Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2020 från Popular Mechanics

THE MORE INTUITIVE A TASK IS FOR humans, generally, the harder it is for artificial intelligence. Think of when Alexa can’t hear your commands, or when your spam filter traps an important email. A computer’s ability to read handwriting, then translate it into letters and numbers it can understand, has been a challenge going back decades. Think of the hit-or-miss capabilities of the Windows Transcriber in the early 2000s, or the PalmPilot in the late ’90s. Handwriting is so nuanced that just analyzing a static letter’s shape doesn’t work. Apple, it seems, found a solution. In the newest update to iPadOS, when you write with the Pencil stylus, the iPad can understand your scrawl. It works like most machine learning—examples inform rules that help predict and interpret a totally new…

THE MAGNETIC NORTH POLE JUST ISN’T where it used to be. Scientists have measured the location of the magnetic north pole since James Clark Ross first identified it in Canada’s Nunavut territory in 1831. The pole has moved several miles annually, but in recent decades, it has been racing toward Siberia at an unprecedented rate. A team of researchers from the U.K. and Denmark say they’ve uncovered the cause of this rapid shift: Two writhing lobes of magnetic force are duking it out near Earth’s core. Our planet’s protective magnetic field, which keeps deadly cosmic rays at bay and serves to orient our navigation systems, is generated in Earth’s outer core, more than 1,800 miles below the crust. “You’ve got these sort of swirling hot masses of molten iron, bubbling…

In 2022 the U.S. Army will choose a new aircraft to replace the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. Bell’s V-280 Valor and Sikorsky-Boeing’s SB-1 Defiant will battle it out to become the winner of the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) program, and either the Valor or the Defiant will fly as the Army’s next combat helo when it deploys in 2030. But “helicopter” isn’t even the right word to describe these two aerial beasts. Bell’s V-280 Valor is a tilt-rotor, similar to the V-22 Osprey currently flown by the Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy, but smaller and with a V-tail. Rather than relying on a single large main rotor for lift in forward flight and vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) like a helicopter, it tilts two large rotors (called…

WHETHER YOU’RE heading into the woods or up a mountain, the tent you pack is one of the most important pieces of camping gear you’ll bring along. Thus a tent, like hiking boots and a properly fitting pack, is worth investing in. Yours should provide protection from the elements, a place to store your stuff, and a cozy spot to catch some Z’s. To find the best camping tents, we considered the spaciousness, features, materials, weights, construction, and costs of dozens of contenders. Because many campgrounds were closed due to COVID-19 concerns, we set up the most promising ones in a backyard and slept in them through rainstorms, one severe thunderstorm, clear nights, and as the temperature dropped near freezing. (For consistency, we used either two- or four-person sizes, though…

I STARTED MAKING MEZCAL FULLtime when I was 16. I had been part of the process since I was about 7 years old, when my late grandfather put me in the mash tun to crush maguey, the agave plant we use. But once I was old enough to be part of the whole process, I dedicated my life to it. For me, this is the heritage of my ancestors. The process unites our family. We’re not in front of a computer all day. One day, we’re cutting maguey, another day we’re cooking, and the next we’re distilling, crushing, or planting maguey. It’s a completely different job from what people do on a daily basis, and it's neither routine nor boring. Especially when we cook. All the people you’re working with…

MATHEMATICIANS FROM THE CALIFORNIA Institute of Technology have solved an age-old problem related to “random walks,” a mathematical process that traces a path based on random decisions at various junctions. If you’ve played a procedurally generated video game like Minecraft or Stardew Valley, you’ve encountered a random walk in the form of a dungeon or terrain. Biologists use random walks to model how animals move and behave, and physicists use them to describe how particles behave. In a random walk, the “walker” can move in any direction at any point, so there’s an assumption that the walker will eventually revert to the mean and end up near its place of origin (because it’s less likely that chance would urge the walker in a single, focused direction over and over). Some…

THE SPACE AGENCY ISN’T BUILDING AN engine that can approach the speed of light—yet. A recent internal feasibility report from NASA suggests we could eventually realize the idea of traveling through folded space. In the report, advanced propulsion physicist Harold White, PhD, resolves a major paradox in the leading theoretical model for superluminal (faster than the speed of light) travel, what’s known as an Alcubierre warp drive. The colloquial term “warp drive” comes from science fiction, most famously Star Trek. The faster-than-light warp drive of the Federation works by colliding matter and antimatter and converting the explosive energy to propulsion. The show suggests that this extraordinary power alone pushes the ship at faster-than-light speeds. The Alcubierre drive, first proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, conforms to Einstein’s theory of general…

1 REFERENCE MICROPHONE / Positioned on the outside of the earcup or bud, this mic analyzes all frequencies of ambient sound and routes them to the circuitry inside the headphones. 2 NOISE-CANCELING CIRCUITRY / A summing amplifier in the earcup receives the reference mic info and calculates the frequencies opposite to (180 degrees out of phase with) the outside noise. 3 SPEAKER / Receiving data from the circuitry, the speaker emits the opposite-phase frequency (alongside your music) to nullify the ambient noise. With the music off, only muffled noise hits your ears. 4 ERROR MICROPHONE / Positioned near the ear canal, this constantly monitors signal-to-noise ratio entering the ear and relays the info back to the circuitry for necessary adjustments.…

FALL IS A GREAT TIME to buy a bike. At dealerships, summer sales numbers have tapered off, and existing inventory needs to be cleared to make way for next year’s models, most of which are revealed in November. Even better, since the 2008 recession, manufacturers have increased efforts to earn new customers, resulting in affordable, practical, and wonderfully strange new designs. Most come with sophisticated safety features such as traction control and stall prevention—and that’s before you put on the leather jacket that automatically deploys personal airbags. Drawing on over a decade of experience both riding and covering the industry, we compared specs, pricing, service intervals, and paint options to choose the four motorcycles we’d buy and recommend for 2020. DUCATI PANIGALE V2 A PRACTICAL-ISH SUPERBIKE Price: $16,495 Engine: 955cc…

NUCLEAR FUSION HAS BEEN “RIGHT AROUND the corner” for decades. But now, that long-promised future is quickly approaching. With tens of billions of dollars on the line, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is almost ready to turn on, 35 years after world leaders, including Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, proposed an international collaboration. While the experimental tokamak—a plasma reactor where extremely hot, charged plasma creates the conditions necessary for atoms to fuse and release considerable amounts of energy—is one of a handful of very costly “miniature suns” in development around the world, it’s arguably the bellwether for self-sustaining fusion, given the seven countries that share its high cost and are invested in its success. All this time, engineers have been designing and fabricating the planned 1 million components needed…

VACUUM BLUETOOTH SPEAKER The Builder: Derek Coulter @derekmcoulter Coulter, a Pittsburgh-based industrial designer for Dick’s Sporting Goods, grew up fashioning new stuff from scraps on his family’s Iowa farm: a zipline out of pulley wheels and channel iron, a downhill racer out of a 2x6 and old cabinet doors. The best thing about upcycling, Coulter says, “is taking something that has lived a good life and giving it a second chance.” That was the case with the Cadillac vacuum cleaner he salvaged from his late grandmother’s junk pile. His idea: turn the beat-up appliance into a functioning Bluetooth speaker. Once Coulter stripped the vacuum down and discovered it was a sheet-metal cylinder, he fetched a few basic materials—including deconstructed Sony speakers, a Lepai mini amplifier, and 5- and 12-volt power…

My family has owned a Ford dealership since before the first World War, but when I was a kid, I loved boats most. Even as I took over the dealership and spent 40 years in the automotive business, I completed a number of boat restorations and builds. Years ago, my mother-in-law gave me a 1935 edition of a book from the Popular Mechanics Press called The Boat Book: Everything of Interest to the Amateur Boatman. Inside were plans to build a modified recreation boat prevalent in the twenties and thirties called a Gentleman’s Racer (or Gentleman's Runabout). I loved the plans, and after a few years of only imagining the build, I laid out a roll of paper on the dealership’s showroom floor and drew the whole boat, full-size and…