James' World 2

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To my astonishment, the apartment stayed tolerable all weekend. The tile floors seemed to emanate coolness. The greenery surrounding my windows blocked direct sunlight and helped bring down the temperature of the outside air. I didn’t have a thermometer, but my guess is that the temperature inside never got above 80 degrees.

“You saw for yourself the power of passive cooling,” buildings scientist Alexandra Rempel told me. “It really can be amazingly, amazingly effective.

Rempel, an assistant professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Oregon, studies how to design buildings that can stay cool “passively,” without relying on air conditioning. The techniques that helped my apartment beat the heat — shade, building materials, strategic ventilation — can be used in almost any home, she explained.

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(Michael Parkin for The Washington Post)

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One of my favorite scientific experiments involved flying four clocks twice around the world. In 1971, physicists Joseph Hafele and Richard Keating took atomic clocks – capable of losing no more than one second every 30 million years – on a commercial jet, flying first west and then east around the globe before returning to their laboratory in Washington DC. There, they compared the time on their well-traveled timepieces to a set of clocks that had remained static. Remarkably, the clocks disagreed: the act of travel had seemingly altered the passage of time.

Another prediction of relativity is that your head is ever so slightly older than your feet

The experiment was a test of a core principle of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which is that time is not universal. The faster you travel, the slower time will pass for you. The effect is small – take a transatlantic flight from London to New York and your watch will be a ten-millionth of a second behind one left on the ground – but nonetheless, you’ll have aged a fraction more slowly than if you’d stayed at home. And Hafele and Keating’s clocks could measure it. 

Another prediction of relativity says that gravity has an effect too. Get further from the Earth’s gravitational pull, and time will speed up. This affects our own bodies: it means your head is ever so slightly older than your feet. Once again, the effect is incredibly small, but at greater distances from Earth, it becomes important. The GPS system that we all depend on to navigate, with its satellites 20,000km (12,400 miles) above the Earth, needs to take this into account in order to work properly.

Despite these phenomena, the Earth is, at the end of the day, a small planet in a big Universe. Around black holes, massive objects whose gravitational pull dwarves that of any planet, these relativistic effects become far more pronounced.

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Traveling into a black hole would do strange things to time (Credit: Edouard Taufenbach/Bastien Pourtout)

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If you live in an area with abundant sunlight—hello, fellow southern Californians—you’ve probably thought about installing solar panels on your roof to save on your electric bill. But with so much information, it can be hard to know where to start.

Look no further—start here

Between the different types of panels, financing, inverters, and other jargon, researching solar energy can feel overwhelming at first. That’s why I recommend starting at a solar quote comparison site like EnergySage, Solar-Estimate, or SolarReviews (the latter two are run by the same people).

Both EnergySage and Solar-Estimate act as educational resources and comparison shopping tools to help you field bids. I’ve been using EnergySage, which is chock-full of articles explaining the technology involved. You can also watch videos, look at their buyer’s guide, or start getting quotes. Their Solar 101 series of articles will help you understand the basics, and when you’re done, scroll through the site’s “Learn About Solar” sidebar to read even more articles that’ll give you a feel for the process.

To understand what your home requires, though, you’ll need to look up how much electricity you use. If your bill tells you the average amount of electricity you use each month, make a note of that, or calculate a quick and dirty average yourself. The more information you have on your usage, the more accurate an estimate you can get from installers.

Your energy usage will determine how many panels you’ll need on your roof. Too few, and you’ll still have to pay the electric company for whatever extra power you use. Too many, and you’ll waste money on panels you don’t need—though the electric company will give you credits for any energy you don’t use, should you one day need electricity from the grid.

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Behold: the power of the sun. Vivint Solar/Unsplash

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If this year’s turkey seems over brined, blame your brain.

The question of when salty becomes too salty is decided by a special set of neurons in the front of the brain, researchers report in the journal Cell.

A separate set of neurons in the back of the brain adjusts your appetite for salt, the researchers showed in a series of experiments on mice.

“Sodium craving and sodium tolerance are controlled by completely different types of neurons,” says Yuki Oka, an author of the study and a professor of biology at Caltech.

The finding could have health implications because salt ingestion is a “major issue” in many countries, including the United States, says Nirupa Chaudhari, a professor of physiology and biology at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.

Too much salt can cause high blood pressure and raise the risk for heart disease and stroke, says Chaudhari, who was not involved in the study.

Craving, to a point

The study sought to explain the complicated relationship that people and animals have with salt, also known as sodium chloride.

We are happy to drink sodas, sports drinks, and even tap water that contain a little salt, Oka says. “But if you imagine a very high concentration of sodium like ocean water, you really hate it.”

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About a third of the food produced around the world goes to waste, and much of it ends up in landfills—where it becomes a source of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Eliminating waste is the ultimate solution, but food scraps will always remain. For that, there is a solution that nearly anyone can do: composting.

Composting turns rotting garbage into a valuable soil enhancer that helps plants thrive. Farmers call it “black gold.” 

And now more cities are implementing curbside composting to help them meet their sustainability goals. New York is currently rolling out a mandatory composting program that will soon be effect in Brooklyn and throughout Manhattan by next year. Washington, D.C., and Chicago are piloting curbside composting programs, and Seattle and San Francisco have been successfully composting residents’ food scraps for years. 

But you don’t have to wait for a city-wide program to begin composting in your backyard to taking food scraps to a community bin. 

“Don’t be afraid of it. It’s relatively easy. It’s not without its missteps, but those are easily learned and corrected,” says Bob Rynk, lead author of The Composting Handbook and a professor emeritus at SUNY Cobleskill. 

What happens in a compost pile?

Food turns into compost through the hard work of small microorganisms like bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. 

“When you have a compost pile, you become a microbe farmer. You’re managing microbes,” says Rhonda Sherman, a composting expert at North Carolina State University. “And what do microbes need? They need the same things we do. Which is air, water, food, shelter.”

On a small scale, in your backyard or neighborhood, a compost pile should consist of three things: food scraps, water, and dry, woody material like yard trimmings or raked leaves.

Yard trimmings are frequently referred to as “browns” and are high in carbon. Food scraps are called “greens” and are high in nitrogen. A compost pile should typically have twice as many browns as it does greens.

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Compost is made from a mix of food scraps and yard waste such as raked leaves. When added to soil, it helps plants thrive. Photograph by Severin Wohlleben, laif/Redux

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/how-to-compost?utm_source=pocket_collection_story

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Check out bioGraphic for a long read of this problem.

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Every spring, as the daylight lengthens and the weather warms, rivers of birds flow north across the Midwest. They fly high and at night, navigating via the stars and their own internal compasses: kinglets and creepers, woodpeckers and warblers, sparrows and shrikes.

They come from as far as Central America, bound for Minnesotan wetlands, Canadian boreal forests, and Arctic tundra. They migrate over towns and prairies and cornfields; they soar over the black tongue of Lake Michigan in such dense aggregations that they register on radar. Upon crossing the water, many encounter Chicago, where they alight in whatever greenery they can find—office parks and rooftop shrubs and scraggly street trees and the sparse landscaping outside apartment-complex lobbies.

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Matt Dutile / GalleryStock

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Washing dishes is awful. It’s the kind of chore that never ends—pretty much every time you eat or drink, you make something dirty. Thankfully, a woman named Josephine Cochrane, who was really concerned about her fancy china getting chipped while being hand-washed, stepped up and invented the first dishwasher.

More than 100 years have passed since Cochrane revolutionized kitchen cleanup and got people hand-cranking their dishes clean. Now, other than the brainpower and Tetris skill you need to load the machine, you’ve only got to put some detergent in the soap compartment and press “start.”

Sure, Cochrane’s invention saves you time, but you still have to buy detergent. Make your own dishwasher tablets, though, and you’ll save some money. It’s easy, makes cleaning up a bit more exciting, and will leave your most likely not-so-fancy china shiny and smelling of fresh lemon… or whatever you want.

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Say goodbye to smelly dishwashers. Photo by alexraths via Deposit Photos

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