and allergies, and cause symptoms to improve among people who already struggle with such problems....

According to a study published January 11 in Advances in Atmospheric Science, ocean heat, salinity contrast, and stratification do not show any signs of slowing down, and better forecasting of these changes is needed to prepare for the extreme climate future ahead. The study found that a new record of 0-2000m ocean heat content (OHC) was set and recorded in 2022, and roughly ~10 zetta Joules (ZJ) of heat was added into the ocean....

But electrical engineer Malcolm McCulloch at the University of Oxford is reviving the design as part of a three-year project to create appliances that can be used in areas without electricity. McCulloch says the forgotten fridge is better fit for rural areas as it has no moving parts. It is also greener. Unlike freon-compressors that rely on greenhouse gases, Einstein and Szilard’s design uses ammonia, butane and water and takes advantage of low air pressure to reduce the boiling point of butane....

An international team of astronomers managed to start capturing data on the exploding star just three hours after it began. Now, after years of data collection and analysis, the team has confirmed that the supernova of 2018, known to scientists as SN 2018zd, is not just any supernova, but an entirely new category of exploding star that has been theorized but never previously observed: an electron-capture supernova. The findings are published in Nature Astronomy....

When the rain began, the antelope and deer of the Y.O. Ranch Headquarters gathered to chew idly beneath the sparse trees. For 10 days in October 2018, a line of storms pounded the Texas Hill Country. Brown currents rose over a bridge on the ranch, spilling out over the roads and gullies of this 14,000-acre property 140 miles west of Austin. The flood tugged at the 8-foot fences around the ranch until it finally pulled them down....

The link between palm oil production and deforestation in the tropical regions where it is grown is well known, but few people realize how prevalent palm oil is in items consumed every day, such as cleaning products and biodiesel. Global production of palm oil has increased rapidly since the 1990s, with plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia supplying around 85% of the global trade. Many of these plantations have replaced natural forests and drained carbon-rich peatlands....

Graph search takes all of the data that’s plugged into Facebook–likes, favorites, tastes and photos and videos and status updates and everything else–and makes it easy to search and group those results. The most obvious way you might take advantage of that is through natural language search, sort of like what Apple’s Siri attempted–instead of searching for keywords, you can just ask questions. That’ll be useful for finding, say, all pictures of your friends from a certain year, or finding any Thai restaurants your friends recommended in a certain city....