The Colorado River, a major source of water for crops, had been running at lower and lower levels, thanks to a 27-year drought intensified by climate change. And the seven US states and Mexico, that rely on the river, are promised more water than is available, causing chronic overuse of the existing supply. When the government declared an official “shortage” on the river last year, an unprecedented step, it triggered major water cuts in the central Arizona county....

There are several ways to put NPT (National Pipe Thread, which is a tapered, sealing thread used in plumbing; it is the US standard for pipe threads) in a drum, tank, or pressure vessel. The obvious is, of course, to use or adapt any threads already provided on the vessel. Another is to drill and tap a pipe-threaded hole, although this only works if the wall of the vessel is sufficiently thick to create enough threads; often it is not....

So, what do the experts recommend? Wash your hands whenever possible, and if you can’t get to a sink, sanitizer is good, too (both the kind from the store and the kind you can make). Here’s the breakdown of why soap comes first, and why sanitizer has its pros and cons. What is sanitizer, and how does it work? Hand sanitizer is essentially isopropyl alcohol, plus gel, plus fun-smelling essential oils if you’re so inclined....

SanDisk, WD, and G-Technology memory cards and flash drives are extra cheap today. They’re up to 30 percent off, so if you need more space for photos and videos or are looking for some extra SD cards to stash in your camera bag, today may be the day to make a move. The SanDisk 2TB Extreme Portable External SSD, for example, is going for $80 less, now available for $300....

Personally, I think this is the most interesting product in the new releases because it addresses a hole in the Echo lineup. The Echo Studio is a powerful smart speaker designed to compete with products like the Google Home Max or third-party speakers like the Sonos Move. For just $200, the Echo Studio brings three 1-inch tweeters, two midrange speakers, and a 5.25-inch woofer, all of which combine to pump out Dolby Atmos audio....

Even though they’ve been signed by the governors, the Alabama and Georgia laws are not yet in effect—people can still get legal abortions in these states. And there is still a constitutional right to abortion in the United States. However, access to safe abortion varies widely across the country: Some states have laws that restrict the number of clinics that can provide abortion services, for example, or require people to wait a certain amount of time between a counseling appointment and the procedure, which is medically unnecessary....

Most serious astrobiologists quite reasonably spend their time thinking about what sorts of lifeforms might evolve on planets orbiting the so-called “main sequence” of stars that produce most of the Milky Way’s glow. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center researcher Jeremy Schnittman, however, is an astrophysicist, and he’s spent many of his less serious moments pondering how life might fare in some of the universe’s more exotic locales. Biology as we know it is complex, but it basically boils down to needing two simple prerequisites: an energy source for maintaining liquid water and a stable environment....

On Thursday, NASA’s Juno spacecraft came within 219 miles of the moon, allowing its camera, the JunoCam, to capture high-resolution images of Europa’s terrain. At the same time, Juno collected data about the geologic features and atmosphere, including its interior and ice shell structure. The photo and data gathering will help close gaps in understanding Europa’s surface and subsurface ocean. “The JunoCam images will fill in the current geologic map, replacing existing low-resolution coverage of the area,” Candy Hansen, a lead developer and operator of the JunoCam, said in the news release....

How did we get here? The original Net Neutrality rules went into place back in 2015, but FCC chairpersons voted to repeal them in 2017. A public comment period preceded the vote, and the process was fraught with controversy because fake comments reportedly inundated the system and skewed the true reaction. In spring of 2018, Democrats put together a bill that would reinstate rules before they ever fell off the books in the first place....

Ted Williams, for instance, one of the greatest hitters to ever play Major League Baseball, finished his 19-year career playing for the Boston Red Sox with a .344 batting average. That’s a 34 percent success rate, tied for seventh best in the sport’s history. But even he famously said that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. So why is that the case? For one, the physics are extreme....

Natural disasters such as droughts, storms, floods, and wildfires are more likely to happen. Globally, climate-related disasters averaged about 40 times a year in the 1970s, but this number increased to over 150 in the 2010s. This year, there have been unprecedented extreme weather events, like the flooding in South Central Montana or the four-season drought in Eastern Africa. These only emphasize climate change’s effects and the importance of disaster preparedness....

Of all the bodies in our solar system, the sun is probably the one we want to give the widest berth. It gushes radiation, and even though its surface is the coolest part of the star, it burns at about 9,940 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to incinerate just about any material. As such, there are no plans to send a manned mission in its direction anytime soon (Mars is much more interesting, anyway), but it can’t hurt to figure out at what distance a person would want to turn back....

But there’s no standard definition for net zero, which means many businesses are either incomplete or totally off with their emissions measurements. At its most simple level, the term means that a company, person, or country removes the same amount of carbon they put into the environment. This can be done in a handful of ways, like reducing how much greenhouse gas is released, and then neutralizing the rest with forest restoration or carbon capture technologies (To note, carbon offsets are still somewhat of an imprecise science, and carbon capture technology isn’t totally well-developed....

While specifically geared toward the needs of defense, much of what DARPA creates ends up in civilian use. Perhaps the best known project is the one that lets you read this: the original internet, ARPANET, was a DARPA project. As Prabhakar quips, DARPA is the kind of place where “if you don’t invent the internet, you get a B.” The internet, and the computing and data revolution that accompanied it, have proven themselves tremendously powerful engines of the modern world....

The dark ages of mobile design In the early days of the mobile web, new phone unveilings often triggered hurried and hands-on recalibration of apps and websites to ensure they’d render properly on a screen with more pixels or wider screens. When the iPhone first launched, at a Steve Jobs-headlined Apple day in 2007, viewing a website in its mobile browser required a lot of pinching. Sites designed with a desktop in mind had strange image resolution, overlapping text, and wonky navigation bars when rendered on a handheld device....

The 2008 startup, whose products were used to create the first 3D-printed Smithsonian bust of a president, now let you print a miniature version of yourself. The Luxembourg based company Artec has found uses for unique used for 3D-scanning and printing from use in hospitals to giving their tech to car manufacturers. In the case of the Shapify booth, it’s used to make a sick-looking desk accessory. Getting Scanned At CES Scanning took 10 to 15 seconds of standing in place as still as possible....

A Bavarian 3-D printing company called voxeljet made three meticulously accurate 1:3 scale models of the classic vehicle, layer-by-layer. Each fake car (below) is made of 18 transparent plastic parts printed out of PMMA by voxeljet’s high-end VX4000 printer, a machine that can make objects as large as 13 feet by 6.5 feet by 3 feet. From there a British prop-making company called Propshop Modelmakers assembled the models and applied realistic finishing like paint, chrome polish, and even bullet holes to match different car chase scenes in Skyfall....

If the experiment can be replicated outside the controlled settings of a test environment, it suggests that managing swarms in war could be as easy as point and click for operators in the field. “The operator of our swarm really was interacting with things as a collective, not as individuals,” says Shane Clark, of Raytheon BBN, who was the company’s main lead for OFFSET. “We had done the work to establish the sort of baseline levels of autonomy to really support those many-to-one interactions in a natural way....

By giving people an elevated view of the surrounding landscape, these watchtowers played an important role in history. Military structures allowed soldiers to spot enemies while they were still a long way off; fire lookouts raised spotters above the treetops so they could locate smoke and flames. And in the modern world, aircraft control towers provide a clear view of aviation activity on the ground and in the air. You don’t need a lofty purpose in order to build your own watchtower....