UDFORSK populære artikler på ZINIO

THERE WAS A TIME, possibly before some of you reading this were born, when astroimaging was an ordeal. Imagine a world with manual guiding. You’d spend hours staring at a star centered in an illuminated reticle until your eye teared up or you passed out into the eyepiece from fatigue. The equipment was also heavy and a pain to transport. If you were using a Newtonian reflector, you would be standing on a ladder for hours watching the guide star. Often, after about 30 minutes, the eyepiece’s position would place you uncomfortably between the rungs of the ladder and you would be stuck in this death crouch, clinging to the ladder in the freezing cold, trying to keep the star centered on the crosshairs. As if this wasn’t bad enough, you also…

In four short years of existence, Genesis has now won two 10Best awards. Clearly, the brand has our attention, even if the general public has no clue what to make of it. Like the other Genesis models, the GV80 has a not-so-subtle winged badge on its nose. If passersby confuse those wings with Bentley’s Flying B, so be it. The GV80’s design and presence only add to the ruse. It shouldn’t be surprising that Genesis found inspiration in Bentley. After all, the Hyundai Group employs former Bentley design chief Luc Donckerwolke, and while styling is subjective, it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch to say that the GV80 is more attractive than a Bentley Bentayga. If you’re thinking, “Well, anyone can rent a tuxedo,” the GV80 has real substance beneath its…

When a hybrid achieves only a 4-mpg gain over its donorengine counterpart, it may not seem worthwhile, but in a pickup like the new Ford F-150, boosting the 3.5-liter V-6’s fuel economy by 4 mpg is a 20 percent improvement. That’s nothing to sneeze at. And when said hybrid runs just as smoothly as the unelectrified pickup while providing nearly as stellar payload and towing capacities, why not stretch your gallons a little further? Debuting in the refreshed-for-2021 F-150, the PowerBoost hybrid pairs Ford’s twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter V-6 with a 44-hp electric motor, making this the highest-output powertrain in the current F-150 lineup. (Ford has yet to lay out what’s under the hood of the 2021 Raptor, which will almost certainly outmuscle this.) The motor is sandwiched between the engine and the…

The Hisense 350-sq. ft. Window Air Conditioner is a reasonably priced Wi-Fi-enabled window AC unit that you can control with your voice, your phone, or the included remote. It’s easy to install and did an admirable job of cooling in our tests. It doesn’t offer power usage reports or compatibility with Apple HomeKit and IFTTT like some other smart air conditioners we’ve tested, but it also costs less than many 8,000-BTU models, making it an affordable option for small to medium spaces. PROS: Reasonably priced. Easy to install. Fast cooling. Voice control. Relatively quiet. CONS: Lacks usage reporting. Doesn’t support HomeKit or IFTTT. BOTTOM LINE: The Hisense 350-Sq. Ft. Window Air Conditioner is a smart AC unit that can be controlled by your phone, voice, or remote, and does a fine job of…

Lots of fitness trackers can measure your calories burned, heart rate, and steps. With the Halo, Amazon wants to give you greater visibility into your overall health, along with actionable insights to help improve it. The Halo does an excellent job of monitoring your activity and sleep, and its companion app gives you access to a wide range of workouts and wellness programs. In addition, the Halo can analyze the tone of your voice to tell you how you sound to other people and measure your body-fat percentage based on images taken with its app. These two features are a bit gimmicky, but the Halo band is otherwise useful when you’re looking to move more and improve your shut-eye. PROS: Unobtrusive design. Automatically tracks activities and workouts. Comprehensive sleep tracking. Features…

When the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 first launched last year, we praised it for combining a 14-inch display (then rare among gaming laptops) with Nvidia GeForce RTX 20-Series power and AMD Ryzen processing at a sweet price. The updated 2021 G14 uses the same design, but pumps things up to RTX 30-Series and newer Ryzen 5000 chips. Our test unit also includes a 1440p display and 32GB of memory, so the boosted price of our model isn’t as strong of a value as the original G14, but the entry-point configuration (which still features an RTX 3060) is an attractive proposition. Also, the market for 14-inch gaming laptops has expanded. Competing 14-inchers are now popping up from most of the usual suspects (the Razer Blade 14 is our top pick), making the…

recipe on page 37 Berry-Stuffed Breakfast Sweet Potatoes 25 minutes | Makes 2 stuffed halves This fresh recipe will more than satisfy a craving for a hearty breakfast, and it’s a great way to use leftover baked sweet potatoes. 1 baked sweet potato*1 Tbsp. almond butter1 tsp. pure maple syrup Pinch sea salt3 Tbsp. rolled oats**½ cup fresh berries, such as raspberries and/or blueberries1 Tbsp. hemp seeds Ground cinnamon (optional) 1. Preheat oven to 425°F. Place baked sweet potato in an oven-safe dish. Cover and bake 14 to 18 minutes or until heated through, turning it over halfway through. 2. Slice sweet potato in half. Scoop 2 to 3 Tbsp. sweet potato flesh out of each half and transfer flesh to a bowl. Add almond butter, maple syrup, and salt to bowl; mash until well combined. 3.…

OVER $40,000 2019 LEXUS RX The RX is the best-selling midsized luxury SUV. And no wonder: It’s reliable, quiet, and comfortable; comes with all the latest advanced safety equipment; and is available with a powerful V6 or an efficient hybrid powertrain. $40,400- $47,775 PRICE RANGE 22/29 mpg V6/HYBRID FUEL ECONOMY RELIABILITY 2019 AUDI Q7 There’s a lot to like about this three-row SUV, including a comfortable, luxurious interior; standard automatic emergency braking; a pleasant powertrain; and an impressive 7,700-pound towing capacity. Far fewer new Q7 models are sold than Lexus RX models, so you won’t find as many used Q7s on the lot. $41,650- $54,625 PRICE RANGE 20 mpg FUEL ECONOMY RELIABILITY PRICES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE DUE TO MARKET FLUCTUATION. $30,000 TO $40,000 2019 TOYOTA HIGHLANDER You can’t go wrong with a well-maintained Toyota Highlander—either the V6 model or the fuel-sipping hybrid. The 2019 models will be coming…

For years, security researchers have complained about the problems with passwords and dreamed of a better, password-free future. But that glorious dream remains elusive—this clunky, outdated technology is still the best solution we have. PROBLEMATIC PASSWORDS What has made passwords so compelling is that they solve multiple problems simultaneously. A password verifies the identity of an individual, since only the correct person would know the correct password. Requiring a password limits access to files and infrastructure, allowing multiple people with different levels of access to use the same systems. Most important, a password lives outside the computer, safely stored in someone’s head. Unfortunately, passwords have not kept pace with the number of sites and services that require them. In 2018, password manager Dashlane reported that the average person had 150 accounts that required…

‘It’s really nice of Boris Johnson and the government to be doing so much publicity for us,’ says Sarah Vaughan, wryly, when we speak the month before Anatomy of a Scandal, the much-anticipated Netflix adaptation of her bestselling novel, comes to our screens. ‘Barnard Castle, partygate, that assumption that the current administration can just break the rules so relentlessly… It’s slightly weird how neatly it all fits with the show.’ Vaughan wrote her novel, which narrates the (fictional) case of a married Conservative politician accused of rape by his parliamentary researcher, between January and September 2016. That was the era of the Brexit referendum, when the cracks in the Tory regime were just beginning to be exposed; at the time of the book’s publication two years later, in January 2018, the…

TWO YEARS AGO, WHEN THE college-admissions scandal dubbed Operation Varsity Blues crashed into headlines, it immediately became a showcase of white privilege. Images of Full House actor Lori Loughlin and Gordon Caplan, the former co-chairman of the white-shoe law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher—making the perp walk to the Boston courthouse where they and nearly 40 other parents were charged with paying an independent counselor named Rick Singer vast sums of money in order to get their children into colleges such as Yale and Georgetown—epitomized the gross inequities of the American class system: rich white people, yet again, were paying to play. It’s a theme that has played out again and again in American culture—and has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. Underlying the parents’ nonchalance, there was something more powerful, and…

With the Apple Watch Series 8 and the Apple Watch Ultra, Apple has introduced features designed to help women take charge of their reproductive health. Except in the United States, women are no longer in charge of their reproductive health, and there is a risk that those who now are could get hold of the data from an Apple Watch and use it against women who use these features. At the Apple Event in September, Apple introduced a feature that it said, “takes our commitment to women’s health even further.” The Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch Ultra each have two temperature sensors, one on the back and one below the display. Data from these sensors is added to Apple’s existing Cycle Tracking app to indicate and track ovulation. Users…

So, Nadhim Zahawi’s been ousted as Conservative Party chairman. Can you blame Rishi Sunak? It’s not a good look for the chap who was once in charge of people’s taxes to be ‘careless’ with his own, to the tune of approximately £5 million. Clearly, Zahawi is the type of rich who doesn’t realise quite how rich he is. Details of his glamorous life are available on a need-to-know basis – and we need to know. Background: Zahawi was born a high-flyer. His grandfather was the governor of the Central Bank of Iraq and minister of trade for the country, and his father is a prominent and well-connected businessman. Nadhim came to Britain in 1976 at the age of nine, when his family, who are of Kurdish origin, fled Saddam Hussein’s regime…

Smartwatches get dirty—filthy, even. But cleaning a smartwatch or a fitness tracker is a simple project, as long as you know a bit about the device and its materials. For example, if you have an Apple Watch, you need to know what kind of wristband you have, such as silicone, stainless steel, leather, or gold. Once you know your materials, you just have to pick the right cleaning supplies. In many cases, you won’t even have to buy anything special. Many common household items will do. SUPPLIES Here’s a list of any supplies you might need, many of them common household items: • water• mild liquid soap, either dish soap or hand soap• distilled white vinegar• microfiber cloth• unused coffee filter• cotton ball• all-purpose leather cleaner and conditioner• clean cotton sock• cotton swabs…

Lewis Tan sends a flying knee strike into the sweet spot of a kick pad. On impact, the pad pops, like a firework. It’s an image (and a sound) right out of an 80s action movie – and it’s even more impressive since Tan’s running on nothing but black coffee and the few hours of sleep he got while flying home to Los Angeles from his training camp in Thailand. He’s at LA’s Unbreakable Performance gym on this Sunday morning. And after a 15-minute warm-up, the 36-year-old actor has found his flow, delivering combo after combo of martial-arts moves. Five days a week, three hours a day, he does workouts like this. Each session helps him relieve stress and stay strong – but it’s about more than that. Tan believes his…

For PC Magazine’s charter issue in early 1982, the newly minted editor-in-chief and publisher David Bunnell flew to Seattle to interview a fresh-faced, 26-year-old Bill Gates, the president and co-founder of a little software company called Microsoft. Bunnell’s goal with this exclusive interview was to understand the part Microsoft and its software played in the development of the groundbreaking IBM PC that was born less than a year earlier. After all, that IBM PC was the namesake of Bunnell’s new publication. In the interview, the two discuss how much fun it was for Bill and his team to contribute to the IBM project, how gratifying it was to have been part of it, and how the IBM and Microsoft teams worked together to actually get it done. They even speak of…

Hours before the Knicks’ biggest game in a generation, a do-or-die matchup that would either make them the 1994 NBA champions or relegate them to being a colorful footnote in hoops history, Pat Riley made a comment that still rings in the ears of one of his closest friends all these years later. Riley and Dick Butera were standing together inside the team’s Houston hotel, waiting for an elevator so they could head to the arena for Game 7 between the Knicks and Rockets in the NBA Finals. It was then that Riley heartily grabbed the real estate developer by the shoulder. “Well, old buddy: I know at least three people are gonna show up tonight. You, me and John,” Riley said, referring to shooting guard John Starks. At the time, Riley’s confidence…

RYAN BUCHTER, 34, has spent almost half his life pitching in professional baseball. In those 15 years, Buchter has been traded four times, released three times, changed organizations 10 times, pitched for teams in 22 cities and only once spent a full season in the majors without being demoted or released. What his itinerant résumé does not show is its cost: a drinking problem and depression that left him so wounded he is speaking out because he knows his story is prevalent among players. “I really think it’s important to share my story [because] of how common it is,” Buchter says. “Truly, I want guys to be more open about receiving help. “This is something I’m extremely passionate about…. I want guys to know it’s O.K. as a man, [a] baseball player,…

2020 LIVE BALL COTTON THREAD LAYER Avg. Weight: 9.62 g OUTER YARN Though the live ball is lighter, this part is heavier, offsetting some of the added weight of the inner yarn. Avg. Weight: 24.34 g MIDDLE YARN Avg. Weight: 14.46 g INNER YARN This is the layer where all the weight came out: It’s lighter by about 3.5 grams. Avg. Weight: 50.88 g PILL Avg. Weight: 25.37 g THE CENTER A lighter center (which refers to all layers beneath a ball’s cover) could lead to a smaller ball with less drag—and more flight. Avg. Weight: 124.83 g 2020 NORMAL BALL COTTON THREAD LAYER Avg. Weight: 9.86 g OUTER YARN This layer is about a paperclip’s weight lighter than in the live ball—consistent with previous MLB balls. Avg. Weight: 23.38 g MIDDLE YARN Avg. Weight: 14.41 g INNER YARN This layer’s weight is unchanged from previous MLB balls, unlike in the “live” ball. Avg. Weight: 54.30…

BILLY MARTIN WAS fired nine times. The first time he was dismissed, in 1969 by the Twins, he was fired by appointment. One Sunday night shortly after the season, the brother of Minnesota president Calvin Griffith told Martin to expect a call from Griffith at precisely 10:30 the next morning. Martin deduced his boss was not arranging the call to extend his contract. He was correct. Yogi Berra was fired by proxy in 1985. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner sent general manager Clyde King to fire Berra after a win in Chicago, just 16 games into a season in which Steinbrenner vowed Berra would manage the full year. So upset was Berra about being fired through an intermediary that he did not set foot in Yankee Stadium or speak to Steinbrenner for…

Highs: Aggressive looks, improved refinement and road manners, good fuel economy. Lows: Hybrid powertrain hurts acceleration, second-row captain’s chairs cannot be removed. The 2021 Toyota Sienna wants to change how we look at minivans. To combat the kiddie-hauler stigma, Toyota dressed the Sienna more like an SUV, giving it a boxier front end with a taller hood. Curves and bulges along the sides and a massive grille give the van an almost aggressive look. But the biggest change lurks under the skin, as the Sienna is now a hybrid. A 2.5-liter inline-four coupled to two electric motors takes the place of the outgoing 296-hp 3.5-liter V-6. The combo churns out 245 horsepower in front- or all-wheel-drive form. Our all-wheel-drive test van got to 60 in 7.7 seconds, nearly a second slower than the…

I’ll admit, I was pretty skeptical before unboxing the first smartwatch from OnePlus, aptly named the OnePlus Watch. At $159, it’s less than half the price of our Editors’ Choice winner, the Apple Watch Series 6 (which starts at $399). And while it doesn’t work with iPhones, it offers many of the same features as Apple’s market-leading wearable. So far, my skepticism appears to have been unfounded. The OnePlus Watch offers a large color touch screen, built-in GPS, 2GB of storage, a 402mAh battery that promises two weeks of power, and the ability to make and receive calls. It also has plenty of health and fitness features, including support for more than 110 workout types, automatic workout detection for jogging and running, rapid-heart-rate alerts, guided breathing exercises, stress detection, and the…

We won’t try to keep you in suspense. When we reviewed last year’s model, we called the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon the best laptop in the world—though we later decided it shared that title with the Dell XPS 13 OLED—and it hasn’t done anything in its latest revision to change that state of affairs. The X1 Carbon Gen 9 catches up with the Dell and other elite ultraportables by moving to an 11th Generation Intel “Tiger Lake” Core processor and a slightly taller 16:10 rather than 16:9 screen aspect ratio. Its premium price and lack of an SD card slot still knock half a star off what would otherwise be a perfect five-star rating, but it effortlessly collects yet another Editors’ Choice award as the most desirable executive notebook on…

Canon Pixma G620 $299.99 EXCELLENT It’s easy to find a bulk-ink printer with the familiar cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) quartet, but finding an ink-tank-rather than cartridge-based inkjet with six inks for superior photo quality has been difficult, prohibitively expensive, or both. Canon aims to change that with the Pixma G620 Wireless MegaTank Photo All-in-One Printer, which gets its tank refills from bottles. At $299.99, it’s half the price of the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8500 Wireless Color All-in-One Supertank. Versus that Epson, the Canon is slow and short on features, so it doesn’t join it (or the wide-format EcoTank Photo ET-8550) as an Editors’ Choice award winner. But the Pixma prints terrific-looking borderless photos at sizes up to 8.5 by 11 inches for pennies, making it a great value for families and…

AUF GROSSER FAHRT Früh schon konstruieren geniale skandinavische Bootsbauer hochsee tüchtige Schiffe. Mit ihnen brechen die sogenannten Wikinger (»Teilnehmer einer Beutefahrt«) ab etwa 790 n. Chr.zu ausgedehnten Raub- und Handelszügen auf, gründen in der Fremde Siedlungen und eigene Reiche – und tragen so die nordische Kultur in weite Teile der Welt IM SCHATTEN DER KRONE Nach einer Ära innerer Machtkämpfe erblühen ab dem 12. Jahrhundert jene Königreiche, die Skandinavien bis heute prägen: Dänemark, Schweden und Norwegen. Am kraftvollsten ist lange die dänische Monarchie – und so regieren deren Könige zeitweise über alle drei Länder VOM KRIEG ZUM FRIEDEN Vor allem Dänemarks und Schwedens Könige ringen wiederholt um die Macht im Norden, um Handelswege und Territorien. Und immer wieder greifen sie auch ein in die großen militärischen Konflikte des übrigen Europa – bis sich die skandinavischen…

AS AN INTERNIST, Gaurab Basu has always understood the link between the air his patients breathe and their health, but never more starkly than during the pandemic. Working just outside Boston, he treats residents of Chelsea, among the cities in Massachusetts with the worst air quality and highest incidence of COVID-19. “It really bothers me that many of my patients have been set up to do poorly through no fault of their own because the pollution in their environment is working against them,” says Basu, who is also a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment. “Exposure to both pollution and COVID-19 is putting strain upon strain on their health.” The health consequences of smog-forming auto emissions are particularly pronounced in urban areas, like Basu’s, where neighborhoods…

Nothing beats a road trip through France. Even the erratic French drivers, who toot at you for having the gall to abide by a speed limit, will add to the fun. The diverse destinations are endless here. Brave the knotted motorways into Paris one day and soar through the vineyards of the Champagne region the next. You can take the western route and have the Channel snake by beside you, or climb through the Alps to the east, swinging through Germanic enclaves like Dijon and the idyllic lake resorts of Annecy and Aix-les-Bains. Take a central path and you will undulate through the Loire Valley, with its abundant châteaux and bucolic views. Ignore the GPS and drive the long way around the lavender fields of Provence, the majestic tree-lined avenues…

Heard the one about how charging your phone overnight destroys its battery? How about this whopper: Macs can’t get viruses? There’s plenty of fake tech news floating around; each new generation of technology products and services begets even more false beliefs. A lot of those are pretty easy to discredit, but we found a few for this story that might make even our readers do a double-take! It’s possible you’re worried about something that isn’t true—or maybe something that used to be true but isn’t now, as new discoveries and updates cleared up the problem. Go through our list below and see if there’s something you thought was true but, well, isn’t. Then pass on the real deal to your friends, family, and social following, so they won’t fall prey to tech…

The news that Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales are flat compared with last year’s sales is about as exciting as a cheeseless quesadilla. Although between 51% and 54% of consumers were predicted to shop online during BFCM in 2021, according to market research firm Coresight, that won’t translate to a big move upward in dollars. The likely culprits are fewer juicy discounts and limited choices because of global supply-chain problems. But there’s another, lesser-known development impacting consumers: E-commerce retailers of all sizes are increasing their customer data-collection activities in a big way. That’s true not only of large e-commerce players such as Amazon but also of small and even local retailers that use e-commerce websites as convenient extensions to their brick-and-mortar operations. E-commerce has become by far the favored purchasing channel for…

If you could levitate, dronelike, above the dilapidated, 1940s-era public-housing projects in California’s Sunnydale neighborhood, you would be able to make out San Francisco’s gleaming silver skyline, just seven miles away. Here, iron-barred windows are framed by exposed electrical wires and water-stained exteriors. There, the median price of a midtier home exceeds $1.5 million; a one-bedroom apartment rents for an average of $3,330 a month. On a crisp October morning, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Marcia Fudge, an austere figure dressed head to toe in black, stood in the gulf between these disparate realities and connected them. She was in Sunnydale to champion the city’s plan to erect 1,770 new mixed-income residential units to replace 775 old ones, but her message was about the larger challenge facing America.…

FOR MORE THAN FOUR DECADES I’ve been modeling the Buffalo Creek & Gauley RR (BC&G), a standard gauge West Virginia short line, in S scale. I started my first rather primitive representation of the railroad in 1978. An improved version was started in 1986. Work commenced on my third and largest BC&G layout in 1997 and was basically complete when it was dismantled for a move in 2016 (see Great Model Railroads 2011). What you see on these pages is the fourth version of the BC&G, now five years in the making (see Model Railroad Planning 2019). Anyone who has gone through the process of dismantling a large layout in preparation for a move to a smaller residence knows it can be traumatic. We modelers put countless hours into our layouts, and…

When I joined PC Magazine as editor-in-chief in June 1991, it had already established itself as the leader among computer magazines. The magazine was founded by editor David Bunnell and publisher Anthony Gold, and the first issue came out in early 1982. It was then (contentiously) acquired by Ziff Davis, which had made its name by focusing on special-interest publications. Jonathan Lazarus next held the editor-in-chief title, and he advanced the magazine. But it really came into its own under editor-in-chief Bill Machrone: He took over in 1984, as the magazine moved from monthly publication to 24 issues per year. Bill built a top-notch team, including editors Mike Edelhart and Paul Somerson. But what made PC Magazine stand out back then was labs-based testing. And it’s still at the heart of…

On Jan. 15, Karl-Anthony Towns tested positive for COVID-19. Just nine months after the 25-year-old watched his mother, Jacqueline, die of the same disease that also killed his uncle and five other members of his family, this was a nightmare scenario. Towns received treatment at a Minneapolis-area hospital, then quarantined at home for the next few weeks, isolated from friends and family. Basketball had been the closest thing in his life to an outlet. Now, by himself, he had no choice but to confront the pain that followed his mother’s sudden death. “I’ve had a lot of situations this year where things were just too much for me,” Towns says. “I just remember [quarantining] in the house, and it was more than just COVID for me. I felt like I was going…

THE BLACK SPRINTER van had just made the turn out of the CBS Studios lot when Joel Embiid made an announcement. “I don’t want to be an actor,” the Sixers star says. Last fall, he linked up with WME, the powerful talent agency, in part to figure out what his post-playing career could look like. An hour on the set of The Late, Late Show With James Corden running through a sketch during an off day in Los Angeles isn’t exactly sending Embiid into acting workshops. “I could do it from time to time,” says Embiid. “But every day? Ten hours a day? I don’t have the patience for that. I could be good at it. But I’d rather stay home and sleep.” It’s also been suggested that Embiid—still just 28—could…

Have you ever watched a game and wondered why a defense can’t prevent the ball from going to the one receiver everyone knows is getting it? Is it reassuring to know that many coaches have wondered the same thing? At this point, you surely know about the rule changes that have encouraged more passing and led to historic offensive output. You also have heard all about the forward-thinking passing concepts that are slowly (sometimes begrudgingly) absorbed from the lower levels of football, allowing rookie receivers to adjust to professional football faster than ever. But what you might not have picked up on is precisely why the NFL’s best pass catchers—and specifically, a certain quartet of them almost universally recognized by coaches and players as being a cut above the rest—get open on seemingly…

Let’s face it: For many model railroaders, the cliché about not getting any younger is no longer a laughing matter. Contrary to the laws of physics, smaller scale models are shrinking before our very eyes. Detail that used to pop out has mysteriously vanished. Hands that were steady enough to do neurosurgery now automatically stir our coffee. And eyes that could read the road number on an N scale boxcar at 10 paces now require reading glasses just to sign checks. Doesn’t sound like you? Your time will come, probably sooner than you think. Think positive thoughts! Rather than brood about how things “ain’t quite what they usta be,” let’s look at the positive side of the ledger. We do indeed have choices that will go a long way toward dealing with…

THE FIRST SPACECRAFT TO PULL into Venus’ orbit in nearly a decade arrived in December 2015, hailing from Japan. Akatsuki was five years late for its rendezvous, but Venus has gotten used to waiting. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express visited the thickly shrouded world in April 2006, and that was the first mission to Venus since NASA’s Magellan arrived in 1990. Named for the Roman goddess of love, Venus wasn’t feeling much of that from space agencies on Earth. Our planet’s more favored neighbor, Mars, had hosted roughly a dozen visitors in the same period. “Venus exploration is behind schedule,” says David Grinspoon, senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of the book Venus Revealed. “Our understanding of Venus is about the same as…

Today’s shortline railroads offer advantages for modelers with an interest in the contemporary scene, but who don’t care to tackle a Class 1 railroad. If the idea of running 50-year-old diesels alongside new passenger locomotives and cars appeals to you, the Morristown & Erie Railway may be the prototype you’ve been looking for. The M&E originated as the Whippany River Railroad in 1895. The line, renamed Morristown & Erie after a merger in 1903, served paper mills and heavy industries until the 1970s when these core customers began to disappear as a result of a general downturn in manufacturing in the Northeast. The Morristown & Erie of today dates to 1982 when a local businessman, Benjamin Friedland, bought the railroad out of bankruptcy and launched an aggressive campaign to develop new customers.…

The public beta of macOS Monterey, released by Apple in early July, doesn’t look surprisingly new. Exceptions include Safari, which gets a dynamically resizing tab bar and other conveniences, and FaceTime, which gets a background-blurring portrait mode and screen-sharing features. As you get more familiar with Monterey, however, you’ll find improvements and conveniences everywhere and may wonder how you managed without them. This is because Apple’s annual updates to the Mac operating system tend to have a regular rhythm. Massive updates arrive on even-numbered years: Big Sur, for example, the 2020 update to macOS that was also the first version that ran on Apple Silicon hardware. Updates in odd-numbered years, such as Monterey, look more or less like the previous version but come with under-the-hood improvements that may do more for…

With COVID-19 still keeping so many people working from home, Wi-Fi routers are doing a lot more than streaming movies and games. Not only are home Wi-Fi routers keeping millions of people working, but they’re also connecting an ever-growing range of smart home devices. That means picking one that does the best job for you and fits your budget is trickier than ever, especially now that we’re seeing more Wi-Fi 6 devices becoming available. When you’re shopping for a new router, start by considering the size of your coverage area and the number of clients you need to support as well as the types of devices that you’ll be connecting. Not everybody needs the kind of performance that you get with the latest and greatest models, and there’s no reason to…

Windows 11 may be better known for its centered taskbar and rounded window borders, but the new Snap Layouts feature (sometimes also called Snap Assist) might be a more useful UI innovation. Windows, as its name implies, has long been excellent at managing and rearranging program windows, but Snap Layouts elevate the operating system (OS) to the next level. HOW DO SNAP LAYOUTS WORK? To get started with this new productivity tool, you simply hover the mouse over the Maximize icon in a program window’s upper-right corner. You’ll see a choice of layouts, like this: Note that not every application supports this feature. In my testing, the Firefox and Spotify programs showed only the old Maximize option. But you can still position them within a Snap Layout after starting the process with an…

Lithium-ion batteries pack an amazing punch for their size. They’re robust enough to run our laptops for hours on a single charge, they’re at the core of the latest smartphones, and they even serve as the power plant behind cutting-edge electric vehicles such as the Tesla line. But lithium-ion batteries do have limits. Given how powerful laptops have become in the last few years, we’re relying on our machines for longer than ever. That has implications for batteries: They’re in service a lot longer, too. And sometimes, that means they show the limits of their technology. You may have had this happen to you: A laptop or phone you’ve had for years suddenly stops working, or maybe just starts showing some sign of internal physical swelling. The screen of your phone…

When my wife, Jenny, and I decided in the fall of 2017 to sell our house of 47 years and move into a retirement community, that meant the Argentine Industrial District Ry. would be dismantled. At age 80, I had no plans to build another railroad. I decided to give away or sell everything. Some 700 freight cars, 25 locomotives, and numerous structures and all support materials were disposed of in about two months. We moved to the retirement community in January 2018. By then, I’d accepted the reality that I’d built my last railroad. But then something surprising occurred when in July, Jenny asked me whether I thought we could find a house in Prairie Village, as she missed living in our own home. We began looking, and to our…

No two ways about it, our Olympia On30 project railroad, as seen on the previous pages, is a compact model railroad. And while the little logging layout yielded a good modeling and operating experience, admittedly, with just a bit more space we’d have had a lot more options. So it should be no surprise that long before we’d finished building the first version of Olympia, I’d already started making plans for a bigger, better layout. When space at the Model Railroader offices for former project railroads became a problem, I moved the Olympia to my basement and drew plans for an expansion I drafted several options, including one that made the layout L-shaped. Eventually I opted to simply extend the railroad in a straight line with a second 22" x 78"…

Fifteen years ago, on January 9, 2007, I sat on the floor of a Las Vegas Convention Center entryway and pondered the iPhone. While I was running around the Consumer Electronics Show looking at the latest LG Chocolate, Steve Jobs was over at Macworld changing the world. I’d been covering smartphones for three years by then, and they were complex gadgets for road warriors. With the iPhone, Apple simplified the smartphone and made it a must-have for everyone. This wasn’t solely about Steve Jobs’ brilliance. He struck when several other technologies were becoming available—3G for the mobile web and capacitive touch screens for finger-friendly interfaces. And he worked without the legacy-software hangovers that Microsoft, Nokia, and Palm all struggled through from the first generation of proto-smartphones. The iPhone has made a huge number…

KATHY JOHNSTON IS SO IN LOVE WITH CHOCOlate, she lies awake at night thinking about it. “For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed,” she says. But as chief chocolate officer of Dubai-based chocolatier Mirzam, that’s a healthy fixation to have. Like many other goods on Dubai’s store shelves, most of the city’s chocolate has traditionally been imported. But Mirzam is one of several ambitious startups developing homegrown alternatives—in its case, it’s making high-quality, bean-to-bar chocolate featuring ingredients sourced from along a historic spice route that ran from the west coast of Japan across the Middle East to Europe. Johnston joined Mirzam in early 2016 after meeting the company’s founders, who persuaded her to work for them, rather than chasing her original dream of moving to Switzerland, chocolate…

In the late 18th century, theorist Jeremy Bentham created the perfect prison. With cells laid out in a circle around a central guard tower, all the prisoners could be observed by a single guard—or, importantly, would assume they were being observed. He called it the “Panopticon,” but it’s best known (thanks largely to Michel Foucault) as a metaphor for the power of the surveillance state. In 2013, roughly 230 years after Bentham’s conceptual prison, a series of leaks eventually attributed to Edward Snowden blew the lid off the National Security Agency’s mass wiretap and intercept program. Shock, confusion, and anger followed. The furor led to the bizarre sight of the NSA head as a keynote speaker at the Black Hat security conference and the shuttering of the program. We all slept…

You’ll get plenty of sound career advice during your lifetime. Much of it will be valuable, but some of it will come at the wrong time or be the opposite of what you need to hear at that moment. Depending on your immediate needs and long-term desires, good career advice can turn out to be wrong for you. Curious to hear other people’s experiences, I asked around and collected ten pieces of career advice that don’t always hold up. 1. GO WHERE THE MONEY IS There are high-paying jobs, and then there are jobs that come with lower base pay but generous compensation packages that lead to more guaranteed money in the long term—and sometimes a happier life. The classic example: any job with a pension. If you collect a full pension for…

Darren Clark lives in Michigan, where he used to receive dismal internet speeds ranging from 2.5Mbps to 3.5Mbps. The DSL internet was so bad that he’d have to drive his family elsewhere to find faster broadband and finish software and game downloads. “Many times, we ended up going to McDonald’s or out to the local Meijer grocery store for internet access,” he told PCMag. But in recent days, Clark’s home internet is getting speeds between 10Mbps and 100Mbps. The reason? He’s among the first people to try out Starlink’s Best Effort tier, the latest offering from SpaceX’s satellite internet service. “I have to say, Starlink Best Effort is a lifesaver for me and my family,” he said. “My kids are amazed that a 1GB download can finish in a couple of minutes instead…

Spend enough time online, and eventually, someone will ask you to rate something. In particular, a company might want you to rate it or the products and/or services it provides. It’s entirely likely you’ll be asked to grade these things on a scale of zero to 10, for how highly—or not—you’d recommend them. Such grades are used to create a Net Promoter Score, or NPS. (Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS metrics are registered trademarks of NICE Satmetrix, Bain & Company, Inc., and business strategist and author Fred Reichheld.) An NPS tells a company or brand how the general public perceives it. The bigger the number, the more positive feedback the brand has received. All year, in our monthly Readers’ Choice Awards and Business Choice Awards surveys, we ask our readers…

HERB TURETZKY attended the New Jersey Americans’ first-ever ABA game in October 1967 expecting to be just a spectator. He was eager to see forward Tony Jackson, a fellow Brownsville, Brooklyn, native, battle the Pittsburgh Pipers’ Connie Hawkins. Turetzky, a student at LIU Brooklyn, arrived early at the Teaneck Armory in his red ’64 Plymouth Fury convertible. Max Zaslofsky, the Americans’ coach and GM who had attended the same high school as Turetzky, greeted him as he walked in. “Herb, can you help us out and keep score of the game tonight?” Zaslofsky asked. “Max, I’d love to,” he replied. “I’m here, so why not?” Turetzky sat down at a wooden folding chair at half court and jotted down the lineups. “I’ve never left that seat since,” he says. “I’m still here…

Perry Squier, Ted Pamperin, Dave Olesen, and I were recently chatting about getting our HO basement-size railroads ready for an operating session. I noted that it usually takes me at least a long afternoon, often extending into the evening, to restage the Nickel Plate Road (NKP). I’ll discuss the particulars in a moment, but right up front I want to share with you an observation that the four of us instantly agreed upon: Staging our railroads is a bit of a pain. And it’s time to chat with you about that. What isn’t a pain at times? To be fair, almost any aspect of scale model railroading can be onerous at times. Some kits are harder to assemble than others; some locomotives don’t perform as well as they should and defy our…

One appeal of astro-observing is that we’re inspecting a vast realm where nothing is sloppily arranged or in need of vacuuming — though the Moon’s southern highlands are admittedly a crowded mess, with many craters piled partially atop others. Then there’s Mars, whose dry and dusty landscape has terminated numerous martian missions, albeit long past their expected use-by date. Dust caked on the solar panels of the InSight lander recently brought that mission to an end, and while the Spirit and Opportunity rovers were lucky enough to have dust devils give their solar panels quick and timely scours, dust eventually did them both in. But rather than sloppiness imposed by nature, let’s talk about whether it matters if you’re a Class 3 slob after you spent your savings on a telescope. It’s…

Saturn, the ringed wonder, achieves opposition this year on Aug. 14 at 17h02m Universal Time (UT), when its rings are 14° open. And this event is not one you’ll want to miss! It will be another five years before Saturn’s rings are again open enough (13°) to fully reveal all their components. Next year’s opposition (Aug. 27 at 8h20m UT) is also favorable, but the rings will open only 9° to our line of sight. That’s just narrow enough to limit the clarity of visual details, especially in the outermost ring, Ring A. This year’s opposition, then, marks the denouement of the northern face of Saturn’s rings. After this apparition, Saturn’s rings will gradually narrow until they turn edgewise in 2025; we will not see them open substantially again until 2027. At opposition,…

MARS IS A WORLD ENTIRELY POPULATED BY ROBOTS: Orbiters and landers from a half-dozen space agencies scout its waferthin atmosphere and stark surface to unveil a surprisingly active past. On the ground, a hardy six-wheeled rover named Curiosity observed its 10th anniversary on the Red Planet this summer. Dust-streaked and running on punctured wheels, it continues to explore a desiccated landscape of wind-chiseled mesas, isolated buttes, and swirling sands for relics of a warmer, wetter, perhaps habitable Mars. The idea of life on the Red Planet has long exerted an irresistible pull, from the canals imagined by Percival Lowell to the monstrous otherworldly tripods of H.G. Wells to the classic lyrics of David Bowie. But while life-forms would find it difficult to thrive on this radiation-drenched wasteland, the infant Mars 3.5…