About half of the remaining space is already occupied by agricultural land.

But we remember that World War II became the cradle of practically all military technologies of the second half of the 20th century, including missile and nuclear weapons. Unsurprisingly, the true beginning of the ARS history also dates back to those hot times.

CARSThe game is worth the candleVladimir SannikovThe prophecies about the imminent demise of the internal combustion engine are not much different in reliability from the prophecies about the imminent end of the world. But spark plugs in the coming years can become as anachronistic as candles on a chandelier.

MASTER CLASSAnd Newton was not invitedSergey ApresovTo enjoy the wonders of non-Newtonian liquids, we put on the classic vibrating speaker experience, which is what you want, because it only requires a couple of packs of starch and a regular subwoofer.

ADRENALINIndie 500Earl SwiftAt the beginning of the century, any auto racing was viewed, on the one hand, as a sporting event, and on the other, as a running-in range for technical innovations. So the American entrepreneur Karl Fischer conceived the famous Indy 500 race primarily as a test site where it would be possible to demonstrate new cars and ideas, try out fresh technical solutions that increase the reliability, speed and power of the car.

INSTRUCTIONSWhat has fallen is horribleSergey ApresovIn the last issue, Sergey Fedosenko, a multiple winner of international competitions, vice-president of the Moscow Federation of Sports Knife Throwing and a leading instructor of the Freeknife School, told us in detail about how serious athletes throw knives at a target. And "for a snack" Sergei has prepared a show for us, designed to show: a person who has perfectly mastered the "control of an object" is able to turn almost any thing into a sports equipment or weapon.

ARTIFACTClock and pendulums by Marcel BetrieseAlexander PetrovSwitzerland is famous for its cans, folding knives and cheese. And also an ultra-precise, expensive watch. Swiss Marcel Betriese can be called a watchmaker. But the clock he makes is not powered by springs or batteries, but by rolling balls, beams of light and the rotation of the Earth.

STORYRat raceOne of the pioneers of computer technology, Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute, at the Joint Computer Conference in the fall of 1968 in Menlo Park, demonstrated to specialists his development – a large wooden box with three buttons and two wheels, which, using potentiometers, tracked the movement of the cursor across the screen. Due to the presence of the "tail", the novelty almost immediately received the nickname "mouse".

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TECHNOLOGIESHow the remains of Nicholas II and his family were identified by DNARoman FishmanThe killers carefully concealed all the evidence – it took almost a century to unravel this complex case. The family of the last emperor was shot in the summer of 1918, and in 2015 the Investigative Committee of Russia resumed its investigation. However, the criminals have long been known, and the main difficulty in the case was the reliable identification of their victims.

ADRENALIN"Gentlemen’s Race": the most beautiful auto show in the worldTim SkorenkoSevere bearded men. Powerful hot rods and motorcycles. Leather jackets. Tattoos. The roar of the engines. The setting sun and the sound of the surf. The "Gentlemen’s Race" is the most beautiful car action of the fall and the best fall weekend: wait for it next October and go to Wildwood, New Jersey, for another gentleman’s battle.

WEAPONTest drive of the T-72B3 tank: "PM" growls, but does not fireSergey Apresov"Tanks are not afraid of dirt" – a phrase that jokingly decorates unkempt cars, although it has nothing to do with armored vehicles, but nevertheless sets up a skeptic earplug pocket.

WEAPONTest drive of an armored car "Typhoon-K": combat "KamAZ"Oleg MakarovThe acquaintance with this unusual car took place in an entourage reminiscent of spy fighters. Meeting at the agreed place in the city of Bronnitsy. We are going after the car of our guide. We taxi onto a deserted road, which leads us to a large asphalted area. Empty and quiet. "We wait!" – the guide tells us.

TECHNOLOGIESWhy Planes Don’t Collide: Robot LocatorsVladimir SannikovThe problem of limited control of aircraft movement over hard-to-reach regions is as old as aviation itself. In the romantic "screw" era, laying routes in the skies over the Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Sahara and the Arctic was a real game with death and cost humanity thousands of lives. But even today, when travel between continents has become commonplace, air traffic controllers control only 30% of the planet’s airspace.

THE SCIENCENaked mole rat: an animal that does not ageAlexey RzheshevskyA naked mole rat looks like a raw sausage, lives underground and naturally does not know how to grow old. Gerontologists all over the world believe that this amazing animal will help mankind get rid of old age.

THE SCIENCEQuantum cryptography: what is it?Ilya FerapontovThe maximum length of a communication channel that allows the use of the quantum cryptography method is only a little over a hundred kilometers. Scientists from the Russian Quantum Center have developed a way to significantly increase this distance.

STORYWhere did the lead additives come from?In his book Something New Under the Sun, historian John R. McNeill wrote that Thomas Midgley "had the greatest impact on the atmosphere than any other living organism in the history of the Earth."

TECHNOLOGIESKettles, strollers and cleaners: the life of the future in fictionRoman FishmanNew inventions and technologies inspire science fiction writers, who in turn inspire inventors. Mobile phones and the Internet, genetic modification and space stations – all this, having arisen in the imagination of futurists, today has become a part of our life. The influence is so obvious that the Californian company SciFutures offers the services of its visionaries for money. The thriving business, with clients including Hershey and the US Navy, is generating ideas that may well include fantastically promising ideas.

WEAPONSu-34: the newest Russian bomberOleg MakarovEveryday headlines from the Middle East will make even the lazy memorize models of Russian warplanes. Now everyone knows that along with the honored veterans – Su-24 and Su-25 – the newest Russian Su-34 bomber is fighting in the skies of Syria. This aviation system was put into service only the year before last. But the history of the aircraft turned out to be quite long.

THE SCIENCEWhat do intelligence tests actually measure?Roman FishmanTo be justifiably proud of your high IQ, you need to answer one simple question: what is it – intelligence?

TECHNOLOGIESSlideshow: the most beautiful pictures of the February issueEach issue of the Popular Mechanics magazine has a Slide Show section. In it we talk not only about the most interesting, but about the most beautiful and visually spectacular technical innovations and events. Photos of the "Slideshow" section on our website are given in high resolution so that, if desired, they can be downloaded and printed without loss of quality. They are worth it!

TECHNOLOGIESGuo: why couldn’t a computer defeat a person for so long?Dmitry SkiryukJust a few days ago, sensational news flashed across the Internet: for the first time, a computer outplayed a person in the game of go! But computers have been playing chess, checkers and any other games for a long time, where there is no element of randomness and everything is based on mathematical calculation. So why was Go a tough nut to crack? No matter how hard the programmers fought, the masters won over any programs for many years. Because go is art.

EDITORIALFoil Fencing, New Guinea Tribes and Other Best Letters of the MonthOur readers write us many interesting letters, and the author of the best gets a valuable prize from the editorial board. Today we have before us the best letters of the February issue.

EDITORIALA letter from the editor about the heroes of our daySergey ApresovWhat does Popular Mechanics magazine write about? The answer to this question is as easy as shelling pears: about science and technology. The question, however, is a trick.

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Roman Fishman"Popular Mechanics" # 5, 2020

Modern agriculture has achieved a level of productivity that the peasants of the past could not even dream of. One farmer can feed hundreds of other people, but this is not enough for the growing appetites of humanity. There are fewer and fewer undeveloped spaces, and you need to use clean water more and more carefully. But there is another way: arm yourself with new agricultural technologies and go to sea, where there is neither fresh moisture nor land.

Minus earth

There won’t be enough land for everyone. Land accounts for about 29% of the planet’s surface, and 29% of this area is glaciers, mountains, deserts and other areas unsuitable for normal life. About half of the remaining space is already occupied by agricultural land. Modern technologies have made it possible to dramatically increase productivity, but fields and pastures continue to require more and more areas. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, a thousand years ago they covered not 50%, but only 4% of usable land. Population growth and, consequently, consumption is forcing producers to constantly expand their agricultural areas.

About half of the land suitable for life is used for agriculture. The map used data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

But this trend has one notable exception. In the Mediterranean Sea in northwestern Italy, a hundred meters from the coast, several transparent capsules sway in the water, anchored to the bottom. Experimental "garden" Nemo’s Garden was launched in 2012 by the local diving equipment manufacturer Ocean Reef Group with the support of the Engineering University of Genoa. During this time, we managed to work out several designs of "biospheres", and today they have reached a volume of 2000 liters, and each one has an experimental greenhouse with 8-10 beds or a couple of dozen smaller pots. The sealed capsules are suspended 5–8 m below the surface of the water, where sufficient long-wave solar radiation reaches. At the same time, the conditions inside remain stable and comfortable for plants.

Nemo’s Garden

Water for irrigation appears immediately: the bottom of each capsule is open, and moisture evaporates from the sea, filling the inner volume. It intensively condenses on the cold walls, is collected by a special system, enriched with the necessary minerals and automatically supplied to the plants. In the summer months (due to storms, Nemo’s Garden works at sea only from May to October) tomatoes and beans, green peas and zucchini, aloe, and various types of salad are cultivated here. Additional pressure only stimulates their growth. “A lot of things look extremely attractive,” said the founder of The Wasabi Company, which cultivates very capricious Japanese plants, about the project. "An isolated environment where you can barely worry about pests and weeds, airborne infections and slugs … It’s like working with a large aquarium."

Minus water

Fresh water supplies are also not endless. Over the past century, its global consumption has grown from 0.5 trillion to 4 trillion cubic meters per year, and about 70% of this amount is absorbed by agriculture. Many densely populated countries are forced to spend huge amounts of clean water on irrigation. For example, in Pakistan more than half of the total area of ​​fields is intensively moistened, in India – about 35%. Meanwhile, only a tiny part of the huge reserves conserved by the planet remains easily accessible to us – about 1.2% of all fresh water. The rest is too deep or trapped in glaciers. And more than 97% of all water on Earth is sea water, too salty for growing ordinary plants.

In the absence of clean water, soils are exposed to salinization, and workers at an experimental farm located on the Dutch island of Texel are busy solving this problem. Here, on 56 experimental beds with an area of ​​160 m2, plants are planted with increased salt tolerance. Watering them with seawater diluted to different concentrations, Salt Farm Texel is looking for the most promising varieties that do not require so much fresh moisture. They do not pretend to develop the oceanic expanses here, however, these plants and the corresponding technologies, methods of irrigation and fertilization will someday make fertile territories, today almost lifeless and completely useless.

Of course, China, where saline soils cover about a million square kilometers, is implementing its own projects to develop resistant varieties. Renowned breeder Yuan Longping estimates that their exploitation could increase rice production by 20% and feed another 200 million people. So far, varieties that can tolerate salt water are not giving an impressive harvest, although in 2017 Chinese scientists managed to harvest quite a decent 4.5 tons per hectare, watering the plants with about five times diluted salt water. According to those who tried it, this rice has a special pleasant taste. However, rice is a completely different story.

Some technologies for growing rice in seawater are still being tested in the laboratory, in fresh water.

Minus earth, minus water

Although an unprecedented variety of foods are readily available today, most of humanity’s calories still come from cereals. Rice directly depends on about half of the world’s population, and rice fields occupy about 12% of all arable land. Despite the fact that yields per liter of water used have doubled over the past 40 years, this extremely hygrophilous crop still accounts for between a quarter and a third of all water used by agriculture. In addition, flooded fields stimulate the activity of methanogenic microbes. Rice production results in 20–30 million tons of methane per year being emitted into the atmosphere – more than the entire coal power industry.

With these frightening numbers begins a very fresh story of the British startup Agrisea, founded by a couple of Durham University alumni. Their project received an initial funding of $ 250,000 from the IndieBio incubator.The startup promises that in 2021, the first floating farms will appear in the ocean on which the leaves of rice that can grow directly in sea water will turn green. It is reported that even serious genetic manipulations are not required to obtain such varieties: rice already has metabolic pathways that provide resistance to salt shock – all that remains is to activate them additionally. Such plants will be able to grow on floating islands, receiving not only moisture directly from the sea water, but also the necessary minerals – if, of course, such varieties appear.

Floating farms