Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2022 i Popular Mechanics

DAVE LUCAS, 70 TV News Anchor / Washington, D.C. Change is constant. Get used to it. My Role Model Growing up, my idol was Arnold Palmer. When I was in high school, he won the first PGA tournament at The Sea Pines Resort on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. I tagged along with a local station’s sports director. When Arnie held the post-match news conference, we were the only TV crew there. The sports guy shot it and told me to ask the questions. I did. Arnie was so kind and not at all condescending. MY FRIEND FAUCI In the early 1990s, I anchored a weekly health and medical news magazine program. As HIV/AIDS emerged, the CDC recommended Dr. Anthony Fauci as the nation’s leading expert. He agreed to do…

NUCLEAR WEAPONS are destructive devices capable of leveling entire cities and, in the case of a nuclear exchange, ending human civilization. But what would happen if all the world’s nukes were detonated at once in the same place? The YouTube channel Kur-zgesagt followed this thought experiment to its apocalyptic conclusion. There were an estimated 15,000 nuclear weapons worldwide in 2019. If all of those nukes exploded at the same time in the same place, they’d produce the equivalent of nearly 3 billion metric tons of TNT. The detonation would create a fireball about 30 miles across and a mushroom cloud 30 miles high, flattening 1,864 square miles around it. With the Russia-Ukraine war ongoing, it’s easy to understand why limiting nuclear proliferation is more urgent than ever.…

In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall determined that a dying patient lost about that amount of weight at the time of death, after accounting for other factors like the loss of bodily fluids. He chalked it up to the weight of the human soul. However, the odd experiment has never been replicated, even though technology for measurement has advanced.…

FOR DECADES, SCIENTISTS HAVE THEORIZED what the surface of Mars might sound like. NASA’s doomed Mars Polar Lander and Phoenix missions have tried and failed to record audio of the Red Planet. Until NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars in February 2021, the Martian soundscape has largely been confined to computer models. In its first year, the rover’s two microphones have captured more than four hours of audio within the audible bandwidth and beyond (20 Hertz to 50,000 Hertz), including the rustling of wind gusts near the planet’s surface, the whirring of the Ingenuity helicopter’s rotors, and short pings produced by the rover’s rock-zapping SuperCam. This data has allowed researchers to more clearly understand how sound travels on Mars and has led to new insights about the planet’s atmosphere…

OPEN THE CAMERA APP ON YOUR PHONE and start recording a video. Place the screen right in front of your eyes and try to use the live footage as a viewfinder. Tricky, right? The shapes, colors, and motion in the video are jarring. Scientists say this exercise is a close approximation of the messy visual data that our eyes constantly bombard our brain with. So how exactly do we see without feeling dizzy or nauseated? In new research published in January in Science Advances, researchers describe a “previously unknown visual illusion” that helps us smooth out what we see over time. The inputs our eyes receive in any given moment may actually be an average of what we’ve observed in the past 15 seconds, the scientists found. There are different…

MOST MODERN SMART-phones have vastly improved and light-sensitive sensors, permit some granular control of the settings, and are able to shoot more detail-rich RAW photos, which are uncompressed and unprocessed image files. Start out with a simple Milky Way shot: Stabilize your phone on a tripod or even against a rock, enable the phone’s “night mode” if it has one, and use the timer to trigger a shot, so that your movement doesn’t jostle the phone while it’s capturing the image. Or use apps like ProCam X for Android or NightCap for iOS, which allow you to do longer exposures and experiment with more settings manually. You can also take pictures with your phone through the eyepiece of a telescope or even a pair of tripod-mounted binoculars. You can try…

1600s Dakota fire hole / As far back as the 1600s, Indigenous Peoples of the Americas employed the Dakota fire hole to create fires that would burn in windy conditions and not spread or endanger their environment. It consists of two holes in the ground connected by a tunnel. Building a fire in one hole causes the rising heat to draw cool air through the tunnel. This constant flow of oxygen creates a hot fire that burns close to 100 percent of the fuel (which was wood). 1780s Ami Argand’s smokeless oil lamp / In 1784, Ami Argand developed a new type of oil lamp that produced more light, and less smoke, than its predecessors. The lamp uses a hollow, cylindrical wick inside a similarly cylindrical glass chimney. As oil…

You’ll want to burn seasoned wood when you use a smokeless fire pit. That means the wood has had time to dry out over six to 12 months, depending on the species. Wood that’s still green or wet will burn more slowly and may produce smoke even when burning in a smokeless fire pit. Hardwoods—like oak, hickory, ash, or maple—are preferable; they’ll burn longer than softwoods like pine or cedar. Some fire pits, like the Tiki we tested, are also designed to burn wood pellets. In either case, you will burn through fuel more quickly in a smokeless fire pit due to the constant stream of air feeding the fire. The upside of this is that with the fuel burning this hot and completely, you’ll have less ash to clean…

FORTY YEARS AGO, I paid $30 for this 1930s Stanley No. 71 router plane at a flea market in New Milford, Connecticut. I cleaned it, oiled its threads, sharpened its cutters, and painted its handles. That’s all it took, and the little plane sprang back to life. But it took many hours of trial and error before I learned to effectively use it to smooth grooves and flatten broad, flat surfaces, such as half-lap joints. I don’t employ it often, but when I do, I feel like I’m part of the long line of craftsmen who used hand tools that were built to serve a lifetime and then some.…

Milwaukee M12 Cordless 3/8-inch automatic ratchet A lifesaver when you can’t swing a manual ratchet in a tight space. Sony LinkBuds Truly Wireless headphones They allow me to hear any call for help. Streamlight Strion flashlight The only flashlight I want with me when I’m working in dark spaces. Klein Tools MM400 multimeter It performs just as well as any $200 multimeter out there.…

Topic WE CAN SEE THE FUTURE For 120 years and counting, PopMech editors have dared to predict the future. Prognostication, of course, is a tricky practice: Informed speculations about tomorrow’s technologies may seem perfectly reasonable in the present, but can look laughably erroneous over time. Indeed, for every accurate bet we’ve made in these pages over the last century-plus—in 1932, a plucky contributor named Winston Churchill predicted a telephone-plus-TV combo that basically foretold the internet—we’ve had a dozen printed misses. (The less said about our ’51 pitch for the personal family helicopter, the better.) Still, as science enthusiasts, it’s our job to make sense of how today’s new innovations and looming challenges might transform the lives of generations to come, for better and worse. Here, our in-house experts reveal what…

ONE OF THE BEST AND MOST UNSETTLING episodes of Netflix’s dystopian anthology series Black Mirror is “Be Right Back,” which tells the story of a woman who loses her boyfriend in a car accident. Rather than wade through the grieving process by looking at old photos, text messages, and social media posts, she uses her dead boyfriend’s data to create an AI version of him. The episode made my skin crawl, but got me thinking: Could my partner use my tweets and Facebook posts to build an AI avatar of me? And just what happens to all of our postmortem data, anyway? In 2019 research published in the journal Big Data & Society, Carl Öhman, an associate senior lecturer with the department of government at Sweden’s Uppsala University, estimated that…

WHY DOES ONE SPECIES OUTCOM-pete another? Because they’re better adapted to their environment and therefore better able to produce offspring. It seems the universe is likewise adapting to changing conditions, which means it’s slowly evolving new laws of physics. It could even be constantly evolving itself into a more stable state, according to new research. That’s because all of the laws of physics we can see or measure today may have worked themselves out over time. To grasp how they came to be, we could apply Darwinian natural selection to cosmology. Picture an early version of the universe where, for instance, gravitational attraction between objects was a more primitive concept. In that case, Newton’s law of gravitation could not be true yet. Today, that law explains why the moon’s surface…

CHANGE BLINDNESS Change blindness occurs when a stimulus changes but we don’t notice it. In a 1998 experiment, scientists conversed with participants and then, during a moment of distraction, swapped places with someone else. Roughly half of the participants failed to notice the switch. INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS This is our failure to notice a visible object because our attention is focused elsewhere. In one famous experiment, participants were asked to watch a video of a pickup basketball game. Half failed to notice a woman in a gorilla suit who walked past and thumped her chest.…

Camera In general, there are two ways to shoot the stars: with a dedicated astro-camera mounted to a telescope or with a conventional interchangeable-lens camera, which you can also attach to a telescope (with adapters) or simply use with a lens. The Orion Starshoot G3 Deep Space Color Imaging Camera ($350) is designed for photographing galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters. You control it through a laptop using proprietary software (not external buttons or dials), and it comes with the simplicity benefit of hardware that doesn’t have to do double duty shooting birthday parties and family vacations. Plus, its sensor and control systems are engineered specifically for low-light, high-resolution celestial captures. On the other hand, the mirrorless interchangeable-lens Sony A7III ($2,000)—a master of all those normal-camera things—has a terrific low-light sensor…

1 / HARPER COUNTER HORSEHAIR DUSTER BENCH BRUSH / $17 / An old-fashioned brush with a hardwood handle and a combination of horsehair and synthetic bristles is still the best tool for cleaning your bench and sweeping yourself off, too. This one clears coarse bits as well as extremely fine, talc-like dust. 2 / HARPER XL ALUMINUM DUST PAN / $20 / Take no half measures when it comes to dust pans. Get this 17-inch-wide aluminum model. Its handle is riveted to the body so it won’t work loose, even when you plunge it into a debris pile. 3 / 3M N95 DUST MASK / $19 / Breathe easy, without fear of inhaling particles, with this N95 mask. We’ve worn them extensively during our own projects. The valve directs hot-and-moist…

MAKE YOUR OWN RAGS Cut old sheets, towels, and T-shirts into 8" squares. Bed sheets are great for applying finish, towels for cleanup, and T-shirts for all-purpose jobs. ROTATE OFTEN To avoid a mess no rag can fix, stick to one job per rag. LAUNDER GENTLY Handwash rags with dish soap and let them line dry. For tough stains, dampen, add a layer of baking soda, and let sit for 24 hours. Wash in equal parts water and distilled vinegar. DISPOSE PROPERLY Rags soiled with grease or wood finish qualify as hazardous waste. Once dry, place in a sealable bag filled with clean water, and dispose at a hazardous waste–disposal dropoff. HOW TO BUILD A RAG DISPENSER This bucket dispenser will keep your rags handy and clean in a garage…

Smokeless fire pits employ the same technique used in the Dakota fire hole, Ami Argand’s oil lamp, and the rocket stove. However, they also induce a secondary combustion to help exhaust gases burn off more completely and with less smoke. When heat from the fire rises in the fire pit, fresh air is drawn into the space between the inner and outer walls at the bottom of the body. Some of this air directly feeds the fire at its base, while the rest of the air rises as it heats up in the space between the walls, exiting at the top, on the inside, to feed the flames. This supplies fresh air to the hot exhaust gases, igniting them and creating that secondary combustion. This process creates a very hot,…

To evaluate these smokeless fire pits, we loaded them with wood, started fires, stoked the fires, sat around them, and then cleaned up afterward. To keep things consistent, we burned logs of a single species of wood—oak—all cut at the same time and seasoned for more than a year. We observed how much smoke the fire pits created, how much heat they provided, and how easy they were to clean up. To judge how well they radiate heat, we measured temperatures 36 inches off the ground at 2, 4, and 6 feet away from the rim of each pit. And because you can get up real close to these fire pits—we may have melted the soles of our shoes in the past—we also took the temperature of the hottest part…

GAS PRICES ARE HOVERING AT AN ALL-TIME high, and so is the appeal of switching to an electric vehicle (EV). It’s no secret that juicing up a battery is more affordable than filling up at the pump. In our testing, a full tank of gas cost upwards of $50, while a couple of hours at a fast-charging point set us back just $1.69 (though that time commitment isn’t lost on us). Today’s charging infrastructure isn’t nearly as robust as the existing network of gas stations. Your options can be further limited, as proprietary charging standards (ahem, Tesla) don’t yet accommodate every EV in the United States. President Joe Biden has set an ambitious goal for electric, hybrid, and fuel-cell vehicles to make up 50 percent of new car sales by…

Finding the perfect algorithms—the sets of rules a computer should follow to perform an operation—can be a tall task. So, a team of computer scientists at Google came up with a new automatic machine learning (AutoML) method back in 2020 to generate the best algorithm for a given task, just like the universe cooked up the perfect laws of physics for our specific world. The system, called AutoML-Zero, can adapt algorithms to different types of tasks and continually improve them through a Darwinian-like evolution process where a computer can roam free and get creative. Esteban Real, a software engineer at Google Brain, Research, and Machine Intelligence, offers this metaphor: “Suppose your goal is to put together a house. If you had at your disposal pre-built bedrooms, kitchens, and bathrooms, your…