Best Sump Pump Backup Systems of 2024

Our tests use rising water levels to recreate a main system failure. Flow rates are measured based on a 10-foot vertical lift, with each pump hooked up to a 10-foot vertical discharge pipe. Testers determine the flow rate by weighing a collection barrel before and after our tests to calculate gallons per minute.  For battery-powered…

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What Are Organic Tampons and Are They Worth Buying?

Even tampons labeled organic can contain worrisome ingredients. Here are the potential risks and how to stay safe. By Catherine Roberts If you’ve ever used tampons, then you’re probably familiar with the basic tenets of tampon safety: Don’t leave one in for more than 8 hours, use the lowest absorbency you can based on your…

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Pavel Durov’s Arrest Leaves Telegram Hanging in the Balance

“Civil society has had a complicated relationship with Telegram over the years,” says Natalia Krapiva, a lawyer at the digital rights group Access Now. “We have defended Telegram against attempts by authoritarian regimes to block and coerce the platform into providing encryption keys, but we have also been raising alarms about Telegram’s lack of human…

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Cars, SUVs, and Trucks With the Best Fuel Economy

The lists below highlight the vehicles by category that got the best fuel economy in Consumer Reports’ latest tests. Rather than display every tested vehicle here, we have selected miles-per-gallon cutoffs that are relative to each category. For example, a vehicle that gets 21 mpg wouldn’t be a standout among wagons, but it would be…

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Best Budget Soundbars of 2024

Here are a few shopping suggestions to keep in mind. • Make sure you can return or exchange the soundbar even if you listen to it in a store before buying it. Soundbars may sound very different in your home. • Determine how many channels of sound you want. To simply enhance your TV sound,…

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The Music Industry’s ’90s Hard Drives Are Dying

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: Roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable. Music industry publication Mix spoke with…

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