Indholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2024 i Popular Mechanics

TODAY, HUMANS INHABIT—OR HAVE, AT the very least, explored—pretty much every corner of the planet. But that immense proliferation of Homo sapiens across the globe was a slow process. With the first humans leaving Africa between 60,000 and 120,000 years ago, the species slowly spread across the Earth over many millennia. And one of the last places these ancient humans made their way to was the southeastern Pacific island of Rapa Nui, known more broadly as Easter Island. Located 2,360 miles off the coast of Chile, Rapa Nui is one of the most isolated places in the world. Its native people, who are also named the Rapa Nui, first arrived on the island’s shores between A.D. 1150 and 1280, and lived in isolation until the arrival of Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen…

A TEAM OF ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOV ered clues from between A.D. 733 and 881 that they say represent a key turning point in Maya rule—and a very public one at that. The discovery at the Maya site of Ucanal in Guatemala “marked a public dismantling of an old regime”—a rather pivotal moment in the collapse of rulers and a key point in a shift in political power, the team wrote in a study published in the journal Antiquity. The event in question occurred at the capital of the K’anwitznal kingdom near a burial site. The bodies and their ornaments—items include a jeweladorned stone mask, fragments of a greenstone diadem, and jade ornaments—were moved from a tomb to a public burning site, where fire engulfed some of the centuries-old items for all to…

An outlet can lose power for any number of reasons. Here are a few of them—plus solutions. A. The house wiring that serves the outlet has lost its continuity (a continuous electrical path). SOLUTION: Call an electrician. B. A splice inside the electrical box that serves the outlet has come loose. SOLUTION: Redo the splice. C. The wire that provides power to the outlet has come off the receptacle. SOLUTION: Even if no damage is visible, assume the worst and replace the outlet. Also, cut and strip each wire and bend it into a clockwise-facing hook. Then tighten the hook under the terminal screw on the side of the outlet. If you’ve never done this before, check out the full version of this piece on popularmechanics.com. D. The outlet receptacle…

With people moving around so much these days, it’s perfectly natural to wonder how an editor can just come along and stick like a barnacle to the hull of Popular Mechanics, lasting for 35 years. People laugh when I tell them how the two of us became acquainted. It happened this way. I took my résumé, cover letter, some clippings, and photos from my work as a newspaper reporter-photographer and bundled the whole mess together, addressed it to this magazine, and put it in the mailbox. Then I dutifully raised the red flag on the box so the postal carrier would be sure to stop. I went inside and cracked open the New York Times. By then, my journalism professor had passed away, but you might say I could still…

YOUR COMPUTER WOULDN’T BE VERY useful without RAM, which is short for random access memory. These chips function as the temporary storage for an operating system, and their speed is of great importance, as they’re constantly needing to access bits of memory to keep everything running smoothly. For more than two decades, the most advanced version of this technology—magnetoresistive RAM, or MRAM—has been the go-to tech for the kind of intense computing necessary in industrial, military, and space applications. Now, a new breakthrough discovered by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has illustrated how a mechanism in a laser beam can control the magnetic state in solids, which the scientists describe as a “paradigm shift” in our understanding of the behavior between light and magnetic materials. The results of…

IN THE 1999 FILM THE MATRIX, NEO DISCOVERS A truth to end all truths—the universe is a simulation. While this premise provides fantastic sci-fi fodder, the idea isn’t quite as relegated to the fiction section as one might expect. In fact, University of Portsmouth scientist Melvin Vopson, PhD, studies this exact thing—the possibility that the universe might indeed be a digital facsimile. And he claims to have evidence. “In physics, there are laws that govern everything that happens in the universe, for example how objects move, how energy flows, and so on. Everything is based on the laws of physics,” Vopson said back in 2022. “One of the most powerful laws is the second law of thermodynamics, which establishes that entropy—a measure of disorder in an isolated system—can only increase…

DANTE LAURETTA SAT IN THE BACKSEAT OF A HELICOPTER HOVERING HIGH ABOVE A REMOTE PATCH OF UTAH DESERT, WAITING FOR A SMALL, TWINKLING SPECK IN THE SKY TO PLUNGE TOWARD EARTH. If you didn’t know better, you might think what was beginning to burn through the skies above the American southwest in the early hours of September 24, 2023, was a shooting star. But it wasn’t a shooting star. Or a meteor. It was a dishwasher-size capsule filled with bits of ancient asteroid—priceless matter from the dawn of the solar system. In other words, it was a treasure chest moving at 27,000 miles per hour and sizzling at a temperature half that of the sun’s surface. That small streak of light represented the end of a NASA-led interplanetary mission suffused…

PHYSICISTS FROM PRINCETON UNIVER sity have confirmed that electrons don’t even need atoms in order to party together. By using magnetic fields, the researchers were able to induce and detect Wigner crystals—orderly assemblies of electrons. To create and examine a Wigner crystal structure, the scientists used a powerful magnetic field around a readied sample of graphene. Graphene is a preparation of carbon atoms that’s just one atom thick, which gives it properties that make it a highly prized tool in the study of microscopic and quantum phenomena. It can be flat, rolled into tubes, wrapped around things, and—in this case—arranged in a double layer. When the magnetic field was applied, each carbon atom’s four electrons were put into play and formed triangular Wigner crystals. “Wigner predicted that when the Coulomb…

A RETIRED U.S. NAVY ADMIRAL BELIEVES that the government should look to the oceans to help solve a mystery in the skies. Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, former Oceanographer of the U.S. Navy, recently published a paper arguing that unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, more commonly referred to as UFO) and unidentified submersible objects (USO) are linked, and should be studied further. → “Transmedium” UFOs Jeopardize U.S. Security // In the paper, titled “Beneath the Surface: We May Learn More about UAP by Looking in the Ocean,” Gallaudet writes that “transmedium” UAPs and USOs—defined as unidentified objects that appear to travel both in the atmosphere and in the water—“jeopardize U.S. maritime security. Gallaudet argues that the lack of knowledge about the undersea world poses hazards for submarines, such as collisions with other submarines—like the…

IT’S NOT SURPRISING THAT Henrietta Lacks—whose “immortal” HeLa cells were pivotal in developing treatments for diseases such as polio, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19—is referred to as “the mother of modern medicine.” But Lacks’s legacy is complicated due to the ethical concerns surrounding the use of her special cells. Lacks, who died of cancer at age 31 in 1951, was never aware that her cells led to significant medical advancements—or that they had been taken without her consent. And even now, her strange case raises questions about the morally dubious methods through which we achieved unquestionably positive breakthroughs in medicine. → The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks // Though her cells live on in labs across the world, Henrietta Lacks remained largely unrecognized during her lifetime. It wasn’t until author Rebecca Skloot investigated…

AARON WIGHTMAN WAS ALMOST BORN IN A SUGARHOUSE. It was early April, and his parents were boiling maple sap in the Western New York shack where they produced syrup and other maple-flavored goods. “It was pretty rustic,” Wightman says, “with just enough power for some lightbulbs.” In other words, not the ideal place for his mother to go into labor. Fortunately, the labor pains turned out to be a false alarm, and Wightman was born a few days later in the hospital—but it wasn’t long before he was back in the sugarhouse. As a toddler, he crawled near the steamy wood-fired boilers his father tended over, sometimes all night. By the time he was 10 years old, Wightman was trudging through the woods, collecting hundreds of sap-filled buckets by hand.…