Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2024 från Popular Mechanics

YOU DID IT. YOU ANNOYED your crewmates enough that they shoved you out of the space station. No suit. No air. Just you and the vacuum of space. Here’s a brief timeline of what you can expect. First, It’s Going to Be Really Cold //The human body will take a while to cool down, but it will be serious. There are three ways to transfer heat from a warm body to its surroundings: Convection is the movement of a fluid or gas, like warm air rising to higher altitudes. Conduction is the transfer of heat through physical contact (or air), like when you touch a hot stove. Radiation means emitting electromagnetic radiation. Without any air or water to surround your body, convection or conduction can’t transport heat and cool you…

NEXT TIME YOU HELP YOURSELF TO A glass of water from your faucet, think about this fact: More than 45 percent of tap water in the U.S. is estimated to contain at least one type of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFAS. That’s according to a study from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) published in Environment International. These “forever chemicals” are everlasting, and are found in common products like some food packaging, Teflon, and firefighting foam. Scientists are still learning about all of the potential health impacts from chronic exposure to PFAS, but these substances are linked to an array of health problems, such as weakened immune systems, decreased fertility, and cancer. Having been in our water supplies for decades, PFAS are now deemed so unsafe that the U.S.…

Ever wondered if you could spatchcock a pteranodon? What sauce to pair with slabs of Columbian mammoth steak? No? Just us? Thanks to advances in paleontology, we now know so much about some of these prehistoric creatures that scientists can almost predict what they might have tasted like. Here at Pop Mech, we relish in the weird, so we’ve created a paleontological menu based on the plants and animals found at three important fossil sites: British Columbia’s Burgess Shale, Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument, and the La Brea Tar Pits in Southern California. Many of these specimens, with features and traits similar to today’s flora and fauna, represent the earliest in their group’s evolutionary lineage and have helped the scientific community piece together a clearer picture of how life on Earth…

Picture yourself strolling through a juniper-oak woodland. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and a Columbian mammoth, a relative of modern-day elephants, is trumpeting in panic. It’s 20,000 years ago in what is now Los Angeles, and the mammoth has gotten stuck in a pool of natural asphalt. Thousands of animals have met their end this way in California’s La Brea Tar Pits, where asphalt—a type of crude oil—is still seeping to the surface. In addition to plant-eaters such as mammoths, a remarkable number of predators such as dire wolves and saber-toothed cats have also been claimed by the tar pits. Predators are rarely found in the fossil record, compared with their prey. The opposite is true at La Brea, where the cries of trapped animals lured hungry…

WORKING ON THE CUTTING BOARD PROJECT IN THIS ISSUE got us thinking about kitchen knives. All too often we care for them by storing them in a knife block but toss them in the sink or dishwasher without a thought. In our kitchen at home, I have one knife set aside for when I’m trimming meat, carving a bird, or preparing vegetables. This knife is set next to the sink and cleaned quickly after use, so it stays sharper much longer than others and is a pleasure to use. That’s why I highly recommend keeping a special knife in your collection. But what should that special knife be? To answer that, we reached out to David Joachim, author of The Science of Good Food. While there are many different types…

A Rite in the Rain notebook is more tool than stationery. It’s produced by J.L. Darling, a Tacoma, Washington, company that got its start in the 1920s making notebooks for loggers in the Pacific Northwest. Any paper tough enough to withstand those soggy, sweat-soaked conditions has my respect. Since then, the company has branched out to supply pads and notebooks to the military, law enforcement, ranchers and farmers, foresters, marine biologists, contractors, and DIY folks like me. Speaking of which, I found my Rite in the Rain No. 935 notebook at my local Lowe’s, hanging (appropriately) in the tool aisle. It measures 3 inches wide by 5 inches long, and I counted 48 pages in it, but I was immediately taken by its rugged build. Its two covers are PolyDura,…

The Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies is one of the world’s most valuable fossil sites, containing a massive trove of preserved critters from the Cambrian Period, more than 500 million years ago. These creatures were likely caught in a series of mudslides, where they were flash-preserved—much like the residents and ephemera of Pompeii—in a much better state than would be otherwise possible, thanks to the layering of minerals that acted as insulation against decomposition. The chemical combination created calcium carbonate, the same hard material many sea creatures’ shells are made of. In addition to bones, these fossils show soft tissue, giving scientists more to analyze as they study and classify them. Some of the more than 65,000 specimens collected from the site are similar to organisms that exist today,…

JUST HOW TOUGH IS J-B WELD? I WONdered about that recently when I found myself at a Tractor Supply Company buying plant and garden materials and ran across a rack of this well-known repair adhesive. That was about the umpteenth time that thought crossed my mind when I found myself shopping for something else. I’m not the only person with some curiosity about it. Go online. People repair everything under the sun with this stuff. Most are small fixes to things on cars, signage, and gizmos. Some of these repairs look kind of janky and might have been better executed with welding, bolts, or screws. But who am I to say? The owners seem to be happy with their results. My encounter with J-B Weld at Tractor Supply was an…

About 150 million years ago, among the Jurassic floodplains of what’s now eastern Utah and western Colorado, enormous dinosaurs filled a landscape carpeted in ferns and dotted with conifer stands. Creatures of every size filled the ancient landscape, with a diversity of dinosaur species seldom seen in other times and places. Long-necked, portly giants such as Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, and Camarasaurus reached their heads high to nibble at ginkgo branches while the spike-tailed, plate-decorated Stegosaurus nibbled at horsetails and other forage closer to the ground. But this place was no herbivorous paradise. Enormous carnivores stalked through the shadows of the woodlands, especially Allosaurus—a 30-foot-long carnivore with triangular horns in front of its eyes and a mouth packed with teeth that evolved to puncture and slice. The remains of these dinosaurs and…

PRICE: $28–$400, depending on size | MADE: 2023 | ACQUIRED: 2023 | FUNCTION: Grip and turn pipe and fittings EVERYTHING ABOUT A Ridgid pipe wrench is highly specific, from the exact metallurgy of the cast-iron handle to the ductility of the forged-steel hook jaw that bears down against a pipe. Even the sand and binders used to form the cavity into which the molten iron is poured are ruthlessly monitored to ensure chemical and structural integrity. The dogged attention to detail helps explain the tool’s durability and why it is so highly prized by plumbers, pipe fitters, oil field workers, and even do-it-yourselfers. What we state above may come as something of a surprise. The tool seems so outwardly simple, consisting of just seven parts. But watch a seasoned plumber…