1. Where to find the largest sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere

A road trip through the Nebraska Sandhills reveals wide-open spaces and natural wonders.

Novelist Jim Harrison once called the Nebraska Sandhills “without a doubt the most mysterious landscape in the United States,” and for good reason. “The vastness and waving of the hilly grasslands in the wind make you smell salt,” he wrote.

Stabilized by a fragile hide of prairie grass and encompassing roughly 20,000 square miles, the Sandhills is the largest sand dune formation in the Western Hemisphere. As the last Ice Age began to wane, glacial meltwater carried sand and silt from the Rocky Mountains to central Nebraska, where the relentless winds whipped up dunes like surf cresting offshore.

The Nebraska Sandhills region is home to four of the top 10 least populated counties in the U.S. While the COVID-19 pandemic has shuttered tourist attractions across the country, many of those in the Sandhills—a National Natural Landmark since 1984—are ready-built for social distancing. A relaxing road trip through north-central Nebraska, traveling east to west, affords the visitor easy and responsible access to a host of overlooked attractions, from a celebrated sculpture garden hidden in plain sight to the largest handplanted forest in the Western Hemisphere. All of it set against the surreal beauty of one of the largest remaining intact grassland ecosystems in the world.

Sandhills sculpture garden

With just 117 people, the village of Bartlett, Nebraska, on the eastern hem of the Sandhills, is hardly an obvious candidate for a world-class sculpture garden. But on the grassy courthouse lawn, just a few blocks off Highway 281, you’ll find 40 finely detailed bronze sculptures by one of the world’s leading cowboy artists.

Herb Mignery grew up just east of town on a sprawling 13,000-acre ranch, helping his father and uncle manage nearly 800 head of cattle. He took note of the emptiness, the undulating hills, the whistle and warble of the meadowlark, and he often wondered if those around him felt the same loneliness and silence.

“That was part of the reason I just knew I couldn’t be a rancher. I loved the openness. I loved the hills. But there was a melancholy to it that I found very early on,” he says. “It was one of those beauties that was almost unattainable.”

Now 83, Mignery is one of the most respected sculptors in the world of Western art, and he credits the Sandhills and its people for his inspiration. His work has been commissioned by movie stars and music moguls, Prince Albert II of Monaco and the Country Music Awards, and is on display in fine art galleries across the country. He runs his own studio in Loveland, Colorado, but over the past two decades he’s donated nearly 40 bronze sculptures—cowboys, immigrants, homesteaders, Native Americans—back to his hometown. Each of them now stands on its own pedestal outside the Wheeler County courthouse, open to the public day and night, year-round and entirely free. Hours from Lincoln, the nearest major city, you’re likely to wander the Mignery Sculpture Garden alone.

“It's given me such a comfort to bring something like that to Bartlett, because a lot of those people will never go to a museum,” Mignery says. “I just wanted those people to have a little something that represents them.”

Frontier fortress

Less than an hour’s drive southwest—still skirting the eastern edge of the Sandhills—visitors will find a second gem hidden along the North Loup river near present-day Elyria. Early white settlers in the Loup Valley—ignoring their own encroachment—considered the Lakota peoples hostile and appealed to their local senator for federal protection. In 1874, Congress approved the building of Fort Hartsuff. Wildfires prevented trees from growing in the valley, so the buildings instead were constructed with locally sourced grout, a sturdy mixture of sand, lime, cement, and gravel. The walls were nearly a foot thick. “If they had been made out of logs or sod or adobe, they would have been gone after the fort was abandoned,” says Fort Hartsuff State Historical Park Superintendent Jim Domeier, who first moved to the park nearly 40 years ago. “Here we’ve got all nine original concrete buildings restored. That’s probably one of the most complete forts of this time period anywhere in the country.”

Although construction of the fort provided economic and social relief to a valley in desperate need, the soldiers only once saw battle. Today, with barely 10,000 annual visitors, you can leisurely stroll through Fort Hartsuff State Historical Park nearly any time of the year. But don’t let the empty parade grounds fool you: This lesser known military outpost, beautifully restored, is well worth your time.

Oasis in the desert

Just 20 miles northwest of Fort Hartsuff, the Calamus Reservoir shimmers like a desert oasis. The Virginia Smith Dam, completed in 1986 as part of the $350 million North Loup irrigation project, stemmed the flow of the Calamus River and now supplies direct surface water service to roughly 53,000 acres of land. Given the Bureau of Reclamation’s use of eminent domain, a number of local farmers and ranchers initially opposed the project. But with 35 miles of sandy white shoreline, three modern campgrounds, and some of the best fishing and birdwatching in Nebraska, the Calamus Reservoir today is treasured by outdoor enthusiasts of all kinds.

“In the middle of June, they start releasing water for irrigation and slowly our beaches start showing up,” says Tommy Hicks, a regional superintendent for the Nebraska Game and Parks. “By late July, early August, we have some of the best beaches in the state. They rival a lot of oceanfront beaches.”

That might be comparing apples to oranges, really, though a late-summer day at the lake—toes in the sand and a six-pack on ice—is hard to beat. White-tailed deer bound through the surrounding hills. Bald eagles nest in the hardwoods and dragonflies skim the backwater shallows. Downed trees and driftwood serve as anchors for the beachgoer, a place to dry your towel or catch some shade, and the sandy cliffs overlooking the water often bear messages from randy teens and lifelong partners alike.

Roughly 350,000 people visit the lake each year, the vast majority between May and September. But even during peak season, you won’t likely have trouble claiming a corner of the Calamus for yourself.

2. How Apple Built 5G Into Its New iPhones

The faster wireless standard uses different chunks of the radio spectrum—but the technology remains nascent.

In introducing the first 5G phones on Tuesday, Apple said it had tested them on more than 100 networks. That’s a significant achievement, because 5G operates across a confusing patchwork of frequencies, meaning Apple had to pack additional chips, radio frequency filters, and multiple antennas into the iPhone 12.

The road to 5G has been less impressive than advertised so far, paved with meh speeds and patchy coverage, largely because the technology is so fragmented.

5G is “a zoo of different technologies,” says Swarun Kumar, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and head of its Laboratory for Emerging Wireless Technology. “There is one standard, but it can be interpreted in different ways.”

Apple did its best to sell people on the potential of 5G when unveiling its new phones, showing how it could make a smartphone behave like a game console by offloading computation. But the wireless technology remains nascent.

Apple’s support for 5G across all four of its new iPhones “is really unusual,” says Ian Fogg, VP of analysis at Opensignal, a UK company that tracks wireless network performance. He notes that only larger Android devices tend to support 5G’s high-speed flavor.

5G was probably destined to disappoint at first, given the hype around it. The standard promises data-transfer speeds reaching 10 gigabits per second—100 times faster than 4G speeds—as well as latencies of 1 millisecond compared with 50 milliseconds on 4G; it also allows far more devices to connect to a network simultaneously.

Just as 4G enabled a new generation of smartphone apps that fueled economic growth, the hope is that developers will build new services on 5G. Besides giving smartphones superpowers, the technology could eventually connect self-driving cars, industrial machinery, medical devices, and smart toasters to the cloud. 5G has also become a geopolitical football as countries jockey to take a lead in rolling it out.

As yet, though, 5G has yet to live up to the hype.

The 5G wireless standard is designed to make the most of different chunks of wireless spectrum. The standard covers multiple frequency bands, but the main chunks are low-band and mid-band frequencies below 6 gigahertz, and ultrawideband or millimeter-wave frequencies above 24 gigahertz. As a general rule, the lower frequencies offer more range but lower speeds while the higher frequencies provide super-fast speeds but only cover a few hundred meters and are highly susceptible to interference. Making the most of 5G means using a mix of all these frequencies.

So far, US network providers have only offered some 5G spectrum slices. T-Mobile and AT&T have focused on low- and mid-frequencies, providing greater coverage but speeds barely above 4G. Verizon has mostly offered ultrawideband 5G, providing download speeds of almost a gigabit per second but only in very small downtown areas. Overall, the US lags behind many other countries in terms of average data speeds for both 4G and 5G, according to an October report from Opensignal.

At Apple’s Tuesday event, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said the company would roll out 5G nationwide. This will run on low frequencies meaning less spectacular speed boosts but broad coverage. The company says this will involve technology that lets 4G and 5G users share the same spectrum.

The picture is complicated in the US because only a limited amount of mid-band frequency, which offers a good mix of speed and range, is available. That will change in coming years, however. The US government recently auctioned off one chunk of mid-band and announced it would make more available through another auction.

Kumar says it isn’t clear if one spectrum range will become more dominant than the others, although he expects a mix of mid-band and millimeter-wave tech to win out. “Everyone is trying to make up their minds, that’s the honest truth,” he says.

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3. A ‘Perfect’ Chocolate Chip Cookie, and the Chef Who Created It

The British pastry chef Ravneet Gill ran countless tests to arrive at her version of the classic recipe.

Calling your chocolate chip cookie “perfect” is a bold move. But the British pastry chef Ravneet Gill had no problem doing it. So far, no one’s contested her claim.

At the end of March, she went Live on Instagram to bake her “perfect chocolate chip cookies,” from her first cookbook, “The Pastry Chef’s Guide: The Secret to Successful Baking Every Time,” which was published by Pavilion in Britain in the spring and arrived in the United States on Sept. 8.

People got to baking and shared their results on Instagram, the photos showing a cookie split in two, with an ideal wet-sand crumb surrounding a glossy pull of viscous molten chocolate. Ms. Gill, 29, reposted them all on her account.

Nearly six months later, she’s amassed 43,000 followers and “inadvertently caused a lot of people to start making cookies and cakes,” she said. “It just sort of kick-started a lot of people into realizing that this is so easy.”

Eight years ago, after completing an undergraduate degree in psychology, Ms. Gill decided to pursue pastry, her mind set on making “flawless patisserie,” or as she describes it in her book, “the stuff that looks unreal because it’s so gorgeous.” She secured an apprenticeship at a restaurant, picked up work at a chocolate shop, and began taking classes at Le Cordon Bleu in London. From there, she writes, she “leapt into kitchen after kitchen.”

In 2015, Ms. Gill started as a pastry chef at St. John, the London institution, where there were no elaborate compositions, garnishes or out-of-season ingredients. In that kitchen, she discovered the flawlessness of a plate of honeyed madeleines served unadorned, straight out of the oven, and of a syrup-drizzled British steamed sponge pudding enhanced with Irish stout. Versions of both recipes are in “The Pastry Chef’s Guide.”

“She is very good at passing on her knowledge and sharing her trade secrets,” said Alcides Gauto, who worked with Ms. Gill at the restaurant Llewelyn’s, via email.

Ms. Gill wrote the book for home cooks to “understand what it is they were doing and not be scared,” she said, and for chefs “who had more pastry knowledge to get to grips with it.”

She emphasized the importance of focusing on theory, something she feels most baking cookbooks skip over. Hers begins with “Pastry Theory 101,” which explains the most basic elements of baking, like butter, sugar, gelatin and leaveners, and how they function within recipes. Then she expands into the building blocks of pastry. The chapter on chocolate distinguishes ganache from crémeux; the one on custard, crème anglaise from crème pâtissière.

So while you won’t find a recipe for a lemon meringue pie in her book, you’ll learn how to make a crust in one chapter, lemon curd in another and Italian meringue in a third. Apply all three skills to make the pie you’d like. Beginners who don’t feel up to the challenge of tripartite confections can start with banana cake, rice pudding or those “perfect” cookies.

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