Tampa’s Hillsborough Transit Authority (HART) announced it will make one of its most popular bus lines free starting on January 5.

“Route 1 serves a vital corridor, connecting downtown Tampa to the University Area, the University of South Florida campus, and the VA Hospital along Florida Avenue, according to a HART press release,” notes Andrew Harlan in That’s So Tampa. The effort is funded by parking revenue.

The agency will also improve service frequency on Route 1 to every 15 to 20 minutes and switch to a paperless, app-based payment system. “It will provide a reliable, cost-free transportation option for thousands of residents, students, and visitors in the Tampa area,” Harlan adds.

• Tampa
• Hillsborough Area Regional Transit
• Public Transit
• Fare-Free Transit
• Free Transit
• Buses

Space exploration is difficult, and when things go wrong, they can go very wrong—as demonstrated by this light-hearted review of 2024’s less than glorious moments in going boldly where no man has gone before. From lunar landers landing every way up except the right way to cancelled missions, budget blow-outs and yet another demonstration of the fact that it’s not aliens—it’s never aliens!—here are 2024’s space-related mishaps in all their ignominious glory.

There’s a whole lot of junk orbiting Earth—and some of that junk is jettisoned deliberately from the ISS, on the expectation that it will burn up on re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Unfortunately, in April, there was a rather spectacular demonstration that these pieces of detritus can prove more resilient than expected. Smash cut to one Alejandro Otero of Naples, FL, who was minding his own business when the remains of a cargo pallet that once carried batteries to the ISS ploughed straight through the roof of his house. Otero was understandably nonplussed: “[There] was a tremendous sound,” he told Florida’s WINK News, “and [the object] almost hit my son.”

As far as space exploration goes, 2024 was the Year of the Questionable Landing. The Japanese moon lander SLIM (an acronym for “Smart Lander Investigating Moon”) set the tone in January by landing upside down. SLIM made Japan the fifth nation to reach the moon’s surface, and it was able to deploy its two rovers successfully, but its rough landing meant the lander’s solar panels weren’t aligned to the sun. Despite its rough start, however, SLIM proved remarkably resilient. It was powered down for the lunar night in early February, which it was not expected to survive. (Lunar days and nights last for about two Earth weeks.) But SLIM didn’t just survive—it also managed to last through several more brutal lunar nights, far longer than anyone expected.

In fairness to SLIM, it certainly wasn’t the only moon lander that had trouble with the whole landing thing in 2024. In February, the lander IM-1, built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines and named Odysseus (or “Odie”) made history as the first privately funded craft to reach the moon’s surface. It was also the first American craft to do so since 1972. Unfortunately, one of the lander’s six legs broke off as it skidded across the lunar surface after touching down. This left Odie lying on its side, an awkward position that limited the amount of data it could send back to Earth. The craft was powered down a week later as the lunar night began, and contact could not be re-established thereafter.

At least SLIM and Odie both reached the moon. Not so Peregrine, which planned to steal Odie’s thunder as the first privately built spacecraft to reach the moon by touching down in early February. In the event, the unfortunate craft barely made it off the launch pad: several hours after its launch in January, Peregrine experienced a “critical loss of propellant”, leading to the plug being pulled on its mission a day later.

Of all the moon-related developments in 2024, though, perhaps the most disappointing was NASA’s announcement in July that it was cancelling the VIPER project. The mission was designed to look for water in the moon’s polar regions, and was originally scheduled to reach the moon in 2022. However, ongoing problems with the lander that was to convey VIPER—built by Pittsburgh company Astrobotic, which also built Peregrine—caused multiple delays, and were one of the reasons cited by NASA for the cancellation. The space agency promises that at least some of VIPER’s instruments will be reused in future projects.

One NASA mission that did go off as planned was Osiris-REx’s 2020 encounter with asteroid Bennu. The craft rendezvoused with the asteroid successfully and brought back soil and rock samples in a sealed container, which arrived safely on Earth in September 2023. The only problem? The container turned out to be very well-sealed—so much so that NASA’s scientists couldn’t get the damn thing open.

The agency documented the issue in an October 2023 blog post, and spent late 2023 figuring out how to pry open the container without contaminating its contents. And in January, three months after it arrived on Earth, the container was finally opened—and happily, the precious, pristine asteroid material therein was extracted successfully.

Did any company have a worse 2024 than Boeing? The problems with the company’s airplanes are well documented, and its space program also had a terrible year, largely because of Starliner. The craft has been plagued with problems ever since 2014, when Boeing won one of two contracts to build a replacement for the Space Shuttle to carry astronauts to the ISS. (The other went to SpaceX, whose Dragon craft launched successfully way back in 2020.)

After years of delays, Starliner finally launched in June, with Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun warning in advance that “the expectation from the media should not be perfection.” Yeah, about that: while Starliner did convey astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams successfully to the ISS, NASA was so concerned about the craft’s manifold technical problems that it decided Starliner wasn’t going to fly the astronauts back. This left Wilmore and Williams effectively stuck on the ISS, where they remain.

In September, Starliner returned home without Wilmore and Williams; they will remain on the ISS until February 2025, when they’ll finally be able to return to Earth… on the rival SpaceX Dragon. Look, no-one is saying that space travel is easy, but Starliner has been … well, it hasn’t been perfection, put it that way.

Speaking of SpaceX, while the company did manage not to blow up any rockets this year—a welcome change, given that the September 2023 explosion of its Starship rocket literally blew a hole in the atmosphere—it didn’t have everything its own way in 2024. For a start, SpaceX remains under FAA investigation for various alleged regulatory and licensing violations, a state of affairs about which the company is not pleased.

It also continues to make a huge mess of Boca Chica, Texas, the remote region of south Texas that serves as its launch site. Locals have worried for years about the site’s effects on the environment, and not without cause—the launches are so loud that they can kill birds miles away and cause structural damage to buildings. There are also potential long-term effects on the local flora and fauna—and on that front, the EPA claimed in August that SpaceX has been illegally dumping mercury-contaminated wastewater from the site for years.

A large crater (approximately 62 meters wide) is visible at the launch silo and extensive damage in and around the launch pad can be seen which suggests that the missile exploded shortly after ignition or launch. pic.twitter.com/2a4l7YWf3m

Russia is one of eight countries known to have operational intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which can deliver warheads (including nuclear payloads) over a range exceeding 3,400 miles. With great power comes great danger, though, and when something goes wrong with an ICBM test, it can go very wrong. This appears to have been the case with a test launch of an RS-28 Sarmat missile—described by former Russian space agency head Dmitry Rogozin as a “super weapon”—in September. While Russia hasn’t acknowledged the incident, Ars Technica reported satellite imagery showing the before-and-after state of the launch silo near the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Before: trees, buildings, and missile silo. After: no trees, no buildings, and a large crater. Whoops.

There’s something about the large fireball that smashed through the atmosphere and into the ocean north of Papua New Guinea in 2014 that seems to attract theories about aliens. First there was speculation that the meteorite itself comprised extraterrestrial technology, and then there was speculation around the ground vibrations recorded by seismometers at nearby Manus Island. Were the vibrations an alien signal??? No, said a study published this March—they were most likely made by a truck. Driving. On a nearby road. Oh.

The post 10 chaotic space-related mishaps of 2024 appeared first on Popular Science.

In a piece for Greater Greater Washington, Patrick McAnaney, an affordable housing developer, contradicts the belief that there are enough vacant housing units in the United States to fulfill demand, if only housing was distributed more effectively.

According to McAnaney, “Some level of vacancy is necessary for any functioning real estate market. If there were no vacant units available, finding a home to rent or buy would be impossible. Yet a large number of vacant units can also be a problem, as it indicates an oversupply.” Historically, vacancy rates hover at roughly 7 to 8 percent. A higher vacancy rate gives renters more leverage, while a low vacancy rate forces them to compete and gives landlords more power. 

McAnaney explains that brand new apartment buildings typically take around two years to reach ‘stabilization,’ where the vacancy rate hovers at around 6 percent. “This typical lease-up period can lead to a common misconception by outside observers: A new building with high levels of vacancy is perceived as proof more homes didn’t need to be built.”

As of October 2024, the national vacancy rate was 6.8 percent. In Washington, D.C., the rate is 5.3 percent. In McAnaney’s opinion, “There is simply no compelling evidence that a surplus of vacant homes exists, especially in high-cost cities, like the District. Rather, ‘vacancy trutherism’ is largely based on misconceptions regarding lease-up timelines and economic incentives for newly constructed buildings.” In McAnaney’s assessment, “Adding new supply drives up the vacancy rate to the point where it blunts or even reverses price increases.” 

• Housing Crisis
• Housing Supply
• vacancy rates
• Apartments
• Housing Costs
• Renters
• Rent

A new state law in New York will ensure students and staff in schools are kept safe from extreme heat. “By setting clear guidelines for extreme heat conditions, the bill will help schools ensure their spaces are conducive to student learning, reduce unnecessary disruptions, and provide for the health and safety of all those in their buildings,” according to a WBEN article by Brayton J. Wilson.

“In June, Gov. Hochul announced the release of the Final Interagency Extreme Heat Action Plan, which advanced her directive to address extreme heat impacts on disadvantaged communities and on New Yorkers with increased risk of harmful health effects.”

The new law establishes a maximum temperature of 88 degrees and defines extreme heat condition days. “In addition, school districts will be required to take action to relieve heat-related discomfort when classroom temperatures reach 82 degrees. Such actions can include turning off overhead lights, pulling down shades or blinds, turning on fans, opening classroom doors and windows, turning off electronics, and providing water breaks.”

• Extreme Heat
• Schools
• Public Health
• Cooling
• Children

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Chicago was awarded a $1.9 billion grant to expand its rail system into South Side neighborhoods by the Federal Transit Administration weeks ahead of President Biden leaving office, according to an Associated Press article.

The money will go toward a $5.7 billion project that will add four new stations to the L system. Cities and agencies are scrambling to secure funding created by the American Rescue Act and other Biden-era infrastructure programs before the new administration has a chance to reverse course. Once funding is allocated, the Trump administration would have a hard time clawing back the money, the article notes.

The new stations will bring much-needed transit access to historically underserved neighborhoods and could spur economic development along the new line. The Chicago Transit Authority expects to begin construction on the extension in late 2025.

• Chicago
• L Train
• Public Transit
• Chicago Transit Authority
• Trains

A Supreme Court ruling from earlier this year in the case of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson that allows cities to criminalize homelessness even when no shelter beds are available is having widespread repercussions across the country, reports Jennifer Ludden for KSMU.

According to Ludden, over 100 municipalities have passed or strengthened camping bans since the ruling. “So far, in the months since the ruling, some places with aggressive new camping bans have ramped up fines and arrests.” 

Advocates for the unhoused say punitive policies only exacerbate the problem, pushing people out of safe spaces and making it harder to connect them to services. “Some cities have held firm against the Supreme Court ruling. The most prominent is Los Angeles, where Mayor Karen Bass has pushed to move people temporarily into motels and touted success after the number of people living on the streets dropped 10% this year.” But despite renewed efforts to build new shelter beds, most U.S. cities remain short.

• Grants Pass v. Johnson
• Homelessness
• Unhoused
• Shelters
• unsheltered homelessness
• Camping Ban
• Criminalization of Homelessness

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. 

There’s a Keurig machine in some 40 million households in the U.S. Single-serve coffee brewing systems — which allow consumers to make just one cup of coffee at a time by feeding a pod into a slot and pressing a button — have soared in popularity since the early 2000s. 

Inevitably, this leads to a lot of trash. 

Every cup of java brewed creates a conundrum: what to do with the coffee pod that produced it. To start, can it be recycled? The answer, in Keurig’s case, is not really. The company’s single-use coffee pods — also known as K-cups — are made of polypropylene plastic, a material that experts warn is not as recyclable as consumers have been led to think. Two of the country’s largest recycling companies have said they do not accept K-cup pods, and one environmental group calculated that if you lined up all the K-cup pods in the world’s landfills side by side, they would comfortably circle the globe 10 times. 

A new coffee pod company claims to have developed a solution to Keurig’s plastic waste problem. Cambio Roasters, which launched in September, offers a Keurig-compatible coffee pod that’s made out of aluminum — which, unlike plastic, is infinitely recyclable. Cambio is led by a team of former Keurig employees, including founder and CEO Kevin Hartley, who was previously a chief innovation officer at Keurig Green Mountain, as the company was formerly known. “This is, in our view, the most exciting innovation in coffee since the K-cup,” said Hartley during a launch-day press call for Cambio.  

Experts, however, aren’t sure that Cambio understands just how big of a problem K-cups pose to curbside recycling systems. 

“Really, plastic is just not a good option,” said Jeremy Pare, a visiting professor of business and environment at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. But even aluminum, with all its benefits, is “still going to have issues.”

Part of the difficulty of creating a truly recyclable packaging option — for just about any consumer good — is the severely fragmented nature of the American recycling landscape. “There are over 10,000 recycling systems in the U.S.,” said Pare, who is also a member of the Plastic Pollution Working Group at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. “And yet, at the same time, only a quarter of the population has access to recycling in the U.S.” (Pare lives in one such community with no formal recycling program, just outside of Augusta, Maine.) In the U.S., the question of whether something is recyclable can only accurately be answered on a local level.

Another problem is the plastic composition of most K-cup pods. Sustainability concerns have followed the Keurig brand closely as it has scaled. (Once a small startup, Keurig was acquired by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in 2006; in 2018, Keurig Green Mountain merged with Dr Pepper Snapple to become Keurig Dr Pepper.) Keurig started selling K-cups pods made of polypropylene in 2016, with the goal of making 100 percent of K-cup pods “recyclable” by 2020. But the company has run into trouble for touting recyclability. In 2018, a California resident sued Keurig for claiming that K-cup pods could be recycled after the foil lid was removed and the coffee grounds were rinsed or dumped out — which resulted in Keurig agreeing to pay $10 million in a class-action settlement. And in September of this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Keurig for falsely claiming the pods “can be effectively recycled.” (Keurig settled the claim by agreeing to pay a $1.5 million penalty fee.) 

Hartley, who left Keurig in 2017, knew consumers wanted a plastic-free K-cup option — and after years of prototypes and testing, he and his team settled on aluminum as an easier-to-recycle alternative. Aluminum is also impervious to oxygen, which causes coffee to lose its flavor over time. “Whenever we brew a cup of coffee, it tastes exactly as the roastmaster intended,” said Hartley. 

Cambio isn’t the first single-serve coffee company to opt to ditch plastic or invest in circularity. Nespresso, a popular single-serve coffee company that’s owned by the Nestlé Group, has made its capsules out of aluminum for over 30 years. In 2020, Nespresso announced that its pods would be made of 80 percent recycled aluminum, and it claims its global recycling rate is 32 percent. 

But Nespresso pods only work in Nespresso machines. Because Cambio coffee pods are designed to work with Keurig models, Hartley hopes to give consumers what they want “without having to buy a new brewer.”

Cambio also allows users to peel back the lid and dump out the grounds before recycling. Nespresso pod lids are difficult to remove, and the company instructs users to recycle their pods as is, grounds and all — but they’re only approved for curbside recycling in New York City and Jersey City, where a designated recycling contractor cleans them out before reprocessing them. (Nespresso consumers can also mail used pods back to the manufacturer for recycling, or drop them off at Nespresso stores.)

Unfortunately, swapping plastic for aluminum doesn’t automatically solve K-cup pods’ recyclability crisis, experts say. What really prevents coffee pods, regardless of what they’re made of, from having a second life is their size. 

After collection, recyclables are sorted at a facility known as a materials recovery facility, or MRF. MRFs aren’t equipped to collect small items — a common rule of thumb is that they can’t handle anything smaller than a credit card — and so small objects placed in recycling bins often wind up getting sent to landfills. “The K-cups are so small that they fall through” the machinery in many recycling facilities, said Pare. “So other than separating” coffee pods from the waste stream “individually, there’s no good way to recycle them.” 

Cambio’s approach to working around this is two-pronged. First, the company says it wants consumers to stack used K-cup pods together — and then pinch them closed — to overcome many recycling facilities’ size requirements. Three or more used K-cup pods should create a piece of aluminum large enough to fit through the machinery at recycling facilities, says Hartley. (These instructions don’t currently appear on Cambio’s packaging or website.)

Cambio says it is also developing a device that will make this stacking and pinching of used K-cups easier. “Think of this device as an easy way for consumers to bundle cups together and then toss into their recycling bin,” said Hartley. He added that the company has filed for patents for second-generation Cambio pods that can be “snapped” together after use.

Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and an environmental nonprofit founder, said, “I don’t think aluminum pods are a meaningful improvement,” citing their small size as a barrier to being accepted and sorted via curbside recycling systems. “Think of the pods like confetti: impossible to collect back up.”

Cambio disagreed with Dell’s characterization of the switch to aluminum, pointing out that currently, essentially no single-use plastic pods are recycled, whereas aluminum can be endlessly recycled. “To Cambio and consumers, these two facts are meaningful.” Hartley also shared that the work of ensuring Cambio’s compatibility with recycling programs across the country is “ongoing.” The company is planning to run tests with MRFs in specific markets “as soon as feasible.”

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson from Keurig Dr Pepper said, “We know our consumers want simplicity and less waste.” They shared that the company has “been lightweighting our pods to reduce the amount of plastic used,” as well as “increasing options for recycling them,” including a soon-to-be-launched program in which customers will be able to mail their used pods to Keurig for recycling. The spokesperson also said the company is “continually exploring” more “sustainable packaging” options. 

Dell leads the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup, which is focused on fighting plastic pollution. The ultimate solution to Keurig’s plastic footprint, she said, is a product that eliminates “the need to collect anything back from customers,” like a fiber-based pod that can be composted along with the grounds.

Keurig is currently testing a plant-based pod format that won’t have any plastic or aluminum, and the company expects it to be certified compostable, according to the Keurig Dr Pepper spokesperson. Hartley said he worked on that product for many years, calling it “an amazing innovation.” 

But these coffee pucks, which are not yet available for sale, will require an entirely new machine to run. “It’s going to take a long time before America is going to throw away 40 or 50 million brewers and buy 40 or 50 million new brewers,” said Hartley. He added, referring to his time with Keurig, “I won’t tell publicly how much money we spent to start from zero and have 50 million American households loving their Keurigs. But it’s a big lift, and it takes decades.” 

In an interview with the Atlantic in 2015, the inventor of the K-cup said, “I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it.” As the market for single-serve coffee brewers grows, so will its impact on the environment, unless its products are somehow wildly reimagined and redesigned. Keurigs and Nespresso machines are marketed as both convenient and luxurious, a combination that is likely to keep drawing in new market segments. 

But eco-conscious coffee brewers can rest easy in the knowledge that you don’t need a Keurig or Nespresso machine to brew one cup of coffee at a time; any coffee maker can be single-serve if you use only the water and coffee grounds you actually need. No pods required — maybe just a filter.  

The post Why it’s so hard to create a truly recyclable Keurig coffee pod appeared first on Popular Science.

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Working remotely (aka from your couch) is one of today’s biggest flexes. But staring at a tiny, cramped laptop screen might drive you crazy some days. If you aren’t switching between 30 Chrome tabs, you’re resizing windows and squinting to read text. 

It sounds like you need a laptop screen extender. You probably don’t want to splurge on a huge desktop setup out of your own pocket (and forfeit being able to work from anywhere), so this is a great option. During our New Year’s sale, it’s also only $180, down from $339. 

If there’s one thing more frustrating than working with a small laptop screen, it’s feeling like that limited screen space is making your work take longer than it needs to. This external laptop monitor adds 13.3 inches of additional space, likely doubling what you already have.

You’ll install its magnetic bracket to the back of your laptop, so you can just slide out the extra screen to the left or right whenever you need the extra room. Maybe you code, write, or present, and you could have another tab open on the extra screen instead of shrinking down windows or switching between tabs like you normally have to.

One thing that makes this portable laptop monitor such a winner is its plug-and-play setup. Any USB-C device works immediately after plug-in and comes with a USB-C to USB-A adapter.

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The post This might just save your sanity while working remotely appeared first on Popular Science.

A multigenerational housing model could offer relief from high housing costs and a built-in community for residents of Anchorage, Alaska.

In a piece for Alaska Public Radio, Ava White explains how one family has housed four generations in a Fairview fourplex. Now, local policymakers like Devin Kelly of the Cook Inlet Housing Authority are looking to make it easier to build and access multigenerational housing. “Multigenerational living allows people to balance community and privacy, and have access to live in support, like eldercare. Anchorage has an affordable childcare shortage, and Kelly calls the potential to live with a built-in childcare giver is a ‘huge deal.’” Kelly notes that the definition of multigenerational housing is flexible and would not apply to only related family members. 

White adds, “The city is in a better position to support new developments of multigenerational housing after Anchorage officials made a number of changes to the housing code. The Anchorage Assembly passed the HOME Initiative in June, which basically eliminates single family zoning. They’ve also increased where accessory dwelling units can be added, and eliminated off-street parking requirements which gives developers more flexibility when building.”

• Anchorage
• Zoning Reform
• Multigenerational Housing
• Fourplexes
• Missing Middle Housing
• Housing Costs
• Housing Crisis
• housing affordability
• Affordable Housing
• Aging in Place

A San Diego County Supervisor is asking county officials to expand a free transit program for people released from the county jail, who are often left with few options for securing affordable transportation.

“Under current practices, only those people leaving jail with less than $7 in cash are given free transit,” explains Jeff McDonald in The San Diego Union-Tribune. In a memo, Supervisor Jim Desmond said, “We have heard from community members and local elected officials that those released from VDF struggle to navigate the public transportation systems and are left wandering the streets of Vista.” According to Desmond, “Limited transportation options act as barriers to reentry, exacerbating challenges faced by the formerly incarcerated population and hindering their ability to rebuild their lives.” 

In response, the Board directed city departments to develop a program for universal free transit passes for people released from custody as part of its Alternatives to Custody initiative. “Over coming months, county officials plan to hold more discussions to expand the transportation element of the Alternatives to Custody program to include housing, counseling, job-training and a host of other services.”

• San Diego County
• Jail
• Free Transit
• Public Transit
• Mobility

Part of living on the modern internet is realizing that a social network just isn’t useful or fun anymore. The thing that you used to get from social media—friends, jokes, or information—have disappeared, generally replaced by some combination of rage, churn, and monetization schemes. 

Even knowing this, though, it can be hard to give up the habit of visiting Facebook, X, Instagram (or whatever network you still use) that’s been part of your life for years or even decades. Part of this is just human nature—we’re creatures of habit. Another part of this is that most social networks employ teams of brilliant psychologists and designers who work hard to make quitting as hard as possible. 

The good news? You can fight back, turning the tricks these companies use against you to your advantage. A new year is about to begin—resolve to stop spending time on a website that you hate. Here’s a few ways you can do that. 

The companies that build social networks work hard to reduce friction—those moments of annoyance that might cause you to do something else. If a page takes a while to load, for example, you might decide to do something else instead. 

Knowing about friction can help you train yourself to visit particular social networks less often: you just need to add some friction. If you tend to reflexively open a social network on your phone, for example, you could remove the icon for the social network from your phone’s home screen, meaning you’ll have to scroll through your list of apps in order to launch it. Or, to make things more annoying, you could uninstall the app entirely.

Even after uninstalling the application you might find yourself still opening the social network in your browser. The good news is that most social networks are horrific in a mobile browser, in no small part because of the constant pop-ups and reminders to install the app. Think of these pop-ups as a reminder that you could be doing something—anything—else with your time.

The situation is a little different on your computer, where social networks generally live in your browser. I recommend logging out of the networks on your computer—that way you’ll need to actually retype your login info in order for the site to take up more of your time. This works even better if you enable two-factor authentication, which will make logging back in just a little more irritating. 

You get the idea. Just do whatever you can to make opening the social network you’re trying to quit a little bit harder to open. This gives you a chance to realize what you’re doing and stop.

Is none of this working? There’s software you can use to block any website or app from opening. There are a number of applications built for this. Freedom is a cross platform solution, meaning it works on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS devices. Cold Turkey works well on Windows; Session is very good on Apple devices. 

All of these applications will stop particular apps or websites from loading. None of them can completely solve the problem for you, mostly because there’s nothing stopping you from turning them off. All of them can help you create more friction, though, which as we’ve talked about can go a long way toward helping you check a social network less often. 

The thing with social networks is that they eat up a lot of your time. The fun part about quitting them is you suddenly find yourself with more time. You could use that time productively, sure, but that’s boring (and, arguably more importantly, might lead to a relapse). This is why I recommend choosing something fun to do in the moments when you reflexively find yourself wanting to log into the social network you’re trying to quit.You could, in theory, replace the bad social network with one that’s better. I prefer to replace the time with something else entirely. My editor Annie told me she’s been using the NYTimes Games app for this. I, personally, have been using a combination of advice columns and music reviews instead. You could also use something like Duolingo, a language learning app that employs a lot of the same tricks that social networks do in order to get you hooked on learning. Or you could just play a game for a few minutes. The point is to find something to open in the moments when you’d otherwise be opening the social network you’re trying to quit.

The post How to quit social media for good appeared first on Popular Science.

Metro Atlanta’s Metropolitan Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) announced plans to expand train service during three major downtown events over New Year’s. According to 11 Alive, “Service will be increased for the Peach Drop, the Chick-fil-A Bowl parade and game, and the Peachtree Polar Opposite Race.”

The agency is encouraging Atlantans and visitors to use public transit to avoid traffic and reach events safely, cautioning that trains and stations will likely be busier than usual.  According to the MARTA website, “Additional trains will be placed in service as needed to accommodate increased ridership before/after the Peach Drop and other NYE events.”

• Atlanta
• Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority
• MARTA
• Public Transit
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Voyager 1 and 2 are still hurtling through interstellar space well beyond our solar system after over 47 years and hundreds of millions of miles. While recent equipment issues hint at the historic mission’s impending end, each spacecraft carries a token of humanity with them into the cosmic abyss: one of two Golden Records engraved with sights, sounds, and depictions of life on Earth. Sure, it may be unlikely that any extraterrestrial intelligence will ever discover the time capsules—but if the extraordinary does happen, what will aliens find on the playable LPs? And who selected the glimpses of our home planet to make the cut?

The Voyager Golden Record project was the result of an official NASA committee chaired by famed astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, then working at Cornell University. The team—which included Rolling Stone editor Timothy Ferris and Sagan’s wife at the time, artist and writer Linda Salzman—spent nearly a year considering a wide range of potential media to include in the project.

“[It’s] the most important artwork of my career, certainly the work I will most likely be remembered for,” Jon Lomberg, Sagan’s longtime artistic collaborator and NASA’s Design Director for the Golden Record project, tells Popular Science.

For the record, organizers ultimately settled on 115 images (plus one used for calibration), chemical composition diagrams, a 12-minute trove of nature recordings such as bird calls, humpback whale songs, and the sound of wind, ocean surf, and thunder. Human vocal selections featured greetings in 55 modern and ancient languages, as well as a spoken message from then-Secretary General of United Nations, Kurt Waldheim. Each record also contained audio of children’s laughter, footsteps, brain wave scans, Morse code, and an engraved message from then-President Jimmy Carter.

When it came to music, the Voyager committee attempted to highlight 90 minutes of songs representative of cultures from around the world. Western classical compositions from Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Stravinsky made the cut, along with Chinese musician Guan Pinghu, Indian classical vocalist Kersarbai Kerkar, and Azerbaijani folk music, among others.

The decision to include more modern music, however, received some pushback. Committee member and folklorist, Alan Lomax, initially pushed back against inclusion of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” after claiming rock n’ roll was too “adolescent” to merit a spot. Sagan reportedly offered Lomax’s opposition with the terse rebuttal, “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet.”

The criticism didn’t end there, either. Although Voyager’s predecessors, Pioneer 10 and 11, included plaques featuring anatomically accurate illustrations of male and female humans, NASA decided against again offending any prudes—be them Earthlings or extraterrestrials. Sagan’s committee originally hoped to include a photograph of nude man and woman, but were forced to compromise on a silhouette of the two bodies without genitalia. That said, human anatomical features are shown in a diagram of vertebrate evolution.

But not all the hurdles were matters of decorum—at least one potentially stemmed from legal red tape. According to some committee members, The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” failed to make it on the records due to copyright issues with the label, EMI. Rolling Stone editor, Timothy Ferris, however, claimed in 2017 that the track was never up for serious consideration.

“It’s not the Beatles’ strongest work, and the witticism of the title, if charming in the short run, seemed unlikely to remain funny for a billion years,” he wrote for The New Yorker in 2017.

The Beatles influenced the records in at least a couple other ways. According to Ferris, project organizers recruited sound engineer (famed producer Jimmy Iovine) after a suggestion from John Lennon. And like Lennon, Ferris also made sure to etch a miniscule, personalized message in the blank spaces at the ends of each record: “To the makers of music—all worlds, all times.” But as for the Golden Records themselves, the plan was never to manufacture solid gold discs to send into space.

“They are actually copper, in an aluminum box,” Lomberg says, adding that makers did anodize both the records and their cases with a “very thin layer of gold” to prevent any potential chemical erosion in space.

Should they be discovered one day in the distant future, extraterrestrial intelligences interested in listening to the record’s audio tracks simply need to play them (presumably on a makeshift turntable) at 16 ⅔ rpm. To glimpse the image archive, illustrative instructions also detail how to construct the images from the recorded signals. But for many still involved on the Voyager mission, the probes represent far more than just the distance they traveled the information they store.

“It is almost like a child who grows up and leaves but always stays in my heart,” flight engineer Sun Matsumoto tells Popular Science. “It is great comfort knowing that Voyage will continue its journey long after being able to call home, carrying peaceful messages to whichever beings care to listen, for years and years, even after we are long gone.”

“To me, the Voyager Golden Record is a beautiful example of humanity and striving for world peace,” adds propulsion engineer Todd Barber. “This was not simply a collection of US music and pictures, but an ambitious attempt to represent planet Earth to the cosmos.”

Regardless of when the Voyager probes ultimately shut down, the Golden Records will continue along their trajectories, further and further into deep space, for the conceivable future. Here on Earth, Lomberg believes their legacy is “destined to live in memory as long as our Space Age is recalled,” adding that he will always remain “very proud to have been a key part of it.” 

This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

CORRECTION: 12/29/24 9:30AM: This article has been updated with Jon Lomberg’s correct position on the Voyager project.

The post What is on the Voyager Golden Record? Shockingly, not The Beatles. appeared first on Popular Science.