Just read a damn newspaper By far the simplest way to get the news without resorting to social media is to go old school. Channel your grandpa and subscribe to an actual, real life newspaper—or at least the website or app of one. It can seem hard to take time away from Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit if you want to stay on top of the latest news, but it doesn’t have to be....
The culprit, Aspergillus fumigatus, is a common fungal pathogen that has infected people all over the world, including over 2 million in the European Union alone. But the drugs typically used to treat A. fumigatus have become less effective in recent years, and this drug resistance puts at-risk populations like leukemia patients in even greater danger. Similar to how some bacteria can become drug-resistant after encountering antibiotics, antifungal resistance may result from exposure to agricultural fungicides, the study says....
Unfortunately, as with any software, your MS Office problems can quickly have you tearing your hair out or banging your head on the desk in frustration. But don’t panic—there’s a built-in troubleshooting tool you can turn to. Take a deep breath, try running Office in Safe Mode, and you might find those annoying bugs are gone. It’s definitely worth investigating before you explore any other more drastic options or decide to switch to the competition altogether....
If you want to make sure that only your contact, and nobody else, sees the data you’re sending, you need to hide it inside another file. This is actually pretty simple to do. Here’s how to conceal sensitive information in a more innocuous guise. Encryption versus hiding files When it comes to protecting your private information, many experts advise that you encrypt your files. In this approach to securely sending data, a secure messaging app like Signal or WhatsApp will do the heavy lifting for you, scrambling the contents of your messages so nobody except the intended recipient can read them....
Many types of creative possibilities are available when photographing cars. You’re proud of your’s and what you may have done to it. But there are good ways and bad to show others the apples and oranges of your eyes. Follow our advice and you’ll be shooting better car photos in no time. Car photography don’ts Avoid parking lot lines Avoid parking your car in a parking lot with the white lines peeking out from underneath....
We were on Lake Millinocket in northern Maine, the state within the Lower 48 that has the highest population of moose. We were looking to get a peek of these massive and often elusive creatures, as seeing them in their natural habitat can truly be a sight. In May and June, lakes like Millinocket are moose locales, as food sources are readily available there. That means moose get to spend less time feeding and more time protecting their calves....
Luckily, you can avoid some of these negative effects without entirely relinquishing your pocket computer’s company. Here’s how to protect your health from your smartphone. Improve your posture How do you stand or sit when you’re occupied with your smartphone? If you bend over the screen, neck cricked, then you’re not alone. Unfortunately, this unnatural position, dubbed “text neck,” could be causing an increasing number of neck and spine injuries, research suggests....
“There is a huge difference between the very gradual and accidental warming trend that early farmers probably caused, versus the much more rapid climate changes that our modern industrial world is effecting knowingly,” said Stephen Vavrus, a senior scientist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Climatic Research who conducted the study, which recently appeared in the journal Scientific Reports. His climate modeling suggests that the amount of warming caused by farming prior to the Industrial Revolution is similar to the amount of warming caused by industrialization over the last two centuries, he said....
Could we make it? From scratch? In… plastic bags? I had not planned anything for the next day’s dinner, so I jumped at the opportunity to try. We’d get a story and I’d get a hearty meal. Two birds with one mac and cheese, as they say. Let’s set the stage a bit. Cooking food in plastic bags is not strange, and if you do it right, you can call it sous-vide (French for “under vacuum”)....
A new study published in Science of the Total Environment found that since 1997, mercury levels in rainfall has been increasing in some areas of the United States, particularly in the western and central parts of the country. In the eastern states, the amount of mercury in rainfall has gone down, declining as coal-fired power plants (a large source of atmospheric mercury) installed ‘scrubbers’ on their smokestacks to filter harmful materials out of the emissions....
Like retailers did with the Internet, transit officials are borrowing a host of space-age applications from the military, enabling real-time reaction, response, repair, and rerouting in routine and emergency situations. Or so said gadget and system developers at the Transportation Research Board’s annual shindig this week, where some 10,000 folks in the road, rail, air, and boat transit world meet to talk riveting topics like pedestrian wait times at stop lights and measuring traffic flow over snow....
When certain species of soil fungi become airborne, people could unwittingly breathe in the spores. Once in the lungs, the fungus can infiltrate the body and cause disease, like histoplasmosis, a lung infection caused by inhaling spores from the Histoplasma fungi. The disease, commonly associated with bird and bat droppings, had primarily been endemic in the Midwest, particularly around the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys, where Histoplasma commonly grows. But now, histoplasmosis has been diagnosed at significant rates in at least one county in 94 percent of US states—an expansion that has been linked to climate change....
Each foot-wide, 11-pound ball can roll up to 62 miles, snap photos at any angle, and take soil samples, drawing its power from the solar panels on its shell. Unlike wheeled rovers, the rounded scouts have fewer motors to repair, never flip over, and are easier to seal from dust. Plus, they rarely get stuck. “The beauty of the system is it needs very little energy to go around rocks, so unless you’re landing on a surface that looks like a bed of nails, it should be fine,” Bruhn says....
The press release is sparse on the details. The patient is a surgeon who works in a wheelchair 11 hours per day. He filed a claim for a $69,500 ReWalk exoskeleton, the only such device approved by the FDA, which would enable him to stand and walk at work and at home. The patient’s insurance company denied the claim, but that denial was overturned by an independent medical review board, deeming that the device was medically necessary for the patient....
Jack Northrop before Northrop John “Jack” Knudsen Northrop was born in 1895, before heavier than air flight became commonplace. But it wasn’t long after the skies began filling with airplanes that he became captivated by aviation; in 1911, he watched a pilot fly a pusher biplane over Santa Barbara. Five years later he was working for Loughead Aircraft (better known by its phonetically rebranded name, “Lockheed”), developing flying boats and designing wings during the First World War....
The size and scope of the Beijing Olympics has bordered on intimidating. In developing the drug-testing protocol for the games, organizers hoped their comprehensive plan would have a similar effect. The number of tests has increased from 3,600 used in Athens to 4,500 in Beijing. At a minimum, the top five finishers are tested, and athletes can be tested more than once a day at the 41 different testing locations....
A bullet is a metal mass at velocity, designed to tear a hole in a person. Bulletproof armor, from early metal plate to kevlar to more advanced concepts, works by dispersing that energy as quickly and efficiently as possible, ideally leaving the wearer bruised instead of punctured. For bulletproof armor to be effective, it needs to distribute and deaden the energy of bullets quickly, it needs to be durable against repeat impacts, and it needs to be light and useful enough that people actually wear it....
But if you try to do something about a metal fire, you’ll probably only make it worse. For example, magnesium burns brighter immersed in carbon dioxide than it does in air. Blow a CO2 fire extinguisher at gently burning magnesium shavings, and the pile will suddenly burn much hotter and faster. (We actually set the photographer’s lights on fire when we took the top-left photo below—when we turned the fire extinguisher on the pile of shavings, it sent flaming magnesium blowing in all directions....
