Indice dei contenuti per October 2014 in Popular Science

Feed 06 From the Editor 08 Peer Review 10 A Bit About Us Now 13 A simple, smart home security device 17 Ten things we love this month 18 Tracing the history of innovation—through sneakers 20 Lighter hockey gear for faster sprints 22 A user's guide to fitness trackers 24 A maintenance-free bike for the masses 25 The fastest high-speed camera money can buy Next 27 An icebreaker for polar research 28 Surgeries that put basketball players back on the court 30 Unsavory news for trick-or-treaters 32 How tweets save lives 34 An asteroid-blasting space mission 36 Artificial intelligence needs smarter standards Manual 71 Make your jack-o'-lantern extra spooky with a tiny smoke machine 75 Turn household items into hurricane-survival tools 76 How duct tape saved the Apollo 13 astronauts…

To celebrate the launch of our sci-fi iPad edition—check it out if you haven't—we asked readers what fictional technology they wished were real. Many had big dreams of time travel or teleportation, but some had more modest requests: LIGHT SABER. SLICES BREAD AND TOASTS AT THE SAME TIME. Amanda Nicolette via Facebook Judy Jetson's closet, so I don't have to think about getting ready in the morning. #lifesaver @femalehankmoody A replicator, and I would use it to make tea: Earl Grey, hot. @jrh3k5 The monolith from 2001. I would kick-start the evolution of dogs into a space-faring species. @OldsLouis…

There's not a lot of wonder attached to the average sneaker, but imagine life without it. That's the job of Steven Johnson. He hosts the show How We Got to Now, premiering on PBS and BBC Two this month. Johnson traces how mundane discoveries influence future inventions. “We're trying to shift the focus in terms of what we talk about when we talk about innovation,” he says. In the spirit of celebrating overlooked origin stories, we examine the humble beginnings of the sneaker.…

A Little More Detail: WiGig is an ultrafast device-to-device transmission protocol backed by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a trade association governing wireless standards. The protocol operates on the 60 GHz frequency band, which is used less often than others so it can accommodate up to 7 gigabits of data per second—more than five times the speed of Wi-Fi. A user could, for example, transfer a full HD movie from a computer to a tablet in matter of seconds. WiGig-certified products will be out by 2015.…

In the time it takes to blink, the Phantom v2511 has already captured more than 7,500 frames of video. Expand that rate to one second, and the v2511 captures 25,600 frames at a resolution of about 1 megapixel. That's still a far cry from the 1-trillion-FPS-camera MIT researchers developed in 2011, but unless you plan to record the motion of light, it should work just fine. 39.32Gigabytes of memory per second used by the Phantom v2511, thousands of times more than the iPhone 5S's slow-motion camera. 70The rate at which a male ruby-throated hummingbird's wings beat per second, measurable only through high-speed imaging. 128The minimum FPS required for a camera to be defined as “high speed,” by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. 12Frames shot in less than…

Bad news, trick-or-treaters: A new recommendation from the World Health Organization (WHO) deals a serious blow to your annual candy binge. The guideline, set to be released this fall, drops the suggested daily intake of “free sugars”—those added to processed foods, such as high-fructose corn syrup, and those that result when naturally occurring sugars are refined, as with maple syrup. “Even orange juice contains added sugar because it's very concentrated,” says WHO adviser Chessa Lutter. Ideally, free sugars should make up a mere 5 percent of one's daily calories. For a fairly active 10-year-old, that's about 23 grams per day, or 5.8 teaspoons. And that translates to a paltry haul of candy. 5.8TEASPOONS OF SUGAR 15.7CANDY CORNS 5MINI REESE'S PEANUT BUTTER CUPS 14.3SOUR PATCH KIDS 39M&M'S 2.3FUN-SIZE BUTTERFINGERS 8STARBURSTS…

At a competition in June, a chatbot named Eugene duped a group of human judges into believing it was a Ukrainian teenager. The judges hailed it as the first time a machine passed the Turing Test—that hallowed measure of artificial intelligence (AI) proposed by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950. Eugene's victory was short-lived. Within days, AI researchers had dismissed the chatbot's achievement as a collection of canned responses. Then they took the Turing Test itself to task. Conceived of as a kind of existential parlor game, the test asks a human and a machine to respond to questions from remote interrogators. A computer mistaken for a person would prove that it had developed the capacity to mimic our own thought processes. That all sounds good enough, but “people are…

In June, Elon Musk opened to the world all of the patents relating to Tesla's electric car technology. He couched the action as benevolence, writing in a blog post that rapid innovation relies on open-source development. But it was also a savvy business decision, and a very Musk-ian one at that. In one grand act, he more or less admitted that he's moved on to something much bigger than making cars. Musk develops platforms: PayPal is a platform that aims to disrupt financial services. SpaceX is a platform that aims to remake space travel. Tesla, it happens, is becoming a platform that aims to foster the development of electric vehicles. Musk is already deep into this strategy. In successfully launching the Model S and taking his company public, he now…

By 2050, the United Nations projects that 66 percent of the world's population—some 6.3 billion people—will live in cities. It's one of the greatest demographic shifts in the history of humanity, and it raises a rather prosaic question: Where will we put all the cars? The answer is, we won't. Car ownership is already declining in cities, says Phil Gott, senior director of long-range planning at the research firm IHS Automotive. A recent IHS study across 600 U.S. cities found that the number of cars owned per 1,000 people has dropped by one-third to one-half in the past 10 years. “Cities are just becoming too congested,” Gott says. AUTOMAKERS WILL LET DRIVERS DETERMINE WHAT THEY NEED WHEN. Car-sharing companies such as ZipCar and RelayRides have capitalized on that trend, and…

In January, Mary Barra became the first woman tapped to run an American automaker. After a century of male dominance in the industry, many people cited the appointment of a female CEO of General Motors as disruptive in itself. We just think it's about time. What's transformative about Barra is how she is rebuilding GM into a 21st-century automotive company. Of the “Big Three” Detroit automakers, GM remains perhaps the most byzantine in its organization. It is known for its layers of bureaucracy and a culture of mediocrity. This year, those shortcomings were on display when investigators linked faulty ignition switches to 13 fatalities. Executives, engineers, and lawyers inside the company had known about the bum part for a decade, but chose to bury the problem. Barra handled the issue…

Nothing about the grooved, inflatable body taking shape inside Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts, resembles a wind turbine. It looks more like a jetliner's emergency ramp, or something you'd tie behind a boat and cling to desperately while bumping across the surface of a lake. But the 14-foot-long structure most resembles what it actually is—an air-filled wing. To be more precise, it's a stabilizing fin, part of a tube-shaped, robotic airship designed to tap the power of high-altitude winds. The blade tips of today's tallest conventional wind turbine, installed at a test center in Denmark this year, stretch to 720 feet. The fully autonomous, lighter-than-air BAT (short for buoyant airborne turbine) will climb as high as 2,000 feet, where winds blow stronger and steadier. “There is more than enough energy…

Sporting a star-spangled jumpsuit and clutching a hollow scepter that typically concealed a stash of Wild Turkey, Evel Knievel strode through a crowd of more than 10,000 on the rim of Idaho's Snake River Canyon. Potato farmers, housewives, hippies, bikers, Boy Scouts, topless women, and a marching band all surged forward into a chain-link fence that was the only barrier between them and their hero, the man who took flight on the wings of a Harley. People were so pumped that many had rioted a day before, burning Port-A-Potties and ripping the roofs off of beer trucks. Undistracted by the Woodstock-like bacchanal, Knievel stoically climbed a 150-foot-high earthen mound at the lip of the canyon and approached a steel launch tower. Mounted onto the girded structure was the Skycycle X-2,…

MATERIALS TOOLS Small screwdriver Wire stripper Scissors Pliers Soldering iron Glue gun INSTRUCTIONS If you don't like e-cigs, go low-tech. Push several nails into the floor of your jack-o'-lantern and place a small foil pie tin on them, with a few tea candles beneath. When you pour a little fog juice into the tin, the candles will heat and vaporize the liquid. This setup can't control the fog like the modified e-cigarette can, but the effect should be equally impressive. Clearomizer and battery Sharp pin or needle Fog juice (one part glycerin to three parts distilled water) Red and black wires E-cig battery connector with hole Universal AC adapter set to about 5V Aquarium air pump and tubing Tape Unscrew the clearomizer's chamber and battery case from its metal base.…

When Emile Petrone began tinkering with Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards, he had trouble finding simple kits to support his new do-it-yourself interest. So in 2012, he created Tindie, a DIY hardware website. “It was basically a hobby that spun out of control,” Petrone says. Today, it's home to more than 500 vendors selling everything from coin-size motion sensors to touchscreen controls for a Raspberry Pi. Less experienced enthusiasts can stock up on kid-friendly items, such as introductory robotics kits and ghost-shaped circuit boards for Halloween. Its roughly 2,500 products make Tindie the largest independent hardware marketplace in the world.…

Short answer Not really. AThere's no direct evidence that TVs, computers, or cell phones cause nearsightedness. Yet worries about the effects of staring at illuminated screens persist. Our eyes adjust their shape to focus on “near work” with printed text or digital displays, so it seems plausible that extended bouts of reading might lead to lasting damage. But Kathryn Rose of the University of Sydney says this hypothesis has not been borne out. That said, staring at screens can cause discomfort, says Mark Rosenfield of the State University of New York's College of Optometry. In a study conducted by his lab, about 40 percent of office workers from a sample in Manhattan reported having symptoms of eyestrain for at least half the time they're on duty—a condition he calls “Computer…

In the spring of 1893, the city of Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, better known as the Chicago World's Fair. For a young nation, the event served as a coming out party, proof that American innovation was equal to any. Tesla, Westinghouse, and Edison were there, demonstrating the virtues of electricity. The Ferris wheel made its debut, as did the motorized walkway, the dishwasher, and even Cracker Jacks (for better or worse). Popular Science, which was there, called the exposition “the utmost achievement of the kind the world has beheld.” Admittedly, that was probably an overstatement. Nonetheless, among the many marvels that caused us to gush was a funny little contraption called the Morrison Electric. Patented just two years before, it was one of the first American electric cars.…

Q: WHAT'S THE MOST DARING THING YOU'VE DONE? 1. Captured a scorpion under a glass and released it. 2. Lived in the desert for one week. 3. Dangled a chunk of raw beef on a string over the side of our boat to catch a piranha. Then I ate it (the piranha, not the beef). 4. Swam with sharks in the Galapagos. 5. Sent a secret-admirer Valentine to my third-grade crush. 6. Posted a video of myself to YouTube. 7. Drove a giant U-Haul through Manhattan rush hour. 8. Climbed Mount Shuksan during a whiteout. 9. Walked on fire! 10. I asked my dad and he said, “Being a parent.”…

Determining when humans began wearing shoes relies on the fossil record. One theory based on anatomical changes in feet date the first shoe-wearers to Paleolithic times. A British inventor ushers in the era of modern shoelaces. Tying things with strings wasn't new, but until then, shoes were largely fastened with buckles or buttons. Charles Goodyear files a U.S. patent for vulcanization, which processes natural rubber into a durable product. The process paved the way for rubber-soled shoes. Lyman Reed Blake patents a sewing machine that can affix shoe uppers to soles. Later improved and called the McKay stitcher, it sped the shoe production process dramatically. The United States Rubber Company announces Keds, the first mass-produced shoe marketed as a “sneaker.” Nike founder Bill Bowerman patents his waffle-soled running shoe concept.…

This fall, Apple is expected to release its first major product since 2010—a health tracker unofficially dubbed the iWatch—that will reportedly log a litany of biometric information using 10 different sensors. The wrist device will likely have the same aesthetic as the Nike Fuelband, FitBit Flex, and the countless other fitness bands already available. With a rising number of wearables hitting the shelves, you'd better know what information is vital and how to make the most of it. 1 Step Detection An algorithm translates an accelerometer reading into distance traveled and helps estimate activity level and calories burned. Healthy Range: About 10,000 steps per day 2 Pulse A sensor opposite an LED monitors fluctuations in light transmitted through your finger. The rise and fall of light indicates heart rate. Healthy…

To get a grip on climate change, researchers must go to where it's changing fastest. Even in winter's deep freeze, this 387-foot steel vessel pulverizes ice floes to study greenhouse gas concentrations and ice melt at the poles. “Polarstern is able to take scientists to fantastic environments where other ships can't,” says scientific coordinator Rainer Knust. Three decades of data from the icebreaker's expeditions help climatologists better understand and predict rates of change. In October, the ship will shove off with a new underwater drill capable of exploring the geology 250 feet below the Antarctic seafloor. 20,000Combined horsepower of the ship's four diesel engines -58Minimum temperature, in degrees Fahrenheit, at which Polarstern's engines still function 4.92Thickness, in feet, of ice it can break through while maintaining a speed of 5.8…

Natural disasters and political unrest trigger torrents of tweets and posts—chaotic snippets of what could be valuable information. Patrick Meier, director of social innovation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, applies artificial intelligence to this crowdsourced data, organizing digital photos and messages into dynamic maps that can guide real-world relief efforts. Popular Science:You work in crisis mapping—what is that exactly? Patrick Meier: In disasters, there are a lot of eyewitness accounts on social media. But the overflow of information can be as paralyzing to response teams as the absence of it. During Hurricane Sandy, there were more than 20 million tweets and several hundred thousand pictures. We're developing solutions to quickly identify needles in the haystack and chart them visually. PS:What do the needles look like? PM: For example, before…

Whether cellphones or cereal, consumers are demanding new products faster than ever before. Certainly, that's the case with cars. In the past two decades, automakers have cut their seven-to-10 year product development lifecycles in half. One company promises to shrink them further still. McLaren, the vaunted maker of supercars and Formula One racers, has long been known for nimble development. In its Formula One skunk works outside London, developers strive to engineer and test a new piece of technology every 20 minutes, which is light speed by automotive measures. New racecars can differ by as much as 80 percent from those fielded the year prior. A few years ago, McLaren entered the sports car market, pushing its ethos of rapid development beyond racing. Since the introduction of its first sports…

For as much as auto bodies have evolved over the years, the modern chassis has remained remarkably unchanged: Four wheels set on a roughly rectangular frame. At the Tokyo Auto Show last year, Nissan challenged this paradigm with a new concept car called the BladeGlider. The vehicle's front wheels sit considerably closer together than its rear ones. By shaping a car like an arrow rather than, say, a nicely sculpted board, the company claims it can dramatically improve vehicle aerodynamics, and therein boost efficiency without sacrificing performance. To test the concept, engineers hacked an Ariel Atom, an English roadster, into a prototype by moving its front wheels 1 meter closer together. Funny looking though it was, the prototype was much more stable on turns and down straightaways than the standard…

CARS MAY BE connected to the cloud, but they are not yet connected to our lives. By inserting a layer of social context into the cabin, Ankur Jain, founder of the start-up Humin, plans to make vehicles an extension of us. What is Humin's philosophy? In the late 1990s, the Internet was built around alphabetical categories such as automotive, books, and so on. This was how you would browse. That all changed when companies like Google built search engines that order information like we do, by relevance. At Humin, we realized that same thinking could apply to relationships. We started with the phone. Instead of having an alphabetized contact list, my phone now understands who people actually are. It remembers that the guy I met today is friends with another…

In May, Google unleashed its latest bid in the quest for driverless cars, a gumdrop-shaped prototype without a steering wheel or gas and brake pedals. Predictably, the car—manufactured in Detroit and outfitted with Google's autonomy package in Mountain View—generated a lot of attention. One survey released in July found that Google was perceived as 20 times more influential in the driverless-car space than GM. Ford and Toyota didn't even make the list. Yet for all the noise, traditional automakers, not Google, will be the first to field autonomy. This year, six major manufacturers released details on their own self-driving car programs, most of which stand a better chance of large-scale implementation in the near term than Google's. In some senses, automakers have been developing driverless systems for a while. Many…

Device: Airfoil How It Works: As the Airborne Wind Turbine makes giant vertical loops, air spins four rotors, which drive generators. A tether sends the power to a ground station. Altitude: 400 to 1,100 feet Commercial Scale: 600 KW Timeframe: Unspecified Device: Kite How It Works: An arm extending from the ground station moves the kite in a figure-8 pattern. As the kite pulls on its tether, a generator on the ground produces power. Altitude: 1,000 to 8,000 feet Commercial Scale: 3 MW Timeframe: 1–2 years Device: Plane How It Works: The PowerPlane glides on autopilot in a figure-8 pattern. As the plane climbs it pulls on its tether, which is connected to a ground-based generator. Altitude: 1,000 to 2,000 feet Commercial Scale: 2–3 MW Timeframe: 2017 Device: Kite How…

Pilot: Big Ed Beckley Engineer: Paul Stender The Vehicle A motorcycle with wings and a hydrogen peroxide—fueled rocket engine, which will provide 6,000 pounds of thrust. A throttle controls speed and the wheels act as gyros to add stability. The Ramp Big Ed Beckley plans to ride freely down a 565-foot ramp and trigger the bike's rocket engine. As he launches at a 40-degree angle he'll be traveling at 150 mph. The Flight Beckley will reach up to 300 mph and a peak altitude of more than 500 feet. A GPS-aided, steerable, ram-air chute will then deploy and guide him to a landing 500 to 1,000 feet north of the rim. Pilot: Eddie Braun Engineers: Scott Truax and Craig Adams, using Bob Truax's plans The Vehicle A rocket ship, called…

It's been a decade since the historic 2004 hurricane season, one of the Atlantic basin's most active years ever. Four major storms wreaked havoc along the East Coast, causing more than $51 billion in damage. Since then, other record-setting hurricanes, including Katrina, Ike, and Sandy, have walloped the U.S. This season, fight back. If a powerful storm knocks out the electricity, these household hacks can supply your most essential needs. Dead flashlight? Score an orange along its equator, deep enough to slit the rind but not the flesh. Carefully detach the peel and its central column of pith. Next, fill the hemisphere halfway with olive oil, coating the pith to make a wick. The orange lamp will burn for about six hours. Keep your perishables cool with a zeer pot.…

Don't watch that YouTube clip on a tiny screen—project it onto the wall instead! The picture may not be movie-theater quality, but it improves if the phone is very bright and the room is very dark. Time 20 minutes Cost $2 Difficulty 1 out of 5 Cut a hole in one end of the shoe box and cover with the magnifying glass. Use tape to ensure light will only enter the box through this lens. To find the focus, point the lens at a nearby window or light source. Move the card through the box until it displays the external image sharply. Wrap the rubber bands around the card to make a phone holder. Tape the card upright at the focus point you just identified. Secure the phone upside down…

Popular Science has been documenting the love affair between Americans and their cars since the first Model T rolled out of the factory in 1908. Like any relationship, it has changed over time, and that's reflected in the magazine's coverage. Car ownership almost tripled by the end of the '20s. Early gearheads benefited from how-to's and stories about maintenance. The '30s saw the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam. Futuristic car concepts were designed to fit the worlds of tomorrow. After World War II, more cars took to the road, only to find highways unprepared. Safety was a focus of R&D departments—and drivers. Love for cars turned into an obsession. Readers devoured details about the newest models. Car technology had come a long way—but humans hadn't.…

“The car has been taking baby steps for decades, basically since its invention,” says our auto columnist Matthew de Paula. “And now we're on the cusp of really big changes.” He would know: de Paula travels the world to test the latest models. In “The Car Disrupted” (page 38), de Paula explored the worlds of engineering, information design, software development, and manufacturing to identify the forces shaping the future of the automobile. For the second year, Veronique Greenwood was asked to identify the year's most influential young scientists and engineers for “The Brilliant Ten” (page 54). For four months, Greenwood and her co-author, Cassandra Willyard, vetted candidates in fields as disparate as palentology and nanophysics to arrive at the final honorees. Despite their tender ages, Greenwood says, “everyone in their…

You're out of town for the weekend, and you want to keep tabs on your home. You could set up a sophisticated security system—with live video feeds, multiple sensors, and remote access—and suffer the hefty installation cost and monthly bills that come with it. Or, you could use Canary. The all-in-one security system packs eight different environmental sensors into a single machine and arms it with artificial intelligence. It plugs directly into an outlet, connects to a network by Wi-Fi or ethernet, and begins logging sensor data within seconds of being taken out of the box. Once users start interacting with Canary, an algorithm learns their daily schedules, minimizing false alarms. A smartphone app enables users to review past events that were deemed suspect as well as a live video…

In 2012, the engineers at Bauer asked themselves if, in the absence of budget and manufacturing constraints, they could make truly game-changing hockey equipment. A million dollars later, they had the OD1N system, some of the lightest and most customizable hockey gear to ever grace the ice. Engineers investigated every piece of hockey equipment during the initial phases of the OD1N program, but in the end, Bauer chose only three products to deliver to a handful of elite NHL athletes. Those players began testing the gear at the end of the 2013–2014 season and will continue wearing it into this one. The advantage? According to Bauer, athletes in OD1N armor and skates will reach the other end of the ice more than a second faster than those wearing conventional gear.…

Every mechanic knows that moving parts break down over time, and David Weiner, founder of Priority Bicycles, knows it better than most. Weiner spent six years as a bike mechanic in Walnut Creek, Calif., near his hometown, and much of his job was spent fixing the same handful of problems: tuning derailleurs, adjusting brakes, greasing chains, and replacing flat tires. Though Weiner eventually left his job for a career in software development, his love for bike maintenance never waned. Years later, after building financial and logistics management software for top-tier bike companies, he decided to fix the inefficiencies of bike maintenance once and for all. By custom-fitting a rustproof, lightweight aluminum frame with extremely reliable parts and removing some hardware altogether, Weiner created something he'd always dreamt of—a maintenance-free bike.…

The stress of repetitive jumping makes NBA players particularly prone to painful, even career-ending cartilage lesions. For decades, microfracture surgery—pricking holes in the knee bone to stimulate tissue regrowth—was the gold-standard repair. But the fibrocartilage that forms is stiffer than the knee's hyaline cartilage, impeding a return to elite play. “So many new procedures coming out are superior,” says orthopedist Joshua Harris, who studied microfracture's impact on the NBA. Here's how three of them work. To fix a lesion, doctors use osteochondral autograft transplant surgery (OATS) to transfer cartilage from a non-load-bearing section of the patient's knee. Riley Williams, director of the Institute for Cartilage Repair at the Hospital for Special Surgery, says that unlike microfracture, this method implants the collagen-rich hyaline necessary to continue competing at the highest level.…

After a dysfunctional Hayabusa mission returned to Earth in 2003 with a measly 0.1 milligram of asteroid dust, Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) didn't give up—it doubled down. In December, the $310-million Hayabusa 2 will launch on an intercept course with a 900-meter-wide asteroid between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Sometime in 2018, the craft will blast its target with a missile, sweep the unweathered surface to harvest samples, then head home with the very first virgin asteroid debris ever collected. Or so we hope. Using a Ka band high-gain antenna (32 kilobits per second), Hayabusa 2 can send and receive more than four times as much data as its predecessor. Two solar array “paddles” provide up to 2.9 kilowatts of power at a distance of one AU (93…

As cars have evolved to provide connectivity, navigation, diagnostics, and more, the cabin, with its many screens and buttons, has become a dumping ground for information. And too little thought has gone into how that data is presented and arranged. At best, the user interface in most cars is aggravating; at worst, it's dangerous. In the past 12 months, automakers have debuted a number of smarter ways to display and access information. The most obvious approach is the heads-up display (HUD). A feature in certain luxury cars since the 1980s, HUDs were too expensive to include in most vehicles. This year, Mazda introduced a lower-cost HUD called a combiner display in its nonluxury model 3. The trapezoidal lens on top of the dash looks like something in a fighter jet.…

Automakers have used 3-D printing since the 1980s to rapidly prototype parts, but printing an entire car is another matter. This past spring, Local Motors, a Phoenix-based car manufacturer that crowdsources designs, challenged its online community to do just that. The result: the Strati, whose frame and body can be printed as a solid block and fit with a powertrain. Engineers have already tested a prototype on a track, and the company plans to print the first full model at the International Manufacturing Technology conference in September (it will be driven off stage once complete). Local Motors has been working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop a large-scale printing facility. To help shepherd the project, Jay Rogers, the CEO of Local Motors, is moving to Tennessee to be near…

Faced with heightened emissions standards, automakers are pursuing alternative powertrains more aggressively than ever. This year and next, they will release an unprecedented number of electric plug-ins and hybrids, along with some hydrogen-powered cars and clean diesels. Which one or ones will emerge dominant? Porsche 918 Spyder In less than five years, Porsche has become a leader in hybrid technology, and the 918 Spyder is the exemplar. The plug-in has two electric motors for zero-emissions cruising and the most robust battery system of any vehicle. Its rapid-discharge batteries provide the extra boost to send the V8 from zero to 60 in just 2.5 seconds, and, unlike in other hybrids, they can charge fully when the car is in V8 mode. That allows drivers to toggle between gas and full-electric mode…

Since the 1950s, a small but growing number of international scientists have spent months at a stretch on the world's most remote continent: Antarctica. This year, 29 countries will host research programs there, meaning about 800 scientists and support staff will venture south for the summer season, from October to March. The U.S. Antarctic Program alone will field more than 100 projects, many of which will be making up for lost time; sequestration kept some expeditions off the ice in 2013. The U.S.-led projects will investigate a number of critical questions, including how climate change is unfolding and what the earliest moments of the universe were like. Here are six experiments to keep an eye on. The Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 281-foot icebreaker-equipped vessel, carries the AMLR team across the…

INVENTS SCIENTIFIC TOOLS FOR EVERYONE When he was a boy growing up in India, Manu Prakash didn't have a microscope, but he'd seen drawings of one. Convinced he could build his own, he stole the thick lenses from his brother's only pair of eyeglasses. Though the fledgling device was not long-lived (his brother soon noticed the theft), Prakash had discovered the power of creative engineering. Today, as a Stanford physicist, Prakash is still reinventing high-tech tools using inexpensive materials—an endeavor he calls ‘frugal science.’ Rather than starting with off-the-shelf components, Prakash lets the problem guide the design. For example, when he set out to build a diagnostic microscope for health workers, he knew it would have to be cheap, rugged, and easily produced. Faced with these constraints, Prakash developed a…

Want to put your neighbors to shame this Halloween? Pimp your pumpkin with a miniature smoke machine. A modified e-cigarette can create a surprising amount of fog, giving your carving an extra eerie touch. Start with a type of e-cig called a clearomizer, available online or at your local vape shop. It has a refillable chamber that you can load with the “fog juice” used in standard smoke machines. Inside, a wick draws the liquid past a wire coil heated by a battery, where it's vaporized. Normally, a person sucks this vapor into his or her mouth, but the smoke machine needs a way to push the fog out. An aquarium air pump attached to the battery end will do the trick. Unfortunately, a sealed connector between the battery and…

In NASA's 56 years of operation, it has put men on the moon and robots on Mars. But one of its greatest achievements is less well known: the hack that saved the lives of three stranded astronauts in 1970. When an oxygen tank exploded as Apollo 13 neared the moon, the three-man crew had to abort their mission, power down the command module, and move into the lunar module for the journey home. Designed to house only two people, the craft quickly filled with dangerous levels of carbon dioxide. To save themselves, the astronauts had to somehow attach a square CO2 scrubber to the circular opening of the lunar module's filtration system. The ground team designed an adapter from the limited items on board, including hoses from spacesuits, tube socks,…

Short answer No, but online worlds can really stress you out. AVirtual environments almost certainly induce genuine anxiety, says Grainne Kirwan, a psychologist who specializes in cybercrime at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in Ireland. For example, your physiological and emotional responses to entering a dark alley in a video game may be comparable to those you'd have in a similar real-life situation. “But would it be to the extent of initiating post-traumatic stress disorder? That hasn't been demonstrated,” Kirwan says. There have been scattered accounts of people victimized in role-playing games such as Second Life or World of Warcraft and suffering in the aftermath. But no large-scale academic study has ever been written up, Kirwan says. And even if a player were to have a…