Indholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2022 i Popular Mechanics

My Pop Life

LESLIE EKKER, 67 Retired Special Effects Professional/Santa Barbara, CA It serves no one to conceal yourself from the world. Post-Retirement Passion I recently became a docent at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and I’ve been learning SO much from the training. I love knowing about our local natural environment, and I see the city through new eyes. COURTESY (EKKER, HOUSE) Go-To Gear My DeWalt DCS391 20-volt circular saw is great; I love not having to run a cord out to the workshop, and the power and maneuverability are incredible. I couldn’t live without my Brown & Sharpe dial calipers. I use them nearly every day. Fast, accurate, and easy to read—they are indispensable in my “happy place”…I mean my workshop. I love cellphone navigation, too. Life-changing. No more…

2 min

Build It

Make Your Own Smokeless Fire Pit RECENT SMOKELESS FIRE PIT TESTING—TRYING OUT SIX new models for this summer—got me thinking it might not be too hard to make one myself. Without taking anything away from companies selling these fire pits, building one is fairly simple once you have an understanding of how they work. The short story is this: I started with a 55-gallon drum, cut roughly in half horizontally, as the main body. Then I slit one of those halves vertically down the side and squeezed it to a smaller diameter to fit inside the other half; this created the double-wall construction that makes these fire pits work. After adding a bottom, I created a cap that bridged the tops of the inner and outer walls. Finally, I cut holes…

8 min

Can’t Stop Thinking About

DECADES AGO, I HAD A WEEKEND JOB DOING condo maintenance and repair. I did all kinds of work, including interior and exterior painting and carpentry. Often, I followed right behind a squad of electricians and plumbers who left holes everywhere they went. I developed this drywall repair method to quickly and accurately fix small to medium drywall holes. I call it the “brick method” because it reminds me of applying mortar to a brick. If an electrician or plumber cut an access hole, I would ask them to leave the drywall cutout because I would use it again. When I didn’t have the original cutout, I would square up and neaten the hole they left behind and cut a patch to fit the opening. STEP 1 | First, cut the repair…

2 min

The Anti-Universe Running Backward in Time

New research lays out a theory of whether there could be an “anti-universe” somewhere out there that looks like the mirror image of our own universe, reciprocating almost everything we do in a backward state. If this theory holds true, it could explain the presence of dark matter—that nonluminous material in the universe that we cannot see. In order for these two before-and-after universes to be truly symmetrical, we would need to add a particle to our existing understanding of the universe around us. Today, we know about neutrinos, extra-tiny mysterious particles involved in gravity and weak interaction only. If our universe is mirrored by a similar universe running backward in time from the Big Bang, then what we call dark matter could actually be a version of a neutrino…

1 min

The 4 Cars We’re Loving for Future Drives

SOME OF THE MOST INTRIGUING UP-AND-COMING cars, trucks, and electric vehicles are primed to hit the road in 2023, and we’ve been able to check out a handful this year. Here are the vehicles that caught our eye and have us excited for a test drive. VOLKSWAGEN ID. BUZZ Aside from some Easter eggs, the ID. Buzz also features quite a few nods to the original VW Microbus. At the front fascia, you’ll notice the same oversize Volkswagen insignia. Moving toward the back, it keeps the same vents that would’ve provided ventilation for the original air-cooled engine—only these are now more of a design exercise, not functional. We won’t get this exact vehicle in the United States. Rather, we’ll be getting a long-wheelbase variant in 2024. 2023 KIA TELLURIDE The…

2 min

How to BUILD TOMORROW

Six years ago, the Apple CEO met Popular Mechanics veteran Ryan D’Agostino and connected over their appreciation for tinkering and for the magazine itself. Now, the two sit back down to talk about protecting your right to privacy, the life-changing power of wearable health tech, and how to be responsible and relentless at innovation. POPULAR MECHANICS: When we first met, you mentioned you had been a fan of Popular Mechanics growing up. What drew you to it? TIM COOK: It answered the question “How?” a lot. And it explored things that I was terribly interested in, from cars to space travel. It got me interested in the 50-in-1 Tandy Science Fair Radio Shack kit. And I think it’s so awesome that it has survived over 100 years, that the magazine…

8 min

THESE REVOLUTIONARY RECYCLING TECHNOLOGIES Can Help Divert CLIMATE CATASTROPHE

IN JUNE 2021, A HEAT DOME PULVERIZED MY hometown of Portland, Oregon, delivering an almost psychedelically high temperature of 116°F, killing 69 people, and smashing any illusions that the Pacific Northwest offered a relative haven from the scourge of a warming planet. We now know that if Oregon hopes to avoid another heat dome, or if California hopes to dampen wildfires, or if Florida hopes to stanch the rise of coastal sea waters, we need to harness the elements of greener energy. Fortunately, some of the brightest scientific minds are striving to reap these elements from the grist of crisis. Those earth-saving elements are literally that, elements. Lithium tops the list, along with cobalt, nickel, and manganese. Those four metals form the cathodes—the source of lithium ions—in lithiumion batteries. Not far…

17 min

GENERATOR DO’S AND DON’TS

Do an inventory of what you intend to plug into a power station to choose the right size. Many manufacturers have a chart with estimated power requirements for common appliances and devices to help add up what’s required. Do keep your gas-powered generator—which must be run outside—at least 20 feet from the house. It should be away from windows and doors, with the exhaust blowing away from the house because fuel-powered generators emit carbon monoxide when in use. Also, look for a model that has a built-in carbon monoxide sensor for increased safety. Do consider a dual-fuel generator that can be run on gasoline or propane. Switching between fuels is easy, and you won’t be tied into the availability of one type of fuel. Do start your generator regularly and…

1 min

Editors’ Choice

Stihl GTA 26 Chainsaw | $160 Stihl’s GTA 26 is a remarkable piece of engineering. A tiny chainsaw designed for pruning and yard carpentry, such as topping fence posts, it’s still capable of cutting far more wood than even its manufacturer lets on. It weighs just 3.1 pounds and measures only 15 inches long and 8 inches wide. Sizing it up, we wondered whether it’s capable of substantial work. We answered that by running it through a downed tree limb that had fallen across a sidewalk up the street from our office. In 15 minutes, we cleared a path through the tangled mess. A 2.6-amp-hour, lithium-ion battery supplies current to the tool’s 10.8-volt motor. That motor’s no-load speed is an extremely fast 19,000 rpm, about as fast as a wood…

1 min

My Pop Life

RACHEL STEFFAN, 42 Art and Technology Education Teacher/Lanse, PA “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”—Albert Einstein MY AHA! MOMENT When I realized I don’t always have to guide my students step-by-step. I can give them advice and then set them free to solve problems at their own speed in their own ways. There was a time when I was basically overplanning my lessons—too much structure can stifle a learning environment. HOW I BECAME A MASTER Ever since I was a little girl living in a rural cabin in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, I’ve been drawing, painting, and coloring. But my professors and intense training at Penn State University made me into an expert while I was working toward a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing. Since graduating…

2 min

Members Only

POPMECH PRO It’s easy to lose track of all the perks that come with your PopMech Pro membership, like exclusive features, detailed plans for DIY projects, and a weekly members-only newsletter. Here are some of the best recent Pro stories you might have missed. (Not a member? Head to popularmechanics.com/join.) FUSION IS THE FUTURE—AND IT’S COMING FAST An MIT spin-off partly funded by Bill Gates has signed a new agreement to continue its nuclear fusion research for at least the next five years. The goal: to make commercial nuclear fusion a reality. MIT is using a tokamak, which magnetically confines plasma to create nuclear fusion energy, but researchers still need to figure out how it can handle extreme heat. SOLVE IT: THE SHIP CROSSING CONUNDRUM Members tried to crack this…

2 min

Whether All the Top Gun Stunts Are Realistic

THIS SUMMER, SOME OF OUR FAVORITE fighter planes and their brash pilots returned with Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel to the 1986 film. The blockbuster brought in more than $160 million in its opening weekend, as Tom Cruise and others pushed the boundaries of flight. We wanted to know how realistic the amazing aerial acrobatics are in the two films. Are maneuvers like rolling backflips, shooting straight up into the sky, and flipping upside-down over another airplane actually doable in real life? THE ORIGINAL → “You may be surprised to learn that the first [film] is actually pretty realistic when it comes to physics and maneuvering,” says aerobatic pilot Bernardo Malfitano. “They did shoot the vast majority of the movie with real airplanes doing real flying, not models or CGI.” Pilots…

3 min

What the Large Hadron Collider Will Discover Next

EARLIER THIS YEAR, THE LARGE HADRON Collider (LHC) was prepped to achieve its next milestone: operating with a record-setting high-energy beam. Combined with a higher rate of proton collisions, the new setup allows scientists to further investigate the Higgs boson, following its discovery in 2012. “When it’s a nice starry evening, and you look up to the sky, everything you see there is only 5 percent of what’s out there. The other 95 percent is still not understood,” says Rende Steerenberg, CERN’s head of the operations group within the Beams Department. “It would be very good if we could find hints of what this dark matter is, and perhaps find a dark matter particle.” During an experiment in the accelerator, twin beams of protons travel at close to the speed of…

3 min

How People Function on Only 4 Hours of Sleep

If you’re highly functional with very little shuteye, there’s a term for that. “Short sleepers” are people who do well with about half of the sleep that the rest of us require (seven to nine hours) to get us through our days. Researchers have discovered particular mutations in three genes that control short sleepers’ resting needs, and their superefficient sleep helps maintain better health and greater resilience to stress. “These short sleepers not only need less sleep, but while they’re awake—for 18 to 20 hours—they are more active than typical sleepers. With all that extra time, they tend to be multitaskers,” says researcher Ying-Hui Fu of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco.…

1 min

THE WORLD’S OCEANS ARE DYING RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES

IT’S AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN, SOMEWHERE OFF THE COAST OF BAJA, MEXICO. One of the eight residents of the SeaLegacy 1, a 62-foot sailboat, is beginning to stir from their bunk. It’s hard to sleep in late—for one thing, the quarters are cramped. Once someone is up, everyone is up. But also, occupants of this vessel are in a race against time, and the sense of urgency in their work pulses louder than any alarm clock. Today, they’re hoping to film fevers of mobula rays, or possibly pods of giant blue whales, or maybe orcas. The SeaLegacy 1 is the office, home, and workshop of Paul Nicklen, 54, and Cristina Mittermeier, 58, life partners and two of the cofounders of SeaLegacy, a small organization of photographers and videographers documenting ocean…

11 min

THE GROUND-BREAKING SOFTWARE That Helps BLIND JAZZ PRODIGY MATTHEW WHITAKER PRODUCE MUSIC

HOLED UP IN HIS EGGSHELL WHITE, LOW ceiling basement in Hackensack, New Jersey, Matthew Whitaker is making magic. He’s surrounded on all sides by an arsenal of machines for creating music: a MIDI controller keyboard, four keyboards stacked in racks of two, and an organ, while a bass cabinet, guitar amp, drum kit, and percussion section fill out the rest of the cramped basement. All of these run through five interfaces which route 40 signals—eight apiece—into the 21-year-old jazz musician’s computer. It sits at the helm of this tightly organized chaos. While chatting on a video call, Whitaker flits around a sea of dials, sliders, LED displays, and keys, like a pilot in the cockpit of a jumbo jet. A turn of a knob here, a click there, then his fingers…

7 min

Powerful, Accurate Leaf Blowers Save You Time and Money

WITH AUTUMN ON OUR DOORSTEP, THE leaves will soon be falling, and you’ll be looking for the easiest way to get them off your lawn and out of your flower beds. In most cases, the best tool to help you do that is a leaf blower. But selecting the right machine is tougher than ever, given that there are so many options from which to choose. Gas, cordless, backpack, handheld? To accurately compare all of them, we had to come up with unique protocols and even make instrumentation to measure their performance. HOW WE TESTED Aside from actually blowing leaves, we also ran a battery of performance tests to help us better understand and evaluate these machines. To that end, we marked out a 6 x 14-foot trapezoid of pavement, covered…

3 min

The Best of All Worlds: Tri-Fuel Generators

THIS OCTOBER MARKS A FULL DECADE SINCE Hurricane Sandy devastated much of the Northeast coast. Areas of Manhattan, Long Island, and New Jersey were submerged in debris as the superstorm wreaked havoc on infrastructure and power lines. Electricity went down for thousands of homes as the autumn temperature dipped, causing inhabitants to scramble for gas to power their generators. Gasoline is the primary fuel used by most single-fuel generators, becoming a hot commodity in times of power outages. In the case of Sandy, it was rationed to just five gallons per car, with some stations banning the filling of gas cans. Long lines mounted overnight as people slept in their cars or on the street just to fill up. Meanwhile, older mom-and-pop stations had gas but were unable to serve it…

6 min

Staff Meeting

THESE TOPICS ARE HOT. OUR TAKES ARE HOTTER. → Every PopMech editor is a proud enthusiast of a specific hobby, trade, or field of study. (It’s practically a prerequisite for working here.) Naturally, when you build a staff of buffs who live and breathe this stuff—and then ask them to expand upon the corners of their worlds that have them most worked up—you’re bound to get some impassioned pronouncements. Here, then, are the hottest takes and possibly controversial opinions from the PopMech crew. Let’s Tour Earth, Not the Universe Having skydived—and watched plenty of hours of Planet Earth—I understand the appeal of space tourism. It would be undeniably cool to see our little blue speck from a new perspective. But with climate change already wreaking havoc and future projections looking…

5 min

Can’t Stop Thinking About

THE FIRST-EVER IMAGE of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way isn’t so much an image of pure darkness as it is a view of the glowing gas that surrounds it. A new report, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in May, offers the first direct visual evidence of “Sagittarius A*.” Over 300 researchers observed the black hole across several nights for multiple hours to create the image, akin to using a long exposure for a photo of a starry night sky. Because a black hole is completely dark, you can’t see the hole, but you do see the glowing gas orbiting around it as a bright, ring-like form. The new image of Sagittarius A*, 27,000 light-years away from Earth, captures light bent by the black hole’s powerful…

1 min

If Soccer Is Getting More Predictable

A PAPER PUBLISHED AT THE END OF 2021 in Royal Society Open Science suggests your favorite professional soccer matches are not the nail-biters that they used to be. Researchers created a database of over 87,000 games spanning the course of 26 years in European soccer leagues between 1993 and 2019. For simplicity, they chose to eliminate tied games. Factoring in things like strength of schedule, for each new match they used a logistic regression algorithm—a classification algorithm that helps assign data into discrete buckets, like labeling emails as either spam or not spam—to predict the probability of their match’s outcome. Researchers found a clear difference between the predictability of games played 10 years ago and matches played today. In a German league, for example, the model has an accuracy of 60…

1 min

How Protons Dance in the Collider

“Imagine that you have two of these bunches [of protons] coming together in the experiments. Then these bunches will cross each other in the experiment and they will collide,” Steerenberg explains. “You will have 100 billion protons in one bunch and 100 billion in the other bunch. … Only 50 of the protons out of the 100 billion will actually collide. And the other 100 billion minus the 50 will continue [around the circuit], and at some point they will come back … and only 50 will collide again.” But the 50 protons have collided and broken apart into smaller, subatomic particles, leaving behind a hole. After many laps around the collider, the bunch eventually depletes enough that the total number and density of protons drop. The rate of collisions…

1 min

THE FUTURE IS RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION

ALMOST 25 YEARS AGO, I CAME TO APPLE FOR ONE simple reason: It was a place where people believed, as I did, that technology could change the world for the better. And I wanted to be a part of this incredible team that was reimagining the future. Our mission at Apple is to create products that enrich people’s lives. We believe that technology infused with humanity can empower people, spark their creativity, and unleash economic opportunity across the globe. That means designing products that are accessible to everyone and good for the environment. It means protecting the fundamental right to privacy. It means providing tools that make it easier for people to learn valuable skills. The theme of this section is responsible innovation—which has never been more important than it…

2 min

CAN A SMART WATCH PROLONG YOUR LIFE?

MICHAEL HAD BIG PLANS. He was working on the old barn behind his old house, which he and his wife had bought less than a year earlier. The barn looked tired. Some of the posts showed bug-nibbled rot. Some of the windowpanes were gone. But Michael saw it for what it was: a beautiful red barn, solid where it counted, capable of wrapping its walls around all sort of memories we would have forever. He was nearly finished converting a portion of it into an exercise room (including a sauna). There were plans for a wine cellar in which you could host a dinner for 12, and a party space with a floor girded for dancing and twinkly lights in the ceiling. I told Mike that my neighbor Andy had…

16 min

Everything You Need to Have POWER ANYWHERE

ALMOST EVERYTHING WE OWN TODAY—SMARTPHONES, laptops, TVs, air purifiers, refrigerators, gaming consoles, and even electric vehicles—requires power. Losing power can be a minor annoyance or a dire situation that threatens your safety or even your life. Extreme weather events, which have become more frequent, can disrupt power systems and cause outages that last for hours or drag on for days. Not only can a loss of power keep you in the dark, but it can affect a whole litany of things like stopping your refrigerator, disabling your basement’s sump pump, interrupting use of a medical device, or even stranding you if you drive an electric car. But the solution is simple: A generator or portable power station can ensure you always have power where you are. Whether that means at home,…

6 min

THE BEST OF THE TEST

ECHO PB-9010T Price: $630/Air speed: 174 mph/Air volume: 1,110 cfm (claimed)/Weight: 26.5 lb/Engine: 79.9 cc, 2-cycle/Decibels: 101.2 dB (at 0 ft), 79.9 dB (at 75 ft) Echo’s PB-9010T backpack blower lives up to the promise of a professional-level machine. With its combined air speed and volume, we cleared leaves in our 6 x 12-foot test area in a remarkable 4.9 seconds. You’ll want to wear hearing protection while using the PB-9010T, though, as all that gas-powered goodness isn’t quiet, measuring 101.2 decibels at full throttle. We found the backpack straps and padding very comfortable, and the blower tube was easily adjustable for people of different heights. This is a great value, too, helping you do more work in less time and for less money. STIHL BGA 200 Price: $410 (blower),…

1 min

Made Right

PRODUCT Samsung C49RG9 49-in. Curved Super Ultra-Wide Monitor MADE: 2019 | ACQUIRED: 2022 | FUNCTION: Providing much more screen real estate to my computer setup. I’D ALWAYS WANTED a massive gaming display, yet one felt firmly out of my grasp due to the four-figure cost. But when I saw this Samsung, released a few years back, discounted online for half the typical price ($700 compared to its normal $1,500), I knew I had to take the opportunity. Now while I’m working at home, I have six windows open simultaneously: Photoshop, InCopy, two for Google Chrome, and two minimized vertical windows for Slack or emails. And after I clock out for the day, I play my favorite video games with a huge, richer field of view that shows more environmental details.…

1 min