Indice dei contenuti per August 2013 in Popular Science

MY WIFE IS a former semipro athlete. She was a track-and-field star in high school and earned a place on the Stanford University team, eventually taking second in the Pac-10 championship in the heptathlon. She made it as far as the Olympic trials before retiring, at the age of 23, due to bad knees. But even in retirement, man, could she run. In the early days of our romance, I introduced her to Ultimate Frisbee, a fledgling sport in which a co-ed team of soccer and lacrosse refugees chase a disc around a field. Where the rest of us had two gears—jogging and running—my wife had something like four or five. She also had a 30-inch vertical. She could outleap anyone guarding her, hanging in the air with enough reserved…

Frequency range 20hz-20khz Repurposed parts 60 percent Price $80 EVERY YEAR, we globally throw out up to 44 million tons of electronic garbage. Only a small fraction of it gets recycled, leaving landfills full of heavy metals, such as lead and mercury, that can bleed into the ground. To help slow the pileup—and inspire other companies to do the same—Urbanears, a Swedish headphones maker, is trying something new. Instead of tossing large stocks of unsold headphones, the company disassembles them and uses the ear cups, headbands, and hinges to create the Re:Plattan headphones. Each pair has brand-new guts, contains about 60 percent repurposed material, and, because the components vary in color, has its own unique look. After the initial, limited run of 3,000 Re:Plattans, designers will have to wait for…

The more components a chip has, the more room manufacturers have to install larger batteries in their devices. Intel shrank the platform controller hub—a traffic cop that routes data to RAM, graphic cards, and hard drives—and moved it from the motherboard onto the chip. The new chips support an “active idle” mode, in which programs keep running (receiving e-mails and tweets or streaming music) while the laptop is closed. Visual processes, such as graphics, stop, allowing some devices to run for up to 13 days. Previously, if the central processing unit (CPU) needed to work on something that the graphics processor (GPU) had loaded—say, a piece of game code—it would have had to make a copy. On some chip models, the CPU and GPU share the same cache, so they…

EVERYONE'S TALKING ABOUT the Internet of Things, a proposed network of intelligent devices that could one day automate much of the world around us. HVAC and lighting systems would adjust depending on a user's whereabouts. Lawns would know when to water themselves. Meanwhile, product manufacturers have been hastily preparing for this transition. The average household already has 10 connected gizmos, and experts predict that number will jump to 50 by 2022. But making devices and getting them to work in sync are two different tasks. Creating harmony will be the hard part. Protocols—systems of digital messaging and rules for exchanging those messages—are the glue that binds devices together. For the Web alone, there are at least 50 protocols. Wireless devices interact through a different set of protocols, such as ZigBee,…

Crabs, birds, and manta rays regularly try to crush sea horses for dinner, but a sea horse has some unusual protective armor. Its tail can be compressed to half its normal size without lasting damage, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, recently found. The tail's resilience comes from its structure: approximately 36 square segments, each made of four bony plates. The plates connect to the spinal column's vertebrae with collagen and can glide past one another, keeping the spine safe. Ultimately, the researchers would like to build a robotic arm out of 3-D-printed plates that mimic the seahorse's flexible and tough tail and use it for underwater excursions or to detonate bombs.…

In a free market, supply follows demand. But in the helium market, regulations set price and production, and with good reason. Helium gas—essential for MRIs, rockets, and space telescopes-is a limited resource. Radioactive elements in Earth's crust emit helium, which gets trapped in natural-gas fields, and we then extract it—or let it escape as we burn the gas. Until recently, the U.S. made most of the world's refined helium. Now it's a global game. Here's a history of the price, world production, and rising power of helium. The U.S. government required the Bureau of Mines to cover its helium production costs, so in 1962, the price more than doubled. The U.S. had concerns like the space race—and only cold, inert helium can pack combustible liquid fuel into rockets. So the…

A DEVICE THE SIZE OF AN ESPRESSO MACHINE quietly whirs to life. The contraption isn't filled with fresh, pungent grounds but, instead, spoonfuls of opaque, sterile goo. Its robotic arm moves briskly: It hovers, lowers, and then repositions a pair of syringes over six petri dishes. In short, rapid-fire bursts, they extrude the milky paste. Soon, three little hexagons form in each dish. After a few minutes, the hexagons grow to honeycomb structures the size of fingernails. No one here is getting a latte anytime soon. The honeycombs are human livers, says Sharon Presnell, chief technology officer of Organovo—or at least the foundations of them. The tiny masterpieces of biomedical engineering are nearly identical to tissue samples from real human livers, and they are constructed from actual human cells. But…

David Holz took the main stage at this year's South by Southwest Interactive, the annual innovation conference in Austin, Texas, looking like a hobbit on casual Friday. He wore an oversize blue polo shirt and billowy khakis with a big wallet bulge in the front pocket and had a wild nest of curly hair that frizzed around a thinning patch in the back. Even at South by Southwest (SXSW), a gathering teeming with bright-eyed inventors with big ideas and little time for haircuts, the 24-year-old founder of the company Leap Motion, which makes a new motion-tracking controller for computers, stood out as a particularly glorious example of the species geek. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk was scheduled to speak immediately after Holz, and Al Gore was up right after…

The most annoying aspect of recycling—and one of the biggest hurdles to its widespread adoption—is having to separate paper, glass, and plastic before they hit the curb. New recycling machines are changing that. With single-stream recycling, recyclables go into one bin, which a truck delivers to a materials-recovery facility, such as Willimantic Waste Paper in Willimantic, Connecticut. There, a largely automated system of conveyor belts, screens, magnets, and lasers separates materials so that they can be sold to metal and plastic recyclers and paper mills. Of the 570 recycling facilities in the U.S., 240 now have single-stream operations, according to Eileen Berenyi, of the solid-waste research-and-consulting firm Governmental Advisory Associates. While the system isn't perfect—its high-speed operation can lead to contamination from broken glass—the simplicity of it means households actually…

For any garageista ready to tackle molecular biology, the centrifuge is an essential laboratory tool. Its super-rapid spin supplies the right G-forces to neatly separate biological materials—including cells, proteins, and DNA—from a liquid. University-grade centrifuges sell for about $2,000, but synthetic biology enthusiast and inventor Cathal Garvey figured out how to build one with a Dremel tool and a 3-D-printed wheel. The combination can spin samples up to 33,000 rpm, creating forces 50,000 times stronger than Earth's gravitational pull. The 3-D-printed wheel looks deceptively simple, with six slots for standard 1.5-microliter Eppendorf tubes, oriented horizontally. Garvey says his early prototypes often deformed, which cracked and shot off tubes like oversize plastic bullets. “People said I was mad,” Garvey says. Yet he prevailed, reshaping the wheel's slots to safely cradle the…

Diego Stocco crafted his first Frankeninstrument when he was 16. Today the 37-year-old Italian musician enlists more than 30 unique creations to write and play scores for popular movies, TV shows, and videogames. One of his favorites, and the centerpiece of his eclectic ensemble, is the Experibass. Stocco built it on a whim in 2009, melding parts from a broken violin, a viola, and a cello to an upright bass [pictured] just to see how it would sound. The finished device resonates somewhat like a piano when he plays, Stocco says, but none of the instruments it's sourced from are easy to distinguish. “It doesn't really sound like anything else,” Stocco says. “It's just the Experibass.” TIME 1 to 2 weeks COST $250 TIME 2 weeks COST $0 Environmental technologist…

LONG ANSWER The belief that optimism can keep you alive—or at least stave off cancer—gained traction after the release of a study in the Lancet medical journal in 1979. The study followed six dozen recovering breast-cancer patients for five years. Researchers found that those who responded to their situation with a “fighting spirit” fared better—longer survival, fewer signs of residual cancer—than those who had feelings of “helplessness” or “hopelessness.” Subsequent studies seemed to corroborate the result, and the benefits of optimism crept into medical doctrine. Rather pessimistically, a few recent large-scale meta-analyses (reviews of multiple studies) have found a lack of convincing evidence that optimism really extends the lives of cancer patients. Neither positive emotions like fighting spirit nor the absence of negative ones such as helplessness or hopelessness reliably…

We held a Facebook conversation with author Annalee Newitz, whose latest book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, explains how to survive mass extinction: PopSci: Could wealthy people buy their way to safety? Annalee Newitz: The wealthy may have access to more resources that could allow them to survive in the short term. For example, if we were threatened by famine or pandemic, they would have access to food and health care that others wouldn't, or if there's a radiation disaster, they may be able to buy their way into underground facilities. But if there's an asteroid strike, a giant volcanic eruption, or gamma-ray bombardment from space? Nope. PS: Are there any lessons to be drawn from previous major extinctions on Earth? AN: One of the big lessons for us is most…

1 The Chrome extension Silencer blocks spoilers from social networks by filtering out posts with words that could ruin a TV episode or sporting event. A user enters a keyword or chooses a list; for example, the Arrested Development list weeds out 38 trigger words. Silencer Free 2 The Rainshader is the toughest umbrella on the market. Because its 10 fiberglass ribs extend below a user's shoulders, the helmet-shaped umbrella is less likely to invert. In wind-tunnel tests, it withstood gusts up to 38 mph without blowing inside out. Hospitality Umbrellas Rainshader $33 3 Meet Arduino's first preassembled robot. The 7-by-4-inch wheeled robot has two microprocessors—one for the motor and one for the sensors—an LCD screen, a digital compass, and a handful of other inputs. Arduino Robot $265 4 With…

While biking near his home in Thailand, Paolo Cechetti noticed a man weaving raw coconut-husk fibers into bags. Cechetti, an engineer at the water-sports-equipment manufacturer Cobra International, is always hunting for techniques to make surfboards stronger and lighter. Typically that translates into a spin on a carbon-fiber-based core, but Cechetti decided to try using coconut fiber [below] instead. The new Coco Mat core, which is now used in boards from Australian brand NSP, is stronger than carbon fiber—and more sustainable. Designers begin to build the boards by separating and cleaning the coconut-husk fibers by hand. Next, they lay them out randomly, sandwich the layer of strands in fiberglass, and insert a polystyrene core. Finally, they place the construction into a vacuum mold and inject epoxy. Coconut fibers absorb less epoxy…

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”—Albert Einstein THE WORLD IS clobbering coral reefs, home to 25 percent of all marine species. Agricultural runoff pollutes the water around them; coastal developments tear them up; overfishing kills their inhabitants; and carbon dioxide emissions make the oceans too hot and acidic. In a provocative op-ed for the New York Times last year, Roger Bradbury, an ecologist at Australian National University, declared that reefs are “zombie ecosystems … on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation.” The slightly more hopeful consensus statement from last summer's International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS), attended by 2,000 scientists, noted that while 25 to 30 percent of the world's reefs were already “severely degraded,” they could still be saved through “global action to reduce the emissions…

Done with your lunch? Good, here we go: You may know that implanting feces from healthy people into sick people can treat the deadly gastrointestinal infection caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile. But Emma Allen-Vercoe and her colleagues at the University of Guelph in Ontario believe that they can improve on this wholesale transplantation strategy. They're working to tailor mixtures of gut microbes for individual patients. Unfortunately, these bacteria are finicky and don't grow well in petri dishes, so her team makes artificial poop. PopSci: What's the special recipe for fake feces? Emma Allen-Vercoe: It contains things like the indigestible cellulose that's left after a meal has passed through your digestive tract and down to your distal gut, the end of the line for digestion. It's pretty nasty-looking. It's a…

“We're doing two things here: using robots to test ideas about how brains work and using biology to develop new robots. Shrewbot is the size of a small dog, can move its head around, runs on batteries, and has omnidirectional wheels—and no eyes. Its only sense is touch, from its plastic whiskers. Its snout has 18 of them, which move back and forth five times a second. (Real shrews whisk twice as fast.) When a whisker touches something, it bends backward, pushing a magnet at its base. A magnetic sensor detects the displacement and sends it to Shrewbot's computer processor. Shrewbot uses these touch signals to create a picture of its environment and distinguish shapes and textures. Shrewbot is completely autonomous. When it finds an object, a computer model based…

The first commercial 3-D bioprinter, developed by Organovo, is manufacturing functional liver tissues that will soon help biochemists test new drugs. Here's a look at the printing process. STEP 1: Engineers load one syringe with a bio-ink (A) made up of spheroids that each contain tens of thousands of parenchymal liver cells and a second syringe with a bio-ink (B) containing non-parenchymal liver cells that bolster cellular development and a hydrogel that helps with extrusion. STEP 2: Software on a PC wired to the bioprinter instructs a stepper motor attached to the robotic arm to move and lower the pump head (C) with the second syringe, which begins printing a mold. The mold looks like three hexagons arranged in a honeycomb pattern. STEP 3: A matchbox-size triangulation sensor (D) sitting…

REMOTE CONTROL: Developers have already created hacks that allow a user to control real aircraft simply by mimicking the roll, pitch, and yaw motions of flight with an outstretched hand. The apps mostly apply to small quadcopter drones, but engineers at NASA recently used the same technique to control Athlete, the agency's 2,000-pound flying planetary rover. ROBOTIC SURGERY: With accuracy of up to .001 millimeters, a Leap Motion device could enable doctors to perform precise surgical procedures by manipulating robotic arms. It could also allow them to treat patients remotely—particularly useful for soldiers in combat zones or astronauts in space. The ability to manipulate robotic arms precisely and at a distance could transform other detailed or remote mechanical work—for example, repairing a fighter jet on the other side of the…

We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations. TIME 5 years COST Undisclosed Tom West has tackled some impressive builds over the years, including telescopes, a sawmill, and his house in Poland, Indiana. But West, a retired teacher, recently completed his swan song: a 30-ton, 56-foot-long sailboat named Faith. The one-mast vessel is longer than a double-decker bus, out-fitted with wind turbines, and armored with a hull and cabin doors made from steel to thwart pirates on global voyages. “Everything you see, we did,” West says, standing next to the craft in his yard. “This all started out in pieces—the whole damned boat.” West had little sailing experience, let…

The cells lining your inner cheeks constantly slough off into saliva but are too small to see individually—which makes them perfect candidates for testing the Dremelfuge. Swab a Q-tip inside your mouth for about 10 seconds to grab some cheek cells. Dip the cotton tip repeatedly in a tube filled with isotonic saline solution to dislodge the cells. (Make your own solution from salt and distilled water, or buy wound wash at a pharmacy.) Fill a second tube to the same level as the other one. Insert the tubes in opposite slots in the 3-D-printed wheel. Run for one minute at the Dremel's second setting (about 10,000 rpm). You'll see a whitish pellet at the bottom of the tubes. Voilà! Isolated cheek cells.…

Alexander Morris lugged a camera around everywhere during high school, making him the unofficial class photographer. Even after he graduated last year, his alma mater in Antrim, Northern Ireland, asked him to document its 2013 prom. Morris couldn't resist. In addition to traditional shots, the organizers wanted a photo booth. Rather than spend money he didn't have to rent one or hire an assistant to man a camera, Morris built a stylish booth that could run itself. The compact and fully automated system fits inside a rounded wooden box, which Morris made to resemble the cartoonish logo of Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service. The contraption's brain is an Arduino microcontroller. Morris wired a circuit to it so that when a prom-goer presses a big red button, the Arduino starts a…

LONG ANSWER No one knows exactly what would happen if mosquitoes, which comprise 3,500 distinct species, were exterminated. The insects provide sustenance for dragonflies, spiders, bats, and birds, and their waterborne larvae are food for fish and other predatory insects. Nonetheless, experts differ on the ecological impact removing them might have. Jo lines, who studies vector biology and malaria control at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, says the effects would be minimal. “There's no food chain that we know of where mosquitoes are an inevitable link in a crucial process,” he says. If mosquitoes disappeared, related insects (though not bloodsucking ones) might fill their ecological niche. “There's an awful lot of things out there that, while they're in the water, look a lot like mosquitoes,” lines says.…

Almost a mile beneath Gran Sasso mountain in Italy sits the DarkSide detector. DarkSide, which started operating in May, is designed to capture the faint signals generated by dark matter, the elusive particles that scientists suspect are partially responsible for the gravitational pull of the universe. Despite an immense international effort, scientists have yet to observe dark matter because it doesn't frequently interact with standard matter. The subterranean DarkSide consists of two nested chambers: a 13-foot-diameter outer sphere surrounded by 100 quartz sensors that measure background radiation, and a liquid-argon-filled inner cylinder with 38 similar sensors poised to capture flashes of light, produced if a dark-matter particle collides with an argon nucleus.…

Last summer, the Environmental Protect ion Agency and the Department of Transportation threw down the gauntlet: They set a new standard that will require the average car to run at 54.5 miles per gallon—nearly double today's average—by 2025. Carmakers could reach that goal the easy way, making vehicles smaller and lighter but, at the same time, less powerful. Instead, several are getting there the hard way, building pint-size engines that squeeze out as many horses as their beefier predecessors. Consumers, especially those accustomed to luxury, often dismiss small engines as weak, noisy, and unreliable. But modifications like turbocharging and direct fuel injection allow more-precise fuel delivery and near-complete combustion, boosting an engine's horsepower even as it consumes less gas. And of course, burning less fuel reduces greenhouse emissions and saves…

Tuning Time 3–10 seconds Weight 9 ounces Price $299 Throughout their 23-year history, automatic guitar tuners have remained stubbornly complex systems that cost thousands of dollars and require tedious professional installation. Chris Adams, CEO of Tronical in Hamburg, Germany, has figured out a way around these problems. Using an off-the-shelf microprocessor, custom tuning algorithms, and six lightweight motors, Adams developed the first system that musicians can retrofit onto nearly any guitar's headstock—without any wiring, drilling, or soldering. Once attached, his $299 TronicalTune can make an instrument pitch-perfect in about five seconds. The TronicalTune consists of a three-inch computer and six motorized tuning pegs, which screw onto the headstock in place of the existing pegs. On traditional tuning pegs, strings thread through holes—a technique that can cause breakage when strings rub…

Because of its cloudless skies and favorable latitude, the Rub' al-Khali desert in the United Arab Emirates is a good home for the world's largest operational concentrated solar plant, the eight-month-old Shams 1. Its 258,048 parabolic mirrors reflect sunlight to heat water into steam to turn a turbine, generating 100 megawatts. But in addition to plenty of high-intensity sunlight, there's also plenty of, well, sand, and if the mirrors get too dusty, the plant's efficiency dramatically decreases. That means a lot of cleaning. Special trucks take three days to clean the nearly seven million square feet of mirror surface area. Scrubbing happens after the sun sets, and it's almost entirely automatic. The operator pulls up to a row of mirrors and pushes a button to extend the truck's robotic arms.…

As Clostridium difficile has become more resistant to antibiotics—causing diarrhea linked to 14,000 deaths in the U.S. per year—doctors have been performing fecal transplants to restore healthy gut bacteria and outcompete the nasty bug. The process is straightforward: Doctors dilute feces from a healthy donor with saline or milk and use a nasal tube or colonoscope to send it to the patient's small intestine. While transplants have reportedly cured more than 300 people, the first controlled trial wasn't published until this winter. The results? Subjects recovered, without a relapse, more than twice as often.…

IN JUNE, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people can't patent isolated human genes, which it considers a product of nature, but they can patent something exceptionally similar: cDNA, a synthesized copy from which someone has removed the noncoding parts. Given that fine line, it's not entirely clear how the decision will play out in practice or how it will affect work on nonhuman genes. But it's a hot area of debate. Earlier this year, Dutch scientists received a patent from their country on the newly discovered MERS virus that killed at least 30 people. The researchers had isolated the virus in their laboratory from a sample sent by a Saudi doctor. The Saudi Ministry of Health protested that the patent would restrict research and lead to more deaths; the…

Since mid-January, Rob Rhinehart has eaten very little of what most people would consider real food. At times, he's gone nearly a month between meals. Instead, the 25-year-old electrical engineer from San Francisco has survived almost entirely on Soylent, a nutrient-packed drink he manufactures in his kitchen. To Rhinehart and a growing legion of followers, the cloudy, white liquid is a substantial step toward changing how humans eat—or don't. Our physiological dependence on food has blossomed into an almost sacred attachment, subdivided into countless cultural, commercial, and aesthetic variations. But food is only fuel. And that fuel costs time and money. Last summer, Rhinehart found himself broke in San Francisco. He'd moved there after graduating from Georgia Tech to start a wireless-communications company. It failed, and he was left subsisting…

IN THE PAST 16 MONTHS, writers Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley have toured 150 of the built, natural, and virtual landscapes of the United States, collecting images and interviews. They call the project Venue, and they are documenting their progress at v-e-n-u-e.com. For Popular Science, they selected 25 of their favorite sites, each one open to the public and perfect for a late-summer road trip. 01 Soudan Underground Mine State Park SOUDAN, MINNESOTA N 47.819302 / W 92.242954 This 19th-century iron mine in the boreal forests of Minnesota has been repurposed as one of the deepest physics experiments in North America—and the deepest that's open to the public. In this subterranean lab, a neutrino detector looks for changes in subatomic particles emitted 460 miles away at the Fermilab particle accelerator.…

Crafting part of a 56-foot-long yacht is one thing. Learning to build Faith and install, maintain, and repair all of its parts is another. Here are just a few of the nautical systems West mastered during his five years of toil. A 100hp diesel motor and 500 gallons of diesel fuel give Faith 1,000 miles of range without wind. A computer autopilot, radar system, sonar scanner, GPS unit, and a gyroscopic compass all work together to get Faith to its destination—with or without a captain. To guard against pirates, West made the core of the master cabin's door from steel and incorporated a thick metal lock bar. The only access to the rudder controls is through the master cabin, so if there's a raid, the Wests can hunker down inside…

TIME 1 hour COST $50 or less DIFFICULTY WARNING: USE SHATTERPROOF EYE PROTECTION, AND OPERATE THE DREMELFUGE INSIDE A STURDY CONTAINER, AS THE DEVICE CAN THROW OFF HUNKS OF PLASTIC AT DANGEROUSLY HIGH SPEEDS. Download schematics for the Dremelfuge wheel from gitorious.org/dremelfuge. Two designs are available; pick the one that fits a Dremel 300 (not a standard drill) 3-D-print the wheel in ABS plastic, using hexagonal infill to strengthen it. (PLA is another common printing material, but Garvey says it tends to shatter under high G-forces.) If you lack a 3-D printer, order the wheel from Shapeways.com for about $50. Screw a rotary-tool disc holder into the wheel's axis, and attach it to a Dremel. Fit any tubes containing a biological sample into the wheel, ensuring each has a counterweight:…

People conduct electric charges, and so do vegetables. This simple fact spurred designer Scott Garner to build the BeetBox: a machine that plays drum-kit sounds with every tap of a beet. The veggies absorb some of the electrical energy stored in humans, which a sensor plugged into a Raspberry Pi minicomputer (“Pi”) can detect. Each touch triggers software to produce one of six percussion sounds. Garner hid the electronics inside a wooden container so that striking the beets emits thumps and snare hits as if by magic. TIME 3 days COST ABOUT $75 DIFFICULTY Box. Build a wooden box to house a Pi, a capacitive sensor, a power supply, speakers, and cables, plus a stand for six beets [see above] Computer. Load Garner's touch-sensing software onto the Pi. Beets. Solder…

The open seas have always been dangerous. Whether the threat comes from wartime submarines or Somali pirates, a lack of maritime defense could sink even the most advanced ships. In March 1942, Popular Science introduced a new World War II naval fleet designed to keep subs and torpedoes from destroying allied forces. The largest vessel measured 160 feet long, weighed 500 tons, and could lay and repair three-inch-thick steel-mesh nets to guard the mouth of a harbor. Concealed underwater mines, detonated remotely by onshore Army personnel, provided additional fortification. With the diminished incidence of formal naval warfare, engineers have shifted focus to antipirate technology: lasers, recon bots, and long-range acoustic devices. To see how one captain built his own pirate-proof yacht from scratch, turn to page 71.…