A lot of the world’s lithium currently comes from evaporation ponds in South South America and hard-rock mines in Australia, according to the Los Angeles Times. The extraction of the rare mineral is often met with fierce opposition from conservationists and Tribal Nations because it has often encroached on sacred indigenous land, especially in the American West. One drilling site in Southern California’s desert, near a notoriously polluted lake called the Salton Sea that spews toxic fumes and has a salinity level that kills off almost all of its wildlife, is taking a different approach to drilling for lithium....

To be clear, intelligent life has not yet come to Earth. But in the new film The Visit, you can play out the scenario to see what might happen if they were to do so. Part documentary and part science fiction, this film is about an event that hasn’t happened yet. It features interviews with experts who delve into the policies and pragmatic measures that global and national organizations actually have in place, by running through a hypothetical scenario wherein extraterrestrials arrive on Earth....

This whole thing is “a bit of an enigma,” as Mardik Leopold, a biologist at Wageningen University who studies the ecology of the North and Wadden seas, puts it. Leopold has been spearheading the efforts to figure out exactly why roughly 20,000 guillemots have died off the coast of the Netherlands (that’s an estimated 10,000 on beaches plus another 10,000 that are likely still at sea). So far there are a lot of theories and few answers....

Google Assistant 1. “Hey Google, play cycling videos on YouTube.” You have a display, so use it. This command will queue up a series of YouTube videos on a topic of your choice—just replace “cycling” with a subject, musician, YouTube channel, or whatever else you desire. Depending on how specific your request is, a list of video choices might appear, or the screen will start playback straight away. 2. “Hey Google, how far is it to New York?...

On April 5, 2012, President Barack Obama sat at a small, wooden desk in the White House Rose Garden and signed the JOBS Act, one of the most transformative pieces of securities legislation written since the Great Depression. Among the 22 pages of dense legalese, one section stood out: the Crowdfund Act. Pending the creation of SEC regulations later this year, new businesses will be able to make their own IPOs, and small investors could act as venture capitalists....

“We really believe the Biden administration and Congress are just getting started taking action on these issues,” says Leah Donahey, the federal advocacy campaigns director for the League of Conservation Voters, a non-partisan environmental lobbying group that has endorsed and run ads supporting Democratic candidates this election. “We’ve never seen change at this level, and from our perspective, whether it can continue comes down to Congress and a bunch of critical House and Senate races across the country....

Popular Science and Working Mother are researching the surefire ways to maintain and keep order in your habitat. Now that your digs are freshly cleaned, take a look below for products that’ll help you keep track of everything you need. No more minutes wasted tracking down that essential toy or utensil. Nobody’s got time for that. One of the scariest places in your home is probably behind your computer desk....

On Wednesday, executives at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino unveiled three new phones: an iPhone XS—a speedier version of the X released last year, with the same screen size; the XS Max, a bigger version of the same; and a somewhat more budget-friendly phone called the XR. That last model, not on sale until October, still has Face ID like its more expensive cousins, but sports an aluminum body and LCD screen, instead of stainless steel and an OLED display, like on the XS models....

In a paper published in Nature on Wednesday, an international team of astronomers report finding a new exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s star, the second closest neighboring star system to Earth (after Alpha Centauri’s triple star system), and long thought to be devoid of any planets of its own. Named Barnard’s star b (or GJ 699 b), the planet is a hefty 3.2-times the Earth’s mass, with a 233-day orbit around the star itself....

We need farms for food, of course. Normally, farms degrade and deplete their soils, which are an important sink for atmospheric carbon; the IPCC report states that regularly tilled fields lose soil at 100 times the rate they could possibly form new material. Switching the way we farm could change cultivated lands from carbon sources to sinks, as well as create other co-benefits like increased resilience to climate change. “We know that agricultural land has the potential to sequester more carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than urban developed land,” says Jessica Rudnick, who studies environmental policy at the University of California, Davis....

The team used a technique called microlensing, in which astronomers wait for two stars to line up perfectly as viewed from Earth and watch to see how the light from the distant star is bent by the gravitational pull of the closer one. White dwarfs are small stars that are slowly cooling off because they no longer burn nuclear fuel. As they near death, stars like our Sun will expand into a red giant, then eject their outer layers leaving only a small, dense core: the white dwarf....

THE PROBLEM It’s Saturday night at a restaurant. The food’s fantastic, the service flawless. The conversation? It gets off to a good start, but as the number of guests rises, diners struggle to hear and be heard over the mounting cacophony. When John Paluska envisioned Comal, his Mexican restaurant in Berkeley, California, he wondered whether he could find a new way to overcome what Zagat Survey says is restaurant-goers’ second-most-frequent complaint: noise....

The region faced not only ice melting, but also a cyclone and flooding. The combined pressures of these weather patterns caused an iceberg about half the size of Manhattan to break off of the Petermann Glacier and float right through the Nares Strait. The Petermann Ice Island 2012, as the once-massive piece of ice has been named, floated and fragmented down the strait over the course of two months. There was no happy ending for the little ice island that could!...

Cable TV: Bad Ditch it. There’s no sense in paying $50 a month when you can score network and cable TV for free on Hulu, Joost, YouTube and the official network sites. Or, if the DTV transition does actually happen in a few weeks, pull your boob tube down from the ether. Microwave Oven: Good Say goodbye to restaurant dining and say hello to the Gorton’s Fisherman. Netflix: Bad Stop shelling out upwards of $16....

You can watch the livestream in the player embedded above and keep scrolling down as we go for live coverage of the event. We’ll have some early hands-on time with the new devices as well. What we know so far We already know that the Pixel 4 will have a 90 Hz screen that refreshes faster than the previous version and matches other high-end Android phones like the OnePlus 7 Pro....

Twitter Circle Twitter announced that it is testing a feature called Twitter Circle that allows you to share Tweets with a select group of people. It’s similar to Instagram’s Close Friends feature or, you know, what Google Plus was trying to do back in 2011. The feature is currently available to “a limited number of people globally.” If you have it, you can add up to 150 people to your Circle (you can only have one at the moment)....

The Dot is the mini version of the regular Echo that users have had since November of 2014. But it includes a big new feature that the first Echo model doesn’t have: support for external speakers. While the Echo offered premium sound quality for a device its size, it was unable to connect to other speakers you own via line out nor bluetooth. The Echo Dot is now able to do both....

Shutterstock, an online marketplace for visual imagery that has built up a wide-spanning collection of licensed photographs, vectors, illustrations, 3D models, videos and music, has been selling its products and metadata to OpenAI as the company built and refined DALL-E since 2021. Paul Hennessy, Shutterstock’s CEO, told TechCrunch that the company has had a “long history of integrating AI into every part of our business.” This much is true. In 2017, the company introduced an AI tool that can detect image composition and where the subject matter appears in the frame, and in 2021, it acquired three AI platforms in order to sort through content, build better computer vision models, and surface data insights....

The Medicane forming near Greece will bring several inches of rain, damaging wind gusts, and rough seas to the country and other parts of eastern Europe as it moves inland over the weekend. The storm’s size, strength, and winds—possibly gusting to 60 MPH at times—make it comparable to a tropical storm, and it’ll have similar effects to one as it makes landfall. Medicanes have a lot in common with subtropical storms in the Atlantic Ocean....

What’s new about iPad 9? The new version of Apple’s baseline iPad features a few meaningful spotlight upgrades but is generally bringing the least expensive version of the tablet up to date with improvements tested in previous versions of other iPads, such as the iPad Pro. The iPad 9 features an upgraded A13 Bionic chipset (debuted in 2019), which Apple claims should deliver a 20-percent performance bump from the previous model....