Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2017 i Popular Science

FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY, scholars worldwide have held up “cellar door” as the most elegant sounding phrase in the English language. It’s OK, but I prefer “storm’s coming”—not just on the merits of its implied drawl and languidly silent G, but because of the image it elicits: air so pregnant with action that you feel the swelling wind seeping into your ears. It’s awe-inspiring. On October 29, 2012, I was in San Francisco on business while my wife rode out a terrifying storm in our Brooklyn apartment. As we checked in over the phone, she asked, “Did you hear that?” She was referring to a crashing boom that, yes, I had heard. Soon after, the call cut out, and for the next six hours, the only contact I had…

THE ALBEDO SCALE a material’s albedo tells us how well it reflects the sun’s energy. 0 Pure black 100% absorbent 1 Pure white 100% reflective IF YOU’VE EVER MADE THE MISTAKE of wearing a black shirt on a sweltering day, you know that dark colors absorb the sun’s heat, while light colors reflect it. Our planet works the same way. White surfaces, like the snow on the world’s glaciers, reflect the sun’s rays back toward space. Darker ones, like forests and oceans, absorb more heat. Overall, about 30 percent of the energy sent to Earth bounces back into outer space, stabilizing the global thermostat. But climate change could upend that balance. Scientists developed a ratio, called albedo, to describe just how much solar energy any given surface reflects. Albedo can…

EVEN CUSHY CUBICLE LIFE can be too rigorous for some gadgets. (We’re looking at you, pile of dead hard drives.) So we assembled a brigade of cavalier devices ready to endure the rigors of the great outdoors. They can survive rain, wind, dust, freezing temperatures, and even the occasional encounter with an especially pointy rock. Don’t be afraid to toss them in your pack and head out into the wild. 1/ Land-scrape Photographer Ansel Adams lugged a huge film camera to photograph our national parks. The Pentax KP DSLR (with weather-resistant zoom lens) would have been a lot more convenient. Rubber gaskets seal the magnesium-alloy body at 67 critical points, keeping out moisture, dust, and sand—all of which could damage the 24-megapixel image sensor inside. $1,600 (includes lens) 2/ Hikey…

TORNADOES SWEEPING THROUGH THE MIDWEST. HURRICANES AND rising sea levels inundating the coasts. Wildfires burning up the Southwest, while blizzards are freezing the North. The environment can, at any time, put your home under siege. But with clever architecture and advanced materials, houses can defend themselves. Of course, this home, with its mashup of different windows and walls, isn’t particularly realistic. It doesn’t have to be; no part of the United States has to face all of these weather disasters at once. But the technology that went into it is real. So if you’re preparing to batten down every possible hatch, consider incorporating some of these designs. 1) Foundation Foundations, which prevent homes from sinking into the ground, typically come in one solid piece. But a vented design lets floodwater…

A big part of my job is simply getting familiar with the extreme terrain I patrol. So a few years ago, two friends and I skied Alaska’s Nelchina Glacier. On our eighth day out, a storm rose up. We hailed our boss on our satellite phone, and he told us the blast would last for days. Rather than risk getting marooned, we decided to ski down. But we couldn’t outpace the weather. The clouds and snow grew so thick, it felt like we were trapped in a white pingpong ball. To avoid falling into a crevasse, we tethered to each other, tied a 30-foot-long green paracord to a ski pole, and threw it ahead into the whiteout, like we were fly-fishing. A compass guided us down the glacier, but the…

When most storm chasers want to see inside a tornado, they set down sensors in its path. But those just sit in one place while the storm passes over. We build rugged drones that collect temperature, pressure, and humidity data to hopefully improve weather forecasting—while we keep our distance. Sometimes that means flying into extreme weather just to see what happens. This past year, we were setting up equipment in a field when a tornado suddenly formed about a mile away. In our world, that’s right on top of you. This massive cloud wall dropped down, like a cliff. We could smell it emitting ozone and feel its electricity. It was exhilarating. Tornadoes typically last less than five minutes once they touch down, so we had to act fast and…

The first two people I ever rescued—during a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, flood in 2016—were a mom and daughter. They had a very high back deck, and the water was right there. We flew past them at first in our chopper, and when I turned to look behind us, I just happened to see a guy waving. So we made a turn and lowered our swimmer. He put them in one at a time, and we picked them up in two separate hoists. The father decided not to leave. A lot of people didn’t want to leave their homes that day. We did two days of nonstop back and forth, refueling, going back, saving people. We were all nervous, but the conversation that goes on between you, the pilot, and the…

THE FINALE OF EVERY SUNSET IS GREEN. TRY to catch it, if you can. The story of the so-called green flash begins by answering this question: Why is the sky blue? Sunlight contains every visible color, each with its own wavelength. Light travels as ripples, with crests and valleys; wavelength is the distance between the crests. The shorter the wavelength, the steeper the ripples. Of the three primary visual colors—blue, red, and green—blue has the shortest wavelength, and red the longest. As sunlight hits Earth, blue light’s steep waves cause particles in the air to scatter it almost totally, turning our skies cerulean. The leftovers combine to create the sun’s yellow glow. At sunset, colors fade at varying rates. Just before the sun vanishes, the red light’s shallower ripple causes…

CHARTED Above-Average Years per Decade These days, Earth pushes the mercury half a degree or more above the 20th-century average far more often than it used to. Here we see the number of years per decade that had above-average temperatures—and how many of those years rose a half, or even a whole, degree above the norm. 2016 WAS OUR PLANET’S HOTTEST YEAR SINCE HUMANS began keeping records, with average global land and water surface temperatures spiking to 58.69 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 1.69 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average. It might not sound like a lot, but the difference between our current global average and one during an ancient ice age—when the U.S. sat under glaciers 3,000 feet deep—is only 5 degrees or so, according to the climate record preserved in…

THE RESEARCHERS HAD ALREADY DONE FOUR FLIGHTS, EARLIER in January, before they saw the first hints of what they were looking for. The crew of meteorologists, atmospheric scientists, and students had converged near Idaho’s Snake River Basin, a horseshoe-shaped depression between ranges of the Rocky Mountains that is 125 miles at its widest point. Most of the state’s famous spuds come from this arable land. Each day that the weather was right—clouds containing the perfect amount of super-cooled moisture at the ideal temperature and altitude— the team flew up into the fluff, dropped silver iodide, and watched to see if they were making more snow than there would’ve been if they’d stayed home and hung on to their silver. It’s called cloud seeding. And people have been planting little chemical…

Popular Science July/August 2017 On AUGUST DAYS IN THE FLORIDA PANHANDLE, THE TROPICAL heat steam-cooks everything. UPS drivers slap wet bandannas to their foreheads. Pirate-themed minigolf parks, shimmering like mirages, lay deserted. But a few miles from the Gulf motels and sandy beach malls, engineers like Kirk Parrish face the worst snowstorms of their lives. Sheathed in parkas, they cold-start their pickups and drive straight into stinging, minus-40-degree whiteout blizzards. Indoors. “It’s absolutely crazy seeing an indoor snowstorm,” says Parrish, a diesel engineer at Ford Motor Company whose job is to make sure your F-150 can start and run in Prudhoe Bay extremes. To prove it can, and tweak things if it can’t, he treks each summer to the McKinley Climatic Laboratory at Elgin Air Force Base. Sprawled over several…

WHOOPING CRANE Grus americana BY THE 1940S, North American hunters and developers had driven these birds to near extinction. Though they rebounded, changing weather threatens them anew. Cranes nest in Arctic wetlands, surrounded by natural moats. Persistent warmth shrivels these defenses, exposing chicks to predators. But intense storms can drown hatchlings. Annual migrations to Texas bring other challenges: Dry watering spots along the way force them to fly farther between rest stops. HARLEQUIN FROG Atelopussp. VIBRANT HARLEQUIN FROGS ONCE CARPETED THE GROUND THROUGHOUT Central America. Now, more than a dozen species of the genus Atelopus are thought extinct. El Niño-related weather changes have driven clouds higher than normal in the Andes, creating a cool, moist environment that’s ideal for frog-killing fungi. In other regions, drought bakes surviving frogs’ skin.…

We’re trained to save people, but sometimes we have to save each other. That happened to three of us one summer when we rafted a remote river through a volcanic-ash field in Katmai. A pilot dropped us off, and we drifted for a day under clear skies. Then the next evening, 40-mileper- hour winds whipped the ash into a haze. The river thickened into mud, so we slogged through it on foot—ash pelting our faces the whole way—until we found a sheltered bay. Our scheduled boat pickup never showed, so we were stranded with a dead radio and a dwindling oatmeal supply. After two days of seeing boat mirages on the whitecapped lake, we finally heard an engine: A fellow ranger had flown in to save us. He landed and…

The Greenland ice sheet is shrinking faster than anticipated. But it’s not like it’s never changed before. I study how the sheet responded to previous climate shifts so I can compare that growth and shrinkage with what we see today. That means giving up my warm Danish springs to travel to Greenland. When my team travels to the far north to take sediment core samples from lakes, it’s so cold that our instant meals sometimes freeze solid in minutes. Climate change is shortening that cold season, which means less sea ice. Because polar bears use sea ice to hunt prey, warm temperatures leave them hungry—and dangerous. About three years ago, as we worked from a sailboat in the fjords, one of those hungry bears swam up and swiped a barrel…

I study clouds because they both trap heat and reflect solar radiation to cool us. So figuring out their net effect helps us create climate models as the planet warms. The water droplets and ice crystals that form clouds only start gathering together when they cling to tiny particles—little cloud seeds made of dust and minerals. We want to know what makes each seed grow. At Mount Washington Observatory, a system of tubes captures and heats the cloud moisture, evaporating everything but the particles. We put similar seeds in a chamber and tweak humidity and temperature until we have a new cloud. Then we can see how it behaves under various conditions. But first, you have to catch a cloud.…

1 Wall Buster A mile-wide tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, in 2011 flattened neighborhoods into piles of wood and rubbish— and embedded a kitchen chair deep into the exterior wall of a store. Hurled by winds over 200 mph, the legs hit the stucco like flying spears. 2 Frog Fall Waterspouts—vortexes that pull water into tornadolike columns—can also suck up objects. In 2005, a spout rudely plucked thousands of frogs from their cozy aquatic homes and dropped them from the sky over the nearby town of Odzaci, Serbia. 3 Blood Rain In 2013, crimson rain drenched the coastal Indian state of Kerala. The cause: red algal spores, likely transported from the ocean to rain clouds by strong winds. The not-uncommon occurrence stained clothing and collected in what looked like puddles…

SUPERCELL THUNDERSTORMS ARE GIANT TEMPESTS with powerful rotating updrafts at their cores—and one out of every four or five spawn tornadoes. Most of these twisters are little, but some can grow fierce. To predict the rare killers—and thus give moretargeted warnings—meteorologists need to better understand how tornadoes form. But simulating a supercell thunderstorm and the tornado it produces involves hundreds of terabytes of data—an amount so vast that Leigh Orf, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had to use a supercomputer to make it happen. Some of that data came from the sheer size of the storm (similar supercells can stretch more than 12 miles high). But Orf needed most of the power in order to capture all the details and see the whole system at…

A COOL BREEZE CAN INSTANTLY take the edge off a sweaty day. Indoors, a fan is a perfect substitute—throw a bowl of ice in front of it, and you’ve got yourself a lo-fiair conditioner. Still, nothing harshes that cool feeling quicker than the propplane racket most air-movers make. The Rowenta Turbo Silence Extreme lets you use your inside voice. On its lowest setting, it registers just 35 decibels (shhhh , that’s library level); on the highest, it’s about 50. That’s roughly one-quarter the din of the average fan. Five 4.5-inch plastic blades (many fans have three) create more surface area, so the motor doesn’t need to crank as hard or spin as fast to push the same amount of airflow. Plus, because the blades are tapered at their edges, they’re…

FOR MOST OF US, AN ELABORATE DOOMSDAY BUNKER IS OVERKILL. But, when facing down a tornado, hurricane, blizzard, or whatever Mother Nature flings at you, a little preparation can save you from a real-life version of the grocery-store frenzy in an end-time zombie flick. Start with basics, like a three-day supply of water (ready.gov recommends one gallon per person per day), batteries, and the infinitely versatile duct tape. Then store these other essentials in a waterproof bucket. There—no fighting over Manwich. 1 For Health A good first-aid kit includes more than just antacids, latex gloves, and Band-Aids. The Backpacker Extended First Aid Kit by REI includes sponges for bleeding, a moldable splint for bone breaks, and a bandage for making a sling. $55 2 For Sanity Step one: Explain to…

Popular Science July/August 2017 On June 27,2011 A WORRIED HOMEOWNER NAMED MARK Winkel stood on his porch and pointed his telescope at a wildfire ripping through the forest several miles from his home outside Los Alamos, New Mexico. The blaze had started 12 hours earlier when a strong gust knocked an aspen into a power line in Las Conchas, a hiking trail along a 13-mile-wide caldera called the Valles Grande. Already it had torched about 7,000 acres, an impressive rate of spread, but predictable given the heavy winds and the onset of fire season, which would last until July’s monsoons finally saturated the tinderbox. Having faced three big wildfires in the span of 20 years, locals in this part of parched and drought-stricken New Mexico knew enough to consider…

ON A LATE WINTER AFTERNOON, IN A WHITE and glass office building 30 miles north of Boston, Jim Lidrbauch, a software engineer at the Weather Company, plugs his laptop into a giant monitor at the head of a conference table and fires up the program they call HOTL—for “human over the loop.” It’s half Google Earth, half time machine. A red slider at the bottom of the screen lets meteorologists fast-forward the weather like a movie. As Lidrbauch demonstrates, the map becomes pocked with polygons, as if a 5-year-old went nuts with a drawing tool. Each shape represents a change made by a human. Since 2015, the Weather Company’s computerized system has run autonomously, generating weather forecasts on demand some 25 billion times a day for people around the world.…

TWISTED For my second career, as a weather anchor, I worked on the Canadian prairie, which is the second-best place to chase severe weather, after Tornado Alley. I was also studying for a certificate in meteorology so I could interpret weather data and make my own forecasts. I didn’t want to be looked at as some ditz who didn’t know what she was talking about. Around that time, a photographer friend invited me to chase with him in the Alley for a month. I said sure; I wanted to learn everything I could. I loved it so much that I went back again and again. During my second round in 2013, I got to see the largest tornado in recorded history—on the very last day of the chase season. We…

At 770 feet tall, the Oroville Dam, where I work, is the tallest dam in the United States and holds the second-largest reservoir in California. I’m from Oroville, and I was there this past February, the day the dam threatened to flood thousands of homes. In just six weeks, storms had delivered six months’ worth of water to the region. The last one hit us much more squarely than we thought it would. The reservoir was rising fast. To drain it, we had to first let it reach the top so it could run into the spillway—the emergency overflow outlet we use only for catastrophes. We sent out about 20 engineers and geologists to monitor potential erosion on the dirt slope. Then on February 12, one of our monitors radioed…