Inhoudsopgave van September 2013 - Popular Science

IHAD LUNCH in Los Angeles recently with a friend who hosts science videos on the Web. She interviews scientists, explains fundamental scientific principles, tours amazing labs—but she doesn't publicly attach the word “science” to what she does. “People just won't watch the video if the word ‘science’ is in the title,” she lamented. The same is true, I've discovered over the years, with the word “education.” Slap that term onto an article and no one will read it. It's therefore doubly difficult, as a magazine entitled Popular Science, to pull off an issue committed to education. And yet here we are, banging away on the theme, because it's absolutely essential to the country's future. The prevailing wisdom is that if you don't get kids interested in science before middle school,…

1 Is that a fish nibbling at the line or a change in the current? The SmartRod is the first fishing rod that automatically detects a bite. An accelerometer on the handle records vibrations from the pole and sends the data to a microcontroller, which differentiates between a promising catch and background jiggling. Tackobox Poletap SmartRod $46 2 The Stealth hammer has a supersized striking face: 1.5 inches. Because it's so big, a user can swing harder but still hit a nail squarely, so the 17-ounce solid-steel head strikes with as much force as a 32-ounce one. Vaughan Stealth $24 3 The Satechi bottle top converts any water bottle into a humidifier. Powered via USB, the 2.5-ounce device contains a transducer that vibrates at an ultrasonic frequency to turn water…

Blades 16 Weight 12.8 ounces Price $180 Cushioned sneakers can help athletes jump higher—a compressed sole returns energy vertically. Adidas has now developed a shoe that could also help runners go faster. Sixteen slanted plastic springs on the sole of the Springblade return a runner's energy horizontally, providing extra forward momentum. Engineers tuned each spring independently, optimizing thickness, height, and orientation to match the role it plays in a stride. Compared with footsteps taken on standard soles, those on Springblade should have measurably more forward propulsion. In a running stride, a person's heel hits the ground with a force equal to three times his body weight. To absorb the impact, the single spring on the Springblade's heel is thicker than the others. It's also as wide as the foot, which…

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.” — Albert Einstein THE FIRST SCIENTIST I meet at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope site is wearing a portable oxygen tank. At 16,400 feet in the Andes, he'd be unable to think clearly without the tube up his nose. He runs the observatory's brain—a supercomputer as powerful as three million laptops working together that compares light from the telescope's 66 dishes quadrillions of times every second. Everything about this place is designed for high-altitude survival. The curved roof can withstand 145mph winds. Heated blankets prevent the toilet cistern from freezing. The dishes themselves point to the sky with 0.6-arc-second accuracy, despite the winds and radical temperature swings. It's the people that are the weak link. Workers are allowed to spend…

In 2011, water pollution closed or drove visitors away from U.S. shores on more than 15,000 beach days across the country. In many places, the problem is getting worse. As coastal towns crowd with rooftops and parking lots, they produce more runoff from rain. The runoff picks up bacteria from animal waste and collects in pipes that then release the water into the ocean. Pretty gross. But some engineers have a simple and effective solution: Send runoff underneath the beach instead, where sand can filter the bacteria out. The research team, led by Michael Burchell at North Carolina State University, has already built three sand-filtration systems under the dunes of a beach about two hours from Raleigh and is considering sites for additional installations. Dirty storm runoff is diverted into…

IN 2012, a shocking 69 percent of American high-school graduates failed to meet college-readiness benchmarks in science. And in a 2010 paper about math and science achievement, the U.S. ranked last out of the eight countries studied (including England, South Korea, and Hungary). So not only are we unsuccessfully teaching basic knowledge to our kids, but many other nations have figured out how to do it better than us, too. There is no doubt about it: The way the U.S. teaches science simply doesn't work. The good news is that a new approach to education could turn these embarrassing statistics around. For the past two years, 26 state governments have collaborated with teachers to develop The Next Generation Science Standards for grades K-12. The standards reflect 20 years of research…

The first massive open online course, or MOOC, launched in September 2008 at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Via the Web, anyone could attend the class on learning theory, and 2,300 people signed up. MOOCs quickly took off. In 2011, a Stanford University class on artificial intelligence enrolled 160,000, inspiring one of the instructors to found the MOOC start-up Udacity. The courses aren't quite substitutes for traditional education; at Coursera, one of the largest MOOC providers, 80 percent of students already hold a bachelor's degree, and only 10 percent finish the courses they start, according to co-founder Andrew Ng. But MOOCs can help students build the skills to become almost anything—or anybody.…

THE VESSELS that typically explore the oceans are professionally engineered. But in Palau, eight students from the Advanced Underwater Robotics team at Michigan's Stockbridge High School also deployed a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). The 40-pound craft successfully dived to 140 feet towing a video-camera system and sonar that it used to image several unknown shipwrecks and a Corsair plane. A local BentProp volunteer had read about the team in 2011 and reached out to the students for assistance. They set to work on building a ROV, using 3-D computer-aided-design software and soldering and electronics skills learned in class. Because Stockbridge, located in a rural community, doesn't have a swimming pool, they tested the craft in a cattle trough. The team also raised $45,000 to pay for the ROV parts and…

WARNING: Mixing flammable powders with pure oxygen is dangerous, and blowouts occurred with this setup. Do not attempt. When you blow air across the top of a straw dipped in soda, liquid rises up the tube. This might seem strange, but a Venturi pump—named after the Italian physicist who invented it—takes advantage of the same effect, simply by virtue of its shape. Any high-velocity, high-pressure jet of liquid or gas creates suction in its wake. As molecules zoom by, nearby material rushes in to fill the void. So if you force a jet through a constricted section of tubing, you can make a pump with no moving parts. Most Venturi pumps use three openings: one for the jet, one for suction, and the last as an exit. The devices are…

So you've got yourself a bitcoin. Congratulations! Its value was hovering around $100 at press time. But what can you do with your newly acquired digital riches? Quite a lot, as it turns out—especially if you have a penchant for projects. More and more vendors who cater to makers accept bitcoin, a digital currency that's created and maintained by its own extensive virtual network. Bitcoins add little or nothing to overhead because they carry no inherent processing fees and can't be traced. This translates to savings on tools and materials for projects. CryptoPrinting.com, for example, will 3-D-print custom designs for prices the company claims are about 20 percent cheaper than its competitors'. Bitcoinstore.com offers a wide variety of electronic parts, such as Arduino microcontrollers, power supplies, and cameras. Go to…

WhenPOPULAR SCIENCE published its December 1981 cover story, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) had just begun to probe dangerous marine environments, like shipwreck sites. Controlled by pilots at the surface, the vessels could descend deeper, explore longer, and ascend faster than human divers. More than 30 years later, untethered autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are a staple of oceanographers. AUVs like Remus—designed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution—don't need pilots at all; engineers program them to survey the seafloor on their own. Turn to page 58 to learn how AUVs are finding felled World War II planes off the coast of Palau in the Pacific Ocean.…

“The sheer violence with which these pieces hit the water … the most robust superalloys were crushed like an aluminum can.” —Jim Remar, president of Cosmosphere During NASA's Apollo missions, the famously powerful Saturn V launch rockets hurled astronauts into space, many toward their lunar destination. After falling back to Earth, the spent F-1 engines sat at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for nearly five decades. Last March, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos led a recovery: With remotely operated vehicles, the expedition crew brought more than 25,000 pounds' worth of F-1 remnants back to the surface. The restoration arm of Cosmosphere, a space museum in Kansas, is now salvaging the components. Technicians flush each piece with water to rinse away corrosive chlorides, then clean out sediment with chemicals, paintbrushes, and…

In 2010, the U.S. Army went to textile manufacturer Polartec with a problem: Troops needed a jacket that would breathe when they worked up a sweat but would also hold onto warmth when they sat still. Down and synthetic insulations don't allow this to happen. They require quilting and tightly knit, less-breathable fabrics to hold them in place and keep them dry. Polartec worked for more than a year to develop an insulation without those constraints. Last year, it gave the Army Polartec Alpha. An Alpha-based jacket consists of a sheet of insulation sandwiched between loosely knit, breathable fabrics. When it's hot, sweat evaporates; when it's cold, Alpha traps warmth in its thousands of tiny air pockets. This fall, a dozen companies, including Marmot and The North Face, will release…

By placing a hand in the vacuum-powered, water-filled CoreControl glove, an athlete can cool down 33 percent faster than by resting alone. Stanford University biologists instructed college-age men to exercise on a treadmill in a hot room, use the lab model of the cooling system for three minutes, then do a set of bench presses. Athletes were about 0.6 degrees colder with the glove than without it, allowing them to complete more reps in the follow-up set. The gentle vacuum inside the device keeps blood vessels in the palms distended, boosting heat transfer between the blood and the chilled water circulating inside the glove.…

In field biology, describing a lizard as “green” just won't do when the exact shade could be the key to identifying a species. You need to be specific: There's pale green, grass green, citrine, and 48 other greens to choose from in the new Color Catalogue for Field Biologists. Gunther Köhler, who studies reptiles and amphibians at the Senckenberg Museum in Germany, created the book of swatches to standardize color descriptions in science, where reproducible data is a must. The catalog contains 300 hues, as well as patterns, like blotches, specks, and mottling. And while carrying around a pocket guide may seem antiquated, other methods aren't reliable. Preserve a specimen? Nope—ethanol changes its color. Take a picture? Sorry, photos often don't capture true shades. In this case, paper is the…

“The idea is to take the energy in light and store it as a fuel we can use later. So we made the GRAFSTRR (Gravity-Fed Solar-Thermochemical Receiver/ Reactor)—a 1,000-pound cylinder of insulated steel, about 3 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall. In the lab, 10 lamps simulate only 10 to 20 kilowatts of sunlight. (In the real world, though, tens of thousands of small mirrors across a field would reflect sunlight into the reactor.) The light enters the top of the reactor and passes through a circular quartz window that keeps out air, which can contaminate the chemical reaction inside. At the light's most concentrated and hottest point—3,000ÐF—it enters the reaction cavity. Fifteen hoppers drop zinc oxide powder into the cavity. When the radiation there hits the zinc oxide, it…

ICECUBE NEUTRINO OBSERVATORY University of Wisconsin-Madison BURIED DEEP IN THE ICE below the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, IceCube is the world's largest and most remote neutrino observatory. Neutrinos are nearly massless particles that rarely interact with matter. Trillions of them pass through the earth every second, carrying information that may help explain the physics of supernovae and the source of high-energy cosmic rays. Because their signatures are very weak and rare, scientists had to bury vertical strings of the detectors deep in the Antarctic ice, which blocks photons from the sun and cosmic rays. The clear ice in IceCube's dark underground setting allows the detectors to see the faint blue light that appears after a neutrino hits an atom within the ice. PARTICLE PHYSICIST, HELIOPHYSICIST, ELECTRICAL ENGINEER Every year, dozens…

A disembodied jet engine, attached to a hulking air vent, sits in an outdoor test facility at the Culham Science Center in Oxford shire, England. When the engine screams to life, columns of steam billow from the vent, giving the impression of an industrial smokestack. Engineer Alan Bond sees something more futuristic. “We're looking at a revolution in transportation,” he says. For Bond, the engine represents the beginning of the world's first fully reusable spaceship, a new kind of craft that promises to do what no space-faring vehicle ever has: offer reliable, affordable, and regular round-trip access to low Earth orbit. Bond and the engineers at Reaction Engines, the aerospace company he founded with two colleagues in 1989, refer to the future craft as the Skylon. The vehicle would have…

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 3 years COST $250,000 In 2007, Matt Denton stopped on the side of the road near his home in Hampshire, England, to watch an excavator dig. The machines had fascinated him since childhood, but after years of designing control systems for animatronic Hollywood creatures, Denton saw the shovel-tipped boom through a more imaginative lens. “It was effectively the shape of a leg,” he says. “So I started to wonder: Would it be possible to buy six of them and attach them to a chassis?” Four years later, Denton can lumber around in a two-ton, nine-foot-tall robo-walker he calls the Mantis.…

TIME 1 to 3 days COST About $50 for six bacterial photos DIFFICULTY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars Microbes aren't known for their artistic merit, but that hasn't stopped scientists from using bacteria to find their inner Ansel Adams. Bioengineer Chris Voigt and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have hacked a harmless strain of Escherichia coli so that it produces black pigment in darkness or, in red light, remains transparent. The result: an organism that behaves like film. In their basic setup, red light shines through a printed transparency that's taped to the bottom of an agar-filled petri dish. Only bacteria growing in the transparency's shadows produce pigment. Voigt and his team borrowed two proteins from blue-green algae to give Ecoli this new ability. The proteins…

A long-standing estimate pins the velocity of a sneeze at roughly 100 meters per second, or 224 miles per hour, but that appears to be a gross exaggeration. The figure originates from a mid-century researcher named William Firth Wells, who analyzed the size of airborne droplets from a sneeze and then inferred the speed at which air must travel across a liquid surface to form them. Wells' figure has been repeated for many years but never directly tested in the lab. “I think people have been waiting for someone to come along and debunk it,” says Julian Tang, a medical virologist at the Alberta Provincial Laboratory for Public Health in Edmonton. For a study published this year, Tang and his colleagues used high-speed cameras to take pictures of pepper-induced sneezes…

HO HASN'T sat on the couch at the end of a marathon gaming session and wondered what it would be like to make a game rather than just play one? With Pixel Press, anyone can do both—no coding required. The app, which debuts on iOS later this year, converts simple marks on paper into a playable videogame. The Pixel Press team invented a sketchable language for game design. Armed with custom graph paper and a small glossary of shorthand—lines, Xs, slashes—users draw games, which the app then scans and converts into an actual, playable videogame level. For example, the app reads a blacked-out square as a power-up marker, and Xs on a platform as spikes. It takes less than 30 seconds for the app to convert the marks; once that's…

Since their debut 13 years ago, in-car night-vision systems, which identify pedestrians approaching a roadway, have arguably made driving safer. But they come with a pretty big blind spot: animals. Each year, drivers in the U.S. strike about a million deer, causing 27,000 human injuries and $3.5 billion in damage. This fall, Swedish safety-system company Autoliv and Mercedes-Benz will roll out Night View Assist Plus on the 2014 S-Class. The system identifies people but also picks out cows, moose, horses, deer, camels, and even wild boar. One reason the upgrade took five years is that recognizing animals is much more difficult than recognizing people. Species vary widely in size and shape, have profiles that change drastically when they turn, and move differently. (Humans, by comparison, have more or less the…

WHEN MICROSOFT INTRODUCED the Kinect sensor in 2010, the company said the motion-capture system would transform gaming. That was only partially true; gamers could do novel things like swing an imaginary golf club or dance, but the Kinect wasn't sensitive enough to register intricate maneuvers. The system, however, has become most popular among hackers, who used it to build smart shopping carts and gesture-controlled quadrocopters. In November, the company will launch an upgraded Kinect with the Xbox One console. With that release, Microsoft could finally disrupt gaming at the level it had originally intended, changing not only how we interact with games but also how games interact with us. Successful videogames have one thing in common: immersion. When drawn in, players lose track of time, their pulse rises, they become…

How will robots of the future get around? Some say tank treads. Some say legs and feet. But nobody knows for sure, and that's why researchers at Cornell University designed a computer program to figure it out. The software simulates evolution. Robots begin as blocks of muscle, tissue, and bone, then natural selection kicks in: The fastest bots in each generation have offspring and are more likely to move on to the next round. The slower ones die out. Here are five of the most memorable variations from 175,000 generations. The bend in its L-shaped body serves as a pivot point, which extends and contracts in a powerful, muscular stride. This bot was one of the first to develop long legs with bone, which give it the stability to run…

IT'S NOT the mosquito's fault. Malaria is actually caused by the Plasmodium family of parasites, which is carried unwittingly by mosquitoes. And these parasites are tricky foes. Come up with a treatment or vaccine and the few that survive will still breed. But Johns Hopkins biologist Rhoel Dinglasan thinks he may have a way around that: vaccinating mosquitoes instead. Dinglasan's team has found that Plasmodium—at a crucial stage in its life cycle—needs to bind to a protein in the mosquito's gut called AnAPN1. If you block this protein, you block transmission to humans. But how do you treat a mosquito? A teensy needle and steady hands? No. Here's the clever part: You give people a vaccine against AnAPNl, turning them into living mosquito-treatment factories for years; their immune systems produce…

To make his autonomous FuzzBot, Quin Etnyre started with a robot chassis kit for Arduino that he received last Christmas. “And then one morning, I decided to hook up a Parallax Ping sensor so that it could avoid obstacles,” he says. “From then on, I worked on the code and perfected it.” Quin also added extra functionality; the FuzzBot can clean floors. He calls it a “hackable mini Roomba” because he attached a duster cloth as a tail that lifts dirt in its wake. Now he's working on a wireless controller. UIN ETNYRE WALKS to the front of a crowded room at Deezmaker 5D Printers and Hacker-space in Pasadena, California. He adjusts his laptop on the workbench, then looks up and addresses the class. “Thanks for coming out on a…

ON A BRIGHT morning in mid-March, Pat Scannon stands on the deck of a 40-foot catamaran looking for an airplane hidden in the waters of Palau's western lagoon. A limestone ridge thick with vegetation juts into the cloudless blue sky behind him. His quick-dry clothing, coupled with a red bandanna knotted around his neck, befits Scannon's role as an amateur archaeologist. He has spent the past 20 years making annual wreck-hunting trips to Palau, about 500 miles from the Philippines, to find aircraft that had been shot down during one of World War II's fiercest battles—planes that may still be holding their pilots. His organization, Bent-Prop Project, works to repatriate their remains to the U.S. To guide the search, Scannon ordinarily relies on interviews with Palauan elders, military records, and…

A pilot selects one of several gait patterns from a touchscreen control panel. One mode designed for rough terrain Instructs the robot to pick each leg up before swinging It forward. Manipulating the joystick can direct the machine to creep forward, backward, or crab-walk to the side. Twisting the joystick forces the Mantis to turn In place. Once a foot touches the ground, force sensors alert an onboard computer. Only then can the next leg in a walking sequence swing forward. A ball joint In the ankle allows the foot to pivot and plant Itself on uneven ground; If the foot meets a ledge, however, another sensor tells the computer to find a more secure spot. Denton hopes to place ultrasonic sensors In each leg so the robot can scan…

The invisibility cloak Harry Potter brandishes against dark lords and nosy professors is now a reality—at least in microwave light. Duke University engineer Yaroslav Urzhumov has designed a plastic disk that makes a small object placed in its hollow center invisible to frequencies from 9.7 to 10.1 GHz (close to the range used by radar speed guns). Holes in the doughnut-shaped cloak can eliminate an object's shadow and decrease its ability to scatter light. In effect, the cloak guides the microwave beams around the object so they can't bounce back—rendering it invisible. Until scientists can scale up, however, it might be useful only for getting toy cars out of a speeding ticket. TIME 3 to 8 hours COST About $100 DIFFICULTY RATING: 1 out of 5 stars Find a 3-D…

For the entomophiles who keep insects as pets, this question will seem a little silly. Some bugs appear aggressive, and others, shy; some venture into the open, others hide by the wall. But beyond casual observation, researchers are still learning the dimensions of an insect's personality and how individuals of the same species might differ in temperament. Last year, a group based at the University of Illinois looked at “novelty-seeking” tendencies in honeybees. The scientists found that bees that routinely searched for new nest sites also had a very strong tendency to scout for food. That suggests particular individuals are programmed in such a way, whether through genetic or other factors, that they manifest wanderlust and an inclination to explore. “Most people think that insects are very similar and behave…