Various Retailers have The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (Kindle eBook) on sale for $1.99.
Thanks to Deal Hunter phoinix for finding this deal.
Available from the following retailers:
Book Synopsis:
Bradbury’s Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars … and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time’s passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls, delights and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.
It feels even thinner when you’re using the device itself. When all you have under your palms is that thin keyboard cover, and you’re not seeing how thick the back of the device is, it’s kind of magical, especially while gaming.
That brings me to another huge advantage of this type of design—the thermals. This thing never got above 70 degrees Celsius internally, even under stress testing in Performance mode. And it stayed fairly quiet. It’s especially noticeable when you aren’t gaming. The Flow Z13 does a great job of keeping quiet and cool when it should, which can’t be said for many gaming laptops. That makes it an even better hybrid work/gaming device.
The excellent thermals have the vertical orientation to thank, sucking in tons of air through the intake vents on the back of the tablet, unobstructed by a desk like the bottom of laptops. The exhaust vents, meanwhile, are located right across the top of the tablet, as far away from the keyboard and your hands as physically possible. That’s another big change over gaming laptops, which often spew hot air at your mouse hand.
A Tough Sell?
Photograph: Luke Larsen
I don’t love the limited configurations for the Flow Z13. Asus sells only expensive configurations with at least 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, starting at over $2,000. It’s a shame there isn’t a lower-tier option to get that starting price down. Not everyone needs that much memory and storage. If the starting price were closer to $1,500, I could see it attracting a larger audience. That’s especially true since the Flow Z13 isn’t necessarily a performance-first machine.
I also wish the speakers and webcam were a bit more impressive. They get the job done and are better than what you find on many gaming laptops, but if they could match the Surface Pro, they’d have an even stronger upper hand over even the most premium gaming laptops. And I’d be remiss without mentioning the newly launched Nvidia RTX 50-series Laptop GPUs. It’ll be a bit before the lower-tier RTX 5050 and 5060 laptops arrive, but when they do, they may make the comparison to the Flow Z13 less favorable.
The price-to-performance comparison with comparable gaming laptops doesn’t play out in the Flow Z13’s favor. It will never hold a candle to its peers on that spec alone. But that’s never been the point. Instead, the Flow Z13 continues to challenge the conventional idea of gaming laptops, and with the 2025 model, it’s surprisingly successful.
Urinals aren’t a new concept. In fact, some of the earliest known examples can be traced back to around 1000 CE, when Sri Lankan monasteries began installing elaborately carved stone receptacles. European versions began taking hold in the 19th century thanks in large part to the work of Parisian civil servant Claude-Philibert Barthelot. By 1917, the public restroom staple was culturally ubiquitous enough to inspire Marcel Duchamp’s “La Fontaine.” Since then, basic urinal design has remained similar, if not nearly identical, to Duchamp’s famous dadaist art piece. And as any urinal user knows, there are still drawbacks—or, rather, splashbacks.
While most people only occasionally experience the unpleasant splash, pee droplets add up. A 2019 study estimated that in the US alone, the country’s roughly 56 million urinals splatter public bathroom floors with as much as 1 million liters of urine every single day. Urine is mostly sterile, but the liquid quickly becomes a breeding ground for bacteria. Meanwhile, its ammonia-laden odor frequently seeps into the ambient air. The results are urinals and floors with significantly higher bacteria concentrations compared to toilets requiring additional cleanup efforts. More cleanup means more labor, which in turn costs public institutions more money, time, and resources.
From left to right: Duchamp’s “La Fontaine,” contemporary commercial model, Cornucopia, Nautilus. b) Maps of impinging angles on urinals and c) histograms showing percent of the area at various impinging angles (A is the area where the impinging angle falls into a certain range and A total is the total area that can be impinged on the inner urinal surface).Credit: Thurairajah et al.
But after 108 years, “La Fontaine” may finally receive scientifically optimized design upgrades to reduce splashback and improve overall public health. Created by an international team including researchers and undergraduate students at Canada’s University of Waterloo, two new urinal builds dubbed the “Cornucopia” and the “Nautilus” leverage fluid dynamics to reduce pee splashback down to a fraction of what’s produced from contemporary commercial urinals. The designs are highlighted in a study published on April 8 in the journal PNAS Nexus.
“This urinal design project is the best teaching tool I can think of, as it is a daily-life problem that covers numerous topics—including fluid mechanics, sustainability, differential equations, manufacturing and prototyping, art, industrial design, human factors, bio-mechanics and testing,” Zhao Pan, a University of Waterloo mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor and study lead author, said in a statement.
According to researchers, part of the project’s inspiration came not from human physiology, but dogs. Canines often urinate against trees at unconsciously specific angles in order to reduce splashing. The team then needed to solve for what’s known as an isogonal curve problem—essentially, urine’s angled interactions with a urinal that produce spiraling similar to the geometry seen in nautilus shells (hence one of the new urinal names). From there, the study’s authors tested a dyed water jet that approximated the flow of human urine onto five different urinals—one standard North American design, a model of Duchamp’s “La Fontaine,” and three of their own making. Finally, researchers soaked up each urinal’s surrounding floor with paper towels, then weighed them to compare their splashbacks.
“We found that when a liquid jet or droplet train impacts a rigid surface below a certain critical impinging angle, almost no splatter is generated,” the researchers wrote in their study. “Thus, a surface designed to always intersect the urine stream equal to or smaller than the critical angle prevents splash-back.”
Images of splatter generated by each urinal under the medium user height, high flow rate test condition with a total “urinated” volume of 1 L: a) La Fountaine, b) contemporary commercial, c) Cornucopia, and d) Nautilus. The gray visualizes the top plane projection of the foam urinal model used in the splatter tests, whereas the white shows the same projection of the ceramic urinal as it would be installed. The stains from sessile droplets of known volumes are indicated at the same scale as the zoomed sections. Credit: Thurairajah et al
More specifically, splashback is significantly reduced whenever urine strikes a fixture’s surface at an angle of 30 degrees or less. In the end, the new Cornucopia and Nautilus urinals managed to reduce splashes down to just 1.4 percent of the common North American design. While Cornucopia is designed for standing users, Nautilus was created to accommodate people with disabilities and wheelchairs.
“The widespread adoption of the urinal designs described in this work would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage,” the authors wrote, adding that largescale impacts could also include improved sustainability, public hygiene, and accessibility.
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡
Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.
Based on conservative estimates, the team believes that replacing all public urinals in the US with something like the Nautilus would reduce splashback by 1 million liters per day.“Assuming 10 times as much water is required to clean a particular volume of splashed urine, we can save up to 10 million L of fresh water used for cleaning per day,” they explained.
But while dogs and nautilus shells helped get the team to start pondering improved public sanitation options, the larger endeavor had predictably humble beginnings.
“The idea for this project truly originated—well, exactly where you think it did,” Pan added. “When you study fluid behavior all day, you can’t help but wonder about these everyday scenarios.”
More deals, reviews, and buying guides
The PopSci team has tested hundreds of products and spent thousands of hours trying to find the best gear and gadgets you can buy.
Do you want to score a great TV for a great price? Today, one of Samsung’s budget-friendly 4K QLEDS is marked down to an even lower price. For a limited time, you’ll be able to take home the Samsung 55-inch QE1D Series 4K QLED for $480. And what better way to start your week than with one of the best TV deals?
Why you should buy the Samsung QE1D Series
Brands like Hisense, TCL, Roku, and Amazon are renowned for producing affordable TVs that still generate a good picture but without a lot of the bells and whistles, you’ll find on more advanced models. In the case of the Samsung QE1D, we like the fact that you’re buying into one of the top TV brands on the market, and this entry-level Samsung has some bite!
The QE1D delivers bright and colorful visuals, which makes it a great choice for a room that pulls in a ton of sunlight. The TV’s reflection handling is decent, too, but you may start to see some glare if lamps or other light sources are too close to the panel. The QE1D also handles upscaling like a champ, enhancing most lower-res sources fed to the TV.
As mentioned, more advanced features are a frequent miss for lower-priced TVs, and the QE1D isn’t without its exclusions. This QLED is capped at 60Hz for its native refresh rate and has zero HDMI 2.1 ports, so it may not be the best choice for console or PC gamers. That being said, when gaming at 60Hz, the TV does deliver some pretty low input lag.
Take $520 off the Samsung 55-inch QE1D Series 4K QLED when you purchase today, and be sure to take a look at our roundups of the best Samsung TV deals and best QLED TV deals for even more discounts on top Samsung sets!
If you’re struggling to get your kids off their phones and outside, the Fitbit Ace LTE is packed with a number of features that are designed to help kids get out and exercise while keeping unwanted distractions to a minimum. And right now, it’s matching its all-time low of around $149.95 ($30 off) at Amazon and Best Buy in both colorways.
With its Tamagotchi-like companion and fun, step-activated games, the Fitbit Ace is meant to make exercise more enjoyable for kids. The platform-agnostic, LTE-equipped watch — which doesn’t require a smartphone to operate once set up via Android or iOS — is an excellent alternative to a phone for younger kids, allowing them to call or text preselected contacts and share their location via Google Maps.
On the inside, it touts the same innards as the Google Pixel Watch 2 and supports Tap to Pay, meaning your child can use their smartwatch to buy things wherever Google Pay is accepted. Thankfully, however, there’s no third-party app store, ads, or internet access; Fitbit even provides parental controls for those who want to manage contacts, tweak settings, and limit the wearable’s use during school hours.
Just bear in mind that the LTE-based features like calling, texting, and real-time location sharing require you to pay $9.99 a month for an Ace Pass. That being said, the price might be worth it given that the wearable doesn’t require that your kid own a smartphone to set it up, and there’s no need to sign up with a carrier.
The advantages, though, were clear in my two days of testing in Arizona (I planned to ski a third day at Mount Hood in Oregon, where conditions are worse than in the Southwest, but a big spring storm had the roads under winter advisory, and I was not interested in strapping tire chains onto a rented Nissan Rogue).
Most skiers agree that a softer ski is better on bumpy terrain or bad snow, while a stiffer ski is more comfortable at higher speeds. Swapping between the two is essentially the promise of Renoun’s design. I skied groomed runs from the slightly icy top of the peak to the slushy bottom in mid-March and found the Endurance 88s performed very well the whole time. I kept my edges when I wanted them, didn’t catch them as I carved turns, and felt no vibrations even at top speed.
The Renoun skis I tested are also noticeably lighter than my regular ride, a pair of decade-old Armada TSTs the same length. The stats say there is a 100-gram difference per ski. That means the Renoun skis are roughly 5 percent lighter, though different bindings make it hard to compare directly. My demo pair has adjustable bindings, which are heavier than standard bindings, and the skis were still noticeably lighter.
Photograph: Martin Cizmar
Fresh Legs
The Renoun’s main advantage for a resort skier bombing blues, like me, is that dampening vibrations keeps your legs fresh. I’m unfortunately cursed by poor life decisions to live as a flatlander and only get out a few times a year, so I usually find my legs are jelly after two days on the hill. But on the day after my two sessions using the Renouns with a pair of CEP compression socks, my legs felt no different than they would on a normal day where I’m awakening at 7,000 feet of altitude after an extended après.
The company’s stated goal is to stop you from thinking about your skis, and that was my experience—as I was reviewing them, I had to force myself to stop and think about them rather than just enjoying the view from the gondola. My only other thought was that the blue-gray colorway looked bad with my green and orange boots, and I wish they’d be a little bolder in style.
