Music is the lifeblood of a good party. Whether it’s a live performance by a great band, a skilled DJ, or even your cousin Sally and Aunt June going ham on a beat-up karaoke machine, it’s part of the soundtrack of our lives. If you’re a musician, you know the sweetness that comes from adding your own notes to that music, which is exactly where the JBL BandBox Trio comes in: the performer’s party speaker.

• All-in-one design can replace a party speaker, small practice amp, mixer, and karaoke box
• Built-in battery makes it easy to use away from an outlet
• Lighter and easier to carry than a traditional combo amp or head + cab
• Intuitive screen-and-knob interface keeps setup and tweaking approachable
• STEM AI tools make practice faster and more useful
• Guitar presets and editable signal chains offer solid plug-and-play flexibility
• Delivers full, fun sound for home use, small parties, and casual performances

• 135W rating overstates its real-world loudness vs. larger guitar amps
• Small drivers can sound crowded at higher volumes when several channels are active at once
• Amp and effects models are good, but not as deep or refined as dedicated gear
• Stock tuning leans bass-heavy and can need adjustment for clarity
• Extra battery costs more, though most users probably will not need it

The JBL BandBox Trio is a cleverly niche all-in-one for musicians who want one compact box to cover practice, parties, karaoke, and casual performance, and while it won’t outgun a real guitar amp or outclass dedicated modeling gear, it packs enough portability, smart practice features, and just-plain-useful versatility to make it a genuinely appealing grab-and-go option.  

JBL is best known for its wide range of speakers and headphones, and already counts among its catalog some of the best party speakers. The BandBox Trio and its smaller sibling, the BandBox Solo, represent a new step for JBL, directly toward solo musicians and performers. If those people happen to have a summer barbecue or office banger where raucous renditions of “Rockin’ in the Free World” are called for (karaoke style), or the “Cha Cha Slide” hasn’t yet made an appearance, well, that makes this all the better of an investment.

Because, yes, the Trio is a party speaker, complete with audio inputs for Bluetooth 5.4, USB, and 3.5mm sources. But it’s also a low-profile, small-footprint guitar amplifier, a mixer, and an effects processor. Each one of these comes with the settings and parameters you would expect, ranging from dialing in the EQ with simple Bass and Treble controls to setting up a full signal chain for an electric guitar, complete with categorized stomp boxes, amps, and cabs. This is the party speaker with versatility built into its DNA.

Its physical construction is robust, but it’s noticeably less so than that of a dedicated guitar amp at a similar price. It’s “party speaker” robust, not “touring rig” robust. On the flip side, the Trio is also much lighter, and that also includes a built-in, swappable battery, so you’re not tethered to an outlet. Even so, I still find it to be well-made and solid. Treated with care, it should last for years. 

Part of the reason it’s smaller and lighter is that it uses a single 6.5-inch woofer and a pair of 1-inch tweeters instead of the single or even double 12-inch cones found in many comparable guitar amps. JBL says it can output up to 135 watts, and maybe it can, but don’t be misled: a 100-watt guitar amp with a speaker almost twice the size gets much, much louder and fills larger spaces far better than the Trio can. But for virtually any scenario at home, including the aforementioned summer get-together, it should get plenty loud. 

And, to be completely frank, it is so much easier to travel with the Trio that I’ve been happy to leave my bigger amp at home unless I really need its power or precise tone.

The Trio resembles a stage wedge, a low-profile monitor used by performers. The front face is all grille with a big JBL logo in the center. On top is a large silicone handle that is so much nicer to carry than a standard amp handle, and the control center. 

Using the speaker is done with a larger, color display and a handful of buttons and knobs. The screen shows a mixing interface when you first turn it on, and it always labels its active controls, making it intuitive to use. The mixing panel shows four channels, each with its own physical button, and clicking into any allows you to adjust levels, change EQ, apply vocal and guitar effects (increasing reverb on a microphone or distortion on a guitar, for example), and change parameters. This is especially rich for guitar, where you can create a complete signal chain for a completely custom tone. 

Around the back is the I/O panel. There are two multi-jacks that can support either XLR or standard 1/4-inch patch cables, plus a third instrument jack. And, like I mentioned up top, USB, 3.5mm, and Bluetooth. You can even use it as a speaker for your PC if you like to gig with a laptop.

Internally, it sports a big 68WH battery that JBL quotes as lasting up to 10 hours. That will depend heavily on how loud you’re playing, of course, but if you run it dry and can’t plug in, you can swap in a second battery. It’ll set you back another $110 and, in most situations where you’d be using the Trio, really isn’t necessary beyond peace of mind.

Finally, we get to the amp’s smart features. This is really where things get interesting. It comes with a selection of basic tools, like a tuner and metronome, a looper, a drum machine, and even AI. Yes, AI, but hold onto your scoffs for just a moment because this is one of the best implementations I’ve seen in a practice tool. 

JBL calls it STEM AI. Using a combination of the app, onboard controls, or both, simply turning on this mode opens the door to some truly useful features—whether you’ve been playing for decades or just picked up the instrument last week. 

The hallmark feature here is that STEM AI can, in real-time, separate audio into individual tracks for different instruments and vocals. You can turn these up or down, allowing you to hear parts better or remove them entirely so you can fill in yourself. Using the app, you can also pitch shift songs, so if you’re practicing a song in a different key than what was recorded, you can quickly adjust, isolate the part you’re learning, and play along.

It’s an incredibly useful learning feature for practicing licks at home, but it is also helpful for live performances, allowing you to use real songs and not “karaoke mixes” for your backing tracks.

In the words of my favorite college professor, the Trio is trying to “wear many different hats” all at the same time. The fear, of course, is that when you’re a jack of all trades, you risk being a master of none and, for this particular speaker, finding yourself in the annals of music-tech history. And while there are definite sacrifices going with an all-in-one product, JBL kinda knocked it out of the park. 

The Trio strikes an important balance between offering a quality feature set and performance-worthy acoustics while also remaining reasonably priced. At $600, it offers just enough in every area to make it worth considering, even while single-purpose alternatives may offer advantages in tone or capability.

As a guitarist and music lover, that’s where I spent most of my time. I used it as a speaker at my day job and carried it home to practice for that week’s worship set, amalgamating multiple guitar parts into a cohesive whole that I could play myself. That’s an important distinction because it requires versatility that simple systems struggle to maintain.

And while it won’t replace my Line 6 Helix and its deep processing capabilities for live or recorded work, I was surprised to find that the Trio isn’t just “fine” but has quickly become one of my favorite pieces of practice gear ever.

As a critic, I approach the Trio from a place that wouldn’t necessarily be charitable to it. The Helix, my daily driver, is an incredible, rich, and very expensive piece of guitar tech. But it’s a single piece of the sound chain. You can’t perform with just the Helix. And so the complications begin immediately, and quickly progress once you get into programming in custom sounds. You can do a lot, but it can take a lot to get there.

The Trio suffers none of that, for better and worse. It comes with a couple dozen preset tones, each the result of a half-dozen built-in effects and amp models dialed in to create a specific sound. You can use these as-is or take them as a starting point, swapping stomp boxes and settings to tailor your tone. “Just far enough” would have been offering tone presets, but being able to dive in and tweak each piece of the effects chain is that “small step farther” that makes this feel like a guitarist’s tool above anything else. 

The thing is, you quickly come to realize that even though it does go the extra step of providing options within its effects chain, there aren’t very many to choose from, and so the tonal options aren’t as robust. You could spend hours tweaking settings on the Helix. With its presets, you get the sense that someone at JBL already has. Each tone is well-represented, from twangy country drive to clean and compressed straight through to blistering lead tones and chunky metal rhythms. Classic guitar tones ranging from the 60s to modern day all have a preset. From there, tweak settings like reverb, drive, and EQ to taste.

From a company that most people probably wouldn’t even associate with guitar, it would be fair to expect that JBL’s simulations of its different amps and effects might lag behind its more established competition, like Yamaha or Positive Grid. And you would be right. Compared with dedicated multi-effects hardware, where modeling is their only job, the sound quality and resolution of the different amps and effects aren’t as high. But they aren’t bad.

And when you consider all that this amp is trying to do, what it offers for simplifying practice and making more efficient use of your time, that in a pinch, you could take it to a coffee shop or summer party, turn it on, and go, exactly like at home—there’s real, tangible, and sometimes even financial value in that. The sounds it provides through its presets are varied enough to get you in the ballpark of most songs, including wah-soaked classics like “Voodoo Child.” Just be prepared to make some tweaks—like lowering the bass on pretty much everything when you’re playing guitar.

The Trio’s biggest challenge is its size. Though it supports four channels, it can sound a bit busy to my ear, like its small trio of drivers is overwhelmed trying to reproduce so much sound. But then, that also depends on what you’re trying to send through each channel. An acoustic guitar, a singer, and a background track are going to sound very different from an overdriven guitar on top of ’80s metal and pretty much any singer trying to butt in on that.

When used to its fullest within its limits, the Trio sounds great. For music, it’s full, weighty, and loud. Its half-inch woofer does a lot of work, and the out-of-the-box tuning definitely leans into the low- and mid-bass at the expense of clarity. Thankfully, this is an easy fix using the global bass and treble settings (something which also applies to guitar). Properly tuned, the Trio can drive a small party all on its own without sacrificing the mids to get there. For performance, with the right musician and singer, or pure karaoke enthusiast, it’s big enough to make you stop and second-guess that so much sound could be coming from such a small speaker. 

With such a blend of capabilities, the Trio is inherently a niche product, but it’s also unique and more than a little cool, given how well it’s put together. If you happen to fall within its crosshairs, it seems inevitable that you’ll find something to love. 

That goes for more than just beginners. I’ve played guitar for more than 25 years, and the ability to quickly isolate the guitar and pitch-shift it to the proper key without a computer has been game-changing for my practice. While you shouldn’t expect the “best tone” or “deepest customization” from an all-in-one unit like this, what’s here is great for the less formal moments in life, be it bedroom or busking. The JBL BandBox Trio is about simplifying the progression from practice to performance and foregoing the need to purchase a separate amp, party speaker, and karaoke machine. And for those beginner guitarists and vocalists out there, this truly is an excellent investment that’s ready to grow with you for years into the future.

The post JBL BandBox Trio practice amplifier review: A party speaker for musicians, not just music appeared first on Popular Science.

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In one corner of a typical 3D printing workshop, failed prints and discarded support structures pile up like industrial kindling. The technology is supposed to be lean. produce only what you need, when you need it. But anyone who runs a printer knows the reality. Misprints, scaffolding, abandoned prototypes: they accumulate.

In a laboratory at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, a researcher is demonstrating something that makes that waste pile look like a design choice rather than an inevitability. He takes a freshly printed object from the printer and crushes it into a shapeless lump with his bare hands. Then he nonchalantly stuffs the lump back into the printer’s material container. Heat is applied. A new object emerges from the nozzle, smooth and clean. No grinding, no reprocessing into filament. Crush, load, print. That’s it.

The material isn’t some exotic synthetic resin. It’s sulfur—the yellowish industrial byproduct that piles up in literal mountains at oil refineries and natural gas plants. Roughly 85 million tons of sulfur pour out of refineries and smelters worldwide every year. Some of it is turned into sulfuric acid or fertilizer. But much of it just sits there in yellow mounds on factory grounds, waiting for a use.

A joint research team led by Dr. Kim Dong-Gyun of the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Prof. Wie Jeong-Jae of Hanyang University, and Prof. Kim Yong-Seok of Sejong University may have found one. Their paper, published as a cover article in Advanced Materials, suggests that sulfur can solve the chronic waste problem that has dogged 3D printing since its inception.

The problem starts at the molecular level. Common thermoplastics like PLA and ABS can technically be melted down and reused, but every time you reheat them, you’re breaking polymer chains. The material gets weaker and less elastic. Research has shown that recycled plastics can drop below usable performance thresholds after as few as three to five cycles. And that’s assuming you’re willing to grind down the failed print, melt it at high temperatures, and extrude it back into filament of uniform thickness—a process that is slow, energy-intensive, and rarely worth the trouble for small batches.

Photocurable resins are worse. When UV light hardens them, it forms irreversible covalent bonds between the molecules. The resulting material won’t melt. It won’t dissolve. There is no practical way to undo the chemistry and get the raw material back.

So the waste problem in 3D printing is really a chemistry problem. Once these materials harden, they’re locked into their final state. The Korea Research Institute team set out to find a chemical bond that can be locked and unlocked at will. A material that holds its shape when needed and breaks apart on command. They found one in sulfur.

The idea of making plastic out of sulfur dates back to 2013, when Jeffrey Pyun’s team at the University of Arizona produced the first stable polymer in which sulfur made up more than half the material. The technique, known as inverse vulcanization, flipped the logic of conventional rubber processing. Normally, you add a small amount of sulfur to harden rubber. Pyun’s team made sulfur the main ingredient and added small amounts of organic compounds to hold it together.

The resulting material had unusual properties. It transmitted infrared light, making it a candidate for thermal imaging lenses. It could selectively absorb heavy metals like mercury from contaminated water. Over the following decade, labs around the world explored variations on the formula.

However, adapting sulfur plastic for 3D printing proved stubbornly difficult. The problem was structural. Inside the plastic, molecules were knotted into a mesh so tight that nothing could move through it. That density gave the plastic its strength. But it also made the material too viscous to push through a printer nozzle, even when melted. Researchers tried adjusting sulfur ratios and swapping in different organic crosslinkers, but the fundamental architecture of the network stayed the same. The mesh was too tight.

Dr. Kim’s team took a different approach. Instead of tweaking ingredient ratios within the existing network framework, they redesigned the network itself. They deliberately loosened the crosslinked structure, spacing out the connections between molecular chains.

This was necessary because sulfur-sulfur bonds break and reform easily. Heat breaks them apart. As it cools they reconnect. In the old, tightly crosslinked structures, the effect was largely suppressed. The bonds didn’t have enough room to rearrange. In the looser network, those exchange reactions came alive. The practical payoff is a property called shear-thinning: When forced through a narrow opening, the material’s viscosity drops and it flows easily. Through the printer nozzle it flows like a liquid. Once extruded, the bonds reform and the shape holds.

Getting the looseness right was the hard part. Too loose, and the material loses its strength. With too little crosslinker the sulfur reverts to its elemental form. It unravels.

“Adding too little organic crosslinker makes the material overly flexible, and the sulfur ends up unraveling back to its original elemental form,” Dr. Kim said. “To maintain the desired properties, a certain minimum amount of crosslinker is required, so we went through a process of fine-tuning the ratios.”

What makes this material genuinely different from conventional 3D printing plastics is what happens after printing. Because the sulfur-sulfur bonds are reversible, a finished print can be heated back into a soft, deformable state at any time. When it cools, the bonds reconnect and the material re-solidifies. The shape changes; the material doesn’t degrade. You can take a failed print or a structure that’s outlived its usefulness, crush it, stuff it back into the printer’s hopper, and print something new. No grinding. No filament reprocessing. The team confirmed that material properties remained stable through up to ten recycling cycles without significant degradation.

They called the process ‘closed-loop printing’. Sulfur that was once refinery waste becomes a printable plastic, gets shaped into a useful structure, and when that structure is no longer needed, gets melted down and printed into something else. At no point does the material leave the cycle as waste.

Recyclability turned out to be only the beginning. The same dynamic bonds that make the material reusable also make it responsive. When exposed to heat or light, the bonds break and reform in ways that allow a printed structure to change shape and move according to a pre-designed pattern—a capability known as 4D printing, where objects continue to transform after they leave the printer.

By adjusting the sulfur content, the team could tune the temperature at which this shape-memory effect kicks in. At 46 percent sulfur, the material returns to its programmed shape at around 14°C. At 63 percent, the trigger temperature rises to about 35°C. At 76 percent, it’s roughly 52°C. Certain compositions also respond to near-infrared light. And when iron powder is mixed in, the material becomes magnetically responsive. Temperature, light, magnetic fields—different stimuli can be combined within a single printed object.

To demonstrate what this means in practice, the team printed several soft robots. None of them contain batteries, wires, or motors. They move entirely through the material’s own shape-memory response to external stimuli.

One was a thread-shaped underwater robot, just one millimeter thick, that rolled through water in response to magnetic fields. Robot cleared obstacles nearly 1.75 times its own body thickness. Another was a gripper robot that opened and closed its arms in response to ambient temperature changes. It could pick up and relocate small objects.

The most striking demonstration was a capsule-shaped robot designed to carry out a chemical reaction autonomously. The team loaded a catalyst inside a 3D-printed sulfur-plastic capsule and sealed it. When the capsule was dropped into an organic solvent solution and the temperature reached 50°C, the lid popped open on its own, releasing the catalyst. Simultaneously, a magnet rotating beneath the container spun the capsule like a magnetic stir bar, mixing the solution evenly. After about 60 minutes, the reaction was complete. Without anyone having to add the catalyst by hand or stir the solution. 

Commercialization is a long way off. The ten-cycle recycling figure is encouraging, but the team hasn’t yet run long-term tests beyond a few dozen cycles. More iron powder improves the magnetic response, but above 20 percent it clogs the nozzle. And no sulfur polymer material of any kind has yet reached commercial production.

“To move beyond lab-scale results and turn this into actual products, we need to target specific application areas and work with companies from the early stages,” Dr. Kim said.

“If you look at each element in isolation, there has been prior research,” Dr. Kim said. “For instance, studies using magnetic particles to build soft robots, or work demonstrating shape-memory properties with sulfur polymers—those individual component technologies already existed. But this is the first time all of these have been integrated into a single material that can deliver so many different functions at once.”

That integration is the real contribution. It is a material made from industrial waste. It is printable and fully recyclable. It can also be programmed to move, respond to its environment, and carry out tasks on its own. Each of those capabilities existed separately. Putting them together in one printable, crushable, re-printable substance is new. 

The post How sulfur could fix 3D printing’s waste problem appeared first on Popular Science.

Many of the animals we know and love today have tails, from the littlest kitten to the largest whale. These tails vary widely by anatomy and purpose—from the grippy tails of opossums to the balancing tails of kangaroos to the swimming tails of fish. Others tell us how an animal is feeling, like a happy puppy with a wiggly butt. 

Having a tail that extends beyond the anal opening is a requirement of membership in the phylum Chordata, where humans and all other vertebrates reside. But us humans don’t really have a “tail” in the same way most creatures do, at least past eight weeks in the womb. Neither do our closest primate relatives. 

For humans, the story of losing our tails goes way back in the evolutionary timeline. “The reason that humans don’t have tails is that our ancestors didn’t have tails,” says Carol Ward, a distinguished professor in the integrative anatomy program at the University of Missouri. But how we lost tails is a story that goes back at least 20 million years into human—and ape—geneological history. 

In the heart of the Miocene, land-dwelling animals were starting to look more and more like the fauna of today. During this era, which lasted from around 23 million years ago to five million years ago, the first dog-bears appeared, primitive giraffes frolicked through Eurasia, and dog-sized three-toed horse ancestors lived in Florida. 

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Humans, on the other hand, weren’t exactly humans yet. Human evolution is a story of divergence that goes back to the Miocene when African apes split off from orangutans. Recent research estimates that the last common ancestor between humans, chimps, and bonobos split off around five to six million years ago, and evidence for early members of the Homo genus didn’t appear in the fossil record until around 2.8 million years ago. 

The trouble here is that these evolutionary cousins of ours are also tailless. So to find a tailed relative, we have to go back even further. Around 25 to 30 million years ago, our ape ancestors branched off from tailed monkeys. Once that split happened, many species of tailless apes started popping up in the millions of years that followed. This makes it pretty much impossible to determine which exact tailless species would go on to evolve into us, says Ward. 

The fossil record only offers us limited glimpses of what was happening, but even those snippets are enlightening. One such glimpse is the Ekembo, a genus with specimens dating back 17 to 20 million years ago that have been found in Kenya. Fossils of one species in this genus, the Ekembo heseloni, offer up a pretty good look at the relationship between apes and tails at the time, says Ward. These guys probably looked like chimps with legs and arms of the same length, adds Ward, and fossil evidence suggests that these creatures climbed on tree branches on all fours and kept the long, bendy lower backs that modern apes eventually lost. But what they were missing was the key components necessary for a tail. 

When it comes to pinpointing when ape tails disappeared, we have to look to the sacrum fossil, the bony structure at the base of our lumbar vertebrae. Sacrum fossils for say, cats and other tailed mammals, lead into a bunch of tail vertebrae. For apes and humans, the sacrum ends with just a small tip. 

“We have that small tippy point for Ekembo heseloni,” Ward says, “We know that sacrum could not have supported a tail, and that animal didn’t have one.”

But Ekembo isn’t the only example of a tailless primate from around this time. Another Miocene-era ape dubbed Nacholapithecus appears in Kenya’s fossil record about 15 million years ago. Fossils of these creatures’ sacrums demonstrate that they too wouldn’t have been able to support a tail, adds Ward.

While it’s not clear which exact ape goes on to become a hominid millions of years down the line, the evidence shows that apes had evolved to be tailless in this time period. And if our ancient ape ancestors didn’t have tails, homidis—and, in turn, humans—won’t either. 

So we know pretty certainly that the “human” tail went the way of the dinosaurs long before humans were a twinkle in evolution’s eye. But why? There are a bunch of theories, but it may have to do with movement and motion, Ward suggests. 

Even though we, and our tailless brethren like gorillas, chimps, and gibbons, are related to these 20-million-year-old apes in some capacity, they likely looked very different from their modern counterparts. 

“Modern chimps and gorillas have really long forelimbs, really long hands and fingers, short hind limbs, and a bunch of other features for hanging below branches,” says Ward. “But millions of years ago, that wasn’t the case. [Early apes] had arms and legs that are about the same length, so we’re pretty sure they walked on all fours.” 

These strategies are intertwined with taillessness. While many animals use their tails to help maintain balance while in motion, they are especially useful if that movement is swift—think a running cheetah or a swinging monkey. 

Miocene apes were eating fruit out of trees, explains Ward. Getting to the good stuff on the edge of a fruit tree branch requires supporting their weight on multiple branches, moving slowly and carefully so as to not lose balance. 

For our slow-moving ape ancestors, a tail may have been a waste of energy to grow, or a potential liability waiting to be yanked by a predator. “They were climbing, but they were doing it deliberately,” Ward says. “The tail just didn’t offer an advantage.”

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Why humans don’t have tails appeared first on Popular Science.

In February 2025, I went to Creswell, Ore., to see whether cult putter manufacturer L.A.B. Golf’s zero-torque premise could do something no golf instruction or my own overactive brain ever could: remove a variable without removing me from the process. In March 2026, I went back on the heels of something heel-shafted—L.A.B. Golf’s unusually country-club-coded LINK.2 blade putters, a more familiar silhouette from a company better known for shapes that look like dares. This was the growing company’s clearest attempt yet to package its zero-torque worldview in a shape traditionalists might actually recognize (and embrace). An older golfer at the Springfield, Va., country club where I first tested a stock LINK.2.1 looked it over lustily and declared it the “Patek Philippe of putters.”

My takeaway from that first visit wasn’t that L.A.B. had invented a magic wand. It was that Lie Angle Balance—the company’s namesake way of building putters so they resist twisting and stay more stable through the stroke—could strip out one of putting’s smallest, most persistent frictions. You still have to read greens. You still have to manage pace. You still have to live with your mishits … your many, many mishits. But the right club will stop asking for so many mid-stroke negotiations.

L.A.B. Co-founder Sam Hahn, also the company “Sultan,” according to the placard outside his office, has long argued that “zero torque” is really a simplification. What L.A.B. is building is really a kind of corrective torque, not the absence of force so much as technology to deliberately manage those forces so the golfer has to do less of it by hand. That sounds like the kind of distinction only a putting obsessive could love, but it gets at something central to how the company sees itself now: not just as the loudest name in a buzzy category, but as a steward of defining it more objectively.

A year later, L.A.B. Golf is in the same location at the edge of the Emerald Valley Golf & Resort, but in a very different place in the industry. It is no longer simply an oddball putter company in its Pacific Northwest bubble, making heads that once inspired equal parts inquisition and zealotry. It is now a company navigating two kinds of validation at once: financial and golfing.

__________

The first came in the form of acquisition by private-equity firm L Catterton, a drawn-out process Hahn described as “excruciating” because it came at a time the company was already growing at “an absolutely absurd, pretty unprecedented rate.” The second came in June 2025 when J. J. Spaun sank the winning 64-foot putt at the 125th U.S. Open with a custom L.A.B. DF3 putter [shown in the air below right], a moment Hahn called “the perfect closure to chapter one,” and one that left the company, “in a small little way,” “officially etched into golf history.”

L.A.B. has been slowly carving out its presence since 2018, but looking around Hahn’s office, you’d be led to believe L.A.B. had been part of golf history for the better part of a century. There’s a picture of Arnold Palmer circa 1953 with his L.A.B. putter. And there’s Richard Nixon with one. And there’s Ty Webb with his. Sure, they’re all photoshopped printouts, but after the last year, it wouldn’t be that hard to replace them all with actual photos from the Tour. You never know what can happen at Augusta National.

Walking through the building, it felt more like a company that could keep up with the $200 million-plus endeavor it had become. The deal didn’t so much change L.A.B.’s identity as remove bottlenecks from a company that was already outgrowing its old shape. Luckily, it’s a company that has no issue with new or odd shapes.

Last year, I saw a place straining at the seams. This year, I saw the same weirdness, but with more room to breathe. More space for conceptualizing and prototyping, a Ted Lasso-style “BELIEVE” sign sitting on the shelf above a workbench. More space for a six-axis precision measuring arm. More dedicated CNC machines for production. More repeatability. More order. Literally fewer walls to make the equipment and 250-plus employees all fit. Same dedication to hand-balancing and verifying every single one of the 1,500-plus clubs that leave the facility daily.

Lead times that once stretched to 14 weeks are now down closer to two on some builds, the result of what Director of Manufacturing Engineering Kevin Martin described as an effort “to level up everywhere in the company, from here to production, from equipment to processes across the board.”

Part of that leveling up involved the LINK.2 challenge to determine head material and shape, entry point of the shaft, hosel design, and weighting to deliver L.A.B.’s forgiveness with limited perimeter to manipulate. Martin also addressed the obvious anxiety that comes with private equity in any enthusiast niche: “The biggest fear … was that our stuff is going to slip once we get bought by PE, but we haven’t seen that at all. We’ve actually been requested to do everything with a higher standard than we had before.” 

Identifying and addressing pain points matters because L.A.B. still does not really make a mass product, even as it has achieved a critical mass of product. Putters still cost $499 stock up to $1,299 custom, offering an increasing number of shapes and components. Of course, L.A.B. is hardly alone in treating putters as an active design frontier. Across golf, manufacturers have been experimenting with new processes, new geometries, and new materials—from multi-material constructions to 3D-printed heads—in an effort to chase stability, consistency, and feel. L.A.B.’s distinction is that all of its experimentation keeps circling back to the same central thesis: remove torque, then fit the rest around the golfer.

Hahn told me the modern golf consumer is “less susceptible to BS marketing than they’ve ever been,” more informed and more interested in “scientific reality.” That has suited L.A.B., who continue to work on ways to quantify zero-torque’s legitimacy. But it has also forced the company to learn a broader audience in real time. There will always be hardcore mallet guys, real L.A.B. rats, but the LINK.2 invites a new Newport crowd to go from intrigued to convinced. That same maturation shows up in fitting.

__________

Last time, the fitting, which was done adjacent to HQ on the club’s putting green with a couple of golf bags of samples, felt like an outdoor mood board with physics. This time, it happens inside a dedicated studio, on a course-like artificial green lined with roughly 250 L.A.B. configurations. That’s not all the millions of potential builds, once you factor in every variation of alignment marks and other aesthetic customizations, but it’s enough to make the point and properly inform the customer perspective. 

Senior Fitting Specialist Tyler Falk, who fit me [several paragraphs below, in orange], says we’re only working with the “24 pack of crayons versus the 96 pack,” because we’re starting with just the recently released LINK.2.1, LINK.2.2, and DF3i models, not every conceivable version. However, we have more than enough to stop pretending this is just a vibe check. And there are those who come in excited to try anything and everything. Different strokes for different folks, as they say.

This room is the clearest symbol of where L.A.B. is now. The first time I stood here, it was an unfinished mound. Now it’s an inviting in-person pilgrimage. The company still sells a philosophy, but it has become much better at measuring how that philosophy meets an individual golfer. My first fitting was a conversation about shape, alignment, shaft feel, and preference. This one is also a conversation about data.

After some initial putter introductions and subjective impressions, Falk walks me through Quintic ball-roll readings and the kind of launch-monitor scrutiny that doesn’t care what I think I want. I hit a series of balls, high-speed cameras measure what happens at impact and during the first second(s) of roll, then we turn to a large screen dotted with reds and greens. The goal, he explained, is forward rotation and getting away from putts that skid or backspin and force you into inconsistent pace corrections. That was inconvenient news for my ego.

I came in thinking I would probably leave with some custom version of the LINK.2, probably with the fanciest TPT carbon fiber shaft because more expensive = better, right? That would best flatter the fantasy I have of the golfer I could become, striding up unassumingly, nonchalantly, and finding the bottom of the cup repeatedly from 20, 30, let’s just say 60 feet. But as the session unfolded, the evidence kept nudging me elsewhere.

___________

What we found after an hour was that the DF3i with a GEARS shaft addressed, more than anything, my need for steadier distance control and a build that would hold up better when my stroke was less than perfect.

The LINK.2.1 and LINK2.2 were not rejected. They were simply not the answer to the question my stroke was asking. Falk’s language around it was refreshingly unsentimental. With the LINK2.2 and an ACCRA shaft, the numbers were good. With the DF3i and GEARS, they were more resilient. He told me there is “no single shaft” that automatically performs better because of price or prestige; the point is matching profile to player. 

In my case, he says, the steel shaft “entered” my transition a little too much, the $250 Diamana carbon fiber upgrade was still a bit too stiff, and softening that profile “just a little bit” with GEARS graphite [available for “only” $175 more but clearly not a tier below] was where he “started to see your distance control really improve.” He liked the DF3i because my mishits produced better launch-and-roll numbers and because the head’s forgiveness made it the build that would “cooperate day in and day out the most consistently.” Different strokes for different folks, as they say.

That result made more sense once I understood how much L.A.B. now thinks about synergizing head materials and shaft materials in the same mechanical conversation. Vice President of Engineering Brian Parks explained that in a multi-material head—for instance, my DF3i’s aluminum body with a stainless-steel face insert—different materials create different sounds and sensations at impact. 

Scientifically, they model those frequencies and try to tune out the kinds of pitches that feel obtrusive. Subjectively, though, there is no universal answer: some players want a click, some want something duller and more muted, some want a more metallic note. The engineering can narrow the field, but preference still finishes the job. 

The shaft side is no less nerdy, or no less personal. Parks says the whole point of working with manufacturers on a growing shaft menu is “sound and feel,” with differences in composite density and stiffness changing how impact is transmitted. L.A.B. measures both frequency and deflection on 37” shafts: TPT sits at the stout, instant-feedback end of the spectrum, while ACCRA gives more visible deflection and a lower, softer sensation. 

GEARS lives in a particularly interesting middle ground. Its filament-wound construction was described to me during the fitting as the graphite shaft that most closely mimics steel, but Parks explained that its structure is more nuanced than that. It has a stiffer section up in the butt, then softens lower down, which gives it a feeling of stability while still letting the player sense the head and hear a more muted sound. In my case, 268 Hertz so good. Come on, baby …

That was useful context, because it meant the DF3i choice was not just about head shape. It was also about how that head’s insert and that shaft’s profile worked together for me. The insert version gave me a firmer, more energetic response than the softer all-aluminum on-rails DF 2.1 that spoke to me on my original visit but had recently felt too mushy, hence my ill-founded belief I was entering my competitive era. And the GEARS shaft kept that response from becoming overly sharp or overly demanding, which was the primary thing holding me back from the heavier, all-steel LINK.2. In terms even I could understand: enough pop, enough stability, not too much drama, which turns out to be the company’s story, too.

__________

What seems clearer a year later is that L.A.B. has not grown by hardening into dogma. It grows by staying flexible inside a rigid premise. Lie Angle Balance, eliminating torque to reduce the need for constant face management, remains the same. But the company keeps finding new ways to meet golfers where they actually are, not where tradition says they should be. Director of Player Development Liam Bedford tells me a story over dinner that perfectly illustrates this.

Pro Camilo Villegas wanted a setup L.A.B. did not really have at the time: a split-grip, counterbalanced-style build that would let him quiet his hands and keep the putter moving more like a single unit. So the company worked up a custom build: a MEZZ.1 Max with about one degree of shaft lean, a 74-degree lie, and a 17-inch grip. Bedford says it became “the first-ever counterbalance putter we built.”

More importantly, when Villegas needed a backup, Bedford says it was “the first time in [our] history that we got feedback that we were able to replicate a build” so precisely that the player “couldn’t tell the difference between the two of them.” This burgeoning confidence and machining prowess meant that what started as a specific tour-player solution could become a direct retail category you’ll find on the L.A.B. site today.

That says something larger than one tour anecdote. L.A.B.’s evolution has involved learning how to turn one-off experimentation into repeatable customization, how to translate an individual golfer’s odd-seeming needs into something real, manufacturable, and eventually scalable. Even palatable, as the increasing acceptance of the original Direct Force putter and its offshoots has shown. 

Another professional’s name fits here, too. Adam Scott. Bedford described the development of what became the MEZZ.1 Max began after Scott wanted L.A.B. to explore a larger concept. Bedford and the team tinkered late into the evening, rebalanced the perimeter, and realized, in Bedford’s phrasing, “oh shit, this is good. This is better.” What stands out is how organic the process sounded: not a top-down product brief, but a player’s need becoming a real product because the right people were curious enough to follow it. As Martin puts it, that is simply “how we operate.” Somebody says something, it sparks an idea, and eventually that idea becomes something you can buy. [And, yes, it was reportedly Scott who introduced Villegas to the putter.]

This makes my own fitting feel less like a separate consumer experience than part of the same company logic. Tour players helped push L.A.B. into new categories. Admittedly, I’m not doing anything so consequential, but I went through a similar basic process: arriving with a set of assumptions, preferences, and self-descriptions, then watching the evidence quietly reassemble them into a custom product.

__________

A year ago, I was fascinated by how L.A.B. putters seemed to reduce micro-adjustments. This time, what struck me was how the company’s expanded fitting process reduced self-mythology. Before, I knew nothing. This time, I thought I knew something. Both times, I learned there was more to know. Fitting politely told me something I sensed deep down: my taste-led instincts could actually benefit from some real problem-solving. At the end of the day, every L.A.B. putter stays square, but with a little effort, you can find the one that squares with playing style and personal style.

That lesson lines up neatly with how Hahn described L.A.B. itself at this moment. Speaking about his own swing changes and the company’s evolution, he says you eventually end up with an identity that reflects accumulated choices, habits, and limitations until those no longer fit the present version of you. Then the challenge is whether to become “a frustrated, middle-aged guy who talks about how good he used to be” or to “accommodate my new self.” 

L.A.B., Hahn says, is facing the same thing: “Chapter two has to look different. Our body’s changing. The goals are changing, the processes are changing. The audience is changing, and we need to change with that.”  

A year ago, my trip to L.A.B. taught me that odd-looking equipment can become intuitive once you stop fighting it. This year, it taught me something slightly more annoying and therefore probably more valuable about how I should stop fighting myself. Improvement is not always about becoming more like the golfer you imagine yourself to be. Sometimes it is about accepting the golfer the numbers have already identified.

I went in expecting to choose on taste and leave with something sleek, blade-adjacent, and flattering to an aspiring flagstick artist’s sensibilities. Instead, an indoor green, walls of options, and a lot of patient evidence pushed me less fantasy, more fit. Less Patek Philippe, more Gimmie Getter. Less projection, more cooperation. Less me as I’d like to be seen, more me as I’d like to actually putt. Eventually becoming the me that drained it rather than duffed it. 

Which, if I’m being honest, is the most L.A.B. Golf lesson imaginable …

… but don’t worry: numbers may have chosen the DF3i, but I chose it in purple, with skulls etched on the sole, a memento mori reminding me to embrace a little weirdness every day.

The post A year later, L.A.B. Golf’s weird science got bigger … and more personal appeared first on Popular Science.

Travel is notoriously hard on your digestion. Jet lag, dehydration, stress, and even slight disruptions to a regular meal schedule can result in unpleasant bathroom difficulties. But the next time you’re struggling with toilet troubles away from home, try to remember: At least you’re not dealing with it in outer space.

“I was thinking about how even on Earth, travel is one of the biggest constipation triggers,” Sarah Jane Bunger tells Popular Science. “[It’s] always going to make this perfect storm of constipation while on Earth. So it’s only going to be more and more exacerbated once you go outside Earth.”

It’s Bunger’s job to think about these things. She’s the global research and development lead for Dulcolax, where she oversees anything and everything tied to new formulas and clinical activities for the laxative and stool softener. But even after more than 13 years in the business, she was honored to learn the medication was available to a new demographic: the astronauts aboard Artemis II.

“We weren’t propositioned ahead of time. It was a lovely surprise for us that we were included,” she says of Dulcolax’s inclusion in NASA’s official Formulary and First Aid Kit.

Supplements like Dulcolax—specifically bisacodyl—are included on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medications, something keenly monitored by NASA’s medical team. At the same time, spacecraft cargo storage is always at a premium, so astronauts need meds that both get the job done and take up as little room as possible.

“I always think of the infamous example of sending a female astronaut up with, like, 100 tampons,” says Bunger, referring to Sally Ride’s historic first mission. “They want to make sure that they’re not overpacking, but that they have everything on hand that the astronauts might need to treat themselves while they’re up there.”

Bunger explains that constipation can be particularly troublesome for astronauts during the first few days in space while their bodies adjust. Eating is predictably difficult in space, although not necessarily for the reasons you think. Zero gravity makes digestion harder on an astronaut’s body because their organs and musculature must work in conditions they’re not evolved to handle. Bunger likens the digestive tract to an elastic material like leggings. While peristalsis—a muscle’s ability to contract and produce wavelike motions—helps move an object through the stretchy passageway, gravity is always lending a hand. Remove the earthbound physics altogether, and all that’s left is the peristalsis.

“That’s why they’re still able to swallow, even without the help of gravity. So there is some impact from the lack of gravity up there,” Bunger says.

Luckily, laxatives like Dulcolax are engineered to work both on- and off-world. The medication aboard Artemis II is the same as the types found in grocery stores, and features a protective coating that guards it against corrosive stomach acid. This allows it to delay dissolving until it reaches the lower GI tract. Bisacodyl also works on contact, so it doesn’t need to be metabolized by the kidneys or liver.

As helpful as the laxatives may be during the Artemis II mission, Bunger hopes their inclusion in the first aid kit has wider ramifications for everyone, not only astronauts.

“Honestly, if I could pick a benefit coming out of this, it would be that it helps address the stigma [of constipation] for some consumers,” she says. “If even astronauts are dealing with this, then you shouldn’t feel bad about the fact that maybe your GI tract is a little bit off, too.”

While not on the official list of mission experiments, there is also the possibility of real scientific progress thanks to laxatives in space. Bunger points out that no one has yet to study the effects of taking them while traveling to the moon.

“I would settle for a stock report,” she suggests. “I don’t need to know who took it and I don’t need to know when. I just want to know that it was taken.”

The post Even astronauts get constipated in space appeared first on Popular Science.

In March, NASA released a broad overview of the Artemis II mission menu accompanying astronauts on their historic, 10-day lunar flyby mission. The rundown was relatively comprehensive, but it lacked a crucial bit of information: Which specific five hot sauces have now traveled farther than any other condiment in human history?

After much anticipation, answers have finally arrived. Speaking with Axios, Johnson Space Center public affairs specialist Victoria Segovia confirmed the astronauts brought along Tabasco, Cholulu, Frank’s RedHot, Heinz Hot Taco Sauce, and Sriracha.

At the risk of sounding biased, the list isn’t exactly the spiciest of revelations. In terms of Scoville rating (the widely utilized hotness assessment based on capsaicinoid levels), the most mouth-burning sauce aboard Artemis II is Cholula with around 3,600 Scoville Heat Units (SHUs). The aficionados at PepperGeek.com deem this a “respectable heat” with a “decent bite,” but that’s about it. Second place is a tossup between Tabasco and Sriracha, each possessing around 2,500 SHUs. Meanwhile, Frank’s RedHot sits in last place with 450 SHUs.

This isn’t a knock on any of the hot sauces’ flavors, of course. If anything, their inclusion speaks to their appeal. Eating is difficult in space, although not necessarily for the reasons you think. Many astronauts have reported odd sensory shifts while traveling beyond Earth. Former NASA astronaut Douglas Wheelan once recalled that strawberries tasted sickeningly sweet and green beans had a grassy flavor during his 178-day tenure aboard the International Space Station.

Others have reported food simply tasting blander. This is largely due to how bodily fluids behave and realign in microgravity, which frequently causes swelling in the nasal passages. Much like having a cold, the subsequent congestion can then block odor molecules from reaching olfactory receptors. Knowing all this, astronauts routinely pack condiments to alleviate at least some of the mealtime weirdness. The hot sauces on the Artemis II mission probably won’t destroy anyone’s tastebuds, but that’s totally fine. Simply being in outer space does a decent job of that on its own.

The post The 5 hot sauces aboard Artemis II are kinda weak appeared first on Popular Science.

I have a confession to make: In my late teens, my car ran out of gas along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Rather than pump my own gas in PA, I’d been trying to make it across to neighboring New Jersey—a state that’s notoriously known for prohibiting self-service at gas stations—on an almost-empty tank. The truth is, I had no idea how to fill a tank on my own.

Since Oregon softened its laws back in 2023, New Jersey remains the only U.S. state in which drivers are not allowed to pump their own gas. Those of us from the Garden State often find the entire process of fueling up intimidating: so much so that we’re willing to run on fumes rather than work the pumps ourselves. My experience on the PA Turnpike was a learning one, for sure. But it left me with questions. 

In order to tackle some of those questions, we at Popular Science asked both Dr. Michael Jerrett, a professor at the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA, and Thomas Wright, a spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development, to weigh in on New Jersey’s unusual law and the science behind it. 

While the first dedicated, drive-in gas station opened in Missouri in 1905, it took until the 1970s for most states to switch over to self-service. They did so in part due to rising gas costs resulting from the 1973 energy crisis. Facing tight margins, gas stations realized they could lower their overhead by reducing staff and then pass that savings on to customers. In short, having patrons pump their own gas allowed gas stations to remain competitive.

To make the switch, these states had to modify their fire codes. This included installing emergency cut-off switches for all pump stations and heavily regulated latch-open nozzles (those notches that allow you to keep gas flowing without having to hold the nozzle yourself). 

Two states held out: New Jersey and Oregon, primarily due to laws they enacted during the mid-20th century citing safety concerns, such as high fire risks and health-safety hazards, including exposure to toxic fumes. 

New Jersey’s legislation prohibiting customers from pumping their own gas dates back to 1949. It’s known as the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act. Under New Jersey’s law, “trained attendants—rather than customers—handle the dispensing of fuel as they are required to know where emergency shutoffs are, recognize potentially unsafe conditions, and ensure that only approved containers are filled,” says Wright. 

While pumping gas is an act that most people (New Jerseyans excluded) do without thinking, there are health hazards associated with it. 

“Basically, gasoline vapors include benzene,” a colorless, sweet-smelling chemical that’s highly flammable, says Jerrett, “as well as other volatile organic compounds,” which are carbon-based chemicals that evaporate into the air at room temperature. 

These include toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene—all used to help improve a fuel’s efficiency and stability as well as an engine’s performance. All of these flammable, colorless liquids are considered neurotoxic, meaning being exposed to them in large doses can cause headaches, fatigue, and even more severe symptoms like death. 

But don’t get too worried, says Jerrett, since it’s the dose that makes the poison. Gas stations nationwide have gone to great lengths to limit our exposure to vapors at the pumps. “California, for example, uses rubber sealers around the nozzle for fueling,” says Jeffett. These prevent harmful gasoline vapors from escaping into the atmosphere during refueling, which protects not only the people at the gas tank but also the environment. 

Wright says that prohibiting self-service also helps with overall general safety measures. “When customers pump their own gas, it’s simply harder to enforce basic rules like turning off engines or not smoking.” 

Indeed, smoking or vaping both provide ignition sources that can be highly flammable at a gas station. It’s the same for vehicles that are left running. Turning off your car’s engine prevents heat from the vehicle’s exhaust inadvertently igniting gasoline vapors. 

There’s also static electricity. This build-up of electrical charge (we’ve all felt that zap!) on the surface of an object often happens when you slide onto and off of your car seat. This can generate high-voltage sparks exceeding 1500 volts, which can easily spark a fire. 

The best ways to avoid a zap are to not get back into your vehicle while you’re filling up and to ground yourself (try touching a metal part of the car away from the nozzle) if you feel a static charge. 

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For self-service patrons, there are things you can do to limit your exposure at the pump, says Jerrett. Avoid standing over the nozzle while filling your tank, or use the latch-open if it’s available and simply walk away. Higher wind speeds can disperse vapors more readily, so avoid pumping gas until the weather calms. 

While fires at gas stations do occur, roughly three-quarters of them result from mechanical or electrical malfunctions—not from pumping gas. In fact, only about four percent of them begin with gasoline igniting, so the chances of starting a fire at the gas station are extremely slim. 

Still, having a trained attendant pumped your gas is generally considered a safer option, since it reduces the risks of vehicles left running, static electricity, and consumers lighting up. It also keeps people who may be at higher risk for health complications—such as senior citizens and pregnant women—away from toxic fumes. 

In 2025, New Jersey had more than 1,900 gas stations and roughly 10,000 workers in the Auto & Watercraft Service Attendant category, which includes gas station attendants. “The law we’re tasked with enforcing prioritizes safety, accountability, and job creation,” says Wright. “Plus, the temperature is better in the car.”

Now, if they could just arrange a course in how to pump your own gas for those traveling out of state…

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post It’s illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey. But why? appeared first on Popular Science.

Nel rilievo moderno non basta più acquisire un ambiente in 3D: oggi è fondamentale sapere anche dove si trova...

The 2026 World Press Photo Contest documents our fragility, resiliency, and the best and worst of humanity. More than 3,700 photojournalists and documentary photographers submitted 57,376 photographs for this year’s awards.

The winners include heartbreaking images of an elephant culling in Zimbabwe, a massive apartment fire in Hong Kong, and the devastating aftermath of drone attacks in Ukraine.

“This is a critical moment — for democracy, for truth, for the question of what we as a society are willing to see and call out and what we are willing to ignore,” global jury chair Kira Pollack said in a statement. “The photographers recognized here have done their part. They have made the record. Now it is our turn to look.”

Visit World Press Photo for a full gallery of winners.

The post 17 poignant images from the 2026 World Press Photo Contest appeared first on Popular Science.