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As the country’s growing urban populations draw down scarce water supplies, wastewater is starting to look pretty appetizing to American researchers and planners. Last year was the second driest on record for Atlanta, which continues to suffer a Category D4 drought–the most severe on the government’s scale. Throughout the West, enduring water problems have grown steadily worse. Arizona’s population, for example, has expanded at 3.5 percent per year since 1990–nearly four times the national average–while the Colorado River, which supplies much of Arizona’s water, has dwindled....

Spanning 80 miles over the screensaver-worthy desert landscape of Canyonlands National Park in Utah, the White Rim Trail features some of the most idyllic vistas in the American Southwest. Most park-goers enjoy the breathtaking scenery from the comfort and convenience of an off-road vehicle because it’s 80 miles long, in the middle of the desert and temperatures average 105 degrees in the summer. As Lauren Steele and Paddy O’Connell set out to walk the trail (in the middle of summer no less), they had to ask themselves and whomever they came across, “are we the toughest or the dumbest?...

What would happen if everyone on Earth lived in one city? To get an idea, you have to look at the world’s biggest and densest cities, like Tokyo. The greatest population density ever recorded was in the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, where people were living at a density of 1.2 million per square kilometer. But you can fit everyone on Earth into one city without it looking like that, it just has to be a city the size of a whole country....

Last night SpaceX announced the identity of the first private passenger it intends to shoot into space: Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. The passenger came on stage and announced he will fund a trip around the moon and will take six others with him as part of a global art project. “I choose to go to the moon,” Maezawa said during the announcement. “With artists!”Amid the hoopla and excitement, it could be easy to forget some of the important aspects of the mission and what it means for the future of the space economy....

Media Platforms Design TeamCredit: U.S. Coast GuardShell’s Kulluk oil rig is grounded near Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, where it came to rest on Dec. 31 after days of struggle in heavy seas. While salvage crews get to work with help from the U.S. Coast Guard, attention turns to the future of offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean.The first question for Shell and regulators is whether the company will get to drill in the summer of 2013....

A Royal Navy submarine and a car ferry reportedly came dangerously close to colliding late last year. The incident took place on November 6, 2018, in the Irish Sea between England and Ireland. The U.K. has not commented on what type of submarine was involved, but its navy operates four ballistic missile submarines armed with nuclear weapons. Royal Navy submarines have been involved in several incidents with other vessels in the past decade, including a rare collision with another submarine....

They say a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind. Having a ton of stuff strewn all over the place can distract you from carrying out your deliverables, ultimately thwarting your productivity. But with the number of gadgets, wires, and dongles that you’re required to use every day, decluttering can’t be as simple as stowing everything away in a drawer (Sorry, Marie Kondo).ProBASE X StandProBASE X Stand$145 at shop....

Facebook filed a patent for technology that could target entire families with ads. The tech uses photos and various other data collected by the social network. In a patent filed last May and made public Thursday, the company describes a system enabled by “deep learning techniques” meant to identify groups of people living under the same roof and their relationships to each other. It uses image captions, hashtags, as well as ISP and search data to build a cache of information that’s stored and later fed to its network of advertisers....

Home Depot’s got some terrific deals today on a variety of DeWALT products. At the top of the list is a DeWALT 5,700-Watt Gasoline Powered Recoil Start Portable Generator going for $600, down from $700. Capable of running for 10.5 hours at a 50 percent load, it’s got a sturdy steel frame and a low oil shut-off that are designed to keep it safe. Its covered outlets help it stay safe in outdoor working conditions, its auto idle control makes sure it uses power responsibly and its fold-down/locking handle makes sure it can be compactly stored away when not in use....

NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, ENGLAND—Gran Turismo 6 producer Kazunori Yamauchi announced at a press conference today that the next installment of the Gran Turismo series, Gran Turismo 6, will be hitting stores this holiday season . . on the PS3.The announcement came during a 15th anniversary celebration of the franchise. Yamauchi, who’s overseen Polyphony Digital’s racing sim series since the original Gran Turismo was released in 1998, outlined the core improvements to GT6: an optimized game engine for smoother performance; an improved graphics engine with better lighting capabilities; and a revamped physics engine, including a new tire deformation model co-developed with Yokohama....

Black Friday deals aren’t limited to just electronics and tools, you can also score deep discounts on that car or truck you’ve been coveting all year, and Cars.com has revealed some of the top car deals at your local dealerships. New car sales have declined 2 percent in 2017, so automakers want to capitalize on the Black Friday frenzy which aligns nicely with their end-of-the-month and end-of-the-year sales goals. According to a new Cars....

Rainfall can be a tricky thing to measure. The amount of rain falling in a given area can change from minute to minute and might be completely different from the amount falling only a few miles away. Many wealthy countries spend large sums of money to build rain gauges over populated areas, and track cloud cover using ground-based radar. But in more rural areas, or in less wealthy countries, those options can be limited or nonexistent....

It’s been a while since Acura introduced its current large sedan, the RL. Get ready for its successor which should be look a lot like the Advanced Sedan Concept that the company revealed at the Los Angeles Auto Show. “We wanted to capture the essenece of an ultra luxurious sedan,” said Dave Marek, chief designer of Honda R&D Americas, Inc. Like other recently shown Acura concepts, the ASC has sharp creases and angular lines that have become an Acura brand hallmark....

Media Platforms Design TeamEditor’s note: This story was originally published on August 14, 2012. This Sunday morning, a 6.0 quake struck Napa, Calif.The Peeps were moving. It was Easter Day, 2010, and I was at a potluck brunch not far from downtown Los Angeles. It was characteristically sunny and warm, and many of the guests had settled into the host’s backyard garden. I was one of a half-dozen people sitting at a wooden picnic table when the shaking began....

🛠Number of parts: 137 | Model: Bafang G310 | Time to Disassemble: 2 hours, 45 minutes E-bikes are booming: The U.S. imported at least 215,000 electric bicyles in 2017, up from 64,000 in 2012, according to industry experts Ed Benjamin and Frank E. Jamerson, PhD. But brand-new rides are expensive. More Things Come ApartThings Come Apart: BinocularsWe Took Apart a MacBook AirInstead, you can buy a conversion kit, and electrify any pushbike for around $1,000....

As far as deadly apocalypse scenarios go, perhaps the worst is a gigantic meteor impact. After all, a meteor wiped out most of the dinosaur species, and at any moment another such meteor could come for us. While a big meteor impact is unlikely, it’s a serious enough risk that NASA, FEMA, and a handful of agencies from other countries are developing an exercise to better prepare for it.The exercise will take place at the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference, where representatives from several different countries will be tasked with planning a response to a hypothetical asteroid....

We knew the U.S. Navy was suffering a serious backlog of urgent repair work on its attack submarines. Now we know just how dire the situation has become. The bottleneck has cost the Navy more than five years of submarine patrolling time and $1.5 billion.According to USNI News, U.S. Navy attack submarines racked up a total of 8,472 days of depot maintenance delays over the past decade. This has resulted in “at least 1,891 lost operational days”—days when the submarines could have been training at sea or on an operational patrol, representing a total loss of approximately 5....

The EmDrive, a type of space propulsion system that claimed to produce thrust without propellant, has been highly controversial (to say the least) since it came around in 2003. Now, thanks to a new study that could explain some of the weird results, the skeptics are claiming victory. But are their celebrations premature?Impossible PhysicsThe EmDrive device, invented by British engineer Roger Shawyer, is a truncated cone filled with microwaves. Radiation exerts slight pressure, and the microwaves supposedly exert more pressure on one end of the cone than the other, resulting in a net push in one direction....

A team of doctors has concluded that mysterious ailments plaguing U.S. diplomatic personnel in Cuba—injuries attributed to mysterious “sonic weaponry”—are real and resemble traumatic brain injuries.A preliminary report prepared by doctors from the University of Pennsylvania states that 24 State Department personnel sent to Cuba have sustained “injury to widespread brain networks.” The reports does not conclusively call out the cause of the injuries. You can read the Journal of the American Medical Association report here....

Without photosynthesis, life as we know it wouldn’t exist on earth. When plants convert light energy into chemical energy, they release oxygen as a by-product. But over the past millennia, they’ve slowly become less effective at production. Researchers at the U.S Department of Agriculture and the University of Illinois have engineered a correction and figured out how to make crops that are 40 percent more productive in real-world farming conditions.The problem lies with an enzyme known as rubisco, short for ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase....