TechnologyCougar

Line drying clothes to reduce carbon emissions is a start—not a finish. Pexels Soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, diseases on the rise. With such high stakes, it’s not surprising that climate change tends to trigger a sense of fear. In fact, one recent, widely-shared story about climate change in New York Magazine opens with the words, “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” “The article paints a bleak picture,” says Seth Wynes, a researcher in the Geography Department at the University of British Columbia. “I think it’s important to realize that we have a lot of choice in the planet that we want to have future generations inheriting. Even if we’ve missed the ideal scenario, which is no climate warming—because we're already locked into some climate warming—we have a much better future in store for us if we act quickly and make significant changes.” Some researchers suggest that we have just a few years to start fighting global warming in earnest if we want to avoid...

Flowers of the multiverse The main reason some physicists obsess over the beginning of the universe is because so much evidence points to there being one. But what if our universe grooved within an ageless multiverse—like a patch of ground from which countless flowers bloom. In this model, each universe has a big bang and keeps its own time. In the most popular version, each universe might even have its own version of physics too. Infinite possibilities yield infinite results: Some say this theory explains life itself. We’d have to be extremely lucky for a single big bang to create a universe with the perfect conditions for life as we know it, but if new universes are springing up all the time, it’s no wonder one of those cosmic neighborhoods turned out just like ours. The universes in this garden grow or wither according to their own rules, while the multiverse around them goes on without a beginning or an end. It’s an elegant blend of change and timelessness, a floral brew many ...

Feel free to watch the solar eclipse—but make sure not to burn your eyes. M. Druckmüller, NASA To watch the solar eclipse on August 21, you could invest in a pair of eclipse glasses. But high demand means high prices—and some of the only reputable retailers are sold out entirely. For a cheaper option, build a pinhole camera, which projects a harmless (but still delightful) image of the sun onto a blank surface. Making a pinhole camera can be as simple as punching a hole in a piece of paper: The sun projects through the gap to throw an image onto another surface (like a second sheet of paper). By adjusting the position of the pinhole, you can focus the image, although you can't exactly get an HD picture. Turning a cardboard box that fits over your head into a pinhole projector will reduce light interference and give you a better closeup, but that's not an experience you can share with your friends. A pair of binoculars, however, can project and magnify an image all a...

Spring has finally arrived, and as I look out my window at the sprawling urban park next door, I see birds in their best feather tuxedos chitter at potential mates and runners in their safety neon chatter with friends. A slight breeze ripples through the scene. The view, I assure you, could not be better, save for just one thing: The wind isn’t just ruffling the new leaves of my neighborhood trees. It’s also sending a shiver through the strips of two ragged plastic bags ensnared in the branches. Each year, Americans use 380 billion plastic bags, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The plastic in these bags, which is manufactured from fossil fuels, requires approximately 12 million barrels of oil annually, which is enough energy to power 1,400 international flights aboard a 747. And because plastic bags can’t be recycled in your household bin (you have to drop them off at special sites, lest they destroy standard sorting machines), they end up sandwiched in our landfil...