Sommaire pour December 2014 de Popular Science

Q: WHAT INNOVATION WAS MOST IMPORTANT TO YOU THIS YEAR? 1. Math. It empowers us to decipher the universe. 2. Toilet paper. It’s a daily reminder to those fortunate enough to have it that our lives are good. 3. The Leatherman multitool has salvaged many a picnic and DIY project. 4. Vaccination. Not sure how many diseases it’s saving me from, but I appreciate their absence. 5. My Kobo eReader saves me from lugging books through airports, camping trips, and the subway. 6. Find My Phone app. With three kids who own iPhones, it's worth its weight in gold. 7. The dolly. I moved houses, and that little sucker saved my back. 8. I use the Sweet Green Level Up app almost daily. It makes me feel like I’m working…

Inside: Dive-bombing from space at Mach 25. The science (and fiction) of suspended animation. A wristband to replace air-conditioning. What it takes for an exoplanet to support complex life. Could drugs help us fall out of love? Since August, Iceland’s Bárðarbunga volcano has been spewing thousands of cubic feet of magma per second, from a fissure 28 miles (45 kilometers) from the central caldera. The thing about a volcano, says University of Cambridge geophysicist Robert White, is that “you can live 45 kilometers away, and molten rock might still pop up under your house.” That’s obviously a grave concern but far from the greatest one. Bárðarbunga is blanketed by Europe’s largest (by volume) ice cap. If a vent opens under the cap, rapid ice melt could trigger devastating floods, and…

Here on Earth, water, oxygen, and an atmosphere provided just the right conditions for single-celled organisms to evolve into walking, calculating creatures (like us). Still, the planet’s uniqueness is up for debate. Since 2009, the Kepler mission has tallied 989 confirmed exoplanets in the Milky Way; once the James Webb telescope launches in 2018, that number should rise. But do any of these have conditions as cushy as ours—what astronomers call “superhabitable”? To make a ballpark assessment, a team led by University of Texas biologist Louis Irwin devised the Biological Complexity Index. Published in May, it scores exoplanets on how amenable they’d be to living things. “The conditions for the evolution of complex life are quite rare,” Irwin says. So far, only a few exoplanets have made the cut. But…

PLASTIC FROM THIN AIR Humans produce 660 billion pounds of plastic a year, and the manufacturing process creates three times as much carbon dioxide by weight as actual plastic. “That’s an insane amount of material,” says Newlight Technologies CEO Mark Herrema. “Wouldn’t we be better off using plastic as a conveyor belt for capturing and sequestering carbon emissions instead?” That’s exactly what his company does. Typically, plastic is made by exposing hydro carbons from fossil fuels to tremendous pressure and energy. Newlight’s first commercial plant, in California, captures methane generated by a dairy farm’s waste lagoon and transports it to a bioreactor. There, enzymes combine the gas with air to form a polymer. The resulting plastic, called AirCarbon, performs identically to most oil-based plastics but costs less—creating a market- driven…

A BIKE LOCK THAT OUTSMARTS THIEVES Bike locks, even the burliest ones, all have the same Achilles’ heel: If given enough time, any determined thief can wrest a bicycle free. Lock8 reimagines bicycle security by using hardware and software to detect and respond to a potential theft. A gyroscope, an accelerometer, and a temperature sensor can pick up on a variety of assaults, including bolt cutters, chainsaws, blowtorches, and ice sprays. And the system will respond to any threat by blaring an alarm and sending alerts to a phone. The brainchild of an ER doctor and an economist, Lock8 weighs less than a pound and connects to a bicycle’s rear hub. The accompanying app provides keyless entry, and by sharing the e-key, anyone can loan or rent his or her…

GRAND AWARD WINNER POC HELMET INTEGRITY SYSTEM A HELMET THAT TRACKS ITS OWN HEALTH The key principle of helmet design is, by and large, simple: Create a container that will protect its contents (your brain). Successful execution is a bit harder. With every impact, a helmet weakens. Sometimes that’s evident—a crushed lid is a powerful indicator that you need a new one. But sometimes it’s not. Subtle deformations and microfractures can compromise protection even if the helmet appears to be in good shape. POC’s Helmet Integrity system monitors a helmet’s ongoing health. Designers embedded sensors throughout the liner that record deformation and measure the severity of a hit. If damage exceeds a predefined limit, an indicator light in the helmet will signal that it needs to be retired. For now,…

Popular Science: Big technology brands are racing toward VR, but is there a market for it? Jeremy Bailenson: Yes. People love media. Everybody’s buying bigger TVs and playing more immersive video games, using systems like the Wii and Kinect. At the same time, the success of social media shows that people like interacting with virtual others. PS: What makes VR so different from the platforms we’re used to? JB: When VR is done right, there is no interface. The way you walk up to something is by walking; the way you make eye contact with someone is by moving your eyes. VR produces the exact perceptual phenomenon you have moving around the world. When I’m using a mouse, I know I’m using it. When you’re in VR, you forget there’s…

THE BIONIC ARM Even with today’s most advanced prosthetic limbs, amputees still struggle to perform certain basic tasks. But the bionic arm made by Deka, the R&D firm founded by inventor Dean Kamen, is nearly as dexterous as the real thing. Nicknamed for the cybernetic hand in Star Wars, the Luke Arm is the first prosthesis that allows a person to make multiple movements, such as rotating the wrist and opening the hand, at once. “Ten minutes after putting it on, people are able to pick things up,” says Stewart Coulter, the Luke Arm project DEKA “LUKE” ARM manager. “Our office is littered with things that people have built with it.” In a clinical trial, 90 percent of the 36 participants were able to do previously impossible tasks, such as…

GRAND AWARD WINNER DOLBY ATMOS FOR HOME THE NEW SOUND OF HOME THEATER In the quarter century since Dolby first introduced home-theater surround sound, the systems have grown steadily more sophisticated: first two audio channels, then five, then seven. But the sound has always been two-dimensional, surrounding listeners in a ring, not a dome. With Atmos, Dolby and its A/V partners (Pioneer, Marantz, and Onkyo, to name a few) have added a third dimension: height, which audio engineers can use to place individual sounds anywhere in a 3-D space. Imagine watching Godzilla while helicopter rotors beat overhead. Atmos systems consist of a receiver and at least eight speakers, two of which handle overhead audio. A processor within the receiver interprets up to 118 object tracks and precisely places sounds in…

As a dancer, Lynn Parkerson performed in traditional productions of The Nutcracker. Now the founding artistic director of Brooklyn Ballet is adding technology to the classic holiday show, with help from Brooklyn-based hacker collective NYC Resistor. Network engineer Nick Vermeer, wearables wiz Olivia Barr, and computer securities expert Billie Ward collaborated on LED-enhanced costumes that light up in response to dancers’ motion. On tutus, the effect is evocative of falling snow. And for the ballet’s mysterious Drosselmeyer character, the team created the “Pexel” shirt, which adds a touch of magic with lights that sync to the dancer’s muscles. ALEXANDRA OSSOLA HIGH-TECH TUTUS Each tutu holds six LED strips. To reduce the weight on the tulle, the team linked the lights together with ultralight wire before gluing them in place. MOTION…

5.6 Pounds, in millions, of propellant carried by the Saturn V rocket, designed under Wernher von Braun’s direction In January 1963,Popular Science anxiously awaited the day humans would set foot on the moon. Naturally, we had lots of questions, and who better to answer them than NASA engineer Wernher von Braun? He explained to readers the details of rocket mechanics, the composition of the sun, what it would be like to live in zero gravity, and even how we might find life on Mars. Fifty years later, America faces another milestone in human space travel: commercial shuttles to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s new Dragon v2 capsule is reusable and can carry seven passengers. For more, turn to page 42. On Reusable Rockets “The needs of a suitable design for…

Over the decades, we have made some good calls. We covered the Toyota Prius before it reached the U.S., Web browsers before the rise (and fall) of Internet Explorer, protease inhibitors just as they hit the market, and the fi rst-ever digital SLR camera (it was the size of a shoe box and cost $20,000). Pick a recent and monumental innovation and chances are we fl agged it in one December issue or another. That kind of track record is great for readers, but truth be told, it’s kind of terrifying for editors. I mean, when you nail something for 27 years straight, you kind of have to ask, Can we pull it off again? More to the point: Can we do it even better? To allay that very particular…

As temperature perception goes, one person’s tropical is another’s tepid. Dualclimate-control cars and mattresses are evidence of that. To address this often awkward sensory discrepancy, the engineers at Embr Labs are trying to give individuals the power to control their own climes. “Thermal is deeply personal,” says Embr co-founder Sam Shames. “In any given environment, we all have a different idea of what comfortable is.” Embr’s solution is a wearable called Wristify. Placed on the inner wrist, it cycles through concentrated temperature pulses—a few seconds on, a few off— continually stimulating the body’s thermoreceptors. “Your skin quickly adapts to constants,” says co-founder Matt Smith, “whereas it actually overresponds to change.” I tried an early prototype in August at Embr’s Massachusetts office, which, as the new home of a start-up, lacked…

On August 25, an explosion tore through the southern Alaskan sky. The blast shook the remote island that houses the Kodiak Launch Complex, where the U.S. Department of Defense was testing an unmanned hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV). The flight of the highly secretive craft lasted a mere four seconds before an “anomaly” in the launch rocket forced controllers to deploy the emergency selfdestruct mechanism. The launch, the latest in a series that began in 2011, was saddled with added pressure: China has reportedly carried out at least two hypersonic tests this year (though both also ended in flames). The two nations are racing to engineer a vehicle capable of traveling faster than 10 times the speed of sound, which presents major obstacles. Such a craft requires materials that can withstand…

Popular Science: What kind of food do you serve at Black Ant? Mario Hernandez: We rescue forgotten recipes from every state in Mexico and bring them to New York with a new twist. Many use insects like grasshoppers, jumiles [stinkbugs], capiguaras [leafcutter ants], and mosquito eggs. PS: When did you first eat insects? MH: When I was a little kid, my grandma would take us to the market every Sunday, and ladies from villages in the mountains would bring insects—some of them would go into salsa, some into different moles. It was always part of our big weekly meal. It was a celebration. PS: How does Black Ant procure the insects for its menu? MH: Insects are seasonal. When the rainy season starts, one of our chefs travels to Mexico…

A NEW MANNED SPACECRAFT U.S. astronauts have been bumming rides to space from Russia for more than three years. Soon they won’t need to. This year, SpaceX unveiled one of the first privately developed manned spacecraft. A few months later, NASA officially selected Dragon Version 2, along with Boeing’s CST-100, as the nation’s new taxi to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX emphasized both safety and efficiency in Dragon’s design. Most spacecraft, including the Soyuz capsules that currently ferry astronauts, rely on parachutes to slow their reentry speed, which makes for a rough landing. SpaceX gave Dragon Version 2 a propulsive landing system instead. This technology should be gentler, to protect delicate instruments, and more accurate, to deliver the craft’s seven passengers with the precision of a helicopter. Dragon…

GRAND AWARD WINNER BLACK & DECKER 20V MAX LITHIUM CORDLESS DRILL WITH AUTOSENSE TECHNOLOGY A DRILL WITH AN AUTOMATIC TRANSMISSION We’ve been driving screws into things for centuries, so one would think we’d have mastered the art of drill-making. Sadly, no. There’s hardly a project that doesn’t suffer the aggravation of a stripped or overdriven screw. Black & Decker’s AutoSense technology could make those problems obsolete. A torque sensor eliminates the need for a manual clutch (the switch that adjusts a drill’s torque) by monitoring the level of resistance of any screw as it’s being driven. When it detects a major shift in resistance, or the moment a screw head hits a work surface, an onboard processor stops the drill’s motor entirely—no stripped heads, no cracked wood, no guesswork. $80…

A CABLE THAT WILL RESHAPE SKYLINES Of all the physical constraints that dictate our cityscapes, perhaps the most counterintuitive is the elevator cable. Very long standard cables become too heavy to haul, a limitation that restricts the height of buildings. But UltraRope, a new cable with a carbon-fiber core and high-friction coating, could double elevator heights to 3,280 feet. Ultra-Rope weighs 80 percent less than a standard cable, with no loss in strength, and designers are already using it to build higher than ever; with UltraRope, the elevator shafts in the new Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, will reach a record 2,165 feet. The lighter material also helps new buildings reduce energy consumption by up to 45 percent. GRAND AWARD WINNER KONE ULTRAROPE Korea Research Institute of Ships and…

This year marked a turning point for bionic technologies. In March, a dancer who lost her leg in the Boston Marathon bombing returned to the stage on a prosthetic foot and ankle. In June, a paraplegic man made the World Cup's opening kick using a mind-controlled exoskeleton. The FDA approved the first robotic exoskeleton for home use that same month. Here, we size up standout recent advances in restoring movement to those who've lost it.…

Inside: The world's fastest hot tub. Hacking The Nutcracker. How maker skills can help the homeless Cold weather makes for cold hands—unless, of course, you have a hand warmer. Don't waste money on those cheap disposable ones. Instead, use kitchen chemistry to make your own reusable versions. When vinegar and baking soda react, they form a compound called sodium acetate. This chemical has a high freezing point, so in liquid form at room temperature, it is supercooled. In such a state, a single sodium acetate crystal will trigger all the liquid to freeze solid, which releases enough energy to heat a bag of sodium acetate to about 136°F. Once it cools down, users can drop the bag into boiling water, reliquefying the chemical and readying it for another use. To…

Marc Roth moved to San Francis-co in September 2011 in search of a sales engineering job. By December, he was living in a homeless shelter. That’s where he overheard a conversation about TechShop, a makerspace that provides access to tools and education. Roth spen nearly all of his money on a membership and ended up taking more than 50 classes. Before long, he was assisting other members and even teaching courses. With help from an investor, he eventually pulled together enough money for a home and his own lasercutting business. 3,035 Number of people living in San Francisco homeless shelters in 2013 At the National Day of Civic Hacking in June 2013, Roth shared his success story—and his plan to replicate it. With support from nonprofits, he founded the Learning…

PUMPING THE BRAKES O N DRIVERLESS CARS We predicted in “The Car Disrupted” [October 2014] that automation would upend transport. Some of you voiced concern. SPEED TRAP If cars operate at the speed limit, how will towns that rely on income generated by speed traps get by? And if you were going too fast, despite the fact that the car was in control, who pays the ticket: you or the car manufacturer? Dave Rodolff, Norco, Calif. MORE THAN JUST A RIDE Half the fun of driving a car is driving the car. If I wanted to ride, I would take a taxi. Plus, driving a car teaches responsibility and decision-making. Terry R. Cornell, Bowling Green, Ky. Tweet out of context And here we are, like idiots, dumping antique water on…

Surgeons and sci-fi writers have long explored the idea of chilling humans in order to save them. Now emergency prevention and resuscitation (EPR)—colloquially known as suspended animation—is, for the first time, in clinical trials. "When a patient has a gunshot or stab wound, we often run out of time," says Samuel Tisherman, the trauma surgeon leading the trials. By pumping cold salt water through the circulatory system, doctors drop the body's temperature to 50'F, slowing cellular activity and buying up to two critical hours to repair injuries, 4TH CENTURY Hippocrates advises using cold water as therapy for ailments such as hemorrhages and injuries of a "gouty nature." 1812 During Napoleons invasion of Russia, French army surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey notices that snow seems to numb the awful pain of limb…

10 Percentage of Americans who classify their marriage as “very happy” but have cheated on a spouse SOURCE: NORC AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Love and heartache have always been inexorably tied. Recall the paranoid, lust-dizzy characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the tortured, memory-deprived lovers in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Wouldn’t it be nice if a pill could take away the pain of a breakup? Researchers are looking into it. As unromantic as it sounds, love is essentially a biochemical cocktail, and a poorly understood one at that. Scientists do know that oxytocin—often called the love hormone—plays a powerful role in bonding. In one experiment, Adam Guastella, a clinical psychologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, administered oxytocin to quarreling lovers during couples’ therapy. “It…

GRAND AWARD WINNER FORD F-150 AN AMERICAN ICON, REMADE The Ford F-150 has been America’s best-selling vehicle for 32 years. So when the company swapped steel for military-grade aluminum in several non-load-bearing parts—a first for any pickup truck—drivers were concerned. They needn’t have been. The alloy performs just as well as steel, and in some cases better, and it reduces the truck’s weight by as much as 700 pounds. (Typically, engineers would cheer the loss of only a few ounces.) Less weight means the F-150 can haul and tow more than it ever could, while accelerating and stopping faster. It also means the truck gets up to 20 percent better fuel efficiency. That’s good for drivers, of course, but when applied to 763,000 new trucks a year, the savings are…

In the past decade, a dark horse has emerged as the most energy-efficient mode of travel: aviation. Since the 1970s, the airline industry has cut its perpassenger, per-mile consumption 75 percent, enough that travel by air now takes less energy than by car, on average. The gains outpace those of buses, trains, and auto mobiles. An electric plane, such as the Airbus E-Fan, is perhaps the logical next step for an industry that saves energy any way it can. Nerd box: Energy charted below is the number of British thermal units, or BTUs, required to transport a single passenger one mile on an intercity (for rail and air) or highway (by car or bus) trip. The figures are national averages, and energy use depends strongly on region and route. EFFICIENT…

GRAND AWARD WINNER SONY _7S A CAMERA THAT SEES IN THE DARK Five years ago, the first mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras (ILCs) were introduced with the hope that they could compete with larger, more expensive digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs). They couldn’t. Since then, manufacturers have been grinding away on the technology, adding bigger imaging sensors and better lenses. This year, Sony introduced a ILC that not only goes toe-to-toe with DSLRs on quality (at almost half the weight) but also does some things even better, namely shooting at night. The _7S is the first camera—DSLR or otherwise—that can capture images in almost complete darkness. It has a fullframe sensor that’s only 12.3 megapixels—about half the typical pixel density. The lower density allows for larger pixels that can capture more light.…

GRAND AWARD WINNER GOOGLE ANDROID WEAR THE WEARABLE OPERATING SYSTEM Every major hardware manufacturer is clamoring for its share of the smartwatch action. This year alone, Motorola, LG, and Apple joined the fray, yet a true leader in wearables has yet to emerge. Instead of stepping into the hardware battle, Google leveraged what it knows best: code. In the past, each smartwatch ran its own proprietary operating system (OS), limiting the number of apps and functionality available to users. Android Wear gives Google an edge on the competition by standardizing the operating system across most manufacturers—much like Android did with its smartphone OS seven years ago. A unified OS means developers can create thousands of apps that easily sync with Android devices. With them, users will be able to place…

GRAND AWARD WINNER APPLE MAC PRO COMPUTER TOWER, REINVENTED Normally when a designer or video editor is hard at work, everyone nearby can tell: The computer is running at a scream and heating up the area in the process. A radical redesign makes the Apple Mac Pro the first high-performance PC that packs tremendous horsepower into a quiet, 9.9-inch-tall cylindrical body—one eighth the volume of its predecessor. Instead of adding heat sinks and fans for each processor and graphics card—a typical layout that adds a lot of bulk and noise—engineers built the Mac Pro around an aluminum thermal core with a single fan at the top. The configuration cuts the tower’s decibel level in half. Apple computers have long been a proving ground for innovative design (how many MacBook Air…

50 Top speed, in miles per hour, of the Carpool DeVille Duncan Forster and Phil Weicker built their first tub-on-wheels as undergrads at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. With a fellow student, they transformed an abandoned 1982 Chevy Malibu into a pool. “This thing was hideous,” Forster says. “The car barely ran, but we were really proud of it.” Twelve years later, living in Los Angeles, they bought a 1969 Cadillac DeVille and one-upped their beloved jalopy. The “Carpool DeVille” ran so well, Forster and Weicker set an even more ambitious goal: world’s fastest hot tub. A successful Kickstarter campaign funded a trip to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats for Speed Week 2014. But after arriving in the desert with their mobile pool, a flooded track—of all things— canceled the race,…

Have a burning question? Email it to askanything @popsci.com or tweet it to @PopSci #AskAnything. How do spiders cast silk strands across roads? Short answer They rely on wind. A With spiders, the age-old question isn’t why they crossed the road but how. Naturalists long believed spiders would fasten a line to a plant and carry the other end away on foot. But in 1889, spider expert Henry Christopher McCook offered an alternative theory based on webs he observed near a New Jersey boat landing, cast from shrub to shrub across open water. “How were these snares built?” he wrote. “We are constrained to call in the aeronautic habit and the air.” McCook never found proof of how wind-facilitated travel works. Almost a century later, William Eberhard, a scientist at…