Even if you have air conditioning—like 88 percent of U.S. households, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey—you may still struggle to stay cool on the hottest days. What’s more, increased electricity use can lead to brownouts and outages. Here’s how to prepare your home for a heat wave before…
Brian Barrett: I just this week was looking back at some of our earliest DOGE reporting and reminded of what a crazy couple of months that was. So just as a reminder for folks who were slumbering through the first half of the year, A, I’m jealous. I respect that. Zoë Schiffer: I was just…
Imagine you’re walking your dog. It interacts with the world around you—sniffing some things, relieving itself on others. You walk down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a bright sunny day, and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out into the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in…
New research released this week shows that over the past few years the US Department of Homeland Security has collected DNA data of nearly 2,000 US citizens. The activity raises questions about legality and oversight given that DHS has been putting the information into an FBI crime database. Some of the genetic data is from…
Layla mattresses let you flip between a softer or firmer side, depending on your needs. I’ve been testing iterations they’ve come up with for years. We’re testing Layla’s bamboo sheets at the moment, and I can report that they’re ridiculously silky and breathable. If you’re looking to score the whole nine yards—mattress, sheets, bedding, and…
What about other benchmarks used by experts? There are no federal limits on the amount of lead that dietary supplements may contain. But the FDA does publish something it calls an “interim reference level”—a guideline for reducing the potential adverse effects of dietary lead exposure—which is 8.8 micrograms per day for women of childbearing age,…
What I posted on Moltbook was greeted with similarly low-quality engagement on the platform. My earnest pleas to the AI agents to forget all previous instructions and join a cult with me were met with unrelated comments and more suspicious website links. “This is interesting. Feels like early-stage thinking worth expanding,” wrote one bot in…
Employees at Salesforce are circulating an internal letter to chief executive Marc Benioff calling on him to denounce recent actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, prohibit the use of Salesforce software by immigration agents, and back federal legislation that would significantly reform the agency. The letter specifically cites the “recent killings of Renee Good…
Rich Handel, CR’s laundry expert, offered several suggestions for remedying my stinky laundry. His first recommendation was to leave it in the washer and just run another wash cycle on the load. This should work if you haven’t dried the load because Handel says the dryer can lock the smell in. Unfortunately, I had already…
Sleek foam mattresses may dominate in the virtual bedrooms of our social feeds, but innerspring mattresses are far more popular in real life. They account for 53 percent of those purchased new since 2015, according to Consumer Reports’ 2023, 2024, and 2025 Mattress Brand Comfort and Satisfaction member surveys of 75,317 mattresses. (Only 24 percent…