BEING SORE SUCKS. Anyone who’s exercised to an extent can probably complain about the stiffness, pains, or—worse—injuries the next day. But as annoying as the achiness gets, it’s a critical part of the recovery process. 

Under your skin, the all-important muscle fibers that push and pull bones to move you around tear slightly during a workout—a phenomenon called microtrauma. Combined with inflammation, these tiny ruptures may cause soreness, which your body alleviates by replacing the cells around the wound.

There are actually two kinds of muscular soreness that you feel after a workout, and they come from different sources. The microtrauma-based discomfort is known as DOMS, short for delayed-onset muscle soreness. You might feel it most between 24 and 48 hours after the workout—and for as long as three to five days. The other type, acute muscle pain, happens after you overwork your body. These pangs go away in about a day or two, just in time for the DOMS to peak. 

So are there surefire ways to get rid of your soreness? Not exactly. The problem is that to ease the aches, your body has to heal the microtears, which isn’t a process you can speed up. There is some good news, though: A solid post-workout ritual could have a placebo-like effect on your mind, blunting some of the pain you feel. And there could be other perks too.

For example, stretching does not lead to faster recovery, but it does make you more flexible and less prone to injury in the future, especially during high-intensity workouts. And while warm-ups don’t help with the healing process either, they do raise your heart rate, preparing you for the sudden jump in activity. 

Then there are the various salves, tools, and self-care schemes people try. A few studies show that proper use of compression gear could confer some benefits for blood flow and enzyme production. Some gymgoers pregame the pain with anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen, though they have no proven power against soreness. Elite swimmers might tolerate the bruises that come with cupping therapy—without any science to confirm the benefits of the practice. Even ice baths and far-infrared saunas (featuring high heat and low humidity) have minor, inconsistent results, according to researchers.

In general, getting a massage a day or two after a workout offers short-term relief for muscle tenderness. You will likely feel a little worse with a pair of hands or a percussive therapy device kneading into you, but as soon as it’s done, your pain will be more manageable for the next few hours. In certain circumstances, massages might even help reduce inflammation and DOMS.

There are three surefire things you can do, however, to soothe your soreness a bit. The first is to rest. Your body needs time to rebuild your muscle fibers, so getting a good night’s sleep and using the sore body parts less when you’re awake will help you recover faster. Weightlifters know this well and will work a different muscle group each session. If you’re a regular at the gym, commit to triceps one day and focus on a different group (biceps, maybe) the next.

The second is to make sure you’re eating well. Your body requires nutrients like proteins and carbohydrates to patch up your muscles, so enjoy a big bowl of pasta or a tall glass of chocolate milk a few hours after training. 

The third thing you can do is keep at it. DOMS hits harder when you try a new form of exercise because your body is not used to the strenuous activity. The first time will always be the most painful. But if you set a schedule and habit around the workouts you like best, it should hurt less after you crush all your reps. 

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On January 24, Prerak Patel’s new 2023 Tesla Model Y was delivered. Five days later, according to tweets from Patel’s account, the car’s steering wheel fell off while he was driving. Luckily, no one was hurt. But this wasn’t an isolated incident. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the exact same issue has happened to another Model Y. It was enough for the NHTSA to begin looking into the problem, which they estimate could affect over 120,000 cars.

“I wasn’t sure what to do,” he said in an interview with Scripps News. “I was really scared—kids were scared too.”

The exact cause of the issue, according to the NHTSA document, is a manufacturing defect. The retaining bolt, the part of the steering wheel designed to keep it in place and attached to the rest of the steering mechanism, was missing. The report says that both cars received repairs before being delivered that involved removing the steering wheel. 

According to the NHTSA, after being delivered, the steering wheels were held in place by pure friction until they eventually experienced “complete detachment.” In Prerak Patel’s case, that happened while he and his family were on the highway. Luckily, there was no car behind him, and Patel was able to stop safely. After making sure his family was safe, Patel started a thread on Twitter to ask Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the company’s customer support for help. 

The NHTSA investigation is just the latest in a long string of Tesla mishaps. As early as 2018 and 2019, Tesla owners posted videos of poor build quality on their newly delivered cars. Tesla has consistently ranked near the bottom of the Consumer Reports reliability survey, placing second to last in 2021 and 19th out of 24 brands in 2022. But in addition to the manufacturing defects and reliability issues, the so-called self-driving software has also faced regulatory scrutiny.

[Related: Massive new Tesla recall focuses on dangers of self-driving software]

In February, the NHTSA announced a recall of hundreds of thousands of Teslas because of issues in their autopilot system. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta (FSD Beta) system has been linked to fatal accidents. That NHTSA report explains that the FSD Beta was driving unsafely around intersections and ignoring speed limits. The problems were reportedly set to be fixed by an over-the-air software update. 

Tesla isn’t the only automaker to cope with a serious problem like the steering wheel coming off. Not long after Toyota’s first electric SUV, the BZ4X, was released, the company quickly recalled the EVs they had begun delivering because of problems that could lead to the wheels—the ones the vehicle rolls on—completely falling off. After an investigation, Toyota discovered that part of the issue was that a wheel supplier had been manufacturing the wheels to a different specification. Just 260 vehicles were affected. 

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It’s hard to go faster on the road than in a Formula One car, which can reach top speeds of 220 miles per hour. The so-called pinnacle of motorsport races takes place around the world, from Australia to Sao Paulo. And after an exciting week of preseason testing, the 2023 season got underway at the Bahrain International Circuit on March 5. Reigning world champion Max Verstappen won for Red Bull Racing, with his teammate Sergio Perez in second. There are 20 drivers across 10 teams in F1, and none of the other 18 drivers finished within 30 seconds of Verstappen. Only time will tell if the other teams will be able to catch up.

Below F1 are Formula Two and Formula Three, which are called the feeder series, and function in a similar fashion to baseball’s minor leagues. They’re mostly young drivers attempting to prove their worth by competing against each other for a spot in the big leagues. It’s how most drivers gain one of the 20 seats currently available in F1. (All three F1 rookies this season, Nyck DeVries, Oscar Piastri, and Logan Sargeant, drove at least one season in F2.)

But like any other vehicle with an internal combustion engine, Formula One vehicles burn fossil fuels, which is a problem in a world that must decarbonize to combat climate change. Beyond the 20 Formula One cars racing on tracks every other weekend, there are the massive transportation costs to move the teams and drivers across the globe and the millions of fans traveling to and from the racing circuits.

The Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), Formula One’s governing body, realizes that. In November 2019, F1 and the FIA announced plans to become fully carbon neutral by the end of 2030, and the plans to make that transition are already underway. 

Formula One currently uses a hybrid fuel that’s 10% biofuel and will make the transition to fully renewable fuels in 2026, meaning all carbon output by the cars will be offset by the production of the fuel. There will be other regulatory changes as well. 

Now, F1 has announced that their feeder series will be following along. Starting with the opening sprint race of the 2023 season at Bahrain last weekend, F2 and F3 cars will use a blend consisting of 55% “Advanced Sustainable Fuel.” And by 2027, according to The Race, the feeder series aim to use a type of sustainable, carbon-captured fuel called e-fuel.

What are sustainable fuels?

“Sustainable fuel” is a catch-all term for a bunch of different alternative ways of producing fuels for planes and cars with the goal of reducing their carbon footprint. It includes biofuels, which recycle organic materials into fuel (this is what F1’s hybrid fuel is) but also carbon-capturing e-fuels that are made by taking carbon from the air, which is what F2 and F3 plan to switch to in 2027. But what all sustainable fuels have in common are their low net carbon emissions.

When it comes to e-fuels created by carbon capture, Nikita Pavlenko, the fuel program lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation, says there are two different sources—getting it directly from the atmosphere, or getting it from smokestacks: “You have a fuel that is pretty close to zero carbon, just produced from renewable electricity and carbon dioxide captured from the air or from a smokestack.” While F1 is allowed to source their carbon from so-called point sources (Pavlenko says this is almost always taken from smokestacks), F2 and F3’s fuel must be fully sourced by direct-air carbon capture technology.

That strict direct-air carbon capturing is what differentiates e-fuel from biofuels and other sustainable power sources, and according to Pavlenko, it’s a very new technology. The F2 and F3 experiments will be one of the first large-scale applications of e-fuel, which has implications for the future of transportation. Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, the chief technology officer at Aramco, who will supply the e-fuel, tells The Race that the FIA understands this is a hard goal to reach because of how underdeveloped carbon capture technologies are but is committed to setting the course. 

Pavlenko says he’s excited that F1 is pursuing e-fuels, because of their very prohibitive cost. “F1 would be one of the use cases that’s best able to support the cost difference,” he says. “It’s a relatively small quantity [in relation to the quantity of non-sustainable fuels] and I assume there’s a high willingness to pay.”

Even better: EVs

There are some concerns, however. The FIA will have to ensure that its e-fuel is made using renewable energy sources. Much like electric cars, producing e-fuel using electricity created by fossil fuels simply moves the source of emissions rather than limits it. In addition, Palvenko says that e-fuel generally has more applications in aviation than on the road, where using electric vehicles is the generally best way to go.

In the past 20 years, F1 has exploded in popularity, thanks to new ownership and a series on Netflix. But as it’s gone global, it’s come under increasing scrutiny for its sustainability, or lack thereof. The FIA is making an effort, however. Even before the fuel changes, F1’s sister electric-only series Formula E launched in 2014. Only time will tell if the two series will eventually merge, but anyone who’s watched Formula E can confirm that the racing is just as electric as the cars are.

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In high school science class, textbooks often feature a recognizable image of the Earth and all its layers—currently, that’s the crust, outer and inner mantle, and outer and inner core. But a new study published February 21 in Nature Communications might leave all of those graphics a little outdated. Seismologists at the Australian National University analyzed the reverberating waves from powerful earthquakes and found what they believe to be evidence of a distinct innermost inner core.

Each inner division of the Earth plays its own unique role in our lives. We exist on top of the thin, outermost layer called the crust. Although there have been past efforts to dig deep enough to break into the mantle, no one has succeeded yet. The mantle, both outer and inner, are made up of liquid rock, and the convection currents present there are responsible for the jostling and bumping of the crust’s tectonic plates. Finally, there’s the core. The liquid outer layer of the core is responsible for producing Earth’s magnetic field, which is further stabilized by the solid inner section. 

[Related: The Earth’s inner core could be slowing its spin—but don’t panic]

We can’t easily study the inner structure of the Earth, so geologists research the mantle by examining samples of rock from volcanic eruptions that may have come from that far underground. On top of that, they study the seismic waves produced by earthquakes. When an earthquake starts at an epicenter deep underground, the movement creates waves that shake the surface. Those waves can be measured by seismometers all around the globe, and by measuring just how fast the seismic waves are moving, seismologists can figure out a surprising amount about just what the center of the Earth looks like.

That is, when the numbers make sense. For a while, seismologists had noticed that when they measured earthquake waves passing through the very center of the inner core, their models would be less accurate. All waves, seismic or otherwise, travel at different speeds through different materials, but a phenomenon called anisotropy means that waves can also travel at different speeds in different directions. In 2002, researchers proposed the existence of the innermost inner core as a way to explain the anisotropic effects they had found when examining some powerful earthquakes.

Now, more research seems to be supporting that theory. As the number of seismic recording stations has increased in recent years, it’s become easier to triangulate exactly how fast and in what direction a wave is moving. The seismologists at the ANU looked at earthquakes above a magnitude of 6.0 over the last decade to determine the exact path of the seismic waves. Because of the increase in equipment, scientists were able to track the waves as they bounced around the Earth up to five times. And indeed, their findings supported that as the waves passed through the center of the Earth, their path was altered as if there was an innermost inner core. The researchers think the divide comes from a different crystal arrangement of the iron and nickel atoms that make up the core.

Some seismologists aren’t completely convinced by the findings because it’s still not clear that this is a hard boundary rather than a gradual transition. But discovering a new layer of the earth doesn’t happen often, and if the innermost inner core continues to be backed up by evidence, the authors argue it might just give geologists more insight into the geologic structure of the earliest days of the planet. 

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New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon is home to some of the most impressive pre-Columbian architecture in the Western Hemisphere. Its wide roads, circular ritual sites called kivas, and sprawling complexes called great houses remain an engineering spectacle for modern society, given the tools anthropologists think were used to create them. It’s also home to a great mystery—large pieces of timber used as support beams all across the complex. 

The ancestral Puebloans that called Chaco Canyon home a millennium ago used more than 200,000 pieces of timber to construct their buildings, with weights estimated between 185 and 605 pounds per log. But the area around Chaco Canyon is a dry, arid climate that likely didn’t have many high-quality, usable trees. And indeed, in 2001, tree-ring experts at the University of Arizona used chemical analyses to pinpoint that the wood was sourced from mountain ranges up to 46 miles away. But that finding left them with even more questions.

Since then, experts have considered many different carrying methods to explain just how the Chaco Canyon residents carried the timber so far without beasts of burden like horses or even wheels to help. Now a new study published on February 22 in the Journal of Archaeological Science presents a reasonable explanation: The Puebloans used a simple piece of fabric looped around their heads.

A tumpline refers to a strap attached on both ends to a sack of equipment like a basket or a backpack. But instead of carrying it over their shoulders, the ancient log bearers would have placed it on their heads, just behind the hairline. Then, by leaning forward, the carriers distributed the weight of their cargo down the neck and spine. Anthropologists know that pre-Columbian cultures in America used tumplines woven from plant fibers to transport heavy loads, but up until recently, had never tested the method on the Chaco Canyon timbers.

That is, until three physiology researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder decided to test it locally themselves. Over the course of 70 days, they trained to properly wear and use a tumpline to move increasingly heavy material. By the end of the regimen, they were able to carry 66 pounds by themselves for an hour with no pain whatsoever. Then, they tested it in pairs. Because the timbers at Chaco Canyon are too large to be feasibly carried vertically, two of the authors attached their tumpline around each end of a 132-pound ponderosa pine log and carried it parallel to the ground for 15.5 miles. The journey took over 9 hours and 44 minutes (with multiple breaks, of course).

The authors reported that their average walking speed only dropped 10 percent when carrying the log, and that overall, the method was surprisingly easy to learn. Although there is no explicit proof that tumplines were used to transport the massive logs the Chacoans used for construction, the feasibility of their approach requires less work than any other tactic proposed.

Next up for the researchers? Moving materials along the full distance from the timber’s sources in the mountains of New Mexico to the Chaco Canyon using nothing but tumplines and their heads. 

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There’s a case to be made that the world’s greatest forests are not terrestrial. That’s in large part due to kelp. Like their less watery counterparts, kelp forests play an important role in carbon cycling across the planet, converting carbon dioxide into oxygen through photosynthesis and sequestering the carbon beneath the ocean’s surface. 

Kelp forests are located in shallow coastal waters across the globe, including in the northeast and all along the Pacific coast in the United States. Despite taking up only a tiny fraction of the ocean, they’re incredibly diverse. Charles Darwin marveled at just how many species are present in kelp forests in his diary while aboard the HMS Beagle. However, they are incredibly fragile ecosystems. Once disrupted, it’s very difficult for the forests to recover.  

[Related: Sea urchin sperm is surprisingly useful to robotics experts.]

With the presence of purple sea urchins off the coasts of the western United States, the destruction of kelp forests has become much faster. But new research from Oregon State University published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that the sunflower sea star, a 24-armed behemoth of a sea star living in kelp forests on the west coast may be a major asset to preserving those important ecosystems, namely by fighting off pesky sea urchins.

Sea urchins are a natural part of the ecosystem, and act as scavengers, feeding on dead kelp and other detritus that falls to the ocean floor. However, when there’s not enough food for them to go around, past research has found that they’ll begin feasting on living kelp. This disrupts the ecosystem, and if not left in check, leads to the formation of an urchin barren, with no kelp to be seen and urchins packed tightly along the ocean floor. Once a barren forms, the rebirth of a kelp forest is all but impossible. Any new kelp growth will promptly be devoured by the urchins, which are able to survive with little food and will live for at least 20 years. 

Marine biologists long ago realized that the predators of sea urchins are part of the problem. Sea otters, considered one of the keystone species of the ecosystem, have been hunted to endangered status. Other predators, like the sunflower sea star, would have to pick up some of the slack. Unfortunately, a sea star wasting disease has decimated the population in the last decade, leaving the population critically endangered. 

This study examined just how effective the sunflower sea star is as a predator of sea urchins by raising well-fed and starving sea urchins in a lab setting. After about six weeks of collecting and raising urchins, the researchers let 24 sea stars free to feed. The sea stars consumed an average of 0.68 urchins a day, and when the urchins were starving, like they are in nutrient-poor urchin barrens, sea stars ate even more. That is a major difference between the sea stars and other predators, like otters, who are picky when it comes to choosing what urchins to eat, preferring healthy urchins that are less common in a barren. 

[Related: A virgin birth in Shedd Aquarium’s shark tank is baffling biologists.]

“Eating less than one urchin per day may not sound like a lot, but we think there used to be over 5 billion sunflower sea stars,” Sarah Gravem, a research associate at Oregon State said in a release. Although there’s no consensus on just how devastating sea star wasting disease has been, most estimates place the loss at around 90 percent of the population. “We used a model to show that the pre-disease densities of sea stars on the U.S. West Coast were usually more than enough to keep sea urchin numbers down and prevent barrens,” Gravem adds.

With this knowledge in mind, future research can focus on how exactly to use sunflower sea stars to keep sea urchin populations in check—and hopefully restore kelp forests in the process.

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About three years ago, I stopped telling people I was on Jeopardy!. This is primarily because it is a very strange way to start a conversation, but also because it does become repetitive answering the same questions (they don’t tell you the categories beforehand, and Alex Trebek was very nice). Recently, the show invited me back to compete in the upcoming High School Reunion Tournament, and as I prepared I found myself cataloging all the techniques I’ve developed over my years of trivia. I’d like to pass on my expertise to everyone who wants to get better.

I’ll be honest, though: some trivia does simply come down to luck—it is a lot easier to name the states bordering Illinois if you live in Chicago, for instance. But there are definitely a few tricks to the trade that will almost immediately help you get better at trivia. So the next time you’re at your local bar playing with some friends or following along with Jeopardy! at home, consider these tips before you finalize your answer.

Every time I hear a trivia question, I break it down into a bulleted list of facts in my head. Take this question I saw last year in the trivia league LearnedLeague: “Kathleen Hanna, co-founder and lead singer of the punk band Bikini Kill, allegedly (and inspirationally) once wrote with a Sharpie on a hotel room wall, ‘Kurt smells like’ what?”

Here’s how I broke it down:

• The answer is a word or phrase that completes the sentence “Kurt smells like…”
• The answer somehow inspired one of Kathleen Hanna’s friends.
• Bikini Kill played punk music, so the answer probably has something to do with rock music.
• Kathleen Hanna knew a guy named Kurt.

You likely only know one musical Kurt (Cobain), and he did play rock music, so it almost certainly has something to do with him. Cobain was the lead singer of Nirvana, so you can start thinking through Nirvana songs. From there, you’re likely to come up with Smells Like Teen Spirit. “Teen Spirit” nicely completes the phrase and is indeed the correct answer.

If you’re asked a question about a movie from the 1940s, for instance, you can immediately begin honing in on your answer based solely on what’s relevant enough for someone to know (think Citizen Kane or It’s a Wonderful Life, not some B movie only five people have watched). While I was in my last year of high school, I appeared on Jeopardy’s Teen Tournament, where I finished as a semifinalist and won $10,000.

[Related: Why do we love game shows like ‘Jeopardy!‘ so much?]

Here’s my breakdown of the final question of that Jeopardy! semifinal (I got the question wrong, in case you were wondering). The category was “the American Revolutionary era”: “She was disowned by the Quakers after marrying an Episcopalian upholsterer in 1773 and later took over his business.”

• The question says she, so we’re looking for a woman.
• This person was a Quaker, but was later disowned.
• This person married an upholsterer.
• This person took over her husband’s business.

There were plenty of women around during the Revolutionary era, but only a few of them are remotely famous. The answer is going to be someone you’ve heard of. It won’t be someone pulled from obscurity. So, I started running through famous revolutionary women—Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and Dolley Madison were the names I came up with.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t go much further than that. I didn’t know any of the presidents’ religions, and the last clue just didn’t fit at all. In fact, the answer was not a president’s wife, but seamstress and alleged flag designer Betsy Ross. I kicked myself when the answer was revealed, going “Of course! Very famous, very ‘knowable.’”

Don’t be afraid to guess

Sometimes, you’ll have to make educated guesses because it’s impossible to know literally everything. At the bar where my friends and I play trivia every Tuesday, an incorrect answer doesn’t have a penalty, so if we don’t know, we always take a guess. On Jeopardy!, which does penalize incorrect answers, it’s wiser to play a little more cautiously when you’re unsure. But in general, it’s good practice to guess.

Take this other question from my other Jeopardy! Teen Tournament appearance: “The word ‘trombone’ comes from the Italian for this related instrument.”

• The answer is the name of an instrument.
• That instrument is related to the trombone.
• Its name is the origin of the word trombone.

At that point in my life, the last time I’d played a musical instrument was during piano lessons in fifth grade. I did not know the answer to this question, and I did not know the origin of the word trombone. However, I did know that trumpet and tuba are both related instruments that start with “T.” Of the two, “trumpet” shares more letters. My gut instinct said trumpet, so I buzzed in, said “trumpet,” and got the question right.

Watch for wordplay

Trivia writers (Jeopardy! especially) love to throw in little wordplay hints to lead you to the answer. Pay attention to them, because they’re relatively common when the main fact is pretty obscure. Wordplay hints generally won’t get you to 100 percent certainty, but they’ll often get you from knowing nothing to an educated guess.

Here’s another example from LearnedLeague: “The American photographer William Wegman is well-known for his warmly whimsical and witty works which primarily feature dogs of what breed?”

• We’re looking for a dog breed.
• This breed is featured prominently in photographs by William Wegman.

I’d never heard of William Wegman or his photographs, but paying attention to the exact wording of the question led me to tack on this bullet point:

• That’s weird, why do so many of the words in this question start with “W”?

To a trivia writer’s mind, this is probably a hint that the name of the dog breed you’re looking for starts with “W.” So, start going through dog breeds until you happen across the correct answer, “Weimaraner”, and take a shot in the dark. This will never be perfect (you could have thought of the Whippet, for instance), but it is quite useful.

There is one more strategy I have for learning things, although it’s a little more artificial than simply consuming media and remembering. There is a subset of hints that either make excellent trivia facts or uniquely identify an individual, but get overused when writing questions. Jeopardy! enthusiasts refer to these clues as “Pavlovs” and quizbowl players call them “stock” clues.

[Related: How and when to use a ‘memory palace’]

For example, the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who wrote Eugene Onegin and Boris Gudonov, fought a bunch of people in duels before dying, so he’s often clued as a “duelist” or as a “Russian duelist.” If I hear that turn of phrase in a question, the answer will almost always be Pushkin.

Other Pavlovs include “Iowan painter” for Grant Wood of American Gothic fame, “Artist in Tahiti” for French painter Paul Gaugin, and “King of Swing” for clarinetist Benny Goodman. 

Pavlovs make nice shortcuts, especially when you’re talking about literature and the arts. You can’t read every book, but if you can remember that Nigerian author Chinua Achebe once gave a speech about racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, you might not need to.

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Portable chargers are never out of season. Whether your phone is always running low on charge or it’s a particularly busy day and you need more juice for your last meeting, a portable charger makes a great safety blanket. They’re especially useful in the winter months, when batteries seem to drain even faster than usual. Anker’s portable batteries charge consistently, hold up to the worst of daily life, and fit easily into a purse, backpack, or even a pocket. 

Anker is currently offering sales on a large portion of their inventory. It has a wide range of chargers, from older models at cheaper prices with fewer functions, but also have many fancy new models with interesting innovations, like the MagGo battery that allows for wireless charging. 

Our top pick, however, has to be their upcoming release: the Anker 733 Power Bank, which features not just Anker’s signature sleek look and fast charging capabilities, but doubles as a regular wall outlet. If you’re at home, use it exactly like a normal wall charger, but grab it when you’re heading out to take advantage of the 10,000 mAh battery wherever and whenever you want. The 733 will retail for $100 at release, but a preorder will set you back just $70. 

• Anker 733 Power Bank (featured) $70 (was $100)
• Anker 747 Power Bank $153 (was $180)
• Anker 737 Power Bank (PowerCore 26K for Laptop) $136 (was $160)
• Anker 737 Power Bank (PowerCore 24K) $110 (was $150)
• Anker 521 Magnetic Battery $30 (was $40)
• Anker 525 Power Bank $51 (was $60)
• Anker 537 Power Bank $98 (was $140)
• Anker 633 Magnetic Battery $64 (was $80)
• Anker 622 Magnetic Battery (MagGo) $45 (was $60)
• Anker 337 Power Bank $60 (was $70)

More charging deals

There are, of course, more options available. Amazon has a good collection of portable chargers, and many of them are also on sale at the moment.

• Mregb Solar Power Bank, Solar Charger, 42800mAh Power Bank $30 (was $80) 
• Solar-Charger-Power-Bank – Portable Charger, 43800mAh Qc3.0 Fast Charging $45 (was $100)
• Solar Power Bank 36000mAh, Solar Charger Qi Wireless Built in $34 (was $70)
• Solar Charger 25000mAh, Hiluckey Outdoor USB C Portable Power Bank $38 (was $57)
• Solar Power Bank, Solar Charger 38800mAh, Qi Wireless Charger $20 (was $80)
• Power-Bank-Solar-Portable-Charger – 40000mAh Power Bank Large Capacity $30 (was $198)
• Feeke Solar-Charger-Power-Bank – 36800mAh Portable Charger $20 (was $60)
• Portable Charger with Built-In Cables and AC Wall Plug, VRURC 10000mAh $30 (was $37)
• LOVELEDI Portable-Charger-Power-Bank – 15000mAh Dual USB Power Bank $16 (was $70)
• LOVELEDI Portable-Charger-Power-Bank – 2 Pack 15000mAh Dual USB Power Bank $20 (was $99)
• ROMOSS 30000mAh Power Bank Sense 8+, 18W PD USB C Portable Charger $32 (was $40)
• TG90 Mini Power Bank 4500mah Portable Charger with Built in Cable $23 (was $40)
• Charmast USB C Portable Charger Power Bank, Battery Pack 5000mAh $18 (was $30)
• INIU Portable Charger, 22.5W 20000mAh USB C $28 (was $65)
• Baseus Power Bank, 65W 20000mAh Laptop Portable Charger $51 (was $80)

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In 2009, Prince Albert II of Monaco asked experimental vehicle manufacturer Venturi to take a crack at designing an electric vehicle that could handle the harsh cold of Antarctica. Over the next 12 years, the company went to work. After testing out two full prototypes, the company pulled off a final product launch on June 1, 2021. The Venturi Antarctica, as the vehicle is called, has been transporting scientists and lab equipment in eastern Antarctica since December 2021.

Designing an electric vehicle for the harsh climate of Antarctica is no easy feat. The battery and other components have to be able to tolerate the frigid Antarctic temperatures, and there needs to be space to store research equipment and transport the researchers comfortably. Venturi has experience with experimental electric vehicles going back to 2000, and has competed in Formula E, the top-tier electric car racing competition in the world, since its inaugural season in 2014. 

[Related: Boaty McBoatface’s new mission is more serious than its name]

According to Venturi, scientists based at the Belgian Princess Elizabeth research station have driven the Antarctica EV over 500 kilometers (310 miles) in just one summer of use. The vehicle has a range of 50 kilometers (31 miles), with space for a second battery if the scientists need more range. However, its range can vary depending on how compact the snow it has to drive on is, and scientists started noticing some problems. 

As climate change has affected global temperatures, Antarctica has warmed. Average temperatures on the icy continent ranges from a frigid -50 degrees Celsius (-58 F) inland to around -10 C (14 F) on the coasts, and the vehicle, designed for the extra cold, needed tweaks to tolerate the relative warmth. Venturi instructed researchers to limit trips to 40 kilometers (25 miles), and is beginning work on modifications to restore the vehicle to its true glory. 

Since Antarctica is covered almost entirely in snow, the Antarctica EV uses a continuous track system, just like you’d expect on a snowcat or a snowmobile. The treads spread the 5,500 pounds of vehicle over its entire surface area, preventing the Antarctica EV from sinking into the snow like a wheeled vehicle would. But the warmer temperatures have caused the snow to stick to the sprockets that drive the treads, creating unwanted vibrations that could further damage the vehicle. The company has since redesigned and replaced the sprockets in an attempt to keep the vehicle in working order.

Increasing temperatures also made it more likely for the cabin, which is packed with electronics and exposed to the sun, to overheat. To balance that out, Venturi has had to install a new ventilation system for a more comfortable riding experience. They also made a new cooling system for the power electronic systems themselves.

Venturi announced on January 24 that their next set of improvements will be focused on redesigning the treads and increasing the vehicle’s range in Antarctica. Barring any other unforeseen circumstances, these should allow the vehicle to putter around the ice and snow of the southern continent more and more in the years to come.

The post This Antarctic EV goes where other electric vehicles can’t tread appeared first on Popular Science.

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Nearly six years ago, on March 10, 2017, the Netflix Twitter account made a very simple claim: “Love is sharing a password.” 

Apparently, there’s been a lot of love going around. More than 100 million people use Netflix passwords from their friends, families, and sometimes even strangers, a figure that Netflix notes in its fourth quarter shareholder letter released on January 19, 2023. It even happens with celebrities—bestselling author and YouTube star John Green revealed on TikTok that he shares his Netflix account with a hacker named Omar.

But account sharing, of course, is bad business for Netflix, and all good love stories must come to an end. Netflix made headlines last year when it announced it was beginning to trial new strategies to curb account sharing on its platform. The company announced in the Q4 shareholder letter that they’re planning to launch new paid sharing features later this financial quarter. Then they updated their FAQ section, and the public noticed.

But what does this change mean for your Netflix account? Is this decision something to worry about? Here’s what you need to know:

The largest change to the platform is that Netflix is redefining which users can share one account. As the first line in the updated Netflix FAQ reads: “A Netflix account is for people who live together in a single household.” The definition for “household” obviously changes depending on who you ask, but Netflix appears to be using a definition based on proximity (more accurately, using “location based information like IP addresses and device IDs,” according to the new FAQ page). If you live in the same location, that counts as one household. If your device is in the correct location, then everything should work as expected, with no changes at all. 

Once you start introducing multiple devices, Wi-Fi networks, and locations, that’s where the new rules will come into play. When someone logs in to Netflix from a device outside of the household, they may be asked for verification, according to their FAQ. The account owner will get an email or text with a code to be input on the device attempting to log in—a slightly altered version of the common two-factor authentication methodologies used by most major websites.

The outcry from the public following the announced changes stems largely from information that has since been removed from the Netflix FAQ page—the original version of the new rules on device sharing had much harsher restrictions. Under those rules, Netflix users had to log into their account from their home network once every 31 days to maintain access. Travelers could request a temporary code to give them access to the site for seven days. 

Netflix has four subscription options in the United States—basic with ads, basic, standard, and premium. The biggest difference between the accounts is how many users can be logged in at once. Both basic plans allow just one user to watch at a time, while the standard and premium plans let two and four viewers watch concurrently, respectively. Regardless of your Netflix plan, you can have different profiles—that’s the screen with the avatars that pops up when you first log in to the site. 

Last year, the company tested features out for users in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru, allowing standard and premium users to add “subaccounts” and letting users transfer existing profiles to a new account. The subaccounts from the tests in Latin America worked well enough that the functionality will be expanded to more countries with the new password-sharing rules to let old borrowers maintain access to their old profiles, as announced in Netflix’s third-quarter shareholder letter. This did come with an extra charge, however. Adding a secondary location costs a user about $3, depending on the country. 

Netflix’s decision to crack down on password sharing will make it unique among streaming platforms like Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney+. 

The moves represent a departure from just six years ago when Netflix tweeted about love and password sharing. Love, it appears, might be more complex than sharing a password, and Netflix access is going to cost you. 

The post Prepare for the great Netflix password-sharing crackdown appeared first on Popular Science.

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Spicy food is exciting. Eating it comes with the thrill of consuming something that is meant to hurt you—contests like Paqui’s One Chip Challenge have gone viral many times over. When you cook, adding a bit of heat can be a good way to get a visceral reaction from your guests. And for a truly personal touch, you can craft a hot sauce recipe that’s entirely your own.

Before you start

When you’re handling hot peppers, it’s important to keep your hands away from your eyes and other sensitive areas so you don’t accidentally irritate your skin. Capsaicin—the chemical compound in hot peppers that makes you feel like your mouth is burning—is largely found in the placenta, or the white stuff that connects the colorful flesh with the seeds. Use particular caution there. With milder peppers, like jalapeños or serranos, the decision to use gloves is up to you, but if you use your bare hands, make sure to wash them thoroughly when you’re done.

If you’re using a superhot pepper like the bhut jolokia or Carolina reaper, definitely wear gloves and be careful with the whole thing: their skin contains capsaicin too, according to Paul Bosland, director of New Mexico State University’s Chile Pepper Institute. Workers at Puckerbutt Pepper Company, where the Carolina reaper was invented, use two pairs of gloves when handling the peppers because the outer pair will wear off in just 30 minutes.

[Related: Why do people like spicy food?]

Although capsaicin is absolutely an irritant, the heat response you feel when touching or eating hot peppers is more of a biological trick. Your skin has one sensory receptor that responds to heat, and capsaicin can bind to that receptor, tricking your body into thinking it’s hot, Bosland says. Capsaicin attaches to fats and oils, but not water, so Bosland suggests reaching for any kind of milk if you eat something too hot. This heat-quenching strategy could be useful as you refine your hot sauce recipe. 

Stats

• Time: 15 to 30 minutes
• Ingredient cost: $10
• Difficulty: easy
• Yield: about 1 pint

Tools

• Cutting board
• Chef’s knife
• Blender
• Storage containers (like old hot sauce bottles or mason jars)
• (Optional) oven
• (Optional) funnel

How to make mild hot sauce

A pepper’s spice level is measured using the Scoville Heat Unit scale (SHU). Pure capsaicin is approximately 16 million SHU, and the Carolina reaper runs at about 1.5 million. This sauce uses jalapeños (about 8,000 SHU) and a roasted poblano (around 1,000 SHU) for a mild concoction with a lot of flavor.

This sauce came out green because all the peppers I used were green, but if you want a red hot sauce, you could use Fresno, Calabrian, or cayenne peppers. Beyond the base pepper-vinegar-salt combo, you can add a few cloves of garlic and some ground cumin if you want to make the flavor more complex. 

Ingredients

• 4 jalapeños
• ½ cup of white vinegar
• 1 teaspoon of kosher salt
• 4 garlic cloves
• Black pepper
• (Optional) 1 poblano pepper
• (Optional) 1 teaspoon of ground cumin

Instructions

1. (Optional) Roast the poblano. Preheat your oven to broil, then wash your poblano pepper. When the oven is ready, roast the pepper for five minutes on each side, 10 minutes total. You’re looking for charred, blackened skin, so feel free to cook for another five or 10 minutes if you’re not satisfied with the results.

2. Prepare your ingredients. Wash your peppers if you haven’t already, then remove their stems and peel the garlic cloves. Cut the jalapeños and poblano into halves or quarters, depending on their size. Since all of this will be blended together, you don’t have to finely chop the ingredients.

3. Blend everything. Put the halved peppers, garlic, white vinegar, and kosher salt into your blender, and blend until all the ingredients are well combined, about one minute.

4. Add seasonings. Despite the name of our publication, cooking can definitely be more of an art than a science sometimes. Before you add anything, taste the blend to figure out what’s missing. After my first spin, I added a teaspoon of ground cumin, eight cranks of black pepper, and another splash of white vinegar. If you think the sauce is too acidic, you can add a bit of sugar. If you want a very runny hot sauce (like Tabasco) you can add more vinegar. You can also dilute the vinegar with water to avoid making the sauce too acidic. 

• Note: This recipe is light on vinegar because I wanted a slightly more viscous sauce. It’s also important to remember that while you can always add more of an ingredient, you can’t add less, so use moderation if you’re unsure about proportions.

5. Blend everything again. Incorporate the seasonings you added by blending the mixture for another minute. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you’re satisfied with how your sauce looks and tastes. 

6. Bottle it up. Once you’re happy with the taste of your homemade hot sauce, it’s time to store it. You can reuse old (clean) hot sauce bottles by putting a funnel into the bottle and pouring your new sauce in. If you have a few mason jars lying around the house, you can use those instead.

How to make spicier hot sauce

For a hotter sauce, I decided to use Thai (or bird’s eye) chilies. These chilies are small and packed with heat, coming in at roughly 100,000 SHU, so I added a red bell pepper to reduce the spice and increase the volume of my sauce. Hot sauces are normally made with white vinegar, apple cider vinegar, or rice vinegar, and I chose the last of those three for this because it’s the sweetest and least acidic—I was concerned about too many conflicting tastes. I also added some soy sauce (and halved the amount of salt so the sauce wasn’t too salty), garlic, and ginger to add a different type of pungent flavor.

Ingredients

• About ⅛ pound of Thai chilies
• 1 red bell pepper
• ½ teaspoon of kosher salt
• 2 garlic cloves
• 1 small knob of ginger
• ½ cup of rice vinegar
• ¼ cup of soy sauce
• (Optional) toasted sesame oil

Instructions

1. Prepare your ingredients. Wash your chilies and pepper, then remove their stems. Roughly chop the bell pepper. The Thai chilies are small enough that you can just leave them whole. Remove the skin from both the garlic and ginger.

2. Blend everything together. Put the peppers, chilies, garlic, ginger, rice vinegar, soy sauce, and kosher salt into your blender, and blend on high until the ingredients are well combined. This may take one to two minutes.

• Note: You may have to stop the blender and scrape down the sides a few times to ensure all ingredients are fully mixed into the sauce.

3. Add seasonings. For this sauce, the only additional seasoning I used was toasted sesame oil. Its flavor can be overwhelming, so add extremely small amounts if you use it, tasting until you reach your preferred flavor.

The post Experiment with spice by making this homemade hot sauce appeared first on Popular Science.

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Any aspiring cook knows that being skilled in the kitchen comes with some organizational challenges. You have to find a place for all the tools you accumulate over time, and figure out how to use all those highly specific ingredients that are now overflowing your cupboards. And then there are the recipes.  

My mother, for instance, has a collection of at least 1,000. Her floor-to-ceiling bookshelf of newspaper clippings, magazines, cookbooks, and website printouts contain enough recipes for a lifetime, but trying to find the instructions to make a specific dish is way more difficult than it needs to be.

As an avid home cook with not enough space to have my own kitchen library, I decided to switch to a recipe manager app. If you’re in a similar situation, you should try one, too. App stores are filled with options, so finding one that works for you will require a lot of downloading and experimentation. Fortunately, I already went through that process so you don’t have to. 

Paprika 3

Paprika 3 has been around for a while and it shows—the user interface, while still friendly, has a blocky design that makes it feel dated. However, the app is comprehensive, which is probably why it’s the top paid food app on iOS and No. 6 on Android.

Unlike some of its competitors, Paprika 3 has no limit on the number of recipes you can store, and its search feature makes it easy to find what you want to cook among a sea of dishes. Adding a new recipe is as simple as tapping the main menu (three lines) in the top left, going to the Browser tab, typing in or copying the URL, and making sure Paprika didn’t make a mistake while importing. The app also helps you shop, allowing you to add all the ingredients from a recipe to your in-app grocery list with one tap. Paprika is the only app on this list with a useful dedicated pantry tab, a separate list for the ingredients you already have at home, which comes in handy so avoid double-buying.

[Related: Quick fixes for common cooking mistakes]

The platform can also assist you while cooking, and you can easily adjust serving sizes by moving a slider, so it’s no problem if you’re making larger or smaller amounts. If a recipe calls for a particular cook time, Paprika will highlight it and let you set up an in-app timer with just two taps. You can also have more than one timer going at once, something any iOS user will greatly appreciate.

Unfortunately, Paprika hasn’t added any major features since 2017, falling behind against its competitors. While other apps use in-app scanners to import paper recipes, Paprika makes you transcribe the steps manually or use a third-party scanner. The app also lacks integration across devices, meaning that you can only access your recipe collection by buying the app for each and every one of your gadgets. This is especially annoying since the desktop version costs a whopping $30. The good news is that because the platform was developed before the subscription model became popular, you can use the app after a one-time payment.

Whisk

Whisk is ridiculously good at almost everything, and it’s free. The app is cleanly designed, user-friendly, and asks about your diet, allergies, and favorite cuisines upon registration—a feature I’m surprised I didn’t see everywhere. 

The app also has a social element, so you can share recipes with fellow Whisk users and review the ones you’ve tried. People in the community can also collaborate and create collections of recipes based on cuisine, meal, cook time, and more. 

Searching for and adding recipes is fast and simple. You can either paste a URL or type some keywords into the app’s built-in search feature (Explore), which helped me find exactly what I was looking for both on the internet at large and among the preparations posted by other Whisk users. In addition, the app’s Chrome extension makes it even easier to search for recipes, and you can save them to the app with one click. You can also build custom recipes within the app, but there is no way to scan them from a paper or book.

Whisk also allows you to easily add ingredients to your grocery list, and thanks to integration with Instacart, Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, and other major stores, you can shop directly for what you need on your favorite platform. The only downside to this feature is that Whisk doesn’t update your grocery list based on what’s in your pantry, so you’ll have to check what you have to make sure you don’t double-buy anything. 

Pestle

Pestle is an iOS-only app and all about aesthetics—the user interface is clean and minimal and the green highlights make navigation easy. The app allows you to add recipes from any website, and if something goes wrong in the process (like a missing ingredient) you can fix it manually. Pestle also lets you scan physical recipes with your device’s camera, though you may get mixed results depending on whether the text is handwritten or typed. 

Unlike Paprika, this platform doesn’t keep tabs on what you have in your pantry, so if you use the app’s shopping list feature, you might end up with an extra onion or two.  

Pestle’s big appeal is its cooking mode. You’ll see each step displayed in big text, with the ingredients highlighted as you need them. The app also highlights certain instructions, and by tapping on them you’ll be able to set timers. Unfortunately, the platform only recognizes time in its numeral form, so if the recipe asks you to bake for “twenty” minutes instead of “20,” you won’t get the option to set a timer.

Pestle brings up instructions one at a time, which is slightly annoying if you want to know the next steps in advance. My saving grace was the voice feature: If you give Pestle access to your microphone, you can move through the recipe by saying “next” or “back,” a no-brainer if you’re dealing with raw meat or anything else that involves messy hands. 

The Discover tab is another of Pestle’s best features. The app keeps track of the sites you get your recipes from and displays the latest dishes posted there. You can save them to your personal collection with one tap.

Yummly

Yummly has an interface that looks nice but doesn’t necessarily provide a good user experience—it feels like a dating app for food recipes. It comes with some pretty interesting features, though. Like Whisk, Yummly asks about dietary restrictions up front before jumping into suggested meals. 

The app’s search feature allows you to apply multiple filters, including liked and disliked foods, to help you find the right recipe. Unfortunately, Yummly’s database does not include paywalled content, so you won’t be able to store anything you’re not already paying for.

What’s more disappointing is that Yummly is more of a portal than a recipe manager, so it doesn’t allow you to edit recipes or add your own. The platform also redirects you to the original web source when you open instructions to third-party recipes, which comes with the added hassle of dealing with individual websites or post layouts every time you want to cook

Yummly’s grocery list feature was the best designed of all the apps, sorting individual ingredients by either store aisle or recipe into collapsible tabs that made shopping effortless. It also links with Instacart, allowing you to get your groceries delivered directly to your door. 

The app can also help you if you don’t know what to cook with what you have at hand—the ingredient scanner lets you take photos of what’s in your fridge and pantry, and provides suggestions for recipes you can make with them. This feature is only available with Yummly Pro, but I was genuinely surprised at how well this worked for produce and eggs. Sadly, the scanner didn’t recognize anything inside a container, like spices. 

But what really sets the app apart from the rest is its original content, which is also a premium feature. Famous chefs like Jet Tila, Carla Hall, and Gregory Gourdet collaborated with the platform to produce recipe collections exploring different cuisines, diets, and techniques. All Yummly Pro recipes come with full instructions (a much better system than linking to the original recipe page) and step-by-step video tutorials. 

People experienced with note-taking apps like Notion (available for Android and iOS) or Obsidian (available for Android and iOS) should also consider using them for recipe management, as they’re incredibly versatile while relatively simple to learn and navigate. Like Yummly and Whisk, using a word processor or notes app means you won’t have access to paywalled sites unless you already have a subscription, but that’s a small price for having complete control over how you manage your recipe collection. 

[Related: The best kitchen gifts for the everyday cook]

You can highlight ingredients and use a few keyboard shortcuts to get a shopping list together. You won’t be able to scroll through the instructions with your voice, but the Google suite, and Notion and Obsidian apps are all free and flexible, which means your system can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. For example, you could use a Google Sheet or a Notion template to do metric conversions for you, or you can use a master Google Doc with direct links to your recipes and use Google Keep integration to keep a shopping list always at hand. 

And if none of these apps convinced you, there truly is nothing wrong with storing all your recipes physically, as long as you’re able to keep the collection organized. Print out your recipes, store them in a binder, and label them however you like. If you’re into meal planning, you can always use a planner, and writing your shopping list on a sticky note is a foolproof way to ensure you don’t forget anything. Sometimes, it’s hard to beat good old pen and paper. 

The post 5 recipe apps to help organize your meals appeared first on Popular Science.

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In 1896, Swedish physicist and chemist Svante Arrhenius predicted that an increase of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere would lead to a temperature increase. Five years later, his colleague Nils Gustaf Ekholm coined the term “greenhouse effect.” But it took over 80 years for people to seriously begin paying attention to their findings.

In the background, though, researchers were still projecting and collecting data on climate change. Studies published in the 1960s and ‘70s examining carbon dioxide’s relationship to the Earth’s average surface temperature led to the United Nations forming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and worldwide awareness of the issue.

Unfortunately, not all that data was used for the greater good. In 2015, Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times published an investigative report together detailing oil giant Exxon’s expansive knowledge of the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming way back in 1977. According to the account, the company funded research into carbon dioxide emissions and rising temperatures for about a decade before dramatically curtailing the program and beginning its strategy of climate denial.

ExxonMobil (the two oil companies merged in 1999) responded to the paper with a statement: “We unequivocally reject allegations that ExxonMobil suppressed climate change research contained in media reports that are inaccurate distortions of ExxonMobil’s nearly 40-year history of climate research. We understand that climate risks are real. The company has continuously, publicly and openly researched and discussed the risks of climate change, carbon life cycle analysis and emissions reductions.”

[Related: ExxonMobil’s ‘net-zero’ goals don’t address its biggest source of carbon emissions]

But a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University wasn’t convinced. In 2017, Geoffrey Supran, now an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, and his advisor, science historian Naomi Oreskes, published a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters examining those documents. Supran found just the opposite—that Exxon funded climate change research in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s behind closed doors but questioned the findings publicly.

Five years later, Supran and Oreskes have published a follow-up review outlining exactly what Exxon learned about climate change, regardless of their public statements. It’s the first systematic analysis of any fossil fuel company’s climate projections and was published in the journal Science on January 12. Here are four of the bombshells they found.

1. Exxon’s models on fossil fuels and climate change were super accurate 

Supran says he was taken aback when he first overlaid Exxon’s climate projections with the actual data. “I had this moment of pause when I actually plotted it, and you see all these lines land so tightly around the red line of reality,” he explains.

Over the last 40 years, the company’s models accurately predicted the increase in global surface temperature over time at an average of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. It was also on the ball with projections on the increase in global temperature with radiative forcing, a metric that measures how much of the sun’s energy remains in Earth’s atmosphere. In fact, Exxon’s models performed better than average when compared to other climate projections from that era.   

2. The researchers correctly rejected the global cooling hypothesis, even as the company promoted it

Of the 14 Exxon climate projections that Supran examined for his paper, not a single one was massively wrong. “They all excluded the possibility of no human-caused warming,” he says. “The curves always went up. The only question was exactly how quickly they rose.”

One chart Supran analyzed was a long-term look that tracked global temperature over the last 150,000 years. This graph was presented to Exxon executives in 1977 and accurately mapped the average global temperature. At the meeting, company scientists warned the executives that emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere could have catastrophic results. Yet, over the following decades, the company publicly pushed the myth of global cooling.

3. Exxon knew when the world would first notice the effects of climate change

In 1995, the IPCC announced it had irrevocable proof that human activities were fueling climate change, a fact it’s reiterated in each new study. Supran analyzed 10 internal reports and one peer-reviewed publication to find Exxon’s estimate: Eight of the 11 predicted the world would detect changes by 2000. But publicly, ExxonMobil executives only acknowledged human-made climate change in 2007.

4. The commissioned studies correctly described the amount of carbon dioxide that would lead to catastrophic climate change

Climate scientists measure atmospheric carbon dioxide in parts per million, which measures the mass of a particular substance compared to the mass of the mixture it’s a part of. For most of human history, carbon dioxide has remained below 300 parts per million. While the Paris Climate Agreement, which resolved to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, did not set a limit on parts per million of carbon dioxide, another United Nations report found that a level of 450 parts per million would give humanity a 50 percent chance of staying under the Paris temperature threshold.

[Related: Renewable energy is climbing in the US, but so are our emissions—here’s why]

When Exxon scientists wanted to know how much carbon dioxide they could reasonably emit, they opted to use an upper limit of 550 parts per million for 2 degrees Celsius. They calculated that somewhere between 251 and 716 metric gigatons (the world emitted 37 metric gigatons total in 2021) was the most humanity could burn before crossing that threshold. More recent estimates have narrowed that range to between 442 and 651 metric gigatons, showing that yet again, the world’s largest oil and gas company understood climate science as well as anyone.

The post 4 ways Exxon predicted climate change, but still denied it appeared first on Popular Science.

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Modern science is a relatively new phenomenon that dates to the early 1900s. So says Russell Funk, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, who notes that scientific thought progressed dramatically through the mid-20th century. Marie Curie won her first Nobel Prize for her work on radioactivity in 1903, Einstein’s theories of relativity date to 1905 and 1915, and Watson and Crick published their paper on the structure of DNA in 1953. But in the last 65 years, even as science has grown massively, the findings that shape our understanding of the world stagnated.

Sociologists from the Universities of Minnesota and Arizona suggest that these types of results, which they called “disruptive” findings, have not kept up with the growth of science since 1945, as they reported in a paper published in the journal Nature on January 4. The rate of big discoveries decreased across all fields measured, including social sciences, hard sciences, medicine, and technology.

The word disruptive can have many meanings, says Funk, the lead researcher on the new paper. “It’s a very particular way of measuring,” he says. “Are you carving out and pushing new directions in science? Or are you building off and refining existing stuff?”

To measure a paper’s disruption, Funk and his collaborators developed a scale called the CD index, which they used to track citations on about 25 million pieces of published research. The index compares the citations of one paper to those of papers that reference it within five years after publication. If the papers largely cite the same material, then the authors determined that the reports were “consolidating research,” which the CD index shows using a negative number. However, if the later generation of papers does not reference the same sources as the original paper, then the CD index considers them to be disruptive, and the number will be positive.

[Related: 10 huge machines that changed science]

While past research on the topic was mostly limited to a single subject, this paper tackles the question across frontiers of science as diverse as astronomy and zoology.

The study finds that although the number of papers published rose dramatically from 1945 to 2010, the number of disruptive papers did not.  For instance, while there were about 16,000 medical papers published in 1945, there were more than 510,000 published in 2010. Over the same time period, the average CD index of medical papers fell from 0.21 to almost nothing, signaling a dramatic shift towards consolidating work. The drop was sharpest in the social sciences, where the average CD index started at 0.51 and fell all the way to 0.04, but all areas converged toward zero by 2010. The paper states that this drop is not actually due to less disruptive work being done—the number of highly disruptive papers each year was consistent over the time period investigated—but instead, the massive amount of consolidating publications is diluting the proportion of highly disruptive papers.   

Funk notes that it’s still somewhat unclear why the increase in papers published hasn’t led to an increase in disruptive findings since 1945. One possible explanation the team considered was that more obvious scientific discoveries, which the researchers called “low-hanging fruit,” have become rarer over time, leading to less disruption. (It was easier for Isaac Newton to describe gravity than it was for Enrico Fermi and his team to invent the nuclear reactor, for instance.) However, if those low-hanging fruit findings are slowly vanishing, their disappearances wouldn’t have happened simultaneously across all areas of science, Funk explains. He says he thinks there’s still plenty of low-hanging fruit out there.

Why else is there a decline? It’s not just a simple cause-and-effect, Funk says, but likely a combination of two main factors: the academic environment and the publishing system. 

[Related: How to tell science from pseudoscience]

First, as scientific fields have developed, it takes longer and longer for new experts to learn all they need to make important discoveries. Philip Kitcher, a retired professor of philosophy at Columbia University who was not affiliated with the study, agrees with this view. “Look, in some areas of science, you don’t get to do your own experiments until you’ve done not only an undergraduate and a Ph.D., but a few post-docs,” he says.

Beyond simply having more to learn, Funk and Kitcher both point to the current publishing system as a large contributor. Funk’s other research includes proposals on reworked grant systems, an effort to fight against the publish-or-perish culture found in many fields. Kitcher says researchers should consider thinking “more soberly and carefully” about how they allocate their time. “In some areas, some scientists and groups of scientists are being pressured to publish too much. The solution for that is to do more qualitative and detailed studies.” 

In fact, Kitcher wished that the Nature paper itself had been slightly more qualitative and less reliant on a numeric scale. He suggests that by analyzing the decrease in the rate of highly disruptive findings, Funk is underestimating the importance of consolidating research, which both supports past disruptive results and leads to future ones. In a 1675 letter, Newton said he owed his success to “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Kitcher preferred a different expression: “Sometimes the giants stand on vast pyramids of dwarves.”

Despite their different approaches to looking at the progression of science, Kitcher agrees with the conclusions Funk and his colleagues reached regarding the current state of publishing. “In some fields to do their jobs, people are doing research that’s not going to add up to much,” Kitcher explains.

The effect he found isn’t necessarily a bad thing for science, Funk says, because if every paper is disruptive, then no progress can be made. He just hopes that science, long known for its resistance to change, might be willing to reconsider some of its methodologies. “Maybe the discoveries of tomorrow are just going to look different than the discoveries of today. But at the end of the day, we don’t care about papers or patents—we care about ideas,” or what he calls the “purest” form of science. 

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