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[ad_1] Today, we live in a world where GPS systems, digital maps, and other navigation apps are all available on our smartphones. Few of us just walk straight into the woods without a phone, a personal GPS, or another navigation tool. But phones run on batteries, and batteries can die faster than we realize. If you get lost off-trail without a phone or a compass, and you literally can’t find north, we have a few tricks to help you navigate back to civilization Before we begin, remember the basics of outdoor safety: Rescue teams will find you more easily if you stay in one place, preferably close to your last known location or your planned destination. Unless you’re facing a serious emergency, such as a natural disaster, stay put and don’t leave the trail! For the sake of this guide, however, let’s assume you have deserted the beaten path. What do you do? Follow the land When you find yourself well off a trail, but not in the middle of completely unfamiliar terrai...

[ad_1] Why do we have seasons on Earth? The planet’s axial tilt, of course. But the tilt does more than just push us from spring, to summer, to fall, to winter. It’s also an important stabilizing force for our atmosphere—without which life on Earth would be almost assuredly impossible. And so it stands to reason that tilt might play an important role in fostering life on other worlds as well. That brings us to some new findings, published in The Astronomical Journal , that suggest a pair of potentially habitable exoplanets possess stable tilts, which bolster the chances they are more Earth-like than we imagined. Those planets are Kepler-186f and Kepler-62f, 550 and 990 light years from Earth, respectively. The former, whose discovery was first announced in 2014, was actually the first Earth-sized exoplanet found in the habitable zone of its star; the latter has a mass 2.8 times that of Earth (making a super-Earth). “It was already known that these two exoplanets...

[ad_1] Most self-driving cars are designed to carry people. That’s what Google’s autonomous vehicles do in Arizona, for example. But a company called Nuro has created a diminutive ‘bot that can drive itself down streets toting eggs, toilet paper, hotdogs, and other kinds of groceries to people’s homes. And interestingly, when humans aren’t your cargo, different ways of handling safety present themselves. A pilot program involving Nuro and the grocery chain Kroger is scheduled to kick off this fall in a to-be-announced city, meaning that in the autumn, people in a test urban area should be able to order groceries by app, then have them delivered by a little independent car. Here’s how the vehicle, which was designed from the ground up just for cargo, works. How does it work? In terms of size, the Nuro car is “pretty similar to a big guy on a motorbike,” says Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson, who previously worked with Google’s self-drivi...

[ad_1] In October 2017 an object zipped through the interior of our solar system at 196,000 miles per hour, and then headed away. Astronomers could tell by the angle at which it entered our cosmic neighborhood that it wasn’t from around here, likely coming from a star system far away. It was moving too fast for researchers to get a good look at it, but as soon as it showed up they started tracking it as closely as possible with any available telescope. Initially, people thought it might be a comet, then an asteroid, then maybe a comet with a bunch of squishy organic gunk on the surface . Now, a study published in Nature finds that it probably is a comet after all, based on small but significant changes in its trajectory as it hurtles away from our solar system. Wait, what’s the difference between a comet and an asteroid? Glad you asked. An asteroid is a small rock orbiting the Sun. The largest, NASA says, is Vesta, 329 miles around. Smaller ones are only a fraction of the s...

[ad_1] There’s an entire subgenre of American humor derived from carefully placing the punchline into the question itself. For example, the answer to the legendary not-joke “Who’s buried at Grant’s Tomb?” is, quite obviously, “Grant.” You’d be forgiven, then, for answering the question “What size is a 2-by-4?” with “2 inches by 4 inches.” But it turns out, you’d be answering this particular riddle wrong. Two-by-fours are actually 1.5-by-3.5s. The same is true for most other wood cuts, which are all systematically smaller than their names would suggest. Here’s why. “Two by four is a colloquialism,” says Mark Stephens, the vice president of Woodworkers Source, an Arizona-based company. The phrase 2-by-4 “rolls off your tongue a helluva lot easier” than the truth, he says. But the origins of the 2-by-4 are more complicated than an old-timey lumberjack deciding to round up. To create ...

[ad_1] Long gone are the days when we would look both ways before crossing the street. The only direction most of us look is down, ceaselessly staring into the infinite depths of our screens. Distracted walking might not seem as dangerous as distracted driving, but it could be a contributing factor in the surge of pedestrian deaths and injuries seen over the last four years, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. But could the very technology that distracts us also alert us to danger? In a study published last week in the journal Human Factors , a team of computer scientists tried to determine if sending warning signs to a distracted person’s phone would help them safely cross a busy roadway. “Pedestrians stand at the edge of the road, one second from death, a lot of time,” says Joseph Kearney, study co-author and professor of computer science at the University of Iowa. “Cars are whizzing by, and one single, false step could be dangerous.” D...

[ad_1] A winter of exceptionally meager snowfall has revived California’s water woes. Snowpack typically supplies the state with much of its water during the spring and summer, but this year, snow is in short supply, spurring Gov. Jerry Brown to instate permanent conservation measures. Thanks to climate change, the problem is only going to get worse, leaving officials worried about the future of water in the Golden State. Huntington Beach, a seaside Southern California city, is taking the long view, investing in a new desalination plant that will turn seawater into clean, drinkable H20. While the plant’s supporters say it’s necessary to guard against worsening water shortages, critics say the plant is a waste of ratepayer money, urging officials to manage water more efficiently instead. As temperatures rise and droughts worsen, this conflict is likely to play out in more and more coastal cities. Central to this fight is the fact that desalination plants require a trem...

[ad_1] DIY Dermatologists say to shave in the shower. Want to get a good shave without hurting your skin? We asked dermatologists for their tips. [ad_2] Written By Rob Verger

[ad_1] Coral reefs are a boon to biodiversity and marine ecology, and their declining health threatens our oceans with a loss of life that’s hardly comprehensible. So it’s a warm surprise to finally get some good news: UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee recently removed the Belize Barrier Reef System from its list of endangered sites—an affirmation of the country’s recent conservation efforts to help rehabilitate and protect the ecosystem from destruction at the hands of humanity. “The Committee considered that safeguarding measures taken by the country, notably the introduction of a moratorium on oil exploration in the entire maritime zone of Belize and the strengthening of forestry regulations allowing for better protection of mangroves, warranted the removal of the site from the World Heritage List in Danger,” UNESCO said in a statement issued Tuesday. To be perfectly clear, the move doesn’t exactly mean that the Belize Barrier Reef is n...

[ad_1] D ashing around a battlefield in the bulky robo-armor Tom Cruise wore in Edge of Tomorrow won't cut it in the real world. For starters, it’s way too big. And the energy required to power something that size—via a gas engine strapped to your back in some early inventor iterations—is noisy and a giveaway to the enemy that you’re approaching. But a raft of newly developed exoskeletons is starting to meet the slimmed-down, stealth requirements of today’s troop commanders, who see these power-assisting suits as vital to the future combat missions. Among the most promising, and weird-looking, is the “third arm” that the U.S. Army Research Laboratory developed to help soldiers carry and support their weapons on the battlefield. The lightweight device, which weighs less than four pounds and hangs at a soldier’s side, stabilizes rifles and machine guns, which can weigh up to 27 pounds. This improves shooting accuracy and also minimizes fati...

[ad_1] Researchers working on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) efforts hunt for the same thing that their predecessors sought for decades—a sign that life arose, as Carl Sagan would say, on another humdrum planet around another humdrum star and rose up into something technologically advanced. It could happen any day. A strange radio signal. A weird, brief flash in the night sky. A curiously behaving star with no natural explanation. It could be anything, so SETI researchers are casting a wide net, tracking down as many promising leads as they can. But one thing they’ve started to realize is that if a civilization from another world follows a similar path to our own, then we may be dealing with a whole different form of brainpower. Not a little green person, Vulcan, or strange organism we aren’t yet fathoming, but an artificial intelligence. To understand why the first intelligence we meet might be artificial, we have to go back to early efforts to look f...

[ad_1] S ome may remember the deadly book of Aristotle that plays a vital part in the plot of Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose. Poisoned by a mad Benedictine monk, the book wreaks havoc in a 14th-century Italian monastery, killing all readers who happen to lick their fingers when turning the toxic pages. Could something like this happen in reality? Poisoning by books? Our recent research indicates so. We found that three rare books on various historical topics in the University of Southern Denmark’s library collection contain large concentrations of arsenic on their covers. The books come from the 16th and 17th centuries. The poisonous qualities of these books were detected by conducting a series of X-ray fluorescence analyses (micro-XRF). This technology displays the chemical spectrum of a material by analysing the characteristic “secondary” radiation that is emitted from the material during a high-energy X-ray bombardment. Micro-XRF technology is w...

[ad_1] The Trump administration's Zero Tolerance Policy, which prosecutes asylum seekers and people trying to illegally cross the U.S. border, sparked a growing public outcry that led the president to sign an executive order to keep detained families together. By then, more than 2,000 immigrant children had already been removed from their parents as a result of the policy implemented in early May. Not only does the forcible separation itself cause what the American Academy of Pediatrics calls "irreversible harm," but children as young as 18 months were then held in "tender age" shelters where caretakers were instructed not to hold or comfort children in distress. Some detention centers run by contractors even used powerful antipsychotics on children without first seeking their parents' permission. And as the Department of Defense begins housing detainees on military bases, the children could face yet another health risk: contaminated drinking water. Water co...

[ad_1] If you keep an eye on the Apple news cycle, you already know that iOS 12 is on its way. Due for a full launch in September, the latest version of this mobile operating system comes with a variety of new updates and features. Highlights include improved password management, better photo organization, a smarter Siri, and new augmented reality (AR) apps. But you don't have to wait months to give your iPhone these abilities. You can duplicate many of them right now, often for free, with existing apps. Here's how to access the best features of iOS 12 before the software officially arrives on your phone. Group video chats When it comes to group video calling, Apple is kind of late to the party—other apps have had this ability for years. That means you can use them to replicate the iOS 12 update that lets FaceTime host group chats with up to 32 participants. These options may not mesh with iOS as well as FaceTime does, but they do offer a pretty much identical set of features. ...

[ad_1] The Trump administration's Zero Tolerance Policy, which prosecutes asylum seekers and people trying to illegally cross the U.S. border, sparked a growing public outcry that led the president to sign an executive order to keep detained families together. By then, more than 2,000 immigrant children had already been removed from their parents as a result of the policy implemented in early May. Not only does the forcible separation itself cause what the American Academy of Pediatrics calls "irreversible harm," but children as young as 18 months were then held in "tender age" shelters where caretakers were instructed not to hold or comfort children in distress. Some detention centers run by contractors even used powerful antipsychotics on children without first seeking their parents' permission. And as the Department of Defense begins housing detainees on military bases, the children could face yet another health risk: contaminated drinking water. Water co...