For the past three winters, Steve Falk of Aurora, Ontario, has transformed his backyard into an Olympic playground, with a double luge fit for racing and a zigzagged course sure to bring the whiplash. Last year’s glacial masterpiece, a snowy 300-foot circuit, even got some nods from Canadian skeleton racer, Jon Montgomery, who challenged Falk’s 13-year-old daughter, Sally, to go racing down backwards, skeleton-style. Here, the Falks share their tips on how, with some snow, a graded slope, and flying saucers, you can create your own backyard luge. The learning curve is steep!
Popular Mechanics
Can Boom-Free Designs Pave the Way for a Supersonic Jet Comeback?
Since Concorde’s retirement in 2003, fliers have had to settle for the subsonic speeds of standard commercial aircraft. Although supersonic flight is by no means a recent technological development, for the members of the general public it remains wistfully shelved next to flying cars and butler robots. Why haven’t supersonic jets come back? The primary reason for this is simple: The Federal Aviation Administration and international regulations don’t allow sonic booms over populated areas. That limits airlines to hops across large bodies of water, making supersonic flight too costly for airlines to keep up. Read more »
Lake Mead Water Tunnel Project Faces More Setbacks
An already-bad 2010 ended terribly for the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s $700 million effort to build a new straw into Lake Mead. (Here is our full report on the effort that aims to provide more water to Nevadans.) Read more »
How to Deal With an Ice-Covered Car
It’s ice storm season. That means that your car can be covered in inches of ice within only a few hours. Or pity this poor guy (photo shown) who parked on a NYC street on a near-zero night right next to the puddle from a broken water main. He’s got a good six inches of rock-hard ice to deal with. Read more »
Techno-Sponge "ShamWows" Oil Spills
What’s super-absorbent and can clean up nasty spills? Wringable, washable and can be reused again and again? It’s called Osorb, and it’s a kind of ShamWow for industrial accidents. Mix it with dirty water and watch it magically absorb oil, pesticides and organic volatile compounds! Read more »
Fabric That Doubles as a Battery
Your smartphone’s dead again? MP3 player out of juice? You may not have your chargers on hand, but you are (hopefully) wearing clothes. That’s good enough for nanotech researcher Ray Baughman, who foresees a day when clothing will power all our handheld devices and, eventually, he says, may even replace them. Read more »
Should We Worry About a War in Space With China?
The idea was straightforward and simple from this magazine editor’s standpointparlay the buzz about China’s lunar ambitions into a conjectural story about the weapons and tactics of a lunar battle. But my “battle for the moon” scenario started to fall apart immediatelymostly because the moon is of such little military utility. Read more »