Inhoudsopgave van August 2015 - Popular Science

A few months ago, I found myself backstage with Bobak Ferdowsi. If you recall the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, then you probably remember him. Ferdowsi is a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and because he happened to sit near the TV cameras—and because he wears a pretty serious mohawk—he unintentionally became the face of the most successful space mission in decades. President Obama dubbed him the “Mohawk Guy,” and then invited him to take part in his inauguration parade. Ferdowsi and I had agreed to speak at the Pioneers Festival—a startup gathering in Europe—on the topic of private space. While we chatted backstage, I lamented that it had been almost eight years since the first of Virgin Galactic’s many promised space-tourism launches. “And we’re still…

CONCERNED YOUTH Q: I’m 14 years old, and a longtime reader of Popular Science. In the June 2015 article “Long Live the Mammoth,” Beth Shapiro neglects a crucial point when talking about the pros and cons of de-extinction. Couldn’t bringing back extinct species have negative impacts on other members of the ecosystem, and even lead to the extinction of other species? Ronnie Eytchison, Huron, Ohio A: While it is impossible to predict every consequence of releasing a species into the wild, one critical component in selecting a species for de-extinction is to carefully evaluate risk at each stage of the process. This includes not only technical and ethical risks, but also ecological risks. To my mind, the goal of de-extinction technology is to restore missing components of an ecosystem so…

Facebook, Google, HTC, and plenty of startups are betting big on virtual reality. But VR headsets could join the graveyard of overhyped gadgets if there’s nothing to watch. Luckily production houses and filmmakers are working on realistic virtual experiences. Though it’s going to take more than a camera that can shoot 360 degrees of footage. Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of virtual-reality studio Jaunt VR, is a tinkerer. At age 12 he made a working photocopier out of LEGOs and a felttip pen, and he used that ingenuity to build the Jaunt prototype camera. It’s made of 16 modified GoPro cameras housed in a 3-D-printed carousel. Jaunt’s fleet of 20 has logged hundreds of hours of footage, like Paul McCartney performing “Live and Let Die” and Yahoo Screen’s sci-ficomedy Other Space.…

Edison Conner, a former SpaceX rocket scientist and co-founder of Varial Surf Technology, tried for years to create a durable surfboard from aerospace material. In his eyes, the surfboard industry was ripe for disruption. Makers had clung to one manufacturing method for more than 50 years. For strength and flexibility, they created a spine from a strand of wood (known as a stringer) and glued it into a polyurethane foam cast. The cast was sanded and wrapped in fiberglass and resin. Conner and the other engineers at Varial tried something different. They replaced the wooden stringer with an ultrarigid foam similar to the type used in helicopter rotor blades and in rocketpropulsion systems. The foam is 30 percent stronger, with seven times the stiffness (or modulus) of conventional foam. It’s…

“There are only about 3 billion people online. It’s not everybody in the world, so there’s a lot of work to be done.” The Internet has changed a lot over its 30-something years. That terrible dial-up noise is gone; the Ethernet cord has been cut; Tinder happened. What’s next? If anyone knows, it’s Vint Cerf, Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist. He is considered a “father of the Internet” for developing the protocols that run it: breaking information into packets, sending them into cyberspace, and reassembling them onto your screen. Cerf has watched his baby grow up and get smarter. Now he’s envisioning how it will mature in the coming decades. When we turned on the Internet in 1983, having a powerful computer in your pocket was science fiction.…

Karen Lord, author of The Galaxy Game I stop jogging, come closer, and lean in to look. The body is dressed in soilsmudged white, and its feet are bare. There’s no ID band, no tourist badge, and no visible way to signal for security, medics, or an undertaker. Criminal? Nomad? Both are unlikely. The frame is too healthy, the face free of scars. The body—the person— opens her eyes and creaks: “Good day. Where am I? Have I gone wandering again?” I stumble back a step. “Holy —! I thought you were dead!” She sits up. “I wouldn’t be so uncivil!” There’s age in her eyes, and that wicked glint that belongs only to those too young or too old to give a damn. “Are you well?” I ask. She…

Mary Robinette Kowal, puppeteer and Hugo Award-winning author, whose latest book is Of Noble Family Albina sat crosslegged on the reclaimedbamboo foor of her condo, with the SmartMortar gripped between her thighs. Leaning into the motion, she ground the pestle with soothing clockwise rotations. She was top of the leaderboard on Grynder, and intended to stay that way. After 50 reps, the mortar chimed: “Good job! Now grind counter clockwise, and remember to keep your shoulder blades back!” “Albie?” Light footsteps sounded in the hall, and her husband leaned through the door. Todd sighed. “It’s the middle of the night.” “With our flight tomorrow, I won’t have time in the morning to grind cornmeal and coffee for breakfast.” Albina kept her focus and tried to take deep breaths with each…

Sugru acts like a cross between glue and rubber. When the material is fresh, you can mold it like modeling clay to fi x a broken toy, create a custom grip, replace a missing part, or form handy hooks for organizing a workshop. But once it sets, a process that takes about 24 hours, it becomes a hardened rubber that adheres fi rmly to almost any surface. “To make it as useful as possible, I knew it would need to stick to as many materials as possible,” says Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh. The Irish inventor developed Sugru over the course of six years, working with scientists on thousands of experiments to perfect the product’s shelf life, malleability, and texture. “It was very much a trial-and-error process,” she says. Dhulchaointigh’s company began…

Rinku Patel While we know that the human microbiome protects our health, “what’s overlooked,” says science journalist Rinku Patel, “is the environment where we pick up the trillions of foreigners that shape our immune system.” Writing “Bugged” (page 40), about the microbes that share our real estate, put her on a mission. She now leaves her doors and windows open so the microbes can come in. Jarren Vink Photographer Jarren Vink is accustomed to making static objects look great. But the Tesla Powerwall (page 16) proved a challenge. “It looks like a giant cellphone,” Vink says. Despite the battery’s unassuming design, it was wheeled into his studio in a wooden crate, stamped with the Telsa logo, worthy of an Old Masters shipped from the Louvre. “Too bad we couldn’t shoot…

Commuters love nothing more than blowing past hipsters on fixies. That’s one reason the 28 mph Stromer ST2 electric bike is a total joy for urban cyclists. With a 90-mile range—twice that of other e-bikes—you can forgo work altogether and head for the hills. The ST2 packs a 48-volt battery in the frame’s down tube, evenly distributed for balance—another e-bike first. It also stretches battery life by way of regenerative braking. A gyroscope and accelerometer further boost efficiency by adjusting battery output while the bike is in motion. Pedalers love the peripherals too. An onboard touchscreen displays your speed and power mode. Riders can customize the level of motor assistance by programming a custom profile; torque, pedal sensitivity, and power-assist level can all be changed on a whim or saved…

Cooking burgers, purifying water, and lighting a campsite all require cleverly designed gear. But that doesn’t have to be exclusive to the backcountry. Similar conditions exist all over the developing world. Now the gear that outdoor companies have spent years developing for adventurers and survivalists are playing important roles in low-resource areas. 1 MSR SE200 COMMUNITY CHLORINE MAKER For 25 years MSR has made lightweight, portable water filters for backpackers and U.S. soldiers. It has now employed that expertise to create the SE200. It’s a chlorinator that uses table salt, water, and a 12-volt car battery to make enough chlorine to kill waterborne pathogens, turning a 55-gallon drum of tainted water drinkable. Health workers will use it to supply remote villages with clean water. $239 2 GOSUN SPORT GoSun’s portable…

Lightning is incredibly powerful. One strike can contain 1,500 megajoules of energy—enough to power a 100-watt lightbulb for six months. But scientists know only the basics of how it works. Maher A. Dayeh, a heliophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, aims to change that. In July 2014, his team triggered a bolt (shown here) by shooting a rocket trailing copper wire into a storm cloud. Fifteen microphones captured the sound waves created as heated air around the bolt expanded and then compressed. The result? The first-ever acoustic image of thunder. From it, researchers can infer how much energy went into forming the bolt, and how much it radiated as sound. Lightning is violent, Dayeh says. “Prediction and protection are almost impossible if we don’t understand the process…

Kameron Hurley’s latest book, Empire Ascendant, will be released in October The wall was made from the faces of the dead. Their souls rested deep inside it, powering the great probability engine at its core. It started as a war memorial, but the technology used to capture these souls had turned the wall into something else: a sentient consciousness that could make even the most unlikely outcome possible. No one could predict what it would do; one could only ask for its aid. Now 4 million soldiers in gleaming obsidian suits stood on top of it, facing an army 10 times their number. First Ofcer Khiv stood with them as the faces of the dead in the wall cried beneath her. “How can we fght?” the generals had asked Khiv…

Wearable technology does a fine job of keeping tabs on your personal fitness. But to measure the health of the place where you live, you need a different tool. This device monitors the temperature, humidity, noise, and light level for any room. It can even track the number of people who enter. Within the casing, a collection of sensors sends information to an Arduino, which interprets the input and displays the data on a small screen. Based on the device’s readings, you can turn on a dehumidifier, lower the thermostat, or crack open a window—whatever it takes to keep your home environment comfortable. DAVE PROCHNOW See this project’s code, hookup guide, and more at popsci.com/homesensor. STATS Time 2 hours Cost $95 Difficulty KEEPING HOUSE 45 Percentage of humidity recommended for…

In 2013, mechanical engineer Gui Cavalcanti and aerospace engineer Andrew Stroup were competing on a reality TV show where contestants tackled invention challenges. They bonded over a shared lament: the fact that oversize battle robots—a staple of videogames and movies—hadn’t yet crossed into the real world. “I told Gui, ‘If you find some investor crazy enough to give us money, I promise that wherever I am, I’ll come help you build giant robots,’” Stroup says. Cavalcanti found an angel investor the next year, and then software company Autodesk offered its support. Stroup packed his bags and headed to Boston. Over the course of three months, a “MegaBot” took shape at the Boston makerspace Artisan’s Asylum. Stroup was the primary builder, Cavalcanti acted as designer, and Matt Oehrlein, an electrical engineer,…

Have a burning question? Email it to askanything @popsci.com or tweet it to @PopSci #AskAnything. Q: COULD A LION LIVE OFF VEGGIE BURGERS? Short answer Not by a long shot. A: Fake meat, as a rule, garners more complaints than compliments from people. Vegetables lack the complete proteins found in meat, and tend to be a poor substitute for its melange of muscles, tendons, blood, and other tissues—each of which confers a different texture and flavor. For cats, it goes beyond mere preference. Felines evolved to be obligate carnivores; in the wild, they must eat meat to survive. Even in a zoo, feeding a lion veggie burgers just won’t work, says Barbara Toddes, nutrition program director at the Philadelphia Zoo: “It’s like putting gasoline in a diesel engine.” Lions’ teeth…

WHAT DOES THUNDER LOOK LIKE? For the first time, scientists can “see” the sound of thunder. The image at left shows how its acoustic energy dissipates. For more storm science, turn to page 25. FROM THE ARCHIVES: A Brief History of Extinguishing Fire In Manual this month, we feature a project that uses sound to put out fire (page 63). We’ve written about creative ways to snuff flames before: DECEMBER 1937 An inventor in New York thought one water hose wasn’t enough. He devised an octopuslike sprinkler system with eight hoses. It was mounted on a tractor that he could drive through orchards and farms when fires broke out. OCTOBER 1938 Find yourself without water? Perhaps there’s some dirt around. We described a unique tool that used rotary blades to…

1 DEATH STAR LIGHT-UP BEACH BALL SwimWays lets you flaunt your Star Wars fanaticism ahead of this year’s big-screen installment. It might not have planetdestroying lasers, but with embedded LEDs, you can use your imagination. $7 2 CONNECTED COLLAR DogTelligent’s Connected Collar quiets unruly pups— and trains them to stay that way. An ultrasonic speaker emits a sound that discourages barking, plus the collar works as a virtual fence and leash. $130 3 LUNA Much of our lives is spent sleeping. So the Luna smart mattress cover uses sensors to track your sleep, and integrates with smart-home devices to control lights or a thermostat to create the optimal sleeping environment. $235 4 HARDWARE STORE SAW Brooklyn Tool & Craft’s short-bladed saw has a unique tooth design that can handle both…

Installing solar power at home is good for your wallet and the environment, but storing it is no easy feat. Until recently, the process involved connecting a series of finicky, fragile, glorified car batteries. The Powerwall, unveiled by Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk earlier this spring, is no DIY project. It’s a simple plug-and-play home lithium-ion battery aimed at changing the way people think about and store energy. Its large curvy case is the size of a futuristic boogie board, and it’s meant to be mounted on a wall like art. It draws electricity from the grid when demand and rates are low or sucks it from solar panels atop your roof (panels sold separately). The energy is saved for use during peak power-demand hours, when utilities raise rates, or…

We Americans are a health-obsessed bunch, buying niche gadgets like wearable step trackers and sensor-flled adhesive strips to help maintain our ftness. Now to keep our outrageous consumption habits in check, there’s the SmartPlate—a $149 Wi-Fi-connected dinner plate that automatically measures the calories in every meal. The plate is equipped with three cameras embedded within the plate’s meal dividers. The cameras work with an object-recognition smartphone app. Scales in each compartment determine portion sizes. The system can identify more than 400,000 diferent types of food. It’s accurate enough to tell the diference between wheat and four pasta, and the app ofers suggestions for what to add and subtract from your meals. The American Heart Association has even partnered with the company. Yet the SmartPlate isn’t dishwasher or microwave friendly, which…

Between the reports of E. colitainted spinach and Listerialaden ice cream, it’s easy to become paranoid about what to eat. And rightly so: One in six Americans will get a food-borne illness this year. But a number of new and soon-to-exist food-monitoring technologies can help keep your fridge contaminantfree, flag when something should be tossed, and tell you exactly what’s on your plate. 1 MILK Scientists at Peking University in Beijing created gold nanorod tags to put on food packages. They’re designed to deteriorate at the same rate as what’s inside. A color change will indicate if a jug of milk has gone bad without having to take a whif (or worse, a swig). “In principle, the tag can be used for any product that deteriorates over time and is…

STRATOSPHERIC BALLOON CARRIER: World View Experience COST: $75,000 1 You board the capsule a couple of hours before dawn. The monstrous polyethelyne balloon that will lift you into the stratosphere towers in the air above. You choose a seat, but it doesn’t really matter—they all swivel for a 360-degree view. After a fiveminute briefing from the pilot, a former astronaut, the craft begins to rise. 2 The ascent is slow and steady, averaging about 11 mph. You barely feel it. As the helium inside the balloon expands, the shape transforms from a long, thin teardrop into a taut, rounded object. After an hour and a half, the balloon reaches 100,000 feet. You’re free to walk around, use the restroom, or have a cocktail. 3 The craft drifts at this altitude.…

Transplant Will McIntosh, Hugo-award winning author of Defenders “Ready? Just look straight ahead. Remember, you have nothing to be ashamed of.” I nodded. My heart was hammering, my too-small, too-narrow palms sweating. I was ready to get out of the rehab facility, yes, but I wasn’t sure I was ready for people’s reactions. I understood their disgust because I’d felt it myself—right up to the moment I was given the choice: a transplant or the morgue. When you’re faced with that choice, suddenly the transplant doesn’t seem so horrible. Eventually you’ll relearn how to move naturally enough that you can pass, my counselor had told me. The real trick is hiding the scars. Scarves are a dead giveaway. No one wears a scarf who isn’t trying to hide scars. I…

James S.A. Corey, author of the The Expanse series, which will debut as an original Syfy network showin December The drones for construction were smaller than beetles but their solar collection grids shown like real insect wings. The swarm scattered over the ice, drifting in the soft breeze of the thin Martian atmosphere, catching the light of a small sun. Machines had been the frst to inhabit the Red Planet, probing its surfaces and digging into its depths. It was always like that. Squidlike machines had been frst to explore the deep seas of Europa and Titan, while geological survey mites had dug into the surfaces of Io and Ganymede. And then, like always, they died. On Mars’ surface, insect-inspired drones now litter the bare stone, their artifcial lives over,…

DIY-HISTORY COLUMNIST WILLIAM GURSTELLE GIVES ANCIENT WARFARE A MODERN SPIN In the early-morning hours of July 16, 1945, a team of scientists at the Trinity site in New Mexico fretted over a large sphere of steel and electrical cables they called the “Gadget.” A few hours later, the device exploded in the first test of an atomic bomb. It created a flash of light, a roar, and a rising cloud of gas, dust, and debris that has since become the universal symbol of unfathomable power. I decided to make my own. Not having access to uranium, I used the next best thing: nondairy coffee creamer. Yes, it’s possible to make a mushroom cloud with the stuff that whitens your coffee. These creamers are mostly flammable fat, and their light, powdery…

In May 1948, the unmanned research balloon on Popular Science’s cover lifted off to explore the stratosphere. As part of Project Skyhook, researchers from General Mills— yes, that General Mills—loaded the balloon with instruments, and deployed it to 100,000 feet to analyze air composition and cosmic rays. “Where our balloons now float will be man’s highway of tomorrow,” Otto C. Winzen, the project’s engineer, told us then. Now, companies are racing to prove Winzen’s prediction correct. They plan to lift tourists to 100,000 feet using footballfield-size balloons that drift on a path over Earth before descending. Read more about how they’ll do it on page 34. 70 Weight, in pounds, of weather instruments the Project Skyhook research balloon could support UNUSUAL BALLOON CARGO TAKES FLIGHT Pet Turtle In October 1934,…