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The Food Lab starts with the preface, “I am a nerd and I’m proud of it.” Then it continues with breakdowns of various methods to make chili, sciences of roasts, ground meat, and vegetables, and devotes several pages to debunking pasta cooking myths. Lopez-Alt spends 21 pages on the proper Thanksgiving, a mixture of cooking content that includes turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing, but the most essential point Lopez-Alt makes in this section is how to properly, and safely, cook stuffing in a turkey....

The best sources of advice for top toothbrushing technique are the best-practice guidelines from both the American Dental Association and the British Dental Association. They’re largely identical, but if you put them together, you’ll get the closest thing you’ll ever have to a brushing bible. We also interviewed Dr. Richard Niederman, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Health Promotion at New York University’s College of Dentistry, to get some adult supervision....

If you’re one of the 2,000 members of the Potomac Pedalers Touring Club and you’re plotting a group ride, club president Anne C.M. Hyman doesn’t want to know about it. All official rides and events for the DC/Maryland/Virginia-area cycling group are canceled amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “All rides led by PPTC members from now until further notice are not PPTC-sanctioned rides,” Hyman writes on the club’s homepage. “This means while you will have access to the club’s Ride With GPS account and member directory to find a route and a buddy, if anything happens to your riders, the liability is on your shoulders....

In Her Own Words: “Scientists have always been explorers—they’ve had to go out and brave the world to make new discoveries. Darwin found unusual finches, and that led to the theory of evolution. But with advances in computing power, scientists won’t necessarily have to leave their homes anymore. Future exploration will start with algorithms. Explorers can come up with crazy theories, use computers to sift through our wealth of data, and pull the signal out of the noise, answering the questions: ‘What am I looking for here?...

For example, something your colleague created on a macOS word processor might not work on your Windows 10 computer. Or a website that asks you to upload a photo might insist that it be a specific type of file. Whatever quandary you encounter, you can usually hunt down an app that will help. In this guide, we’ll recommend some of the best format-conversion services out there and give you a few tips so you’ll never be stuck with a wrongly-encoded file again....

To test this hypothesis, I created my own black spots by dragging a dinner plate through my friend’s backyard pool. The plate’s motion created, on the pool’s surface, two dimples that slowly drifted away from me while remaining in sync with each other. When I squeezed a few drops of food coloring into each dimple, the dye swirled down to reveal an incredible half-ring vortex connecting the dimples to each other....

So there’s a lot to gain in figuring out Reddit’s algorithm, which is used to decide what gets on the front page. And Reddit has been harder to trick than other, similar sites, most notably the old version of Digg, which was notoriously easy to fool. (I used to work for Gizmodo, one of Gawker Media’s sites, and we had a system to get just about any story on the front page of Digg with a single email....

Private group chats in messaging apps have become a popular way to share photos and videos away from the glare of social media feeds. But if you still want some level of exposure, blogging is a way to get your thoughts, pictures, links, and other content out into the world. It goes back to an earlier, simpler time on the internet, and if that sounds appealing to you, this is how you post like in the good old days....

If you’re going on a jaunt through some flat conservation land, you’ll require little if any equipment. But for anything more intense than that terrain, you should prepare better. Climbing a 4,000-foot mountain in New Hampshire, for example, will usually take you above the treeline, where the rocky summit will provide expansive views—and more exposure to the elements. Here’s how to pack for an ultralight day hike the right way: The trick is to stay streamlined while also preparing for that surprise rainstorm or blister....

If you’re tired of your produce going bad after a few days, here are a few tips to keep it fresh. Shop smart Keeping produce fresh starts with, well, buying fresh produce in the first place. The fresher it is when you grab it off the shelf, the longer it’ll last once you take it home. “Often, it’s difficult to judge how old your produce is just by its appearance,” says Jeffrey K....

What attracts raccoons and other fuzzy nuisances? Animals adapt to human-created habitats through a process called urbanization. As it turns out, some mammals benefit from our tendency to replace everything with a strip mall. A 2003 study found raccoons were uniquely suited to living in cities. In fact, city life might actually be better for them. Think about it: humans arrive, kill or drive off big predators, install sources of clean water like sprinklers and hose spigots, and leave out bins of food....

Our 206 bones do more than just keep us standing, walking, and singing through life. They also protect our organs, harbor bone marrow, and store minerals such as phosphorus and calcium. But just like your muscles, bones require maintenance work. Here’s how to keep them healthy for the long run. Human bones don’t come ready at full strength. Instead, our bone density starts increasing shortly after birth and continues until we are about 30 years old....

Create your own audio Smartphones can herald a new call or message with almost any sound. Before you set that audio, however, you’ll need to obtain it: Record a clip directly to your phone, take a snippet from an existing song or video file, or find a prepared ringtone through a specialized app. Then convert it to a common format—MP3 is a good option because it’s so widely used. To record audio on your phone, try a free app like Voice Recorder on Android, or Voice Record Pro on iOS (which also offers an optional $7 upgrade to get rid of ads)....

Know your evacuation zone When weather threatens a particular area, authorities may call for a recommended or mandatory evacuation. Even before hurricane season rolls around, you should look up whether your area might be evacuated in case of disaster—and the route you’ll need to take away from home if this happens. You should be able to find this information on your local government website, and this list contains links to maps of evacuation zones all over the United States....

Of course, security is still the main reason to download a VPN to your phone. Any connections you make will receive secure encryption, so nobody can look at your online activity. This is particularly important on public WiFi networks like the ones in hotels or coffee shops, where anyone else can get on the same network. Using a VPN makes it much harder for the owners of the network, your internet service provider (ISP), or anyone else to follow you around the internet....

Of course, these are all the same moon. On Sunday night, stretching into the wee early morning hours of Monday, the one single moon we’ve adored for 4.5 billion years will be all of these things at once. If you play your cards right and find yourself lucky with the weather, you’ll get a chance to spend some time moon-gazing and enjoying a spectacle that’s about as rare as moon-gazing events get....

Malus Domestica If Silk Road travelers had minded their litter, we wouldn’t have today’s apples. Kazakh fruits hitched rides to China and Europe, where trees grown from discarded cores cross-­pollinated with soft Asian and sour crab varieties. Farmers cultivated some of the European offspring, creating a new species—the ancestor to all modern pomes. Red Delicious A random seedling in an 1870s Iowa orchard blossomed into crisp red globes. Half a century later, serendipitous genetic mutations led to a deeper crimson skin....

The idea that blood circulates around the body. It may seem a common, even obvious notion. Yet that familiar concept that the heart is an organ that pumps blood and oxygen through the arteries, with the “waste” returning by way of the veins, took over two thousand years to develop. When it was established, it revolutionized the life sciences and inaugurated modern medicine. In importance, it stands alongside the Aristotelian Corpus that laid the foundation for the biological sciences, and Darwin’s theory of natural selection....

The Reverb G2’s biggest draw comes from its display resolution. Each eye gets a 2160 x 2160 screen. Most other headsets typically opt for a 1440 x 1600 per eye resolution, including the Valve Index and the Oculus Quest. Increased resolution helps eliminate typical VR issues that can take away from the illusion that’s essential to immersive VR. With lower resolution, digital objects can have jagged edges or the whole picture can suffer from screen-door effect, which makes everything look as if you’re peering through a fine grid due to the dark spaces between pixels....

Millar and his crew watched the whales circle around a “bait ball,” a school of fish herded into a tight spherical shape. The humpbacks would slap their tails to keep the prey inside that sphere, and pick off the straggling fish nearer to the outside. The crew managed to capture the phenomenon on video, and commemorated their experience in an Instagram post. It’s apparently only the second time such a massive aggregation of humpback whales has been spotted in Australian waters, according to Millar....