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On February 28, 2026, the City of San Diego began enforcing a wildfire rule that most homeowners still have not heard of. It applies to the first five feet around a structure, and it is now part of local fire code. San Diego adopted it ahead of the state. The requirement sits in San Diego Municipal Code §512.0604, part of the city's Wildland-Urban Interface code, and it applies to properties in Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. The thing that surprises people is what it actually regulates. Not roofing. Not vents. Landscape. Five Feet Is Where Homes Ignite The reasoning behind Zone 0 is unglamorous and well documented. Most homes lost to wildfire do not burn because a flame front reached them. They burn because a wind-blown ember landed somewhere…

A few miles south of Kailua-Kona sits a shallow, sheltered bay that ranks among the most popular snorkel spots in all of Hawaii. Kahaluʻu Bay is protected from big swells by an ancient stone breakwater, filled with tropical fish and coral heads, and easy enough for beginners that it draws an enormous, steady stream of visitors. It is also, because of that very popularity, a place where the tension between loving a reef and harming it plays out in plain sight every single day. The people who work at Kahaluʻu have learned things about that tension that apply to every reef on the island. What they want snorkelers to understand is not complicated, but it runs against some deeply ingrained habits. Loved Nearly to Death The scale of visitation at…

In October 2025, Reddit did something that reframed how the entire industry should think about the value of a comment thread. It sued an AI company, arguing that its users' posts were being taken and resold without permission. The target was Perplexity, along with a set of firms Reddit accused of scraping its content at industrial scale. The complaint's language was blunt: Reddit's chief legal officer described an economy built on laundered human conversation. Reddit's October 2025 complaint named Perplexity alongside three data-scraping firms, accusing them of harvesting posts through Google's search results and reselling the material. It followed an earlier suit Reddit had filed against another AI developer over similar claims. Why a Forum Is Suddenly Worth Litigating Over Companies do not go to federal court over things that…

Buried in Chrome Canary is a new experimental flag that does something almost embarrassingly basic: it lets you actually, fully hide the bookmarks bar from the New Tab page. Firefox and Safari have offered this exact level of control for well over a decade. Google is testing it as if it's new ground. What the New Flag Actually Changes Right now, stable Chrome forces the bookmarks bar to appear on the New Tab page even when a person has toggled it off everywhere else in their settings — the exact bug that plagued Chrome 148 users for weeks. The new Canary flag, spotted first by Windows Report, replaces the old blunt on/off toggle with a three-option dropdown: show the bar everywhere, show it only on the New Tab page, or…

It is one of the more confusing experiences for denture wearers. The appliance fit beautifully when it was new, and a few years later it slips, rocks, or rubs, even though nothing about it appears to have changed. Nothing about the denture did change. The mouth holding it did, and understanding why points straight to a simple maintenance step many people delay far too long. The Jawbone Beneath the Surface Is Always Shifting When natural teeth are removed, the bone that once supported them begins to change. Without the stimulation of tooth roots, the ridge of bone gradually shrinks and reshapes. Clinicians call this residual ridge resorption, and it is a normal, ongoing process rather than a malfunction. The foundation a denture rests on is, in effect, slowly remodeling underneath…

The assumption baked into most gaming-gear marketing is that the customer is sitting at a desktop PC. For years that assumption was mostly correct. A tournament that wrapped up in Jakarta this January is a sign that it is quietly going out of date. The M7 World Championship for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang became, by Esports Charts' count, the most-watched mobile esports tournament in history, peaking north of 5.6 million concurrent viewers. That is a number that would have been respectable for a major PC final a few years ago, achieved entirely by a game most people play with their thumbs. It is tempting to file that away as a story about phones. It is actually a story about a much larger and younger audience entering competitive gaming through a…

The story of the decade in energy might not be generation at all. It might be wires, towers, and substations. The grid that moves electricity from where it is made to where it is used is being rebuilt at a scale not seen in generations, and steel is at the center of it. Most of that steel is unglamorous high-strength structural plate, the kind that holds up transmission towers and substation structures without ever drawing attention to itself. A once-in-a-generation grid buildout The numbers are staggering. J.P. Morgan points to $5.8 trillion of cumulative grid investment forecast globally between 2026 and 2035, with the United States alone expected to spend on the order of a trillion dollars over the coming decade. Two forces are driving it. Aging infrastructure built decades…

For most of the last decade, the pitch for a metal roof in the GTA was simple: pay more once, then forget about it for fifty years. That math still holds, but the "pay more once" part has gotten steeper, and the reason has almost nothing to do with the roof over your head and everything to do with trade policy. When the United States doubled its Section 232 duties on steel and aluminum to 50% in the summer of 2025, the shock did not stay south of the border. Canadian mills and distributors price against the same continental market, and the cost of coil, panel, and trim moved with it. By the spring quoting season, that pressure had worked its way into estimates being handed to Toronto homeowners. Why…

Australia has spent forty years telling people to cover up, and it is fair to wonder whether all that messaging actually worked. A landmark Queensland study offers some of the clearest evidence yet that it did. The findings are cautiously reassuring, and they say something important about persistence in public health. A Forty-Year View Researchers examined more than 100,000 Queenslanders diagnosed with a first melanoma between 1982 and 2022, tracking how often they went on to develop a second, separate melanoma. People with one melanoma carry a substantially higher risk of another. The trend told a story. The risk of a second primary melanoma climbed from the 1980s, peaked at almost 8 per cent within a decade for those diagnosed in the early 2000s, and has since begun to plateau…

When ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred crawled toward the southeast Queensland coast in early March 2025, most of the coverage focused on the wind, the blackouts, and the flooded streets. The slower story showed up weeks later, on the walls of houses across Brisbane. Alfred was the first system of its kind to reach this far south in half a century. It stalled offshore for days before it crossed, and that lingering meant the rain did not arrive and leave. It sat. At Lower Springbrook in the hinterland behind the Gold Coast, gauges recorded 814 millimetres over roughly a week, close to four-fifths of Brisbane's average annual rainfall in a handful of days. Brisbane itself logged its wettest 24 hours since 1974. That kind of saturation does not just flood gutters. It…