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My grandmother Inez used to stuff towels under her bedroom door whenever I came to visit. Steeped in Appalachian folklore, she believed that hoop snakes rolled downhill, that a milk snake would crawl into a crib to suck the breath from a newborn’s mouth, and that a baby rattlesnake—”three times more poisonous than its mother”—possessed the devil’s tongue. My fascination with the scaly creatures was a witch’s curse in her eyes, and she was deathly afraid that a serpent would crawl from my pocket and strike her in her sleep....

But $100 isn’t chump change and you also have to consider the widespread privacy issues surrounding these mainstream kits. Some of the manufacturers have no problem sharing your information with law enforcement, organizations conducting specific studies, or even advertisers. But if you’re really curious to discover where your ancestors are from without succumbing to a hefty price tag or shady privacy terms, an excellent option is The Complete SelfDecode DNA Test Kit + 1-Year Subscription Bundle....

If you can relate to this, that’s because most Americans fall victim to throwing out food. The average citizen wastes $370 a year on food they end up pitching. But the problem of food waste runs far deeper than that, permeating every aspect of its production in the US and abroad. Every step of the way, food is discarded or lost, resulting in a third of all food produced (2....

Weather The biggest reason rocket launches get scrubbed is the weather. If adverse weather is enough to cause delays and cancellations for commercial flights, you can certainly bet it’s enough to scrub a mission worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And we’re not just talking about extreme conditions. When it comes to space launches, engineers on the ground are monitoring a huge slew of different factors. For NASA’s standards, there can be no precipitation during launch; winds cannot be faster than about 21 mph from the northeast and about 39 mph from other directions; temperatures below 48 degrees Fahrenheit will force a launch scrub since cold weather can cause ice buildup on the rocket or create problems in some of the equipment (the 1986 Challenger explosion that killed seven crew members occurred because the rocket’s rubber O-rings got too cold on the launch pad the night before); and cloud ceilings can’t be lower than 6,000 feet in altitude....

We reported on this problem back in November, when the Centers for Disease Control informed the public that the first invasive tick in 80 years had entered the country undetected at some unknown point. According to the CDC, it’s now definitely present in eight states. Given all this, entomologist Ilia Rochlin decided that “it would be prudent to assess this species’ potential habitat”—and that’s putting it mildly. See, Asian longhorned ticks are terrifying in a number of ways....

This scene took place July 7 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, as part of a training exercise. The flying grenade is a Drone 40 modular quadcopter. It can be either a scout or a loitering grenade. In action, it looks goofy, like someone saw a “Sky Dancer” flying toy from the 1990s and decided it would be a great basis for a bomb. What sets the Drone 40 apart from a host of other small drone designs is the long, vertical fuselage....

As I write this, there were 1,729,694,062 websites (and counting) on the internet. While the World Wide Web can be a helpful place most of us cannot live without, many of those sites are useless fodder of little use to anyone. However, once in a while, we stumble upon a simply wonderful site, a site that has not been promoted heavily, is not bankrolled by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and is purely supported as a labor of love....

This 15-day excursion—one of the final legs of a six-month journey through South America with our one-year old, included visiting the Argentinian and Chilean sides of the glaciers and the far end of the world in Ushuaia: Tierra del Fuego. In all, we spent $1,537.80 on the three of us. Planning and Budgeting Create a budget—and stick to it as best you can Based on estimates provided by individual traveler blogs and the Budget Your Trip website (which lists the average daily per-person cost by country and budget type), I allocated $100 per day for our time in Patagonia....

Here are a few of our favorite laminators currently available. This Swingline Laminator is light, compact, and performs both hot and cold laminating, making it as perfect an option for on-the-go teachers, artists, and office administrators as it is for someone with limited space. Despite being compact, it supports items up to nine inches in width, warms up in just four minutes and laminates at a rate of nine inches per minute....

Sun Chaser 20,000mAh Solar-Powered Wireless Phone Charger As you can tell by the name, the Sun Chase is a solar-powered portable battery that can fuel up any smartphone 2.5 times full or any tablet at 100 percent. It can simultaneously charge up to 3 devices and has a built-in LED floodlight that can illuminate an area of 20 square feet. Normally $129, it’s on sale for $59.99. GoSun Solar-Powered Kitchen If you’re planning on going off the grid, but have no plans on surviving hunger while at it, make sure to bring this solar-powered kitchen with you....

“Whether it’s restocking household essentials or purchasing a last-minute gift, we know that Venmo users shop over two times more frequently than the average shopper and are 19% more likely to make repeat purchases,” reads the announcement, citing a study from Netfluential and Edison Trends.

Now a mechanical chameleon from China can change color to almost every hue in the visible spectrum with the aid of bumps made of gold and silver on its skin, researchers say. The scientists published their work this past month in the journal ACS Nano. Materials scientist Guoping Wang and his colleagues at Wuhan University in China 3D-printed a plastic chameleon that they covered in square electronic scales. Each scale had a thin film of glass on top of a backing of indium tin oxide, a transparent conductor often used in touchscreens, video displays, and solar cells, which helped the scales generate electric fields....

3:01pm MDT – Joe Kittinger: “I’d like to give a special one-fingered salute to all the folks who said he was going to come apart when he went supersonic.” Ha! 2:52pm MDT – Felix felt he was going into a flat spin. “There was a period of time I thought I was in real trouble.” Referring to his emergency drogue chute, “I knew if I pushed that button I would not go supersonic....

Sikorsky released a new video today of their coaxial candidate, called the SB>1 Defiant, demonstrating some of what it can do, such as banking at 60 degrees, hitting a speed of about 272 miles per hour, and descending into a tight space surrounded by trees. Because the Defiant looks so different from a regular helicopter, it’s worth unpacking how it works. Its two rigid top rotors are stacked atop one another, and they counterrotate....

Curiosity’s principal investigator, John Grotzinger, was quoted on NPR Tuesday morning saying the team might have some very big news soon. “Earthshaking” was the word of choice from NPR’s science correspondent, Joe Palca. Palca was apparently in Grotzinger’s office when some of the data from SAM started streaming in through the Deep Space Network last week. Grotzinger wouldn’t tell, but his excitement was obvious: “This data is gonna be one for the history books....

1 / INSECTS Countless arthropods swarm your sustenance, leaving traces as it moves from field to market. The Food and Drug Administration says everything from macaroni to wine can contain dozens, even hundreds, of bug bits before regulators deem it contaminated. 2 / RODENT FILTH Vermin scurrying around food-processing sites introduce fur and other, uh, leavings to myriad products. The FDA allows one rat hair for every 100 grams of peanut butter, to offer just one example....

The most recent flurona alarm sounded when Israel confirmed that a young, pregnant, unvaccinated patient had tested positive for both viruses right before the turn of the new year. While the catchy portmanteau is new, COVID-19 and flu co-infections are not. Cases have been reported around the world, including in the United States, Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary, and other countries. The first known report of flurona occurred at the very beginning of the pandemic, long before that term was coined....

When we walk, our ankles and knees work to balance the body’s weight over a single foot, allowing the other to release and swing forward. Just before that leg’s foot leaves the ground, its knee bends and elastic energy that was stored in the ankle tendons releases. The combination of elastic energy, pivoting, and lifting is what allows humans to walk using comparatively little energy, but the process is complicated....

This may sound like something you won’t necessarily have to face, but it’s been happening for years and it’s happening right now around the world—people are being violently repressed and gassed during protests in places such as Hong Kong, Ecuador, Chile, Barcelona, and Lebanon. Protesting is protected in most parts of the world by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which endows people with freedom of speech and expression....

If you were born post-World War II in the U.S. or any other industrialized country, the news reports about bed bugs have likely left you scratching more than your heads. What are these things? Why haven’t they bothered us before? Turns out they have. 3,300-year-old preserved bed bugs have been found in tomb builders’ sleeping quarters in an Egyptian archaeological site. The ancient Greeks even ate them. The most popular theory suggests early hominids lived with the bugs in bat-infested caves tens of thousands of years ago, and that the pest has been following us, its main food source, across the world ever since....