Annually, the average American eats 13.4 pounds of bananas—our favorite fresh fruit. But since peels can comprise 35 percent of the fruit, a large portion of what we buy goes in the trash. Eating the peels could reduce a significant amount of food waste. And by the way, discarded food is the single largest category of material that ends up in municipal landfills, producing methane—a potent greenhouse gas—as it breaks down....

Digital photos are wonderful, but there’s no point shooting them if you just leave them sitting on your smartphone, totally ignored. Sure you’ve thought about putting everything in place, but just thinking about diving into those folders most likely scares you. Don’t worry—I’m here to tell you that sorting that photo mess of yours is possible, though it won’t be quick. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re in a somewhat similar situation: years of shooting smartphone photos have given you an entirely unsorted, multi-thousand-picture camera roll....

“It’s impressive to me how many times people don’t recognize the extent of digital assets that they own,” says Mark Parthemer, Managing Director and Senior Fiduciary Counsel at Bessemer Trust. “With many clients, they’re concerned about financial things, but they need to protect the sentimental assets too, like photographs.” To start, Parthemer says, make an inventory of the digital items that your family may want to access after you die....

Wildlife tourism like this is booming, raising much-needed funds for and awareness of conservation efforts. However, there is a dark side to this business, and many tourists unknowingly put animals at risk by supporting activities that encourage the capture of wild animals or cause them pain or distress. But that’s not to say you should avoid wildlife tourism altogether – we just need to be more aware of the impact we can have on the lives of wild animals....

And, to my stats-savvy eye, it is a bunch of hogwash. Just when it seems that news consumers may be wising up—remembering to ask if science is “peer-reviewed,” the sample size is big enough or who funded the work—along comes a suckerpunch of a story. In this instance, the fast one comes in the form of confidence intervals, a statistical topic that no layperson should really ever have to wade through to understand a news article....

For those who don’t know much about electronics or sewing, dealing with both can seem daunting at first. But don’t worry, you won’t need a ton of skill with either, or expensive kits, to make this work. And once you learn the basics, you’ll be able to tailor any project to your child’s interests. What you’ll need: Forget soldering irons, wire strippers, wire cutters, and breadboards—tools and materials you’d typically find in electronics projects, but that can be dangerous or difficult for children to use....

Help them learn to identify rip currents While it might seem safest to go into the ocean where the water looks peaceful—where the waves aren’t breaking—these calm areas are typically the most dangerous. Imagine the shoreline without water for a moment. If you started pumping water back into the ocean from the land, how would it travel? Like all water, it would follow the slopes or the path of least resistance....

To many public health researchers, this didn’t come as a surprise. While vaccines have been miraculously effective in preventing severe illness, they don’t fully stop transmission, especially against the hyperinfective delta variant. That fact, coupled with the high number of people who are choosing not to get vaccinated, means that it’s very unlikely that vaccines will stop the spread of COVID in the way that they have for measles. “I think it is a realistic [decision] given the obvious inability to eliminate the virus,” says Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco....

It’s too late to purchase tickets to the main visitor complex, but you can watch the SLS rocket soar into the sky on NASA TV, NASA’s official live broadcast, the official NASA Twitch stream, or NASA’s mobile app. You can also register for free online to let the agency know that you’re hosting a watch party through their Virtual Guest program. (This will be especially exciting if you’re interested in receiving a virtual passport as a memento for the occasion, though this is not official documentation and will not guarantee you access into space....

Researchers filmed three species of captive woodpeckers pounding away, and found that their heads behave like “stiff hammers” to peck as efficiently as possible. If the birds had shock-absorbing skulls, the hardware would just get in the way, the team concluded. What’s more, because woodpecker brains are so small, they don’t sustain the kind of damage that a human would endure from similar impacts, the authors reported today in Current Biology....

Hurricane Ida, which made landfall over the weekend in Louisiana as a Category 4 storm, is moving towards the Northeast as a strong storm, bringing heavy flash floods and tornadoes to many parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York. Even below tropical depression levels of wind, what remains of Ida may bring once in a century rains. The National Weather service has issued its most severe flash flood warning for those parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast that are expected to get three to eight inches of rain over the next day or so....

The growth of favorable conditions in the Atlantic is already apparent off the coast of Africa. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) started issuing advisories on Potential Tropical Cyclone Six near the Cabo Verde Islands on Thursday. The term “potential tropical cyclone” is a designation assigned to a tropical wave that hasn’t yet become a tropical cyclone, but it’s expected to develop into one soon and is close enough to land that watches and warnings are required....

In late October, Google started addressing this. Using optical character recognition, the search engine will now convert images to text and include the results. The process is not a straightforward one: should “O” be read as the letter or the number? Is the text in English or another language? But the search engine crawls the Web at regular intervals, decrypting the vast storehouse of information. In April, Google started including HTML form text in search results, and has been including PDF text as well....

Paul Simon never wrote a song about Kodak Ektachrome, so you’ve probably never heard of it. But you have seen pictures shot on the film: The astronauts brought it to the moon in 1969, and National Geographic photographers have carried it around the globe.Launched in 1946, Ektachrome evolved from a slightly finicky stock prone to issues with fading into a go-to medium valued for its vibrant colors. Hues skew toward the blue end of the spectrum, creating more-realistic images than the warmer Kodachrome of Simon fame....

Kushleyev and Mellinger weren’t in Cannes to swap business cards or brand strategy over flutes of grand cru. The duo have little interest in selling cell phones or mid-luxury sedans, or anything else for that matter. In fact, that’s what makes KMel Robotics, their young startup, so unique: though they are a leader in their field, they aren’t trying to sell their technology. Kushleyev and Mellinger specialize in quadrotors, those small, four-propellor hovering aircraft that can carry small payloads and, in the right setup, work together to perform complex tasks....

Instant Omni Pro 14-in-1 Air Fryer $199 (Was $299) This high-end air fryer has a typical basket as well as a full-on rotisserie chicken that will give Costco a run for its money. Automatic controls and a clear display make operating it as easy as a simple microwave. This is a serious air fryer. Instant Pot Pro 10-in-1 Pressure Cooker $79 (Was $129) Most slow cookers are, well, slow. The Instant Pot adds pressure into the equation to pick up the pace when you’re trying to make soup, stew, braised meat, or anything else that usually eats up tons of cooking time....

A year later, in 2014, I repeated the experiment and had a completely different experience. Venture capitalists had discovered Bitcoin, pouring money into startups that made it easier to use. Intense interest from China sent Bitcoin’s value over $1,000, minting many of those early cryptogeeks into multimillionaires, at least on digital paper. Businesses had learned that accepting Bitcoin was an easy way to get press. So I was able to use Bitcoin to go on a wine tour of Santa Cruz and eat a 14-course dinner at a hip new restaurant....

Traffic congestion is more than just an annoying time suck. It can have negative impacts on health due to the air pollution emitted from cars idling, with one study estimating that the emissions from passenger vehicles spike by as much as 200 percent during rush hours which raises the concentration of air pollutants in areas surrounding highways. It affects a lot of people, with more than 11 million Americans estimated to live within 150 meters of highways....

Pilots reported 14,349 strikes between civil aircraft and birds in 2017, the last year for which comprehensive numbers are available. Minimizing the chance for these encounters, and dealing with the fallout, is a high priority for the U.S. government and, whether they know it or not, the millions of Americans who fly each year. Only 4 or 5 percent of these strikes actually cause damage to the plane in any given year, Begier says, and even fewer make headlines....

Financial Review notes that Hirofumi Doi, a program manager at the Ministry of Defence, gave the timeframe for the flight in an interview in Tokyo. The plane is built by Japanese industrial giant Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The 46-foot-long plane was developed at a cost of $440 million (or the cost of roughly three F-35s), and it’s been in the works for a while. Last year, we caught a grainy glimpse of the plane, and even if all goes well with the first flight, we shouldn’t expect it to enter service any time before the 2030s....