Earlier this year, NASA announced plans for the station’s eventual retirement in 2031, but it’s unlikely that the 450-ton lab will meet a quick demise. Once operations end, most dead satellites drift out of orbit and eventually burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. However, most of the ISS will sink into Point Nemo, a remote area of the Pacific Ocean so far from land that many scientists refer to it as a “space cemetery,” after the number of spacecraft laid to rest in the watery grave....

I haven’t found good data on how many such poisonings occur this time of year, but there are annual estimates. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 48 million people get food-borne illnesses every year. Out of those, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. So, how do you feed your hungry friends and family without feeding them nasty pathogens? Our Modern Plagues has your back. And, fair warning: You might not want to read this if you’re eating....

How to delete Facebook Your Facebook and Messenger accounts are one, so deleting one will affect the other. This will not happen with WhatsApp or Instagram, or any other apps you’ve used your Facebook account to log into. If these findings have exhausted your patience and you’ve decided you no longer can be a part of the company’s community, all of Facebook’s platforms have easy-to-follow steps to back up your data and delete....

There might be slight differences between them, but all password managers work similarly. In our opinion, 1Password is one of the best available, so we’ll go through that setup process so you know what to expect. For other alternatives, check out Dashlane, LastPass, Keeper, Bitwarden, and NordPass. Signing up for a password manager You can try 1Password for 30 days for free, but because it doesn’t have a free tier, you will need to enter payment details to do so....

“You can buy large leaves in some produce sections or on Etsy,” says Grahame Hubbard, owner of Plant Specialists, a landscape design and service agency in New York City. “But what’s better than growing your own?” “Look for plump, fleshy leaves,” says Hubbard. “The aloe plant hasn’t been looked after if the leaves are wrinkled or limp to the touch.” Aloe vera prefers well-draining soils to mitigate the risk of root rot and nutritional deficiencies....

On the first sub-freezing day in Brooklyn, catastrophe struck. I woke up to find that the leaves on my pothos and Chinese Money Plant were wilted and wrinkled in a way that could indicate a lack of water—or a potentially deadly lack of heat. I immediately moved the stricken plants to another corner of the room, away from the windows. Notably, my Tricolor Stromanthe, string of hearts, and succulents still looked perky—and have continued to since....

The waste individuals generate is much less, but still important. In 2018, landfills received 146.1 million tons of trash from places like households, offices, shops, schools, and hotels. Food makes up for 24 percent, followed by plastics at more than 18 percent. Other contributors included paper products, rubber, leather, and textiles. People around the world are doing their part in trying to reduce their daily landfill contributions, but sometimes this is harder than it seems....

A flight school (otherwise known as an aviation training organization (ATO)) conducts the business of teaching people to fly. It can take on a variety of guises, from the small, traditional flight school at a local airport using a light aircraft or two all the way to those international ATOs that train pilots for the airlines—and often conduct their recurrent training as well—in large fleets of aircraft and flight simulators....

Here’s the good news first: Despite its name, eye strain isn’t a physical injury and doesn’t carry any risk of long term damage to the eyes. Still, it’s no fun, and can make life difficult in the digital age. Fortunately, there are simple steps you can take to prevent, or recover from, these symptoms. What causes digital eye strain? When we’re not looking at screens, humans blink about once every four, says Priyanka Kumar, an ophthalmologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia....

Nature

If you play music on Spotify, you know it’s not quite the same as stacking your shelves with vinyl. You’ve got access to tens of millions of songs, but keeping track of them can be a chore. That’s why many users build playlists. The problem is, it’s easy to accidentally delete one of your favorite playlists. Here’s how to restore vanished playlists, and preserve them for future use. Use Spotify’s playlist recovery tool The first page you’ll see gives you access to all the standard account information, including your name, your profile picture, and, if you have a premium subscription, the method you use to pay Spotify every month....

But if you need to retrace more of your steps over a longer period of time, you’ve also got options. This feature is technically known as file versioning, and it keeps old versions of files available should you ever want to go back to them. This can be particularly useful if, for example, you suddenly realize you’ve been inputting the wrong figures into a spreadsheet for the past week. Some applications come with file versioning built in, so if you want to go back to a proto version of a document, you should start there....

Autoplaying clips are enough to make us pine for the days when the internet was just text and low-res images, but there are ways to fight back against the scourge. Follow these steps online or on your phone to take the auto out of autoplay. In your web browser The bad news is there’s no “master switch” in most browsers that you can flick to prevent videos from playing on their own, which means you need to get a bit more creative....

Getting out of bed can be one of the toughest challenges of the day, but technology can help. We’re not talking about your phone, though. Ditch the smartphone alarm you’ve been relying on for years and switch to one of these alternatives for an easier way to ease into the day. By gradually getting brighter, these lights aim to wake you up the same way the sun would. Some bulbs, like those in the Philips Hue family of products, can find sunrise times for your location and program themselves accordingly....

A left turn is a tricky maneuver, but the driving environment itself is also a factor in what kind of obstacles the human—or the self-driving car—might encounter. A two-lane road on a sunny day with clearly painted lines and scant traffic offers an easy landscape. But an IKEA parking lot on a Saturday afternoon? Ouch. In fact, parking lots are a distinctive enough environment that Waymo, the self-driving car company that’s a sibling to Google, specifically trains its vehicles to deal with them by setting up real-world scenarios in a controlled environment....

Whether you’re heading out of town for a graduation, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, or any other occasion, traveling light has its advantages: you will have to remember fewer items to pack, you’ll have an easier time navigating crowded streets, and simply won’t have to carry as much. The big hotel chains also have their own apps, and they’re usually worth installing to cut down on the amount of paperwork you have to take with you on your travels....

But there are more pieces to the virtual reality puzzle than just the Vive, which is HTC and Steam’s joint offering. Oculus Rift kicked off the modern VR race, and the Facebook-owned headset is coming very soon — it became available for online pre-order in January for the lower price of $599. Playstation VR will be the first and only virtual reality headset from a first-party, dedicated-console maker. But the HTC continues to keep the Vive’s (now Vive Pre) feature list ahead of the pack....

While tracking the slow creep of Arcangel’s creation, I wondered: If rising sea levels, air pollution, and temperatures one day push humanity underground, is this all we’ll have to remember the sky? Humans have lived underground for millions of years, but only in fits and starts. Our cave-painting ancestors left behind handprints and hunting scenes. In Tunisia, many people still live in what the The Atlantic calls “crater-like homes,” with rooms built into the Earth, and a central circular patio open to the sky....

Those lakes are filled with methane and ethane rather than water, and any inhabitants would have to deal with temperatures reaching 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but where liquid sloshes, life might find a way. Specifically, life could assemble itself from a particular chemical building block uniquely suited to Titan’s harsh environment, some researchers have suggested. “People took this proposal very seriously. There’s not that many concrete suggestions in astrobiology,” says Martin Rahm, a chemist at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden....

For many people, taking hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures is now a crucial part of going on holiday – documenting every last detail and posting it on social media. But how does that affect our actual memories of the past – and how we view ourselves? As an expert on memory, I was curious. Unfortunately, psychological research on the topic is so far scant. But we do know a few things....