Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2021 i Popular Mechanics South Africa

BY THE TIME you read this, I will either be out on the trail, or would have already completed the five-day hike some of my friends and I have planned to celebrate the end of 2020, and the dawn of the new year. And I’m sure I’ll hear no objections from you that getting to the end of 2020 in one piece definitely deserves some celebrating. It was most certainly one for the record books. Reminding my body and legs about physical exertion, in the weeks leading up to our hike, has taken quite some effort. The global health crisis and ensuing lockdown, among many other things, resulted in the majority of us being a lot more inactive for the past nine months or so. It turns out that walking…

PHYSICISTS HAVE LONG struggled with a perplexing conundrum: Why do tiny particles such as atoms, photons and electrons behave in ways that bacteria, bees, and bowling balls do not? In a phenomenon called quantum superposition, for example, individual units (say, of light) exist in two states at once. They are both waves and particles, only settling on one or the other if you specifically test for it. This isn’t something that will happen to an object like your desk. It won’t turn solid when you set your coffee cup on it, or liquid if you try to drink it. Superposition has only been observed in the smallest units of matter, which made physicist Markus Arndt of the University of Vienna curious about where the line is. Does quantum weirdness stop…

If we’re not going to listen to Sir David Attenborough about saving our planet, then who? SIR DAVID Attenborough is 94 years old and over the course of his life he has written, directed and narrated more than 100 documentaries. He’s an international treasure as well as one of the most well-travelled people on the planet. He’s seen a lot over the last century and, quite frankly, much of the change he’s witnessed hasn’t been good. In summary, we’ve taken far more from the planet than what we’ve given back. We’ve ripped down rainforests, polluted the seas, overfished and over-farmed. We consume fossil fuels that have raised carbon emissions, and all of this combined is having a devastating effect planet-wide. The point at which we find ourselves now is unsustainable,…

K-WAY EXPEDITION SERIES JACKET I was super excited when told I’d be reviewing one of the K-Way Expedition Series Jackets, as it meant I could visit the K-Way laboratory again. I’ve been a proud owner of a K-Way Expedition Series Kilimanjaro Shell Jacket since 2012, but it’s now sadly reached the end of its lifespan. Over the years, it served me well in a variety of harsh conditions. At Cape Union Mart, we test our Expedition Series gear in the conditions for which they are designed, and my shell was put through its paces on a 12-day expedition to Everest Base Camp, as well as many more local treks. I visited the K-Way factory to do additional research on why these jackets perform so exceptionally well. An outer-shell jacket needs…

SUBSEA CABLES CAN SEND 3 840 GIGABITS OF DATA PER SECOND THE INTERNET IS a physical network connected on land and under the ocean by around 380 undersea cables worldwide that form the backbone of the internet. The more than 1.2 million km of submarine cables span entire oceans and take years to plan and build, and just as long to install. Undersea cables are phenomenal pieces of networking infrastructure. They require state-of-the-art technology that combines the best engineering minds, advanced physics experts and marine biologists. Each cable has to be built for purpose, and the stretch of ocean it spans as well as where it lands on shore must be taken into account. The standard design of fibre consists of send-and-receive components – two fibre pairs within a urethane…

WE ALWAYS try to give our workshop-made tools a bit of style and flair – after all, they will adorn the walls of your workshop and should be a pleasure to build, view, hold and use. On the end of our panel-gauge beam, we fitted a standard pencil. The gauge is dead easy to adjust and use. Following these instructions, it should only take a few hours to make. For materials, search through your special off-cut stock or, better still, visit rarewoods.co.za and choose some attractive wood for the project. We chose to showcase African padauk and hard maple. I’ve been a loyal client of Rare Woods since their inception in the early ’80s, and my visits to the Cape Town and Knysna warehouses have always made me feel like…

Master Lock Mini Safe: Perfect for when you need to keep your keys safe, but don’t want to carry them with you, this handy key-storage unit lets you set your own combination. There is enough space for multiple keys or access cards, and dual-locking levers provide added resistance. Solid zinc body withstands hammering and sawing. Master Lock Tower Combination Lock: Set your own combination on this sturdy padlock featuring a 37 mm-wide zinc body. The 7 mm-diameter shackle is 22 mm long and made from hardened steel, offering extra resistance to cutting or sawing. For added peace of mind, there’s a limited lifetime warranty. Master Lock M1 Excell Padlock: Features a tough boron-alloy body that’s 50 per cent stronger than standard padlocks, and a 45 mm laminated steel core with…

WITH THE RISING popularity of gluten-free bread, there is more demand for it lately. The catch? It takes longer to make. But scientists from the Institute of Food Technology of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, Austria, may have come up with an energy-saving fix: using electric shocks to cook it from the inside out. They believe a concept called ohmic heating could save energy and time during the manufacturing process, according to a paper published in the journal Food and Bioprocess Technology. Ohmic heating passes an electric current through food to generate heat and cook it. This is possible through what’s known as Ohm’s law, where electrical energy is dissipated into heat ‘The heat is generated instantaneously within the complete dough,’ professor of food…

LAST YEAR was a very good year for sci-fi. With no major Avengers blockbusters (thanks to Thanos’s shenanigans in 2019) and Star Wars going on a cinematic hiatus, other films were given a chance to have their own moment. Because of the pandemic, a few others expected in 2020 have had their release dates pushed back to this year. THE INVISIBLE MAN Any adaptation of an HG Wells classic is going to grab our attention. Starring Elizabeth Moss, The Invisible Man takes Wells’s work and modernises it into something that seems to be speaking to today’s #MeToo movement. Whether the film has entirely succeeded with this update is hard to say, but it’s certainly a gripping narrative that shouldn’t be missed. VERDICT: Must-see ARTEMIS FOWL This is one of the bolder,…

THE MORNING OF the powered exoskeleton finals at the 2016 Cybathlon opened on a less-than-promising note. Mark Daniel, a 26-year-old former welder who’d been paralysed from the waist down in a car accident at 18, was rushing down a ramp at the venue when his wheelchair caught on a post. He took a hard tumble out of his chair and on to the pavement. This alarmed his teammates, a group of six engineers and technicians from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. They’d been working 12-hour days for months, designing, assembling, and refining the robotic exoskeleton suit for which Daniel served as the lone pilot. They had no Plan B. Given the public and media spotlight focused on the Cybathlon, careers could rise or fall depending on Daniel’s…

AT HIS MOST POWERFUL, Alec Wilson’s biceps measured a foot and a half around, and his quads were each three hands wide. On a good day, he could dead lift 212 kg, the equivalent of a lion, and bench press 158 kg, not far off twice his own weight. In the moments before he heaved an almighty load, he would summon a rough growl up from his stomach and out of his throat, shocking his body into the production of adrenaline. Others knew when he’d arrived at the gym. They could hear him roar. It was halfway through 2012. Wilson was 36. He was not a professional bodybuilder, like other men he knew, or a strongman, the kind that jerks boulders and tugs trucks for a living. He wasn’t even…

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TIK TOK HAS OUR children’s home addresses. The FaceApp has our photos and the ability to predict what we’ll look like over the course of our lives. Our hotel check-in apps show our travel destinations, room preferences, and upcoming stays. This might not seem like a big deal, but all of this data could be allowing other nations to attack the security of citizens through geotargeting, facial recognition, and pattern projection. A smartphone has the potential to be a more useful weapon than a missile. According to NPR (National Public Radio in the US), some foreign nations, such as Saudi Arabia, use information shared across apps to identify dissidents and potential spies or to hack into computers. Additionally, the data collected through apps can be used to create psychographic models…

FUJIFILM X-S10 Photographers looking for high-end specs in their hardware but who want to pay mid-range prices are in luck. Fujifilm has launched the X-S10, a camera with in-body stabilisation and several other sought-after attributes found in the brand’s high-end X-T4, but now in a smaller body with a new magnesium-alloy economic grip. The 26.1 MP X-Trans CMOS 4 sensor and high-speed X-Processor 4 processing engine (also shared with the X-T4) in this model ensure maximum functionality. Tipping the scales at a mere 465_g, the X-S10 is nicely suited to those who want to retain ease of mobility while shooting stills and video. The AUTO /SP (or Scene Position) makes it all much easier for beginners, too, as it adjusts the settings to achieve the best results, without the user…

I HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO design cars, but that changed when I got to design school. That’s where I discovered a world of materials, processes, and tools I never knew existed. Cars were limited when it came to this, and after a trip to Europe, I found a new passion on two wheels. This inspiration was driven further when I returned to an assignment to study bicycle design for a class. It was then that I discovered bamboo frames from the 19th century. My mind made a design almost immediately. It’s just putting tubes together, right? How hard could it be? The answer came over six months. After that, I was hooked. It’s been my life since 2007, especially after the earthquake that hit Mexico City in September 2017. I…

BMW MOTORRAD’S raison d’être has always been touring, touring, touring, either on- or off-road. Exceptions aside (the nutty S 1000 RR springs to mind), Markus Schramm’s team has served up clinical, superbly engineered continent flatteners for close on 50 years, epitomised by the Reise- Tourer boxer road bikes (RT) and the Gelände/Straße off-road stalwarts (GS). THE REASONING Why, then, introduce a giant, low-riding cruiser, more Milwaukee than Berlin? The answer, in a phrase, is new markets. BMW’s recent retro obsession boils down to a desire to capture a younger, hipster market. Faced with a saturated touring market (of mostly older, white men), the marketing gurus suggested a fusing of BMW history and the current vogue for all things retro. First were the so-called naked bikes, the R nineT range –…