Dryer sheets are a bullshit waste of money, and they're actually ruining your stuff. Here's how they work. The sheet is non-woven polyester coated in a waxy softener, usually quaternary ammonium compounds, plus fragrance. Yum. Heat melts the coating off and it transfers onto your laundry. Static goes down because your clothes are now wearing a thin film of grease. Double yum. That film is the problem. First, it stops your towels from absorbing water, which is kind of the damn point, isn't it? If you're wondering why your towels get worse as they age, that's your answer. Second, your athletic wear stops breathing. Moisture-wicking fabric works by moving sweat through the weave. Coat it and it holds the sweat, and the smell, instead. Triple yum. The residue also builds up on your lint screen. If water beads on it instead of running through, that's the film, and a clogged screen is both a fire risk and a longer dry time. Then there's the fragrance. Manufacturers aren't required to tell you what the "fragrance" is made of. University of Washington researchers sampled dryer vent exhaust from homes using scented laundry products and found more than 25 volatile organic compounds, including acetaldehyde and benzene. That study used detergent and sheets together, so you can't pin it on the sheet alone, but nothing about dryer vent emissions is regulated or monitored either. Use wool or hemp dryer balls instead. A set runs you about $15, lasts for years, cuts dry time, and ultimately costs a lot less. Or you can use nothing. Static mostly comes from overdrying. Pull the load while it's just barely damp and the problem largely disappears.

Meet Martha. Except, well... you can't. She died in 1914, alone in a cage, the last passenger pigeon on Earth. She was about 29 when she passed, which is old for a pigeon. Her two male companions died in 1909 and 1910 and after that, she was it. The zoo offered $1,000, roughly $30,000 in today's money, to anyone who could bring her a mate. But nobody ever collected. Her species had been the most abundant bird in North America and possibly the world. Flocks passed overhead for hours and blocked the sun. Audubon watched one migration in 1813 and put it at over a billion birds. Then the telegraph arrived, and the railroads. That's what did them in. Commercial hunters could wire ahead about a flock's location and ship barrels of birds to city markets overnight. Pigeon became the cheapest meat in America. They netted them, shot them, and burned sulfur under roost trees to drop them by the thousand. It only took about fifty years to go from billions to none. Martha was found on the floor of her cage on a September afternoon. They froze her in a 300-pound block of ice and put her on an express train to the Smithsonian. She arrived three days later, and she's still there today.

Bug zappers are shit at killing mosquitoes and excellent at killing beneficial bugs. If you have one running, unplug it. In 1994, two entomologists at the University of Delaware put six residential zappers in suburban backyards and ran them for ten weeks. Then they counted and identified every single thing that died in them. 13,789 insects total. Only 31 of them were biting insects, like gnats and mosquitoes. Not 31%, 31 total. .2% of the total. Almost half were non-biting aquatic insects, caddisflies and midges blown in off nearby creeks, which are the base of the food web for fish, bats, swallows and dragonflies. Another chunk were moths, which pollinate at night and feed the birds and bats in your yard. Roughly 14% were predators that eat pests: ground beetles, parasitic wasps, ladybugs. The zapper averaged 445 kills per trap per night. Bug zappers suck at targeting mosquitoes for a simple reason: the female mosquito isn't looking for light. She's tracking the carbon dioxide you exhale, your body heat, the lactic acid on your skin. She flies past the zapper without it even registering. Every moth in the neighborhood navigates by light, so the device pulls them in from across the yard and kills them. Notre Dame ran the other half of the test: yards with zappers and yards without had no significant difference in mosquitoes present. Unplug it. It's doing terrible things for the local environment and nothing beneficial for you.

A bug zapper running in September is taking food out of a bat's mouth in the weeks she needs it most. Bats are feeding hard right now, building the fat that has to carry them through months of hibernation with no food at all. A little brown bat that goes into winter underweight doesn't wake up in April. Your zapper is killing exactly what she's hunting. A University of Delaware study counted nearly 14,000 insects killed by residential zappers over one summer. Mosquitoes were 31 of them. Less than a quarter of one percent. The rest were moths, beetles, and lacewings. That's pretty much your local bat's grocery list. And the light is its own problem. A zapper pulls insects in from a wide radius, which means it isn't just killing what wandered past, it's actively drawing them in from the surrounding acre and killing that too. Unplug it. It's not killing the mosquitoes you want gone and it's making it harder for the actual mosquito hunters to get through the winter.