The ProMare Go suits a wide range of outdoor activities and is eye catching for

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Please call Muhle Glashutte USA on 727-896-4278 for any new model.
 HOW
YOUR WORLD
WORKS

The New Plan to Fight

with This

AMERICA’S
MAGAZINE
SINCE 1902
 ENJOY RESPONSIBLY
©2018. DEWAR’S BLENDED SCOTCH WHISKY 40% ALC. BY VOL. IMPORTED BY JOHN DEWAR & SONS COMPANY, CORAL GABLES, FL.
COV E R I L LU S T R AT I O N BY A L E X A N D E R W E L L S
 ↓ FR O M T HE EDITO R

The Comfort
of Rituals
H E N WE MOVE D from the city to the country, the boys were, I think, six Starting on page

W
and three. On the third night in the new house—the irst house they’d ever 8, you’ll ind 37
lived in—my wife and I were tucking them in and the older one started great presents
to cry. I asked him what was wrong. for any holiday
“I liked when we used to walk to the bagel store across the street in our you might cel-
pajamas,” he garbled through his tears. ebrate. Here’s
He was right. Every Saturday morning, we would wake up and shule a 38th, from
across First Avenue to Ess-a-Bagel and order a big, warm, pufy breakfast. A city ritual. contributor
Now the view out our kitchen window was a red barn and a ield. Gary Dell’Abate,
We told him that we would do new fun things that would become regular things. And we Howard Stern’s
have done that. The bagels were replaced by warm cider doughnuts from the local orchard, longtime
steaming in their white paper bag and getting cinnamon everywhere. We go in pajamas. producer.
There’s another tradition, but it’s one we have to wait
I’ve dreamt of being
for each year. We live a few houses down from a sort of able to tell Alexa
town green, where no one ever goes except on Christ- to turn on my TV,
mas Eve. It’s across the street from a dirt road and backs and now I inally
up to a meadow. In the middle is a big ir tree, and every can. Setting up
year some of the guys who maintain the roads in town— the Amazon Fire
they call it the highway department, which is kind of TV Cube ($120)
is super-easy. I
funny—string up lights. They build a big bonire with told it my cable
a combination of seasoned firewood and old pallets. company, that I’m
Around 5:30, everyone who’s in town for Christmas using a TiVo, my
heads over to the green. Some friends usually park in ZIP code. Once my
our driveway and walk down with us—the police set up passwords were in,
lares and block of half the road, big doings in our town. which is still a chore,
my voice replaced
There’s hot cider, and a volunteer from the Episcopal
all my remotes.
church hands out lyric sheets to carols. Then, at 6:30, Instead of turning
you can see lashing lights coming up over the hill by the on the TV, select-
old union hall, and one of the ladder trucks from the vol- ing Input 2, picking
unteer ire department appears, with Santa Claus riding up my Apple TV
on the back. He makes his way to the tree, receives a long remote, and inally
asking Siri to ind
line of sticky-lipped kids, and everyone drinks cider and
Ozark, now I walk
sings and eventually drifts of to their houses, full of the in the room, say,
smells of Christmas roasts and cookies. “Alexa, play Ozark”
This will be our seventh Christmas in town. Twice it was canceled because of rain, once and the TV turns on
because of snow, and once we were at my parents’. But we’ll be there this year, grateful for right to the episode
the company of friends and neighbors, and grateful, too, for the comfort of the ritual itself. I was watching. It
works on my cable
I wish you and yours a happy season, doing whatever brings that same comfort to you.
box, too. It’s awe-
some. I love it. And
it’s the beginning of
something much,
RYAN D’AGOSTINO
Editor in Chief much bigger.
@rhdagostino

4 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

 Winter wonderlands are
always within reach.
Presenting the all-new 3-row Subaru Ascent.™

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Standard Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive + up to 27 mpg* gets you out there.
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Subaru is a registered trademark. *EPA-estimated highway fuel economy for 2019 Subaru Ascent and Ascent Premium models with standard equipment. 2019 Subaru Ascent Limited shown is
rated at 26 mpg highway. Actual mileage may vary. †Internet access is purchased separately through AT&T with monthly, per gigabyte, and unlimited data options available. Existing AT&T customers
have the option to add an additional line to their AT&T Mobile Share plan. **Requires third-row dual USB charging port accessory. ††MSRP excludes destination and delivery charges, tax, title, and
registration fees. Retailer sets actual price. Certain equipment may be required in specific states, which can modify your MSRP. See your retailer for details. 2019 Subaru Ascent Limited shown has an
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 Every other Friday, be entertained and enlightened
by the editors of your favorite magazine.
Hosts Jacqueline Detwiler and
Kevin Dupzyk explore ideas,
products, hacks, tricks, projects, and
techniques that are guaranteed to
make your life easier. (Jacqueline is a
neuroscientist! Kevin is a great guy!)
The Most Useful Podcast Ever is an
entirely original, 25-minute, biweekly
audio program that’s perfect to
listen to while doing yardwork,
driving, washing dishes, running,
jogging, walking . . .

H E RE ’S H OW TO G ET IT:

SUBSCRIBE

Go to the iTunes store Subscribe to Get automatic Enjoy

or popularmechanics. The Most downloads every time
com/podcast Useful Podcast Ever a new episode airs

Learn everything from lawn-care secrets to the best way to hang a TV

to the proper way to sear a steak. Also: On one episode, for reasons we now forget,
Jacqueline and Kevin had an on-air push-up contest. (She won.)
 A

8 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com P H OTO G R A P H S BY L E V I B R O W N

 A / Lego Tech n ic
Bugatti Ch iron
AFTE R MANY EVE N I NGS of work-
ing on this two-foot model (and it
will be many), along with having a
to-scale version of one of the most
beautiful cars ever made, you’ll
also know how the engine works,
because these pistons actually
reciprocate. You’ll know that the car
has an eight-speed transmission,
because you can actually shift gears
by pulling on the steering-wheel
paddles. You’ll know that the real
Chiron needs a special key to acti-
vate top-speed mode, because you
need a special Lego key to drop the
rear wing into the same top-speed
position. Like the McLarens and
Ferraris and the Porsche Lego made
before it, the Chiron shows how good
Lego is getting at letting those of us
who will never see this hypercar in
real life enjoy that it exists. $350
—Alexander George

B / Superior G love
Endura Welding Gloves
YEARS AGO, I worked in a shop in
which everyone tended the dan-
gerously ancient woodstove. The
method was to swing open the door,
heave the log into the inferno, and
hope for the best. If the log ended
up well-placed, we considered it a
happy coincidence. Our real goal
was to survive without burns and
a ruined shirt. Everything that
makes these gloves perfect for weld-
ing—the double layer of cowhide in
the palms, protection nearly to your
elbow, and a comfortable insulating
lining that easily slips over the cuf
of a burly work shirt—would have
also taken the fear out of loading
that old stove. Give them to anyone
you know who owns a ireplace and
they’ll know no fear again. $25
—Roy Berendsohn
I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY D O U G L A S G I A R L E T T I

C / M SR E lixir 2 Tent
I BOUG HT MY FI RST backpacking tent not because it would minimize the weight in my
pack, but because it would it in a carry-on. My brother and I were lying to Hawaii to
hike the Nā Pali Coast, the jagged part of Kauai that looks like Jurassic Park. We took
an 11-mile trail over mountainous terrain with sheer drops into the ocean. By mile 8,
I was sure that if I had carried one more ounce of anything, my legs would have failed
and I would have fallen in. My brother almost did. At the end of the trail, I laid down and
whined. And I still had to set up the tent. Luckily, ultralight tents—like the Elixir 2, which
weighs only six pounds and actually its two people comfortably—have few poles. Instead
of hiking out the next morning, we were ofered a ride on a jet ski—if all our stuf could
go in the driver’s dry bag. The tent it there, too. $250 —Kevin Dupzyk

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 9


A MY GRANDFATHER ALWAYS carried a pocket-
A / Ca rha r tt Storm Defen der
Shoreline Jacket a n d Overa lls
I DON ’T H U NT or ish, but I do watch foot-
ball. At the Notre Dame/Navy game last
year, it poured during the tailgate and
game without stop, the temperatures
barely rising above 40 degrees. Friends
poked fun at my conspicuous camo print
(not my choice; my mom won it in a raf-
le) but I wasn’t shivering underneath
the heavy-duty waterproof synthetic. It
didn’t seem as silly when I stood in the
house after the game in the dry clothes I’d
worn under the suit while they peeled of
limp jackets and jeans that left blue dye
streaks down their shriveled legs. Bury
me in my Storm Defenders. jacket, $120;
overalls, $130 —James Lynch
M i lwau kee R i d gi d Pro
Re d l i th i u m G ea r C a r t Too l b ox
U S B H eate d A convenient and easy
G loves upgrade to a classic tool-
As tough as any box, with the option to
Milwaukee gear, stack multiple toolboxes.
with a built-in bat- Because the job isn’t
tery that keeps always close to you.
your hands warm $59
for up to six hours.
$179
10 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
B / SOG Switch p lier 2 .0 M ultitool
knife. He had several, none particularly
special. His thought on it was that you could do
a lot more with a pocketknife than you could
without one. The same can be said for carrying
a multitool, only more so, if you do the math.
I’ve owned a few over the years. The stan-
dard Swiss Army knife. A Gerber I bought
when I was barely out of Marine Corps boot
camp. The Leatherman Wave, your basic
workhorse. And the one I currently carry at
work as a ireighter, the SOG SwitchPlier.
One of my greatest instructors, Lt.
David Russell, described ireighters in
today’s complex environment as “profes-
sional problem-solvers.” We’re tasked with
everything from car accidents to hazmat
conditions, the inevitable alarm mal-
function, to, of course, ireighting. The
SwitchPlier helps in all of them.
The pliers are button-activated with a
spring assist, opening efortlessly with true
one-hand operation—nice when you’re reach-
ing while holding on to something. At about
three quarters of an inch, the jaw opening is
not enough to tackle a big job, but when we get
called to a gas or water leak, it’s adequate to
secure a gas shutof. Since gears in the pivot
point increase the gripping strength, it’s also
powerful enough to help with a rusted water
valve. As with most multitools, the handle
houses a knife with a serrated edge, a suite
of screwdrivers, an awl, and a ile. And while
not a perfect version of any one of these items,
it is far better to have a pretty good Phillips
screwdriver in your pocket at all times than
to have a great screwdriver in a toolbox back
on the rig. Just like my grandfather said. $60
—Andrew Northshield
The rm -a - Rest B i g A gnes
U no Ca m p Cha i r B o l te n
A comfortable folding Sleeping Bag
chair that folds down to A mummy bag
the size of a with lexible
Frisbee. sides that let you
$90 actually move
inside it. Good to
20 degrees Fahr-
enheit. Weighs
less than three
pounds. $289
C / Wolverine G lacier
Xtreme Winter Boot s
N EWSPAPE R RE PORTE R , at
least where I worked in east-
ern Pennsylvania, was not a job
that could cover all of the bills.
So I chased stories at night and
worked in a lumberyard dur-
ing the day. Every winter there
were two things that I needed for
both roles: a better cofee ther-
mos and a better pair of boots.
Whether I was walking a snowy
city for an interview or drop-
ping 2x10s on my toes, grateful
that my feet were too cold to
really feel the pain, I learned the
importance of good boots. These
Wolverines have a synthetic toe
cap and heel counter for dura-
bility, and an aerogel insulation
that keeps you warm even when
you aren’t wearing your thickest
wool socks, which, for me, were
never thick enough. If I were still
doing double duty, no way could
I keep it up with what I used to
wear. Turns out youth can help
you through quite a bit. Also:
Stanley thermos. Two quarts.
Keeps it warm all day. $210 —R.B.

Lee Va l ley & B io Li te Fi re Pi t

Ve ri ta s Ja pa nese A super-eicient, app-
K n i fe - M a ki n g K i t controlled portable ire
Sp ecia l i zed Comes with honed Craf t s ma n pit that burns particulate
Al lez B i ke carbon-steel blades and 1 37- Piece Too l K i t matter to limit smoke. Or Ca se Cu rly
For under a thousand beech handles that you Just reintroduced and still use it with charcoal as a M a p le Kn i fe
bucks, you get a carbon- can shape to it your hand perfect for anyone getting grill. $200 Instead of the typical
iber fork, mounts for exactly. $60 started in working on their synthetic material, this
racks and saddlebags, Shi- car. An insanely cheap price knife has a maple-eye burl
mano shifters, and a name that includes Craftsman’s handle dyed a beautiful
you can trust. $800 lifetime warranty. $80 black. $118

Winter 2018–19 11
 Li ght & M otio n
Vya Pro Co m m u te r
Co m b o B i ke H ead -
Pata go n ia Stee l l a m p a n d Ta i l l i ght
Fo rge D e n i m Jacket Lights that go on and of
The company’s irst foray on their own so you don’t
into workwear is made have to worry about for-
of USA cotton in a blend getting to shut them of
that makes it 15 times and draining the battery.
stronger (by weight) than $100
steel. $199
Klea n Ka n - Craf t s ma n
tee n 27 oz M u l ti - B i t s 4 -Way Pe n
Wate r Bottle A pocket-size adjustable
Same tough and magnetic screwdriver.
lightweight water We’ve never seen any- M a gp u l DAK A Pou ch
bottle, but now it thing more convenient A simple and elegant place
has a new environmentally and useful. $3 to store all of your charg-
friendly inish that’s four ing plugs and cables when
times tougher and should you travel. Our technol-
never chip. $21 ogy editor, Alex, swears
by it. $23

12 Winter 2018–19
A / Ma kita 18v Circula r Saw
MY FI RST CI RCU LAR SAW was a Black &
Decker Saw Cat, a famous power tool in New
England. But as good as that old saw was, it
was corded. So you needed an extension cord.
And nobody, myself included, owned a decent
one in those days—always undersized and
wrapped in more electrical tape than was
safe. Like many power tools today, the Makita
circular saw doesn’t use a cord. What makes
it unique is that it has as much power as its
corded predecessors. Even my Saw Cat. With
a 6,000-rpm brushless motor engineered to
match torque and rpm to the load, it’s faster
than my old saw, especially given its improved
handling with rubberized grips and advanced
geometry. The only thing that improved the
handling on my old saw was getting bigger
forearms. $239, tool only —R.B.

B / Eddie Bauer BC
Ever Therm Down Jacket
IT DOESN ’T MATTE R the qualiications of
the jacket—heavy-duty, arctic-tested, life-
time guarantee—on me, down doesn’t
last a season. Usually it’s a tree branch
that catches me. Or a bush. Tears right
through the exterior, or pulls the stitch-
ing out of a seam. The down inds its way
out, water inds its way in, and I’m left not
much warmer than if I were wearing no
jacket at all. The new EverTherm jacket
has no bales, no seams for me to tor-
ment. It doesn’t need them, since the
down inside is in super-thin sheets that
hold their shape without being stufed
into stitched compartments. I’m sure
I’ll ind a way to ruin it, but at least
there’s a chance that’ll take me
more than a year. $500
—Henry Robertson

Guitar-Jo Fjä l l - Treepod

Guitar Clamp K’ N ex Th ri l l Ri des räve n Pl u s
Add it to an electric gui- B io n i c B la s t Rol l e r Sp litpack Tree
tar to immediately give Coa ste r B u i l d i n g Set When you Lou n ge r
yourself the sound of a An 809-part powered unzip this A miniature
banjo. $38 roller coaster. Down- backpack, clubhouse
load the app and put your it cracks open into for kids, U n io n Ga ra ge
phone in the included VR two separate halves. Pack but it hangs D e l uxeToo l Ro l l
goggles to get a irst-per- your ready-to-go hiking from a tree. A beautiful and organized
son view of the coaster. gear in one and everything $230 tool kit for your motorcycle.
$100 else in the other. $175 $295

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 13

 A / Otterbox
given to themselves. What can you do for those people? Ya m pa D r y D u f fel
Give them something that will make their gift even better. YOU MAY BUY the Yampa for your
canoeing trip, but you’ll use it for
I F TH E Y G OT . . . I F T H E Y G O T . . .  I F T H E Y G O T . . . 
An iPhone XS A new DSLR A Nintendo Switch everything. The zippers on most
G E T T H E M . . .  GET THEM . . . GET THEM . . . dry bags need to be wrestled closed
the Logitech Powered a Timbuk2 Camera Super Smash Bros. or open, which means when you’re
Wireless Charging Sling Bag Ultimate in a hurry you won’t get a good seal.
Stand
It’s designed for the An addictive ighting Boom, leaks. The Yampa’s zipper
Logitech’s stand works current era of compact game with adorable slides like the one on your favorite
up to 7.5 watts, the mirrorless cameras, sound efects. $60 sweatshirt. The material is tough
fastest wireless charge with customizable
speed iPhones can enough for anywhere you throw it,
padding and pockets
handle, and holds your for memory cards and and the backpacking straps make
phone upright so you can charge cables. $70 carrying big loads easy. So far I’ve
see notiications. $70 used mine in a boat, driven 400
miles with it in the bed of my truck,
and strapped it on the back of my
motorcycle across the Adirondack
Park. Pretty sure it doesn’t care
where we go next. $250 —J.L.

14 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

B / For Flying
SO NY WH -10 0 0XM3
The only other head-
phone to match Bose’s
noise-cancellation
technology, plus crazy
comfortable padding
for your ears and an
industry-top 30 hours
of playback between
USB-C recharging.
$350
C / For Your Desk
RHA MA65 0
WI R E LESS
Neckband head-
phones from a Scottish
company that sound
F O R H U N D R E D S M O R E G R E A T G I F T I D E A S , G O T O P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S . C O M / H O L I D AY - G I F T- G U I D E .
way better than any-
thing you can buy for
less than $200. The
12-hour battery will
last all day, and as long
as you take the time to
ind the correct earbud
it, they’re light enough
to forget you’re wear-
ing them. $100
D / For
Wa lking the Dog
APPLE AI R PO DS
Many companies
have tried, some have
come close, but no
one else has achieved
the convenience of
what Apple released
in 2016. You can use
either earbud alone,
and the pause/play
function when you
remove them never
fails. The sound quality
won’t loor you, but for
podcasts and a back-
ground soundtrack for
mundane errands, it’s
still a futuristic experi-
ence to use them. $159
E / For
Working O ut
PL ANTRO N I CS
BACKB E AT FIT
Sealed against rain
and sweat, with a band
system that hovers on
your ears and won’t fall
of during plyometric
exercises. The earbuds
let in ambient noise,
so you can hear traf-
ic if you jog outside. If
you can spend more,
the Jabra Elite Active
65t ($190) earbuds
are even smaller and
sound better. $130
F / For Rea lly
Listen ing to M usic
G R ADO
L ABS GW10 0
These are open-back
@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19
headphones, which
means anyone nearby
will know when you’re
listening to Ariana
Grande. But if all you
care about is you and
the music, open-back
headphones make it
sound like you’re in a
room full of instru-
ments. The Grados
come with a 3.5mm
cable and a 6.5mm
adapter to plug into an
amp, or you can use
Bluetooth 4.2 with
apt-X, if you don’t mind
losing a little idelity to
go wireless. $249
15
 TH E R E A D E R PA G E

Readers Helping Readers

The photo of the “closet” furnace in the September issue (“Is Your House Bleeding
You Dry?”) is an opportunity to emphasize an important safety issue. Your com-
ments about sealing joints are appropriate. The louvered door for the closet is
appropriate. However, as a ire investigator I have seen multiple instances of
condo or apartment ires where this type of door is remodeled with a solid
door. Even worse, I’ve seen original installations with solid doors. This
mistake can lead to ires, carbon-monoxide poisoning, and inei-
cient operation. The same issue applies to gas-ired water heaters.
—James Reddington, Middletown, Connecticut

A Christmas Story
ON A M I D - FE BRUARY afternoon, a neigh-
bor visited as I was inishing a toolbox for
our youngest grandson’s fifth birthday,
adapted from some Popular Mechan-
ics plans I found online. The toolbox and
the neighbor’s engineering background
prompted him to say, “I’d like to give my
grandson a toolbox like that.”
son and wondered when we should begin
building it. I said we should wait a bit, as
his grandson was still young for it. The
neighbor agreed.
I don’t remember if I talked with my
neighbor again. A week or two later, he was
admitted to the hospital, and later died.

“He just turned three.” What’s Up

several years. I explained that
his grandson likely wouldn’t
be able to use the tools until
he was ive or six.
A year later, I was sur-
prised to ind our neighbor’s
wife at the door early on a snowy
park in our driveway. Her husband had
just had an early morning cardiological
appointment, and a lot of snow had piled on
their long, steep driveway. I quickly agreed
and drove them to their house in our front-
wheel-drive vehicle.
As we passed my woodworking area on
the way to the car, my neighbor said that he
hadn’t forgotten the toolbox for his grand-
uary, my wife and I ran into the child
and his mother while strolling through
our neighborhood. When prompted about
his favorite gift, he said, “My toolbox
from Santa!” We smiled. My promise
had been kept, and two woodworkers
received a special and treasured Christ-
mas gift: our neighbor’s grandson’s joy.
—John Hart, Corvallis, Oregon
with That Clock?
T H E S W I S S C LO C Kby Eric (Reader Proj-
ect, October) is a great piece of work. A
most interesting design. It also brings to
mind something I have observed over the
years when it comes to clocks using Roman
numerals. Many years ago when I was learn-
ing Roman numerals I learned that the
letters for 4 were IV (1 from 5 or 5 minus 1). I
can see that IIII can also equal 4 (1+1+1+1=4)
but is it the proper method of using Roman
numerals? Has the rule for using Roman
numerals changed since then? Just curious.
—George De Baca, Augusta, Georgia
Editor’s note: We did some research
and found out that using IIII over IV is
traditional in clock-making. It is also
how the clock appears in our original
instructions. There isn’t one agreed-
upon answer for why IIII is the norm;
proposed reasons include the Roman god
Jupiter, King Louis XIV of France, and
the way numerals were cast out of metal.
Sometimes, you just have to stick with
tradition.

Letters to the editor can be emailed to

editor@popular mechanics.com. Include
your full name and address. Letters may
be edited for length and clarity.

16 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

TO FIND NEW STYLES AND GREAT FITS, VISIT WRANGLER.COM
H OW YO U R WO R L D WO R KS

↓ LARGE PHOTO OF
THE MONTH

Last month, construction

broke ground in Dubai on a
$40 million, 130,000-square-
foot vertical farm, the largest
in the world. For now, the New-
ark, New Jersey, headquarters
of AeroFarms (pictured) still
holds that title: At 70,000
square feet, with lightweight
plant beds stacked under a
custom array of LED lights, the
facility yields 2 million pounds
of greens per year. That’s 390
times more productive than a
traditional farm would be with
the same amount of land—
while using 95 percent less
water. When water and arable
land are scarce, or import costs
are steep, this new kind of farm
ofers a way to grow fresh,
local, and environmentally
sustainable produce.

PH OTOG R APH FO R
PO PU L AR M ECHAN I CS BY
ADAM FRI E D B E RG

Winter 2018–19 19
H OW YO U R WO R L D WO R KS

↓ VETER A NS

The New Army

of Caregivers
As more and more wounded veterans come home,
their families have had to take on the role of caregivers.
Whether they’re ready or not. / B Y LY DI A W O O L E V E R /

M
MOST NIGHTS, TIM MEADOWS stays up late.
It’s the only time the house is inally quiet.
At 3 a.m. he might read a book or take a walk
outside, inally able to get a moment to him-
self—a break from the responsibilities that
accompany the daylight. Even in the dark-
ness, though, the 23-year-old is still on the
clock. His dad, Jon, could emerge from his
room at any time, asleep and wandering.
There are security cameras throughout the
house, but Tim does most of the watching.
“This is a constant babysitting job,” Tim
says. “Just making sure he doesn’t break
anything, or break himself.”
For 43 years, Jon Meadows lived a decent
life. He was a truck driver and a family man;
he enlisted in the National Guard in 2002.
During a combat mission in Afghanistan in
2013, an IED struck the vehicle behind him.
His body remained intact, but an injury to his
brain’s right frontal lobe left him in need of
constant care and supervision. Along with the
sleepwalking, the retired staf sergeant still
sufers from reduced motor skills, impaired
speech and memory, seizures, narcolepsy,
P H OTO G R A P H BY G A B R I E L L A D E M C Z U K

vision loss, and mood swings. With Jon in

need of constant care, and no real recovery
in sight, he and his wife, Melissa, soon gave
up their house.
After 17 years of war in which 2.7 million
Americans have served, a 2014 Rand Cor-
Tim Meadows, right, and poration study estimates that there are 5.5
his son, Oliver, center, million military caregivers like Tim Mead-
have been helping take
care of Tim’s father, Jon, ows in the United States right now. Military
since 2014. protective gear and battlefield medicine
are better than they’ve ever been—far more

20 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

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↓ VETER A NS

advanced than they were in Vietnam or even “It would be easier to just walk out and supposed to. When Tim gets home from his
the Persian Gulf War. Many more servicemen leave this situation, but I can’t do that,” Tim classes at the local community college, where
and -women return with injuries that, in the says. “There’s a sense of duty, loyalty. A really he studies accounting, he takes over, tackling
past, might have killed them. It also means big part of it is my own son.” the household chores and then turning to Jon,
that their spouses, parents, and children, While Tim wanted to help his parents, as staying up at least as long as his dad is awake.
most of them untrained in medical or psycho- a single dad, he igured he could also use a As many as three times a week, he makes a
logical care, have become full-time handlers. hand with Oliver. They moved down in 2014, run to Michaels for art supplies.
Elizabeth Dole, the former senator and eventually settling in rural Maryland, about Art is a new hobby for Jon. Found therapy.
caregiver to one of the Initially he thought it was “for
most famous and her- girls,” but not anymore. Now,
alded wounded veterans WHEN TIM GETS HOME FROM HIS CLASSES, HE most days he’s standing in his
in United States history, TAKES OVER, TACKLING THE HOUSEHOLD basement studio, thick strokes
is working to spread aware- of paint across the canvas. His
ness of the need to help CHORES AND THEN TURNING TO JON, STAYING UP clay sculptures line the china
these caregivers. Her foun- cabinet in the front room.
AT LEAST AS LONG AS HIS DAD IS AWAKE.
dation calls them hidden And it helps. Jon continues
heroes. “It really is an to show small signs of improve-
incredible, hidden situation that most Amer- a 90-minute drive from the VA where Jon ment. His ability to find words and form
icans are not aware of,” Dole says. “These has weekly therapy appointments. sentences has grown. Still, Tim admits to
caregivers face enormous challenges and Activities at home have fallen into a man- feeling numbed by it all: “It’s hard to stay pos-
make tremendous contributions to their ageable routine. Melissa usually handles the itive. So much has gone wrong. So many bad
country. They need to be recognized for that.” day shift, gently waking Jon and making things have happened. I expect the worst, but
At the time of Jon Meadows’s injury, Tim breakfast, giving him the first part of his still try to hope for the best.”
was 18 and living in Connecticut with his nine daily medications, including Neurontin “Tim was so young when this happened.
son, Oliver, two, who is autistic, and attend- for nerve pain and Topamax for seizures. For A lot of his plans got put on hold,” Jon says. “I
ing college. A year into Jon’s recovery at the the irst couple years, Melissa would also help feel for him. We’re both struggling, but he’s
Fort Belvoir medical hospital outside of homeschool Oliver, who is a mini-caregiver helped me a lot. And he’s a really good dad.
Washington, D.C., however, Tim got a call himself, helping deliver Jon’s medicine and I’m thankful that they’re here.”
from Melissa. She needed help. razzing him when he does something he’s not They’ll be there tomorrow, too.

A CLOSER
LOOK AT
HIDDEN HEROES
• Former senator Elizabeth Dole
founded Hidden Heroes in 2011,
shortly after her husband, former
senator and presidential candidate
Bob Dole, spent ten months at
Walter Reed Army Medical Cen-
ter near Washington, D.C. She
was inspired by frequent visits at
Senator Dole
the hospital with families of other greeting Dole
wounded veterans. caregiver fellow
Don Peters of
• The campaign is primarily a New Mexico
at the second
resource center. It ofers fellow- annual National
ships, forums, funding initiatives, Convening.
and research to caregivers, and
connects them to vetted assistance
programs and fellow community ing for post-9/11 veterans. The value individuals with mental health condi-
members for support. of the care they provided was worth tions and substance abuse problems.
an estimated $3 billion, but the cost Most of them balance these respon-
• In 2014, Hidden Heroes funded a of their lost productivity in the work- sibilities with other jobs and have
study with the Rand Corporation. It place was nearly $6 billion. no support network. More than
discovered an estimated 5.5 million 40 percent are male.
military caregivers in the U.S. Nearly • Post-9/11 caregivers tend to be
20 percent, or 1.1 million, were car- younger. They care for younger To help, go to hiddenheroes.org.

22 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

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Killing Us

PACK AG I N G WASTE I N PE RSPECTIVE

In 2015, ¼ of paper and cardboard
made in the U.S. ended up in a landill.

68 million tons of Same impact as 94 coal-

new cardboard in ired power plants running
2015 for 1 year

Recycling 1 ton of
cardboard
Energy equivalent to
104 gallons of gas
7
to

10
Number of
times producers
wants a bigger
reduction
used to think this year. It’s
the ibers in encouraging
Total Volume (Billions of Square Feet) cardboard could vendors to
be reused. redesign
500 packaging
WHY IS With newer
tech, that
Amazon reduced packaging
waste by 16% in 2017, eliminat-
so items can
ship without
THIS GRAPH number might
be closer to
ing 305 million boxes. Also, in
2017, it shipped 5 billion boxes
an Amazon
overbox.
SO BORING? to Prime members alone.

200

30
%

5%
.1
92

17

49

1.
20
19

ot

2%
on

9%

ep
6.

%
az

1.

1%
.7

.3

2%
3.

st 2%
ay

Since ecommerce sales are growing at about 15% or

Am

up
t3

1.
e

e
eB

1.
Co 1.
pl

om

ro
ar

ir
Bu

yearly, why is corrugated cardboard production only

Ap

co
s
G

fa
m

y’
H

st

VC

40
al

ay
ac
e

increasing at 2% to 3%? The simplest explanation:

W

Be
Th

W
M
Q

The boxes have shifted from the back rooms of retail

stores to our doorsteps, so we’re just seeing more. Even small changes would have an outsize efect,
Even so, now that we know what trash does to the because Amazon makes up almost half of the U.S.
environment, why isn’t this number going down? ecommerce market.

THERE MIGHT BE 1/ A BETTER KIND OF STYROFOAM.
The mushroom-based packing material Ecova-
HOPE, AFTER ALL tive makes only requires 1⁄5 to 1⁄8 the energy used
Two materials that by a similar piece of plastic foam. Mycelium sam-
ples grow through and around agricultural waste
use much less en-
like wood chips to form completely compostable
ergy—one organic, padding—the opposite of polystyrene, which can
one vinyl. take more than a million years to biodegrade.
2/ A MAILER YOU CAN REUSE FOR TEN YEARS.
That’s ten years with no new boxes. The cus-
tomer just folds up Limeloop’s waterproof
mailer—which used to be a vinyl billboard—and
sends it right back to the vendor for the next
shipment. The irm is testing a pilot program
this year with companies including Toad & Co.,
MAIKA, and Western Rise.

24 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

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A New Kind THE GOAL FOR MOST Marvel movies is to take all the
insanity that happens in a comic-book panel and use
of Computer computers to make it look like it’s inhabiting a real

Animation world with prestige actors and Chris Hemsworth.

Supercar
Suspension for
Bicycles
W H E N YO U ’ R E mountain biking, you’ll
often manually adjust the suspension
according to the terrain, same as a Range
Rover or McLaren. FOX’s electronic add-on,
called Live Valve ($3,000), does that auto-
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you’re on rocks or pavement, going downhill
or uphill, monitors terrain 1,000 times per
second, and makes suspension adjustments
in as little as three milliseconds—deliver-
ing the ideal ride.
But for the new computer-animated film Spider-
(from an Old Man: Into the Spider-Verse, about the collision of
a bunch of Spider-Mans from alternate universes,
Source) the ilmmakers did the opposite: They wanted the
look and feel of a classic comic book—which meant
creating a new approach to computer animation, which had become too slick for their
purposes. The team, led by visual efects supervisor Danny Dimian, started by taking
cues from old, rudimentary printing processes. They limited their color palette and
used an inker’s technique called half-toning, in which dots and patterns of color in dif-
ferent sizes convey shade and light. Then they went through and purposely took out the
smoothing modern animation software adds to make computer-generated scenes look
like they were shot with a camera. But that still wasn’t enough. “When we looked at what
made comic books so interesting, it was how the illustrators used lines on faces for the
extra emotion,” Dimian said. In a movie like Toy Story, Woody is built out of geometric
shapes that have volume—he’s supposed to be a real, solid thing. Comics don’t work that
way. So the team wrote new software to render the faces in Spider-Man with linework
that’s animated separately, as if drawn by a comic-book artist. The result? The other
Marvel movies are movies about comic-book characters; this movie is a comic book that
moves. Check it out in theaters December 14.

Night-Vision Footage Like You’ve Never Seen Before

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER in a consumer video camera, footage taken in complete
darkness looks like it was shot in the middle of the day. The SiOnyx Aurora IR night-
vision video camera uses a massive one-inch optical sensor with pixels three times
larger than those of most other cameras, allowing it to gather the minuscule bits of
light relected of the moon, stars, and foliage around you. If you’ve ever been hin-
dered by low light when using a GoPro, you’ll love it.
On a recent trip to Fire Island, enjoying the boardwalk on a moonless night, we
could barely make out one igure alone on the sand. Then we looked again through
the Aurora. In night mode, the OLED monocular revealed a surprise: That solitary
igure was, in fact, two people, passionately kissing, and...a third person observ-
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less creepy, and we were 60 feet away.
Priced at $799, it’s for die-hard outdoor enthusiasts. But it performs. It’s water-
resistant and captures stills and 720p video, extending your day into night whether
you’re hiking, boating, camping, or just watching the kids chase lightning bugs. This picture
was taken on
(Law-enforcement oicials have also shown interest, since it’s great for recon- a moonless
naissance.) And if you bring along a cheap IR lashlight, you can use the camera in night.
places where there’s no natural light at all, such as underwater caves, where peo-
ple kissing will never expect you. —Dan Dubno

26 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

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H OW YO U R WO R L D WO R KS

↓ STUNT OF THE MONTH

How They Pulled Off the

Chase Scene in Robin Hood
/ BY JACQUELINE DETWILER /

Robin Hood

G
O O G LE TH E N A M E
and you might be amazed at how
often a filmmaker adapts the
tale—at least every two years,
and three times in 2012. The
latest, out November 21 and
starring Jamie Foxx and Kings-
man’s Taron Egerton, is diferent: Lit like
a Batman movie, with eternally compel-
Taron Egerton
ling themes of corruption and abuse of the Jamie Foxx
masses, it feels modern. “It’s absolutely
still set in medieval times, but as a viewing
experience, I didn’t want it to feel like a tra-
ditional, cliché medieval period drama,”
says director Otto Bathurst. That think-
ing led to scenes like this one—a chase
between two horse-drawn carriages that
looks more like The Fast and the Furious
than Braveheart—down to two-wheel turns
and drifts worthy of rally racing. With the
help of a team of champion carriage-race
drivers from Hungary, almost the entire
five-minute sequence was performed for
real. Here’s how:

THE CARRIAGES
Over four weeks of shooting for just
this scene, the carriages took a beating.
(The horses were switched out regu-
larly.) To keep the carriages in top shape,
the special-efects team reinforced their
frames with steel and aluminum. Carbon
iber wasn’t an option because it would Hard-rubber
actually make the carriages too light. running surface.
“Normally in racing, you try to shed the
weight of the racing car, but the horses
need to feel the weight of the cart, so
when we take sharp bends, the carriages
won’t ly out of control,” says Domonkos
Pardanyi, the movie’s stunt coordinator.

THE BRAKES
To make the carriages capa-
ble of sliding, drifting, and
performing screaming turns
like cars, the carriage wheels
were made of steel with a
hard-rubber running sur-
face. They also had hydraulic
brakes that came from race The wheels were
cars. The carriage driver, steel, but painted to
who operated the ped- look like wood.
als from a seat in the front, Both these pedals do the
could brake the front and same thing: brake.
back wheels separately.

30 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY S Y D F I N I

 THE FALL
Only one part of the chase used
signiicant CGI, and it’s at the very
beginning, when a carriage makes a
six-foot jump through a breakaway
platform to the ground. “It would
be too risky to tie the horses to
the carriage and do that big drop,”
says Pardanyi. So the team shot
the carriage making the drop by
itself, and then shot the four horses
making the jump in formation,
with riders wearing green-screen
suits. They combined both shots in
postproduction.

THE HORSES
Several dozen horses worked on
the scene, all of them from the
traditional Hungarian carriage-
racing circuit. But they couldn’t be
active race horses, and Bathurst,
the director, wanted them all to be
black. That proved impossible—
many of the available horses were
white or gray. “We had to dye the
horses black [with horse sham-
poo approved by animal welfare
agencies],” says Pardanyi. “You can
imagine the amount of dye you’d
need to do a horse.”

THE ROUTE
THE FLOOR Rubber Even though the steel factory was
The scene was shot granules to
soften stunt
spacious, there wasn’t a ton of
in a ramshackle performers’ room for two carts and a dozen
old steel factory in falls. horses traveling at more than 25
Budapest, Hungary, miles per hour. To make sure there
and the original were no unplanned collisions, sec-
looring was made A mix of sand,
rubberized
ond unit director Simon Crane,
of concrete. To granules, and who has managed stunts for major
make the surface wood chips. action movies including Rogue One
suitable for the and the latest Jason Bourne, made
hooves of galloping Special looring moving storyboards of where the
horses, the stunt to protect the horses would pass. “We had to
team laid down horses started devise a igure eight so we didn’t
with a layer
three diferent of dirt. have to slow down midway through
layers of material: a shot,” he says.

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 31

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H OW YO U R WO R L D WO R KS

Your Holiday WH E N I WE NT on a girls’ trip to Las Vegas this

summer, our text chain started out the usual
Travel Could way—shows and concerts worth attending, out-

Be Worse it planning, makeup tutorials on applying fake

eyelashes. Then someone realized that DEF
CON, one of the largest and longest running of
the world’s computer-hacking conferences, was going to be in town the same week we
were, and we began sending such a frenzy of worried messages back and forth you’d
think we were about to visit a town full of omnipotent wizards. Could a black hat cast
forth his malware to breach our irewalls? Mighteth he phish us and clone our Clouds?
DEF CON’s frequently asked questions page described the conference’s Wi-Fi setup as
“the world’s most hostile network.” It sounded exciting. And dangerous.
Hackers stole about $172 billion from consumers in 2017, and their tactics are con-
↓ HEARST SPECIAL EVENT tinuously shifting. To keep up, dozens of hacking conferences have popped up all over
the country, including PhreakNIC, ShmooCon, and Honolulu’s Shakacon (one website

Michelle Obama lists 65 conventions this year). And the things attendees can accomplish with computers
are truly frightening: While I was hanging out in a pool at the Mandalay Bay, an 11-year-
on Improving old boy at DEF CON was able to hack into a replica of Florida’s Secretary of State website
and change election results within ten minutes.
STEM Education That said, “There are deinitely some hysterics [about these conferences],” says Ryan

for Girls Speers, a cybersecurity expert at River Loop Security and regular DEF CON attendee.
But he does ofer some sound advice: Avoid Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on devices you care
Michelle Obama’s
F O R M E R F I R S T L A DY about, and pay attention to whether your phone connection drops of of LTE, because
Reach Higher initiative guided American someone might be trying to intercept your phone.
students toward postsecondary education, My iPhone emerged unscathed. (I think.) But I did end up surrounded by a motley
and her Let Girls Learn program bolstered crowd of DEF CON attendees in the line for airport security the morning after the con-
education for girls around the world. Oprah ference. Mostly young men, they were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with a Mad Libs of
Winfrey recently visited Hearst Magazines technology terms: secur-anon, infosec, botnet-crypto-lulz. It was fun trying to igure
with Obama to talk about this and many out how dangerous each person might be in a cyber-ight.*
other topics. Popular Mechanics editor in But even though the TSA reported no serious problems screening thousands of hack-
chief Ryan D’Agostino got the chance to ers carrying uniquely mischievous electronics, the sense of danger remained among the
speak with Obama about how STEM edu- civilians until well after Sin City receded into the distance. “Do you know how to get on
cation in the U.S. could better serve young the Wi-Fi?” a passenger said on my light home.
women. An excerpt from that conversation: “I wouldn’t do that,” came the reply from his seatmate. “I hear they like to play tricks.”
—Jacqueline Detwiler
“With girls, one of the things when I talk
to groups in education is that we have to
think about how we teach math and science.
I’ve seen in my own girls, they’re incredibly
bright, they’ve gone to great schools, they’ll
go to great colleges. But they lost interest in
math so early because math is taught like
a race: If you don’t know the unit within a
period of time, you don’t get a good grade. The
speed in which you learn the subject should
have nothing to do with teaching it, but that’s
how our system is set up. If you can’t get it in a
week, maybe you could get it in two. But if you
haven’t gotten it well in a week, it’s on to the
next one. So we have to really think through
whether we’re teaching to a system that is
designed for the way the male mind works.
Is the competition and the
structure something that
is turning of girls? I think
we’ve got to open all of that
up.” —Michelle Obama

Obama’s new memoir,

Becoming, is out
November 13.

*They deinitely do not call it a cyber-ight.

34 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
H OW YO U R WO R L D WO R KS

↓ THE BODY
MECHANIC
/ BY JACQUELINE DET W ILER /

do circadian rhythms matter enough for hundreds of researchers

Why You Should to study them? It turns out that every cell in the human body con-
tains the genetic time counters the Nobel prizewinners found, and
Have Heart Surgery they control the expression of roughly half the genome, turning
various functions on and of as needed. If the schedules of various

in the Afternoon organs, muscles, and glands get even slightly out of whack, you can
develop depression, anxiety, sleep problems, diabetes, obesity, car-
And other shocking new discoveries diovascular disease, or cancer. “Pretty much every nasty thing you
can think of,” says Partch.
about how your body’s internal clock But how do your clocks get out of whack? More importantly: How
can help you live longer. do they stay in whack? Usually, the body’s billions of clocks are syn-
chronized by a master clock in the brain that is activated by light.
Carl Sagan said that we have billions If you don’t get the right amount of light at the right times of day

“Y
OU KNOW HOW
of stars? Well, we have billions of clocks,” says Carrie
Partch. “Someday I think there’s going to be this palm-
to-forehead moment where we all say: I cannot believe
we didn’t understand that every form of life on this
planet has a clock that links us to Earth and its ter-
restrial day.”
Then Partch led a mindfulness meditation outside the temple
at Burning Man while celestial gongs rang to celebrate a new day’s
rising sun.
Just kidding. Partch is a biochemist at the University of Califor-
nia, Santa Cruz, who specializes in circadian rhythms, which is not
only an actual research ield, but one whose adherents won the 2017
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the 1980s and 1990s, the
three scientists who received the award igured out how genetic time
counters in cells aligned biological function to the 24-hour solar
day. Particularly over the last couple of years, the work has solidiied
into a body of research that indicates timing can afect processes as
diverse as sleep, metabolism, and cell growth.
Apart from jet lag, which is when the body’s internal schedule
temporarily doesn’t match the schedule of the outside world, why
(dawn and dusk, generally), your clocks can get screwy. But there
are other causes as well: Clocks keep worse time as we age, and they
can become desynchronized by poor eating schedules or natural
genetic variation. Experiments on animals in which certain molec-
ular clock genes were deactivated in the pancreas showed that the
animals acted normally, only to later develop diabetes.
Molecular clocks can even affect the potency of medication.
“There are several diferent mechanisms—metabolism, so if you
take a drug at the wrong time, it might be metabolized too quickly
and cleared,” says John Hogenesch, a chronobiologist at Cincinnati
Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “The second is transport—it
may not be transported to the appropriate cell or organ type. And the
third is the actual target [could be turned of at that time].” A current
clinical trial at Washington University in St. Louis is testing whether
administering chemotherapy for brain cancer when certain critical
clock genes are at their peak could improve survival rates.
While chronobiologists continue to unravel the complete mys-
teries of time–cellular interactions, the oldest advice remains the
best: Get more sleep and spend more time outdoors. Chakra cleans-
ing not required (for now).

WAYS TO RESET YOUR MOLECULAR CLOCKS

1 2 3 4 5 6
EAT ALL YOUR FOOD ASK YOUR DOCTOR GET YOUR FLU SHOT HAVE HEART SKIP THE NIGHT GO CAMPING.
WITHIN TEN HOURS. WHEN TO DOSE. IN THE MORNING. SURGERY IN THE SHIFT. A researcher at
Mice missing The efectiveness A 2016 study AFTERNOON. The World Health the University of
certain circadian of low-dose aspi- found that the A 2017 study Organization Colorado, Boulder,
clock genes are rin therapy, certain immune system found that heart classiies circa- recorded students’
prone to obesity, statins, and even created four times attacks were half dian-disrupting light exposure on
but when they chemotherapy can the antibodies to as likely in patients shift work as a a camping trip and
keep a tight eat- be greatly afected a lu shot when it who had valve class 2A “Probable found their clocks
ing schedule they by when you take was given in the replacements later Carcinogen.” returned to normal
remain lean. the medicines. morning. in the day. within two days.

36 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

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THE ROBOT
REVOLUTION
IS HERE.

rave new world . . . or source of fear? Ever since robots first appeared in science

B fiction, they’ve inspired fascination, dread, and wonder. Popular Mechanics tells
the true story, examining the way we live with these sophisticated machines today—
in our cities, skies, military, medicine, and in space.

Available wherever books are sold.

 H OW YO U R WO R L D WO R KS

Big questions. GREAT

↓ UNKNOW NS
Answers you can’t find on the internet.

If we’re ever able to

time travel, will we go forward
or backward first?

Y
OU LIKELY DON’T REALIZE IT, but you’re holding a time into the future,” says Dr. Ulvi Yurtsever, coauthor of a seminal
machine in your hands right now. When you’re done paper on time travel. So, in theory, if we could improve propul-
reading this article, you will have traveled perhaps 90 sion systems enough, we could skip ahead centuries. But we still
seconds into the future—and maybe even more if you’ve couldn’t move backward.
misplaced your reading glasses. This may sound like a Indeed, backward time travel, while theoretically possible, is far
“joke” (indulge us), but the truth is that it is easier, the- trickier and would involve black holes and “tunable wormholes”
oretically speaking, to travel forward in time than it is and more energy than a kindergarten class on a sugar binge. “You
to travel backward, and that’s partly because we’re all moving for- can write down solutions of the equations,” says Cliford V. John-
ward in time naturally. son, a professor of theoretical physics at USC, “and those equations
The possibility of time travel stems from Albert Einstein’s tell you two things: how you twist up space and time, and what mat-
theory of special relativity, which, ter you need to do that. And every
loosely speaking, describes the time you get those weird twists in
relationship between space and space and time that look like a time
time. An outgrowth is something machine, the matter and energy you
known as “time dilation,” which need to do that is in a form that may
suggests that time can move at not exist in this universe. So that’s
diferent rates for diferent observ- just a fancy way of saying that the
ers—and therefore at diferent rates jury is out.”
in different places. This theory is So from a technical standpoint,
borne out by the (rather freaky) fact it seems far more likely that we’d
that clocks on the space shuttle— move forward in time irst. But how
whether internal clocks or atomic about from an ethical one? “Scien-
clocks placed aboard for experi- tists and physicists may say ‘You
mental purposes—run more slowly know what, it’s much safer for us to
than reference clocks on Earth. In go to the future, because if it’s pos-
this sense, astronauts on extended sible to alter the past and therefore
missions may already be considered have that reverberate into the pres-
time travelers, as they arrive home ent—create a paradox—that’s pretty
very slightly later than the elapsed dangerous,’” says Bob Gale, who has
time measured on their own instru- spent some time thinking about this
ments would suggest. Moreover, “Time beats faster on the moon stuf, given that he cowrote the 1985 time-travel blockbuster Back
than on Earth, and time beats slower on Jupiter,” says celebrated to the Future. “So they would say ‘Well, to preserve the sanctity of
physicist Michio Kaku of the City College of New York. “So if you the space-time continuum, we better go into the future, because
were to simply camp out on the moon or Jupiter, you’d be going that provides the least amount of risk.’” Ryan North, author of
backward and forward in time. Now, of course, these are for frac- the recently published book How to Invent Everything: A Survival
tions of a second.” Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, argues that by going back-
A more useful implication of time dilation is the fact that the ward, we could advance society hundreds of thousands of years.
closer to the speed of light you’re moving, the slower your inter- Even so, North muses that if we had a single shot at round-trip time
nal clock will be ticking relative to time on Earth. “If you reach travel, the better choice might be to plunge ahead. “Download the
99 percent of the speed of light and spend like a year moving at equivalent of Wikipedia onto a thumb drive and bring it back,” he
that speed—around the solar system, say—and then come back to says. “I’m all about stealing ideas from the future.”
Earth, you will ind that the Earth has moved on, 100 to 200 years So there you have it: 25th century, here we come.

Do you have unusual questions about how things work and why stuf happens? This is the place to ask them.
Don’t be afraid. Nobody will laugh at you here. Email greatunknowns@popularmechanics.com.

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 43

T E C H N O L O GY

The Best Tech

of the Year
The Popular Mechanics Technology Depart-
ment had a busy year once again. We visited
Apple’s new HQ, we installed beta apps,
we reviewed hundreds of prototypes—the
whole time asking ourselves the questions
you would: Is a $1,000 phone worth $1,000?
Samsung Should I upgrade my camera
Galaxy Note9 before that vacation? Is it time
The Note9 is a power- to join the smart-watch revolu-
house, with industry-top tion? Here are our picks for the
specs, a huge battery, technology we think will most
and, yes, a headphone improve your life.
jack. Our favorite: the
X20 LTE modem, which
means download speeds
up to 1.2 gigabits per Google Pixel 3
second. Real-world users
won’t hit those numbers A showcase for the use-
yet, but the speed bump ful stuf that comes out
is still noticeable with the of Google. It will prompt
right carrier. $1,0 0 0 callers to identify them-
selves and show you a
real-time transcription, so
you can ignore spam calls.
Point the camera at a pair
of shoes, and it’ll tell you
where to buy them. And
unless the Samsung A9’s
four-camera setup per-
forms miracles, Google
keeps its title of the best
camera on a smartphone.
$8 0 0

PHON ES
OF THE YEAR

OnePlus 6T
Since it arrived in the
U.S., OnePlus has been
the best value for
Android phones. The
6T’s coolest trick is an
under-screen ingerprint
scanner, which pre- Apple iPhone XR
serves the phone’s thin
For those of us who don’t need the lagship iPhone XS, the XR is
bezels without requiring
an easy recommendation. It’s got the same chip, same memory,
an expensive face-scan
and same Face ID as the XS, for hundreds of dollars less. Among
system. price to be
its negligible concessions is an LCD display (rather than OLED)
announced
that, unless you regularly watch 1080p HD videos, you won’t care.
Plus, colors! $75 0

44 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com P H OTO G R A P H S BY L E V I B R O W N

 Sonos Beam
The most convincing reason yet
to allow Amazon’s Alexa into
your house. Not only will the
Beam’s acoustics blow away
your TV’s built-in speakers, but
walking into a room and saying,
A U DIO “Play Stranger Things,” and hav-
ing the TV do just that feels like
the future home is inally arriving.
OF THE YEAR $40 0

Devialet Reactor 600

A few years back, a French company known for expensive
ampliiers released the Phantom, one of the few wireless
home speakers so beautiful and so able to ill a room with
clean sound that it set the standard for the modern era of
wireless speakers. This new, smaller model sounds almost
as great as the original Phantom, but for $700 less and with
a smaller footprint. $1,0 0 0
Bose Sleepbuds
They don’t play music. They don’t track your activity. All
these earbuds do is play soothing sounds—white noise, a
campire, rustling leaves, speciic loops that distract your
brain from car horns and snoring. They’re up to Bose’s high
standards of design: light enough to forget you’re wear-
ing them, and slim enough not to notice if you sleep on your
side. As for eicacy, your mileage may vary, but we can’t go
back to sleeping without them. $25 0

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 45

T E C H N O L O GY

CAM ERAS
OF THE YEAR

GoPro Hero7 Black

After the Karma Drone
went away, GoPro
needed a hit. So its engi-
neers built an uncannily
efective image-stabili-
zation system resulting
in a camera that cap-
tures footage that’s less
Cloverfield and more
Planet Earth II. $40 0

Sony RX100 VI
The capabilities of most modern
cameras crammed into a pocketable
point-and-shoot. The OLED view-
inder is especially brilliant, making
a small camera feel like the only one
you’ll need to pack. $1,2 0 0

Canon EOS R and Nikon Z6

Mirrorless cameras are the future of photography, and the last of the SLR holdouts
are now on board. Both have created fantastic devices, especially in low light when
you need a high ISO. The controls are so intuitive, it’s clear that these are not just
converted SLRs. Choosing one will come down to whether you already have Nikon
or Canon lenses that you want to use (both require adapters). But neither will
disappoint even serious photographers. Canon: $2,3 0 0; Nikon: $2,0 0 0

46 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

 RANDOM STU FF
OF THE YEAR

Dyson Cyclone V10 Absolute Xbox Adaptive Controller

No, really. You can give someone a vacuum, and they’ll thank you. Besides The result of years of research and testing with
being prettier than any other appliance, the V10 is impossibly powerful for occupational therapy groups, this Xbox con-
being cordless. Dyson is so conident in its technology that, starting with troller can be custom mapped and modiied so
this model, the company is no longer making corded vacuums. $ 60 0 gamers with motor disabilities can play. $10 0

Fat Shark 101

If you’re not a photographer, but think drones
are a blast, irst-person-view lying is what you’re
looking for. This kit comes with goggles similar
to those used in the Drone Racing League, and a
compact, newly redesigned drone that’ll survive
inevitable crashes. $2 0 0

Okay, gather ’round. This
time it’s for real.
The smart watch and the
Apple Watch in particular
Apple have until now mostly been
Watch classiied as Pretty Cool.
BY RYAN For me, the watch’s greatest
D’AGOSTINO attribute was that it made
me reach for my phone fewer
times per day. But the new
Series 4 feels like an arrival.
The screen is bigger enough
that even if you never saw the
previous ones, you’ll probably
say, “This is a big screen.” It
displays eight complications
at once—texts, calendar,
heart rate, even the time!—
which means less poking tiny
icons to ind stuf. I probably
won’t need the ECG and fall-
detection capabilities, but
those are astonishing bits of
technology that could help
millions of people. The haptic
feedback on the dial, so it
feels like a mechanical dial?
Beyond cool, and actually
useful. The beautiful visuals
that are meant to help calm
you? They calm you.
So, here’s something
I’ve never said before: You
should get a smart watch,
and I recommend this one.
$40 0

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 47

T E C H N O L O GY
THE
↓ I.T. GUY
/ BY ALE X A N DER GEORGE /
Are
Hobby
Drones
Dead?
Proposed laws could
stop criminals, but
discourage new pilots.
S I W A T C H E D the guy
A
unpack his Phantom 4
drone in the middle of a
gorgeous valley in Mongo-
lia, I thought: Part of the
reason I blew out my check-
ing account on this trip
was to get away from people like this.
Here we were, far from LTE reception,
watching wild horses run. Beauti-
ful stuf. Then the dude’s propellers
started their power-tool whine and his
drone was whipping around the sky so
he could pretend to be David Atten-
borough for his Instagram followers.
I’m saying, I kind of get why the
Federal Aviation Administration and
Congress are changing the rules for
drone operation. The literature is a
mess of initialisms (FAA, AMA, DHS)
and legislation (Bill S.2836, Section
336, Part 107), but the proposals come
down to restricting where people can
ly drones, and how many hoops pilots
will have to jump through in order to
ly them legally.
A few days before I wrote this,
the president signed the FAA Reau-
thorization Act of 2018. Among the
regulations that come with that is
legal permission for government
employees to surveil and destroy
drones that fly into sensitive air-
space. Besides stopping a terrorist
attack, the idea is to prevent incidents
like when an amateur pilot lew his
Phantom 4 into a Black Hawk Army
helicopter late last year. The Act also
repeals the aforementioned Section
336, which, in many words, restricted
48 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
the FAA from regulating recreational
drones apart from a few reasonable
rules to keep hobbyists out of trouble.
That repeal opens regulation to
an idea that’s unpopular with drone
pilots: make anyone who wants to ly
GET CERTIFIED any drone obtain a Part 107 certiica-
To get a drone tion, similar to a driver’s license: You
license, you
need to know
pay $150 and take a written test. All
a lot: how air- professional drone pilots need one.
ports operate,
weather stuf,
The concern among drone people such
radio rules, as myself is that this might discourage
and more.
Ryan Felner,
students who want to use drones for
a Connecti- a science project or a contractor who
cut teen who wants to use a drone for home inspec-
has a business
photographing tions. And if people are afraid to mess
houses for real around in their backyard with a $180
estate listings,
used Gold Seal Parrot Mambo FPV mini drone, they
UAV Ground might never get hooked, get their 107
School ($199)
to prepare. The certification, and go on to become
FAA also has a the next great cinematographer or
free study guide.
Read up. crime ighter.
A more reasonable idea is to
develop what drone-industry people
call remote identification—essen-
tially, as-needed surveillance. Last
year, DJI started selling a device called
AeroScope to police, sports stadiums,
airport administrators—anywhere
with concerns about UAVs. It’s a
cooler-size box with a monitor and
antennas that can pull information
on any DJI drone within a few-mile
radius. It tells the operator the regis-
tered owner, the trajectory, and, most
importantly, the location of the opera-
tor. Rather than knocking a drone out
of the sky, potentially hurting people
below, law enforcement can ind the
operator and reprimand him or her
accordingly. I don’t like adding more
avenues for authorities to ind unnec-
essary intelligence about the public
it’s meant to serve, but if giving up
the same information airplane pilots
give to control towers means respon-
sible drone pilots can ly without fear
of an expensive citation, it’s worth it.
People at DJI, like many drone
enthusiasts I know, say that the major-
ity of pilots want to use their devices
without bothering anyone or breaking
the law. The fact that some companies
sell anti-drone weapons might contra-
dict that, but I mostly believe it. And
most pilots I know follow the basics—
ly below 400 feet, avoid airports and
crowds, don’t ly at night, and keep the
drone in sight. (New pilots who don’t
know those rules will learn them when
they need to pass a test that DJI added
to the app required to ly its drones.)
There are still people who fly
drones into Army helicopters, or get
drunk and land them on the White
House lawn. We need ways to deal
with jerks. But we also need to calm
down. I was annoyed by that guy in
Mongolia, but I know that drone pro-
liferation is a net good. With them,
rescue workers can quickly ind sur-
vivors after a disaster. Potential
home buyers can get a view of the
property they never could before.
And a 14-year-old kid with a great
idea and a little practice can make a
heck of a science project.
 insurance and you could save.

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T E C H N O L O GY
Want
to Be A
Hacker?
Go to
Dallas.
The newest hacker
community in the United
States is nowhere near
Silicon Valley.
/ B Y J O E PA P PA L A R D O /
MAN NAMED TINKER clutches
A
an HDMI cable as he bumps
through the crowd milling in
front of the stage at Family Kara-
oke, a joint on Dallas’s east side.
A former Marine, Tinker has
a solid but not overly muscled
frame. Less weight lifter than baseball
infielder. He has a voice that belongs on a
live-fire exercise. It booms, even over the
thrump of the techno blasting from two
speaker towers on the stage.
“Okay, what’s the irst rule of this place?”
he asks the crowd before answering his own
question: “Don’t hack the venue!”
This is the monthly meeting of the Dal-
las Hackers Association, the largest of the
local groups—for there are many more than
you would expect. A hacker named Wire-
fall started DHA in June 2013. A handful
of people showed up back then. Tonight,
under 1970s-chic red and purple neon, Fam-
ily Karaoke is illed with enough attendees
to worry a fire marshal. Nearly 150 hack-
ers, and those who might be called hacking
enthusiasts, sit on stools and around small
tables. Security pros, hash crackers, ledg-
ling programmers, and a few members of the
curious public. None are here to sing. They’re
here for this month’s iretalks—15-minute
presentations of irsthand achievements in
subverting, repurposing, reprogramming,
or overriding modern technology.
North Texas has become an unexpected
haven for hackers seeking not only camara-
derie but paid work. There is an ecosystem
50 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
here that can sustain them. The Dallas–
Fort Worth area has the most available
cybersecurity jobs in the nation. Commu-
nity colleges and universities are building
cybersecurity institutes. The area has a
history—starting with Texas Instruments
in 1951 and through today, when AT&T,
Raytheon, and Facebook’s new data stor-
age facilities are located nearby. All of those
companies need smart programmers. And
cybersecurity. They need hackers.
Tinker’s rule—don’t hack the venue—was
instituted after organizers had to apolo-
gize to the hosts at their previous meet-up
location after someone hacked the cashier
system. It’s necessary instruction again
here: “We have surveyed the cell towers in
the area and there are two new ones tonight,”
he says. The phony tower signals are set up
to trick cellphones into connecting so that
their data can be surreptitiously collected.
“C’mon, guys,” Tinker says. “Do not shit
where you eat!”
Another hacker, WhiskeyNeon, deejays
from his laptop on stage. (Like ighter pilots,
hackers have call signs that they prefer to
use in public.) He turns down the hard-
edge techno a little. Behind him, images
flicker on a drop-down screen: “Support
Your Local Hacking Community,” “Watch
out: The Feds Have Eyes Everywhere,” and
slides promoting DC214, Hack Fort Worth,
OWASP, North Texas CyberSecurity Group,
and other hacking associations in the area.
Another driver of growth is how uncom-
monly accepting the city’s hackers are of
new blood. “These people have been alone,
or just virtually connected,” Wirefall says
of the crowd. “Now they have found the
place for people like us.” People like Whis-
keyNeon. Like many in the crowd, he’s a
transplant. He moved here from Louisiana
in 2015 after hearing about opportunities
from a group of trusted phone phreakers.
“Every good thing that has happened to me
in my life has come from DHA,” he says. He
traces his entire circle of friends, income
from consulting, startup business connec-
tions, and girlfriend directly to the group.
“It pulled me out from a very dark place.”
Wirefall has helped a lot of people like
Whiskey. Sometimes they call him the
hacker nanny. Tonight he wears a T-shirt
with a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes seated
at a desktop computer. He has a gray beard
and stout frame, a former weight lifter and
Air Force radio repairman who channels
Friar Tuck—a frontline monk who protects
a band of idealist troublemakers from their
own impulses.

ALO N G WITH the centralized bar and res-
taurant, DHA has commandeered several
karaoke rooms. In one, a dozen hackers sit
on couches, laptops and tablets used for pen-
etration testing (called “Pwn pads”) on their
legs, competing to crack password cyphers.
In another, a handful of people work slender
tools to open handcufs and padlocks under
the long-lashed eyes of MoeBius.
MoeBius has a cool handle, but she’s
not a hacker. Her boyfriend is a DHA orga-
nizer. Her lock-picking hobby quickly
became a specialty and a draw, not just at
DHA but at larger hacker conferences and
“PARENTS WHO ACTUALLY WANT THEIR KIDS TO
BECOME HACKERS? THAT’S AWESOME,” SAYS WIREFALL.
local cybersecurity camps for kids that are
run by local colleges and the Girl Scouts.
Lock-picking has plenty in common with
hacking. It combines skill with trial-and-
error patience and using the right tools to
manipulate a lock’s tumblers to get the cor-
rect coniguration. Like pickers, a skilled
hacker can either safeguard people’s belong-
ings or gain unwanted access to something
they shouldn’t.
On the main stage, an anonymous hacker
At Family Karaoke, the
monthly meeting of the
Dallas Hackers Associa-
tion draws about 150
participants and onlook-
ers—including, they
say, FBI agents looking
for leads and corporate
recruiters looking for
talent. Photographed
for Popular Mechan-
ics on September 19 by
Brandon Thibodeaux.
describes a recent exploit he discovered. It
allows him to access corporate networks
through the starish-shaped polycom boxes
that are ubiquitous in conference rooms.
DHA prides itself on disclosing these vulner-
abilities in public, without warning those who
own the systems ahead of time. And they like
to gloat. “We’re dropping zero day exploits
like F-bombs,” Tinker says to the crowd.
Then he starts in on the undercover
agents that he’s sure are in the room. “We
have a sherif’s deputy here, but he talks so
it’s cool. The FBI guys just sit there and lurk.”
He looks around a little more. “Where are
the FBI agents? There’s one,” he says, point-
ing to a young, professionally dressed man.
“They triangulate, so the other one will be
somewhere over...there.”
This game of spot the fed is common at
DHA meet-ups. Everyone has theories on
who they could be. The agents often come
in pairs but sit apart, they say. They tend
to be younger, too, delegated to a task con-
sidered to be low on the totem pole. For its
part, the Dallas FBI office says that the
@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19
FBI doesn’t conduct any oicial outreach
with groups like DHA. Which is interest-
ing phrasing, considering the number of
DHA hackers who say FBI agents have qui-
etly approached them to either help with an
investigation or to build a case on someone
else. Tinker keeps an FBI agent’s business
card in his wallet.
He’s wrong about the guy at the table. It
turns out he and his colleagues are not look-
ing to arrest hackers but hire them. Tech
irms send recruiters, often attractive young
women, to DHA to scout talent. They buy
pitchers of beer for the hackers, enticing them
into conversations about job opportunities.
There are always recruiters at these meet-
ups because there are always jobs to fill.
Texas glows on a heat map of cybersecurity
jobs. CyberSeek, an interactive tool funded
through the National Institute of Standards
and Technology, shows 21,000 open cyber-
security positions in Texas. Nearly 10,000
of them are in Dallas–Fort Worth. That’s
nine percent more jobs than there are in
San Francisco.
DHA’s internal oral history includes tales
of irredeemable hackers who were ofered
jobs the very night they presented at the
karaoke bar. Of hackers who slept in their
cars when they arrived at DFW and are now
gainfully—and legally—employed. Of self-
taught hackers who scored jobs with major
telecom companies through connections
made at DHA. Tinker himself hires his free-
lance crews of penetration testers mainly
from meet-up participants.
The stories get out. There’s now a new gen-
eration that will continue to grow Dallas’s
hacker culture: “We’ve seen parents who
come to learn about information security so
they can get their kids into it,” Wirefall says.
“Parents who actually want their kids to
become hackers? That’s awesome.”
AT TH E E N D of the night a small crowd lin-
gers. New hackers corner experienced ones
with hardware questions. One of the sus-
pected federal agents tries his hand at a
challenge in a side room. Everyone seems
to have a vape. They make new connections
and greet old friends. Swap stories of cor-
porate clients gone bad and local hackers
made good. They gripe about the hacking
challenges at national infosec conventions
and the teams from security software com-
panies that dominate them.
It’s not a place for plotting. It’s too pub-
lic for that. These are afternoon-in-the park
conversations, albeit with a tech edge and
under neon. The kind of exchanges that
bind you together. That transform you into
a community.
51
P R AC T I CA L K N OW L E D G E

↓ TOOL TEST

Use them for

deburring, ine
sanding, and
stripping of rust.
/ BY R OY BEREN DSO H N /

A PENLIGHTS

WHAT WE PELICAN 1920

PUT THEM
THROUGH
224 lumens
A long (and
very dusty)
Two brightnesses.
afternoon of Smooth on/of
sanding wood switch.
$30
and steel.

A / Eastwood 1366 0 B / Genera l C / WE N 6502

STREAMLIGHT
I nternationa l B D70 0 4
MICROSTREAM

AM PS: 4.3 AM PS: 4.3 45 lumens

LI KES: Attractive it and AM PS: 4 LI KES: Its belt-sanding table Tiny and useful and
inish. The front-mounted LI KES: A decent little sander was the largest, and it has
P H OTO G R A P H BY R I C H A R D M A J C H R Z A K

belt-tension lever makes it
easy to swap belts. Good
power and runs smoothly
with no vibration. We also
liked the clearly marked
angle gauge below the
work support on the table
that serves the disc.
D I SLI KES: It and the
General have a small work
surface on the belt.
$15 0
at a decent price. In the hori-
zontal position, it exhibited
the least delection. It comes
with the most aggressive belt
of the three, allowing the tool
to function like a belt grinder,
which is handy for something
like cleaning up a mower blade.
D I SLI KES: A poorly placed
rubber bumper makes chang-
ing the belt a challenge.
$110
USB-chargeable.
both a horizontal and a vertical $18
work surface. The belt-tension
lever and tracking knob were
front-mounted, and it was the
only machine equipped with
a circuit-breaker/overload MINI MAGLITE LED
switch in case you overdo it
during a sanding session.
100 lumens
D I SLI KES: Horizontal on/of
Slim, classic design.
switch (also on the General) is
Reversible clip.
not as easy to access as vertical.
$21
$95

52 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

 ÌÌÌÌÌ
“The quality of their watches is equal
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P R AC T I CA L K N OW L E D G E
↓ ASK
ROY
/ BY ROY BERENDSOH N /
I’ve watched lots
of instructional
videos on removing
popcorn ceilings.
What most of those videos don’t
cover is what to do if the popcorn
has been painted. If that’s the
case, dampening the material irst
has little efect to soften it, and it
doesn’t come of the ceiling without
irst time. If you run into this problem,
54 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
Is there
any way to
make our
Just hear me out.
lem. Maybe it’s worn out. Other times, however, the
cause of the noise is dirt accumulation, or air in the
system, or a water-logged pressure tank, or under-
voltage to the motor. Those issues overtax
the pump and, probably, other
parts of the well system, too.
Unless you’re comfortable
working around water and
Popular Mechanics’ senior home editor
solves your most pressing problems.
askroy@popularmechanics.com @askroypm
 Learn the skills you need to
protect your family, save yourself,
and conquer any possible danger.

AVAILABLE
WHEREVER
BOOKS ARE
SOLD!

IN AN EMERGENCY, WOULD YOU KNOW HOW TO: Whatever the

▼ Purify water ▼ Jump-start a car risk, keep this
book close
▼ Escape a lood or fire ▼ Forage for firewood to survive . . .
▼ PROTECT YOUR FAMILY? and thrive.
P R AC T I CA L K N OW L E D G E

SHOP Easy ways

↓ NOTES
to do hard things

Bottle Jacks
Lift Sink
▶ I had to replace an under-mount sink recently,
and I had to devise a process to do it for myself
because none of the pros wanted the job. The sink
store told me to talk to a plumber. The plumber
told me to talk to the counter guy. The counter guy
told me he’d do it, but would probably break my
counters in the process. That seemed a little dra-
matic. Counter guys are such divas.
The full install is a longer story—just know that
every adhesive, even GE Iron Grip, the one whose
label says something like “Want to glue bowl-
ing balls to a Telon ceiling? Bring it on!” can be
undone by the constant strain of a sink, a garbage
disposal, and various pieces of water-illed cast-
iron cookware—but I did stumble upon a better
approach to lifting the sink into place than what
the guides usually tell you.
The common approach is to run a strap or sup-
port down through the drain and tighten it to
a 2 x 4 resting on the counter, but that method TWO TIPS
doesn’t work too well when you’ve got a single ofset Cut a stack of 2 x 4 scraps before Give the jacks a check after a
1 1
drain—one side of the sink isn’t supported. What you even start. Light-duty bottle few hours, or the next morning.
I landed on: a pair of bottle jacks. I’d used them to jacks are ine, but they’re not tall They probably bled a little bit of
prop up the old sink when it started sagging and enough to reach from your cabinet pressure and could use a pump or
loor to the bottom of the sink. You’ll two. If there’s room, add jack stands.
realized they’d work perfectly for lifting the new
need to build up a stand from beneath, Just in case.
sink into place. It was way better balanced than then add one more chunk of 2 x 4 on
the 2 x 4 approach, and it was easy to ine-tune the top to distribute the pressure from
position before the adhesive set. —Ezra Dyer the jack.

SLIP AND
Improve FALL LESS
Your ▶ To prevent
sliding on slick
Morning surfaces, rub
the soles of your
SONGS TO
CLEAN THE
Coffee shoes with sand-
GARAGE TO If you’re already grinding your paper or a wire
I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY JA M E S C A R E Y

beans at home—which you brush, which

“Station to Station” will increase
David Bowie should be—try adding whole
spices directly into the grinder. traction. And
“Willin’ ”
Little Feat Our favorites: cinnamon sticks, a spritz of hair
vanilla beans, cardamom spray, once dry,
“Setting Me Up”
Dire Straits pods, cocoa beans. will provide a
“She Got Kick” little extra grip
Ben Harper with on ice.
Charlie Musselwhite

56 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

 Trunk Rehab
1/ I dentif y 3/ Sa n d
the f in ish To smooth out the
Based on the age and scratches, we started
warm, antiqued look, with an orbital sander,
▶ I FOU N D this cedar-lined trunk at an antique shop, priced at a steep discount. Roy suspected shellac. then used a sanding
The inish had chipped of the top in places, and it was scratched clear down to To conirm: In an incon- block on particularly
spicuous place, rub in a damaged areas. Things
the wood. But the underlying build quality seemed excellent. When I showed
little denatured alcohol. to avoid: removing so
it to senior home editor Roy Berendsohn, he agreed: They don’t make ’em like If it’s shellac, the inish much wood that the top
this anymore. (The trunk contained a warranty card from April 1938.) He also will immediately start itself becomes compro-
helped me igure out how to restore the top. Here’s what we did. —Kevin Dupzyk to dissolve. mised; overzealously
attacking scratches and
leaving depressions that
will allow shellac to pool.
In some cases, it’s not
worth trying to remove
a scratch completely—
let it suice that it’s
signiicantly lightened.
BEFORE

2/ Remove
the f in ish
Strip the shellac from
the trunk by rubbing in
denatured alcohol with
grade 0000 steel wool.
I was only dealing with
the top, and it still took
a while—even with two 4/ Clea n sawd ust
other people helping. If Run a tack cloth over
you’ve got a big piece of the entire sanded area.
furniture, I recommend Then do it again. All
ordering pizza and sawdust has to be of
throwing a Shellacking before you apply a new
Party. coat of shellac.

AFTER
5/ Shellac
Roy recommended a
high-quality China-bris-
tle brush—a good brush
goes a long way toward
getting shellac to apply
smoothly. Take long,
continuous strokes
at a consistent speed.
Pausing will allow the
shellac to pool, which is
very noticeable when
dry. Luckily, you can
ix that when sanding
P H OTO G R A P H S BY Z AC H & B U 

between coats. The

process: Let shellac dry;
give it a quick pass with
high-grit sandpaper, like
800 or 1,000; hit it with
a tack cloth; next coat.
For a trunk people will
occasionally be sitting
on, we igured three
coats would do.

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 57

DRIVING

↓ THE NEW VINTAGE

The GM Pickup THE SYCLONE was so cool because

it had that ’80s mini-truck look,
That Was a but it was also really fast. It beat a

Sleeper Supercar Ferrari back in ’91, when I was a

teenager. A decade later, when I had
some money, I found one 35 min-
MAKE/MODEL
utes away. It was pretty much bone
1991 GMC Syclone stock, so I upgraded the boost, then
started some other bigger projects.
David Dickman But I realized I didn’t want to do
that. It’s too easy to get sucked in.
L O C AT I O N FOUND ON Next thing you know, you’re replac-
Pensacola, Autotrader ing the original parts with some
Florida
guy’s aftermarket parts. So I took
PURCHASE YEARS it all back to stock. Now, the only
PRICE OWNED work is maintenance, which I do
Only about 3,000 $10,000 15 myself. Being turbocharged, it’s a
Syclones were
made, all for the spaghetti mess of vacuum hoses,
1991 model year. At so for some jobs you have to prepare
the time, it was the
fastest-accelerating for several days of work. But it’s still
production car. a monster of the stoplight. People
are always waving, giving thumbs-
up, shouting “Nice truck.” And
next thing you know, we’re racing.

P H OTO G R A P H BY DAY M O N G A R D N E R

58 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

DRIVING

↓ ROAD TESTED
/ BY EZR A DYER /

Comfortable,
Contractor-
Friendly
The GMC Sierra gets
new engines, a new
transmission, and,
yes, a luxury model.

Base price: $34,995

Weight-saving feature: The CarbonPro
bed, the irst cargo box made of carbon
iber
Fuel-saving feature: Dynamic Fuel
Management, which can run the V-8 on
just two cylinders
I pull up to the ATV dealer to
check out a new Can-Am, and
the guy up front is all over the new
Denali. I show him the heads-up dis-
play, how the power running boards
slide back so you can reach into the
bed. I toggle the rear-view mirror
into video mode, its roof-mounted
camera seeing past loads in the bed.
“I have a 2017 Sierra,” he says. “If I
win the lottery, this is the irst thing
I’m getting.”
While the Sierra has two new
engines—a 2.7-liter turbo four-cyl-
inder and a 3.0-liter diesel V-6—the
Denali keeps last year’s 420-hp 6.2-
liter V-8, paired with a fantastic new
ten-speed automatic codeveloped
with, of all companies, Ford. That’s
the business up front, and there’s def-
initely a party out back, in the form of
GMC’s MultiPro tailgate. It’s a tail-
gate within the tailgate, with an inset
you can drop to carry long stuf like
Dear Ezra,
lumber. Fold everything down and
that inset transforms into a stair- I need to get to a train station during the
case/primo-tailgating seat—there’s week, and drive my kids on weekends. I think
even a 110-volt outlet in the rear cor- I need all-wheel drive for snow. Please, just
ner to run your TV. That mode doesn’t tell me what to get! —Hans S., Bend, Oregon
You need a Porsche 911 Turbo S. It’s got AWD
work so well if you’ve got a trailer
and a backseat! No? Okay. Then I’m going
hitch on, though, since the drop- to recommend the Subaru Crosstrek. Great
down section will hit the hitch. This mileage and AWD for around $22K. I once
may be hard to hear, truck buyers, used one to drag a stuck UPS truck up a hill
but maybe you can’t have everything. during a blizzard. It’s the real deal.
The Denali comes close, though.
It’s like a Cadillac that will tow 12,000
pounds and carry a load of lumber.

$34,29 0

60 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

Crossovers
Can Be for Fun
Attention to driver engagement
compensates for the Acura RDX’s
strange user interface.
The term oversteer means that the rear end of the
car loses traction before the front. Oversteer can
be fun, but it’s generally considered too scary
for the driving public, so it’s banished via elec-
tronics and design. But, lo and behold, I took a
hard left in the Acura RDX, cutting across traf-
ic, and there was a moment when the back end
started to come around. Whoa. Did a crossover
just start to drift? It did, because the RDX’s lat-
est all-wheel-drive system can send 70 percent
of the power to the rear end, and from there, all of that
can go to either outside wheel. This is called torque vec-
toring, and boy is it fun.
The RDX’s 272-hp 2.0-liter turbo is a relative of the
engine in the Civic Type R, and it’s plenty lively. The interior
of the A-Spec model also sells the drama with red-on-black
leather and blacked-out trim where other models have
chrome. The RDX isn’t a four-door NSX, but it’s got the
Honda sporting gene. It’s also got the Acura confounding-
interior gene, where the shift lever is replaced with buttons
and the stereo tuner knob is replaced by a touch
Base price: pad. And, granted, this is probably the best
$38,295 touch-pad system, but you still have to look over
Race version: at a screen to see what you’re doing. You know
The RDX that
Acura ran at what you never have to look at? A tuner knob.
Pikes Peak Or a shift lever.
had an electric
supercharger The RDX does have a big knob in the center
that pushed of the dash. You use it, primarily, to activate
the car to 350
horsepower. Sport Plus mode. I guess I can’t argue too
much with those priorities.

Eight Cylinders
and Three Rows
The Dodge Durango SRT is a mea-
sured SUV that just looks like excess.

Thank you to the SRT for giving us an excuse to

revisit Dodge’s peculiar SUV. This iteration was
introduced in 2011, which is so long ago that it shares DNA
with the old Mercedes GL. (It was designed back when
Benz owned Chrysler.) And Mercedes SUVs age well. Look
at the G-Wagen, which just got its irst redesign since “My
Sharona” was number one.
Base price The SRTDurango uses the 475-hp, 6.4-liter
(SRT): $64,390 V-8 also seen in the Charger and Challenger,
Actual Durango allowing it to run zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds. It
color names:
Redline Red, can also tow 8,700 pounds, making it a unique
Destroyer Gray, cocktail of impractical speed and actual three-
White Knuckle
row-SUV usefulness. I used it to tow about
4,000 pounds and it certainly didn’t have any
trouble merging.
The cool thing about the Durango, though, is that even
a base model shares the SRT’s fundamental goodness—
rear-wheel-drive proportions and handling, world-class
ZF eight-speed transmission, and truck-like capabil-
ity. The non-SRT V-6 model can tow 6,200 pounds,
which points to the fact that the Durango is not a cross-
over, not an adapted front-wheel-drive sedan. Neither
is it derived from a body-on-frame pickup truck, with
all the compromises that entails. It’s a European lux-
ury SUV that happens to be American and afordably
priced. Maybe it’s been around for eight years, but that

Dear Ezra,

What’s up with all these VW diesels back on the road? —Tori S., Dallas
Volkswagen ixed them. Newer ones got new software. Older ones
got new software and a new NOx trap. Some got scrapped, but the
government wants most of them back on the road, since the biggest
energy consumption in a car’s lifetime is when it gets built.
DRIVING
↓ OWNER’S
MANUAL
/ BY EZR A DYER /
The Secret
Lake
A rare visit to the hidden proving grounds
where Mercury revs its engines before you
do. Code name: Lake X.
N 1957, M E RCU RY MARI N E founder Carl Kiekhaefer bought a
I
1,440-acre body of water that he called Lake X. It was perfect for
covert testing, close enough to his Orlando headquarters to be
convenient, but far enough away to ensure that nobody outside
the company would end up there by accident. In 1984, Mercury
sold the property to the Kirchman Foundation, a nonproit con-
servation group, ostensibly because Mercury’s racing program
outgrew the conines of the three-mile lake. Now, Mercury is back
at the compound, leasing the property from Kirchman to test pro-
long as you keep it under 100 mph or so.
Lake X is surrounded by 10,000 acres of forest and
swamp. There’s a guard at a gatehouse, the sole
access point, at the terminus of a dead-end road.
But security is provided by the army of alligators,
some of whom occasionally wander out of the lake
to lounge in the sun. The original boathouse and
shoreline observation tower are still standing and
look straight out of early-’60s sci-fi: metal struc-
tures with convex round windows that were meant
to evoke a boat’s (or perhaps a spacecraft’s) portholes.
Neglected for decades, the buildings lend an eerie
J.J. Abrams abandoned-compound vibe. The rusted
observation tower, overtaken by birds and various
opportunistic plants, looks like the kind of building a
the experiments happened.”
62 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
Sixty years of covert
testing, somewhere outside
Orlando, Florida.
Over the years, Mercury used Lake X for both product devel-
opment and publicity stunts. On the latter front, the company
conducted a 50,000-mile endurance test in 1957, running boats
24 hours a day around a 5.8-mile course. But engineers wouldn’t
bother doing that today. According to Mercury’s research, the
top concerns are performance and ease of maintenance. Reli-
ability was something like ifth, which I found surprising since
breaking down on the water is a unique type of nightmare. “These
days, people take reliability as a given,” says John Pfeifer, Mer-
cury Marine president. “The other day, I got an angry letter from
a customer because he had to spend $1,000 for maintenance on
his 2005 Verado. A 13-year-old motor! But that’s where expecta-
tions are now.”
I got onto Lake X today because Mercury has a new product,
something that would give itself away the irst time it ired up at
a public marina. Previously, Mercury’s big-horsepower Verado
outboards have been supercharged straight-sixes. But when a Mer-
cury test driver turns the key on a new 300-hp Verado mounted
on a center console at the Lake X dock, it doesn’t whisper like a
six-cylinder. It sounds like a Corvette, the unmistakable burble
of a big-bore naturally aspirated V-8. And that’s what it is, a new
4.6-liter double-overhead-cam V-8 hiding beneath the angular
engine cover. Like its high-performance automotive brethren, the
Mercury V-8 announces itself with a cold-start exhaust bypass.
Reengineering the company’s entire big-horsepower lineup,
including a new 3.4-liter V-6, is a ton of work. But there’s a pretty
major clue to why Mercury did this, and it lies in the engines’
breathing architecture. Since the current top-dog Verados are
supercharged, you might expect Mercury to eventually slap super-
V-8s put their blowers in the vee of the block, close
to the intake valves. But the Mercury blocks are a
reverse “hot-vee” setup, meaning that the intakes
are on the outside of the block, and the exhaust
dumps into the center. And why would you do it that
way? For turbocharging. Since turbos are powered
by exhaust gases, putting a turbo in the middle of a
hot vee gives it the shortest path from the exhaust
valves, minimizing lag. Most new turbocharged V-6s
So, bold prediction: 500-hp turbocharged V-8
outboards. But maybe such a thing exists already.
Maybe it has already been on the water at Lake X.
 STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP,
MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION
1. Publication Title: Popular Mechanics
2. Publication Number: 0530-3900
3. Filing Date: October 1, 2018
4. Issue Frequency: Monthly; except combined Jan/Feb &
Jul/Aug
5. Number of Issues Published Annually: 10
6. Annual Subscription Rate: $24.00
7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Oice of Publication:
300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019. Contact: Kolin
Rankin, 212-649-2816.
8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General
Business Oice of Publisher: 300 West 57th Street, New
York, NY 10019.
9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher,
Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher: Jack Essig,
300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019; Editor: Ryan
D’Agostino, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019;
Managing Editor: Helene Rubinstein, 300 West 57th Street,
New York, NY 10019.
10. Owner: Hearst Communications, Inc.: Registered oice:
300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019; Stockholders
of Hearst Communications, Inc. are: Hearst Holdings, Inc.:
Registered oice: 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY
10019; CDS Global, Inc.: Registered oice: 1901 Bell Avenue,
Des Moines, IA 50315.
11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders
Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of
Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None
12. Tax Status: Not applicable
13. Publication Title: Popular Mechanics
14. Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: September 2018
15. Extent and Nature of Circulation:
Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months:
a. Total Number of Copies: 1,163,880
b. Paid Circulation
1. Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated
on PS Form 3541: 703,256
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3. Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales
Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors,
Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside
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the USPS: N/A
c. Total Paid Distribution: 724,568
d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution
1. Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies
Included on PS Form 3541: 355,864
2. Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on
PS Form 3541: N/A
3. Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other
Classes Through the USPS: N/A
4. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail:
8,510
e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: 364,374
f. Total Distribution: 1,088,942
g. Copies not Distributed: 74,938
h. Total: 1,163,880
i. Percent Paid: 66.54%

No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date:

a. Total Number of Copies: 1,117,500
b. Paid Circulation
1. Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated
on PS Form 3541: 683,393
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3. Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales
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d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution
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Included on PS Form 3541: 345,360
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i. Percent Paid: 66.96%

16. Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months:

a. Paid Electronic Copies: 59,846
b. Total Paid Print Copies + Paid Electronic Copies: 784,414
c. Total Print Distribution + Paid Electronic Copies: 1,148,788
d. Percent Paid: 68.28%

No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date:

a. Paid Electronic Copies: 62,100
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I certify that 50% of all my distributed copies (Electronic and
Print) are paid above a nominal price.

17. Publication of Statement of Ownership: If the publication

is a general publication, publication of this statement is
required. Will be printed in the December 2018 issue of this
publication.
18. Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager,
or Owner: Jack Essig, Publisher. I certify that all information
furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand
that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information
on this form or who omits material or information requested
on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including
ines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including
civil penalties).
DRIVING

TEST YOUR OIL

A $30 analysis will tell you

how long your car can really
go between oil changes.
Knowing to skip even one
unnecessary trip to the
shop makes it worth it.

STEP

1 SET UP FOR A
FULL OIL CHANGE.

Why My Decade-Old You could pull just enough for

a sample, but the results might
over-represent the dirt lurking

Motor Oil Is Still Fine / BY EZR A DYER /

around the drain.

STEP

your car to the oil- A basic analysis costs $28. 2 WARM UP

YOUR ENGINE.

Y
OU BRING
change place and they slap a
sticker on the windshield: Change
it again in 3,000 miles or three
months. You probably knew that
the 3,000-mile interval was ridic-
ulous, but what about that other
I was particularly interested in the TBN
(total base number). Oils contain bases to pre-
vent acidiication, so the TBN shows how much
additive is left to keep it healthy. A TBN of less
than one is considered bad. My oil’s TBN? Five.
Hooray! The sample was also spot-on for aver-
This cooks of any fuel and gets
the oil lowing. Have a clean
container ready. I used an empty
water bottle—dry, of course.
STEP

deadline? What if you don’t drive much and
let your oil sit for six months? A year? I know a
guy with a leet of Ferraris, some of them seven-
igure cars, and he goes only by mileage. “That
oil was in the ground for 100 million years,” he
says. “What’s six more months?”
Good question, one that I recently answered
3
age values of zinc and calcium, but a little high
on sodium. Silicon was way high, about four DRAIN
times normal. Flashpoint was a little low, at 360 YOUR OIL.
degrees Fahrenheit.
What does all this mean? Blackstone wrote it Halfway through, funnel a three-
ounce sample into your bottle.
out on my oil’s report card: “Universal averages
show typical wear for similar Honda engines STEP

through semi-intentional negligence. Here’s
what happened: In 2008, I bought a Troy-Bilt
lawnmower with a Honda engine. After a few
years, I realized I hadn’t changed the oil. But, by
then, electric mowers were getting cheap, and
I really wanted an electric mower. I igured I’d
just let the Troy-Bilt go until it blew up.
Which it refused to do. I kept mowing my
lawn, season after season, the little Honda purr-
ing away, until I eventually started feeling bad
for the thing. I decided that if I pulled the trig-
ger on an electric mower, I could at least give my
Troy-Bilt to someone who would use it. I warmed
it up, tilted it over, and drained the oil, saving a
few ounces to send to Blackstone Laboratories,
an oil-testing company in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
with about 65 hours on the oil. This oil was in
use for ten years, and may even be the factory
ill. If so, some of the excess metal is from ini-
tial break-in and silicon could be sealer material
from assembly. Silicon can also show abrasive
dirt contamination, which causes poor internal
wear. There’s also some fuel and moisture in the
oil. The TBN is okay at 5.0, so the oil actually has
additive left in reserve. Make sure the air ilter
is in good condition.” It still had additive, and
the biggest contaminant, silicon, is probably
from the initial break-in. The oil was dirty, but
leaving it there for ten years didn’t really hurt
anything. So, should you wait ten years between
oil changes? No. But don’t worry if you miss the
date on the Jify Lube sticker.
4
MAKE SURE THERE
ARE NO LEAKS.
In Blackstone’s case, you wrap
the sample jar in absorbent
material, zip that in a plastic bag,
then put that in a larger plastic
container, which you also seal.
That one has a prepaid USPS
sticker on it, so of it goes—
maybe. Oil is not a hazardous
material, but some post oices
might give you guf about send-
ing it. Refer them to USPS
Publication 52, “Hazardous,
restricted and perishable mail.”
Or just put your sample in a box.

64 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

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INVENTION

↓ MAKER CITY

About six of every ten acres in

New Haven Connecticut remain forested,

and the state maintains the
highest percentage of tree
coverage in urban and community areas in the country (67 percent). Since the Colonial
era, Connecticut’s trees have been prized not only for their beauty but for watershed
protection and wildlife habitat. In New Haven, brothers Ted and Zeb Esselstyn work
with city oicials to make sure that even felled trees continue their contribution to the
culture and history of the state. / B Y F R A N C I N E M A R O U K I A N /

THE MAKERS
TED ESSELSTYN AND
ZEB ESSELSTYN

THEIR COMPANY
CIT Y B E N CH

H E STO RY of City Bench has long

T
and winding roots. My brother,
Ted, and I started the company in
2009 with the mission to transform
urban trees into iconic furniture,
and it was his idea to reuse trees
that had to come down anyway and
would otherwise become landill, mulch, or
irewood. Millions of trees are discarded from
metropolitan areas across the country each
year, and we wanted to transform as many as
we could into beautiful objects.
Nothing about our approach made prac-
tical sense. It was the height of the Great
Recession, I had recently been to journal-
ism school (among other careers), and my
brother is a former M.D. But both of us had
building experience, and Ted was a long-
time artist based in Connecticut. Our irst
challenge was how to source wood. There are
169 towns in Connecticut, each with a tree
warden who approves all tree removals, and
when we reached out to diferent communi-
ties the only person who responded with an
enthusiastic yes was Christy Hass, the for-
mer tree warden of New Haven. They now
supply us with logs—even changing the way
they cut many of their trees so we get ten- to
12-foot sections instead of the typical two-
foot pieces—which we use in our custom
design, and in exchange, we mill lumber
for the city’s truck beds, footbridges, and
benches for habitat areas of city schools.
In 2012, we began to mill
at the Department of Parks,
Recreation, and Trees main-
tenance facility in East Rock
Park). Our mill is located up the hill from
the Olmsteds’ former nursery, and a stone’s
throw from an old barn that 100 years ago
converted trees into public fences, bridges,
and picnic tables. You can still see the orig-
inal century-old belt-driven woodworking
equipment inside. We’ve made an old idea
new again on the same spot.
Another project with a powerful story
can be found in New Haven’s City Hall: a
20-foot bench made from the Lincoln Oak
tree, which blew over during Superstorm
The City Hall bench
wood was salvaged
from a massive his-
toric oak planted on
the spot where the
Connecticut State
Sandy in 2012. The large House once stood.
pin oak was planted on
the New Haven Green in 1909 by Civil War
veterans to mark the centennial birthday of
Abraham Lincoln, and when Sandy uprooted
it, history, too, was uprooted. Embedded in
the root ball was a concrete time capsule
and seven human skeletons, dating back
to Green’s history as a cemetery in the mid-
1600s. Following the cleanup, we were asked
to salvage the wood, which we’ve since trans-
formed into a variety of tables and benches.

66 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

 ZEB
RECOMMENDS

We do a mix of private
and commercial work
with a focus on large
surfaces—primar-
ily dining tables and
boardroom tables, as
well as distinctive cof-
fee tables, benches,
and feature walls. The
wood we use is natu-
rally embedded with WALKING
character and often a THROUGH ...
rich story. The trails of East
Rock Park. There
is a lot of topogra-
phy in the park and
the trails meander
all over, provid-
ing terriic views
of the city and the
surrounding areas.
The old carriage
roads in the park
are great to walk
as well.

ABSORBING
CULTURE AT ...
The Yale Univer-
sity Art Gallery.
It’s a world-class
museum with a ter-
riic collection and
it’s always free and
open to everyone.

A three-story feature
wall at the Newman’s
Own headquarters in
Westport. Made from
21 diferent species
of urban Connecticut
trees, it took us years
to collect such a vari-
ety of wood, and the
result is a tapestry
of colors, textures,
and patterns all held
together by a story of
the urban forest.

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 67

INVENTION

↓ SPIRITS

The Most
Unheralded Berry
That would be the cranberry. Two men are out to change
that by introducing it to your liquor cabinet.
/ BY FR A NCINE M A ROU K IA N /

OME DISTILLERS MIGHT talk about the limestone water similar,” says cofounder Matt Nuernberger. (He’s an M.B.A., his

S
that runs through their property, or the heirloom crops cofounder/cousin is a chemist.) “The earthy sweetness was our
in their mash. But it would be hard to ind a spirit more regional signature, before rum started being made everywhere.”
deeply rooted in its place than Massachusetts Crane-
berry Liqueur: classic New England rum infused with STEP TWO Transferred to stainless-steel tanks, the rum base
cranberries, indigenous to Massachusetts gets the inal layer of lavor complexity from added cranber-
and still the state’s number-one agricultural ries (about eight pounds for every barrel), which macerate
crop. Harvested through mid-November, cranberries for about a week. Filtered and minimally sweetened for bal-
are a forever-American holiday tradition, and Crane- ance, Craneberry is proofed down to bottle strength at 30
berry, distilled by GrandTen Distilling in Boston, is a percent ABV, highly sippable on its own or extremely mix-
new way to experience a lavor most people associate able in cocktails. (See “Holiday Craneberry Manhattan.”)
with either turkey sauce or Ocean Spray juice.
WHERE
WHAT South Boston’s Foundry, a rehabbed 19th-century wire-
Referencing the name used by early settlers because works, originally the Alger Iron Works, specializing
the cranberry flower resembles the in cast-iron ordnance, built by inven-
head of the sandhill crane (nests tor and metallurgist Cyrus Alger
around marshes or bogs), Crane- and site of the first gun ever rifled
berry Liqueur has a slightly tart, in America.
slightly sweet quality, whether Nuernberger was committed to
taken alone like sherry or to bal- an urban location. “It’s an expensive
ance a cocktail. endeavor that pays of in street-level
vitality,” he says. “What other manu-
HOW facturing goes on in the middle of a
S T E P O N E The foundational city? And if you can’t interact with
rum is composed from multiple your customers, if you can’t have a
sugar sources including blackstrap tasting room so people can experi-
molasses, a concentrated by-prod- ence what you make, why bother?
uct of sugarcane production with There are a lot of synthetic places in
lots of lavor and tons of aromatics. the bar/restaurant industry. I don’t
A proprietary blend of yeast mean that in a negative way—it’s
strains is added and the mixture is often their purpose to transport you
fermented in open tanks. Unlike to another part of the world or another
closed fermentation tanks, open- time. But at GrandTen, we don’t want
top vessels expose the mixture (as you to be transported anywhere. We
it converts sugars to alcohol and want you right here, with us.”
carbon dioxide) to changing ambi-
ent factors (local microlora like
HOLIDAY CRANEBERRY
the bacteria and wild yeast in the
MANHATTAN
air) that contribute to the fermen-
tation, almost like a fingerprint 1 oz Craneberry
1 oz sweet vermouth
of the space. “I don’t want to use
1 oz dry vermouth
a word like terroir here, but envi-
P H OTO G R A P H BY L E V I B R O W N

4 dashes orange bitters

ronmental fermentation is 4 dashes Peychaud’s
bitters

68 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

Jim Beam Black® Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, 43% Alc./Vol. ©2018 James B. Beam Distilling Co., Clermont, KY. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Awarded International Wine & Spirit Competition’s 2016 Bourbon Trophy.
INVENTION

MY PATENT Before there’s a patent, there’s an idea.

↓ STORY

Better Than
a Neck Pillow
An adjustable platform that sits on an air-
plane seat’s tray table and extends in a Z
shape to an ideal pillow height. Also incor- (6) TIFFANY: Six or seven years ago, my family and I would
porates a charging port and speakers. often travel back and forth from Beijing to here in Califor-
nia. Those trips were really long. So one trip, when I was
around 12, my dad helped me prop my backpack on the
(1) PATENT
food tray, and then I put a small pillow on top. That turned
out to be one of the best plane naps I’ve taken.
Extensible Z Accessorized
Travel Headrest (7) ROBERT: Over the past four or ive years we’ve been work-
ing on diferent patents. We internally call this one JetNap.
(2) LAST NAME (3) FIRST NAME (4) PATENT NO.
(8) ROBERT: We wanted to use a commercial-able name,
Chen Robert 10,022,002 like JetNap, but for the patent examiner you have to make
& Tifany it more descriptive of exactly what it does.

(5) ROBERT: Tifany is my daughter. She is a senior at Monta (9)
Vista High School here in Cupertino, California. Steven Jobs
went to high school in Cupertino.
TIFFANY: That’s awesome.
ROBERT: We lived in Beijing for seven or eight years.
There was continuous back-and-forth. The patents Tifany
and I came up with were really functional devices like, for
example, SinkUnclogger, because all the apartments we
rented were clogged.
TIFFANY: Gross.
ROBERT: It was the experience of living overseas that led
Tifany and I to come up with some of these ideas.

(10) TIFFANY: Last year I took a business class at my school,

and my business teacher was really interested in my patents.
We took a ield trip down to San Jose’s U.S. Patent and Trade-
mark Oice, and I helped give a presentation to all the other
classmates who were interested in inventing something.

(11) TIFFANY: A lot of my classmates, juniors and seniors,

they were like, “I’ve had a couple ideas, too. How do I initiate
this?” And it was interesting telling them about my process.

(12) ROBERT: We started crafting the JetNap on paper, and

then went to a sheet-metal company. It took about eight
months from drafting the document to having inished
prototypes. Then we contacted our patent attorney.

(13) TIFFANY: Building diferent prototypes for these pat-

ents with my dad—that was the fun part.

(14) ROBERT: If you look at patent applications, most of

them are done by males. With Tifany, I felt that I should
keep encouraging her to have a mind of discovery, a mind
to look into science and technology. I hope future genera-
tions encourage more girls and women to invent.

Tell us your patent story at editor@popularmechanics.com.

70 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

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 INVENTION

THINGS
↓ COME APART

/ A P HOTOGR A P H BY TODD M C LELL A N /

D I S A S S E M B LY R E P O R T

Smart Lock
MODEL: PRODUCED: TIME TO
NUMBER
YALE ASSURE SHANGHAI, DISASSEMBLE:
OF PARTS:
LOCK SL CHINA 1 HOUR,
CONNECTED
BY AUGUST
12 MINUTES
115
NOTES: Has any renter in history ever heeded the “Do not duplicate” dictum on
the face of an apartment key? What if you get locked out? Better make a copy
for your neighbor. Plus a set for when you go running. And then your sister
comes to stay for two weeks, so she needs one too. On it goes. And then one
goes missing. Mechanical keys have been with us for a long, long time—at least
since the Romans, and probably longer—and their biggest weakness has always
been that they are objects, which can be broken, copied, lost, and found. Now
comes the smart lock and a new conception of keys: that they should be more
like user proiles on a computer. Are you allowed to come into my home at any
time of day? Okay, then here’s this key. The teenager’s key stops working after
curfew. Deliveryman? Here’s a key you can use exactly once. It’s a great system.
The only thing wrong with it is the name. The guts of the lock are basically the
same. They should have called them smart keys.

INSTALLING THE LOCK
You install a smart lock in pretty much
the same way you would a traditional
lock. The latch mechanism (13),
which includes the bolt (11), installs
in the door along the long horizontal
axis. The strike plate (9) gets aixed to
the doorjamb so it aligns with the bolt.
The exterior escutcheon (2)—which is
where the keyhole would be, but here is
only a screen (4)—mounts to the latch
assembly on the outside of the door.
On the inside—the secure side—you
screw the mounting plate (5) in place,
then attach the interior escutcheon,
which features a thumb turn (10) for
operating the lock from the inside.
The interior escutcheon is also where
you install the batteries, which feels
like a weird thing to have to do for a
door lock, and a network module (1),
which allows the lock to talk to other
smart systems, like Amazon Key for
deliveries, or August Connect, which
lets you control the lock from anywhere
with Wi-Fi. Which feels even weirder.
USING THE “KEYS”
Once the lock is installed, you pro-
gram in a master code using the key-
pad (3). That’s like the administrator
password. It’s required to register new
people with new PIN codes. Once it’s
set, you can create codes for anyone
who might need to get in (including
you). When you come home from
work, you tap the screen; the keys
light up, you punch in your code. It’s
validated by the microprocessor
(6), and the door unlocks. (Note: A
mechanical key isn’t only a security
device—it’s also a tool for transmit-
ting force from your muscles to the
bolt. Absent the key, the smart lock
uses a motor [12] to actuate the bolt.)
So what can go wrong? If the bat-
teries die—they last for about a year,
and the lock warns you when they get
low, so they shouldn’t—you can give
the lock temporary power by hold-
ing a nine-volt battery against two
terminals (8) below the screen. If
at that point your PIN doesn’t work,
someone may have activated privacy
mode, using the privacy mode but-
ton (7). In that mode, PIN codes don’t
work. You might use it at night, when
you don’t want to get Kramered by the
neighbor you gave a code to because
at reasonable hours you’re buds. If the
lock isn’t in privacy mode, and your
PIN still doesn’t work, you’ve either
forgotten it—the new way to lose
your keys—or, well, someone decided
you’re just not welcome anymore.
—Kevin Dupzyk

72 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

 2
3 4

10

13

11

12

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 73

THE LIFE

At Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah,

avalanches are a constant threat.
Which is why Eric Murakami and
his team climb the mountain, study
the slopes, and set them of.

THE BOOM
PATROL
74 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com P H OTO G R A P H S BY J A K E S TA N G E L
 Murakami and the
Snowbird snow-safety
team often work in
low light to clear
dangerous avalanche-
prone slopes of snow.
THE LIFE

FTE R LAST N IGHT’S STORM , it’s a good snow

A
day. Every lift shack and snowcat, every deli-
cate needle on every spruce, and every trail at
Snowbird are covered with powder perfect for
morning ski runs. It’s also the perfect condi-
tions for an avalanche. In groups of two and
three, the Snowbird Avalanche team hike in
ski boots through fresh snow up to their knees, their
backpacks full of two-pound hand charges the size of
soup cans. Someone shouts, “Fire in the hole!” then
pauses briely before tossing the slurry of explosives,
listening carefully for any hastily shouted objection.
The two-minute fuse burns for what feels like a lot more
than two minutes. Is it a dud?
BOOOOOOM!
Snow rushes down the empty chute, just as planned.
It roars through trees, slows down, piles up. Some-
times great sheets break of from ridge to ridge, like
the whole mountain is moving. A calamity induced to
avoid a tragedy.
Eric Murakami, the Snowbird snow-safety assistant
director, has been on this mountain since before 5 a.m.
The 20-year veteran needed time to plan. Even when A
you know the storm is coming, you can never be sure
what it will give you. “You
don’t want to get too smart A / At the end of the day, D / Todd Greenield,
and think you know every- some patrollers grab a Snowbird director
beer at a local bar, The of snow safety, goes
thing that’s going on or else Tram Club. Todd Green- over the avalanche-
you’re going to get burned.” ield and Eric Murakami mitigation plans.
play a game of pool.
Eric and his team pore over E / Frankie, an avalanche
weather reports and wind B / Determining the rescue dog, runs through
threat of an avalanche a training exercise to ind
readings. They ask trail involves tracking skiers buried by snow.
groomers what they saw the weather reports, but also
getting out in the snow. F / Even in the digital
night before. They ride the age, hard copies of
tram slowly up the mountain, C / Eric digs in the snow weather data, patrollers’
to examine individual assigned routes, and the
shooting bright spotlights layers that accumulate day’s schedule help keep
through the morning dark- after each storm. A bur- the dangerous work
ness down to the snow below. ied weak layer could give, organized and efec-
causing an avalanche. tively communicated.
Most important, they get in B
the snow themselves, digging
two, three feet down, looking for the thick, lufy, crystal-
lized weak snow that might give, creating an avalanche.
Once they form a plan, they hike to their spots,
working top-down, constantly radioing their locations
and when they’re throwing charges. Areas that are
too dangerous to walk over call for the Avalauncher, a
compressed-nitrogen cannon that shoots explosives up
to 1,000 meters. Although the team sticks to “islands of
safety,” areas protected from the induced avalanches,
the snow, and what it covers, can be unpredictable. “You
have to be careful what you’re looking for, because you
might ind it,” Eric says.
All of this happens while those 7,000 skiers are layer-
ing on the polypropylene, searching for their other glove,
drinking an espresso from Alpha Cofee, hoisting skis
and boots over their shoulders on the way to the moun-
tain. When they get there, it will be safe, though most
of them won’t consider why or how. They might even see
Murakami or one of his guys grabbing a beer later, but
they won’t know it. There’s a lot the skiers don’t know
about how the place works, and that’s ine. They’re just D
supposed to have fun. —James Lynch
For a shoppable list of what Murakami and Greenield are wearing, see page 78.
76 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
 C

E F

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 77

THE LIFE

THE SHOPPABLE LIFE

7 6 –7 7
PA G E S
Sweet Protection Oakley Fall Line Arva Airbag California Cowboy Flylow Handlebar
Trooper MIPS Helmet Prizm Goggles Reactor 32 High Sierra Shirt Flannel Shirt
Molded thermoplastic Anti-fog Prizm lens for Space for longer trips, Thermal-lined lannel Classic look, made with
combined with increased contrast on avalanche airbag for with a pocket that its 100% polyester to wick
carbon iber. white slopes. bad ones. an après-ski beer. moisture, dry quickly.
$320 $190 $700 $148 $90

Fisher + Baker K2 Trucker Hat Jack Wolfskin Grass- Cotopaxi Fuego LT Gordini MTN
Passage Vest Rep your ski brand, land Hybrid Jacket Down Jacket Crew Gloves
Down vest to throw cover your helmet hair, Wind-resistant. Insula- Water-resistant goose Windproof and water-
on after a ski, or and vent head heat. tion wicks moisture and down, perfect as a layer proof, down-insulated,
dress up at work. $25 still works damp. or between seasons. real cowhide trim.
$278 $163 $230 $75
ALSO USED IN THIS STORY

SPY Legacy Goggles K2 Pinnacle Buf Knitted Hat Smartwool Merino Farm to Feet Little
No fog, its over 118 Skis Take of the helmet 150 Base Layer Cottonwood Socks
glasses, bonus lens so Wide powder ski, ir/ and stay warm Merino helps regulate Wool backcountry ski
you’re ready regardless aspen core, carbon into the teens. body temp year round. socks, reinforced ankle
of conditions. added for pop. $32 Smooth lat-lock seams. for walking lexion.
$230 $800 $75 $24
P H OTO G R A P H S BY A L L I E H O L LO WAY

Danner Raptor Smartwool Merino Black Crows Nordica Promachine Elan Ripstick
650 Boots 250 Pullover Manis Gloves 130 Ski Boots 106 Skis
Waterproof, PrimaLoft Merino wool base layer, PrimaLoft insula- Lighter-weight plastics, Carbon tubes in
insulation, leather and seam-free shoulders for tion, waterproof goat great tread for walking, laminate wood core.
wool, megagrip sole. chafe-free backpack. leather, neoprene cufs. impact-absorbing cork liner. Strong, light.
$240 $100 $140 $749 $900
78 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
 After snow-removal
work, Murakami and
the rest of the team
rope of closed trails,
practice rescues, and
aid skiers in distress.
THE LIFE
GETTIN G
Bowling
↓ STARTED I N...
You’re gonna want to get a lot of lane time.
And a ball. But mainly: lane time. / B Y M A U D E C A M P B E L L
y bowling roots run deep. I
M 1
had the same bowling-alley
birthday party we all had at
age eight. But unlike you, I
just...kept bowling. I joined
a league in fourth grade
and was on my varsity bowling team
in high school. (That’s actually a thing
in Michigan.) ¶ But you don’t have to
commit that much to become very good
at bowling. You just have to go more
than the once, maybe twice, a year you
do now, spend a little more money, and
understand that this seemingly sim-
ple, fun sport has its complexities. And
that iguring them out makes it way
more fun.
80 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
happens so far away from where it
started. It’s like throwing a water
balloon or shooting a clay pigeon.
/ Dr. Dean Hinitz, sports psycholo-
gist for Team USA bowling, says that
the satisfaction of bowling, the ball
rolling down the lane and crashing
against the pins, boils down to four
So, why factors: experience of mastery, sense
is bowling of autonomy, purpose, and related-
fun? ness to others. “Bowling is a sport
that, from beginning to end, the
experience of being able to progress
TH E FE E LI NG of the ball hitting the and gain some mastery quickly is on
pins, hearing and seeing them fall a diferent rate and pace than most
down, is deeply gratifying. We have other sports. Very few sports aford
all felt that instantaneous reward. It’s such an ability to have a signature
about control and chaos. And you did way to do it—it’s inherently satisfy-
it. You’re the reason that ball is trav- ing to say here’s where I am and I’m
eling down that lane, at that speed, going to do something; there’s a goal
hitting the pins in that way. And it and I can reach it.”
“7–10 Split”
M E AN I N G : Also called Bedposts, it’s one
THINGS of the hardest splits to pick up as you
BOWLERS have to get the corner pin to slide all the
SAY way over the lane. The Greek Church is
the hardest split—Google it.
 2
YOU WANT ON E that feels heavy, but not so
Can

4
heavy that you struggle to roll it down the lane
I take and you’re sore the next day. You want the
lessons? throw to feel efortless, but not so easy you’ll
throw the ball into the TV screen (YouTube it).
The only other important factor is the inger
you can find a
AT L E S S O N S . CO M , holes: Your ingers should feel snug in them,
teacher by taking a short survey and What’s the right ball but not so snug that your thumb pops out on
selecting your location. (You’ll spend for me? release instead of smoothly exiting the ball.
$25 to $120 per hour, depending on
geography.) For free, you can use You- Coverstock Polyester/Plastic Urethane Reactive Resin
Tube to study the form of coaches and Material
pros alike to get you started develop-
Durability Hard, built to last Ofers more friction Creates higher
ing your own. between ball and lane friction and sensitivity
surface to lane conditions and
user error

3
What’s the Hooking
Potential
Virtually none or low Noticeable increase
from house ball
Increased angle
of entry
initial cost
like? Expense $50 to $90 $63 to $130 $73 to $175
(Ball Only)
Best Picking up spares Working on your Sinking into the
STARTING OUT, you can use the house Used For hook release pocket
balls at the alley. The only cost will
be renting a lane and a pair of shoes
(around $30). When you’re ready to WHY SOME BALLS MOVE
purchase your first ball, go to your DIFFERENTLY THAN OTHERS
local pro shop (often located in the
A bowling ball is made
alley itself) and speak with them
up of a hard outer
about what you are looking for in your PA NCA KE shell with a weight CORE
game. Once you have the coverstock block in the core. The
material determined (see right), they mass and shape of the
will help you determine a weight that weight block is what
is suited for your body and measure afects the spin of the
ball and how it curves
your hand so the ball will be custom-
Provides “straighter” as it rolls down the Heavier roll and increased
ized for your grip. You’ll be paying for lane.
momentum down the lane hook potential
the cost of the ball and customization,
plus the labor (around $250).

“Anchor”
M E AN I N G : The person who
bowls last on a team in league
play. Usually the best bowler
on team, cool under pressure.
a strike the traditional way.
The ball had to cross over to
the other side of the head pin
opposite to how I threw it.
spare because I didn’t adjust
consecutive strikes instead of my throw to account for that
being satisied with a turkey pin directly behind the 1, 2,
(three strikes in a row). or 3 pin.

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 81

THE LIFE

↓ GETTING STARTED IN BOWLING

THOSE MARKINGS have

5 6
three purposes: to help
What do those you perfect your stance, How much
markings on approach, and throw. But time until I
the lane mean? the lane helps you in lots get decent?
of ways:

B your non-bowling
A movements controlled, and take
A / BOARDS: There are 39 boards on a
lane, about one inch wide. They help deter-
mine where to place your feet and target your
shot, along with three rows of dots on the
approach. For your irst shot, place your slid-
ing shoe (should be opposite of the hand you
bowl with, so if you bowl with your right hand,
would be your left shoe) on the center dot of
the irst or second row. Once you ind a good
starting spot, be consistent for every irst ball
you throw.
B / FOU L LI N E : The line that separates
the approach from the playing surface and
where the oiled surface begins.
D
C bowling works.”
C / DOTS AN D ARROWS: These will
help guide your ball into the pocket or to the
pin you’re trying to hit. The dots before the
foul line guide your approach, and the dots
after the line help you see where your ball is
heading. Also for aim, at 15 feet past the foul
line, seven arrows show the path of your ball.
D / B REAKPO I NT: The part of the lane
where your ball begins to hook back into the
pocket (hopefully) and can show you the
results of the targets you picked on the lane.
If you’re not achieving the shot you’re trying
to make, adjust your alignment, target, ball, or
throwing speed.
bowler,
FO R T H E O N C E - A -Y E A R
it might take only a few games to
see improvement. Pro bowler Jason
Belmonte says, “There’s so much
instruction scattered through You-
Tube. Study it. Then put it into
practice on the lanes. Be patient.
Give yourself time to understand how
There’s two ways to judge decency:
score and hook. And they’re related.
Hooking the ball allows it to roll into
the pins at an angle and do more dam-
age. Here’s how you do it:
Hold the ball
roughly at waist
height, with your
elbow tucked into
your side. Cradle
the ball and use
hand to support it from the bot-
tom. Choose your target before
you begin your approach, keep your
careful steps.
Your arm should
swing back like a
pendulum, remain-
ing straight and not
wrapping around
your backside.
When you release
the ball, your thumb will leave irst
and your ingers will follow. An
easy and inexpensive way to prac-
tice releasing the ball at home is
to throw a football underhand in a
nice, tight spiral.

Your wrist should

ANOTH E R TH I NG : I THOUGHT “LEAGUE NIGHT” WAS FOR remain straight
EXTREMELY SERIOUS, SUPER-COMPETITIVE BOWLING as you release
PEOPLE. CAN THIS BE A HOBBY FOR ME? the ball, and your
hand should fol-
Everyone is welcome in bowling. It’s usually an all-ages, all-abilities situation. You’ll be bet- low through with
ter than some, worse than some. You can join a league either by stopping by your alley of the shot. That’s
I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY A R T H U R M O U N T

choice and inquiring within or through Google. Depending on the alley, you can either go why you see some
in blind—where they ind a team for you—or with a group of friends, coworkers, or fam- bowlers remain at the end of the
ily. You may get intimidated by the seasoned pros, but remember that even if you bowl 37, lane with their hand up in the air
you’re still improving and you get to have fun while you lub. or it swinging back and forth long
after the ball has left their ingers.

Beer is one of the major social aspects of the game, and it can help ease your tension and boost your
AND: IS IT
conidence. One too many can make you lose your form. And bowling is a game in which tiny changes
can have a huge efect on where the ball goes and how many pins it topples. Bowling is a game of
A BEER?
nuance. One nuance: Spilling on the lane is a no-no.

82 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

THE LIFE
↓ HOMESTEA DING
Millie, the Dog Who Wouldn’t Stay
A lesson in electricity, canine curiosity,
and doing it right the irst time.
F A CAT has nine lives, then our family dog, Millie, has bragging
I
rights few felines can match. She has already lived a few times
nine, so much so that not long ago my children and I had to take
on a project to keep her alive.
Millie is a small yellow Lab, six years old. In keeping with her
breed she is gentle, smart, and sociable—a ine addition to a fam-
ily with ive children.
Her one tic is that she likes to wander, a trait that after a mild-
mannered life as a puppy she developed late in her second year.
About that time, our well-behaved dog began dashing out the door
unleashed. This new behavior was maddening enough. It got worse.
We live on a busy road, and Millie developed a trick she performed
as a coup de grâce. After escaping, while loitering beside traic, she
often encountered motorists who slowed to check on her. Millie’s
response? She would immediately lie in the asphalt—belly up, tail
wagging—and surrender. When someone stepped from behind the
wheel to move her, she’d jump into their car.
Millie wears tags bearing her name and address. You can guess
the rest.
A routine took shape: The kids would leave a door ajar. The dog
would escape and submit to the random driver of a passing car. Soon
the exasperated driver would appear on our porch, holding a cheerful
Millie by the collar. There were days when the dog would be depos-
84 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
/ BY C.J. CHIVERS /
ited on the front porch by one driver and within the hour escape out
the back through the legs of a child. A fresh knock would sound on
the door. Millie would be there again, tail wagging, eyes bright—in
the custody of someone else.
Then one Saturday she escaped onto the road, followed joggers
half a mile to a grocery store, passed through the automatic doors,
and commenced roaming the aisles. She ended up on the store’s
Facebook page.
Our yard is not small. A fence was beyond budget. And our house
is frequented by neighborhood kids who are no more attentive at
the back door than our own children. We needed a better idea than
urging children with ages in the single digits to be more careful
with the latch. We decided to install an underground electric dog
fence. Maybe, we thought, a light shock collar would be a suicient
deterrent.
The concept of the underground fence is simple: With a base sta-
tion and a large loop of signal wire, we could create a circumference
that opened at our back door. When Millie escaped into the yard, her
options would narrow. If she got within a few feet of the edge, the
signal wire would cause her collar to vibrate and beep. If she drew
closer, the collar would give her a light shock. Worried for Millie’s
life, we hoped such a fence might contain her at last. We also hoped
that once she learned the system, the warning beeps would suice

and the shock feature on her collar could be switched of.
Two of my sons and I sat at the table and sketched out a diagram
of our house and yard. We settled on a basic scheme. We would run
a loop around the backyard, leaving the space around the front
door and driveway unchanged. In this way we could leash Millie
in the house and lead her out the front door to the car or for neigh-
borhood walks.
The next weekend we had our materials, the standard stuf of
the underground dog-fence trade: an electric collar, a base station,
a spool of medium-gauge wire, and a bundle of small marker lags.
We opted not to buy the heavier-gauge wire, saving a few dollars.
A long row of irewood racks runs along one side of the back-
yard. We rolled the spool over the ground and stapled the wire to
the rack’s base. Where the racks end, we dug a shallow trench and
buried the wire for an underground run along the second side. The
third side of the yard is a mix of racks, poultry coops, and a tool
shed. Here we opted to cut corners, and buried sections of wire
but stapled some of it to the bottom of racks, a time-saving choice
in a low-traic area that let us move quickly to the house, where
after a half-hour on a ladder with the staple gun we had elevated
the wire over the back door, down the cedar shingles to the base
station by an outlet in another shed. The kids trotted along the
new perimeter and set up small white marker lags, delineating
for Millie the outline of what would soon be her conined space.
We were almost done.
Mick connected the base station to power, installed the battery
on the collar, and tested the shock on himself to see if it was too
strong. His eyes told the story. He decreased the setting and fas-
tened the rig to the dog.
Looking for a happy ending? We almost have one.
Within the day Millie had figured it all out. The white flags
IF THE BALL ROLLED NEAR
T H E B O U N D A R Y, M I L L I E
WOULD STOP SHORT,
TURN AROUND, AND EMIT
A SINGLE BARK, TELLING
U S THAT WE COULD FETCH
THAT TOSS OURSELVES.
marked the yard’s new limits, which she quickly understood. When
playing fetch, if the ball rolled near the boundary she would stop
short, turn around, and emit a single bark, telling us that we could
fetch that toss ourselves.
Once this pattern was clear, Mick switched Millie’s new col-
lar from light shock to beep. We saw that when she approached the
property line, the warning beeps proved to be deterrent enough.
For several years Millie did not escape again. Front-porch vis-
its from drivers ceased. Her life was preserved. We had succeeded,
or so it seemed.
But there is a moral to our story, and it’s not about how Millie, the
Labrador Retriever who likes to lie down in the road, remained alive.
It’s more universal than that. The deeper truth is that we had tried
to be thrifty with labor, running that medium-gauge signal wire in
places above ground. We had all but scheduled a fail.
One summer day a year or two ago, one of the kids entangled the
wire by a wood rack in a weedwacker, severing it in a lash. Mick
repaired and sealed it. But over time water intruded into the splice,
and suddenly the signal wire was transmitting no signal. This I
learned while I was traveling and my phone rang. It was a neighbor
from a few blocks away. Millie was in his yard, playing with his dog.
If dogs could grin, this was her expression.
The next weekend the kids and I (along with a few neighborhood
kids whose rap sheets show they have often left my back door ajar)
were at it once more, this time with a heavier-gauge wire and more
time at the shovel, ensuring that wherever we run the weedwacker
the wire is under the dirt. The old rules? They are old for a reason.
Do a job right and you won’t be doing it again.
C.J. CHIVERS is the author of The Fighters, a correspondent for
The New York Times, and a winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize.
@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 85
PAG E
18-19
86 WINTER
ILDFIRES USED TO have
a sea son. From May to
October, much of Califor-
nia—plus parts of most
states west of the Rockies—
would be on alert for dry conditions. Cold,
wet November meant the threat was over.
Then 2018 happened.
This year David Tikkanen, a twenty-
year veteran of the California Department
of Forestry and Fire Protection, worked
86 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
a thirty-four-day shift, from July 19 to
August 21. “Back when I first started, it
was the eleven-day mark,” he says. “When
I started to cross the eleven-day mark
on a regular basis, it was the twenty-one,
twenty-three-day mark that I would start
getting stir-crazy. And then after I did that
for a long stretch of years, it was thirty-,
forty-plus days.” His record is ifty-three.
The ire season grows. California faced
its biggest fire ever this year—the Men-
docino Complex, which lasted fifty-four
days a hundred miles north of San Fran-
cisco—and collectively, California fires
charred an area twice the size of Rhode
Island. Nevada lost 1.1 million acres. In
Oregon, Idaho, and Utah, 1.8 million.
And it’s not just out west: Nearly six hun-
dred thousand acres burned in Oklahoma.
The earth’s changing climate con-
tributed to the increase, meddling with
precipitation patterns and hastening
P H OTO G R A P H BY D W I G H T E S C H L I M A N
snowmelt, as did our history of suppress-
ing wildfires—which creates a buildup of
natural fuels. But so has the push of people
into nature. Wild states like Arizona, Colo-
rado, and Utah have exploded in population.
There are many ways to start a ire, and save
lightning, they all begin with us. Fireighters
in urban areas are a crucial line of defense,
and they don’t have it easy, either. New syn-
thetic building materials burn hotter and
with higher toxicity than wood and brick.
Well, 2018 is over and 2019 brings hope.
A irehouse in Silicon Valley is pioneering
ways to put drones to work for emergency
workers. Scientists can better predict how a
ire will burn. Jamie Hyneman, the former
MythBuster, has engineered a firefight-
ing tank that can be platooned and piloted
remotely or even autonomously.
After his record ifty-three-day hitch,
Tikkanen rolled into camp and told every-
one he was done. The higher-ups gave him
@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19
two paid days of. “I got to go home, pay the
bills, kiss the wife, dogs, and kids,” Tik-
kanen says. Then he was back. In the future,
maybe he’d be rotated onto drone duty. Or
VR-pilot Hyneman’s tank. Maybe he’d tele-
commute. One thing’s for certain: In the
future, if he’s in the ield at all, he’ll be safer
than ever. In this special report, Popular
Mechanics has found exciting new methods
and technologies that will help ireighters
around the country for years to come.
87
 FIFTY YEARS AGO lashover—the point at which a room gets
so hot its contents ignite, enguling anyone inside—took
twenty to thirty minutes. But changes in home design and
the increased use of synthetic materials have dropped it to
fewer than ive minutes. The average arrival time for ire-
ighters is six and a half. But a new set of technologically
enhanced protocols—some already rolling out, others not
far of—will help ireighters deploy more eiciently.

Present
You notice a candle has
toppled and lit the couch
on ire. You call 911 and
explain what you see, doing
your best to describe the
size of the ire, the type of
couch, and anything else
that might be relevant.
Future
You call 911. The dis-
patcher takes down your
information. Then he
accesses your phone’s
camera and mic. He trans-
mits live video of the ire
to the men who will be
responding to it.

Present
A computer-aided dispatch
system (CAD) orders the
trucks and special exper-
tise (like hazmat or medical
resources) suggested by
the information the dis-
patcher collected. At the
irehouse, a crew deter-
mines a route and leaves.
Future
As the CAD determines
what resources to send, an
autonomous drone—the
one docked in the clos-
est of many “drone nests”
around the city—takes of
and lies to the coordi-
nates transmitted by your
cellphone.

Present
The captain in the pas-
senger seat of the irst
unit on scene gives a visual
description over the radio.
Upon arrival, he gets out
and does a “360,” literally
running the perimeter of
the structure on ire and
reporting conditions.
Future
The drone locks its cam-
eras on the structure
and lies repeated circles
around it, ofering an ongo-
ing loop of 360s. It utilizes
standard cameras, but also
things like infrared, which
pick up hot spots not visi-
ble to a human ire captain.

Present
Fireighters connect to a
hydrant and start ighting
the ire. Tactics are deter-
mined by the initial size-up
and adjusted based on the
experience of the men
inside.
Future
Fireighters also jack
into the fiber hydrant—a
connection to the neigh-
borhood’s broadband
network at the hydrant.
This provides the band-
width to ly drones, send
live video to men inside, and
run A.I. or machine learning
on data they send out.

In 2006, the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Group at the

National Institute of Standards and Technology built a spark-
throwing machine called the Standard Firebrand Generator
(a.k.a. The Dragon). It lights things like wood chips on ire
and passes the sparks through a size screen to create a ire-
brand shower like one from a real wildire. In noncombustible wind tunnels at the Building
Research Institute in Japan, researchers then test how well buildings resist the heat. (One
inding: Firebrands can ignite roofs by slipping under individual shingles.) NIST’s latest instru-
ment, the emberometer, which will be tested into the spring, consists of several of-the-shelf
cameras with certain color ilters removed to track the irebrands escaping from actual ires.

88 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY A L E X A N D E R W E L L S

 IN THE SUMMER OF 2014, Craig Clements was driving his
lifted Ford F-250 down California State Route 44 when
the postdoc from his lab, San Jose State’s Fire Weather
Research Laboratory, said the words of every scientist’s
For the past few years was to create new stress-test-
dreams: “Oh my gosh. Look at that.” They had been mak- Anthony Putorti, a ire protec- ing requirements for those
ing a wide pass around the Bald and Eiler wildires in the tion engineer at the National facepieces—but the data Put-
Lassen National Forest, trying to get out of the smoke so Institute of Standards and orti gathered turned out to
they could see the dense plumes curling out of the top. The Technology and a former ire also be useful for determining
postdoc, Neil Lareau, was sitting in the passenger seat investigator, has been work- ire characteristics after expo-
ing on a test series examining sure. Now researchers are
operating a Doppler lidar sensor as they drove, and when
facepieces from the respi- working on ways ire investi-
they popped out of the haze, he saw a low, thick layer of rators ireighters wear to gators can use the indings of
smoke sliding along the ground in the opposite direction prevent smoke inhalation. The his study to reverse-engineer,
of the wind. It was, he thought, a density current, a phe- lenses, which ireighters look based on gear damage after a
nomenon in which shade from smoke cools the ground through as they work, were ireight, the conditions of the
below it, creating a temperature gradient not so difer- melting under certain extreme ire they’re ighting—which
ent from the cold fronts that appear on meteorological conditions. The original goal will help them ight it better.
forecasts. That’s what was making the smoke move in the
wrong direction: weather created by ire.
This is not as crazy as it sounds. Fires release huge amounts of heat and water
vapor into the atmosphere, the same factors that create rain clouds, winds, and
convection currents—the ingredients of weather. Only because wildires release Density Current: Smoke blocks sunlight from
so much heat, the weather they create can be stronger and more extreme than even the forest loor, creating a low-lying layer of
hurricanes—updrafts fast enough to down a plane, smoke plumes full of debris, and dense, cool air that pushes smoke in unexpected
100-mph lame blasts driven by wind and pockets of fuel. But we know surprisingly directions.
little about how wildires behave, which is why researchers such as Janice Coen, proj- Pyrocumulus Cloud: Hot air and water vapor
ect scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, released by combustion rise over a wildire. The
are incorporating new data into combined weather–ire computer simulations that vapor condenses into clouds that can cause rain or
could one day save lives. For example: When ireighters are on the less active side of lightning.
a ire, it can suddenly shift direction and run at them with 200-foot lames. “Gust Updraft: Heat creates crazy-powerful winds that
fronts overwhelming the ireighters have been behind a number of fatalities,” can sweep skyward at up to 120 mph. Clements’
says Coen. When the models get good enough, they’ll be able to see them coming. team unwittingly lew through one. “One of the
radar scientists on the aircraft hit his head and
started bleeding,” says Clements. “We got this text
where he said, ‘I’m bleeding for science, but we’re
okay.’ ”

Horizontal Roll Vortex: Updrafts rotate along

the ground in opposite directions (like log-rolling).
“They can lean over and collapse on ireighters,”
P H OTO G R A P H / I L LU S T R AT I O N BY T E E K AY N A M E

says Coen.

Fire Whirl (a.k.a. Firenado): Winds swirl around

hot, buoyant gases from the ire so they shoot up
in a spiral pattern, then ignite once they reach an
area with suicient oxygen. A irenado in British
Columbia sucked up (and melted) a ireighter’s
hose.

The Flamethrower (a.k.a. the Finger of Death):

When a ire climbs a hill, sometimes it encounters
a cache of unburnt fuel and shoots a inger of ire
about 300 feet at 100 mph that collapses in less
than two seconds. “You can think of it like a lame-
thrower that’s pointed along the ground,” says Coen.

P H OTO G R A P H / I L LU S T R AT I O N BY T E E K AY N A M E @PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 89


MARCH 2016. On a sunny Bay Area Friday,
Jamie Hyneman is alone at M5 Industries,
a tinkerer’s dream of a workshop in south
San Francisco that was for thirteen glorious
years the de facto headquarters of Myth-
Busters, one of the most successful reality
shows in television history, of which he was
the walrus-mustached cohost. He’s alone
here a lot these days, now that the show is
over and the crew cleared out. He owns the
space, and a lot of the MythBusters stuf is
still here, pieces and parts and gear stacked
in neatly labeled boxes from loor to ceiling.
He’s giving an impromptu tour to a couple
of kids, showing them scary masks from his
days doing Hollywood special efects and a
mechanical spider that’s taller than they are.
And then, in a well-lit workroom toward
the back, he pulls out a drawing of what looks
like a tank. He gets serious—he’s always
serious, but something in his tone reveals
that this is special. The tank, he says, is
unmanned. It is saddled with massive water
tanks and outitted with a remote-control
system that will allow it to be piloted directly
into wildfires—the kind that can rage in
this state and others in the Northwest for
many months each year—spraying water
and saving the lives both of ireighters and
homeowners, a remote-control robotic irst
responder.
Nothing like it exists, he says.
Just something he’s working on, he says.
ONE AFTERNOON IN 2003, Hyneman
was standing on a film set on Hermosa
Beach, in Los Angeles, wearing full scuba
gear and holding a remote control. He was
surrounded by a crew ilming a 7 Up com-
mercial, for which Hyneman had been hired
to build a robot. “They wanted to have a 7
Up machine that was mobile and had tank
treads on it and would bring 7 Up to you, and
the thing gets a little aggressive by pushing
its product on people by shooting cans out
the slot,” he says. “So I got a little carried
90 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
away and I actually made a fully automatic
soda-shooting machine gun that actually
propelled them about 400 miles an hour.”
Hyneman piloted the machine around
the beach using the remote, shooting 7 Up
at a surfer and crushing beach cruisers like
cars at a monster truck rally. The broad
treads hugged the sand, pivoting the robot
to and fro at Hyneman’s whim. For the cli-
max, he cranked the remote control and sent
the vending machine through a volleyball
net and straight into the Paciic Ocean. He
was wearing scuba gear so he could retrieve
it—he had made a deal with the production
company that he’d get to keep the robot after
the shoot.
“I thought we were going to lose it,” he says.
“But just for why not, once they called cut, I
hit the stick all the way over for a second, and
forward—and the thing came marching right
out of the water.” He took the 7 Up robot back
to his workshop in San Francisco, sand still
clinging to those big, wide treads.
HYNEMAN HAS one degree to his name,
and it is in Russian linguistics, from Indi-
ana University. Jamie Hyneman, creator of
one of the most feared robots on Robot Wars,
Blendo—a saucerful of pikelets that crossed
a lawnmower engine with a wok with sharp
objects—once ran a pet store. Jamie Hyne-
man was a Caribbean charter-boat captain.
Jamie Hyneman was a chef.
He is not what you’d call a linear thinker,
Jamie Hyneman. He wonders, and he arrives
at something. When he looked at those
treads, what he saw was surface area. And
for some reason he can’t explain, he thought
of grass ires, and the fact that the most ei-
cient way to put out a fire was to stomp it
with a wet blanket—wet it and smother it.
He thought, Instead of some guy out there
in the field dousing fire with a sprayer,
maybe I could spray water on those treads
with all their surface area and roll right
over the flames.
TH I S I S N OT the traditional kind of leap to
make: Maybe this thing that’s typically used
for this could actually be used for that. Or at
least, it’s not a leap anyone else had made.
No one else envisioned a pack of autonomous
tanks running down a wildire. That’s why
some people are inventors, and some peo-
ple get a strange idea, the love child of a non
sequitur and a lark, and dismiss it, because
Well that’s ridiculous and might not even
work and anyway I’m late for a meeting and
what should we have for dinner tonight?
BY 2 01 5 , Hyneman had an idea and was
working on a prototype. What he didn’t have
was inancial backing. Then he met Palmer
Luckey at a venture capitalist’s picnic in
2016. Luckey, of course, had founded Oculus
VR in 2012, built a revolutionary virtual-
reality headset in his parents’ garage, and
sold the company to Facebook in 2014 for
$2.3 billion. But within a couple years of his
conversation with Hyneman, he was out of
Oculus and getting ready to launch Anduril
Industries. Anduril would be a diferent kind
of defense contractor. The traditional model,
according to Luckey, is that companies irst
secure a huge defense contract, then go try
to build something. Anduril would instead
irst build things worthy of the Department
of Defense, then sell them—by his estima-
tion a better process.
“We talked a bunch about projects that
we wanted to be working on, if we could do
anything, and I told him about some of my
crazier stuf,” Luckey says. “And he told me
he had this idea for a remote-controlled ire-
ighting vehicle that was self-cooling.”
Anduril wanted in on Hyneman’s tank
in part because it was a perfect test for vir-
tual reality as Anduril wants to apply it.
Wildires are chaotic: challenging terrain.
Smoke. Heat that’s invisible to human eyes,
even when it’s intense enough to cause a
1 . WATE R M O N ITO RS —
high-powered water
guns—follow the gaze and FOAM WATER DIESEL
direction of remote pilots.
2 . E X TE R NAL S PR AY-
E RS douse the treads in
water, creating a roll-
ing wet-blanket efect of
smothering and cooling
action as the Sentry moves
across a ire scene.
3 . I NTE R NAL S PR AY E RS
douse the entire inside of
the vehicle with a 50/50
mix of glycerin and water,
cooling components,
scrubbing the air of haz-
ardous particulates, and
preventing rust.
4 . TH E B R AI N BOX
houses the computers that
run the Sentry’s sensor
package and remote-
control apparatus.
5. A suite of TAN KS house
1,000 gallons of water,
100 gallons of lame-
retardant foam, and 100 live on the Sentry’s exterior. a brief stretch if it were out of The entire Sentry is sheathed
gallons of diesel fuel (for diesel fuel. in the same fabric used in prox-
running the engine, not 7. A set of Z E RO M OTO RCY- imity suits for ireighters and
ireighting). CLE S M OTO RS , which deliver TH E O UTE R S H E LL of the volcano explorers. It delects
exceptional power for their size Sentry is made of polished alu- 95% of heat and is rated to
6 . CAM E R A S —including and weight, drive the Sentry’s minum, which ofers extremely 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
infrared for sighting heat pumps and could potentially be high heat relectivity.
as well as visible lames— used to power the Sentry for

reignition. But what if terrain could be
mapped by lidar and heat by IR camera
and all of it paired to high-resolution maps,
then stitched together into a seamless vir-
tual environment that pilots could remotely
navigate using a VR headset? Hyneman saw
immediately how that could be great for
ighting ires. Anduril saw how it could be
great for other defense applications.
So, in 2017, Anduril bought in. Hyneman
is a contractor. If he can hand of a physical
object to Anduril, his work will be done.
HYNEMAN’S FIRST IDEA was simply to run
tracks around a giant water tank. Then one
of his collaborators suggested looking at
M113 armored personnel carriers, giant
people-moving tanks the military has been
using since Vietnam. They can carry and
tow an excessive amount of weight and travel
40 mph. But there were questions about the
legality of owning an armored military vehi-
cle. That led them to a non-armored variant,
the M548 tracked cargo carrier—basically a
pickup-truck version. It had room in the back
for water tanks, and because it was designed
to be airlifted, it was relatively light at 14,500
pounds. Hyneman bought one in 2017 from
an Army surplus store in Pennsylvania and
stashed it in his shop in San Francisco.
When Anduril decided they wanted in,
and that they would be designing a system
of VR controls, digitizing the functionality
of a ifty-year-old military vehicle became a
necessity. A tank in a virtual environment is
worthless if a computer can’t work its throt-
tle. Hyneman enlisted Jim Newton, a former
science advisor on MythBusters who went
on to found the TechShop maker spaces, to
devise, program, and build the network of
sensors and microcontrollers that would
give the tank a digital doppelgänger.
He also moved the M548 to an industrial
fabrication shop in Oakland, Cooper Gray
Robotics, that he’d worked with in the past.
It’s the kind of place where every spare inch
of shelf space—and there’s lots of shelving—
seems to be stacked with scrap metal; where
the crew is equally adept at customizing
equipment for heavy industry and building
ire-breathing zoomorphic vehicles for eccen-
tric billionaires (not that they’re allowed to
talk about it). They were perfect for working
on the modiications Hyneman had devised,
which were myriad—some straightforward,
some eccentric. The M548 went up on blocks
in the crease of two towering sets of shelves,
maybe thirty feet high, which walled of dif-
ferent work spaces. On top, still for a dozen
years, were the treads of the 7 Up robot.
IMAGINE THIS: You are a wildland ireighter
battling an expanding blaze in the woods
around a small town. The winds shifted sud-
denly overnight, and no one was able to warn
the people. You’re in a wildland fire truck,
which is pretty rugged, but there’s only one
road into the town and it’s a wall of flames
and the heat from the ire has ripped up the
asphalt and layered the roadbed with smol-
dering debris. Even if you could get the truck
to the trapped townspeople, how could you
justify the risk to the driver?

92 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com I L LU S T R AT I O N BY G R E G M A X S O N

 “With a system like this you can start
doing things that are radically diferent,” says
Luckey. When you have instead of a truck a
tank and instead of a driver a remote pilot,
you can charge through the wall of lames.
You can crush smoldering debris like tinfoil.
This all puts an emphasis on heat resis-
tance—which was a thorny problem.
“There were just too many surfaces we
had to protect,” says Newton. “Too many
things. You know? From wiring to batter-
ies to controllers to electronic stuff and
pumps. So many things. It was like, we can’t
run a traditional heat-exchanger system on
all these components. It’s just impossible. I
mean, yeah, we could do it, but it would be
crazy. So Jamie’s idea was, well...What if
we just spray water all over everything?”
Hyneman calls it The Rainstorm: The
inside of the tank is a maelstrom. A cool-
ant that is a 50/50 mix of glycerin and water
sprays continuously over the entire interior,
so the vehicle can drive into a ire without its
electromechanical guts becoming chitlins.
Once the coolant absorbs the heat, it sinks
down into the vehicle’s bilge—it’s amphibious,
so it has one—which is located so the cool-
ant’s heat is passed of to the thousand gallons
of water in the tanks, after which it can be
pumped back to the sprayers to rain again.
So what about the townspeople who have
to climb inside the vehicle once it’s charged
through the wall of lames to rescue them?
They’ll be in the rainstorm too? “If you go
in here to get rescued,” Hyneman says, “you
come out like you’ve been in a spa.”
JAM I E HYN E MAN is not precious when he
talks about his inventions. The inside of the
vehicle is deluged by “the rainstorm.” The
vehicle’s electronics live in the “brain box.”
The entire vehicle is wrapped in a tailored
suit of heat-resistant fabric, which he calls
“ire jammies.” The tube of ire jammies that
wraps a deluge gun looks like an “elephant’s
trunk,” and at one point, considering how
people being rescued will pass through the ire
jammies to get inside, he considers a circular
hole that will cinch shut, like a kind of “anus.”
I N M AY,there was a night when Newton
stayed at the shop in Oakland until mid-
night, and returned way too early. A big
demo was set for eight in the morning.
He’d been programming the servopneu-
matic valves that would allow the tank to be
remote-controlled. These were the six valves
that would operate the tank’s real controls in
the absence of human hands: moving treads,
goosing the throttle. He’d built a circuit to
Sara McAllister, an engineer at the
Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory,
researches how fuel beds of difer-
ent materials burn (think grass ire
versus forest ire). But big ires from
a rich fuel bed are hard to study in
controlled conditions, as their large
plumes of smoke can afect airlow
on the ground. So she simulates the
smoke efect under a big indoor
chimney. “We make an artiicial
barrier by putting the chimney
above the ire, which then forces air
through the fuel bed,” she says. The
chimney has more than doubled the
rate of burning in some cases, mim-
icking ires much bigger than what
would otherwise be possible in a
lab-controlled burn.
operate the valves, tested them on a manu-
facturer’s test board with great success, then
brought them to the shop, to the real vehi-
cle—and nothing had worked.
Newton was able to replace one of the six
with a valve from the test kit. One. Then he
found out Hyneman had an extra valve in his
shop in San Francisco, across the Bay from
Oakland. He raced to get it. That gave him
two working servos, enough to control one
tank tread and the throttle.
And then it was time for the demo.
When their guest arrived, they posi-
tioned him on one side of the tank. They ired
it up and used the remote controls to bring
it to life. Tread turning. Throttle roaring. Of
course, the other side of the tank was kaput.
“Oh, that’s really cool!” the guy said,
none the wiser.
THE OTHER THING about the way Jamie Hyne-
man talks about his inventions is that you
can tell he is open to new ideas, and to suc-
cess, and to failure. It’s in the way he tosses
in qualiiers that begin “We may well...” to
indicate a possibility that has occurred to
@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19
him, but that wasn’t quite his intention, but
that he understands may become the reality:
“I had the battalion chief for northern Cal-
ifornia down here, and he was the one who
pointed out that it may well be that the most
important use for this thing may be cleanup.
“So if we have something like this tank
that is a range extender or a manpower
extender, then that may well be the main
purpose for it.
“And, you know, we may well have issues
with the sensors.”
I N L ATE AUGUST, Hyneman, Newton, and
two VR experts from Anduril gathered in
the shop to start up the vehicle, which was
nearly complete. It must have been twelve
feet tall. Its surface covered in shiny alumi-
num. Its haunches two ive-hundred-gallon
tanks. Over its left and right front corners
there are professional-grade water monitors,
also known as deluge guns, which can raise
and lower and pivot and drain those tanks
completely in fewer than ive minutes. It is
oicially called the Sentry.
Newton climbs up a ladder to the top.
“Track check!” he says.
“Right track is clear,” one of the Anduril
guys says. He walks to the other side. “Left
track is clear.”
“I’m going to turn the air compressor on,”
Newton says.
“Air on!” comes a chorus of voices, fol-
lowed by the tenor thrum of the compressor.
“Fuel pump on,” Newton says.
“Engine on!”
“Engine on!”
“Fuel pump on. Engine front on. Remote
control on. Starting engine.”
The roar of the diesel explodes off the
walls of the shop. There’s a computer set up
on a workbench, with a virtual-reality head-
set and two hand controls, each operating
one side of the vehicle—treads and monitors.
“Gear on!”
When the joystick of the left hand con-
trol is actuated, a waterfall roar arises from
the spinning of the left tread. Same with the
right. When the virtual pilot looks left, the
monitors pivot to follow his ield of view. In
the shop, the tank is up on blocks. In virtual
reality, it’s in a forest of laming trees. In vir-
tual reality, the pilot watches from above as
the tank stalks a lickering yellow prey. When
the pilot pulls a trigger on the hand control—
Well, they haven’t actually rigged the
monitors to ire yet. They’re still in a shop,
after all.
“Engine of!”
“Gear of!”
“Air of!”
93
“WHEN I’M PROBLEM-SOLVING with
something, I have, efectively, a CAD
program in my head that’s like a room
that has speciic qualities to it that I go
to some deal of efort to populate. Tex-
tures and smells, something like that.
With the intent of creating attach-
ment points for my brain. Things
aren’t invented in limbo or in a vac-
uum. They have a context. So I try to
intentionally populate that context
for them...I became interested in this
just because I’ve got these big tracks
left over from a commercial. What
are they good for? And I start bring-
ing them into the CAD program inside
my head. What else could it do? Well,
you could stamp out a fire, because
that’s a lot more efficient. And then
the whole thing avalanches. Less water
resources, hotter, drier conditions—
this becomes a thing. What could we
do to minimize water use? What could
we do to make sure you can optimize
that? That’s what the Sentry is, over
the course of a long period of time.”
IN LATE SEPTEMBER, a latbed truck
chartered by Anduril pulled into the
shop’s lot. Hyneman drove the Sen-
try, now of its blocks, onto the trailer.
The truck drove it down to Anduril
HQ in southern California, where the
VR will be perfected and field tests
will begin.
For Hyneman, it’s been, roughly,
ten years of thinking about it, and
one year of building.
“Yep,” he says. “I’m done.”
ABOUT THE RUSSIAN linguistics.
It started with Slavic music. That
was an ofshoot from an interest in
classical music. And that? “It had
something to do with a girlfriend
whose father was interested in clas-
sical music,” Hyneman says, in the
shop to help make adjustments as
the fire jammies are being tailored
on a small Singer sewing machine.
“That started me in that direction in
the irst place.” He pauses for a sec-
ond, considering the long, strange
chain of cause-and-efect, problem-
solving analysis and revision, which
some people simply call a lifetime.
“Way to get access to the girl, I guess.”
94 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com
There was a time when a
ireighter in a burning build-
ing got fresh air by smashing
a window, sticking his head
out, and gulping down a few
breaths. Then someone devel-
oped a respirator, and the
health and safety of the guys
running toward danger took
a big leap forward. We’re
still making leaps like that,
whether it’s reining fabrics to
fend off cancer-causing par-
ticulates or using AR to render
smoke transparent. Here’s
the cutting edge.
Upper loors
Ground level
QWAKE C-TH RU
Uses infrared sensors and augmented reality to
restore visibility in a smoke-illed room. Statistical
analysis processes infrared sensor data to display
edges of objects: walls, doors, furniture, and even
people. In the future the masks will be able to collab-
orate, creating a loor plan of a building. This could
mean things like Google Maps–style walking direc-
tions to lead a disoriented ireighter to safety.
Available: 12 to 18 months
High-rise buildings are designed
to make it very unlikely that a
ire spreads beyond the loor
it started on. Even so: Put 50
stories between the ire and the
trucks on the ground, and things
like water pressure and con-
taining smoke get a lot trickier.
Here’s how the FDNY ights ires
in New York City’s highest sky-
scrapers, according to battalion
chief Tom Richardson:
1. Fire trucks are equipped with
high-pressure pumps capable
of pressures up to 600 pounds
per square inch, which get water
from the ground to 30 or more
stories up.
2. Giant positive-pressure
ventilation (PPV) fans are strate-
gically placed where their airlow
will contain smoke on the loor
of origin: They can create enough
pressure in an internal stairwell
that smoke cannot escape into
the hallway or other rooms, but
is forced out the windows.
3. If ire has spread down a
hallway or superheated the air,
ireighters will use a high-rise
nozzle, an angled, structured
nozzle that allows them to attack
lames from the loor below
through a window. Once the
air is cooled, another team of
ireighters can then attack the
lames from the same loor.
I L LU S T R AT I O N BY G R E G M A X S O N

3 M SCOT T AI R- PAK X3 PRO
A self-contained breathing
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ighters comfortable and
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commander to monitor heavy
breathing, and warns if elec-
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As the metal in cars gets
stronger, so too must the
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solid 1 ¾-inch bar of steel
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The eight-inch-wide jaws can
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Available: Now
of them before they make it to
the neck and head.
Available: Now
R E S PO N D E R-X
Using accelerometers and
triangulation of radio frequen-
cies, ResponderX tracks up to
1,000 ireighters each car-
rying their own transmitters.
Incident commanders can look
at a map of a building to know
an endangered ireighter’s
exact loor and location.
Available: 1 to 2 years for
structural firefighters; less
than a year for wildland
D U PO NT N O M EX NAN O
TH E R MAL LI N E R
Made from spinning, rather
than weaving, nano ibers, this
fabric is 90% air. That makes it
10% lighter than previous heat
shields, and 40% thinner, and it
protects against steam burns
by not over-absorbing moisture.
Plus, the fact that it is inherently
lame-resistant means the ben-
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Available: Now
M SA CAI R N S XF1 H E LM ET
Unlike traditional ire helmets,
this design looks more like a
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ighters to move and operate
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head. Optional integrations
include lights, a communica-
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Available: Now

AUGUST, DU RI NG TH E CARR FI RE —one of northern Califor-

nia’s largest wildfires this year, which the Menlo Park Fire
District, from the heart of Silicon Valley, helped ight—Jack
McCandless managed to get a piece of drone-detection equip-
ment hooked up to a statewide command center. A specialist
with the police department had been unable to igure it out for a month; McCandless
got it up and running within a few minutes. “Now we’re getting calls from members of
the statewide system: ‘Oh, this is great, how did you make that work?’” battalion chief
Tom Calvert says. “It was just having Jack.”
“Drones are a cutting-edge technology, so there’s a lot of bugs,” McCandless says. “I
help smooth that out. Fireighters expect it to work the irst time, every time.” The nine-
teen-year-old, a paid intern and drone technician, has been working with the ire district
for three years. He was introduced to Calvert by a mutual friend, just as MPFD was getting
its drone program going. “At the time, he was working out at NASA Ames for a company
that does satellite stuf,” Calvert says. “He was all of sixteen.”
The Menlo Park drone program got started in April 2014, after Calvert saw a drone at
another ireighter’s bachelor party and realized it would be an important tool for emer-
gency workers. Drones outitted with cameras help ireighters get a better idea of the
scope and damage to the surrounding area or perform search-and-rescue operations.
Today, MPFD personnel are in demand as experts on integrating technology into ire
response. And despite (or maybe because of) his youth, McCandless is a crucial part of
the program, which includes a leet of fourteen DJI drones of various sizes and capabili-
ties. He has an intuitive ability for getting the drones to cooperate and interconnect with
other ireighting tech, and he also fabricates custom accessories for the MPFD drones
from his home workshop, in a role Calvert says is “basically research and development.”
He’s added mounts for devices like gas meters and Geiger counters. He’s currently test-
ing a mechanism that could throw life preservers or lifelines during water rescues.
“We’re using this technology in a way that has never been used in our industry, in a
way it wasn’t intended to be used,” Calvert says. “That’s where Jack is very helpful. He’s
an expert at this stuf. We compare him a lot to Q in the James Bond ilms, who makes
all the gadgets. That’s what Jack is for us.”

@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 95

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PRQH\" Derek Dudek; landscapes: Yale University;
p. 68 cranberries: Getty; p. 80 Alamy; p. 82
lane: Alamy; beer: Getty; p. 89 ire: Getty;
HYDRO-STA p. 95 McCandless: Tom Calvert; pp. 100–101
TIC Apple HQ: Shutterstock; Cook: Getty; Oost-
DRIVE! dyk, pillows: Mermaid Pillow Co.; drone:
Airhogs; p. 104 rocket, coders, meteors, hik-

!"! "  ers: Getty; Transformer: Paramount Pictures.

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INFO KIT
FAMILY w h e n I ’m

WHAT IT’S LIKE
TO VISIT THE APPLE
HEADQUARTERS
This fall, Apple revealed three new
iPhones and a new watch. I got to
be there when it happened.
/ BY JOH N D’AGOSTINO, AGE 12 /
S
OMETIMES
bored, I just go to the Apple
Store and look at iPads,
Apple Watches, iMacs,
a nd i Phone s. I w at ch
YouTube videos of upcom-
ing iPhones, or news about
new software updates or beta ver-
sions. And now I got to go to the big
event with my dad.
When I irst saw Apple Park—the
ininity loop—it was awesome. I had
no idea it was so open and futuristic
and vibrant. They guided us up to the
Steve Jobs Theater. We walked up this
winding path surrounded by a lot of Tim Cook
reveals the new
plants. It felt like we were in a humon- Apple Watch!
gous terrarium, and we were little
insects. I was taking a lot of pictures
and my dad was eating these little Series 4. Big new screen, amazing
things with caviar on top, I think. I wallpapers, ECG-taking thingama-
ate two fruit kabobs. bobber. It was awesome. At the end of
We entered the theater and sat the presentation, I said, “Dad, I have
right in the middle of the media sec- to get this!”
tion, and it was really cool to see all The next announcement was the
the reporters posting on Twitter and iPhone XS and XS Max. I was scream-
working at their workstations. Then ing quietly to my dad about that. They
it started. I was at the edge of my seat. had so many new features, like the
They introduced the Apple Watch new A12 Bionic processing chip, the

100

new Smart HDR, and the humon-
gous screen. When that was done,
they announced one more thing: the
iPhone XR. This phone had all the
cool features but wasn’t as expensive
as more-expensive past models. They
spoke about iOS 12 (which I already
had in beta), then the theater part
was over.
I rushed into the hands-on area
and was the first in line for hands-
on for the iPhone XS and XS Max.
They were amazing to hold. I made
a YouTube video about it right there
in the room.
There were a lot of people, but I saw
a crowd gathered around somebody. I
couldn’t see who it was. But I worked
my way through and it was Tim Cook!
After doing only one interview with
another reporter, Tim saw me and
said, “Hey buddy, how you doing?”
And I was like, “Uh, uh” . . . I was so
excited. I said, “Could I get a picture
with you?” And he said, “Sure!”
Apple, to me, is about what the
future is. My parents are always tell-
ing me that I’m the future. So I guess
I was in the right place.
TOY
OF THE
MONTH!
Five-year-old
Aubree Oostdyk
designed this
gymnastics-
themed pillow. If you’re new to
drones, the Air Hogs
Supernova is an easy
way to start. (Even if
you have some experi-
ence, it’s still a blast.)
It has four sensors
on its side and one on
the bottom. With a
little practice, you can
use hand movements
to send the drone
around the room, or
pass it to a friend.
When you get really
good, put the drone
in trick mode. Spe-
cial gestures make it
dance, shoot out like a
boomerang, and spin
around your body.
The battery lasts only
about ive minutes,
but it charges back
ENTREPRENEURSHIP! up pretty quickly. Buy
MAYB E YOU ’ VE ALREADY invented a product that will one for $40 at Target
change the world. Or maybe you just want to. Either way, and Walmart.
you’re going to need to know how (and where) to make it,
how to get people to want to buy it, and then how to sell it.
Being an inventor takes a lot of hard work. Luckily there
is a place where you can learn how to do all of these things.
Mermaid Pillow Co. has been in business for two
years. It was started by a mom, dad, and their children.
They turned the lessons they learned into an entre-
preneurship course for kids. It’s a series of ten videos
that you watch online with your parents. Watch them
when you have time after school or before you head to
the park on the weekend. The series starts out with
designing a pillow. Dinosaurs,
pandas, superheroes—you can
do anything you want! Then
you’ll make a video to market
it. This is your chance to con- WILD WEATHER
vince someone why they should
O J O G Z E U R Z Y N A M E B
buy the pillow you made. The
N Y B S N A N S I D C S X N A
video will be posted on Mer-
T V Q E W I G O I E M P O A Y
maidPillowCo.com, where
U N Z M F L N T L P T D N C C
customers can see it, suggest
how to make it better, and even I P Y B Z F O T X C A J N I N
buy it. Next, you’ll learn how D R A Z Z I L B H N Y O S R P
your pillow gets made and how, S E P L E F N W R G O C O R P
after someone buys one, your N L I J T A L O F H I N D U I
pillow gets to their house. After W A E J J T T O P S X L X H M
a few weeks, when you’ve fin- H X W E Q D C Y O X U B N M A
ished the course, you’ll get your H I N G T T T V T D N G S E N
custom pillow in the mail. And M V M K J W Q K F W E L L N U
if anyone else likes your pillow R C H V L T R X Z F G K S N S
enough to buy it, you’ll make $5 X U X H B L V V R I J Y G P T
for every one you sell.
N Y I S N K V Q W B Y L A Y J
To ind out more, check out
For the answers, see page 98.
ecommkids.com with a parent.
@PopularMechanics _ Winter 2018–19 101
P M FA M I LY

SAFET Y TI P!
Always wear your
safety glasses when WHAT’S THE
you’re hammering. DIFFERENCE:
The nail could break,
and that would be
PARALLEL
very dangerous. AND SERIES
CIRCUITS
WH ETH E R IT’S YOU R toaster
or your laptop charger, every
electric device runs on a cir-
cuit. It’s the path that allows
electrical current to get to the
thing that needs power. If that
circuit is broken, no electrical
current can get through—and
your toast will never pop up.
There are two main types
of circuits: parallel and series.
In a series circuit, there is
only one path for electrons to
travel. If that path is broken,
the current can’t get through.
In a parallel circuit, there are
multiple paths, so if one is
Rest the base of your the wood. If you’re hav-
broken, the current just con-
hand on the wood for ing a really tough time,
tinues on to another.
HAMMERS stability. Start by tap- get a small piece of
Think of a string of Christ-
ping the nail lightly, just scrap wood and put it
THE TOOL enough to get the tip of under the head of the mas lights. If that string is in
When most of us think the nail into the wood hammer. This gives you series, the current has to get
of a hammer, we think so that the nail can more leverage and the through the irst bulb to get
of the claw hammer. stand on its own and nail should pop out.
The round face is for
to the second, and so on. So if
you can get your ingers
hitting nails. The claw one bulb burns out, the elec-
out of there. Swing the TWO OTHER
on the back is for pry- hammer hard, but not trical path is interrupted, and
ing things. You’ll want too hard—like you’re the entire string of lights goes
to start out with a casting a ishing rod. dark. In order to ix the lights,
lighter hammer at irst. Too hard and you might you would have to check each
Heavier hammers drive miss the nail and dent
metal. The round nose bulb until you found the bro-
nails more easily, but the wood.
they’re harder to con- helps you strike inside ken one to restart the electric
trol, and they’ll make HOW TO PULL A NAIL a space where the head current.
you tired quickly. Flip the hammer around won’t it. In a parallel circuit, how-
and slide the claw under ever, the current has multiple
HOW TO DRIVE A NAIL the nailhead. Rock the paths to each bulb. If one bulb
Be careful! Pinch the hammer away from the burns out, the current goes
nail between your nail, sliding it closer to Sledge: This heavy
thumb and foreinger the nailhead as more of hammer is mostly used
around the interrupted path
about halfway down. the nail is pulled from for demolition. and on to the next one. And
your Christmas tree stays lit.

MONSTROUS DEVICES By DAMIEN LOVE

I L LU S T R AT I O N BY L E I F PA R S O N S

Monstrous Devices is about a 12-year-old boy named Alex who receives a strange robot
from his grandfather. It becomes very important to other people in the story who want to control it. And Alex
tries hard to protect it. Later you learn the robot is about a much bigger idea. I enjoyed the book because it
was a mixture of speciic topics. It had so much action and adventure! With all the chasing and running away,
hiding and inding, and much, much more. I especially loved how it had a bit of mystery to it, like the uniden-
tiied people and the meaning of things. I liked how the author, Damien Love, would exaggerate and hint at
important details and emotional moments. I loved how he showed emotion in the main character and then
started the confusion all over again! I absolutely love how it ends on a kind-of clif-hanger. I hope that Love
writes another fascinating book soon. —Sascha Zissu, age ten

102 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

P M FA M I LY

TO DO THIS
MONTH
Code!
From December 3 to 9, millions of
students all around the world will be
coding, together. It doesn’t matter if
you know how to code already or not.
There’s something for everyone to
learn—and to have fun doing it. Find an
event near you or learn how to host one
at your school at hourofcode.org/us.

Check out
a rocket launch!
On December 15, SpaceX’s Falcon 9
rocket will deliver an Air Force naviga-
tion satellite from Cape Canaveral.
Watch live at spacex.com.

Go outside!
December 11 is International Mountain
Day, a great excuse to go hiking, skiing,
snowboarding, or sledding. If you don’t
live near a mountain, that big hill in the
park still counts.

Watch a
meteor shower!
If the skies are clear, head outside the
night of December 13 for the Gemi-
nid meteor shower, which stargazers
call “the king of the meteor showers.”
At the peak, which happens around
10 p.m., you should be able to see two
meteors every minute. And you don’t
need a telescope!

Watch a movie!
In the new Transformer movie, Bumble-
bee, out December 21, you learn the
story of an old yellow VW bug that helps
defend his new human friend—and the
whole world—from the evil Decepticons
(pictured). Just be ready: Your parents’
car will feel pretty disappointing on the
drive home from the theater.

104 Winter 2018–19 _ PopularMechanics.com

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