Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2025 i Popular Mechanics

THE STATE KNOWN AS LUCID DREAMING IS an unquestionably surreal one, and it just got even more so. A team of researchers at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands has discovered that lucid dreaming is a state of consciousness separate from both wakefulness and REM sleep (the state usually associated with dreams). In fact, it is associated with its own type of brain activity. To identify what sets lucid dreaming apart from the rest of sleep, the team pulled previous studies together into what is now the most extensive dataset in this field of sleep research. The researchers then compared brain activity patterns for wakefulness, REM sleep, and lucid dreaming to find that the eerie self-awareness experienced in lucid dreams is connected to certain types of brain waves. Perception and…

TOUCH SCREENS HAVE BECOME THE norm for navigating infotainment systems in modern cars. But while they look brilliant, I can confidently say that they’ll never be as good as the buttons and knobs present in the cars of yesteryear. WHY? // Safety is my primary concern with touch-screen and touch-sensitive controls in cars. Screens take significantly more mental bandwidth and finger precision to use than buttons. I’ve often found myself looking down at the control panel when testing vehicles with these systems just to find the setting I want to adjust, which slows down these tasks and takes my focus away from the road. Buttons, on the other hand, are always where you remember them to be and can easily be used without taking your eyes off the road. Because…

BETWEEN 14,800 AND 5,500 YEARS AGO, the Sahara—known for being one of the driest places on Earth—actually had enough water to support a way of life. Back then, it was a savanna that early human populations settled to take advantage of the favorable farming conditions. Among them was a mysterious people who lived in what is now southwestern Libya and should have been genetically sub-Saharan—except, upon a modern analysis, their genes didn’t reflect that. A team of researchers analyzed the genes of two 7,000-year-old naturally preserved mummies from the Takarkori rock shelter. Though genetic material does not preserve well in arid climates, there was enough fragmented DNA to give insights into their past. “The majority of Takarkori individuals’ ancestry stems from a previously unknown North African genetic lineage that diverged from…

PSSST, YOU KNOW YOU NEED ME FOR SOMETHING. They sit like sentries at the end caps of big-box stores. Towers of orange, blue, red, or white stocked at eye level. Their mere presence whispers: “Pssst, you know you need me for something.” ¶ And we absolutely do. ¶ The bucket has been an indispensable tool throughout the ages, evolving alongside human civilization, taking on a multitude of uses and made from a multitude of materials—from copper, bronze, wood, leather, and galvanized metal to (finally) plastic. Today, we deploy them in so many capacities it’s easy to forget just how simple they are. You probably have one sitting in a shed, its walls lacquered with dried leaves from last season’s gutter cleaning, or in your garage, overflowing with car-wash supplies or…

David Mendosa called it the wall of fat. In 1994, a doctor diagnosed him with type 2 diabetes, and over the next decade, he felt helpless as his weight crept upward until he tipped the scales at 312 pounds. Pastimes he once enjoyed—hikes in the low-lying portions of the Rocky Mountains close to his hometown of Boulder, Colorado—were stymied by the excess girth he carried around his abdomen. This was the wall, and although Mendosa stood at nearly 6 foot 3 inches tall, he was, by all medical definitions, severely obese. “Moving my big body became much harder,” recounted Mendosa in an article he wrote for the diaTribe Foundation website in 2007. He described using a “grabber” to retrieve the newspaper from his driveway and said that getting out of…

SKELETONS UNDER DEPARTMENT STORE Recently 317 medieval and post-medieval skeletons were discovered at the site of a department store being remodeled into a university. This was oddly unsurprising, as other skeletons from the Roman and medieval periods have surfaced since renovation efforts began in 2023. Nonskeleton artifacts will be put on display once the new campus opens. —Elizabeth Rayne ROMAN GRAVE UNDER SOCCER FIELD Renovations on a soccer field outside of Vienna, Austria, uncovered a Roman-era mass grave that held the remains of roughly 150 males. Experts believe the site was likely a battlefield where a “catastrophic event” took place near the end of the first century, an idea potentially corroborated by the hasty covering and disorderly nature of the burial. —Tim Newcomb…

HOMO SAPIENS IS THE MOST SUC-cessful mammalian species in Earth’s history, and it’s not even close. However, a new study suggests that the impressive nature of humanity’s proliferation may have been vastly underreported. Most estimates place Earth’s human population at around 8.2 billion, but Josias Láng-Ritter—a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University in Finland—claims that these estimates could be underrepresenting rural areas by a significant margin. “We were surprised to find that the actual population living in rural areas is much higher than the global population data indicates—depending on the dataset, rural populations have been underestimated by between 53 percent to 84 percent over the period studied,” Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. With a background in water resource management, Láng-Ritter looked at a different kind of population data gathered from rural…

A LARGE TEAM OF SCIENTISTS CLAIMS to have achieved “certified randomness” using a quantum computer. In a classical computer, you can never make a truly random number. When you ask one to give you a random number, code behind the scenes is doing an approximation of randomness. But it’s basically like shuffling a deck of cards until the results appear random to a user. The computer has no free will, so there’s no way for it to “choose” anything without metrics or assigned values. Quantum systems, however, involve an amount of unpredictability and entropy. As such, simply identifying certain qualities at certain times is randomized by nature. In a 2016 literature review of quantum randomness projects, scientists explain the metric used for the desired level of randomness: “[H]ere we are…

NOTORIOUS FOR BLACKMAIL, extortion, and even murder, Johannes Bückler—also known as Schinderhannes—was one of the most infamous criminals in all of Germany during the late 18th century. He was responsible for more than 200 offenses during his reign of terror. His life of crime came to a halt in 1803, when he was sentenced to death. The delinquent—along with colleague Schwarzer Jonas (Black Jonas)—was executed by guillotine. The skeletons of both Schinderhannes and Schwarzer Jonas were eventually given to the Heidelberg University anatomy department. But, at some point during the early 19th century, the two skeletons were accidentally mixed up—a snafu that has persisted for over 200 years. Now, a new study analyzing the sets of bones is correcting the record, and the skeleton long assumed to be the remains of…