Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2021 i Popular Mechanics

BOBBY LEA Test Editor Happiest when playing with bikes and power tools. Coolest Thing on My Desk My Olympic rings from the Beijing, London, and Rio Games for cycling. When I’m feeling trapped at my desk, it’s fun to reminisce on some great adventures that feel like a lifetime ago. PRODUCTS I’M USING RIGHT NOW 1 Carhartt Washed Duck Work Pant Hands down the best money I’ve spent on work pants. The more wear and tear they get, the better they are. 2 Garmin Fenix 6 Pro Solar Watch My cycling power, speed, and heart-rate sensors connect via Bluetooth. Plus: The face recharges with direct sunlight. 3 Wahoo Elemnt Bolt Bike Computer It’s small, simple to use, and has an incredibly long battery life. I never fret about running out…

Nonalcoholic brews are having a moment, but nowadays beer lists are also starting to include options that range from 2% to 4% ABV. Previously, social drinkers looking to mitigate their alcohol, sugar, or carbohydrate intake might turn to a low-alcohol option, such as a session, which usually hits 5% ABV or lower. But “the trend now is to go even lower,” Philip Brandes at Bravus Brewing Co. says. Beer in the 2% to 3% ABV range can be made more or less normally, but using less fermentable sugar like malt, says chemistry professor Roger Barth. “The body can be bumped up with maltodextrin or some other carb that is unfermentable by brewer’s yeast,” he adds. “One can also fiddle with mashing conditions, usually by mashing at high temperature, which suppresses…

AUTOMAKERS DEDICATE A HUGE AMOUNT OF testing and material science to keeping your car from oxidizing. Some build with aluminum and magnesium components, which are lighter, stronger, and corrode much more slowly than steel. But those better metals are still expensive and used sparingly. For most car owners, rust is still an issue, which is why you need to periodically check your vehicle, regardless of where you live or the time of year. ■ How to Prevent Rust The best advice is the most obvious: Wash your car regularly to clean off the road grime, salts, and dirt that lead to corrosion. It’s worth paying extra at the car wash for the undercarriage spray. Some not-so-obvious DIY advice: Especially in winter, take a hose to the space behind the wheels,…

ON PAPER, IT’S ONE OF THE SIMPLEST math problems in the world: 2+2. If you’re counting something, like screws at the hardware store, it’s pretty straightforward. But the lines blur in other contexts. If you add 2 cups of vinegar to 2 cups of baking soda, and the reaction produces 5 cups of a fizzy mess, does that mean 2+2=5? We bring assumptions into the world of mathematics. In this case, the simple “counting numbers”—the whole integers 1, 2, 3, and so on—signify a gulf between math’s abstraction and application. Using “2+2=4” as food for thought, mathematicians are exploring the circumstances in which 2+2 doesn’t actually equal 4, at least not neatly, and we can extend those interpretations to larger questions in epistemology—how we know what we know. Kareem Carr,…

NUCLEAR ENERGY'S REPUTATION IS ON THE EDGE OF MELTDOWN Often touted as a more flexible, powerful alternative to renewables, nuclear’s advantages haven’t outrun its dogged volatility. We associate nuclear reactors more often with disaster than innovation, but as the United States takes more coal and gas plants offline, engineers are hoping fresh reactor concepts could redeem nuclear’s stature in American energy. Bigger is no longer better. The future, experts say, looks like “multispeed” nuclear energy—a combination of traditional large plants and smaller, safer megawatt reactors. “Until now, customers only had one choice for nuclear, and that was a gigawatt-sized power plant,” says Rita Baranwal, the assistant secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy. “Now, we’re talking about reactors at the megawatt scale that can flexibly meet a customer’s…

Brands like Goal Zero offer plug-and-play products that make setup simple. Just buy a battery with built-in inverter and charge controller, and use standard MC4 cables to plug in your panels. But wiring it yourself is not terribly difficult. Start by daisy chaining the panels together—each has a positive and negative cable, and polarity is denoted on both the male and female connections—and bringing them to the charge controller, which usually has a screen to show how much power they’re pulling in. Wire that to a deep-cycle battery and finally to an inverter, for plugging in common electronics. Keep the charge controller, battery, and inverter all fairly close (roughly 5 feet) to avoid wasting power. Insulate the battery, especially if you’ll be in places that will be very hot or…

These fractions within fractions let mathematicians study irrational numbers, like Pi and √2 and find patterns in their infinite decimals. Finding patterns in complex, irrational numbers is crucial to fields like cryptography and encryption. The easiest way to jump into a continued fraction is to start with a “simple and finite” continued fraction, where you’ll have nothing but 1s in the numerator position of the continued fractions, and it will resolve in just a few steps. Continued fractions for an irrational number, like Pi, go on ad infinitum. Take 37/13. That’s one of those awkward improper fractions. You can also write 37/13 as 2 plus 11/13. That’s step one in converting to a continued fraction. To get to the next nested layer, you again need an improper fraction to divide.…

When looking at all-mountain skis, pay attention to rocker—it can reveal a lot about how the ski will feel under your foot. Just as brewers play with hops and yeast to create flavor in beer, designers can tweak a ski’s rocker to get it to behave how they want. It plays a major role in making these skis so versatile. Rocker describes how close to the bindings the tip and tail start to bend upward. It’s where the ski’s camber (the arc that lifts the middle section of an unweighted ski off the snow) ends. More camber gives the ski better hold on hard snow. More rocker, especially at the tip, helps the ski float better and glide in deep snow. “More rocker also reduces the ski’s effective edge,” says…

Watch the complete MADE HERE video series on YouTube. CRICKET IS ONE OF THE MOST celebrated sports in the world, with an estimated 2.5 billion fans. Its popularity in Pakistan inspired my grandfather to open MB Malik Sports in 1964. My father eventually took over, and I joined after receiving my master’s degree. Our cricket bat is crafted mostly by hand and involves a lot of skilled labor. On average, about 5,000 are assembled per month. We rely on some tools but depend mostly on our 500 to 600 workers. We import English willow, a lightweight yet resilient wood capable of withstanding high-speed impact. Cricket balls have a solid cork core wound tightly with layers of string, then covered in leather and stitched closed. Pressing the bats secures that satisfactory…

A FEW YEARS AGO, I WAS TALKING TO computer scientist/professor/author/enviably prolific human Cal Newport. He had just written a book, Digital Minimalism, on how to be more deliberate with technology, and how to spend the time you win back on more satisfying pursuits. The idea is to follow some small rules—no bingeing Netflix when alone, check social media from your laptop instead of your phone, that kind of thing—to make your devices contribute to your life more usefully. Because, at least for me, new tech is capable of so much that I sometimes forget whatever task it’s supposed to be helping me achieve. My iPhone, for example, helps me find new music, laugh with friends, or drive somewhere faster. I’m not getting my money’s worth from it when I’m scrolling…

In May 2020, Russia’s Akademik Lomonosov floating nuclear plant (above) started providing power and electricity to 200,000 people in the fareastern town of Pevek, Russia. The 70-megawatt plant, housed on a nonmotorized barge, took three years to build and another decade to begin operations, running up a price tag of $740 million against initial estimates of $140 million, though it has a lifespan of 40 years. Lomonosov is the first floating plant of its kind, but its plans are designed for replicable manufacturing. It is the 11th industrially operated nuclear power plant in Russia, and the northernmost in the world.…

THE WALLS OF THE CELL WHERE CHRISTOPHER HAVENS WAS SERVING A 25-YEAR MURDER SENTENCE WERE COVERED IN NOTEBOOK PAPER. The sheets filled with numeric and Greek scratchings had quickly overwhelmed his modest desk and were now forming a patchwork wallpaper that spread from that corner and began to wrap around the 8x12 room. The neatly nesting equations of the continued fractions guiding his chase could run on for 15 feet as he hunted for patterns that might offer a clue. Some pages were complete nonsense, grasps into the unknown with whatever method appeared to him. Other pages made progress. They showed promise in his self-taught number theory education. Though Havens didn’t know this yet. He also didn’t know his problem didn’t have an answer. Guards and other inmates would do…

2020 CHANGED HOW WE GO ABOUT OUR LIVES and the importance we place on the things that power our work and fuel our passions. Navigating a global pandemic and economic uncertainty isn’t easy, yet many of us are trying to find solace, stress relief, and at times, joy in taking on homeimprovement projects and renovations; retreating to campgrounds and hiking trails; and learning new skills. Electronics play an increasingly meaningful role in our daily lives, connecting us to work and maintaining our vital social connections with friends and our families. Here, you’ll find exceptional gear that we’ve rigorously tested. It would be the best of the best any year, and there’s plenty here to help you navigate this new normal, whatever your solace.…

To test these nailers, we fired them into a variety of materials that simulate what goes on in finish carpentry and craft projects. We wanted to be sure our test was tougher than what these guns would typically encounter in a day’s work. For example, when testing for nail-sinking capability, we fired slowly and methodically into red oak, both ¾ inch thick and 1½ inches thick. For longer nails, we doubled up the oak so that the gun was firing into wood that was either 1½ inches thick or 3 inches thick. For rapid-fire simulations, we prepared strips of various materials, such as white pine, radiata pine, birch and fir plywood, and MDF (medium-density fiberboard). In these cases, we were more concerned with the tool’s precision and speed than its…

MAYBE YOU’VE SEEN IT AT THE BOTTOM of a restaurant’s beverage menu or a brewery’s extensive beer list: the “NA” or “nonalcoholic” option. There, it might feel like an afterthought. But the nonalcoholic movement, especially when it comes to beer, is gaining traction in the adult-beverage market. Nonalcoholic beer dates back to Prohibition, but it’s having a resurgence, fueled by changing consumer habits and brewers’ successful tinkering with the complex processes required to make it. Between this past July and September, NA beer sales were up approximately 38% in the U.S.compared with the same period in 2019, according to data analytics group IRI. Craft operations dedicated to NA suds have sprung up across the country, not to mention beer giants like Heineken and Anheuser-Busch—the maker of Busch NA and O’Doul’s,…

In 2011, China revealed the Chengdu J-20 “Mighty Dragon” as its first fifthgeneration stealth fighter. The fighter has flat, angular surfaces to minimize its radar signature, large forward canards for enhanced maneuverability, and an estimated top speed of Mach 2. The J-20 packs two engines, internal weapons bays, electro-optical sensors, and an advanced electronically scanned array (AESA) radar. It’s hefty enough that it could act as either a long-range fighter or a fighter bomber. And it can target American airborne tankers, intelligence, and early warning aircraft with the new PL-15 longrange, radar-guided missile, forcing American fighters to fight without critical support aircraft. The Su-57 fighter jet—NATO classification name “FELON”—is the first stealthy Russian design, with angled surfaces to reduce radar returns and a radar-absorbing paint coating. The Su-57 features two…

COLDEST PLACE ON EARTH Average daily temperatures in Oymyakon, Russia, the coldest permanently inhabited settlement in the world, hover around –50°F in the winter. The frigid town’s record low is –90°F. Only Antarctica’s Vostok Station has recorded a lower temperature. HIGHEST ELEVATION La Rinconada, Peru, a gold mining town in the Andes Mountains, sits at more than 16,700 feet above sea level, making it the highest settlement in the world. Scientists are working with locals to understand the effects of the thin air—half the oxygen of that at sea level—on their bodies. DRIEST INHABITED PLACE Chile’s Atacama Desert has long been heralded as the driest place on Earth. Quillagua, a town situated on the northwestern outskirts of the desert, holds the record for driest inhabited location in the world, with…

WORK SHARP UNDERSTANDS THAT a sharp blade is critical for a nicely carved turkey, a cleaned fish, or finely diced vegetables. And getting a razor’s edge to do the job should be simple. Anybody can use The Precision Adjust Knife Sharpener to put a decent edge on their kitchen knife, fishing knife, or everyday carry. We sharpened a variety of edges with it, including a couple of badly dulled utility knife blades. They went from discards straight back to service. The process is easy. You position the blade in a clamp, then set the angle of a swinging sharpening rod by turning an adjustment knob. The rod is equipped with three rotating sharpening pads. Two are diamond grit (coarse and medium) and one is ceramic (for honing). With the angle…

You already know modular math, thanks to how we read clocks. Modular arithmetic gets its name from the modulo operator (mod for short), which dictates how you’ll count through a series of numbers. On a clock, the mod is 12. We count up to 12 and then start over again. Which is why 3 p.m. is not 15 p.m., but 3 is congruent (essentially, equal) with 15 (mod 12). The modulo operator can be any positive number, and acts as the key for understanding how the values of numbers have changed. For example, in mod 2, the numbers 3 and 5 are the same. In modular arithmetic, your mod value is how many numbers are in your mod. But unlike the numbers on a clock, we start with 0 where…

BEST ELECTRIC MOWER Cub Cadet SC300 Intellipower $329 Cutting tall grass in the spring and early summer can severely tax a mower. To help the SC300 switch easily from normal cutting to severe, Cub Cadet equipped it with a sensitive electronic governor and a two-position throttle-control lever that lets you choose between average and tough conditions. Shifting to the high-power position increases engine rpm and boosts output by 20 percent. We flipped the lever and wheeled the SC300 into kneedeep weeds. Taking cuts with half the 21-inch deck width at a time, we found the machine more than capable of handling the load. After a few passes, we started cutting with the full deck width. This Cub held up, producing a very good quality of cut. BEST FLASHLIGHT Maglite ML300L…

BEST HANDHELD CONSOLE Nintendo Switch Lite $200 Compared to the regular Switch (which has been sporadically in and out of stock for months), the Lite is smaller, one piece, and doesn’t connect to a TV. But those aren’t drawbacks. Essentially the latest Gameboy, the Lite is meant for portability, and screen real estate is still respectable at 5.5 inches. Gamers who prefer handheld solo play will take to it. During our testing, we got roughly four hours of battery life. Hard buttons are in welcome contrast to tapping on a touchscreen while playing mobile games. And the Lite reinforces one of the core commandments of great gadget design: Simpler is better. BEST HEADPHONES Sony WH-1000XM4 $348 A follow-up to our favorite wireless cans, Sony’s WH-1000XM4 brings subtle but meaningful tech…

THROW A GLOBAL PANDEMIC ON TOP OF UNPREDICTABLE WINTER weather and skiers are facing one of the most chaotic seasons in history. Navigating resort restrictions, COVID-era travel, and the whims of the snow gods won’t be easy. But if you do head to the mountains, at least make sure your skis are ready for anything. We tested the latest all-mountain planks to help you find the right pair, shredding East Coast hardpack and spending several days at Winter Park, Colorado, where we hit groomers and bumps as well as tight trees and windblown chop way up high. Most of the models we tested had waists in the mid-90s, though a few were wider. With modern design, that width typically delivers enough float for powder days yet a lively feeling on…

BY THE EARLY 2010’S, YOUTUBE HAD blown up, allowing us to create and consume amateur content in quantities that we never had before, and people were hungry for more angles. And GoPro had cornered the action-sports market with small, affordable cameras that captured incredible first-person POV footage, but there was a clear hole in the hobbyist videographer’s repertoire: aerial. Sure, major companies like Red Bull could afford to rent a helicopter to shoot an epic stunt, but it was almost completely inaccessible to consumers and the indie set. Inventive filmers would attach GoPros to remote-control planes, helicopters, and even weather balloons, but none of those were particularly easy to fly. Then, in 2013, DJI introduced the Phantom drone. “DJI was one of the first companies to understand that a consumer…