Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2024 i Popular Mechanics

WHEN HUMANS GET INVOLVED IN places they weren’t invited, things start to change. The Moon is no different. A team of researchers at the University of Kansas believes that human involvement has made us one of the dominant forces shaping the Moon. That’s enough, they believe, to declare a new epoch on the Moon—the “Lunar Anthropocene.” “This idea is much the same as the discussion of the Anthropocene on Earth—the exploration of how much humans have impacted our planet,” Justin Holcomb, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “We argue the Lunar Anthropocene already has commenced, but we want to prevent massive damage or a delay of its recognition until we can measure a significant lunar halo cause by human activities, which would be too late.” The team says that,…

TOOLS LOSE THEIR EDGE AND BECOME DULL. That’s a fact of their existence. But it’s also a fact that they need not stay that way. Sharpening nearly anything, from a shovel to a putty knife to a plane to a chisel, is a relatively simple procedure. You abrade away some metal and, in the process, produce a cleanly shaped bevel that leads to an acute edge. When seen under magnification, however, the first sharpening pass on the bevel may leave deep scratches in it. The second phase of sharpening is to polish out these scratches. Let’s not complicate matters. That’s sharpening. Remove metal, smooth out scratches. Here’s another fact of sharpening. There are multiple ways to get the same job done. You might enjoy the endless discussion that this topic generates…

Soldering looks much harder than it actually is—and it’s a surprisingly useful skill. It’s a process that’s used to bond wires, cables, and electrically conductive materials using a filler metal, which is, well, solder. Commonly used to assemble and fix electronics, soldering establishes a connection between wires and other metal surfaces—among other uses. This process, sometimes confused with welding, heats the adjoining metals but doesn’t melt them. Building first-person view (FPV) drones was my gateway into soldering. My brother first showed me the ropes, as he had more than 10 years of soldering experience amassed through projects of his own; FPV drones were a great common ground for us to work together. After getting the fundamentals dialed in, he showed me that this act of electronics joinery is just the…

If you’re a character in a mob movie, and you have to get rid of a body, one of your top options is probably going to be to chuck the unfortunate victim into a large container of acid. No body, no crime. In real life, you hopefully will never need to get rid of such incriminating evidence. But, unfortunately, there will likely be a time when you have to decide between burial and cremation, whether for yourself or a loved one. In recent years, however, other options have begun to pop up, including an alternative form of cremation called alkaline hydrolysis (or, water cremation), which basically speeds nature along. This Sopranos-style method of dissolving a body uses a strong base, such as sodium hydroxide, as opposed to something like hydrofluoric…

Removing a door from its hinges is one of the easiest DIY jobs that comes along. Yet more than one hinge pin has refused to budge even after employing a variety of tools and methods. If this ever happens to you, we’re here to help. There are two sources of trouble that cause a hinge pin to be difficult to remove: the inability to hit the pin squarely and on target, and friction. Here, we show you how to deal with both issues, neatly and efficiently. HIT IT SQUARELY // The old technique of putting a big common nail under the hinge pin and whacking it is a perfectly good way to knock the hinge pin from its bore…until it isn’t. I’ve seen more than one pin held so securely…

BRAD BLOIS CAN VIVIDLY RECALL THE FIRST time he fought a wildfire from the air. He remembers the thick stench of smoke, the sound of chatter crackling through his radio, the physical vibrations of the other tankers nearby—a total sensory overload. “It was like drinking from a firehose,” he says. But he knew he’d made the right decision. It was the spring of 2014, and a fire—likely ignited by sparks flung from railroad tracks—was tearing through a forest in Alberta, Canada. Blois had never worked as an aerial firefighter before. Typically, on top of their training, new hires will fly as a copilot for their first few flights. Because Blois had significant flight experience, he started off as a captain immediately. Blois, 49, began flying professionally in 1999. He spent the…

HONING FREEHAND → To hone freehand, lock your hands and wrists, and produce the honing motion by rocking on the balls of your feet and bending your knees to ensure you keep the plane iron steady. Some people lock their hands and wrists and pivot from the waist. Some woodworkers put equal pressure on both the forward and back strokes, while others put more pressure on the back stroke because it’s easier to apply steady pulling pressure than pushing pressure. See what works best for you. TOOL WIDTH AND STONE WIDTH → If the tool is wider than the stone, you have two options: A. Hold the tool sideways to the stone. B. Hold the tool at an angle so that its entire hone surface is on the stone, then…

Soldering isn’t the only way to connect wires to electronics. In fact, it can be unnecessarily laborious for basic jobs like joining wires together—which often feels like it requires five hands to hold everything in the right spot. Before we start a firestorm of letters to the editor, we’re aware that solder clamps and other “helping hands” devices are a big aid. Crimps and Solder Seal Butt (SSB) connectors are two other solutions that might keep your sanity intact. Crimp connectors have long been the gold standard for pairing wires together. Despite their ubiquity, crimp connectors aren’t waterproof, tend to be bulky, and can be pulled apart fairly easily. SSB connectors are a much slicker solution, fixing all of the shortcomings with crimp connectors; SSBs are shrinkable tubes that seal…

THE U.S. NAVY DESTROYER MASON (DDG- 87) was wrapping up a mission rescuing a tanker from pirates in the Gulf of Aden when the situation sharply escalated. The ship’s radar detected at least one—or possibly two—missiles moving toward its position at supersonic speeds, each loaded with well over a half ton of explosives. One or two truck launchers (situated in territory controlled by Iran-backed Houthi rebels) had erected their weapons into firing position and launched a missile arcing high on a ballistic trajectory toward the general position of Mason, the Japanese destroyer Akebono, and the Liberian tanker Central Park—a trio of ships that had been called together the day prior to deal with a boarding by unknown armed assailants. Since the outbreak of conflict between Hamas and Israel in October…

WHEN GERMAN MATHEMATICIAN Christopher Clavius introduced the world to the humble decimal point in 1593, he used it in one table, and never mentioned it or used it again. Clearly, the decimal point is incredibly important to the way we do math today. So, why did Clavius abandon such a monumental discovery so soon after making it? Because he’d stolen it. Well, “stole” may imply a bit more malice than is necessary. Let’s not read motive into 14th century mathematicians. But according to a paper published in the journal Historia Mathematica, Clavius actually likely imported the decimal point into his own work when referencing the work of Italian merchant and mathematician Giovanni Bianchini from the 1440s—work that had been done almost 150 years earlier. “In order to understand what Bianchini was…

WHATEVER YOUR STANCE IS ON climate change, it’s impossible to have missed the near-ubiquitous call to action to “keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels.” Over the past few years, the some what bureaucratic phrase has become a rallying cry. This ambitious target first surfaced following the Paris Climate Agreement, and describes a sort of climate threshold set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—if we pass a long-term average increase in temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and hold at those levels for several years, we’re going to do some serious damage to ourselves and our environment. Well, a new paper from the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute has some bad news: The world might’ve blown past that threshold four years ago. Published in…

JEFFERSONTOWN, KENTUCKY NOVEMBER 2021 The suspects had stashed the van inside a residential garage on Southside Drive in this suburb just outside Louisville. At 4 a.m., officers from the Jeffersontown Police Department burst onto the property, raided the garage, and opened the van’s back doors. There, they found their mark: almost 200 catalytic converters, a tangle of rusty parts with hacksaw marks where each had been cut from a vehicle. It seemed the homeowner was fencing stolen catalytic converters, paying thieves for the parts, then selling them to a processor who extracted the precious metals inside. One catalytic converter (or “autocat,” to gearheads) can net a thief more than $100, while the broker buying the parts could sell each one to a recycler for up to $500. And it’s pretty…

IT’S A BRIGHT fall day in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The air is chilly and crisp, and sunlight shines through leaves tinted in the deep reds, oranges, and golds of the season. And there, just to the right of a winding footpath, lies a cadaver, a nude male mottled in the purples and blues of a bruise. Lying on his back, nestled among the leaves, he looks almost as if he’s fallen asleep—but he’s actually working. His job is to decompose so that scientists can study his body’s biological undoing and answer morbid questions about how mummified tissue breaks down. These answers might one day assist in murder investigations and could possibly reveal new ways to identify John and Jane Does. Compared to some of his peers nearby,…