Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i Popular Mechanics South Africa

TIME CERTAINLY FLIES when you’re having fun. No, really. So, the 15-plus years that have passed since our cover last featured a high-tech South African eye turned heavenwards seems like just a moment in time. In the grand 13-billion-year scheme of things, of course it has been a blink. Although the Popular Mechanics heritage stretches back not quite as far as SKA – the subject of this month's cover story – will be able to see, it goes back a long, long way. It’s great to be able to draw on more than a century of heritage, as our colleagues in the USA have done for this month’s other big feature, PM’s Greatest Hits. Thumbing through the archives is like time travel, without the surprised look on people’s faces when…

1954 Hope might have flared briefly among drought-stricken Cape Town residents searching for alternatives to conventional plumbing, but although the headline reads “Lavatory complete with running water attaches to side of car”, this Germandesigned portable plumbing system had no WC, just a tap and washbasin to help campers and tourists freshen up en route. 1954 Still on the subject of water: it’s illegal to hose down gardens using municipal water in drought-hit areas, but what about taking a shower on the lawn? This nifty gadget consisted of a pipe with a spray head at its curved end and a sharp point at the other, plus a hose connector. 1991 Our cover story celebrated the imminent resurrection of the SR-71 Blackbird, brought back from retirement under the aegis of a NASA…

LINDSEY SCHUTTERS: WHEN I BOUGHT MY FIRST KIA Sorento, I was actually shopping for a good deal on something completely different. I knew I wanted a hardy 4x4 and sitting in it felt, for lack of a better term, solid. Ladderframe chassis, BorgWarner transfer case, BorgWarner turbochager, Bosch common rail direct injection system and Hyundai’s 2,5-litre D4CB diesel generator engine. The Sorento brought high quality components at a price undercutting all of its competitors at the time. Inside there was also automatic climate control, leather seats and cruise control. The only regret I ever had was getting a 2005 Sorento because Kia introduced its 10-year warranty from the 2006 model year. The only mechanical issues I had was a failed slave cylinder that the dealer replaced and then a costly…

> THE SUNROOF is nonsense. (February 2017) > STEP ONE: Scratch head. (November 1997) > AMONG THE HUNDREDS of nail types available at any hardware store, only one size and shape is the best to use for a particular job. Other nails may do the job, but the right one will do it better. (June 1968) > ASSORTED RUBBER BANDS can be cut from worn-out rubber gloves. (March 1952) > THE DIAMOND WAS once such a dull little pebble you wouldn’t even stoop to pick it up. (February 1950) > FOR THE LAST TIME, there is no spinning in foosball. (February 2015) > YOU THINK YOU’RE SAFE in sleep, you think you’re beyond fear, but the reeling mind is most vulnerable a few hours after midnight. (September 2015) > IN…

FROM THE MOMENT the first aeroplane crashed into the World Trade Centre on the morning of 11 September 2001, the world has asked one simple and compelling question: How could it happen? Three and a half years later, not everyone is convinced we know the truth. Go to Google.com, type in the search phrase “World Trade Centre conspiracy” and you’ll get links to an estimated 12 300 000 websites. Thousands of books on 9/11 have been published; many of them reject the official consensus that hijackers associated with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda flew passenger planes into US landmarks. To investigate 16 of the most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists, Popular Mechanics assembled a team of nine researchers and reporters who, together with PM editors, consulted more than…

As do-it-yourself projects go, building a deck is among the most complex. Weyerhaeuser intends to make the process less daunting with its computerised Design Centre. Poised in front of the computer’s screen, homeowners plot the deck’s outline and then progress to a finished plan, requiring only the help of a home centre employee trained in using the system. You can save time and money by not having to make repeated trips to the lumberyard to buy or return materials due to inadequate plans. Do-it-yourselfers can quickly explore different designs. The system can design one-or two-level decks that are square or rectangular. It can also yield decks with cutout areas or ones that are U-shaped or L-shaped. Any design can have decking (flooring) 90 degrees or 45 degrees to the framing.…

WINNING LETTER EATING THE CITY Thank you for a great article on hydroponic agriculture in the February issue. It’s great to learn of some of the success stories in our cities. I am a masters student in architecture at the University of Johannesburg, and my 2017 final project was titled ‘The Edible City’. Its research and output were aimed along the same lines as was your article, with two differences. Firstly, one of the main issues that urban agriculture aims to address – especially in South African cities – is food security. This was mentioned in From the Editor, but not expounded fully in the article. Being food secure means having access to sufficient quantities of food that is nutritious, diverse, geographically and culturally suitable, and also being able to…

PHILA MEANS ‘TO LIVE’ when translated to the common tongue. It’s also the name of the app that was custom designed to Team Dimension Data’s specific requirements. The app tracks the daily physical and mental performance of the team’s 39 World Tour and Continental riders located in 10 countries. Data collected from the team includes geographical location and time zones, quality and quantity of sleep, response to training, muscle soreness, as well as mood, motivation and stress levels. Developed by Dimension Data’s Digital Practice in partnership with Team Dimension Data’s riders and Australiabased MIK Health, Phila is also a communication and data-sharing management tool for the team. Every day, Phila prompts the riders to complete an assessment via their mobile device. The information is correlated with existing training data captured…

OUT THERE IN deep dark ocean is a 269 000-ton floating mass of waste plastic. An estimated 5,25 trillion pieces of man-made material is choking the life out of the marine ecosystem and it needs to be dealt with. But how best to approach this mammoth task has been the biggest problem. Richard Hardiman (yes, the same guy from radio and MC gigs not too long ago) has an answer and it starts in the harbour, before the waste gets out to open water. Oh, it’s also a drone. Drones are a lot more fun and it gives an opportunity to upskill people. You could be a man with a pool net doing this job, but you’re not and can take those skills somewhere else. And the job satisfaction is…

We all want the best for our children, even when their creative endeavours seem to overtake every surface in the house. How do you know when it’s gone too far? Well, when you start writing cheques with a Day-Glo pen or get the cold shoulder for accidentally sitting on your finger-painted portrait, it’s time to bring some of your own skills into the act. To help out, we’ve designed an easel to help focus your kids’ expressive energy. It features a dry-marker board on one side and a corkboard on the other. FINISHING We finished the easel with three coats of water-based polyurethane in a satin finish. To do the job, first remove all hardware and sand the wood with 120-, 150-, and 220-grit sandpaper. Then apply each coat according…

WHO WANTS TO CONNECT YOU TO THE INTERNET IT’S THE MONDAY MORNING following the opening weekend of the movie Blade Runner 2049, and Eric C Leuthardt is standing in the centre of a floodlit operating room clad in scrubs and a mask, hunched over an unconscious patient. “I thought he was human, but I wasn’t sure,” Leuthardt says to the surgical resident standing next to him, as he draws a line on the area of the patient’s shaved scalp where he intends to make his initial incisions for brain surgery. “Did you think he was a replicant?” “I definitely thought he was a replicant,” the resident responds, using the movie’s term for the eerily realisticlooking bioengineered androids. “What I think is so interesting is that the future is always flying…

1 VOLKSWAGEN POLO A complete redesign, the sixth-generation Polo not only borrows styling cues from its siblings, but also now features high-tech driving aids usually found in a class or even two above. And although the compact dimensions remain, the new VW family styling endows the Polo with a distinctly grown-up look. The new Polo is also bigger than its predecessor in every dimension and offers more space for the driver and passengers. Boot space is up too, from 280 to 350 litres. Besides the three usual trim lines (Trendline, Comfortline and Highline), there’s a special edition Polo Beats (features including a 300-watt sound system), R-Line package and, later this year, the GTI. This is the first Polo based on the company’s modular transverse matrix (MQB) platform. According to VW,…

2009 Q I’ve heard that tossing a whole, dead chicken into my septic tank lessens the need to have the tank pumped because the bacterial action created by the rotting carcass is effective at breaking down sewage. True? A Like other urban myths, this theory seems to have taken on a life of its own. I first learnt of it in the late ’80s from readers who said they knew people who’d been using the technique for decades. I’ve also heard about people throwing in rotting hamburger meat or roadkill. Then or now, adding anything to your septic tank to stimulate decomposition is liable to have the opposite effect. I suspect that there are still people who fervently believe in the chicken hypothesis, swearing that they haven’t had to pump…

THE TEAM OF technicians working in the world’s largest online-only supermarket has gained a new pair of hands that’s not only smart, but also strong. The ARMAR-6 prototype collaborative robot that has emerged from the SecondHands project will test and develop new technologies related to the maintenance and repair of automation equipment for UK-based online supermarket Ocado. The maintenance techies have their work cut out keeping Ocado’s highly automated warehouses, known as Customer Fulfilment Centres (CFC), running smoothly: the company delivers more than 260 000 customer orders a week. SecondHands is an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project that combines the skills of world-class researchers focusing on a real-world industrial use case. Among SecondHands’ objects are the creation of a knowledge base to facilitate proactive help, a high degree of human-robot interaction…

A SET OF PLAIN white locking cabinets in the Popular Mechanics US head offices houses the PM archives. The editors there pull these hardbound copies – big, black things with gold lettering, like volumes of a mail-order encyclopaedia – off the shelves with surprising regularity. Their South African counterparts have a smaller, unbound and musty but surprisingly comprehensive collection dating back to the early 1900s to choose from. Sometimes the act of thumbing through the archives is to find a dusty Shop Note that still works, to put together our monthly Time Machine feature, or to check on a prescient old story whose subject is finally news. But much of the time, it’s just to smile. This is a magazine that has predicted flying cars in no fewer than six…

I. “Like insurance, lifesaving devices are hard to value. If you don’t need them, they’re useless, even a bother. If you do need them, they’re priceless.”– POPULAR MECHANICS, 1962 December in Chicago and there’s some loon pretending to drown in the Sheraton Towers Hotel pool. It’s an indoor pool, but still. This guy is floating in there in a white T-shirt and jeans, upright, with his head lolled back and his eyes closed, sneakers just grazing the bottom. An inflatable plaid life jacket barely holds his face out of the water. Later, he grabs for a floating cushion, but that slips out of his hands and he sinks up to his forehead reaching for it. This man’s name is Bayard Richard, and you shouldn’t worry about him. He swam backstroke…

THE CONTRAST BETWEEN the blinking screens of CES and gleaming aluminium of Detroit’s North American Auto Show has never been more stark. Mercedes-Benz, for instance, paraded its new MBUX in Vegas and had a G-Class preserved in amber in the Motor City. Cars have been unveiled at CES for years now. It is, after all, a piece of technology people spend the most time with. BETTER SECURITY If you thought Samsung bought Harman purely for its audio technology, you were wrong (and so were we, kind of). DRVLINE is the first major product of the $8 billion acquisition and came after the establishment of the Samsung Automotive Innovation Fund (a $300 million project). This new platform is said to be modular, scalable and open, allowing automakers to build advanced systems.…