Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2025 i Popular Mechanics

IF YOU LIKE HOW TO REBUILD A HIGHWAY IN 12 DAYS / P.20 CHECK OUT REBUILDING THE MAZE IF YOU LIKE GEAR OF THE YEAR / P.52 CHECK OUT EMERGENCIES HAPPEN. HERE’S HOW TO PREPARE. IF YOU LIKE WHY ORANGE CATS EXIST / P.11 CHECK OUT THE UNIVERSE IS PAINTED WITH COLORS YOU CAN’T SEE IF YOU LIKE A LIFESAVING CRISPR TREATMENT / P.13 CHECK OUT A SWARM OF STINGING BEES HEALED A DYING WOMAN IF YOU LIKE WARP SPEED, ENGAGED / P.40 CHECK OUT A NEW THEORY SAYS TIME HAS THREE DIMENSIONS…

DARK MATTER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT ON February 13, 2023, the Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss (ARCA) array—part of the larger Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT), located in the Mediterranean off the coast of Italy—detected a high-energy particle unlike any other. After crunching the numbers for two years, scientists earlier this year announced that this particle likely originated from a blazar and was the highest-energy neutrino ever detected, by a factor of 35. Even more impressive, the array documented this particle while it was only partially finished. However, there was one strange attribute of this neutrino event, which was dubbed KM3-230213A—the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the South Pole has never recorded such an event and did not detect this high-energy event, either. Now, a new preprint study…

WHEN THE WALLS OF a 15th-century Portuguese church collapsed during poor weather, they revealed more than just dust and debris—they exposed at least 12 skeletons stashed inside the walls. The ancient Igreja Matriz de Portimão (which translates to Main Church of Portimão) is located at the highest point in the city of Portimão near the famed Praia da Rocha beach. It was likely one of the most impressive buildings in the region when it was constructed, but time took its toll and eventually caused a wall to collapse. When crews arrived on site to assess the damage, they stumbled into an unexpected archaeological situation. “The work to replace the wall ended up uncovering part of the bones, and at the time, an archaeology team was called in to study the findings,”…

LIFE’S ABILITY TO COPY BIL-lions of distinct letters in a genome is an absolute biological wonder—but mistakes are made. Genetic disorders and birth defects occur in one in every 33 babies in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For all of history, a person born with a disorder just had to live with it, and depending on the defect, those lives could be brutally short. But in 2025, that changed forever. In a groundbreaking announcement, detailed in a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, experts from institutions around the U.S. saved the life of a patient named KJ, who was born with a rare genetic disorder. To pull off this incredible feat, doctors employed the world’s first custom in vivo (i.e., inside…

GOLD ISN’T AS RARE AS YOU MAY think—it’s just hard to reach. More than 99 percent of Earth’s precious metals lie hundreds of miles beneath our surface under (literal) tons of solid rock in our molten core. Fortunately, Earth is making it easier for us humans. According to a study published in the journal Nature, Earth’s core is “leaking” gold. Now, don’t get too excited—gold isn’t spewing out of the ground in cartoon-esque fountains—but the researchers on the study did find evidence that precious metals are oozing out of Earth’s core and into the mantle. Unlike the core, the mantle is mostly solid and makes up most of the planet (84 percent of the Earth’s volume, to be exact). Comparatively, the mantle also has less of a platinum-group metal called…

STANLEY KUBRICK’S 1980 horror film, The Shining, terrifies viewers as Jack Nicholson’s character descends into madness. The scariest part of the flick for me was when he first walked into the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel and we’re shown a massive wall of windows that are all going to need to be reglazed at some point. If you have wooden windows in your home, you likely have some that need attention—and you may be hesitant, if not fearful, to take on the work yourself. You may even be thinking about just replacing them with a more energy-efficient window altogether. This article won’t delve into the argument about replacements, though I will note that, while window companies tout the cost savings of energy-efficient windows, preservationists have crunched the numbers to show…

GARFIELD MIGHT BE THE MOST ICONIC orange tabby cat around, but he has so far refused to give up orange tabbies’ most guarded beauty secret—how do they get their auburn coats? Hiroyuki Sasaki, a cat enthusiast and geneticist at Kyushu University in Japan, was determined to identify the elusive gene that carries the orange mutation in Felis silvestris catus (the domesticated cat). He and his research team analyzed DNA in skin tissue from cats with and without orange fur and found a mutation to the ARHGAP36 gene. This was a type of deletion mutation, meaning that a segment of a gene is missing. In orange cats, the missing segment is located on an intron, or noncoding region, of the ARH-GAP36 gene. The location of the mutation on this particular gene…

FINALLY, AFTER YEARS OF STUDY, THE REAL but in fact, it is a very real archaeological identity of the Dragon Man has been discovered. That might sound like something shouted by the villain in a comic book, breakthrough—one that helps reshape our understanding of the early hominins who once roamed the earth and whose DNA can still be found mixed in with our own. A skull discovered in northern China had, for several years, been suggested to belong to a previously undiscovered species, which had been labeled Homo longi (named for the discovery’s proximity to the Long Jiang, or Long River). As the river’s Chinese name literally translates to “Dragon River,” they nicknamed the discovered skull “Dragon Man.” The species that skull belongs to has now been properly identified, and…

Edwin Hubble’s discovery of Andromeda as a galaxy in its own right fueled giant advances not only in astronomy and physics during the 1920s but also in science fiction. In 1926, a 20-year-old American sci-fi writer, John W. Campbell Jr., wrote a little-known story called “Islands of Space” for the Spring 1931 edition of Amazing Stories Quarterly. In it, Campbell writes what’s considered today as the very first description of a warp drive. “A gravitational field tends to warp space in such a way that the velocity of light is lower in its presence. Our drive tries to warp or strain space in the opposite manner.” Campbell’s story wasn’t an instant classic. “This is a real lousy book,” American sci-fi writer The-odore Sturgeon wrote when reviewing a book edition of…

EVER GET THOSE EERIE “GUT FEELINGS” that something may occur in the future? Scientists have been diving into the mysteries behind precognition, the idea that consciousness could potentially transcend the linear perception of time. What they’ve found through extensive research is shocking—and statistically significant. Learn more about the science of precognition with our latest exclusive feature. WHEN IT COMES TO FINDING FOSSILS, you may think of places like Egypt and China as prehistoric hot spots. But how about…suburban New Jersey? Popular Mechanics spent time with Kenneth Lacovara, PhD, founder of the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum in Sewell, New Jersey, to explore how a four-acre marl quarry behind a Lowe’s became one of the country’s most notable fossil beds. PLASTIC IS EVERYWHERE—even at the bottom of our world’s oceans. But researchers…