After you’ve downloaded and installed the new OS version, it might not seem as though a huge amount has changed, but iOS 15 is packed with plenty of new features to explore. They’re designed to make your iPhone safer, more capable, and easier to use. Do Not Disturb already does a good job muting alerts and distractions when you need it, only allowing important contacts and messages to come through....

Mann, a paleoclimatologist, wears a sport coat over a turtleneck. As he takes a seat at his desk, a narrow sunbeam angles through the window, spotlighting a jumble of books, journals and correspondence. Behind him, a framed picture of his six-year-old daughter rests near a certificate for the Nobel Peace Prize he shared in 2007. Propped into a corner is a hockey stick, a post-lecture gift from Middlebury College, which Mann jokingly says he keeps “for self-defense....

Best overall: Asus ROG Swift PG32UQBest for gaming: Asus ROG Strix XG27AQBest 4K: Asus ProArt Display PA329CVBest ultrawide: Asus ROG Strix XG349CBest curved: Asus ProArt PA34VCBest budget: Asus TUF Gaming VG27AQ How we picked the best Asus monitors As a critic covering games and gaming hardware, I’ve written about computing and monitors for Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and NBC Select. I’ve researched, tested, and reviewed dozens of gaming monitors, and have a strong sense of which specs are important and which are not....

So, if the laptop you’re using right now is starting to wheeze, slow down, heat up, or just generally give out, check the links below and get something new. You deserve it. The best Buy Black Friday deals on electronics, appliances, and more The best Black Friday Walmart deals Great Black Friday deal we love The Best Black Friday Laptop Deals 2021 The best Apple laptop deals Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch with Touch Bar $1,299 (Was $1,799) Apple MacBook Pro 16-in with Touch Bar $2,199 (Was $2,799)...

To shoehorn a full 360 into the 2.25-by-16-by-12-inch case and keep it playable, Heckendorn had to install fans and speakers and redo the internal layout of the machine several times. He then rewired the console to output the video to the 17-inch LCD display, on which he mounted an Xbox Live Vision camera for online multiplayer games. For the exterior, he coated the aluminum case with plastic engraving material, allowing him to paint hexagonal designs in gold on the marbled green surface....

But there’s a lot to consider when choosing the right one, including whether to get an indoor or outdoor one. And if outdoors, whether stand-alone, portable, or over the barbecue. Here’s what you need to know. Indoor vs. Outdoor: The first thing you’ll need to think about is where you’re going to use your pizza oven. Indoor models are all electric and you will need suitable counter top space to use them....

It was back in 2013 that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released its first report on the threat of antibiotic resistance and kicked off a whole slew of initiatives to try to combat the problem. At the time, though, we didn’t have great data on exactly how many cases or deaths any given kind of bacterium was causing. Now we know the CDC’s estimates were way off. But luckily, some of the resulting interventions appear to have had a real impact....

The terrestrially situated DSRT joins NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, launched in 2018 and 2020 respectively, in ongoing efforts to study the sun’s complexities. Radio telescopes such as the DSRT are especially helpful when studying activity in the sun’s upper atmosphere, or corona, such as solar flares. Another solar weather event, a coronal mass ejection (CME), involves hot plasma eruptions that release high-energy particles which then can travel to Earth....

Huban Gowadia, Director of the DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection office, last Thursday blogged that the Department has awarded a multimillion dollar contract to develop such a device. The DHS is calling it the “Human Portable Tripwire.” She writes: The device will be used by the Coast Guard, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the TSA. The project has been in the works for a while; the DHS posted the first notice of the contract in June 2014....

In Flower, Zuckerman says he aims “to translate the essential nature of his subjects and unearth qualities that have previously escaped scrutiny.” The hefty coffee table tome is the result of an investigation of over 300 species, providing an intimate, pared-down look at the botanical world. Filmmaker David Lynch sings his praises on the book’s back cover: “These photographs of flowers taken by Andrew Zuckerman are pure.” And everyone knows you can’t argue with a book blurb from David Lynch....

Ancient teeth at this site hint that it was home to a diverse group of Indigenous people. Roughly a third of the population came to Cahokia from other areas in middle America, based on the varying strontium levels in the dental fragments. The architecture is telling too: The organization of the mounds in Cahokia leads archeologists to believe this city had some level of urban planning, and was not just a collection of villages....

The bill will inject billions of dollars into the federal government’s Superfund program, which cleans up the most polluted areas in the country. Superfund sites include former aluminum smelters that left the ground contaminated with arsenic, military bases that spilled jet fuel, benzene, and mustard gas into the soil, and even a plume of chlorine chemicals under Brooklyn. By the end of 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency had cleaned just over 1,500 sites....

And now engineers are turning to the species for research by adding pigeon flight feathers to an airborne robot. The resulting fusion is called, naturally, PigeonBot. PigeonBot cleverly integrates tried-and-true elements of traditional flying machines with tried-and-true elements of evolution. The researchers behind the project weren’t trying to build a machine that flaps like a bird, which would be much harder to do from an engineering perspective; they were using the mishmash of the biological and the mechanical is to learn more about how avians fly....

Apple pioneered pressure-sensing capabilities for the mass market earlier this year, first in the form of the Apple Watch’s “Force Touch,” and later in iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, which both offer “3D Touch.” In either case, the feature is very similar: both the Apple Watch and iPhone 6S/6S Plus can present a new list of options when a user presses firmly on a specific portion of the screen....

Joanna Harper’s research started not in a lab, but on the track. Though she didn’t have a background in sports science—she held a master’s in medical physics, and her work involved tailoring cancer radiation treatments—she was an athlete in a unique situation: In 2004, the nationally ranked long-distance runner started hormone therapy (HT) as part of her transition to female. She knew the testosterone blocker and estrogen would alter her body....

In our second installment, we leave the ping pong balls on the porch and head to the track. Inside you’ll find shoes that don’t match, a suit not made by Speedo, an excuse for why you never won races in high school; along with a plea for some better technology. Andalé! Lace It Right With every left turn a NASCAR car makes, the right and left side tires are stressed unequally....

The earthquakes have also raised questions among SoCal residents, some wondering if the tremors have somehow mitigated the ongoing threat posed by the precarious San Andreas Fault. The shaking also brought back many other old earthquake myths. Like many natural disasters, quakes are scary and out of our control. And since humans don’t like uncertainty, we sometimes we attempt to make sense of events like these with poorly interpreted geology....

While some accounts seem puzzling when taken at face value, airspace researchers insist that just because you can’t identify an object in the air doesn’t mean that the object is otherworldly. The sky is a big and diverse place, full of birds, locusts swarms, thunderclouds, drones, fighter jets, plastic bags, and much, much more. Surveillance systems exist, but they tend to be expensive and tailored to meet specific, well-defined needs—none of which is to single out every last flying object....

Back in June 2017, President Trump told the world that the US would drop all commitments to the Paris Agreement. The accord first went into action in 2015 when 200 countries joined in the non-binding agreement to lower carbon emissions, with wealthier nations agreeing to help pay to blunt climate impacts in poorer ones. So far, the US is the only government to break the pact. The goal of the agreement is to keep the global climate from rising 1....

Fact: Smoke enemas were part of the first real effort to resuscitate drowning victims By Rachel Feltman Until the 1700s, Western doctors didn’t generally try to revive patients who seemed to be dead. Drowning victims, for example, were out of luck if someone happened to pull them out of the water before they were quite thoroughly deceased: Touching an unknown body was taboo, given that it might be the corpse of a criminal or someone who’d committed suicide, and in many places a failed effort to resuscitate someone on your property could leave you liable to pay for their funeral....