Majalah Popular Mechanics USA - October 2016

WIN
You Could
a Luxury Vehicle
Road Trip
page 60
HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS
Microsofts New
HoloLens
Revolutionizes
Human
Communication
PAGE 76
THE 2016
BREAKTHROUGH
AWARDS
PLUS
26
AMERICAS
MAGAZINE
SINCE 1902
More
BOLD IDEAS
That Are Changing Our Times
4
6
8
The Reader Page

Calendar
PM Everywhere
CONTENTS
T H E 2 016
HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS

13
16
18
20
24
26
28
The underwater microscope that

could help preserve coral reefs
Fords greatest factory
How to fight infections with a virus
The chemistry of your cologne
A doomed oil rig in a parking lot
Things Come Apart: Gas meter
Great Unknowns
74
OCTOBER 2016
The research, projects, innovators, fats, scientists, and students whove made the
world a little better this year. Including:
KNOW-HOW
31
34
40
44
49
52
The DIY haunted house

Entrepreneurs: Budget priorities
Tool Test: Jigsaws, earbuds, and
multimeters
Shop Notes
Getting Started In: Ornithology
Ask Roy
DRIVING
57
60
62
64
66
Why you should want to build your

own car
Track day in a rental car
Let the utility trailer change your life
Reviews: New rides from BMW,
Cadillac, and Fiat
Two bikes. One big, one small.
Both fun.
THE LIFE
69
Made From Scratch

A welder-turned-pit-master doing
things his own way in Georgia
PROJECT
113 Bluestone Patio
Make your backyard a true retreat
with a patio
POPULAR MECHANICS FOR KIDS
118 A Halloween-candy collector with
a built-in flashlight!
STUPID OR AMAZING?
124 Telemedicine
By Bud Shaw
A coding school for miners Proof that Einstein was right Two cheap
ways to get to space Cracking the coldest temperature in the universe Turning
CO2 into rock The kids who are shaping the future
76
PLUS
COVER STORY
WE CAN SEE THE FUTURE FROM HERE
Weve stared through our phones into augmented reality. And have put on the
blinding goggles of virtual reality. The next step forward in converging our digital and
virtual worlds is HoloLens, from the same people who brought you Xbox Kinect.
BY KEVIN DUPZYK
96
THE TRUTH IS IN THE

MUCK
Bun Lai is a sushi chef with an
environmentalists conscience who
prefers to cook with invasive
species. The author is a blind travel
writer who doesnt back down from
adventureand who cant judge
his food based on its appearance.
Together, they dig through the
ocean floor, searching for the freedom in limitations.
B Y R YA N
KNIGHTON
This month, enter for a chance to win

hotel, airfare, and a car for a week.
Details on page 60.
ON THE COVER: The Microsoft HoloLens photographed for Popular Mechanics by James Murray.
102
TH E E N CYCLO PE D IA
O F C LE A N I N G
How to clean crud, grit, and
grime off of anything and
everything, including carpets, decks, the L.A. Lakers
hardwood, and fingernails.
@ P o p u l a r M e c h a n i c s _ OCTOBER 2016
The Reader Page
efore retiring, reader Elliot

Ofsowitz worked in IT and
engineering. It was his engineering brain, he says, that
kicked in when his wife, Barbara, asked for a potting station to
use in her garden. After looking at a
few purchasable plans, Ofsowitz figured he could probably build a more
suitable model himself. When I
would accomplish something else
around the house, shed jokingly
give me a hard time about not having her potting station, Ofsowitz
says of his wife. So I finally said,
What the hell, Im gonna do this.
He began by lifting a few ideas from
other planslike a latticework surface to sweep dirt through into a
binand made scale models out of
cardboard and wooden yardsticks.
Then Ofsowitz began assembling
the parts: wood, caster wheels from
a furniture dolly, a card-table leg
repurposed as a handle. In total, the
project took him countless hours to
research and three weeks to assemble, and cost about $120.
A SALVAGESOURCED
POTTING TABLE
PROJECT
OF THE
MONTH
REMEMBER: We give $100 for reader projects that we publish, and $50 for original reader tips that we run. You can send both to editor@popularmechanics.com.
LETTERS
THE CREW CUT: THE MIES VAN DER
ROHE OF HAIRCUTS
Regarding your article Hair Architecture
(How Your World Works, July/August), I write
in praise of the humble crew cut. Some men
may have stylists, but many of us still simply
have barbers, who happen to be artists with
electric clippers. If someone comes near my
head with shears rather than clippers, I know
Ive gone to the wrong place. I love the culture
of barbershops and the fact that I dont need to
pay more than $15 for a style that is timeless
and inexpensiveand, dare I say, handsome.
Todd Lundgren
Yakima, Washington
SAGE ADVICE FROM MIKE TYSON
I was reading the Riding With Buzz Bissinger story (My Very Bad Day, July/
August) while recovering from a broken leg.
The injury was the result of a recent motorcycle accident caused by a dog in the road.
The adjoining advice on How to Crash
Correctly reminded me of a timeless Mike
Tyson quote: Everyone has a plan till they
get punched in the face.
Brad Hall
Portsmouth, Ohio
4
OCTOBER 2016 _ P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S . C O M
ACTUALLY, 10 PERCENT OF OUR

READERS ARE WOMEN!
I am a longtime reader of Popular
Mechanics. I also happen to be a woman.
While I accept that Popular Mechanics,
like my career in engineering and IT, is
male-centric and that theres not much
I can do about it, I do appreciate it when
my expertise and interests are taken
into consideration by my
male counterparts without
a second thought to my
gender. So thank you for
featuring a shirtless Ryan
Lochte on the July/August
cover. This small gesture
did not go unnoticed by
your female readers. All
five of us.
Kendra Appleheimer
Arlington, Virginia
Letters to the editor can be emailed to
editor@popularmechanics.com. Include your full
name and address. Letters may be edited for length
and clarity.
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IA 51593
subscribe: subscribe.popularmechanics.com
Awesome
Workshop
Instagram of
the Month
FROM USER @DRTEPI

You can always get our attention on
Instagram by using #popularmechanics or
tagging our account @popularmechanics.
THE ORIGINAL LIGHT BEER
Calendar OCTOBER
SUNDAY
MONDAY
TUESDAY
25
26
27
WEDNESDAY
16
TIP! To keep your
jack-o-lantern
looking fresh
until Halloween,
spread petroleum
jelly on the cut
lines.
23
30
15
10
11
12
13
14
The November
issue of Popular
Mechanics hits
newsstands.
The NHL season opens with

Toronto versus
Ottawa in Canada, and St. Louis
versus Chicago
stateside.
PlayStation VR,
the consoles
virtual-reality
headset, drops
today in a boon to
your Grand Theft
Auto fantasies.
Ben Affleck makes

your CPA seem
even more boring
while moonlighting as an assassin
in The Accountant, out today.
17
18
IN NEXT MONTHS ISSUE

We find Americas best hardware
stores, and automotive editor Ezra Dyer
squeezes into some tiny cars. Plus, why
you shouldnt fear the Cloud.
24
25
While youre at
it, help the kids
upgrade their
pillowcase to a
candy carrier
(page 118).
Clive Cusslers
Built to Thrill,
out today, is a
coffee-table
book youll
actually read.
31
Halloween. Give
out Milk Duds.
Everyone loves
Milk Duds.
SATURDAY
If youre in the
area, visit the
Albuquerque
International
Balloon Fiesta,
featuring 500
hot-air balloons.
Columbus Day.
Discover someplace new. Like
that local maker
studio youve
been meaning to
check out.
19
21
22
Hugh Laurie returns

to TV doctordom
as a forensic neuropsychiatrist in
Chance, a psychological thriller, on
Hulu today.
Tom Cruise is
back in the silly
but entertaining
Jack Reacher:
Never Go Back.
This year, build

your own haunted
house. See page
31.
28
29
27
Lady Liberty turns

130 today. She
doesnt look it.
TUESDAY 10/4
TUESDAY 10/25
FRIDAY 10/28
HOW TO MAKE DEAD

LEAVES USEFUL
THE BOOK RECOMMENDATION
THIS MONTH IN (PATRIOTIC)

MECHANICAL HISTORY
Shred your autumn leaves by running

the lawn mower over them. Then
put the mulch into black trash bags,
moisten, and close the bags, poking
a few air holes into the sides. After
a year, you'll have leaf mold. Add it
to your flower beds in the spring to
improve the quality of your soil.
FRIDAY
Its that time of

year again. Get
out the rake.
THURSDAY
How to get the most

out of your month.
Clive Cussler, the prolific novelist,

owns more cars than books hes written. And hes written more than 70.
His latest, Built to Thrill, showcases
cars from his collection of more than
100 classic automobilesa departure
from the underwater thrillers hes
known for. Cusslers private collection includes a 1951 Daimler DE-36
Green Goddess Drophead Coupe
one of only four left in the world.
The 305-foot Statue of Liberty was

dedicated in New York Harbor on this
day in 1886, given to the U.S. by France
as a gift of friendship. Some statistics:
The statue was built in France, disassembled, then shipped and rebuilt in the States.
Lady Liberty herself stands just over 151
feet with her arm extended into the air. Her
arm is about as long as a school bus.
Her copper coating is only 3/32 inch thick,
about as thick as two pennies put together.
2016 P&G
OFFICIAL SHAMPOO OF THE NFL
SHOULDERS WERE
MADE FOR GREATNESS.
NOT DANDRUFF.
EVE RYWHE RE
What Were Up To Beyond These Pages
P I N T E R E ST. R E A L LY !
IN OUR 114 YEARS as a magazine, weve pub-
lished quite a few projects. Assuming you dont

have quite the archive that we do, you can now
find most of them on Pinterest. Our boards are
organized by locationlike the backyardor by
tools, so you can find a project that suits you best.
Go to pinterest.com/PopMech.
LDS T!
WOR ST JE
E
ch
T
AR
h- te
SM
s hig eight
s
F-35
The uter use code.
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com n lines o
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P O P U L A R M E C H A N IC S.C O M !
THE F-35A LIGHTNING II, a fighter jet meant to upgrade the U.S. militarys fleet, has been called the most advanced fighter jet in the world.
But its taken 15 years and billions of dollars to get off the ground and has
attracted controversy because of it. Digital assistant editor Jay Bennett
flew out to the middle of the ocean to watch an F-35A refuel, midair, on its
first transatlantic flight. You can check out the story, photos, and exclusive
video, all at popularmechanics.com/F35refuel.
INSTAGRAM!
See what its like to ride in the Ghostbusters
car, park an Alfa Romeo 4C, and visit Woodford
Reserves whiskey distillery on our Instagram.
Go behind the scenes at instagram.com/
popularmechanics.
T H E P O D C A ST S!
For more coverage of our Breakthrough Awards (see page 74), check out the How Your World Works
podcast. This month youll hear from the scientist behind efforts to reduce carbon emissions by turning
CO2 into rock. Meanwhile, on the (equally entertaining!) Most Useful Podcast Ever well be testing a
cooling vest that claims to help you lose weight. You can find both of our podcasts in the iTunes Store.
Editor in Chief Ryan DAgostino Design Director Michael Wilson Executive Editor Peter Martin Managing Editor Helene F. Rubinstein
Deputy Managing Editor Aimee E. Bartol Articles Editor Jacqueline Detwiler Senior Editor Roy Berendsohn Automotive Editor Ezra
Dyer Technology Editor Alexander George Senior Associate Editors Kevin Dupzyk, Matt Goulet Associate Editor Lara Sorokanich
Assistant to the Editor in Chief Katie Macdonald Editorial Intern Andrew Deck Copy Chief Robin Tribble Copy Editor Maude Campbell
Research Director David Cohen Research Editor Henry Robertson Art: Art Director Alexis Cook Associate Art Director Zachary Gilyard
SINCE 1902
Photography: Director of Photography Allyson Torrisi Assistant Photo Editor Ida Garland Contributing Editors: Tom Chiarella, Daniel
Dubno, Wylie Dufresne, Kendall Hamilton, Francine Maroukian, Nick Wicks Moreau, David Owen, Joe Pappalardo, Richard Romanski,
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Moseman DIY Editor Timothy Dahl Associate Editor Eric Limer Assistant Editor Jay Bennett Mobile Editions: Mobile Editions Editor Tom Losinski Popular Mechanics Interactive: Producer Jeff
Zinn Popular Mechanics International Editions: Russia, South Africa SVP/International Editorial Director Kim St. Clair Bodden Published by Hearst Communications, Inc. President & Chief Executive
Officer Steven R. Swartz Chairman William R. Hearst III Executive Vice Chairman Frank A. Bennack, Jr. Hearst Magazines Division: President David Carey President, Marketing & Publishing Director
Michael Clinton Editorial Director Ellen Levine Publishing Consultant Gilbert C. Maurer Publishing Consultant Mark F. Miller
Publisher, Chief Revenue Officer Cameron Connors Advertising Director Adam C. Dub Executive Director, Integrated Marketing Jason Graham Executive Director, Digital Advertising Sales
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Digital Sales Managers Brett Fickler, Mia S. Klein LOS ANGELES: Integrated California Sales Director Anthony P. Imperato Integration Associate Michelle Nelson Assistant Michael Okubo
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N E V E R S T O P B E I N G A N AT H L E T E
T H I S I S T E C H N I C A L A P PA R E L F O R YO U R R E A L L I F E
KITANDACE.COM
standup2cancer.org
#reasons2standup
#su2c
ASTRAZENECA, CANADIAN BREAST CANCER FOUNDATION, CANADIAN IMPERIAL BANK OF COMMERCE, CANADIAN INSTITUTES OF HEALTH RESEARCH,
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STAND UP TO CANCER IS A PROGRAM OF THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY FOUNDATION (EIF), A 501(C)(3) CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION. IMAGES FROM THE STAND UP TO CANCER 2012 AND 2014 SHOWS.
THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR CANCER RESEARCH (AACR) IS STAND UP TO CANCERS SCIENTIFIC PARTNER.
ANTIBIOTICS | AN OIL SPILL | FORD | COLOGNE
A fluorescent shot of
Pocillopora damicornis
coral, otherwise known
as cauliflower coral,
taken with the Benthic
Underwater Microscope.
OCEANS
The Underwater Microscope

The first camera capable of magnifying the seafloor
will help us understand coral reefs before its too late.
BY L ARA SOROK AN ICH
ntil very recently, scientists who wanted to study sea creatures in microscopic detail
usually had to remove those creatures from their habitats in order to place them on
glass slides in a laboratory. This is one reason (along with vast size, crushing pressure, and darkness) why the sea is the earths final frontier: The bulk of the important
stuff functions best in a place we dont. Take coral reefsthey span miles of ocean,
but are made up of millions of millimeter-wide individual coral polyps. We know that each polyp has
13
A T H IN G YO U S H OU LD K N OW
While looking for lost airliner MH370, search
teams sent signed Styrofoam cups to the
seafloor along with locating equipment. The
pressure, which can reach 6,500 psi in the
deep Indian Ocean, pushed air out of the
Styrofoam, miniaturizing the cups.
a symbiotic relationship with single-celled

algae called zooxanthellae, which provides
energy for the coral. We know that warm
water makes the algae leave, turning the
reefs white. But we currently have no idea
how to fix a bleaching episode, nor do we
have enough information to even imagine
how that would work.
The worlds first microscope capable of
imaging the seafloor might change this. The
Benthic Underwater Microscope (BUM) was
invented at the University of California, San
Diego, and named for the oceans deepest
layer, the benthic zone. It is the first camera
that can take microscopic photos, videos,
and time-lapse shots of organisms such
as coral polyps in their natural habitats
watching without harming to give us more
information than weve ever had before.
So far, the BUM has been on just two trips,
to the Red Sea in Israel and to the
coast of Maui, and already its caught
never-before-seen footage of coral
polyp behavior that could help scientists better manage reefs in the
future. In Maui, the team discovered that after a bleaching, dangerous algae invade the coral in a very
specific way that might be a target
for a solution. Outside Israel, they
discovered that healthy coral polyps
from the same colony periodically
connect their mouths throughout
the night. Were not exactly sure of
its purpose, says Andrew Mullen,
a lead author on the microscopes
debut study. But we think that the
neighboring polyps are exchanging
or sharing organic materials. For
now, theyre calling it kissing.
14
So far, the microscope has

been to the Red Sea in Israel
and the coast of Maui,
and already its caught
never-before-seen shots of
coral polyps in real life.
As for how the scope works, it has two
pieces: an imaging unit that houses the
lenses and camera, and a control unit with
a computer, hard drive, and live display. A
diver sets the imaging unit up on a tripod
with the optical port about two and a half
inches away from its subject, and six LEDs
light up the sample.
Because the hardest part of underwater
microscopy is focusing, the scientists built
an electrically tunable lens that works much
like the lens in your eye. Soft and flexible, it
E LS E W HE R E
I N T HE OC E AN
In September 2015, we
published an article (Bob
Ballards Endless Voyage)
about Robert Ballard, the
man who discovered the
slightly changes shape in order to focus on

objects at different depths. The diver can
adjust the lens to focus on a target using the
computer control unit. Once the diver selects
a setting, an actuator presses on optical fluid.
The fluid puts pressure on the lens.
While easy to adjust, the tunable lens can
focus on only one plane of an image at a time.
When the diver wants to take a picture, he
does some manual focusing to get the image
within the rough range he wants, and then
the lens rapidly and automatically adjusts
through different planes of focus, like the
Burst feature on an iPhone. The scope captures about 100 of these individual shots
per image. Back in the lab, the researchers
use a computer program to reconstruct a
photo out of about 20 of the individual shots.
Using an alternative technique that uses
single shots, the microscope can also create
real-time or time-lapse videosa photo per
minute for eight hours, for exampleto
show how a slow-moving coral changes
throughout a day.
Apart from pictures that would make
a nature documentary director drool, the
results of BUM studies could help us save
the oceans. The interactions between corals
and algae are very important, says Mullen.
If we want to understand whats affecting
the health of a whole reef, we need to understand what affects the health of these teeny
organisms. Which is a lot easier now that we
can see what the heck theyre doing.
Titanic, and his uniquely

adventurous exploratory
ship the E/V Nautilus,
which had just received
additional funding for more
missions.
A year later, the Nautilus
has finished a four-month
tour of the West Coast. In
June, the team discovered
unusual coral-based ecosystems around methane
vents in the seafloor of the
Cascadia margina seismically active area outside
Washington State.
Then, near Californias
Channel Islands in July, the

team discovered a glowing purple orb that might
be a new species. While
livestreaming sucking the
orb into a remotely operated vehicle, the team made
guesses as to whether it
might be an egg sac or a
type of colorful invertebrate called a tunicate.
Maybe its a spider-egg
sac, said one of the team
members. Lets leave it
then, said another. We
dont want to be messing
with spider-egg sacs.
HISTORY
The Engines of Progress

y grandfather worked in
the plant pictured above.
He spent two summers
as an inspector at Fords
Rouge Factory complex
in my hometown of Dearborn, Michigan, earning money to pay his tuition and
become the first person in our family to
graduate college. His job was to check
coils of steel that would get stamped into
16
the bodies of the cars that Ford had been

churning out at the plant since it opened
in 1917. (Today, they make F-150s there.)
About 55 years after my grandpa, Id
spend my own college summers working
the loading dock at a sausage-processing
company across a set of railroad tracks
from the Rouge. Driving down Wyoming
Avenue at 5:30 every morning, Id see the
smokestacks spewing flames like a torch
beckoning me to my shift, just as they did

for my grandpa. In the early 90s, photographer Michael Kenna took this picture
while creating a photo book he hoped
would document the technological ingenuity that has put thousands of families to
work for nearly 100 years. Called Rouge,
the glorious book will be reissued on
October 25the first time its been available since it sold out in 1995. Matt Goulet
P H OTO G R A P H BY M I C H A E L K E N N A
WHY SETTLE FOR A SINGLE
GOOD CUP OF COFFEE,
WHEN YOU CAN HAVE A GOOD CUP OF COFFEE
EVERY SINGLE TIME.
EACH MAXWELL HOUSE BLEND IS SELE

SELECTED FROM
FIVE DIFFERENT TYPES OF BEA
BEANS, SO EVERY
DELICIOUS CUP IS GOOD TO THE LAS
LAST DROP.
Keurig, the Cup and Star design, Keurig Brewed and K-Cup are trademarks of Keurig, Incorporated. Used with permission. 2016 Kraft Foods.
Bacteriophages (literally,
bacteria eaters) are scary
looking, but they infect bacteria
instead of humans. Theyre also
everywhere: There are more
of them on earth than all other
creatures combined.
MEDICINE
Your Next Antibiotic

Might Be a Virus
The latest weapon in the fight against superbugs

is touching you right now. B Y K I R A P E I K O F F
hen a 43-year-old Chicago woman caught a sinus infection in 2009, she never imagined it could kill her. But five
years later, after multiple antibiotics had failed to work,
her body began to shut down: She could barely eat, her
vision suffered, her head spun, and her joints ached. She
had contracted methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), one of
about 20 multidrug-resistant superbugs that together infect about two million
people in the United States every year, killing 23,000 of them.
Desperate, the woman turned to the internet, where she discovered a treatment called phage therapy, an alternative to antibiotics that is not currently
approved by the Food and Drug Administration but is attracting excitement as
our national stockpile of antibiotics grows increasingly less potent. In July of last
year, the worlds first scientific trial of the therapy began in Europe. In January,
the National Institutes of Health dedicated funds to studying it here. And this
month, a startup called AmpliPhi Biosciences, in partnership with the U.S. Army,
will release the results of the first major FDA study of the treatments safety.
18
A NOT HER
R EASON
SU PER BU G S
WILL SOON
BE TOAST
A recent NIH grant
provided $5 million for studying
phage therapy
alongside other
weird techniques
for defeating
superbugs, such as
developing a decoy
target that will
trick the bacteria
into attacking the
wrong thing.
This is a coup for a medical technique that was popular before the discovery of penicillin and which has for
years only been available in countries
like Russia, Georgia, and Poland. Its
a lot like returning to old warplanes
from modern fighter jets and realizing
that the original planes had certain
advantages all along.
The phage in phage therapy is
short for bacteriophage, which is a
type of virus that infects bacteria
rather than people. Doctors in Eastern
Europe create cocktails of them to give
to patients. The woman with the sinus
infection flew to a clinic in Tbilisi,
Georgia, to receive one of these cocktails for ten days. She has since tested
negative for MRSA. Twice.
Phages are extremely specific
for the bacteria we want to kill, says
Robert Ramig, a microbiologist at
Baylor College of Medicine. Each
virus prefers a single species, so doctors can target bad bacteria and spare
beneficial strains. In cases where bacteria develop resistance to the phages,
doctors just create a new cocktail. Or
they can give patients phages and
antibiotics at the same time. For
some reason, when bacteria become
resistant to phages, they lose their
resistance to antibiotics, which often
become effective again, says Ramig.
The bacteria lose either way.
The FDAs strict rules about drug
safety make it virtually impossible
to approve the personalized phage
cocktails used in Georgia, which is
why AmpliPhi is testing blends for
common bacteria. But because bacteriophages are already everywhere
(there are roughly 10 million in a drop
of ocean water), the FDAs less stringent food-additive arm has already
approved phages for food producers
to spray on meat. The sprays, which
are organic, kill more than 99 percent
of the nasty bugs they touch. The postantibiotic age may be coming, but
were not out of weapons yet.
LARRY THE
CABLE GUY,
ACTUAL USER
Prilosec OTC has been the

#1 Doctor recommended,
#1 Gastroenterologist^ recommended, and
#1 Pharmacist^^ recommended frequent
heartburn medicine for 10 straight years.
ONE PILL EACH MORNING. 24 HOURS.
ZERO
HEARTBURN*
*Its possible while taking Prilosec OTC. Use as directed for 14 days to treat frequent heartburn. May take 1-4 days for full effect.
AlphaImpactRx ProVoiceTM Survey, Jan 2005 - Mar 2015. ^^Pharmacy Times Surveys, Acid Reducer/Heartburn Categories 2006 - 2015.
Procter & Gamble, Inc., 2016
H OW T O FA K E
A FR AGR ANCE
GROOMING
Chemistry
You Can
Wear
The science
behind your
cologne.
BY JACQU ELI N E
DETWILER
LEATHER
PHENOLS
A category of
scents that were originally
extracted from coal tar. Usually
acrid and smoky.
STYRAX A tree resin that
resembles leather when burned.
SAFFRON When its not mixed
with vanilla, it smells very much
like leather.
GASOLINE
THIAZOLE Smells like
gas but is sometimes also

used to re-create food
scents. When combined, it
can also resemble the smell
of cooked meat.
PINE Certain types of pine can
resemble turpentine and gasoline fumes.
HOT METAL
HABANOLIDE A trademarked
molecule that is meant to smell

musky but also has a metallic
note thats usually covered
with other scents.
efore he became a New York City compound smells both accurate and pleasant.
cabdriver, and long before he Dont burn or alter the odors of the fragile (and in
became an internationally lauded some cases flammable) ingredients while doing
perfumer, Christopher Brosius vis- this. And dont get a headache.
You cant just distill motor oil, says Josh
ited his grandfathers sawmill in
Greenbriar, Pennsylvania, almost weekly, play- Meyer, a self-taught perfumer who started the
ing in the yard because he was forbidden to enter cologne company Imaginary Authors in Oregon in
his grandfathers workshop, full of lathes, grind- 2012. Theres no such thing as a leather essential
ers, and welding machines. What he remembers oil. Youre just taking aroma chemicals and mixing
them to make it smell like that.
most is how the workshop smelled:
To inform their blending, scenthay, sawdust and thick axle grease,
makers can use a specialized techtobacco, damp concrete, and hands
SC E NT MAKE S
nology called headspace analysis.
washed with Lava soap. When Brosius
THE MA N
There is a glass reservoir that you
started his own scent company, called
Some traditionally
can put around a flower or whatCB I Hate Perfume, he decided to turn
masculine scents
contain ingredients
ever you want. You can put your foot
what he remembered of the sawmill
that arent mascuin it or your cat or anything, says
into something he could wear. The
line at all. Stetson
cologne contains lavChristophe Laudamiel, a perfumer
result was a fragrance he calls Greenender, jasmine, and
who created, among other famous
briar 1968.
vanilla. Original Old
scents, that ubiquitous Abercrombie
Successfully creating a scent like
Spice contains carnations, geraniums,
& Fitch cologne. The machine then
Greenbriar 1968 is a lot like assemand heliotrope flowuses heat and suction to capture
bling a puzzle that happens to be iners. And Barbicide,
that blue water from
the odor of flower, foot, or cat on a
visible. The instructions: Choose and
the barbershop,
sponge. A gas chromatograph heats
blend chemicals so that the resulting
smells like violets.
20
the sponge until the chemicals on it

evaporate and separate, and then a
mass spectrometer resolves these into
individual molecules.
Because natural objects can contain thousands of scent-producing
chemicals, at best headspace technology provides a very close approximation. This is where the art comes in.
The more difficult a scent is to literally re-create, the more important it
is for a perfumer to be able to fake it.
The chemicals that make beer smell
good evaporate too quickly to work
well in a perfume. The same is true
of gasoline. (Plus its toxic.) Apricots
are tough to mimic, and there arent
enough starchy-smelling chemicals
available to make a good steamed rice.
Approximations of these scents exist,
but they can sometimes smell uncomfortably distant from the real thing,
like an uncanny valley for your nose.
Brosius, who once won an award for a
perfume that smells like snow, likens
the process to that of an impressionist
painting a tree. When done well, you
can still see what the painter is getting
at. And you can smell it too.
P H OTO G R A P H BY J . R YA N R O B E R T S
Government 5-Star Safety Ratings are part of the National Highway Traffi c Safety Administrations (NHTSAs) New Car
Assessment Program (www.safercar.gov). Tests include driver and passenger front, side and side barrier and pole tests.
SuperCab and SuperCrew when equipped

with optional forward collision warning.
MOVIES
Howd They
Get That Shot:
Deepwater Horizon
For an action-packed movie about the
2010 BP oil spill, Lionsgate re-created
the ill-fated rigin a parking lot.
MEDIA COVERAGE OF the largest marine oil spill in United States

history mostly focused on the environmental damage, not on what
befell the 126 crew members who became stranded on a torch 40
miles from shore. Deepwater Horizon, out September 30, shows us
what happened to them. But re-creating the tragedy required serious engineering. For one thing, the real rigwhich exploded when a
bubble of methane gas blew out the drill column, killing 11 workers
and eventually spilling 4.9 million barrels of oilwas massive: 256 by
396 feet. For another, whats left of it is currently at the bottom of
the Gulf of Mexico. To shoot the action scenes, production designer
Chris Seagers and his team built a replica rig to 85 percent of the
actual scale on land. He told us how they did it. Katie Macdonald
FIRE
WATE R
To fake the Gulf of Mexico, we

worked with an East Coast company
that constructs gigantic plastic
tanks for fracking and river repair
work. They built a 350-by-340-foot
tank holding about two million gallons of water. We used a second
tank nearby for close-up shots.
The special-effects team constructed a special piping system

about four to six inches below the
waterline. When a scene required
flames on the water, they pumped
natural gas through the pipes and lit
it. Stunt doubles and camera lenses
make the fire look closer than it is.
LANDING PAD
In an early scene, BP executives

and crew members (including Mark
Wahlberg as electrician Mike Williams)
take a helicopter to the rig. To land
a 19-passenger Sikorsky, we had to
build a helipad big enough to handle
the weight 70 feet in the air.
STRUCTURE
It took eight months and 150

people to build the base. Each leg
required 10,500 cubic feet of concrete. We were working in Louisiana
going into hurricane season and we
had to make sure the whole thing
wouldnt just take off. It ended up
being so heavy we had to bring in
structural engineers.
LOCATI O N
Originally, we wanted to film on a rig or abandoned power plant, but halfway through the movie there
is a significant amount of fire. We realized wed need to build our own steel structure, and we found an
enormous parking lot at the old Six Flags amusement park outside New Orleans that would let us do it.
24
T H I N G S C O M E A PA R T
A P H O T O G R A P H B Y TODD MCLELLAN
D I S A S S E M B LY R E P O R T
GAS METER
MODEL: ELSTER AMERICAN
METER AC-250
NEBRASKA
CITY, NEBRASKA
PRODUCED:
TIME TO
DISASSEMBLE:
52 MINUTES,
0 SECONDS
NUMBER OF PARTS:
133
The first commercial natural gas well in the U.S.

was drilled by William Hart in Fredonia, New York, in
1821. He piped gas to an inn for stagecoach travelers.
In those days, it was mostly used for lighting. In the late
1800s, methods for efficiently burning gas were developed, so it could be used for heat and cooking. That
allowed it to become a standard home utility, and by the
middle of the next century, the U.S. was crisscrossed by
pipelines. In all that time, one thing remained more or
less the same: the gas meter. The two-diaphragm meter
was invented in 1843, and the design seen herewhich
is still found on most homesisnt much different.
NOTES:
THE GAS FLOW

The AC-250 is a positive displacement
meter, which means there is a direct
mechanical connection that relays gas flow
to the readout on the index (7). To accomplish this, the body (11) of the meter is
divided into halvesa front and a back
each of which contains a diaphragm (5). As
gas from the utility flows through the inlet
port (2) and into the meter, it either enters
a diaphragm and expands it, or enters the
space around the diaphragm, forcing the
diaphragm to contract. In either case, a
paired diaphragm linkage (13) and valve
linkage arm (6) translate the inout motion
of the diaphragm into the rotational motion
of the crank (14).
The turning crank operates a system of
two valves (12), each of which slides back and
forth among three positions. Each position

blocks a different set of passageways in the
meter, controlling which chamber fills with
gas and which chamber empties through
the outlet tube (10), out the outlet port (3),
and into the home. The meter must be able to
accurately measure the amount of gas that
passes through it without interrupting the
flow. Thats why the AC-250 has four chambersfront and back, plus each diaphragm.
They ensure there can always be gas flowing
both in and out.
The die-cast aluminum body is sealed
with gaskets (4) to prevent leakage (though
a maintenance plate [1] atop the meter can
be removed to access the mechanical components) so that the exact size of each space
can be used to reliably measure how much
gas has been used.
THE INDEX
In addition to the valve linkages, the crank
also operates a gear set (8) that connects it to
the index. The meter is designed to pass one
cubic foot of gas with every nine revolutions.
The gearing translates this into a system of
dials that display how many cubic feet have
passed through the meter. When the utility
company reads the meter, each dial displays
a digit: thousands, ten thousands, hundred
thousands, millions. The index is cumulative and never resets, so to keep track of how
much a home has used in a given month,
the utility subtracts the previous reading
from the current reading. Today, most utilities have removed this index and used the
mounting holes from the index cover (9) to
install an RF index instead, which can be
read remotely.
Kevin Dupzyk
HOW TO SAVE MONEY ON YOUR GAS BILL

Replace an outdated or oversized
boiler or furnace with a modern,
direct-vent type. These will produce
less exhaust at a lower temperature, so it doesnt shoot out of your
chimney, carrying energy with it.
26
Turn down the temperature on

your water heater.
Buy a programmable thermostat
(such as one from Nest, pictured)
to keep the temperature low when
youre not there.
Air-seal and insulate your home:

You can have all the right equipment
and still pay a fortune on gas
if youre also heating the yard.
Invest in some sweaters.
Roy Berendsohn
14
13
12
11
10
27
BIG QUESTIONS.
ANSWERS YOU CANT FIND
ON THE INTERNET.
Do fighter pilots ever

puke during a dogfight?
ITS TOUGH TO prove a negative
and, believe us, chundering in the

cockpit just as some belligerent MiG
jockey tries to sneak a missile up your tailpipe
is a big negative. But generally speaking, the
answer is no.
Would-be pilots with weak stomachs dont
tend to make it through training. In fact,
retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel
Craig Quizmo Brown, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm who has flown F-111s
and F-15Es and taught budding aces for six
years, says that as many as 30 percent of the
students in his class washed out of flight
school due to an inability to overcome motion
sickness. Today, thanks to better screening
of trainees, thats down to about 10 percent.
Brown himself threw up on his first official
Air Force jet ride.
Instructors, guided by flight surgeons,
have developed a few approaches to calming
queasy recruits. For one, it helps to let the
student pilot fly the airplane as much as possible, as opposed to operating in ride-along
mode. Just as drivers are far less likely to suffer car sickness than passengers, the man
or woman behind the stick, who must focus
on the horizon and who is in a better position to anticipate motion, can more readily
avoid nausea. Also, in the same way it helps
to roll down the window in a car or to head
to the deck on a boat, fresh, cool air can help
motion-sick pilots. Keep the cockpit as cold
as possible, advises Brown. Get some air on
your face, wrists, areas of your body that are
your thermostats.
Still, in the end, not every stomach is steely
28
enough for the demands of dogfighting. And

speaking of washing out, that responsibility is
on you if you do lose your lunch aloft. Ive seen
people throw up in their gloves, says Brown.
Ive seen people throw up in the oxygen mask
and it just sprays out both sides. Thats always
lovely. You name it, weve seen it. But the standing rule is that if you mess it, you clean it.
How deep a
hole in the earth
could humans
actually dig?
While there seems to be a
certain presidential candidate with a notorious Twitter account who is determined to find
out, scientists could save him some trouble
the present limits are more or less known.
First, bear in mind that there are two ways
to think about the depth of a hole. One is a
straight measurement; the other looks at it
in terms of how far toward the center of the
earth you can get before heat and pressure
make further gains impossible. The latter is
the limiting factor, as the linear depth of the
hole varies depending on whether you drill
from the planets surface or from the ocean
floor, which affords you a bit of a head start on
your journey toward the center of the earth.
That said, the deepest hole ever dug in the
conventional sense is the Kola Superdeep
Borehole, drilled by the Russians between
1970 and 1994. Extending to a depth of 7.5
miles, the hole eventually was thwarted by
underground heat and aboveground funding
shortfalls. Scientists say that with current
technology (plus some savvy engineering

and about $1 billion), we should be able to get
down about ten miles deeper than thatto
a spot known as the Moho (short for Mohorovicic discontinuity). There, the earths
lower crust meets its upper mantle layer. But
thats about the limit, as heat and pressure
at that depth would give the earth the consistency of goopy molten plastic and make
further drilling a messy, frustrating affair.
The Chinese, it seems, can rest easyBugs
Bunny is unlikely to pop up unannounced
in Tiananmen Square.
Do thieves still
hot-wire cars?
Only in Hollywood
much to the consternation of those who know
better. Every time I
watch a TV show where they rip the wires out
from under the dash and put a couple together
and it starts, I cringe, says Mike Calkins,
technical services manager for AAA. That
hasnt been possible since the 1960s.
There have been a few intervening fixes for
the twist and start theft, but nowadays the
issue is that thieves typically have to contend
with radio frequency identification (RFID)
technology embedded in high-tech keys or
associated fobs. If the car doesnt sense the
keys unique code, the engine wont crank, no
matter how many wires a crook may fish from
under the dash and braid together.
Of course, the fact that about 700,000
cars are still stolen annually suggests there
may be, you know, work-arounds. One is the
obvious: drivers who, God bless their trusting
souls, leave their keys in the car and perhaps
even leave it running while they pop into the
Loaf N Jug for a quick errand thats destined
to turn into a long afternoon. And theres
always carjacking, but wheres the challenge in that? Another low-tech but reliable
approach is the old fake-tow ruse, in which a
uniformed lowlife simply winches an ostensibly disabled but highly coveted ride onto
the back of a flatbed and drives off with it.
Issues with RFIDs are solved later, once the
car is halfway around the world. (High-end
stolen cars may be in shipping containers
headed offshore within hours of their disappearance.) Criminals can also pick up RFID
codes remotely using scanners, and, with the
help of unscrupulous locksmiths or car dealers, replicate keys in advance.
Do you have unusual questions about how things
work and why stuff happens? This is the place to
ask them. Dont be afraid. Nobody will laugh at you
here. Email greatunknowns@popularmechanics.com.
Questions will be selected based on quality or
at our whim.
I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY G R E G C H R I S T M A N
FAST AND EASY
COMMON HOME REPAIRS
Clogged gutter? Broken window? Flickering fluorescents?
DONT CALL A PROFESSIONAL! TRY THIS NIFTY GUIDE TO FAST, EASY HOME REPAIRS INSTEAD.
In this world there are two types of people: those who can x whatever goes bust, and those who beg the
rst group for help. Popular Mechanics When Duct Tape Just Isnt Enough gives you simple and ingenious solutions for many common home quandaries, from plumbing and appliance failures to computer
breakdowns and pest infestations and more!
AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD $14.95 ($16.95 Canada), Flexibound
WHILE SOME WAGE

HOT WATER WARS,
RINNAI FAMILIES HAVE
DECLARED PEACE.
A shower. Laundry. Running the dishwasher.

When dinner ends, the scramble to use hot
water begins. It doesnt have to be that
way. With a Rinnai Tankless Water Heater
your family will have an endless supply of
hot water for everything you need. Hot
water wars over. Peace and harmony at
home achieved.
Rinnai. Hot water for all.
To learn more about Rinnais innovative

lineup of high-efficiency water heaters,
visit us at rinnai.us/tankless
JIGSAWS
MULTIMETERS
BIRDWATCHING
BUILD THIS
COFFIN!
Get our free plans at

popularmechanics.com/
coffin
Make Your Own

Nightmares
A visual guide to engineering the greatest haunted house

your neighborhood has ever seen. But beware:
Next Halloween the neighbors will expect even more.
BY L ARA SOROK AN ICH
P H OTO G R A P H BY J . RYA N R O B E R T S
31
H A L LOW E E N ( co n t i n u e d )
THE
GARAGE
OF
HORRORS
Gene Schopf at
fieldofscreams.
com recommends setting a bright light at
the entrance. The light
will constrict visitors
pupils so its harder for
them to see when they
get inside.
Line both walls

of a hallway with
inflated fabric, completely filling the space.
Visitors will have to
slide and feel their way
through. Maybe theres
a person waiting in
there to meet them?
For instructions, see
below.
2
6
Mount a dogtraining shock mat

flush with one wall,
Schopf says. As visitors
track their hands down
the wall to find their
way, theyll touch the
mats and get a slight
shock. Nothing painful. Just scary.
Remove all of the dangerous parts

of an air wrench or circular saw
and put it in a box with a lid. Set it up with
a motion sensor (available on Amazon
for $10) nearby. When people walk by,
theyll trip the sensor and set off a
terrible racket.
Keep your hallways, and thus the sight

lines, short. No longer than 12 feet
each, Leonard Pickel at hauntrepreneurs.
com says. It keeps people nervous about
whats coming. Plus, the less room there is
to fill, the closer people will have to get to
the scary stuff.
Pickel suggests designing each room

around one scary feature. And keep it
simple: Someone jumping out, something
touching you, or a reconstructed scene
from a horror movie. When in doubt,
go with a pitch-black hallway with loud
noises or bursts of air.
HOW TO BUILD A CLAUSTROPHOBIA HALLWAY

By Gene Schopf at fieldofscreams.com
1 Cut two sheets of tearresistant, vinyl-type fabric.

They should be a little longer
and taller than your walls, so
that when they are inflated,
they touch in the center of
the hallway.
32
2 Attach grommets to the

edges of your fabric and
fasten the sheets to the
wall, close to the ceiling and
one foot off the ground so it
doesnt get stepped on.
3 In the plywood walls, cut

holes the size of the opening of a fan blower such as a
Power Glide or Craftsman,
centered behind the fabric.
Mount the blowers to the
back side of each wall.
4 Turn on the blowers.

When inflated, the sheets
should touch in the middle of
the hall, but be soft enough
for someone to squeeze
between them. Adjust the
blower power accordingly.
I L LU S T R AT I O N BY K Y L E H I LTO N
AMERICAS
ORIGINAL CRAFT VODKA
WINE ENTHUSIAST RATINGS

SCORE OUT OF 100 POINTS
PTS
My American vodka beats

the giant imports every day.
Try American! Its Better.
ENTR EPR ENEU RS
HOW IT WORKS
Transmitters
Homemade
Fermentation
Cooler
When the beer in each
1 of Transmitters tanks
has completed the fermentation stage, it is cold-crashed:

The system drops it to 34
degrees over a period of just
24 hoursso spent yeast and
other sediments settle at the
bottom.
The condensers from the
2 a/c units are submerged
How to Set the

Right Budget
When youre starting out, you dont always need the equipment people
say you do. Especially if you can make it yourself.
BY ROBERT VRABEL
Anthony Accardi (above left) and

so yeast ferments properly, they found that
Rob Kolb opened Transmitter Brewcommercial models cost $5,000 to $10,000
ing in 2014 in a former limousine
before installation and plumbing. So they
garage in Queens, New York, beneath a
designed their own using parts from
bridge that spans two of the citys most
an old air-conditioning unit. Once
industrial neighborhoods. They built
they got it working, they built two
out the space themselves, and when
brewery-scale versions with a/c units
it was time to stock up with equipthey bought for a combined total of
ment, they didnt worry about the
$850 and installed themselves. Kolb
aesthetic focus thats currently trendy
estimates they saved at least $10,000,
in the craft beer market. Its unneceswhich allowed them to put their money
sary, for one thing. And expensive. At
into something more important: their
every opportunity, instead of doing
beer. In the two years it has been open,
something the cool way, they did it
Transmitter has already increased
the cost-effective way. Take tubing,
its capacity tenfolda necessity once
for example. Many breweries spend TRANSMITTERS New Yorks high-end restaurants
G1 GOLDEN ALE
thousands of dollars on copper tubstarted stocking its bottles alongside
ing, when much cheaper PVC pipe works fine.
fine winesand it won the 2016 Rupperts Cup
When Accardi and Kolb priced out fermentaas New York Citys best craft brewery. Not bad
tion coolers, which rapidly chill brewing beer
for a couple of cheap guys in Queens.
34
in Coleman and Igloo coolers,

and the fans and compressors
are mounted behind the coolers. PVC piping passes through
the coolers and connects to
the pumping system.
A 1-horsepower pump-
3 ing unit sends glycol, an
antifreeze, to the fermenters

at 15 psi.
Two four-inch PVC tubes
4 carry the glycol across
the ceiling of the brewery.

Those tubes are spray-foamed
at the ends, which holds
everything in place while also
providing insulation.
A three-tube manifold of
5 one-inch PVC separates
the glycol circulation, allowing

each of Transmitters four fermentation tanks to receive an
equal amount of coolant.
Actuators at each fer-
6 menter connect to
Transmitters Brewery Control

System, an Arduino-like device
that uses temperature and
time parameters preset by the
brewers to tell the cooling system when to turn on and off.
Kolb and Accardi can
7 monitor and adjust the

cooling process from anywhere
with an internet connection.
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TOOL TEST
THE PROVING GROUND FOR EVERY THING YOU NEED
Jigsaws
Although other tools get more attention, the

versatile jigsaw makes curved and straight
cuts in everythingsteel, ceramic tile, wood,
pipe. We gathered eight of the best and tested
them on wood and metal.
Milwaukee 2645-22
WEIGHT: 7.8 lb with 3-Ah battery

VOLTAGE: 18
LIKES: A whopper of a saw, in terms of
weight, but that heft pays off. The
Milwaukee exhibited no vibration or any
other problem in any cut, in any material.
With its flawlessly accurate motor-speed
control, the saw always cranks through.
DISLIKES: It would benefit from a work
light.
$350
40
Hitachi CJ18DSL
DeWalt DCS331

VOLTAGE: 18
LIKES: Given that its not as hefty as these
other saws, the Hitachi pleasantly surprised
us with how quickly it gobbled up 1/8-inch
steel and tough cuts in thick hardwood.
DISLIKES: Tilting the base isnt a tool-free
operation. It requires loosening an Allen
setscrew.

VOLTAGE: 20
LIKES: Powerful, with little to no vibration
and sound industrial design. A silky smooth
drivetrain and precise motor-speed control
allowed the saw to move gracefully through
all materials. Tilting the base is easy, and the
well-located blade-release lever makes blade
changes a snap. It even has an adjustable dust
blower to keep the cut line clear.
DISLIKES: It could also use a work light.
$115 (tool only)
$150 (tool only)
REVIEWS
Craftsman
315.115690
$70 (tool only)

VOLTAGE: 19.2
Vibrates a bit.
Great value.
A
Earbuds
Ridgid R8831
When you dont feel like listening

to your new jigsaw.
$120 (tool only)
VOLTAGE: 18
Powerful, steady.
So-so speed
control.
Makita
XVJ02
D
Ryobi P523
WEIGHT: 6 lb with 4-Ah battery
VOLTAGE: 18
LIKES: A solid performer that kept up with
the big boys in the steel test and in cutting
thick wood. There was a little more vibration, but you cant beat it for price.
DISLIKES: Speed control is awkward. The
trigger is a simple on/off switch, so you have
to adjust speed with your other hand, using
a sliding lever at the front of the saw.
$60 (tool only)
$280 (tool only)

VOLTAGE: 18
Strong. Cuts steel
like butter.
Bosch
JSH180BL
$240
VOLTAGE: 18
Feels small but
cuts big.
Beats
urBeats
1More Triple
Driver
Erato
Apollo 7
LIKES: Clean
sound and modern design. The
sleek metal
earpieces block
outside noise and
have no buzz
even when the
bass is bumping, which, in
the Beats tradition, is always
the case. Flat
cabling prevents
tangles, and the
built-in mic was
the clearest we
tested.
DISLIKES: If the
mic isnt pointed
directly toward
your mouth on
a phone call, it
barely picks up
your voice.
LIKES: Flawless sound,

no matter the
volume level.
The Triple
Drivers have,
as the name
implies, three
speaker drivers, along with
a nice build
and a flexible
woven-cloth
cable. Nine
different earpiece options
guarantee
a good and
comfortable
seal.
DISLIKES: None.
LIKES: Eratos
Bluetooth earbuds weigh only
4 grams and have
sound quality that
would be impressive even in wired
headphones.
Small buttons
on the earbuds
control volume and tracks,
and answer the
phone. The batteries last only
3 to 4 hours, but
the charging
case is small and
convenient.
DISLIKES: Pairing
was more difficult
than it should be,
and the Bluetooth
occasionally cut
out in our testing.
$100
$100
$300
41
TOOL TEST
THE PROVING GROUND FOR EVERY THING YOU NEED
THE
CT
PERFE
TOOL
BUCK
BROTHERS
3/4-Inch
Chisel
B
Entry-Level
Multmeters
Check your batteries, power sources, or

circuitry. All for less than $50.
Craftsman 82334
Extech EX320
Amprobe AM-500
MAXIMUM AMPERAGE: 20
The huge 20-amp current capacity should accommodate any
household need. We also like that
the screen is backlit, which makes
it very easy to read.
An outstanding, compact meter
that has the most intuitive settings
of any we tested. Plus, the noncontact voltage tester is a simple
way to find out if any switch or
outlet is hot.
Perfectly capable for most household work and appliance repairs,
with a convenient battery-test
setting on the dial. The continuity
buzzer is nice and loud.
$40
42
$50
$30
Its kind of ugly,

but the Buck
Brothers chisel is
a solid tool that
takes a razor edge.
The sturdy metal
end cap can take
a firm hit with a
hammer with no
fear of damage.
If you do manage to break it, it
costs only $12. To
replace one of my
German cabinetmaking chisels
costs three times
that. But this is not
a cabinet-making
tool. Its an everyday tool, one I take
with me on every
job. It might pare
out a hinge mortise or cut a notch
in framing lumber
to fit a pipe. It regularly goes to the
grinder to refresh
its edge. In a
couple of years itll
be nothing more
than a stubif it
makes it that far. I
know Ill inevitably leave it behind
somewhere or
loan it to someone
who never brings
it back. But thats
fine. The Buck
Brothers chisel is
not a great chisel
because it lasts. Its
a great chisel while
it lasts. And then
you buy another.
Roy Berendsohn
P RO MOT I ON
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SHOP NOTES
E A S Y WAYS TO D O H A R D T H I N G S
M
FRO E
H
T
ES
HIV
ARC 68!)
(19
A Tool for
Cleaning Gutters
Freshen Up
With Vodka
Paint Sample From the Future

to color-match old paint on an outdoor surface
that has faded over time. Solve this problem by thinking ahead. When
painting a surface, make a paint-sample chip and attach it to an inconspicuous location on the same surfacesay, near the eaves on an exterior
wall or at the foot of a metal railing. The chip will fade with the surface, and
when its time to touch up, it can be easily brought to the hardware store.
ITS NEAR IMPOSSIBLE
D I S TA N C E T H R E E W AY S
Three iterations of the ruler, and why they all belong in your toolbox.
TAPE MEASURE
How to use: You
know the basics. A
pro tip: To measure
interior spaces, abut
the body of the tape
measure to one side
and extend the tape
to the other. The full
measurement is the
sum of whats shown
on the tape and the
length of the reel
which any quality
tape measure will
have labeled.
When to use: This is
the go-tothe best
tool for 95 percent
of jobs.
44
CARPENTERS
RULER
How to use: Unfold
the links until you
can read off the distance. If theres not
space to unfurl the
last link, extend the
slider for an exact
measurement.
When to use: A
carpenters ruler
is thin enough to
fit some places a
tape measure cant.
And by fixing it at
the needed length,
a measure can be
easily transferred to
multiple workpieces.
LASER MEASURE
How to use: Place
the butt of the
device against one
side of the space,
point the laser at a
reflective object on
the other side, and
press the button.
When to use: Great
for long distances
or locations where
routing a tape
measure would be
a challenge. Also
useful for quickly
estimating a surface
area or volume, as
before laying carpet
or pouring concrete.
If a suit jacket or
other dry-cleanonly garment
has picked up an
unwanted scent,
spritz it with vodka
to deodorize. As
a volatile, colorless liquid, vodka
deodorizes without
staining.
Clean
Sandpaper
With a Shoe
You can extend
the life of a sanding belt by using
a store-bought
abrasive cleaning
stick to remove the
gunk from its gritty
surface. Izzy Swan
of Think Woodworks has found
that the sole of
an old sneaker
cleans just as well.
If you dont mind
the smell.
WD-40 Keeps
Mud Off
Fenders
Before your next
trip off-road, spray
WD-40 on the
fenders and any
parts of your vehicles undercarriage
that are hard to
clean. It keeps dirt
from sticking, making it easier to rinse
off when you return
to civilization.
Clean the gutters more efficiently

this fall by constructing a simple
tool to extend your reach and lift
more effectively. Take a plank of
an appropriate width for your gutter and attach an old scrub brush to
one end and a beveled board to the
other (or just bevel the plank). Use
the brush to gather debris and the
bevel to lift it out.
Compressed Air Cleans

Headphone Jack
A headphone-jack socket gunked up
with dust and pocket lint will make
a fussy, staticky sound at a headphone cords slightest movement.
Clean it out with a burst from a can
of air duster. If youre still having
trouble, try licking the jack before
reinserting itsaliva is conductive
and can bridge a poor connection.
Reusable Wall Anchor

Drill Stops
Reader Matt Chitty of Stafford,
Virginia, found a clever way to
make drill stops he could use over
and over again: He cuts plastic wall
anchor sleeves to a length that will
stop the drill at the needed depth
when slipped over the bit. When
he needs to drill more holes of the
same depth later in a project, all
he has to do is put the right anchor
back on the drill.
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T IP
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THE
POPULAR
MECHANICS
BOTTLE
OPENER
TED
L I M II O N !
EDIT
BY BEN
AROH
Stained and sealed bourbon

barrel staves catch your bottle caps
before they can hit the ground!
Handmade by craftsman Ben
Aroh in an exclusive partnership
with Popular Mechanics.
GET YOURS WHILE THEY LAST
AT AROH-CO.COM!
Getting
Started
In...
ORNITHOLOGY
Thats right. Birds. Its a thing. And youre gonna love it. B Y
Birding is like hunting, but you dont

have to worry about eating everything you catch. Besides, its an
excuse to go outside, which we all could use.
Give it a shot. Youll be amazed at the things
you didnt realize were right outside your
window. Plus, your newfound knowledge
will impress people. Anyone who can distinguish a pileated woodpecker from a downy
woodpecker is someone others tend to trust.
P H OTO G R A P H BY T I M S C H U T S K Y
M AT T G O U L E T
Did You Know?
Hummingbirds eat more than twice their body weight in nectar

and flying insects every day. And theyre the only kind of bird that can
fly backward and forward, which must be useful.
All of the 200 million European starlings that populate North
America descended from a group of 100 that were introduced in
New Yorks Central Park in the 1890s.
During fall migration, the blackpoll warbler can fly for more than
72 hours nonstopfrom the eastern coast of the United States to
the northern part of South America.
49
Getting Started In ORNITHOLOGY

B
A
Get the
Right Gear
Note: The right gear never
includes those khaki vests.
A. Bushnell E Series 8x42

The perfect beginner binoculars.
Moderately priced, with
eight times magnification and a
42 mm objective lens to let in
plenty of light.
$179
C. REI Flash 18 Pack

A lightweight place to store
snacks and water, should
you really get into this and want
to stay out all day.
$40
D. Stanley Flask
Looking at birds can be relaxing.
Also relaxing? A nip of
bourbon while youre outside.
Combine them.
$25
HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR BINOCULARS

More powerful isnt necessarily better. Look for binoculars with a magnification between
six and nine. More than that and its hard to stabilize the image, which gets incredibly
frustrating. The diameter of the objective lens (the end of the binoculars) determines
how much light is let in. Find something between 40 and 45 mm.
Load
Up Your
Phone
Apps that help you identify and log birds can be

as vital as a field guide.
Three popular options:
50
B. 18 oz Yeti Rambler
Made to take a beating. Throw
ice cubes in when you fill it
up, and double-vacuum insulation
means theyll be floating in there
hours later.
$40
Merlin
The app asks the date and
your location, then leads you
through key questions (size,
color, behavior) that will help
you identify a bird.
Audubon Bird Guide:

North America
Helps you ID birds by shape,
family, or name. Create a
login and you can store your
sightings and location. Its like
Pokmon Go, but for real life.
(And it wont cause you to distractedly walk into traffic.)
E. Field Guides
The key to knowing what youre
looking at. Petersons is easier
for beginners. Switch to
Sibley when you know what
youre doing.
$15 to $19
BirdGenie
Shazam for birds. BirdGenie listens to live birdsongs, then runs
the song against a database to
help you make an ID. Right now
the app is offered only on a trial
basis, but it should be widely
available next year.
Identify That Bird!

Simple steps for your big moment.
The female
mountain
bluebird chooses
a mate based on
nest location and
quality, not the
brightness of his
feathers.
Chicken-like
marsh birds
Long-legged
waders
Swallowlike
Duck-like
Owls
Treeclinging
Hawk-like
Perching
Upland ground
The first thing you do when you see a bird, besides
Go Outside
Your backyard may be fine for robins, but a nearby state park will have
a lot more options. If youre a complete novice, sign up for a guided
outing. Yes, you might have to deal with annoying questions from the
group, but youll have a lot more eyes working for you. If youre on your
own, spend some time in one place and let the birds come to you.
Your best chance at seeing the most species is in areas at the edges
of different habitat types, like the woods near a clearing or along the
shore of a river or pond.
Perhaps more important than where you go is when. Prime times
are from dawn until about 11 a.m., when the birds are up with the sun
and feeding, and again at dusk.
Bird activity depends on your specific location, but for most fourseason-weather regions, according to the Audubon Society, you can
generally count on finding at least one category of bird each month.
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
dropping your jaw in admiration, is note its proportions

and shape. Later youll use this information, along with
your field guideit includes silhouettes like theseto
figure out the genus or family. Dont bother trying to
take a picture. It wastes precious observation time, and
other birders might make fun of you.
If the bird is singing, try to remember the length
and cadence of its song. Note behavior (i.e., whether
its hopping around on the ground or flying from branch
to branch). If its large and circling you with four to five
friends overhead, youve probably been out too long and
should think about heading in.
Note any distinctive marks, like a bright-red head or
orange breast. These are more useful than general color.
Finally, pull out your field guide. Once youve located
the proper family, use the field markings and behavior to
make an ID. Minor celebration is appropriate, depending
on the rarity of the bird and your blood-sugar level.
Birds You Should Never Proudly ID
Pigeon
Crow
Seagull
Big Bird
MARCH
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
Sparrows & raptors
Sparrows & raptors
Waterfowl
Songbirds
Songbirds
Nesting & high

altitude
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER
Nesting & high

altitude
Shorebirds
Southbound migrants
Southbound migrants
Waterfowl
Northern
wintering birds
51
ASK ROY
POPULAR MECHANICS SENIOR HOME
E D I T O R S O LV E S YO U R M O S T P R E S S I N G P R O B L E M S .
BY R OY B E R E N D S O H N
Whats the best way

to remove fiberglass
splinters from clothes?
DENNY A., ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
After an incident a few years ago in

which I inadvertently spread
fiberglass dust all over the house and onto
the clothing of some of my not-too-pleased
family members, I developed what I think
is the perfect protocol: Once Ive finished
working with fiberglass, I go outside and
shake out my work shirt. Then I walk a few
steps away from any floating fiberglass and
put my shirt back on. I take a small bench
brush and thoroughly clean my hat, work
shirt, and pants. I close my eyes and even
brush off my face, dust mask, and neck.
Then I rinse off my safety glasses and wipe
them dry. Next, I wrap a piece of duct tape,
sticky side out, around my hand and pat
down my chest, sleeves, and pant legs. You
can also use heavy-duty masking tape or a
lint roller with disposable adhesive sheets.
The tape goes directly into a trash can or
some secure container. Finally, I knock the
fiberglass dust out of the bench brush by
banging it against the foundation or some
other hard surface, and all my work
clothing goes into a plastic bag to keep it
separate from other laundry until wash day.
For really big insulation jobsor something particularly nasty, like in a crawl
spaceI put on disposable coveralls and a
spray sock, the close-fitting hood and neck
covering that painters wear when they use
paint guns. After Im done, I fold the spray
sock into the overalls and put them both
carefully into the trash. All this may sound
excessive, but it works. I havent had a fiberglass itch in years. Neither has my family.
52
I saw this new allpurpose adhesive at the

home center. Is it any better
than old-fashioned epoxy?
How do I rejuvenate
the weather-beaten
polyurethane trim on the
outside of my house?
BO S., FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS
KRIS S., COLUMBUS, OHIO
You must be talking about RapidFuse,

a new glue by DAP thats getting some
attention. It calls itself all-purpose, and
from what Ive seen experimenting with it
around the office, thats pretty accurate.
It holds together a wide range of materials,
from wood and metal to ceramic, glass, and
some plastics. To answer your question, I
wouldnt say its better than epoxy, just
different. Epoxies are thick, gel-like
materials that have such good gap-filling
properties that they are often used to build
up a joint that fits poorly or that has
material missing from damage or wear.
RapidFuse is too thin to do that. But what
really makes it impressive is that the glue is
repositionable. Typically, superglues are
meant to work with a minimum of clamp
time. You hold the product together for 30
seconds and then let go, hoping you got the
position right. With RapidFuse, if you
begin to apply pressure and you realize the
parts are out of position, you just pull them
apart and try again. Thats extremely
helpful in the rough-and-ready jobs where
these adhesives are used, such as reattaching the arm of the porcelain figurine that
you broke.
So if this stuff is so good, why doesnt the
adhesive industry just abandon all other
formulations? Cost. A 0.85-ounce bottle of
RapidFuse costs about $5.50. The same size
bottle of epoxy is $3.50, and an eight-ounce
bottle of pro-grade wood glue wont run you
much more than $3.
The first step is to clean the trim,

thoroughly but gently, with a
soft-bristle siding brush and a mixture of
siding cleaner and water. If theres any
mildew, youll need a cleaner specifically
rated to kill that, such as Zinsser Jomax.
Rinse the trim with a spray nozzle on a
garden hose. Again, gently. You dont want to
blast the trim with water, and you certainly
dont want to use a pressure washer, which
can cut right through the trims surface,
especially if its already compromised by
weathering. Next, if theres damage from
nails or screws, or if the factory coating has
peeled, fill any imperfections with a
lightweight exterior-grade spackle. Steer
clear of hard materials such as Bondo that
can require a lot of sanding to level. You
want to apply the filler, knife it smooth, and
let it dry. Sand it very lightly, if at all, with
220-grit through 400-grit abrasive paper.
Using a small, low-nap roller, apply an
exterior primer, followed by a semigloss
acrylic topcoat. If the first coat of paint
shows brush marks, lightly level it with
waterproof 400-grit or finer sandpaper.
Rinse it, let it dry, and apply the final coat.
Your trim shouldnt need repainting for
another five to seven years.
Call 212-649-2828 and leave a message

with your home or yard question. You
could be featured on a new Popular Mechanics
podcast. Questions can also be emailed to
askroy@popularmechanics.com.
O
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#mechanix
WITH
EZRA
DYER
The fiberglass
body of a
Type 65 coupe,
shaped like a
Shelby Daytona, is about
250 hours
of customer
wrenching
away from
being a running
vehicle.
Build Your Own Car

in Just 400 Easy Steps
YES, THE MANUAL IS THE SIZE OF A
PHONE BOOK. YES, IT TAKES
HUNDREDS OF HOURS. BUT ASSEMBLING YOUR
RIDE FROM A KIT OFFERS REWARDS
THAT BUYING OFF THE LOT CANT MATCH.
P H OTO G R A P H BY TO N Y LU O N G
57
WITH
EZRA
hink of a Factory Five

kit car as the ultimate adult Lego set.
The premise: An average weekend warrior,
armed with basic tools and about
250 hours of spare time, can build
a hot rod, a midengine supercar, or
a replica Shelby. Spend $19,990 for
Factory Fives Mk4 Roadster kit, add
an engine, transmission, wheels, and
paint, and you have a sweet Cobra for
less than $35,000.
Yes, the term kit car still carries a
bit of pejorative sting. The early days of
this automotive sub-industry included
machines that were unappealing concepts (art deco roadsters based on
Volkswagen Beetles), had parts that
didnt fit (this was before computeraided design), or both. Not so anymore.
Modern kit cars are designed using 3D
CAD software and engineered around
powerful, reliable running gear like
GM V-8s or Subaru flat-fours. A halfmillion-dollar laser CNC machine cuts
parts with accuracy to within a hundredth of a millimeter, so the pieces
actually line up.
Even so, the prospect is daunting.
Can a half-competent wrench jockey
like me really build a whole car? Im
at Factory Fives Massachusetts headquarters to find out.
Before me is a red fiberglass body
and dozens of boxes that, Im told, con-
58
DYER
tain the raw ingredients of a car. Three employees help me

gingerly lift the body off its tube-frame chassis. Then, we
start wrenching.
Today, our goal is to get this car rolling, with brakes,
suspension, and tires. Almost immediately, I screw up. I
bolt the lower control arm onto the chassis only to discover
that Ive used the wrong spacers. If Id slowed down and
read one step further in the assembly manual, I wouldve
known better. When founder Dave Smith walks in, I ask
whether my handiwork is besmirching the companys good
name. Thats not something he worries about. Early on,
he says, a consultant said that one of our biggest issues is
that our name is on the final product, but we dont control
the quality. But that hasnt created any problems. People
are invested in what theyre building, he says. They build
their cars to a standard that we wouldnt even go for ourselves. Im not sure if thatll be the case for me. Have you
ever been deep into a piece of Ikea furniture and realized
that you bungled something 15steps back? Thats where
Im at. But I fix my mistakes and make progress.
We dont structure the build for speed, R&D director Jim Schenck says. Its designed to deliver periodic
rewards so that you dont get discouraged. I backtrack,
swap the spacers, and continue. Soon enough, Im lifting
the 8.8-inch solid rear end into place with a floor jack and
mating it to the chassis. The suspension goes on, followed
by the hubs and brakes. The wheels are especially satisfying, the whir and rattle of the impact driver tightening the
lugs on the studs. Ive been in here for three or four hours,
but it feels like minutes. I wouldve bungled more than a few
steps without Schencks help, but I feel like I could do this.
I walk outside to fire up a completed Mk4. This ones got
Fords 5.0 Coyote engine, found in Mustangs. Its a popular
option with plenty of power, and the result is a balanced,
controllable car. But it drives like youre riding a grenadepowered skateboard. It feels too raw for the street.
In a way, it is. You cant just buy
a car like this from a dealer. The
thicket of regulations that govern
modern vehicles means that building a kit is the only way to get a new
car thats exempt from rules about
stability-control systems and ignition interlocks. That changes next
year with the Low Volume Motor
Vehicle Manufacturers Act, which
will allow a company like Factory
Five to sell as many as 325 kit cars
per year fully assembled.
But skipping to the finished
product, I found, is missing the
point. Only when these parts are
scattered all over your garage and
youre muscling a torque wrench
to the positive click of 190 lb-ft do
you appreciate the artfully orchesA real Shelby
Cobra costs seven
trated amalgamation of parts that
figures. Factory
gets you to the Quik Mart. Where,
Fives kit version is less than
incidentally, a woman pulls along$35,000. You just
side my silver and yellow Mk4 and
have to assemble
it yourself.
declares, Badass. I smile, waiting for her to ask who made it.
OTHER NICE KITS
Local Motors Rally

Fighter
Head to the Local Motors
factory in Arizona and spend
five days helping build your
car. The Rally Fighter feels
like a full-on desert trophy
truck on the street. And,
yes, you can jump it.
$99,900 (complete)
Superlite Nemesis
Tandem
A two-passenger track
beast whose seats are
arranged fighter-jet-style
with a finished weight
of 1,400 pounds. If a
typical Volkswagen fourcylinders 300 horsepower
isnt enough, you can crank
up the boost to 500 hp.
$24,995
(plus cost of engine)
Meyers Manxster
DualSport
An update to the classic
Meyers Manx dune buggy,
but focused on street driving
rather than tearing up
the playa down Mexico way.
Youll need a Beetle or a
Super Beetle to surrender
a chassis and engine, or you
can swap in a water-cooled
Subaru for more power.
$8,545
(plus cost of a Beetle)
P H OTO G R A P H BY TO N Y LU O N G
IMPROVE & RESTORE ENGINE PERFORMANCE

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It is specially formulated to solve problems with todays direct injection engines, but can be
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performance, reduced emissions, smoother idle, and quicker / easier starts.
PERFORMANCE ADVANTAGES
+ Restores fuel economy
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+ For use in both gasoline

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WITH
EZRA
DYER
435 hp?
Yeah, Ill take the
insurance.
Initial here, sir.
to exploit the cars 435 horsepower:

the Charlotte Motor Speedway and
its newly renovated road course.
The course can be run in three
configurations, two of which use
part of the Nascar oval to increase
the distance and allow much higher
speeds. But I stick to the self-contained inside section, 1.1 miles per
lap, tight and twisty, like a piece
of Smoky Mountains back road
dropped in the middle of a 131,000seat arena.
The GT-H loves it. I turn off
traction control and the rear tires
struggle for grip as the 5.0-liter
engine thunders through first gear.
I toggle the console switch to Track
Mode and the dash icona race
helmetconfirms the selection,
rendering the throttle response
sharper, the steering heavier. I
also see the Line Lock there on the
menu, yet I dont try it. Its strange.
Some high-functioning part of my
brain overrules the lizard-level
operator who wants to spin the
Michelin Pilot Sports right into
finely atomized rubber vapor. I
HERTZ HAS A SPECIAL-EDITION SHELBY MUSTANG IN ITS FLEET.
paid for the extra insurance, but
WE SUGGEST YOU UPGRADE.
I dont want to abuse the Rent-ARacer the way I might if Id rented
an anonymous midsize sedan with
ental agencies are notorious for Big Brother oversight of their no performance pretensions whatsoever.
But what matters is I could have. The car isnt a dumbedcarsthe fast ones especially. A driving instructor friend of
mine once told me about a student who brought a rental Char- down Mustang GT, and there is no override switch that can
ger to his driving school. They had the GPS set up, he said, so be flipped drone-like from behind the rental counter. Its
when they saw it going around in circles, they shut it down from almost disconcerting a few hours later, when I pull into the
their office. Another friend rented a Porsche 911 and took it to a drag strip. His Hertz return lane, the one-way tire spikes in my rearview
time slips confirmed that the rental company had electronically neutered the mirror. This beast is a rental car? It is. And in a few hours
engine output by about 100 horsepower. So I was skeptical when I heard about itll be washed and gassed up, the hood popped for inspecHertzs Adrenaline CollectionV-8-powered machines that normally fall far tion, ready for more fun.
outside your upgrade options. Like the black 2016 Shelby GT-H that I picked
up recently at Charlotte Douglas International Airport for $249 per day.
LD
OU
This is not a Shelby GT350, the 526-hp king of the current Mustang staUC
O
Y
ble. That car is only available with a manual transmission, a device that rental
agencies fear the way vampires do sunlight. This is a black automatic Mustang
GT that has been shipped to Shelby American headquarters in Las Vegas and
fitted with a Ford Racing handling pack, a mild cosmetic overhaul (including signature Hertz gold stripes), and a performance exhaust system. This
is the way all Mustang GTs should soundbooming and ornery. The concussive shock waves of the exhaust pulses sending shivers across the hood.
For your chance to
Before I can drive it off the lot, though, there is the inspection. Not your
SPEND A VACATION IN THE SHELBY GT,
standard walk around the car to check for dings and scratches. No, the attenenter the Hertz Popular Mechanics Sweepstakes.
dant pops the hood and opens the doors and does an inventory of 33 items
that need to be there when I return the car, from the fluid filler caps to the
The winner gets a weeklong rental courtesy of Hertz,
headrests. The last time Hertz tried this, in 2006, it learned that customers
plus $2,000 toward airfare and hotel.
love Shelby parts so much that they tend to keep them. Once the attendant
Enter at popularmechanics.com/hertz
is finished, he scrawls Ready for fun on the paperwork and Im on my way.
See page 122 for details.
Naturally, I head for the only place to find out how much leeway Ill really have
How to Rent a Muscle Car
N
I
W
60
TO P : P H OTO G R A P H BY B E N S K L A R
THE ROBOT
REVOLUTION
IS HERE.
rave new world . . . or source of fear? Ever since robots first appeared in science
fiction, theyve 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.
WITH
EZRA
DYER
A UTILITY
TRAILER WILL
CHANGE YOUR
LIFE. YOU JUST
HAVE TO GIVE
IT A CHANCE.
The Accessory
Every Car Needs
And if you get a flat?

Youve got another tire
on that side.
Rule 3
Still, bring at least one spare
trailer tire on every trip.
And a decent jack, and a
big four-way lug wrench. A
portable air compressor is
handy, too. Maybe a grease
gun for the hubs. Inexplicably, wheel bearings on
cars last 100,000 miles, but
trailer bearings are as delicate as panda romance.
Rule 4
Go to the far reaches of the
Merch-Co parking lot and
practice. Spend an hour
backing around a few cones
until youre confident. You
dont want to be learning
your trailers idiosyncrasies
at the boat ramp while
getting stink-eye from
fishermen.
After years of renting and hat-in-hand

borrowing, I finally bought a utility trailer.
Its the best purchase Ive made in years. Trailers unlock possibilities. Want to haul an ATV
somewhere? Drive on up. Need a yard of gravel
for your driveway? Dont wait to schedule a delivery. Dump runs, moving, landscapingits like
owning a pickup, except better, because you only
use it when you need it. And pickup beds arent
12 feet long by six feet wide.
The caveat, however, is that
trailers present unique
possibilities for mayhem.
$1,000
Latch one on and your vehicle becomes long, heavy,
and hinged. Itll take longer to stop and require more
room to turn. When youre
Utility
backing up, the trailer
moves opposite of the car.
Things can fall off. Or the
trailer can decide to part
ways with your tow vehicle.
But most of it is preventable. You just need to buy
wisely and prepare accordingly. Then, adventure and
capability are yours.
62
Rule 1
Whatever type of trailer
you get, go bigger than you
think you need. My boat
trailer can handle a 25-foot
vessel at 7,000 pounds, so
its comfortable (and so
am I) with my 3,000-pound
21-footer. Itd work even if
an axle fell off.
BUYERS GUIDE
$2,000
Trailer
Heres the sweet spot: 10- to
12-foot with mesh sides, a solid
steel floor, and a hinged gate.
The sides and solid floor mean
you can carry loose material
like mulch, and the gate swings
down to become a ramp when
you need to tote home that
shiny new lawn tractor.
Rule 2
Speaking of which, when in
doubt, get tandem axles, a
trailer with four wheels. A
single-axle trailer is stable
only when hitched to a
car. Add any weight and
it swings like a seesaw.
Tandems track straighter
down the highway, too.
Rule 5
When choosing a tow
vehicle, think about maneuverability, not power. Tow
ratings tend to be understated, so your Toyota
Highlander is often more
than enough. And if youve
got a tight corner, itll be
more nimble than the 3500
Mega-Mega Towmonster
Poundfooter.
$3,000
Boat Trailer
Two questions: bunk or roller,
aluminum or galvanized? Go aluminum (lighter and wont rust)
if you can afford it, and always
bunk (long wooden supports
covered in carpet). Rollers create pressure points on the hull
and make it easier for the boat
to slide around in transit.
$4,000
Car Trailer
Open car trailers have low or no
sides, which means room for car
doors to open and more surface
area, ideal for things like ATVs or
snowmobiles. Enclosed car trailers are secure and dry, but youre
working with limited space.
Know the dimensions of what
you intend to tow before buying.
MY WISH IS TO BE A
HOLLYWOOD STUNT DRIVER.
Professional driver on closed course. Do not attempt. Prototype shown with options. Production model will vary. 2016 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.
2
Base price:
$54,490
Forthcoming
variant: Plugin hybrid
Number of
backseat
passengers
you see in
the video
rearview
mirror: Zero.
Creepy!
Base price: $95,395
Base price: $25,990
First-gear acceleration, in lateral gs: 0.94
Years since Fiat last made a

124 Spider: 31
Number of touch-free gestures that control the

entertainment system: Five. Twirl your finger in
the air to control volume, for example.
Weight difference, in pounds, to

the base model Miata: 104
(The Spider is heavier. Barely.)
2016 BMW
750i XDRIVE
2016 CADILLAC
CT6 AWD 3.6L
2017 FIAT
124 SPIDER
People criticize BMW for being overengineered. Its a valid concern for the
practical buyer considering a 3 Series, but for
the $100,000 7 Series, technological overkill
is the whole point. The expected extravagance
of the 750i creates a safe space where BMW
engineers can suggest, for example, that the
rear seats incorporate an interactive exercise game, and nobody will make fun of them.
There is such a game: Passengers follow the
seat-back video screen through eight instructional exercises, pressing their shoulders into
the seat at varying intensities. Theres also a
perfume atomizer with multiple scents and
a tablet that lets you do things like raise the
privacy shades, actions that would otherwise
require a strenuous reach for a button. But for
all its creative luxuries, the 750i still prioritizes driving. The ride is soft and isolated, but
this thing can hustle. Structural use of carbon
fiber helps pare weight to about 4,600 pounds,
and the 445-hp V-8 enables a Camaro-hounding sub-5.0-second zero-to-60. The result is
BMW doing what it does best. Its the kind of
car that begs for European delivery, something
to be wheeled out of the factory and driven
straight onto the nearest autobahn.
Cadillac knows how to build worldbeating cars. Look at any model with a
V badge for evidence. But it also tends to aim
just short of the unapologetic opulence you
find in other manufacturers. The CT6 is one
such car. Call it an almost flagship.
Its got enough lavish, geeky features to
make it a high-end sedan. The wide-screen
rearview mirror is actually a live video display, for full visibility. The 34-speaker Bose
Panaray stereo is a factory sound system
powerful enough to rattle screws inside
surgically repaired ankles, according to
an orthopedically repaired friend. Most
versions of the CT6 weigh less than 4,000
pounds, making it far lighter than other luxury sedans. Pair it with the optional 400-hp
turbo V-6 and the driving experience is consequently frisky.
With a base price of less than $60,000,
the CT6 is positioned against the midsize
Germans. Instead of an American MercedesBenz S-Class, its an E-Class with extra space.
That is to say, the CT6 is not an object of conspicuous consumption. The true Cadillac
flagship, the excess-drenched king of opulence, goes by a more familiar name: Escalade.
If the Fiat 124 Spider reminds you of a

Mazda MX-5 Miata, theres good reason: Beneath its redesigned body, Fiats new
roadster is a Miata, albeit with a different
engine. Its very existence exposes a philosophical rift among sports-car aficionados. In one
camp, we have people who think the Miata is
great and worthy of imitation. The other camp
thinks that the latest Miata is the platonic
ideal of a sports car and any changes at all are
inevitably detrimental. I lean toward the first
side. Give us more flavors of Miata, whatever
theyre called.
Fiats engine swap gives the Spider an
entirely different character than its Mazda
kin. The 124 uses a turbocharged 1.4-liter
four-cylinder in place of the MX-5s naturally
aspirated 2.0-liter, producing a little more
horsepower (up to 164) and a lot more torque.
The turbo four doesnt need to rev very high, so
the effect is to relax the car. Where the Miata is
frenetic, the Fiat is happy to chill out.
If you look at an empty parking lot and envision a potential autocross course, get a Miata.
If you look at a Miata and envision it painted
in a hue called Rosso Passione (Fiats name
for red), then maybe youre Spider material.
REVIEWS
64
GMC SIERRA 1500

DENALI CREW CAB
A hauler with heated seats.
ASTON MARTIN
VANQUISH VOLANTE
Beautiful and V-12, worth $300K.
2017 MAZDA CX-9

Gorgeous interior.
Modest power, though.
The Fast
and the
Teeny-Tiny
THE 2016 HONDA CRF1000L
AFRICA TWIN AND THE
2017 KAWASAKI Z125
PRO GIVE YOU TWO VERY
DIFFERENT EXTREMES
OF POWER, VERSATILITY,
AND FUN. YOULL LOVE
THEM BOTH.
BY DAV I D C U R C U R I TO
irst, the name. Its called the Honda Africa Twin ($12,999; above not. It was too much fun.
The motorcycle (yes, it is a real four-speed, air-cooled,
left) because it has a 998-cc twin engine. The Africa part comes
from a grueling thing called the Dakar Rally, a famous off-road 125-cc motorcycle) was initially designed for Southeast
rally that originally ran from Europe through the African des- Asia, where its small size lets you weave in and out of
ert and that always devolved into a Mad Max movie. Hundreds traffic-clogged streets. The bike is capable of carrying a
of maniacs driving motorbikes, quads, cars, and trucks ripped through the second passenger, but I wouldnt recommend more than
desert for two weeks, hitting livestock and the occasional local, and often one smallish wife at a time. Since theres not a lot of traffic
maiming the drivers themselves. The twins predecessor won the race four where I live, I decided to take it on a fun back road in the
timesfrom 1986 through 1989so it can definitely handle upstate New country. But first I have to take it on a stretch of 55-mph
York, where I live. The 2016 model is a hell of a ride, on and off some country highway to get there.
Im fully geared up and I feel silly. Full-face helmet,
roads. Whats interesting is the dual-clutch option, which means...no shiftprotective jacket and pants, proper riding. It feels strange. My left hand keeps reaching for the missing
The Twin
ing boots and gloves. I make sure theres
clutch like I have a lobster claw, and my shifter foot taps into
plenty of room before I pull onto the road.
empty air, like Im doing the soft shoe. As soon as you get over
throws enough
My knees are practically hitting the hanthe phantom-limb sensation you realize how balanced, fast,
horsepower to
dlebars. The bike is surprisingly quick as
and easy it is through the tight-leaning turns, and all without
launch me off
I get through all the gears. Soon this thing
having to think about the gears.
a 50-foot sand
is moving. It feels really fast because
The suspension is high and forgiving andwith its ABS and
Im just inches off the ground. On the
different modes of tractioneasy to control. At 533 pounds,
dune over a
straightaway I seem to max out at 55 mph,
the bike is light, but it feels much lighter. Did I mention this
rally car and a
although I gain a little speed going downbike is really fast? The twin in Africa Twin throws almost 100
terrorist.
hill57, 58, 59, 60. As I go uphill the bike
horsepower, plenty to launch me off a 50-foot sand dune, over
slows considerably. Even when I downshift
a rally car and a terrorist firing a machine gun at me to win the
Dakar Rally. Yes, all of those things have happened in past rallies, although I cant gain enough speed. This particular hill seems to go
not at the same time, but I decided instead just to kick a little dirt, avoid the on forever and I quickly slow to 40 mph. I hear honking
behind me, and when I turn I see half a mile of backedgrazing deer, and call it a day.
The Kawasaki Z125 Pro ($2,999) is tiny. The seat height is only 31 inches, up and furious drivers. Eventually I get back to my happy
just above my kneecaps. When I first saw the Z125, I laughed, and my voice place, my yard, where I can once again ride like a fool,
cracked like a goofy 13-year-old kids. I hopped on immediately and rode in no delivering rounds of drinks while my friends play bocce
particular direction on my two-acre lawn like a giggling fool. My wife Jessicas and my wife shakes her head from the porch. Im pretty
head was on a swivel following me, not knowing if I was completely mental or sure shes smiling, too.
66
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The Woodpile
Whole trunks
of oak dry out
behind Furmans
Savannah restaurant, just a
few feet away
from the smoker.
He knows
theyre ready for
the firebox when
the bark begins
to peel off.
Zachary Prell shirt
($115), Levis jeans
($260), Red Wing
Heritage boots
($270).
Bryan Furman used to bring in his

homemade barbecue to coworkers at his
job as a welder. Now heand his staff
of fifteen employeesare feeding all
of Savannah, Georgia, heritage-breed
hogs at Bs Cracklin Barbeque.
Photographs by
J O D Y H O RT O N
69
Bryan Furman starts his day in the overgrown back lot of Bs Cracklin
Barbeque at about 6:00 a.m. in a flurry of heat and smoke. The former
welder left his job operating the laser cutter at a construction-equipment
manufacturer and cashed out his 401(k) three years ago to open his own
barbecue stand. Now hes up in the early morning, pulling off the hog that
had gone on the night before and prepping with his employees the next
round of meat to hit the smoker. Furman set out to do barbecue differently and focuses on the quality of the meat when its still walking around
on four legs. He bought his own line of heritage hogs from a local farmer.
The food was so good it spawned a following. And after his original stand
burned down in 2015 when a fountain soda machine went on the fritz,
barbecue authorities across the South and neighborly fans showed up to
help him raise funds to reopen. Furman and his wife, Nikki, opened up
at their new location a year ago and are preparing a second in Atlanta.
Tucked next to a laundromat in a strip mall on the edge of Savannah, Bs
is far from the citys downtown, so locals and tourists make it a pilgrimage. Out back, Furmans guys get the firebox going with oak (for heat) and
cherry (for flavor) and put on the ribs, chicken, and brisket that fill out the
rest of the menu at Bs. And the man who made it all happen, who doesnt
like to be called a chef or a pit master but an entrepreneur, oversees it all.
70
(A) How to
Build a Smoker
Furman commissioned
buddies from his old welding job to put together a new
smoker for his upcoming
Atlanta restaurant. The
steel plates, grating, and
carved-out five-hundredgallon propane tank all
came together out in his
garage.
Timberland shirt ($68).
(B) Still Improvising
The airflow in Furmans

smokehouse is limited, so
hes rigged up a fan to direct
some air and fuel the flames.
A small trick that makes a
big difference.
Tailgate Clothing T-shirt ($34).
(C) The Heritage
The theory among barbecue guys goes that since

the skin and hair on the
heritage-breed hogs that
Furman uses are darker and
more mottled than that on
your standard white pigs,
they absorb more sunlight
and can stand up to heat better. On the smoker, theyre
going to retain flavor and
maintain a better texture.
(D) His Guys
Fifteen employees help Bs

Cracklin run day to day, and
Furman has made a point of
teaching them his process.
Things are meant to be
passed down, he says. Now
hes got a crew that can put
out the same quality barbecue at his upcoming Atlanta
location.
71
Hustling for a Heat

Source
Furman put together a

deal to collect scrap oak
and cherrywood from a
local tree-removal business in order to fuel his
operation, loading up
the bed of his F-150 with
enough wood to run his
smoker for a few days.
Because the consistency
of the wood is integral
to the consistency of his
food, Furman will bring
his own logs with him
whenever he takes the
smoker on the roada
rare policy for a traveling pit master.
72
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HE FIRST TIME I SAW 3D graphics was on my dads
computer when I was a boy. Dad was a programmer

for the phone company, back before they called
programmers coders and before being a coder was
cool. He didnt make apps; he wrote routines for a
brute of a mainframe that lived somewhere in the bowels of Pacific
Bell. He stayed up all hours of the night telecommuting before it was
a perk of every job. Sometimes, my younger brother and I would
wander in to see what he was up to, and if we were lucky, hed set us
on his lap and boot up a game, Wolfenstein 3D, a first-person
76
shooter. You were a GI trying to escape a Nazi castle. I never thought

of the graphics as looking real, but they were undeniably effective.
The three of us would sit in the darkened office, soldiers running
down corridors, anxious and scared at the possibility the next turn
might lead to Gestapo lying in wait. In the tensest moments, Dad
would physically lean his body, my brother and me with it, to try to
peer around corners.
Did the rudimentary machine we were playing on intuit my fathers
movements and respond? Did we become part of the game, in anything more real than our imaginations? Dad was good, but not that
good. Besides, it was the Dark Agesthe mid-90swhat do you want?

The protagonist of this story is a machine. A wearable, holographic computer that leaves your virtual, surpasses your augmented, and
just gives you the reality. You might call it a second-sight machine,
giving you the cognitive powers of the machine you were born with,
but freed from the tyranny of physics. It is a set of magic lenses
through which humans see, with unprecedented clarity, their relationship to the world.
The applications for this machine are limitless, from planning
tricky surgeries to designing other intricate machines with your
partner who is in Tierra del Fuego but right there with you at the
same time to just having the time of your life. With this machine,
the Nazis wouldnt have known what hit them.
HAT GOD CREATED THIS particular universe?
In 2007, Alex Kipmantoday a technical fellow at

Microsoft, then a leader of the Windows teamhad
just overseen the release of Windows Vista. It debuted
to something less than acclaim, so much less, in fact,
that eight years later it made the cut for a Silicon Valley joke about
77
the worst high-profile tech products of recent memory. Kipman was

disappointed in himself: Six years into a career at Microsoftthe
only place hed worked since earning his bachelors degreehe realized he had no point of view of his own. Hed simply been following
the dictates of other people. Of the industry. So he took a sabbatical
to his native Brazil to find a purpose.
He repaired to the Atlantic Forest, the vast tropical cover of Brazils eastern coast, to an off-the-grid farm. He walked with a notebook
in a place teeming with life and devoid of technology and he did not
stop until his mind had conceived a machine, one that would take
an unknowable number of years to create. It was a machine with one
animating impulse: to understand the world.
UBCONSCIOUSLY, AT incalculable speed, the human
brain is always reasoning: commanding senses to take

in information, gain context, and deduce what is happening in the world around it. When Alex Kipman left
the Atlantic Forest, he couldnt yet build the machine
he dreamed of. But he had an idea, a guiding principal. It was a way
of organizing the world as a machine might, were it attempting to
understand the world like a human brain. The things in the world
on one axis, and the ways of interacting
with them on the other. When Kipman
returned from Brazil, he began building.
He started with the simplest machine
he could imagine. Microsofts naming
conventions dictate that developing projects be named after cities, so he called it
Project Natal, after a city in Brazil whose
name means birth. A depth-sensing
camera that sat on a television, it was a
machine that could see and respond to the
movements of the human body. In 2010
it was released to the public as Kinect,
an Xbox peripheral that allowed gamers
to control games with the movements of
their bodies, and it sold faster than any
piece of consumer electronics in history.
So Kipman moved on to a machine that could not only see a person
and his environment, but could also make him see things.
Kipman called his new project Baraboo, this time named after a
peculiar town in Wisconsin, once the headquarters of the Ringling
Brothers Circus, a town that Kipman says is home to the only clown
cemetery in the United States. Hed been pitching a strange idea
around Microsoft: mixed reality, a headset that showed its wearer
three-dimensional holograms, accurately rendered in the space
around them. Might as well name the damn thing after the place Ill
end up when it fails, Kipman figured.
In March of this year, after years of development with partners
like Volvo and NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Project Baraboo
became available to select developers willing to pay $3,000 for a
developers kit. As of August, anyone can buy it. Kipman had dodged
the clown cemetery. The machine was called HoloLens.
HERE ARE MANY ways to describe what HoloLens is:
a mixed-reality device, a holographic computer, an expensive escapist technology. But what it is, most notably,
is the gift of sight. It can see like no machine before it.
HoloLens floats over a persons head like a smoke78
ring halo. A padded inner gray circlet rests on the crown of the skull
and cinches tight in the back. The glassesactually a clear glass
shield with a second set of trapezoidal lenses underneathfloat
around the inner ring on a tilting axis. They are adjusted to hover in
front of the eyes. And the bulk of the machine is above the lenses, in a
crescent moon of plastic and silicon that rests against the forehead:
a bundle of sensors.
These sensorsa variety of cameras and motion detectorsall
send their data, terabytes per second, to a control center called the
holographic processing unit. The result is a coordinate system that
tells HoloLens what the room looks like, where the wearer is, and
what is within his field of vision. Then what HoloLens does is learn,
with the help of a calibration program, the particular quirks of the
wearers eyes. And because HoloLens understands the environment
around the person and where he is looking, when its two tiny projectors
shine holograms into his retinas, those hologramsaside from their
odd, shimmery essenceare truly in the scene. No longer holograms,
they are real. They can be half-hidden behind a couch, sit on a kitchen
counter, or come crashing through a wall.
The device is controlled with a cursor that follows the wearers
gaze and is activated with hand gestures (or voice commands). There
are essentially only three. The most ubiquitous, the air tap, is done by
holding the index finger straight up in the air, then bringing it down
and back up, as if its being pricked by a needle. It is the equivalent of
a mouse click or a tap on a smartphone. Scrolling is accomplished
with an air tap and hold: keep the index
finger at the bottom of the tap, then scrub
the hand up or down (also used for zooming
and resizing). Finally, the virtual back button is the bloom: Hand out, palm up, fingers
together, you raise your hand and open the
fingers, like a flower to the sun.
To observe a person using HoloLens is to
regard something that looks like a religious
experience. A strange play of light comes
over his eyes, greens rolling across the
lenses like the aurora borealis. He gestures
as if having a conversation in sign language,
but with no one, and using only three words.
He sees things that others, the unwearing,
cannot see.
S MICROSOFT HAS slowly introduced HoloLens
to the world, it has set up demo rooms around the
country. These are tiny rooms, each decorated and
well appointed, each different. One looks like an urban
apartments living room. Another like the sales floor
of a Volvo dealership. A den with a chandelier and a busted dimmer
switch; a design studio. Inside each room, somewhereon a table,
on a deskis a HoloLens. In the living room there are holographic
adornments hanging on the walls and scattered across the floor like a
childs things. The sales floor has a holographic demo S90 that zooms
across the room and pops its chassis the way the real thing pops its
hood. These experiences are technically impressive, but ultimately
facile, too designed and sleek to awe. The more compelling way to
see what HoloLens can do is to see what people do while wearing it.
Aviad Almagor is the director of the mixed-reality program at
Trimble, a company thatamong other thingsworks with clients
to create digital models of buildings. Almagor has worked extensively
on developing ways to use HoloLens for collaboration, which often
involves gathering multiple HoloLens wearers on different corners
of the planet around a single 3D model. Each individuals HoloLens
shows him the same model, as well as avatars of his collaborators.
HoloLens uses a suite of sensors to develop a deep understanding of its environment,

so it can then fill it with holograms that look and sound real.
1. Four environmentunderstanding cameras

create a spatial map of
the room.
2. The depth camera
maps the surfaces in the
environment, allowing
holograms to interact with
things like walls and tables
in a natural way.
3. The inertial measurement unita gyroscope,
magnetometer, and accelerometertracks head
movement thousands of
times a second, so holograms appear to stay in
the same place even as the

wearer moves.
4. The holographic processing unit synthesizes the
massive amounts of data
coming from the sensors
to create a coordinate system that apps use to place
holograms.
5. Two pairs of microphones
isolate the wearers voice
for speech recognition.
6. An RGB camera captures
what the wearer is seeingboth the real world
and the holograms.
Everyone can move freely around the model as they discuss it.
When you bring out a virtual model, Almagor says, people
tend to put it on a table. There is no reason for thisthe model can
float in midair. But for some reason we need a solid surface to place
the model on. And people will always walk around it. They will not
cross it. Its the same with avatarspeople will not get too close to an
avatar. They keep some kind of distance, like in real life.
This is an important lesson, because humans do not treat comput-
7. A pair of light engines

shoots light through the
devices inner lenses and
into the eyes, creating
holograms.
8. The waveguidesthe inner
lensesare three-layer
pieces of etched glass that
reflect light from the light
engines to create holograms
that appear in specific locations in the environment.
9. An ambient light sensor

measures the brightness of
the room so the holograms
are projected at the brightness that maximizes their
clarity.
10. Spatial sound speakers
project sound into the ears
at different angles so that
sounds accompanying a
hologram seem to come
from its location.
ers like reality. They treat computers like machines.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory used HoloLens to develop an
application called OnSight, which uses existing photos of Marss
Gale Crater to create a fully immersive Martian environment.
Earthbound geologists explore as if they were in the field, walking
around Mars and examining it with the same facility they have in
their own gravity on this home planet.
But in designing OnSight, JPL hadnt fully accounted for real@ P o p u l a r M e c h a n i c s _ OCTOBER 2016
79
create technology that removes the interface from technology,

Kipman claims, the species will evolve.
The early days of augmented reality suggest this is true. In 1992 a
doctoral candidate from Stanford University named Louis Rosenberg noticed its evolutionary potential when he was working on a
ity. It had designed it as if it were any other graphically intensive
U.S. Air Forcefunded project to help surgeons perform surgeries
application, using a philosophy common to game design: If theres
remotely, with robotic arms. Rosenberg came up with the idea for
an object like a hill that blocks a users view, why waste computing
what he called virtual fixtures, digital aids that could help surgeons
power rendering whats behind it? Users cant see it, anyway. But
make more accurate incisions. If a needle needed to be injected into a
when JPL gave it to testers, one of the first Martian environments
patient in a precise location, Rosenbergs system could make a virtual
geologists got to see found the rover, Curiosity, stationed in front of
cone out of visual and vibrational feedback that would funnel the
a small hill, and the first thing most of them did was dash to the top
needle tip to the right spot. Or suppose a surgeon had to make a cut
of itand what they saw behind it was low-res and ugly.
that would be lifesaving if one centimeter deep, but nick an artery if
We asked them why they did that, says Parker Abercrombie,
even one millimeter deeper. It would be helpful to build a depth stop,
a software engineer at JPL. And they said, Well, if I was out in the
like you would for a table saw. Except its hard to build a depth stop for
field, the first thing I would do is Id go to the top of the tallest point
a cut inside a human body. But what if the depth stop were virtual?
and get the lay of the land.
You could get to a level of suspension of disbelief where you
In 2014, shortly after hed started at JPL and gotten to try out
didnt know what was the real information and what was the virtual
OnSight himself, Abercrombie went camping in the California
information, Rosenberg says. And, in fact, when people were
High Desert. Not too far outside Los Angeles, bound up in the larger
working in the virtual fixtures system,
province of the Mojave, the landscape
if there was a virtual cone that they could
of the high desert is a monochrome of
feel, they were going to rely on that cone
low brush, dirt, and rock. Ringed by the
Alex Kipmans sabbatical to off-the-grid
Brazil led to Xbox Kinecta Breakthrough
as if it were real. They were basically, in
tall, dry landscapethe San Bernardino
winner in 2009and now HoloLens.
their mind, merging their perception
Mountains, the San Jacintos, the Granite
of those two spaces, a merger of real and
and Providence ranges off in the disvirtual information, and the boundaries
tanceAbercrombie took in the distant
between those two really didnt matter
ridgelines with a pang of familiarity.
to them.
This feels so much like Gale Crater, he
When Rosenberg ran standard perthought. Never mind that he had never
formance tests on people using virtual
been there: Because of OnSight and a
fixtures, he found their performance
gray headset, out in the California desert
increased by 70 percent. Hed given
Abercrombie wasnt recognizing Mars
them superpowers, simply by harnessthe way you recognize a place youve seen
ing their tendency to treat the virtual
only in pictures. He was remembering it.
as the real.
The trouble was that virtual fixtures
V E R S I N C E W E inrequired massive amounts of hardware.
vented machines
Rosenberg had built a room-size rig of
even before computrobot controls, goggles, and monitors.
ersweve bent over
HoloLens fits atop a human head.
backward to be able
On Mars, the OnSight team came to
to speak, and communicate, and give
realize they could do better than simply
them instructions, says Dav Rauch.
rendering the landscape behind the
Weve learned the languages of the mahills, so people could run up them with
chines that we have created. Weve been
abandon. Theyre giving the geologists
wrapped around their finger.
the ability to fly. What better way to get
Rauch is a creative resident and sethe lay of the land? And having seen
nior design lead at IDEO, the global
geologists constantly struggle to orient
design firm. He got his start in movies,
themselves, theyve already added another new feature. In OnSights
designing interfaces for futuristic technology. If you saw scientists
virtual re-creation of Mars, any time a geologist looks up into the
standing at their computers in Avatar or Tony Stark looking through
Halloween-colored sky, hell see the numbers of an azimuth ring,
his suits headset display in Iron Man, youve seen his work. His
floating, pointing the way north.
point is that typing into a keyboard is about as far from natural
human communication as you can getbut we had to develop it to
utilize computers effectively. The complexity of our interactions
AN, NO, IM completely not happy with it, says
with computers grew for most of their historypunch cards, then a
the man who invented HoloLens.
keyboard and monitor, then a keyboard, monitor, and mousebut
HoloLens is the most beguiling machine
now are dissolving into gestures, voice, and gaze. The latter three,
thus far produced, on the cutting edge of senof course, are how we communicate with each other.
sory processing, image technology, and sheer audacity of vision.
I think the point were finally getting tostarting with gesBut it is large. It is heavy and wearies the neck in just a short period
tures, and were going to see it more completely with virtual and
of time. The batteries die too fast and the field of view is limited
augmented-reality environmentsis where user interfaces disapand the holograms themselves lack the acuity of the sharpest 3D
pear, says Rauch.
graphics, not to mention of the real world.
Kipman, for his part, believes the future is easy to see. If you
Its the only fully untethered holographic computer, and its a jewel
80
Having spent my professional life explaining

mechanical concepts to
our readersas well as
staff, friends, neighbors,
family members, and folks
who come up to me when
Im at the local home centerand having received
instructions from experts
in return, I can tell you
that this new HoloLens
from Microsoft fills in the
crucial missing links that
occur when youre trying to explain something
complicated to somebody.
Mechanical problems,
electrical work, plumbingall of this is difficult
to talk someone through,
especially over the phone.
There are variables.
Pieces dont fit. Things
break. Problems arise
because the references
you used are wrong or out
of date, or youve fouled
something up and cant
find your way back. Or any

number of other reasons.
The HoloLens is the next
best thing to an expert
guiding you through. As
the teacher, you can see
what your pupil is doing.
You can draw imaginary
circles in the air around
the wire he is supposed to
chooseand he can see it!
DIY magic, I tell you.
I can foresee a day
when you, our reader,
calls a Popular Mechanics editor, and we talk
you through that faucet replacement, or the
woodworking project that
we just ran in the magazine, or any other project,
because we can both put
on our HoloLenses and
see what the other person
is doing. So, yeah, its very
cool that the HoloLens can
let researchers explore
Mars as if they were there,
but Im just as excited
(okay, maybe a little more)
about being able to see
your leaky kitchen sink
and showing youlive and
in person, from a thousand miles awayhow to
fix it. Roy Berendsohn
and achievement of computing, but its incomplete, Kipman says.

What HoloLens is is a harbinger, an inflection point.
Its the equivalent of throwing a blanket over the real world,
which is our spatial map. It creates a mesh of the real world that
doesnt know the difference between a human, a couch, the floor, the
ceiling, anything like that, Kipman says. Which is epic, because it
does it in real time at frame rate, and nobodys anywhere near that
kind of technology. But its the beginning of a journey.
When Kipman thinks back to Brazil, he can see HoloLens is but
a few steps down the road toward the ultimate goal.
In Kinect, the machinery exists in the environment, Kipman
says. Its plugged in and tethered underneath your TV. You dont
wear anything. And yet it understands humans. In HoloLens, the
machine is on the human, and the human is ambulatory, walking

around. We didnt talk at all about what happens when you put the
machinery on objects. The same mixed-reality understanding,
when applied to an object, gets you robots and self-driving cars. If
you imagine over time the proliferation of this machineryexisting
everywhere, becoming ubiquitousthen to some extent the only
time you need the machinery on the human is in an environment
that doesnt contain the machinery.
Kipman suggests holograms emanating from the home, the
office, the bus. Who needs a holographic computer on his head when
holographic computers are everywhere? In some not distant future,
humankind will be a race of supermen, bone machines enabled on
all sides by digital machines that understand us.
And it will not stop there.
Jason Alan Snyder, a futurist whose patents shaped aspects of
Google Glassa forerunner, in a way, of HoloLensis one of many
developers working on experiences for HoloLens. He works for a
marketing agency, focusing on what he calls digital sampling, the
ability to test products and experiences virtually before buying. But
he sees past that. He thinks technology is at a place where we can
begin to transcend language. He described an experiment in which
subjects from different cultures greeted each other by thinking of a
greeting in their own language. They wore EEG helmets to read their
brain waves, and when a computer detected a thought forming
say, a greetingin one persons brain, it triggered a phosphenea
brain-produced optical artifact that looks like a bright light seen in
peripheral visionin another.
By thinking that greeting, a person on the other side of the world
would see that greeting, Snyder says. If we could direct that into
one of these AR [augmented reality] devices, like HoloLens, that
would be tremendous.
Mind-to-mind communication sounds like science fiction. But
then, so do holograms.
N THE BASEMENT of Building 92 of Microsofts Red-
mond, Washington, campus, in a room dressed as an office

at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I got to try OnSight
myself. When I went into this room, I put on a HoloLens and
with the click of a button, a Microsoft guide made the landscape of Mars, the red planet, appear all around me in remarkable
3D. I paced forward. Mars. Looked down at my feet. Mars. I panned
in a circle, scanning the entire landscape. As I turned to look back
over my left shoulder, a giant shape loomed over me, and I jumped
back, startled. It was the Curiosity rover.
The guide called me over to the desk in the office. The monitor
showed the picturesactually taken by Curiositythat had been
stitched together to create the landscape. I could click on a rock
in a picture and a flag would appear staked in the ground of the
room, where I could walk up to it and take a closer look, in three
dimensions.
One of the flags I planted was on a rock that, in 2D, seemed to
bulge over the landscape. It begged to be explored. Good choice,
my guide told me. Thats a pretty interesting rock. Weve got a lot
of pictures of it, she said.
Come look.
I walked over to the rock. It did indeed bulge over the landscape.
I could almost feel it next to my leg. Its overhang cast a shadow on
the rocks below it. We even know what the bottom of it looks like,
my guide said, subtly beckoning.
I thought of those late nights on Dads lap, straining to peer
around corners. And with that on my mind, I got down on my
hands and knees in the red Martian dust, to have a closer look at
the underside of a rock that was sixty million miles away.
81
The backpack holds the

GTs batteries and also
provides trunk support
so users dont need walkers or arm supports to
remain upright.
Since DARPA began developing them

in 2001, modern exoskeletonsthe
hydraulic bodysuits worn to enhance a wearers strength and speedhave been primarily
used by the military. But the medical uses are
obvious. In an exoskeleton, a person who has
suffered a spinal-cord injury no longer needs
a wheelchair. The suits also reduce repetitivestress injuries when worn by construction
crews. And now, they can be used to help
stroke patients regain the ability to walk. This
year, Ekso Bionics Ekso GT suit became the
first exoskeleton approved by the FDA for
treating stroke victims, which means twenty
times more patients can be treated. Heres
how the GT works.
The benefit of the exoskeleton is
that it helps the body find alternative
routes to movement, working around
muscles with limited function and
creating new neural pathways, says
Allan Kozlowski, an assistant professor at Mount Sinais Icahn School of
Medicine (who uses the GT in physical
therapy with his patients).
A technology called Variable Assist
allows Ekso to read how hard the suit
is working to support the patient. A
therapist reads this information, then
adjusts the controls to personalize.
In contrast to other types of exoskeletons, the GTs motors can be
individually controlled. If one side of
the body works well on its own, as is
the case with many stroke patients,
the suit can leave it alone.
82
A patient sits in the

suit as he would in a
chair, fastening Velcro straps around his
legs, torso, and feet. A
therapist initiates the
sit-to-stand procedure, then controls the
patients movements
using a Nintendo-like
device on the back of
the suit.
The legs and

torso are adjustable to fit nearly
any body size.
Since many
patients cant feel
skin irritations,
which can lead to
abrasions, the suit
straps are made of
custom-sewn Velcro backstitched
for maximum
comfort.
The fifty-fivepound Ekso GT is

mostly made of
aluminum.
T E C H N I C A L I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY G R A H A M M U R D O C H
Hydroelectric PowerDuring
a Drought
Hydropower saves the equivalent of fossil-fuel
emissions of thirty-eight million passenger cars
each year. But it only works where youve got high-pressure
water, and there are only so many waterfalls and dammable rivers in the country. Hydropower currently accounts
for only 2.4 percent of U.S. energy output, but with a new
technology from Alameda, Californias Natel Energy, that
number will soon rise. Natels hydroEngine maximizes
hydropower by collecting energy in two stages, once when
the current enters the turbine and moves the blades up,
and once when it leaves and the blades move back down.
The engine makes thousands of low-pressure streams
and medium-size rivers viable power sources. So far,
Natel has installed its turbines at projects in Oregon and
Maine. Soon, there could be one creating power in your
backyard, even if its only big enough for a beaver dam.
The Miner Who

Learned to Code
When the largest coal-mining operation in the U.S., Peabody Energy, filed
for bankruptcy in April, joining Walter
Energy, Arch Coal, and Patriot Coal,
most news reports worried that miners were
headed toward low-wage jobs or destitution. But
to coal miner Rusty Justice, that idea is absurd.
Doctors can split wood and construction workers
can write books. Why couldnt a coal miner transition to a different career? He found the stereotype
so insulting that he decided to prove it wrong.
Though Justice and his partner M. Lynn Parrish
still run a functional excavation company, Jigsaw,
they bought a former Coca-Cola bottling plant
with the intention of founding an enterprise to
help their friends. Their goal: Hire laid-off coal
miners and teach them how to code. The new
company, which they named Bit Source, sent
out a call for applications in late 2014, planning
to hire about ten coders and pay them with government grants while they trained. More than
nine hundred people applied. Those first ten
students have since been through a twenty-twoweek program, and the company has garnered a
half-dozen contracts. Bit Source plans to become
profitable this yearmuch faster than a lot of
other tech startups.
The deadly Amtrak

train crash north of
Philadelphia in May
2015 may have been the
first time many people heard about positive
train control (PTC), a
system of controlling
trains through sensors
built into tracks. But
Amtrak and Congress
have been trying to
implement it for nearly
a decade. Problem is:
Retrofitting Amtraks
infrastructure takes
time and moneymore
than Congress expected

when, in 2008, it gave
an initial deadline of
2015, and billions of
dollars. This year, as
Amtrak continues to
update its railways
(now to be completed
by 2020), Californias
Sonoma-Marin Area
Rail Transit (SMART)
will become the firstever rail line to begin
service fully equipped
with PTC. SMART
uses a fiber-optic network that sends pulses
down the entire rail system. Transponders on

the bottom of each train
pick up those pulses,
so that SMART operators can see exactly
where each car is on
the tracks, and control the trains speed.
If a conductor does not
slow down within sixty
seconds of entering a
reduced-speed zone,
a computer code automatically halts the
train, keeping passengers and crew safe.
A Fat That Saves You From Sugar

You eat a lot of sugar, you gain weight. Most of us know that. But few of us realize that simple sugars like
those found in a can of Coke can also damage thousands of genes in your brain, including those related to
Alzheimers, heart disease, and depression. Thats exactly what UCLA professors Xia Yang and Fernando
Gomez-Pinilla discovered in May. Luckily they also found some good news: An omega-3 fatty acid called
DHA, which is found in fish, including tuna and salmon, reversed the damage.
83
A solar panel that follows the sun throughout the day makes sense. Building that
solar panel out of several thousands of dollars worth
of parts that cant withstand weather does not. In 2011,
Leila Madrone and Saul Griffith of the San Francisco
based company Sunfolding decided to reinvent the
mechanism that allows a photovoltaic cell to move with
the sun. They simplified the system, replacing expensive and unreliable parts with mass-produced polymers.
Instead of hundreds of gears, motors, wires, and bearings, Sunfolding trackers move using compressed air
pistons, which have no wear surfaces. Even if the new
parts break, which happens much less frequently, they
are cheap to replace. In 2015, the California Energy
Commission awarded Sunfolding a $1 million grant to
build panels capable of handling 300 kilowatts. Youll
see them on rooftops by the end of this year.
A Faster
Vaccine
Current vaccine development
schedules are the stuff of
epidemiologist nightmares.
Imagine if Ebola or Zika
spread near uncontrollably
for ten years while scientists
tried to create a vaccine that
is safe, effective, and abundant enough to administer to
large groups of people.
Inovio Pharmaceuticals, the
drug company behind what
looks to become the fastest
vaccine ever to come to market, may be able to halt such
a spread before it gets out of
control. The company shocked
the medical world in June by
announcing that its Zika vaccine had already received FDA
approval for human clinical trials, just nine months after the
race to prevent Zika began. If
all goes well, its shot will be
available to the public as soon
as early 2018.
Inovios secret is that its
using a completely new form
of vaccination. In first-generation vaccines, a weaker or dead
form of the virus triggers your
immune system to develop
antibodies that could shut
84
down the real virus. Newer

vaccines include only outer
pieces of the virusthe envelopethat specifically trigger
the antibodies. These vaccines
are safer, because theres no
way for them to copy themselves until they make you sick,
but they can take a long time
to create in a lab.
Inovios vaccine is a thirdgeneration vaccine, a DNA
vaccine. All it contains are
DNA instructions to build the
virus envelope. If the Zika
virus were a Mercedes-Benz,
were just making the front
grille. Everyone recognizes
the three-pointed star as a
Mercedes, but its not the
actual car, says Dr. J. Joseph
Kim, president and CEO of
Inovio. The instructions are
made out of simple, readily
available chemicals. Once a
doctor injects the instructions into your arm, your own
cells build the envelope. Then
your immune system fights the
envelope and youre safe from
the real virus. Its sort of like
outsourcing the work of creating a vaccine to the human
bodyno long wait times or
biohazard suits required.
THIS YEAR
HAD SO MANY
BREAKTHROUGHS,
WE HAD TO BUILD
AN EXTENSION TO
FIT THEM ALL.
OPEN THE FOLDOUT FOR MORE!
COMPUTERS
T H AT
U N D E R S TA N D
CONTEXT
Alice drove down the
street in her car.
A DNA vaccine consists of viral DNA and
an electrical pulse that pushes that DNA
into the cell nucleus.
Once inside the nucleus, the vaccine tells

the bodys own cells to create proteins
from the virus envelope.
The virus envelope proteins (red) spur

the immune system to make killer T-cells
(red and blue) and antibodies (yellow).
You understand what

that sentence means. But
a computer might not.
Taken literally, it could
mean that Alice was driving on a street that existed
inside her car.
This May Google
released SyntaxNet, software that breaks down
sentences into a format that computers can
analyze, leading to more
accurate searches. Just
as you did in eighth-grade
English, the software diagrams sentences. After
every word is tagged with
a part of speech, an algorithm explores possible
relationships between the
words, with a likelihood
assigned to each one. SyntaxNet also learns from
itself, getting stronger each
time its used. The algorithm isnt perfect, but its
close. The English plug-in,
called Parsey McParseface, reads with 94 percent
accuracy. Which might
even be better than you.
Local Motors
Nuclear fusion is a
complicatedand
expensiveprocess. The
U.S. government sets aside
$1 billion a year for nuclear
and fusion energy research,
resulting in very few critical breakthroughs. But last
year, without any of that federal money, a privately funded
California company called
Tri Alpha Energy overcame a
major obstacle. It figured out
how to keep fusion plasma
stable.
Nuclear fusion works like
this: When two very light
atoms bond together, they
make an atom that has less
total mass than the two that
formed it. The missing mass
is given off as energy, which

can then be captured and
used. There are several problems with this. The first is that
two atomic nuclei dont want
to fuse. Theyre both positively
charged, so they repel each
other. We solved this already:
If you heat the atoms until they
become plasma, they lose electrons, becoming fusible. The
bigger problem? The temperature required to make fusible
plasma is hotter than the core
of the sun. Oh, and it requires
immense pressure to force
those atoms together. Even if
scientists can overcome both
of these obstacles, keeping the
atoms in the appropriate state
long enough for fusion to occur
can cost more energy than it

creates.
This year, however, Tri
Alpha held a plasma stable for
five millisecondsten times
longer than ever before, and
much longer than you need to
achieve fusion. The plasma
wasnt quite at the core-ofthe-sun temperature, but
CTO Michl Binderbauer is
confident it can be done: The
temperature barrier is generally considered to be an easier
challenge than stability. Binderbauer projects that Tri Alpha
will be able to solve the problem
in the next three or four years.
Seven to ten years after that, it
hopes to have a facility that can
send electrons to the grid.
In 2014, car manufacturer Local

Motors received its
first Breakthrough
Award for creating a
3D-printed car. This
year, it applied the
same technology to
public transportation
with a 3D-printed,
twelve-passenger,
self-driving shuttle
called Olli. The vehicle
was introduced in
June in National Harbor, Maryland, and
service should begin
in Miami by the end
of the year. Olli has a
thirty-two-mile range
per charge and can
be used on its own or
in a fleet, as a shuttle
or a point-to-point
alternative to Uber.
It all depends on the
city and the need.
Every Olli on the road
is connected, learning from itself and
constantly calculating the most efficient
routes. And thanks
to a partnership with
IBMs Watson technology, Olli can interact
with its passengers,
answering questions
about the weather,
how long it will be
until you reach your
destination, and where
you might want to
grab dinner when you
arrive. The only thing it
cant do is get you the
reservation. Although
that can probably be
solved in the next software update.
P H OTO G R A P H BY V I N C E N T F O U R N I E R
The latest mind-bending project from NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the mystical California birthplace of miracles like Jupiter probes and space clocks, is the Cold Atom Lab. Its an appliance about the size and shape of a sideways filing cabinet that is
scheduled for launch to the International Space Station early next year. It shoots atoms with lasers and radiation until they get
so incredibly chilly that they turn into a rare, strange fifth state of
matter, called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Scientists know
hardly anything about BECs other than that the atoms in them
behave like waves, giving BECs properties that could be useful
for future miracles like infinite batteries and atom-based lasers.
Why the ISS? Gravity tends to work against the cooling process
that creates condensates. In space, these BECs could be a trillion
times colder than the coldest places in the universe and a hundred times colder than anything ever artificially created on earth.
In addition to potentially changing physics forever, this will be fun
for astronauts, because BECs are visible with the naked eye. You
can actually see the tiny cloud in there, says Anita Sengupta, the
Lasers are usually hot, but in laser cooling, they counteract the movement
labs project manager. You have to turn the lights off, but you can
of individual atoms, slowing them down by tapping them like bumper cars. A
see a little ball. This will come in handy if the astronauts ever get
second stage of cooling employs a radioactive wind to blow hotter atoms
away. Once cold enough, the atoms start to behave in unison, like a wave.
tired of looking out the window.
P H OTO G R A P H BY S P E N C E R LO W E L L
Simply reducing the

amount of carbon
dioxide that spews into the
atmosphere each year isnt
enough to save the environment. We also need a way to get
rid of whats already out there.
This year, a team of engineers
and scientists from Columbia
University, the University of
Iceland, and the University of
Copenhagen figured out a way
to do just that: Theyll turn the
gas into rock. In Iceland.
Because of Icelands volcanic activity, geothermal plants
there drill into the earth to tap
volcanically heated water for
power, releasing carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. In
the past, CO2 that escaped during this process was captured,
then pumped back underground into former gas or oil
reservoirs. That technique
worked for awhile. But there
was no way to guarantee that
people wouldnt accidentally
pierce those reservoirs in the
future, releasing the stored
CO2 back into the atmosphere.
This new process ensures that
that will never happen.
Now, the CO2 is still
pumped underground, but
first it is dissolved into water.
The engineers pump the mixture into natural formations
made of basalta porous lava
rock that likes to react with
carbon dioxide. When the

water floods into the basalt,
the carbon reacts with the
rock to form a chalky mineral
called carbonate. It was previously thought that this process
took hundreds or thousands
of years, but the researchers
have already found that it can
happen extremely quickly. In
two years, 90 percent of the
injected CO2 has solidified.
Because basalt is a common
rock found all over the world,
the team in Iceland thinks that
this technique can be applied
in many other countries. For
now, it may be costly, but so
is running an air conditioner
when its 120 degrees outside.
CO2 is dissolved in water and pumped

into basalt stores. There, it reacts with
the rock itself, becoming carbonate.
The problem with science

awards is that you only really
hear about the big discoveries. No one wants to celebrate
basic researchthe nitty-gritty
explorations into atoms and cells
that make advances like spaceflight possiblebecause it can
seem unexciting. Mona Jarrahi,
associate professor in charge of
the University of California, Los
Angeles Terahertz Electronics Laboratory, could have this
problem, because what she
does is integrate semiconducting nanostructures into lasers
to convert light into terahertz
waves, then converts those
waves into an electricalsee?
But the thing is, the Department of Defense, President
Obama, and the Nobel Prize

Committee are all interested
in Jarrahis basic research,
because essentially what she
has done is increase the sensitivity of terahertz scannersthose
body scanners you get to pose
in every time you go to the airportby a factor of five.
Much like X-rays, terahertz
scanners can see through
clothes and inside organs,
but because they employ a
longer wavelength, they dont
damage DNA and can detect
unique chemical signatures
from substances like water.
This makes terahertz waves

ideal for locating both hidden
explosives and cancer tumors.
With the increase in power
that comes from Jarrahis
work, shes been able to build
scanners as small as a deck
of cards. One day, she hopes,
theyll replace mammography
machines, and doctors will
be able to spot breast cancer
with an iPhone. Currently, she
is partnering with the MedStar Washington Burn Center
to see if her tiny scanner can
determine the depth of injury
in burn victims.
A Better Understanding of Earthquakes

We know why earthquakes happen: Tectonic plates in the earth push against
each other until the pressure is too great and they have to shift, bend, or
break. But figuring out where those shifts will happen? That has always
been a challenge. For decades, scientists have tracked the Pacific and North
American plates as they move side to side. Up and down, however, isnt so
easy. The latter movement is caused by seismic forces but also by factors
such as pumping out groundwater for irrigation. This year, researchers from
the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the University of Washington, and the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography created an algorithm that removed
nonseismic factors from the data. For the first time, scientists could see
the rise and fall of pockets of land along faults in California. The movement
is smalla few millimeters each yearbut it has big implications. Not only
does it give scientists an idea of the energy available for an earthquake, it
helps them understand where those earthquakes might strike.
P L A N E TA RY S E C R E T S !
NASAs Juno probe entered Jupiters orbit on July 4, 2016, ending a five-year journey from
Cape Canaveral. The satellite is larger than a basketball court, thanks to three thirty-foot-long
solar panels, which have more than eighteen thousand solar cells. Because Jupiter receives just
one twenty-fifth the solar power of Earth, the satellite will need every one of them. Juno will
spend the next year and a half collecting data from about three thousand miles above Jupiters
surface, offering the closest look weve ever gotten of the largest planet in our solar system. The
more we learn about Jupiterwhat its made of, how its magnetic fields and radiation work
the more we might learn about the origins of Earth.
P O R T R A I T BY Y U R I H A S E G AWA
Two Cheaper Ways to

Get to Space
In a spinal-cord injury, the pathway between the brain and the muscles is interrupted,
and signals from the brain make it only as far as the damage in the cord. Many treatments
focus on attempting to repair that path, but researchers at Ohio State University and the Battelle
Memorial Institute did something different: They bypassed the spinal cord completely. This year
the team, lead by Ali Rezai at Ohio State, published the results of a study in which they implanted
a small chip in the motor cortex of a twenty-four-year-old quadriplegic. As the patient attempted
to replicate basic hand movements he saw on a screen, the chip recorded the neural firing patterns for each gesture. When the patients forearm was wrapped in a sleeve of electrodes and he
was hooked up to the computer, he could think of a movement, and the chip would recognize the
neural pattern and broadcast the appropriate signals directly to the electrodes, moving his hand
in response. Using the new technology, the patient was able to swipe a credit card, play Guitar
Hero, and stir cream and sugar into a drink. And all he had to do was think about it.
You can already buy and name

starsone of the least romantic
anniversary gifts out there, for
the recordbut this year two new
products were released that will
let you own lights in space.
Jekan Thanga, an assistant
professor at Arizona State Universitys School of Earth and Space
Exploration, leads a
team of students that
created the SunCube
FemtoSat satellite
(pictured above).
At a tiny size of
twenty-seven cubic
centimeters, it costs
only $500 to buy and
$3,000 to send into
low Earth orbit. (Companies such
as NanoRacks will do the latter
for you.) Thats one-fifth the cost
of the cheapest spacecraft in use
today. The minisatellite uses photovoltaic cells for power and has
a three-megapixel camera and an
eight- to thirty-two-bit processor,
depending on the data computation you plan on doing.
Meanwhile, a team of researchers led by Mason Peck at Cornell
University has developed Sprites,
bitsy satellites about the size and
shape of a Cheez-It cracker. At
about $30 apiece, Sprites include
a circuit board, solar cells, radio
transmitters, and sensors that can
detect direction and movement.
Both projects provide opportunities for exploration without
extreme cost. Right now so many
people are denied the opportunity
to participate in space exploration
just by virtue of the cost effects,
Peck says. With this approach,
with relatively little money, you can
put one of these together yourself.
Researchers will be able to send
probes to previously unexplored
parts of space, with very little at
stakeand without the help of
anyone named Musk or Bezos.
Few people had heard of

the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory before it shared news in
February that it had confirmed
the existence of gravitational
waves, a phenomenon Albert
Einstein predicted back in 1916.
But that doesnt mean it wasnt
there. LIGO, which is actually
two enormous L-shaped scientific instruments called laser
interferometersone in Hanford, Washington, and another
in Livingston, Louisiana
first opened in 1999 and ran for
years before upgrading in 2007.
That initial run was sort
of an experiment. No one had
ever tried to find gravitational
waves before. The ripples in
space-time are caused by events
like stars collapsing and black
holes colliding. The only way
to know if one has passed is to
detect a tiny signal, the result
of microscopic stretching and
compression of the earth, on two
Active seismic
reduction platform
identical laser interferometers,

set many miles apart. The interferometers work by splitting a
beam of light in half and sending it down both arms of the L
simultaneously. Each beam hits
a mirror at the end of its arm,
which sends the beam back to a
photodetector. When the beams
reach the detector, they cancel each other out. The sensor
sees nothing until a gravitational wave bounces through,
stretching space so that the
Four-stage
passive
isolator
Mirror
Mirror
Beam
splitter
Photo
detector
Laser
CLEANER
OIL
Only visible when

a gravitational
wave is present
arms themselves lengthen and

shorten by a distance as small as
one ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton and some light
waves make it to the sensor. In
those first eight years, scientists found nothing. But they did
learn how to increase potential
signal and decrease noise from
things like earthquakes. So they
closed the facilities down and
built an even better version.
When the new, improved
LIGO opened in 2015, just
months before it detected its
first wave, the lasers were twenty
times more powerful, the mirrors were more reflective, and
it had a souped-up vibrationisolation systema four-stage
hanging setup that passively
reduces shaking by a factor of a
trillion, and a two-stage seismicreduction platform that actively
counteracts the motion of the
earth. The analogy I like to
give is that the first interferometer was a family sedan, but the
new one is a Ferrari, says LIGO
executive director David Reitze.
And now it even has a bunch of
awards on the dash.
Cheap and widely available heavy fuel oil (HFO) is what keeps maritime shipping afloat, but burning the sulfur-rich
substance emits as much air pollution as fifty million cars every year. Field Upgrading of Calgary, Alberta, created
a solution: Combine HFO with molten sodium, which reacts with the sulfur in the oil to create sodium sulfide. Separate
out this compound using a centrifuge, and youre left with clean oil. Cleaner, at least. For now, a test facility produces
ten barrels per day, but by 2019 that number should be closer to ten thousand.
93
A Better
Hockey Helmet
Clara Wagner, 17,
Saginaw, Michigan
Her freshman year of high school,

Wagners parents dragged her
to a science museum with an
exhibit about the mechanics of
the woodpeckers formidable
head, whichthanks in part to
a strangely spongy part of its
skullcan withstand up to 1,500
gs of force without getting a
concussion. (Humans can barely
withstand 100 gs.) Surprised,
Wagner launched a full-fledged
investigation into concussion
safety. She visited the lab of helmet researchers at Virginia Tech
University. When a roughly twelvefoot pendulum they use for impact
testing caught her eye there, she
went home and built a full-scale
replica in her garage, so she could
test her own helmet designs.
Inspired by the woodpecker, shes
working on hockey helmets that
contain non-Newtonian fluids,
which turn solid under stress (as in
a body check), limiting acceleration and head trauma. Her designs
have already managed to reduce
head accelerations by more than
20 percent compared to some
mainstream hockey helmets. And
with a whole concussion lab in her
garage, theres nothing to stop her
from making them even better.
A Better Way of
Preserving Blood
Julian Elmasry, 18, Galax, Virginia

Blood samples require immediate refrigeration to
avoid decay, which means doctors in developing
countries, where refrigeration is a luxury, dont often
have the opportunity to make the kind of lifesaving
diagnoses we take for granted. Elmasry found this
unacceptable, so he invented a solution. His Revolutionary Blood Test Tube 2.0, a 3D-printed, triple-layer
test tube, is the first major innovation in blood-testtube design in forty-five years. The innermost layer
is vacuum-sealed and holds the actual blood sample.
The middle layer contains water and an endothermic
powder; when they mix, the resulting reaction absorbs
heat. The outermost layer is filled with insulation.
Combined, the three layers keep blood samples at 38
to 46 degrees Fahrenheit for four to five hours longer
than test tubes currently on the market.
94
Power From
the Sea
Hannah Meiseles, 17,

The Woodlands, Texas
With California in an epic drought, Meiseles

became curious why desalination plants,
which create usable water from salt water,
arent more common. Those plants, she
learned, require huge amounts of energy and
generate an environmentally harmful, highly
concentrated saltwater brine. Which gave
her an idea. Graphene, a 3D-printable material that generates electricity under flowing
salt water, could be added to the process.
In small-scale tests a one-millimeter thick,
three-inch-long piece of graphene under
5 percent brine created seven to eight volts
of electricityequivalent to five AA batteries. Meiseles also had success using ocean
water, a 3.5 percent brine. Her work suggests
one possibility for a sustainable future, in
which ships and oil rigs generate electricity
just by being in the water, and desalination
plantswith graphene-coated pipesare far
more common and energy efficient.
P O R T R A I T BY J A S O N K E E N ; S O L D E R I N G I R O N BY G R E G G D E L M A N
Poison Oak:
Neutralized
Amy Dunphy,
15, San Jose,
California
Dunphy loves hiking in
the hills surrounding
San Jose, but always
seems to come home
covered in rashes.
Like 80 to 90 percent
of Americans, she is
allergic to urushiol,
the allergen found in
poison ivy and poison
oak. In search of relief,
she discovered that
an urushiol neutralizer already existed.
Urushiol is a key component of lacquer,
and people dont have
allergic reactions every
time they touch finished cabinetry. But the
way lacquer is made
safe is notoriously
slow and inefficient,
so Dunphy created her
own solution. By mixing benzoyl peroxide,
an antiseptic commonly found in acne
products, with urushiol
extracted from poisonoak leaves, she created
a balm that could neutralize 95 percent of
the allergen, well below
the threshold at which
it causes a reaction.
Soon Dunphy will test
her technique on mice
and hopes to one day
bring a skin-care product to market.
A hackathon is like a tag-team MMA fight for makers: Coders, woodworkers,

engineers, and dreamers form teams to think up and build inventions in a highpressure environment. Major League Hackings weekend-long competitions attract 65,000 high school and college students every year. At the end of an annual
circuit of events, they crown a school as champion based on its hackers performance.
Here are some of the most inventive teams from last season.
The Cadillac
of Soldering
Irons
Bergen County
Academies,
Hackensack,
New Jersey:
Jake Kaplan,
16, and Danny
Yim, 16
Better
Care for
People With
Parkinsons
Rutgers
University:
Nicholas
Grieco, 21,
Walee Qawasmi,
21, and Phil
Rechani, 22
Full-Body VR
University of
Maryland: Joseph
Brosnihan, 20,
Jack Bundra,
19, Chris
Castellano,
20, and Galen
Stetsyuk, 23
Soldering irons come in

two varieties: $10 plugins, which quickly burn
themselves out, and
hardier temperaturecontrolled irons that can
cost as much as $70.
Knowing the struggles
that come with the less
expensive kind, Kaplan
had a thought familiar
to most hobbyists: The
extra parts for a quality
product cant possibly

cost the extra $60 Im
being charged. He and
Yim took a $10 soldering iron and started
adding features. They
gave it temperature
control by using a solidstate relay to turn it on
and off, equalizing at the
optimal temperature.
They added an LED to
improve visibility in dark
or obstructed workplaces. And they used

their own 3D-printed
clips to attach a pipe and
tubing to suck up fumes,
so the iron doesnt have
to be kept in front of a
fume extractor. They
were right. Its still
cheap. Even with the
base they built to hold it
at a cool idle temperature, it cost only $30.
Nearly one million

Americans live with
Parkinsons disease,
the neurodegenerative
disorder that can start
with a barely noticeable
tremor. Most Parkinsons patients need to
monitor the shakings
escalation over time, but
get to the doctor only
a few times a year. The
Rutgers teams app can
track tremor velocity
every day from home.

Rechani developed a
system to track hand
tremors with a sensor
designed to follow hand
movements in virtual
reality. Grieco incorporated real medical
practices, like an existing
tremor-rating system.
But Qawasmis job was
the toughest. Since the
sensor captures noise
in its tremor data, he
spent fourteen hours

writing code to interpret
the data correctly. His
big break came when he
realized he could adapt
an algorithm for analyzing the performance
of volatile stocks. The
project won an award
from Merck Pharmaceuticals, and now the
team is considering how
to apply the strategy to
other diseases.
When a traditional video

games controls and
movements dont feel
natural, its annoying. In
virtual reality, the same
problem can make you
sick. The team from the
University of Maryland
wanted to capture the
thrill of acceleration
without giving anyone
simulation sickness.
They hacked an office

chair and an eighteeninch-long piston into a
rig that tilts to create
the feeling of a speeding train ride through a
mountain tunnel. First,
they determined the
maximum speed and
angles the piston could
move the chair. Then
they synced it to the vir-
tual experience theyd

designed. (A plywood
prop held riders feet
off the ground, because
nothing kills the illusion
of a speeding train like
feet firmly on the floor.)
Their project attracted
such a long line, some
of the team members
didnt get to try it. Not a
single person got sick.
95
Writer Ryan
Knighton and
sushi chef Bun
Lai drag for
tiny baitfish.
Lai prefers to
serve them
rather than
use them
as bait.
96
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIC HEIMBOLD
B Y RYA N K N I G H T O N
An environmentally
conscious chef eschews
conventional sushi in
favor of the undiscovered
pleasures of strange,
invasive species. A man
who lost his eyesight refuses
to pity himself and instead
becomes, of all things, a
travel writer. Together, they
dig their hands into the
dark ocean mud in search of
enlightenment.
Blindness can
make people
sensitive to
motion. Knighton takes
Dramamine to
combat this
problem on
boats. He also
hates flying.
from the mouth of the Branford River, just beyond the Thimble
Islands off the coast of Connecticut, rocks jut from the ocean like
broken teeth. Some are the size of a kitchen table, others the size of
a kitchen, small streams and straits of dark water cutting between
them. Perched on one with my friend Bun Lai, a sushi chef, I considered that we could be the only people to have ever surveyed the
empty horizon from this spot. My feet were bleeding. I could feel
a chunk missing from my right toe and cuts pinstriping my soles.
Beside me dripped a bag of rockweeda dark, tough seaweed wed
harvested by hand as we snorkeled the nooks and shallows. The
plan was to add our findings to a foraged feast that Bun would cook
for us. That is, if we could get home. We were strandedour boat
high on the rocks after the tide had washed out. Theres something else you should know: Ive been blind for more than twenty
years. I cant see a thing.
98
Buns restaurant, Miyas Sushi, first

opened its doors in New Haven in 1982,
when his mother, Yoshi, freshly separated
from her husband, needed to support herself
and her children. At the time, Yoshi saw only
two possibilities: She could earn money as
a clothing designer or she could open a restaurant serving the cuisine she knew best.
Sushi wasnt as popular then as it is now.
She feared the business might struggle. If
it did? At least she could be certain her children would eat.
A little more than a decade later, Bun
would nearly sink his mothers restaurant.
It wasnt that he didnt know how to cook
he spent his childhood in the kitchen. The
problem was his conscience. As a young
man, Bun spent most of his spare time reading adventure novels and romping around
in the forest and nearby ocean. His father,
a Yale ophthalmologist, pushed him to finish his homework and to learn about science.
So Bun compromised, reading science magazines about the outdoors. It wasnt long
before he read about ocean contaminants
and invasive species, and about how the very
fish his mom served were disappearing from
the oceans. He knew that there would come
a day when he could no longer, in good con-
science, turn out another tuna roll.

This story is more about comfort than
you might imagine. Its also about restlessness, and safety, and complacency. Tuna
rolls are familiar, but they dont do a lot for
the environment. And like Steve Jobs and
Benjamin Franklin, Bun does not get off
on familiarity. He could have just made the
damn sushi and brought home a paycheck
and gone to bed after House Hunters like
anyone else. But Bun was restless. He saw
himself not as a chef but as some kind of
environmental steward. He could, he figured, use his little restaurant in a forgotten
city to try to rehabilitate, in some small
way, not just the nearby Atlantic, but all the
oceans in the world. Imagine what life would
be like without people like thatwithout
people who werent satisfied with the easy
way. No one would ever have found Australia, for one thing.
Bun began to consider how we could turn
our destructive power as super predators
toward invasive species. Instead of tuna
and salmon wed eat weeds, jellyfish, crisped
wax wormsthe plants and animals currently demolishing our local ecosystems.
After a trip to Louisiana, he even incorporated nutria, a large swamp rodent, into
his sashimi repertoire. Early on, customers
simply walked out, unable to recognize his
inventions as sushi, or even as food. Tables
remained empty. Bills mounted.
By the time I met Bun in 2013 at Chicagos Ideas Week, a TED-like festival of
provocative talks given by authors and
entrepreneursand, in Buns case, an ecowarrior sushi-makerhe was winning
culinary awards. He took the stage in an old
hoodie and jeans and spoke about foraging
for sushi ingredients in the waters and forests near his New Haven restaurant, about
his sushi, and about the future of fish.
At the closing party, Bun slid into a booth
next to me and tapped my shoulder. Hed
heard I was a travel writer. A blind travel
writer. Was it true?
It was.
You remind me of a guy from this novel
I read when I was a kid, he said.
The book was Theodore Taylors The Cay,
published in 1969, about a boy and his family fleeing Curaao during World War II. The
protagonist, Phillip, survives the sinking
of a torpedoed ship only to be blinded and
stranded on an island. But Phillips new
perspective eliminates his inhibitions.
Hes able to forage by touch and eat things
he would have formerly avoided. The story,
Bun said, formed his interest in the possibilities of sushi. Imagine what wed be willing
to eat if only we couldnt see it.
Id also given a talk that week, in which I
spoke about being diagnosed with a heredi-
tary retinal disease at the age of eighteen

and slowly going blind over the next five
years, and about the time I went to Cairo
right after the Arab Spring to write a travel
story. I had been restless too. It was as if Bun
had recognized a kindred soul when he saw
me. Like, Oh, youd rather ride around in
taxis in war zones than sit in a room lamenting your blindness? I almost ran the family
business into the ground serving swamp rat
to Yale students. Wanna hang out?
Thats it, Bun said as he pulled on his
beer, not his first of the night. Were going
diving.
To be stranded on a rock in the ocean a few

years later with Bun is, in hindsight, ironic
when you consider the plot of the book that
led him to invite me. I wasnt immediately
sold on Buns offer to dive with him, either.
Imagine the sensation of swimming down,
down, enveloped in darkness, to jam your
hands into the mud and grab whatever lurks
there, unseen. The thought made me shiver.
But blindness, Ive learned, is a constant
battle against comfort. To be safe is to be
bored, and that is in many ways more crip-
pling than blindness itself.

Milford is a short drive from New Haven,
its shoreline park locked tight at 4:30 in the
morning. Of course Bun knew a way around
the gates. Abandoned houses dotted the
beach, their blown-out windows staring out
to sea like the eyes of Easter Island heads.
Hurricane Sandy, Bun explained.
He eased me into the trip. With our
buckets and a dragnet, we scuttled to the
waters edge to begin our first day of foraging along the rocky shore and tidal pools. In
the afternoon we would pick invasive greens
like amaranth, garlic mustard, and butterbur from the local woods. Tomorrow we
would motor Buns Boston Whaler to sea to
skin-dive for clams and seaweed, the final
ingredients Bun needed to cook us a meal.
Knee-deep in low tide, we dragged the net
stretched between us like a spoon until wed
gathered enough weight to lift our find to the
sand. Dozens of smelt flipped and slapped
their bodies, the sound like rain on a sidewalk. One by one I grabbed and pinched
them, filling our buckets. The yield could
have been purchased from a store for less
than twenty-five cents, but Bun has dragged
for smelt since he was a child and still loves
to do it. A few bluefish, the preferred sport
catch of this area, leaped among our smelt.
We let them loose. Most people, he said,
catch bait to catch another fish. But why
not appreciate the bait, which is far more
abundant?
A few hours later we spidered our way
under the parks wooden boardwalk. My job
was to overturn stones so Bun could scoop up
the tiny Asian shore crabs that would bolt for
cover. Our buckets filled fast with the tiny
Because of
his disability,
Knighton is
willing to try
things most
people would
avoid, like
handling Asian
shore crabs.
99
brown creatures. Bun can still remember

a time when the crabs didnt exist. Today
theyve colonized beaches all the way to
Maine. At some point in the late 1980s the
crabs were probably accidentally pumped
from an international ships ballast. Not
only do they lay hundreds of thousands of
eggs each year, Asian shore crabs also eat
the larvae of other species to eliminate
their competitors. After much trial and
error, Bun discovered that the crabs could
be panfried in olive oil and seasoned, cre-
salt, water, flesh. In a way, it tasted like a

glimpse of the world around me. Food can
be a way of seeing.
Just beyond us floated a commercial
clam dredge. The ships nose shovels the
ocean floor, and its vacuum inhales everything it touches to capture the clams. It spits
back the rest. Bun could buy from them. It
would be cheaper and easier than coming
here with his staff three times a week to
raise one clam at a time from the depths. But
Buns right about the way things taste when
I m a n a g e d to p lu c k a c l a m th e s i z e o f a
ten n i s ba l l f r om th e o c ea n f l o or l i k e a ra d i s h .
Ho w st ra ng e to f e el th e r u s h o f a hu nter.
T h e th r i l l o f a p r e d ator. I h a d it . I d f o u n d on e .
B l i n d p e op l e n e v er f i n d a ny th i ng .
ating a taste that is an uncanny imitation

of a Dorito.
The next morning, the Boston Whaler
bobbed in the swells, anchored just inside
an inlet. Worried about seasickness, Id
loaded myself with Dramamine before we
left the dock. Blindness makes a person
sensitive to motion. Once we were over the
dive spot, I jumped into the murky water
wearing flippers and gloves, only to spin in
place like a top as I paddled to keep my head
above the waves. An aggressive disorientation bloomed behind my eyes. The ache.
The nausea. If I was going to dive for clams
like the hero of Buns boyhood novel, I had
to do it quick.
On Buns count, I took a last breath and
shot straight down into the dark, my legs
kicking hard and my hands in front feeling
for the bottom. Even if I could see, I couldnt
have seen through the water. Clamming
here is hunting by touch, an equivalent experience for the sighted and the blind alike.
Down I continued, my lungs burning, my
nerves singing with the primal horror of
reaching through the black to touch something unknown.
Mud. Broken shells. I jammed my hands
into the silt and clawed, struggling to stay
down in place long enough to find, yes, a
weight. A shape. A rock. No, a clam the
size of a tennis ball. I was almost out of air,
already floating up and away when I managed enough of a pinch on its shell to pluck
it from the ocean floor like a radish. I had
it. Id found one. Blind people never find
anything. How strange to feel the rush of a
hunter. The thrill of a predator.
Back on the boat, Bun shucked my first
clam. Drink it all down, he insisted. I took
the meat into my mouth and slurped. Sand,
100
they have a philosophy and a human touch

behind them. They taste better.
The last ingredient for our meal was
rockweed, so we motored farther out to sea
and anchored the boat beside a patch of
jagged rocks. There I snorkeled through seaweed, a sensation like swimming through an
endless plume of flowing hair. Within half
an hour I had pulled enough tufts to fill my
bag, and within that same amount of time
the tide had gone out and left our boat, which
weighed hundreds of pounds, stranded on
a rock. To free ourselves we would have to
somehow move the whaler across ten feet
of jagged stone, the distance growing by the
minute as the tide slid farther and farther
from our lonely precipice.
Across the street from the Yale School of

Architecture, squeezed between towering
apartments, Miyas Sushi is a low-slung
node of resistance to the scale and money
surrounding it. Profits are not poured into
decor. Waiting patrons can peruse some
of the restaurants media coverage on the
wall outside the restrooms, or read Buns
own writing for Scientific American. One
of many awards hangs over the mens urinal. Egos are kept in their place.
Seated outside on my first night, my fingers traced several crispy knobs served in
a basket.
Japanese knotweed, Bun said, handing
me one. Its one of the ten most destructive
invasive plants on the planet.
American travelers returning from
Japan first brought knotweed to America.
Left alone, it will crowd away other plants
and even grow through concrete. Worse,
if you dig the roots out from their soil, any
crumbled bits will regenerate into a new
plant, like a virus. Pickled in soy sauce and
chili flakes and tempura fried, however,
knotweed is tastier than a kale chip.
Every dish at Miyas includes something
thats been growing where it shouldnt, it
seems. There are sea robins and mugwort.
Venomous lionfish. Even the miso soup is
cooked with pumpkin, squash, and dead
mans fingers, a pernicious seaweed Bun
tucks as a toasted seasoning into many of
his constructions.
The edible species come from far beyond
New Haven, as well. Hearing about Miyas,
a few struggling Kentucky fisherman contacted Bun for help with the Asian carp that
were transported to the U.S. in the 1970s to
consume algae in fish-farm ponds but had
since escaped into the Mississippi Basin and
denuded it of sport and market fish. Today,
the carp have proliferated to a degree that
they threaten to invade the Great Lakes.
The carp are a perfect example of Buns
philosophy: Though its a popular meat in
Asia and Europe, hardly anyone cooks it
here. Who walks into a restaurant and asks
for a carp steak? But Bun now receives shipments from the Kentucky fishermen and
features variations of carp, raw and grilled,
on the menu. A trend, he hopes, will follow.
It has in the past. If youve ever eaten a sweet
potato roll, youve eaten one of Buns most
successful inventions.
Very few of Buns dishes challenged me in
the ways Id expected. My blindness didnt
seem to be an advantage to enjoying a roll
that combines cashew butter, banana, and
shrimp, or another of salmon bones and
broccoli stems, common kitchen scraps that
Bun pressure-cooks into a tender delicacy.
They were all tasty enough that my fellow
diners and even my wife ate them happily
no blindness needed.
Then came the insects. One roll came
topped with a desiccated cricket. One was
peppered with dehydrated black soldier
flies. Im told they looked like little raisins.
They tasted faintly of peanuts. In other
dishes, smoked soldier fly larvae provided
a crunchy imitation of bacon bits.
One pound of beef protein, Bun
Fried Asian
shore crabs
on sweet
desalinized,
gelatinized
ocean water,
with wild
seaweed.
Sun-dried
smelt as
medusastyle nigiri
sushi.
Smoked hardshell clam

nigiri topped
with chum
salmon eggs.
explained, can require up to two thousand

gallons of water. A pound of cricket protein
typically uses about a gallon and a half.
In a world of diminishing freshwater
sources, the math is hard to dismiss. Bun
raises his own black soldier flies and crick
ets and worms in small aquarium tanks and
feeds them restaurant spoils. The insects
are protein and vitamin rich, organic as can
be, contaminant free, and dense in healthy
fatty acids. Compare that to an industrial
supermarket beef steak: Bite for bite, his
crickets provide as much nutrition but lack
all the health risks of red meat, not to men
tion the environmental pollution of raising
cattle. A person just has to get past, you
know, the bug thing.
Even I struggled. Immediately I recog
nized the crickets shape with my tongue
and reflexively shut my eyes, as if I could
help avoid the knowledge of what my mouth
was forcing me to see. Did the cricket have
an amazing flavor? Not really. Texture? Id
probably have to eat the entire aquarium
before Id get used to it. But the insects were
good, in a sense. A very broad, philosophi
cal sort of sense.
So is Buns strategy working? Perhaps.
Other chefs have turned to featuring inva
sives on their menus. In Washington,
Wolfgang Pucks The Source sells invasive
snakehead, a carnivorous Asian fresh
water fish that has no known predators in
the United States other than adventurous
chefs. New York City restaurateur Ryan
Chadwick serves invasive lionfish at his res
taurant Normans Cay and has even begun a
wholesale lionfish sales business to further
target the species. Bun himself has been
invited across the country to help others
hunt and cook the unwelcome abundance
outside their restaurant doors.
For some ecosystems, perhaps it is too
late to eat our way out of the problem. But
Bun is determined. Ive seen his relent
less grit firsthand. Marooned on that rock,
we put our hands to the boats hull, dug in
our feet, and shoved. The boat gave a cou
ple inches. Sometimes less. Bun hung on
the prow while I shouldered the tail side
ways in an attempt to walk the boat back to
sea. The rocks gashed deeper into our feet
with every push. I slipped on blood and sea
weed. Inch by inch, though, the boat closed
in on the water.
If at any point during our marooning Bun
had any regrets about having invited a blind
man on a dive trip, he didnt say them aloud.
Honestly, I believe he considers occasional
crises a natural, even desirable consequence
of pursuing rewarding activities. I believe
this too: that the best experiences are the
ones that try to push you out of them. The
ones that, at first look, you might not see.
101
Cleaning, at its best,

is restoring a thing to its
virgin state. The white shirt,
the wood floor, the sparkling car. Its reversing entropy, turning back time. One of the
reasons a clean home feels so good is that
its a stronghold of human effort against the
disorder of the universe. Heres everything
you need to know to create yours.
A-B
A
AU T O M O B I L E
Dont bother. Just replace it.
And if you have a K&N cone
filter, dont even do that. Being
dirty doesnt necessarily hurt it.
L AW N M O W E R
Paper filters can be blown out
with compressed air. For a
primary foam filter, blow it out,
then wash it with degreaser
and water. Moisten with clean
engine oil before reinstalling.
VA C U U M
See Dishwasher.
WINDOW A /C UNIT
Go over it with the tube of a
vacuum or run it under the
sink. Let dry before replacing.
B
BARBECUE SAUCE
Not your fault. (See also: marinara, chicken wings, and the
meatball sandwich.)
BARNACLES
Put on your scuba gear, swim

under the boat, and attach
yourself to the hull with a suction cup. Thats what Alex
Daniello at Barnacle Busters, a
yacht maintenance company in
Palm Beach Gardens, Florida,
does. He uses a six-inch putty
knife, a 5-in-1, and a brush. Buy
the cheap stuff. Its gonna rust.
BRILLO PADS
When I was nine, my parents bought a restaurant in

Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
It had been closed for some
time, so the kitchen grease
that had built up had settled
and hardened on all the pots,
pans, and racks left behind.
My brother and I had to get
rid of the greaseall of it
or we wouldnt pass health
103
THE ENCYLOPEDIA
OF CLEANING
B-C
inspection. The only cleaning

supplies we had were boxes of
Brillo steel-wool soap pads and
hot water. For three horrible
August afternoons we scrubbed
shelving racks behind the restaurant, littering the ground
with the used-up nubs of Brillo
pads and the soaked cardboard
boxes they came in. It took two
hours to clean each shelving
unit rod by rod, knuckles busting when the pads would slip
loose. Old chowder pots ground
down two or three pads each.
Our fingers stung from the
steel-wool splinters. The sour
smell of old chowder and hot
soapy water made my nose run
and my skin crawl. It was terrible work, but to this day when
I need something really clean, I
reach for only one thing.
Michael Wilson
BUILDER
A chemical added to a cleaner

that helps it make more suds,
which help it grab soil, which
can then be washed away.
C
CARPET
For food stains, spray with a

mix of one part vinegar to two
parts water. Cover with a damp
rag, then hold an iron over the
rag (on the steam setting) for
30 seconds. And next time eat
in the kitchen.
VOCA BU LA RY
CLEANING
The removal of dirt or
debris.
SANITIZING
The reduction of bacteria
on a surface to 99.9 percent
within 30 seconds.
DISINFECTING
The destruction or complete removal of microbes
(bacteria, viruses, and fungi).
Typically relies on increased
time or concentration.
104
THE ENCYLOPEDIA
OF CLEANING
C-G
CHELATING AGENT
A chemical added to cleaners,

such as laundry detergents,
that grabs onto metal ions
in water, keeping them from
interfering with the part that
actually removes stains.
D
DECK
Pressure-wash with a deckwash concentrate, followed

by a high-pressure rinse
with a 25-degree (green) or
40-degree (white) nozzle.
old paintbrush and Shop-Vac

to brush off and vacuum up any
dirt and debris. Disconnect
battery leads and cover the
battery, alternator, fuse boxes,
and all sensitive electronics
with plastic bags. Spray on an
engine cleaner-degreaser and
let soak for 15 to 30 minutes.
Scrub heavy deposits with a
long-handled plastic kitchen
brush. Rinse gently. Air dry.
Show at least one person.
F
FINGERNAILS
Use your other fingernails.
FOUNDATION,
CONCRETE
DISHWASHER
An underutilized cleaning tool.

Also works on vacuum filters,
the cooking grates from your
stove, and contact-lens cases.
(Seriously. Wash those things
before you get an infection.)
Apply Jomax with a pump

sprayer to kill mildew. Pressurewash with a 40-degree (white)
nozzle. Dont dawdle in one
spot or youll cave into the
stucco or pop chunks of mortar
from the joints.
G
THE CLEANING
PLAY LIST
Music that, through lyrics,
tempo, or just the joy it
makes you feel, will make
cleaning a little easier.
JEREMY
Pearl Jam
HERE COME THE
WARM JETS
Brian Eno
For the patio. Or the pool if
you wanna be literal.
THE EARTH IS NOT A

COLD DEAD PLACE
Explosions
in the Sky
There is no better music to
vacuum to.
DROP CLOTH
So much easier than cleaning up.
DUB AND SCRUB, THE
The proper method of cleaning

exceptionally dirty patches
of flooring with a string mop.
Double the strings back over
on themselves and apply pressure until the stain is removed.
E
ENGINE
Not sure why you would, unless

youre exhibiting in a car show
or have some form of automotive OCD, but if you must:
Park the car on a large tarp to
protect the driveway. Use an
CAR WASH
Rose Royce
GASOLINE
Effective at removing tough

grease and oil from your
hands. Use sparingly. Afterward, wash hands thoroughly.
GLASS, SCIENTIFIC
Ed Bufil, the optics technician

at Hawaiis Keck Observatory, uses high-pressure CO2
canisters to clean the telescopes mirrors. Some of the
CO2 comes out as snow, which
collides with particles on the
mirror and breaks them free.
The rest comes out as gas, and
blows the particles away.
GOOD ENOUGH
S.O.B.
Nathaniel Rateliff & The
Night Sweats
BLACK
SABBATH
VOL. 4
Black Sabbath
For anything involving steel
wool or the garage.
BEAST OF BURDEN
Rolling Stones
YOUR SMILING
FACE
James Taylor
Dont try to scrub a toilet
without that playing.
RUST NEVER SLEEPS

Neil Young
A level of clean defined by the

cleaner himself. Lower thresholds are perfectly appropriate
for things like the garage floor
or the couch in the basement.
Not so much for a toothbrush
that fell in the toilet.
Side 2, the electric side,

is nice for washing the car
in your driveway on a hot
summer day.
TRIBULATIONS
LCD Soundsystem
105
THE ENCYLOPEDIA
OF CLEANING
G-P
MY FAVORITE CLEANER:
K RU D KUTTER
You see a name like that, theres no

wondering what it does. That name is a
declaration: This stuff cuts crud. Sorry, kuts
krud. Whats krud? In my experience, krud
includes grease spots on work clothes, carbon film in a boiler closet, bacon grease, bird
poop, soap scum, carpet stains, and more.
Works on all of them. My wife once said to
me: Youd brush your teeth with that stuff
if Id let you. Maybe not my teeth, but Id
certainly use it on saw teeth. Although Im
sure it would take care of either.
Roy Berendsohn
GRILL
Always heat up the grill first,

which will liquefy fats and
loosen debris. Then, scrub the
grates with a wire brush or an
onion cut in half and dipped in
canola oil. Or both, but only in
that order.
GROUT
Use a pH-neutral tile-andgrout cleaner, such as

Rejuvenate Bio-friendly
GroutDeep Cleaner, working
along the grout lines with a
scrub brush. Wash from the
bottom to the top, but rinse
from the top down. If that fails
to brighten the grout lines, you
need an acid-based cleaner,
such as Zep Commercial
Grout Cleaner & Whitener.
Apply sparingly, though,
because this stuff will actually
dissolve the top layer of grout.
And probably your skin.
Wear gloves.
remove the last little flecks of

paint or stain on your hands
and arms, possibly with the
hope that someone will ask you
what you were working on. Not
that we would encourage that,
but it happens.
J
JEANS
Clothing that covers the lower

half of your body. Also useful
as a napkin, rag, or tissue.
M
INCOMPLETE CLEAN,
THE
When, after moderate scrubbing, you dont bother to
PAINTBRUSH,
HEAVILY SOILED
NATURAL STONE
Dont. Lichen and other imperfections just make it prettier.

But if you got something terrible on there, like bloodor
barbecue sauce that your
neighbors might mistake for
bloodclean gently with a
mild pH-neutral detergent,
cold water, and as little scrubbing as possible.
DISH
DETERGENT:
COCA-COLA:
Surfactants in
detergent weaken
oil bonds so water
can carry away the
stain.
The cleaning power

of Coca-Cola has
proven time and
time again no
human should consume it. Useless on
shirts though.
SPRAY CHEESE:
CORNSTARCH:
ALOE VERA:
SHAMPOO:
SHAVING
CREAM:
HAIR SPRAY:
RUBBING ALCOHOL AND SALT:
BABY POWDER:
Many turn to aloe

vera to remove oils
from skin. Doesnt
work on chain
lubricant.
MDF, PAINTED
See PVC trim.
Lathers like soap.

Especially useful for
cleaning stains in
carpet.
MOWER DECK
Remove the spark-plug wire

to avoid losing a hand. With
as little gas in the tank as possible, tip the mower on its side
and scrape dried grass from
below the mower deck with a
putty knife or wire brush with
a scraper blade.
Suspend the brush in a bucket

of water (for latex paint) or
mineral spirits (oil paint), so
that the bristles are not touching the bottom. Soak for at
least an hour, then massage
the brush between your hands
to work out excess paint and
solvent. Use a brush comb to
remove hardened paint, then
wash the brush in warm water
and detergent or Pine Sol.
Rinse, press out excess water,
FROM CLOTHING
There are dozens of home remedies touted for grease removal.
We tried ten of them by first saturating a T-shirt with 3-in-One oil,
a lubricant and rust protector, letting the stain dry, treating it, and
then running it through a wash cycle. Our results:
MAGIC ERASER
Some form of black magic that

removes soap scum, mildew,
and even paint. Best not to
wonder how it works.
HEADLIGHTS
Some people think

this works. We dont
know why.
Smear toothpastesomething
gritty and not a gelall over
a clouded headlight lens. Rub
it in with a toothbrush (not
yours). Add a little water to a
cloth and rub the toothpaste in
a second time, then rinse.
A go-to for college kids looking

to clean, ahem,
bongs. Perhaps too
specialized for this
purpose.
Cornstarch has
been used to soak
up food spills, but it
didnt soak up our
grease.
Surprise: The three

products most
similar to clothes
detergent are the
only ones that did
the job.
Rubbing alcohol,
the active ingredient in hair spray,
was supposed to do
the work. No dice.
Said to absorb
stains on cloth,
but better used on
babies.
FROM GARAGE FLOOR

After sweeping the floor, mix an alkaline cleaner/degreaser with
hot water in a bucket, then apply using a deck brush. Use a floor
squeegee or Shop-Vac to remove the water.
107
THE ENCYLOPEDIA
OF CLEANING
P-R
and replace in its cover.
PAINTBRUSH,
LIGHTLY SOILED
Soak in a little water or mineral spirits. Flick that out in

the sink, then wash with soap
and water. Rinse, press, and
replace in its cover.
PAVERS
Use a pressure washer and

a 15-degree (yellow) or
25-degree (green) nozzle, held
at six to 12 inches from the
surface to avoid surface etching and stripes. Unless thats
something youre going for.
pH
Power of hydrogen, or potential hydrogen. pH is measured

on a scale of zero to 14. Seven
is neutral, zero is extremely
acid, and 14 is extremely
base. Fat, grease, and oil are
cleaned with cleaners that are
more basic, while minerals are
cleaned with acids.
PVC TRIM
Wash small areas by hand

using a siding brush, but be
gentle to avoid scratching.
For larger areas, use a housewashing concentrate in a
pressure washer and rinse with
a 40-degree (white) nozzle.
Q
QUATS
Quaternary ammonium cations, compounds added to

cleaners like liquid hand soap
to help them get a surface
wetter, making them more
effective at lifting dirt.
R
RIMS
Use a natural sponge and a carwash soap. Or follow the advice

of Dave Nichols, tire specialist for Nascars Team Penske:
After pressure-cleaning the
108
THE ENCYLOPEDIA
OF CLEANING
R-Z
wheel, he uses Wurth brake

cleaner and a scrub brush.
soap and a potato scrubber to

get it off his (prodigiously sootcovered) hands.
STEAM
Cleans and disinfects carpets

and floors, usually without a
lot of work from you, which is
nice.
RING AROUND THE

COLLAR
Shampoo. Rub it in, throw it in

the wash. If it doesnt work, its
time to get a new shirt.
ON CONCRETE
Use an acidic cleaner such as
CLR, diluted with water. Apply,
scrub, and rinse immediately
with cold water.
ON PORCELAIN
Just like concrete. But be a
little more gentle with the
scrubbing.
ON WOOD
Use a mixture of cold water
and oxalic acid (wood bleach).
Scrub gently and rinse
immediately.
S
SOILING AGENT,
INORGANIC
A stain that contains no carbon. Rust, for example. Best

cleaned by solutions with a low
pH, such as vinegar.
SOILING AGENT,
ORGANIC
A stain that does contain carbon, such as a fat or grease.

Best cleaned by solutions with a
high pH, such as baking soda.
SUBWAY TRACKS
More than 2,000 tons of trash

is removed from subway tracks
every six months in New York
City, much of it by vacuum
trains. The electrified third
rail is cleaned by hand, using a
special fiberglass bow rake.
SURFACTANTS
SOOT
Blacksmith Nick Wicks

Moreau uses Dr. Bronners
WALLS
Mix a little trisodium phosphate (TSP) or a powdered

cleaner, such as Dirtex, in
warm water. Put on rubber
gloves and eye protection,
because TSP is potent, then
apply with a sponge.
They make water more viscous

and increase its ability to penetrate a surface and wash out
dirt. Found in laundry detergents. Also laxatives.
T
TOILET SEAT
Scrub with household cleaner.

And dont forget to clean under
the actual seat. Ew.
Two options, both equally

effective: Clorox Wipes or try
not to think about it.
V
WOOD FLOORS
Take it from Ed Flewelen,

whos spent the last 15 years
cleaning the L.A. Lakers
court: Do a first pass with a wet
towel. If you run into any gum
or nacho cheese, remove it
with a spatula. Then mop with
a wood soap such as Murphys.
Classic cleaning agent and

salad dressing. Use alone or
combine with baking soda to
make a paste (cleaner only).
HOME
The secret is a sponge and a
squeegee. Mix a few drops of
dish detergent into a bucket
of warm water. Use the
sponge to mop the glass.
Make one horizontal pass
with a high-quality squeegee
across the top of the glass
and then make vertical
passes down the glass.
CLEA NERS
WOR K
By Evan Boyst, Avomeen
Analytical Services and
product testing laboratory
MECHANICAL
EXAMPLE: Sponge
Relies on a physical source

to remove the material.
Using a scrub brush or
even a paper towel, you
are a mechanical source.
Youre scraping away
deposits.
CHEMICAL
EXAMPLE: Shampoo
WORK SHIRT
Any shirt that, through facial

expression or direct decree,
your family has deemed inappropriate attire for social
interaction.
WORK SHIRT, NEW
VINEGAR
AU T O M O B I L E
Work in the morning or in
the shade, so the cleaner
wont evaporate as quickly.
Spray a cotton rag or
microfiber cloth with glass
cleanerour pick is Stoner
Invisible Glassthen put some
elbow grease into it.
HOW
TV REMOTE
SOLVENT
Something that dissolves

something else. Water is one.
So are alcohol, ammonia, and
petroleum distillates.
VINYL SIDING
Fill the injector tank of a

pressure washer with a sidingcleaner concentrate. Apply
the soap with the black nozzle,
then rinse with a 25-degree
(green) nozzle if the siding is
severely dirty or a 40-degree
(white) if its not that bad.
What the shirt you werent

wearing as a work shirt
becomes the moment you
think you can handle a quick
project without making
a mess.
Relies on a chemical
interaction between the
material and a solvent
of some kind to remove
dirt. Most household
products are chemical
cleaners that need
mechanical help (you).
THERMAL
EXAMPLE: Steam
Heats debris to a more

fluid state so that it can be
more easily mechanically
or chemically cleaned.
109
American Manufacturing Done Right!

FloorLiner
Provides absolute interior protection
Laser measured to perfectly t your vehicle
Has channels to carry uids and debris to a
lower reservoir
Rear
r the Hum
FloorLiner
Ove
Material provides soft touch top, rigid core

strength and bottom surface friction
Available in Black, Tan and Grey for

Cars, Trucks, SUVs and Minivans
All-Weather Floor Mat
Cargo/Trunk Liner
Complete trunk and cargo area protection
Digitally designed for each application
Remains exible under temperature extremes
Underside Nibs and
Anti-Skid Ridges
Ribbed Design
Deep sculpted channels designed to trap water,

road salt, mud and sand
Will not crack, curl or harden regardless of temperature
Available in Black, Tan and Grey

for Cars, SUVs and Minivans
Seat Protector
Protects against scratches, damage and
spills that can potentially ruin the seat
surface of your vehicle
Features a durable water-repellent nish

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LAR MECHAN
IC
PU
O
S
P
ESTD
1902
HOW TO BUILD A
BLUESTONE PATIO
In one afternoonand with a little heavy liftingyou can make your

backyard a place youll never want to leave.
hen my wife and I left our tiny onebedroom apartment for a new
place a little farther out in Brooklyn this summer, we were thrilled
by a lot of things. Like central
heat and air, a spare bedroom, and enough
space to have an actual kitchen table, just like
real adults. But what we were most excited
for was the backyard. Our new backyard is
not a nice backyard. Its small, 20 by 18 feet.
Theres not even grass, just a concrete floor
P H OTO G R A P H BY M AT T R OT H
with a drain in the center. All there really is, is

opportunityand soon there will be a patio.
For us, a patio provides a place to grill and
to host the dinner parties my wife insists she
gets pleasure out of throwing. And I definitely
plan on falling asleep out there on Saturday
mornings, when its too late to be in bed but
too early for college football. For you, it may
be a place for sunrise breakfasts or a kiddie
pool or the perfect spot to set up what people
on Pinterest call a bistro table.
However you plan on using a patio, you

need to choose the right material to build
it. Concrete is durable and long-lasting, and
brick is attractive, but the best option weve
found is bluestone. These multihued slabs
are the perfect pavement. They have a delicate and subtle color that weathers nicely,
and they never crack. One downside is that
bluestone is not easy to work with. Its heavy,
at approximately 159 pounds per cubic foot.
But the results are worth it. Peter Martin
113
INSTRUCTIONS
DESIGNED
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Choose the dimensions for your

patio, then mark them off by
driving batter boards (H-shaped
stakes) a couple feet outside
the corners of the four boundaries. You want them far enough
away from the perimeter that
you wont need to move anything during construction.
Stretch masons string between
the stakes to mark the edges
of the patio. Clip a line level to
the masons string to ensure an
accurate horizontal reference.
Use a square-nose shovel to create the

perimeter of your hole. Cut the hole eight
inches deepenough to accommodate the
layers of support beneath the stones and
the stones themselves. The sides should be
clean and square. Check the bottom of the
hole for level with a four-foot level. If you
dont have one, you can place a smaller level
on top of a long straight piece of lumber to
get the same effect. Backfill any areas that
were cut too deep and use a hand tamper
to firmly pack them. Its very important that
each layer of your patio be level. Any shallow spots can cause water to pool, creating
puddles or, in the winter, ice patches.
3
The next step is to add
base material, usually
crushed stone or gravel.
Unlike soil, stone has a
uniform hardness and
provides efficient drainage. But before you can
add that, you need to set
up your screedsstraight
pieces of lumber set parallel in the holeabout three
feet apart.
Two by fours positioned
on edge work well. Sight
down each to make sure
that the boards are straight
and do not crown, or rise
up, in the middle, then
check them for level in the
hole. If your screeds arent
long enough to span the
patio space, or if you dont
have enough to cover the
entire area at once, work in
segments.
Set your screeds in the
footprint of your patio.

Hold them in place by
packing base material
around their sides, then
dump one to two inches
of base layer between
the screeds. (Each layer is
called a lift.) Distribute the
stone with a base rake, a
wide aluminum plate with

one smooth and one serrated edge. An ordinary
bow rake will also work,
but youll need to rake
several passes with the
tines down, then flip the
rake on its back for a few
more passes.
Presented by
I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY G E O R G E R E T S E C K
BLUESTONE PATIO
AMERICAS
MOST USEFUL TOOL
4
Cut a piece of lumber to fit from
one screed to the other, notching it,
if necessary, to fit between them.
This is called a screed board. Slide it
over the material to level its surface.
STRONG STICKY WATERPROOF

5
Each lift needs to be compacted
before the next is laid. After adding
the first layer, remove the screeds
and fill in the slots left behind with
base material. Using a vibratory
plate compactor, which you can
rent at most hardware stores,
start on the outside of your patio
footprint and make a single lap
around the perimeter. Then move
in toward the center in concentric rings, overlapping each pass
by half the width of the compactors base plate. One round of this
should be enough. Youll know its
properly compacted if you can step
on the material and it doesnt take
a footprint.
Reset your screeds and add
another one- to two-inch layer
of base material. Remove the
screeds, fill the remaining gaps,
and compact again.
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The next lift is the bedding layer,

which can be anything from finer
crushed stone to sand. This layer
provides a softer surface for the
bluestones to settle into. Place
your screeds over the base layer,
then add one to two inches of
bedding. After youve screeded
the bedding layer, mist it with a
fine spray from a garden hose.
The water lubricates the stone or
sand particles in the bedding and
allows a firmer pack. Remove the
screeds, fill the leftover slots, and
compact the bedding layer.
T SHAR
E
G AND
GET BACK TO WORK
SHARPEN
YOUR DRILL BITS
Start at one corner and run the first row

of stones on the bedding, as close to each
other as possible. Given that the face of
the stone against the bedding is relatively
uneven and the stones thickness varies,
to avoid wobbles youll need to level each
one by making slight adjustments to the
bedding material. Use a concrete float to
smooth the bedding material after making those adjustments, and tap each stone
level with a dead-blow mallet. An easy way
to check for level is to lower your string line
so it sits a little bit above the stonesthe
thickness of a scrap of lumber. Now you
can slide the lumber across the stones, and
if it fits perfectly between the line and the
stone, you know your patio is level.
If you need to cut any stones for

fit, do it with a circular saw and
a diamond-grit masonry blade.
If you find yourself doing a lot of
cutting, you can always rent a gasengine power cutter. Whichever
method you choose, use a spray
bottle to mist water on the blade
to reduce dust.
Use a large exterior broom to sweep bedding material over the surface of the patio
to fill in the joints. After the surface has
been thoroughly swept in, mist it with a
garden hose to consolidate the material. A
garden edger is a useful tool for packing the
material between joints. Its just the right
width and lets you remain standing as you
pack. Repeat the process until the joints are
completely filled and packed.
Sharpen the bits you already own

Sharpen from 3/32 to 3/4 bits
Sharpens High-speed Steel, Cobalt,
Carbide, TiN-coated, and Masonry bits
Sharpens and creates split point bits
DD750X
WATCH DEMO
HOW TO BUILD A SHED

Ashland, OR
DRILLDOCTOR.COM
Contributing editor Joseph Truini has built his

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Now hes written the definitive book, Building
Sheds ($16). It covers every step of the process,
in every style you might want in your backyard.
To build one yourself, all youll need are your
tools, materials, and this book.
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KID
POPULAR
PROJECT TITLE
CHANICS FO
THE ULTIMATE
HALLOWEEN
LIGHT-UP CANDY
COLLECTOR
ME
A project to build with your children.

D E S I G N E D B Y J A M E S S C H A D E WA L D
Difficulty:
EASY
REASONABLE
Time: 15 minutes
HARD
Ages: 6+
Shopping List
QTY
DESCRIPTION
4" x 5' PVC sewer and drain pipe
4" x 3" reducer coupling
4" ABS insert test cap
3" LED battery-powered puck light
" x 3' nylon strapping
No. 8 x 3/16" aluminum binding post

and screw
DIAGRAM
Binding
post and
screw
PVC
pipe
LED light
Insert
test cap
Reducer coupling
OUR BUILDER:
Virginia Moore is an
11-year-old from
Pennsylvania.
PROJECT NOTES
AFTER AN INITIAL prototype that

required quite a bit of cutting, we came
up with this version, which requires
only one real cut. The LED puck light in
its end is bright, but stays cool, so you
wont end up with melted candy. And
it can be decorated however you like,
with paint, decals, or both.
118
APRIL 2016
OCTOBER
2016
_ P_OPPOUPLUALRAM
REMCEHCAHNAIN
C ISC. C
SO
. CM
OM
OTO
G RN
A ;PIH
/ I L LU
T RI O
ATNI O
NG
BY
E EEK R
AY
ME
PH OTO G R A PH BY R EB ECCPAH M
C A LPI
LLUS
T RSAT
BY
EOTRG
E TNSAECK
HALLOWEEN CANDY COLLECTOR
Instructions
kid only
parent only
parent and kid
1. Using a coping saw fitted

with a 10 tpi (teeth per inch)
blade, crosscut the 4-inch
PVC pipe to 24 inches.
2. Drill a 13/64-inch hole with a
twist drill bit 2 inches from
each end of the pipe. The bit
should go through only one
side of the pipe.
3. Cut the nylon support
strap to length with scissors, and use a soldering iron
or awl to make a small hole
near each end.
4. To fasten the strap to the

pipe, insert the aluminum post
into the hole from inside the
pipe. Put the hole in the strap
over the post, then drive the
screw into the post until the
screw bears down firmly on
the strap. Repeat on the other
end of the pipe and strap.
5. Place the insert test cap in

the end of the pipe. Theres no
need to glue it. It makes a firm
fit. Trim off the caps excess
flange using heavy-duty scissors or a utility knife. Peel off
the backing strip and attach
the self-stick puck light to the
center of the test cap.
6. Clamp a 3-inch reducer fitting to the workbench. Use a
drill to make a series of four
evenly spaced -inch holes
around the circumference of
the 3-inch-diameter end.
120
7. Glue the reducer to the end

of the pipe with the puck light.
(We used PVC Gorilla Glue, a
low-odor adhesive that does
not require primer.) Apply a thin
band of glue to the 4-inch side
of the fitting, press it on, and
give it a slight twist. All that's
left to do is decorateand fill it
with candy.
Start a child you

know on a lifetime
of projects with a
gift subscription to
Popular Mechanics.
Go to popularmechanics.com/gift.
P H OTO G R A P H S BY R E B E CC A M C A L P I N
8 CIGARS
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p. 3 HoloLens: Microsoft; Mustang: Peter Taylor; sushi chef:

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Statue of Liberty, leaves: Getty Images; girl: Rebecca McAlpin;
p. 8 F-35A Lightning jet: Getty; p. 14 Ballard: Ben Sklar;
p. 18 virus, virus detail: Getty; p. 20 prop styling: Lynn Chan/
Halley Resources; tool belt: Shutterstock; gas can, metal rod:
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Studio D; prop styling: Mia Katoh; p. 42 multimeters: J Muckle/
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ruler: Getty; p. 51 mountain bluebird, pigeon, crow, seagull, Big
Bird: Getty; p. 52 fiberglass, broken vase: J Muckle/Studio D;
mold: Getty; p. 60 Mustang: Peter Taylor; p. 62 main image:
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pp. 7677 models photographed by Philip Friedman/Studio D;
p. 80 Getty; p. 83 miner: Getty; p. 89 CO2: Getty; p. 90 Juno
probe: NASA; p. 103 barbecue sauce: Getty; p. 105 dishwasher,
drop cloth, engine, gasoline, Richards, Young, Osbourne,
Eno: Getty; p. 107 mower, stone: Getty; p. 108 rims: Getty;
p. 109 shirt, toilet, remote, vinegar, wood floors: Getty.
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available to first-time purchasers. From time to time substitutions may occur.
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Telemedicine
While telemedicine services tout the

safety of online consults, a 2016 review of
sixteen websites that offer telemedicine serSTUPID
A M AZING
vices revealed potential pitfalls, with some
online consultants giving wrong diagnoses, bad advice, and potentially dangerous
IN 2010, MY ninety-year-old father called to tell
prescriptions. Many websites didnt disme that the skin of his right ankle was dying.
close the credentials of those giving medical
His doctor wanted him to see a vascular suradvice. Clearly, patients need to scrutinize a
geon forty-five miles away. Im just a transplant
website before trusting it with their health.
surgeon, but I was suspicious of the diagnosis.
Luckily, help with making good choices is
Dad and I connected via video chat and after
already available. The ATA has published
helping him get his camera pointed at his leg
guidelines for best practices and established
and not the ceiling, I saw enough to identify his
accreditation standards. Insurerswhich
problem. I told him to stay away from poison ivy
already include Medicare and Medicaid
and to get a different doctor.
will only cover online services they have
That was a simple but effective example of
carefully evaluated.
telemedicine, the use of video communication
An internist with years of experience in
to provide medical care over distance. Its been
telemedicine told me that for
around in force for about five years.
her, safe use of the technology
But, paced by improvements in
Paced by
means understanding that it
video quality and internet speed,
improvements is mostly a really good tool for
and by the ubiquity of smartin video quality screening patients: determinphones, telemedicine has, in a
and internet
ing which problems are simple
sense, gone viral. The American
speed, and by
and treatable at homesore
Telemedicine Association (ATA)
throats, colds and flus, cuts
estimates that in 2015, 1.25 milthe ubiquity of
and bruisesand which arent.
lion medical consultations took
smartphones,
For those patients, video works
place online, and this year the
telemedicine
great, especially if they would
nations largest insurer, Unitedhas, in a sense,
otherwise drive hundreds of
Healthcare, added telemedicine
gone viral.
miles. But then a guy pops up
services as in-network care options
on my screen with a bad headfor twenty million of its customers.
ache, a fever, hes restless, maybe acting a
Now those people can log in 24/7 and connect to
little weird, she said. Is it the flu? Mena doctor. Patients can increasingly bypass traingitis? An early stroke? If my sixth sense
ditional doctors offices, clinics, and hospitals.
doesnt work long distance, I pull the plug
The technology available today for sharon the video and ask the guy to come in.
ing medical information at a distance makes
Telemedicine brings appropriate and
my 2010 experience with my dad seem pretty
safe care to thousands of patients for whom
crude. Back then, for instance, he still had to
access is difficult or impossible, whether
go see his doctor to get a blood-pressure review.
shut-in or field scientist, rancher or misToday, my $60 Omron 10 Series blood-pressure
sionary, with the important requirement
machine sends data to an Omron app for transthat every one deserves a professional on
mission to my doctor. Devices that measure
the other end of the video who understands
blood sugar or oxygen, that record EKGs or lung
its limitations. But weve always demanded
sounds, can transmit data from remote locathat of our doctors, even before a device the
tions to consultants anywhere, giving patients
size of a deck of cards could let them tell us
immediate access to care and saving them the
a rash is just a nasty case of poison ivy.
expense and inconvenience of travel.
BY BUD SHAW
124
@shayleewelch
Follow
Sooooo I kinda hurt my foot last night...

#swollen #shouldigotothedoctor
Add a comment...
@stewieb80
Follow
Feeling under the weather today.

Possible upper respiratory infection.
Just saw a doctor virtually with the
@doctorondemand app! Too cool!!
Add a comment...
@christinahexy
Follow
I put my #symptoms on #webMD and it

turns out I just need to be on a #beach
drinking #beer.
Add a comment...
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