Best overall: Temtop M2000 2ndBest smart: Atmotube Pro PortableBest indoor outdoor: Davis Instruments AirLinkBest portable: Sensirion SPS30Best budget: Temtop P20 How we selected the best air quality monitors Largely, selecting the best air quality monitors was more a matter of hitting the research shelves than the shopping cart button. With such a product, the customer sentiment and manufacturer-supplied specs really mean a lot less than in-depth product analysis from researchers and experts that were able to compare consumer-facing products with laboratory-grade equipment....

Among the many hats our smartphones wear, “meteorologist” is one that’s donned frequently. With the tap of a finger, our little pocket computers can make sure we’re never caught without an umbrella or sunscreen as the weather changes. The best weather apps on Android and iOS will provide all manner of weather forecasts and meteorological data for you, but not all are created equal. Get one or more of these nine on your handset, and you’ll be able to stay on top of weather conditions in your immediate area or anywhere else in the world....

We’ve made it through what’s probably been one of the strangest Memorial Day weekends of our lives. As we ease into the summer months, it’s hard to predict what a season of watermelon eating, pool parties, and barbecuing will look like as the coronavirus pandemic remains at the center of our minds and daily lives. Over the past few weeks, spikes in COVID-19 cases have indeed eased up, and it seems like brighter days are ahead—but we aren’t out of the woods yet....

From mysterious pyramids to miraculous tunnels, here are some of the coolest discoveries recently uncovered in Egypt. Pyramid of an unknown queen found near King Tut’s tomb A century after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, a team of archaeologists unearthed several coffins, mummies, and artifacts, a series of interconnected underground tunnels, and the pyramid of a never-before known ancient Egyptian queen. The team discovered her name was Neith, and she has yet to appear in the historical record according to Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former state minister for antiquities....

A Light Armored Vehicle is faster and more vulnerable than a tank, providing the advantage of time. By moving quickly from where it arrived, be it from landing craft on a beach or straight from transport planes on a rugged runway, Marines using LAVs can help the rest of the force choose where to fight, and how to win. A battalion of LAVs, used together for reconnaissance, “helps to reduce the ‘fog of war’ by locating where the enemy is, where he is not, where he is strong, and where he is weak,” reads a Marine Corps manual from 2009....

Oh, the possibilities. Perhaps you’ve chosen the grizzly bear, which can charge at its prey as fast as 30 miles per hour. Or the black widow spider, whose female’s venom is more dangerous than that of a rattlesnake. There are plenty of ways to get killed by an animal in America—and plenty of scary species to choose from. But the most dangerous critters might not be the ones you’re ready to scapegoat....

Here we’ve pulled together our favorite third-party apps on iOS. No matter your interests, you should find something of value here. (You may notice some crossover with our list of essential Android apps. Some apps are just that good.) 1. Overcast When it comes to podcast players, few have the polish or range of features Overcast can offer—it certainly runs rings around Apple’s own podcast player. From the way it can boost and normalize dialog levels, to the automatic silence trimmer, it comes packed with a host of ways to improve your podcast listening experience....

Over the course of the past two weeks, ground operators pointed the Webb telescope to 156 different positions around the star’s presumed location about 260 light years away from Earth, generating 1,560 images in total. They then stitched all of those captures together to create the fuzzy image above. The result is as if a person’s eyes were pointed in multiple directions, causing them to see double, Scarlin Hernandez, flight systems engineer at the NASA Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a live stream on January 24....

The most compelling change comes in the form of the main camera’s sensor, which has 40 total megapixels, but combines them into groups to eventually create 10-megapixel final photos. Almost all modern digital cameras are built on the same basic premise. A field of light-sensitive pixels sit underneath an array of colored filters. Each pixel gets a red, blue, or green filter and the whole array is arranged into a specific pattern....

This week’s episode is about all things messy—providing just a quick taste of the sorts of stories you’ll find in the latest issue of Popular Science. We’re now a digital-only magazine, which means you can access it right here and now. FACT: A kitchen scrubber changed marine biology By: Corinne Iozzio True story: About a decade ago, the Clorox company discontinued a kitchen scrubber and sent the world of marine science into a tailspin....

This week, Google started rolling out an updated version of Google Photos that has brought the search function to the forefront and added a few more handy features that make it even more worthwhile. The update is rolling out to users on Android and iOS this week. Once it arrives, you’ll see a simplified, three-tab layout with search in the center. Click on the search tab and you get the familiar text bar, as well as a selection of people and pets you may want to quickly find....

The 2020 McLaren GT aims to be the supercar you can live with, by applying McLaren’s established carbon fiber chassis, linked hydraulic suspension system and twin-turbocharged V8 engine to a car that prioritizes comfort and practicality over racetrack lap times. Because its fundamental design demands excellent performance, the GT can afford to give away a few percent of absolute track acumen in exchange for the ability to drive the car with an unexpected degree of comfort....

Just bagged yourself a shiny new gadget? You’re probably eager to start playing with it as soon as possible. But to make sure your new device’s life stays trouble-free, you should first take the time to set it up properly. Follow these simple pointers to keep it running smoothly for years to come. Even if you purchased a shiny new gadget, its manufacturer may have released a few software updates since it left the factory....

The site of my public humiliation could not have been more incongruous with the task at hand. This week, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted groups of elite, would-be, and reluctant cubers for oohs, ahhs, personal guidance, and the gospel of the Rubik’s cube. Scrunched into a private dining room at the museum’s incomprehensibly fancy Michelin-starred restaurant, observers and acolytes alternated between trying to convince a chunk of colored plastic to give up its closely-guarded secrets, and sitting briefly at the knee of its reclusive inventor....

Men are particularly prone to sloppy kissing, she notes, possibly because males tend to have a poor sense of smell and taste and aggressive face sucking may be an unconscious effort to gauge a partner’s estrogen levels and fertility cycle. It may also be an unwitting effort to transmit testosterone, which can be found in saliva and can increase sexual attraction. Alternatively, it may also be just plain gross. (That would be my unscientific conclusion....

“Wow. Oh my god,” I said. I remember a brief feeling of disorientation, but the flip was over in seconds. Just a few minutes later, Buehn landed his AT-6C aircraft—a restored plane originally made in 1942—at Reno Stead Airport. “[The] airplane’s quite capable of a lot more,” Buehn, a veteran of the Vietnam War and former test pilot school instructor with the Air Force, told me after the flight, leaning on the plane’s wing....

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control shows just how bad the state of maternal health in the U.S. continues to be. Though our national system for collecting this kind of data is exceedingly poor, what little we have shows that mortality rates related to pregnancy haven’t improved at all in recent years. Right now, the CDC estimates that three out of every five maternal deaths is entirely preventable—we’re just not preventing them....

Fact: Face blindness could affect as many as one in 50 people. By Rachel Feltman I’ve always been bad at recognizing people, but it wasn’t until a few key incidents in my adulthood that I realized I was really bad at recognizing people. In this week’s segment, I give a brief history of our very-much-still-evolving understanding of prosopagnosia, otherwise known as face blindness. Scientists are still figuring out exactly how and why some brains are clinically bad at recognizing or recalling facial features, but one thing is already clear: The condition is much more common than previously assumed....

When he got home, Gulak drew up a plan for an all-electric unicycle that would emit no fumes and, he figured, be easier to weave through crowded streets than a standard two-wheeler. To give the ride more stability, he put the wheels side-by-side just an inch apart and directly under the rider, who accelerates by leaning forward, as he would on a Segway. When the rider leans into a turn, the inside wheel lifts and the outside wheel lowers, so both stay firmly on the ground....