Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2016 i Popular Mechanics South Africa

I realise I am treading on dangerous territory here. But, after all, taking risks is what Popular Mechanics people do. The subject of women in technology shouldn’t be an issue in 2016. That it still is says something about perceptions of our roles in society. You know, the idea that some of us get our hands dirty and some of us are seen as decoration. Kind of like forwards and backs in a rugby team. Although "Technology’s Secret Weapon is Women" (page 43) focuses on Silicon Valley, its insights are pretty universal. It’s a fact that women have been subtly – sometimes overtly – encouraged to seek other, ostensibly more appropriate roles than those traditionally designated for men. To overcome the glass ceiling, we note, you have to break things,…

BY THE FIRST QUARTER OF 2016, CAPE TOWN’S MYCITI rapid transit bus fleet had recorded more than 38,5 million passenger trips since its inauguration. For the month of November 2015 alone, more than 1,5 million trips were undertaken. In the coming months the MyCiTi transport will be adding more routes to its schedule, hoping to feed the demand for public transport. But with fossil fuel prices soaring, and increasing pressure to lower carbon emissions, the city’s local government earlier this year announced a tender for battery powered electric buses to join the public transport fleet. Cities across the world would soon reach a point where alternative fuel for public transport was no longer a choice, but a prerequisite, mayor Patricia de Lille said. Therefore, Cape Town has decided to expand…

POPULAR MECHANICS: How much did you know about the technology available going into remaking The Jungle Book? Jon Favreau: I’ve been slowly indoctrinated into being comfortable with visual effects. I’ve had the cool experience of walking through the history of the science through the projects I’ve worked on, from forced perspective and stop-motion, through early CGI using hard surfaces and comping and eventually to CG characters. And in this case, fur and water and ray tracing . PM: Some of the technology you used to make The Jungle Book was developed by James Cameron for Avatar. Were you two able to compare notes? PM: He came by the set. He knew many of the people I was working with, and he was very happy to see someone else taking advantage…

It arrived in an unassuming brown box. The blue core slips into one of the two strap lengths. I read through the short manual, picked the longest strap, wrapped it twice around my wrist and downloaded the app. That’s when things started to get interesting. There are a ton of preloaded workouts and they either require you to wear the unit on your ankle, wrist or wear two, depending on the workout. Moov Now is a fitness coach that analyses your form and counts your reps via clever 3D movement tracking. When cycling, you strap it to your ankle for cadence and speed; running, on your ankle for stride, distance and cadence data; but for workouts it's worn on your wrist. That’s when the real magic happens. Each type of…

IF YOU WANT TO SEE IT UP CLOSE, you have to wait for the three or four people in front of you to finish taking pictures or lose interest. You feel as if you’re standing three-deep at a bar, only here, on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Centre, there are fluorescent lights a mile overhead, everyone is wearing a lanyard name tag and some drag around a rolling backpack. There are 4 137 companies exhibiting on 214 000 square metres of floor space. Oculus is here somewhere, and Netflix and Ford and Chevy and Mercedes-Benz and Samsung and Intel. But you just had to stop at this one. Ehang, the banner says. People in the crowd read from the press materials or parrot what they’ve heard about the…

Humans have been communicating since the dawn of time by ever-evolving means. Optical communication is the technology at the very backbone of our society. When we connect over the Internet, make calls or send data by our smartphones, we ultimately link into the fibre-optic network around the globe. Light is sent down this glass fibre, which is no more than a tenth of a human hair in diameter, and detected on the other side. To encode information into the light, we make use of its core properties, for example, using many colours, each to carry information, or using intensity modulation, switching light on and off in a manner analogous to the old Morse code. Today our state-of-the-art networks enable a global average connection speed of 5,1 Mbps, and up to…

THE SUPERCAR IS ALIVE AND WELL Geneva is one of the automotive calendar’s largest events. Carmakers from all corners of the globe clamour for a spot to bask in the limelight. Despite the recent shifts towards more environmentally conscious motoring and the birth of semi- and fully autonomous cars, raw power is still very much on offer. From established and not so established brands, here’s our pick of the bunch on display in Switzerland. ARASH AF10 The range-topper from the British supercar manufacturer isn’t new. It’s an update, but is first on our list – not just because of alphabetical order, but also because special mention should be made of the AF10’s ridiculous peak power output of 1 457 kW from its 6,2-litre supercharged V8, which is aided by no…

On the medical studies he’s doing during Scott’s deployment: “There are several universities that are involved in the twin studies, including Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Purdue, and Stanford. It’s been over a year now, since before my brother launched last March. They’ll randomly show up at my house or a hotel room somewhere, and they’ll take blood samples, saliva samples, urine samples, stool samples. Everything they can get. I also go to NASA about once a quarter to do MRIs and ultrasounds of certain parts of my body, like my brain, heart, some big blood vessels, and my eyeball. [Scott uses] an ultrasound machine up there. And he sends blood down to the ground. He takes his own blood. It’s sent down on a SpaceX spacecraft.”…

WE SHOULDN’T HAVE LET PLASMA DIE. Yes the units were big, heavy, energy inefficient and ran high operating temperatures, but the sizes were realistic (by today’s standards) and the TV didn’t sear your eyeballs when you wanted to catch a movie in the dark. It was also great for gaming, but the current crop of gamers won’t know much about 600 Hz TVs and truly stark contrast. After years of brainwashing from clever but sometimes misguided advertisers, a new champion of infinite contrast and instantaneous refresh rates has emerged. Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TVs share all of plasma’s strengths and thoroughly address the ancient technology’s considerable weaknesses. Where LED backlighting has learnt a few tricks like localised zone dimming to improve contrast, nothing beats having each individual pixel as its…

NEW GEAR NEW YOU Tesla Model 3 This is not a drill, former South African and real-life Bruce Wayne Elon Musk tweeted that the Rainbow Nation will be part of Tesla’s next wave of global expansion and will be able to pre-order the company’s latest vehicle. While the latest fleet addition is firmly the budget option in the family, Musk is bullish about his new baby. “It will be the best car at its price, even without options.” The $35 000 sticker on the base model will probably translate to R600 000 in our money, but that’s for a fully electric vehicle with a minimum range of around 350 km and a swift 0-100 km/h in six seconds. While Eskom’s tariff increases will surely diminish the overall impact of EV…

This isn’t the heralded Apple Watch challenger. It also isn’t even the big dog in FitBit’s kennel. But it is a properly good activity tracker that more than compensates for its shortcomings with a couple of wicked exclusive additions. In terms of the FitBit product line, the Blaze sits below Surge, losing out on GPS functionality in the process. But it gains interchangeable straps and is lighter and more comfortable to wear all day. Plus there’s a significant improvement in battery life over what we experienced with the super watch which died within a day of use. It does all the same things like continuous heart rate tracking, activity tracking, step counting and sleep tracking. On the sports side you can load different profiles from the app like running, yoga…

DR CAMILLA FLOROS Winner, Science as Art: Pearlessence (main picture) What inspired you to choose this particular subject? I took this photo on a field trip because the patterns and colours of the fish scales on the Blue Emperor were really striking. I remembered reading about pearlessence and wondered how many people actually knew that fish scales were used in beauty products. I thought it was a story worth telling. What equipment did you use? Olympus TG4 in microscopic mode. Runner up, Science in Action: Turtle release (right) What inspired you to choose this particular subject? This image shows 10 endangered loggerhead turtles waiting to be released back in the ocean. I love that it shows the people who have worked incredibly hard to rehabilitate these little turtles so that…

You play football. You play rugby and cricket and tennis and hockey. But motocross? You ride motocross. You don’t play it. Which is strange. Wrong, really. Because if there is any sport that captures the essence of what it was like to play as a child it is riding dirt bikes. Spending hours outside. Splashing around in the mud. Getting as filthy as possible. Racing your friends. Pretending you have superpowers and can fly. Of course, in motocross and especially in supercross, with its bigger arenas and crazier jumps, you really do fly. That is what is happening on this early-January morning inside Angel Stadium of Anaheim. Tonight is the first race of the 2016 Monster Energy Supercross season, and at the moment a half-dozen men astride deafening 450-cc engines…

The blue Seville sets off a shock wave of nostalgia. It’s from the early ’80s, with a bonnet that stretched into the horizon and a stubby boot that makes it look like the car just got rear-ended. My grandfather had one when it was new. Much later, it was handed down to me. I took that Seville on a road trip to Atlantic City, floating down the highway at 120 km/h, running out of fuel when the digital fuel gauge proved itself optimistic by eight litres. Mechanically, that car was a nadir for Cadillac, General Motors and human civilisation. But its stereo, with separate amplifiers at each speaker, was something else. At a time when factory car stereos sounded like those Hallmark cards that play music when you open them,…

AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF SOUTH AFRICA’S dire shortage – current and potential – of scientists and engineers, the Cape Town Science Centre and software giants SAP came together in creating a foundation team that gave birth to last year’s Africa Code Week. Officially ranked as the largest literacy initiative ever organised on the African continent, Africa Code Week sparked the interest of more than 89 000 children across 17 countries to write their first lines of code. According to Julie Cleverdon, director at the Cape Town Science Centre, there’s clearly a huge demand for this skill set: “An example would be the attendance figures, which aimed to reach 20 000 children, but managed to surpass this figure by 444 per cent.” Each of the countries involved battled it out in…

YOU PROBABLY ASSOCIATE THE WORD DATA with your smartphone's ability to give you access to the internet. While that's not entirely inaccurate, there's more to it. The rate at which that communication, for instance, is dependent on the speed of your data network. Now imagine the internet as a server and the story begins to unfold. What's actually happening is that one machine is asking another machine for something. The internet of things is highly dependent on one device's ability to transmit noughts and ones to another. That's called data transfer. When the 5G demos were done at the 2016 Mobile World Congress, it was chiefly machine to machine communication. Finally we have a fast enough communication that can be deployed to make the autonomous car more efficient. The last…

I’m an unabashed fanboy of TomTom’s Cardio running watches. The company blitzed the market by delivering reliable wrist-worn heart rate monitoring, a move so effective that the likes of Garmin and Suunto only caught up in the last two years. But it wasn’t all roses because consumers shifted to all-day activity tracking in a big way, leaving what was probably the best sports watch at the time relegated to sportspecific use. The Spark is TomTom’s response. All of the strengths of the previous generation of Cardio sports watches (accurate GPS, open source data, fantastic app) and now introducing all-day heart rate monitoring and activity tracking. The +Music bit also gives it 3 GB of internal storage for music which you can play via Bluetooth directly from the watch. I didn’t…

In November 2015, Pinterest released an impressive new feature: a magnifying-glass icon (A) that calls forth a visual-search box that can focus on any element of a picture, summoning similar dresses, rugs, nature scenes, or chests of drawers from the entirety of the Pinterest empire without anyone typing a single word. It took four male engineers nine months to build it. And then those engineers took a beta version to software engineer Tracy Chou, who opened the search box over a wedding dress. The algorithm returned sundresses, senior prom dresses – clothing that was aesthetically similar, but not remotely in the same conceptual category. “The team couldn’t differentiate between the types of dresses, so they thought the product was at a reasonable stage to be shipped,” Chou says. She requested…

It’s official: we live in the matrix. Social media. E-commerce. Streaming entertainment. Virtual reality. Any service or experience, available at the touch of a button. The only thing missing is data ports implanted in our skulls. You never even have to leave home. Except you do. To be truly human, you have to set technology aside once in a while. Challenge Nature. Exhaust yourself. Test your physical limits. Like the three adventurers profiled on the following pages do every day. You might say they are leading the rebellion against our digital overlords – and calling us all to join them. Consider this your red pill. A guide to escaping digital bondage and enjoying the wonderland that is planet Earth. Possibly on a dirt bike. It is the first week of…

A RETROFIT FOR SAFER GUNS Guns that unlock with a fingerprint already exist, but getting that convenient security meant replacing your current stock. Now two companies, Identilock and Veri-Fire, have made fingerprint locks that fit over the trigger of more than a hundred handguns. Touch your finger to the panel and the lock releases the trigger. Batteries last at least six months in standby mode and there’s a clear low-battery warning. AVAILABLE: mid-2016 AUGMENTED REALITY THAT HELPS YOU FIX YOUR CAR Most auto manufacturers would rather have you drive to the dealership than get your hands dirty. It’s that creeping don’t-void-the-warranty attitude that keeps me from opening up my iPhone. But with Hyundai’s augmented-reality app, you can pop the bonnet of your 2016 Sonata, point your phone’s camera at the…

The most versatile vehicle gets even better with one modification A pick-up with a comfy cab, a long loadbed and a durable bed liner may just be the most capable thing on four wheels. But there’s a catch: many bakkie loadbeds have only a few tie-down hooks, which limits how effectively you can secure cargo. Reader Ken Loomis of Jeannette, Pennsylvania, found a perfect solution. He runs a length of sturdy chain around the perimeter of the bed, starting at the rear hook on one side, through the front hooks and ending at the rear hook on the opposite side. The chain is secured to the rear hooks with heavy-duty carabiners. Now the links of the chain provide a wide variety of tie-down locations. HONE YOUR CHISEL WITH SANDPAPER Though…