Table of contents for January - February 2017 in Popular Science

IT’S DARK AND YOU’RE FAR FROM HOME. WHERE DO YOU stay? Back in the day, you had to know somebody. Nowadays your smartphone does. When night falls, every vagabond—old or new—requires a roof over their head and a bed under their bottom. But where we stay has drastically changed over time. Now uncovering a place to crash can happen in a matter of moments. PREHISTORYPRESENT A PAL’S PLACE Staying at a friend’s house—or cave, or loft, or cave-loft—is a tradition as old as friendship itself, and that practice is new again thanks to the sharing economy. Services like Airbnb help you find a room in which to crash 1900-2000S HOTEL SYSTEMS Thousands of miles of U.S. highway constructed in the 20th century attracted travelers, fueling the peak of hotel creation…

YOU ARE LOOKING AT A TINY SLICE OF THE LARGEST-EVER 3-D MAP OF the cosmos. Each of these nearly 50,000 dots represents a galaxy. That sounds like a lot, but it’s only about 3 percent of the 1.2 million galaxies that the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) recently mapped. BOSS is helping astronomers figure out how dark energy accelerates the expansion of the universe. By measuring shifts in the density of visible matter all around us, the survey determines how swiftly galaxies are spreading apart from Earth and each other. Hundreds of Sloan Digital Sky Survey and BOSS researchers spent a decade charting these positions in a region that is 650 billion cubic light-years in volume. Their data helps to check Einstein’s general-relativity theory, which predicts how fast the structure…

SEASON AFTER SEASON EXTREME WEATHER BOMBARDS THE continental United States. Over the next 83 years, its cascading effects will force U.S. residents inward, upward, and away from newly uninhabitable areas. But don’t worry: We’ve mapped out how these factors will alter the country’s landscape in 2100. Now go nail a quality spot while the pickings are still slightly more plentiful. –Additional reporting by Sarah Fecht and Grennan Milliken Your New Home: Let’s all move to Sault Ste. Marie! Nestled in Michigan’s upper peninsula, this small city will be only slightly warmer than it is now (don’t sweat it; you can still ice fish) and will be lucky enough to escape most of the changes wreaking havoc on the rest of the country. DROUGHT Almost the entire country is at a…

c - 5 m super galaxy A UNIVERS E OF CARGO Behold the hollow belly of the largest airplane in the U.S. Air Force. The C-5M Super Galaxy is Lockheed Martin’s latest version of its C-5, first flown in 1968. With that monster cargo bay, longer than the entire distance of the Wright brothers’ first flight, it can carry a 280,000-pound load (equivalent to two 68-ton M1 Abrams tanks) for 2,150 nautical miles, then unload and keep going for 500 more. C-5s have transported everything from a deep-sea rescue submarine to Vietnamese children in 1975’s Operation Babylift. dreamlifter CAVE OF THE WINDS The main cargo hold of Boeing’s Dreamlifter is 65,000 cubic feet. Another way to think of it, says Dreamlifter operations expert Dave Beck, is that the hold has…

BROTHERS MASSOUD AND Mahmud Hassani grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan, knowing that one wrong step could end their lives. “When we walked to school, we had a special path to follow—otherwise we would end up in a minefield,” Massoud says. Mines are cheap to manufacture and deploy, but slow and expensive to remove. An estimated 110 million land mines litter the globe, killing 15,000 to 20,000 people a year. Living among them “ becomes like a mental disorder,” Massoud says. “The fear is on your mind all the time.” After the Hassani family relocated to the Netherlands, the brothers created an antimine device based on a windpowered tumbleweed toy they’d built as children. The Mine Kafon (kafon means “explode” in Dari) could roll through a minefield, detonating any mines it…

YOU DON’T NEED A GAS STOVE TO cook a hot meal while you’re out exploring. Lightweight flat-pack materials like cardboard can assemble into an oven that harnesses sunlight for heat. This solar oven, designed by high school student Brandon Spellman, can reach temperatures above 200°F +TOOLS & MATERIALS • Two cardboard boxes • Box cutter • Silicone adhesive • 1-inch-thick foam insulation • Black gaffer tape • Scissors • Eight 1-foot bamboo skewers • Aluminum tape • Sheet of glass or plastic • Oven mitts TIME 2 hours COST $30 DIFFICULTY ••••• +INSTRUCTIONS 1/Line the inside of one box with adhesive and foam insulation, and cover the insulation with gaffer tape. 2/Cut duplicates of the first box’s flaps from the second box. Tape the duplicates to the outer edges of…

DRIVERLESS CARS ARE moving fast. Google and Lyft flash us their self-driving-car schemes, and Uber has already put robo-cabs to work in Pittsburgh. But if autonomous cars are going to chauffeur us, we need to regulate them. During his time as Secretary of Transportation, Anthony Foxx, who leaves his post at the end of January, penned laws to keep us safe on these changing roads. And he has some tips for the new hire. What advice would you give the new secretary? We’ve laid out a template for the future, one that you can build upon. Take our work on data sharing. It’s one thing for a company to build an autonomous vehicle and collect data on it. It’s another for a manufacturer to collect data, anonymize it, and share…

MODERN EXPLORERS ARE NOTHING LIKE Ferdinand Magellan, whose maps were riddled with blank spaces. Today’s maps display the work of centuries of cartographers and thousands of satellites. Still, some areas remain unknown. Unnamed glaciers streak across the Alaskan wilderness, untamed peaks jut out from the Patagonian mountains, and unseen shores hug the Greenlandic north. Nearly every ocean has unswum waters with seafloors that only the bottom-dwelling creatures that live there know. It won’t be long before even the untouched corners of the world are fully explored. But for now, these remaining uncharted outposts are a reminder that humankind is never done exploring. ANTARCTICA is inhospitable for humans but important for science. Studying how ice sheets move can help researchers predict how they’ll melt, which will dramatically affect sea-level rise. Climatologists…

PREFRONTAL CORTEX COCAINE Normally dopamine carries signals between neurons, binding to cell receptors until a transporter removes it. But cocaine keeps the neurotransmitter latched in place. Dopamine then floods the brain, causing an addictive euphoria. Continued use alters this decision-making center, making it even harder to resist using the stimulant AMYGDALA+ NUCLEUS ACCUMBENS MARIJUANA (THC) THC binds to cannabinoid receptors on nerve cells, altering communications all over the brain. It can cause contentment in the nucleus accumbens, a reward center, and paranoia via the amygdala, which regulates fear and emotion. THC curbs pain and nausea by hindering signals from sensory nerves. REWARD PATHWAY SUGAR Sometimes we alter our brain chemistry with sweet stuff. Eating sugar activates a reward pathway that includes the striatum, which tells you to eat that tasty…

BY JOE BROWN This city is known for its worldbuilding factories, but it’s actually creating something far more important than silicon and plastic. Shenzhen is ground zero for the new culture of globalization. -PG. 37 PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTINA HOLMES YOU ’ VE PROBABLY BEEN TO A DOZEN JOINTS like Frankie’s: The varnished bar runs almost the length of the restaurant, an oaken finger indicating the cigar room in back. The brick walls are thick with beer logos and framed nostalgia. Twenty-somethings flit between high tables, flirting and munching on chicken wings. A guy you swear you’ve seen in so many other watering holes sits flanked by empty barstools, suit coat on a peg under the counter, keeping counsel with a Kindle and a glass of wine. Dim overhead lights halo…

CINDY LEE VAN DOVER HOLDS MEMBERSHIP IN A most exclusive boys’ club: Of 42 gearheads, engineers, and former Navy commanders who have piloted the submersible Alvin—the stubby, three-crew midget research sub that explored the Titanic—she is the only woman. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Van Dover says, “was to become an Alvin pilot.” To earn pilot certification takes months of training, memorizing the language of check valves, autoclaves, ballast systems, oxygen monitors, electrical systems, and a Rube-Goldberg system of mechanical levers and knobs. You must master and execute it all 2 miles underwater, where there’s no other way up or out. Since Van Dover’s first piloted dive in 1990, she has descended into the ocean 235 times, discovering dozens of exotic invertebrates living off hydrothermal vents.…

YOU CAN’T STOP GAZING AT THE luminous full moon—you need to share this with Instagram. So you pull out your phone, aim at the heavens, and capture... a fuzzy white blob. The firmament is one of the hardest targets to snap on a phone. Why? A smartphone’s camera lens is wide, and it automatically sets the exposure to capture the dark sky instead of the bright objects in it. To up your phone game, try adding some additional technology. These tips will help you photograph celestial bodies near and far. 1 SHOOT THE MOON Before you adjust the settings on your phone, fix the setting around it. Go to a dark area to avoid light pollution, clean the camera lens with a soft cloth to remove any smudges that might…

1 POKEMON GO Last summer you may have bumped into the reverent heads-down multitude clogging streets. They were playing Pokemon Go, the app version of the ’90s video game. A cool 45 million players downloaded it and wandered off on a global scavenger hunt. The goal: catch the game’s 151 monsters while learning facts about local landmarks as you go. Free + In-App Purchases, iOS and Android 2 FIELD TRIP Stumped on a great place to eat or shop? Field Trip is a travel discovery app that’s better than a crumpled list from your smartypants friend. It taps into sites like Thrillist, Zagat, and Eater, and uses your current location to show you photos and reviews of nearby locations. Or you can let the app alert you to notable spots…

1/ MSR POCKETROCKET CANISTER STOVE Some places don’t allow campfires. Others simply have nothing to burn (think snowy mountains). A canister stove has your back. The PocketRocket folds to the size of a softball and will stick with you forever. $39.95 2/ FJALLRAVEN KAJKA 65-LITER PACK When camping for a few days, 65 liters of gear is plenty. The frame on this pack adjusts to men’s and women’s body types, and the lid can be used as a light bag for quick trips from camp. No, it doesn’t come in neon. $370 3/ BLACK DIAMOND ION HEADLAMP From helping you find that lost s’more to lighting the path for your 2 a.m. pee break, the camper’s headlamp is a crucial piece of your kit. They’re easy to lose though, so…

COLIN DEVEY LAUNCHED HIS VOLCANO-HUNTING career on land, studying a 66-million-year-old lava flow that once covered half of India. But in 1987, he scored an empty bunk on a Tahitian research cruise. Though it’s hard to see volcanic rock on the seafloor, he found the landscape geologically simple. “The continents are complicated because they’ve been around for billions of years, and they’re messed up, like a billboard covered in 150 advertisements, layer on layer,” Devey says. “The oceans are like a new billboard.” For the past 30 years, Devey has busied himself reading those billboards and hauling news of their movements to the surface, altering what we know about plate tectonics and how continents drift apart. Thousands of underwater volcanoes make up the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a roughly 37,000-mile-long chain of…

WHO NEEDS A SURVIVAL KIT? YOU HAVE A PHONE. Compass. Flashlight. Maps. Translator. Classic tools of exploration, all there under your uncalloused thumb. But your phone is not a rain poncho or a power bar. It’s time to think like a modern explorer, one as capable on an urban grid as on a dirt switchback. The items here will help you break away from your routine while letting you hang on to your app-store comforts. Welcome to the Silicon Age of Exploration. 1/ FOOD Whether you’re trekking the trails or the avenues, you’ve gotta eat. Powders and bars made from crickets pack protein, iron, vitamin B12—and less sugar than most granola. You won’t even know you’re eating bugs. Chapul Protein Powder, $39; Chapul Bar, $3 2/ POWER Nothing says “rookie…

WHEN HUMANS MOVE INTO NEW TERRITORY, WE LEAVE waste behind, and one of our most harmful byproducts is plastic. Dave Hakkens wants to solve the planet’s plastic problem with a build-it-yourself home recycling system that will make the material easy to reuse. “With wood or metal, you can recycle it yourself,” he says. There are already consumer tools that can cut, bend, melt, and reconnect scraps of this material. The machines that process plastic for recycling, on the other hand, are not available in your average workshop. So Hakkens decided to design those machines himself. His Precious Plastic system includes four appliances: One chops up and shreds clean plastic refuse into scraps. The other three heat and reuse that plastic by squeezing it into filament for 3-D printers, injecting it…