Popular Mechanics - USA (2019-05)

@PopularMechanics _ May 2019 21

4. Godzilla 2000 (1999)
   A flying saucer’s death ray snaps off
   the top of a skyscraper, and it flattens a
   bewildered Godzilla.


5. Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)
   Rodan picks up Godzilla and throws him
   into King Ghidorah, knocking both into
   the ocean. Tsunami destroys a house.


6. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)
   Mechagodzilla swivels his head 180
   degrees, then torches King Caesar with
   rainbow eye lasers while simultaneously
   strafing Godzilla with toe missiles.


7. King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)
   King Kong rips a tree out of the ground
   and shoves it in Godzilla’s mouth.
   Godzilla spits it back at him
   in a burst of fire. Godzilla
   charges in for the kill, but
   in a shocking reversal, Kong
   hits him with a suplex.

THE SELF-CONTAINED

breathing units firefight-

ers carry into burning

buildings are heavy, bulky,

and limited in capacity.

So a team of former fire-

fighters came up with an

idea: What if they ran an

air line through the fire-

hose back to an air supply at

the truck? With engineer-

ing assistance from LIFT,

a Detroit-based public–

private partnership,

they created the Life-

line Firehose. Fire Chief

Rodney VanDeCasteele

of Grand Ledge, Michi-

gan, explained what his

firefighters have learned

as the pilot department for

the new hose.

Normal air packs that firefighters wear

will last 30 or 45 minutes. Our capacity right

now on the truck is about an hour and 15

minutes with two people breathing on this

system—but I can change an air bottle at any

time without stopping the flow. So now what

happens is if I have a firefighter in a building,

and it’s going to take us a little bit of time to

remove debris from around him, or to get

him out of the building, we have an unlimited

supply of air we can give to that firefighter.

For the incident commander on the scene,

it offers a little bit more security. And since

we’ve had this on the truck, since we have

had the ability to play with it, we’ve

found other uses for it. If we have a fire

that we consider a defensive fire—nobody’s

going in, but all the firefighters are sitting in

the smoke while fighting it—they don’t have

to wear a self-contained breather, all that

heavy stuff. We don’t have to keep moving

firefighters in and out, changing air bottles.

In the year we’ve been using this thing, help-

ing Lifeline work out glitches, we’ve been

training with it and we’ve pulled it out on a

couple scenes. We haven’t had to utilize it

yet, but the policy of our department now is

that when the first crew goes in, the backup

crew grabs this line as a standby. Hopefully,

once this catches on for other departments,

it’s going to be one of the newest revolutions

in firefighting. —As told to Kevin Dupzyk

THE VAST MAJORITY of the energy in the ubiquitous radio waves used for Wi-Fi

or to send a text message is simply lost into the air. What if we could capture and

use it? Enter the rectenna, a device that receives electromagnetic signals with an

antenna, generates AC power, and then converts, or “rectifies,” it into a usable

DC electrical current. Rectennas have been around for decades but are typically

constructed using silicon and gallium arsenide, highly rigid materials, making

them unsuitable for the increasingly small, wearable electronics common today.

But now a team led by researchers at MIT has designed a three-atom-thick mate-

rial called molybdenum disulfide and created a flexible rectenna.

The team’s proof-of-concept demo has already achieved 30 percent efficiency,

roughly half that of rigid rectennas. And by harvesting ambient energy of 40 to

50 microwatts, it could power biomedical applications like implanted glucose sensors. (Radio penetrates the human

body.) The rectenna material can also be manufactured at sizes much larger than typical silicon electronic compo-

nents. Dr. Xu Zhang, one of the project’s leaders, envisions a future in which large-scale infrastructure like buildings

or roads are coated with the membrane to power networks of sensors that relay real-time data on road conditions or

structural soundness. “This provides a new opportunity,” he said, “to rethink electronics.” —Jackson Langland

The Best Godzilla

Takedowns Ever

JUST A FEW strategies Millie Bobby

Brown and Vera Farmiga may want to

consider in this month’s Godzilla:

King of the Monsters.

The Firehose Becomes a Lifeline

Tiny and flexible, a
new molybdenum
disulfide rectenna
opens up myriad
new uses for the
excess energy in
the radio waves all
around us.

Tiny Tool Harvests Energy from the Air