Plenty of articles about gardening “hacks” assume that everyone has access to truckloads of nutritious soil and enough space for plenty of plants. This will not be one of them. We know these gardening staples aren’t always easy to come by, especially if you live in a city. Thankfully, there are some veggies that can regenerate using water and sunlight alone.
The premise behind regrowing vegetable scraps in water is simple: plants are generally built to harness energy from the sun and nutrients from the earth. A small glass or dish of water won’t provide the same nutrients as hearty soil, but plants can still use it to grow new tasty shoots or soil-ready roots.
Plants that will grow shoots
You can easily regrow the edible stems and leaves of some common kitchen veggies by simply placing their inedible base in water. For best results, position these stumps on a sunny windowsill and change the water frequently.
Lettuce and cabbage
Chances are, you usually discard that tough white chunk at the base of a head of cabbage or lettuce once you’ve torn off all its leaves for your salad. But by placing this part in water, you can coax out some new leaves. Put it in a wide mug or shallow bowl with an inch or two of water, leaf-side up, and check it often to make sure the outside isn’t getting slimy. Within a week or two, new baby leaves should start sprouting from the center of the stump. Your homegrown head won’t return to its full leafy glory, but this can be a great way to grow garnishes or supplement a larger dish.
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You might not get enough mint to sustain your mojito habit this way, but you can certainly grow some starter plants. DepositVad / Depositphotos
One of the most frustrating hobbies I ever took up was archery, but not because it’s hard to hit a target on the wall (it is, but I got pretty good at that). My problem was that one of the popular ways to go out and have fun with archery was to do “3D shoots,” where you would have to shoot at a series of statues of animals, each positioned at an unknown distance.
Estimating distance turned out to be my downfall. If you don’t have a good sense of how far away the fake deer is, you’ll end up shooting way over its back or burying your arrow under the ground beneath its feet. At the time, I assumed that estimating distance was less a learnable skill and more a gut feeling. Hence, my surprise when I recently came across a quick eyeball-and-mental-math trick that allows anyone to estimate distance pretty accurately.
The technique involves some gut-level estimation, but a much easier type. Then you just multiply by 10. Here’s how it works:
Hold your thumb in front of you (with your arm fully outstretched), and close one eye. Line up your thumb with an object whose size you have some sense of (for example, a car).
Without moving your thumb, close your open eye, and open the other one. Your thumb will appear to be in a different place. (see article for next steps)
Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope came online in 2022, astronomers’ jaws hit the floor.
“I remember thinking, This just can’t be right!” says Mike Boylan-Kolchin, a University of Texas Austin astronomer.
The observations he’s referring to would, to you and me, seem like little smudgy red blobs among a field of other smudges and blobs. But in his eyes, they represented a potential challenge to the story scientists have painstakingly constructed about the formative years of our universe.
That is, some time after the Big Bang, around 12-plus billion years ago, when the universe went from a dark, diffuse place full of gas to a light-filled universe populated by stars and galaxies. This is the era that laid the foundation for everything to come — including our solar system, and you and me.
Scientists had some theories about what happened during this crucial period, but the new telescope put them to the test by observing regions of space humans have never seen before.
And if the observations were correct, Boylan-Kolchin thought, “everything we know about cosmology is wrong at some level.” Cosmology is the study of how our universe evolved from the earliest times onward. So, the potential to be wrong about it “was pretty unpalatable,” he says.
Boylan-Kolchin was agog, but not alone in his thoughts. “I cannot even get across how mind-boggling the past year has been of looking at JWST [James Webb Space Telescope] data,” says Caitlin Casey, also an astronomer at UT Austin. “We have been seeing all sorts of wild, wild things in the early universe.”
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The James Webb Space Telescope can produce “deep field” images that reveal the history of the cosmos. NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology), and R. Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh). Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
The ancient Babylonians were a remarkable bunch. Among many extraordinary achievements, they found a now-famous mathematical solution to an unpleasant challenge: paying tax.
The particular problem for the ordinary working Babylonian was this: Given a tax bill that has to be paid in crops, by how much should I increase the size of my field to pay it?
This problem can be written down as a quadratic equation of the form Ax2+Bx+C=0. And it is solved with this formula:
Today, over 4,000 years later, millions of people have the quadratic formula etched into their minds thanks to the way mathematics is taught across the planet.
But far fewer people can derive this expression. That’s also due to the way mathematics is taught—the usual derivation relies on a mathematical trick, called “completing the square,” that is far from intuitive. Indeed, after the Babylonians, it took mathematicians many centuries to stumble across this proof.
Before and since, mathematicians have found a wide range of other ways to derive the formula. But all of them are also tricky and non-intuitive.
So it’s easy to imagine that mathematicians must have exhausted the problem. There just can’t be a better way to derive the quadratic formula.
Enter Po-Shen Loh, a mathematician at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who has found a simpler way—one that appears to have gone unnoticed these 4,000 years.
In the 1970s, officials in New York City banned in-sink kitchen garbage disposals over concerns about aging sewer systems and discharge of raw organic refuse into nearby rivers. Paper-waste recycling programs dominated conservation efforts at the time, and a green-waste management solution seemed less urgent without the looming specter of climate change. Plus, disposers weren’t an easy sell: the pulverizing devices were noisy and costly to install, their blades the stuff of kitchen-sink horror. (In fact, garbage disposers don’t use blades at all: spinning “lugs” or impellers use centrifugal force to continuously force food particles into a grind ring, which then liquefies the waste and flushes it into the sewer system.)
According to a 1997 Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) report, only about 25 percent of NYC households had a disposer in 1971. Organic waste was “the next big frontier” for the city, explains former First Deputy Mayor of New York City Norman Steisel, who played a key role in the legalization of garbage disposers during the Dinkins administration (1990-1993), and who served as Sanitation Commissioner for many years. Though Steisel recognized that the city was dependent on landfills and emitting sizable greenhouse gases, the city was still sorting out the details of its recycling program.
Steisel encouraged the Department of Sanitation and the DEP to work together, promoting life-cycle studies that showed both the financial and ecological potential of disposers—research that would shape legislation ultimately passed during the Giuliani administration. The city installed more than 200 of the devices in select city apartments for a 21-month trial run; they then compared apartment units that had disposers with disposer-less units in the same building. Careful analyses from this study and others formed the basis of DEP’s report: the projected impact of citywide disposal legalization was minimal, and the Department estimated a $4 million savings in solid waste export costs.
City officials lifted the ban on garbage disposers in 1997. Twenty years later, though, their adoption is slower here than almost anywhere else in the country. Why are New Yorkers so reluctant to install garbage disposers—and what’s at stake if we continue to dispose all of our trash curbside?
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Can you calculate 85 percent of 24 in your head?This is not as hard as it sounds. If you know how to halve numbers and divide by 10 you can probably do this in your head. This video explains how to calculate many percentages as a combination of ones that are easier to compute.
From the outside, it looked as though Adam Alter was gliding along.
At 28, he had earned a doctorate in psychology from Princeton and soon afterward landed a job as a tenure-track professor at the N.Y.U. Stern School of Business.
But he felt stuck. Preparing to teach while simultaneously doing research became overwhelming, especially after having just emerged from five intense years of graduate school. And although he was often surrounded by people in New York City, he missed having a close network of friends.
He likened it to being trapped on a conveyor belt. “I was making a career for myself,” he said, “but I wasn’t sure if those were the ways I wanted to succeed.”
Dr. Alter, who has now been a professor for 15 years, has devoted much of his career to researching the notion of feeling stuck. In 2020, he surveyed hundreds of people on the topic, and every respondent said they felt stalled in at least one area: failed creative pursuits, stagnant careers, unsatisfying relationships, an inability to save money — the list went on.
Why we get stuck
Falling into a rut or feeling stagnant from time to time is a universal experience, said Dr. Alter, whose latest book, “Anatomy of a Breakthrough,” offers 100 ways to get unstuck.
Why? When tackling any long-term goal, you will inevitably hit a plateau, he said. And because some goals don’t have clear end points, it can be difficult to feel like you’re making progress.
Other sticking points can originate from big life changes like illness, having a baby, moving or being laid off. Dr. Alter found that people tend to be especially self-reflective when approaching a new decade, for example at ages 29 or 39, and that these turning points can feel overwhelming when life isn’t going as planned.
Hidden cameras are being found in hotel rooms, house rentals, cruise ships, and even airplane bathrooms, leaving many travelers to wonder:
“Could a hidden camera be watching me?”
Spycams, as they’re called, are getting smaller, harder to find and easier to buy.
From alarm clocks to air fresheners, water bottles and toothbrush holders, cameras come embedded in common household items that seamlessly blend with home decor. They can be purchased in shops or online, and through retailers like Amazon and Walmart.
And rather than having to retrieve the camera to obtain the recording, owners can stream live images straight to their phones, said Pieter Tjia, CEO of the Singapore-based tech services company OMG Solutions.
Even worse, voyeurs can sell the footage to porn sites, where it can be viewed thousands of times.
It’s no wonder why websites, from YouTube to TikTok, are filled with videos of people recommending simple ways to find hidden cameras.
But do these suggestions work?
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Reports of spy cams in hotels and home rentals have many travelers on edge. Nadia_bormotova | Istock | Getty Images
It feels so good to be able to do something with the things we’d normally discard. Coffee grounds as rose fertilizer and clementine peels saved for DIY candles come to mind, not to mention composting in general.
If you’re a regular or occasional tea drinker, you can add your tea bags to the list of garbage you shouldn’t throw out just yet. Here are some ways to re-use them post brew:
Add a hint of flavor to rice or grains. Hang your used tea bags in boiling water to infuse your food with a touch of flavor. Think jasmine tea with rice or chai tea with oatmeal.
Protect house plants from fungal disease by re-brewing a used tea bag and using the weak tea (cooled) to water your plants.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
You might not get enough mint to sustain your mojito habit this way, but you can certainly grow some starter plants. DepositVad / Depositphotos
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