Last Tuesday, Dallas Seavey won the 1,000-mile Iditarod sled dog race in a record 8��days, 11 hours, 20 minutes, and 16 seconds. It was the 44th running of the race, which��remains one of America’s most original and greatest endurance events. Thanks to winds that sometimes reached 50 miles per��hour, temperatures that dropped as low as��negative-50 degrees Fahrenheit, and rough trail conditions, a full fourth of the 70 to 80 entrants don’t finish. Of the 16 dogs each musher starts with, only six are required to be in harness when they cross the finish line because so many succumb to exhaustion or injury.

As you can guess, proper gear is essential if you even want to��attempt the race. I went to this year’s event to find out what mushers use to survive. Here’s a description of their most important kit.

The Top

Just like winter recreationists, mushers layer up top��with��a moisture-wicking shirt under a warm��fleece or wool midlayer. But instead of a��down puffy or Gore-Tex shell, they often go for a��mushing-specific down jacket with waxed-canvas face fabric and a fur ruff around the hood.

The ruff is key because the��long hairs around the collar��catch flying snow and protect the musher’s eyes. Fur inside the hood adds warmth.��There’s also a��thick wire rim along the border of the hood that��allows��the ruff to be precisely positioned��in front of the musher’s face.“A good ruff is better than any modern technology,” says Elliot Anderson, a 24-year-old musher who was running his second Iditarod. “You can have a nice pair of goggles, but a good ruff is better in a blizzard.”

The competitors opt for��waxed canvas because it’s much more durable than the nylon of a standard puffy. Elliot, who is sponsored by Filson, wears a modified version of the brand’s��, which has a four-ounce wax-treated cotton outer that has��stood up to miles of abuse. Its other important features include��850-fill down,��Velcro pockets that are easily accessible with gloves,��and special pockets for storing food so it doesn’t freeze.��

The Bottom��

On their legs,��mushers typically��wear long underwear made from merino wool��(known for its high warmth-to-weight ratio)��and and them something like the�� or the�� with Gore-Tex Pro Fabric as an outer layer.��On their feet, they’ll��combine tall felt ��with insulated . Mushers are constantly stomping on the sled brakes, so they sometimes add extra socks to prevent bruising.

On their hands, mushers��wear oversized mittens, like��, along with��.��They also bring a supply of hand-warmers because even the best gloves will get cold when you’re whipping along for 12 hours at a time.

The Accessories��

Of course, there’s a lot of other gear on the sled. The rest of the kit usually includes��an ax, knife, snowshoes, water, first-aid kit, fuel, metal burner, multiple headlamps, extra clothing, and food—anything from nuts to oatmeal to pizza, all wrapped in tinfoil. In addition to a normal first-aid kit, Billy Snodgrass, a 59-year-old kennel owner from Wyoming, says he carries superglue to seal any cuts��and zinc oxide cream to treat skin irritations like rashes or sunburns.����

There isn’t enough time to set up and break down a tent every time the mushers stop to rest, so they lay negative-25-degree bags��on a pile of hay.��(Bales are available at checkpoints along the way.)��

The dogs also get hay for beds, frozen meat��and kibble��(which the dogs eat twice a day, mixed with water), and lots of Cordura booties to protect paws from��ice and rocks.��“I’ll go through about 1,500 dog booties in the race,” Snodgrass says.��If they need to carry an exhausted or injured dog, mushers will��sometimes pull a small dog crate on runners. If they don’t bring a crate, the tired dog rides on the sled.

Beyond the gear they need to stay safe and warm, the athletes��also carry an iPod or some kind of digital music device. “I have a lot of disco on my iPod for when I get tired,” says Snodgrass, who will belt out songs to fight off sleep deprivation and push through the roughest stretches of trail. “The dogs like it,” he explains.

The Hacks and the Sleds

Veteran racers have gotten creative on the trail. Jeff King built —a thin vertical design that he can drop a��metal growler into and quickly boil water. Lance Mackey, who won the Iditarod four times in a row, from 2007 to 2010, has a spillproof burner��about the size of a construction worker’s tool bucket��bolted to the back of his sled so he can��boil water while on the move.

While some mushers still race on a wooden sled, most have switched over to aluminum or carbon fiber. Hockey stick blanks,��sometimes coated in fiberglass or carbon fiber layers to increase durability,��are commonly used��for the stanchions.

Mushers can’t carry everything they need for the entire race on one sled—especially when it comes to food for them and the dogs—so they send supplies ahead and restock at the 21 official checkpoints between the Iditarod start in Willow, Alaska, and the finish line in Nome. “You have to take so much stuff, it just gets stupid,” Snodgrass says.��They’ll even send whole new sleds that they swap out. Trail conditions are usually worse in the first half of the race, requiring a sturdier sled to ram through sections without much snow. Conditions improve in the second half—though the weather grows more brutal—allowing mushers to use a more agile and lighter sled for the final push.

The post Here’s the Gear You Need to Survive the Iditarod appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

The Iditarod Sled Dog Race is called the Last Great Race on Earth, and for good reason. Mushers and their teams of 16 Alaskan Huskies trek 1,000��miles through the Alaskan while facing gale-force winds, whiteout blizzards, and temperatures as low as -50 degrees. It’s been much warmer this year—so warm, in fact, that race organizers had to import snow for the ceremonial start of the event in downtown Anchorage—but that hasn’t made things easier: racers face snowless sections of rock and dirt.

Any musher will tell you that the real athletes of the race are the dogs. They haul a 450-pound sled for the 9-to-12 day journey from Willow��to Nome, on the Bering Sea. The trip is so demanding that mushers are sometimes forced to drop some of their dogs at checkpoints along the way as they succumb to injuries and exhaustion. Only the strongest dogs complete the full 1,000-mile run.

To understand how the Iditarod’s top dogs are trained and prepared for this epic undertaking, �����ԹϺ��� talked to current and former mushers about what they eat, how they exercise, and how to prevent dogfights before they happen.

Breeding

The Alaskan Husky is a mongrel that is bred for one specific purpose—to pull a sled for as long as possible. Siberian Huskies and Canadian Inuit Dogs were the original sled dogs used for transportation, both by native peoples in the Arctic and by mail carriers and supply runners during the gold rush in Nome, Alaska, around the turn of the��20th��century. These original sled dogs were bred with many different breeds, such as German Shepherds and German��Shorthair��Pointers, to improve endurance and strength, making Alaskan Huskies the most efficient sled dogs in the world.��Due to their mixed bloodlines, their appearance and temperament varies highly from dog to dog, but generally they are very friendly toward humans and have loyal pack instincts.

Breeding sled dogs is still a fine art today. A good lead dog��can sell for as much as $5,000, and some kennel owners��will lease out race dogs to mushers for��as much as $1,000 per dog.

Diet

Alaskan Huskies bred for racing require significantly more protein and calories than your average domestic dog—they burn as many as 10,000-to-14,000 calories on the trail a day, compared to the 1,000 calories a typical house dog burns in a day. A standard diet is raw meat and kibble mixed with water to help them stay hysrated. (Despite the enormous amount of energy that the dogs use while running, they tend to be reluctant to drink plain water, especially when��tired.)��

Raw salmon is one of the most common meats fed to the dogs due to its high water content, but each musher and kennel uses��their own specialized��diets. Some use a combination of proteins that often includes chicken, beef fat, lamb, elk, and bloodmeal. Lance Mackey, who won four consecutive��Iditarod championships��from 2007 to 2010, swears by beaver as a “super food” for the dogs.��“I like to keep it simple,” Mackey says. “Fish, beef, beaver, and supplements to make the dogs healthier.”

The supplements for sled dogs include multi-vitamins (just like the ones we take) and vitamin E capsules to help prevent the buildup of lactic acid and cramps.��“Red Cell is another good trick,” says��Dana Grant, who trains sled dogs in Wyoming.��It's an iron-rich horse supplement��designed to boost red blood cell count, which helps with circulation.

Exercise

The Alaskan Husky��is an incredibly energetic animal that needs to be run often.��In the summer offseason, Iditarod mushers often send their dogs to run commercial tours on the glaciers in northern Alaska to keep fit. They will also harness their dogs to a vehicle other than a sled—an ATV in neutral, for example—to run the dogs when there isn’t enough snow on the trails, according to Dana��Grant. Iditarod racers will generally start running their dogs on a strict training routine in September or October to prepare for the race.

During the winter race season, canine competitors generally run harnessed to a sled for about five hours, five or six days a week. In the��Iditarod, they will run much more than that, clocking 12 or more hours a day with three- to six-hour breaks, and one 24-hour rest at some point during the week-and-a-half-long race.

Training

Mushers typically train dozens of dogs before settling on a core team. They��start training at about nine months of age, and the best of dogs can race until they are nine or ten years old.

Owners of large kennels will often hire assistants for what amounts to a��dog-training apprenticeship. Apprentices raise the dogs from pups and start running them��attached to a sled when they're roughly one year old. Before they are ready to run in a harness, some trainers will run the pups through obstacle courses or encourage them to chase vehicles like ATVs. By two years old,��dogs are ready to race in the��Iditarod, and a trainer will put together a team of 16 dogs that run well together.

It’s particularly important during training to find a lead dog that is smart, can hear commands from the musher on the sled (“gee” means left; “haw” means right), and is not easily distracted by wildlife or other dog sleds. The strongest dogs are generally placed closer to the sled, in the rear of the pack, but for the wheel position right next to the sled, smaller dogs are required so they do not get rubbed raw by their harnesses.

Fights occasionally erupt during��a long race, but they rarely��last long,��because race dogs are trained to respond quickly to a musher’s commands. To prevent fights, some mushers believe in placing males and females side by side. Most mushers run a combination of male and female dogs, but some mushers believe that single-sex teams work��best.

Out on the trail, mushers are unquestionably the alpha of the pack, and that means more than just telling the dogs what to do and when to turn. If a musher turns frustrated or disheartened, which is easy to do in a frigid 10-day race, it can affect the dynamic of the whole team.

“You’re like a coach out there,” says Elliot Anderson, who is running his second Iditarod this year. “You have to stay positive or your dogs will pick up on it and they won’t perform. You go through ups and downs mentally, but you need to stay happy for the dogs’ sake.”

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If there’s a single economic indicator of the health of the job market in a given location, it’s the number of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) jobs. The average annual salary for STEM workers across the country is $81,000 compared to $47,000 for other jobs, and STEM fields grew 11.4 percent between 2001 and 2015 compared to 4.5 percent for all other fields. With more than half of all STEM jobs in computer-related positions, it’s easy to assume that you have to move to tech meccas like the Bay Area and Seattle to get in on the rush. But as it turns out, growing number of towns offer both a large number of tech gigs and the ability to live an active lifestyle.��

The post The Outdoor Life Is a Magnet for Tech Geeks appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

From Sunday, October 4, to Tuesday, October 6, a team of three Sherpas summited three previously unclimbed 20,000-foot peaks in the Rolwaling Valley of the Himalayas, in east-central��Nepal, according to . Nima Tenji Sherpa, Dawa Gyalje Sherpa,��and Mingma��Tashi Sherpa secured the first ascents of Mount��Raungsiyar (20,420 feet), Mount��Langdak (20,407 feet), and Mount��Thakar Go East (20,184 feet). The three veteran climbers have a total of 23 Everest ascents between them, , but this expedition marks the first all-Nepalese team to achieve a Himalayan first ascent.

“It was the first time the Nepalese have explored a new peak,” expedition leader Nima Tenji Sherpa told �����ԹϺ���.

The three climbers’ names—Nima, Dawa, and Mingma—translate to Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, respectively. The names refer to the days of the week when the climbers were born, and the team arranged their expedition so that each Sherpa would lead the summit on the day that corresponded with his name.

Nima��Tenji��described the expedition as a healing process after the earthquake that killed thousands last April. “After the earthquake, we like to help��promote Nepal,” he said.

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Andy Weir’s novel The Martian��has been��widely praised for reigniting our enthusiasm for manned space exploration and for being scientifically accurate. Everything from the design of the “hab” occupied by the main character, astronaut Mark Watney,��to the chemistry and engineering he employs to survive on the Red Planet��is hailed as being grounded in fact.

That’s due in part to thousands of online readers who fact-checked��The Martian when it was first published online, in 2011, as a free serialized novel. Aficionados were quick to point out inaccuracies, allowing Weir to revise and strengthen the credibility of his story before it was published��as an��ebook on Amazon and,��later, in hardcover.��One reader��even used the orbital trajectories of the spaceship,��Hermes, and future relative positions of Earth and Mars to figure out the unspecified , which Weir confirmed in a Facebook post. (The initial launch date of Hermes��is July 7, 2035.)

To apply the same scrutiny to the film, released on Friday, October 9, screenwriter Drew Goddard and director Ridley Scott consulted Weir as well as NASA engineers. “While they were filming, I would get questions filtered through intermediaries from Ridley about these deeply technical subjects,” Weir told �����ԹϺ���. Several of the situations portrayed in The Martian—both��the book and the film, which follow nearly identical storylines—are fully accepted as being plausible:��Watney��pulling potable water from jet fuel, the orbital trajectory of the Hermes��slingshot maneuver around the Earth, the design and functionality of the hab, for example.

But how accurate are some of the story's pivotal moments? To find out, we turned to��advisors of our own: NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab��mechanical engineers Michael Burger and Megan Richardson, who are working on future missions to Mars. If anyone would know how plausible Watney’s survival methods are, and how Mars’ surface systems function, it's these two. Warning: spoilers ahead.

The Storm: Impossible

A windstorm on the surface of Mars at the beginning of the film almost blows over the return spacecraft, forcing Watney’s fellow astronauts to launch without him. But a storm of that magnitude has never been recorded on Mars, Burger says.��“The storm at the beginning could not have knocked over that spaceship,” he��says. “You can get winds on Mars up to about 60 miles per hour, which sounds pretty fast, but the pressure is about 0.6 percent of what it is on Earth, and you need both the pressure��and the wind to actually knock things over.” Meaning that the air on Mars isn't dense enough to��blow over a craft like the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV).

The Punctured Suit: Likely

That windstorm slams a satellite dish into Watney, sends him flying down a hill, and drives a metal rod through his space��suit and abdomen. The pinched angle of the rod and smattering of blood seal the suit enough to keep him alive.��“I think it’s possible,” Richardson says. “That didn’t strike me as something completely unrealistic, but I wouldn’t want to try it.”

“It makes sense that if you have enough coagulated, congealed, stuck-together blood, it’ll be able to hold the pressure of whatever is inside the suit,” adds Burger.

Growing Crops: Unlikely

After Watney makes it back to the hab, he quickly realizes that he will need more food than the available rations to survive until the next crewed mission to Mars can rescue him some four years later. His solution: grow potatoes inside the shelter.

While Burger says that the low gravity on Mars—about 38 percent of Earth’s gravity—shouldn’t prevent crops from growing (we have successfully ), Richardson suggests that high amounts of radiation on the Red Planet would pose a major problem to growing food. “I don’t think [the potatoes] would have gotten enough natural sunlight with the amount of radiation shielding that would be needed on the hab,” she says.

The Depressurization Chamber Blowing Off: Unlikely

Halfway through the story, Watney experiences his greatest setback since becoming stranded: after using the same airlock many times to enter and exit the hab, the depressurization chamber finally rips from the hab and launches through the air,��with Watney inside.

“If you have a very small hole letting air out of a balloon, it will fly around like crazy,” explains Burger. “If you have a very large hole, it will just release a large puff of air and not go very far. I think when the hab blew up it would have blown out a very large hole. It would have been a problem, but I don’t think it would have gone flying.”

Duct-Taping A Space Helmet: Maybe

After bouncing around inside the blown-away decompression chamber, Watney’s faceplate cracks. He covers the hole in the glass with duct tape and dashes—outside—to the safety of the rover.��“Duct tape probably would not work,” says Richardson. “In the book,��[Weir] says that he had a patch kit with some special material and adhesive,” in addition to the duct tape.

But Burger thinks Watney would have a chance. “You don’t need one whole atmosphere [the��measure of air pressure at sea level]��of pressure inside of the suit to keep somebody alive. So if the pressure on the inside is pretty low and the tape is sticky enough, it would probably hold for a little while. I think it could happen.”

Astronaut Floating Around �����ԹϺ��� of Hermes: Unlikely

At one point, as Hermes is returning to Mars to rescue Watney, we see astronaut Chris Beck outside the craft, bounding recklessly from one part of the ship to the next, without a tether and around rotating pieces of the ship, to get away from a bomb that the crew intentionally uses to decelerate.

“They would never ever do that,” laughs Burger. “They would never jump through some spinning object. They would always have a tether. Working in space is very slow and methodical. They don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

The Rescue Launch: Unlikely

Then there’s the issue of Watney’s eventual escape. After tricking out one of the rovers to drive more than a month to the next mission site (all correctly calculated), he uses the MAV, already set up for the next crewed mission to Mars, to launch off the planet and reunite, in space, with Hermes.��

The problem the characters face is that Hermes used a gravitational slingshot around Earth to get back to Mars in time to save Watney’s life; and it��is traveling too fast to enter Mars’s orbit. Watney strips the MAV down to the bare bones, even removing the nose cone and replacing it with extra canvass material, then launches the MAV to a much higher altitude than it was designed for to reach Hermes.��

“That seemed very farfetched to me,” says Richardson. “I think he probably would have gone into some sort of uncontrollable spin. As the different things were blowing off, I feel like it wouldn’t have been as controlled, and he wouldn’t have gotten nearly close enough to his destination for them to reach out with a tether and grab him.”

But Burger thinks Watney might have a chance.��“There was a project that I worked on for a little while that had a MAV [not for an astronaut to fly in], and we were messing with the idea of not using a nose cone to launch something into Mars orbit from the Martian surface. I’m sure people have looked into launching a MAV without a perfectly aerodynamic shape because of the low atmospheric pressure on Mars. I’m not entirely sure that it wouldn’t work.”

The ‘Ironman’ Stunt: Impossible

Even with a change of course from Hermes, the crew isn’t quite close enough to grab Watney, so he cuts a hole in the glove of his suit and uses the escaping pressure to “fly like Ironman.”

“You can have small portions of your body touching space for relatively long amounts of time,” says Burger. “Once, a guy on a spacewalk had a cut in his suit, and his skin got stuck to the outside of the spacesuit and was touching the vacuum of space. When he came back in,��he was fine. But if you did that to your glove, your palm would get sucked to the hole and seal it up pretty fast. So I don’t think you would actually be able to use it like a jet.”

Verdict: Improbable

Overall, Richardson and Burger say that though many of the turning points of the story are farfetched, much of the technology in The Martian already exists or is being developed. As Richardson points out, the International Space Station is already equipped with a water reclaimer that can filter potable water from waste, and Mars 2020 will be equipped with an instrument to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, similar to Watney’s oxygenator.��

Even Pathfinder, the Martian lander that Watney digs up to communicate with Earth, looks exactly like the real probe that was launched to Mars in the mid-1990s. Says Richardson:��“At one point I wondered if we��actually sent them some hardware or some photos to work off of.”

The post How Accurate Is ‘The Martian’? appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

If you were lucky enough to score a ticket to this year’s Great American Beer Festival, held this past weekend in Denver, you’d have a run at 3,500 beers served by more than 800 different breweries from around the country.
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I don’t care who you are, that’s a lot of ground to cover in just three short days. But we powered through. We didn’t sample every beer—anyone who tells you they did is probably lying—but we did a whole lot of research up front to help us cull the list down to a manageable roster. Following is a well rounded lineup of the best brews we found. And, no, they’re not all from California!

Pennsylvania Tuxedo Pale Ale,��8.5 percent ABV

Dogfish Head Brewery—Milton, Delaware
One of Dogfish Head’s newest experiments, Pennsylvania Tuxedo is a “heavy” pale ale infused with spruce tips from central Pennsylvania and Georgetown, Deleware. The high ABV invites comparisons to strong IPAs, but the bitter hoppy flavor of traditional IPAs is replaced here by fresh resinous spruce and rye. A strong malt base balances this tribute to “the flannel-suited hunters and gatherers who dwell deep in the backcountry of north-central Pennsylvania.”��

Available on a rotating tap.

Maduro Brown Ale,��5.5 percent ABV

Cigar City Brewing—Tampa, Florida
This is what you get when you make an English-style brown ale under the influence of American craft culture. Maduro has a complex flavor profile, weaving chocolate, caramel, toffee, espresso, and roasted peanuts into a smooth, creamy ale. Cigar City recommends pairing this beer with mild to medium cigars, but it’s tasty all by itself.��

Available year-round.

Pivo Pilsner,��5.3 percent ABV

Firestone Walker Brewing Company—Paso Robles, California
This year’s gold medal winner in the German-Style Pilsner category, Pivo is a German-inspired pilsner with a hoppy edge. The classic pilsner profile is accented by spicy notes from German Spalter Select and Saphir hops, which add aromatic floral notes and a touch of lemongrass flavor to this light-bodied beer. Incredibly crisp and refreshing despite the distinctive hop characteristics.��

Available year-round.

Acequia Wet Hop IPA,��7 percent ABV

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A photo posted by Bosque Brewing Co. (@bosquebrewingco) on Sep 28, 2015 at 1:48pm PDT

Bosque Brewing Company—Albuquerque, New Mexico
Every year, brewers rejoice in the seasonal hop harvest that provides fresh, unpreserved, whole-cone hops for bold, flavorful IPAs. The 2015 gold medal winner in the Fresh or Wet Hop Ale category, Acequia is unlike any traditional IPA. Chinook and Cascade hops are added to the brew less than 24 hours after they’re picked and give it earthy, spicy, citrusy flavors.��

Available on a rotating tap.

Golden Angel Barrel Aged American Sour Ale,��7.0 percent ABV

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A photo posted by Wicked Weed Brewing (@wickedweedbrewing) on May 23, 2015 at 8:52am PDT

Wicked Weed Brewing—Asheville, North Carolina
Wrangling the complex flavors of Golden Angel into a coherent ale is a marvel of modern brewing techniques and Lambic fruit-brewing tradition. Aged for ten months in red wine puncheons (casks that are twice the size of traditional barrels), Golden Angel is a tart, funky, sour ale with sweet apricot flavor. The finish is smooth and doesn’t leave an acidic flavor on your tongue, gearing you up for another sip.��

Available on a rotating tap.

Oysterhead Stout,��5.2 percent ABV

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A photo posted by Magnolia Pub (@magnoliapub) on Feb 10, 2015 at 11:16am PST

Magnolia Pub and Brewery—San Francisco, California
Scents of roasted malt, caramel, and coffee provide the first impression of this incredibly drinkable stout. The creamy dark malt flavor is accented by hints of espresso and salty notes from Sweetwater oysters. Oysterhead manages to remain bold without drinking too heavy.��

Available on a rotating tap.

Golden Ale,��7.0 percent ABV

New Glarus Brewing Company—New Glarus, Wisconsin
This Belgian Style Trappist Ale manages to remain exciting and bold without an overwhelming wheat flavor. The bronze medal winner in the Brett Beer category, New Glarus’s Golden Ale blends a malty base with dry hop notes and the characteristic funky flavor of brett yeast.��

As part of New Glarus’s R&D Series, the Golden Ale flavor is subject to change from year to year.

Deceit Belgian Style Golden Ale,��8.5 percent ABV

Funkwerks, Inc.—Fort Collins, Colorado
A staple of Funkwerks’ lineup, Deceit pays homage to Belgian Tripels and Golden Strong ales. The ale’s unique blend of Belgian yeast with a generous amount of pilsner malt results in a smooth body with a tart citrus edge. The beer is fully drinkable and refreshing, despite its deceptively high ABV.��

Available year-round.

Hopzilla Double IPA,��8.7 percent ABV

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A photo posted by @freakish_c on Sep 8, 2015 at 11:30pm PDT

Lawson’s Finest Liquids—Warren, Vermont
This dry-hopped beer combines Summit, Amarillo, Centennial and Cascade hops but manages to balance the bitterness with heavy malt flavors. So rather than sucking the back of your tongue after sipping this, you can relax and enjoy its complexity.

Available year-round.

Oktoberfest Märzen Style Lager,��6.1 percent ABV

Odell Brewing Company—Fort Collins, Colorado
A classic combination of sweet malts and herbal hops, Oktoberfests personify the complex flavor combinations of the fall. Odell’s Märzen Style Lager beautifully showcases sweet Munich and Vienna malts and finishes with a crisp floral note from noble hops. Having lagered (fermented at near-freezing temperatures) for over eight weeks, each of the flavors of Odell’s Oktoberfest comes through cleanly.

Fall seasonal.

The post The Top 10 Beers of 2015 appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

Andy Weir first tried his hand at fiction writing two decades ago, when he was in his early 20s and working as a��programmer for companies like AOL and video game maker Blizzard Entertainment. In his spare time he penned a novel—his first—about an interplanetary society where people undergo special surgeries to enhance their careers. No publisher wanted anything to do with it.

Fast forward to 2011. Weir, a self-described computer science geek, had posted several short stories to his website, , and gained a small but devoted readership. His work ranged from a supernatural piece about death, called “,”��to fan fiction set in the universe of Doctor Who. Then he tried a new format—posting serial installments about a man left for dead on the Red Planet, titled The Martian. Set in the near future, the story chronicles American astronaut Mark Watney and his struggle to survive alone on Mars after being stranded there in a botched evacuation.��

The website blew up.

Four years later, Weir’s web serial morphed into a best-selling paperback, occupying��the top of the New York Times bestseller list.��Now Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, starring Matt Damon, is due out October��2. The novel’s publication history is an extraordinary example of an artist successfully using the Web to circumnavigate traditional outlets for his work.

Apart from its critical acclaim, Weir’s story has also managed to ignite conversations about space exploration, with the Washington Post that The Martian may have given NASA enough of a PR boost to secure more funding in the future.��

�����ԹϺ��� recently caught up with Weir to talk about his thoughts on the upcoming movie and the future of space exploration.��

OUTSIDE: The story has already ignited the conversation about a manned mission to Mars. What influence do you hope the movie and the book will have on space exploration in the future?
WEIR: I certainly hope that if it has an effect that it’s a good one. But that wasn’t my objective when I wrote the book. I don’t have a long-term goal. I don’t want to change people’s minds about anything. I don’t want to push an agenda. All I care about is that the reader enjoys himself or herself while they’re reading the book. But I’d love it if it turned out that it helped get NASA more funding or helped ignite interest in the space program.

When do you think we’ll send a person to Mars?
I always answer 2050. NASA says they can do it in the 2030s, and I have no doubt that they could if they had the funding, but I’d be surprised if Congress gave them enough funding.

What challenges do you see in a manned mission to Mars?
I think the main thing they should be working on is centripetal gravity. In other words, just having a spacecraft that spins to provide gravity for the occupants, because human bodies break down so much when they’re subjected to long-term weightlessness. Have you ever seen the astronauts returning from ISS [International Space Station]? They have to be lifted out of the capsule and put in lawn chairs on the ground. They can’t move after spending six months in zero gravity. So what happens if we have astronauts spend about that long in zero gravity, and then they need to step out of their capsule onto the surface of Mars?

What role do you see private corporations like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic playing in future space exploration?��
I think they’re absolutely critical. I think the key to human kind’s future in space is reducing the cost of putting stuff into orbit. If you can get that cost down to the point where middle-class people can afford a vacation into space, then you will have effectively infinite demand. That’s when the companies will start cropping up, and when demand exceeds supply, we will have a genuine commercial space industry. It’ll be like the commercial airline industry—big, wealthy, lots of money to be made, lots of competitors, everybody driving the price down.

And then the vehicles. If you look commercial aircraft, they are masterpieces of technology. Here’s a thing that can take a couple hundred people from New York to L.A. It takes about five hours to do that, and then when it’s done, you don’t need to throw it away and make a new one or anything. You just add more fuel, and then it can do it again. And that’s where space vehicles will be eventually.

What kind of research went into writing The Martian?
Just lots and lots of sitting around, Google searches, and doing math. But that stuff is fun for me because I’m that kind of dork. I have a lifetime of being a science and space fan, so I had much more than a layman’s knowledge.

How faithful is the movie to the book?
It sticks to the book very well. I mean they had to take stuff out of course, because otherwise it’d be a 10-hour-long movie, but they didn’t really deviate from the plot.

How involved were you in the filmmaking process?
Well, mostly my job was to cash the check [laughs]. But they chose to involve me. Drew Goddard, who wrote the screenplay, called me almost every day while he was working on it. And when he had his first draft done he sent it to me to get feedback, and he made some changes based on my feedback and��ignored other changes because it’s his screenplay. So I got to watch that kind of take shape. And then while they were filming, I would get questions filtered through intermediaries from Ridley about these deeply technical subjects. They had NASA and JPL advisors and stuff, but I was useful because I was an immediate response. They could just call me up and I’d be happy drop what I’m doing to answer.

Is there anything that they changed that you wish they hadn’t?
There are a few minor things, but it’s me being nit-picky. One thing I was sad about is that the Aquaman joke isn’t in there.

“He’s stuck out there. He thinks he’s totally alone and that we all gave up on him. What kind of effect does that have on a man’s psychology?” He turned back to Venkat. “I wonder what he’s thinking right now.”��
LOG ENTRY: SOL 61 How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

I think it is one of the funniest moments of the book, and it didn’t make it into the movie. It was used in one of the , but it’s not in the movie and it was never in the screenplay.

Did they have to make any concessions given the difficulties of depicting people on Mars?
The biggest challenge is gravity. Mars’s gravity is 0.4 Gs, but there’s really no way to film partial gravity. So you just make that concession and everything is filmed in one G. They didn’t try to slow it down or anything like that to make it look like 0.4 Gs.

Can you tell us about the new book you’re working on?
Yeah, it’s tentatively titled Zhek, that’s a working title, and it’s a more traditional science fiction story, done my own way. It’s got aliens and faster-than-light travel and stuff like that. But I only have one little spot where I explain the made-up physics—the physics I had to invent. Everything else is either based on that or based on real physics. And the made-up physics don’t violate real physics.

What year is it set in?
Modern day.

So humans have achieved faster-than-light-speed travel?
No, the aliens have [laughs].

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When Adam Sklar decided to start , which makes custom handcrafted cyclocross and mountain rides, he briefly considered locating his company in Boulder, Colorado, or Austin, Texas. Then the Montana State University student thought, Why leave Bozeman?

“I went to school here mostly to go skiing,” says Sklar, 22. “But I loved being surrounded by people who are just as passionate about that as they are about their work.”��

That’s been happening a lot in Bozeman lately. “People who come to Montana State for that well-rounded outdoor experience don’t want to leave,” says Brit Fontenot, Bozeman’s director of economic development. The city has long been home to companies like Simms Fishing Products and Kletterwerks backpacks, but now young entrepreneurs are spread across the state, taking advantage of Montana’s blend of outdoor access, quality workforce of recent grads, and business-friendly regulations like easy permitting procedures and no sales tax. , which tracks business growth in the U.S., Montana had the highest rate of entrepreneurship of any state in both 2014 and 2015.

Much of the growth is in tech. After Oracle purchased Bozeman cloud-software company for $1.5 billion in 2012, former executives began funding ventures around the state. Most of the money has gone to technology startups—which continue to attract young workers from California and the East Coast.

“You can’t live here and not love the outdoors,” says Greg Gianforte, founder of RightNow. “One of our first interview questions was, ‘What outdoor sport do you enjoy?’ ”��

Those tech workers are buying into the outdoor lifestyle; today, Montana craftsmen are as common as Silicon Valley coders. Dan Brown and Barbara Pfannkuch started in Whitefish, where they design camping enamelware. James Behring moved from Michigan to Missoula to found . And Alex Buck launched in Bozeman, focusing on durable commuter packs.

“There is a sense of community with other gear companies,” says Buck. “Quality of life is more than just a perk here.”

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On Saturday afternoon, 34-year-old Jacob Thomas Brewer died during a charity ride when he lost control of his bike and collided with an oncoming car in the opposite lane, . Brewer, an avid cyclist and mountaineer, was participating in the 160-mile Ride to Conquer Cancer from Washington, DC, to Mount Airy, Maryland, and back.��

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A photo posted by Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammertime) on Sep 20, 2015 at 11:11am PDT

As a senior policy adviser in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Brewer was known for his bipartisan efforts to bring technology and programming education opportunities to young people. ��

In on Sunday, President Obama said he was “heartbroken at the tragic loss” of one of his advisers.

“Armed with a brilliant mind, a big heart, and an insatiable desire to give back, Jake devoted his life to empowering people and making government work better for them,” the statement reads.��

Brewer is survived by his wife, journalist Mary Katharine Ham, and his two-year-old daughter, Georgia. Ham is seven months pregnant with their second child.

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On Saturday morning, two kayakers were paddling into shore after a morning of whale watching in Moss Landing Harbor, California, when a large humpback whale breached the surface beside them and landed on the front of their kayak.

“It came above us and blocked out the sun, and I think both of us thought that was the end,” Tom Mustill, one of the kayakers, told �����ԹϺ���.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8u-MW7vF0-Y%3Frelated%3D1%26autoplay%3Dfalse

Mustill, a nature documentarian for PBS and the BBC, and fellow kayaker Charlotte Kinloch, both from East London, were on vacation with a group of friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to look at underwater drones when a scientist told him that there was “an exceptional situation with the humpback whales that was worth checking out.”

Early the next morning, Mustill and Kinloch��went on a guided kayak tour��and watched humpbacks feed.��Kinloch said��that��she’d never seen a whale in the wild before and expected to see a fin of one in the distance.��After about two hours of whale watching, the two friends started toward the shore when a whale leaped out of the water about 20 yards away from them.

“When it came out of the water, it was like a building grew out of the deep,” Kinloch said. (Humpback whales weigh between 25 and 40 tons,��.) “The forces involved were incredible. We were just being dragged under by the whale.”

“The next thing I knew, I was underwater and thinking, ‘How am I not dead?’”��Mustill said.

The kayakers were wearing life jackets and popped up unscathed��shortly after going under.

“There was a part of me that was totally intoxicated by what happened,” Mustill said. “It was incredible to see a whale that close and above you in the air. Now that the shock of it has worn off, I can’t stop thinking about it.”

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