Popular Mechanics - June 2017 Usa.pdf

HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS

CO ULD WE

PREVENT

ALTOGETHER? A H GO D,

T H AT W O ULD BE THE

H OLY GR AIL,

W O ULD N’T IT?

A N D I T HIN K

THE A NSWER IS G O N N A BE

—Dr. Jennifer Wargo, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston

OUR SPECIA L R EPORT ON TECHNOLOGY VS. CA NCER BEGINS ON PAGE 74

TASTE THE ORIGINAL The light beer that launched the category. Brewed for more taste, only 96 calories. MILLER LITE. HOLD TRUE.

©2017 MILLER BREWING CO., MILWAUKEE, WI

av. analysis (12 fl. oz.): 96 cals, 3.2g carbs, <1g protein, 0g fat.

JUNE

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From the Editor

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PM Everywhere

9

The First Story: The new combat drones that will change how we fight

14

Drinking: Coffee liqueur you’ll actually want to drink

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How to pack an ordinary sedan—and turn it into a mobile workshop

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Things Come Apart: Air conditioner

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Tool Test: Electric mowers, pliers

24

Ask Roy

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Maker City: Boston

29

Getting Started In: Fly-fishing

35

Tools They Use: Amanda Stamper, fire management officer, Eugene, Oregon

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Road Tested with Ezra Dyer: Lexus, Volkswagen, Chrysler

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Internal combustion, optimized

42

Parts & Service: Fix your car interior for only 60 bucks

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The New Vintage: An ultrarare two-door Isuzu

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The Keepers of the Game: Every year at the PGA Merchandise Show 40,000 inventors, buyers, and golf pros come together to share the latest technology— and the clubhouse stories of a nation. BY TO M CH IAR E LL A

74 COVE R STO RY

DISRUPTING CANCER Despite the celebratory headlines, many cancer patients are still receiving therapies developed in the 1970s. We talked to 35 cancer researchers across the country to find out what it will take to cure the world’s most complicated disease— and how close we are to pulling it off. BY JACQ U E LI N E DETWILER

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The Life: Homegrown West Virginia RVs

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How to Buy a House: Why a marble might be the most important tool in a home inspection, and 18 other tips.

WHAT I LEARNED AT MY SUMMER JOB

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Project: How to build a garden fence

A collection of wisdom

102 Shop Notes 104 Popular Mechanics for Kids Paper Airplane Launcher!

90 FLIGHT With more technological advances in the last ten years than in the previous 100, the yachts in today’s America’s Cup are sailing in uncharted territory: above the water. BY CH R I S J O N ES

112 Great Unknowns On the cover: Typography exclusively for Popular Mechanics by Tal Danino.

@PopularMechanics

JUNE _ 2017

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CANCER IS Cancer is fear. Cancer is a waiting room full of orange chairs with worn wooden armrests and a doctor with a white beard mouthing words that sound distant and muffled until you feel so hot and so cold that you run to the bathroom, where you kneel over the toilet. Cancer is pain in your bones and your eyes, pain so intense it makes you cry out. Cancer is the metronomic, mechanical grind of the small machine that pumps liquid food through a tube into your stomach. Cancer is watching the blue number on the heart-rate monitor, and checking the color of the urine, and wincing at the needle, and waiting for the results, and the incessant ringing of a phone at the nurses’ station in the hallway. Cancer is two people looking up at each other over soup scraped from a vat in the café across the street because that’s the only place open at this hour, not saying anything because what do you say at the slow end of another day with cancer? Cancer is the things people say to each other: “What if the radiation doesn’t work?” “Nobody knows why children get cancer, sweetheart.” “They said this part should pass in a few days.” “It’s spread to the lymph nodes.” “It’s in remission!” “The neighbors left some food in the fridge.” “I can’t do this.” “You can do this.” “I love you.” Cancer is lying in your own bed watching another movie, feeling like an alien in the room you know better than any other. Cancer is pain and sadness and uncertainty and disbelief. Cancer is anger. Cancer is not something you get used to. Cancer is a mother or a brother or the hired nurse

leaning over the bed, humming faintly, pushing another ten milliliters of medicine through the syringe and into a body that needs every drop of medicine and every bit of hope. Cancer is not a single, well-defined disease. There are types and subtypes, and each type and subtype requires the energy and intelligence of whole teams of doctors and researchers. You hear about them sometimes—a breakthrough, a new drug trial. You hear about fund-raisers and 5K runs, and about statistics that either show progress or stasis, depending on how you read them. What you don’t often hear is a lot of cancer researchers talking at once. Sharing. Cancer is a diffuse problem, but where are we in the overall fight? Will this ever end? Because, man, this is requiring a lot of time and money and patience, and people are dying. For the special report that begins on page 74, articles editor Jacqueline Detwiler spent three months trying to find out. We didn’t want to wait for a conference to convene, and we didn’t want to rely only on medical journals. We wanted to talk to people—in their labs, in their offices. So Jacqueline did something radical. She traveled to Memorial Sloan Kettering (New York), MD Anderson (Houston), the Parker Institute (San Francisco), Stanford University Medical Center (Palo Alto), City of Hope (Los Angeles), St. Jude (Memphis), and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (New Mexico), and interviewed experts at Novartis, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute, Dana-Farber, BioAtla, Juno Therapeutics, DigniCap, and the University of Pennsylvania. Her question to each person she met: What are you working on? Jacqueline saw, firsthand, innovations and theories and breakthroughs

in laboratories and data centers. But one of the most astonishing conclusions she made had little to do with medicine or cells or genomes. It had to do with communication—doctors talking to each other more, sharing more, collaborating more. In the broad, heroic field of cancer research, belief is mounting that despite the diversity within the disease called cancer, and despite the seeming disconnect that diversity creates between various types of research, thousands of great minds working together will be better than thousands of great minds working alone. Cancer is the leading cause of death in the world. Will there be cures someday? Could that day be soon? Is cancer beatable? When you meet some of these people, and when you hear in their voices the inspiration they feel right now, you start to do something more than hope that the answer is yes. You start to believe it.

RYAN D’AGOSTINO Editor in Chief @rhdagostino

A B O U T T H AT W R I T I NG ON T H E C O V E R The words cancer and yes on our cover were created by Tal Danino, director of the Synthetic Biological Systems Lab at Columbia University. He uses live matter to build images, a process he developed with the Brooklyn and Rio de Janeiro–based artist Vik Muniz. “We have thousands of pictures of cells under a microscope that we use in the lab to study them. To make this cover, we went to our database and digitally took them, cell by cell. These are HeLa cells, for Henrietta Lacks, the woman the cells came from in the 1950s. On an artistic level, it’s very interesting to think about making beautiful artworks out of cancer. It’s this extraordinarily visceral, emotional topic that everyone has experienced, because everyone knows someone who’s had cancer.”

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P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

PRESENTING THE CLASS OF 2017

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WHAT WE’RE UP TO BEYOND THESE PAGES

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T RU C K C A M P E R

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T Y P E A M OTO R H O M E

ON L I N E!

When one of your two jet engines fails over the Atlantic Ocean on your way from Zurich to Los Angeles, what do you do? In the case of Swiss Flight LX40, pilots made an emergency landing on the tiny airstrip on Baffin Island, Canada. And then it got worse. The world’s largest jet engine had to be replaced. In nearly minus-40-degree temperatures. Read about the amazing mechanical feat exclusively at popularmechanics.com/ engineswap.

INSTAGRAM!

Confused about the difference between a hammer drill and a rotary drill? Looking for the best cutting pliers? Senior home editor Roy Berendsohn has started posting quick and helpful videos on Instagram, so you can get DIY tricks anytime you need them. Check him out @AskRoyPM or at Instagram.com/AskRoyPM.

P OD C AST ! PARK M O D E L RV

The Most Useful Podcast Ever just got even more useful. In addition to the biweekly episodes—in which hosts Jacqueline Detwiler and Kevin Dupzyk teach you how to fly a drone better and occasionally make bets that end with Kevin taking a pole-dancing class—MUPE is now on Twitter and Instagram. Follow us @MUPEpodcast.

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P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

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geico.com | 1-800-947-AUTO | Local Office Some discounts, coverages, payment plans and features are not available in all states or all GEICO companies. Motorcycle and ATV coverages are underwritten by GEICO Indemnity Company. Homeowners, renters and condo coverages are written through non-affiliated insurance companies and are secured through the GEICO Insurance Agency, Inc. Boat and PWC coverages are underwritten by GEICO Marine Insurance Company. GEICO is a registered service mark of Government Employees Insurance Company, Washington, D.C. 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. GEICO Gecko image © 1999-2017. © 2017 GEICO

I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY R YA N I N Z A N A

DISPOSABLE DRONES

As air-launched munitions get smarter, the Air Force is creating a new class of weapon—a combination of drones and missiles. But can they be advanced enough to work, yet cheap enough that it’s okay to lose a few in battle? BY J O E PA P PA L A R D O

@PopularMechanics

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AN AC-130 GUNSHIP BRISTLES WITH SENSORS. It has advanced radar, forward-looking infrared cameras, and laser rangefinders—all used to help the 13-man crew direct a barrage of lethal fire to the ground from 12,000 feet. But for all of this advanced technology, the vision of the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command gunships can be thwarted by the threatening adversary known as a cloudy sky. The Air Force has a solution: Launch a small unmanned aircraft from the gunship to drop below the cloud cover and serve as the eyes of the AC-130’s crew. Special Operations officials last year spoke publicly about using a drone called the Coyote—the wings of the Coyote unfold as the drone launches from a sixinch-wide tube. A higher-endurance version is in development. Weapons are getting smarter and drones are getting smaller, and pretty soon it will be hard to tell the difference. “The main weakness of sUAS [small unmanned aircraft systems] is range,” says U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Alexus Grynkewich, deputy director for operations at the National Joint Operations and Intelligence Center and coauthor of a recently released Pentagon study called “Air Superiority 2030 Flight Plan.” “You need some delivery method to get them close.” Grynkewich sees the engineering challenge as a series of trade-offs. A heavier engine increases a drone’s range, but the airplane that launches it isn’t able to carry as many. The amount of sophistication on the sensor adds expense to the drone, which may be lost in battle. And the wingspan is limited by the hardware on the airplane. Despite these complexities, the Air Force sees smart but disposable aircraft as an important solution: Airpower Swarms is a game of threat and response. One can be made up side makes a powerful radar array, of more than the other creates stealth warplanes that can fly undetected. By the time the new airplane is ready to meet the old threat, a new one has emerged. It’s a lot easier, cheaper, and faster, however, to redesign miniature drones, a drone than an entire airplane. each with a wing“The idea is to have a tech refresh span of 11.8 inches fielded in months instead of years,” and a length of 6.5 says Reid Melville, strategy lead for inches. unmanned systems at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. “That way, when we get surprised, we will have the infrastructure in place to make a rapid change.” Except when it comes to singing The Righteous Brothers songs in bars, this new generation of drones promises to be the perfect wingman. They make no mistakes and have no emotion. And if the situation demands it, they are willing sacrifices. There is one big difference, however: Like soldiers, drones will always deserve gratitude. Unlike soldiers, however, they’ll never deserve a funeral.

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THE ARSENAL

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MINIATURE AIRLAUNCHED DECOY (M ALD)

• MALD is a trailblazer. In the mid-1990s DARPA started researching this small jet-engine-powered craft, fired from a warplane’s wing, that could fly along GPS waypoints and emit signals to mimic a fullsize aircraft. Hidden air-defense systems shoot at MALD and expose themselves to counterattack. After a stutter-step start, the technology caught up with the idea and in 2009 Raytheon delivered the first MALD to the Air Force. Recent upgrades include a carbon-composite fuselage that lightens the airframe. An upcoming datalink ability will enable pilots to reprogram MALD’s flight path after launch. • STATUS: Currently deployed.

COYOTE

• Dropped from an airplane, these disposable drones are launched from a six-inch tube and unfold in flight. They are currently launched from National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration airplanes to study hurricanes. The Air Force special-ops folks have converted them for use on gunships, to aim at targets obscured by clouds. • STATUS: Currently deployed.

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

SEVEN OF THE MOST PROMISING DESIGNS RIGHT NOW.

03

AIR-LAUNCHED, TUBEINTEGR ATED, UNM A NNED SYSTEM (ALTIUS)

• Drones such as the Coyote can stay airborne for only an hour. The USAF tactical off-board sensing program wants a drone that can provide continuous surveillance coverage for at least four. So they came up with ALTIUS. It has a state-of-the-art, high-energy-density power system that can withstand harsh environmental conditions, does not pose an explosive hazard, and can be stored for more than six months. It uses a highly efficient, lightweight carbon-composite airframe, and its slender shape is designed to fit in a six- to eight-inch launch tube. • STATUS: In development. Anticipated deployment: ten years.

@PopularMechanics

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AGILEPOD

• The Air Force Research Lab wants to make a one-sizefits-all attachment that allows any aircraft to carry drones. Drone makers will be able to design around the pod’s specs, opening the door to innovations from smaller companies. (A common launcher gives small drone makers the chance to bid on Pentagon contracts without having to learn how to make military-grade airplane parts.) The pods range in length from 28 to 60 inches. Those compartments can be assembled in different configurations—like Legos, but with interlocking radar, jamming emitters, and spy sensors. • STATUS: In development. Anticipated deployment: five to ten years.

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SWITCHBLA DE

• The need for ondemand reconnaissance and pinpoint air strikes prompted the Army, soon followed by the Marines, to rapidly develop and field the Switchblade. A soldier carries the drone in a backpack, launches it within minutes to scout a target beyond his line of sight, and then drops it on the target like a precision missile. Ground troops fire the craft out of a tube, similar to a mortar, which could easily be mounted to an airplane—which is exactly what the Marines did during a test in 2015. • STATUS: Ground units are already deployed. Aircraft units are in development and should be battle-ready within five years.

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GREMLINS

• This may come as a surprise, but the Pentagon isn’t eager to throw money away. DARPA has a program to create systems that can recover flying drones with a moving airplane. Department of Defense officials and the companies involved in the program don’t part with details easily, but there is one practical method an Air Force official shared with us. It involves deploying a boom, much like the equipment used to refuel aircraft in flight, that attaches to the front of a drone using infrared sensors. The mother-ship airplane then reels in the boom, along with the drone, and we all save a bunch of money. • STATUS: In development. Anticipated deployment: ten to 15 years.

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PERDIX

• Pilots could use one drone to hunt and attack an enemy radar, but it would need to maneuver and carry countermeasures to survive long enough to complete the mission. Which would be expensive. Instead the idea is to send a bunch of less costly UAVs that can work together, knowing that some will be lost en route. Such a swarm is only as good as its components’ ability to talk securely to each other, however. One hacker or jamming system could sabotage an entire mission. • STATUS: In development. In late 2016, the Navy and MIT Lincoln Laboratory deployed a swarm of 103 Perdix drones at China Lake, California. During the test, the aircraft changed flight formations and positions in response to one another. Anticipated deployment: five years.

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Dynamic Radar Cruise Control,1 now standard. Traffic can be stressful. That’s why Full-Speed Range Dynamic Radar Cruise Control helps you keep a smart distance between you and the car in front. It’s just one of the standard Toyota Safety Sense™ P (TSS-P)2 features on Prius designed to help give you confidence on the road.

C-HR prototype shown with options. Production model may vary. Prius shown with options. Dramatization. Minimum setting distance is greater than distance depicted. 1. Full-Speed Range Dynamic Radar Cruise Control is designed to assist the driver and is not a substitute for safe and attentive driving practices. System effectiveness is dependent on road, weather and traffic conditions. See Owner’s Manual for additional limitations and details. 2. Drivers are responsible for their own safe driving. Always pay attention to your surroundings and drive safely. Depending on the conditions of roads, weather and the vehicle, the system(s) may not work as intended. See Owner’s Manual for additional limitations and details. ©2017 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.

A Stodgy Barroom Syrup Gets a Jolt

A distiller elevates coffee liqueur—a weird, forgotten beverage—to the top shelf. BY FRANCI N E MAROU KIAN

“Every category of spirits has been through a revolution in the last decade, from vodka to bourbon. I thought it was time to consider traditional liqueurs found on the bottom shelf of every bar. I decided to be the guy who starts with coffee liqueur, turning it from that overly sweetened syrup we all know into a deeply rich spirit in which the sugar takes a backseat to the coffee flavor.” That’s Jeff Kessinger,

founder of a tiny operation called Firelit Spirits in Napa Valley, California. He set out to find a flavor you can’t achieve by dropping a shot of whiskey into a mug of hot coffee. “The coffee’s temperature is already opening up

your taste buds, and the heat makes the alcohol so volatile it becomes overpowering,” says Kessinger. Irish coffee uses sugar to add balance, but Kessinger took a structural approach: To marry both ingredients without diluting the integrity of either, he infuses cold-steeped coffee with

unaged brandy. Heat can bring out the aggressive oils and acids in coffee solubles, whereas cold-steeping— gently extracting flavor over time—produces a smoother drink without bitterness. “Problem is, when you cold-steep 200 pounds of coffee, everything clogs,” he says. “I lost sleep thinking of efficient ways to separate the liquid coffee from the grounds. Build a huge coffee filter? A giant French press?” Here’s what worked. THE TA NK

Firelit uses a 1,000-liter stainless-steel tank, typically used for wine fermentation, that has a conical bottom and a trapdoor—or manway—at the base, so after the liquid coffee is drained, Kessinger can reach in and remove the coffee sludge. A lot of coffee sludge. “It’s a real mess.” THE RECIPE

THE ALCHEMY

“Then I go home and think about it.” The alcohol goes to work on floating particulates—stray coffee grounds and coffee dust—in different ways, deepening the color. After a month or so of integration, evaporated cane juice is added, which dissolves quickly into the liquid and delivers a light, balanced sweetness. THE FINISH

Firelit goes into the bottle unfiltered, letting the coffee silt add weight to the liqueur—some coffee realness. The packaging is DIY: Kessinger and his occasional team of two (his brother and girlfriend sometimes help out) manually crank out the labels—handstamped to identify the roaster and single-origin coffee for that batch—and push in the corks.

P H OTO G R A P H BY C H R I S T I E H E M M K LO K

A large metal plate with glycol refrigerant running through it is inserted into the tank to chill the steeping coffee over 18 hours. The liquid coffee then moves at a slow trickle (so grounds don’t get stirred up) to holding drums while the tank

is cleaned. Returned to the tank, the liquid coffee is cut with California-made “grape brandy designate” (clear, unaged brandy made from wine). “You don’t want to use barrel-aged brandy because the flavoring properties of the wood interfere with the flavor composition of the coffee liqueur.”

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P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

HOW TO

CREATE A WORKSHOP ON WHEELS

clean cut on wood, but will also cut through aluminum, copper pipe, PVC—everything except steel. If you have to cut any long items, instead of bringing a work surface for stability, use scrap wood to make a couple T-blocks.

When you travel to a work site, your car becomes a giant toolbox. And you can bring only the tools that fit.

Reciprocating Saw ● Bring as many blades as you have—demolition, metal, wood, and carbide-grit that will cut cast iron. You don’t want to run into something you can’t get through.

BY R OY B E R E N D S O H N

When I’m running to a volunteer job or helping

Toolbox

out a friend, I can’t take everything with me. And since I don’t always know exactly what we’ll be doing, I have to improvise. I need tools that can handle wood, metal, and plastic. PVC and sheet metal. I prefer cordless tools, because you never know what the power supply will be, but my heavyduty tools are corded. After decades of refinement, this is the most versatile group of tools I’ve discovered. The real trick is getting it all to fit in the car.

● Nesting trays allow you to fit more in less space. With these and any other heavy, hard-sided cases, put the long axis in the direction the car moves. If you stop short, the box will slide forward instead of tipping over.

TOP LAYER

Tool Sacks

FLOOR AND FIRST LAYER

● No matter the job, you’ll always need to get something off the ground, whether it’s for cutting or painting. Slide them along either side of the trunk.

● I pack two circular saws—a sidewinder and a worm drive. One has a plywood blade, and the other has a framing blade, so I can cut any variety of construction lumber or finish. For safety, these heavy things need to be on the floor in front of the front passenger seat or the rear seats. That way if you take a quick turn, only the light things on top will shift.

Sawhorses

Hand Truck ● For demolition or lugging anything remotely heavy, take a hand truck. I used one to remove a full-size range from a second-floor apartment. By myself. Folding options are still quite sturdy and easier to fit in the trunk.

Long Tools ● These can fit in a channel outside of the sawhorses. I bring a shovel, wrecking bar, bow rake, extension pole, and a few small pieces of lumber, in case we need scrap.

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Circular Saws

Hammer Drill ● Handles more than a drill driver, and doesn’t take up any more space. On big jobs, I also bring a rotary hammer.

Miter Saw ● Use it with a blade designed for nonferrous metal. It still makes a nice

● Sacks are perfect for mobility. They conform to most spaces. Use a few different bags for everything that doesn’t fit in the toolbox: pliers, shears, wrenches, bits and blades, extension cords, and painting, plumbing, and electrical tools.

BONUS!

The Rucksack ● Even with the trunk and floor jammed, there’s still a little remaining space: the passenger seat. I strap a Duluth Trading Cab Commander to it. This vertical rucksack holds hearing protection, safety glasses, bug spray, sunscreen, a first-aid kit, water, and coffee. Necessities, no matter where you end up.

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

P H OTO G R A P H S BY G R E G G D E L M A N

TRUNK EDGES

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

A I R CON DI T ION ER FRIGIDAIRE GALLERY 8,000 BTU

MODEL:

PRODUCED:

WUHU CITY, CHINA TIME TO DISASSEMBLE:

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NUMBER OF PARTS:

250 NOTES: If you grew up with central air conditioning, what you likely called “the air conditioner” was a loud, hulking fan

assembly on a concrete pad in your backyard. But that was only half the story. That part of the air conditioner dissipated heat from inside the house into outside air. The other part of the air conditioner, which absorbed that heat in the first place, was somewhere inside your home, at the heart of all the ductwork. A window a/c unit has those same parts, shrunk small enough to fit in a window—but still large enough that mounting it on a high floor is at least a little frightening. So before you install one, get yourself a sturdy window bracket (not pictured).

ISOLATION A window air-conditioning unit is a heat pump that moves heat from an interior space, like a bedroom, to an exterior space, like the great outdoors—then disperses the now-cooled interior air where you need it. To do this efficiently, the spaces need to be isolated from each other. So when properly installed, with the top rail (1) holding the unit snugly under the sash, side panels (2) extend outward to fill the window opening, which is the portal between indoor and outdoor. Insulation (3) fortifies these panels, and weather stripping (4) lines their edges. A foam window seal (5) above the

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sash closes off another opportunity for leakage. REFRIGERATION A loop of piping full of R-410A refrigerant moves heat from indoors to outdoors. Based on the principle that heat flows from warm things to cold things, heat moves from the interior air to the refrigerant to the exterior air. Here’s how: The air conditioner’s interior-space fan (8) sucks indoor air into the unit. The air passes through the grille (15) and the air filter (13) tucked in behind it, so it is cleaned before it reaches the evaporator coil (10), which contains chilled liquid refrigerant. The air cools as it passes

heat to the refrigerant, which phase-changes to gas. Then the fan blows the now-cooled air through louvers (17) that disperse it into the room, and the gaseous refrigerant flows from the evaporator coil to the compressor (11) and condenser coil (6) on the exterior side of the a/c. The compressor mechanically forces the refrigerant into a lower volume, which increases its temperature and pressure. That way, when it reaches the condenser, it’s warmer than the outside air blown over it by the exterior-space fan (7). Heat passes from the refrigerant to the outside air. As it cools it returns to its chilled liquid

state, and circulates back to the evaporator coil. REGULATION Buttons on the air conditioner’s control panel (16), remote control (14), and phone app (it has a Wi-Fi antenna [12]) allow the functionality of the unit to be modified. Perhaps most important is temperature control: A comfortable room temperature is selected, and a thermistor (9) in the unit allows the device to automatically switch on and off to maintain it. The user can also select fan speed and even turn the compressor on and off, so the unit can be used as a fan when air conditioning is not needed. —Kevin Dupzyk

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A Worthy 3D Printer for Kids

The IDO3D Print Shop ($60; available this summer) offers kids their own small-scale toy factory. Designed for ages eight and up, the Print Shop requires no programming and fills a mold of a child’s making. Unlike the Creepy Crawlers and Easy-Bake Ovens of past generations, the casts are made of a remoldable silicone called Formula 4D that captures enough detail to reproduce the type on a quarter, says IDO3D brand manager Jason Miranda. When the child is ready for a new mold, soak the Formula 4D in 120-degree Fahrenheit water for 30 seconds to make it pliable. Then wrap it around anything—a costume ring, Lego, or action figure arm. The mold size is limited to 1 inch by 1.5 inches, but Miranda points out that larger toys can be re-created piece by piece. Molds are filled with the same light-activated ink as the company’s 3D-drawing Vertical Pen. It’s non-toxic, comes in 20 colors, and each fill ($5) is good for 20 to 25 casts.

A Pocket-Size Primer to the Universe

For those seeking cosmic enlightenment in an afternoon, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson offers Astrophysics for People in a Hurry ($19). Rich with insight, the 222 pages move with impressive speed and clarity from the opening, universe-forming nanoseconds of the big bang into the latest theories on dark matter and energy. Tyson breaks these big ideas into digestible lessons with the humor and charisma he’s known and loved for. So you might not mind rereading a page or two. At times Astrophysics peers into the future as Tyson shares his dreams of what we might discover, and his nightmares of the unknowable. But along the journey, he sews in historical vignettes that illuminate the breakthroughs of Newton and Einstein, as well as more accidental discoveries, like that the first observed proof of the big bang was mistaken for radio interference from pigeon poop.

The Best Koozie to Keep Your Can Cold Thermos engineered thinner metal walls and flattened the vacuum between to the thickness of two dimes— all to ensure this koozie fits in your beach-chair cup holder.

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Warm beer is bad, we can agree on that. (Soda too.) So we rounded up six of the top koozies to see which kept our drinks colder, longer. Thermos won by a single degree Fahrenheit after three hours, but with the smallest profile and lowest price ($20) it became the undisputed champion. Thermos chose the slender size because it realized that fatter metal koozies can’t fit in cup holders—like in your beach chair or on your boat. That’s because traditional vacuum insulation relies on a pair of two-piece metal walls for the interior and exterior with the heat-stopping vacuum in the middle. Thermos, by opting to press the stainless into a die instead of welding the walls together, produced single-piece walls with a 3/32-inch vacuum— about the thickness of two dimes—that could outpace the conventional design. The cylinder is topped by a silicone sleeve that secures your drink, and can accommodate extra-tall cans. P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

KNOB CREEK® KENTUCKY STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY, 50% ALC./VOL. ©2017 KNOB CREEK DISTILLERY, CLERMONT, KY.

EGO LM2101

56 volts

DECK: 21 inches LIKES: The EGO cuts with ease and precision. It was one of only two mowers (the other was the Worx) that easily powered through our 8-inch weed and grass test. It’s quiet, and its powerful headlight isn’t a gimmick. You could actually cut in the dark with this thing. DISLIKES: By cordless-mower standards (and gas-engine machines’, too), the EGO is heavy at 68 pounds. That weight makes for good noise damping, but it’s more to push. $450

M O W E R S : P H OTO G R A P H S BY H E N R Y H U N G

ELECTRIC MOWERS

They’ll cut grass, weeds, and even a wheat field. Pretty much silently. And they never run out of gas. BY JA M E S S C H A D E WA L D

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P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

PLIERS AT ANY PRICE 58 volts

40 volts

Linesman pliers are used for cutting wire and cable. Sometimes more. Here are the best. Craftsman 45094

Simple and compact.

Echo CLM-58V4AH

Ryobi RY40180

DECK: 21 inches LIKES: The Echo gives you a reliably smooth cut in both typical and tough mowing conditions. It’s easy to maneuver, too, with a design that allows the blades to reach very close to the side edges and front of the mower. DISLIKES: Although the handle does fold down for storage, it’s not as compact as it could be.

DECK: 20 inches LIKES: This spunky mower is a joy to handle. It weighs just 55 pounds, and it cuts crisp and quickly. The mower holds its own in tall weeds, too. And when you’re done, the handle slides together and the entire machine folds down so you can stand it on its end. DISLIKES: None.

$400

$24

$300

Channellock 369CB

High-leverage with a slim head and reaming nose. $26

Klein J213-9NECRN

A powerful cutter with built-in wire strippers and a crimper. Very comfortable handles. $45

56 volts

Worx WG771

36 volts

Stihl RMA 410 C

Ideal 30-3430

Built-in crimper. Tremendous leverage, flawless workmanship, and the fish-tape pullers provide an excellent grip. $45

DECK: 20 inches LIKES: This is a great mower. Once we adjusted it to Turbo mode, it tied the EGO for power in the tall-grass test. The Worx’s front caster wheels make it the most agile of the mowers we tested, especially around flower beds, where maneuvering can be tight. It’s also the only mower of the group to have a durable metal deck as opposed to plastic. And it quickly folds down for flat storage. DISLIKES: None.

DECK: 16 inches LIKES: Thanks to its small size and light weight (just under 44 pounds), the Stihl is very quiet and agile. It rolls along smoothly on ball-bearing wheels. This is a specific machine for a specific type of yard. It’s small and polite, suited only for immaculate cutting conditions. DISLIKES: Stihl swapped the grass bag for a plastic box, which looks nice but tends to let dirt and clippings escape.

$500

$620

@PopularMechanics

Knipex 09 12 240

Built-in crimper. Has a longer cutting surface—7/8 inch—and a large cable recess, allowing it to easily snip big bundles of wires. $52

JUNE _ 2017

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POPULAR MECHANICS’ SENIOR HOME EDITOR S O LV E S YO U R M O S T PRESSING PROBLEMS. B Y R OY B E R E N D S O H N

JASON G., ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN

Water purifiers use ultraviolet lamps to zap germs. As with fluorescent bulbs, it’s normal for a purifier light to give off a low hum. That said, sometimes a hum is created by the failure of the bulb or its ballast, which regulates power. To determine if your noise is a problem—and to avoid replacing parts that might not need replacing—check the owner’s manual for the longevity of the system components. If the bulb or ballast is nearing the end of its life span, go ahead and replace it. The other culprit could be loose components. Tighten any screws on the purifier or any apparatus Email mounting it to the wall. With a few turns of your the screwdriver, quiet will be restored. hom

e an questi d yard ons to a s kroy@ popula rmech anic an d wa tch for s.com Roy’s answe r in upcom an in colum g n.

Can I install a keyed lock in my sliding patio door if it didn’t come with one? ROGER E ., K AT Y, TEXAS You have two options: You can get a general retrofit kit from an outfit like Swisco.com (it bills itself as “the replacement hardware authority”) or the manufacturer of the door. Getting a keyed lock kit from the manufacturer is easy—if you can figure out who the manufacturer is. Check the door edges for a sticker, either from the company or the American Architectural Manufacturers Associa-

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tion. Both list the maker of the door and the model. If there is no sticker, sometimes the brand will be stamped into the door edge itself. If you just can’t find anything, go with Swisco. The company has hundreds of parts to choose from. You can even submit the dimensions and a picture of your door and its handle through the website. A representative will point you to the right part.

I want to mount a mailbox on the side of my brick house. How do I do that? CONNIE C ., PINE BUSH , NEW YORK

Your first step is to use a Sharpie or a carpenter’s pencil to mark the location for the screws for the box’s mounting bracket, if there is one. If not, make two marks for the pair of screws from which the box will hang. Obviously, those screw holes have to be level. Bore on your marks using a hammer drill and a carbide-tip masonry bit sized to suit the plastic screw anchors. Make the hole slightly deeper than the anchor’s length. Before tapping the anchor into the hole, clean the dust out of it using a shop vacuum. Finally, drive the screws for the mounting bracket or drive the hanging screws. If you’re replacing a mailbox and the previous box left exposed mounting holes, fill those with an exterior grade filler, preferably something lightweight such as DAP Fast ’N Final. Use an artist’s paintbrush and some acrylic paint from a craft store to apply a couple of dots of paint to blend the holes into the brick or mortar.

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY O L A L E K A N J E Y I F O U S

My home’s ultraviolet water purifier gives off a steady buzzing noise. What can I do to stop it?

The Bed Loved by Sore Achy Backs “Highest in Customer Satisfaction with Mattresses, Two Years in a Row” as ranked by J.D. Power¤

Frustrated by the Quality of Your Sleep?

Know. Adjust. Sleep.

Do you toss and turn at night? Can’t seem to find a comfortable position? Does your back ache when you awake? These are signs that your mattress may not be supporting you properly, robbing you of the sleep you need.

Now, with optional SleepIQ® technology, you have the knowledge to adjust for your best sleep. Using sensors inside the Sleep Number® bed, SleepIQ® technology tracks your sleep and provides you with information that empowers you to achieve your best possible sleep, night after night. There’s nothing to wear, nothing to turn on. All you have to do is sleep.

Perfect Combination of Comfort and Support Whether you prefer supreme softness or conforming comfort layers, the Sleep Number® bed adjusts to you, for a truly individualized sleep experience. At the simple touch of a button, DualAir™ technology allows you to find ideal comfort and support with exceptional pressure relief on each side—your Sleep Number® setting.

Proven Back-Pain Relief It’s the bed clinically proven to relieve back pain and improve sleep quality.*

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So you both have the time to get completely comfortable in your new bed.

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*For a summary of clinical studies, visit sleepnumber.com. Find the technology tested in the clinical studies in Sleep Number® c2, p5, p6 and i8 mattresses. †2-year limited warranty on SleepIQ® technology. Warranties available at sleepnumber.com. ‡The In-Home Trial period varies by mattress model. Restrictions and exclusions apply. Does not apply to adjustable bases, Upholstered Collection or factory outlet, closeout/clearance or demo/floor model purchases or mattresses already exchanged under another In-Home Trial period. You pay return shipping. Refunds will be made to the original method of payment less original shipping/delivery fees. Visit sleepnumber.com for complete details. §Sleep Number received the highest numerical score among mattresses in the J.D. Power 2015–2016 Mattress Satisfaction Study. 2016 study based on 2,662 total responses from 7 companies, and measures the opinions of customers who purchased a mattress in the previous 12 months, surveyed October 2016. Your experiences may vary. Visit jdpower.com. SLEEP NUMBER, SELECT COMFORT, SLEEPIQ and the Double Arrow Design are registered trademarks and IT is a trademark of Select Comfort Corporation. ©2017 Select Comfort Corporation

BOSTON

As a Revolutionary port, Boston thrived on three-corner

trade with Great Britain and the West Indies, and on the work of craftsmen like silversmith Paul Revere (who also rode horses). Today, the city’s makers combine their own creativity with Boston’s storied abundance of research and education. We asked two of them what they do in their shops—and out.

BY FRANCI N E MAROU KIAN

THE MAKER KEVI N WO LFSO N

THE MAKER IAN SCH O N

HIS COMPANY FI R E FLY B I CYCLE S

HIS COMPANY SCH O N DSG N

Firefly was born because we had a clear vision of a connection between riders and their bikes. We include our customers in the design process, initialed after weeks of conversations to determine geometry and tubing.

Although we’re not reinventing the wheel, the improvements we do make add up to a bike that looks as special as it functions, fits, and handles. Every frame is aligned (in every dimension) to within ten thousandths of an inch

from the center line— thinner than a Post-it. When you buy a Firefly bike, you get a USB drive with a visual record of the build that brings you closer to the process and demonstrates the care and attention we give our work.

HE RECOMMENDS

A LONG BIKE RIDE West through Lexington and Concord to the town of Harvard in Worcester County, a beautiful, bucolic area with well-maintained roads that are a pleasure to ride.

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SOME LOCAL COFFEE Gracenote in the Leather District takes great care with everything, from the shop’s design to the music they play to the coffee they make.

Before graduating from Boston University with a degree in mechanical and manufacturing engineering, I wanted to create an everyday object and settled on a compact metal pen. There is a forever quality to a well-made pen,

and mine is designed to be unobtrusive, yet reliable and aesthetically pleasing. I also liked the idea of using only the tools I had: a mill and lathe. Because this restriction helped to create a minimal look, I was able to scale to local manufacturing partners without sacrificing design details. My current passion project is producing small-batch watches, machining cases, dials, and other components in my shop. I’ll adhere to my guiding principles, including sourcing materials and manufacturing in the U.S. as much as possible.

HE RECOMMENDS

THIS INSPIRING BUILDING The sharp angles and metal facades of the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT, designed by Frank Gehry.

THIS RESTAURANT Alden & Harlow in Harvard Square has good bar eats—even for vegetarians.

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

WH E N O N LY TH E B E ST WI LL DO. 303® PROTECTANTS AND CLEANERS ARE PROVEN TO STAND UP AGAINST EXTREME CONDITIONS AND EXTREMELY HIGH STANDARDS – INCLUDING YOURS. We’re as passionate as you are about keeping your ride looking like new, and we know you won’t accept anything less than the best. That’s the reason 303® products undergo rigorous testing to ensure superior performance and outstanding protection. From your dashboard to your tires, 303® premium protectants and cleaners keep your car looking newer, longer.

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G O T

Y O U R

N U M B E R®

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*Product selection varies per retailer

PROMOTION

GEAR UP, GET OUT, GIVE BACK

J

oin us on National Trails Day® for a purpose-powered challenge to rebuild some of America’s greatest trails. Led by a team of experts from the American Hiking Society, attendees will be provided with

the tools needed to get the job done before setting out for a day of hiking, outdoor adventure, and trail maintenance.

SATURDAY, JUNE 3RD CRYSTAL LAKE RECREATION AREA, SAN GABRIEL MOUNTAINS NATIONAL MONUMENT, CALIFORNIA REGISTER : POPULARMECHANICS.COM/GEARED

GET INVOLVED WITH NATIONAL TRAILS DAY WHEREVER YOU ARE: GEAR UP : Grab the tools to hike, bike, explore & maintain trails

GET OUT : Find an event near you: bit.ly/EventNearYou

GIVE BACK : Share your adventure #NATIONALTRAILSDAY

Getting Started In...

FLYFISHING BY JON GLUCK

The fish was holding maybe 40 feet upstream, rising every 30 seconds to feed. When small fish eat flies that way, they make little splashes as they break the surface. Big fish push the water in slow, silent ripples. I saw ripples. I had already cast to this particular target twice, but my fly landed wide the first time and a few feet short the second. On my third attempt, I managed to put the thing a few inches from my quarry’s nose and...he took it. He ran, and I played him for a minute or two @PopularMechanics

before bringing him alongside the boat. Twenty inches is a benchmark of size for a German brown trout, one of the sport’s most prized species. This fella was easily 21. After I netted him, I asked my friend Tim to hold him for a moment so I could position myself for a picture. We were on the South Fork of the Snake River in Idaho, just across the Wyoming border from Jackson Hole. The Tetons stood in the distance, still snowcapped in late July. The sun shone, the water sparkled, and the cooler was full. I had

just landed the largest, most beautiful trout I had caught in my life, and I was about to log photographic evidence so I could brag to all the world, as one does, about outsmarting a lower-order vertebrate. And then, when I took the net back from Tim, my trophy was gone. That’s when I saw the hole in the net. I have never felt so happy and so heartbroken in such rapid succession. That’s why I fly-fish. It’s life, in all its joy and pain, distilled and intensified. With beer. JUNE _ 2017

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G E T T I N G S TA R T E D I N F L Y - F I S H I N G

WHERE TO LOOK Like anything that breathes, fish are hardwired for survival. They look for hangouts that provide (a) protection, (b) food, or (c) rest. Rob Ceccarini, fishing manager at Orvis in Manhattan, suggests the best places to try your luck.

WHERE WATER TURNS FROM GREEN TO DARK GREEN Indicates a drop-off in water depth, which provides safety and a steady “pour-over” of natural flies.

JUST DOWNSTREAM OF BOULDERS AND ROCKS Fish can hold in the relatively slow water without having to work too hard, but can easily dart into the main current for food.

CASTING TIPS

Fly-fishing is essentially the art of putting a fake fly in front of a fish in hopes he’ll mistake it for the real thing and eat it. That all begins with the cast. Here, casting champion and Texas Gulf Coast fly-fishing guide Rick Hartman explains the basics.

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BE SMOOTH The key to generating distance is to stop the rod—abruptly—at ten o’clock and two o’clock. “That’s what generates power and shoots the line with maximum speed,” Hartman says. Some guides teach anglers to think of hammering a nail into a wall, but Hartman says that often leads them to stop their rod too soon, robbing their cast of oomph. “Just make a nice, smooth stroke forward,” he says, “then stop.”

BEWARE THE FLYING ELBOW Another common error is to cast with your arm too far from your body. Tuck a newspaper under your arm to practice, Hartman advises. “All that flailing your arm around is a waste of energy. Your casts will be weak and you’ll tire out faster.”

IN POOLS THAT RECIRCULATE UPSTREAM Fish (and flies) seem to like to ride the gentle, backward currents.

BENEATH UNDERCUT BANKS The trifecta: overhead protection from predators; cool, dark conditions; and terrestrial insects falling into the water.

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY S T E V E S A N F O R D

MAKE LIKE A METRONOME The casting stroke “is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o’clock,” wrote Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It, arguably flyfishing’s most beloved text. Live that advice. “The biggest mistakes I see people make are to cast too fast or with too big a stroke,” says Hartman. Imagine you’re trying to toss a tin can off the end of your rod. “Keep everything tight and easy.”

1

THE THREE BEST FLY-FISHING BOOKS

2

3

6

The Compleat Angler Published in 1653, Izaak Walton’s treatise on flyfishing and its pleasures is widely viewed as the sport’s urtext.

4

5

8

7

ESSENTIAL GEAR

Many lodges will be glad to lend you a rod and reel on your first visit. When you decide to take up the sport, these are the key pieces of equipment. 1 / Sage 2200 fly reel The large-arbor size lets anglers retrieve line fast. ($129)

2 / Cabela’s rubber landing net The wide mouth makes for easy scooping. ($40)

3 / Simms Freestone waders Comfy, practically puncture-proof, and the right pockets for holding stuff. ($250)

4 / Smith Guide’s Choice polarized sunglasses Essential for reducing glare and spotting fish underwater. ($219)

5 / Winston Boron III Plus rod A balance of light and strong from one of the sport’s most venerated makers. ($855)

6 / Stanley classic water bottle Hot stuff stays insanely hot, cold stuff stays insanely cold. ($25)

7 / Cabela’s Adams parachute dry fly A versatile mayfly pattern that belongs in every angler’s box. ($16 per dozen)

8 / Orvis camo ball cap Solid sun protection and retro style. ($25)

A FEW PLACES TO GET STARTED West Branch Angler Resort, Hancock, New York American fly-fishing got started in the Catskills, and these simple, clean cabins harken back to that tradition. The nearby West Branch of the Delaware is known for big, aggressive rainbow trout.

@PopularMechanics

Three Rivers Ranch, Warm River, Idaho The famed Henry’s Fork River is a short drive away; the Railroad Ranch section is simply one of the best stretches of fly-fishing water in the world. Owner Lonnie Allen is an ace angler and even better host.

Madison Valley Ranch, Ennis, Montana There is no holier trinity of rivers, in Big Sky country or anywhere, than the Madison, Yellowstone, and Gallatin, and all are no more than a short drive away. Book an Upper Channels room for the view.

The River Why Set in the Pacific Northwest, David James Duncan’s novel is a fishing yarn, love story, paean to the natural world, and tale of selfdiscovery all beautifully knitted into one.

A River Runs Through It Norman Maclean’s elegiac memoir is equally brilliant on angling, family, and loss. The film version made Montana fly-fishing (and Brad Pitt) famous.

JUNE _ 2017

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S O R R Y. N O T S O R R Y.

OFFICIALLY BANNED BY THE NHRA Dodge is a registered trademark of FCA US LLC.

A M A N DA STA M PER THE JOB: Fire management officer at The Nature Conservancy LOCATION: Eugene, Oregon

HARD HAT In forested environments, fire loosens branches and rocks. We have to wear hard hats to protect our heads from falling debris. On grass fires, there’s little likelihood we’ll end up with debris falling on our heads. But it does protect your hair. I braid it and throw it under my hard hat to protect it from smoke and ash. BENDIX KING RADIOS We use powerful two-way radios to communicate. In theory, if you get along far enough in a fire, you need to be able to find yourself on a map without help. We’re trained to figure out where we’re at and keep track of that. That said, people get lost all the time.

P H O T O G R A P H BY J U S T I N K A N E P S

BLADDER BAG When you can only get to places on foot, you need a bladder bag. It’s a fivegallon water-delivery device that doesn’t rely on an outside pump or hose. Instead, you hand-pump water out of a wand attached to the end of a hose that’s attached to the bag on your back.

“I get excited about fire, whether it brings people together, or how it takes care of our ecosystem. It’s a high level of responsibility to intentionally set things on fire for a living. I think about that.” @PopularMechanics

HUSQVARNA CHAINSAW You need at least a year under your belt before running a chainsaw on an active fire. The chainsaw takes time to learn. A lot of time. It’s simple to start it and cut stuff. But you also have to learn the mechanics and geometry of falling trees.

JUNE _ 2017

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W I T H E Z R A DY E R

1

2018 Lexus LC 500 Lexus has a new flagship.

The LC 500 harkens back to Lexus’ origins, when obsessive craftsmanship was the company’s philosophical touchstone. Look around the LC’s interior and everything is leather, Alcantara, or highquality plastic. Carbon fiber peeks out from the inner door panels, visible only when the door is open. The cabin is so finely wrought that you notice the mundane passenger-side-airbag dash deactivation light. It should be sexier. This is a big coupe, skin stretched tight over rear fenders that swell outward

from the body, filling the rearview mirrors. It’s a hot concept car translated to the street with minimal interference. And the performance supports the visual aggression: a 5.0-liter naturally aspirated V-8 running 471 horsepower through a tenspeed transmission. Yeah, it’d be quicker if it were turbocharged, but then it wouldn’t have the booming, free-revving zing to redline that defines the experience. Refreshingly, it seems like Lexus mostly ignored arbitrary numerical goals and instead honed the less tangible rewards of driving— the sounds, the steering feel, the crispness of the shifts. There’s a hybrid model, too, but having driven the V-8, it’s hard to imagine this car without it. In execution and intent, the LC 500 is the Japanese Aston Martin. That’s why, even at about $100,000, it’s actually a great deal.

Base price: $92,975 Fun fact: The hybrid (left) can do a burnout.

What It’s Like to Drive the New Rolls-Royce Ghost Black Badge

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You expect the luxury. You expect the two-tone leather upholstery, and the fact that one of those tones is Smurf blue. You expect the seat that somehow combines a race-car cockpit with a featherbed, and you expect the “aerospace-grade” aluminum and carbonfiber dash. You even half expect the ceiling speckled with hundreds of tiny LED lights, which looks like the night sky. What you don’t expect (unless, perhaps, you’re someone who drives a car like this with regularity—and if you are: well done, friend) is just how fast the 6.6-liter 603-hp V-12 can push a Rolls-Royce to triple-digit speeds when you —Ryan D’Agostino feel like you’re still doing 45. I mean, it happened on the on ramp.

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

Base price: $31,425 Rows of seats: Three Safety options: Lanedeparture warning, automatic post-collision braking

3

2017 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid Meet the first electric minivan.

2

The Pacifica Hybrid is surely the first EV that can fit a four-by-eight sheet of plywood inside—64 of them, actually. While it loses the gas Pacifica’s secondrow Stow’n Go seating (the floor cubby where the seats would tuck is now filled with 16 kilowatt-hours’ worth of battery), the interior is otherwise unaltered. Okay, not totally unaltered—the seats’ ice-blue stitching is a hue we last saw in a custom Bentley Flying Spur. That’s confidence. The Pacifica

Hybrid is electrified and proud of it. With 33 miles of electric range, it can probably run your daily errands without ever firing its V-6. And, unlike some other plug-in hybrids (Volvo XC90 Twin Engine, we’re looking at you), the Pacifica’s two electric motors are robust enough that you won’t force the gas engine to fire up every time you need to accelerate at a rate quicker than a Thanksgiving parade float. As a bonus, the Pacifica gets 32 mpg on the gas engine, meaning it would still be the most efficient minivan ever, even if you never plugged it in. Silent, smooth, and practical, the Pacifica Hybrid represents the future of the family transportation game. And right now Chrysler is the only one playing.

2018 Volkswagen Atlas They should’ve called it the “At Last.”

We first drove the Atlas deep in the wilds of Quebec, intending to test the car’s proficiency on a frozen lake. Instead of freezing, it rained, and ice turned to slush. So we ended up on unpaved back roads, annoying locals with quasi-rally-car shenanigans. Quebec, je suis désolé. But real roads led to a better understanding of Volkswagen’s first three-row crossover. In its solidity and comportment, the Atlas is like an overgrown Golf. Its optional 3.6-liter 276-hp VR6 engine even issues the same off-kilter gargle that earned the old Golf R32 the nickname “Wookie.” The base model will start at $31,425 and top out close to $50,000 for a loaded VR6. Which is about where a two-row Touareg starts. So how is the bigger vehicle less expensive? Well, it’s not as nice inside, that’s how. The interior, while capacious, seems benchmarked to the median quality of its midsize peer group, rather than to strivers like the Mazda CX-9. Come to think of it, that’s the case in most Atlas aspects—price, power, towing. It’s in the middle, playing it safe, not drawing too much attention. Which is probably all Volkswagen wants for a while. @PopularMechanics

Base price: $43,090 ($13,000 more than the gas Pacifica) Electric-only range: 33 miles

JUNE _ 2017

37

Old Engine, New Tricks

Combusting at lower temperatures creates less nitrogen oxide and soot.

Bowl-shaped pistons are tuned to optimize smooth, controlled combustion when the fuel is injected.

After 100 years of refinement, you’d think the internal combustion engine was out of innovation, coasting along until electrification takes over. But these manufacturers are coming up with new ways to get more miles from petroleum. BY E Z R A DY E R

Since the explosions are gentler than typical diesels, the engine block can be made of lighter but more fragile aluminum, reducing weight.

The Precision Diesel Nobody tinkers with internal combustion like Mazda does. Over the past two decades, it’s produced a Miller-cycle engine, rotaries, and a tiny 1.8-liter V-6. Now, it’s made a 2.0-liter fourcylinder diesel that runs so clean it doesn’t even require an exhaust aftertreatment. And unlike the German TDIs, it comes by that distinction through technical innovation rather than devious software. With a low compression ratio— 14.4 to 1—the fuel–air mixture ignites when the piston is at top dead center rather than on its way back down, maximizing the energy achieved by each combustion event. That ratio also allows for explosions at lower

temperatures, creating less nitrogen oxide and soot—that is, pollution. The combustions are also less violent, so Mazda can make the engine block out of aluminum and slim down the reciprocating parts, dropping weight and improving responsiveness. To control the explosions, especially when the engine is cold, multi-hole piezoelectric fuel injectors deliver up to nine separate injections per combustion, ensuring a precise fuel–air

mixture. “You can even smooth out the clatters that you associate with diesel,” says Dave Coleman, a Mazda development engineer. “We can set up combustion events at frequencies that cancel each other out, like active noise cancellation.” The twin-turbo Skyactiv-D will be available this fall in the CX-5 as the top-of-the-line engine—both the most powerful and the most fuel-efficient option.

COMPRESSION RATIO: The space in the combustion chamber when the piston is all the way down versus all the way up.

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P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

FAST AND EASY

COMMON HOME REPAIRS

Clogged gutter? Broken window? Flickering fluorescents?

DON’T 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 fix whatever goes bust, and those who beg the first group for help. Popular Mechanics When Duct Tape Just Isn’t 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

Low compression ratio: lots of boost, lots of power.

High compression ratio: low boost from the turbo, high efficiency.

The 20-Year Turbo

Similar to batteries, ultra­ capacitors store electricity, but in an electrical field rather than in chemicals.

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predicts it’ll make 268 horsepower and 288 lb-ft of torque with 27 percent greater efficiency than “a V-6 of similar output.” Apply that latter figure to the QX60—currently powered by a 3.5-liter V-6—and you’d have a big three-row crossover that gets 34 mpg highway. Variable compression took two decades, but those numbers make it look like it’ll be worth the wait.

The mechanism between the connecting rod and the crankshaft allows the engine to adjust piston height.

The Two-Stroke Savior Two-stroke engines seem like a bygone technology, conjuring buzzy, pollution-spewing ’80s dirt bikes and, these days, mostly just chainsaws. But BRP, which owns brands like Ski-Doo, Sea-Doo, and Can-Am, is still developing these engines for outboard boat motors and snowmobiles because the two-stroke is still unbeatable for simplicity and power-to-weight ratio. The new SHOT system, a $600 option on new snowmobiles, improves the latter by saving about 20 pounds. “People spend two or three thousand dollars in carbon-fiber parts to save that much weight,” says Frederic Desjardins, engineering project manager for Ski-Doo. Here’s how it works: Instead of a typical battery and electric starter,

SHOT uses a small electric generator called a magneto and an ultracapacitor—it functions like a battery, but outputs more energy at the expense of long-term charge storage. The rider pull-starts the engine at the beginning of the day, and a magneto attached to the flywheel charges the capacitors. From that point on, the rider can kill the engine and restart it within a half hour. The capacitors hold a charge for up to two hours, but the probability of a successful restart drops as the clock keeps ticking. The system works only with twostrokes, but Desjardins predicts that it could spread as two-strokes themselves make a comeback. “I think they’re going to have a resurgence, particularly in dirt bikes,” he says. “Our 165-hp engine weighs 84 pounds. There’s nothing else like that.” P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

I N F I N I T I I L LU S T R AT I O N BY P E T E R S U C H E S K I

In every piston engine, the compression ratio is fixed. Choose either a high ratio for efficiency, or a low ratio for more power and turbo boost. Infiniti’s VC-Turbo, however, can do both. A reduction gear connected to an external electric motor powers the mechanism between the connecting rod and the crankshaft, allowing the engine to adjust piston height on the fly. It can change the compression ratio from 8 to 1 (big power, lots of turbo boost) to 14 to 1 (low boost, high efficiency). Infiniti invented the system in 1998, but it’s taken till now to perfect it for production. With three times as many bearings as a conventional engine, durability was a concern, so Infiniti logged the equivalent of nearly two million miles in the lab. Final road testing is happening right now, and when the engine goes into production next year, Infiniti

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→ The Bronco’s seats look like they tried to break up a fight between two rabid wolverines, too far gone for any leather spray to save. Time for seat covers. Options included Hawaiian motifs, wetsuit neoprene, or that old northeastern Saab tenure-track English-professor standby, sheepskin. Cabbies: You’re on to something with those acupressure beads. Aiming to match the factory interior rather than make a statement, I bought a pair of tweedy-tasteful ProElite 500s. Turns out, this is one of the best bang-for-thebuck upgrades you can make. Mine will shroud the Bronco’s upholstery until I find a pair of F-150 King Ranch seats on eBay.

→ The first owner must’ve smoked a pack a day through the grunge era, sold the car to someone who spilled a bottle of Surge while worrying about Y2K, and the guy I bought it from apparently left the truck parked outside in the rain with the roof off. Wait, that was me. Whatever the case, you have options. The Power Out can comes with a removable plastic brush to massage the foam into the carpet. Somehow, it actually lifted dirt out of the fibers while the foam devoured stains I thought were permanent. The carpets don’t look new, but the Power Out took about 15 years off their perceived age. It’s like Botox for your rugs.

→ “Perfect for use on your vehicle’s vinyl, cloth, headliner, and leather,” reads the bottle. “Also excellent around your garage, shop, and home.” It’s everything but a dessert topping. Not exactly. It left the upholstered door panels looking like a wet cat, and no amount could budge a discoloration on the dash, perhaps a melted lollipop circa 2004. Unlike other cleaners that just coat surfaces with shiny oil, Griot’s seemed to actually clean the trim, but it didn’t match the grime-busting horsepower of more caustic agents I’ve used. This stuff is really for the owner who doesn’t let the interior get out of control in the first place.

→ The interior cleaned and the seats looking presentable, there was just one final step: aromatherapy, administered by spray bottle. With Odor-X, Turtle Wax purports to replicate the alluring offgassing of new plastics and upholstery, the scent we call New-Car Smell. In practice, the smell is closer to a mildly floral air freshener. Which isn’t bad. But if you want new-car smell, you’re going to need to spend a lot more than $6. And in general, unless your car reeks like Randy Johnson’s spittoon, you can skip this step. I got more of my money’s worth from the visual and tactile improvements that other products provided.

1

2

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The Power Out’s foam devoured stains that I thought were permanent.

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P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

P H OTO G R A P H S BY J E R E M Y L A N G E

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My parents bought a 1988 Trooper two weeks before I was born. I came home from the hospital in it. Twelve years later, I learned how to drive it. And since then, I’ve pretty much never had anything else. When my parents’ Trooper was in an accident, I salvaged the engine and put it in another one that I bought myself. I still own it. But then I started hearing about this mythical beast: the two-door. Isuzu basically took the fourdoor, cut 14 inches out of the center, and shoved it back together. It’s super rare. In ’89, only 800 were imported to the United States. One day, when I was looking around online for anything Trooper-related, I saw one for sale. I bought it from a family out in Albuquerque, selling

it because it had stopped running. I had to spend a few grand for another salvage engine, then install it, but I didn’t care. I was just so lucky to get my hands on one. It has a tight steering radius, and the short wheelbase and big tires give it high ground clearance. I take it all around Arizona—climbing trips, backpacking, off-roading, and just daily driving. I work on it myself as much as

I can. In the Southwest, junkyards are a huge thing, so you can find Troopers that are almost 30 years old that still have quality parts. A friend’s dad owns a shop, so I can go down there on the weekends and put it up on the lift for standard maintenance. And if something starts sounding different, any minor problem, I can diagnose it from experience. I’ve been around them since I was in the womb.

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At the annual PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, golf’s temperate dignity gives way to a crackling energy reminiscent of a carnival midway. Innovators, inventors, hustlers, and acrobats populate the convention’s kiosked alleyways.

THE KEEPERS OF

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A

THE

Before it reaches your golf bag, new gear is rolled out at a Florida convention center—along with free samples, advice, and plenty of stories. BY TOM CH IARELL A PHOTOGRAPHS BY J E F F E R Y S A LT E R

@PopularMechanics

A quiet Saturday in June, at the very mouth of summer, and I’m standing beneath the white disc of the sun, on a very trimmed-up little piece of earth, staring down into the grass at my feet. Not an insect in the air. Not a sound, save my breathing. I look to the horizon—small line of trees, a swell of green, the earth dropping to meet the lip of a pond, that tiny rippling flag—then back at the ground beneath my shoes. Yes, that’s my ball there. Dammit. Two hundred thirty-nine yards and one wet sheaf of grass from home. But this is golf, and I have to play. I don’t like the lie. Sidehill, slightly downhill. All around me, my friends advance. I’m above the hole though, and the wind is at my back. Difficult. It is my shot. I know I am capable. That is the affirmation of the game: I can do it. The compact of the game? I have to make a lot of choices—club, stance, target line, swing speed, hip position, and so on—and I must act. Quickly, proficiently, using only the skills I bring and the tools in my bag. Just then, I wish I’d brought a little more. I want something new in my bag. It’s a long way to the hole. Golfers always want. This is one of the great truths of the game, and one of the ways it’s such a good sport for humans. We want. More distance, more spin, more game. More time. More tools. More choices. This is not greed I’m talking about. Not lust, or envy. A golfer wants to match his equipment to his game. A golfer doesn’t need every putter ever made so much as the single putter for him—for his posture, his balance, his confidence level. Want, in golfer’s terms, is the ability to make better choices within the frame of the game. And in golf, those choices (the ones you can control with your wallet, anyway) come in the form of products, brands, makes, designs, and specifications—ball compression, stiffness of shaft, tackiness of grip, cavity-back iron or blade. There are hundreds of choices, thousands of discrete decisions in the matter of want—what to carry, what to wear, what iron to play, what ball to favor, what tee, what glove, what bag to carry all that in. These choices are framed months before that quiet, bugfree Saturday in June on the muni course in Wherever, Indiana. They’re born, in fact, in a pre-retail carnival in central Florida in January called the PGA Merchandise Show. The show gathers forty thousand attendees on a million square feet of convention space. All fifty states are represented among the exhibitors. Eighty-four countries. Those are the small numbers. Here’s the big one: Golf is a $70 billion industry in the United States. To find where a golfer’s mid-summer choices on a long par 5 are born, you have to go to the show.

JUNE _ 2017

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T Tuesday in January now, and I’m

standing on the main concourse of the Orange County National Golf Center watching a man ride a golf bike, which is pretty much what it sounds like: a bicycle with a built-in golf bag on the back. Never seen that before. He’s making wide, comfortable circles and eating popcorn. I stand for a while next to a gum-chomping assistant golf pro from southern Maine, with his arms folded across his chest. “What do you think?” I ask. He answers without taking his eyes off the golf bike. “I’d want one,” he says. “I like mountain biking.” He nods. “But if I brought one of those back with me to my club, the greens keeper would hang me.” Now he’s shaking his head. “We have a rule against bikes on the course. There’s a sign specifically about bikes.” The bicycle floats its loop on the convention carpet once more. The rider wears a tie. It is a hypnotic sight. “Everybody’s got an idea,” the assistant golf pro from Maine says. We stare. Pretty soon, he cracks his gum convincingly. “Makes you want to sing ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,’” he says. I squint and stupidly look up. Rain? But—no. Ahh, of course. Butch Cassidy. He’s right. When I look back to him, he’s disappeared into the crowd. You have to have a badge to get into this vast, vaguely muffled space. There is some noise, to be sure. Music blares from speakers, robot golf bags prowl the wider aisles. More than a thousand vendors represented—garage-based inventors and massive corporate vendors and everything in between. All of them talking, selling, pitching. The place gives off the energy of the casino floor of the Bellagio. Minus the drapery.

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The badge asserts that the wearer is on one side or another of the professional game: a member of the PGA—a teaching pro, or club pro, swing coach, short-game coach, putting coach, strength coach, brain coach—or someone with something to sell to those guys—golf balls, golf tees, swingtraining devices, golf carts, Segway-like golf carts, golf bikes, golf bags, robot golf bags, simulators, weighted clubs, poker chips, flight-track analyzers, gloves, launch monitors, artificialintelligence-driven wireless caddies, socks, shoes, insole liners, rubber three-piece shoes, and, of course, golf clubs: drivers, hybrids, rescue clubs. Putters plated in gold, putters made of acrylic, putter-face inserts. Head covers, lead-tape dispensers, ball markers, protein bars, protein shakes, protein gum. An indestructible tee. A shade generator. A microbially safe steering-

wheel cover for rented golf carts. If it has been thought of, it resides in these rowdy quarters. It takes two and a half hours to walk every aisle and row of the golf show, stopping only for the occasional conversation or sales pitch. With golf, distance is a part of the game and patterns emerge. The most-talked-about devices at the 2017 show are launch monitors, tee-side electronic panels that track the trajectory and flight of any shot—even if you hit it into a net ten feet in front of you—by gauging the elemental mechanics of every swing, including club speed, launch angle, swing path, ball position, spin rate, and angle of the club face. And this year’s buzzed-about launch monitor is the TrackMan A/S, a Danish product: iconic orange and black panel, like an iMac without a screen, that uses radar and swing data for teaching pros and course designers. Retailing for

Everywhere, the inventors make their stand. One guy staked his retirement on a “revolutionary” new tee. P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

THE NEW GEAR PING G IRONS In its quest for distance and forgiveness, Ping has created a mainline performance club with four times the face flex, higher shot flight, and increased MOI. BIION GOLF SHOES Great shoes. These are golf shoes, boat shoes, and classy street shoes rolled into one. No spikes, no laces. A lazy man’s dream. OCTOBER GOLF GEAR BAG I can never find my keys in the four pockets in my pants. So the typical golf bag, with its menagerie of zippers and storage, presents a particular nightmare of lost essentials. Using military technology, October offers the ability to modularize the layout of your bag—one pocket or fifteen—depending on how you most prefer to lose your wallet. ARCCOS You put a subtle sensor in the end of your club, you take your chops at the ball, and the Arccos system collects remarkably complete data on every shot, on every course you play. After five rounds, it uses your collected data to make club suggestions through your smartphone. Like a good caddie, it can make you a smarter golfer. But you have to listen. –T.C.

@PopularMechanics

$18,995, TrackMan is more of a highend institutional teaching tool than a toy for a techie golfer. Those are available too, though. Like the remarkable Arccos system: inserts in the grip of a club (these are even built in to the new line of Cobra drivers) record the data for every hack a golfer takes in a conventional round, and collects that over every round. That data is then fed into proprietary Microsoft software that spits out the best club choice for a given shot on a given course (using GPS technology—a previous year’s big-ticket bet). The smartphone displays it, allowing golfers to jimmy their swings and fuss less over club choice and future shot selections. The software learns your game. The caddie moves to your front pocket. Better golf follows. By midafternoon, I’m sitting with three engineers from Ping in a faux lounge set up in the Ping product area. The first is a handsome British Ph.D. The second: also handsome. The third is a design engineer. American. Weirdly good-looking as well. Ping was started by an engineer, Karsten Solheim, in his garage in 1959, they remind me. “We’re still fundamentally an engineering company,” Engineer 1 says. So if the measurables remain largely the same from year to year, how do you create something new with each season? How do you help a golfer hit it better? “We’re always talking about the Moment of Inertia,” he says. MOI is a performance mea-

I

surement taken at the bottommost moment of the swing, when contact is made, measuring the resistance of the club to being twisted at the moment of impact. This is the Ping lounge, and the idle chit-chat of engineers. “We’re very proud of the fact that ours is among the longest in the business,” says Engineer 1. MOI is an assertion of forgiveness. “It’s essentially a measure of the club’s resistance if you don’t hit it perfectly,” says Engineer 2. To help the golfer hit it better, they examine the misses. Perfection is easy to model. Besides, no one hits it perfectly. Engineer 1: “These are games of misses. Tennis is a game of misses. Golf is a game of misses. We examine ways to affect that moment.” walk the midway. A caterer

hands me a small empanada. A Russian woman sells me a thermolite bracelet to promote negative ionization in the bones of my hand. I tell her I have a bad right shoulder, and she puts the bracelet on my left wrist and hangs on my bad shoulder. I do not buckle. No pain. It feels like a trick. But I buy another. I lose a putting contest. I hit a bucket of balls into a virtual driving range. I am handed a beer. I then win a putting contest. I am handed tees, hats, wristbands, twenty-three ball markers. Energy bars are chopped into samples. Music blares at one table. Silence rules at a nearby putting green. Brand names pile in the skull. The conveyance of clubs is a central puzzle. Travel bags, staff bags, standup bags, batterypowered rolling carts, pull carts, golf bikes, and the classic twoman cart are bought and sold by the fleet here at the convention.

JUNE _ 2017

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Iceblock putters. CaddyTalk. GPSQuickClip. GelTees. Certifresh Cigars. Real Jerky. GolfSmash. Zero Friction GPS DistancePro. These names either explain the product in its essence—the Iceblock putter is a putter made with a clear acrylic head—or obscure meaning a little, so you have to stop and ask. Zero Friction GPS DistancePro is GPS technology built into a glove. The price you pay for the ball markers and the energy bars, the tees and belt buckles? More golf talk with the tribe of talkers. All manner of commerce—multinational corporations, family-owned businesses, threadbare LLCs, overseas venture-capital projects—stand on alert as stories are traded. And everybody is ready, most of all, to act like golfers. Golfers talking, without apology, about golf. Aisle after aisle and aisle. I’m not judging. I like golf. I’m just saying the game is ancient. Oldest sport there is. And yet the PGA Merchandise Show buzzes like these guys invented it five days before.

A

t night, in the hotel bar, I realize that, like the fact that golfers always want, this is another great truth of golf: Golfers talk. They love to talk about their game, their shortcomings, their new club, Gadgets be damned. Sometimes the sharpest golfer has the best pants. On the Putter Buddy, we’re not ready to comment.

“Everybody is pumped up,” the rickshaw driver says. “Golf makes people happy.” their old putter, their last round, their next round. In clubhouses and golf carts and pubs and, here in Orlando this week, in Hiltons and Hyatts: happiness. New ideas. Drinks. I find myself sitting with a golf pro from Salinas, California, an accounts manager from Kaiser Permanente, and a sales rep for a golf umbrella outfit. “Sure,” the golf pro says, “it’s the happiest moment of the golf year. Why wouldn’t people be happy? Everything is out in front of you.” “Do you make good money? Like on the tour?” the Kaiser Permanente woman asks. The golf pro, who bought the drinks, shoots her a withering look. He’s a teaching pro. He’s already told her that much. She is not a golfer, so she couldn’t listen. “It all seems fine now. Everybody’s pumped up,” he says. “Sometimes you get stuck. I bought all these one-pocket pants one year. No one liked them. I dumped them at Goodwill.” “You gotta have two pockets,” the umbrella guy says. “Four,” the pro says. “That’s all you need to know. Four pockets is an idea

you can’t improve on.” “Here’s a new idea,” the umbrella guy says, whipping his foot up onto the bar stool, gently taking off his bright yellow shoe. “This is a golf shoe,” he says, dangling the shoe from his finger. “Ew,” the Kaiser woman says. “It only weighs four ounces. It’s rubber. I bought this at the show. You can wear it anywhere, but it works as a golf shoe.” “Nobody wears yellow shoes,” she says. “People will wear yellow shoes.” “Bright colors are very popular these days. People wear bright orange.” There is a silence then. They drink. “What about umbrellas?” the woman asks. The umbrella guy hmpfs. “What about them?” “Do golfers buy yellow umbrellas?” He slips on his shoe. “It’d be a special order,” he says. “But I bet they would.” “You gotta have an umbrella,” the golf pro says. “That’s why they sell,” the woman says. “Maybe not in Salinas,” says the umbrella guy. I tell them about the portable shadegenerator I’d seen that day, made for driving ranges in desert areas. “It was just an umbrella on a pole,” I tell them. The pro tilts his head. “An umbrella is always a good idea.” Everybody agrees.

S

econd day, busier than

the first. People huddle up. Mechanical engineers stand with driving-range owners, travel agents meet with PowerPoint experts, metallurgists crowd in to look at new indoor golf simulators. Software analysts gas on with club pros. At the edges of the floor, the inventors make their stand. These are people who have quit better jobs, staked their retirement, gone out and raised capital

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JUNE _ 2017

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developing a product they designed, prototyped, and often patented, using ideas they had during their Tuesdaynight league. They want the talk, too. Near the Papa John’s cart, on the far side of the show, I meet Dave Crivelli of Phoenix, a former Los Angeles homicide detective and celebrity bodyguard. He’s hawking a product he calls the Bugle Tee. His flyer says it’s revolutionary. By this time, I have forty sample tees laid out on the queen bed in my hotel room. I am skeptical. Crivelli is a big hulk of a guy with arms like rolled phone books, and a too-tight baseball hat on his melon. He’s leaning into the act of wolfing a sandwich, pacing in front of a folding table, urging people to take some free tees. “It’s the only tee you’ll need this year,” he says. “It’s unbreakable.” Crivelli acquired rights to the design after a friend in Phoenix came back with several of the tees after a trip to Sweden. “He gave me one,” Crivelli says. “And I used it for years. You can’t break it. It’s a two-piece construction.” “I called these guys up in Sweden,” he says, pointing to his skinny Scandinavian partner, also manning the

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It’s hard to say what makes is covered with tiny metal inserts table, “and we attained one ballmark repair tool betfashioned to lift the ball off the the rights to the Western ter than another, but there are always guys in golf shirts flat surface of the green. Damned Hemisphere.” He has other ready to talk it through. smart, it seems to me. I’m a lousy stories, too. Chemotherapy. putter, but I start dropping the rolls Heart trouble. He is frank. at a rate I’m not used to. It makes me And blunt in his honesty. People stop look forward. The inserts give the ball a and listen. He is the mayor of inventor’s slight loft at impact, making it easier to alley. Passersby wish him luck. roll. Putt after putt, I find myself want“People look at me here, and they ing to show someone what is happening. think what they think,” he says. “But Optimism. Hope. This too defines they don’t know that what I liked best you as a golfer. It makes you want to talk. about this tee is that this is a very green Better still, Wilson puts its new product. In just one season, it replaces D300 driver in the hands of anyhundreds of wooden tees, thousands one willing to take a swing. And on that just break after one use. That’s this second day, that’s me. It’s lighter why I like it so much. It’s green.” than anything I’ve swung this week, He grabs a bottle of water, and and comes with an amped-up abilstops a woman in a CBS Sports jacket. ity to increase swing speed by using a “You need to try one of these,” he says. series of interchangeable weights and “You only need one, and I’m going to loft adjustments, implemented using give it to you.” a small wrench. Handing all these Elsewhere in the hangar, Cobra rolls adjustments over to a lousy golfer feels out its new drivers. The vocabulary of a little like letting a fifteen-year-old the selling year is established. Taylorinstall a nitrous oxide system on your Made names Tiger Woods a member of father-in-law’s new Toyota Avalon, but its Playing Pros. Odyssey representait’s legal. And the D300 is fun. And tives fan out to explain the microhinge I can see results, even on the virtual mechanics of their new putting face— driving range. I’ll buy one, I think. This this is an idea that makes sense to me, one might do the trick. I’m thinking I incidentally. The putting-face insert

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

You have to believe you’re going to get better on the next shot, and the next, and the next...

can sneak in a little range time tonight. Maybe a round before the plane. When optimism sets in, a golfer is carried forth, toward the game itself. n the morning of my third

and final day, as I park my rental car, the Convention Center flops once again at the far end of everything visible, big as a real city. A Ferris wheel looms. I stand out there and wonder if I’ve finally had enough golf. It’s a long way to the show from the parking lot, on a buggy Florida morning. More than a mile, and I’m sick of walking it. So I hire a rickshaw to ferry me across the sea of asphalt and gleaming rentals. The driver wants to know my destination. “There’s a surf show and a golf show this week,” she says. She cranes for a look at me. “I’m betting you’re a surfer.” God bless her. She thinks I’m a surfer. It makes me laugh to think it.

O

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“Sorry,” I sigh. “Golfer.” “Don’t be sorry!” she chides, nudging the bike toward some unseen concourse. “Everybody is all pumped up. Golf makes people happy.” She makes a hand signal for a left turn, pulls out across convention traffic. I close my eyes. “Golf will never be as cool as surfing,” I assert. “You know,” she shouts back to me, “I drive this bike at Coachella every year. I do the Super Bowl. I did Vegas during the adult video awards. I follow Dave Matthews around and drive at every concert.” All of this seems cool. “But people are happier at the golf show!” she says. Happier than porn stars, sure. But Dave Matthews fans? Those guys are stupid with happiness. Somehow I don’t believe her. “Come on,” I say. “Come on, your own self!” she barks back. “This is the PGA Merchandise Show up ahead! It’s like mad golf in

there. They brought in a beer truck. New golf clubs all over the place. And golfers talking to golfers about golf. You can’t be sorry about that.” She’s hit a slight incline and strains a little, so we ride in relative silence. At the drop-off she tells me, “I grew up playing golf in North Carolina with my dad.” She stands and turns. A pair of egrets stab the grass on a traffic island. “Hoo boy, he would give his testicle to get into the PGA Merchandise Show.” I hand her a twenty. She makes eye contact then. “Yes, singular,” she says of her father’s testicle, though I didn’t ask. “Cancer.” She takes a look at the birds too. She shrugs. “So that’s really saying something, because he only has the one.” I cringe a little, nod and gather myself to head in. Then she asks if I can sneak her dad in for a look. He lives in Dr. Phillips, which she assures me is a suburb of Kissimmee. “Golf is good,” she pronounces, loudly. Pedestrians look up. “There’s a lot of history in it and all that.” She doesn’t care about the history, though. “I tell him to think about all the golf he still gets to play,” she tells me. “Think about the future, I tell him.” This, of course, is the greatest truth of all: Golf is a game of optimism. Otherwise no one would play. You have to believe you’re going to get better on the next shot and the next and the next, if you can just do this one thing and that and get that new club. Maybe more than any other sport, optimism sustains golf. I look back and wave. Even as she stands there, over her bike, with the Dave Matthews cranked on rickshaw speakers, I can see she knows what she wants. She’s full of optimism, and she will tell you all about it. She too is a golfer. P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

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Will Sutherland built an RV to travel the country with what he had— an old bus. His friends soon followed, converting what they could into campers with scraps and sweat. • Photographs by JA R E D S O A R E S

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A

A / Work in Progress Will Sutherland is now on his third bus conversion, with plans to install a bed, love seat, and kitchen sink. Today, he and his girlfriend, Sabrina Hartley, install wall insulation. On Sutherland: Sunspel shirt ($95). On Hartley: Sunspel shirt ($90), Levi’s jeans ($198), RAEN sunglasses ($200).

B / Make Camp Sutherland unfolds the Primus Kamoto portable fire pit ($130). Levi’s jacket ($398).

Previous page At a spring campout, the Vanhandlers grill dinner on the Camp Chef Pro 90X stove ($300).

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B

The first meeting of the club wasn’t really a meeting. It was a group of friends sitting around Will Sutherland’s backyard fire ring in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, talking about the love they had in common: adapting large vehicles for big adventures on the open road. There was no call for members on Facebook or meetup. com. Sutherland mentioned the idea to someone, who mentioned it to someone, and one night his driveway was filled with homemade recreational vehicles. Fueled by burning ash logs and cold beer, the gatherers came up with a name that played @PopularMechanics

off the panhandle region of the state. They called themselves the Vanhandlers. It’s more than an auto club. Every vehicle in the Vanhandlers is a home-built conversion and an exercise in making the most of what you have. Charmaine Mills’s 2003 Impreza is the smallest, but it’s impressively simple—with the back row folded flat, she laid down two layers of puzzle mats and covered them in blankets. Sutherland, the de facto president, took his previous RV, a twenty-one-foot short bus, on a three-week tour of the Rockies and the Pacific Coast last year. To Sutherland there’s no beating an RV, of any shape or size. “There’s no unpacking, and everything I need is just there,” he says. “Get tired? Pull over and

there’s your room.” There’s plenty to talk about when the crew gathers, despite the varied vehicles. Everyone seems to agree that an American flag makes an excellent headliner replacement. And everyone has the same concerns: privacy, propane, and portable toilets. Clay Anders made wood cutouts that pop into his 1994 Plymouth Voyager’s windows at night. Kevin Rudisill found a Westfalia-inspired propane cylinder that mounts under a vehicle but, unlike the classic VW’s, doesn’t need to be removed to be refilled. And Mills recommends the $20 membership to Planet Fitness for nationwide shower access. Nobody, however, has found a great toilet yet. JUNE _ 2017

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A / Measure Twice

A

Sutherland prepares the final board for his bus’s kitchen countertop. G-Shock watch ($300).

B / The Classic Conversion Kevin Rudisill found his Chevrolet van at auction for $200. He’s installed benches with storage, a foldout bed, and propane for cooking.

C / Back Around a Campfire After dinner, the crew relaxes with beer, Hartley’s homemade rosé, and a little bourbon. From left, on Rudisill: Levi’s T-shirt ($88). On Charmaine Mills: Purnell shirt ($64). On Clay Anders: Filson shirt ($98), Dickies jeans ($32). On Hartley: Filson shirt ($125), Rumpl blanket ($99).

B

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C

@PopularMechanics

JUNE _ 2017

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What I

Learned

Summer Job Summer jobs build character. They put a little cash in your wallet. They instill humility and a willingness to wear a paper hat. They also prepare you for life. y father ran a huge mall and office complex called

M Midtown Plaza in downtown Rochester, New York,

when I was young, so my friends and I always had summer jobs. Because he did not want to show me favoritism (and I was a lippy know-it-all), I always got the worst jobs. I crawled belly down through ancient puddles of coolant and rainwater, under a twenty-ton roof chiller while dragging a fire hose to blow out the stray gravel. Painted the underside of forty-foot-long HVAC units with a three-inch brush taped to a broom handle. Tended the thirty-yard dumpsters. Disposed of fluorescent lightbulbs, used toilets, office partitions, cables, chains, buckets, wire, lead pipes, broken PVC, wet Sheetrock, shredded ceiling tiles, vermiculite, broken glass, and obsolete grease traps. So, not great work. I didn’t learn many skills. There was no one job I liked better than any other, nor any I particularly hated. Work was just work. You had to do it. And over time, I decided my best skill was to be unafraid of any job. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t even that good at any of this. My dad never said he was proud of me, or that I’d done a good job. That didn’t matter. I came to know the value of being the guy who would do what was needed. And that complaining about paid work is inelegant and lazy. As a result, I’ve never been unemployed, not for a single day of my adult life. I know what work is. And I know what I can do. I learned long ago not to think of my limits. —TOM CHIARELLA, writer

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own money and be in the working world. The most important things I learned were responsibility, and how to manage inventory and maximize staff potential to increase the amount of money the place I was working took in. My last straight job was working at a Häagen-Dazs in Washington, D.C. We were friends with all the other shops on the block. We would borrow things all the time—whipping cream, coins for the register. One time, a man came over from the French restaurant across the street and asked if I wanted to buy some dimes from him. I said sure. I bought four rolls from him and gave him twenty dollars out of the register. He left. I opened one of the rolls, it was a dime on the end but the rest were pennies. He didn’t work at the restaurant, but he knew the hustle. That happened on my watch, so I paid back the register with my own money. Twenty dollars in those days took a lot of hours to make. I still have the rolls of pennies, so I never forget about keeping my eyes open and being responsible for my mistakes. —HENRY ROLLINS, musician

efore tenth grade, I worked at my cousin’s Italian deli.

B He taught me how to make sausage. You get twenty-five

pounds of pork, cut off all the bones and fat so it’s just meat, then feed it into the grinder. I’d pull the composition notebook off the shelf and find the recipe for hot sausage, sweet sausage, whatever. Add a quarter cup of paprika, salt, pepper. We had a mixer, but to get spices right, I had to go hands-in with the meat—you can never wash your hands enough. This machine used water pressure to put the meat into the casing. You’d hook it up to a hose, attach the casing, step on the pedal, and it’d keep pushing it out, pushing it out, until you have twenty feet of sausage. You take a kite string, tie a knot, then another knot every six inches. My cousin would say, “That’s too long, that one’s good,” until I learned to eyeball them. Make one link, then the next, one link, then the next. Hang it up to let the blood run out, then sell it. At the end of the summer, I was pretty fast at it. It’s a weird skill, but it’s a skill. If I had to do it tomorrow, I could. —GARY DELL’ABATE, executive producer, The Howard Stern Show P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY J A N E W E B S T E R

AT MY

never wanted an allow-

I ance. I wanted to make my

n college, I had a co­op at NASA’s Langley Research Center developing com­

I ponents for flight simulators. They gave us the job of designing a support for

the main control stick to rest on. We developed this complex torque box—an open box with a pole in the middle to resist force in any direction—but in the end, after some subtle guid­ ance, we just made a flat plate. I learned to always try the simple solution first. —TRACY DRAIN, NASA deputy chief engineer, Juno mission

y first job was in the dining room of

M La Posada, a Red Lion resort in Scotts­

dale, Arizona. It was the summer of 1985. I wore a polyester brown tuxedo and was almost gleefully incompetent, breaking hundreds of dollars of glassware and constantly falling behind on my napkin folding. Mostly, though, I scavenged. When the customers didn’t fin­ ish their crocks of French onion soup, I’d take their trays back into the kitchen and slurp up the leftovers like a dog. If anyone left even a hint of meat in the back of their broiled lobster tail, I’d pry it out with a salad fork and gulp it down before the dishwashers could get their mitts on the plate. I probably ate the equiva­ lent of ten lobsters a week. But I got greedy. I began clearing dishes before customers were done. One night, I was joking with a well­ heeled party who seemed to like

me. “The food sure looks good!” I said. “I hope you don’t finish it so I can take it back into the kitchen to eat it myself!” At the end of the shift, the manager called me into his office. “Did you tell customers that you were going to eat their food?” He asked. “Yes,” I replied, sheepishly. “That is not acceptable,” he said. “And if you do it again, I’m going to have to send you home.” The way he treated the situation has always stayed with me, because I’d been almost shockingly unprofessional. But he didn’t fire me or make an example. He gave me another chance. That said, two weeks later, I quit. I’ve never worked in a restaurant since. While I may have learned an important lesson in fairness and decency, I also realized that I’m an unrepentant plate­licker. There was no place for a guy like me in food service. —NEAL POLLACK, author

hen I was sixteen, I got a job in a retail stockroom putting price stickers on the mer­

W chandise. As business started to wane, and the amount of work slowed down, I did too.

Of course the boss noticed he was getting less output, so when he reduced the staff, I was one of those let go. It didn’t take me long to figure out my mistake. I went back to the boss, beg­ ging to be rehired, explaining that from then on I would work as hard and as fast as I could. He relented and gave me a second chance, and from then on my nickname at work was Flash. —TIM LEATHERMAN, founder, Leatherman Tools

he summer before I was a

T freshman in high school,

the fellow next door owned an elec­ tronics firm and offered me and the kid down the street a summer job doing inventory. It was going to offer—you ready for this—$1.15 an hour! Whoop de doo! I jumped at it, and so did the kid down the street. So we show up at 8 a.m., not knowing any­ thing about inventory or electronics, but we were going to earn some money. He took us into this warehouse which was full of shelves. Lots of them. And these shelves were loaded with bins full of electronic components: resis­ tors, capacitors, transistors, coils, diodes, and lots of other itty bitty things. Each bin has like nine hundred pieces in it, and they go as far as the eye can see. @PopularMechanics

He gave us a clipboard each and says, “Take each bin, empty it out, count the pieces, write it down, put the pieces back, and put the bin on the shelf.” So we jumped right in, we wanted to be good employees. We had started about 8:10 or so and after what must have been at least three or four hours I was ready to kill myself. I looked at my wristwatch and it was only 8:45. I did it the whole damn summer. And he was a neighbor, so my parents said “You can’t quit,” because they would be embar­ rassed. The lesson I learned is before you say yes to anything, find out as much as you can about the job. In the next life, I’ll know better. —RAY MAGLIOZZI,

former cohost, Car Talk

he summer after high

T school, I had three jobs.

First, I rode on a garbage truck at Maryland’s Gunpowder Falls State Park. My job was to stand on the back and get the drums full of two hundred pounds of crap. One day I slipped in some unthinkable slime, fell off the truck, and face­planted right in front of a family having a picnic. I broke my nose, fractured my jaw, loosened three teeth, and got my boot caught as well. I was actually dragged for about ten feet and lost most of the skin on my palms and my chin. I was desperate for another job, and of course no one is going to hire me when I looked like the loser in a really, really long cage match. But in 1980 Spider­Man made some sort of re­emergence and Kmart decided they wanted Spider­Man to sign autographs. I just sat there wrapped in this rubbery latex suit sweating and stinking, slowly oozing blood and ointment, and sti­ fling screams while kids squatted on my broken legs that had no skin. I was just thinking, Yeah, this goes on the list of stuff not to do. The third was selling magazines over the phone. It became this fas­ cinating challenge because I hated every second of it, I really and truly hated making these phone calls and disturbing people, but I was good at it. I was making six to eight sales, and $50, an hour. In hind­ sight that was the job that taught me for the very first time that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you should do it. That was a big summer of lessons, foreshadowing from the garbage truck that eventually got me to Dirty Jobs. The cautionary tale of Spider­ Man: I always wanted to act and be on stage but after Spider­Man? Screw that. And this weird cognitive dissonance of the success of doing something you loathe. All of that in hindsight was a pretty good back­ drop for a career in entertainment. The following year, I dug graves. —MIKE ROWE, TV host and CEO, the mikeroweWORKS Foundation JUNE _ 2017

65

THE SECRET GUIDE TO FINDING THE

SCAN THE ROOF

Walk across the street and check the roof for missing, cracked, or curling shingles. We recommend: Olympus Roamer 10x21 compact binoculars ($57).

RIGHT HOUSE Nobody will care more about the function and structure of your next house than you. That’s no knock on professional inspectors, but you’re the one living there. Your inspector—and he should be yours, not the agent’s—gives your next home a bill of health, but you can save yourself time, money, and frustration by knowing what pitfalls to look for before you put an offer in.

FOLLOW THE WATER

Check that rainwater from the roof drains away from the house— including once it hits the ground, which should slant down from the edge of the foundation.

RED FLAG

A drop from the garage to the driveway hints at water draining against the house (it’s most common on downhill driveways), a potential foundation hazard. I L LU S T R AT I O N BY T W O A R M S I N C .

LISTEN

Two bad-news sounds: a water drip you can’t find (plumbing leak in the walls) and a buzzing service panel (probably overheating, definitely a fire hazard).

WALK THE PERIMETER

Scan the foundation for cracks, the siding for peeling paint or rot, and that the surrounding foliage doesn’t touch sides or extend over the roof.

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RED FLAG

Any funky smell. Trust your nose. It’s probably mold.

LIGHT UP WATER DAMAGE

Check for water damage in hard-to-view or dark spaces: behind toilets, basement corners, the attic ceiling. We like the pocket-friendly Ledlenser T2 flashlight ($44).

RED FLAG

Mineral buildup around plumbing points to a slow leak.

TEST THE ELECTRICAL OUTLETS

You’re the only one who will take the time to check every outlet is wired correctly. This simple tool is all you need: Klein Tools Receptacle outlet tester ($10).

RED FLAG

Fog between double-paned windows. It signals a broken seal and the entire window will need replacing.

UNEVEN FLOORS

Use a large marble to test floors for slants or low spots. This can indicate a house settling unevenly and possible foundation damage.

KEY THE WOOD

GREEN LIGHT

A basement full of old cardboard boxes indicates that water has never pooled on the floor.

If any wood looks suspect—possible water or insect damage—press the point of your house key into a discreet spot. Healthy wood won’t yield, damaged wood will feel spongy.

RED FLAG

FIND THE SERVICE DATE

Large mechanical systems, such as a water heater, should bear their last service date in Sharpie.

Ancient electrical brands. Any electrical service panels or fuse boxes bearing the names Federal Pacific, Sylvania, Zinsco, or Bulldog are old enough to need replacing.

UNCOVER HIDDEN LEAKS

To check for an out-of-sight plumbing leak, make sure nothing is running in the house and check the water meter.

@PopularMechanics

JUNE _ 2017

67

THE HOUSE WE DIDN’T WANT THE PERFECT HOUSE IS A MYTH—BUT HERE’S HOW TO FIND A GREAT ONE I was doing errands with my daughter one afternoon when I ran into the father of a girl I’d gone to high school with. He said that his daughter and her husband had just bought a house, and when I got back to our apartment I called my wife, Ann, in a panic—she was at work—and told her that we’d fallen behind our friends. Two weeks later, I went house-shopping for us, in a town a couple of hours away, and signed a binder for the second place the real-estate agent showed me. The agent asked whether I thought my wife ought to have a look first, and I said, Oh, no, I’m sure she’ll love it. Ann hadn’t come along because we hadn’t wanted to subject our daughter, who was less than a year old, to a long, boring day in a car. But we’d talked about what we wanted—“big” and “old”—and this house, which was built in 1790 and had once served as a boarding-school dormitory, was both of those. When I took Ann to see it for the first time, a month later, I had trouble finding not only it but also the town it was in. Then, when I did find it, she didn’t like it at all. It needed paint, and it was filled with ugly wallpaper and cheap, low-hanging chandeliers, and the yard was

a mess. But our daughter was crying, and the inspection hadn’t turned up anything truly alarming, like rotten sills or a crumbling foundation, and my appointment with the real-estate agent had used up most of an afternoon. If we backed out now, how would we ever find another? So we bought it. Well, that was thirty-two years ago, and we’re still here. Getting rid of the wallpaper ended up being quite a challenge, but I got to fill my basement with power tools and I now know everything there is to know about ice dams. The town, once I learned where it was, turned out to be great, and I served as an elected official for twenty years. The daughter of the lawyer who handled our closing became our daughter’s best friend, and he and his wife and many of their best friends became some of our best friends, and so on: a domino-like succession of happy accidents that began only because we’d been too young to know what we were doing. The moral might be that if you stick to your base demands—like “big” and “old”—and don’t sweat the wallpaper, you and your house can work out the rest. —David Owen

HOW TO WALK AWAY Always be prepared to walk away. Anybody in the business

will tell you the same thing. It may sound coldhearted, but don’t get emotionally attached to a house. Don’t let your imagination go to work. Don’t think about having Christmas in front of the fireplace or your kids running through the grass. You can get saddled with a home you’re unable to repair. The reality is, there are a lot of houses out there. But for many people, a house is the most serious financial commitment you’ll take on. It will affect every aspect of your life and will determine whether you take a vacation or buy a new roof. At all times you need to be a realist and stay detached. If not, you can get hosed. —Roy Berendsohn, senior home editor

WHAT ROY WOULD ASK 1/

When was the house reroofed?

2/

When was the furnace installed?

3/

How long has the owner lived here?

4/

Do the neighbors always park on their lawn?

FI N D A CERTI FI ED I N S PEC TO R AT H O M E I N S PEC TO R .O RG .

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The men and women who are trying to bring down cancer are starting to join forces rather than work alone. Together, they are winning a few of the battles against the world’s fiercest disease. For this unprecedented special report, we visited elite cancer research centers around the country to find out where we are in the war. • BY JACQ U ELIN E DETWILER

PRECISION MEDICINE

What is cancer, though, really? W h en y o u v i s it St. Jude Children’s

Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, you expect to feel devastated. It starts in the waiting room. Oh, here we go with the little red wagons, you think, observing the cattle herd of them rounded up by the entrance to the Patient Care Center. Oh, here we go with the crayon drawings of needles. The itch begins at the back of your throat, and you start blinking very fast and mentally researching how much money you could donate without starving. Near a row of arcade games, a preteen curls his face into his mother’s shoulder while she strokes his head. Oh, here we go. But the more time you spend at St. Jude, the more that feeling is replaced with wonder. In a cruel world you’ve found a free hospital for children, started by a Hollywood entertainer as a shrine to the patron saint of lost causes. There is no other place like this. Corporations that have nothing to do with cancer—nothing to do with medicine, even—have donated vast sums of money just to be a part of it. There’s a Chili’s Care Center. The cafeteria is named for Kay Jewelers. Scott Newman’s office is in the Brooks Brothers Computational Biology Center, where a team of researchers is applying computer science and mathematics to the question of why cancer happens to children. Like many computer people, Newman is very smart and a little quiet and doesn’t always exactly meet your eyes when he speaks to you. He works on St. Jude’s Genomes for Kids project, which invites newly diagnosed patients to have both their healthy and tumor cells genetically sequenced so researchers can poke around. “Have you seen a circle plot before?” Newman asks, pulling out a diagram of the genes in a child’s cancer. “If I got a tattoo, it would be one of these.” Around the outside of the circle plot is something that looks like a colorful bar code. Inside, a series of city skylines. Through the center are colored arcs like those nail-and-string art projects students make in high school geometry class. The diagram represents everything that has gone wrong within a child’s cells to cause cancer. It’s beautiful. JUNE _ 2017

75

Over two days in March, Popular Mechanics dispatched twelve photographers to cancer centers across the country. Their simultaneous photo shoots captured, hour by hour, the real work of curing the most complicated disease in the world. For the complete timeline, visit popularmechanics.com/cancer, and check out Instagram #ItWillTakeAnArmy.

“These are the genes in this particular tumor that have been hit,” Newman says in a Yorkshire accent that emphasizes the t at the end of the word hit in a quietly violent way. “And that’s just one type of thing that’s going on. Chromosomes get gained or lost in cancer. This one has gained that one, that one, that one, that one,” he taps the page over and over. “And then there are structural rearrangements where little bits of genome get switched around.” He points to the arcs sweeping across the page. “There are no clearly defined rules.” It’s not like you don’t have cancer and then one day you just do. Cancer—or, really, cancers, because cancer is not a single dis-

man says. To whittle down the complexity, he applies algorithms that pop out gene mutations most likely to be cancer-related, based on a database of all the mutations researchers have already found. Then, a genome analyst manually determines whether each specific change the algorithm found seems likely to cause problems. Finally, the department brings its list of potentially important changes to a committee of St. Jude’s top scientists to discuss and assign a triage score. The mutations that seem most likely to be important get investigated first. It took thirteen years and cost $2.7 billion to sequence the first genome, which was completed in 2003. Today, it costs $1,000 and takes less than a week. Over the last two decades, as researchers like Newman have uncovered more and more of the individual genetic malfunctions that cause cancer, teams of researchers have begun to tinker with those mutations, trying to reverse the chaos they cause. (The first big success in precision medicine was Gleevec, a drug that treats leukemias that are positive for a common structural rearrangement called the Philadelphia chromosome. Its launch in 2001 was revolutionary.) Today, there are eleven genes that can be targeted with hyperspecific cancer therapies, and at least

WARGO STUDIED BACTERIA IN 300 PATIENTS GETTING CHECKPOINT T H E R A P Y. T H E R E S U LT S , S H E S A Y S , W E R E “ N I G H T A N D D A Y.”

ease—happens when glitches in genes cause cells to grow out of control until they overtake the body, like a kudzu plant. Genes develop glitches all the time: There are roughly twenty thousand genes in the human body, any of which can get misspelled or chopped up. Bits can be inserted or deleted. Whole copies of genes can appear and disappear, or combine to form mutants. The circle plot Newman has shown me is not even the worst the body can do. He whips out another one, a snarl of lines and blocks and colors. This one would not make a good tattoo. “As a tumor becomes cancerous and grows, it can accumulate many thousands of genetic mutations. When we do whole genome sequencing, we see all of them,” New-

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thirty more being studied. At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, 30 to 40 percent of incoming patients now qualify for precision medicine studies. Charles Mullighan, a tall, serious Australian who also works at St. Jude, is perhaps the ideal person to illustrate how difficult it will be to cure cancer using precision medicine. After patients’ cancer cells are sequenced, and the wonky mutations identified, Mullighan’s lab replicates those mutations in mice, then calls St. Jude’s chemical library to track down molecules—some of them approved medicines from all over the world, others compounds that can illuminate the biology of tumors—to see if any might help. If Mullighan is lucky, one of the com-

pounds he finds will benefit the mice, and he’ll have the opportunity to test it in humans. Then he’ll hope there are no unexpected side effects, and that the cancer won’t develop resistance, which it often does when you futz with genetics. There are about twenty subtypes of the leukemia Mullighan studies, and that leukemia is one of a hundred different subtypes of cancer. This is the kind of precision required in precision cancer treatment—even if Mullighan succeeds in identifying a treatment that works as well as Gleevec, with the help of an entire, wellfunded hospital, it still will work for only a tiny proportion of patients. Cancer is not an ordinary disease. Cancer is the disease—a phenomenon that contains the whole of genetics and biology and human life in a single cell. It will take an army of researchers to defeat it. Luckily, we’ve got one. INTERLUDE

“I used to do this job out in L.A.,” says the attendant at the Hertz counter at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. “There, everyone is going on vacation. They’re going to the beach or Disneyland or Hollywood or wherever. “Because of MD Anderson, I see more cancer patients here. They’re so skinny. When they come through this counter, they’re leaning on someone’s arm. They can’t drive themselves. You think, there is no way this person will survive. And then they’re back in three weeks, and in six months, and a year. I’m sure I miss some, who don’t come through anymore because they’ve died. But the rest? They come back.”

CHECKPOINT INHIBITOR THERAPY

You have the power within you! On a bookshelf in Jim Allison’s office at MD

Anderson Cancer Center in Houston (and on the floor surrounding it) are so many awards that some still sit in the boxes they came in. The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award looks like the Winged Victory statue in the Louvre. The Breakthrough P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

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• 9:00 A.M. EST Philadelphia: Greg Simon, who ran Biden’s Moonshot, at a breakfast conference.

I L LU S T R AT I O N BY S I N E L A B

Prize in Life Sciences, whose benefactors include Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, and Mark Zuckerberg, came with $3 million. “I gotta tidy that up sometime,” Allison says. Allison has just returned to the office from back surgery that fused his L3, L4, and L5 vertebrae, which has slightly diminished his Texas rambunctiousness. Even on painkillers, though, he can explain the work that many of his contemporaries believe will earn him the Nobel Prize: He figured out how to turn the immune system against tumors. Allison is a basic scientist. He has a Ph.D.,

rather than an M.D., and works primarily with cells and molecules rather than patients. When T-cells, the most powerful “killer cells” in the immune system, became better understood in the late 1960s, Allison became fascinated with them. He wanted to know how it was possible that a cell roaming around your body knew to kill infected cells but not healthy ones. In the mid-1990s, both Allison’s lab and the lab of Jeffrey Bluestone at the University of Chicago noticed that a molecule called CTLA-4 acted as a brake on T-cells, preventing them from wildly attacking the body’s own cells, as they do in autoimmune diseases. Allison’s mother died of lymphoma when he was a child and he has since lost two uncles and a brother to the disease. “Every time I found something new about how the immune system works, I would think, I wonder how this works on cancer?” he says. When the scientific world discovered that CTLA-4 was a brake, Allison alone wondered if it might be important in cancer treatment. He launched an experiment to see if blocking CTLA-4 would allow the immune system to attack cancer tumors in mice. Not only did the mice’s tumors disappear, the mice were there@PopularMechanics

• 7:30 A.M. PST British Columbia: Immunotherapy pioneer James Allison prepares a symposium keynote.

after immune to cancer of the same type. Ipilimumab (“ipi” for short) was the name a small drug company called Medarex gave the compound it created to shut off CTLA-4 in humans. Early trials of the drug, designed just to show whether ipi was safe, succeeded so wildly that Bristol Myers Squibb bought Medarex for $2.4 billion. Ipilimumab (now marketed as Yervoy) became the first “checkpoint inhibitor”: It blocks one of the brakes, or checkpoints, the immune system has in place to prevent it from attacking healthy cells. Without the brakes the immune system can suddenly, incredibly, recognize cancer as the enemy.

• 11:00 A.M. PST San Francisco: Whiteboarding at Napster founder Sean Parker’s R&D operation.

“You see the picture of that woman over there?” Allison points over at his desk. Past his lumbar-support chair, the desk is covered in papers and awards and knickknacks and frames, including one containing a black card with the words “Never never never give up” printed on it. Finally, the photo reveals itself, on a little piece of blue card stock. “That’s the first patient I met,” Allison says. “She was about twenty-four years old. She had metastatic melanoma. It was in her brain, her lungs, her liver. She had failed everything. She had just graduated from college, just gotten married. They gave her a month.”

A Genetic Disaster This circular visualization shows real gene mutations found in 3,000 pediatric cancers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Genes with sequence mutations are labeled in blue; those with structural variations are in red; and those with too many or too few copies are in green. The ribbons between genes show where chromosomes have been cross-connected or rearranged.

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• 1:00 P.M. PST Palo Alto: Stanford’s Crystal Mackall is developing cancer-fighting cell machines.

The woman, Sharon Belvin, enrolled in a phase-two trial of ipilimumab at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where Allison worked at the time. Today, Belvin is thirty-five, cancerfree, and the mother of two children. When Allison won the Lasker prize, in 2015, the committee flew Belvin to New York City with her husband and her parents to see him receive it. “She picked me up and started squeezing me,” Allison says. “I walked back to my lab and thought, Wow, I cure mice of tumors and all they do is bite me.” He adds, dryly, “Of course, we gave them the tumors in the first place.” After ipi, Allison could have taken a break and waited for his Nobel, driving his Porsche Boxster with the license plate CTLA-4 around Houston and playing the occasional harmonica gig. (Allison, who grew up in rural Texas, has played since he was a teenager and once performed “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” onstage with Willie Nelson.) Instead, his focus has become one of two serious problems with immunotherapy: It only works for some people. So far, the beneficiaries of immune checkpoint therapy appear to be those with cancer that develops after repeated genetic mutations—metastatic melanoma, non-small-cell lung cancer, and bladder cancer, for example. These are cancers that often result from bad habits like smoking and sun exposure. But even within these types of cancer, immune checkpoint therapies improve long-term survival in only about 20 to 25 percent of patients. In the rest the treatment fails, and researchers have no idea why. Lately, Allison considers immune checkpoint therapy a “platform”—a menu of treatments that can be amended and com-

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• 2:00 P.M. CST Houston: A neurofeedback session at MD Anderson, designed to reduce nerve pain caused by chemotherapy.

bined to increase the percentage of people for whom it works. A newer drug called Keytruda that acts on a different immune checkpoint, PD-1, knocked former president Jimmy Carter’s metastatic melanoma into remission in 2015. Recent trials that blocked both PD-1 and CTLA-4 in combination improved longterm survival in 60 percent of melanoma patients. Now, doctors are combining checkpoint therapies with precision cancer drugs, or with radiation, or with chemotherapy. Allison refers to this as “one from column A, and

one from column B.” The thing about checkpoint inhibitor therapy that is so exciting—despite the circumscribed group of patients for whom it works, and despite sometimes mortal side effects from the immune system going buckwild once the brakes come off—is the length of time it can potentially give people. Before therapies that exploited the immune system, response rates were measured in a few extra months of life. Checkpoint inhibitor therapy helps extremely sick people live for years. So

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Houston: A melanoma tumor sample is processed for analysis.

• 9:00 A.M. CST Houston: Jennifer Wargo and team remove lymph nodes from a melanoma patient.

unchecked. And yet I’ve talked to thirty-five researchers and policymakers and visited seven cancer centers and I haven’t seen a shred of evidence that doctors who treat very sick people—and whose job it is, sometimes, to tell people that they will die—aren’t trying with their very souls to succeed at their jobs. “It’s just that it’s hard,” I say. The woman huffs. Someone more interesting is sitting on the other side of her. And that’s the end of that.

what if it doesn’t work for everyone? Every cancer patient you can add to the success pile is essentially cured. Jennifer Wargo is another researcher at MD Anderson who is trying to predict who will respond to checkpoint inhibitor therapy and who will not. Originally a nurse, Wargo got so interested in biology that she went back to school for a bachelor’s degree, then a medical degree, and then a surgical residency at Harvard. It was during her first faculty position, also at Harvard, around 2008, that she started to wonder how the microbiome—the bacteria that live in the human body, of which there are roughly 40 trillion in the average 155-pound man—might affect cancer treatment. Wargo was investigating the bacteria that lived near the site of pancreatic cancer— in and around the tumor. Could you target those bacteria with drugs and make the cancer recede more quickly? In the early 2010s, research about the microbiome in the human gut—the bacteria in humans’ stomachs and intestines that appear to affect immune function, gene expression, and mood, among other things—gained traction in journals. Before long, two separate researchers had shown that you could change a mouse’s response to immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy by giving him certain kinds of bacteria. Wargo added the microbiome to her slate of experiments. Along with her team, she collected gut microbiome samples from more than three hundred cancer patients who then went on to receive checkpoint inhibitors as treatment. The results were, Wargo says, “night and day.” People who had a higher diversity of gut bacteria had a stronger response to checkpoint inhibitor therapy. Now, Wargo is transplanting stool samples from patients into germ-free mice with melanoma, to see if she can predict whether the mice will mimic the treatment responses of the people whose bacteria they received. “Can we change the gut microbiome to enhance responses to therapy . . . or even prevent cancer altogether?” she says. “Ah god, that would be the holy grail, wouldn’t it?” she whispers, as if not to invite bad luck. “It’s gonna take a lot of work to get there, but I think the answer is gonna be yes.” Immunotherapies do have one other problem worth worrying about, one that underlies the most frustrating experience of having cancer. When a patient is diagnosed, the first therapy is still one of the standards: surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. Cut, burn, or

poison, as the doctors say. Doctors can’t use promising immunotherapies as first-line treatments yet because immunotherapies are still dangerous: No one knows what will happen long-term if you shut off the immune system’s brakes. Does a patient survive cancer just to develop another terrible disease, like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), in fifteen years?

@PopularMechanics

*Some names have been changed to protect patient privacy.

INTERLUDE

“Just to play devil’s advocate,” says a woman at a margarita bar and restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “Don’t you think the cure exists somewhere already and the medical industrial complex is hiding it? People stand to lose billions of dollars. Don’t you think they want to keep that money?” I have been talking to this woman for twenty minutes. She is familiar with cancer. She works with natural cures, is a big fan of neuroscience, and knows some of the prominent names in medical research. I tell her that the conspiracy theory she is referencing—that the government or pharmaceutical industry is hiding the cure for cancer—can’t be true. Of course it’s hard to believe that Richard Nixon initiated the war on cancer in 1971 and the disease still kills 595,690 people a year. And that the most brilliant minds of our time have turned HIV into a chronic disease but cancer continues relatively

CAR-T CELLS

Tiny machines On a shelf in Crystal Mackall’s office at

Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, catty-corner to a window that looks out on a lovely California scrub scape, is a teddy bear that once belonged to a boy named Sam.* Sam, who Mackall treated at the National Cancer Institute more than ten years ago, had Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer that usually affects children and grows in or around bones. Mackall is a pediatric oncologist with a dark blond bob and a wry, take-no-prisoners sense of humor. She has worked on cancer since the 1980s, so she has met a lot of very, very sick children. The way Mackall tells the story of Sam, like she’s taking a shot of foultasting medicine, you can see the distance she’s had to put between her emotions and her work. “We lost Sam. He was ten,” she says. “We gave him immunotherapy and it didn’t work.” With that, Mackall moves on

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in all patients, especially children, whose cancers generally do not have the vast numbers of mutations needed to attract the attention of a newly brake-free immune system. For a long, dark time, immunotherapists would try other sorts of techniques to get the immune system to respond in these patients, and the patients would die anyway, like Michael did. The treatments were toxic or they damaged the brain or they just didn’t work. The doctors would recommend hospice. Hospice. Hospice. And then all the research began to pay off. In August 2010, a retired correctional officer named Bill Ludwig walked into the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to try CAR-T CELLS EXPLAINED a new therapy developed by a researcher named Carl June. To make a CAR-T cell, doctors Ludwig had chronic lymphoremove some of a patient’s T-cells cytic leukemia (CLL), another using a process similar to dialysis. In cancer that affects B-cells. Mula lab, they use a gene-editing techtiple rounds of chemotherapy nique, such as infecting the T-cells had failed to cure it, and he with a modified virus, to add in a didn’t qualify for a bone marrow new receptor (A). This new receptor, called a chimeric antigen receptor, transplant. June’s idea, which or CAR, is like a key that matches a was so risky that the National very specific lock (B) on the surface Institutes of Health had turned of cancer cells. the same way they would a cell infected by a virus. down several grant applications When doctors return the mutant First, the T-cells release a chemical called perforin, to fund it, was the only option T-cells to the patient, they flow which makes a little hole in the cancer cell. Then the Ludwig had. June had only through the body, attach to the canT-cells release cytotoxins, which flow in through the enough money to try it in three cer’s lock, and start trying to kill it hole until the cancer cell dies. patients. Ludwig went first. To understand how June’s therapy works, to the story of a girl named Lisa, who is pic- cured. But then treatment stalled. “We have tured in a photo not far from the bear. Lisa made steady progress, by all accounts,” says consider the T-cells that Jim Allison found had the same illness as Sam around the Mackall. “But it’s been largely incremental. fascinating. They’re cells that kill other cells, same time, but her therapy did work. Lisa’s And there’ve been these plateaus that have but they don’t kill you because they have a built-in targeting mechanism. Each person story lasts more than a minute, with Mack- just driven us crazy.” all practically cheering at the end. “So she In those unfortunate few children who has millions of T-cells, and each one of those remained fertile and that’s her little boy!” relapsed or didn’t respond to the chemo, or T-cells matches a single virus, like a lock and she yells, gesturing toward Lisa’s photo. who got a different variety of cancer, like a key. If a virus enters the body, its own perMackall smiles the pained, confused smile Ewing’s sarcoma, there were few treatments sonal T-cell key will find and destroy it, then of someone who has inexplicably survived left to try. Mackall’s patients came to her copy and copy and copy itself until the virus a car crash. “You have your ups and your after having had surgery and then chemo- succumbs. “I liken it to a bloodhound,” says downs,” she says. therapy once, twice, three times. “You can Mackall. “What the marker says to the T-cell Overall, children’s cancer has been one just see, they’re beat up. They’re making it, is: Anything that has this thing on it, kill it.” Previously, researchers had created a fake of the great success stories in cancer treat- but all they do is get their treatments,” she ment. In the 1970s, dramatic advances in says. “They didn’t have enough energy to do key called a chimeric antigen receptor, or chemotherapy put most patients with cer- anything else.” And then, if they lasted long CAR, that matched a particular lock, CD19, on B-cells, which is where Ludwig’s leuketain types of leukemia (particularly acute enough, they got into a trial. lymphoblastic leukemia in B-cells, otherThere are several ways to turn the immune mia was. During the trial, Ludwig’s doctors wise known as B-ALL) into remission. Today, system against cancer. Checkpoint inhibitor removed as many of Ludwig’s T-cells as they 84 percent of children who get ALL can be therapy is one of them. But it doesn’t work could, and June’s team inserted the CAR

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Philadelphia: Before Biden appointed him, Simon himself was treated for leukemia three years ago at Sloan Kettering.

using a modified form of HIV, which can edit genes. Then they returned the T-cells to Ludwig. Ten days later, Ludwig started to have chills and fever, like he had the flu. He was so ill that doctors moved him to the intensive care unit. But then, less than a month later, he was in remission. The T-cells had located and demolished the cancer, the same way they would a virus. When case studies of the first three patients were published in scientific journals, mainstream media went crazy: “Cancer treated with HIV!” they shouted. But it was

CAR-T treatments. “A more sensitive test than just looking in the blood. And that was also negative for 83 percent of the patients.” An 83 percent cure rate in children who would otherwise die is a monumental achievement. If there is a moment where a culture hits on an idea that can cure a disease—vaccines, for example, or penicillin—we are in it. It is difficult to overstate this: Humans have been trying to create a cell therapy for cancer patients for generations. “People said: That can’t be done, You can’t make them from cancer patients, You can’t make them, You can’t get them, It’s too complicated,” says Crys-

a later study that showed that the furor was warranted: When the Penn team partnered with the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania to try CAR-T cell therapy against B-ALL in children, the cancer disappeared in twentyfour out of twenty-seven patients. Novartis was the drug company that partnered with the University of Pennsylvania to turn June’s treatment into a drug for the general public, and the company submitted results of all three required levels of tests to the Food and Drug Administration early this year. If the FDA approves the drug, any child who has B-ALL and has failed her first therapy can have her white blood cells removed, frozen, and shipped to Novartis’s processing facility in Morris Plains, New Jersey, where molecular engineers will insert the new “key” and send the T-cells back. The patient gets a one-time infusion, and there’s an 83 percent chance she will be cured. “We also do a second measure of remissions where we look to see if there’s any measurable disease at all,” says David Lebwohl, Novartis’s global program head for

tal Mackall. “But it’s happening.” Though Novartis couldn’t confirm an official release date, Mackall suspects the drug will become widely available this year. Cancer being cancer, of course, there are limitations: Until it clears further FDA hurdles, Novartis’s drug will be available only for children with B-ALL and not for any of the dozens of other types of cancers that affect children and adults. In solid tumors, the CAR-T cells aren’t strong enough to kill the whole thing, or they die before they finish the job. Worse, once attacked, some leukemia cells will remove their CD19 proteins and go back into hiding. “The thing about cancer is, it’s quite a foe,” Mackall says. “The minute you think you’ve got the one thing for it, it’ll outsmart you.” Slowly, though, the successes are mounting. At City of Hope National Medical Center just outside Los Angeles, Behnam Badie, an Iranian-born brain surgeon who has the kind of bedside manner you’d dream of if you ever required a brain surgeon, is developing a surgical device that can continuously infuse

@PopularMechanics

Los Alamos: Rain falls on the National Security Sciences Building.

CAR-T cells into the brain tumors of cancer patients while he operates. For a while, he was working with the California Institute of Technology to build a magnetic helmet that could move the cells to the correct places, but the project ran out of money. Meanwhile, Crystal Mackall is working on a backup target for the CAR-T cells, CD22, in case a child’s cancer resists the ones targeted to CD19. She is also trying to make the cells live longer. Working with similar but slightly different engineered cells, she has managed to get her therapy to stay alive and working for up to two years in patients with solid sarcomas. One of her patients has since gotten married and bought a farm. Another went on a volunteer trip to Africa. Ma ck a l l li kens genetically engineered cells to rudimentary machines. Over the next decade, she says, scientists will refine them until they can control where they go and what they do and when. “We’re going to be in a situation,” she says, “where a doctor can tell a patient to take pills to activate his cells one week and then rest them the next.” In fact, a biotech company based in San Diego called BioAtla has already developed conditionally active markers that could tell a T-cell to kill or not kill based on where it is in the body. Eventually, programmable cell machines could fight autoimmune diseases, or arthritis. They could be used to rebuild collagen in athletes’ knees. But, because such powerful new technology requires a ton of risk to attempt, none of this would have been developed without an adversary as vile as cancer to require it. “We treated forty-nine kids at the National Cancer Institute with refractory leukemia. Every single one of those kids had exhausted every other therapy available. If it weren’t for the CAR-T cells, they were gonna die,” Mackall says. Sixty percent of those children went into remission, and a sizable fraction of those appear to be cured. “You’re able to take the chance only in that situation, when people don’t have other options.” People will die waiting for CAR-T therapy to really, truly happen. In the United States, JUNE _ 2017

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• 12:00 P.M. PST San Francisco: Robert Schiemann, a software engineer at the Parker Institute.

• 9:30 A.M. MST Los Alamos: Behind leaded glass, robotic arms quality-test isotope production. The goal: Create actinium-225, an isotope that can be used in cancer drugs.

doctors aren’t permitted to experiment on patients who have other options, and it will take a long time for CAR-T to prove itself better than the treatments already available. But someone has to choose to take the first walk down the path to the future. In a final act that is equal parts self-preservation and sacrifice, that person is usually a cancer patient. And soon, more of them will be able to make the decision for themselves.

“What’re ya down here for?” asks an older gentleman at the bar of a tourist barbecue joint near my hotel in Memphis. I’m halfway through a plate of pickles and dry-rubbed ribs. I explain that I’ve spent all day at St. Jude. “God bless you,” he says. “I couldn’t do it.” The man is from Texas—he works in shipping or packing or something or other. The bartender, a bubbly twenty-threeyear-old, offers the gentleman another beer. “You know, I was treated at St. Jude. Diagnosed at ten. Cured at thirteen,” he says, beaming. “Was it awful?” I ask. “Getting cancer as a kid?” “Naw, I loved going to St. Jude. I remember I looked forward to school being over so I could go over to the hospital and get chemo. Your doctors are so happy to see you.” The bartender is studying to be a truck driver so he can visit California. He’s not sure if he’ll settle down there, but it seems nice. The man from Texas looks at the bartender hard for a good minute, says, “You’re a lucky man, son.”

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POSTMODERN RADIATION

Any other ideas? To get to the Los Alamos National Labora-

tory in New Mexico, you drive from Santa Fe through peach-parfait mesas and off into the sunset. Even on the public roads, there are checkpoints where security officers will ask to see your driver’s license. The deeper you go, the more intense the screening gets, until finally you end up in a place employees just call “behind the fence.” After the public roads but before “behind the fence,” are the hot cells: four-foot by threeand-a-half-foot boxes where employees use robot hands controlled by joysticks to process non-weapons-grade isotopes. The isotopes are made on another mesa, by a linear parti-

cle accelerator that shoots rare metals with proton beams. Just outside the hot cells, Eva Birnbaum, the isotope production facility’s program manager, asks me if I know what a decay chain is. She points in the direction of an expanded periodic table that, despite a year of college chemistry, means about as much to me as a list of shipbuilding supplies from the 1600s. Birnbaum launches into a primer on radiochemistry: Isotopes are chemical elements with too many or too few neutrons in their centers. Some of these are unstable and therefore release energy by shooting out various types of particles. Unstable isotopes are radioactive, and the particles they shoot out are known as ionizing radiation. As for what a decay chain is: When radioactive isotopes release radiation, they usually turn into another radioactive isotope, which releases radiation until it turns into another radioactive isotope, and so on, until it hits on something stable. The pattern by which a particular isotope morphs is its decay P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

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INTERLUDE

• 11:00 A.M. MST Los Alamos: Isotope expert Eva Birnbaum and team members David Reass and Adam Davis at the Isotope Production Facility, where radioactive chemicals used in medical scans are made.

MICROSOFT BELIEVES A.I. WILL DO A BETTER JOB OF PARSING PAPERS FOR INSIGHTS THAN PEOPLE CAN.

chain. Today, in addition to whatever goes on behind the fence, Los Alamos National Laboratory is the primary producer of certain isotopes whose decay chains make them useful for medical scans, such as PET scans and heart-imaging techniques. Scientists at Los Alamos deliver the parent isotope in a container called a cow. As the parent decays, doctors “milk” the daughter isotope off to image patients’ hearts. Decay chains present both an opportunity and a responsibility for the U.S. government. You can’t just throw decaying radioactive @PopularMechanics

isotopes into a landfill, so after the nuclear age and a half-century Cold War with the U.S.S.R., there are caches of radioactive uranium and plutonium isotopes sitting around gradually turning into other stuff. One of these caches is uranium-233, which was originally created for a reactor program and is currently stored at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Over the last fortysome years, it has been slowly turning into thorium-229. Thorium-229’s decay chain leads to actinium-225, which is of interest to can-

cer researchers for several reasons. For one thing, actinium-225’s decay chain goes on for several generations. It turns into francium-221, then astatine-217, then bismuth-213, then mostly polonium-213, then lead-209 before finally hitting a hard stop at bismuth-209, which is stable. In most of these generations, the radiation released consists of alpha particles, which can destroy cancer cells but have low tissue penetration—they leave the surrounding healthy cells mostly alone. Currently, all but one of the radioactive isotopes used in cancer treatment release beta radiation, which causes considerably more collateral damage. If a drug company could attach an atom of actinium-225 to a targeting system—like, say, the kind in CAR-T cells—the actinium-225 could continuously attack cancer for days at a time, like an artificial, radioactive version of the immune system. Newer chemotherapy drugs called antibody-drug conjugates already use this technique, directing chemotherapy agents that are too strong JUNE _ 2017

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to give intravenously precisely where they are needed. At least two of these, Kadcyla and Adcetris, have already been approved by the FDA (for HER2-positive breast cancer and Hodgkin’s lymphoma, respectively). The U.S. system of national laboratories is already in talks with drug companies about making antibody-based radioactive drugs a reality. They seem promising: In a paper released last July in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, one late-stage prostate cancer patient treated with three cycles of targeted actinium-225 at the University Hospital Heidelberg in Germany went into complete remission and another’s tumors disappeared from scans. But of course, there’s a problem: Now that the reactor program and the Cold War are both over, no one is making uranium-233 in the U.S. (or anywhere). And because it takes more than forty years for uranium-233 to turn into enough thorium-229 to be useful, it wouldn’t matter much even if they did. There are currently only about fifteen hundred to seventeen hundred millicuries of actinium-225 anywhere in the world, which would just treat one hundred to two hundred patients a year. Which brings us to the reason Los Alamos has gotten deeply involved in actinium-225 at all: They’re going to figure out how to make more from scratch.

his chin toward Los Alamos. “So he’s like a monster?” asks the second man. “Nah, they’re physical, like us, but they only have three chakras, so they’re not as balanced.” He nods, sagely. “Highly carnivorous.”

POLICY REFORM

Divided we fall Imagine cancer researchers as thousands of ships attempting to cross the Pacific, all with skills and tools that they have perfected

The Magic Isotope The appeal of actinium-225 as a cancer drug is in the alpha particles it releases. Alpha particles have such low tissue penetration that they can’t even pass through a sheet of paper, so in theory they could kill cancer cells without causing

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fourth decay can occur by two different routes, with each path releasing one alpha particle and one beta particle before reaching lead209. The small amount of stable bismuth-209 that remains at the end is excreted in the urine.

many side effects. If a drug company could attach a targeting mechanism to the actinium-225, the isotope would attack cancer cells with alpha particles as it decays into francium-221, astatine-217, and bismuth-213. The

INTERLUDE

lead-209

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A roughshod man with bloodshot eyes rolls a cigarette outside a coffee shop in Taos, New Mexico. I can’t be sure if he is the backpacker who was playing a flute at this table earlier or a new person. “You a reporter?” he asks. “Er, yeah. Just got off the phone with a drug company that thinks they can cure cancer.” “A drug for cancer already exists,” the man says. “More people need to be looking at marijuana. It can cure all kinds of sicknesses, but the thing is, the government doesn’t want people knowing about it.” A light breeze rustles the wind chimes. We are hiding from the sun under a pergola on the shop’s back porch. Another man attempts to come to my rescue: “But wasn’t Obama trying to change the rules about experimenting—” “Obama doesn’t want to change the rules because he’s not like us,” says the first man. “He’s got pharaoh DNA that they blend with lizard blood up in the mountains.” He inclines

in their home countries. Some have expert navigators. Others build the most watertight ships. If someone could combine the skills of the entire group, they could build a supership the likes of which has never been seen. Instead, they seem to communicate mostly by throwing paper airplanes at each other. “All you could do with governmentfunded academic research, in the age of paper, was share information in person, so you had these huge cancer meetings once a year where everybody holds their research until they get there,” says Greg Simon, the executive director of former vice president Joseph Biden’s Cancer Moonshot, an initiative launched by the Obama administration in 2016. “We haven’t changed it since.” The system of medical journals, subscriptions to which can cost thousands of

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I L LU S T R AT I O N BY S I N E L A B ; P H OTO G R A P H S F R O M L E F T: C H R I S TA A N F E L B E R , S T E P H E N A LVA R E Z

New York: Britta Weigelt and Jorge Reis-Filho use police forensics techniques to repair old tumor samples at Memorial Sloan Kettering so the samples can be genetically profiled.

dollars, are hardly the only baked-in obstacle to progress in cancer research. Clinical trials are still designed the same way they were fifty years ago. Funding, applied for and received in crazed round-robins of grant-writing, tends to reward low-risk experiments. There’s secrecy and competition and slowness and inherent bureaucracy. The system wasn’t created to be inefficient, but now that it is, it is intractably so. Just this week, Simon has flown all over the country trying to bring bullheaded institutions with impossibly huge data troves into a single kumbaya circle of progress. This morning, he gave a speech at the 28th Annual Cancer Progress Conference. Now he is entertaining a journalist at a sushi lunch in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel. By rights, he should be asleep at the table with his face on a plate. Instead, he orders plain fish, no rice, in a disarming Southern accent. (Simon is from Arkansas.) When Simon was twenty-eight, he played drums in a rock band called the Great Zambini Brothers Band. Then he decided to do something with his life, “quit the band, waited tables, went to law school, got a job, and hated it,” he says. A friend found him work in Washington and by forty-one, Simon was working in the White House as an aide to then vice president Al Gore. Then he cofounded a Washington think tank called

@PopularMechanics

FasterCures. Then he worked as senior vice president for patient engagement at Pfizer. If anyone on earth knows how to get from here to there, Simon is the guy. Since he left the White House (again) in January, Simon and his team have begun developing, out of a WeWork space, a spinoff of the Cancer Moonshot they’re calling the Biden Cancer Initiative. It will be its own separate nonprofit, apart from government or charity. Its goal: Fix policy and make connections so that those with the expertise to cure cancer have a clear path to the finish line. To achieve such a feat, Simon will work against a scientific version of the tragedy of the commons—an economic theory in which each person, acting in his own best interest, screws up the whole for everyone else. Convincing people and institutions to act against their own best interest will be much like governing, which is to say, slow and impossible. And yet it’s hard not to believe in Biden, a man who helped run the most powerful country in the world at the same time he lost his own son to brain cancer. “We won’t be funding research. The world doesn’t need another foundation with money,” says Simon. “What it needs is someone like Biden, who’s willing to knock heads together . . .” He pauses. “Or cajole heads together, to make the changes that every-

Memphis: John Easton, director of the Computational Biology Genomics Lab at St. Jude.

one has an excuse not to do: I wanna make money, I want tenure, I wanna get published, I want this, I want that.” The fragmentation in medical research— the lone ships out on the ocean—doesn’t exist as much in other sciences, says Simon, because scientists in other disciplines have no choice but to share equipment: telescopes or seismology sensors or space shuttles. Industries that have managed to work together have sent humans to the moon. “We don’t even know how much progress we could make in our cancer enterprise because we’ve never had it up and running at a level that would be optimal,” he says. Simon himself had cancer. Three years ago. It was CLL. “I found it through a physical,” he says. “I never had any of the raging symptoms, like bleeding. During the chemo I didn’t notice it at all. Zero side effects. I thought I’d lose my hair so I grew a beard. But I didn’t.” INTERLUDE

“You are writing. Are you writer?” asks the flight attendant on Delta Flight 3866 from LaGuardia to Memphis in a thick Eastern European accent. It’s a late flight— post-work—and many of the passengers are asleep. My reading light is one of just three that are illuminated. “I had cancer,” she says. “Breast cancer. I still have no boobs. After my surgery, they put in a balloon that they inflate step by step. After a few weeks I say to the doctor, ‘I am still as flat as pancake!’ And he says, ‘Ah, there must be a hole.’” The flight is turbulent, so the flight attendant perches on the arm of the seat in front of me. “I go home after surgery and I have a chill, so I take my medication—they give you such powerful medication—and I sleep.

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New York: Grad student Madeline Dorso in a nanomaterials lab at Sloan.

SILICON VALLEY

The brain Through the floor-to-ceiling windows

of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in San Francisco are the windswept headlands of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Pacific Ocean, and a frothy coral rotunda called the Palace of Fine Arts. “Would you like a water?” asks the center’s publicist when I visit. “Still or sparkling?” Of all the cancer centers I visited, the Parker Institute seemed the most like the future of medicine. The office, a few doors from Lucasfilm, has one of those pristine, snack-filled tech startup kitchens with glass jars and a microwave that pulls out like an oven. On a table in the reception area sits a set of glittery silver pamphlets the size of small yearbooks explaining the mission. The man behind the Parker Institute

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New York: Dan Heller, a researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, whose lab built this custom supercontinuum laser infrared plate reader, is developing an implantable cancer sensor made of nanocarbon. When Heller implanted a prototype sensor into a mouse, he could determine whether it had ovarian cancer just by shining an infrared light on it. Heller hopes to be able to use the technology in women’s IUDs within two to three years.

F R O M L E F T: C H R I S TA A N F E L B E R (2) , W H I T N E Y C U R T I S

Thank god my friend came over and said I had to take a shower, because I took off the bandages and it was as red as this!” She points to the crimson bit of her Delta pin. The flight attendant, diagnosed with stage 3a breast cancer, had developed a blood infection, and had to go to the hospital for intravenous antibiotics. After that, she had eight rounds of chemotherapy and thirtythree of radiation. “There was so much pain, but I had to walk through the pain. I made myself,” she says. “I wrote ‘I love you’ on my mirror in lipstick. When you’re single and you have cancer and you look at yourself, you need to read that. What else is there to do?”

is serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and intermittent recipient of richly deserved tabloid jabs. Parker doesn’t have the most sterling humanitarian reputation: In the movie The Social Network, Justin Timberlake portrayed him as a narcissistic party boy who screws over one of Facebook’s cofounders and is arrested for cocaine possession. Parker was fined $2.5 million by the California Coastal Commission for building the set of his $10 million Lord of the Rings–themed wedding (complete with fake ruins, waterfalls, and a cottage) in an ecologically sensitive area. And yet, a little over a year ago, the same man donated $250 million to fund the study of immunotherapy at a lavish backyard gala featuring performances by John Legend, Lady Gaga, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The public story about Parker’s philanthropic effort is that it stemmed from the death of his close friend, film producer Laura Ziskin, to recurrent breast cancer. According to Jeff Bluestone, the Parker Institute’s president and CEO (and, incidentally, the researcher who characterized CTLA-4 around the same time as Jim Allison), Parker was interested in cancer long before he met Ziskin. “Sean’s been interested in the immune system for much of his life, because he’s got asthma, and he’s had a serious immunological imbalance,” he says, sitting at a polished raw-wood conference table half again as long as a normal conference table. (Parker is extremely allergic to peanuts.) “As long ago as 2004, before Laura got sick again, he thought the immune system was going to be the answer. He deeply understands a lot of the science. We joke, is he a second-year graduate student? A thirdyear postdoc? Should he just go get a Ph.D.?” Parker is not the first very wealthy person who has used his money to combat disease. Several people at the Institute took care to explain how they were different from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a science-funding organization founded by the reclusive airman in 1953. A more influential predecessor might be Michael Milken, the Wall Street financier who founded a charity dedicated to family medicine with his brother Lowell in 1982 that supported, among other things, the research that led to Gleevec, the precision-medicine drug. Milken’s funds also supported Jim Allison during an important time in his pre-checkpoint-inhibitor-therapy research when his National Institutes of Health grant had briefly lapsed. In 2003,

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• 11:00 A.M. CST St. Louis: St. Jude researchers Jinghui Zhang and Charles Mullighan at Children’s Oncology Group.

Milken cofounded FasterCures with Greg Simon with the goal of increasing the pace of cures to “all serious diseases.” Some would argue that technology entrepreneurs are exactly the people who should be constructing the immaculate future of cancer research conceived by people like Joe Biden and Greg Simon. For one thing, tech entrepreneurs have already disrupted everything else. They understand the fastmoving, coin-chasing world of biotech development. Parker himself has already succeeded at convincing hardheaded institutions to work together. While he was an early investor and board member in the music streaming service Spotify, he negotiated with Universal and Warner to convince them to participate. The Parker Institute’s fundamental accomplishment thus far has been to do exactly this in cancer research. From the beginning, six academic research institutions signed on to work together under the Parker Institute’s umbrella: Memorial Sloan Kettering; MD Anderson; Penn Medicine; Stanford Medicine; University of California, Los Angeles; and University of California, San Francisco. The six, along with independent investigators at a few other research institutions, agree to share research data and work together on goals and projects without getting hung up on institutional constraints, such as intellectual property. In return, they get two things: money, which every cancer researcher needs; and guidance, which is equally pressing but not necessarily as obvious. “To become a leader in this field, to be a Carl June or a Jim Allison, you usually have to be a bit—not myopic, but a little blind,” says Fred Ramsdell, the Parker Institute’s vice president of research. This is common in science. To understand and work on a com@PopularMechanics

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Redmond, Washington: Microsoft’s Hoifung Poon applies big data to cancer research.

• 2:00 P.M. CST Memphis: St. Jude computational biologists Scott Newman (left) and Xin Zhou demonstrate ProteinPaint, a tool to help researchers visualize genetic mutations from thousands of patients.

plicated concept, a researcher has to shut out the noise of everything except his exact area of expertise. Someone who works on checkpoint inhibitor therapies in melanoma, for example, might not see much use in reading about ovarian cancer detectors made out of nanocarbon—until suddenly it’s the exact bridge to his own next level of progress. “If a person knows nothing about nanoparticles, I can step in and say, Hey, this nanoparticle thing might be exactly what you need,” says Ramsdell. “I spend a

researchers and drug companies, or engineering companies, or the U.S. Patent Office. It doesn’t really matter, so long as the arrangement furthers knowledge. Up the coast in Seattle, another tech company is attempting to help cancer researchers cross entrenched divides. Microsoft’s Project Hanover has already made considerable progress on creating a combined, searchable repository of the scientific news released every month by cancer researchers all over the world. The idea is

lot of time trying to develop relationships between people who might not always do so on their own.” Some of those relationships are between researchers themselves. Others are between M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s, or between

that artificial intelligence will do a better job of parsing the vast landscape of scientific papers (those paper airplanes flying between ships) for insights. Rather than fallible humans trying to catch every valuable new detail as papers fly out of scientific clearinghouses, the system will do it for them, considering every possible combination of targeted drugs and genetic interactions in less time and more detail than it would take a team of educated humans. Microsoft calls this the reasoning bottleneck. In a way, they’re tackling it the same way the Parker Institute is. The same way the human body does: They’re adding a brain.

ONE DAY, THE MIRACLES WON’T BE MIRACLES AT ALL. THEY’LL JUST BE WHAT HAPPENS. 88

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INTERLUDE

San Francisco. It’s late. At the restaurant, there is a man seated at the chef’s table when I arrive, drinking a balloon glass of red wine. “How’s the food?” the man asks after a good half hour. It is delicious—a buttery bucatini with lamb ragu and bread crumbs.

The man has lived down the street from this restaurant for years. He’s a former tech entrepreneur who is now a project manager for a retail company. I tell him what I am writing. “That’s a hell of a coincidence,” the man says. “I just flew home from watching my father die of cancer.” “Jesus, I’m sorry.” “He’s still there. With my sister. He told me he was tired of feeling like he was on death watch. He told me I should just go. So I went.” He sips his wine.

Hope What you see after a person has been debilitated by cancer and lived are the scars. The missing jaw or breast. The colostomy bag. Hair that has grown back curly or coarse or gray in patches. Tattoos that mark the paths of radiation beams. The disease that contains all of human biology leaves no one unchanged. There is before cancer, and then there is after. Above Patrick Garvey’s desk, on the top shelf of a bookcase, sits a stack of brown resin jawbones—dozens of them, mostly the mandible, or bottom jaw, which is commonly replaced with a bit of lower leg bone when it has to be removed because it is shot through with cancer. Every jawbone above Garvey’s desk is a relic from a surgery he has performed at MD Anderson over the course

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of three years—more than two hundred patients whose faces are forever altered by their interaction with the disease. Later today, Garvey will operate on a man with a more difficult case—a large tumor in the maxilla, or top jaw—as part of two surgical teams. The first team will remove the tumor and most of the bone, including the man’s eye, and then Garvey’s team will remove a piece of the man’s fibula along with its blood supply and use it to reconstruct the man’s face. “We’ll be here into the night,” Garvey says. This type of surgery is called microvascular reconstruction surgery. It drastically improves life for patients who would otherwise, like late film critic Roger Ebert, no longer be able to eat or talk without support. When it fails, however, it fails impressively: The transferred bone must have the correct

blood supply or the body will simply reabsorb it, leaving only the bare metal scaffold the doctor implanted. Human bone is far better suited to the long-term mechanics of chewing and talking than metal is, and a plate without bone to protect it will eventually snap, like a paper clip bent back and forth over and over. Garvey has had to reconstruct jaws that have failed before, leaving patients disfigured and unable to chew properly. For a patient who has already undergone treatment for cancer, the impact of having to have multiple reconstructive face surgeries is harrowing. To make the surgery simpler, Garvey’s team uses 3D-printed cutting guides and robotically milled metal plates to create the most precise reconstruction possible. This is how the brown resin jawbone graveyard above his desk got started. After a patient has a CT scan, a company called Materialise in Plymouth, Michigan, prints the jaw models as well as bolt-on cutting guides that show the surgeons exactly where to saw and reconnect fibula bones to match the @PopularMechanics

Norwalk, Connecticut: A patient uses the DigniCap at Smilow Family Breast Health Center.

person’s original bone structure. Another company, in New York, creates a metal scaffold that is meticulously bent so as to re-create the original face angles, so MD Anderson’s surgeons don’t have to bend an off-the-shelf part into position during the reconstruction. By a l l a ccount s, using 3D-printed guides to reconstruct a human face is an advance at the very edge of cancer medicine, and yet it is still disheartening to look at the statistics. Last year, another 1.7 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer, and almost six hundred thousand died. Since 2004, according to the latest data available, the overall decline in death rates has been just 1.8 percent in men and 1.4 percent in women year over year. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer, which most doctors consider the worst of the worst, sits stubbornly at just 8.2 percent. Perhaps the cure for cancer seems so elusive because it’s a failure of semantics. “Curing cancer” is impossible, and the statistics reflect that: Cancer kills more Americans every two years than those who died in every war we’ve ever fought. However, helping some cancer patients, the luckiest of the unlucky, live in relative normalcy for years is not just possible. It is happening. The fiveyear overall cancer survival rate is up from 50 percent in 1975 to 67 percent today. For melanoma, it’s 91.7 percent. For prostate cancer, it’s 98.6. It will take time for the most promising treatments to trickle down to everyone they might be able to help, but in the meantime, the march continues. What this has to do with Patrick Garvey is that, even subtly, using 3D-cutting guides to improve plastic surgery shifts the focus of cancer treatment from emergency battlefield triage to matters of aesthetics and psychology that matter months and years down the line. Without saying it, exactly, the field of cancer treatment is acknowledging that cancer could one day become a survivable disease—that even a stage four metastatic cancer patient could survive long enough for normalcy to matter. There are others on the front lines: At hospitals across the country, women with

breast cancer can wear a scalp-cooling system called DigniCap during chemotherapy treatments to reduce the likelihood of hair loss. At MD Anderson, a neuroscientist retrains patients’ brains to improve altered

nerve sensation caused by chemotherapy. St. Jude hired a psychologist to help teen cancer patients plan to save their eggs or sperm, in case their treatments render them infertile and they want to have a family in the future. Future. A tricky word for a cancer patient. Who gets to have one is still a function of blind fortune. But all these ideas are starting to come together, and progress is suddenly accelerating. We are at what Crystal Mackall calls “the end of the beginning,” and the hope is that one day soon, the miracles will no longer be miracles. They will just be what happens. Until then, we pin our hopes on the incremental or unpredictable improvements—the half measures, the better outcomes. It will always be true that once a person has had that most frightening of conversations with chance, life will be split into two parts—the time before cancer, and the time after it. But for a fortunate few, perhaps the second part can be as good, and even as rich and wonderful and as great as the first. JUNE _ 2017

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F Oracle Team USA’s boat, USA 17, is removed from the water by crane after a practice in Bermuda.

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graeme spence didn’t have time to contemplate why, exactly, he had just fallen off his very fast boat. He hadn’t been able to study the failures that had launched him into Bermuda’s Great Sound on an otherwise routine training day in February, his hands still stretching desperately for the hold ripped out of his reach. He had a deep understanding of the gravity of his situation, but not the sort of understanding that allows for remedy. Spence was the first man to go over the front of the sailing vessel USA 17, Oracle Team USA’s entry in this summer’s edition of the America’s Cup, less a boat than a collection of knives racing over the water. Whether Spence would also become the first man to survive the trip under 17 wasn’t really up to him. “By the time I realized I wasn’t in the right place at the right time...” he says. Calling 17 a sailboat is like calling the stealth bomber a plane. It’s not inaccurate, but the picture it makes is incomplete. Waning are the days of billowing spinnakers and yachtsmen in striped ties and blue blazers. Today’s boats are anti-romantics. They are stripped-down engineering solutions to hydrodynamic problems, and they’re crewed by athletes better judged by their strength and reaction times than their readings of the wind. Not much can keep up with a modern racing yacht, and that sometimes includes the men who sail them. 17 is that sinister-looking class of boat known as a foiling catamaran. It has twin carbon-fiber hulls, sleek and black, connected by a pair of beams with fairings that look like spoilers. There is no teak in sight. There is, however, a futuristicseeming pod that serves as its spine, supporting the towering wing it has in place of a sail. Never mind a sheet of canvas flapping in the breeze; 17 is driven by a stiff, laser-precise assembly of Nomex, carbon-fiber, and Clysar. That wing is so efficient, and the boat is so light—

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Three months until the race: Sailors from Team USA exit the wing shed, where 17’s massive “sail” is stored.

fifty-three hundred pounds, including its hulking six-man crew—it floats on the surface of the water only at rest, which is almost physically impossible for it to take. At speed, it has no draft. 17 flies, riding sometimes several feet above the waves on top of four thin foils. Usually, only one of the two larger foils at the front (called daggerboards or L-foils, because of their distinctive shape) is in the water. The other is raised clear to reduce drag. The smaller two at the back (rudders with T-foils) are almost always both in the L-FOIL: Or daggerboard, a carbon-fiber blade attached to the boat’s hulls, which allows it to fly above the water.

water, unless something has gone wrong. A lot of things had gone wrong when Spence went overboard. After, Oracle Team USA’s forensics team would analyze the gut-churning moment using their continuous streams of onboard data and camera footage. “I hope we never see that again,” Christoph Erbelding, a German aeronautics expert and the boat’s wing designer, says today. “Falling off the front is really bad.” Like accident investigators, the team reconstructed the “cascade of events” GRAEME SPENCE: A lifelong sailor and a grinder on Team USA. He narrowly escaped injury after falling off 17 during a practice in February.

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ers of less ruthlessly efficient days. They provided the sun-bleached backdrop for 17’s striking black mass. After being escorted past the breakwater, the boat’s Australian skipper, Jimmy Spithill—he became a licensed pilot to help him better contend with this new breed of vessel—took one of the distinctive red wheels. It has several twist grips, designed with help from BMW, to control the height and attitude of the L-foils. A stick had also been tried, but it proved too tough to hold in the wind and chop. Sometimes old sailing technology is the right technology, and even the most modern ships are best steered with wheels. Spence was one of the four grinders on board. With their enormous arms— Spence, also an Australian, is built like a rugby player—the grinders spin winches “like hamsters on a wheel,” he says, to generate hydraulic pressure. That pressurized oil provides the energy to do things like move the daggerboards or shape the wing. The boat buffeted across the sound, its crew trying to divine the secrets of their new charge. Just before Spence fell, Spithill was struggling to reduce the daggerboard’s angle of attack. It was pitched like an aileron at takeoff so that the boat could take its version of flight. This time, there wasn’t enough pressure in the hydraulic system for Spithill to level the daggerboard after he reached his desired altitude. He couldn’t flatten things out. Either the system wasn’t efficient enough or the grinders had not been grinding that led to Spence’s slipping under a machine that might hit an incredible fifty knots. (The Swiss winner of the 2007 America’s Cup, the more traditional single-hulled Alinghi, topped out at about 15 knots.) Sailors who fall over the front of a foiling catamaran have the significant misfortune of finding themselves in the path of its blade-sharp foils. Together, 17’s boards make for just fifty square feet of wetted surface. But when you just have to hope that none of them hits you, “that’s a lot of real estate in the WINCH: A hand crank that powers accessory motors.

@PopularMechanics

water,” Erbelding says. In 2015, Franck Cammas, a veteran America’s Cup skipper, went over the side of his smaller, slower foiling catamaran during a training sail and was struck by one of the rudders. His right foot was nearly severed. The front-falling Spence would have to contend with the daggerboard, too. The boat had been in the water for only a few days, its crew just getting to know it. They had watched it get pulled out of its boat shed, shining in the sun, and craned into place at Bermuda’s historic Royal Naval Dockyard. The wing is kept in its own pristine hangar, and it too needed the crane to be mounted into place. Old stone warehouses, former ruins made new again, were the only nearby remind-

Though high-tech, 17 still requires brute force to sail.

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enough, or both. The daggerboard stayed dialed back. Which meant the boat continued to climb until it exited the water, foils and all. It went airborne. Although 17 can seem as much plane as boat, full flight is, in the words of Andrew Campbell, another sailor on board that day, “very momentary.” Water provides much more lift than air, and 17’s daggerboards are sufficient to steady it when submerged. In the sky, not so much. The boat crashed back into the water. 17’s speed never makes a greater impression, particularly to its occupants, than when it hits something. “Man, you understand really quick how fast you’re going,” Campbell says. He clattered into a crewmate and was happy for his helmet. Spence, who had been bounding across the net stretched between the hulls, was tossed forward into the sea. He splashed into the crystal-blue water between 17’s leeward hull and its central pod. The two beams loomed above him. The daggerboard knifed just below him. Then the rudder somehow did as well. Spence popped out of the froth behind the boat, looking as though he had seen something he would never forget. Unlike Franck Cammas, he still had his four appendages fully attached. Like 17, he is also still given to fly.

Sailors remove salt from the hulls after every practice.

May to determine who will compete in the best-of-thirteen final against the Americans this month. Most of the time, the defender and the challengers agree on the class and size of the yachts they are going to race. (Usu-

THE BEST SAILORS IN THE WORLD WERE STRUGGLING TO HARNESS THE FEARSOME CAPABILITIES OF THEIR BOATS.

the america’s cup is the oldest trophy in international sports. The “Auld Mug” is an elaborate silver ewer that was first won in 1851 by the schooner America in a race around the Isle of Wight. The syndicate that owned America named the trophy after its winning ship and wrote a set of rules called the Deed of Gift, meant to ensure that the America’s Cup remained an object of perpetual pursuit by sailors in fast boats. This year’s edition will mark the thirty-fifth time the defender of the title has been raced by a challenger. Oracle Team USA—which has been funded by Oracle founder Larry Ellison since 2000 and represents the Golden Gate Yacht Club—is the current holder of the trophy. Rivals from New Zealand, Sweden, Japan, Britain, and France began racing against each other in late

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ally races must take place within ten months of an accepted challenge.) This year, all six boats have identical fifty-foot hulls, and the wings are all the same size and shape—only the foils, fairings, and hydraulic and electric control systems differ. Their specifics are closely guarded secrets, but from any sort of distance, the 2017 boats are indistinguishable from one another. Three or four of them might take to the sound for practice at the same time, and were it not for the flags on their wings, they could be confused for a colony of bats, identical down to their alien midflight corrections. On less fair-minded occasions when no such class agreement can be reached, the competition reverts to the parameters outlined in the Deed of Gift: Yachts no more than ninety feet long and ninety feet wide shall race in salt water. That’s what happened in 2010, when it was decided that the Alinghi’s Swiss defenders would face the Golden Gate Yacht Club, with each team racing whatever sort of sailboat it wanted. It just couldn’t be longer

or wider than ninety feet. Ellison, who had already mounted two unsuccessful challenges, also made a judgment of his own: This time, he was going to win. For that race, he financed what remains one of the most ambitious boats ever built, the sort of miracle that comes when bored billionaires decide to do something insane. The Deed of Gift was written at a time when only the size of the boat mattered, because it’s always been held that the bigger the boat, the faster it sails. But instructing modern boat designers that they need only confine themselves to a square that measures ninety feet by ninety feet—and giving them a budget far more limitless—made possible some new kind of monster. All of Ellison’s boats are named 17. The 2010 iteration was a massive trimaran with a wing instead of a sail. That wing happened to be the single largest one ever constructed, for plane or ship. Topping out at 223 feet, the Golden Gate Yacht Club’s entry could not sail under its namesake bridge. The Swiss showed up for the race with a catamaran, because multihulls are faster than bottom-heavy monohull yachts. (The game, although now taken to extremes, has always been about increasing lift and reducing drag.) Regrettably for the Swiss, they also showed up with an old-fashioned sail.

for a sport that prides itself on its heritage, nothing would ever be the same. Three years later, the best sailors in the world still struggled to harness the fearP O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

I L LU S T R AT I O N BY A L E X PA N G

some capabilities of their boats. The protocol for the 2013 America’s Cup mandated that seventy-two-foot winged catamarans would face off in Ellison’s home port of San Francisco. They were foiled, but design and race rules were written with the expectation that the boats would stay boats—a kind of self-imposed governor meant to restore sanity to the proceedings. Ian Burns, Oracle Team USA’s director of performance, helped write those guidelines. “We put in a bunch of rules that we thought would make it relatively impossible to fly,” he says. Team New Zealand had other ideas. Sailing has always been a sport won on its edges. Sometimes that edge is gained during the ingenuity race that precedes the actual competition. More often it’s found by the brave pioneers charged with sailing these unpredictable machines. In 2013, the Kiwis looked at their boat, and they looked at the rules that bound them, and they still found a way to fly. Like those who fought to conquer the skies before them, the first generation of flying sailors suffered for their progress. Winged multihulled boats are fast, but their lack of a keel makes them easy to tip. Spithill pitch-poled that year’s 17 during its early trials, heavily damaging it after only eight days on the water. The Swedish team’s entry also capsized, leading to the death of a crew member. But the Kiwis remained committed, and the hosts soon found themselves behind in the best-of-seventeen final eight heats to one. At first they could only watch as their rivals flew downwind— even through jibes, when a boat turns away from the wind instead of into it and speed drops considerably. Oracle Team USA spied and studied and practiced, trying to crack the Kiwi code. “Until you really get pushed by the best, that’s what raises the development curve,” Spithill says. The Americans eventually found their downwind wings, and they also kept aloft during jibes. Then, just when one more loss would have cost them the trophy, they managed to do the unthinkable: They flew upwind, too. AULD MUG: The actual “cup” awarded to the winner of the America’s Cup since the race’s founding in 1851.

@PopularMechanics

HOW IT WORKS During races Team USA’s grinders tuck into 17’s hollow hulls to spin winches, which provide the hydraulic power to raise and lower the L-foils, shown above. Though 17 has two L-foils (one on each hull) it usually flies on only one, with the other raised into the boat to minimize drag. Rules state both L-foils may be lowered on occasion for thirty seconds at a time, for stability in jibes and tacks.

Only foiling tacks defied them. They won eight straight races to come back and retain the cup, gliding around the course at over thirty knots, stunning Team New Zealand and the wider sailing community. Grant Simmer, Oracle Team USA’s chief operating officer then and now, still marvels at the memory. “We didn’t go into the Cup thinking we were going to foil upwind, no way,” he says. “Since then, we just foil everywhere.” Including tacks? He nods. “We can do a dry race now,” he AMERICA: The namesake and first winner of the America’s Cup, circa 1851, was a schooner owned by the New York Yacht Club. Its top speed was about 11 knots.

says. As in, the hulls never touch the water. This year’s 17 is still a boat, because it can float. But for the first time in sailing’s long history, it will be a mistake if it does.

after decades of incremental change—after it took 2007’s Alinghi far longer than a century to grind out what would have amounted to a four-knot advantage over 1851’s America—it has taken only the last ten years to fly more than three times as fast. What was considered the height of racing design only a decade ago is now almost laughably obsolete. “Cleopatra going down the Nile was going roughly the same speed using roughly the same technology,” JUNE _ 2017

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When 17 takes full flight, its dagger­ board (black) and rudders (red) are in full view.

Team USA Coach Philippe Presti reviews film of practice at the team’s facility in Bermuda.

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I L LU S T R AT I O N BY T. M . D E T W I L E R

Ian Burns says. “You look at where we’ve come since 2007, it’s bigger than a revolution.” Remember the bigger the boat, the faster it is? “That law’s been completely broken,” he says. This year’s fifty-foot entries would whip the seventy-twofooters from 2013. Nobody knows what’s possible for a boat that’s powered by muscle and wind anymore. As it waits in its shed for another experimental run, today’s 17 remains an enigma even to the people who made it. Builder Mark Turner puts its number of custom parts in the high hundreds. Because they’re too expensive to test for failure—a set of daggerboards costs about $300,000 and takes eight weeks to make in distant New Zealand— each component harbors its own set of tiny mysteries. “You’re sort of on the edge the whole time,” Turner says. That’s why 17’s designers and builders often refer to it as a “thing” rather than a “boat,” as though they won’t know what it can do until it does it. “It’s a pretty crazy thing, actually,” Erbelding says, looking at drawings of his dreams. Asked what 17’s top speed might be, the genial German smiles and shakes his head. “I can’t tell you,” he says. “We don’t know.” By this past March, 17’s crew had pushed well beyond the envelope suggested by pre-build simulations, and they still had nearly three more months to master sailing it. They reported to Team USA’s sprawling base like soldiers, usually starting their twelve-hour days in their top-end gym, complete with a boxing ring and big plastic buckets for when they throw up. Then they get on their safety gear, looking like fighter pilots who also plan on taking a dip, sailing the boat as often as six times a week, chased across the sound by opposition spies with 1,000hp motors, their wakes like vapor trails on the water. Each day the crew pushes a little faster, a little farther, waiting for frantic calls from someone like Erbelding, monitoring wing loads on his laptop back on shore. The association with Oracle comes in especially handy there. So far, everything’s held up with the exception of a single daggerboard that couldn’t take the strain. Speed normally compromises a boat’s ability to turn, but 17 has proved @PopularMechanics

nimble. Foiling tacks, the most elusive of goals only four years ago, still aren’t easy—they require a precisely choreographed dance between the six men on board and their boat—but they are closer to routine. Watching 17 tear across the sound is like watching a rocket that hasn’t quite hit escape velocity but will. It doesn’t whistle past. It screams. On increasing occasion, the boat moves so fast through the water that it effectively begins boiling it, an unlikely seeming phenomenon called cavitation. “We’ve come up against a different kind of wall,” Andrew Campbell says. When the foils slice through the water—and thankfully not through Graeme Spence—the pressure on top of them can drop so much the water starts to bubble, the way soda starts to fizz when the cap is taken off. But the bubbles aren’t air. They’re steam, which leads to crippling drag and loss of lift. Although 17’s relationship with the ocean is minimal, how to stop cooking it has become one of Team USA’s more otherworldly concerns. Making the foils smaller isn’t really an option. “As soon as you wipe out once, it’s not worth that extra bit of speed,” Campbell says. Unlike traditional yachts, foiling catamarans aren’t meant to lean in the wind, which is one of the harder adjustments to make in watching them. Much more than a 15-degree swing off vertical usually spells disaster. In ideal conditions, these boats stand bolt upright, leaving them looking even more imperious than they can already seem. It takes time to understand that the weakness of 17, and so the even greater possibility of it, is under the surface. Maybe the foils should have slots like

an airplane’s wing—like the wing that powers 17—widest at takeoff and made slender in flight. Maybe the shape of the L-foil is wrong—it’s really the only shape that’s been tried—and an O-foil or an F-foil or a W-foil will prove superior. Maybe the algorithms that are hunting through bottomless files of telemetry data will stumble upon some speed equation that the human brain can’t parse. Maybe the control systems, much finer than they were only a few years ago, will be made better still, allowing for some small adjustment that opens a door no one even knows exists. Maybe the sailors themselves will wake up in the night and realize that if they only did this, they could fly even higher.

THE BOAT ISN’T BEAUTIFUL. IT’S MORE LIKELY TO KILL A MAN THAN ROCK HIM TO SLEEP. BUT WHEN IT SAILS, IT SCREAMS.

CAVITATION: When changes in pressure around a fastmoving foil cause the water around it to boil.

Jimmy Spithill smiles, thinking about the possibilities. “I can’t wait for my kids to be giving me shit in ten years, saying ‘What were you doing in those old foiling boats out there? What were you guys thinking?’ I reckon there’s going to be another big step,” he says. “There’s still a lot to be learned. Who knows what will be the next big breakthrough? There are a lot of smart people in the world.” Christoph Erbelding is one of those smart people. He looks at 17 and feels something like love. He understands why others might not. “It’s a different animal completely,” he says. It’s not beautiful, and it will more likely kill someone than rock anybody to sleep. The new class of purists created by its arrival will no doubt resent its coldness. But it’s also a remarkable demonstration of invention, the winner of exponential gains in a sport and world that defies them. 17 is almost a new kind of vehicle that grants us a new kind of passage: the ability to travel faster than the wind that drives us. “We’re not touching down ever again,” Erbelding says, and the way he says it, he makes you confuse sailing with soaring and mistake water for air. He makes you look at fish and see birds. JUNE _ 2017

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The Personality-Driven Garden Fence

It’s just to keep the deer out, sure, but it’s also a large, permanent, highly visible lawn ornament. Make it how you want it. B Y R YA N D ’ A G O S T I N O

THERE ARE STRONGER

P H OTO G R A P H S BY CO R E Y O L S E N

fences out there. Fences more precise in their dimensions, more uniform in their materials. Fences that took less time to build because they were planned out ahead of time, or even bought as an E-Z prefab kit. Mine I kind of made up as I went along. We needed the fence because we have deer. Many deer. Also foxes, bobcats, coy@PopularMechanics

otes, the occasional river rat, chipmunks, squirrels, and something that makes tracks we haven’t been able to identify. I don’t know how many of these animals enjoy eating vegetables, but enough that the fence was mandatory. This is ostensibly a how-to article about fencing in your backyard vegetable garden, but even if you were to follow these steps by the number, your fence

would turn out different. As it should. It’s your yard, and your fence, and I learned while building this one that a fence can have personality. My yard, for example, has about a 30-degree slope in the area where my wife wanted the garden, and I wanted the fence to move with the slope. That’s one way our fence developed its particular personality. But don’t build this fence. Build your fence. JUNE _ 2017

99

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Tighten the chicken wire after you wrap your fence. Pinch the horizontal wire with a pair of linesman pliers, then rotate your hand to kink the wire tight.

INSTRUCTIONS

TILL THE PLOT In the preceding fall I tilled two parallel strips into the grass, each forty feet by ten feet—these would be the planting beds. I left a six-foot runway of grass between them, which provides both a place to walk without stepping on the vegetables and a barrier against erosion (because it’s on a slope). I didn’t peel away the sod before tilling, I just tilled the grass right into itself. This is not the best way to do it, because it encourages the grass to regrow. But for one thing, I used aggressive machinery: a Kubota BX25D-1 tractor with a fifty-inch power take-off tiller. Each tine clawed six inches of loamy soil with every revolution, and there were six tines in total. I dragged that thing over both forty-foot plots at least ten times. And again, this was in the fall, so the grass didn’t pop right back up anyway. We covered all the dirt with a layer of hay, then it snowed all winter, and by spring the grass seemed to have been put in its place.

1

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DIG THE POSTHOLES I intended to buy four-by-four cedar posts—I don’t like pressuretreated wood—but then a friend told me about these beautiful, tenfoot, bark-on cedar poles at a local lumberyard, Mahopac Railroad Tie Corp. They were eighteen bucks each and I needed fifteen posts, but I liked the natural look so I sprang for them. I rented a two-man General brand auger with a Honda engine from Decker Tool Rental in Danbury, Connecticut, my reliable local supplier. The other man was my neighbor Andy, and we spent most of a Saturday wrestling the corkscrew through very good but very rocky soil. We started with the two holes that would mark either side of the garden gate and worked our way around from there, digging each hole at least thirty inches deep. You have to go at least that deep, especially if you’re not planning to anchor the posts in concrete, which I wasn’t. Some holes, in truth, were less than thirty inches because we hit enormous rocks and gave up.

2

SET THE POSTS The drill: Throw a shovelful of gravel in the bottom of each hole. Set the bottom of the post on the gravel (for drainage). Fill the hole, alternating a few inches of soil with a few inches of gravel, topping off with a layer of sand, which my father told me keeps bugs away. (Even with cedar, you can’t be too careful.) Don’t worry if some of the posts wiggle a little. Eventually they will draw strength from each other. I halved the remaining four cedar poles on a 45-degree angle with a chainsaw and used them as braces on the four corner poles [Fig. 3], fastening the braces to the poles using four-inch

3

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

bury the steel mesh. Some varmints burrow deeper than that, but it was getting hot, so that’s as deep as we dug. Once we stapled the beginning of the mesh roll to one of the gateposts, two guys (me and my father) pulled the roll taut while a third guy (my brother Mike) madly hammered staples into the next post. Whenever Mike hammered his thumb, we’d switch. Afterward, you can tighten the wire to fit by kinking it with a set of linesman pliers [Fig. 1]. Complete the fence by stapling up the poultry netting.

Fig. 3

LEVEL THE TOPS Because our holes were all different depths (remember the rocks), our posts were all different heights. They had to be even. The only question was: What did even mean? The ground sloped. Should the posts make up for that—that is, should the lower posts be taller so the tops were all on plane? Or should they all be the same height, so they sloped with the hill? I chose the latter. No need for a tabletop top. On this day, Andy was back, and with my Sawzall he buzzed them all at about nine feet. We saved the nubby tops for some future use, which still has not been determined.

5

Fig. 4

RUN A WIRE A strong deer can jump eight feet from a dead standstill, so we ran a single 16-gauge galvanized steel wire around the tops of the posts, simply wrapping once and stretching it to the next one [Fig. 4]. At the last post, I wasn’t sure how to finish, so I just wrapped it around ten times and it hasn’t budged.

6

GRK #8 construction screws. Then I realized the gateposts should have braces, too, because they would be under stress every time someone opened or closed the gate. I had no more cool cedar poles. So I picked through the brush pile that had grown behind my barn and found some good branches. WRAP THEM Now for the part that makes the fence useful: one hundred feet of 14-gauge galvanized steel mesh, fastened using ¾-inch poultry-fence staples and a low course of poultry netting to keep out small rodents. First we dug a foot-deep trench to

4

@PopularMechanics

Fig. 5

MAKE A GATE You need a top, a bottom, and two sides, plus hinges [Fig. 5] and some poultry netting. Some cedar boards left over from a barn-door repair became the bottom and the sides. The top was scrap. I bolted the four edges together and added a diagonal for strength. My door is a parallelogram, because of the slope, and so far it’s worked fine [Fig. 2]. I never added a latch, so we just kick a river rock back and forth to keep it shut or open. No animal of any kind has been spotted in the garden, ever.

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E A S Y W AY S TO DO HARD THINGS

M FRO E— H T ES — HIV ARC 68!) (19

Pivoted Prop for Window A short length of sturdy wood can hold open a window with a sinking sash. Here’s a trick: Mount the wood to the sash with a pivot screw located off to one side of the support’s center. When it’s oriented horizontally, the window can close. When it’s oriented vertically, depending on which side faces down, it’ll either open the window just a crack or hold it wide enough to admit a summer breeze.

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THE LAZIEST WAY TO CLEAN THE SHOWER DOOR

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The best squeegee isn’t a squeegee at all: It’s a hydrophobic glass treatment like Rain-X. A properly applied coat will cause water to sheet off the shower door, avoiding mildew and soap scum (and elbow grease).

READER NOTE

Wing Nut Turned by Claw Hammer If you’ve got a wing nut with a broken wing, it can be difficult to get the leverage needed to loosen or tighten it—not to mention that the broken wing might have dangerously jagged edges. Reader Harrison Bennett of Willingboro, New Jersey, suggests a solution: Grip the remaining wing in the claw of a hammer and now you’ve got a large, easy-to-use handle for turning the wing nut.

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

I L LU S T R AT I O N BY M O R N I N G B R E AT H

A few years ago, several friends and I went for a boat ride off the coast of Maine. We wanted to explore an interesting-looking island, but we needed permission to land. There was a sign onshore with visiting instructions, but we couldn’t get close enough in the boat to make out what it said. So I took a picture with my camera, then zoomed in until I could read it. I often use the same trick at home. I broke the glass globe of the light fixture on the ceiling in our laundry room, and in order to replace it I needed to know the model number of the fixture. I was too lazy to go downstairs for a step stool, so I held my phone over my head and clicked. You find applications everywhere: checking the score of the World Series on the TV above the bar on the far side of the restaurant; exploring wall cavities and other tight spaces that you can’t peer into because your forehead gets in the way; remembering where you parked at the airport; and making a step-by-step visual record of what the inside of your clothes dryer looked like before you foolishly began unscrewing things. —David Owen

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PAPER AIRPLANE LAUNCHER!

Flip the switch, load the plane, and let it fly. D E S I G N E D BY JA M E S S C H A D E WA L D

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Time: 1 hour

HARD

Ages: 12+

MATERIALS LIST • 1-inch x 3-inch x 4-foot poplar project board • two 3-volt electric motors (Lowe’s item #364310, model #884477) • push-button on-off switch (RadioShack part #2750617) • holder for two AAA batteries (RadioShack part #2700398) • two Solarbotics small rubber wheels with 2-mm shaft (bananarobotics.com part #BR010266) • 3/8-inch x 2-inch carriage bolt, washer, wing nut • 4-foot 20-gauge bell wire

TOOLS • miter saw • drill press • 15/16-inch spade drill bit • cordless drill • ½-, 3/8-inch drill bits • wood glue • hot-glue gun • soldering gun • wire strippers • pliers

DIRECTIONS PARENT

PARENT AND KID

Use a miter saw to cut two 9-inch lengths and two 2-inch lengths from the poplar.

1

On one of the 9-inch boards, mark the position of the motor holes according to the diagram (opposite page). Bore the holes using a 15/16-inch spade bit and a drill press or cordless drill.

2

Test-fit the motors and launch wheels to verify proper spacing. Use a hot-glue gun to fasten the motors so that their tops are flush with the top of the launch platform.

3

On the lower-left corner of the poplar piece with the launch wheels, use a drill and a ½-inch bit to make a hole for the push-button switch. Line the hole with a little hot glue and insert the switch. Use a 3/8-inch bit to make the bolt holes in the mounting blocks—the 2-inch lengths you

4

OU R BU I LD E R : 12-year-old Aiden Dierwechter from Pennsylvania.

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P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

P H OTO G R A P H S BY R E B E CC A M C A L P I N ; I L LU S T R AT I O N BY G E O R G E R E T S E C K

KID

THE PLANS Launch wheels

Motor

2 1/2" 13/16" on center Switch

1

Motor

2 1/2"

1/2" Wiring

3/4"

9" Motor

1/2" AAA AAA

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Battery holder

Motor Switch

DIRECTIONS cont’d cut in step 1—as shown in the diagram. Cut two 9-inch lengths of wire and five 4-inch pieces. Strip ½ inch of insulation from each end.

5

Solder all of the connections in the schematic (above) except for the two on each motor. For those, bend the ends of the wires into hooks and insert them through the motor tabs. Insert batteries and test-drive the launch wheels. The motor on the right must turn clockwise; the left counterclockwise. If necessary, switch the positive and negative wires to reverse the wheels’ direction. Once confirmed, crimp and solder the motor connections.

6

7

Hold the mounting blocks together and center

G I V E!

them on the base according to the diagram. Make sure the bolt holes are on opposite edges. Spread some wood glue on the bottom of one block and the top of the other, then squeeze the blocks between the base and the launch platform to glue them in place. Use the hot-glue gun to fasten the battery holder to the launch platform. Insert a carriage bolt and washer through the holes in the mounting blocks. Tighten with a wing nut to connect the two halves of the launcher at a 45-degree angle.

8

Slip the rubber wheels 9 over the top of the motor shafts. You should be able to fit five sheets of paper between the wheels. Tighten the set screw on the motor shaft.

Start a child you know on a lifetime of projects with a gift subscription to Popular Mechanics. Go to popularmechanics.com/gift.

@PopularMechanics

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POPULAR MECHANICS (ISSN 0032-4558) is published monthly except for combined July/ August and December/January, 10 times a year, by Hearst Communications, Inc., 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 U.S.A. Steven R. Swartz, President & Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Hearst Magazines Division: David Carey, President; John A. Rohan, Jr., Senior Vice President, Finance. ©2017 by Hearst Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Popular Mechanics is a registered trademark of Hearst Communications, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at N.Y., N.Y., and additional entry post offices. Canada Post International Publications mail product (Canadian distribution) sales agreement no. 40012499. CANADA BN NBR 10231 0943 RT. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 707.4.12.5); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address corrections to Popular Mechanics, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Printed in U.S.A. EDITORIAL & ADVERTISING OFFICES: 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 100193797 SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES: Popular Mechanics will, upon receipt of a complete subscription order, undertake fulfillment of that order so as to provide the first copy for delivery by the Postal Service or alternate carrier within 4 to 6 weeks. >>> Subscription prices: United States and possessions: $24.00 for one year. Canada and all other countries: $40.00 for one year. >>> Should you have any problem with your subscription, please visit service.popularmechanics.com or write to Customer Service Department, Popular Mechanics, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Please enclose your mailing label when writing to us or renewing your subscription. >>> Popular Mechanics is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or art. None will be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. MAILING LISTS: From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies who sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such offers via postal mail, please send your current mailing label or exact copy to Popular Mechanics, Mail Preference Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. You can also visit http://hearst.ed4.net/ profile/login.cfm to manage your preferences and opt out of receiving marketing offers by email. AS A SERVICE TO READERS, Popular Mechanics publishes newsworthy products, techniques, and scientific and technological developments. Because of possible variance in the quality and condition of materials and workmanship, Popular Mechanics cannot assume responsibility for proper application of techniques or proper and safe functioning of manufactured products or reader-built projects resulting from information published in this magazine.

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Shhh! They’re watching us. Over there. Don’t look! Bloody amateur. Listen, I’m leaving now. Wait nine minutes and follow me out. Make three right turns around the block to see if you’re being tailed, then head to the park, by the carousel. Ask the vendor for a blue cotton candy “with extra gravy.” In the paper cone, you will find the answer to your question, which will be: Nobody knows for sure, but educated estimators put the number in the low thousands. Government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and NSA, declined to hazard a guess, or, indeed, to offer any comment at all. But figure it thusly: There are many different types of “spies” working to ferret out our secrets. Most common are your garden-variety intelligence officers posted to embassies and consulates around the country. These folks usually have some BS “official cover” like “Assistant Minister for the Promotion of Shrubbery.” “They do that job enough to maintain the cover,” says Steve Bucci, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a political think tank, and a former Army Special Forces officer and Pentagon official. “The rest of their time they spend wandering around Washington, D.C., trying to make contact with people who they can then get to share information.” Consider that 177 nations maintain a diplomatic presence here and the numbers start to add up. “The U.S. has interests all over the world, and there-

fore countries all over the world are interested in us. So even a small embassy will have an intelligence officer there,” says Peter Earnest, a 35-year CIA veteran and executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. That includes our allies, by the way. “Friends spy on friends,” says Bucci. “So Britain, Germany, every other close ally also has operatives here.” Next, tack on what are known as NOCs (for “non-official cover”). These are professional spies posing as businessmen, journalists, students, etc. It’s “impossible to get any count on those,” says Mark Stout, a former CIA officer who heads the intelligence graduate program at Johns Hopkins University. “But you can assume at least a handful are coming in and out of the country every day.” There are also untold numbers of “co-optees,” private citizens of foreign countries who spend time in the United States under their real identities and pursue real careers, but sniff around and report any interesting findings back to their native intelligence services (or industrial competitors) as a sneaky side gig. Far rarer are the “sleeper cell” types, like those on The Americans. But they do exist—the U.S. rounded up ten deepcover Russian “illegals,” as they’re also known, in 2010. Stout says these spies have fake identities, life stories, and even ethnicities. One of the Russians caught in 2010—a KGB general—was posing as a Peruvian who had grown

THE MOST INTERESTING STUFF AT THE INTERNATIONAL SPY MUSEUM 1

2

3 1. A lipstick pistol, circa 1965, was used by KGB operatives and could fire a single shot. It was nicknamed “the kiss of death.” 2. A pigeon camera, circa World War I, was attached to a bird and took continuous photos as it flew over enemy camps. The original drone. 3. A shoe microphone and transmitter, circa 1960 to ’70, were once covertly put in the shoe of an American diplomat by Romanian spies so they could eavesdrop on his conversations.

Do you have unusual questions about how things work and why stuff happens? This is the place to ask them. Don’t be afraid. Nobody will laugh at you here. Email [email protected].

112

JUNE _ 2017

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.C O M

I L LU S T R AT I O N BY G R E G C H R I S T M A N

How many spies are currently living in the United States?

up in Uruguay. Plants are difficult and time-consuming to establish, so overall numbers are thought to be low. Finally, we’d be remiss not to mention a fifth spy type: the traitorous American. Sadly, you’ve got to assume there are a few of these out there. “Historically, in any given year there is usually a small handful, from a couple to eight or ten, that ex post facto we find out were spying but we didn’t know at the time,” says Stout. Take all the above species of spy together, he says (and our other experts agree), “and you’re probably in the low thousands. That’s a very backof-the-envelope guess, but I think quite low thousands is about right.”

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