Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2017 i Popular Science

FOR ME, IT STARTED WITH trains. As a kid in Manhattan, the typical objects of childhood fixation were often scarce. I couldn’t climb trees or skip stones—but I had 400 tons of urban-rail righteousness thundering beneath my apartment. I’d spend hours in the subway: riding lines to their ends, exploring abandoned stations, and racing through tunnels (sorry, Mom). My friend Nicky even figured out how to jimmy the doors to empty conductor compartments so we could hijack the PA system. (Not sorry.) To this day, there are few sensations that center me like the repetitive rock of a rail car. I still ride the subway every day, and if I’m traveling anywhere near a train line, you’ll find me on it seconds after my bag hits the hotel floor. At…

INSTEAD OF PULLEYS AND SPRINGS, LIVING CREATURES RELY ON CELLULAR machinery to do the work of life. Perhaps none function as unconventionally as ocean-dwelling siphonophores. Born as single embryos, these animals grow not by elongating their limbs but by budding entirely new beings called zooids. These cloned bodies complete specialized tasks: Some help the siphonophore move, others find food, or reproduce—yet a single nervous system orchestrates their motion. Here’s how three of these chandelier-like invertebrates thrive as multitudes. Bathyphysa conifera When BP oil workers spotted this entity during an ROV patrol of the ocean floor in 2015, they joked that it resembled the Internet-famous “Flying Spaghetti Monster”—a cartoon meme mass of spaghetti and meatballs with a pair of protrusive eyes. The resemblance is uncanny indeed. B. conifera’s stem branches off…

MANY OF THE WORLD’S 4,000-or-so roller coasters are of the humdrum county-fair variety. Only an elite few rides reach the monumental heights and speeds of record-smashing supercoasters, which draw millions of thrill-seekers a year— and inspire cut-throat competition that makes it way harder to keep a record than to break one. We rose to the challenge. Our Frankencoaster splices together four real-life record breakers— tallest, fastest, steepest, and most topsy-turvy—into one seriously sick ride. You’d better buckle up. 1 Quick Takeoff A hydraulic start just like the ones used to launch fighter jets? Oh, yeah. The Formula Rossa debuted at Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi in 2010 and— as you’d expect from Ferrari—stole the checkered flag for world’s fastest acceleration. Just 4.5 seconds after takeoff, you’re hurtling forward at an…

YOU BOGARTED YOUR NIECE’S ROBOT DINOSAUR for a solid three hours after her birthday party. Admit it. We won’t judge you. Today’s playthings are some tempting stuff. They’re bigger, stronger, and faster than the foot-powered plastic “cars,” immobile Lego fortresses, and dead-eyed Teddy Ruxpin dolls that came before. Building sets are so lifelike, go-karts so zippy, and robots so intelligent that even adults will find these outsize toys utterly irresistible. Now kindly hold my beer, kid; there’s a Nerf battle that needs my full attention. 1 Top Gun Childhood isn’t childhood if you’re not bruising someone’s eyeball with a soft dart, amiright? At 2.5 feet, the Nerf N-Strike Mastodon is the largest foamthrower around. In our tests, its motor shot a full magazine of 24 darts up to 65 feet…

A ROCK CONCERT BLASTS 105 decibels into your ear holes. And, though your neighbors might curse the day you moved in, you can re-create that level of acoustic insanity in your living room, basement, or whatever personal sound cave suits you. WARNING—cranking up the volume can lead to bad sound. But have no fear: If carefully constructed, a high-end audio setup can knock you back in your seat, without losing its fidelity. 1/ Source Even with bass rumbling, the Technics SL-1200GR turntable won’t skip. The aluminum platter (aka the playing surface) has a rubber lining, the footings are silicone, and polymer tubes string through the body—all absorbing bad vibes. $1,700 (est.; cartridge sold separately) 2/ Preamp The preamp gets an audio signal ready for the amplifier to crankify. Unlike many…

In big-kid amusement parks, you get to drive the heavy equipment you spent your childhood dreaming of. These are the thoughts I’m having in the climate-controlled cab of a 26-ton Komatsu PC210LC-10 idling in a north Texas pasture while Jason Nibbe speaks calmly into my headset via two-way radio. Prior to handing me the keys to this bright yellow beast, Nibbe asked me and another client to watch a brief instructional video demonstrating the basics of operating this excavator, as well as the bulldozer and wheel loader that we would be driving later. Nibbe says I am to ignore the two pedals—each of which is paired to one of the machine’s independent steel treads—and focus on my hands. The joystick on the left controls the “stick” and “swing,” while the…

Sheila Dwyer, Hanford Observatory Ripples in spacetime make LIGO’s 2.5-mile-long arms quiver so its lasers hit detector mirrors inside. Dwyer kept the mirrors aligned. Madeline Wade, Kenyon College Wade writes code to calculate LIGO’s moves—within one-tenthousandth the diameter of a proton—based on laser behavior. Michael Coughlin, Harvard University Cosmic collisions—like black-hole mergers—make LIGO dance. Coughlin uses optical telescopes to track down those black holes. Robert Schofield, University of Oregon A lightning strike 6,000 miles away in West Africa could have caused LIGO’s quiver. Schofield proved that it didn’t. Anamaria Effler, Livingston Observatory Effler tweaked hardware to better catch false alarms. She and her team finished tinkering for the night just before the real signal hit. Joey Key, University of Washington By October, the wave was confirmed. Key heads the team…

MATTHIAS HESS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS I’m fascinated by cow guts. The microbes in the rumen—the largest of four sections in a cow’s stomach—break down plant materials extremely well. Studying that process can help us design better cow feed, which could minimize the greenhouse gases cattle emit. It could even help us find ways to optimize our own guts To study these questions in the lab, I designed an artificial cow-gut system. It looks a lot like a beer fermenter. But for the system to work, I need live rumen samples, and for that I have to literally reach into a cow’s stomach. You do this using a fistulated cow. That’s one where a veterinarian cuts a hole in its side, and inserts a tube…

TALLER THAN THE STATUE OF LIBERTY AND HEAVIER THAN THE EIFFEL TOWER, THIS German mining machine is one of the largest land vehicles on Earth. In HBO’s futuristic Westworld, a bucket-wheel excavator like this claws out an entire city. In reality, these diggers work in openpit mines. The excavator pictured here, called Bagger 288, uses its revolving wheel of buckets as a shovel to continually shift 8.5 million cubic feet of dirt a day. Once it reaches a seam of brown coal, or lignite, it can harvest 265,000 tons of fuel a day. And the crew this behemoth requires? A mere three to four people. 4 conveyor belts receive overburden (soil and rock) or lignite from the buckets, and carry the material at more than 11 mph. Each belt is…

CRUISE SHIPS ARE ENTIRE CITIES SET TO SEA—THE LARGEST ONES CAN CARRY thousands of people. To function far from shore, floating burgs like these rely on washing machines that swallow hundreds of pounds of sheets, water-filtration systems that serve both fresh- and saltwater swimming pools, and an army of aerobic bacteria to eat tanks of poop. This is the oftenhidden machinery working behind the scenes on an average mega-liner. 1/Control Room Two floors below the “hotel,” or passenger decks, sit the engines, air-conditioning compressors, and diesel-power generators, which engineers can adjust directly or remotely, from a control room. Certain ships display these controls on massive touchscreen tables. 2/Water To clean seawater, ships often rely on two main methods. Reverse-osmosis membranes filter out salt, and evaporators use heat from the engine…

1/8 • You need deep water to float a big boat. That’s why Robert Ingalls plunked his 800-acre Ingalls Shipbuilding yard on the banks of the yawning Pascagoula River, where it drains into the Gulf of Mexico, in 1938. The Mississippi facility has since birthed nearly 70 percent of the U.S. Navy’s warships. Today, its 11,000 workers cut, weld, and otherwise bang together several Navy craft at a time. Shown here is the future USS Tripoli, an amphibious assault transport whose 855-foot deck is longer than some nations’ aircraft carriers. It will be armed with attack helicopters and 1,600 Marines ready for inland strikes—all thanks to Ingalls’ orchestrated feats of manufacturing. To meet the woman who runs the show, see page 86. SHEET TO SHIP • The operator of a…

KARI WILKINSON, VP OF PROGRAM MANAGEMENT AT INGALLS SHIPBUILDING IN PASCAGOULA, MS This is an 800-acre shipyard. When I first came here after college, I saw the massive equipment and huge ships, and realized how little I actually knew about naval engineering. Ingalls has built nearly 70 percent of the U.S. Navy fleet. We have 11 military vessels under construction, and nearly 12,000 employees. The biggest challenge is seeing how the millions of pieces fit together—that’s my job. To build one of these boats, which can reach more than 800 feet long, we create units. These are the building blocks, like Legos, that we connect and stack together to make bigger sections of the craft. Some units are four decks high, and some are a single level. We lay down…

VICTOR SINGER, FORMER S TRUCTURAL ENGINEER FOR ORBITAL ATK My first interplanetary rocket motor was a solid-fuel Star-24. I can still picture it: 24 inches in diameter, almost spherical, with a nozzle sticking out. That nozzle was mine. I designed it. NASA employed the Star-24 on its 1978 Pioneer Venus multiprobe, which studied the planet’s atmosphere. Once the probe reached orbit, the rocket’s job was to slow the Pioneer enough so it would fall toward Venus, gathering data until it burned up. During the week prior to launch, the company left our newly minted design in the final assembly building so we could say goodbye. I remember it was there in the shipping box. I stepped in, put my arms around the motor, and I cried. It’s a privilege to…

Yes, the saw continues.... STIHL MS 880 MAGNUM 5´11? chain bar length 59 MPH max chain speed 8.6 HP engine power 89 OCTANE gasoline THOR HAS HIS CRUSHING HAMMER. Vulcan has his crippling anvil. And modernday mortal tree-fellers have the Stihl MS 880 Magnum. The most powerful chain saw available, the professional-grade tool can slice clean through an 8-foot-thick oak trunk in just two minutes. The saw’s 8.6- horsepower gas engine is more than four times burlier than what weekend limb-trimmers cut with, which gives the MS 880 enough oomph to run a massive 5-plus-foot chain bar. Despite its brawn, Stihl engineers made sure the slicer isn’t too heavy for arborists to hold steady: The designers shaved weight off the engine housing by replacing magnesium with a light-but-sturdy plastic, which…

Oil won’t last forever, and Dubai’s government knows it. To stay prosperous, the city-state bets big on science and technology. I. After Oil At a cluster of buildings about a halfhour south of the city, a guard slides open a high steel gate for our white SUV, with Alhaz Rashid Khokhar at the wheel. A project manager for the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, Khokhar has, for the past several months, been working toward the opening here of a 200-megawatt expansion of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park. The dark panels stretch across the desert for more than 2 miles, a distance so far beyond the vanishing point that standing at one corner is like looking through a double mirror. The largest operating solar plant in the United…

ERIK VARSZEGI , LEGO MASTER BUILDER When we spoke to Erik Varszegi in January, he’d just finished building a Batmobile. A 17-foot-long, 7-foot-tall Batmobile. “It was so big, we almost couldn’t get it out the door,” says the Lego master builder. That’s child’s play compared with the life-size Star Wars X-wing fighter he and colleagues crafted in 2013. With 5.3 million plastic bricks, weighing nearly 46,000 pounds and spreading into a 43-foot wingspan, it’s the world’s second largest Lego sculpture. Varszegi, who jokes that his job is to “play with toys all day,” is one of just seven artists that Lego pays to design its head-snapping creations for splashy public events and flagship retail displays. Here’s how to construct your own career in Lego mastery: Step 1: Hit the Bricks…

As a youngster, I liked airplanes, and I knew I wanted to be a test pilot. Today, I fly Boeing’s 747s, including the 747-8, the world’s longest passenger jet. We push planes to their limits, sometimes doing hazardous maneuvers so engineers can enhance the safety of the airliner. For instance, we’ll purposely stall an engine and let the craft pitch nose-down to make sure it behaves well without pilot intervention. Jets today generally recover quickly. One of the most fun things we’ve done is a million-pound takeoff. One million is a big round number! We were testing how the 747-8 flies at its maximum certified takeoff weight of 990,000 pounds. Normally, as you burn fuel, that weight drops before you can get in the air. The extra 10,000 pounds of…

A Device that Moves Poorly Parked Cars @ANNIENM8 VIA TWITTER We’re so bad at parallel parking that we squander coveted, public asphalt. A massive forklift could create space by shifting offenders, but would block traffic. And it’s doubtful that car owners would let you move their property. You could, however, curb congestion. “We all want to park on the street. It’s so cheap,” says Michael Manville, an urban planner at the University of California at Los Angeles. His solution? Surge pricing. Charge more at busy times, and those spaces will open. A Smog-Busting Blimp CLIFF RUSSELL VIA FACEBOOK Totally doable. Engineers could easily rig blimps with massive catalytic converters—like those found in cars—and send them skyward to transform smog into clean air. However, says Peter Eisenberger, an environmental scientist at…