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How aerial firefighters battle blazes from the skies

An Erickson Aero Tanker aircraft, left, dropping fire retardant. (Shelby Snow /)

The most dramatic way to fight a fire is from the sky.

An air tanker may fly about 150 feet off the ground at 161 miles per hour and can paint up to a mile-long line of retardant on the ground. A big helicopter could dump as much as 2,000 gallons of water to try to save a house. And smokejumpers fling themselves from airplanes 3,000 feet above their landing area below to snuff out a small fire in a remote area before it gets bigger.

Right now, California is home to two historically enormous blazes: the SCU and LNU Lightning Complex fires. The state is using aircraft to combat the two huge conflagrations. “They keep swapping positions for the second- and third-largest wildfires in our state history, unfortunately,” Brice Bennett, a spokesperson for CalFire, told Popular Science earlier this week. All the fires in the state right now cover an area larger than 1.25 million acres. “We’re dealing with just an incredible situation,” he comments. As of today, aerial assets in California have dropped 3.35 million gallons of fire retardant and 4.69 million gallons of water, according to Bennett.

California, of course, uses aircraft—it has both its own fleet and can employ contractors—to mount full-court presses on fires, but the practice is certainly not limited to combating burns in the Golden State. Here’s how these aerial operations work, and what it’s like battling blazes from the air.

Draw a perimeter

There’s an important, counterintuitive fact to know about those big planes full of retardant: “Air tankers don’t put out fires,” says Kevin Hopf, the chief pilot for an outfit called 10 Tanker. His company flies DC-10s that used to carry passengers; the seats and overhead bins and other equipment have all been removed. His aircraft has five external tanks that carry retardant and three big clamshell doors on the bottom, each about 22 feet long, which open to deploy the red stuff.

For the most part, tankers like the one Hopf flies drop a line of retardant not on the fire itself, but in a place that will help steer or contain the blaze. The “firefighting mantra,” Hopf says, is simple: “anchor, flank, and pinch.”

The first step is to begin the line of retardant at some type of anchoring area that can stop the fire, a starting point such as a bunch of rocks. Then comes containment. “You flank the fire, on both sides, and you keep running up the flanks until you get ahead of it, and then you start trying to pinch it off,” Hopf explains. Pilots will then begin bringing the two flanking lines towards each other.

That’s a standard firefighting tactic, although he notes that truly enormous fires—maybe 50 miles wide, 100 miles long—would be impossible to anchor, flank, and pinch. “There’s not enough air tankers in the world to do that,” he says. “Now you start going for structure protection.”

On those occasions, on a big fire when he’s tasked with guarding structures, “you hope to find out the next day that they’re all still standing,” he says. “We very seldom see our work.”

A tanker fighting a fire in Arizona in June. (John Hall - JDH Images/)

And it’s decidedly not about thrill-seeking or cultivating a cowboy image, says Brent Connor, the senior captain for Erickson Aero Tanker. Their fleet is mostly MD-87 aircraft that also used to be passenger-carrying airliners. “When I teach people how to do this,” he says, “I tell them that if your adrenaline is pumping, you’re probably doing something wrong.”

Deploy water from the sky

While the airplanes usually carry the red retardant, helicopters generally schlep water, which they dump on flames from above. Tanner McInnes flies a small, light helicopter—a Bell 407—for a Missoula, Montana company called Minuteman Aviation. If he’s dispatched to fly off towards a little fire in the forest—it might just be smoke spotted by a lookout, probably the result of a lightning strike—he’ll shuttle a fire manager in the front seat next to him, and two firefighters, part of a helitack crew, in the back.

After assessing the fire from the sky, he might land the helicopter nearby and drop off the firefighters. The manager stays on board. If the authorities want him to drop water on the fire, the manager will install a bucket that hangs from the bottom of the chopper, and McInnes will grab what he can from a pond or river. (He says he’s never picked up any fish.) And since he needs to be able to stick his neck out and look down while he’s flying with that bucket, the manager can remove the chopper’s side door and stash it inside. “It’s actually nice, because it’s hot generally when we’re flying,” he says.

He tends to carry about 180 gallons of water in a bucket. Still, he emphases that “aviation does not put out fires—it’s the firefighters on the ground.” Take a small fire, he says, by way of example, with one burning tree: he’ll douse it with water, only to find that the flames have sprung back up again. “It’s amazing how much heat there is: A lot of times, if lightning strikes, they hit the tree, and they smolder for days before they actually show themselves,” he says. To take care of the problem for real, the firefighters on the ground might cut down the tree, and break it up, and stir up the soil to make sure everything is out, and dig lines around it.

An Erickson helicopter in Greece in 2009. (Erickson, Inc/)

While McInnes’ chopper carries its water in a bucket, that’s not the only way to do it. Ken Chapman flies a strange-looking helicopter for Erickson Incorporated called an S-64 Aircrane, and to get the wet stuff on board, all he has to do is submerge a snorkel about 18 inches deep in a body of water. It sucks the water up through a hose, needing just about 40 seconds to fill up with around 2,000 gallons of fresh water.

When it’s time to drop the payload on a fire, Chapman’s goal is to deploy it from about 150 feet off the ground, flying at some 69 miles per hour. With that setup, as the water falls through the sky, it “loses its forward momentum, and rains down on the fire,” Chapman says. Dropping the water that way means that ideally there’s no “shadowing,” which is when the water smacks into just one side of the target. “If you come in low and fast, you’re going to paint on one side of the trees and stuff, and the other side is going to be dry,” he explains.

The most intense fire he’s ever flown was the 2018 Carr Fire in Redding, California. “The thing that was amazing to me was how fast it went, and it was burning in the city,” he recalls. “This thing was coming into subdivisions. It reached a point, where they just said, ‘Go save a house.’ And you’d get a load of water and you’d come in and dump, trying to protect a house, and by the time you went and got water and came back, the house was gone.”

Jump out of the plane

Not all aircraft drop retardant or water. Some deploy people known as smokejumpers. Pat McGunagle is a jumper based in West Yellowstone, Montana. He’s made more than 60 jumps, although the vast majority of those have been for practice—he’s a relative newcomer to the field. The jump height out of the Dornier 228 airplane he and the others fling themselves out of is 3,000 feet above the ground, although smokejumpers who use an older, round-style chute do it from 1,500 feet.

Jumpers aim to arrive quickly at a blaze in the woods—most of which get sparked by lightning—and deal with it before it spreads. They deploy in groups of two. McGunagle will jump out of the plane carrying supplies that include drinking water, food like beef jerky or peanut butter, solution for his contact lenses, and a pound of coffee. The coffee, of course, is for starting the day. “The youngest guy on the load has to make the coffee every morning,” he says.

Other gear, like chainsaws or Pulaski tools, comes down as cargo from the same plane from about 150 feet above the terrain.

To put the fire out, he says, you have to “dig and stir.” He’ll even use his arm to make sure it’s truly out. That works like this: “Stick your hand down in there, all the way to your armpit, down this scary, black, smoking hole, and find that little bit of fire down there,” he says, “and scoop it out and stir it.” That’s the way to make sure it’s truly extinguished—with work not from the sky, but on the dirty ground.

The CDC’s new COVID-19 testing guidelines could make the pandemic worse

Experts worry that the decision is based more in politics than scientific fact. (Photographer: James Gathany/)

Follow all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage here, including tips on cleaning groceries, ways to tell if your symptoms are just allergies, and a tutorial on making your own mask.

American policy surrounding COVID-19 has been nearly universally confusing, and yesterday things became even more mangled. A controversial change in the CDC’s coronavirus testing policy makes it so that fewer people require COVID-19 tests, even as rates and deaths climb across the country with no end in sight.

Prior to this week, the CDC recommended that anyone who had been in close contact with an infected person should get tested, regardless of whether they showed symptoms or not. Now, the government agency says only folks displaying symptoms should seek a coronavirus test.

The updated guidelines, made in conjunction with the White House Coronavirus Task Force, are supposedly in place to put more emphasis on testing patients with symptomatic illness, individuals with significant exposure, and vulnerable populations, CDC Director Robert Redfield told CNN. Today, he clarified that everyone who “needs” a COVID-19 test can get access to one, but not everyone who “wants” one.

Following the announcement, a number of public health experts cast doubts about the effectiveness of this new policy. So called asymptomatic spreaders (people who show no signs of infection but still test positive) account for as much as 40 percent of coronavirus cases. And many argue that this new recommendation could falsely decrease the number of reported cases in the United States. The fewer people that get tested, the fewer cases the public will know about.

Further, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, was under anesthesia undergoing planned vocal cord surgery when the final decisions were announced. Here’s everything else you need to know and what it means for you.

What exactly are the changes?

Until yesterday, the CDC recommended testing for COVID-19 for all close contacts of someone who had the infection, whether or not they had symptoms. A big reason for this is because asymptomatic carriers are big players in spreading the virus unknowingly, leading to case surges after weddings, parties, and gatherings. People who didn’t know they were positive attended the events and spread it to other guests. Testing all folks exposed to the virus helps identify these potential silent spreaders.

The new changes to guidelines recommend you only get tested if you have symptoms, if you’ve been cozied up within six feet of a confirmed positive case for at least 15 minutes, or if your local healthcare provider recommends it. The updated CDC site reads “not everyone needs to be tested.”

Scientists say people with potential COVID-19 exposure should be tested more, not less

Unsurprisingly, experts across the country are already speaking out objecting the more relaxed new guidelines. Major organizations like the American Medical Association and the Infectious Disease Society of America put out official statements against the change yesterday.

“Testing asymptomatic individuals who have been exposed to a person with COVID-19 remains a critical evidence-based strategy for containing the pandemic and reducing transmission,” the ISDA wrote in a statement. AMA president Susan Bailey went a step further by asking the CDC to release any scientific evidence that supports the change.

One reason behind the new guidelines has been stated to focus on “vulnerable” populations, which would only be justifiable if there was a shortage of testing resources, says Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University who previously served as Baltimore’s Health Commissioner. There’s been no such mention of such a shortage.

“If they came out and said [testing resources were in low stock], I think people would have a better understanding,” Wen says. “If that’s the actual justification, that’s understandable. But they should not be implying that asymptomatic people don’t need testing, which is what the implication is here.”

Another defense of the change is that a negative test might not mean that you are negative—especially if you get tested right after contact. But if that’s the case, Wen says, people who have been in contact with a positive person should be tested more, not less.

Other public health experts affirm that testing and quarantining if you come into contact with a COVID-19 positive person—even if you don’t have symptoms—is crucial.

Is the decision political?

Politics have played a big role in many countries’ successes and failures across the globe. And for countries that have successfully lowered their COVID-19 cases against the virus, testing has often played a big role. After all, trying to solve this dilemma without mass testing is kind of like “fighting a fire blindfolded,” World Health Organization director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said back in March.

But, the more testing is done, the more cases we will discover, a statement President Donald Trump has made several times., He has publicly stated that he’d like to slow down cases to keep official case counts low. When questioned further if his statements were a joke back in June, he told CBS’ Weijia Jiang “I don’t kid.” Additionally, a CDC official told CNN that the new guidelines came from “the top down.”

“The idea that we should be testing people less and not more is not only pure craziness, but seems to be in line with Trump’s claim that he’s asked his people to slow down testing,” says Craig Spencer, the director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University.

George Washington’s Wen adds there wasn’t a press release or official statement that accompanied the website change. Instead the new guidelines were thrown suspiciously onto the website “in the dark of the night.”

NIH leader Fauci was not present at the meeting where the new testing guidelines were being discussed, and instead was undergoing a planned surgery. However, he had seen an “earlier iteration” of the guidelines and posed no opposition.

“I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact it is,” Fauci told CNN.

Several governors, including Andrew Cuomo of the once hotspot New York, have decided to ignore the CDC’s guidelines, sticking with previous testing advice.

“The only plausible rationale is that they want fewer people taking tests, because as the president has said, if we don’t take tests, you won’t know the number of people who are Covid-positive,” Cuomo told The New York Times. Kentucky governor Andy Beshear and California governor Gavin Newsom echoed similar sentiments.

But even with these statements, local healthcare providers and state officials look to the CDC for guidance. Now, they are swimming in confusing murky waters when it comes to making decisions. Wen says, the credibility of the CDC, once the “premier health agency in the world”, will likely be tainted by this decision.

“If it’s not based on science, what is the motive behind this?” Wen says. “And what does that do for the credibility of this institution, and of public health in this time when we need that credibility the most?”

Long-term impacts of less testing

Without testing, asymptomatic cases fall through the cracks. And every time this happens, there’s a huge risk of spread. With less testing, Wen says, there will be more spread that could’ve been prevented, and we’ve already seen that happen in many regions of the country.

“We’ve already seen what happens when we don’t have the testing that we need,” says Wen, “which is community spread happens all around us, and before we know it, a single case turns into a cluster, a cluster turns into an outbreak, and an outbreak turns into an epidemic.”

We know that at least 30 or 40 percent of COVID-19 cases consist of asymptomatic carriers, says Spencer. So, a blanket statement of just quarantine might not be enough to keep potential carriers in lockdown. But an actual positive test can give people the motivation to stay in quarantine and not spread it further. The fewer tests we do, the fewer people have that bonus push to really stay in lockdown.

An additional repercussion of not doing enough testing is putting long-term cases, or people who continue to suffer even after they’ve recovered from COVID-19, in the horrible position of possibly never having a test to confirm that they even had the disease that in some cases may leave them with chronic suffering, says Spencer.

Spencer saw this firsthand in the treatment of patients during the early stages of outbreaks in New York City, where the patient obviously was ill but the resources to test them were unavailable. Now, in accessing care, these people have little evidence to hold up having COVID-19, and with fewer tests, more people are at risk of facing the same difficulties.

While it may feel hopeless to see all of this unfold, just remember that you can still take responsibility in securing the health of yourself and the people you love. Keep wearing masks, get takeout instead of sitting down at a restaurant, and take quarantine seriously even if you can’t, or don’t, get a positive test back.

Toilet training your cat isn’t as great as it sounds

Litter boxes allow cats to fulfill their natural instincts, such as digging and covering after going to the bathroom. (Unsplash/)

Ever wish you could peer into your cat, dog, skink, or betta fish’s brain? It would give you a far better perspective of the world—or at least help you be a smarter pet parent. We’re here to demystify your animals (to some extent), while also shedding advice on how you can best thrive together. Welcome to Pet Psychic.

A cat politely peeing into a toilet—it almost sounds like a dream. No more scooping litter twice a day, no more cluttering your living room with a clunky litter box. So understandably, toilet-training cats burst into the scene in the early 2010s, products like Litter Kwitter promising that your cat will be toilet trained within six weeks.

Here’s how it works. The training kit includes an instructional DVD describing a three-step regimen and concentric plastic discs to install into your toilet, which, at first, completely cover the toilet bowl. The discs can be covered with kitty litter to make your cat feel at home, perched on top of the toilet. Every two weeks, the innermost ring can be removed, until your cat can at long last poop or pee into a gaping, wide-open toilet bowl. The company’s website sings lofty praises of the process: “Your cat learns to go directly into the toilet while balancing all four paws on the seat with their rear over the hole.”

However, as cute as toilet-trained cats are, it’s not as easy as simply sharing a toilet bowl with your cat—and it could actually be detrimental to your kitty’s health. Here’s what cat behavioral specialists have to say about this controversial training process.

“The idea is nuts,” says Jackson Galaxy, cat behavior expert and host of Animal Planet’s My Cat From Hell. “It symbolizes changing the nature of what a cat is in order to better suit your purposes.”

Galaxy, who has been working with cats for twenty-five years, centers his cat-rearing philosophy around preserving and respecting the cat’s natural instincts. This includes the cat’s routine of stepping into sandy-textured litter, doing its business, and burying the waste. To deny a cat a litter box reveals the owner’s inability to compromise with a cat’s nature, and even instigate behavioral and medical issues down the line. “It’s a very unnatural move for cats to make, perching themselves precariously over water in order to eliminate,” says Galaxy.

And what if your cat falls into the toilet? Laughs aside, Lisa Stemcosky, a cat behavior consultant in the D.C. area, says that even one splash into the toilet can have long-term consequences. “That’s a traumatic event,” says Stemcosky. “They get wet, it’s terrifying.” Even if cats are successfully toilet trained, the stress surrounding going to the toilet can cause mental distress and toilet and litter aversion, especially if an accident occurs when no one is home.

Medical issues may creep up on cat owners if cats continually use the toilet. Tracking your cat’s waste may be one of the most effective ways to catch diseases and conditions early. One sift through a litter box can reveal multitudes of issues. A lack of urination can indicate a urinary tract infection, urethra blockage, or even diabetes. Diarrhea and constipation can also reveal serious underlying issues, according to Stemcosky. If your cat’s waste is flushed down the toilet, these signs may go unnoticed.

Cats who aren’t fans of the toilet might just choose not to urinate, according to Mikel Delgado, an animal behaviorist and postdoctoral fellow at the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis. “They will retain their urine and hold it as long as possible,” says Delgado. “This can lead to health problems because they’re not urinating when they need to.” Long-term urine retention can lead to bladder damage, urinary tract infections, and even kidney damage.

Plus, toilet traffic might occur, especially in busy, bustling homes. And anyone who has a cat knows that they aren’t going to wait patiently in line for their turn in the bathroom. “If the seat’s up, the door’s closed, or someone’s using the toilet, they will likely find someplace else to eliminate,” says Patience Fisher, a cat behavior consultant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The bathroom floor, the bathtub, or anywhere else in the house is fair game. One of Stomcosky’s past clients adopted an adult cat, who had previously been toilet trained. Upon entering a new home, the cat struggled to adjust to a litter box, and continued to pee in the toilet and all over the bathroom. “It can be confusing and very stressful,” says Stemcosky. Delgado, who also works as an animal behavior consultant, claims that she’s unwilling to work with a client whose cat has urinary issues unless they supply their cat with a litter box. “I feel like it’s one of the most basic things you can do to care for your cat.”

“If you don’t just want to scoop a litter box, don’t get a cat,” Galaxy says. “There’s very little that they demand of us as opposed to dogs. Their demands are few. Having a place to eliminate is one of them.”

If you do decide to take the plunge and toilet train your cat, here’s one last word of advice—don’t teach them how to flush. There’s a chance they might enjoy it a little too much.

Five cool ways to upcycle old coffee sacks

You see burlap, we see couture. ( Thomas Thompson / Unsplash/)

Fresh coffee goes stale too fast to travel far. The beans in that daily espresso you get from your local shop were probably roasted just a few miles down the road—or even in the shop itself.

Your local independent roaster is probably buying big bags of raw coffee from Asia, South America, or Africa, and the burlap bags it comes in—produced by the millions each year—are mostly a waste product. Unless someone does something with them.

Where to find coffee sacks

The simplest way is to ask at a local café that roasts their own beans. Each sack makes around 700 standard cups of coffee, if you were wondering—so even micro-roasters go through a couple of them a week.

Some roasters will happily give you a few sacks for free, especially if you’re a customer. Other slightly more enterprising cafés will charge a couple of bucks for each one or ask for a donation to charity. As a ballpark, the standard price sits somewhere around $1 and $2 per sack—I paid less than $10 to have four of them shipped to my door, so if you’re spending more than that you’ll probably want to check other shops for a better deal.

If you’re visiting your roaster in person, you’ll likely be able to pick out whatever sacks you want, but if you buy them online, you’ll probably just get a random assortment. If you need to calculate a specific amount of raw material for a project, don’t worry—the size is pretty standard (about 38 by 26 inches) so the biggest difference will be the designs printed on the front.

How to clean a jute sack

By the time you get them, your coffee sacks will have travelled halfway around the world, if not further, so don’t be surprised if they are hard-used, wrinkled, and a bit dirty. Depending on what you want to do with them, you’ll likely want to give them a wash first.

The loose hessian weave of most coffee sacks won’t survive the washer and dryer, so the best thing to do is hand-wash them in soapy water and leave them to hang dry.

To eliminate any wrinkles, grab an iron and work out any creases on the highest setting—it’s not a light fabric so it can take a few passes.

What to do with coffee sacks

You can use a coffee sack to make a tote bag or a planter. Or a tote that doubles as a planter. (Priscilla Du Preez / Unsplash/)

Coffee sacks are a great source of burlap, which you can use for pretty much anything you can imagine. But they don’t just have to be raw material.

Turn them into grow sacks

Burlap is seriously useful in the garden. The hardy material can stand up to the weather while still letting your plants drain. “Gangsta gardener” and master of repurposing, Ron Finley, suggests growing potatoes in them, but he also uses them as a base material in his planter boxes. My girlfriend and I liked how they looked so much, we used them to plant flowers we later put outside the front door.

Build a pet bed

If you want a quick and easy pet bed, it’s hard to beat a coffee sack. Take a clean one, stuff it with a pillow, put it on the ground, and watch your pets flock to it. If you want to take things further, you can sew a zipper to the open side of the sack to seal it up.

Craft a custom tote bag

You can use a coffee sack as the base for any fabric-project you like, but a tote bag might be the simplest. After all, you’re mostly just adding handles. Depending on your level of skill (and access to a sewing machine), you can make a basic tote or go all in and create a gorgeous beach bag. Just make sure to wash your sack first.

Create some decent decor

Coffee bags are marked with the details of their contents and origin. Some of the designs look pretty cool, especially when cleaned up. Just wash, press, and frame a sack to add a special touch to any room in your house. You’ll have to trim a bit off the edges, but a 36-by-24-inch frame will give you the best results.

Organize a sack race

This was my best event on sports day, so I’d back myself in a sack race over anyone—even Usain Bolt. With a couple of spare coffee sacks lying about, you can replace your routine workout with a fun and wholesome race. Find someone to compete with and let the jumping begin.

Hurricane Laura is the strongest storm to hit Louisiana in more than a century

Hurricane Laura sweeping inland on Thursday morning (NOAA/)

Hurricane Laura made landfall as a Category 4 storm in the early hours of Thursday morning, with winds just a few miles per hour shy of the Category 5 mark. Wind speeds hit 150 mph, tying with a hurricane from 1856 for the strongest storm to ever hit Louisiana. Laura has now been downgraded to Category 2 storm, but it’s still barreling over Louisiana with winds of 110 mph.

The full extent of the damage isn’t clear yet, since the storm is still raging, but there are already massive storm surges recorded and roughly 400,000 without power. Meteorologists predicted water levels up to 15-20 feet above ground level, a height at which the National Hurricane Center termed the surge “unsurvivable.” It will likely take days just for the floodwaters to recede.

There were evacuation orders in place for some half a million people across Louisiana and Texas, but as is always the case during severe weather events, some residents were unwilling or unable to relocate.

Vermilion Parish Sheriff's Office has warned those stayed behind. “If you choose to stay and we can’t get to you, write your name, address, social security number and next of kin and put it a ziplock bag in your pocket,” the sheriff's office said. https://t.co/ciunWh6ckv

— Jesus Jiménez (@jesus_jimz) August 27, 2020

Evacuations were also hindered by the social distancing requirements in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A county spokesperson in Texas said that only 15 to 20 people were being placed on buses rather than the usual 50, and there were concerns about having large numbers of people sheltering in one place.

This is the strongest storm to hit the region in any resident’s lifetime, and the area will be recovering from the storm for a long time. Hurricane Katrina was a Category 3 storm with 125 mph winds, though it still holds the record for most intense hurricane in Louisiana by barometric pressure. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards told a local radio station that “There will be parts of Lake Charles underwater that no living human being has ever seen before.”

Laura has already killed nearly two dozen people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the death toll is likely to increase in the coming days. Governor Edwards reported the first confirmed US death on Thursday morning, telling reporters that a 14 year old girl had died when a tree hit her home. He has called in the entire state’s National Guard to help rescue people stuck in the storm’s path.

🌀 4AM advisory from @NHC_Atlantic shows that Hurricane #Laura is moving northward over southwest Louisiana.. Minor to moderate impacts across SE Louisiana and southern Mississippi are expected through Thursday . Greatest impacts are expected to stay west of the local area. #lawx pic.twitter.com/z3dqDsPyR4

— NWS New Orleans (@NWSNewOrleans) August 27, 2020

At least 150 people have stayed behind in one parish in Louisiana, and there are doubtless others who could not or would not evacuate. There are a lot of reasons that people stay in their homes when a hurricane hits, and many of them are complex. One crucial factor: money. Housing, fuel, and food during an evacuation can cost a family of four upwards of $2,000. In January 2020, surveys showed that less than half of Americans had $1,000 in savings they could use in an emergency. With tens of millions across the US currently unemployed, the number of residents with anything close to an ample emergency nest egg has likely dropped even lower. The median household income in many of the affected Louisiana parishes is below $50,000, with poverty rates upwards of 15 percent.

Leaving behind pets can also seem like an insurmountable hurdle for others, and though legally shelters are supposed to provide care for pets, not all actually do. Other people have loved ones with disabilities—or disabilities themselves—that makes it hard to leave, either because it’s physically a challenge or because they worry a shelter won’t be able to meet their needs.

Yet another reason: people don’t have experience with these types of storms. Many folks who have lived in the area for a long time are likely to recall prior storms that they weathered just fine, and figure they can survive whatever the next one brings as well. Sociologists estimate that people remember the worst effects of a hurricane for just seven years, and that 85 percent of US coastal residents haven’t actually experienced a direct hit from a major hurricane before.

While the extent of Laura’s impact still remains to be seen, you may already be wondering how you can help some of the people affected. The best course of action, according to people who research natural disaster responses, is to donate money, not things—and to send that money to local organizations rather than large non-profits. Smaller organizations are more likely to know what their community needs and to stick around for a long time after the disaster. They’ll also know exactly what supplies they need and won’t want to grapple with the tons of items that well-intentioned people send to the area. You can also look for local businesses you can support from afar, or see if you can volunteer for a non-profit like the Red Cross.

With the ongoing pandemic, physically flying to the region might not be the smartest or safest choice, especially when resources are already limited to support the people whose homes have been destroyed. If you can’t donate money, you could try donating blood or helping out with fundraising efforts for a local organization. The impulse to help is wonderful—so make sure you put it to good use.

This post will be updated periodically as more news on Hurricane Laura comes in.

How a 19-year-old lion fathered 35 cubs in 18 months

Lion tamer at work. Though no evidence is available, the mustachioed man is unlikely to have survived this scene. (Library of Congress, 1873/)

Popular Science’s WILD LIVES is a monthly video series that dives like an Emperor penguin into the life and times of history’s noteworthy animals. With every episode debut on Youtube, we’ll be publishing a story about the featured beasts, plus a lot more fascinating facts about the natural world. Click here to subscribe.

Feature Creature: Frasier the Sensuous Lion

Have you ever wondered about the number of lions at your zoo? You probably don’t think about lion reproduction too much. Well, consider this:

If one female lion in captivity has a litter of cubs and they all survive and breed—for reference: zoo lions can start breeding before their third birthday—and then those offspring all survive and breed, and then the next generation the same, and so on, it would take about 37 years until that one family tree of descendants from that one lioness needed to eat the entire population of Los Angeles every day just to survive.

Dr. Craig Packer, Professor and Head of the Lion Center at the University of Minnesota, originally came up with this thought experiment. He used it as a way to answer a question on if lions have any difficulty breeding in captivity or the wild. Clearly, no panda bear-type pornos are needed to stimulate mating here. This lion factoid came up during a conversation about a lion that actually did take over L.A. That prolific Panthera leo was named Frasier. This is his story.

Let us now praise other famous animals

Below, a collection of fast facts about famous critters.

Question: why does this Peruvian military helicopter emblem have a tiger on it—its tail around a missile—when there are no tigers anywhere in South America? (Tom McNamara/)

Magicians Siegfried and <a href="https://ift.tt/2yKi50i" target=_blank>Roy</a> got their start in 1957 in Germany when Roy, who apparently took care of a cheetah at a local zoo, borrowed the animal and used it as part of the duo’s show. Nearly half a century later, their act came to an end when Roy was attacked by a tiger named Montecore onstage at the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas.

In 2015, Cecil the Lion was killed by American dentist Walter Palmer. The <a href="https://ift.tt/2YVVIPJ" target=_blank>13-year-old lion</a> was a popular attraction at Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, known for his striking black mane and comfort with tourist vehicles. His fate drew intense news coverage, a flurry of celebrity tweets, and an impassioned monologue from Jimmy Kimmel. <a href="https://ift.tt/2YVVIPJ" target=_blank>Read more. >></a>

In a recent book, <a href="https://amzn.to/2E4SQ8P" target=_blank>No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History</a>, author Dane Hucklebridge details the surprisingly methodical and incredibly blood machinations of a single Bengal tigress. Between 1900 to 1907, the Champawat man-eater stalked humans living in the villages of southern Nepal and, because tigers know no borders, eventually northern India. Along her route, she killed 435 people, making her perhaps the most murderous non-human animal in recorded history. <a href="https://ift.tt/2D4Kuk7" target=_blank>Read more. >></a>

El Jefe the Jaguar is the last known of his species to be seen in the United States. The Panthera onca was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTC8XdViC5s" target=_blank>spotted in the Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson, Arizona</a>, between 2011 and 2017.

In 2014, I accompanied a scientific expedition to a previously unexplored part of the Peruvian Amazon. When I boarded a military helicopter to get there, I noticed the design on the door pictured above. Why a tiger? There are no tigers anywhere in Amazonia. Well, first, there are no tigers or lions in Detroit, but that doesn’t stop the city from having those animals as their mascots. A member of the expedition clued me in, though, saying that across South America the Amazon Jaguar is often called “tigre” or tiger. And, let’s be honest, the tail around the missile is a nice touch.

Popular Science’s Encyclopedia of Big Cat Facts

The math of tiger stripes:

How’d the tiger get its stripes? MATH! (Pond5/)

Math might be able to predict the tiger’s stripes. Or, more accurately, mathematical rules likely work with biological processes to determine patterns on animals—the leopard’s spots, the horse’s dapples, and, yes, those beautiful black stripes that contour and bend around the tiger’s orange fur.

Famed World War Two codebreaker and British mathematician Alan Turing first theorized in the 1950s that spontaneous patterns emerge when “chemicals [react] together and [defuse] through tissue,” writes Ian Stewart in his 2017 book, The Beauty of Numbers in Nature. These chemicals are also known by another name: morphogens, a term Turning coined. We should think of them as shape creators.

Over half a century later, scientists found support for these theoretical models in the real world. A 2015 study published in Cell Systems used them to take Turing’s theories a step further to explain pattern orientation. Think about it, if math can predict an animal’s spots and stripes, why couldn’t it also tell us why a tiger’s stripes are vertical and an okapi’s stripes are horizontal? The most abstract level of mathematics can play out in the day-to-day lives of the biological world. Read more about the study, this way. >>

The Saber-toothed cat

Los Angeles looked a lot different 10,000 years ago. Teratornis birds, saber-toothed cats, and an extinct species of horse all roamed around the La Brea Tar Pools. Fall in and you’ll be preserved forever! (Field Museum/Charles R. Knight, 1921./)

How long did it take for Smilodon fatalis—the saber-toothed cat—to grow their 7-inch long mouth swords? Well, the extinct feline’s fearsome canine teeth grew at an incredibly quick 6 mm per month, almost twice as fast as human fingernails.

(Oh, and that picture is by way of famed early 20th Century natural history painter Charles R. Knight, who was legally blind. Some of his paintings are hidden like Easter eggs on random walls at The Field Museum in Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.)

How climate is changing animals

Snow Leopard, Panthera unica. (Joel Sartore/Getty Images/)

This spotted and thick-coated Snow Leopard thrives in a Goldilocks zone between 9,800 to 17,800 feet in altitude across the Tibetan Plateau, a frigid, rocky region that offers wild goats and sheep as prey. But rising temperatures are pushing the zone higher, forcing leopards and their quarry up the slopes, fragmenting their habitats into isolated summits. Rising temps also pull in competing predators like common leopards, which previously avoided the chilly heights in favor of forested hunting grounds at lower elevations. Humans are moving in as well to graze their domesticated goats and sheep, which sometimes requires killing cats who get too curious about the flocks. Read more about animals reacting to climate change, this way. >>

Calls of the Wild

East African Cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus jubatus. Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. (Tom McNamara/)

If you had to guess, what sound does a cheetah make? Lions roar. Tigers bellow and growl. And cheetahs…chirp? Yup. They also purr, hiss, bark, and even meow. It turns out, their chirp can mean a lot of things. Females, who are more solitary compared to males, chirp to attract mates. Yet both sexes also chirp when they’re distressed. Males do it if they get split up from their pack—and they chirp in celebration when the crew gets back together again. Same goes for mothers and their cubs. According to the National Zoo, “cheetahs may even be able to identify each other by the sound of their chirps.”

Denzil Mackrory · Cheetah Chirp

And, finally, rabbit holes I went down while researching this video

What’s the lion equivalent of a rabbit hole? “Daniel in the Lions' Den” is a 1614–1616 painting by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. (National Gallery of Art/)

Did you know in the 1970s. actor Tippi Hedren (probably most famous for her role in the Hitchcock classic, The Birds), her husband Noel Marshall, and their whole family lived with 150 untrained wild animals? And filmed it? Roar, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi3fz5Dbn6k" target=_blank>released in 1981</a>, became known as “the most dangerous movie ever made”—mostly because 70 members of the cast and crew were injured in its creation. Someone even got their scalp sliced clean off. New Yorker <a href="https://ift.tt/2RW2X6o" target=_blank>remembers the film</a> here. The movie is somehow worse than you’re imagining.

This headline from <a href="https://ift.tt/2hV7IhF" target=_blank>The Washington Post in 2017</a> says it all: “The strange and deadly saga of 15 circus cats’ final week in America.” Also, this <a href="https://ift.tt/2FZXjx3" target=_blank>history of the Indian circus from Quartz India</a> is fascinating.

Ever wonder what it’d be like to be a lion tamer? OK. Probably not. But one-third of Errol Morris’ 1997 documentary <a href="https://ift.tt/3lqtu9l" target=_blank>Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control</a> will make you glad you found out about lion tamer Dave Hoover. The other two-thirds of the movie are pretty weird in a good way, too.

After watching the PopSci <a href="https://youtu.be/eK_zmYWHxxo" target=_blank>video short about Frasier the Sensuous Lion</a>, you might start having questions about if it’s ethical to keep wild animals in captivity or not. This <a href="https://ift.tt/3gymgfQ" target=_blank>2007 Radiolab episode</a> about zoos is a must-listen, especially the first segment.

PopSci found out if <a href="https://ift.tt/2EBUq54" target=_blank>a lion could live on veggie burgers</a>. Also, did you know that <a href="https://ift.tt/31AkExU" target=_blank>mountain lions are so scared of humans that the sound of talk radio sends them running</a>?

And, if you can stomach it, you can meet the deadliest cat in the world via <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl8o9PsJPAQ" target=_blank>a PBS Nature clip</a>. It’s intense. Seriously. Turn back now. OK, you’ve been warned.

Subscribe to WILD LIVES on YouTube for more wild stories about animals like Frasier the Sensuous Lion.

California and the Forest Service have a plan to prevent future catastrophic fires

A road during the Jones Fire (Marcus Kauffman/)

As hundreds of fires scorch California, state officials and federal forest agents signed an agreement that may help the state be able to better weather future fire seasons.

Right now, the second and third largest fires in the state’s history are ripping through coastal forests and inland shrubland in Northern California. The flames have claimed more than 1,100 homes and other buildings, along with 1.4 million acres of land.

Climate change is culpable here. While fire is a normal and necessary part of much of California’s forest and rangelands, the region’s trend toward heightened wet and dry extremes, coupled with overall warmer conditions, make the state especially primed for high-intensity burns.

But the way forests have been managed for the past 100 years hasn’t helped the situation. Prior to the Gold Rush, fires were a part of the landscape—ignited by both lightning strikes and Native Americans. Around four million acres burned every year on average, and smoky skies in summer and fall were probably not unusual. After settlers forcibly removed Indigenous people from the land, their cultural burning practices were eventually replaced by policies of full-on fire suppression. Between the 1930s and 1970s, the U.S. Forest Service and state officials maintained a mindset of dousing all blazes.

But periodic, generally lower-intensity fires are important for distributing nutrients, helping seeds germinate, and managing disease. They also prevent the build-up of small trees, shrubs and woody material, which otherwise cause the fires that do spark to become especially large and intense. In response, management has been changing in recent decades, albeit at a slow pace. The perceived risks about the process and high costs have blocked an aggressive statewide policy to reintroduce fire and reduce fuels.

Now, as smoke chokes much of the northern and central part of the state, officials in Sacramento have signed an agreement that appears to do just that. In the agreement, Forest Service agents, the California Natural Resources Agency Secretary, and Governor Gavin Newsom committed to “shared stewardship” of the state’s forests and rangelands. Most strikingly, the non-binding memo names a goal of thinning, burning, or otherwise treating vegetation across one million acres annually by 2025 (with federal and state agencies each contributing 500,000 acres). For comparison, prescribed burns in California totalled less than 50,000 acres in 2017 (though that stat doesn’t include those wildfires that were allowed to burn or tree thinning).

“This kind of commitment is a really great step,” says Rebecca Miller, an environmental scientist at Stanford University studying wildfire policies. “Restoring healthy forests and rangelands is a great move forward.” In a 2018 forest carbon plan, state officials included a goal to treat 60,000 acres a year on non-federal lands, and noted that 500,000 acres was an “aspirational goal.” So the new agreement seems to be an effort to turn that aspiration into action, and commit the Forest Service to matching the effort. Across California, approximately 20 million acres are thought to be in need of some kind of treatment, such as managed fires or thinning.

The agreement also addressed a key barrier to broad-scale action: coordination between different land managers. California forests and shrublands encompass a patchwork of private, state, and federal management. Sometimes that quilt of management strategies is visible from the sky. “Sometimes, if you have an aerial image, there’s a line you can see when it goes from Forest Service to private land, or from Forest Service to national park, just because whatever has been done on that land is so different,” says Emily Moran, a plant ecologist at the University of California, Merced. She says that at one research site of hers, the trees are visibly a different color between private and federal groves when viewed from above. “Fire and other factors don’t respect those boundaries,” adds Moran. “I think it’s encouraging to try and get people to talk to each other more.”

The agreement emphasizes the need for agencies to collaborate on restoration, since fire is indifferent to jurisdictional boundaries. This could include setting shared goals, consolidating data, and working together to monitor ecosystems and support long-term research projects. For private landowners, the agencies proposed streamlining permitting processes and providing technical assistance to make it less expensive and easier to thin stands. This could be crucial: Miller points out that 39 percent of forests in the state are privately-owned. If an agency, for example, wanted to reduce woody fuels around the perimeter of a town vulnerable to fires, one uncooperative landowner can spoil the effort. “If you get a little bit of resistance, it can complicate efforts to conduct your burn,” says Miller.

Of course, this all comes with a price tag. The agreement notes a few ways to recoup funds. One is to “improve” timber harvest—the statement is vaguely worded but appears to suggest increased logging. “California has some of the highest environmental standards for timber harvest in the world, producing California lumber could decrease demand for timber harvested with lower ecological standards,” the agreement reads. “Given California’s increasing housing needs and greenhouse gas emission goals, California has a direct interest in consuming ecologically sourced lumber.”

That provision may give environmental groups reason to worry. “The question is how you do [tree thinning] in a way that’s responsible and driven by science and not driven by the political demands of the logging industry,” Kathryn Phillips, executive director of Sierra Club California, told the The Mercury News.

A more creative funding idea floated in the agreement is to somehow monetize the small trees, twigs, and other bits scraped up into piles during thinning treatments. Right now, those piles present a fire risk and are costly to manage. But there might be other options, such as a market for chopping debris into plywood material or burning them for biofuel. “That could provide funding that’s needed in order to treat all the areas,” says Moran. “But you would also have to be very careful you don’t create any sort of perverse incentives to overharvest.”

The agreement also provides for continued research throughout these efforts. Moran says that it will be important to continue analyzing how different treatments affect factors like fire behavior and biodiversity. Generally, managed or prescribed flames tend to mimic natural conditions better than thinning treatments, but sometimes fire might be impractical or unpopular (for example, due to concerns about air quality).

Even with the warmer and drier conditions we’re baking into the region, Moran says that management can make a big difference for ecology as well as safety. “If fuel is more spread out and patchy, it is still going to be harder for fires to get up to the really huge sizes we’ve been seeing some recent cases,” she says. “So my instinct is—and what the research seems to be suggesting at this point—is that management is still going to be helpful, but we are still going to be seeing effects [of climate change].”

The Trump administration opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil companies—but none may bite

The Brooks Range sets the backdrop for vital caribou feeding grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. (USFWS/)

Scott L. Montgomery is a lecturer at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. This story originally featured on The Conversation.

The Trump administration has announced that it is opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas development—the latest twist in a decades-long battle over the fate of this remote area. Its timing is truly terrible.

Low oil prices, a pandemic-driven recession, and looming elections add up to highly unfavorable conditions for launching expensive drilling operations. In the longer term, the climate crisis and an ongoing shift to a lower-carbon economy raise big questions about future oil demand.

I’ve researched the US energy industry for more than 20 years. As I see it, conservative Republicans have backed oil and gas production in ANWR since the 1980s for two overriding reasons. First, to increase domestic oil production and reduce dependence on “foreign oil,” a euphemism for imports from OPEC countries. This argument now is largely dead, thanks to the fracking revolution, which has greatly expanded US oil and gas production.

The other motive for drilling in ANWR, I believe, is to score a major, precedent-setting victory over government policies that prioritize conservation over energy production and environmental advocacy groups that have fought for years to protect ANWR as “one of the finest examples of wilderness left on Earth.” Capturing ANWR and transforming it into a locus of fossil fuel extraction would be a massive physical and symbolic triumph for politicians who believe that resource extraction is the highest use of public lands.

President Trump seems to understand this, based on his recent comment that “ANWR is a big deal that Ronald Reagan couldn’t get done and nobody could get done.” But global, national, and oil industry circumstances are overwhelmingly arrayed against Trump getting it done.

Years of debate

ANWR is unarguably an ecological treasure. With 45 species of mammals and more than 200 species of birds from six continents, the refuge is more biodiverse than almost any area in the Arctic.

This is especially true of the 1002 coastal plain portion, which has the largest number of polar bear dens in Alaska. It also supports muskoxen, Arctic wolves, foxes, hares, migrating waterfowl, and porcupine caribou, which calve there. Most of ANWR is designated as wilderness, which puts it off-limits for development. But this does not include the 1002 Area, which was recognized as a promising area for energy development when the refuge was created in 1980 and left that way after a 1987 study confirmed its potential.

Climate change is causing especially rapid warming in the Arctic, with probable negative effects for many of these species. Environmental advocates argue that fossil fuel production in ANWR will add to this process, damaging habitat and impacting the Indigenous people who rely on the wildlife for subsistence. But the situation is complex: There are also Indigenous groups who support ANWR development for the jobs and income it would bring.

Energy companies’ interest in ANWR, meanwhile, has risen and fallen over time. The discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968, followed by two oil shocks in the 1970s, sparked support for exploration and production in the region. But this enthusiasm faded in the late 1980s and ’90s in the face of fierce political and legal opposition and years of low oil prices.

Scientists performed two major assessments of oil reserves in the 1002 Area in 1987 and 1998. The latter study concluded that ANWR contained up to 11 billion barrels of oil that could be profitably recovered if prices were consistently high. But when prices rose between 2010 and late 2014, companies chose to focus instead on areas to the west of the refuge, where new discoveries had been made.

In the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, a Republican-controlled Congress directed the Trump administration to open the 1002 Area to leasing. The bill required one lease sale within four years, and at least two sales within a decade. But as the Interior Department tried to comply, it was hampered by political controversies and environmental assessment requirements.

The new Record of Decision, released on August 17, 2020, determines where and how leasing will occur. It represents the Trump administration’s last chance to bring forward a well-designed leasing plan, and is certain to spark legal challenges from environmental and wildlife organizations.

Is ANWR oil worth it?

Toady the oil industry is facing its greatest set of challenges in modern history. They include:

A collapse in oil demand and prices due to the global pandemic, with a sluggish and <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market-report-august-2020">uncertain recovery</a>

Companies canceling and reducing activity worldwide, with bankruptcies in the US shale industry and <a href="https://energynow.com/2020/08/u-s-oil-gas-rig-count-falls-to-record-low-for-14th-week-baker-hughes/">drilling rig counts</a> falling back to 1940 levels

New uncertainty about future global oil demand as climate concerns push public interest and government policy toward electric vehicles, and automakers respond with new EV designs

The growing possibility of Democratic victories in the November 2020 elections, which would likely lead to policies reducing fossil fuel use

Increasing <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-barclays/barclays-pressured-by-shareholders-to-cut-fossil-fuel-financing-idUSKBN1Z700F">investor pressure</a> on banks and investment firms to reduce or eliminate support for fossil fuel projects.

All of these factors compound the challenges of leasing and drilling in ANWR. Well costs there would be among the highest anywhere onshore in the US. Only one well has ever been drilled in the area, so new drilling would be purely exploratory and have a lower chance of success than in better-studied areas. Under these conditions, it would make more sense for companies that are active on Alaska’s North Slope to pursue sites they currently have under lease, which pose much lower risk.

What’s more, as I have argued previously, it’s not clear that there’s a need to drill in ANWR. Energy companies have made new discoveries elsewhere south and west of Prudhoe Bay—most recently, the Talitha Field, which could yield 500 million barrels or more.

Companies that pursue leases in ANWR also will have to weigh the prospects of litigation, investor anger and a tarnished brand—especially large firms with public name recognition. Shell’s experience in 2015, when it abandoned plans to drill offshore in the Arctic under heavy pressure, indicate what other companies can expect.

If Trump is voted out of office, I expect that a Biden administration would quickly move to reverse the directive for leasing in ANWR. In my view, this contested area will have far more meaning and value as a wildlife refuge in a warming world that is starting to seriously move away from hydrocarbon energy.

The best monitor arms for desk-mounting your display

Increase your desk space with a monitor arm. (Piotr Wilk via Unsplash/)

If you spend any time working on your computer at a desk, a monitor arm is an essential piece of equipment that will streamline your workflow and keep your space ergonomic and tidy. Not only can an arm lift your display off a surface, freeing the desktop up for other uses and reducing wire clutter, but it also brings the screen to a comfortable height and allows you the flexibility to pivot and view it from a number of angles. Mounting your monitor on an arm also makes your space easier to clean, and the result is an undeniably sleek and integrated look without the bulky, conspicuous factory base. The best part of all is that they’re incredibly easy to install on just about every monitor out there.

Take a look at this list of our favorite monitor arms currently available.

Tilts 90 degrees and swings a full 360. (Amazon/)

Mount-It offers this single arm mount for monitors anywhere between 19 and 32 inches. It’s made of a strong aluminum alloy with a black finish and it supports screens weighing up to 17.6 pounds. The C-clamp and grommet assembly allow secure installation on desks up to two inches thick, and the unique quick-detach VESA plate makes for easy setup and teardown if you anticipate rearranging your office. There’s also a built-in cable management system within the arm to further reduce clutter and keep your desk looking clean.

Available in a variety of pole heights for different desks. (Amazon/)

The Ergotron LX monitor arm is an option that excels in situations where stability is to be ensured and style is a major consideration. This robust and sleek arm comes in three finishes—black, white, and polished aluminum—and it can support VESA-compatible screens at up to 25 pounds in weight and 36 inches across. It offers 13 inches of vertical lift, 360 degrees of rotation and 75 degrees of tilt, which allow it to be flexible in a variety of workspace conditions including sit-and-stand desks and creative studios.

Smooth and easy adjustment within a wide height range of 13 inches. (Amazon/)

If work conditions call for using two monitors in tandem, this dual-mount monitor stand from AmazonBasics stands out for its robust yet minimal design. Each arm can independently support up to 20 pounds, and they’re joined together by a single central desk clamp. The design offers independent screen rotation and positioning, and each can tilt back up to 70 degrees or forward by 5 degrees. For gaming setups, creative studios, and even traditional offices, a dual-monitor setup is a great way to boost efficiency, and if you’ve got the space, this is the arm for the job.

Over 16 inches of forward extension. (Amazon/)

Vivo’s single-arm monitor stand is a cost-effective option that can support and lift screens up to 27 inches in size. Made of aluminized steel and carrying a weight capacity of 22 pounds, it features an integrated cable management system, heavy duty C clamp, and an optional grommet attachment for installing the arm directly into a desk surface. The articulating arm offers 15 degrees of tilt and full 360-degree rotation and swivel so you can place the screen wherever you need it and stow it away when you don’t.

Make every project a breeze with the right miter saw

Great for woodworking. (Vance Osterhout via Unsplash/)

These days, you don’t need to be a full woodworker to get the right tool for your home project. Thankfully, many brands have simplified the process and it’s easy to pick the right miter saw for your next build. In case you’re wondering what a miter saw does, it’s a specialized power tool that helps you cut wood at different angles—think for crown molding, garden beds, door frames, and more. The key to those angled cuts is, of course, the blade mounted on the swing arm of the miter saw that moves left and right. Miter saws come equipped with all the gadgets to help you make the most precise cut, including lasers, measuring setting, and more. Keep on reading to see what’s good on the market right now.

Everything you need. (Amazon/)

If you’re looking for a basic miter saw at an affordable price, this DeWALT Sliding Compound Miter Saw will help you get those cuts just right. The back fence helps you cut up to 2x14 wood at a 90-degree angle and 2x12 at a 45-degree angle, without a laser guide. The best part? Its dust collection system captures up to 75 percent of dust generated by your project so clean up is easy. No confusing features to get stuck on, just a straightforward power tool that helps you get the job done.

Your wallet will be happy. (Amazon/)

Hitachi has new branding now—Metabo HPT—and this miter saw puts the power in powerful. At a great price, this 10-inch compound miter saw allows you to get the most precise cuts thanks to its thumb activated stop for adjustments. You get a bevel range of up to 45 degrees and the horizontal handle and clamping system helps you get a good grip on your lumber as you cut down. It’s a great power tool for your beginner workshop as you go through your list of home projects.

Cordless cuts. (Amazon/)

A cordless miter saw gives you the freedom to set up anywhere you want to work on the project you need to complete. Despite being battery-operated, you don’t lose any of that cutting power in the process. You can easily do an eight-inch cross cut at 90 degrees and cut lumber, hardwoods, trim, and more without much effort. It’s lightweight at just 22 pounds and the side handles make it easy to carry. The attached dust bag keeps everything clean as well and your preferred adjustments stay put thanks to the lockable knobs.

For the professionals. (Amazon/)

For the pros that like to take their work home, high standards come with the territory. This dual-bevel sliding miter saw comes with a glide system that allows for wider, more precise crosscuts. Blade alignment stays where it needs to be, thanks to the one-touch lock feature on the slide fence. The miter saw is fully adjustable with easy to read markers and a 14-Inch expanded horizontal cutting capacity. At about 65 pounds, it’s still approachable enough to take site to site with the help of a work table (sold separately).

Backpacks that will charge your phone

Always be prepared. (Felix Rostig via Unsplash /)

Is there anywhere you want to go without your phone these days? Probably not. Whether you’re hiking a trail, packing for the beach, commuting to work, or on the way to class you’re going to want to keep your phone charged. These nifty backpacks come with built-in batteries to charge your phone while offering the storage capacity and durability of regular backpacks.

You’ve got the glow. (Amazon/)

The Lmeison Luminous Backpack will get your child noticed. It absorbs sun during the day, which it will reflect at night for up to six hours. It comes with a USB charging port, but you’ll have to provide the actual battery pack. The backpack itself is made of breathable, waterproof material that will survive spilled drinks, mud, and being tossed around. It also comes with a pencil holder and a lock. At 17.7 by 11.8 by 5.5 inches it will fit a laptop with up to a 15-inch monitor.

Grab it and go. (Amazon/)

This conservative but stylish backpack will fit your laptop, books, battery pack, pens, pencils, snacks, and phone. Multi-paneled, ventilated padding protects your back as you lug your world around with you. An attached USB cord and charging cable will allow you to charge your phone on the go, but again, you’ll need to buy the battery pack separately. Water-resistant polyester will keep yourself fairly safe. But maybe don’t take it to the beach.

Built to last. (Amazon/)

If you’re the adventurous type, this Kroser bag will do you good. Its water-repellent ballistic fabric keeps the weather out while RFID shielding will protect from unwanted intrusions into your important documents. A hardshell compartment will keep your sunglasses and cell phone snug and safe. Its 18.6 by 13.5 by 10.8-inch frame will hold up to a 17-inch laptop and an external USB port will keep your phone charged. The battery pack, however, is sold separately.

Entertainment center on your back. (Amazon/)

This Ranvoo bag is perfect for your high schooler, as it fits up to a 15-inch laptop, has a cord for phone charging, and provides a dedicated headphone jack that allows for listening on the go. The polyester fabric isn’t designed for safari, but how much trouble could a high schooler get up to anyway? (Don’t answer that.)

The right way to walk your dog

A nice, relaxing stroll. (Stephen Goldberg/Unsplash/)

Walking your dog seems simple enough—it’s just you, your pup, and the great outdoors. But without the right equipment and approach, a much-anticipated W-A-L-K can be disappointing.

Get some good gear

Search for “walking a dog” online and you’ll find pages of photos with people holding leashes attached to a collar around a dog’s throat, which is exactly what the experts we spoke to advise against.

“I’m not a big fan of anything around the neck that’s pulling,” says Anna Mynchenberg, a manager at Bark, the company behind BarkBox. “I can’t imagine having any pressure on my neck, so I wouldn’t want to do that to my dog.”

There are simply too many reasons your furry best friend might pull on the leash, pressing the collar against their windpipe, says Kate Perry, a dog trainer based in New York City. That could choke them or, in a worst-case scenario where they leap off a bridge, leave them dangling by their neck.

A comfortable harness

You can avoid potentially strangling your dog by buying a harness. There are many to choose from, including models that can help keep an eager canine from pulling on the leash. Mynchenberg, who has a master’s degree in human-canine life sciences from Bergin University of Canine Studies, says she likes harnesses with handles because they offer an easy way to grab and hold your pet.

Going a little deeper, if your dog is stronger than you, or if you’re training a puppy, consider a front-clip or no-pull harness. Leashes that attach at the back of a dog’s shoulders only reinforce pulling, Perry says. But fasten one to the front, and it’ll block much of your pup’s power and keep them from yanking, she explains.

Before you strap on a harness, though, Perry recommends taking a few days to familiarize your dog with the equipment, as they may not be comfortable with it at first. That means creating positive associations by putting it on and taking it off multiple times in a row while giving them treats, and buckling them in during meals and playtime.

A leash that lets you maintain control

For most, if not all, of the time you’re walking your dog, your hand will be holding a leash—so get something comfortable. “You want something you can really grip,” Perry says. For a medium-size dog, she suggests a ½- to ¾-inch-wide nylon leash. Try rope-style leashes for another option.

Perry’s ideal leash is 6 feet long with three sets of knots along the length to use as grips if your dog pulls away from you (also the perfect length to help you keep proper social distance from anyone you walk by). If you don’t want to knot up your lead, you can buy a leash that has two or three loops sewn in.

A waist leash is another option. Mynchenberg says she likes these because they allow her to keep her hands free to work on training or simply enjoy time with her dog. Perry, however, isn’t a fan of these, as your dog could pull and injure you. Ultimately, it comes down to how well you know your dog and how well you’ve trained them, she says.

Another note: Don’t get a retractable leash unless you’re going to spend a lot of time roaming parks, beaches, or hiking trails, where you can let your dog run relatively free. On city streets, they can be more trouble than they’re worth. For one, you don’t really have control when you let the leash spool out, and while you’re supposed to be able to reel it back in, they sometimes malfunction. Perry has also seen unsuspecting pedestrians walk into leashes linking dogs and owners that are far apart.

Other useful options

A harness and leash are the bare minimum you need to walk a dog, but you should bring a bunch of bags along to pick up your pup’s poop, too. Don’t forget treats, either, especially if your dog is highly motivated by snacks, like Mynchenberg’s two boxers, Hercules and Denver. “If they want that squirrel, you have to have something better,” she says.

And if you like to accessorize, consider a fanny pack. They can hold treats, your phone, your keys, and whatever else you normally would’ve shoved into your pockets or carried in your hands, Mynchenberg says.

Plan when to walk your dog

A misty morning walk will keep your dog cool. (Tadeusz Lakota/Unsplash/)

Depending on your dog and the reason for walking, you should hit the street one to four times a day. That could include one long exercise trek, two shorter workouts, and/or bathroom time. Mynchenberg suggests heading out in the morning or evening to avoid midday heat and traveling less-crowded paths to avoid overstimulating your pup. These numbers may vary depending on your pet’s age and energy level, as well as whether you have a fenced-in yard.

Keep things consistent

As soon as the leash is on, decide which side you will keep the dog on for the duration of the walk. “If I’m walking with a child, I won’t let them zig-zag around, but will hold them in my left or right hand,” Perry explains. “You’re loving your dog by giving it some order.” Stop to reposition them if they wander astray while you’re moving. It’s also important that if multiple people are taking the dog out, they all maintain the same basic procedures, Perry says.

Think about the route

In short, don’t walk your dog on hot surfaces. If you can’t touch the ground with your bare hand or step on it with bare feet, it’ll hurt your pet, Perry and Mynchenberg both say.

Beyond that, though, the preferred path depends on the dog. Among Mynchenberg’s companions, Denver will walk on anything because he’s had a lot of experience getting to know different environments. Hercules, on the other hand, took a long time to walk over bridges. If something is new, dogs sometimes respond with fear or hesitation—so if they’re not a fan of what’s around them, you’ll know, she says.

Pick up your dog’s poop

That’s it. That’s the tip. Don’t let it decompose in nature or “fertilize” someone’s yard. Send it straight to the landfill.

Keep your dog’s pee away from people

Generally, try to find a grassy area or curb for your dog to urinate on and stick to it. Ideally, you’ll want to train your dog to pee in one or a few spots and keep them away from hosing down anything people might touch or pick up, including trash cans, Mynchenberg says.

Learn to handle distractions

If your dog has a high prey drive, anything that moves quickly will spark excitement, Mynchenberg says. Having the right equipment is one part of the solution, but training is the other. For example, Mychenberg’s dog Hercules will react to people and other canines, so they taught him to heel to her right side. He knows this means treats, pets, and praise, so he responds to the command well, she says.

You should also train your dog to look back at you every time they see a squirrel or something interesting, to essentially ask permission to investigate. Whenever your pooch does so, you’ll want to reward it, Mynchenberg says. She explains that every time Hercules sees a person, he checks in with her.

If your dog isn’t well-trained yet, it’s important that you understand their triggers and how much they can handle stimulus-wise. Know what to look for and keep an eye on your surroundings so you can manage any potential problems before the situation escalates, Perry says. Cities like the one she lives in are full of distractions, so she likes to stand between two parked cars and do command training to get the dog she’s with to focus on her and ignore whatever’s whizzing by.

Don’t always follow the same route

Once you’ve established a solid walking regimen, it’s good to keep things interesting. “Dogs will find something to sniff even if the path is familiar, but it adds that extra layer of excitement if you go somewhere new,” Mynchenberg says. If you’re still training your dog, however, stick to a route your pup is used to, which limits distractions.

Understand the risks of exercising with your dog

You may be a marathoner or an expert cyclist, but your dog may not be (we’ll bet they can’t even ride a bike). “Just like humans have to work up to running or exercising, dogs do, too,” Mynchenberg says. “You’re not going to be setting any personal records on your dog’s first run.”

If you do exercise with your dog, pay attention to them and make sure you meet their needs first. That means running when it’s cool out, bringing a bottle of water to keep them hydrated, and taking frequent breaks. After all, a dog’s normal body temperature is a few degrees higher than a human’s, and they’ve got a full suit of hair. “Imagine having a fever, with a coat on, and running,” Perry says.

Riding a bike with a dog is more complicated because wheels move faster than legs (even four of them). Any ride you take will have to be fairly leisurely. There’s also the risk that your dog pulls the bike off balance. But before you even get on a bike, you’ll want to make sure your dog is used to being near them. A good way to familiarize them with the machine, Mychenberg says, is to walk them next to it. To avoid having to hold anything while riding, you can get a bike seat attachment that connects to your dog’s leash.

Be careful when going off-leash

Before you set your dog free, make sure you know the leash laws in your area. Many places require dogs to remain linked to their humans at all times. You’ll also want to have rock-solid commands that will make them come to your side immediately, stop what they’re doing, and drop animals and objects they’ve picked up, Perry says.

Both Perry and Mynchenberg stress that enclosed areas, like a dog park or fenced-in yard, are most ideal for off-leash sessions. That goes for well-trained dogs, too, because once you take the leash off, a lot of factors will be beyond your control. Even wide open areas like beaches and parks are risky because your dog may encounter an unexpected trigger or unseen danger, says Perry, who has also authored the book Training For Both Ends of the Leash. In such situations, it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of your pet and a learned list of commands.

Cool down after the walk

Once you get back home, you can flop down and relax or try to squeeze a little more productivity out of your pooch. When a dog is calm and tired post-walk, Mynchenberg likes to take advantage of that time to work on essentials that are tough when a dog is amped up, like crate training.

Not every walk is going to be perfect, but if you have a plan and know what you and your dog want to get out of it before you go, each one will be better than the last.

The COVID-19 pandemic is about to collide with flu season. Here’s what to expect.

Flu shots (nasal and otherwise) will be particularly important this year. (CDC/)

Now is about the time that the annual flu shot reminder articles start popping up. It’s rarely on people’s minds in late August or even in September, but that’s actually the perfect time to get vaccinated. It takes a few weeks for immunity to build, so by the time the virus really starts circulating you’re already protected.

This year, though, we all have another disease on our minds, and the growing awareness of two overlapping, widespread viruses circulating at the same time has epidemiologists and other public health experts concerned.

“I’m very worried about this,” says Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health. “I would feel more secure if we were taking strong COVID-19 precautions, but with schools and universities and many workplaces opening back up, I’m not at all optimistic about the fall and winter.” Here are the reasons Murray and others are so concerned.

COVID symptoms might be mistaken for the flu

There’s a lot of overlap between the symptoms that each virus causes. Both can give you a fever, cough, fatigue, sore throat, stuffy nose, muscle pains, shortness of breath, and headaches. But the outcomes of each disease are very different—COVID-19 is much deadlier than the flu (some evidence suggests as much as 50 to 100 times deadlier). One reason for that is that very few people have any kind of immunity to it.

The current advice for people who think they might have COVID-19 is to self-isolate, then go to a hospital if they start exhibiting serious symptoms like shortness of breath which could be life threatening. . But as flu season ramps up, folks who come down with COVID-19 symptoms might brush it off as “just the flu.” They might not take proper precautions and then spread the coronavirus to others. They also might be less willing to see a doctor for the flu, which could put them at a higher risk of experiencing a dangerous case of COVID-19.

Already overloaded testing systems are going to get even farther behind

The logical way to differentiate influenza from COVID-19 would be to get tested. Self-isolation in combination with easily available testing could be an excellent way to tamp down both viruses—according to epidemiologists, proper testing is a big factor in helping us return to relative normality.

But the United States doesn’t currently have that capability. We were already behind on COVID-19 testing in February, and in the first two weeks of August we ran fewer tests than the week before. Nonprofits, philanthropists, and healthcare professionals have tried filling in the gaps where the government has largely failed, but it will take time for companies to get systems in place to help everyone who needs it. And meanwhile, the current testing system is falling farther behind. Often, results take days or even weeks to get back, which isn’t a useful timeframe when people are already infectious before they’re symptomatic.

So when a flood of people start getting COVID and flu-like symptoms and want to get tested to see if they’ve been infected with the novel virus, the system isn’t going to be able to help them. “If people are going to get tested or self-isolating for any fever then the testing systems are going to become overloaded,” Murray says. Testing is the most basic form of pandemic control—it enables us to isolate the sick from the well—and it’s not a good sign that we’re already behind.

Healthcare systems could get overloaded, too

On top of a breakdown of the testing systems, there’s a serious concern that an influx of people with severe influenza could push healthcare systems over the edge too. Despite much drum-beating on the topic, much of the public is still unaware that seasonal flu is a serious affair.

“One of the common refrains we’ve heard from people is ‘isn’t COVID-19 just like the flu, and therefore no big deal?’ but the flu is actually a pretty big deal,” Murray says. “A lot of people get sick and die from it every year and this year is likely to be no different. Add that on top of COVID-19 and our health care and public health systems which are already overtaxed are likely to completely break down.”

Co-infections might be an issue

Diseases usually strike one at a time, but it is possible to get infected with two viruses at once. Having influenza and COVID-19 at once—both respiratory viruses—would be nightmarish. The real question is how likely that is to actually occur.

Co-infections are pretty rare in general, and in some cases being infected with one virus can have a protective effect against others (for instance, having influenza A seems to reduce the chances of having a rhinovirus), though virologists aren’t exactly sure why that is.

“I do think it’s reasonable to be concerned that co-infections could be more deadly, although we have no evidence either way as far as I’m aware,” Murray says. Unfortunately, says Murray, this is something we’ll have to wait and see on.

The good news: COVID precautions are also influenza precautions

One small glimmer of hope comes from the southern hemisphere: Flu cases were at historic lows this year. Australia, which has already been through the worst of this year’s winter season, had 925 cases in 2018, then 9933 last year, but in 2020 only saw 33. A similar pattern has occurred in Argentina, Chile, and South Africa. All of those countries had over a thousand cases in 2019 and at least 700 the year before, but have had less than 55 cases this season.

Though it might be that people are simply not showing up to hospitals and therefore not being counted, it’s more likely that those countries ended up with low flu counts due to the social distancing measures they put in place for COVID-19. “In general, we’re very good at doing flu surveillance so I believe that the reduction in flu is real,” says Murray. “It seems reasonable to attribute that to the precautions we are taking against COVID-19 also being effective for the flu.” The US was at the tail end of what should have been a severe flu season in 2020, but when the pandemic was declared there was a precipitous drop in cases.

But that doesn’t mean this winter is going to be an easy one.

“It’s important to note that the precautions that many Southern hemisphere countries have been taking against COVID are stricter than the precautions we are taking in the US,” Murray notes. “We can’t necessarily rely on seeing a similar decrease in flu here.”

How to help your pet with separation anxiety

What do you mean you have to go back to the office?! (Pexels/)

For the past couple of months, our pets have become our coworkers, confidants, and constant companions. With social distancing still going strong in many states, we’ve been spending a lot of time inside on our couch with our pets curled up next to us, providing adorable distractions all day long.

For better or for worse, though, governments have started opening up communities across the country. Soon, we’ll be headed back to our offices, and our pups, kitties, and other animals will no longer have our undivided attention day in and out.

What do we do to start getting our fluffy, feathered, or scaly buddies ready for more and more alone time? Here are a few tips from animal experts on readjusting to schedules that don’t include 24/7 cuddles.

Look for warning signs

You’ve probably heard about pet separation anxiety, but what does it actually look like? Some signs would be your dog or cat exhibiting destructive behaviors after you leave home, like pacing, vocalizing, trembling, or even relieving itself on the carpet.

Separation anxiety isn’t the only kind of stress that a pet might go through as you get busy again. General anxiety due to change is also common, says Rebecca Ruch-Gallie, a veterinarian at Colorado State University’s veterinary teaching hospital: Pacing, lip licking, salivating, and a flat or sunken body posture can all be clues.

Your furry buddies might not express these behaviors while you’re around, but you can keep a watchful eye on them with a well-placed camera. If you spot something surprising on the feed, share the clip with your vet.

“We’ve been able to diagnose many pets from a video that just bark a little bit right when their owners have left, and then they just do not settle,” says Margaret Gruen, a professor of behavioral medicine at NC State University’s vet school.

It’s especially important to look out for these behaviors if you’ve just adopted a shelter animal. One of the most positive things to come out of shutdowns is that more and more people have opened their hearts and homes to new furry friends. But shelter animals are more likely to have anxiety, period, says Sara Bennett, a professor of behavioral medicine at NC State University’s vet school. If they’ve entered your life in a time where you can shower love on them all day and things suddenly change, you’ll want to be extra vigilant in watching for symptoms of stress.

It’s also super important to remember that whether it’s a destroyed couch or a pile of poop on the floor, your pet isn’t trying to get back at you for leaving them, says Leanne Lilley, a vet and professor of behavioral medicine at Ohio State. Your kitty or pup probably unsafe or panicked, and that’s why they are acting out. So, try your best not to get angry with them, no matter how irritating they can be.

“Vaccinate” your pet against missing you

Since the shutdowns began, many of our schedules have gone to the wayside. We’ve traded our work clothes for all-day sweatpants, and happy hour starts the second the laptop closes. That’s all fine and dandy, but a lack of a schedule can be confusing for our animals, especially when they usually have free reign of the house from 9 to 5 every day.

Some ways to start getting your pets back into the swing of things is by “vaccinating” them to being attached to your hip, says Katherine Houpt, an animal behavior expert and veterinarian at Cornell. With a dog, use a sit and stay command and then step away to see if they can resist chasing you down. If they obey and seem comfortable, there’s a good chance your pup will survive the day without you.

Another way to ease your pet into the situation is by stepping out your front door for a few minutes and then coming back in. If you keep upping the time of the experiment, your dog or cat will eventually realize that no matter how long you leave for, you’re always going to come back and be excited to see them.

You can also help get your pets back on schedule by running errands around when you’d leave the house for work, instead of some random point in the day. If you’re generally out of the house for the day by 9 a.m., let’s say, try and make your grocery run then (even if that means getting out of your pajamas before noon).

Make sure you’re not the only source of fun

We love our pets a whole lot—but we we have other relationships and commitments in our lives. For our pets, on the other hand, they pretty much just have us. They aren’t texting their litter mates to catch up and swiping around on the furry equivalent of Bumble. No pressure, but you’re pretty much your cat or dog’s world.

That makes leaving them behind to head to the office all the rougher. Luckily, dogs don’t need much to be entertained. Fill up a kong toy or use a puzzle feeder to keep the entertainment going while you’re outside of the home. A timed kibble dispenser can also help your pet learn that you aren’t the patron saint of food.

“You become not so much the sole caretaker in the world,” Ruch-Gallie says. She also suggests leaving around special toys and snacks for when you leave, so that your cat or dog associates something positive with that alone time.

Keep up the fun things you did during shutdowns

If you’ve been taking your dog on longer, more frequent romps in the past few months, you’re not alone. It’s become a highlight in many pet owners’—and pets’—days.

Continue this new tradition of leisurely strolls filled with sniffing, socializing, and observing as life picks up again. Not only is getting out and about good for your health, it also does wonders for your dog’s welfare, Gruen says.

In this time of getting to know your animal better, you might also realize that you don’t need to crate them all day when you’re at work, Guren says. Let them roam around in a room with some kind of monitoring system in place. “Maybe we can make some changes for the better,” Guren adds.

If nothing else, the pandemic has likely showed you how your pet reacts to your presence. Don’t forget how much your animal loves you and is excited to share time with you, whether it’s all day or after work for a different kind of happy hour.

Can you expose the truth in these two riddles?

Working through brain teasers like these keep your mind sharp. (Pixabay/)

We know you are bored at home right now—we are too. Here are some puzzles and brainteasers to challenge your family and friends with, either in person or over video chat.

QUESTION ONE:

This party of locals is made up of two classes of people: warriors and lords. They are as much different as they are the same. The crucial thing you need to know about them is that warriors always tell the truth, and lords always lie. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Two people stand guard next to each other, watching the area. One wears green and the other red. A sign tells you that you can pass if you can correctly identify which type of citizen each of them is: Are they a warrior or a lord?

The one in green says: “There’s at least one lord standing before you.” Simple enough, but you can glean much information from that sentence. What type of islanders are they?

Click here for the answer (Spoiler!)

Green is a warrior, red is a lord. This remains true if the one in green is a warrior or a lord. But, if green were a lord, they’d be lying. So, green can only be a warrior, making red a lord.

QUESTION TWO:

You answer correctly and continue your trek. Soon, you reach a fork in the road and another pair of locals standing guard, waiting for you to arrive.

This time, you know for sure that one of them is a lord and one is a warrior. And, as luck would have it, they know where your hotel is. However, you don’t know which is which. To find out which direction leads you back to your residence, you are allotted just one question for them to answer. What question do you ask? (Hint: Decide on a query that both a warrior and a lord would have to provide the same answer to.)

Click here for the answer (Spoiler!)

Which direction would the other person tell me to go to get me in the right place? If the person you ask is a warrior, the other must be a lord. The lord would lie and say the opposite of where to go. If the person were a lord, the other would be a warrior bearing the truth—but the lord would lie about what the warrior says. In either case, you would get the opposite of the correct direction.

This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 Danger issue of Popular Science.

The most secure ways to lock up your bike

Use multiple locks to ward off would-be thieves. (Michael Frank/)

This story originally featured on Cycle Volta.

Let’s get something straight as you read this guide: If a thief is determined, there’s almost nothing you can do to prevent your bike from getting nabbed, short of standing guard 24/7.

And unfortunately, according to the nonprofit registry, Project 529, over 2 million bikes are stolen across North America each year. Bikes, thanks to Craigslist and eBay, are now easy profit centers for perps. So beyond investing in a lock, make sure your bike is on your homeowner’s or renter’s insurance. And yep, register it with Project 529.

I’ve been the unfortunate victim of bike theft; I’ve had bikes stolen that were locked outdoors, and even from my home. It stinks. But I’ve also been very lucky. A bicycle is just a product. It’s replaceable. I’ve never been present for these violations, so I’ve never had to make the almost surely bad choice to try to defend my bike from someone who could be carrying a weapon. When a perp takes your belongings it screws you up psychologically. But having someone swipe your stuff is not assault. Let them have your bike; throw in your wallet while you’re at it. You only get one life. They’ll make more bikes.

But the larger point is that, presuming you’re not standing guard and only the locks are there to defend your spiffy ebike, your job is to annoy the crap out of any would-be thief. You want to make their pilferage ultra annoying. The best analogy is outrunning a grizzly. You don’t have to—just outrun the slower person also fleeing the bear.

In this case, unlike the scenario of not being eaten, your hope is the bike thief will move on to easier prey.

Two important caveats I should mention about this guide …

One, you’ll note the iZip I use in the photographs has a removable battery. It’s locked to the bike, but if you’re locking up for any extended period of time, particularly overnight, and it’s reasonably convenient, take the battery with you.

Two, this isn’t a lock performance test. It’s a primer on locking. I’ve highlighted some good options, and these brands/models are provided to give you an idea of what’s out there, and their potential virtues, but I didn’t take a hacksaw or grinder to each item to test its ability to foil a crook.

Lock the frame through the main triangle

Start with securing the front triangle of your bike frame, but this should only be a first step. (Michael Frank/)

No matter the lock, you want to snake it through the main triangle of the frame and to a fixed object. Here I’m using Hiplok’s Spin wearable combination lock. It’s a chain threaded through a padded sleeve you wear like a belt. At 1.76 pounds it isn’t too onerous to lug around, while providing just enough length at 30 inches to attach to most bikes/bike racks. That’s something to think about throughout this primer, by the way: Is the lock versatile enough to lock my bike easily? To lock two bikes to a rack on my car?

In this example I’m leaving both wheels on the bike. It’s the most basic way to lock up. They can take the wheels and the saddle off the bike, but nabbing the frame would require more work. If I’d locked through a wheel they could steal the whole bike, minus a single wheel. Hence, at least going through the main triangle creates one level of defense.

If I’m rolling into a Starbucks, in plain sight of lots of foot traffic, and the rack’s right out front, my odds are decent this is enough deterrent to ward off the baddies. But see the next few entries, because for the most part, we don’t think just locking the main frame and calling it good is actually good.

Remove the front wheel

Removing and locking the front wheel is particularly important if your bike has easily removable quick-release axles. (Michael Frank/)

Especially when a bike has quick-release axles, it’s always a good idea to remove the front wheel and lock it through the main triangle and to a fixed object. If your lock is long enough, ideally you also weave it through the main triangle, the rear wheel, and the removed front wheel. Regardless, the moment a bike is partially disassembled it automatically makes the perp have to do more work, and that’s your goal. These are not the most enterprising folks. Make the easy into a festering mess of sweat and cursing and they’ll mosey along.

By the way, the same theory works for any lock. For example, the ABUS folding 5700 is handy because the 3-foot, 3-inch length gives you lots of room to get it around a fixed point and through the frame and rear and front wheels. Like a chain, folding locks are squirmy under a cutting device. That’s good. Make the jerk bleed for your bike and they’re far less likely to bother at all.

Add another lock

Putting the seatpost through the rear spokes and locking the saddle rail to the seatstay with a padlock not only secures both items, but prevents the rear wheel from rolling. (Michael Frank/)

Have you ever stared at a complex piece of machinery, especially an exploded view of, say, a rocket engine, and wondered how it even works? That’s precisely the confounding picture you want to present to a criminal. This bike has a quick-release to hold the seatpost in the seat tube. I’ve pulled the seatpost out of the frame, inserted it through the rear triangle so that the rear wheel couldn’t roll, and locked one seat rail to the seat stay. Your perp “friend” would be forced to first cut through the chain around the main triangle and then carry (not roll) the bike to a van. They’d then have to go at that padlock or the seat rail and be very careful not to slip and cut the frame in the process. It’s a migraine just thinking about the effort involved. And that’s precisely the seed I want to plant in their sleazy skull.

More locks amount to more bother for opportunists. (Michael Frank/)

I’m also showing you the Z Lok Combo from Hiplok, because even just adding another lock to a bike adds annoyance. Again, they’d have to cut the chain from the main triangle, then carry the bike to a vehicle. Or they could attack the Z Lok out in the open too. But all that takes time, and that’s a good measure of how you want to think. More time spent stealing your bike endangers the thief, and that makes them think twice. FYI, Z Loks are also long enough to thread a helmet onto the frame, and the whole jumble starts to look extra irksome to tackle.

Make things complicated

Even if you’ve got no decent option to lock your bike to, like a rack or a lamppost, you’re never out of options. Make the job hard for the criminal, period. One of my favorite in-a-pinch hacks is to lock my bike to the metal of a few grocery carts, especially if there’s no good bike rack or post around. You could still steal it, but you’d need several people, and yeah, you’d have to hoist a couple of grocery carts and the bicycle into the back of a van or pickup. It would be a very unpleasant chore, and again, that’s the pickle you’re trying to present.

Lock it up at home, too

Homemade security: Here, our author has used a chain wrapped in an old inner tube and run it through a wall-mounted anchor to secure multiple bikes. (Michael Frank/)

When we had our break-in, the two bikes that didn’t get swiped were locked to each other. Not locked to anything else, just each other. The thieves could’ve stolen them, but clearly the effort seemed too much, since it was a fat bike and a road bike and they were nose to tail. That was a useful lesson to me: Just make it a little harder.

Hiplok’s ANKR is one cool solution to home locking because you can use their chain/belt devices, or, as I’ve done here as well, a chain threaded through a sleeve of old bicycle tube that snakes up to the chainstay of that road bike on the wall. From there I can daisy other lengths of chain to more bikes, so that the one anchor point on the wall now serves as the octopus’s body, with all these arms snaking off in several directions. This is a nightmare for the thief, because they have to decide how much time and risk they want to devote to the job.

Keep them out of sight

I would add a coda to all of this. When I heard a friend had several bikes ripped off in the Bay Area, he blamed himself. He’d displayed his gems to his street, arrayed at the head of the garage, facing the road. His garage was frequently opened when he was in there tinkering. I used to do this, too. Anyone casing my property could, and probably did, see my bikes. You may not have a choice; your bikes might be visible, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. But certainly in that instance you should be practicing the mantra repeated throughout this story: Make it look hard to rip you off. Make sure eyes trained on your spread see bikes visibly locked, and yep, there should be a camera (working or not) visibly “peering” out, where perps could see that too.

Because you don’t have to outrun the grizzly; you just have to make it hunt elsewhere.

The new fitbit knows when you’re stressed—and how to help you chill

The design matches Fitbit's typical aesthetic. (Fitbit/)

Stress abounds in the world at the moment. If we lived in the Ghostbusters II universe, that angry pink ooze would be pouring out from every possible manhole cover.

But Fitbit thinks it can help. Today, the Google-owned company introduced a gaggle of new smartwatches and fitness trackers, including the new Sense, which claims it can help measure—and mitigate—your stress levels as you go through the day.

The $329 Sense looks as you’d expect from a Fitbit smartwatch with its rounded-square shape and AMOLED display. Put your hand over the screen, however, and a built-in electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor will measure electrical activity in your skin along with other vital signs (like heart-rate) to try and discern just how stressed out you’re feeling in the moment. The Sense breaks down the data and assigns you a score—higher numbers mean you’re doing a better job dealing with your stressors. A lower score means you’re possibly heading for a meltdown.

A new mechanism holds the watch face to the band to make swapping simpler. (Fitbit/)

If you score low enough, the watch will present you with some guided suggestions about ways in which you might be able to manage the stress.

As you might expect, the Sense also comes equipped with an ECG sensor that can help monitor your heart rhythm if you feel like something funny is going on. That’s in addition to the typical heart rate sensor, which will automatically alert you if your beat is unusually fast or slow when compared to your activity level.

Rounding out the sensor suite, the Sense includes a temperature sensor that monitors your body’s temp regularly throughout the day and looks for notable changes, which might suggest you’re getting sick. When you get a fever, your heart rate tends to increase, even before you notice other symptoms, so it can act as an early warning system.

Like the other Fitbit devices, it’s not meant to charge every single day. The Sense promises up to six days of juice before it needs to spend some time on the charger. It also has typical smartwatch features like call answering, built-in storage for holding your music, Bluetooth, and the ability to answer calls and texts as long as it’s connected to an Android phone.

To make the most of all those features, Fitbit asks that you sign up for its Premium service at $10 per month or $80 for the year. That will get you more granular information about your fitness data—including more detailed breakdowns of how it arrived at your stress score.

Sensors on the back of the Sense keep tabs on your vitals. (Fitbit/)

When you consider the price along with the subscription, that’s a big ask when compared to other smartwatches on the market like the Apple Watch and Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch 3. The long battery life is obviously a huge plus for the Fitbit and its fitness-specific features excel, but it lacks the more robust smartwatch features and infrastructure of its competition when it comes to everyday use.

For $229, you can step down to the Versa 3, which provides the same features as the Sense, but lacks the ECG and EDA sensors for the stress and detailed heartbeat tracking.

Or, you can go all the way down to $99 and opt for the Inspire 2 fitness tracker, which sheds any smartwatch ambitions and concentrates on the simple tracking aspects of the device. It has a 10-day bakery life, which doubles the previous version’s capabilities, and it comes with a full year of FitBit premium, which is most of the device’s cost in itself.

All three devices will go on-sale in the coming weeks.

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