r56un by selenafresgo

THESE NUCLEAR THERMAL PROPULSION ROCKETS WILL WIN WORLD WAR III P.14

HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN STITCH-AND-GLUE BOAT P.40

POWER THROUGH THE NEXT OUTAGE WITH ONE OF OUR TOP-RANKED INVERTER GENERATORS P.70

I THOUGHT WE WERE DOING A RENOVATION, NOT AN EXORCISM. THE HOUSE HAD OTHER IDEAS.” P.50

THE SCIENCE OF PERSONAL TECH WILL GIVE YOU A BRAND NEW SENSE P.16

NEW ROUTES TO A SUSTAINABLE WORLD A MORE ADVANCED FLEET ON AMERICA’S ROADS The way we drive is changing, and the United States Postal Service is changing with it. We’re committed to building a new ﬂeet for a better environment, with more fuel-efﬁcient vehicles driven by cutting-edge technologies. Find out more at usps.com/newroutes.

// STA NDA R DS //

▶ September/ October 2021

My POP Life Tips, gear picks, and vetted wisdom from our staff. p.6

Deep Math The numbers that allow ocean vessels to predict the waves of a storm at sea. p.28

Space The audacious plan to save billions of life forms with a lunar “Noah’s ark.” p.30

2 From an Editor Why the best work boots ignore gear trends and belong in any era. p.10

10 Physics An atomic bomb blast has created a crystallike material. p.34

3 Drinks Distillers are transforming craft beer into whiskeys that redefine the classic spirit. p.12

11 The Test Headlamps tested for true brightness, and how to use their alternate colors. p.64

4 Military Tech We could be just four years away from a nuclear thermal rocket. p.14

12 Editors’ Choice This innovative bike helmet reimagines safety. p.68

Bioengineering Can humans learn to echolocate like bats? Science says yes. p.16

Machines The radioactive diamond battery that lasts 28,000 years. p.20

Home One of these inverter generators is your best bet for backup power. p.70

Tools Cordless chainsaws, tested. Plus: The best technique for felling a tree. p.74

7 Genetics Researchers say they’ve sequenced the entire human genome. p.24

15 How to Be Good at What You Do Repurpose plastic to make durable furniture. p.92

A N DY CO C H R A N E (B O AT ) ; CO U R T E S Y W E S L E Y W O R K S R E A L E S TAT E (P I N E) ; D O U G S T R I C K L A N D (S U P E R CO M P U T E R)

// FE ATURES //

The Smartest DIY Boatbuilding Method We’ve Ever Seen A pioneer of the stitch-and-glue method shares his secrets. p.40

What Really Happened at 777 Pine Street? A false chimney, a hidden panic room—a home renovation reveals a curious mystery. p.50

How America’s Top Supercomputer Can Beat COVID-19 for Good Are 200 quadrillion operations per second enough to beat the virus? p.56

// ON THE COVER // ILLUSTRATION BY GN8/GETTY IMAGES

POPULAR MECHANICS (ISSN 0032-4558) is published six times per year by Hearst, 300 West 57th St., NY, NY 10019 USA. Steven R. Swartz, President & Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman; Mark E. Aldam, Chief Operating Officer. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc.: Debi Chirichella, President & Treasurer; Kate Lewis, Chief Content Officer; Kristen M. O’Hara, Chief Business Officer; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Copyright 2021 by Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Popular Mechanics is a registered trademark of Hearst Communications, Inc. Customer Service: For changes of address, and subscription orders, visit service.popularmechanics.com or write to Customer Service, Popular Mechanics, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Popular Mechanics (PM) cannot be responsible for unsolicited material. Mailing lists: From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies that 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 Mail Preference Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. You can also visit preferences.hearstmags.com to manage your preferences and opt out of receiving marketing offers by mail. Periodicals postage paid at N.Y., N.Y., and at additional mailing 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. As a service to readers, PM publishes newsworthy products, techniques, and scientific and technological developments. Due to possible variance in the quality, condition of materials, workmanship, PM 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.

September/October 2021

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• Hormone gland problems:

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Problems can also happen in other organs and tissues. These are not all of the signs and symptoms of immune system problems that can happen with OPDIVO and YERVOY. Call or see your healthcare provider right away for any new or worsening signs or symptoms, which may include: • • •

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Talk to your doctor about OPDIVO + YERVOY www.OPDIVOYERVOY.com 1-855-OPDIVOYERVOY

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•

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What are the possible side effects of OPDIVO and YERVOY? OPDIVO and YERVOY can cause serious side effects, including: • See “What is the most important information I should know about OPDIVO + YERVOY?” • Severe infusion reactions.

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My Pop Life

Alexander George EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

// E XPERT H ACKS, GE A R RECS & LIFE-TESTED W ISDOM FROM OUR STAFF //

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Current Passion Project KYLE MIZOKAMI Contributing Editor Wherever you go, there you are.

My wife and I are stepping up to a singlefamily home, and I have the opportunity to plan out a garage workshop from the ground up— a lifelong dream.

Best Thing POP Ever Taught Me

This Gadget Changed My Life The IBM Selectric III typewriter. My mother would bring it home for work, and I would bang away on it for hours, writing. It had an enormous impact on my life.

PRODUCTS I’M USING RIGHT NOW

I’ve been reading Pop Mech for more than 30 years, and the one consistent lesson is I can do it—whatever it is—myself.

IMPERIAL OR METRIC?

Prometheus Design Werx Raider Field Pants

Rad Power RadRover 5

I have a 4-year-old, so my pockets are pretty much garbage cans. Goodlooking pants with discrete pockets get a nod from me.

San Francisco’s hills sucked the joy out of cycling, but an electric motor makes the hills go away. Fat tires help because I live by the beach and there’s a lot of sand.

I’ll admit metric is the better system for overall measurement, but Lyle Lovett sings about a girl who is “5-foot-2,” not “157.48 centimeters.”

Attack Submarine or Fighter Jet? Your fighter jets are sexy, but when my submarine closes the shipping lanes, I’ll see you at the armistice table.

What Keeps Me Thinking... 3

Nikon Monarch 7 Binoculars

Benchmade Bugout Pocketknife w/ Rockscale Design Titanium Scales

I bought these binoculars for the rifle range, but they’re also good for spying on ships and planes in and around San Francisco Bay.

Aftermarket titanium scales force you to tear the knife down and learn how it works.

September/October 2021

North Korea is poorer than Guatemala yet possesses an arsenal of nuclear weapons. We know so much from ordinary people who’ve deduced information from photos and satellite imagery—now the North Koreans are putting up tarps to hide backgrounds, essentially from people sleuthing in their underwear.

Matt Allyn Features Director; Christine Anderson Executive Director of Commerce & Content Strategy; Brian Dalek Director of Content Operations; Leah Flickinger Director of Content Creation; Lou Mazzante Test Director; Suzanne Perreault Editorial Operations Director; Jesse Southerland Creative Director DESIGN + PHOTO Amy Wolff Photo Director; Colin McSherry Senior Art Director; Alyse Markel Art Director; Eleni Dimou Senior Designer; Ash Bartholomew Digital Designer; Kristen Parker Photo Editor; John Hamilton Associate Photo Editor EDITORIAL Bette Canter Deputy Editor; Taylor Rojek Features Editor; Tyler Daswick Associate Features Editor; Andrew Daniels How-To Editor; Courtney Linder Senior Editor; Danielle Zickl Health & Fitness Editor; Rosael Torres-Davis Special Projects Editor; Jennifer Leman News Editor; Daisy Hernandez Associate News Editor; Josiah Soto Social Media Editor; Jessica Coulon Assistant Editor; Leah Campano Editorial Planning Associate; Amber Joglar Administrative Assistant TEST TEAM Will Egensteiner, Jennifer Sherry Associate Test Directors; Jeff Dengate, Matt Phillips, Tara Seplavy Senior Test Editors; Roy Berendsohn, Dan Chabanov, Adrienne Donica, Brad Ford, Amanda Furrer, Morgan Petruny Test Editors; Lakota Gambill, Trevor Raab Photographers; Joël Nankman Logistician VIDEO Josh Wolff Director; Jimmy Cavalieri Production Manager; Pat Heine, David Monk, Ken Kawada Producers CONTRIBUTORS Caroline Delbert, Daniel Dubno, Wylie Dufresne, Kyle Mizokami, Darren Orf, David Owen, Joe Pappalardo, Richard Romanski, James Schadewald, Paige Szmodis, Joseph Truini, Nicholas Wicks EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Bill Strickland Popular Mechanics International Kim St. Clair Bodden Russia, South Africa • SVP/International Editorial Director Editorial Offices 132 South 3rd Street Easton, PA 18042 HOW TO REACH US: Customer Care Visit Online POPCustServ@ CDSFulfillment.com; Phone 800333-4948; Mail Customer Care Service Dept. Popular Mechanics, PO Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-0128. LICENSING AND REPRINTS: Contact Wyndell Hamilton, Wright’s Media, at 877-652-5295 ext. 102 or hearst@wrightsmedia.com. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021

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Easy to use. Innovative. Reliable.

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CURRENT PASSION PROJECT

Senior Editor Just a lady with 63 coffee mugs (yes, I counted).

Pen or Pencil?

COURTNEY LINDER

I’m currently enrolled in an open-water scuba diver certification course—I can’t wait to discover what lurks below the other 71 percent of Earth’s surface.

PRODUCTS I’M USING RIGHT NOW

You haven’t truly lived until you’ve experienced the smooth glide of a Pilot G2 gel pen on soft paper.

CURRENTLY READING

JBL Clip 3

Austin the Avocado Squishmallow

I’m a total freak for audiobooks, and this thing is loud enough (and clear enough) to blast a narrator’s voice over the shower.

I know, how much more of a millennial could I possibly be, sleeping with a novelty avocado pillow? But seriously, this thing rocks.

Dark Archives, by Megan Rosenbloom. A librarian investigates the history of books bound in human skin.

Best Money I Ever Spent Used cars are hot, hot, hot right now—so I traded in my old car for a 2021 Volkswagen Jetta in habanero orange. No ragrets, my friends.

September/October 2021

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Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop Researching... Marine biology—I’m especially partial to new reports on classic sea creatures (and have the tattoos to prove it).

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Ring Fit Adventure

Oculus Quest 2

Dare I say it, this is a fun and effective fitness game. I used it all winter to “fight” monsters with squats and shoulder presses.

I love “Beat Saber,” but narrative-driven games like “Down the Rabbit Hole” and truly strange ones like “Accounting+” are just as delightful.

Coolest Thing on My Desk An avocado plant that my dad grew from a pit and gifted to me a few years later. It’s two feet tall, and will probably never bear fruit, but still looks awesome.

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My Pop Life

ATEM Mini Pro model shown.

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Live Stream Training and Conferences

Create Training and Educational Videos

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ATEM Mini’s includes everything you need. All the buttons are positioned on the front panel so it’s very easy to learn. There are 4 HDMI video inputs for connecting cameras and computers, plus a USB output that looks like a webcam so you can connect to Zoom or Skype. ATEM Software Control for Mac and PC is also included, which allows access to more advanced “broadcast” features!

With so many cameras, computers and effects, things can get busy fast! The ATEM Mini Pro model features a “multiview” that lets you see all cameras, titles and program, plus streaming and recording status all on a single TV or monitor. There are even tally indicators to show when a camera is on air! Only ATEM Mini is a true professional television studio in a small compact design!

The ATEM Mini Pro model has a built in hardware streaming engine for live streaming via its ethernet connection. This means you can live stream to YouTube, Facebook and Teams in much better quality and with perfectly smooth motion. You can even connect a hard disk or flash storage to the USB connection and record your stream for upload later!

Use Professional Video Effects ATEM Mini is really a professional broadcast switcher used by television stations. This means it has professional effects such as a DVE for picture in picture effects commonly used for commentating over a computer slide show. There are titles for presenter names, wipe effects for transitioning between sources and a green screen keyer for replacing backgrounds with graphics.

ATEM Mini..........$295 ATEM Mini Pro..........$49 ATEM Mini Pro ISO.......

Learn more at www.blackmagicdesign.com

September/October 2021

wear (left) and after being refurbished (right).

that you can grow old with, find a pair that looks like it would have been perfectly at home on someone’s feet 80 years ago. After nearly half a century wearing work boots, I’ve given up on advanced designs, insulation, waterproofing, fancy stitching, and any features claiming to produce comfort. A traditional leather work boot can be easily dried out and cleaned, and even resoled or rebuilt. My Thorogood boots (above) are a perfect example. I don’t know how many projects and tool tests for this magazine I’ve done while wearing those boots over the last 13 years, but it’s a lot. I recently sent them out to a shoe refurbisher called NuShoe for a complete overhaul. They came back astonishingly clean, given what I’d put them through, with even the “tobacco” stain restored. It was good to take those boots out of their box, unwrap them, and admire the workmanship in their original construction and in their rebuilding. It was enough to make me feel like a 12-year-old kid again. ROY BERENDSOH N IS A SENIOR TEST EDITOR A N D H AS W OR K ED AT POPULAR MECHANICS SINCE 1986.

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

good quality, U.S.-built (of course), and were large enough for me to grow into. That one pair took me from childhood through buying my first truck, construction jobs, college, and into full-fledged adulthood. When, after more than a decade, they became outright disgusting, I used them as the boot of last resort for painting and driveway sealing. Once, lacking a pair of rubber boots, I even wore them while pouring the concrete slab for a crawl space. I just waded in and hoped for the best. The boots were fine; a thorough cleaning with a garden hose washed off the concrete. Calling them work boots doesn’t give them enough credit. Aside from wearing them on the job or in the yard, I—and everyone I grew up with— also wore them hiking, camping, hunting, fishing, wrenching on jalopies. Later in life, I turned to work boots when my kids were young. In that era, they were more like “father boots,” the footwear I wore on countless miles of nature trails, slogging up and down sledding hills with one of my kids on my shoulders, stumbling around corn mazes, and selecting a Christmas tree to cut down. In those days I probably wore work boots as much as I wore sneakers. If you want one piece of advice for buying boots

Dog trainer and wingshooter Durrell Smith puts our Flat Creek Tech Flannel and PRO LT Hunting Gloves to the test near Marietta, GA.

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Drinks // BY A A RON GOLDFA R B //

The Genius of Distilling Beer Into Whiskey 12

September/October 2021

cult maker of imperial stouts based out of Anaheim, California, visited Interboro Spirits & Ale in Brooklyn, New York. The plan was to brew a collaboration beer, but the Californians took interest in the copper pot still lurking in one corner of the brewery. “They said, ‘Sure, let’s make a beer but, more importantly, let’s make a whiskey,’” says Jesse Ferguson, Interboro’s cofounder, brewer, and distiller. This wouldn’t require much extra work. To produce whiskey or beer, you start by mashing grains: taking barley, corn, and the like, combining it with water, and then heating the mixture. Then things typically diverge. For beer, you add hops and yeast; for traditional whiskey, you add yeast and, once fermented into distiller’s wash, you distill it. While Interboro recognized the efficiency of adding a distillery to a brewery, some distilleries now also take the step of brewing or sourcing full-flavored beer. The results are whiskeys with unusually complex flavors. The distilling of craft beer is not exactly new. It was spawned by 13th-generation master distiller Marko Karakasevic, whose family’s Charbay Distillery has been producing brandy in northern California since 1983. When he joined Charbay in 1995, he was itching to produce whiskey. Wanting to differentiate his first release from the big brands that were using the typical corn, rye, and malted barley mash bills, he took inspiration from the local microbreweries that were revolutionizing the oncebland beer industry. He and his dad took 20,000 gallons of a Czech pilsner from a microbrewery, then spent three-and-a-half weeks double-distilling on a copper alembic pot still, around the clock, to turn it into 1,000 gallons of Charbay Whiskey. “I was quite happy with what occurred,” Karakasevic says. “Anything that was alcohol-soluble, distilled over.” Meaning, the essential oils in ingredients like hops were carried with the vaporized alcohol from the pot still to the condenser. Karakasevic figures the flavors of the pilsner became 10 times more intensified, with aromas of pine and weed and a palate bready and a bit spicy. “All the top notes from those crazy hops from Germany and Washington state—but no lingering bitterness— were now concentrated and gave the whiskey more flavor and character,” he says. And he found that distillation preserved hops’ aroma and f lavor

M I TC H R I C E / CO U R T E S Y C H A R B AY

Charbay master distiller Marko Karakasevic started brewing beer, then realized he could use it to make whiskey.

N M A RC H 2 019, B OT TLE LO G I C B R E W I N G , A

F R O M L E F T: CO U R T E S Y C H A R B AY; J A K E S A LY E R S/ CO U R T E S Y I N T E R B O R O ; CO U R T E S Y F O U N D R Y D I S T I L L I N G CO M PA N Y

indefinitely, unlike in beers, where it degrades in a matter of months. Karakasevic had inadvertently created a style of whiskey—“hop flavored whiskey,” according to U.S. labeling standards—uniquely his own. Eventually, Karakasevic decided to distill Bear Republic’s Racer 5 IPA, sourcing a 6,000-gallon tanker truck full of it. The resultant Charbay R5 would become a unique cult hit with its mix of floral, dank, spicy, and citrusy notes. “To me, it’s the ultimate form of making whiskey,” Karakasevic says. And a lot pricier, too. He figures it costs him $5 a gallon to distill craft beer, whereas distiller’s wash—which, while potable, would be like drinking flat, bland beer—costs less than a buck to distill. “But it’s a lot more flavorful, bottom-line.” Eventually, Karakasevic’s thinking would inspire a raft of distilleries. Launched in 2004 as House Spirits, Portland, Oregon’s Westward Whiskey has always fermented its mash with ale yeast, which is more flavorful than the typical distiller’s yeast. In 2016, Westward collaborated with BridgePort Brewing Co., pot-distilling a clone of their Kingpin Double Red Ale recipe. Two Malts Whiskey, as it was dubbed, was released in mid-2021, with herbal and zesty notes typical of a rye, along with a coffee and cocoa palate akin to a dark beer. Elsewhere, Foundry Distilling Co. in West Des Moines, Iowa, has set up the Brewer-Distiller Alliance, working with acclaimed craft breweries to turn some of their most famous beers into whiskey. So far, they’ve released six whiskeys distilled from a stylistically diverse group of beer, including Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat Ale, Surly Furious IPA, Left Hand Milk Stout, and Arrogant Bastard Ale. “The most exciting thing is how much of the beer character comes through,” Foundry Distilling owner Scott Bush says. “It is really cool for folks to try the whiskey along with the beer and realize that both started their lives as the same liquid.” As for Interboro, when it came time to brew their beer and impromptu whiskey collaboration, Ferguson decided to employ an old English technique called parti-gyle—essentially making multiple beers out of one mash. They first collected what is known as the first runnings—undiluted wort that (by this recipe) could be fermented to a 12 percent–alcohol imperial stout. After that, Ferguson flushed the grains with hot water to collect

a heavier char flavor than a typical Scottish single malt, with notes of dark cherry, vanilla, and caramel.

ARROGANT BASTARD WHISKEY | 48.5% ABV | $60

3 BOTTLES TO TRY

INTERBORO STRAIGHT MALT WHISKEY | 50% ABV | $48

CHARBAY R5 | 49.5% ABV | $60 Now in its fifth bottling, Bear Republic Racer 5, a 7 percent IPA, is doubledistilled into R5. The nose is extremely bright and aromatic, piney and dank with hints of lemon zest. The palate leans more toward chocolate.

The first whiskey release from the fiveyear-old Brooklyn outfit, this is a blend of two barrels aged for three years in first-use American oak before spending their final year in barrels that had previously held Woodford Reserve Double Oaked bourbon. The result is

The Escondido, California, brewery produces their typical Arrogant Bastard wort (unfermented beer) and transports it to Foundry Distilling, where a distiller’s yeast is pitched to start fermentation, before it is columndistilled. Aged for 26 months in undersized, 30-gallon new charred American oak barrels, it offers bright notes of citrus zest with hints of herbal tea, though the youth of the whiskey is evident by its graininess.

900 more gallons of the weaker second runnings, which could be fermented into an unhopped 8 percent beer he and Bottle Logic distilled. A few months later, the stout, Fuel for Fractions, was released. It offered rich notes of figs, cocoa, and coffee. A couple of years from now, a four-year-old malt whiskey with the exact same mash bill (and, in theory, a similar but more concentrated flavor profile) will also be released. “In terms of technology, nothing we’re doing is new,” Ferguson says. “From what I’ve heard, the oldest distilleries were all originally breweries too.” And yet, in 2021, what he’s doing certainly feels innovative, giving us flavors never before experienced in whiskey. September/October 2021

Military Tech

The Pentagon Wants to Launch a Nuclear Thermal Rocket in 4 Years

I C T U R E T H I S : W O R L D WA R I I I I S J U S T

hours away. In the cold vastness of space, enemy robotic spacecraft are slowly adjusting their orbits and preparing to launch a surprise attack on the U.S.’s fleet of satellites. The uncrewed craft, with robotic arms strong enough to disable a satellite, are creeping up on American spacecraft, about to deal a knockout blow to the U.S. military. But down on Earth, U.S. Space Force guardians have been keeping track of the assassin craft, knowing that in order to present as low a profile target as possible, they have just enough fuel for one attack. At the last minute, after the enemy satellites have com14

September/October 2021

mitted to attack, the command activates the nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) engines on the American satellites, quickly boosting them into a higher orbit and safely out of range. Later, as the enemy satellites careen unpowered into the infinite void of space, the same engines, powered by uranium, will safely return the American sats to their positions in lowEarth orbit. This capability could arrive sooner than you think. In April, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that it commissioned General Atomics, Blue Origin, and Lockheed Martin to build the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO): the world’s first NTP system for spacecraft. Cislunar, the region between Earth and the moon, covers a much more expansive area than the simple Earth orbits followed by satellites. A cislunar spacecraft would need powerful and efficient engines that maximize the ship’s fuel-carrying capacity. Enter NTP, which works by pushing a liquid propellant like hydrogen through a working

CO U R T E S Y DA R PA

// BY K YLE MIZO K A MI //

nuclear reactor core. As the reactor splits the atoms of the uranium fuel, it generates heat. The heat then transforms the hydrogen into a gas that squirts out of the rocket exhaust nozzle at high pressure, creating thrust. The Department of Energy believes NTP will be twice as efficient as chemical rockets, which produce relatively heavy water vapor as a waste byproduct. Hydrogen gases, on the other hand, are lighter and thus easier to accelerate, generating greater thrust. “DRACO is developing NTP propulsion technology that will enable the rapid maneuver needed to enable a wide variety of missions in the future,” says the program’s manager, Air Force Major Nathan Greiner. These would include conducting space domain awareness missions—detecting, tracking, and identifying objects in Earth’s orbit—within the cislunar domain, Greiner says. NTP provides a specific impulse, like gas mileage, that’s much greater than existing chemical propulsion systems, “with a thrust-to-weight that’s far higher than existing electric propulsion systems,” Greiner explains. This unique combination allows NTP to quickly execute large delta-V maneuvers—a spacecraft’s ability to change velocity—and enable rapid transits across long distances, he says. The goal is to send a DRACO-powered, proof-of-

An NTP spacecraft, which will use a liquid propellant like hydrogen, could be twice as efficient as a chemical rocket.

concept spacecraft above low-Earth orbit in 2025. If the Pentagon prioritizes NTP, it “could likely be deployed as an operational system by the early 2030s,” Greiner says. Successful military operations, from air-toair combat to campaigns, are often determined by one side’s ability to outmaneuver adversaries. Once spacecraft have weapons, the race will be on to build increasingly faster armed spaceships. Just as the steam engine trumped the sail at sea, NTP could improve upon chemical rockets in space. On Earth, humans have seized control of the domains of air, land, and sea with military vehicles. If history is any guide, the Space Force and the military space arms of other countries will likely need an entire ecosystem of armed craft to conquer the next domain. Space warfare may mimic the evolution of war at sea, only across much greater distances. Small drone “spacefighters” could be launched from larger craft to destroy enemy vehicles, similar to today’s aircraft carriers. These new carriers could be guarded by defense ships, like the guided missile cruisers that protect naval task forces at sea. This might sound like science fiction, but it follows a well-trodden path through human history—and NTP could make it a reality.

CO U R T E S Y N A S A

A Brief History of NTP Programs NERVA

PROJECT ORION

In 1961, NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission investigated the use of NTP with the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) program. Like DRACO, NERVA would generate thrust by using a nuclear reactor to heat and expel hydrogen. NASA envisioned using an NTP engine as the third and final stage of an otherwise chemical rocket. But NASA ultimately scrapped the promising program in 1973 due to lack of funding.

In the early 1960s, Project Orion aimed to put a spacecraft into orbit and beyond by detonating a string of nuclear bombs underneath it—an idea made possible by shielding the spacecraft (and spacefarers) with a large graphite plate. The craft would ride the shockwave into the atmosphere on a pillar of successive nuclear explosions. However, the Partial Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty of 1963 outlawed nuclear explosions above ground and in space, putting an end to Orion.

PROJECT TIMBER WIND In the 1980s, the Pentagon established the Strategic Defense Initiative to build an air-, land-, and spacebased defense system to stop a nuclear attack. This required lifting large payloads into space. Enter Timber Wind, which studied using NTP to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles. Timber Wind eventually died along with the Cold War, as the Soviet Union ceased to be a major threat and the rationale for a space-based defense system evaporated.

September/October 2021

Bioengineering // BY SA R A H W ELLS //

Humans Can Develop a Sixth Sense, Study Proves 16

September/October 2021

S A N I M A L S G O , H U M A N S H AV E R E L A -

tively limited senses. We can’t smell as well as dogs, see as many colors as mantis shrimp, or find our way home using the Earth’s magnetic poles as sea turtles do. But there’s one animal sense we can learn: bat-like echolocation. Researchers in Japan demonstrated this feat in a paper published in the journal PLoS One, proving that humans can use echolocation—or the ability to locate objects through ref lected sound—to identify the shape and rotation of various objects without light.

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Similar to bats, humans can detect shapes and moving objects with echolocation.

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As bats swoop around objects, they send out high-pitched sound waves that then bounce back to them at different time intervals. This helps the tiny mammals learn more about the geometry, texture, or movement of an object. If humans can similarly recognize these three-dimensional acoustic patterns, it could literally expand how we see the world, says study author Miwa Sumiya, Ph.D., a researcher at the Center for Information and Neural Networks in Osaka, Japan. “Examining how humans acquire new sensing abilities to recognize environments using sounds, or echolocation, may lead to the understanding of the flexibility of human brains,” says Sumiya. “We may also be able to gain insights into sensing strategies of other species by comparing with knowledge gained in studies on human echolocation.” This study is not the first to demonstrate echolocation in humans—previous work has shown that people who are blind can use mouth clicking sounds to “see” two-dimensional shapes. But Sumiya says that this study is the first to explore a particular kind of echolocation called time-varying echolocation. Beyond simply locating an object, time-varying echolocation would enable human users to better perceive its shape and movement as well. To test subjects’ ability to sense echolocation, Sumiya’s team gave participants headphones and two tablets—one to generate their synthetic echolocation signal, and the other to listen to the recorded echoes. In a second room not visible to participants, two oddly shaped cylinders would either rotate or stand still. The cross-section of these cylinders resembles a bike wheel with either four or eight spokes. When prompted, the 15 participants initiated their echolocation signals through the tablet. Their sound waves released in pulses, traveling into the second room and hitting the cylinders. It took a bit of creativity to transform the soundwaves back into something the human participants could recognize. “The synthetic echolocation signal used in this study included high-frequency signals up to 41 kHz that humans cannot listen to,” Sumiya explains. For comparison, bat echolocation signals in the wild range from 9 kHz all the way to 200 kHz—well outside our range of hearing of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. The researchers employed a one-seventh scale dummy head with a microphone in each ear to 18

September/October 2021

record the sounds in the second room before transmitting them back to the human participants. The microphones rendered the echoes binaural, like the surround-sound you might experience at a movie theater or while watching an autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) video recorded using a binaural mic. The signals were also lowered in frequency when received by the miniature head to an eighth of the original frequency so the human participants could hear them “with the sensation of listening to real spatial sounds in a 3D space,” says Sumiya. Finally, the researchers asked participants to determine whether the echoes they heard were from a rotating or a stationary object. In the end, participants could reliably identify the two cylinders using the time-varying echolocation signals bouncing off the rotating cylinders by listening to the pitch. They were less adept at identifying the shapes from the stationary cylinders. Nevertheless, the researchers say that this is evidence that humans are capable of interpreting time-varying echolocation. Sumiya hopes it could one day help humans perceive their spatial surroundings in a different way; for example, helping visually impaired users better sense the shape and features of objects around them. The next step for this research is to give participants freedom to move around when they’re interpreting these echolocation signals, Sumiya says. That will more closely mimic the action bats might take when using echolocation “because echolocation is ‘active’ sensing.”

How Visually Impaired People Develop a New Sense Losing one sense can heighten others. It’s a phenomenon known as neural reuse or neural repurposing, in which the brain adapts and heightens remaining senses, and it has helped some people who are blind develop the ability to use two-dimensional echolocation by making clicking sounds with their mouths. Research shows that a portion of the brain—the primary visual cortex located in the occipital lobe—involved with visual processing

can restructure itself to treat the echoes resulting from the clicks as visual stimuli. In essence, the brain can “see” the echoes as they bounce back and use the sound to help a person reconstruct the space and objects around them. This has given some echolocators the ability to draw a room and its contents by merely walking around it while making clicking sounds and listening for echoes.—Daisy Hernandez

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This battery, made with nuclear reactor waste, could have a life span more than 356 times longer than the average U.S. citizen.

September/October 2021

able to buy a smartwatch—powered with a radioactive diamond battery—that will outlive you and your progeny for generations. The potentially game-changing battery comes from the San Francisco–based startup Nano Diamond Battery (NDB), which lauds its namesake “high-power diamond-based alpha, beta, and neutron voltaic battery” for its ability to give devices “life-long and green energy.” Imagine: Just one battery could power your insulin pump or pacemaker for your entire life (with loads of time to spare). Or it could provide the juice for a space rover, collecting Mars regolith samples for decades without any human assistance. Those are ambitious goals. So, could NDB’s bold claims actually become reality? First, let’s dissect the specs. To build its Nano Diamond Battery, NDB uses layers of impossibly tiny, paneled nano diamonds (for context, one nanometer is one billionth of a meter). Diamonds have exceptional heat conductance, which makes them ideal for electronic devices. In fact, they are the best-known natural conductor of heat, according to a publication by the University of Houston’s College of Engineering—and are three to four times more effective than copper or silver. Scientists cultivate these miniature diamonds using chemical vapor deposition, a process in which gases at extremely high temperatures force carbon to crystallize on a substrate material. That process, NDB admits, creates a cost bottleneck; making the special diamonds is energy-intensive and expensive. After all, they’re “artificially boron-doped diamonds,” explains Yury Gogotsi, director of the A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute at Drexel University in Philadelphia. (Gogotsi has no affiliation with NDB.) That process produces diamonds with blue color and higher conductivity than the average diamond. True blue diamonds (see sidebar) are naturally occurring on Earth, but they’re rarer and even more expensive than artificial blue diamonds. Once NDB has sourced the nano diamonds, the company combines them with radioactive isotopes from nuclear waste. Specifically, they use radioactive isotopes of uranium and plutonium, “which probably come from radioactive power plants’ waste,” Gogotsi says.

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From there, single-crystal diamonds—just a few square millimeters in size—move heat away from the radioactively decaying isotopes so quickly that the transaction actually generates electricity. “The decay sources deposit their energy onto the NDB transducer, which converts the kinetic energy of the incident radiation to electrical energy,” says Nima Golsharifi, CEO of NDB. You’re probably wondering what the catch is. There’s a diamond battery out there that really uses nuclear waste, lasts thousands of years, and involves layers of only the most minuscule diamonds? It’s slightly more complicated than that. Each battery cell will produce only a small amount of energy, for one thing, so scientists must combine the cells in huge numbers in order to regularly power large devices—raising the cost a great deal, along with increasing the complexity. Golsharifi touts the tiny size of the Nano Diamond Battery cells as an advantage for scalability, though. “Take the battery for a wristwatch, for instance—it consumes around two microwatts, [so] a much smaller NDB cell would be sufficient,” he explains. “So if we need to power a different application, the number of stacked cells can be increased to meet the demand.” Still, there’s the issue of wear-and-tear: Researchers implant the nuclear waste inside the diamond cells, which creates a natural structural weakness that, statistically speaking, will eventually fail in some of the cells over time, Gogotsi explains. When the Nano Diamond Batter y becomes widely available in the future, there’s a chance that some of the cells will break or simply go to waste with the devices that they power. “This creates an issue of nuclear waste, which is inevitable if large numbers of batteries are used,” Gogotsi says. “Some of them will eventually break apart. This may not be an issue in space, but will certainly be a concern on the surface of Earth.” That doesn’t mean the diamond battery isn’t a worthwhile pursuit. If those issues are addressed, some possible applications for it include long-termuse devices like hearing aids or pacemakers. “Take a child that gets a hearing aid implanted or an elderly person with a pacemaker; people shouldn’t have to go through the possibly traumatizing sur22

September/October 2021

gery more than once,” Golsharifi explains. The batteries could even prove useful in space vehicles that need to run for years without help, NDB says. Take satellites, for instance. NDB’s claim that the battery lasts 28,000 years is based, in part, on these low-power space applications. Voyager—NASA’s iconic space probe, meant to study the outer solar system when it launched back in September 1977—used three “Multi-Hundred Watt Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators” (MHW-RTGs) for power. Each generator’s power output began at just 158 watts, which is less energy than you’d need to power a household light fixture for a year. And if enough of these diamond battery cells are combined, they could still power electronics here on Earth with higher energy demands, from LED displays on tablets to mobile phones. But for its first commercial product, NDB plans to introduce a smartwatch, with an expected launch date sometime in 2022. If that really happens, you could own one watch with a single battery and pass it down for generations without ever needing a replacement—talk about an heirloom. Still, NDB plays its cards very close to the vest, divulging few of the nitty gritty details about the Nano Diamond Battery (its power density, for instance). And, there aren’t even video demos of the technology yet. But the promise of the radioactive diamond battery is still very real, and NDB’s forthcoming smartwatch will tell us a lot about the feasibility of such technology in other applications. And we’ll be waiting—all we have is time. All

Why Blue Diamonds? The diamonds in NDB’s battery have a beautiful blue hue, thanks to the trace amounts of boron contained in their carbon structure. These blue diamonds are artificial, but are reminiscent of true blue diamonds, which are some of the rarest gemstones on Earth. According to findings from an August 2018 study in Nature, they’re formed in Earth’s lower mantle, which is about 410 to 1,680 miles below the surface. As such, you can only find blue diamonds in three mines in the entire world, which helps explain their hefty price tag: roughly $15,700 for a 0.3-carat light blue diamond, and $75,000 for a 0.25-carat dark blue diamond.—Courtney Linder

Genetics // BY CA ROLINE DELBERT //

N J U N E 2 0 0 0, SCI E NTI STS A N N O U N CE D THE

first draft of the human genome sequence h a d b e en c omple t e d . G ener a t i n g t he sequence was a technical feat—one that allowed scientists to begin reading humanit y’s genetic blueprint—but it was still missing about 8 percent of the genome. Now, an international consortium of about 100 scientists, dubbed the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium, say they’ve finally assembled

September/October 2021

Once this draft of the human genome sequence passes peerreview, it will be the first of any vertebrate to be fully mapped.

the human genome in its entirety. If their work, which was published May 27 to the pre-print website bioRxiv, holds up to peer review, it could change the future of medicine. As researchers become more familiar with humanity’s genetic code, they can, for example, make more precise and effective medicines—including the kind of gene-focused treatment that powered the first effective COVID-19 vaccines. The first draft led to a boom in technology, like CRISPR, and therapeutics, but scientists didn’t

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realize how incomplete the draft was at the time, says Karen Miga, Ph.D., a genomics researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the T2T Consortium. The 2000 sequence was the product of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and private company Celera Genomics. HGP claimed it had mapped the whole human genome at the time, but was careful in how it defined its success: “‘Finished sequence’ is a technical term meaning that the sequence is highly accurate (with fewer than one error per 10,000 letters) and highly contiguous (with the only remaining gaps corresponding to regions whose sequence cannot be reliably resolved with current technology).” “Current technology” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. At the time, HGP used a technology called bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC), where scientists used a bacterium to clone each piece of the genome, and then studied them in smaller groups. A complete “BAC library” is about 20,000 carefully prepared bacteria with cloned genes inside. But that BAC process inherently misses some portions of the whole genome. Humans have 46 chromosomes, in 23 pairs, that represent tens of thousands of individual genes. Each gene consists of base pairs made of adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C). There are billions of these base pairs in the human genome. The base pairs in the untouched 8 percent of the 2000 genome draft, it turns out, are made of many, many repeated patterns that were too difficult to study using BAC or similar methods. For the latest sequence, T2T turned to the California-based Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) and the U.K.-based Oxford Nanopore Technologies. PacBio uses a system called HiFi, where base pairs are circularized (made into a circle) and repeatedly read to ensure accuracy. The system is just a few years old and represents a big step forward in both length and accuracy for those longer sequences. Oxford Nanopore, meanwhile, presses strands of base pairs through a microscopic nanopore—just one molecule at a time—where an electrical current zaps them in order to observe what kind of molecule they are. By zapping each molecule, scientists can identify the full strand. The amount of ground T2T covered is staggering. “Over the last 20 years we’ve had a genomic revolution where we’ve started to put function, base 26

September/October 2021

by base, across the genome,” Miga says. “Now we’re going to present to the community 200 million bases, which have not been looked at before, to start to assign function and start to understand how our genome works.” There’s still more work to do. One snag is that both projects studied cells that had just 23 chromosomes instead of the full 46. That’s because they use cells derived from the reproductive system, where eggs and sperm each carry half of a full chromosomal load. The cell used in the latest research is from a hydatidiform mole, a kind of reproductive growth that represents an extremely early, nonviable union between a sperm and an egg cell that has no nucleus. Choosing this kind of cell, which has been kept and cultured as a cell line used for research purposes, cuts the huge sequencing job in half, but, in this case, it only carries genetic information from the father’s chromosome. After the study passes through the peer-review process, both PacBio and Oxford will attempt to sequence a genome that includes genetic information from both parents. Another snag is that the material from which this genome was sequenced represents only the genetic information of a single person. The consortium has tapped another team, the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium, and is planning to sequence the genomes of people from different regions around the globe, and build an ethnically diverse array of genetic material to study.

How the Human Genome Is Helping to Fight COVID-19 Since the beginning of the pandemic, scientists have raced to figure out why some people contract severe cases of Covid from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while others experience few to no symptoms at all. In a recent study published to the journal Nature, an international team of roughly 3,000 scientists combed through genetic data from 46 studies and pinpointed 13 locations in the human genome that influence the susceptibility and severity of the disease. This information could help scientists identify high-risk populations and develop better treatments. To see this research in action, read “Can America’s Fastest Supercomputer Defeat COVID for Good?” on page 56.

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The Math That Can Help Cargo Ships See Into the Future 28

September/October 2021

ARGO SH I PS LOST OVE R 3,0 0 0 CONTAI N E RS I N 2020, AN D

reportedly another 1,000 have already fallen overboard in 2021, according to the World Shipping Council. For comparison, the Council estimated an average annual loss of 779 containers between 2017 and 2019. The damage is inconvenient for you, but can also disrupt entire supply chains. A team from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) might have a solution to these maritime woes. Using a few simple calculations, researchers can predict the height and direction of incoming waves without relying on expensive, and occasionally unreliable, wave radar equipment on the vessel itself. Currently the team is testing their method on stationary ship models. But one day, it could help captains avoid disaster.

P H OTO I L LU S T R AT I O N BY A LY S E M A R K E L U S I N G G E T T Y I M AG E S

To keep precious cargo safe, researchers are using new calculations to predict how waves will ricochet off a ship’s hull.

“If we know the waves, then we know everything we want,” says Zhengru Ren, postdoctoral fellow at NTNU. Waves hold crucial information about ocean variables, like the swell height and depth, which provide valuable insight to sea captains. In March, Ren and company published a paper in the journal Marine Structures detailing their new wave-analysis approach. It involves a concept called the “wave buoy analogy,” which relies on a ship’s size, shape, and motion responses to the water to understand the overall sea state (including wave direction, height, and frequency). This all hinges on the scientists’ ability to treat ships like buoys. The flotation markers sit on the ocean’s surface, moving in tandem with the sea itself—rising and falling with a wave’s peaks and troughs—so, the buoy’s movement (or the ship, in this case) is a proxy for the ocean’s movement. Ren’s team has added in a new factor: the ship’s often asymmetrical geometry. The team can add that data into its pre-sail calculations, called “response amplitude operators” (RAOs). Ren says captains can easily plug those into a simple algebraic equation, along with a vessel’s motion, then use regression-based methods to solve for the wave spectrum. That’s a measurement detailing the sequence of waves in the sea, helping captains see into the ocean’s future behavior. “We can do one linear equation, like in high school algebra,” says Ren. “It’s y = ax. For this, the ‘x’ is the wave spectrum. The ‘a’ depends on RAO. And ‘y’ is the vessel motion.” It’s a case of simple division to solve for the wave spectrum. The wave-buoy analogy has existed since the 1980s, but Ren and colleagues found that the estimation technique wasn’t very precise. To solve this problem, they needed to smooth out the data with a concept called a Bézier surface, which is made up of Bézier curves (see sidebar). These parametric curves smoothly connect points on a plane, much like the arc of a thrown baseball. Previous estimation methods relied on just three points to cover the peaks and valleys of an entire curve (here, the wave spectrum), but Ren’s method can use as many points as necessary. “The more nodes we consider, the more smooth the estimates will be,” he says. In this way, the team could more accurately predict wave parameters, like height. As long as a captain knows their ship’s geometric specs, they can make these RAO calculations safely on land, as

RENAULT’S SLEEK CURVES While working for the French automaker Renault in 1968, Pierre Bézier unveiled his “UNISURF” system for Computer Aided Drafting (CAD), which made it possible to use computers in designing the sleek, curved bodies of Peugeots and Renaults. Specifically, UNISURF allowed users to intuitively maneuver

the curves in a car’s design by manipulating a number of control points, called nodes, to shape the parts (see Fig. 1). Notice that some nodes sit outside the curve itself, with the exception of the first

Figure 1

and last points. Today, these Bézier curves are used to smooth out everything from new typefaces, to computergenerated illustrations with a simple clickand-drag motion. —Courtney Linder

the ship is being designed or purchased, says Ren. His tech will take the form of a software package like WAMIT or ShipX (which captains already use to calculate RAOs). It’s not ready to hit the seas yet, but Ren estimates it will debut within the next decade. Because Ren’s team is still testing out the software on stationary ship models, for instance, the technology may be better suited to stationary vessels—like floating wind farms—in the short term. It’s yet to be seen whether Ren’s method really will work on moving ships, explains Ulrik Dam Nielsen, an associate professor of marine technology at NTNU who was not involved in the work. “The research is truly novel, but whether or how the method will work in practice with real data and for ships having forward speed still remains unclear,” he says. For his part, Ren is confident that the new method could elevate the sacred connection between a captain, their ship, and the sea. “The field of marine technology is moving toward digitalization,” he says. “One hundred years ago, captains had no information about the sea state; they could only trust their eyes and experience…this [new] information can just help the captain make better decisions.” September/October 2021

Space // BY COURTNE Y LIN DER //

Scientists Are Planning to Build Noah’s Ark on the Moon

TE AM AT TH E U N IVE RS IT Y O F AR I ZONA

is proposing a concept that just might save us from extinction: a 21st-century version of Noah’s Ark on the moon. This ark wouldn’t contain two of every animal, but rather a repository of cryogenically frozen reproductive cells from 6.7 million species on our planet. Consider it a global insurance policy, says Jekan Thanga, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Arizona’s Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and the project’s mastermind. “As a human civilization, we’re in a fragile state,” he says. And such a shelter could come to fruition in the next three decades, he adds. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, an Earth-bound version of the lunar ark, opened in 2008 and currently contains more than 1 million crop seed samples, including staples like rice, wheat, and barley. It’s a somewhat appropriate analog for the lunar ark, but storing 6.7 million gametes, spores, and seeds isn’t the same on the moon as it is on Earth; there are the added challenges of microgravity, radiation levels roughly 200 times those on Earth, and wildly fluctuating temperatures. With that in mind, Thanga’s team plans to install the lunar ark inside the moon’s extensive network of over 200 lava tubes just beneath its rocky surface. These tunnel-like structures are an ideal home because they insulate the facility from harsh conditions in much the same way that Svalbard’s storage facility, built deep inside a mountain, provides protection from the ele30

September/October 2021

In the event that an asteroid threatens our planet, the lunar ark might be our best bet at maintaining life on Earth.

ments here on Earth. The tea m wa nt s to f irst send a mission called SphereX (not to be confused with NASA’s Earth-orbiting SPHEREx mission) to explore the lunar lava tubes and collect lunar regolith (loose rock and dirt). A team of robots would deploy from a nearby lander, hop or fly into the tubes, and then form a relay, transferring images and data back to the lander. SphereX could teach researchers about the lava tubes’ layout, temperature, and geological makeup, to guide the design process for what would be the first structure built on the moon.

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“What we envision is taking one of the existing pits—just the opening into the lava tube—and installing an elevator shaft,” Thanga says. From there, the elevator shafts would function as the entry and exit to a series of 32 cryopreservation modules. These upright cylinders, stacked in 16 rows, would preserve the reproductive cells. Robots or astronauts would be able to check samples in petri dishes in and out, “like a library,” Thanga says. The storage modules would need cryogenic coolers to maintain the cells at the right temperatures: –292 degrees Fahrenheit for reproductive cells, and –320 degrees Fahrenheit for stem cells. And they would require a spinning apparatus that uses centrifugal force to keep the freezers in motion and prevent the cells from clumping together and building up cold spots. “The setup would be similar to a carousel shelving unit with music CDs packed into a circle,” Thanga says. Meanwhile, robots connected to a magnetic strip (to simulate Earth’s gravity) could remove the samples from their modules and transport them to an analysis lab, periodically checking to see if the seeds and sex cells are stable. There’s evidence to suggest that the samples would remain viable despite the radiation and microgravity. In 2010, researchers at the Slovak Academy of Sciences found that flax plants could grow in radioactive soil near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant with minimal changes to the plant’s proteins. And this June, scientists in Japan produced 168 healthy mice offspring from sperm cells that had been in storage aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for nearly

THE LUNAR ARK SOUNDS LIKE A SETTING FOR A SCI-FI NOVEL, BUT THANGA SAYS THE POSSIBILITY FOR SUCH A SHELTER IS VERY REAL — AND IT COULD COME TO FRUITION IN THE NEXT THREE DECADES.

MOON CONSTRUCTION 101 Building out the lunar ark will be an expensive endeavor, considering it costs about $700 to put a onepound payload into Earth’s orbit, according to NASA. That’s why scientists want to avoid lugging

September/October 2021

six years. Thanga says that private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, which continue to drive down the cost of space launches, further bolster the likelihood of establishing a lunar ark. With some back-of-the-envelope calculations, Thanga estimates it would take 250 rocket launches to carry 50 specimens each of the 6.7 million species his team wants to preserve on the lunar ark. To put that into context, it took 40 launches to build out the ISS, the most expensive structure ever created. Thanga’s team is currently planning an experiment that will send two cryopreservation pouches into space. Each will contain 500 samples from one animal species—50 individual samples are the bare minimum to prevent inbreeding in the short-term, while 500 individuals are required to prevent genetic drift. Ideally, the system will demonstrate successful cryopreservation for five to seven days in-orbit before returning to Earth to see if the samples survived.

cement into space; instead looking for ways to use moon rocks, says Sven G. Bilén, Ph.D., professor of engineering design, electrical engineering, and aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University. “The regolith that’s on the moon is a very, very challenging regolith to work with, because it’s essentially these tiny little

razor blades, they’re very jagged and sharp, they’ve never had a geological process to form them,” says Bilén, who is not involved in the lunar ark project. So, building this kind of complex would likely require an entire moonrock mining operation, as well as a processing center where operators could melt the rocks down into a flowable cement.

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Physics // BY JEN NIFER LEM A N //

c r a te r r a d i us 500 fe e t

300 fe e t

DECADES-LONG QUEST TO FIND

quasicrystals—a crystal-like material with a seemingly impossible structure—has led researchers to an unlikely location: the site of the Trinity test, the first atomic bomb blast. When the U.S. military detonated a plutonium bomb over the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, sand fused with copper cables that stretched to the top of the bomb’s detonation tower, forming a glassy mineral called red trinitite. From a sample of this mineral, Luca Bindi, Ph.D., a mineralogist at the University of Florence in Italy, and his colleagues were able to isolate a previously undiscovered quasicrystal. The discovery, announced earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could shed light on how these unusual grains form. It’s the oldest anthropogenic quasicrystal found yet. Quasicrystal alloys could be used in LED lights, diesel engines, and even surgical instruments. Thanks to their characteristic hardness and slipperiness, they could act as a substitute for the Teflon coating on cookware, and could be added to steel alloys to strengthen body armor. And because of their low heat conductivity, some types of quasicrystals could be tapped to develop heat-insulating coatings. The physical properties of these mysterious microstructures depend on two things: the elements that make up the material, and the arrangement of those elements.

a r e a o f f use d e a r t h

September/October 2021

The red variety of trinitite, seen above, is much rarer than the green or black varieties. The internal atomic composition of quasicrystals can be seen next to the red trinitite.

Atoms found in regular crystals—be they salt, quartz, or diamond—have a uniform and repeating lattice-like structure. Depending on their chemical composition, these atomic building blocks can take on two-, three-, four-, or six-fold rotational symmetry, meaning they can be rotated around a point in symmetrical fashion without leaving gaps. The atoms in quasicrystals, however, break the long-established laws of crystallography and have impossible symmetries, such as five-fold, which wouldn’t naturally rotate symmetrically. While the red trinitite sample’s soccer ball–like

G E T T Y I M AG E S (E A R T H) ; E L E N I D I M O U (G R A P H I C S) ; LU C A B I N D I A N D PA U L J . S T E I N H A R DT (C R Y S TA L) ; I N D U C T I V E LOA D/ W I K I M E D I A CO M M O N S (PAT T E R N)

The Key to Finding This “Impossible” Material Might Be a Nuclear Explosion

LU C A B I N D I A N D PA U L J . S T E I N H A R DT ( X- R AY )

icosahedral symmetry (20-faced, with every face being an equilateral triangle) has been seen before in other quasicrystals, its chemical composition— mainly iron, copper, calcium, and silicon atoms—is entirely new to science. The inclusion of silicon, for instance, is particularly unusual as most known quasicrystals are primarily made from metals. The race to understand how quasicrystals form has been dramatic. Daniel Shechtman, Ph.D., now a materials scientist at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, discovered the first quasicrystal in an aluminum-manganese alloy in 1982. The revelation was so controversial, he was asked to leave his lab. (He eventually earned the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work.) For a while, it seemed these structures could only be generated in a laboratory—often by melting different minerals into a homogenous soup, then re-solidifying them. In 2007, Paul Steinhardt, Ph.D., a theoretical physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and his team plucked the first naturally occurring quasicrystal from a meteorite found in northeast Russia. At the time, they surmised it must have been created by a powerful impact, such as the collision of two celestial bodies. To test this theory, the team traveled to a specialized laboratory at Caltech and shot a projectile at a stack of minerals. The experiment generated a powerful pressure shockwave. “We were able to reproduce, in fact, the same quasicrystal we had seen in the natural meteorite through this artificial process,” explains Steinhardt. He and his colleagues theorized there could be other scenarios powerful enough to create a quasicrystal. Enter the atomic bomb. “The interior of a nuclear fireball is just a really strange place for

QUASICRYSTALS COULD AID NUCLEAR WEAPONS FORENSICS

the chemical bonding of materials,” says Chloe Bonamici, Ph.D., a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not affiliated with the research. “The temperature, the pressure— all of those things are fluctuating on the scale of microseconds.” In other words, this high-pressure, high-temperature environment is a perfect quasicrystal nursery. Bindi scoured the internet for samples of red trinitite, then sliced, polished, and analyzed the chemical composition of the samples until he found the prized quasicrystal. He was able to wriggle the tiny structure—no wider than one tenth the width of a human hair—loose with the point of a needle. Its discovery within the wreckage lends support to the theory that high-pressure shockwaves can “lead to new forms of matter that were not known before— in this case, new forms of quasicrystals,” Bindi says. And now that researchers have the chemical formula of the red trinitite quasicrystal pinned down, they can try to recreate it in a lab and measure its physical properties. The ultimate goal, Steinhardt says, is to tweak the chemical building blocks of lab-grown quasicrystals in order to optimize them for different industrial uses. Tracking down variations of these tiny structures can shed light on new, strange chemical combinations that scientists might not have thought to try. Steinhardt and Bindi aren’t limiting their search to nuclear explosions and meteorite impacts—they plan to search for these elusive structures in fulgurites, the material that sometimes forms from a lightning strike, and in lunar rock samples. The race to find more quasicrystals—and possibly apply them to future technologies—is heating up.

There’s a chance quasicrystals could be used in nuclear forensic chemistry, explains Chloe Bonamici, Ph.D., a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The chemical makeup of the quasicrystal—composed of nearby elements—could

help identify a bomb’s components, or reveal the location of previous, covert detonations. Publicizing this information could help deter bad actors from using nuclear weapons. “If we can read the record that is in the solid pieces of nuclear debris, then

we can make sure that other groups know, ‘We can find you and we can make you accountable if you should happen to use one of these weapons,’ ” Bonamici says. And unlike a fingerprint or a sample of DNA, these crime-scene clues won’t degrade.

September/October 2021

▶The door to Sam Devlin’s shop in Olympia, Washington.

September/October 2021

I L LU S T R AT I O N S B Y G E O R G E R E T S E C K (B O AT ) ; CO L I N M C S H E R R Y (B U OY S)

THIS IS THE EASIEST DIY BOAT-BUILDING METHOD WE’VE EVER SEEN. A N D T H E G U Y W H O D I S COV E R E D I T I S S H A R I N G A L L O F H I S S E C R E T S

September/October 2021

In the summer of 1974, Sam Devlin was working on a tugboat in Alaska when he read the first issue of Wooden Boat Magazine. He was immediately entranced. “I couldn’t shake the image of that wooden boat from my head,” Devlin says. “I can even see it today, almost five decades later.” Devlin had loved boats from a young age and had worked on fiberglass boats in the past, but the process lacked creativity, he says, and didn’t challenge him. This wooden boat, though, was something different. A n at u r a l cr a f t sm a n, D e vl i n believed wooden boatbuilding was a career he could be proud of. He leaned into the idea of making vessels that were both beautiful and functional— something that would last. Physical labor suited his strong, tall frame. And as a child of the ’60s, someone who

came of age post-Vietnam, he felt the freedom to draw his own roadmap and forgo a traditional career. However, the wooden boat revival had just begun, and very few builders were sharing their processes. Devlin had to come up with his own from scratch. Starting in 1977 with hand drawings and small, to-scale models, Devlin created hull shapes that looked viable for small sail and motorboats. But one part stumped him: how to fuse the panels together. Nevertheless, he forged ahead. “My dad agreed to buy the materials if I would build him a boat,” he says. Cutting the hull panels was the easy part. But they needed a method to attach them together. “We looked around the shop and saw baling wire and pliers, and two hours later we had the boat stitched together and looking like the

shape we wanted. That was the eureka moment,” Devlin says. He had stumbled upon the stitch-and-glue method. The stitch-and-glue method is a simple boat building technique popularized in the 1960s that creates a solid, one-piece hull, unlike most other wooden boats, which start with frames and bulkheads and build the hull on top. Using marine plywood panels stitched together with electric fence wire and sealed with epoxy resin, the process eliminates the need for frames or ribs, making it a simpler, faster construction. Stitch-and-glue doesn’t require expensive molds like fiberglass, and can be maintained over the long term, perfect for DIY builders. Devlin and his father continued to tinker with the shape and construction of their boat. A few days later they had a functional skiff. It wasn’t perfect, but it showed the stitch-and-glue process was more than viable—it had clear advantages over other boatbuilding methods. Stitch and glue, generally speaking, has a remarkable ability to adapt. Without high tooling costs like most other boatbuilding mediums, it’s more accessible to more builders, which makes for rapid idea evolution and pervasion about the method. “With low barriers to entry from an experience side, we learned a lot quickly,” Devlin says. They learned that if they cheated on the grade of plywood, they would be sacrificing the integrity of the whole boat. They learned to use epoxy resins because they would seal stronger than more popular polyester resins. And moreover, they learned the process, the best order of operations, and how unique it was to quickly go from an idea to an actual, working boat. Less than a year after finishing his first boat, Devlin embraced boatbuilding as a full-f ledged career. Research led him to builders making small boats in England and New Zealand that used a method similar to the one he had devised with his dad, but not at the same scale or complexity he envisioned. ▶ Sam Devlin pressure-washes one of his boats at dock.

September/October 2021

▲ The back room of Devlin's shop is filled with tools he uses in the boatbuilding process. ◀ Devlin shares some of his CAD boat designs.

From there, he focused on improving the process. “We needed to nurture the method, testing the parameters and not constraining it with patents,” Devlin says. “My goal from the beginning was to proliferate the knowledge as much as possible and keep persisting and developing my own skills as a designer and builder. “Most people didn’t see the potential for boats over 15 or 20 feet with stitch-and-glue, but I didn’t believe in

September/October 2021

that limitation. I hung my boatbuilding shingle on the door of my shop at the time in Eugene, Oregon, and I got my business started in 1978 with 25and 30-foot boats.” Devlin’s business has grown since then, adding members to his team, expanding his shop, and refining his process. Today he works on a variety of wooden boats, and currently is putting the finishing touches on a 40-foot ocean-going catamaran. The biggest advancement in the

stitch-and-glue method in the past decades has been computers replacing hand drawings. Using 3D modeling and CNC machines to cut out shapes, the panels of the boat are more accurate and easier to work with during assembly. This also allows boat designers like Devlin to ship kits to home builders with precut panels to assemble using their own tools. In 2012 Devlin received the Lifetime Achievement in Boatbuilding and Design award by the Wooden Boat Foundation and Wooden Boat Magazine, after designing and building over 400 boats (ranging from 7 to 65 feet) with the stitch and glue method, which he helped improve and bring to the mainstream. To this day Devlin is still building boats, from his facility in Olympia, Washington. Here are his tips for making your own.

SUPPLIES

Tools □ circular saw or jigsaw □ sander □ grinder □ drill □ block plane

□ compass □ tape measure □ plumb bob □ hammer □ linesman pliers

2 5 ST E P S T O B U I L D I N G YO U R OW N ST I T C H - A N D G LU E B OAT

I LLU S T R AT I O N S BY G EO RG E R E T S ECK

□ broom for cleaning □ framing square to keep lines straight

Materials □ electric fence wire □ marine plywood □ epoxy □ fiberglass tape

1 | Procure a set of plans, or scaled drawings of what you’re going to create. Devlin creates plans for hundreds of DIYers, detailing the peel shapes and all the materials you’ll need. 2 | If your boat is longer than 8 feet, edge-join the marine plywood panels end to end (called scarfing). If using a kit, the kit manufacturer will provide waveto-keyhole type indexing to the

All of these can easily be found at a marine supply store or ordered online from most hardware sites.

ends of the panels that will help allow them to be joined. 3 | If you have a CNC router, use it to cut the panels to size (there are usually 5 to 8 for a small, simple boat). Skip to step 14. 4 | If you don’t have access to a CNC router, draw lines across the width of the panel at right angles to the long edge of the plywood, 1 foot apart.

September/October 2021

5 | Make marks at the bisects at each line, as shown on the plans, then hammer small brad-type nails (“fence posts”) partially into the plywood at each of those intersections. 6 | Draw smooth curves between these fence posts using a flexible wooden batten to span smoothly between each of the fence posts. When complete, remove the nails. 7 | Saw the panels out, leaving about 1⁄8 inch extra plywood overhang so you can see the line you drew.

8 | Take both pieces and use a block plane to even them out so they’re symmetrical, smoothing the cutting lines out to the pencil line marks made previously. 9 | Do this for all of the panels of the boat, which together will make up the entire hull. 10 | Use a block plane to knock 45-degree bevels on half the thickness of the panel, on the inside surfaces (where it will mate with another panel).

September/October 2021

11 | Scribe a stitch line, usually the thickness of the plywood plus 1⁄8 inch, and pre-drill small holes as marked on the designs. This works well on the bottom panels. 12 | For larger boats (those above 15 feet long), stitch upside down—it eliminates having to roll the boat over another time. A small boat can be stitched right-side up, because rolling one of these is much easier.

instead of a needle, you can feed the wire through the holes with your hands. It should be tight enough to keep the peels sealed together. 15 | Open the two halves of the bottom panels like opening the pages of a book and fit them over the bulkheads upside down. For small boats, use spreaders to maintain the correct shape.

16 | Repeat this process with each panel, stitching one side and then the other, from bow to stern. When all the panels are in place and the stitches are clamping the panels together into a boat shape, stitch the transom to the ends of the panels. For small boats, add spreaders to open up the top of the boat to the planned size.

13 | For larger boats, set up the bulkheads, or athwartships (sideways) and longitudinal (lengthwise) structures that add structural strength and help define the architectural space of the boat. For small boats, use spreaders, which are small battens that open the top of the boat to the designed width, to stretch out the shear of the boat. 14 | Start with the two bottom panels laid one over the other (like a closed book) at the bow end and stitch the first two panels together at their keel edges. This process is similar to sewing two pieces of fabric together, but

September/October 2021

17 | Start epoxy tabbing, which is like tack welding, putting epoxy and fiberglass tabs between the wire sutures, on the interior of the hull. 18 | Once the tabs have cured solid, at least 24 hours but maybe more in humid climates, you can pull out all the wire stitches and lightly sand over the tabs to smooth things out.

22 | Sand the boat inside and out to help smooth the edges and overlaps of the fiberglassing. Reseal with epoxy resin rolled and brushed over the hull as smoothly as possible. 23 | Sand and seal one final time and roll the boat over.

24 | Install the interior, such as seats, hardware, and the engine. 25 | Paint the entire boat, inside and out. Opaque paint offers the best UV protection, which is important to shield the boat from the sun’s reflection off the water.

19 | Finish fiberglassing the interior seams of the boat. Set several layers of fiberglass tape in epoxy resin over the top. Then fiberglass the exterior plywood panel seams. 20 | Once the hull is to the designed thickness and all seams between the panels are taped with epoxy and fiberglass cloth layers, sheath the entire exterior of the boat with epoxy and fiberglass cloth. Some builders use a final layer of peel ply to control the resin-to-cloth ratio and eliminate air bubbles. 21 | Finish fiberglassing the seams of the interior of the boat, starting with narrow tapes up to the final width of the plans designated.

September/October 2021

I thought we were doing a renovation, not an exorcism. The house had other ideas.

BY DAV I D H OWAR D

September/October 2021

the kind where the light takes on the hue of burnished gold. It was October of 2009, and we were looking at homes in a small, appealing town in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. The place had been staged for our visit, of course, but the red and burnt-yellow leaves falling from an old maple tree in the backyard twirled and waltzed with an unpremeditated perfection. There was a huge hearth and a brick patio and a seven-foot cedar fence surrounding the yard, which at almost an acre was massive for a house in town. Ann and I took this in through two enormous living room windows—like twin IMAX screens projecting visions of some impossibly idyllic domestic life. The house itself had a heft and audacity that was striking. Built in 1955, the four-bedroom ranch-style home sprawled out and up over 3,000 square feet, a funky amalgam of slabs and angles and cantilevered windows. The kitchen, though filled with dated appliances, was roomy and warm, a potential nexus of conversation and aromatic meals. The vast basement was segmented into five rooms; one of them housed a billiards table and featured the word “POOL” in raised letters on the door. The only other home we’d owned had been a creaky 1800s farmhouse that had seemed to tilt in the wind; by contrast, this was a fortress. On the way out, we stopped by the w indows. “There’s no way we can afford this,” Ann said, “but it would be such a cool place to have a party.” Afterward, we shook off the spell. It was impractical, too big for a family of three. But a few weeks later, the 52

September/October 2021

price dropped, and we asked for another look, and began a series of what-ifs and yeah-buts: If we did this, we would need to replace at least part of the roof; the furnace was ancient; and the upstairs… What was the deal with the upstairs? It was seemingly once a buttoned-on in-law apartment, but it was now gutted down to studs and subfloor. And yet. The house was so big, we could rent out the second floor, which would cover some costs. And what if the roof really wasn’t so bad? What if the furnace held out for a winter or two? All we knew for sure was that we wanted to live in that house. Years later, I remember that I had tried to talk Ann into it, and she recalls fervently selling me on the idea. Maybe both recollections are true. The inevitable gut-check moments followed. Our inspector filled a binder with notations that, in the restrained language of his vocation, suggested that we faced some headaches. The seller appeared to have surrendered over the years to a series of systemic complications. “Guys,” our real estate agent cautioned, “this place is cool, but there’s a lot of work here. I don’t want you to never be able to go on vacation.” We listened to all of this and heard none of it. Individually and as a couple, we tended to absorb the conventions of adulthood solely so we could flout them. We quit jobs to travel, embarked on challenging self-guided adventures. We eloped in western Canada. Sure, I was a writer who possessed few home-improvement skills, but Ann liked that sort of thing. The risk was part of the appeal. The day we closed on 777 Pine Street, we showed friends the empty, echoey upstairs. There were grooves in the floor where walls once stood; a forlorn, half-tornout section of red carpet was the only sign that anyone had ever lived there. Except that, when you looked closer, there were some curious features. A ladder led up a false chimney; at the top was a submarine-style hatch from which it was possible to poke your head out. During the inspection, we’d discovered a secret compartment: a section of shelving that opened on a hidden hinge when you pressed on it, like something out of a pre-CGI James Bond movie. A series of miniature doors fed into a crawl space that encircled the apartment. And the passageway led past a carpeted room, four feet high and eight feet deep, with a chainoperated lightbulb and a deadbolt that could be locked from the inside. We called it the panic room. It was over whelming. Our friend Diana commented, jokingly, “If this were my house, I’d be on anti-anxiety medication.” We nodded and smiled and maybe cringed a tiny bit. But the truth was, we had no idea.

PH OTO G R A PH/ I LLU S T R AT I O N BY T EEK AY N A M E

CO U R T E S Y DAV E H O WA R D ( A F R I C A , R I P L E Y ’ S) ; G E T T Y I M AG E S (P I C T U R E F R A M E , T E X T U R E S) ; CO U R T E S Y L E H I G H CO U N T Y (F LO O R P L A N S) ; A LY S E M A R K E L (G R I D A N D TA R G E T D E S I G N) ; P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : CO U R T E S Y L I S A S W I N E H A R T (B O B S W I N E H A R T ) ; CO U R T E S Y W E S L E Y W O R K S R E A L E S TAT E (H O M E) ; CO U R T E S Y DAV E H O WA R D (N E W S PA P E R C L I P S) ; G E T T Y I M AG E S (P I C T U R E F R A M E , T E X T U R E S) ; CO U R T E S Y L E H I G H CO U N T Y (F LO O R P L A N S) ; A LY S E M A R K E L (G R I D A N D TA R G E T D E S I G N)

B E FO R E TH E E LE PHANTS and the three-ton rhino and the lion and Cape buffalo, a 5-year-old boy stalked rabbits in the farm fields of eastern Pennsylvania. It was the mid-1930s, the country only beginning to shrug off the malaise of the Great Depression. The boy used a hickory limb and a piece of binder twine for a bow, and stiff meadow weeds for arrows. Though he was a torrent of kinetic energy, Bob Swinehart also possessed a dreamy quality. He loved to draw, and escaped into elaborate fantasies that sprung from Robin Hood movies and cowboy and Indian TV shows. When he saw a movie about Howard Hill, the world’s greatest archer, Bob instantly identified the man as his hero. Roaming the nearby woods, he imagined he was Hill standing among Africa’s massive creatures and exotic landscapes. On Bob’s 12th birthday, his parents gave him his first real bow, a Ben Pearson lemonwood longbow. He practiced through his adolescence before heading to college, where he majored in art. He served in the army during the Korean War, where, he later wrote, his “thoughts often drifted back to college art projects, high school sports, [my] oil paintings, and early days with bow ’n arrow.” He said little publicly or to family about his wartime years. Just before heading overseas, he married June Houser. Bob’s father-in-law owned a booming construc-

▼ Swinehart's extensive travels to Africa became part of his personal brand (left). The Ripley's Believe It or Not! drawing that depicted Swinehart’s successful rhino hunt (right).

PH OTO G R A PH/ I LLU S T R AT I O N BY T EEK AY N A M E

tion company in the Lehigh Valley, an area located at the intersection of God and money—Amish buggies sharing roads with traffic flowing to and from one of the world’s largest steel producers. Bob found his way back to archery, becoming president of the archery club of the local fish and game association. Over time, he discovered a preternatural talent. He could hit repeated bull’s-eyes, and when that was no longer a challenge, he would recruit friends to flip silver dollars in the air. In a fluid, blur-fast motion, he would raise his bow and fire, a loud ping indicating a hit. He even learned to shoot the bow accurately with his feet. Bob had a round face and wore his hair in a modest pompadour that conveyed a striking resemblance to Elvis. He was compact—5 foot 10, 170 pounds—and prodigiously strong, but his face looked round and soft, likely owing to his obsession with pretzels. He claimed to have eaten a pound, on average, every day since birth. He also was an avid Coke drinker. In 1959, Bob arranged through the fish and game association to host Howard Hill at an exhibition at the local high school. Hill stayed with the Swineharts for a time—one of the highlights of young Bob’s life. They talked extensively about archery, and Swinehart began to ramp up his own aspirations. A year later, he stalked a 200-pound black bear in Canada, and although he needed six arrows to finish off his quarry—one of which missed and embedded in a tree—the hunt triggered his first wave of notoriety. Bowhunting magazine named him one of the nation’s top woodsman-bowhunters, and a local newspaper headlined a story “Shades of Robin Hood,” noting that the feat “is believed to be the first of its type ever accomplished by a Lehigh Valley

September/October 2021

sportsman.” It ended with a rhetorical twist: “Could be Swinehart is another Howard Hill. Bob cautiously says time will tell.” Swinehart, in fact, did nothing to discourage such comparisons. He soon began writing his own bombastic recollections of his experiences, pushing both his risk-taking and his turgid prose to new levels. “I do not look upon facing a dangerous beast as an act of bravery,” he wrote. “I simply do not feel fear in those situations.” He and June would have four children. But even as he deepened his roots, he spent increasing amounts of time hunting. The heads of his prey, preserved by taxidermy, became trophy pieces in the trophy home they’d built. As the 1960s unfolded, Swinehart, fully in the prime of his life, turned his attention to filling his walls and shelves with even more impressive specimens. And he knew, from his hero Howard Hill and from his childhood daydreams, that there was only one place where he could fully cement his own legend.

O N E W E E K E N D M O R N I N G three months after we bought the house, our son, Vaughn, came into the bedroom and tapped me on the shoulder. He was 5, a tumble of red hair splayed around wide eyes. “Dad?” he said. “Dad, something happened in the living

CO U R T E S Y DAV E H O WA R D (H O M E) ; G E T T Y I M A G E S ( T E X T U R E S)

▼ Ann investigates a door leading to the crawlspace that surrounded the second-floor apartment (left). A handyman inspects the false chimney that was actually designed to be a lookout where Swinehart could observe the neighborhood (right).

room. It’s wet.” I rolled over, blinking, groggy. “Did you spill something? Just get a towel, buddy.” “Daa-aad, it wasn’t me,” he said, bouncing softly at the bedside. “Some water came through the ceiling.” My eyes snapped open. We had just experienced several days of spring-monsoon weather, and, perhaps not unrelated, Ann and I had been up on the flat part of the roof, which we knew was near the end of its life span. We’d poked at the patches up there, trying to guess whether we might wait another year, in our attempt to triage the most pressing issues. I stood and trailed Vaughn into the hall, still in my boxers. We turned the corner and there, on the living room floor, a pile of wet debris marinated in a gray puddle. I looked up. A chunk of ceiling roughly the footprint of a compact car had caved in. A gentle stream trickled from the maw. We stood there for what felt like a long time, Vaughn looking back and forth from the wreckage to me. During the brief time we had lived in the house, we’d continually run into people who shared stories about it—they’d visited once or had heard local gossip. The mythology dated back to the man who’d built it in the ’50s—an eccentric bowhunter. Fences were rare in town, but this house was surrounded by a high, cedar enclosure that imposed a distinct sense of remove. Neighbors had noted a camera-based security system and remote-controlled gate in the driveway—both unheard of in these parts. What was all the privacy about? The seller’s real estate agent, who had grown

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PH OTO G R A PH/ I LLU S T R AT I O N BY T EEK AY N A M E

CO U R T E S Y D E A N O FA R K A S ; G E T T Y I M AG E S ( T E X T U R E S , P I C T U R E F R A M E)

up in town, reported a rumor of a secret tunnel from the basement to the street. Some of it—the tunnel, for example—was clearly urban legend. But we found camera mounts around the house and wiring and shelving for monitors upstairs. We couldn’t explain the chimney lookout, or the panic room, or some of the other features. The stories were an engaging distraction from all the work: paint and new flooring and tearing out wallpaper and old carpeting. Ann took charge as the fearless renovator—I attributed her DIY ethic to her Irish-farmer lineage— and I helped with unskilled labor. The experience fit our lives together as a pointedly unconventional couple. Early in our romance, we’d alternated adventures on bikes in places like Chile with shoestring self-employment in a tiny New York City apartment. We avoided office jobs and predictability. Health insurance seemed like a pointless frivolity. Having a child changed things—I took a fulltime job as a magazine editor—but we still thought of ourselves as resourceful and unorthodox and unafraid of hard work. And, most of all, we were a team. Pine Street was in certain ways a natural extension of our live-first, ask-questions-later ethos. Maybe it would be the place we’d live the rest of our lives—I thought so. Yes, it was daunting. But nothing we couldn’t handle. Or could we? As Vaughn and I stood frozen in place, another chunk of ceiling snapped loose and landed with a thwump. Water trickled in a little faster, and particles of what I guessed was loose insulation swirled in the air. It reminded me of scenes in war movies when, right after a bombing, dust hovers over the rubble in solemn dawn light, the imagery both serenely beautiful and terrifying. I wondered what I should do. I also wondered, for the first time, what we had done.

He was in Angola, under a fierce sun, on a 100-degree day. It was June 1966. He was stalking a creature he’d dreamed of since his childhood: a rhinoceros with a horn that measured over two feet, a majestic animal that weighed thousands of pounds. Swinehart and his guide and crew had been tracking it for hours over countless miles, a bubble wrap of blisters forming on his feet. But he still hadn’t seen the rhino, because it was traveling under the cover of thick, thorny vegetation and his guide, Rui Almeida, kept him third in line—for his safety, behind scouts B O B SW I N E H A R T WA S E AG E R .

PH OTO G R A PH/ I LLU S T R AT I O N BY T EEK AY N A M E

▲ Swinehart practicing in the backyard at Pine Street in 1964. His daughter, Lisa, tosses a target in the air for him to hit.

with rifles. They stopped to confer. “Look, this third-man stuff is no good with bow and arrow,” Swinehart told Almeida, according to an article he later published. “Too dangerous,” Almeida replied. “Maybe so. But necessary if I’m to get an arrow into this rhino.” No archer had ever killed a rhino. It was considered too risky; the animal was “a battlewagon on four legs,” as Swinehart put it. A rhino could gore and trample a man as easily as a person crushes a spider. Two years earlier, a rhino had charged after Swinehart had fired an arrow. “My backup man poured a lot of lead before the three-ton mass dropped,” he recounted. “It came within a few yards of us.” The incident cost him the $750 he’d paid for the license—he’d need to start over to achieve the feat with his bow—and nearly his life. And the previous day on this second trip, a rhino had chased Swinehart and his party up a tree before he ever fired a shot. “Okay,” Almeida replied. “We’ll give it one more try.” Swinehart finally spotted his quarry in a gap among thorn bushes. Here is his recollection (italics his), from the December 1966 issue of Archery World: He was big! So was the front horn! His head was slightly turned, with one of his beady eyes glaring at me. I quickly drew an arrow on my 90 pound longbow. On the instant of release the dark mass of muscle whirled with such amazing agility that he was coming face on when the arrow got there. The steel-tipped fiberglass arrow struck the shoulder area, doing no mortal harm, and continued on page 78 September/October 2021

DEFEAT COVID BY A.C. SHILTON

September/October 2021

It can perform 200 quadrillion operations per second and has one goal: eradicate the virus.

P HOTOGR AP H Y BY DOUG STRICKLA ND

September/October 2021

> > > > > > >

up the gears of a virus hell-bent on infecting human cells. She focuses on therapeutics—the things doctors rely on to treat disease. Head spent decades at a major drug company searching for drugs that would combat diseases, including viruses like HIV. But in February of 2020 she was working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Moving to public sector meant Head had an obligation to find something, anything, that might serve the public good in this time of crisis. It also meant that she had access to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. While the most visible war against COVID-19 was being fought in ICUs and emergency rooms across the country, another line of defense was assembling in Tennessee. The nation’s brightest computer scientists were pressing Summit, a 200-petaflop supercomputer, into service as a Covidfighting machine. The only problem? They had to keep the machine—which demands constant monitoring from a crew of on-site technicians—running, despite a global pandemic.

do it, Bronson Messer, Ph.D., told himself in January of 2020 as he decided to return to his old job at Oak Ridge. Messer is a computational astrophysicist, who prefers to spend his days noodling out questions like, Where did all the uranium in the universe come from? From 2010 to 2011, Messer had pushed aside his own research while he served as the Director of Science at Mar ti Head, Ph.D., had a bad the Oak Ridge Leadership Computfeeling. It was mid-Februar y of ing Facility. It’s a job that required, in large part, helping other research2020. She’d just returned to her ers achieve their data goals on Summit home in Tennessee from a work at the expense of his own work. Messer trip. Somewhere, probably in an says he missed the research life and stepped away. But in late 2019 the job airpor t, she’d picked up what opened again. Messer knew how to do it she thought was just a cold. and allowed himself to be pulled back in. What he did not know, though, was just how chaotic—and high-stakes—this role would become in two months. Sure, physically she felt crappy. But the bad feelOn March 22, 2020, President Trump announced the ing, which she described as “itchy,” came from the formation of the COVID-19 High Performance Computnews coming out of China. A career spent working ing Consortium, an effort to pair researchers working on with infectious diseases had given Head all the info Covid-related solutions with time on 16 of the nation’s she needed on what, exactly, the novel coronavirus supercomputers, including Summit. Within days, Messer might be capable of. had on his desk a pile of projects—like finding how Covid And so, when her nose started running and her attacks the body, and searches for drugs that might save throat got scratchy, Head quarantined herself and lives. These researchers needed time on Summit. It was up her husband. Instead of watching trashy TV in bed to Messer to make sure the brightest minds and the worto recover, she tucked into her quarantine cocoon thiest projects rose to the top of the pile. By April, three of a home office—with tissues and tea at hand—and to four of his workdays per week were spent just allocating started hunting. time to researchers requesting a turn on the machine. See Head is a drug hunter. A computational chemyou later, supernovas, he thought. ist by training, Head uses complex computer As proposals crashed into Messer’s inbox, Paul Abston simulations to search for molecules that can gum was trying to figure out just how, if the pandemic got as bad SOMEONE HAS TO

September/October 2021

as predicted, he would keep Summit running. Abston is the group leader for infrastructure and operations at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Keeping the lights on and the computer working is his responsibility. With the formation of the High Performance Computing Consortium, Summit was designated as critical infrastructure—right alongside America’s power grids and water pipes—and effectively ordered to stay online. Ever y employee who worked on Summit was now essential. Come a power outage, or water leak, or Covid outbreak in the facility, Abston was going to have to find a way to keep it humming. Humming is not hyperbole. Supercomputers are more like a high-powered telescope than a laptop. Summit is a collection of 9,468 CPUs (central processing units, the processing systems your home computer runs on) and 27,756 GPUs (graphics processing unit, what your gaming systems run on). They’re stored in refrigerator-sized cabinets, lined up in rows like recruits at boot camp, standing shoulder-to-shoulder and ready to take orders. Inside each cabinet are 18 nodes, or drawers. Each node contains two CPUs and six GPUs. One hundred eighty-five miles of high-speed cable connects all those CPUs and GPUs. Pipes jut in and out of the ceiling, bringing water to cool down the cabinets, which burn up to 13 megawatts an hour—enough energy to power more than 10,000 homes. Stepping into the building that houses Summit is an auditory experience, like standing next to the ocean. Calculations can be pushed through Summit remotely. But Summit is a machine, things break. At least weekly there’s a communication issue or a storage failure where someone’s work doesn’t get saved, Abston says. And those are just software problems. The 4,000 gallons of water running through the room to cool the machine could become a nightmare if a pipe sprung a leak. So, too, could a cyber attack. Or an attack on the power grid. There was a lot that Abston was tasked with protecting—and a bevy of workers he’d need to do it. At least some would have to be on site, which meant Abston needed to do everything in his power to stop a Covid outbreak before it could even begin. First he reviewed exactly how few people he could get away with hav▶ ing in the building at a time. Then Marti Head’s Summit he reviewed his employees’ workresearch may stations. If someone had tasks that lead to drugs that treat had to be performed in a tight space, those who get infected. he’d try to move them to shifts where

they worked alone. Then he considered testing. Thankfully, Oak Ridge National Laboratory got its own testing facility up and running at the beginning of the pandemic. And it would be needed. By April, Tennessee was seeing hundreds of new cases every day. By fall, they were in the thousands. Over the winter, the situation was dire, peaking at more than 10,000 new cases and more than 100 deaths daily. Still: Abston kept the lights on. He juggled schedules as colleagues needed to quarantine after they were exposed by a spouse or child. Sometimes he just came in and filled the gap. But, whatever happened, Abston simply could not allow an outbreak of Covid among his staff to stop Summit’s steady march toward progress. THERE’S A STORY that Ray Smith likes to tell about how 60,000 acres of Appalachian farmland became a secret hub for American science. In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt warning of fission chain reactions utilizing uranium that could likely produce large amounts of power, and his belief that Germany was pursuing the research. “They were worried that they were going to build a bomb,” says Smith, historian for the City of Oak Ridge. Roosevelt knew America needed to act. Smith says that

September/October 2021

Roosevelt went to Senator Kenneth McKellar, then head of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “He said, ‘Senator, I need to put a large amount of money against the war effort. And I can’t let the press or anyone know how much it is or what it’s being used for. Can you help me with that?’” The good senator from Tennessee responded that he could help with that—and where in Tennessee was it going to go? By 1943, Clinton Engineer Works, which would later become the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was up and running under the Manhattan Project to produce weaponsgrade plutonium. Scientists from around the country were soon reporting for duty in a town which was too new to exist on maps. After the war, Oak Ridge continued to be a hub for science. In recent years, it’s become known for its hosting America’s most powerful supercomputers. Traditionally, we’ve talked about supercomputers mostly by how fast they can do calculations. That term is a “FLOP,” or a floating point operation, says Jeff Nichols, the associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge. A floating point operation is just an addition or a multiplication, and when we rate supercomputers, we add up how many operations they can do per second. A million per second, that’s a megaflop. A billion is a gigaflop, and a trillion is a teraflop. Summit is a 200-petaflop machine, meaning it can do 200 quadrillion operations per second. But back around 2009, supercomputer builders were stymied by how to continue to expand FLOP capacity without making these machines into monster energy guzzlers. The supercomputer then at Oak Ridge, named Jaguar, used up to about 8.2 megawatts per hour, says Nichols. “We knew that if we were going to double the computing, we were going to double the power, and we couldn’t do that anymore,” he says. Looking for a solution, supercomputer designers wondered if they could use gaming processors to boost their energy efficiency. GPUs can be 10 times as powerful as CPUs, says Nichols. The problem, however, is that they were not as accurate. If Superman’s foot doesn’t quite hit the edge of the building when he jumps, our imaginations can close that gap. If a supercomputer misses a calculation when doing crucial drug research, that supercomputer is useless. Nichols says that the team building Summit approached NVIDIA, a Santa Clara, California–based GPU manufacturer, and asked if it could build a GPU with the accuracy of a CPU. By altering the type of silicon used in the chip, NVIDIA was able to pull it off: They created a GPU that was both efficient with power and accurate with its calculations. The first supercomputer at Oak Ridge to be built with GPUs was named Titan. It was 10 times more powerful than Jaguar. In 2017, Titan was replaced by Summit, which was, again, 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. Of course, power is good, but it’s not the only thing that matters. What researchers like Head and Dan Jacobson,

September/October 2021

Ph.D., really need is a smart supercomputer. Artificial intelligence—Summit’s biggest advantage over Titan— allows supercomputer users to build a model, and then tell the machine to look for patterns that might be like that model. Without this machine learning, you can only send a computer off to look for exact matches. That doesn’t help when you’re seeking molecules that may dock up with a virus. If there’s no exact match, your search will come up empty, when really, something that might have been close enough to work was overlooked. And machine learning allows researchers to be extremely specific in what results they do and don’t want returned to them. If the computer isn’t giving you what you want, you can teach it to do better. Thanks to a special type of processor core, called a tensor core, Summit became both extremely fast and a quick study when it came to machine learning. Tensor cores allow computers to group and compare related data to identify connections and see how they interact. A normal core knocks out operations as they come, but a tensor core can also compare that operation to another that it’s been told is related. scientists from all over the country applied and got time on Summit for Covid-related projects. But perhaps two of the most important queries on the computer attacked the virus from opposite ends of the scientific spectrum. One wanted to know how Covid attacked the body, so we could better understand the disease. The other wanted to discover how we could stop the virus in its tracks. The lab’s own Jacobson was charged with writing the code that would get answers on exactly why Covid was behaving in ways doctors had never seen before. Jacobson is a computational biologist. His work is specifically in systems biology, which involves deciphering the interconnected complexity of living organisms at the cellular level—whether that’s in plants destined for biofuels or in the human brain, unwinding the causes of various neuropsychiatric conditions like Alzheimer’s and autism. Jacobson was watching the pandemic well before the rest of us. Through another project, he had contacts working in the Beijing embassy when the first cases in Wuhan were reported. He instantly understood the trouble mankind might be in. “There were a few of those ruh roh moments, where we said, ‘Yeah, this could go really quite poorly,’” Jacobson says. Jacobson looks for patterns in data that reveal what exactly is happening in the molecular relationships within and between cells. At first, there wasn’t much data to work with. But then, as so many scientists across the globe put

A RANGE OF

> their other research on hold to work on Covid-related projects, it was like a firehose, and Jacobson wanted all of it. He approaches biology holistically, using huge amounts of data from all types of inquiries to look for patterns and interesting interactions between s ystems. When it ca me to Cov id, he hoarded everything: gene expression information, immune system information, physiology data, genetics data, protein structural data, electronic health records, environmental data, microbiome data, and autopsy data. The goal was to look for patterns that changed when people became infected, were sick, and then recovered from Covid. Looking at everything all at once “allows us to find things that often are missed otherwise. If you’re just looking at one thing at a time, you’re taking a very traditional approach,” he says. And you may find that one thing you’re looking for, but “you’ll overlook important things because

you’re focused very narrowly.” Marti Head wanted her turn, too. Before joining the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Head spent part of her two decades at pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline hunting for drugs that would attack bacteria. Fighting Covid was going to be markedly harder. “Bacteria are alive, so you can kill them. They fight back, but you can kill them,” she says. “Viruses aren’t really alive, and it’s much harder to kill something that’s not really alive.” Instead of going for the kill, Head’s drug-hunting hopes rested on finding molecules that could, essentially, throw a wrench in how the virus worked. In one case, she and her colleagues started looking at the main protease, an enzyme that essentially cuts the protein chain found in a cell infected with Covid into little tiny protein bits that then go off and do the virus’s bidding. Head needed a molecule that was exactly the right size and right shape to dock with a small groove they’d identified on the main protease. Step one was writing an algorithm that would essentially

September/October 2021

▲ Messer and his team write the code for every query that gets run through Summit.

search for molecules that could possibly be the right size and shape to dock with the virus. But it’s not just enough for the two parts to fit, says Head. “Proteins are not just sitting there waiting for us in a static way to do something. They’re constantly moving as part of what they are, and so we need to understand those motions.” only as super as the people writing code for it. A misconception, says Messer, is that you log onto Summit and can simply click on programs that help you run your query. For the vast majority of calculations on Summit, someone has to write all the algorithms. Usually, that someone is actually a group of someones. The researcher writes some of the code, but Messer adds that the graduate students doing code development are the lifeblood of Summit. What makes writing code for these projects hard is that there’s rarely a single answer you’re seeking. An if-then algorithm won’t work, because you don’t want just one answer. “When I run an astrophysics code, there’s no answer at the end,” says Messer. Instead, he watches as

A SU PE RCOM PUTE R IS

September/October 2021

▶ a stream of data is produced that The control might point him toward possible room monitors Summit’s 37,224 answers. “And then I have to climb processors. inside all the data that are generated ◀ to be able to infer some scientific Two of the 260 rows of racks insight,” says Messer. that make up To crack exactly why Covid was Summit. making so many people so sick, Jacobson was going to have to crawl inside a whole mess of data, too. Jacobson started at the beginning, focusing on how the virus hooks onto cells. This he already knew: Covid goes after the ACE2 protein, which isn’t a typical receptor for a virus to latch onto. When he began looking at data from other coronaviruses—like the ones that cause the common cold—he realized that many of them target proteins in the renin angiotensin system (RAS) as entry points into cells. The RAS is partially responsible for regulating blood pressure and fluid and electrolyte balance. Jacobson figured he’d start there. Covid previously had seemed like purely a respiratory disease. So targeting the RAS was a little unexpected. His next step was to use Summit to evaluate gene expression in lung tissue samples from infected and uninfected patients. Summit went searching, plowing through 2.5 billion calculations. The analysis coughed up a trove of data on exactly how genes are normally regulated and how those regulatory patterns were dramatically altered by SARS-CoV-2 infection. And then: “I had that eureka moment. Not many times in my career can I go back to a discovery where there was a single eureka moment,” says Jacobson. But it was right there in the data: Covid was causing a massive dysregulation in the RAS. Back to Summit Jacobson went. Because of the computer’s massive computational abilities, Jacobson was able to see changes in many cellular functions—ranging from inflammatory and permeability responses, to hyaluronic acid synthesis and degradation, to electrolyte balance and coagulation, that connected in some way to the R AS. From that resulting data set, it became clear that something strange was happening at the intersection between the RAS and the kallikrein-kinin (bradykinin) system, which both play roles in inflammatory responses. “We then dived into the clinical literature of what happens when you dysregulate those systems,” he says. “You look at those predictive symptoms in different parts of the body and, wow, they match up really well with what’s

going on in Covid-19.” This research helped reframe the discussion of Covid being as much a vascular disease as a respiratory one. Dysregulation of the bradykinin system can cause blood vessels to essentially leak—which could explain why doctors were seeing patients with so much fluid in their lungs. Thanks to Summit and Jacobson’s research, and that of similar groups, clinicians began thinking about whether Vitamin D, a known regulator for the RAS, might help some patients. While just going outside and standing in the sunshine certainly won’t prevent Covid, there is evidence that it could reduce the severity of infections. Likewise, the bradykinin hypothesis brought icatibant, a drug that acts as a bradykinin B2 receptor antagonist, into clinical trials. Though these drugs are not a cure-all for Covid, the bradykinin hypothesis is helping doctors understand what they’re seeing. While Jacobson was discovering what was causing severe disease, Head was working the other side of the equation, hunting for a drug to beat back that severity. Drug hunting takes a lot of patience. While Head has numerous patents and has taken several molecules fairly far in the drug testing process, she had yet to find a molecule that got to market as an efficacious drug. So much can go wrong in the development process: Maybe the molecule only docks with the protein in the lab. Or maybe it

works when injected into mice, but won’t survive the acid of a stomach when swallowed in capsule form. “We need it to be that one-in-a-million,” she says, describing the odds of finding a molecule that does it all. Thanks to Summit, Head has a lead on that one-ina-million. It’s called MCULE-5948770040, and it both binds and inhibits the main protease. In late March, she published a pre-print paper on her team’s finding. That research is currently undergoing peer review. New variants, meanwhile, have made her work even more important. So far, vaccines appear to be effective against the new variants, but should that change, therapeutics will again become a most precious tool in the fight against Covid. Highlighting the importance of the development of effective Covid drugs, in June, the Biden administration announced $3 billion in funding for drug development projects like Head’s. But Head is thinking well beyond the variants, too. What she’s truly hoping to build is code that’s a starting point for fighting the next pandemic. Because there will be a next pandemic. “We want those platforms ready to go, so we can respond quickly to the next Zika, Ebola, influenza, and coronavirus,” she says. “When, heaven help us, SARS-CoV-3 comes along, as long as we have the will to stay invested and vigilant, we will have the data, the platforms, and the people around the globe who are going to respond.”

September/October 2021

The Test // BY A DRIEN NE DONICA //

Shining a Light on Headlamp Performance 64

September/October 2021

E A D L A M P S A R E A V E R S AT I L E , H A N D S - F R E E M E A N S

of illuminating the world around you. They’re great for attending to camp tasks after dark, racking up miles when the sun is nowhere in sight, stalking prey in the predawn hours, and even working on repairs and projects in your home’s light-starved nooks and crannies. A tool this indispensable needs to be reliable. So we developed a multistep test that pushed eight headlamps to their limits and revealed which hit the sweet spot of performance, ease of use, comfort, and price.

P H OTO G R A P H Y BY T R E VO R R A A B

MEASURING BRIGHTNESS Buying a headlamp based on its advertised lumens is tempting, but it won’t tell you the full story. Conventional headlamp design causes light output to decrease over time, often starting as soon as you press the power button. This is partly caused by the variable nature of electrical circuits, but it’s also a byproduct of manufacturers regulating power delivery to balance brightness, battery life, and heat management. Still, comparing the lumens of different headlamps gives you some idea of how they will suit your needs. So at the Pop Mech Test Lab, we measured the lumens of each while it was on its brightest setting by using an integrating sphere, a hollow instrument with a white reflective interior that scatters light evenly inside and a lux meter for measuring that light. Test Editor Brad Ford built our sphere and calibrated it with the help of product engineers at two companies that make portable high-performance LEDs. We recorded the reading on the lux meter every 30 seconds for the first three minutes, then again at the 5-, 10-, 15-, 20-, 25-, and 30-minute marks. (This is similar to the widely adopted standardized methodology used by manufacturers, if you were wondering.) The findings showed how close our test samples came to their advertised maximum lumens and how steady or rapidly their brightnesses declined over time.

1200

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BioLite HeadLamp 750 (Burst) BioLite HeadLamp 750 (High) Black Diamond Icon 700 Black Diamond Onsight 375 Coast XPH30R (Turbo)

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n7 mo 0 nd Ene Ons 0 rgiz igh er V t3 75 C isio n U oast XPH ltra 3 HD Rec 0R har gea Fen ble ix H L Pet 18R-T zl A cti k Pet Core zl I ko Cor e

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As expected, every headlamp on our list grew progressively dimmer during our half-hour test. Two of our top picks—the BioLite HeadLamp 750 and Coast XPH30R—had the largest swings, due to their optional 30-second burst modes. When we tested them on their brightest non-burst setting (500 and 490 lumens, respectively), their consistency improved significantly. The BioLite, in particular, proved to be an incredibly stable—though much dimmer than promised—performer, thanks to its Constant Mode tech (see review on p. 67 for more on this). During the test, its brightness dropped by 7 percent compared to the average decline of 60 percent among the lamps we tested.

None of our test results exactly matched the manufacturers’ claimed lumens, but most were within a reasonable 10 percent margin. The Energizer Vision Ultra stood out as one of the most accurate, though it reached this peak at the one-minute mark instead of immediately after being powered on.

800 LUMENS

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Coast XPH30R (High) Energizer Vision Ultra HD Rechargeable Fenix HL18R-T Petzl Actik Core Petzl Iko Core

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The Test

TESTING IN THE FIELD

Another way to assess a headlamp’s effectiveness is to measure its beam distance. After dark, we found the farthest point where each headlamp was bright enough for us to clearly identify a silhouette of a person, painted neutral gray, by moving the silhouette along a line of reflective traffic cones, each spaced 25 feet apart. The headlamps were on their brightest mode and set to their most focused spotlight beam shape. See reviews on the opposite page for the results of our top three performers. To find how long each headlamp lasts on a full charge or new set of batteries, we ran them on their highest setting until the bulbs faded, flickered, and died. Finally, we wore them while hiking, camping, on late-night runs, and around the house to gauge fit and overall usability.

Headlamps are often outfitted with multicolor LEDs. Understanding which is best for what purpose requires brushing up on your biology. “Color is not in the retina. It’s not some reflex tied to wavelength,” explains Bevil Conway, who has a Ph.D. in neurobiology and runs a National Institutes of Health–funded research lab that studies color and cognition. “It’s actually this quite elaborate, sophisticated operation of interpretation that the brain is doing.” That process starts when the millions of rods and cones at the back of the eye absorb light. These photoreceptors are tuned to react to different wavelengths and operate under different lighting conditions. Rods only respond in very dim light, whereas the three types of cones—respectively most sensitive to long, middle, and short wavelengths—do the work under normal circumstances. So choosing between white and colored light lets us see our surroundings in different ways.

SEEING COLORS

To see the most detail and color, stick with this neutral light. But in total darkness, use the highest settings judiciously. Bright light creates a glare that causes our rods to shut off, thereby hampering our night vision in the process. WHITE

This common colored light, processed from long wavelengths, is best for preserving your night vision because it doesn’t oversaturate your rods. That means they will still work (and you can still see) when you turn the light off. Switch to red when you want to chat face-to-face with a buddy without blinding them or when you want to hide from bugs. (Most insects have photoreceptors that can’t register red light.) RED

Although it’s rare to find in headlamps, green light makes it easy to see at relatively dim settings. Thank your Land M-cones for that; both are most sensitive to yellow and green light. GREEN

Rarer still, dim blue light is the hardest to see with and, contrary to popular belief, won’t help you track a trail of blood when you’re hunting. That’s because your relatively few S-cones absorb the long wavelength red and reflect shorter, blue wavelengths that don’t look markedly different under your headlamp. Limit the blue to mood lighting. BLUE

September/October 2021

B E ST O F TH E TE ST

BEST OVERALL

BEST VALUE

BEST FOR JOB SITES

B I O L I T E H E A D L A M P 75 0

E N E R G I Z E R V I S I O N U LT R A H D R E C H A R G E A B LE

COA ST X PH 3 0 R

Price: $100 / Weight: 5.4 oz / Beam distance: 375 ft / Run time: 36 hr 57 min BioLite baked some helpful tech into its newest, very comfortable, and somewhat pricey headlamp. The most noteworthy is Constant Mode, which prevented the 750 from subtly dimming on us. For recreational users, this offers peace of mind, but in an emergency, it keeps lumens exactly where you need them to be to navigate or work safely. We also appreciated the setting memory that let us turn the lamp off in one of five white and red light modes, then turn it back on in that same mode without needing to cycle through the options. Bonus: A rear red light increases visibility.

Price: $35 / Weight: 2.8 oz / Beam distance: 250 ft / Run time: 4 hr 41 min The cost of rechargeable tech has come down considerably over the years. But the initial investment can still be a barrier, be it for an electric vehicle or a headlamp. Energizer bucks that trend with the affordable, lightweight, and surprisingly powerful Vision Ultra. The addition of the red and green LEDs made the lamp feel all the more valuable, even if we mostly stuck to using the white and red lights. And we liked the adjustable frame that let us tilt the housing down as much as 90 degrees. A drawback is the lamp’s relatively short run time.

R e a d m o re a b o u t a l l t h e l a m p s we te s ted a t p o p u l a r m e c h a n i c s . co m .

PICK YOUR POWER

Price: $70 / Weight: 5.3 oz / Beam distance: 375 ft / Run time: 9 hr 39 min By virtue of its removable head strap, this dual-fuel model transitions from headlamp to flashlight in seconds—useful for all those spots your head can’t fit into but your light source needs to. We also appreciated that one end of the lamp body is magnetic, so we could hang it from a nearby metal surface while we worked. As for light modes, the XPH30R has four settings (white light only) and easily transitioned from floodlight to spotlight when we twisted the bezel around the bulb. Its run time was notably shorter than the other high-output lamps in the test, but 9.5 hours is at least long enough to get you through most workdays.

Although we didn’t directly test battery types, it’s worth weighing your options. Models that use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are great for long-distance efforts, saving you from packing any replacement on top of the power bank or solar charger already in your kit. Those running on alkaline or lithium batteries cut out downtime that comes with charging and can be more affordable up front. We’re big fans of the dual-power models that continue to proliferate and offer the greatest flexibility.

September/October 2021

Editors’ Choice // ONE PIECE OF GE A R TH AT’S W ON THE HE A RT OF OUR TEST TE A M //

▲ Lumos U ltra M I PS B ike H elmet $20 0

Helmet safety technology is more affordable and arguably better than ever. But nothing’s going to keep you safer than avoiding a bad spill in the first place. When I’m riding on the road, that means lighting up my bike so cars know I’m there. The new Ultra does the same for my head. The MIPS-equipped commuter helmet is studded with 30 small LEDs on the front that shine up to 284 lumens. The 64 additional rear lights further increase your visibility. I’ve managed to make it more than a week without pulling out the charger, but battery life depends on your settings. Clicking the power button at the back cycles through two flashing and one solid preset modes. But after connecting to the Lumos app, I slightly lowered the brightness, slowed down one of the flash patterns, and reordered the modes so that the solid beam

September/October 2021

comes first. The Lumos Helmet app also provides controls for the rear turn signals, but I preferred using the Lumos Remote. This $25 add-on installs on your handlebar and lets you activate the automatic brake lights, too. At 14 ounces, the Ultra is on the heavier side. But my main quibble is with the fit. It took several adjustments before I found a comfortably secure position. Even now, it’s not the best-fitting helmet I’ve tested. But it’s good enough that I feel protected, especially with the lights on. As the days grow shorter, the Ultra is exactly what I want to wear on my rides.—Adrienne Donica

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Why an Inverter Generator Is Your Best BackupPower Bet

September/October 2021

X T R E M E W E AT H E R — L I K E T H E C O L D

snap that took down the power grid in Texas, heat waves that spiked demand and caused rolling blackouts in California, and more severe hurricanes that have been strafing the East Coast from Florida to New England—is increasingly making backup power a priority. A good generator can run appliances such as refrigerators, freezers, sump pumps, well pumps, and chargers for laptops and mobile devices, protecting our food and belongings as well as keeping us connected to the larger world during natural disasters and emergencies.

P H OTO G R A P H Y BY T R E VO R R A A B

Today, for many people with laptops and phones to charge and smart appliances, home-theater systems, sound systems, or other sensitive electronics to power, whether during a blackout or while tailgating or camping, the best option will be an inverter generator. Consider the main advantage over their non-inverter cousins: These generators provide clean power for modern electronic devices, many of which are susceptible to fluctuations in electrical current. That “clean” power is 120 volts of alternating current (AC) at a frequency of 60 Hertz (Hz), the same you’d get from a typical wall outlet. The electrons flowing through wires carrying AC change direction at regular intervals, with 60Hz indicating that the current does this 60 times in one second. Visually, the frequency of the alternation of the current looks like a perfect sine wave. Most commercially available non-inverter portable generators produce 120 volts of AC at 60Hz. However, many appliances require more power to start up. This initial load requires generators to boost the current to meet the demand. Because the generator must first sense this voltage draw, there’s a lag before it increases the current to the device. This delay can cause both the voltage and frequency from the generator to dip before returning to steady states. Again, represented as a sine wave, the individual peaks and valleys will appear asymmetrical, and the measurement of the deviation from a pure sine wave is called Total Harmonic Distortion (THD). Too much THD can jack up both the voltage and current and increase heat in components on circuit boards, which in the extreme can damage

WHAT KIND OF GROUNDING WILL I NEED IN A GENERATOR? Electrical circuits need to be grounded in order to operate safely, so that any current that shorts out or has a fault is directed to the ground—the literal earth—and the electric-

them and also shorten their life spans. Decreases, on the other hand, may be passed through circuits, causing malfunctions. You’ll see THD listed in most generator specs as a percentage. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) says that power systems for computers and related electronics and equipment should have no more than 5 percent THD. And there’s the rub: Traditional generators may have THD as high as 15 or 20 percent. Inverter generators produce AC power as well, but they convert it to direct current (DC) and then back to AC before it can be used to power anything. DC current is very stable, flowing constantly in one direction. So the conversion of AC to DC acts like a filter, and the inversion back to AC yields a THD that is typically very low. Other benefits include their closed-frame design, in which the engines are fully encased, making them much quieter than traditional generators. And most models have an economy mode that reduces engine RPM when there are low loads on them, boosting the lifespan and efficiency. Their engines are also set to run at lower RPM in general, and due to the stabilizing nature of the conversion and inversion from AC to DC and back to AC, they don’t labor as much to meet increased demand. To size one correctly, you still need to calculate and account for the start-up loads of larger appliances and tools. But if you’re charging mobile devices, using computers, modems, or sound equipment, or powering smart appliances, an inverter generator is the best choice to prevent potential (and, likely, expensive) damage to your gadgets.

ity doesn’t have to go through you to reach it. And generators come with one of two types of grounding circuits. In a bonded neutral design, the neutral wire connects to the generator frame, which serves as the ground. With a floating neutral, the wire isn’t connected to the frame; there’s a terminal if you need to connect the wire to a grounding rod driven into the soil.

If you’re powering appliances, tools, or other devices temporarily by plugging them directly into the standard outlets, get a generator with a bonded neutral. If you’re powering circuits in your home, floating neutral is best. Still, consult the manual, a licensed electrician, or local building officials and ordinances for requirements connecting to your home or a grounding rod.

September/October 2021

Home

TO T E S T T H E S E M O D E L S , W E M E A S U R E D S O U N D L E V E L S O F E AC H F R O M T H R E E F E E T

THE BEST GENERATORS FROM OUR TEST BEST HOME BACKUP

PR E DATO R 9, 5 0 0 - WAT T INVERTER

Price: $2,000 / Running watts: 7,600 / Starting watts: 9,500 / Decibels under load: 89.1 / Outlets: one 12v DC, two USB, four 120v 20A, one 120v 30A, one 120/240v 30A twist lock / Ground: Bonded neutral / Starting: Electric, manual recoil / Carbon monoxide shutoff: Yes / Weight: 257 lb The Predator 9,500, from Harbor Freight, is a very big inverter, capable of powering all the critical circuits in a modest-size home. With a generator this size, we can’t overstate the importance of the four wheels it sits on and the sturdy, fold-out handle that facilitates moving it. We were able to pull it around fairly easily with one person, but lifting it was definitely a team affair. To hit the running capacity, we powered two air conditioners, a portable heater, a table saw, and a planer. Despite the slew of devices it can run, we were able to easily have conversations around the generator; it’s that quiet. Finally, the Predator comes with two plug ends for 120-volt, 20-amp outlets and one 240-volt, 30-amp twist lock, in case your cables don’t match up or need converting—handy if you buy the 9,500 in an emergency and get home to find your plugs don’t match. While a lot of money, $2,000 is worth it for a generator with so much capability.

September/October 2021

away while they were idling with no load and while running under load. And to observe the current sine wave, frequency, voltage, and THD of the AC current generated by these machines, we employed a Fluke 345 Power Quality Clamp Meter. To reach each generator’s maximum starting and running watts (how much they put out when powering up devices and over the course of use, respectively), we used a selection of tools and appliances, including a window air conditioner, a portable air conditioner, a space heater, a planer, and a portable table saw. The THD results we got will still help indicate whether these are safe to use on sensitive tech like laptops and phone chargers. We also took into account ease of starting, power response, sound levels, value, safety, durability, reliability, and portability when selecting the top performers.

A N OT H E R O P T I O N : MOST RUGGED

G E N E R AC I Q 35 0 0 I N V E R T E R

Price: $1,300 / Running watts: 3,000 / Starting watts: 3,500 / Decibels under load: 83.2 / Outlets: Two USB, two 120v 20A, one 120v 30A twist lock / Ground: Floating neutral / Starting: Electric, manual recoil / Carbon monoxide shutoff: No / Weight: 109.1 lb Coupled with two sturdy handles, the metal doors and enclosure of the IQ3500 make

clear that it’s a durable, well-built machine. We appreciated the convenience of the push-button electric start. During testing we used two 120-volt loads, our 15-amp table saw and a 10-amp portable air conditioner. While turning the saw on and off, the sine wave of the current had consistent symmetrical waves. We were initially disappointed to see there’s no fuel gauge on the tank, but the LCD made it easy for us to monitor performance and keep tabs on remaining fuel and run time. The IQ3500 is a great compact generator for job sites and emergency home backup.

BEST FOR RV CAMPING

C H A M P I O N 4 ,65 0 - WAT T D UA L- F U E L I N V E R T E R

Price: $1,000 / Running watts (gas): 3,650 / Starting watts (gas): 4,650 / Decibels under load: 85.4 / Outlets: one 12v DC, two 120v 20A, one 120v 30A RV / Ground: Floating neutral / Starting: Electric, manual recoil / Carbon monoxide shutoff: No / Weight: 103 lb Champion packed a lot of value in here, starting with the ability to run on either gas or propane. Monitoring the current when turning the saw or planer on, we saw a symmetrical sine wave. THD held at zero percent, though it blipped to 3.7 when we turned the saw on. With a 30-amp, RV-style plug, this generator is suited to powering a medium camper and, though it doesn’t have a 240-volt outlet, it could come in handy during an emergency at home.

P O R TA B L E P OW E R S TAT I O N S If you already have an AC generator or only want to be able to power smart devices and a few appliances, a portable power station may be a good option, too. Essentially a big battery pack, one will provide perfectly stable, pure sine-wave power for electronics. Plus, larger ones can last days without a charge, and they can always be recharged from a generator if needed. Bonus: Unlike generators, they’re safe to use inside. We tested Goal Zero’s Yeti 3000x ($3,200), which is on the larger size for a power station. With a huge lithium-ion battery and 2,000-watt AC inverter (with 3,500-watt surge capability), it can juice major appliances and a bunch of smaller ones for a weekend. That makes it a real option for emergency backup power. We ran a fullsize, energy-hungry fridge, 60-watt light, and radio constantly for 38 hours. In that time, we also ran four cycles of a toaster and recharged a laptop once and an iPhone twice—basically, the essentials you’d need to comfortably get through a short power outage.

September/October 2021

Tools // BY ROY BEREN DSOH N //

F For Yardwork and More, Chainsaws Are Better When They’re Powered by Batteries 74

September/October 2021

OR DECADES, GAS-ENGINE POWER

equipment was the only choice for yardwork, followed by corded power tools at a distant second. Anything powered by a battery was either ineffective or an expensive novelty. The few successful versions of battery-powered outdoor equipment were limited to low-power applications, like grass shears. Of course, for every rule there’s an exception: We reported on the highly effective GE Elec-Trak battery-powered tractor and Black & Decker’s somewhat effective battery mowers in our April 1970 issue. In many respects, gas-engine equipment still rules the outdoors in terms of power and cost effectiveness–at least for people with serious work to do. But a revolution in outdoor power is occurring. For many people doing yardwork, cordless power tools are now the default choice. This has stood the status quo on its head. Since chainsaws require so much power, given the strain that churning through wood puts on them, they were the last outdoor power tool that seemed practical to power with a battery. But even battery-powered chainsaws are now the better

P H OTO G R A P H BY T R E VO R R A A B

choice for yard maintenance. It took a lot of engineering to solve the hurdles to efficient battery power, which were 1) getting enough of a charge in the battery without making the tool much heavier, and 2) eking enough power out of an electric motor. The pieces of design responsible for addressing those, respectively, and the success of cordless tools: lithium-ion batteries and brushless motors. I remember the first time I witnessed the power that lithium-ion could deliver. I was attending the Milwaukee Electric Tool demonstration at the 2005 Builders Show in Orlando, Florida. Walking into the conference room, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. People were running a massive ship auger drill bit, lengthwise, into a gigantic pressuretreated beam without a shadow of hesitancy or stalling—incredibly impressive. The key was that it was powered by a massive 28-volt lithium-ion battery, of the same chemistry used in consumer laptops. We learned that the technology offered light weight and a high energy density, making it ideal for power-tool applications, so long as you could harness all that current without overheating and melting the battery or other circuits. Milwaukee solved that problem with a computer chip that allowed the battery, switch, and motor to communicate, metering current flow. Other power tool manufacturers quickly got on board, and then Makita took the next step when it offered the industry’s first brushless-motor cordless tool in 2010 with its TD133D impact driver. Brushless motors achieve their efficiency by eliminating the energy-robbing carbon brushes that transfer current from the stationary part of the motor to the spinning output shaft. Instead, they use small circuit boards and sensors to transfer current. The motor circuit sensors and computer chip also provide extremely precise speed control while monitoring electrical input. Since they are so electrically efficient, they are ideal for pairing with a battery. The combination of the lithium-ion battery’s lightweight charge density and the brushless motor’s high torque-to-weight ratio means that cordless tool technology can challenge the gas engine in many applications, even the most demanding of all: cutting wood. Outdoor power equipment manufacturer Stihl was the first to cross the threshold. In 2010, it produced its 36-volt chainsaw, the MSA 120-CB. That tool was the game changer, a mid-duty saw per-

INVEST IN A PAIR OF LIMBSAVING CHAINSAW CHAPS

On the fence about whether you should buy a pair of chainsaw chaps? Consider that the most common wound chainsaws inflict is to the left leg (particularly the knee, below the knee, or the foot) and requires about 110 stitches to close. Chaps protect against such gruesome injury with a unique mechanism. Once the saw pierces the outer fabric, the chain tears into the synthetic

fibers below, which so thoroughly entangle the chain and its sprocket that both are stopped dead in their tracks. Sure, the chaps are ruined, but your leg isn’t. I’ve never cut into mine, but one time I came so close that the chain splattered a stripe of oil on the chaps as it flew by. When I look at that greasy stripe, I think the $100 I paid for those chaps was among the best money I’ve spent.

fectly capable of quickly and quietly producing small batches of firewood or doing outdoor maintenance with ease. But what followed was even better. The MSA 220-CB has a bigger motor and more torque and is an even faster cutter that comes much closer to gas-engine performance. But these cordless saws are more expensive than their equivalent gas-engine power tool. And this is because their motor, battery, circuitry, and charger are more expensive to produce than a combustion engine. Also, their thin-kerf chain is specially engineered to produce less drag and to be as efficient as possible; it’s more expensive to grind than the typical saw chain. And cordless saws are best suited to cutting sessions that run for a couple of hours. Our testing indicates that the sweet spot for these saws is in wood less than a foot in diameter and the saw itself equipped with a bar 14 inches long or shorter. With those disclaimers out of the way, a cordless saw can do several remarkably well. It will take care of most downed limbs, or even a small tree that has come down in a storm (say with a trunk 8 to 10 inches in diameter and 20 to 30 feet tall). It will do work cleaning up riding and hiking trails and selective pruning in a small orchard or on trees out in your yard. Having an extra battery will help you do a pleasant and quiet morning’s worth of firewood cutting, enough to fill a small pickup truck. So where does this leave you? If you cut several cords of firewood a year, stick with a gas-engine saw. If you do maintenance wood cutting, yard cleanup, produce a little firewood for the stove, fireplace, or fire pit, go cordless. September/October 2021

Tools

OPEN-FACE DIRECTIONAL FELLING NOTCH, 70° PRO SKILL:

THE OPEN-FACE DIRECTIONAL FELLING NOTCH

Cut 1 Cut 4 Cut 5, holding wood/ strap

Cut 2 Cut 3, Bore

1. The initial step is a felling notch with an extremely shallow angle. The first downward sloping cut is about 70 degrees. 2. Next comes the horizontal cut, which drops out the wedge of wood. This produces a felling notch that removes more sapwood from the tree than the traditional 45-degree method and makes it more likely that the falling tree will snap its hinge at a safe point in its fall.

ALTERNATE VIEW

TRADITIONAL 45° FELLING NOTCH 10%

Notch

10%

Apex of notch is 80% of tree diameter

450 Notch

Back cut

Hinge

September/October 2021

3. The key difference is the bore cut, which goes in from one side of the tree’s trunk and right out the other. Note two things about this bore cut. It’s level with the ground and about an inch or two above the vertex (the point where cuts one and two meet) of the felling notch. And most importantly, it leaves the hinge wood intact. The hinge produced by the felling notch should have a width equal to 80 percent of the tree’s diameter when measured at chest height.

4. The wood cutter then moves the chainsaw (and its bore cut) toward the back of the tree and stops, leaving a couple of inches of wood on the back. This uncut wood is called “the strap” or “holding wood.” As its name implies, it holds the tree in position and affords the feller a chance to ensure everything is in order before the fall. Withdrawing the chainsaw, the operator pounds wedges into the bore cut, one from each side of the tree. These apply pressure upward and in the direction the tree will fall. 5. Finally, they cut the strap/ holding wood. As the saw works in, the tree will begin to lean and makes the distinctive creaking sound that signals gravity is taking over. Stopping the saw and moving back quickly at a 45-degree angle, the feller lets the tree fall in the direction of the notch as its hinge snaps.

Hinge tears as tree falls Step formed where notch meets hinge

I L LU S T R AT I O N B Y CO L I N M C S H E R R Y

When people first stopped felling trees with axes and turned to chainsaws, they kept using the same technique: basically, making a 45-degree notch on the side of the tree toward which they wanted it to fall, then making a level cut from the back of the tree. Called the back cut, this is an inch or two up from the point of the felling notch (see diagram). The wood that’s left between the 45-degree felling notch and where the back cut ends is called the hinge, and it helps guide the tree safely to the earth. But this method can still be dangerous, with the potential for the butt of the tree (the part closest to the ground) to launch up backwards, injuring or even killing an unwary tree feller. So a few decades ago, Swedish logger and chainsaw instructor Soren Eriksson pioneered and perfected a method that takes advantage of a chainsaw’s unique ability. It’s called the open-face directional felling notch. It’s more complex, but it’s also safer, and it gains that safety from giving the wood cutter far more control of how and when the tree falls.

they cut while mitigating vibration and stalling, taking into account any hesitancy and lack of trigger response. To gauge that performance and expose any of those potential weaknesses, we charged the saws’ batteries and ran them through a truckload of hardwood logs. This involved cutting as many test discs—or “cookies”—as we could on one charge. Also, if the saw had a low threshold for thermal cutoff to protect the battery and circuitry, that showed up because rapid repeat cuts through hardwood generate a lot of heat in the tool. W H E N T E S T I N G SAWS , W E LO O K FO R H OW W E L L A N D LO N G

Testing the Top Battery Saws T O O L- F R E E C H A I N T I G H T E N I N G

D E WA LT D CC S 670X1

Price: $349 | Volts: 6 | Number of discs cut: 43

L A KOTA G A M B I L L (D E WA LT ) ; CO U R T E S Y S T I H L ; CO U R T E S Y H U S QVA R N A

DeWalt fans will not be disappointed with this saw. It’s a powerful cutter, and the cookie

CUTS THE LONGEST

H U S QVA R N A 5 4 0 I X P

count doesn’t convey how enthusiastically it goes about its work, thanks to the great big motor and an equally massive battery. It’s an easy saw to use, with excellent battery access and visibility. The tool-free chain tightening furonly dislike is the thumb-activated safety switch, which is too stiff.

is how quickly and easily it got to that number—no stalling, vibraequipped with a massive 9.36-Ah

Price: $610 | Volts: 40 | Number of discs cut: 124 Take one look at the number of discs this saw produced. It indicates a powerful saw that has a high tolerance for hard work. What that number doesn’t tell you

boost its number. On top of that and drivetrain and is formidable The 540i XP is ideal for cutting scaping maintenance.

September/October 2021

PINE STREET

the rhino stopped, turned, and began to trot away. Swinehart wrote: The delay was long enough to get off another arrow, which buried deep behind the foreleg just as the rhino disappeared behind the thorn growth. More loud snorting and crashing, small trees snapping to the ground, then all was deathly still. Slowly trailing we soon spied his massive form crumbled to the earth like a pile of gray boulders. The successful hunt brought Swinehart notoriety of a sort. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! noted the accomplishment with one of its iconic pencil drawings. He appeared on national TV and on magazine covers; Archery World called him a “celebrated figure of world prominence.” In one published photograph, Swinehart kneels over the animal, its eye nestled in a mass of pachyderm wrinkles. His right hand sits almost tenderly on the rhino’s head, and his eyes peer off into some middle space. On the same trip, Swinehart bagged a lion in Mozambique, claiming the last of the so-called Big Five—he’d taken an elephant, Cape buffalo, and leopard in 1964—becoming the first archer to accomplish the feat. His exploits entered him into the realm of legend, if mostly of his own creation. In his stories “the natives were primitive, but friendly,” and lacked the strength to pull his bow. His safari was “one of the most successful of its kind ever to come out of Africa.” He was the star of his own Hemingway novel, only without the understatement. Swinehart parlayed his assault on the world’s most charismatic megafauna into a cottage industr y. He toured frequently, showing slides from his hunts: Here he was hunched over a dead lion; there he was handing villagers pretzels from a massive Bachman can. He conducted demonstrations in which he pinged coins with arrows. He starred in a two-hour TV show about archery that aired in 1967. In 1970 he published an autobiog raph ic a l cof fee -t a ble b o ok , 78

September/October 2021

Sagittarius, named for the archer of mythology. In his fables, Swinehart was the god of all his realm. He took extraordinary chances, creeping to within yards of lions and leopards, and when his talent wasn’t enough, he also possessed uncanny physical prowess and even luck, like when he outran several buffalo before they cut him off from his vehicles. The only question was what Swinehart might do next. Except that just when things seemed like there was nowhere on the planet he couldn’t travel to and conquer, he began to lose his way.

There were as many peculiar tales about Swinehart as there were about the house—the kind that get told in small towns over generations.

in haunted houses. Houses are collections of wood and nails and glass and paint. They are incapable of agency, or pathos. Spirits don’t occupy them any more than they occupy a kitchen table or a lampshade. Haunted houses, of course, are an enduring part of the American zeitgeist. But I’ve always felt that stories about haunted houses are really stories about haunted people. People are the damaged ones, because they are abused or endure trauma or are involved in some unfortunate accident. Later, if they fall ill or drink too I DON’T BELIEVE

much or ruin their marriages, they neglect their living spaces in the same ways, which leads to leaky and rusty and waterlogged homes. These troubled houses, passed on to new owners, now harbor bedeviling defects. Haunted house stories are war stories—not real war, obviously, but war in the sense that you’re struggling against those who came before, whose lives now overlap with yours in the shared experience of living under the same roof. Their decisions and misfortunes sometimes become yours. In the middle of our second night on Pine Street, a big window fell out of its casing and shattered loudly. Not long after that, in the spring, when Ann was poking around on the second floor, she was besieged by a swarm of flying carpenter ants. Sometime later, a section of ceiling collapsed in Vaughn’s room while he slept. Once, after we’d installed a naturalgas furnace, we hired someone to empt y a nd remove t he ob solet e 1,000 -ga llon ba ck ya rd oil tank. The contractor left the supply line uncapped in the basement—the tank had been pumped dry, after all. Except, a day later, oil began bubbling up from that line in a small geyser. As we grappled with all of this, we absorbed stories about Bob Swinehart, learned that he had built his identity—and maybe even some of our house—on archery, and on the killing of rare animals. As omnivores, we’re fine with subsistence hunting, but feel that trophy hunting is repugnant. It made everything Swinehart touched feel somehow compromised. There were as many peculiar tales about him as there were about the house—the kind that get told in small towns over generations, larded with embellishments and grotesqueries. Swinehart had become increasingly odd and reclusive over the years. As paranoia set in, he installed the false chimney to sur veil the neighborhood. He ruined his marriage, then built himself the apartment upstairs, order ing cement f loor ing so his estranged wife couldn’t shoot at him through her ceiling.

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continued from page 55

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PINE STREET

We had no idea how much of it was true, but when we dealt with problems in the house, we imagined that we were contending with Swinehart himself. His outsize, and maybe somewhat unhinged, persona loomed over us, determined to leave its mark. That mark was now our mark, and I would have conversations with him in my mind. Bob: Did you really have to build the upstairs like a bomb shelter? Maybe ever y thing was a testament to his inability to recognize his excesses. Or maybe there was some deeper pathos. Either way, we sought real-world explanations for ever y instance of would-be haunting. The previous owner (another family lived there between the Swineharts and us) had left that bedroom window unfastened when they switched out the screens. The framing under the roof was rotting, and carpenter ants had long been feasting on it. The long supply line had oil left over inside it. We were doing a renovation, not an exorcism. Ann made steady progress. Entirely self-taught, she replaced cedar siding, removed and replaced windows, installed new flooring, patched drywall, and on and on—she compiled lists to keep track of her lists. Vaughn spent the hear t of his childhood in a room Ann painted in a motif of rolling green hills and blue sky. We threw footballs and frisbees in the yard, and he and his friends played under the tent-like branches of a Japanese maple. We organized scavenger hunts around the property. There were birthday parties and weekend dinner parties and an annual Halloween gathering, when I made a pot of gumbo for friends before trickor-treating. Impromptu gatherings bubbled up on the back patio, faces glowing under strings of lights Ann had installed across the eave. Five buddies came over for monthly poker nights in the basement. Some of our struggles amounted to nothing more tha n sa d-trombone comedy. Late in our first winter there, our hot water heater conked out. We were exasperated and broke, 80

September/October 2021

and couldn’t swing a replacement, so instead we took showers at work and school for several weeks. It was a little like camping, and the dishwasher still worked. Finally, we called a repairman. He came up from the basement with a sheepish grin: An electrical issue had simply knocked the heater off at some point. All we needed to do was hit the reset button. Other issues pushed us closer to what felt like a real abyss. The $5,000 we thought we’d spend to replace the roof doubled when the roofers found rot. We faced an appalling choice: Find money now to dig up half the backyard and remove the 55-year-old oil tank or face a modest environmental disaster later if it leaked. We clawed for financial handholds. My first book came out in 2010, but our income overall fell short of what we needed to cover the renovation and the mortgage. We were caught in a Catch-22: An upstairs tenant would help pay for all the house-related costs, but without the repairs, no one could live up there. Doubts crept in. We’re in over our heads, I would muse as I pushed the lawnmower around. Maybe this time, we were caught between who we were and who we believed ourselves to be. But when I worried about going over a cl i f f, A n n r em i nde d me: Haunted houses aren’t real. None of us has cancer. No one is dead on a battlefield. It’s a house. It’s only a house.

TH E R E WA S A N OTH E R

systemic odd-

ity at Pine Street. Our first summer there, a thunderstorm ripped through, and the power guttered, blinked out, then came back to life after a minute or two. Everything returned to normal, except that in the kitchen, the light in the breezeway wouldn’t come back on. The lights had buttons instead of switches because the house ran on a low-voltage electrical wiring system that had been fashionable in the 1950s. I pressed the button repeat-

edly, in the pointless way people jab at call buttons for slow-moving elevators. When that didn’t work, I changed the bulb. Still nothing. About 10 days later, another storm hit, and the power went off for an hour. That night, Ann pressed the button to extinguish the row of recessed lights in the hallway leading to the bedrooms, and nothing happened. Now those lights wouldn’t turn off. We looked at each other and shook our heads. We’d seen a lot from Pine Street, but this was new. We were too tired to puzzle through it, so the lights stayed on that night. The next day, unable to make any headway, Ann switched off the fuse. Over time, certain lights in different parts of the house continued to misfire in this way—either they wouldn’t turn on or they wouldn’t shut off. Finally we called the only electrician we could find who serviced low-voltage electrical systems. We’d had complicated experiences with servicemen. Ann fixed, replaced, patched, painted, and caulked, but when problems extended beyond her capabilities, she would invite in the appropriate specialist. Most seemed fascinated by our one-of-a-kind features: our stainless-steel gutters, our gargantuan leak-prone chimney, the oddly sized windows. One roofing guy, after looking the place over, turned to Ann and declared, “My God, this place is a money pit.” A SubZero repairman cringed when he saw our ancient refrigerator, saying he’d done all he could for that unit for the previous owner. (We resorted in the fridge’s final days to stuffing bags of ice in the freezer to help it stay cold, like nurses treating a fevered patient.) He beseeched Ann not to call again. After some reconnaissance, the electrician said he couldn’t identify the electrical problem without probing further. He offered a choice: He could try to solve the issue at $80 per hour, or he could tear everything out and rewire the house for $8,000. It was an easy call. There was no eight grand lying around, so he arrived the next morning in sleuth mode. His

G E T T Y I M A G E S ( T E X T U R E S)

continued from page 78

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September/October 2021

whatever—no one bothers to ask. No one bothers, period. I want you to just ask, one time, which fork I want. Once.” I was almost shouting. And I was both there and not—looking back, it’s like I was hovering over the room, at some level aware of the absurdity of what I was doing. Yet in that moment, I was willing to die on that hill. A long, painful, elastic silence ensued. I poured myself a third glass of wine. Later that night, Ann pulled me aside: “What is with you?” she said, cornering me. I waved her off, disappeared into the folds of our couch. This became a pattern: me check-

I still didn’t blame Pine Street. No haunted houses, only haunted people. The problem was, I was becoming one of them. ing out, marinating in my misery, Ann dropping by to ask if I wanted to connect. She tried to get me to do yoga with her. “Let me think about it,” I’d say—code for no. Later, I lay awake alone until the small hours, my headspace a grand opera of imagined catastrophe. I envisioned standing in the driveway next to piles of furniture, orange foreclosure stickers over the front door. I imagined telling Vaughn he would have to rely on predatory loans for college. I obsessed over every step in our life’s journey: How could we have nothing saved at this stage of life? How could we have taken such a reckless gamble?

And so we repaired the house but incurred damage elsewhere. I stayed in my tunnel, using work as a cudgel and a permanent hall pass. It wasn’t that I wanted things to stay broken; I just wasn’t sure anymore what could be f ixed. Those weirdly fickle light switches, for example. The electrician puzzled for two days over our low-voltage system. It seemed that the harder he worked to unravel the rogue wiring, the more he found himself at a loss. At the end of it, he slumped into our kitchen and told Ann that we had the most impenetrable tangle he’d ever seen. She thanked him and paid him for his time, and that was the way Pine Street stayed—with some lights that worked all the time and others not at all. We were a house divided, and permanently darkened. I still didn’t blame Pine Street, though. No haunted houses, only haunted people. The problem was, I was becoming one of them.

the time he published Sagittarius, Bob Swinehart took over as president of his fatherin-law’s constr uction company, building homes around the valley. He continued with his exhibitions, and readers of local newspapers and archery magazines awaited stories from his next adventure. But none came. This may have been partly due to Swinehart’s newfound responsibilities. There was more to it, though: He and June split, and he moved to the second-floor apartment, with its dedicated entrance. Friends noticed that the irrepressible natural showman seemed moody, isolated, and volatile. Swinehart avoided hanging around camp with his hunting companions after they’d finished for the day; he preferred to go off and sleep alone in the bush. In 1974, the local paper ran an auction notice: He was unloading many of his things, including his 1949 RollsRoyce Bentley, spears, ostrich eggs, and a “Real Elephant foot bar stool.” The IN 1970, AROUND

G E T T Y I M A G E S ( T E X T U R E S)

presence over the next couple of days continually reminded me of how we were perpetually backsliding, one problem solved only to have a bigger one appear. Ann’s to-do lists seemed to grow no matter how many items she crossed off. It was like the Red Witch told Alice, marooned in Wonderland: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” We had never been good savers— we always prioritized experiences instead—and so, with no other choice, we started the great American credit shell game, shuffling balances from one credit card to another, lower-interest account. To keep us from falling off the back of the treadmill, I focused on two things: working, and worrying. To try to cover the gaping crevasses opening in our finances, I started a second book and took freelance jobs. For a time, I started working every morning at 5 and didn’t stop until 6:30 at night. This helped keep the wheels on, but the cost in other ways was immeasurable. I spent weeks pushing into exhaustion. I felt sour and besieged, at once a victim and a tormentor, quizzing Ann about the upstairs renovation, reminding her about our proximity to the abyss. I mumbled through or declined calls from family and friends hoping for a friendly catch-up. One evening, plummeting toward a low point, I sat down to dinner. Ann had made a pasta dish, and as we were about to eat, she noticed she had a fork she didn’t like and, since I’d set the table, asked me for another one. This was a thing; she was particular about her cutlery. Normally we bantered about this idiosyncrasy. But this time, I snapped. With everything going on, I asked, were we really in a position to be picky about our flatware? And why wasn’t she concerned about anyone else eating with inferior cutlery? I held up my own fork as exhibit A: Did no one happen to inquire whether I was okay with my mine? Ann smirked. “Like you care,” she said. This infuriated me. “I’m serious,” I said. “No one cares, right? I just take

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PINE STREET

house, with all its eccentricities, would soon be occupied by someone else. Sw inehar t kept only his most prized possessions from his hunts— his collection of taxidermied animals, heads, tusks, skins, and artifacts from his eight safaris—which he would store with family in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He and a new fiancée, Catherine, were heading deep into the jungle of Gabon to study gorillas for the yet-tobe-determined future. If Swinehart felt ambivalent about liquidating his trophy life, he didn’t let on during an interview with a local newspaper reporter. “For the first time in my life,” he said, “I can totally forget everything and do what I want.” Little went as planned. Swinehart returned after a year or two in Africa and was feted at a 1977 event held by a local bowhunters’ club. He and Catherine had two children, but their marriage soon began to come undone. There were no further articles about archery in Africa. Swinehart eventually landed in Ohio, working for a tree company. Eventually he moved back east to Pottstown, suffering from what police chief James Rodgers later described as “mental health problems.” On a frigid day in January 1982, he received shattering news: His brother, Dave, a successful real estate developer in Pottstown, had been bludgeoned and stabbed to death outside the home of his estranged wife, Patty. Bob vowed to track down the killer, but the truth took nearly a decade to untangle: Police would allege that Patty had conspired with Thomas and Jeffrey DeBlase, her nephews through marriage, to kill her husband so she could collect more than $500,000 in life insurance. The DeBlase brothers were convicted of murder, but Patty was acquitted in 1994. Just after the murder, Bob Swinehart’s sister, Karen, checked him into Philadelphia Veteran’s Hospital for an indefinite stay. Four months later, he left the hospital on his first furlough. He asked his mother, Viola, to bring him to the Swinehart Building in Pottstown, one of his late brother’s properties. It was a Monday afternoon, 84

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May 10, 1982. Swinehart, then 54 years old, said he wanted to look over personal belongings he’d stored there. It seemed like a natural thing, mourning and processing his brother’s loss by sifting through the artifacts of his life. Maybe Swinehart was trying to find his way back to himself. But when he didn’t return after a while, Viola grew worried and asked for help. The search ended quickly, back at the Swinehart Building. He had located among his possessions his .243 caliber hunting rifle. As Swinehart had done so many times during his adventures, the legendary hunter had hefted his weapon, steadied it, and, one last time, fired. Once again, his aim was deadly accurate.

A S T H E Y E A R S PA S S E D , we invited friends to stay upstairs in exchange for help fixing the space. Ray erected a few walls and installed insulation and drywall; Joe rebuilt and tiled the kitchen and bathroom, among other foundational improvements. Having the second floor occupied for the first time made me think more about Swinehart, made me wonder: What kind of guy builds a house like this? I began asking around. One of Sw inehar t’s old friends, Wilmer Schultz, told of traveling to Chicago with “Bobby,” partying with him, having dinner as a foursome with their wives. He knew of Swinehart’s precipitous descent. “I think he went berserk,” Schultz said. “In the last couple of years he wasn’t the same Bob Swinehart I knew when Evelyn and I used to go down there.” But when I pressed for an explanation, Schultz demurred, saying they’d drifted apart by then. I read Sagittarius, with its hagiographic narratives and cartoonish ethnographies, and I dug up articles Swinehart had written. I wanted to know not just the particulars of what he did, but why. It seemed important in a way I couldn’t identify. Maybe, partly, it was the realization, as I learned more about him, that in

certain ways he and I were eerily alike. Swinehart was a travel writer; I had been one, too. We both had outdoorsoriented childhoods, both loved hiking and camping. We were virtually the same age, around 42, when our first books were published. And we were both in our 40s and living on Pine Street when our lives started to fray. Was he disappointed that his writing career fizzled after Sagittarius? Did his obsessions derail his life? Did his trophy house become his anchor? Maybe if I understood everything about him, I could avoid his fate. Maybe by telling his story, I could objectify my own—pull it outside myself so I could study it, and illuminate larger truths about what was happening, about what I was doing, and why. My own precarious descent came at a steep cost: Ann and I were becoming increasingly distant. She couldn’t understand how I had become so dark, so work-obsessed, and she took it as rejection. We began to face the fact that we were no longer a team in the same way—that the house had formed a wedge between us. On a hike one wintry day, Ann told me she didn’t know if she wanted to be married to someone who was so obsessed about work and the house, at the expense of everything else. I shrugged and said, if that’s the way you feel, well then. One day, t wo men stopped in. Deano Farkas was a hunter who had admired Swinehart throughout his life; Lawson Heckman was one of Bob’s old friends. They wanted to run a metal detector around the backyard, look for coins Swinehart had used for target practice. Toward the end of the visit, Heckman mentioned that Bob had seemed haunted. He said Swinehart had confided in him about his Korean War service—that at one point Bob was given the harrowing task of repatriating battlefield casualties. In winter, that meant collecting bodies that were frozen as they’d fallen. As a “cracker,” he sometimes had to snap them out of hunched positions to load them, Heckman recalled. That wasn’t all. Heckman also said Swinehart had been questioned in

G E T T Y I M A G E S ( T E X T U R E S)

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we put the house up for sale. We were weary of doing battle with it, each in our own way, and we wanted to return to more of an urban setting. That was part of the story, at least. Ann later said she wanted to get rid of the house so that we might take one last stab at finding IN AUTUMN OF 2018,

September/October 2021

our way back to each other. She sealed off the miniature doors so that the place didn’t seem quite as strange and disassembled the ladder to the false chimney. The hatch and panic room were no longer accessible. The new owners closed on the house almost nine years to the day after we bought it. It’s funny what you get used to. All you can do is live in the space you have in the time you have it, navigating the obstacles you encounter. Every night, going to bed, I had negotiated that hallway where we’d turned off the circuit breaker, plunging it into permanent darkness. Sometimes I’d use my phone to illuminate the way, but often I’d just grope along the walls, around the corner, and through the doorway, occasionally tripping over a stray shoe or dog toy but otherwise relying on my brain’s mapping. In many ways, years later, I’m still feeling my way along.

people gathered in Indianapolis in January 2000 to honor that year’s inductees into the Archer y Hall of Fame. The 50th person to be enshrined, 18 years after his death, was Bob Swinehart. AHF president Dave Staples told Swinehart’s hometown newspaper that the induction “was long overdue.” He added: “Sagittarius took archery out of the cornfield and made it global.” In the audience were 19 members of the Swinehart clan, including five of his six children. “I remember Daddy shooting in the backyard a lot, not because he had to practice but because he so loved shooting the bow,” his daughter, Lisa, told the assemblage. “My father left us all with a love of wildlife, adventure, and the outdoors.” The complexities of his life and his suicide went unaddressed: The irony that a man who consistently dodged death while hunting couldn’t survive himself—couldn’t flee the darkness that stalked his mind. Instead, the hall and the people there embraced Swinehart’s legacy as R O U G H LY T H I R T E E N H U N D R E D

a trailblazer and storyteller, a man who was unafraid to risk everything to chase a kind of immortality. Maybe, finally, all those years later, he’d reached the place he was always trying to go.

hundreds of miles away where the air is salty and the winters are long, and rented a place where someone else fixes the furnace when it conks out. But we couldn’t escape the oppressive shadow of the house, and eventually, last year, Ann and I split up. In many ways both literal and metaphorical, we’ve moved on. But I still go back to Pine Street in my mind. There’s no limit to what I’ll do when I’m there because, finally, all the work is done. Sometimes I’ll stand by the above-ground pool in the backyard that 6-year-old Vaughn loves to flop into. He’ll pop up with his red hair plastered around his glowing, freckled face. “Dad!” he’ll yell. “Jump in!” After that we’ll throw a football around, the spirals dropping effortlessly into his hands as he glides past the big maple. When we’re done, I’ll sit out back with Ann, sipping a glass of wine, admiring the way she’d spruced up the patio. We’ll be bathed in the late-afternoon light that washes over Pennsylvania toward the end of summer, when the world seems to be made of molten gold and spun cotton, and soon friends from around town will drift in and join us. Sam will make a toast, and Jeremy will tell a funny story that has everyone doubled over. We’ll stay up most of the night, eating and talking, reveling in the company and in the fullness of our lives, the chatter and laughter bouncing back to us off the thick walls, and the glow from strings of lights forming a protective circle until everyone finally drifts away home in the gray of pre-dawn. Somewhere in there, I’ll put my hand on Ann’s shoulder and she’ll look up at me. Then, nodding toward the table in front of us and the trees and grass and fence beyond, she’ll say, “This was such a good idea.” WE M OVE D TO A CIT Y

G E T T Y I M A G E S ( T E X T U R E S)

David Swinehart’s murder—because allegedly the brothers had engaged in some sort of dispute over a piece of land prior to the killing. The police, according to the story Heckman says Swinehart told him, had taken Bob in for several lengthy interrogations, including one that lasted a full night. A few years later, I spoke to Swinehart’s daughter, Lisa Weida, who said that her father had suffered from bipolar disorder. This may have explained Swinehart’s boundless energy and insatiable hunger for adventure—and also his struggles with paranoia and despondency, which would grow so profound, she said, that he was at times unable to take basic care of himself. The condition remained undiagnosed for years, and even after doctors identified his illness, the conquering hunter would neither own up to his suffering nor accept treatment. “We knew he needed help,” Weida says. “But he refused to go to a doctor.” It seemed that even the people close to Swinehart couldn’t agree on his undoing. The blunt-force trauma of war, the devastating aftermath of his brother’s murder, an untreated mental illness—any one of those things could have dragged him toward an abyss. In combination, they may have conspired to nudge him over the edge. Nearly 40 years on, we may never know the full truth. The swirling mysteries surrounding his death form an apt coda to a life that—even while he embraced a kind of minor celebrity—was largely hidden from view. His greatest passion and escape was hunting. But with all his demons— actual, inherited, and imagined—baying at his heels, he might have felt as if he was the one being stalked.

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The Most Important Coins In the Modern Era When President Ronald Reagan signed the Liberty Coin Act into law, he didn’t know American Eagles would have the impact they’ve had, year after year. The coins were so popular that between 1986 and 2020, over 535 million were struck. That’s more than HALF A BILLION coins, easily making Silver Eagles the most bought coins in the world. Hugely popular now, Silver Eagles may soon become even more popular!

Collectors Crave Firsts Collectors covet coins with Key Dates. Key Dates mark significance in a coin’s history...firsts, lasts, lowest mintage, new finishes and new designs. Now, for the first time in over three-and-a-half decades, the Silver Eagle is getting a new design, leading to a historic “first” unlike anything we’ve seen. The iconic Heraldic Eagle reverse is being replaced by a beautiful new “Eagle Landing” design. This is arguably a bigger deal than even the actual introduction of the coin because there’s so much more interest now than in 1986, with investors and collectors!

If You Knew Then What You Know Now...

uncirculated condition continue to be sought-after. Now you’re getting another chance to land a big Silver Eagle first, a Key Date. Additionally, since these newly designed Silver Eagles are only being released during the second half of 2021, it’s quite possible this will be one of the lowest mintages we’ve seen. That’s significant because it could make 2021 a DOUBLE Key Date, with both a new design and a low mintage. Demand for these coins is already sky-high, but if that happens, watch out! No one can predict the future value of silver, but many Americans are rushing to stock up, for themselves, and their loved ones.

Don’t Wait, Order Now! Buy More and Save! Don’t wait another 35 years! Get your 2021 new design Silver Eagles in Brilliant Uncirculated (BU) condition by calling 1-888-201-7639 right now, and using the offer code below. Buy more, save more! New Design 2021 American Eagle Silver Dollar BU 1-3 Coins- $44.95 ea. + s/h 4-9 Coins- $44.75 ea. + FREE SHIPPING 10-19 Coins- $44.50 ea. + FREE SHIPPING 20+ Coins- $43.95 ea. + FREE SHIPPING

FREE SHIPPING on 4 or More! Limited time only. Product total over $149 before taxes (if any). Standard domestic shipping only. Not valid on previous purchases.

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If you’d had a crystal ball in 1986, you undoubtedly would have grabbed every Silver Eagle you could get. Those coins in 14101 Southcross Dr. W., Suite. 175 Dept. NRE163-02 • Burnsville, MN 55337 GovMint.com® is a retail distributor of coin and currency issues and is not affiliated with the U.S. government. The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2021 GovMint.com. All rights reserved.

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America Beautiful” campaign was in full swing. Curbside recycling had become widespread, and t he ne e d t o t r a n s for m mountains of plastic had grown. This included high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic. HDPE is a thermoplastic polymer recognized for its outstanding tensile strength, large strength-to-density ratio, and high impact resistance and melting point. My entrepreneurial partner, Mark Phillabaum, and I wanted to create the best possible product with this extremely durable, weather-resistant material. We landed on outdoor furniture—with a focus on the Adirondack chair—and Polywood plastic lumber was born. Today, we primarily source milk jugs, the most consistent supply of HDPE, from nationwide recycling centers and worldwide, ocean-bound hotbeds of plastic. Polywood plays a role in the sustainability aspect of “what do we do with collected postconsumer plastic?” We are caretakers of the Earth. It’s a mindset that transcends into how we manufacture products and achieve zero waste. We aspire to do something meaningful for future generations.

Machines process, clean, flake, then pelletize baled postconsumer plastic. Next, a vacuum moves and stores the pellets into silos where they combine with other secret materials to become genuine Polywood lumber boards. The lumber boards are dyed, heated, and formed to match the size needed for the furniture. Three separate cooling tanks solidify the material, before it’s cut and routed in a CNC machine. From there, the pieces are packed and sent for shipping.—Bryce Glock, Polywood Retail Sales Manager

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