Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2025 i Popular Mechanics

IF YOU LIKE BUILD THIS DIY RUSTIC BENCH / P.34 CHECK OUT HOW TO BUILD AN ELECTRIC GUITAR IF YOU LIKE ACCESSING 37 DIMENSIONS / P.16 CHECK OUT ALIENS FROM THE FOURTH DIMENSION MAY BE INVADING OUR WORLD—AND WE DON’T EVEN KNOW IT IF YOU LIKE AMERICA’S DEADLIEST INDUSTRIAL DISASTER WAS ERASED FROM HISTORY / P.22 CHECK OUT THE FATAL ENGINEERING FLAW BEHIND THE DEADLIEST ACCIDENTAL BUILDING COLLAPSE IN U.S. HISTORY IF YOU LIKE CRYOPRESERVATION / P.12 CHECK OUT THIS BODY WAS FOUND PRESERVED ON A BLOCK OF ICE IN A COLORADO SHED. IT HAD BEEN THERE FOR 30 YEARS. IF YOU LIKE WRONG COLORS / P.15 CHECK OUT A NEW CAT COLOR IS DEFYING GENETIC EXPECTATIONS…

JUST ABOUT EVERY TOWN IN AMERICA has its local legends—the scary stories told at sleepovers or around campfires that someone’s friend or cousin always swears they totally saw for real one time. xIn the town of Summerville, South Carolina, they have the tale of the “Summerville Ghost.” The story involves a man who either worked for the railroad or simply walked along the tracks every day, depending on which version you hear. (The story’s been told since the 1950s, so some details vary over time.) One day, that man was struck by a train coming down the tracks that ran between Charleston and Summerville, and in some versions of the story, he was even decapitated. But the Summerville Ghost isn’t the spirit of the headless man who died on the…

THE INCAN TEMPLE OF THE SUN IN Cusco has long been a visual and cultural jewel of the ancient empire. But there’s even more to admire below the surface. Recently, archaeologists confirmed a long held rumor: the existence of a labyrinth of underground tunnels extending out from the temple, sometimes over a mile in length. First hinted at in historical texts that date as far back as the 16th century, this labyrinth—known as a chincana—has had researchers wondering if it was real. Turns out, it was. Archaeologist Jorge Calero Flores announced the findings at a press conference and said the research team found a main branch connecting the temple to the fortress of Sacsahuaman, just over one mile away. The system is made up of three smaller branches—one near the…

THEY ARRIVED IN GAULEY BRIDGE BY THE DOZENS, AND THEN BY THE HUNDREDS, UNTIL THEIR NUMBERS REACHED INTO THE LOW THOUSANDS, SWARMING THE TINY WEST VIRGINIA TOWN WITH THE KIND OF HOPE THAT’S HARD TO TELL FROM DESPERATION. Some of the men were as young as 18, many were in their 20s and 30s, and some were much older than that, decades of labor recorded in their suncracked skin and hard hands. They came from Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina, from Ohio and Kentucky, from Florida and Tennessee and the reaches of West Virginia itself, leaving behind fallow fields where the yields on cotton and tobacco could no longer feed a family, where jobs in steel mills and coal mines, if you could get one, now paid almost nothing.…

LAUNCHING ROCKETS IS SERIOUS business. It takes a ton of fuel, a ton of manpower, a ton of resources, and if it goes bad, it can go really, really bad. It’s also one of the least sustainable parts of an already unsustainable industry. But just because something is serious business and has serious problems doesn’t mean it can’t have fun solutions. Enter SpinLaunch, the company that is trying to chuck satellites into orbit with what is basically a souped-up catapult using no rocket fuel. Seriously. The concept, despite being nicely distillable for comedic effect, is not an inherently ridiculous one. Basically, SpinLaunch has built a large, disc-shaped centrifuge with an exit chute positioned along one side and a clock-style arm attached at the center. At the other end of that arm…

PUTTING HUMANS INTO A STATE OF suspended animation has been a sci-fi aspiration for decades. And recently, Alexander German (a researcher at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany) found a way to do just that—cryogenically induce a state of suspended animation in hippocampus slices from mouse brains…and then revive them. Until now, whether living brain tissue could be shut down by freezing and still regain function was unknown. Building on previous experiments, German and his team put the brain segments in a deep freeze for a week, and then warmed them back up to find that electrical activity had returned to almost normal levels. A 2006 study attempted to freeze and revive hippocampal slices from rat brains in a similar way, but there was not enough evidence to claim the…

BLUE SUN In 1831, a massive volcanic eruption caused the sun to appear in varying shades of purple, green, and even blue, due to excess sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere. Scientists have tried for years to find the volcanic culprit, and a new study comparing polar ice shards with samples from the Zavaritskii volcano in the Kuril Islands has found an exact match. Understanding these events could help coordinate a global response when the next catastrophic eruption hits. GREEN EARTH A new study from scientists at Nagoya University in Japan analyzes how the Earth likely sported a green hue in its early days. Due to evolutionary pressures and the light spectrum available to photosynthesizing cyanobacteria on early Earth, the world’s oceans were likely much greener than they are today.…

SCIENTISTS ARE MAKING A CASE FOR adjusting our understanding of how exactly genes first emerged. For a while, there’s been a consensus about the order in which the building-block amino acids were “added” into the box of Lego pieces that build our genes. But according to genetic researchers at the University of Arizona, our previous assumptions may reflect biases in our understanding of biotic (living) versus abiotic (nonliving) sources. In other words, our current working model of gene history could be undervaluing early protolife (which included forerunners like RNA and peptides) as compared to what emerged with and after the beginning of life. In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, researchers explain that vital pieces of our proteins (a.k.a. amino acids) date back…

DO YOU HAVE a “no shoes inside” rule at home? Or do you just try to avoid tracking debris in after messy yardwork? If so, this rustic bench will be a welcome addition to your house. If you’re not into the rustic, liveedge aesthetic, you can build it with a solid slab of dimensional lumber. Choose a wood species—oak, maple, black walnut, cherry, or other more exotic woods—to match your colors or decor. Whatever you choose, make this easy-to-build bench your own by altering the dimensions to fit your space. This project uses common tools, so you probably have everything you’ll need, with one exception: a log tenon cutter. Usually used to build log furniture, this tenon cutter fits into a drill chuck and cuts a uniformly round tenon on the…

OUR WORLD RUNS ON COMPUTER CHIPS. From the chips that run new cars to the chips that help your phones and computers process information to the microchips that help track lost animals, very few aspects of modern human life are not touched by chips. As a result, there’s a huge and consistent push to make better and more innovative chips as quickly as possible—sometimes by any means necessary. And apparently, that sometimes means taking a portion of the design control out of human hands. A group of scientists recently explained their process of letting artificial intelligence (A.I.) design and test more efficient computer chips in a new study, published in the journal Nature Communications. Lead author Kaushik Sengupta has been careful to explain that the goal is to supplement human productivity…

CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS don’t really get along, as the science of the subatomic can get…well…weird. Take, for instance, quantum entanglement, which says that the state of one particle can be determined by examining the state of its entangled pair regardless of distance. This strange fact flies in the face of classical physics, and even led Albert Einstein to famously describe this quantum quirk as “spooky action at a distance.” This is what is known as “quantum nonlocality,” where objects are influenced across distances (seemingly faster than the speed of light). Classical physics, on the other hand, follows local theory—the idea that objects are influenced by their immediate surroundings. This is a pretty sharp divide, as explained by the famous no-go theorem known as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) paradox, which essentially…

ADNA STRAND LIKE ME IS A BLUEPRINT “for building a living thing,” says the anthropomorphic double-helix Mr. DNA at the start of 1993’s Jurassic Park. “And sometimes, animals that went extinct millions of years ago, like dinosaurs, left their blueprints behind for us to find.” Luckily, pulling organic material out of fossils seems to be almost as possible in real life as it is in the movie (still waiting on that DNA discovery, though). A new study, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, analyzed a fossilized hip bone from an Edmontosaurus using “advanced mass spectrometry and other analytical techniques.” Those techniques—including protein sequencing—led to the discovery of bone collagen, which remained intact despite fossilization. “THIS RESEARCH SHOWS " BEYOND DOUBT THAT ORGANIC BIOMOLECULES, SUCH AS PROTEINS LIKE COLLAGEN, APPEAR…

THE FIRST TIME Jason held a set of Pokémon cards was in 1999, when he was 9 years old and he received a pack as a birthday gift. Jason had no idea that the pieces of shiny cardboard in his hands were small bits of history: The first sets of Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) cards had appeared in North America only months earlier. All he knew was that he was entranced by the brightly colored holographic images. In the game, two players acting as Pokémon trainers battle using decks of 60 cards, trying to knock out each other’s Pokémon and claim their prize cards. After learning to play, he became an avid collector, storing cards in binders, only pausing in college while working toward an engineering degree. Not long after…

EMBARK ON A COSMIC ADVENTURE with our mind-bending video series, Popular Mechanics Explains the Universe. Plunge into the mysteries of space, marvel at stunning galaxies, and explore the infinite wonders of the stars. UPGRADE YOUR YARD GAME with our roundup of the best lawn mowers—our 8 top picks are packed with raw power and razorsharp precision to tackle your turf like a champ. DISCOVER THE GROUND-BREAKING IDEA CHALLENGING EVERYTHING WE KNOW— Could the universe itself be intelligent, and is your brain already tapping into this cosmic consciousness? Dive into the science that redefines reality!…