Andrew Daniels

In real life, Nick Offerman isn’t exactly like Ron Swanson, the iconic character he portrayed on the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation from 2009 to 2015. It’s reasonable to assume, for example, that unlike Swanson, the actor still has all 10 toes, leaves plenty of room for non-breakfast foods in his daily diet, and appreciates the library as a vital institution instead of condemning it as a scourge on society.➡ Join Pop Mech Pro for exclusive access to our huge archive of classic and modern woodwo…

Ex-Intelligence Director confirms Navy and Air Force pilots have seen “difficult-to-explain,” “hard-to-replicate” objects.

“It almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing,” said the American Airlines pilot who saw it.

5G conspiracy theorists are circulating what they say is a diagram of a 5G chip inside the COVID-19 vaccine.The schematic actually just depicts a guitar pedal.Still, 5G conspiracy theories are dangerous—and totally false.Look, you have to hand it to conspiracy theorists—they come up with some truly incredible stuff. When last we checked in on 5G truthers, they were buying fake Faraday cages because they believed the fifth generation of broadband cell networks spreads COVID-19, and if they put th…

A leaked photo purportedly shows unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).It’s likely that an F/A-18 pilot captured the photo while flying above the Atlantic in 2018.The photo is said to come from a 2018 report issued by the government’s UAP task force—the official unit that replaces the Pentagon’s secret UFO program.An unclassified image that’s reportedly been circulated among U.S. intelligence agencies shows what appears to be unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), the Pentagon’s term for unidentifie…

With one veto, the president could prevent the Pentagon from disclosing findings on unidentified aerial phenomena.

President Donald Trump is banning TikTok from U.S. app stores by Sunday.U.S. officials are concerned with TikTok because the hugely popular, Chinese-owned app can potentially pass on users’ data to the authoritarian Chinese government.The U.S.-owned tech company Oracle is in talks with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to purchase or acquire a majority stake in the app.President Donald Trump is making good on his controversial promise to ban TikTok in the U.S., the Department of Commerce annou…

The Pentagon’s on-and-off-again, once-covert UFO program is decidedly back on—and will soon reveal some of its findings to the public.An astrophysicist who consulted on the UFO program confirms the government possesses materials from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”The news comes on the heels of the Navy’s official release of three notorious UFO videos.Update 7/26: We’ve updated this story to include official comments provided by the Pentagon to Popular Mechanics, as well as a clarif…

Some say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but we say that’s B.S. Don’t let someone else snatch up those old, worn-out items collecting dust in your garage, workshop, or shed—they’re your pieces of treasure. So go ahead and reclaim them.For this month’s #PopMechProChallenge, we’re asking you to once again build with us all month long. Your mission: Make something old cool again, and finish your project by the end of June.With this challenge, the only limit is your imagination. Find a fe…

We know it’s tempting to cram your cooler to the brim with cheap beers this weekend, but summer is just getting started; the cold ones will be there to quench your thirst all season long. Instead, we suggest spending some much-deserved deck time on this distinctly American holiday with a distinctly American booze: rye whiskey.These days, bourbon may get a bit more shine in the mainstream, but distillers are increasingly finding new ways to make its spicier cousin stand out. While rye’s basic rul…

With most of the world stuck indoors right now, we all have a lot of extra time on our hands. There’s never been a better moment to tackle a tough, but rewarding new project.And so begins this month’s #PopMechProChallenge.Starting today, we’re throwing down the gauntlet again and asking you to build with us all month long. Your mission: Build something useful with LEGO, and finish your project by the end of April.You can use LEGO bricks to create just about anything, from self-lacing shoes to pr…

There’s nothing quite like a maddening math problem, mind-bending optical illusion, or twisty logic puzzle to halt all productivity in the Popular Mechanics office. We’re curious people by nature, but we also collectively share a stubborn insistence that we’re right, dammit, and so we tend to throw work by the wayside whenever we come upon a problem with several seemingly possible solutions.This triangle brain teaser isn’t new—shoutout to Popsugar for unearthing it a couple years ago—but based o…

A guy in New Zealand put a piece of bread on the ground, and at the exact same time, a guy in Spain—on the exact opposite point of Earth—also put a piece of bread on the ground. The result was an Earth sandwich. None of this would have been possible without Reddit, a strange, wonderful place. Because it’s important to have goals, a man from New Zealand named Etienne Naude has long searched for someone in southern Spain to just make a damn sandwich with him already. If that sounds like a weirdly…

From beefy machines to behemoth buildings, we’re big fans of big suckers—so much that we once came up with a list of the biggest things in the world and only stopped at 50 because we had to meet a deadline. Our love for the large especially includes prodigious planes, so you can imagine how long we’ve been waiting to see the much-anticipated Airbus BelugaXL—a colossal cargo plane that will carry aircraft parts between Europe and China—officially take to the skies after years of tinkering and tes…

The mysterious unmanned craft spent an astonishing 780 days in orbit.

The Amazon reviews are incredible.

We’ll gleefully watch any machine go rogue and sputter out of control, as long as no humans are injured in the process. So imagine our delight when we saw this video of what appears to be a beverage cart violently careening in circles next to an ERJ-145 jet on the tarmac at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport:The video is courtesy of Kevin Klauer, D.O., who was waiting for a flight when he spotted the cart suddenly entering beast mode and grabbed his phone to seize his moment. Being the CEO of the American…

It isn’t our place to wade into the dicey waters of President Trump’s controversial call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and Congress’ formal impeachment inquiry that sprung from it. We’ll leave the politics talk to our friends at Esquire. But when there’s a tech angle on the table—especially concerning the hilarious misuse of it—we can join the discussion.Earlier today, the White House prepared a list of talking points refuting aspects of the leaked call summary between Trump and Zele…

Jan Hakon Erichsen hates balloons. Like, really really hates balloons. Like, really really hates balloons so much that he rounds up every household utensil that doubles as a weapon for murder and just brutally beats the crap out of balloons—once a symbol of merrymaking, now a poor victim of senseless, albeit riveting violence. Exhibit A:More than 12 million people have watched Erichsen’s latest act of carnage since he posted the clip to Twitter two days ago, which tells us there’s either a globa…

There it appeared on Twitter, like a cruel taunt:Every few months, the Internet eats itself over some kind of viral riddle or illusion, each more infuriating than the last. And so, like clockwork, this maddening math problem has gone viral, following in the grand tradition of such traumatic events as The Dress and Yanny/Laurel. These kinds of conundrums are purposely meant to divide and conquer, and predictably, the seemingly simple problem posed in the offending tweet—8÷2(2+2)—practically cause…