RAMSEY, Minn., Dec. 19, 2024 – Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced awards for more than $4.37 billion in clean energy investments through the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Empowering Rural America (New ERA) Program. Rural electric cooperatives will use the funding to support thousands of jobs, lower electricity costs for businesses and families and reduce climate pollution by millions of tons each year.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19, 2024 – U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced the second round of Regional Agricultural Promotion Program (RAPP) grants, which is intended to allocate $300 million to 67 partners once all legal and administrative requirements are satisfied, expanding American food and agricultural exports in emerging global markets. This latest investment brings total RAPP funding to $600 million in 2024.

The humble after-dinner walk has a new name, thanks to a TikToker (mairlynthequeenoffiber) who spoke frankly to the camera about how taking a “fart walk” will help you “age wonderfully.” Her voiceover has been added to dozens of videos, some funny, some sincere. But most importantly: the fart walk really is a health hack, so maybe you should try it—whether you call it that or not. 

What is a fart walk? 

A fart walk is a walk that you take after a meal. It gets its name for the obvious reason: after a meal, your intestines start moving things around, which can sometimes feel like an uncomfortable level of bloating. But exercise like walking helps to relieve that feeling, while also bringing some benefits to your metabolic health, and adding to your daily and weekly exercise quota.

Fart walks may help with the feeling of bloating

Exercise does seem to help relieve bloating. That’s been anecdotally known for a long time, but to really prove that point, researchers infused gas into people’s intestines(!) and then had them lie on their backs, pedaling their legs bicycle style. This pedaling helped to relieve the bloating when compared to just resting. They concluded: “Mild physical activity enhances intestinal gas clearance and reduces symptoms in patients complaining of abdominal bloating.”

Fart walks may help glucose control

After we eat, our digestive system releases glucose (blood sugar) into our bloodstream. That’s normal and good, and the hormone insulin is then supposed to signal the cells of our body to store and use that blood sugar. Exercise helps with glucose control, and so all types of exercise—from walking to weight training—have long been recommended to prevent diabetes and manage symptoms if you already have it.

Exercise after meals might be especially helpful. A 2018 systematic review found that after-meal exercise helped people with type 2 diabetes improve their glucose control. The authors concluded with a recommendation that people with this condition try to get at least 45 minutes of moderate intensity exercise (like walking) after their largest meal of the day. 

That said, the literature is not totally clear on whether exercise really needs to be after a meal to be beneficial, though. The authors of a 2017 study on exercise timing and glucose control concluded that it’s better to get little bits of exercise throughout the day rather than to exercise just once, whether that’s after a meal or otherwise.

It’s nice to get some exercise and talk a walk, farts or no

Besides the benefits to gut health and metabolism, you may just find that you enjoy taking a walk after dinner. A 30-minute walk, at least five times a week, fulfills the minimum exercise guidelines that we should all be meeting (but don’t forget to do a little strength training on the side). 

Or to look at it another way, when you take a walk in the evening, you’re engaging in an Italian tradition called la passeggiata. As Becca Lewis writes there, “it’s about taking the time to enjoy some quiet time with your own mind (if you’re walking alone), and to connect with others (if you’re walking with a partner or a group). It’s not a brisk walk for the purpose of raising your heart rate, but about taking in the sights, and maybe stopping to enjoy a beverage.” You don’t even have to tell anyone that you think of it as your fart walk.

Before I get started: No, people can’t steal your credit card information using AirDrop. AirDrop doesn’t even know what your credit card number is.

In a hoax that’s been spreading around TikTok as of late (the source of the rumor is unclear), viral videos are now saying that hackers can use the iPhone’s AirDrop feature to steal your credit card information from your Apple Wallet. The news was first reported on by The Daily Dot, which to its credit, quickly called it out for the nonsense it is.

What the rumors say

In videos that have been spotted over the embattled social media app the past few weeks, popular users including @vanessaromito13 and @the_journey76 urged their audiences to be cautious of Apple’s AirDrop feature following a “recent update,” claiming hackers can now steal your credit card information just by walking by you with an iPhone in their pocket. Specifically, the latter says hackers can “walk past you now and from one iPhone to another using that AirDrop setting, they can get all the cards in your wallet. In your Apple Wallet.” The former, meanwhile, attempts to offer a solution, encouraging followers to disable the “search with other iPhones” setting.

Fortunately, neither are correct.

Can people steal information through AirDrop?

Whatever sparked these concerns, there’s nothing in the most recent iPhone update (iOS 18.2) that would have done it. Despite the worries over AirDrop, last week’s update made no changes to either AirDrop or Apple Wallet, instead focusing the bulk of its attention on Apple Intelligence.

Instead, the rumors seem to be a repackaging of earlier concerns over the iPhone’s NameDrop functionality, which allows two iPhones to share contact information just by coming into close proximity. Even law enforcement got in on the fearmongering here, but tech experts were quick to point out that the feature requires extremely close physical proximity and consent on both ends. In actuality, most concluded that it doesn’t pose much of a risk.

Saying that people can use AirDrop to steal your credit cards just by walking past you with their iPhone nearby preys on a similar fear, but doesn’t even reference a feature that exists.

First, there is no “search with other iPhones” setting to disable. Speaking generously, the influencer might be referring to the “Bringing Devices Together” setting that got added with NameDrop, or the ability to set your AirDrop permissions to receive requests from everyone for 10 minutes.

Regardless, neither work in the way described. “Bringing Devices Together” is a NameDrop only function, while accepting requests from everyone just means other users can offer to send you files, which you’ll still need to accept before they make their way over to your phone. For them to get files off your phone, you would need to send them over yourself. And regardless, your settings will revert to “Contacts Only” after 10 minutes, with no always-on option to share with everyone available.

Second, AirDrop can’t interact with Apple Wallet. The feature can only share files accessible via the iPhone’s file browser, which isn’t where Apple Wallet stores information. And even if it were, Apple Wallet doesn’t actually have your credit card information—it uses a “Device Account Number” generated by your bank or card provider, which gets encrypted along with everything else in your wallet and is very hard to do anything with unless you have the iPhone it’s tied to. According to Apple, “your card number is never stored on your device or on Apple servers.”

In short, the most risk you have of someone nearby stealing your credit card number through Apple Wallet is if they see the last four digits of your card by physically looking at your screen. And even so, there’s not much they can do with that.

Can people steal your Apple Pay transactions through tap-to-pay?

So, yes, this recent warning is a hoax. AirDrop can’t do anything with your payment information, and it’ll take a hacker a bit more diligence to take money from your Apple Pay than just walking by you with an iPhone in their pocket. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be vigilant.

Right now, there are two known ways for people to steal from you using Apple Pay, although neither will give them permanent access to your financial information.

The first is to take advantage of stressed-out buyers by overcharging them. As also reported by The Daily Dot, if you’ve already approved a transaction by double tapping into your Apple wallet and authenticating the payment (via FaceID, TouchID, or your PIN), but haven’t yet seen the seller’s screen, they could charge you whatever they like by simply tapping their phone to yours without confirming the sale with you first. In one case, a woman was charged $975 for what she thought would be a $10 box of chocolates because she was already preparing to use Apple Pay before seeing the scammer’s seller screen and how much they were actually going to charge her. Always ensure you see a charge before activating Apple Pay, rather than relying on whatever the seller says the charge will be.

The second is a bit harder to avoid. While hackers can’t use AirDrop to steal your payment information, they can use their own software to steal transactions over-the-air from nearby payment terminals. This is a bit harder to avoid, and is usually employed at particularly busy vendors, such as those at music festivals. In this case, you’ll only be out on whatever you were intending to pay the vendor, but if you’re planning to be in a crowded area with lots of sales going on at once, pay attention to others near you while you’re using Apple Pay— they’ll have to be close by to steal a transaction using NFC. In the case that they do pull it off, though, you can at least rest assured that all information sent to the terminal will have been encrypted.

Again, there are legitimate threats to watch out for here, and it’s a good idea to exercise caution. But allowing panic-spreading social media posts to whip you into a worried frenzy just makes it harder to keep track of the real risks out there, and may make you miss out on the real benefits that come with encryption-focused payment methods like tap-to-pay.

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’ve lost your iPhone and googled in search of help. I feel your pain. You don’t know whether you left it at the restaurant after dinner, whether it was stolen, or whether it’s hiding between your couch cushions. Worse yet, if your iPhone is set to silent, you can’t even call it to find it. There is a way to force it to make noise, though, no matter what settings are enabled: You just need to ping it.

What does it mean to “ping” an iPhone?

Depending on how involved you are with iPhones and Apple products, you may or may not be familiar with “pinging.” It’s not Apple’s failed attempt to turn iTunes into a social media platform (yes, that really happened)—I’m talking about making your iPhone play a high-pitched tone, no matter where it happens to be. Pinging is the preferred method for finding a missing iPhone in your immediate area because it doesn’t matter if the phone is on silent or not.

Plus, we don’t always have access to another phone to call ours in these types of emergencies. Unless you’re with a friend, or you have the nerve to ask a stranger to use theirs, you can’t call your phone without your phone. So, pinging it is.

Apple makes it easy for those in the Apple ecosystem to ping their iPhones. In fact, it offers three different methods for doing so. Check out all three below, and pick one the next time your iPhone goes missing.

How to ping an iPhone using Find My

The Find My app isn’t just good for pinging iPhones. Since it tracks the location of many of your Apple products, you can likely see the phone on the map as well. After jumping into Find My, you might be able to tell where the phone is without needing to ping it at all. However, if you already know your iPhone is in your house, you just don’t know where, that’s where pinging comes in handy.

If you have an Apple device connected to the same Apple ID as your iPhone, you can launch Find My there. Just search for “Find My” on either your Mac or iPad to open the app. If you don’t have a connected Apple device with you, you can log in to icloud.com and choose Find My from here. Either way, choose your iPhone from the list, and tap Play Sound to ping it. (If you’re using the Find My app on Mac, you’ll need to right-click your iPhone or click the (i) that appears on map in order to find this option.) At first, your iPhone will simply vibrate. After a few seconds, however, it will begin to play a high-pitched sound. This sound will continue to play until your iPhone is found—or you stop the sound through Find My—so keep that in mind.

Note: If you’re a part of a “Family Sharing” group, one of your family members can actually ping your iPhone for you. Family members can see the connected devices of all other members of the group—even if they don’t have the device’s location. Following the same steps, they can select your iPhone from the list, then choose Play Sound.

How to ping an iPhone with your Apple Watch

If you have an Apple Watch, you can use it to ping your iPhone. It’s certainly much faster to tap a button on your watch instead of reaching for Find My, so, if you have one of Apple’s wearables, I recommend you use it first.

The option to ping your iPhone lives in your Apple Watch’s Control Center. To access it, press the side button on your watch. (If running an older version of watchOS, swipe up from the bottom of your watch face). Either way, tap the button that features an iPhone with sound waves. This will ping the iPhone, but only for a few seconds, unlike Find My’s never-ending ping.

There’s a hidden feature to this Apple Watch button, though. If you hold it down instead of tapping it, your iPhone’s LED will flash, as well. That way, if its speaker is a bit muffled, you can also rely on the flash to help locate your phone.

How to ping an iPhone using Siri

If you don’t have an Apple Watch, Siri is another quick way to find a lost iPhone (or anything, really). Just fire up Siri on one of your connected Apple devices, and ask it to find the device you’re looking for. For example, you could ask Siri on your Mac to ping your iPhone, or you could ask your iPad to ping your Mac.

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If you walk into an Apple Store today, an employee will happily sell you a new pair of AirPods Max for $549. That’s a big ask for any consumer-grade wireless headphones, even with the “Apple tax” that comes with the AirPods name. What’s most egregious to me, however, is that money you spend today gets you an arguably worse overall experience than Apple’s previous AirPods Max generation.

New does not mean better

There are actually two different models of AirPods Max, although it’s quite difficult to tell them apart. The latest model, which Apple released in September, hardly changes a thing from the originals, which dropped at the end of 2020. The only advertised differences are a few new color options, and, more importantly, the addition of USB-C, replacing the Lightning port on the original models. That’s a much-needed change that comes as Apple ditches its proprietary Lightning port for USB-C on its suite of products.

Other than that, however, these headphones are effectively the same: They pair the same way, have the same (excellent) sound quality, and are compatible with the same Spatial Audio features. If you’re a wireless-first person, you won’t notice a difference, unless you go to charge the headphones.

That changes if you’re someone who likes to use their AirPods Max to their devices via wired connection, though. As reported by 9to5Mac, you cannot connect your USB-C AirPods Max to your iPhone, Mac, iPad, or any other device of your choosing. It appears that, for these headphones, when Apple says wireless, they mean wireless.

It’s not so shocking if you’re coming from another wireless-only pair of headphones, but it is jarring for those of us with a first-gen AirPods Max. (I know it is for me.) These models do support a wired connection, so long as you use a Lighting to 3.5mm audio cable.

Wires still have a place in 2024

Again, you might not see the big deal if you’re a wireless-only person. But, to me, it’s the principle: The “new” AirPods Max loses a feature—a useful feature—from the original AirPods Max, for seemingly no reason. That Lighting to 3.5mm audio cable means you can use your AirPods Max with devices that require a wired connection, like a record player or a live audio interface. It’s also required if you want to listen to lossless music in Apple Music, since Bluetooth has a limit to the quality you can transmit over. (That said, Apple says the Lightning to 3.5mm cable can’t be truly lossless, so you still need a dedicated wired headphone for true lossless.)

What’s more, the original AirPods Max are usually much cheaper than the newest option. As of this article, you can get the Lightning AirPods Max in blue for $399 on Amazon. The blue AirPods Max with USB-C are $130 more. Look, I love the dream of USB-C, where you can charge all your devices with one cable. But is it worth $130 to leave your Lightning cable at home? I don’t think so.