Inhoudsopgave van November 2013 - Popular Science

THE WORLD belongs to engineers. I mean no offense to designers. As a journalist, I covered design for several years and developed a high opinion of it. If nothing else, design humanizes research and technology. But for a fundamental task—a suit that will keep astronauts' blood from boiling in space, a bridge across an impossible chasm—call an engineer. As any engineer can tell you, though, the profession isn't known for social graces. And yet engineers now make mobile devices, software, and video compression—they're building social experiences. And when you let an engineer throw the party, sometimes it can be a little awkward. I spent the last few months testing a new category of social engineering: remote-presence devices. These are mechanical avatars through which I can haunt Popular Science's New York…

Most hybrid-auto makers have the efficiency thing down, but they still can't build a high-performance car that's both fun to drive and efficient. At least, not until now. To create the Porsche Panamera S E-Hybrid engineers married a supercharged V6 with a plug-in hybrid powertrain. The car's three driving modes—electric, hybrid, and recharge—give drivers the flexibility they need to scream down the highway and then flip to electric power for short-range cruising. A 9.4-kilowatt-hour battery powers the 95-horsepower electric motor, which delivers its full 229 foot-pounds of torque the instant the driver hits the throttle. Porsche says the battery will run for 22 miles (we clocked 33 on our test drive) before dipping below a 15 percent charge, at which point the gas engine kicks in. The engine will also…

FOR SHELTER and supplies after a devastating storm, communities turn to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But for a clear sense of how bad things are, FEMA turns to Waffle House. Nearly a decade ago, Florida's emergency management chief, W. Craig Fugate, noticed that when information was scarce after a disaster, the status of a 24-hour Waffle House restaurant often indicated whether an area had electricity, gas, and passable roads. So he created a three-color rating: green (fully open), yellow (limited menu), and red (closed). Then he brought it with him to his current post as FEMA's administrator. Fugate isn't the first to extrapolate large trends from unconventional indicators. Economists at Vanderbilt University recently used Big Mac prices to evaluate economic differences among countries that use the euro and…

This month, two fossilized dinosaurs, locked in eternal battle, will be auctioned off at Bonhams in New York City. Experts expect them to fetch one of the highest ever prices for a fossil, up to $9 million. The pair's prehistoric fight was intense. The carnivore, called a Nanotyrannus, sports a cracked skull, and 26 of its teeth are lodged in the body of an herbivorous Triceratops-like dino. But the fossil's significance goes beyond the action; the find, predicted to be more than 90 percent complete, could yield definitive evidence about whether the Nanotyrannus is actually a new type of dinosaur or just a young T. rex—evidence that other fragmented fossils can't provide. Discovered in 2006 on private land in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, the cretaceous-era duo is priced…

THE THOUGHT OF a robot laying tracks over Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's footprints just seems wrong. And the risk is greater than you might think. Private spaceflight is flourishing, and even the Google Lunar XPRIZE for moon rovers includes a sub-prize of up to $4 million for “a Mooncast showing the Apollo artifacts in HD.” Humans have a tendency to tromp all over things we haven't yet assigned a specific value, even when we're trying to be careful. But an increased sense of conscience about the Apollo sites recently spawned a bill to preserve them. The proposal, put before Congress this past summer, is to eventually nominate them as UNESCO World Heritage sites. It's not perfect. First, under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, accepted by 101 countries, no…

Chris Rivard has a fancy official title: principal food scientist, R&D global operations. Around Ben & Jerry's, though, he's known as a “flavor guru.” Rivard uses his degree in food sciences and nutrition to develop flavors for the ice cream giant. On an average day, he'll experiment with prototype versions of classic frozen treats as well as some strange ones—Rivard says the R&D group has tried such flavors as ranch dressing, roasted garlic, and mushroom. Perfecting the combination of ingredients takes patience and a hearty appetite, but such are the sacrifices required in the ice cream biz. Once a year, Rivard and the other flavor gurus take a field trip. The agenda, he says, is to “eat our way through a chosen city to find inspiration for new flavors and…

Alex MacDonald gets paid to drive Corvettes. As a performance engineer specializing in chassis control for General Motors and a former amateur racecar driver, MacDonald tests cars on extreme surfaces—ice, gravel, and sand—to assess the performance of braking systems and to monitor their software. He typically runs his test on a high-speed track. Software records thousands of variables, while a calibration engineer riding shotgun time-stamps the data and inputs comments into a laptop. MacDonald gets to test other GM performance cars, such as the Camaro, as well, usually a full two years before they're ready for production. “Most days, it is the best job in the world,” he says. “I'd pay to do it.”…

In 2005, Cynthia Chiang, then a physics graduate student at Caltech, had the choice to work on a telescope in Hawaii or Antarctica. “It was a no-brainer,” she says. “You can buy a plane ticket to Hawaii anytime.” So off to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station she went for a summer of −40 to −10°F degree weather, restricted menus, and long days studying cosmic background radiation through the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization telescope. The conditions were hard but not terrible. And then, in 2012, she went back for winter. At the South Pole, the sun sets on March 21—and doesn't reappear until September. Winter temperatures hang between −70 to −90°F but often drop below −100°F. Scientists still need to go outside regularly to check on the equipment and grease…

On the surface, Mark Gammage's job sounds a little dull. As the group manager of Amway's Reliability Lab, Gammage oversees a team of four engineers who design complex product-testing equipment and software. But the group's real directive is to invent ways to torture and destroy everything the company makes. Tests in the lab, known as “the Room of Doom,” include exposing cookware, medical devices, and other products to extreme temperatures and zapping them with 8,000 volts of electricity to simulate a lightning strike. Gammage says his favorite test is to detect weaknesses in water-treatment tanks, which involves pressurizing them until they blow up. “You can hear it and see it as it explodes inside a protective clear case,” he explains. “Many times, guests do the honors and dial up the…

ON AN ORDINARY spring morning in Columbia, Missouri, Ethan Brown stands in the middle of an ordinary kitchen tearing apart a chicken fajita strip. “Look at this,” he says. “It's amazing!” Around him, a handful of stout Midwestern food-factory workers lean in and nod approvingly. “I'm just so proud of it.” The meat Brown is pulling apart looks normal enough: beige flesh that separates into long strands. It would not be out of place in a chicken salad or Caesar wrap. Bob Prusha, a colleague of Brown's, stands over a stove sautéing a batch for us to eat. But the meat Brown is fiddling with and Prusha is frying is far from ordinary. It's actually not meat at all. Brown is the CEO of Beyond Meat, a four-year-old company that…

Minneapolis-based 1.21 Jigawatts built a graffiti translator. Players sprayed colorful images onto a roll of paper and pressed a button to feed it through the back of the instrument. Photo sensors scanned the artwork and converted it into data as it moved. Depending on the paint's color, contrast, and location, the machine triggered differently tuned copper chimes. The device won the People's Choice Award and earned the team a CubeX 3-D printer as a prize. TIME 72 hours COST $1,600…

Taking an electronics prototype to the next level often means soldering tiny components onto a custom-printed circuit board. Solder paste applied without a stencil, however, can ooze, cause shorts, and end a project in flames. Systems engineer Felix Rusu devised a simple process to make robust soldering stencils from soda cans. Here's how you too can save yourself from the expensive made-to-order variety. TIME ABOUT 30 MINUTES COST $20 DIFFICULTY For full instructions, visitpopsci.com/solderstencil. Slice the ends off a soda can and cut the cylinder open. Flatten and warm the metal with a clothing iron for a minute. Rub off the interior and exterior coatings with acetone. On a computer, ensure the holes in the stencil design are white and everything else black. Laser-print it with toner onto a transparency,…

“For thousands of years, man has dreamed of going to the moon,” wrote I.M. Levitt in the Popular Science May 1958 cover story. “Today, that dream is almost a reality.” Levitt, director of the planetarium at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, predicted that scientists and engineers would have to execute a five-step plan, including a mission to record surface elements using an atomic bomb, before mounting a manned moonwalk by the year 2000. Of course, humans actually strode across the lunar surface just 11 years later. Nearly a half century after Neil Armstrong's first small step, humans again dream of lunar travel—this time with help from private industry. Fearing that new moon landings could sully the historic footprints, some want the Apollo sites protected. On page 34, we argue for a treaty…

After a 2001 earthquake severely damaged the double-decker section of Seattle's Route 99 highway, state and city officials decided to move the main thoroughfare underground. In July, they unleashed Bertha, the world's largest-diameter tunnel-boring machine. Built in Japan and reassembled in the U.S., Bertha is digging the 1.7-mile tunnel by advancing at an average of 35 feet a day. As its 57.5-foot-wide head spins, 4-by-6-inch drill bits tear into the ground, dislodging small rocks and breaking up the soil. A set of spinning gears on the head crumbles large boulders. Scrapers then knock the dirt onto a conveyor belt that brings the haul to the surface. Bertha even has its own electric power source, so its 25,000-horsepower engine won't disrupt the local grid. Seattle's new double-decker highway is scheduled to…

Wanting only a glass or two of wine puts drinkers in a tough spot. Once the bottle's opened, the wine starts to oxidize and lose its flavor. No rubber stopper will halt the process, leaving partial bottles to go to waste. Greg Lambrecht, a medical-device entrepreneur, figured out a way to solve the problem. The devices that Lambrecht once built used a special needle to access implants without creating permanent punctures. His Coravin Wine Access System uses the same idea to draw wine from a bottle without uncorking it. To pour a glass, a user places the Coravin on top of a bottle, pushing its hollow 2mm-thick needle through the cork. A capsule then releases argon, an inert nonpoisonous gas, into the bottle. The pressure forces out the wine. In…

NOVEMBER 26, 2011 The Mars rover Curiosity launched from Cape Canaveral at 10:02 EST, aboard the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft. AUGUST 6, 2012 Landed in Mars's Gale Crater at 1:32 a.m. EDT. It took its first photo soon after. AUGUST 19, 2012 Shot a million-watt laser, designed to plasmify rock. It's the first laser of its kind used extraterrestrially. SEPTEMBER 2012 Discovered an ancient streambed. Scientists used the size of the bed's pebbles to calculate that the stream had been ankle-to-hip deep. FEBRUARY 8, 2013 Performed the first robotic drilling on another planet. The geological samples will be analyzed for evidence of a once-wet environment. JULY 4, 2013 Began its journey of about five miles, at a top speed of 450 feet an hour (0.085 mph), to the lower reaches…

In August, Silicon Valley darling Elon Musk—CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors—unveiled his concept for the Hyperloop, a high-speed system of 28-person pods that would shoot through low-pressure tubes on air bearings. Musk's published proposal calls for the Hyperloop to link San Francisco and Los Angeles; pods would blast down the I-5 corridor at 760 mph, reducing the journey from five and a half hours by car to just 35 minutes. Musk envisions the system connecting cities less than 900 miles apart—beyond that, he writes, “I suspect supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper.” Using the 900-mile limit, we calculated other areas that could be connected by the Hyperloop. Theoretically, pairs such as Memphis and Chicago or Salt Lake City and Seattle could bridge the distance of a…

“Turn here. Take the dirt road on the right. You've got to see this.” I park my rental car, and Rick Gaitskell directs me to a makeshift wooden observation deck overlooking the Trojan mine in Lead, South Dakota, just a mile down the road from his home. In the thickening twilight, we watch a phalanx of Caterpillar earthmovers scooping up and carting away chunks of a mountain, creating a large terraced pit. Nearby, a flat-crested ridge rises where the trucks have recently piled up rock from an earlier dig. Their piercing headlights mirror the glow of Venus, hovering just above the horizon. “It's incredible,” Gaitskell says. “There's no stopping it. They are literally moving mountains in search of gold.” I try to read his expression in the dim light. At…

Every summer, thousands of greasepainted fans of the group Insane Clown Posse (ICP) gather in a field outside Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, for the Gathering of the Juggalos. Over the course of five days, the Juggalos, as the fans call themselves, will attend rap concerts, ingest a staggering amount of mind-altering substances, and socialize at events such as “DJ Clay's Horny Nuts and Big Butts Party.” And Rahima Schwenkbeck records it all. Schwenkbeck, a Ph.D. candidate at George Washington University, studies Juggalo culture to learn how ICP has become such a cult-like success despite being considered “the Most Hated Band in the World.” That sometimes means logging hours at merchandise tables to record purchasing habits. At other times, it means dressing like a Juggalo herself. At the gathering, she goes stealth, taking…

The New York City subway system moves 5.4 million people a day across 660 miles of track, much of which lies deep below the city in dank, vermin-infested tunnels. While most commuters whip through the passages unaware, a small army of transportation engineers toils away, testing signals and ensuring that tracks are set properly. Although the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) provides extensive training, nothing can adequately prepare engineers for tunnel work. Temperatures in the summer can soar to well above 100 degrees. Rats are everywhere. Homeless people too. And then there's the storied third rail, the power source for the subway cars, which transmits 600 volts DC, enough juice to cause serious injury or death. All the while, 400-ton subway trains barrel by at 30 miles per hour or more.…

“Mud logging finds people who are willing to do a thankless job well,” says Kurt Vanderyt, who did it for a year after studying geology in college. Of all the jobs on an oil rig, mud loggers are lowest on the food chain. “And nobody lets you forget it.” The job itself is brutally straightforward: collect and examine rock samples that have been forced from a well during drilling and record every sample's mineral composition and hydrocarbon potential. That's it, over and over again: 12 hours of looking through a microscope, for weeks on end. Mudloggers often work in pairs, so while one is logging, the other sleeps; typically, they take turns using the same bed. Drudgery alone might be tolerable. But clogs can require the loggers to lean shoulder…

I ROLL OUT OF MY OFFICE and immediately crash into a box. Across the hall, three colleagues in a group stop talking and turn to watch me. I feel intensely self-conscious. My appearance, I know, must be off-putting, but I don't actually know what I look like. I'm a continent away, steering a semi-robotic avatar via my laptop. My instinct is to drive to the restroom and look in the mirror, like a newly unwrapped plastic surgery patient, but I don't know how I'll open the door. So I turn and roll away in embarrassment. Seeking refuge, I steer unsteadily, like a drunk, into the cubicle of the articles editor. Normally, she'd greet me in a friendly, professional way. Instead, she laughs in terror and defensively turns her monitor toward…

Developed countries consume about 40 percent of meat worldwide. According to the UN, that figure will fall to 30 percent by 2050, driven by population growth and dietary changes in developing countries, even as total global consumption rises from 280 to 500 million tons. The inclusion of more meat in developing-world diets may help feed undernourished populations, but it will also require existing farmland to be far more productive. If current trends continue to 2050, farmland will grow by only 20 percent, but fertilizer and pesticide use will more than double. To feed a hungry growing world, agricultural ecologists need to know who will be eating more meat, and where. THE TYPICAL DIET: TODAY DEVELOPED COUNTRIES Poultry 19 lbs. Poultry 60 lbs. Pork 64 lbs. Pork 26 lbs. Beef 14…

When viewed from Earth, the moon appears flat. Stereo vision requires each eye to see an object from slightly different angles, but the intervening 239,000 miles squash the moon's deep craters and spherical shape into a uniform, luminous pancake. You could build a spaceship to get close enough for a respectable 3-D view—or just trick your brain using the 2.5 inches of space between your pupils as well as photos that reveal the moon's subtle orbital wobble. (The motion, called libration, creates different lunar perspectives over time). Make this stereoscope for a stellar view of the moon. ACUT: Using the wire cutters, snip the reading glasses at the bridge. Cut off the earpieces to create stubs about one inch long protruding from each lens. Sand any rough edges until smooth.…

short answer Everyone got mad at the Germans. long answer More than 98 percent of all scientific articles published today are in English, but that hasn't always been the case. “There used to be one language of science in Europe, and it was Latin,” says Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton University who is writing a book about the selection of scientific languages. But researchers began to move away from Latin in the 17th century. Galileo, Newton, and others started writing papers in their native tongues in part to make their work more accessible and in part as a reaction to the Protestant Reformation and the declining influence of the Catholic Church. Once Latin was unseated as its lingua franca, scientific discourse splintered into local languages. Researchers worried…

In 1968, Arthur C. Clarke created HAL 9000, the sentient computer in his Space Odyssey series. Now, more than 60 years later, the company Ivee has launched something similar, albeit less villainous. The Sleek draws individual smart-home devices into a single hub and adds artificial intelligence so that users gain voice control over them all. In other words, it's HAL for your home. Once the Sleek is on the local Wi-Fi, users add devices through a Web dashboard. When the Sleek hears a command, it sends the audio to the WATSON language-processing server, which converts the signal to text. The Sleek scans for keywords to determine its action. (If it hears “make it warmer in here,” it gets that warmer and here mean ticking up the thermostat.) The Sleek is…

AT THE END OF MAY, the Chicago Sun-Times laid off all its staff photographers. The paper would instead use newswires, freelancers, and reporters armed with iPhones. It was not the first time traditional media turned to untrained photojournalists—consider the Instagram photos NBC published after the Boston Marathon bombing or CNN's iReport—but it was the first time any outlet made a policy of doing so. As one might expect, the Sun-Times' decision has met with criticism. It's been called “shortsighted” and “idiotic.” There's even a Tumblr of head-to-head comparisons between the Sun-Times and the still-photo-staffed Chicago Tribune. But the change does have its logic. First, it's cheap. And, in theory, it will give the Sun-Times even more reach, by leveraging the cameras already in place at news events. For the strategy…

The outdoors is a horribly inconsistent place to do science. That's why many ecologists work in laboratories, where they can exactly replicate an experiment many times over, although with the understanding that their results may not fully reflect what would happen in nature. But on Lake Stechlin in Germany, researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries have created a wild environment that they can manipulate as they please in order to run controlled tests. LakeLab is a group of enclosures that delineate 24 miniature lakes. Called “mesocosms,” the plastic cylinders are 30 feet across and 66 feet deep—they reach all the way to the bottom and hold not just water, but algae, plants, and everything else. Scientists are now tweaking the temperature distribution of 12 of…

When a male túngara frog wants to mate, it announces its desire by inflating a vocal sac beneath its chin while making whines and chucks. Biologists Michael Ryan and Ryan Taylor (from the University of Texas at Austin and Salisbury University, respectively) wanted to change the order and timing of those calls to study mating behavior, but there was no way they could train a túngara to perform dependably on cue. So they special-ordered an exceptionally sexy robotic male frog. Túngara frogs are so small—about 1.5 inches—that some key robotic parts had to be placed outside the body, including the speaker needed to produce its low tones and the pneumatic pump that inflates its vocal sac with air. The frog's builders, University of Wisconsin—La Crosse biologist Barrett Klein and Joey…

Sure, everyone loves monkeys. But few test that love like Jake Owens. An environmental science Ph.D. candidate at Drexel University, Owens studies the ecology and behavior of drill monkeys. Typically, that involves trips to places like Bioko, an island off Africa's western coast, where he crawls through snake-infested vegetation to collect monkey dung. In 2010, Owens had to survey an illegal bush-meat market in Equatorial Guinea, where merchants sell meat from endangered primates. Amid the stench of rotting flesh, he took hundreds of hair and tissue samples from the monkeys for isotope analysis. Using this data, Owens aims to locate poaching hot zones. “Most people at the market hated me or the effort to stop poaching that I represent, and they didn't hide it well,” Owens says. The merchants regularly…

There are likely few researchers in the world with a stronger stomach than John Vucetich. As associate professor of ecology at Michigan Technological University, Vucetich studies the population dynamics between gray wolves and moose on Isle Royal, a national park just off the northeastern tip of Minnesota in Lake Superior. Although it sounds romantic, Vucetich's work often boils down to a pretty grim task—searching for moose carrion. Typically, the hunt starts with a smell: the sickly sweet scent of rotting flesh. Once they find a carcass, Vucetich and his team begin cutting it up with axes and knives. (Helpful tip from Vucetich: “It's useful to take the jaw off the skull. It's easier to carry that way.”) To get at the bones they want, Vucetich navigates swarms of maggots and…

Bedbugs elicit a predictable response in most people—first horror, then fury, then violence. For Scott Harrison, they inspire a strange kind of love. Harrison is a graduate student at Ohio State University and friend of the bedbug. While his lab mates spend their days trying to eradicate the pests, Harrison's job is to raise more of them for experiments. The lab houses more than 30 populations of bedbugs—some numbering in the tens of thousands—with varying degrees of pesticide resistance. Each day, Harrison lovingly feeds the bugs rabbit blood, even breathing on them and holding them in his hand, acts that stimulate the bugs' feeding impulse. There are days, of course, when Harrison winds up as the day's entrée, but the upside of working with bedbugs, he says, is that his…

To say that Glenn Gibson's job stinks is an understatement. Gibson is a microbiology professor at the United Kingdom's University of Reading, and he studies bacteria found in the human gut to develop treatments for such disorders as irritable bowel syndrome. To conduct his research, Gibson pours a fluid made from volunteers' fecal samples into models of the human digestive compartments. He then examines bacterial samples using liquid chromatography. “The smell permeates the lab, the whole building, and the surrounding area,” he says. Gibson does his best to protect himself from contamination, wearing gloves and a mouth mask, but contact is unavoidable. He once got splattered with feces containing blood while opening a package that had been mailed to the lab. Thankfully, not all the deliveries are so unpleasant—at least…

VGO Communications An impressive combination of sensors and motors for under six grand, but the small screen at stomach level is the fatal flaw, as the audience leans in awkwardly to see the operator. (A height extension improves things but raises the price.) Also, it's impossible to go anywhere unannounced: Its locomotion is audible from 15 feet away. $5,995 (plus annual subscription fee) Romotive A toy rather than an office solution and as much about the software as it is about the mechanical package, the Romo is for entertaining a child or connecting that child with a distant friend or family. That said, it's impressive at this price. Next, the company is working toward giving it computer vision so it can navigate obstacles on its own. $149 (iPhone not included)…

As summer beat down on an outdoor music festival in Brooklyn in June, four men from Portsmouth, Virginia, took shelter beneath a tent. They were one of six teams at McCarren Park hoping to win Red Bull Creation, an annual build-off based on a surprise theme. This year's challenge was to construct a crowd-friendly, never-before-seen instrument. The catch: Teams had only 72 hours to vie for a $10,000 grand prize. North Street Labs, as the Virginia team called itself, was taking its third crack at the event in as many years. Last year, the group built a death-defying merry-go-round for a “game of games” contest. This time, Creation's judges started the countdown clock by asking each team to make a musical instrument capable of composing and playing live music for,…

Graphic designer Giovanni Re likes to scribble his many ideas and drawings in paper notebooks. He also wants digital access to them, so Re built an inexpensive scanner using his iPhone. A stand positions the phone's camera at the precise height and angle to take photos without shadows, which he can then archive using apps like Evernote. Use some foam board, a hot-glue gun, an extra phone case, and a utility knife to build your own. TIME 30 MINUTES COST $5 DIFFICULTY Download a blueprint of Re's stand atpopsci.com/smartphonescanner. Trace Re's blueprint onto a 24-by-16-inch slab of foam board. Cut out the V-shape bridge and square piece. Carve away foam below the dashed-line blocks on the square piece, and slice a wedge between each of the bridge's dashed lines (but…

short answer Different trees make different pigments. long answer Leaves are loaded with chlorophyll, which makes them green. But all green plants also carry a set of chemicals called carotenoids. On their own, these look yellow or orange—carotenoids give color to corn and carrots, for example—but they're invisible beneath the chlorophyllic green of a leaf for most of the year. In the fall, when the leaves are nearing the end of their life cycle, the chlorophyll breaks down, and the yellow-orange is revealed. “The color of a leaf is subtractive, like crayons on a piece of paper,” says David Lee, formerly of Florida International University, who has studied leaf color since 1973. Most trees have evolved to produce a different set of chemicals, called anthocyanins, when it's bright and cold…