Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2021 i Popular Mechanics

@adrienneperri ADRIENNE DONICA Expert Reviews Editor My ideal day starts on a trail and ends with a drink in hand. Gearing Up I love testing backpacking packs. I hope my take on which features are best for different types of hikers helped some people find one they love. ON MY READING LIST I’m fascinated by the phenomena and people who have shaped our natural world. I highly recommend On Trails: An Exploration, by Robert Moor, for any hiker and The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston, for any tree-huggers. For Your Next Cocktail… Stop making your simple syrup on the stove (or buying it at the store). Instead, shake equal parts sugar and water in any jar or water bottle for about a minute. Now you’re ready to build a cocktail.…

LIGHTER WHEELS ARE FASTER WHEELS. And after decades of incremental advancements in wheel casting and forging technology, additive manufacturing (3D printing) is primed to transform how little performance wheels can weigh and what the wheels look like. An early example of what we can expect was produced in 2019 by wheel-building boutique HRE in collaboration with GE Additive, GE’s 3D printing subsidiary. Their HRE3D+ wheels mated printed titanium components with a carbon-fiber barrel. The 20" x 9" front and 21" x 12.5" rear wheels weighed just 16 and 19 pounds, respectively. For high-end wheels of the same size, this saves roughly a pound in the front and two pounds in the rear. Traditional wheels are manufactured using cast or forged aluminum alloys. These existing processes are cost-effective but suffer from…

THE WORLD’S LARGEST AND MOST POWerful magnet, the “Central Solenoid,” is finally here—or at least, the first piece of it is. Fully assembled, it will be 59 feet tall, 14 feet wide, and weigh about 1,000 tons, meaning the decade-in-the-making magnet will be truly massive. Appropriately, it will find a home in southern France at the world’s largest fusion reactor, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), by 2023. Constructing a magnet of this magnitude is one huge job. Engineers and technicians at General Atomics in San Diego have spent over half a decade designing, fabricating, and testing the various components of the Central Solenoid in its production facility—and that’s only half of the battle. Transporting each piece of the magnet is a Herculean endeavor in and of itself, requiring custom-built…

FOR SOME OF US GROWING UP, OUR VISION OF THE FUTURE was filled with flying cars and robots that did our work for us. While the hovering sedans of the Jetsons have yet to materialize, robot vacuums, on the other hand, have arrived. And, while they don’t look like George’s Rosie, these wafer-shaped, dirt-sucking automatons have come of age. Costing from a bit under $200 to over a thousand, they boast a wide range of features and technology. And given that there’s a lot going on under the hood, so to speak, we had to develop several in-depth tests to get a fair gauge of their performance. THE ROBOT CORRAL First, we set up three 8 x 8–foot pens, each with a different floor surface, where we could repeat cleaning scenarios…

BEST NEXT-GEN TITLE Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart $70 Taking Sony’s beloved buddy action franchise into glorious 4K, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s expansive worlds show off what we can expect from the next generation of games. From vibrant cyberpunk cityscapes to lively lush jungles, the massive explorable planets of Rift Apart couldn’t be rendered on last generation hardware. You can see this when dimensional rifts transport you to a completely different environment during a boss fight in real time without any loading. Haptic feedback lets you feel each unique weapon as you fire, and realistic trigger resistance makes this game more immersive than most. BEST VR GAME Population:One $30 Population:One breathes new life into the oversaturated battle royale genre by taking it to virtual reality. With 1:1 motion controls,…

SCIENTISTS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY have created the world’s smallest microchip, which can be implanted into the body and may eventually be able to detect medical conditions such as strokes. The chips, called motes, are the size of dust mites, measuring less than 0.1 cubic millimeter, and can only be seen under a microscope. Motes operate as a single-chip system, complete with their own electronic circuit. They’re implanted via hypodermic needle, and the data they collect is read using an ultrasound machine. And though the chips have only been tested in lab rats, the Columbia team hopes that one day they can assist in monitoring everything from glucose levels to oxygen saturation. “These devices can be designed to sense things and communicate this information back to the ultrasound image, which also provides…

FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE’VE OBSERVED A 50-YEAR-OLD theorem from Stephen Hawking in the natural world. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and Stony Brook University analyzed the gravitational wave data of two inspiraling black holes. What they found in the collision proved Hawking’s Area Theorem: The area of a black hole’s event horizon cannot shrink. When a binary black hole system inspirals, the orbits of the two black holes shrink, and the system begins emitting gravitational waves. The emission rate increases as the orbits shrink further and gain speed, and when a merger finally occurs, wave emission peaks. The two black holes become a single, new black hole, and according to Hawking’s theorem, that new black hole should be equal in area…

Landing a plane on a runway is simple. A backward-pushing force, such as friction between the tires and the ground, or the engines’ reverse thrust, slows the plane, while lift from the wings and the natural reaction force from the ground counter the downward forces of gravity. A water landing is similar, but pilots must also account for frictional forces from the water that can rotate—and wreck—the plane. If the plane’s nose contacts the water first, the force will rotate the nose downward and flip the plane. If one of the wings hits the water first, the plane can rotate in a spin. So a pilot needs to have utmost control over a plane’s pitch, yaw, and roll—in addition to speed—to keep the plane level. Here’s how to pull it…

Most people can appreciate a good toy or game. Whether you’re like one of our editors who went on a spree of building the Lego sets of iconic Star Wars ships or a parent who wants to test the STEM waters with your kid, toys and games can provide an endorphine-boosting hit of nostalgia and an opportunity to get together and do something fun and educational—or just crush your friends in a good-spirited game of Trivial Pursuit. We’ve spent hours testing the best board and video games, consoles, controllers, and learning toys to find the most worthy distractions and pastimes for you.…

AS NEW TECH SHRINKS EACH YEAR, essential ports like USB-A, HDMI, and ethernet are being replaced by the slimmer USB-C. A hub (often referred to as a dongle) is a small, port-laden gadget that plugs into a single USB-C slot on devices such as laptops, transmitting advanced data and power signals to stand in for those disappearing inputs and restore functionality. Befitting a tool that connects many others, these hubs are versatile, sometimes in ways that aren’t always apparent. Through them, many electronics you already own can connect to peripherals and displays. With some experimenting, you can turn a streaming stick, gaming console, or phone into fully functioning computers. SWITCH BETWEEN A LAPTOP AND A DESKTOP You probably know how to use a USB-C hub to add external devices like a…

If you’re like me, you live in an imperfect house; mine needs constant repair and maintenance. And a perfect implement for an imperfect house is the Fein Multimaster, an oscillating multitool that cuts, grinds, and sands in a reciprocating arc. It takes a number of attachments, such as saw blades and grinding and sanding pads. I’ve used the FMM 250 Q to cut drywall, plaster and lath, nails and screws, lumber, plywood, and pipe, plus grind out grout, sand into corners, and strip paint. It’s as indispensable as a cordless drill or a work light. My model is sadly no longer available, but the MM 300 is its closest current Fein. Because it’s so good at cutting and grinding in tight places, it minimizes collateral damage. Need to cut…

TIDAL FLOODS CAN SHUT DOWN HIGH-ways, turn parking lots into lakes, and spread runoff from overwhelmed sewage systems. And while they’ve been more common to low-lying East Coast cities like Miami or Charleston, South Carolina, coastal towns that have historically stayed dry could soon find themselves underwater, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change. Until five years ago, tidal floods in Hawaii, for example, were a rarity, says Phil Thompson, Ph.D., the study’s lead author and a physical oceanographer at the University of Hawaii. If sea levels rise in line with NOAA’s Intermediate Sea Level Rise scenario (roughly three feet globally by the end of the century), Thompson and his fellow researchers predict a dramatic increase in tidal flooding events in some cities in the coming decades. The…

ENCRYPTION—THE PROCESS OF SENDING a scrambled message that only the intended recipient’s device can decode—allows private and public sectors alike to safeguard information. Traditional encryption uses schemes based on complex mathematics such as factoring (breaking an integer down to its prime factors) or discrete logarithm. Classical computers would require billions of years to crack these codes. Quantum computers, however, won’t be stumped by such hard problems; their exponential leaps in processing power will render classical cyphers obsolete, potentially exposing troves of sensitive data across commercial entities, healthcare providers, government institutions, and billions of individual users. Experts are working to devise cryptographic schemes that can run on today’s computers, but that can also be used in ciphers to protect data against quantum attackers. Quantum computers can perform certain functions that ordinary computers…