In a world where we are increasingly dependent on electronics, water has become the boogeyman. We live in constant fear of dropping our phones into our pools, sinks, and toilets. But while water damage is scary, everybody knows that the best way to fix it is to just drop your phone into a bag of rice, right? Unfortunately this is one of those times when what “everybody knows” isn’t really true. The reality is that putting a wet phone into rice won’t help at all, and might actually hurt. You see, the common wisdom is that since rice is a dry food that absorbs water as it cooks, then it must be able to absorb the water out of a wet phone, but that isn’t actually the case. Yes, we cook rice by forcing it to absorb hot water, but that doesn’t mean that the rice will actually absorb the water out of your phone just because it happens to be nearby. In fact, rice doesn’t absorb water out of the air very efficiently at all (that’s why we boil it). To make matters worse, rice is also dusty,...