Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2023 i Popular Science

Workout 360 takes you through all the steps to make fitness feel good. TO MAINTAIN a healthy level of physical fitness, everyone should commit to at least 30 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise or strength training a day. That’s easier said than done. With running errands, working a desk job, and fulfilling family obligations, the modern lifestyle does not leave much time for regular exercise. If you do prioritize working out, you might still be neglecting key muscle groups that support posture, movement, and overall health. Keep reading for a list of the most ignored ones, exercises to strengthen them, and the reasons you might need more variety in your routine. Healthy fitness goals Before you start switching up your workouts, Christopher Geiser, an exercise science professor, physical therapist, and trainer…

NESTLED IN the beach town of Ocean City, New Jersey, a nondescript summer home stands among rows of vacation rentals. Inside in the darkness, a hawk snoozes, a hungry falcon flaps its wings, and an owl stares intensely with orange eyes. This birdy hangout is not a summer home: It’s a falconry mews, where up to 18 birds of prey, or raptors, eat, rest, cool off, and get groomed. Just before 10 a.m., as the town’s 2.5-mile boardwalk comes to life with shorebirds and humans riding bikes, veteran falconer Bill Brown is outside the mews preparing to feed a quail to a large Harris’s hawk named Karen. He’s been tending to her for only a few days, so the two are getting better acquainted. Brown smiles and talks to Karen…

WHEN VALER CLARK and Josiah Austin moved to El Coronado cattle ranch in southern Arizona in the 1980s, the seasonal rain didn’t soak into the soil but roared through arroyos and washes, cutting them deeper into the earth. The erosion was threatening a road, so they placed a few rocks across the adjacent wash. The tiny structure worked as intended, slowing water, catching soil, and fostering the return of long-gone plants. Clark and Austin had instinctually re-created an Indigenous technique for managing water in drylands. Ultimately, the duo added around 20,000 small rock barriers across tributaries of the often-dry Turkey Creek, which ran through their 1,800-acre property in the Chiricahua Mountains. Within a few monsoon seasons, water seeped from the structures year-round, and the creek corridor turned green with plants.…

FROM ANCIENT treadwheel cranes to modern guitar effects pedals, the creative energy of our feet has come a long way. Roman aqueducts, medieval castles, and Gothic cathedrals were raised, mega-stone by mega-stone, by machines powered by human-size hamster wheels. Treadles, or foot levers, made their debut in the Middle Ages to power looms and spinning wheels. The stair climber got its start in 1818 as a prison treadmill—not to intentionally torment England’s inmates (as sometimes alleged), but to put their feet to work, turning gears to pump water and grind corn. In the late 19th century, pedal power took a fresh turn as artisans used the wheels of stationary bikes to spin up their wood lathes, bandsaws, drill presses, and knife grinders. By the early 20th century, even percussionists were…

Workout 360 takes you through all the steps to make fitness feel good. DO YOU HAVE a big tub of pre-workout powder sitting close by? Look at the label. How many ingredients do you recognize? Protein used to be the “it factor” in fitness supplements. But these products, sometimes called “pre-workouts,” have tweaked their recipes in the past decade. “One new trend is the increasing caffeine content,” says Andrew Jagim, director of sports medicine research at Mayo Clinic Health System in Wisconsin. In 2019, he and two other experts analyzed the chemical contents of 100 widely available pre-workout powders, vitamin supplements, and drinks to understand how consuming them might affect the average exercising adult. While the breakdown hasn’t changed much in the past four years, Jagim thinks some labels are more…

Workout 360 takes you through all the steps to make fitness feel good. BEING SORE SUCKS. Anyone who’s exercised to any extent can probably complain about the stiffness, pains, or—worse—injuries the next day. But as annoying as the achiness gets, it’s a critical part of the recovery process. Under your skin, the all-important muscle fibers that push and pull bones to move you around tear slightly during a workout—a phenomenon called microtrauma. Combined with inflammation, these tiny ruptures may cause soreness, which your body alleviates by replacing the cells around the wound. There are actually two kinds of muscular soreness that you feel after a workout, and they come from different sources. The microtrauma-based discomfort is known as DOMS, short for delayed-onset muscle soreness. You might feel it most between 24…

BUMS. HEINIES. FANNIES. DERRIERES. Few muscles in the human body carry as much cultural clout as the gluteus maximus. “Butts are a bellwether,” writes journalist Heather Radke in her 2022 book Butts: A Backstory. Radke goes on to explain that our feelings about our hindquarters often have more to do with race, gender, and sex than with the actual meat of them. Unlike with a knee or an elbow, Radke argues, when it comes to the tuchus, we’re far more likely to think about form than function—even though it features the largest muscle in the human body. For all the scrutiny we spare them (outside of when we’re trying on new jeans) our butts aren’t mere aesthetic flourishes. A booty is, in fact, a unique feat of evolution: Out of…

I THINK THE BARBELL SAVED ME. Before that, I was toiling under the bar as a sports-bra-clad 20-something, lifting heavy things off the floor in pursuit of vain aesthetic goals. Then one day, that version of my life evaporated over a small bowl of rolled oats. That pivotal morning, I felt something novel: earth-shattering pain like I’d never felt before. It crept up and down my back, hammering my vertebrae as if they were piano keys. Over the next few weeks, this percussive melody swelled to a full-body symphony. Agony spread to my limbs and tightened, viselike, around my ribs until I suspected I was having a heart attack. My sleep shattered into tiny, torturous fragments. I was suddenly sensitive to bright lights and loud noises, wading through waves of…

Workout 360 takes you through all the steps to make fitness feel good. MOST PEOPLE have a certain mindset when it comes to working out: They tend to stick to a familiar plan and will push their bodies to the brink to achieve their fitness goals. But a healthy exercise routine has several building blocks—and a surprising number of them depend on what you do outside your regular sweat sessions. Warm-up Activities that prepare you for your main fitness practice can serve two primary purposes: reducing injury and improving performance. Warm-ups hit those marks by increasing blood flow, ramping up muscle and core temperatures, and disrupting the temporary connective tissue bonds that can make you feel tight and sore. This leads to performance-enhancing benefits like faster muscle contraction, better reaction time,…

TIME AND AGAIN, plants have evolved the ability to eat animals. From Madagascar to North Carolina, wildly different kinds of flora have figured out how to thrive in nutrient-poor soils by adding crunchy insect snacks to their diets. Lacking the power of flesh and fangs, carnivorous plants catch and consume prey with a more inventive set of traps, anatomical structures, and chemical potions. And while they can be difficult to track down in the wild, the US Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., hosts a staggering collection of them, giving scientists and general admirers a chance to study species’ wily ways up close. ↑ KING SUNDEW (DROSERA REGIA) Most sundews have the ability to turn their tiny gelatinous hairs toward their victims to entrap and digest them. But this species, which is…

SCHIAPARELLI WAS OUT OF CONTROL. As the probe entered Mars’ atmosphere on October 19, 2016, an onboard computer miscalculated its altitude, prematurely jettisoning the craft’s parachute. The disc-shaped probe with what looked like a futuristic World’s Fair of instruments on its flat back sent one last swan song of a data package back to its circling companion, the Trace Gas Orbiter, as it tumbled into free fall. Onboard thrusters fired for three seconds rather than 30. Then, some 1,272 pounds of atmospheric and meteorological sensors—and nearly two decades of European deep space ambition—slammed into Mars at 335 mph. The probe added another crater to the pockmarked surface, peppered a stretch of the Red Planet with mechanical debris, and joined a growing list of disappointments in the European Space Agency’s quest…

THE NEXT TIME you travel on an airplane, consider the giant engines that muscled it into the sky. Technically known as turbofans, they inhale massive amounts of air and blow it out the back to generate enormous thrust. In fact, one of the engines that General Electric creates has even set a world record: In 2017, the GE9X model produced 134,300 pounds of thrust. Picture about 10 African elephants; their collective weight is equivalent to the force that one engine made. That record-breaking moment happened at a sprawling, 7,000-acre wooded location in southern Ohio called Peebles, which is the perfect place to fire up engines without bothering any neighbors. There GE carries out a number of different types of tests. Before it delivers an engine to an aircraft maker, the…