Innehållsförteckning för May/June 2023 från Popular Mechanics

pg28 → At long last, a cover story about how living on Mars is more reality than dream. Thank you, SpaceX. Even in 2016, when I first visited the remote Brownsville, Texas, beach where SpaceX planned to build a spaceport, the company’s ambition of developing a rocket and lander to colonize Mars seemed far-fetched. Now its massive Starship lander and booster is on track to nail its first orbital launch from Starbase this year—and become the most powerful rocket ever flown. Starship is the most likely vehicle to land people on Mars. Even if a crewed NASA mission comes first—which could involve Starship, as is the case with the Artemis moonshot—SpaceX has laid out the clearest plans yet for a Martian mission. As its massive lander goes, so does humanity’s…

pg44 → I’m a natural skeptic. Before I started reporting on Lue Elizondo, I was pretty dubious of the idea of UFOs and UAPs. But after talking at great length to not only Elizondo but also a number of military servicemen and women who saw unexplainable things while on the job, I’m far more inclined to believe there’s something to these sightings. It’s the depth and specificity of the stories that highly credible people told me. Not just people who saw something funny in the night sky, but military pilots who witnessed objects up close, in the course of their duties, and their observations were backed up by sophisticated radar and other technology.…

→ A TEAM OF RESEARCHERS FROM M.I.T., HARVARD, ITALY, AND Switzerland discovered that ancient Roman concrete gets its strength from self-healing properties, which help fill in cracks as they form. The true star of the show is “hot mixing,” a process of creating concrete that forms reactive calcium. In other words, these small lime-clast chunks can react with water, post-mixing, to recrystallize as calcium carbonate, and fill cracks while reacting with the ash for further strength. The reactions take place spontaneously, self-healing the cracks before they spread.…

WHEN SHOWERHEADS IN YOUR HOME ARE WEAK, water dribbles out of faucets, and the washing machine takes forever to fill, the problem could be low water pressure. This is a relatively common plumbing problem that can be caused by any number of things, ranging from clogged pipes in a municipal water system to worn-out components in a private water well. Here are a few simple tests you can run to get to the bottom of the problem. Water-Pressure Test // To quickly and accurately calculate the water pressure in your home, purchase a pressure gauge, which will run you about $10. Tighten the gauge’s female-threaded fitting onto an outdoor garden-hose faucet. Check to make sure that all the valves closest to the water meter are fully opened (in the case…

AT FIRST BLUSH, IT SOUNDS LIKE A LINE from Jurassic Park, the fictional dream of resurrecting creatures long dead: “We have the DNA, the technology, and the leading experts in the field. Next, we will have the woolly mammoth. Alive again.” But this is a very real statement from Dallas-based biotech company Colossal, which is serious about its genetic engineering mission to recreate a version of the six-ton animal that roamed the Siberian tundra 10,000 years ago. The company’s de-extinction project aims to fill an ecological niche by allowing woolly mammoth 2.0 to pound the Arctic tundra once again—as soon as 2027. “Most importantly, it will inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the mammoth’s extinction,” according to Colossal’s website. Ecological researchers aren’t convinced. //The vision of herds of insulated…

MADE: 2022 | ACQUIRED: 2022 | FUNCTION: For measuring up to 6 feet I MAKE MOST of my measurements with a 25-foot tape measure. I’d be lost without it. It’s as familiar in my right hand as a hammer. But other times its shape and size seem clumsy. Enter the folding ruler, and in this case, the Rhino Ruler. Made in Switzerland and sold by U.S. Tape, the ruler (or rule, if you prefer) is built out of a rugged fiberglass-reinforced polyamide plastic. The Rhino is identical in width, length, and hinge spacing to the famous Lufkin folding ruler (which I also own), but there are key differences. The Rhino’s numbers are deeply embossed, its edges are square and sharp, and its reinforced-plastic construction makes it more wear-resistant and abuse-tolerant…

I picked up a free sample-size tube of this grease at a trade show about 20 years ago. After packing it away in my toolbox, I forgot about it. But when a bolt with a slightly damaged tip refused to thread into its hole, I remembered it. I spread a tiny glob of grease onto the bolt tip and, to my amazement, the bolt slipped in as if it were freshly threaded. Several more incidents like that depleted the trade show sample, so I bought a full-size tube and have kept one in my toolbox to this day. Some investigation into Super Lube revealed that it’s silicone grease with micro powderized particles of PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene; the most well-known version of this is Teflon). The grease is clean to apply and…

pg24 → ChatGPT wasn’t really what I would call uncharted territory for someone like myself. However, after spending some time with it, I realized the AI chatbot can actually be quite useful—when used in the right way, for the right job. For instance, instead of asking it how to plan an entire dinner party, I merely requested a “new” Negroni spin-off to check the box on cocktails. And it gave me surprisingly solid results. → 1 oz gin→ 1 oz Campari→ 1 oz dry vermouth→ ½ oz pineapple juice→ ½ oz lime juice→ ½ oz honey syrup (equal parts water and honey)→ Dash of orange bitters The only real misstep was that it wanted me to shake the Negroni before serving, when it’s normally just built in the glass and…

The journey to Mars would expose travelers (and their electronic equipment) to six to nine months of cosmic radiation if they’re unprotected. The average annual dose from cosmic radiation on Earth totals 0.33 mil-lisieverts (mSv), and a medical CT machine delivers anywhere from 2 to 10 mSv of radiation per scan. The Curiosity rover turned on its radiation detector during the trip to Mars and measured an average of 1.8 mSv per day. Using this data, the Southwest Research Institute calculated that a trip to Mars would expose travelers to a whopping 330 mSv. One thousand mSv increases fatal cancer risk by 5 percent; NASA’s limit for astronauts today is 3 percent. Any spaceship heading to the Red Planet must have robust radiation shields, and researchers are coming up with…

Within years of their arrival, the underground structures in which the Martians first lived have been replaced by freestanding habitats that look like they were built by giant wasps. Robotic arms 3D-print the ruddy-brown Martian dwellings by applying wet construction material—a mixture of reinforced basalt fibers and polylactic acid sourced from the waste-fueled bioreactors—in quickly hardening layers. Cylinders are an ideal shape for a pressure vessel because their curved surfaces can withstand higher pressures. They also afford the most interior space. Each of the buildings, shielded from the elements and interconnected by subsurface tunnels, are divided into floors with comfortably sized rooms. Each structure is double-hulled with thermoplastic material. The space between the inner and outer walls serves as a light well, bringing natural rays from the structure’s tip to…

Eviation’s Alice / The northern Mexico–based regional airline Aerus announced a deal this year to purchase 30 of Eviation’s nine-passenger airplanes, which run on two electric-propulsion engines. Pipistrel’s Velis Electro / The first electric aircraft to be Type-certified by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), the Velis Electro can ferry two passengers using two electric-propulsion engines. NASA’s X-57 Maxwell / NASA’s four-passenger electric plane—a modified Tecnam P2006T—is powered by seven propellers on each wing. It could hit the tarmac for a 20-minute test flight later this year.…

TRADITIONALLY TETHERED TO A COMPRESSOR WITH A PNEUMATIC hose, impact wrenches were largely specialized tools used by those in professional trades. With the advent of cordless versions, they became not only more portable but also more versatile—they could be used on almost anything, anywhere. And, while originally a big, brute-force tool, they became a time-saver for common everyday tasks that require the removal of all manner of mundane nuts and bolts. Today, there is a variety of models available suited to all kinds of jobs, but the most useful, helpful, and adaptable are the compact models that excelled in our testing. HOW WE TESTED To test these impact wrenches, we performed specific assembly and disassembly tasks with each one. We first used them to remove and replace new, 9⁄16-inch, grade-8…

SONY’S PLAYSTATION VIRTUAL REALITY (PSVR) 2 headset represents the next generation of high-fidelity VR. These goggles pack some of the most advanced technology of any headset, like eye tracking and a crisp 4K HDR resolution OLED display for just $549. This makes PSVR 2 the most affordable way to play the latest, most graphically demanding VR games. The rest of the VR industry is stagnant, focusing efforts on wireless standalone headsets held back by weak mobile chipsets. On the other hand, Sony’s powerful hardware and talented game studios are poised to revive blockbuster VR experiences that are sorely needed in the space. While virtual-reality headsets like the original PSVR have been around since 2016, VR finally broke into the mainstream with the 2020 release of the affordable all-in-one Meta Quest…

pg72 → I was just 17 years old when I brought $950 to a Target parking lot in Brentwood, New York, one of long Island’s sketchiest neighborhoods and a hotbed for gang activity. An hour earlier, I had tried the PlayStation VR headset at a Best Buy, demoing the Star Wars Battlefront X-Wing experience. This was my gateway into high-fidelity VR; I’ll never forget my first time hopping behind the cockpit and feeling my stomach dip as I barrel-rolled across space. I knew immediately that I had to buy a system. Unfortunately, they were sold out, so I headed to the platform of deals gone wrong: Craigslist. Armed with a fat stack of cash, I was greeted by a chunky scalper in his mid-40s. As he carefully counted my money,…

JACKIE APPEL Associate News Editor Professional question-asker. I’M AN EXPERT IN… Being curious, as cheesy as that may sound. I know a little about a lot, and thanks to my job, I get to talk to experts all the time to learn more. EAR GEAR I just got a set of Bose QuietComfort 45 headphones—they’re incredible for noise cancellation on flights. And I never go anywhere without my second-generation Apple AirPods. I prefer the regular version over the Pro. Even though they're a bit out of date, they're more comfortable, IMO. A Hack So Simple, It’s Brilliant If you have a top-load washer, get laundry detergent with a dispenser tap and store it above the machine. That way, you can just pull it forward and dispense it right into your…

THE SECRET TO FASTER-THAN-LIGHT physics could be to double down on the number of dimensions, according to research published last December in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. Specifically, the solution may lie in three dimensions of time, with just one representing space. The key concept at play is the “superluminal observer,” a hypothetical thing that is looking at the universe while traveling faster than light. It’s you in your Star Trek warp-speed shuttle. Superluminal observers marry together two very different sides of physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics. General relativity is the work proposed by Albert Einstein; it governs how spacetime functions as bodies move around the universe at subluminal, or slower-than-light, speeds. Quantum mechanics explains how subatomic particles behave, or don’t behave, in very strange ways on the…

CHATGPT HAS RECENTLY BLOWN UP THE internet with its ability to replicate human speech. Powered by OpenAI—an artificial intelligence research laboratory in San Francisco, California—the chatbot has given way to headlines claiming that it can write college-level essays, successfully debug code, and even pass the bar exam. But should you really be worried about your job security disappearing overnight? To find out more, we talked to Sameer Singh, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California Irvine; Singh works on machine-learning algorithms, as well as other models that analyze text to mimic the idiosyncrasies of human writing, much like ChatGPT. What Is ChatGPT? // Generative Pre-Training Transformer (or ChatGPT) is a plugin for OpenAI that taps into a neural network to make sense of writing, and then…

Mobile chips helped establish the consumer VR industry, but aren’t capable of rendering high-fidelity 4K experiences. The Quest 2’s games are more limited in world scale and look a bit jagged. Titles ported from the Quest 2 to PSVR 2 look a bit better, thanks to the PS5’s lighting and texture enhancements, but you can still see how certain mechanics were built around the constraints of mobile hardware. This is best illustrated by the models and environments of the VR shooter Pavlov. On PSVR 2, you get realistic lighting, material textures, and set dressing like furniture and signs in spaces that make the world feel more lively. Look over at the Quest 2 and you’ll notice that surfaces appear soft, effects like muzzle flashes or blood spurts don’t have as…