Before you've hauled out the holly, grabbed your ladder, untangled light strands of holiday seasons past, and risked unleashing your inner Grinch, consult our guide to lock in your game plan.
Not long ago there was just one way to illuminate the outside of your home: string lights with large incandescent bulbs. Today, there is a variety of holiday lights-string, icicle, net, pathway, and spotlight-available with LED or incandescent bulbs. Incandescent lights are more affordable and emit a warmer glow, but LEDs are more energy efficient, last longer, and never get too hot to touch. You can connect together many more strings of LED lights than you can incandescent lights. Plus, LEDs typically produce much brighter, more vibrant light than incandescent bulbs. Some LEDs are programmable, allowing you to change the light color and select various illumination modes, such as always-on, twinkling, and sequential blinking.
The type and style of lighting that's right for your home depends on the look you want. We break down what you need and how to install four popular holiday lighting designs.
Highlight Your Roof
BEST LIGHTS FOR THE JOB:
C9 OR ICICLE
WHY THEY WORK / Both incandescent and LED string lights are sold in C6, C7, and C9 sizes. These strawberry-shaped string lights are the most traditional style and deliver a much-loved retro vibe. To showcase your roof, use C9s, which are larger, brighter, and more visible from the street compared to C6s and C7s.
Esta historia es de la edición November - December 2022 de Popular Mechanics US.
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Esta historia es de la edición November - December 2022 de Popular Mechanics US.
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THE WORLD'S TOUGHEST ROW
They rowed 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, battling unpredictable weather, chaotic seas, and finicky equipment. But what they discovered gave them profound new insights into the power of the ocean.
HOW TO DIY OFF-GRID SOLAR
SPEND THE TIME UP FRONT AND PLAN IT CAREFULLY TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT
Are We on the Verge of an ARMS RACE in SPACE?
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Quantum Entanglement in Our Brains
IT HAS LONG BEEN ARGUED THAT THE human brain is similar to a computer. But in reality, that's selling the brain pretty short.
The Tools of Copernicus
WAY BACK IN 1508, WITH ONLY LIMited tools at his disposal, Nicolaus Copernicus developed a celestial model of a heliocentric planetary system, which he described in hist landmark work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. It was a complete overhaul of our conception of the universe-one that, unfortunately, earned him the ire of the Catholic church for decades after his death-and forever changed the way we look at the stars.
The Electroweak Force of the Early Universe
TODAY, THE UNIVERSE AS WE KNOW IT IS governed by four fundamental forces: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity.
This Ancient Fossil With a Brain and Guts
WE KNOW WHAT FOSSILS LOOK like. For example, typical dinosaur fossils are bones turned to stone and preserved from the passage of time, located, if we're particularly lucky, in large collections that can be reassembled to represent the beast they used to prop up in their entirety.
A Cuneiform Shopping List
MOST OF US CAN DO ALL OF OUR shopping with the click of a few buttons, and while that's certainly convenient, it can make it difficult to keep track of when exactly that new armoire or bookshelf will show up at your doorstep.
SNOWBALL EARTH
IMAGINE A PLANET WHERE THE AVERAGE temperature is a delightful -58° Fahrenheit every day. Not a place you'd want to visit, right? Lucky for you, then, that you weren't around several hundred million years ago, because these brutal conditions were the unfortunate reality of the \"Snowball Earth.\"
Henrietta Lacks - It's not surprising that Henrietta Lacks-whose
It's not surprising that Henrietta Lacks-whose "immortal" HeLa cells were pivotal in developing treatments for diseases such as polio, HIV/AIDS, and COVID19-is referred to as "the mother of modern medicine." But Lacks's legacy is complicated due to the ethical concerns surrounding the use of her special cells. Lacks, who died of cancer at age 31 in 1951, was never aware that her cells led to significant medical advancements or that they had been taken without her consent. And even now, her strange case raises questions about the morally dubious methods through which we achieved unquestionably positive breakthroughs in medicine.
