Get A Backup Drive With technology that auto manufacturers are now developing, electric cars can act as backup power sources during a blackout. A fully charged vehicle might power a home for a day or two. Install Smart Meters Forty million houses now have smart meters, digital devices that can provide homeowners with detailed information about their energy use. Over time that’s led to a 5 percent reduction in consumption....
For the past millennium and longer, windcatchers have existed in and around the Persian Gulf. These architectural towers are perfect examples of natural ventilation and passive cooling—ideas that have become increasingly relevant in sustainable design. As architects and environmentalists alike seek to move away from conventional energy-intensive heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, windcatchers are a prime example of the marriage between architectural design and the environment as a solution to our new climate realities....
Every Thanksgiving, Americans gather to celebrate family, give thanks, and stuff our faces until we all feel sick. Tragically, filling up too fast on a good holiday meal means you won’t manage to grab seconds or thirds of all the best dishes on the table. You need to maximize your intake—here’s how to eat more food on Thanksgiving. Note: This advice is not conducive to a healthy everyday diet. But then again, neither is Thanksgiving....
If you want to add some intrigue and adventure to your online media consumption, you can become a digital explorer and have the honor of calling yourself the first to lay eyes (or ears) on these rare obscurities. A warning, though: you’re likely to come across a lot of garbage in your travels. After all, there might be a reason a lot of these videos and songs have zero plays....
But you can dig deeper into the software. Just as with Windows and macOS, you can opt to switch from the regular iteration of ChromeOS to a beta version that’s still a work-in-progress. By joining the program, you get access to new features before everyone else, and help Google fix what doesn’t quite work yet by providing feedback about any bugs you might run into. And now is the perfect time to get more involved with the operating system, as the company recently launched the Beta Tester Hub, where they’ve made it easier to engage directly with ChromeOS developers and read up on what’s new with the software....
Just like most other animals, chickens can fall victim to ectoparasites—freeloading critters that live outside their hosts, such as fleas, lice, and mites. Now, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have surveyed chicken parasites that lurk in yards and coops across southern California. The work published this week in the Journal of Medical Entomology. The researchers examined five randomly selected chickens from twenty properties last summer, and found six species of chicken lice, three mite species, and one type of flea....
Location, location, location If you can, go for fireworks that play out over grand architecture or water for colorful reflections. If possible, get permission to shoot from a tall building for an altered perspective. After learning the rockets’ firing positions, visit the site before the event and choose several shooting locations. On the day of the celebration, set up at a place that’s crosswind or upwind of the display. Otherwise, by the time the finale comes, you’ll be shooting through smoke....
When someone slips your phone from your pocket or steals your laptop from a cafe table, you might have to scramble to deal with the consequences. In one stressful rush, you must attempt to retrieve your lost photos, deal with the loss of your vulnerable data, and eat the cost of the physical hardware. To avoid this difficult and expensive process, you can take steps right now—while your devices are still in your possession—to prevent thieves from pinching your gadgets....
Just because you prefer the curved aesthetics of the iPhone doesn’t mean you want to go all-in on the Apple software ecosystem. After all, Google and Microsoft make iOS apps that are just as good as Apple’s defaults. While some apps will require a few extra steps to replace the built-in versions, you can make the switch relatively easily, especially if you already use Google or Microsoft for your email and other cloud services....
You’re enjoying a cozy dream until your alarm suddenly blares. But when you peek out the window, it’s still pitch black outside. Did your clock malfunction? Nope, it’s just winter—making the sun rise later so it will be twice as hard to crawl out of bed and into the cold darkness. As the days get shorter, our mornings lose that crucial light cue, so waking up gets harder. That means you’ll need to put in extra effort to either start work or get to work on time....
NGC 2775′s spirals of gas, which act as star production factories, have spread far out from the galaxy’s unusually massive center bulge. Earlier in the galaxy’s life, the bulge would’ve been filled with gas that long ago transformed into clusters of white-hot stars. The current enormous size of the bulge and the relatively small ratio of spiral arms to bulge size reveal that this galaxy hasn’t been producing many stars lately, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), which partnered with NASA to produce this image....
This single-serve 16-ounce tumbler made of strong BPA-free plastic is similar to a French press, with an inner chamber you remove while brewing. Steep your loose leaf tea of choice in hot water filled to a clearly marked line in the tumbler, and when it’s ready add ice to the inner chamber and press it through your infusion. You can even add fruit or spices for a custom treat. The flip-top lid makes it easy to sip without spilling....
This story originally featured on The Conversation. As temperatures dipped this week, the National Weather Service issued freeze warnings for much of Florida and Georgia, adding a warning in South Florida for “falling iguanas.” Here I explain the physiology of cold iguanas, and why many people in Florida aren’t shedding tears for the iguana-cicles lying around the region. What happens to iguanas when temps drop? When temperatures fall into the 40s and 30s, green iguanas become cold-stunned....
If we’re puffing up our planet, other civilizations could be doing the same to theirs, producing a ring of satellites that we might be able to spot with telescopes we have today. That’s according to Hector Socas-Navarro, an astrophysicist at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, who gave a talk on the topic at NASA’s Technosignatures Workshop in Houston last week. Scientists have long speculated that fantastical sun-sized structures might betray the presence of technological aliens, but while a mega-solar panel blocking a distant star is theoretically easy to spot, such notions remain squarely in the realm of science fiction....
According to a recent patent filed by Apple, upcoming iPhones could could have a feature that lets users activate an emergency panic mode depending on which finger is pressed against the Touch ID scanner. Users could presumably set their thumb print to unlock their device and assign their pointer or middle finger to enter the emergency mode. The patent application dictates that this panic could immediately transmit an alert to the authorities, record photos and video of the situation, and grab audio....
We all know the “is a tomato a fruit?” debate (correct answer: yes, but you still shouldn’t put it in a fruit salad). Now we’d like to bring you a whole new botanical question you never knew you had: Is corn a fruit or a vegetable—or is it a grain? The answer is more technical than you might think, and to fully understand it you’ll need a little primer on corn biology....
The bottle of NyQuil always seems to be grimy, faded, and buried beneath layers of toiletries when you come down with a sudden cold. Tired and sniffling, you peer at the label. The medication expired six months ago. At that moment, it’s easy to question the number printed on the bottle: How solid is that expiration date, exactly? Gina Bellottie, a professor of pharmacology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, says that, as a general rule, people shouldn’t take drugs past their expiration dates....
After the deadline got extended by an extra year, it looks like the competition is finally heating up. Now that SpaceIL has filed its launch contract, the other teams have until the end of 2016 to sign up for a launch and complete the mission requirements by the end of 2017. Sixteen teams are competing to be the first privately funded mission to touch down on the moon. Once there, their goal is to travel at least 500 meters across the surface and transmit high definition images and video back to Earth....
“People sometimes don’t realize that they need to take some extra precautions,” says Suzanne Beavers, medical officer in the Asthma & Community Health Branch at the Centers for Disease Control. “That they need to take it easy, not do so many activities outside, and drink plenty of water.” Heat is serious. The United States sees hundreds of heat-related deaths per year (it’s the deadliest type of weather), and we’re likely to see many more in the future: Climate change will drive more frequent heat waves, which will in turn lead to more deaths....
The JBL Charge 5’s design At first glance, the JBL Charge 4 and Charge 5 are similar in size, measuring around 8.7 inches by 3.8 inches by 3.7 inches and about 2.1 pounds. But as soon as you see the bold, blown-up JBL logo with its prominent exclamation points stamped on the front grille, you know the Charge 5 is about being a little extra. It’s still got a 27-watt lithium-ion battery, but that’s now pushing two 2-inch bass drivers (up from 1....
