The California blackouts are not a temporary thing — PG&E is claiming these unprecedented power outages, which leave millions without power for days at a time, will be the new normal for the next decade. That’s the bad news. The one bit of good news we can offer is that it doesn’t take a ton
It’s like something out of a movie: Korea deploys snipers and drones to its borders to stop the infected from entering and spreading a disease that alarmed scientists estimate will wipe out fully one quarter of the global population… of pigs. African swine fever is threatening the world’s protein supply, in what the World Organization
Our staff comes across a lot of novel and potentially great products during the course of the week. If readers like this (let us know!), we’ll periodically share these quick roundups on the blog. If you see something cool that you think should be included, drop it in the comments and we’ll consider it for
PG&E warns it could cut power to more than 2 million people beginning Saturday night, LA Times. “Pacific Gas & Electric said Friday that it would probably begin cutting off power to 850,000 Northern California customers — more than 2 million people — on Saturday night as historic winds returned to the region. It would
Helle of Norway is best known for traditional Scandinavian-style bushcraft knives, but the Helle Utvaer is an attempt to offer a more American-centric, “tactical” knife design while still keeping finished product fundamentally Scandinavian in build and functionality. The result is a gorgeous design by Danish knifemaker Jesper Voxnaes that, as the only full-tang knife in
Solar + storage to survive disasters, PV Magazine. “A research note by Roth Capital Partners predicts the residential storage market in the United States to grow more quickly than expected. This prediction is founded just as much in disaster mitigation as it in economic viability.” Lithium will fuel the clean energy boom. This company may
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is in the opening phase of a very large, planned blackout in Northern California. This will affect some 800,000 customers, and already some 500,000 are without power today. This affects not just homes but stores, schools, and even hospitals will lose power for anywhere from 24 hours up to a
If you’ve spent any amount of time shopping for survival products then you’ve come across premium materials like titanium, Dyneema, silnylon, carbon fiber, and the like. These are low-weight, high-strength materials developed for industries like racing or aircraft manufacturing that, in recent decades, have found their way out onto trails and mountain peaks as gear
After recently analyzing over 2,200 miles of municipal pipes and plumbing, Portland city officials have concluded that a large earthquake will knock out water for almost 1 million people in a 225 square mile region for two weeks or longer — not just homes and businesses, but fire stations, hospitals, and other critical first responder
“Civil War 2.0” is a topic that comes up with depressing regularity in my social media feeds, both because it’s a real concern in some quarters and because it’s a source of sweet sweet clickbait traffic for mainstream media outlets. I have read most of the clickbait and some of the serious work on this
Major power shut-offs are new reality as California enters peak wildfire season, LA Times Forest Fires Are Turning Indonesia Into Mars, Earther Panic at 137 Bank Branches as RBI Limits Withdrawals to ₹1,000, Bitcoin.com Meet Zed Merrick, a kid whose second degree burns were healed with the Spray-On Skin treatment, Reddit FDA Approves 1st live,
A new group called the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, working under the auspices of the World Health Organization and the World Bank, has released a dire report warning that the world is woefully unprepared for the next global pandemic. Some highlights (or, lowlights, rather): “The world is not prepared for a fast-moving, virulent respiratory pathogen
During our recent fire starter review, one of my favorite “under the radar” products was the Fire-Fast Trekker. Apart from the Light My Fire Swedish Firesteel that won the overall contest, the Trekker was the only fire steel we tested that gave me the confidence it was made of genuine European ferrocerium. But we hesitated
This is a semi-regular list of news links from around the web. Please drop us an email or stop by in the comments to let us know what kinds of news and topics you’d like to see more of, and what you’d like to see less of. Coming Soon to a Battlefield: Robots That Can
If you’ve logged onto the internet this morning, you’ve no doubt seen novelist Jonathan Franzen’s big climate essay in the New Yorker making the rounds. The piece is being shared widely in prepper forums, but before you pile on and click “share” you should know that Franzen is getting a lot of strongly negative reactions
