Advisory: An advisory is a forecast released by the NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC), the agency responsible for predicting tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific basins. Advisories are issued every six hours when a storm is out to sea, and every three hours when the storm is close to land. Cone of Uncertainty: The cone of uncertainty is the margin of error in a hurricane’s track forecast. Track forecasts have gotten much better over the past decade, but small wobbles or a complicated weather pattern can make it harder to predict a storm’s path....

No single small solar event—like this C-class flare—can yet be definitively linked to a specific problem, like a GPS device in a minivan leading its driver onto railroad tracks. Skov nonetheless calls incidents like this one smoking guns, even if scientists can’t conclusively prove the cause. She strives to make people aware that this kind of thing can happen. “I was trying to impress upon people that GPS is extremely susceptible,” she says of the van accident, “and just blindly trusting it is nuts....

Modern cameras, however, involve even more mathematics than anything from the past. In fact, Apple’s new iPhone XS Max camera is doing “trillions” of computations, but you, the shooter, never really see any of them. In fact, it’s only thanks to a new feature (which has nothing to do with the actual mechanics of photography) that the iPhone camera even mentions a once-fundamental photographic concept like f-number, which tells you how much light your lens can let in through its aperture....

That could explain the growing popularity of Dry January. Known by some as Dryuary, participants challenge themselves to put down the bottle opener, hide the corkscrew, and go the entire month of January without any alcohol. In a January 2021 survey conducted by Morning Consult, a full 13 percent of a representative sample of US adults said they planned to take a month off alcohol. Of those, 79 percent said they were putting the brakes on their drinking to be healthier....

What are the Jabra Elite 7 Active earbuds? The comfortable, secure fit alone is enough to qualify a pair of the Elite 7 Active as some of the best true wireless earbuds for working out. But when you add in features like active noise control (ANC) and customizable sound that pumps out of powerful 6mm drivers, you’ve got an excellent pair of sports earbuds that can keep pace when your heart is really pumping....

Time travel is often portrayed as a superpower or phenomenon in a fictitious, far off future. But for the James Webb Space Telescope, time travel is kind of its purpose. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), was built to peer back into a part of space-time that has never been seen before—when the earliest stars and galaxies formed, more than 13.5 billion years ago. As the largest and most powerful space telescope in NASA’s history, designed in collaboration with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, its launch in December of 2021 marked the end of a 17-year construction process and the start of a decade-long voyage into the depths of the universe....

A few weeks ago, the JWST team detected a micrometeoroid hitting one of the telescope’s 18 hexagonal mirror segments. A micrometeoroid is a piece of space debris, usually left behind by a comet, that’s just a fraction of an inch long. While the majority of them are innocuous, if they pick up enough speed in the vacuum of space, they can cause damage to flying or orbiting craft. But in this case, NASA engineers concluded that the mirror’s functions stayed intact and that operations could go on as planned....

What is kratom? Kratom is essentially an extract of korth tree leaves, or Mitragyna speciosa. People in the tree’s native Southeast Asia would traditionally chew the leaves, but today most preparations involve drying and pulverizing them into a powder. That powder can be taken straight or put into a capsule (it apparently has quite a bitter taste), though some people also brew the dried leaves into a tea. Not many people have studied exactly which ingredients in kratom provide its purported pain-relieving and psychoactive effects, but two of the alkaloids it contains—mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine—have an opioid-like interaction with receptors in the human brain....

Most recently, one woman died and over 70 other people were infected in the largest outbreak of the disease in Georgia history after staying at the Sheraton Atlanta Hotel in mid-July 2019. From 2000 through 2017, the number of reports of Legionnaires’ disease increased over 500 percent in the United States. Many factors contribute to this increase: a true increase in cases, an older population at higher risk, better diagnosis, improved disease reporting and more thorough investigation of outbreaks by health departments....

A new study of more than 29,000 LGBTQ+ teens nationwide shows that 91 percent of them had been bullied at least once. What’s more is that these individuals weren’t just picked on for their sexual orientation or gender identity: At least 73 percent of them reported being targeted for reasons other than their queerness, including race, disabilities, and body weight among others. “There’s so much data at this point that shows that there are these health disparities for LGBTQ youth,” says Leah Lessard, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut and main author of the paper, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine....

Tech has well and truly taken over our lives, and although it can make all kinds of tasks easier, it can also be overwhelming. That’s where If This Then That, also known as IFTTT, comes in. (If you don’t want to stumble over all those T’s, it’s pronounced like “gift” without the “g.”) This online service (and an app) will help you automate your life. It first became popular around eight years ago, but it’s worth revisiting because many people seem to underestimate just how good it is at managing tech overwhelm....

“Rates of sea level rise in many tropical coastlines are going to exceed 7 millimeters per year in [2050], so there’s a very low probability that they’ll be able to sustain growth,” says Erica Ashe, a climate data scientist at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and a coauthor of the new study. Mangrove trees and shrubs grow along tropical and subtropical coastlines across the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australasia. They thrive in conditions that would kill most other plants, with salty water flooding over their roots whenever the tide comes in....

In honor of the event we present Did You Know: Pit Crew Edition. The average Nascar pit stop, including a change of tires and refueling, takes between 12 and 13 seconds.According to one crew chief, you can’t win a race with a 12-second stop but you can lose it with an 18-second stop. Yogi Berra call the front desk.Penske wheel man Ben Brown can whip off five lug nuts in less than two seconds....

Astrobotic and CMU hope to nab the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon. Polaris is designed to seek out water ice trapped in the cold craters and regolith at the moon’s poles. It has 3-D cameras and laser guidance systems for navigation, and it will communicate directly with Earth using an S-band antenna. A lunar day lasts about two Earth weeks, and about 10 of those days would have enough sunlight for drilling at the moon’s poles....

On Monday night, at 9:00 p.m. eastern, Elon Musk announced the identity of the first passenger on SpaceX’s inaugural lunar mission. “We are honored that he’s choosing us—we’re not choosing him,” Musk said of Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who will become the first non-American to fly around the moon. Maezawa introduced himself to the assembled journalists as a skateboarder, drummer, and an entrepreneur who started an e-commerce business, Zozotown. The 42-year-old’s net worth is estimated at 3 billion dollars and he is an avid art collector who once bought a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting for $110....

Croatian automaker Rimac knows this and has been focusing on building powerful battery-powered cars since 2009. On June 1, Rimac finally revealed its latest gasoline slayer to the world—and it boasts some of the most impressive performance stats to ever hit the pavement. Meet the Rimac Nevera, the 1,914-horsepower hypercar named after a Mediterranean storm and destined to demolish speed records around the world. Using four hub-mounted electric motors—one at each wheel—the Nevera generates a whopping 1740 pound-feet of combined torque....

One of the biggest whaling disasters happened in 1871 (less than a year before Popular Science was founded). That year, 33 ships were caught in pack ice off the coast of Alaska, trapping the fleet and the 1,219 people on board. Now, NOAA researchers think that they’ve found the wrecks of two of those ships, thanks to warming temperatures which left the sea ice a mere fraction of what it would have been like in 1871....

Britain becomes first country to approve COVID-19 antiviral pill On Thursday, Britain approved the COVID-19 antiviral pill, molnupiravir, jointly developed by American Merck and Ridgeback Pharmaceuticals. The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) recommends the pill, branded Lagevrio in the UK, for those with mild to moderate COVID-19, and for those with at least one risk factor for developing severe illness such as heart disease, obesity, and asthma. US advisers will convene this month to vote on whether to greenlight the pill....

It turns out the red planet as a little trick up its sleeve. In new findings published in Nature Geoscience this week, a group of scientists suggest that meteor impacts could be the key to Martian cloud formation. “Clouds on Mars are extremely tenuous,” says Victoria Hartwick, a research assistant at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the lead author of the new study. They’re made of water ice like the ones hovering above Earth: droplets of water condense over a particle (often sea salt, smoke, or pollutants of some kind) and form a small nucleus of ice that continues to accrete more and more condensation....

A newly described fossil found in China shows that birds evolved one of these notable features very, very early–while they were still dinosaurs, in fact. A team of researchers from China and South Africa just published a study detailing the presence of what they believe to be lung tissue in the fossil. This is the first time evidence of lungs has been found in an avian dinosaur fossil, and it may help explain why one group of avian dinosaurs—the Ornithumorpha, of which this fossil was a member—was able to survive the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs and continue to evolve into modern birds....