A great grill cleaning brush isn’t just the easiest way to keep your grates immaculate—it’s also an essential tool to keep your grill working at peak performance. Each time you grill, food residue builds up on the grates and burns in place. Straggling peppers from a kebab or a stray piece of chicken skin can…
Some contaminants, like lead and cadmium, are naturally found in the environment, which can partly account for their presence in food. But processing can also introduce heavy metals and chemicals found in plastic. In CR’s tests, our experts found lead, cadmium, or both in all the kits. Even in small amounts, these heavy metals can…
The US Coast Guard’s Titan submersible hearing kicked off with a startling revelation. “I told him I’m not getting in it,” former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen said to a panel of Coast Guard investigators, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to act as a pilot in an…
Last month, Google’s GameNGen AI model showed that generalized image diffusion techniques can be used to generate a passable, playable version of Doom. Now, researchers are using some similar techniques with a model called MarioVGG to see whether AI can generate plausible video of Super Mario Bros. in response to user inputs. The results of…
CR has long tested and rated liquid detergents, pods, and packs. So our test engineers recently put laundry sheets from six brands—Earth Breeze, Ecos, Ecowise, Kind, Sheets Laundry Club, and Tru Earth—to the test. To test detergents, our engineers launder fabric swatches that are saturated with blood, body oil, chocolate, coffee, dirt, grass, and salad…
It’s difficult to make a fair head-to-head comparison between, say, a six-year loan and the standard three-year lease. At the point the lease ends, the bank borrower still has three years of payments to go, but the lessee has to look for another car—or perhaps take the lease’s buyout offer. A lease can also be…
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…
Around here, we have a saying: mattresses are always on sale, but they’re not always the same price. The explosion of the bed-in-a-box business has led to a never-ending price war where you, the consumer, can be the wartime profiteer if you play your cards right. From now through the end of the year, you…
Dust is complex. It’s composed of dead skin cells, pollen, animal dander, dust mites, dust mite corpses, and dust mite droppings. These tiny creatures are arachnids that eat our dead skin after it falls off (thank you!) and also trigger allergies and asthma (no thank you!). Dust mites don’t sting, bite, or otherwise purposefully harm…
Properly aligning the cartridge and stylus can help ensure you get the best sound and reduce wear on your records. (This step is also called setting the overhang.) Many turntables, including mine, come with an alignment protractor, also called an alignment gauge. As you can see in the photo below, the protractor is a rectangular…