Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2013 i Popular Mechanics

We read all of your comments, tweets, and letters. We're often impressed by your penmanship. Curated by Steve Rousseau Readers had plenty to say in response to Mike Rowe's recent column highlighting the widening gap between college and trade-school graduates and pointing out the potential flaws in platitudes such as "work smart, not hard" ("The Worst Advice in the World," September). ? "I applaud Mike for his insight into what I've always considered a basic flaw in our country's perception of success," writes Jordan Smith of San Juan Capistrano, Calif. "We cannot outsource firefighters, police officers, mechanics, or any of the 'dirty' jobs that are essential to everyday life." Commenting via Facebook, Joe Dean writes: "I couldn't agree more that it is a fallacy that a more expensive education will…

Gaming The System Can you really learn elite racing skills from video games? A rising group of racers say yes. TEST DRIVES Jeep Cherokee Mercedes-Benz S-Class Mazda3 Chevrolet Spark EV Buick LaCrosse Nissan NV200 Compact Cargo Driver Jann Mardenborough earned his racing stripes on his PlayStation instead of on the track. Great racers start young. Seven-time Formula 1 world champion Michael Schumacher won his first kart championship at age 6. Four-time Nascar Sprint Cup champ Jeff Gordon's parents moved from California to Indiana when he was 14 so he could drive 650-hp sprint cars. By conventional wisdom, if you're not on a track by 12 or 13, you're already too old. But a new breed of drivers who spent their formative years playing racing video games instead of behind the…

IT STARTED WITH A THUNDERSTORM. AROUND 5:40 PM ON FRIDAY, JUNE 28, RESIDENTS OF THE SPARSELY POPULATED MOUNTAINS 75 MILES NORTHWEST OF PHOENIX REPORTED A WILDFIRE SPARKED BY LIGHTNING. THE BURN GREW SLOWLY AT FIRST. ON SATURDAY MORNING, A HELICOPTER CREW DOCUMENTED THE AFFECTED AREA AT 8 ACRES. AT 7:38 PM, THE FIRE WAS 100 ACRES—TINY AS WESTERN wildfires go. It was still 2½ miles from the closest town, the isolated community of Yarnell, population 650. By Sunday morning, a couple of hundred firefighters were on the scene. Among them were the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a municipal team out of nearby Prescott. The men were highly trained and meticulously fit, one of 110 specialized hotshot crews in the country. The 20-person squads are expert in manipulating the path of wildfire—often…

We found this single-unit lunch table in a 1939 POPULAR MECHANICS book. Its midcentury-modern styling caught our eye, but it needed updating. A few tweaks, such as adding contours to the tabletop, allowed us to reduce its size and make it more practical for today's lifestyles. The result is a compact table for two that's ideal for a casual afternoon snack or evening drinks. The shopping list is short and thrifty, and you can build this table in a day. But that doesn't mean you need to downscale the design. For a contemporary look, use kiln-dried cedar lumber for the supporting structure and add hardwood edging to the contrasting walnut-veneered plywood. RECOMMENDED TOOLS Miter saw / No. 8 countersink bit / clamps / cordless drill / jigsaw / table saw…

That's an important question. Visit any repair shop and you'll see the problems that E10 gasoline—which is actually 10 percent ethanol—can cause in small air-cooled engines. The alcohol in the fuel dissolves plastic and rubber parts in the fuel system. It also attracts moisture, which leads to corrosion of metal parts. And even if the engine escapes damage, it experiences a loss of performance from chemically degraded fuel, because ethanol-based gasoline can spoil rapidly, often separating into layers of alcohol and fuel. If your mower is equipped with a Briggs & Stratton engine, as many are, the advice is straightforward. "There's no need to drain gasoline from the engine prior to winter storage if stabilizer is added to the fuel according to its directions," says Steve Lavender, the enginemaker's senior…

1877: Giovanni Schiaparelli discovers on Mars geometric patterns that he dubs canali. Later the streaks are assumed to be waterways made by advanced civilizations. 1894: Percival Lowell sets up an observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., where he spends 15 years studying Mars and popularizing the theory that the planet holds intelligent life. 1909: Nikola Tesla claims that Martians are trying to contact him via his wireless transmitter. This doesn't help his reputation as a mad scientist. 1938: A radio dramatization of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds airs. Listeners ignore disclaimers and freak out, believing the Martian invasion is real. 1963: An exoanthropologist from Mars crash-lands on Earth, where he befriends a reporter for The Los Angeles Sun. My Favorite Martian's 107-show run ends in 1966. 1965: Mariner 4 achieves…

Not content with overturning two transportation industries, Elon Musk, head of the space-launch company SpaceX and electric-car manufacturer Tesla Motors, in August unveiled a super-high-speed-transit concept that would allow passengers to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes. But will it actually run? The Hyperloop concept is bold: pods with 28 passengers whizzing through a tube at 760 mph, with a price tag of $6 billion—$62 billion less than the planned California High Speed Rail that would reach only 220 mph. Still, Musk's idea isn't as outrageous as it might sound. Dean Peterson, a retired scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked on a maglev-cargo-transport concept for the Navy, says there are challenges that need to be overcome, but he remains optimistic. "With existing technologies…

The new space thriller Gravity opens with an unbroken 12-minute shot of two astronauts installing a data-gathering device on the Hubble Space Telescope. Sandra Bullock, playing a flustered medical engineer on her maiden voyage, and George Clooney, as a veteran shuttle commander on his final mission, float in zero gravity while bantering, chasing a stray bolt, and marveling at the sight of Earth far below. Then things quickly go very, very wrong. A catastrophic accident triggered by a debris field cripples the shuttle and sends the astronauts pinwheeling into space, forcing them to improvise their own rescue mission. At the core of this taut, 90-minute survival story are the physical facts of life in low Earth orbit. Thanks to a combination of mechanical ingenuity and breakthrough visual effects, weightlessness especially…

For 13 days in 2011 Michael Farmer and Robert Ward combed the southern desert of Oman, seeking treasure in the sands of Dhofar. The pair were not on the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula to hunt for gold, gems, or fossils. They were there for meteorites. Oman's untouched landscape, monotone taupe background, and arid climate make for ideal hunting conditions. The trip was proving to be particularly successful—Farmer claimed a find that had once rested on the moon. He knew a collector who would want it, so he called from the field to arrange a $45,000 sale. For his part, Ward found a watermelon-size specimen, weighing nearly 100 pounds, that could easily be worth $60,000. Then, on the 14th day of the trip, the two Americans were stopped at…

ARDISAM EARTHQUAKE CS4518 Price: $170 Engine: 45 cc Horsepower: 2.1 Bar length: 18 inches Working weight: 14.9 lb* Likes: If you're cutting a little wood for the campfire, this saw is a good and inexpensive choice. It has enough power for small-diameter hardwood and for occasional users cutting stumps, branches, and roots in suburbia. Dislikes: The sprocket cover is a bit fussy to put on, and the oil-fill location is inconvenient. ECHO CS-450 Price: $380 Engine: 45 cc Horsepower: NA Bar length: 18 inches Working weight: 14.1 lb* Likes: Echo's equipment always does well in PM tests, and this saw continues that long tradition. Running the Echo couldn't be simpler: Flip up the toggle switch, pump the purge bulb, pull the choke, and light the engine with a pull or…

There was a time—not too long ago—when the very idea of sharing a car would have seemed absurd. This was back in the days before smartphone apps made it possible to find a set of wheels within walking distance of your home and rent them for a trip to a big-box store in the suburbs. When Zipcar launched in 2000 as a membership-based car-sharing company, it had four vehicles—all parked in Cambridge, Mass. Today it has a fleet of 11,000 autos at the ready in North America and Europe for people in need of a quick ride that might last only an hour. Roughly 900,000 Americans use such car-sharing services, according to Susan Shaheen, codirector of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley—and with good reason.…

Give people phones that provide Internet access and they'll take them everywhere—including into the bathroom and to the swimming pool. Waterproof phones have been a long time coming, and we finally have the first models that aren't ruggedized clunkers. These new submergible phones look and work like their water-averse counterparts. Here, we take three of the latest for a dip. — RACHEL Z. ARNDT SONY XPERIA Z ($630/$580 WITH T-MOBILE PLAN) 1 The Xperia Z is the most elegant-looking of the bunch, and its functionality is nearly as good as the S4's (also reviewed here). But its sharp, angular lines make one-handed operation uncomfortable, and opening the tiny protective flaps that shield the charging and headphone ports requires some tricky fingernail maneuvering. We also find the user-interface design a touch…

"THE DAY BEFORE SOMETHING IS A BREAKTHROUGH, IT'S A CRAZY IDEA." Leadership Award 1. THE TECHNO OPTIMIST PETER DIAMANDIS For a man with such outsize influence, Peter Diamandis has a surprisingly small office. Or maybe it just seems small because it's so filled with stuff—a treadmill desk, a regular desk, a coffee table, a couch, Star Trek memorabilia, model planes, astronaut action figures, toy UFOs, dozens of badges from conferences and speaking engagements, and a framed poster of 28 "Peter's Laws," including "The squeaky wheel gets replaced" and "The ratio of something to nothing is infinite." That densely packed office, located in Playa Vista, Calif., seems symbolic of the breadth of Diamandis's ambitions, crammed into a single human life span. Through the X Prize Foundation, which he started in 1995,…

SMARTPHONE BANKING AUTOCORRECT BLUES ROKU WI-FI Drones have gained a reputation for hunting terrorists and spying on both foreigners and Americans alike. So it's easy to overlook the fact that these hovering, loitering aircraft have quite a following in the hobbyist world as well. To the people who build and fly them recreationally, modern unmanned aerial vehicles (the terms drone and UAV are pretty much interchangeable) are just a technological advancement of the radio-controlled planes and helicopters that amateurs have been flying for years. The Federal Aviation Administration is still struggling to work out the rules for operating UAVs commercially, but for private use, the agency's regulations are remarkably lenient ("Drone Skies," September)—no license is required, and so long as you keep your drone below 400 feet and don't do…

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Q+A The method used to warm a car's cabin isn't a whole lot different from the one used to keep its engine cool. In fact, it's all hooked together and runs on the same circuit. Coolant circulates through the engine and absorbs engine heat, which is exchanged with the outside air by way of the radiator. A much smaller radiator called the heater core uses the same hot coolant to keep the cabin toasty. In general, there are two things that can go wrong with this setup. The first item to check is the engine temperature. To help cold engines warm up fast, the flow of coolant is restricted by way of the thermostat—a thermal valve that opens when it's hot and closes when it's cold. When the thermostat wears…