Google Maps has been helping us get from A to B since 2005. In that time, it’s amassed a huge amount of data about the world—from business opening times to national boundaries. And alongside the map itself, there’s satellite imagery and imagery at ground level, courtesy of Street View.

You may well have used Street View before, dropping a little pegman onto a road in Google Maps to see what it looks like if you’re actually stood on the sidewalk. What you might not be aware of is that you can go back in time in Street View—back to 2007 in the first places that were mapped with this technology.

It means you can check out your neighborhood (or someone else’s neighborhood) as far back as twenty years ago. You can see what’s changed and what hasn’t. It works for the most iconic streets and locations in the world too, from Times Square to the Arc de Triomphe. Here’s how to use the feature.

How to find Street View time travel

The feature is a little easier to use through Google Maps on the web, not least because there’s more screen real estate to work with. Scroll and pan to the part of the world that you want to take a look at, or use the search box up in the top left corner to jump to somewhere specific.

You can find the little Street View pegman icon down in the bottom left corner (yes, pegman is his official name). Click and drag the pegman over to the map, and you’ll see all the roads, paths, lanes, and freeways that support Street View highlighted in blue. Drop the pegman on the spot you want to take a look at.

You’ll go straight into the immersive Street View mode, with ground-level imagery. Use the mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard to take a look around. You can also start moving up and down the street using the up and down arrow keys, or by clicking the arrow icons overlaid on the ground.

Here’s the time travel bit: Click the See more dates link up in the top left corner, and along the bottom of the screen you’ll see thumbnails of older imagery, together with dates—scroll to the right to see the oldest available pictures.

Bear in mind that the total number of different date options, and the years they cover, are going to vary depending on  how long Google’s Street View cars have been covering a particular area, and how regularly they’ve been back. You’ll find there’s quite a substantial difference in how far you can go back, depending on where you are in the world.

Exploring neighborhoods of the past

As soon as you select one of the image thumbnails representing an earlier year, you’ll be taken back in time in Street View. You can still look around and explore as before—the views you see will be from the same year you’ve selected, until you choose a different month and date from the carousel at the bottom.

It lets you check out how businesses and houses have changed over time, and in some locations you’ll even be able to see roads or buildings being built (or being leveled) as the years go by. For busy areas, you get an interesting peek into the changing fashions for both people and vehicles.

It’s possible to check out famous landmarks in this way too, though if they’re iconic then they don’t tend to be modified much over time. When you’re ready to return to the present day, click the See latest date link in the top left corner.

You can time travel through Street View through the Google Maps apps for Android and iOS as well. To get to Street View, long-press on a road on the map, then tap the Street View thumbnail that pops up in the lower left corner. You can then tap the date label (top left) to find other dates.

It’s also worth noting that historical imagery is available in Google Earth too, for both Street View images and satellite maps. Either drag the pegman in from the bottom right corner and then choose See more dates, or click the historical imagery button in the top toolbar (it looks like a globe with an arrow around it).

The post How to go back in time with Google Maps appeared first on Popular Science.

Want to spend less on energy? You’re not alone. Summer’s approach means air conditioning season is almost here, just in time for a global energy crisis.

Naturally, we’re all looking for ways to lower our energy bills. There’s a lot of great advice out there, from ditching incandescent lights to getting a heat pump. But there’s also some energy-saving advice that is useless—and a few tips that actually waste energy. Here are a few common myths about energy conservation, debunked with actual science. 

Closing vents in empty rooms doesn’t save energy.

If there are rooms in your house you don’t regularly use—a guest bedroom, say, or an occasionally used rec room—you might wonder whether it’s worth heating or cooling it year-round. What if you closed the vents in those rooms, just to save a little money? There’s a certain intuitive logic to this. Heating and cooling costs money, so why bother leaving the vents open in rooms you’re not using? 

But HVAC systems don’t work that way. Research suggests that closing vents will probably end up costing you more money. Here’s how.

A 2003 study by I.S. Walker at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory tested this in a lab environment, simulating various California households and climates. Researchers found that closing vents actually increases energy usage. 

“The reduction in building thermal loads due to conditioning only a part of the house was offset by increased duct system losses,” the study concluded, stating this was “mostly due to increased duct leakage.” 

Put simply: Closing vents doesn’t save energy, because doing so pushes heated or cooled air into your walls instead of your rooms. HVAC systems use pressure to force air through vents, and the system is typically calibrated for the number of vents in your home. Closing one of those vents means there’s more pressure. Because no home HVAC system is free from leaks, that increased pressure means air ends up being pushed through those leaks into your attic or walls instead of any of your rooms. 

This doesn’t mean you can’t ever close your vents—you might do so for comfort reasons, for example. It just means that closing vents isn’t a good way to save money on energy. 

Fans don’t cool rooms; they cool people.

If it’s hot out you should turn on the fans, right? Not exactly. It turns out fans are only useful if there are people in the room; leaving them on in an empty room is pointless. 

Why is that? Because fans don’t cool rooms, only people. You can experiment with this at home if you have a thermometer. Turn on the fan and see if the temperature goes down (it won’t), then also note if the room feels cooler (it will). The reason behind this is the windchill effect. 

Air moving across your body speeds up heat transfer from your skin to the air, which we experience as cooling. Anyone who lives in a climate with cold winters is used to hearing both the actual physical temperature and what the temperature feels like given the windchill effect. The wind doesn’t change the physical temperature, which you can measure with a thermometer, but the human experience of it. 

The exact same force is at work inside when you turn on a fan, and it can lead to real energy savings. According to the US Department of Energy, turning on a ceiling fan during the summer “allows you to raise the thermostat setting by about 4 degrees Fahrenheit without reducing comfort.” A 2013 study by researchers from the University of California in Berkeley goes further, suggesting people can feel comfortable in a room 6 degrees higher with a fan than without it.

Either way, turning on a fan could allow you to avoid turning on the air conditioning in some conditions, which obviously saves energy. Even with AC on, though, a fan could allow you to set the thermostat a little bit higher. Just remember: There is no point to leaving a fan on if you’re not in the room. 

Cranking the thermostat doesn’t speed things up.

Here’s a trick people try sometimes: turning the thermostat up past what you actually want in order to speed things along. The problem is that HVAC systems don’t work that way. That’s according to Trane, a leading manufacturer of HVAC systems. “When you set your thermostat to a specific temperature, such as 70 degrees, your HVAC system will operate at the same rate to reach that temperature, regardless of whether you initially set it higher or lower,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Setting it higher won’t make your home heat up any faster; it will only cause your system to overshoot the desired temperature, resulting in unnecessary energy consumption.”

BC Hydro, a Canadian energy utility, agrees, writing that “the science is that rooms don’t heat up any faster when you crank the temperature up to 24 degrees Celsius instead of 21 degrees”. With very few exceptions, HVAC systems adjust the temperature at a pretty consistent rate. The best policy is setting the temperature you want and waiting. 

Turning the lights on and off doesn’t affect modern light bulbs.

There is an idea that you shouldn’t turn off the lights every time you leave a room, because doing so takes up more energy than simply leaving them on. It’s not true. 

Many energy-saving myths have their origin in now-obsolete technology. This is one of those. Fluorescent lighting, the light-saber shaped tubes of light once common in office buildings and schools, wear down more quickly if they’re constantly being turned on and off. The same is true of compact fluorescent bulbs, or CFLs, which were a common energy-saving tool in the 2000s. For this reason, according to the US Department of Energy, you should only turn off fluorescent lights if you’re going to be out of the room for 15 minutes or more. 

This advice isn’t really relevant in the 2020s, though, because fluorescent lighting is a rarity now. Most modern lighting is LED-based, and “the operating life of a LED is unaffected by turning it on and off,” according to the Department of Energy.

So, unless you’ve got some really old lighting, go ahead and turn the lights off every time you leave a room. You’ll use a little bit less energy and it won’t damage your bulb at all. 

The post Fans don’t cool rooms and 3 other myths about home energy conservation appeared first on Popular Science.

When you search Google for something topical, you might see a cluster of headlines from news outlets, reporting breaking stories related to your search query. If you want to focus on those results, you can click to see More news, or navigate to the News tab at the top of the screen.

How these news sources are chosen depends on a variety of signals and factors—just the same as any other Google results—but you now have the ability to set “preferred” sources that will always show up first.

Maybe you want more New York Times and less CNN, or vice versa—Google will let you pick your favorites (which hopefully include Popular Science). This can also help you surface content from news sources you wouldn’t otherwise see in Google, like a local website covering your area.

How to set preferred sources

If you run a Google search on the web for something in the news, topical enough that the Top stories box comes up in your results, you can then click the small icon next to the Top Stories heading to pick your sources. The icon looks like a couple of rectangles with a plus symbol on top.

This brings up a new dialog, where you can pick specific sources. Just start typing the name of the website you want to read more often, and select it when it appears. You can’t add any website on the internet though, only those that are regularly updated (and therefore qualify as news sites).

While there’s no specific set of rules about how often preferred sources show up, Google says you’ll see them “more often” than other outlets. As you add more sources, you’ll see the option to Reload results based on your last search. This should now include your selected sources, as long as they’ve published something related to your search recently.

You can head back to this dialog via the Top stories box whenever you want, and add new preferred sources or remove existing ones—there’s actually no limit to the number of sources you can add, so you’re able to cover a full gamut of perspectives and topics. You can also head to google.com/preferences/source directly in your web browser.

Many news websites have now started adding Add as a preferred source on Google badges on their articles, which you can click directly to jump to the preferred sources dialog. In our articles, you’ll find it’s labeled Add Popular Science, just under the headline and sub-heading—click the link to add us.

Preferred sources and Google News

Google hasn’t officially said anything about how preferred sources in Google search relates to the dedicated Google News website and apps for Android and iOS, but there is some overlap here.

If you head to Google News on the web and then open the Following tab, you’ll see that the preferred sources you’ve selected via search are also listed under Sources. However, there’s no way (at the moment) to add new sources from Google News—you need to go through Google search.

On the dedicated Google News portal, if you click the three dots next to any story, you can opt to see more stories or fewer stories like it—but you can’t specifically request to see more of a particular publisher. You can block an outlet though, by choosing Hide all stories from… on the same menu.

There are other factors that affect your Google News selection as well, and if you scroll down the front page of Google News to the Your topics section, there’s a Customize button to the right. Click on this, and you can tell Google News which topics you want to see more of (like sports, entertainment, and business, for example).

We may well see a closer connection between preferred sources and Google News in the future, but for now there are a variety of ways to customize the stories you get served up inside Google’s portals. If you’re spending a lot of time reading news, it’s worth making sure your favorite publishers appear first.

The post How to avoid garbage news on Google Search appeared first on Popular Science.

The major refreshes that Apple gives its software each year get a lot of attention—you can read our round-up of new iOS 26 and macOS 26 features—but there are also plenty of minor updates that appear during the rest of the year as well.

These minor updates don’t often include big changes that will significantly affect how you use your devices, but they regularly feature small improvements and tweaks that are well worth knowing about.

Listed below you’ll find all the notable upgrades included in iOS 26.3 and iOS 26.4, the two most recent updates pushed out by Apple, besides the usual slew of tweaks and bug fixes. To check for new updates on your iPhone, head to Settings, then select General > Software Update.

iOS 26.3

Limit precise location: iOS 26.3 lets you limit how closely your carrier can track your location, though the carriers themselves also need to add support for the feature. Apple says it’s like the difference between knowing which neighborhood you’re in, and which address you’re at: Choose Mobile Service > Mobile Data Options from Settings to find it.

Transfer to Android: Apple is lending Google a hand and making it a little more convenient for you to switch over to Android, if you’ve had enough of Apple phones. When an iPhone is in a transfer state, an Android handset can move data over from it, and you can find this from iOS Settings by selecting General and then Transfer or Reset iPhone.

Weather and Astronomy wallpaper: Wallpaper options get a refresh in this update as well, with Weather and Astronomy breaking out into their own categories so you can get to these types of backdrop more quickly. Open Settings, then select Wallpaper to make changes—you can either customize the existing iOS theme, or work on a new one.

iOS 26.4

Average Bedtime: iOS 26.4 comes with a small tweak to the Health app, in the form of a new Average Bedtime metric in the Sleep section. It gives you another stat to check against your sleep quality, and to use for goal setting, if you’re using a connected Apple Watch (or another device that plugs into the Health app) to monitor your slumber overnight.

CarPlay AI: Third-party AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can be accessed through the CarPlay interface for the first time with this software update, though you’re still relatively limited in terms of what you can do. You can only interact with them via voice, and you can’t use them to control any of the settings in CarPlay or your vehicle.

Concerts Near You: One of the new additions to Apple Music with this update is a Concerts Near You feature, and you can probably guess how it works from the name. Once you’ve granted Apple Music permission to use your location, on the Home tab you’ll find a new section for upcoming gigs in your area, matching the artists that you regularly listen to.

New emoji: Updates to iOS regularly come with new emoji included—after they’ve been approved by The Unicode Consortium—and that’s the case with this update too. Among the new graphics you can look forward to using in your messages are symbols for a trombone, a Bigfoot-style creature, a treasure chest, and a distorted (eyes bulging) face.

Offline music recognition: You can now use your iPhone to identify a song that’s playing in your vicinity without an internet connection… kind of. If you tap on the Recognize Music button in Control Center when you’re offline, iOS will record a snippet of audio data to use for reference, and then look up the song title whenever your device gets back online.

Playlist Playground: Back to Apple Music upgrades, and another new feature you’ll spot in the app is Playlist Playground. This is a new way of generating a playlist from an AI prompt box. So if you enter something like “the essential indie music hits of the 90s,” you’ll get back an appropriate selection of songs. Try it with moods, genres, and feelings.

Purchase sharing: File this under changes that seem to be relatively minor, but which can make a significant difference for certain people. If you’re an adult in a Family Sharing group, it’s now possible to use separate payments for purchases—so you don’t have to use the same bank account or credit card for everything that goes through iOS and its apps.

Urgent reminders: Another Apple app getting an improvement with this software update is Reminders. While the option to categorize reminders as ‘urgent’ isn’t new, there is now a smart list of these urgent items, so you can more easily find them. There are also a couple of extra ways to mark something as urgent, via a long press or from the floating toolbar.

Video podcasts: Many a podcast is adding video these days, and while Apple Podcasts has technically supported video before now, the latest software update brings some big improvements. You can switch between audio and video more easily, you can download videos for offline playback, and you can adjust the playback speed for videos as well.

The post 12 new features Apple quietly added in iPhone updates appeared first on Popular Science.