Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2023 i Popular Science

WHEN EUROPEANS first arrived in North America, the continent was home to between 60 and 400 million beavers. Streams from the rainy Pacific Northwest to the Utah desert were strung with their dams. The fur trade of the following centuries nearly wiped the animals out, and in their place, colonists built their own dams, replacing the dense tangles of beaver wetlands with quiet, deep reservoirs and plowed fields. Beavers, like humans, shape their ecosystems not just by eating or excreting, but also by building and tearing down. And because of those similarities, the rodents have become North America’s best-known “ecosystem engineers.” But the scientific idea of ecosystem engineering wasn’t born in a beaver lodge—it came from Israel’s Negev Desert. The pea-size rock-eating snail sticks to the underside of limestone boulders…

INSIDE THE Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., there’s a living time capsule. The massive storage facility, run by the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, is filled with wax cylinders, record players, and other pieces of dated audiovisual equipment. Some might see it as a junkyard of outdated technology, but Stephanie Barb likes to call this place the “land of lost toys.” “We used to play records all the time,” says Barb, the deputy director of IT service operations at the Library of Congress. Now, owning a record player is almost a whimsy. When machines become obsolete, the data they hold can be lost as well. Software and hardware fade out of general use as newer products and services replace them. It’s one of the several roadblocks technicians…

YOU’RE WALKING through a forest. The soil is soft beneath your feet, and the sun is shining brightly through the dark green treetops. To your left, you see rotten logs with dense clusters of oyster mushrooms. On your right, a thick bundle of chanterelles sprouts from the leaf-littered floor. Farther off the beaten path are stout-looking porcinis, frequently with a colony of poisonous fly agarics nearby, and, maybe, a bunch of magic blue gyms—those might ruin your nature walk, though. The mushroom kingdom holds many shapes and secrets beyond those of the little white buttons and baby bellas found at the grocery store. Ethical foraging is one of the easiest and most valuable ways to incorporate an array of mushrooms into your life; to get started, you can join a…

GROWING UP IN a small Danish town, Carsten Olsen didn’t have much access to information about space. Until the internet came along. Once connected, Olsen started frequenting discussion forums, where real rocket scientists and even astronauts came to chat. He ordered rocketry books on Amazon and became obsessed with reaching toward that great beyond. He didn’t grow up to become a rocket scientist himself—not professionally. He works at a public school in Copenhagen. But he did join an untamed, dangerous, and optimistic space endeavor: a hobbyist group hoping to build rockets that could, someday, send a volunteer astronaut to the edge of space. They call themselves Copenhagen Suborbitals, or CopSub, and work out of an old shipyard in Denmark’s capital city. Olsen first heard about CopSub, an amateur human spaceflight endeavor,…

KC DAVIS is famous for leaving dishes unwashed, forgetting to sweep, and, perhaps most of all, never folding laundry. But many of her 1.5 million TikTok followers credit her with helping them keep their homes cleaner than ever. Through her experience living with ADHD and her training as a licensed therapist, Davis has learned that a functional space isn’t always a tidy one. Her unique approach to what a well-kept dwelling should look like has helped followers, patients, and Davis herself radically reimagine how and why they clean. Davis first started posting TikTok videos about parenting and housekeeping as a way to socialize during COVID-19 lockdowns. She’d just moved and had a second child on the way, and the added stressors of 2020 brought her lifelong dislike of cleaning tasks…

IN 1989, Albert Wood and Peter Dunn thought they had unlocked a critical chemical door to treating hypertension and recurring chest pain. The two British Pfizer scientists reportedly created a new drug, named sildenafil, that reacts with a specific protein in muscle cells to allow for increased blood flow to the heart. But a few years later, human clinical trials revealed the drug was only effective when given multiple times a day and had a poor reaction with other existing cardiac treatments. What’s more, the blood rush was going to unexpected places in the body in addition to the heart. In one study, a nurse observed that most of the male volunteers were lying on their stomachs in embarrassment. The reason? Erections. Wood and Dunn had inadvertently stumbled upon the…

PLANTS ARE crucial to human survival, even when there’s no sunlight. But dealing with darkness is second nature for someone with a green thumb like Howard Levine, chief scientist for NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) Research Office. Nurturing leaves outside Earth’s atmosphere is not only important for cycling nutrients and water during future space voyages, but also helps alleviate the cooped-up feeling astronauts experience. “On the ISS, you’re up there for six months at a time. People often say it’s like being in the bathroom with six of your best friends,” says Levine, who has been growing plants in orbit for decades. Space might be an extreme example, but cramped, dark dwellings exist on the ground too. Keeping your houseplants alive in windowless rooms, in shadowy corners, or during short…

ANCIENT ROMANS were masters of concrete, fashioning concoctions of sand, water, and rock into long-lasting marvels. Bridges, stadiums, and other structures they built with the stuff still stand tall—even harbors and breakwaters that have been soaked by tides and storms for nearly 2,000 years. This substance, robust to the microscopic level, far outlives the modern material, which generally requires steel supports in salt water and is still likely to corrode within decades. When the Roman Empire ended, so did its method of making marine concrete. But by following chemical clues within ancient architecture, today’s scientists have revived this technique. In recent years, researchers have only gotten better at understanding it, applying lessons from fields as diverse as archaeology, civil engineering, and volcanology. They have pulled tubes of the ancient substance…

LONG BEFORE SIRI, there was Audrey. But even before Audrey, there was the blueprint for the name-challenged Voice-trol. In June 1950, Popular Science contributing writer Karl Greif, an electronics technician from upstate New York, offered do-it-yourself instructions for building a voice-activation switch that ultimately became known as Voice-trol. At the time, voice activation was such a novelty that DIY was just about the only option available to enthusiasts. “There’s power in your voice,” Greif wrote. “It can be used to make many kinds of apparatus heed your wishes.” Today, voice-command alternatives abound, but for most “apparatus,” it takes at least some DIY mojo, such as the ability to install a hub and integrate it with appliances, to realize the power in your voice. Greif’s 1950 instructions came with electrical schematics…

IN 1989, rock-and-roll legend Chuck Berry attended one of the biggest parties of the summer. The bash wasn’t a concert, but a celebration of two space probes about to breach the edge of our solar system: NASA’s Voyager mission. Launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1977, identical twins Voyager 1 and 2 embarked on a five-year expedition to observe the moons and rings of Jupiter and Saturn, carrying with them Golden Records preserving messages from Earth, including Berry’s smash single “Johnny B. Goode.” But 12 years later, out on the grassy “Mall” of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists celebrated as Voyager 2 made a previously unscheduled flyby of Neptune. Planetary scientist Linda Spilker remembers the bittersweet moment: the sight of the eighth planet’s azure-colored atmosphere signaled the end of the…

OFF-THE-GRID LIVING is experiencing a renaissance. Dwellings devised to support a sustainable lifestyle could help us adapt to some of our biggest present-day challenges—from a lack of housing for the world’s growing population to pollution and extreme weather. With the climate crisis in mind, architects are looking to more resilient options that don’t depend on the overdrawn electrical grid at all. Some designers are reinvigorating decades-old “biotecture,” like the 1970s Earthships made from reclaimed and natural materials; others are rejecting synthetics and leaning on Indigenous practices of building with natural materials. Meanwhile, weather-resistant domes and 3D-printed dwellings could house more people with fewer resources. We asked architects and engineers about off-the-grid living solutions that could help us adapt to changing environments. Earthships The definition of the term off the grid…

I AM STANDING in the basement of 1550 Mission Street in San Francisco—a new high-rise in the city’s prime real estate location—listening to the steady hum of human grime being filtered. Above me, residents on 38 floors are showering and brushing their teeth as part of their morning routine. In front of me, a maze of pipes and tubes feeds their discarded water into a membrane bioreactor the size of a backyard hot tub. Inside, the membranes and oxygen bubbles purify the H2O and channel it back into the building instead of into sewage pipes, clean enough for flushing toilets and urinals. “We’re able to reuse about 95 percent of it,” says Aaron Tartakovsky, co-founder and CEO of Epic Cleantec, the company that designed the technology. His father, Igor, the…

IT’S HARD to find pleasure these days. Our fast-paced, tech-centric lives can give us little space for intimacy and satisfaction in bed. But instead of leaving us to our own devices, innovators around the world are taking on the challenge of making sex better for anyone who’s experienced childbirth, reproductive health problems, or the erosion of romance. Founded in 2014, UK-based MysteryVibe is one company filling that niche. Using robotics and other facets of engineering, it set out to create a durable sex toy that could adapt to a variety of bodies, shapes, and desires. What it didn’t know was that its first creation, a flexible six-motor vibrator called Crescendo, would also end up as a certified medical device for conditions like pelvic floor pain. A 2022 MysteryVibe-funded study at…