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Hurricane Ophelia is an odd storm. It’s a picture-perfect hurricane with winds around 90 MPH, but that’s not the odd part, of course. What makes this storm weird is its location. It’s way out in the Atlantic, where it’s usually too cool for hurricanes to develop—much less survive. Ophelia is so far off the beaten path that instead of heading for the Americas (as so many storms have this season), the system will evolve and threaten Ireland and the United Kingdom early next week. Ophelia is our tenth consecutive hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean. The streak began with Hurricane Franklin in the middle of August and continued straight through three devastating landfalls in the span of a couple of weeks. We haven’t seen 10 hurricanes in a row in the Atlantic since the late 1800s, a testament to the tenacity and power of this overachieving hurricane season. Ophelia is our tenth consecutive hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean. The streak began with Hurricane Franklin in the middle of August a...

Yesterday was press day at CES, but now the show floor is open and the gadgets are spilling out all over the place. Here’s a rundown of some of the coolest new stuff to debut.  Click here to see yesterday's roundup! The Samsung press conference is always one of the biggest productions at CES. This year’s event was slightly dull compared to previous years. We got to see a smart car cockpit technology developed by Harman that's rather cool, and of course, there was a new Family Hub smart fridge with Samsung’s digital assistant Bixby built-in. There’s a definite theme this year of putting smart assistants into, well, everything, and trying to get excited about it. One interesting new product called Flip is a digital white board meant to spice up office meetings. It's a $2,700, 55-inch display with which multiple users can interact at the same time. It's the kind of thing we could easily imagine working its way into classrooms down the road to compete with things l...

"BLOOD" MOON This shot was from a 2015 eclipse as seen from upstate New York. It was shot on a Canon 7D with a Tamron 150-600mm zoom lens. Stan Horaczek The moon is a photographic tease. It hangs up there in the sky, all big and bright. Then you try to take a picture of it and you get a pathetic white blob floating in a sea of digital noise and darkness. It’s frustrating, especially when you’re experiencing a super moon, or a blood moon, or a harvest moon, or any of those other moon phenomena that don’t really mean anything, but are extremely good at helping websites rack up page views and Instagram users gather likes. But, while the earth’s little lunar buddy can be a pain to photograph, the results can be rewarding. Here are some tips for photographing a full moon, no matter what kind of camera you have, or what kind of media hype that particularly moon brings with it. Plan your shot Let’s start with the bad news: Stumbling across a beautiful...

California is likely facing another year of water woes. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which supplies up to a third of California’s water, is exceptionally meager this year. Experts found around half as much snow on the mountains as they typically would in early April, when the snowpack is historically most voluminous. Not only does the dwindling snowpack put California’s water supply at risk, it also portends more floods, wildfires, and mudslides over the coming year. This is precisely what makes climate change so dangerous. Even small changes in weather can have cascading effects, multiplying the risk of natural disaster. Declining snowfall means less fresh water Climate change is depriving California of needed precipitation, and it is also causing more precipitation to come down as rain instead of snow. The result is that, over time, the Sierra Nevada see less and less snow, with consequences for the Golden State. Every spring and summer, that snow melts, feeding the streams and...