Table of contents for Winter 2022 in Popular Science

OVER THE LAST CENTURY, seas have risen by roughly a foot, making sunny-day floods a regular occurrence, particularly on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Under the most dire climate scenarios, the ocean around the United States will go up another two to seven feet by the year 2100. As higher tides climb up America’s coastlines, which are far too developed to move residents away from the water entirely, the country will need to embark on a campaign of coastal defense building—sea walls, levees, and floodgates—to protect urban areas as varied as Houston, New York City, and Charleston. In the South, where seas are rising fastest and hurricanes are intensifying, much of that work has already begun. Those efforts hold clues for how future strategies might take shape across the country.…

HUMAN HEARING has its limits. Frequencies as high as 20,000 hertz (think of an anti-loitering alarm) can cause a pair of young ears to perk up. Any vibes above that fall into the range of ultrasound, meaning they don’t register to us at all. But gadgets like full-spectrum recorders and radio scanners have upped our auditory sensitivity and let us explore new worlds of information. Here are five shrill and mysterious noises that we’ve harnessed in some form. A singer’s impossible peak You might imagine Mariah Carey or Maria Callas would top the scales, but Brazilian soprano Georgia Brown set the bar by hitting a G in the high 10th octave. Musical experts later confirmed the note, which translates to about 25,000 hertz, earning Brown a Guinness World Record in…

PSYCHEDELICS are having a moment. This past spring, Netflix’s How to Change Your Mind documentary series introduced the binge-watching masses to the concept of using trippy substances to reboot troubled brains. Numerous startups offer at-home ketamine therapy in glossy ads on Instagram. And in 2020, Oregon became the first state to vote to legalize psilocybin for therapeutic use. The world of scientific research is buzzing too. Clinical trials on the use of MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder have shown promising results and could lead to FDA approval in the next year or so. A recent study in the Journal of Affective Disorders suggested that administering ketamine before a cesarean section might mitigate postpartum depression in some patients. And in August 2022, a small study on substance use disorder in…

ONE MORNING IN JUNE, Daniel Roa and Max McLaughlin pull over near the dusty intersection of County Road 80C and Deadman Road in northern Colorado. Their white pickup truck, which their employer got on Craigslist, carries a few tanks of helium, a black trunk packed full of instruments, and a yellow barrel stuffed with a deflated balloon. They flip up a mast set in the vehicle’s bed, hook one side of the balloon to it, and clip the other to a carabiner near the cab. They stick a hose attached to a helium tank under the balloon’s skirt, and the gas inflates the material till it looks like a kid in a ghost costume, if that kid were the size of a Volkswagen Bus. Roa leads flight operations and McLaughlin…

ONLY A SELECT FEW get the chance to escape Earth’s bubble, fewer will set foot on another orb, and fewer still will sit at the helm of a spacecraft. Of the 18 travelers NASA has tapped for its Artemis missions, which will bring people to the moon for the first time in more than a half-century, it is the pilot who must ferry the crew safely, pulling off historic landing maneuvers in an untried spaceship. A likely candidate to sit in that chair is Victor J. Glover, who’s spent much of his 20-year career soaring across the heavens as a Navy test pilot and is among a new generation of astronauts aiming to create a permanent base camp on the moon’s surface. Artemis 3, which NASA intends to launch in…

TEAM USA BASKETBALL PLAYERS had at least one thing in common between 1936 and 1976: They all wore high-top Chuck Taylor All-Stars. A blend of flat rubber soles and canvas that rises above the ankle, these sneakers dominated the hardwood and other American athletics until the debut of more tech-y performance trainers. The heir apparent, the 1985 Air Jordan, incorporated the earlier high-top design and became synonymous with performance. As Spike Lee put it in a classic Nike commercial, “It’s gotta be the shoes.” Sadly for Spike, the kicks don’t hold all the answers. At least, they aren’t more ergonomically advantageous or safer to play in than other footwear, says Jay Hertel, a professor of sports medicine at the University of Virginia. For example, he explains that there isn’t any…

ON A GOOD DAY, assuming decent weather, little traffic, and skills behind the wheel, a cab ride from John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens to downtown Manhattan should take about 45 minutes. Yet who can reliably predict New York City traffic? That trip could last twice as long on a bad day. Now assume you could avoid the streets entirely and get to lower Manhattan in minutes. By some estimates, more than 200 startups are racing to deploy what popular culture has dubbed flying cars. And, by their admittedly optimistic estimates, there’s a chance that the 45-minute drive on pavement from JFK will be converted to a 10-minute flight through the air by the end of this decade. Leaders in the quest to make cabs airborne believe everyday passengers…

ON A FOGGY midsummer morning 54 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, California, SpaceX engineers hustled through a ritual they’d been through before. They loaded a Falcon 9 rocket with tens of thousands of gallons of kerosene and supercold liquid oxygen, a propellant combo that brought the craft’s nine Merlin engines roaring to life with 1.7 million pounds of thrust. Soon after, the machine shot through the stratosphere, ready to dispatch 46 of the company’s Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit. But the rocket made another delivery too: a trail of sooty particles that lingered over the Pacific hours after blastoff. The launch was the company’s 32nd of 2022, maintaining its current pace of firing off close to one rocket per week. With a record number of rides shuttling equipment,…

ENERGY NEVER STOPS radiating through space, or on Earth. For more than a decade, hundreds of millions of samples from the never-ending deluge of protons, nuclei, and other atomic debris have collected in the International Space Station’s cosmic ray bucket—an instrument called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Here at home, cloud chambers—like those used by CERN, the Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research—illuminate the universe’s invisible cosmic storm. In March 1951, longtime Popular Science contributor Kenneth M. Swezey treated space enthusiasts and DIYers to a step-by-step guide to making a cloud chamber, using a peanut butter jar. “The secret of any cloud chamber is a supersaturated vapor,” Swezey wrote. “As atomic particles dart through this vapor, they condense molecules in their path, leaving visible droplets—like vapor trails of high-flying aircraft.” The…

WHEN FORMER Google executive Alan Eustace dove more than 135,000 feet through the air, it was the culmination of three years of work: parachute and balloon design, test falls from 57,000 and 105,000 feet up, and flight simulations. On October 24, 2014, Eustace donned a custom high-pressure spacesuit and strapped himself into a helium balloon. He focused on his breath as he made his ascent, and calmed his nerves by thinking of his practice runs. Then he made skydiving history. The plunge from the stratosphere was 1.5 miles longer than the previous record, making Eustace the current record holder for the highest-altitude free-fall jump. Few would have the stomach to drop at speeds hitting 822 mph from the top of Earth’s ozone layer with nothing but a parachute on their…

TO BUILD some of humanity’s most awe-inspiring architecture, workers had to deal with the technological and environmental challenges that came with their times. Whether from 2600 B.C.E. or the 21st century, the stories of their feats can often be even more impressive than a structure’s final form. The Great Pyramid: more than 6.6 million tons of stone Modern headstones can’t hold an oil lamp to the approximately 2.3 million blocks that laborers stacked 481 feet high over the ancient Egyptian tomb of Khufu. Although the king’s burial chamber is encased in granite, most of Giza’s largest pyramid consists of limestone: both the weathered brown core that remains today and the mostly missing pale exterior were built with that rock. Ulm Minster: 513 years to finish Construction on what’s now the…

IN THE BEGINNING, the story goes, the Earth was formless and empty, and darkness shrouded the surface of the deep. Several millennia later, an independent scientist named James Lovelock started to ponder this primordial arrangement: He imagined a fictional planet called Daisyworld, carpeted with black and white daisies. The pale flowers reflected the sun, while the dusky ones absorbed light and heat. As the sun’s rays grew more powerful, the balance of blossoms shifted, stabilizing the globe’s temperature. A similar process, Lovelock speculated, might have maintained Earth’s temperature over geological time. He believed the planet’s systems could self-regulate, and in the 1970s, he proposed what came to be known as the Gaia hypothesis. In 1987, shortly after Congressional hearings on climate change—during which a Republican senator from Rhode Island concluded…

EACH DAY, some 59 million parcels land on doorsteps and porches and in package rooms across the US. To manage the rising number of e-commerce orders, which amount to almost $1 trillion a year, companies have spread their operations across sea, air, highway, and rail. Few places embody the attendant growing pains better than the Port of Los Angeles, a Pacific nexus of the global supply chain web—and the country’s busiest commercial seaport. The 7,500-acre facility, which is roughly six times the size of the Navy’s largest shipyard and sits partially on an island in the San Pedro Bay, is almost incomprehensible in scale until you’re above it, says photographer Justin Fantl. Though the scene can feel frantic, his images focus on the “organized design” of the terminals, where goods…