Popular Scienceの June 2015 の目次

A few weeks ago, our executive editor forwarded me an invitation to a discussion on the future of energy. From the sound of it, a bunch of engineers were gathering at a local bar to drink beer and delve into the nuances of base loads and grid smoothing. She wrote, “Cliff, this sounds like your idea of a great night out.” She was not being ironic—she was actually right on the mark. Of the many things I geek out on (and oh, there are many), few are closer to my heart than energy. Steam power sparked the industrial revolution; electricity helped usher in the machine age; and oil and gas make possible our current era of globalization. With every innovation in how we harness and use energy, we, as a…

I read your article about taking a fish for a walk [“Teach a Fish to Walk,” April 2015]. In Pennsylvania I once caught a catfish, took it off the hook, and set it down on a rock. Believe it or not, when I turned back to pick up the fish, it was standing up and very slowly walking across the rock. It was incredible. I haven’t been able to keep any catfish after that afternoon. A BETTER BASEBALL Q: I’m surprised that in the description of the flat-seamed baseball [“How It Works,” April 2015] there was no mention of the effect on pitches. Aren’t the seams what cause a ball to curve or slide because of the way they affect the air flowing over the ball? Alan Bronstein, Elkins Park,…

1 COOLBOX For all the innovations in tool design, the humble box to house them has remained, well, a box. Coolbox not only stores hammers and nails; it also has a tablet stand, built-in battery, LED lights, and even Bluetooth speakers. $179 2 MIPOSAUR WowWee’s newest self-stabilizing bot has teeth and talons. But this toy is far from frightful—MiPosaur plays with, guards, and chases a little ball using the company’s BeaconSense technology. If you have a few MiPosaurs, they’ll play with each other too. $120 3 TACTUS PHORM Tactus’s iPad mini case snaps onto your tablet and uses microfl uidic channels to expand a top layer of polymer. The result: your cold, unfeeling touchscreen morphs into a tactile keyboard. $149 4 LEATHERMAN TREAD Leatherman is getting on board with wearables.…

How much do you know about the climate inside your home? Humidity, volatile organic compounds (VOC), and barometric pressure? We thought so. That’s where CubeSensors come into play. Palm-size and wireless, these wee boxes sniff out the tiniest changes in atmosphere, helping you assess the condition of any Wi-Fi–connected room. Each set includes a base station that connects to a mobile app via a router or modem. To get a reading, shake the cubes. A blue glow means everything is fine. Red means you have a problem and need to check the app for details. Ultimately, you can combat allergies and (literally) breathe easier when you know what’s in your air. The cubes can also be paired with a Fitbit or Jawbone Up, allowing you to link sleep disruptions to…

100K Number of WIMPs scientists think pass through every square centimeter of Earth each second A mile beneath Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain lies the DarkSide-50 detector. The three-story cylinder was built to search for our universe’s most mysterious substance: dark matter. “We know it exists in our galaxy and roughly how much there is,” says Princeton physicist Peter Meyers. “What we don’t know is what it is.” The most promising lead is WIMPs—weakly interacting massive particles. If they do exist, these theoretical particles should drift through the walls of DarkSide-50’s three nested tanks and collide with atoms of liquid argon at its core. The argon atoms would then recoil like billiard balls and emit light, providing proof of WIMPs and bringing us closer to figuring out dark matter’s elusive identity.…

AUROCHS Bos primigenius WHY: Herbivores like this six-foot-tall wild ox, which went extinct in 1627, could help restore European grasslands. HOW: Domestic cattle are descended from wild aurochs, and some still contain aurochs-like traits. Through selective breeding, a Dutch organization called the True Nature Foundation plans to concentrate these traits in a single lineage . After many generations, they will have an aurochslike animal—and will have essentially reverseengineered domestication. STATUS: The Dutch team has begun selecting rare cattle breeds for this purpose, including some endangered ones. BUCARDO Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica WHY: A falling tree killed Celia, the last member of this Spanish mountain goat species, in 2000. That sad tale plus the promise of scientific glory amounts to an irresistible challenge. HOW: A team of French, Spanish, and German…

Machines designed to reveal subatomic particles operate on huge scales. Detectors at the Large Hadron Collider weigh thousands of tons, contain millions of sensors, and record particles moving at close to the speed of light. But they don’t have to be so complex. In fact, some are small and simple enough to operate in a living room. Take the cloud chamber, which uses evaporated alcohol to make vapor that’s extremely sensitive to passing particles. The DIY version is an empty fish tank with a ceiling of alcohol-soaked felt and a floor of dry ice. The room-temperature alcohol at the top evaporates into the air and sinks toward the ice at the bottom. As it cools, it will condense on anything it can. Cosmic rays are constantly crashing into Earth from…

Go Ahead . . . Have a burning question? Email it to askanything @popsci.com or tweet it to @PopSci #AskAnything. Q: WHY DOES MOLD COME IN SO MANY COLORS? Short answer Pigments offer protection. A: The amazing diversity of colors produced by molds and other fungi can vary regionally, says Sara Robinson, a researcher at Oregon State University. Blues and greens are prevalent in the Pacific Northwest, whereas oranges are more common in the Amazon. But the raison d’être of this rainbow of melanins, carotenoids, and other pigments isn’t always clear. Some of the species Robinson studies secrete melanins that act as weapons against enemy fungi; some lay them down as barriers that rival molds can’t breach. Other labs have found that pigments can protect fungi from ultraviolet light, temperature…

Tyler Graham After years of back pain from snowboarding spills and endless desk work, writer Tyler Graham tried a new and unproven stem cell treatment. He wrote about his experience in “The Cure-All” (page 58). Graham knew it was risky, but so far, so good. “I feel great, but sometimes I hear Donald Rumsfeld's voice echoing in my brain,” he says. “When it comes to stem cells, what are the unknown unknowns?" Sarah Charley Sarah Charley majored in chemistry in college but was more interested in writing than lab work. An early assignment left her fascinated by particle detectors. “They let us look into a world that’s impossible to see otherwise,” she says. With help from the European Organization for Nuclear Research, she created instructions for a DIY version in…

Three years ago, Eben Upton needed a cool gadget to lure students to his computer science program at the University of Cambridge. So he invented the Rasberry Pi. It has since become the cheapest hackable computer on the planet. He has sold five million (at $20–$35 a pop), released a faster version this February, and become an icon of DIY culture. Now, as Microsoft prepares to launch a Pi-friendly version of Windows, Upton is bracing for a wave of new users. He recently spoke with Popular Science about hacking, education, and his tiny creation. Popular Science: Why does the world need Raspberry Pi? Eben Upton: We wanted to build something affordable and programmable and fun and robust that kids would want to have in their lives. You know, it sucks…

For the first time, in March, an autonomous car drove itself from San Francisco to New York City. How is that even legal? That’s the kind of question Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina, tries to answer. He’s an expert on the legal implications of self-driving cars. Smith sees a future in which these vehicles all but eliminate crashes, transform liability, and make us look back in horror at the risks we once took on the road. 40 Percentage of car-crash deaths that result from drunk or distracted driving— two things an autonomous car could never do SOURCE: NATIONAL HIGHWAY TRAFFIC SAFETY ADMINISTRATION People ask me, ‘Are you concerned about self-driving cars?’ And I say, ‘Yes, but I’m terrified of today’s cars.’…

THE FIRST USE OF THE WORD “DE-EXTINCTION” WAS, AS FAR AS I CAN TELL, IN SCIENCE FICTION. IN HIS 1979 BOOK THE SOURCE OF MAGIC, PIERS ANTHONY DESCRIBES AN EXPLORER WHO SUDDENLY FINDS HIMSELF IN THE PRESENCE OF CATS, WHICH, UNTIL THAT MOMENT, HE had believed to be an extinct species. Anthony writes, “[The explorer] just stood there and stared at this abrupt de-extinction, unable to formulate a durable opinion.” I imagine this is precisely how many of us might react to our first encounter with a living version of something we thought was extinct. The idea that de-extinction may actually be possible— that science could advance to the point where extinction is no longer forever—is both exhilarating and terrifying, even to me. I am a biologist. I teach classes…

Ever since windmills arrived more than a thousand years ago, engineers have wrestled with how to make them more effi cient. As Popular Science observed in December 1923, German manufacturers designed a turbine with blades that revolved around a wheel, which rested on a ball bearing so that they always faced the wind at a right angle. “A breeze barely suffi cient to stir the leaves of the trees will set the great wings in motion,” we wrote. And if a gale came, a braking mechanism kept the blades from turning too rapidly. Now engineers have developed a turbine with blades that bend with the wind to capture more energy. The design also helps to protect the turbine from storm damage. To learn how it works, turn to page 46.…

15K Estimated milligrams of caffeine in all the items on page 36—that’s the same as about 158 cups of coffee Bet you didn’t know… It would take 38 minutes to fall through a (hypothetical) hole from one end of the Earth to the other. Until recently, it was thought to be 42 minutes. What Have You Been Tossing in the Ocean? While reporting on ocean plastic (page 32), we came across a report by the Ocean Conservancy that highlighted the strangest debris found on the planet’s shores. Some of our favorites: •A 1904 typewriter •A lava lamp •A working iPad •A plastic eyeball •A trampoline •A washing machine MISTAKE OF THE MONTH An explosion in a drum containing nuclear waste last year is being blamed on cat litter. For years,…

Searing steaks and veggies to perfection is a burden when you’re trying to chat with guests—or disappear into the den for a few innings. Luckily, the grill obsessives at Lynx have devised a way to get you off the hook. Their new SmartGrill is a voicecontrolled, WiFi– connected, appdriven stainlesssteel cooker that takes your order and executes it with precision. Start with a command: “SmartGrill, sear some radicchio.” The grill selects a recipe from its online data base and fires up the burners to the right temperature. It tells you where to place the food, and then automatic temperaturesensing probes work with motorized gas valves to ensure everything cooks evenly. When done, the grill shuts off the burners and sends you a text message. In time, its brain, an embedded…

Working out is tough. Activity trackers like the Nike+ FuelBand are good motivators, but they’re bad at crunching important data. Some can fail to track calories burned by as much as 40 percent, according to a study last year from Iowa State University. Still, technology can help you lose weight and get in shape if you know what to use—and how to use it. Jumpstart your summer fitness regimen with these tools. MAKE CARDIO COUNT TANGRAM SMART ROPE Boxers have long known that jumping rope works nearly every major muscle group. It also burns as many calories in 10 minutes as jogging an eight-minute mile. The Smart Rope syncs with your phone to make training recommendations (like when to speed up) and log calories burned. The rope’s 23 LEDs display…

Paying for things used to be simple: paper or plastic. But the new world of mobile payments brings your smartphone into the mix. Apple CEO Tim Cook promised that 2015 would be the year of Apple Pay, and other big players like Samsung, Google—and potentially Microsoft—hope to replace our billfolds. There’s also CurrentC, which enables mobile payments using bar codes, and Stratos, which put out an app-connected smart card that mimics any card’s magnetic strip. Now for the big decision: Do you reach for your phone or your wallet?…

You’ve almost certainly taken the world’s most commonly used psychoactive drug. In the U.S. alone, 90 percent of adults consume caffeine daily—often as coffee, but increasingly in the form of beverages, pills, snacks, and even pure powder. Global sales of energy drinks nearly doubled from 2008 to 2013. U.S. emergencyroom visits linked to energy drinks doubled from 2007 to 2011, too. As consumption continues to surge and new products enter the market, scientists and regulators are racing to better understand how caffeine affects the human body. 1 Seventythree percent of U.S. kids consume caffeine on any given day, according to a 2014 Pediatrics paper; a Yale study found that middleschoolers who imbibe energy drinks are at a 66 percent higher risk for hyperactivity than their peers who abstain. Kids’ caffeine…

We may never be able to clone dinosaurs Jurassic Park–style: If we did somehow find ancient DNA in a preserved mosquito, it would be far too degraded to use. But new research in the field of robo-paleontology offers a way to bring back ancient creatures as robots. If fossils show what extinct animals looked like, robots can reveal how they actually moved. For example, we know that our ancestors likely used fins to crawl out of the water some 300 million years ago. But we don’t know how these fishy tetrapods, or “fishapods,” maneuvered bodies best suited for swimming on land. To find out, Daniel Goldman, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, modeled a robot after one of the fishapod’s modern analogs, the mudskipper. By setting the robot…