For younger children, a day at the playground is not complete without some sandbox time. Long a favorite of children and parents, sandboxes could also be sheltering dangerous pathogens.
Everything from disposed of drugs to hormones and disease-causing bacteria — anything that is rinsed or flushed down the drain — can contaminate wastewater.
Look no further than Flint, Michigan, to discover the serious consequences of contaminated drinking water. Around the world, water polluted by pathogens and toxins sickens people or cuts them off from safe drinking water. Looking for a solution, researchers created tiny, swimming robots that pack a powerful punch against waterborne pathogens.
Arsenic occurs naturally in the environment, but it is also one of the most commonly found heavy metals in wastewater, deposited there by inappropriate disposal and arsenical pesticides, for example.
Scientists are constantly on the search for new organisms, species, and other types of life. A special group of these researchers, calling themselves "bioprospectors," dive deep into mines to find unique lifeforms with special properties not found anywhere else.
Canned pumpkin is something I always stock up on and keep in my pantry, because it's endlessly useful when cooking or baking. Sweet, creamy, and mild, pumpkin can be folded into baked goods and savory dishes with ease.
While Kobe beef cows get massaged, American dairy cows are taking a real beating. Many people are cutting back on dairy while a growing number of people are discovering that they're lactose intolerant. As the public's disdain of cow's milk grows, milk sales themselves are at a forty-year low.
Pumpkin carving and decorating is a favorite October pastime. After you've carved an amazing design or face into a pumpkin or two, you want to show it off through your window or set it out on your porch for the neighbors to see.
Eating healthy poses a challenge nowadays with so many options that taste great but aren't really good for you. Nutritionists have made it their life's work to understand what actually does a body good. Here's how you can follow their example.
Certain ingredients that a professional chef might work with in a restaurant-style setting may seem bizarre, dangerous, and even downright scary to a home cook, and for good reason.
Chances are that you've been using your microwave just to nuke leftovers, but they can do so much more than heat up last night's dinner—microwaves can help you peel garlic more quickly, get more juice out of lemons, disinfect your kitchen, dry out herbs, give beauty products new life, cause exciting explosions, and even arc weld.
I used a plastic water filter for years. Who wouldn't? It cuts down on buying bottled water, which, as it turns out, is pretty much the same as unfiltered tap water. Plus, bottled water is terrible for the environment and your wallet, too. Water that costs only pennies a day and actually was purified as opposed to just saying it was? That's a no-brainer.
Even though I often end the workday exhausted and just want to wrap rotisserie chicken parts in a store-bought tortilla and shove it in my eating hole, I generally try and take a couple of minutes to warm up said tortillas before I begin my meal. But if you're starving, do you really need to take the time? Do warm tortillas really make that much of a difference?
I've never understood the phrase "smooth as a baby's bottom" to describe a really close shave. I mean, have you ever touched a baby's cheek? It's even smoother and a lot more sanitary. It just doesn't spew off the tongue as nice.
This summer's going to be a hot one, so skip the water pistol this year and break out the big guns! In this project, I'll be showing you how to build a water balloon shotgun—a high-powered water balloon launcher that's capable of firing 17 water balloons at the same time!
Not that long ago I wrote an article discussing what it would be like, realistically, if you were to accidentally travel back in time to the Victorian era. At the end of that article, I mentioned that the best thing you could bring with you on a time-traveling adventure is a Kindle, or similar e-reader, stuffed full of the knowledge of the 21st century. Why a Kindle? Well, I own a Kindle, and I love it. However, there's far more to it than that.
Do you live in a dangerous neighborhood? Even if your area isn't known to be dangerous, it could still be a target of home burglaries. Don't let the thieves have the upper hand. Make sure the only thing they're stealing is grass. To properly secure your home from external threats, you must find weaknesses potential and potential entry points and fix them.
In this how-to video series, learn how to make a mosaic tile table from expert potter Susan Ting. Susan will show you how to design a mosaic clay tile table, how to trace that design onto clay, and how to cut the design out of clay. She will demonstrate how to smooth the edges of the tile, how to add detail to the clay tile design, how to glaze the clay tile, and how to arrange the clay tiles to make a clay tile mosaic table.
You know Moana's a rock-solid pick for Halloween this year. The question is, how far will you go to become Moana? Are you going to just slap on a cream skirt and a red bandeau? Or do you want to go all out and end up with the finished product like YouTuber Gladzy Kei did?
Break out the office supplies and kitchen utensils, because improving your morning makeup routine is about to get a lot easier. Some of the things you have lying around the house can provide the perfect solution for some of the most common beauty problems. We've collected 10 of our favorites.
This time it's serious. Really. The largest web security vulnerability of all time went public on Monday, April 7th, 2014, resulting in widespread panic throughout the Internet as system administrators scrambled to secure their websites from the OpenSSL bug known as Heartbleed.
As was mentioned by the great OTW last week, TOR, aka The Onion Router, has had its integrity attacked by the NSA. In an attempt to reduce the anonymity granted by the service, the NSA has opened a great many nodes of their own. The purpose is presumably to trace the origin of a communication by compromising some entrance and exit nodes. Once both are compromised, it is much easier to correlate traffic with a particular individual.
If you're looking to improve your browsing experience, then a VPN is the right way to go. If you're tired of censored or geographically blocked sites and wary of companies selling your data, then a good VPN can be your answer to a problem that limits every aspect of your experience online.
One of the scariest things about the COVID-19 virus is that you can show no symptoms but still be infected (and contagious). Naturally, we all want to know whether we're carrying the new coronavirus, but if you're showing signs of COVID-19, how can you be tested to know for sure? Websites are popping up to help with that, screening for symptoms, and directing you to a testing site if needed.
Sniffing packets over a network is an easy way for hackers to gather information on a target without needing to do much work. But doing so can be risky if sniffing packets on an untrusted network because a payload within the packets being captured could be executed on your system. To prevent that, Sniffglue sandboxes packet sniffing to provide an extra layer of security.
Unlike some of the popular app lockers out there, a nifty app fittingly named App Hider completely erases apps, files, and their associated footprints from your smartphone. Think of App Hider as a micro-OS within your smartphone's system. This miniature ecosystem can operate copied apps independently, thus giving it an unprecedented layer of privacy and freedom within your handset.
When a photo or video is just too sensitive to leave laying around in your Photos app, you'll want to either delete it for good or hide it away in safe, secure location on your iPhone. As for the latter, Apple actually has a few tools available to make photos and videos hidden — even password-protected — on your iPhone.
Snapchat offers a rich experience for anyone looking to communicate with pictures in addition to (or instead of) words. There are many ways to share your snaps, from Memories to My Story. You can even draw all over your snaps, creating a unique experience that hinges on your own illustrations. Sometimes, though, you want to customize your snaps in a different way. In a more collage-y sort of way.
Deep down inside, Android is really just a fork of Linux, the popular open source desktop OS. You can see traces of its roots everywhere, and this lineage still holds a certain appeal with many Android fans. If you're in that boat, you'll love the newest notes app we just found.
More than a year after Harley Quinn made her splash in the summer of 2016, her popularity has not waned one bit. According to Google Trends, the Harley Quinn costume remains ever popular, trailing only Wonder Woman in searches. These two DC Comics characters provide a powerful one-two punch, a mix of superhero and supervillain.
While at work, you notice your gloves changing color, and you know immediately that you've come in contact with dangerous chemicals. Bandages on a patient signal the presence of unseen, drug-resistant microbes. These are ideas that might have once seemed futuristic but are becoming a reality as researchers move forward with technology to use living bacteria in cloth to detect pathogens, pollutants, and particulates that endanger our lives.
In a disturbing turn of events, Uber has been tracking oblivious iPhone users even after they removed the application from their phone. Two years ago, the situation escalated to such an extent that CEO Travis Kalanick earned a slap on the wrist from Apple mogul Tim Cook.
A recent pathogen outbreak in Illinois is just one of many outbreaks of an underappreciated, but serious, viral infection passed from rodents to humans. These hantaviruses have been cropping up more frequently in the last decade or so, giving us more reason to clean out our dusty attics, basements, and garages.
When you do an internet search, you'll see ads that are relevant to your query mixed in with the rest of your results. Nothing surprising there—it's how the internet is funded. But then, when you click one of the search results, you'll also see ads that are related to your initial search. Now that's a bit creepy, because it demonstrates that one webpage knows what you typed into a different webpage.
Though the word "pie" may conjure up images of a dessert made of dough with various fillings, the famous Frito Pie is, in fact, something of an entirely different nature. Absurdly simple in its construction, this pile of Fritos and chili is served in the actual chip bag and more closely resembles nachos than it does a traditional pie.
Hello Strangers, This is my first article for null-byte and its about staying anonymous on the Internet. But the question is why would you want to stay anonymous online?
Welcome back, my neophyte hackers! Digital forensics is one of the fields often overlooked by aspiring hackers. In a rush to exploit every and any system they can, they often ignore learning digital forensics—the field that may lead to them being traced.
I always have several sheets of puff pastry in my freezer. It's unlike any other pastry dough: the layers of butter let out steam when the dough bakes (hence, the "puff" in puff pastry). The dough's flakiness perfectly compliments sweet and savory dishes, which makes it a totally versatile—and completely necessary—fixture in your kitchen!
CEO's of IT companies doesn't know this because they are not a hacker. Only a true hacker can become a successful Security head officer.
In recent weeks, major bank websites around the world have experienced outages after being have been hit with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Although few, if any, of these banks have been totally knocked offline, these DoS attacks have dramatically slowed the response time of their websites to legitimate customers. The most recent victim was the Royal Bank of Scotland. Due to this attack, RBS customers were unable to access their accounts for about an hour last week.
