Table of contents for March 2014 in Popular Science

On December 1 of last year at around 7:20 a.m., a speeding commuter train bound for New York City careened off its tracks, killing four and injuring 59. Popular Science is based in New York, so for us the accident was particularly scary, and we all waited eagerly for an explanation. An investigation soon revealed that the train had approached a sharp bend in the track at 80 mph, nearly three times the advised speed. And then an all too familiar detail emerged: The engineer had nodded off at the controls. Of the body's primary functions, sleep is the one we most often take for granted. On average, Americans sleep about an hour less than they used to in the 1940s, and 43 percent say they're routinely under-slept. We get…

Inside: Smart glasses, ranked. Ten things we love this month. An unstrippable, unslippable screw. The most addictive videogame ever. Hydrogen-powered Hyundai. A tiny robot with perfect balance. Smartphone construction, democratized. For all their engineering, speakers are mostly just form-Less boxes—eyesores that we shove into corners and forget about. The Harmon Kardon Aura is one that even the most design-conscious can proudly plop in the middle of their living rooms. Engineers molded the six-driver Bluetooth speaker into a retro-futuristic dome that evenly distributes audio 360 degrees. A 30-watt subwoofer fires up into the dome, which radiates the bassline up, out, and into the room—instead of into the floor. Interior LEDs sync with the music to draw a LittLe extra attention. Drivers six, plus subwoofer Frequency Response 50 Hz to 20 kHz…

On March 11, Electronic Arts will release Titanfall (Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC; $60), an online first-person shooter that promises to reinvent shooting-your-friends-in-the-face technology. Developed by Respawn Entertainment, it comes with a notable pedigree. Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella created the Call of Duty franchise before Leaving Activision, and his team has the best track record in the business for creating preternatu-rally compelling games (the CoD series has sold more than 100 mil-lion copies). With new gameplay concepts and technology, Titanfall will be this year's shooter to beat. Here's why. The approximate amount of time that people have spent killing one another in the Call of Duty series, more than 10 times the entirety of human existence. Zampella's team devised CoD's grabblest feature, an awards system that gives players weapons based…

Every year, Americans toss away 9.1 billion single-serve beverage pods, so roasters are working to make them from biodegradable material instead of plastic. The greenest of the lot, the OneCup Bio by Rogers Family Company, is made primarily from corn and wood pulp and is 97 percent biodegradable. Rogers and another roaster, Canada-based Canterbury, are each working to replace the final part—a fine mesh filter—with organic material, which will render the pods loo-percent waste-free.…

Our favorite specs this month come from a fully automatic rubber band shooter. We'll let them do the talking. Barrels: 16. Shots: 672. Speed: 14 shots per second. Range: 26 feet. $130 Leading up to the 75th anniversary of Batman, DC is launching a weekly comic book during the month of April featuring a wide cast of Gotham characters. The series will have the “nuttiest, craziest” Batman stories yet, according to the lead writer, Scott Snyder. $2.99 per issue These lamps mimic the structures of quasicrystals, so-called “impossible crystals” because they have symmetries scientists didn't think could exist. But they do! And you can hang a model of one on your wall. $680 The GripLine is the first tape measure that can hold onto round objects. The extra-long tip gives…

The tongue recognizes five basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami—a savory aspect associated with meat and mushrooms. But the taste you actually experience isn't that simple. In recent years, a growing number of studies have shown that taste can be influenced by a host of surprising factors. People praise food with a descriptive name more than the same food with a lackluster name. For example: Succulent Italian Seafood FiletVSSeafood Filet Spoons made from copper or zinc enhance a food's apparent saltiness. Researchers suggest further study into how this could help people eat less salt. Warm beer tastes more bitter Cold ham tastes saltier Bacon beer? tastes horrible* Forty-eight percent of participants thought soda in a blue glass was more thirst-quenching than in other colors, likely because they associated…

In the U.S., a person's health care averages more than $8,000 a year, about twice that of other developed countries. To help hold providers accountable, last year the government made a subset of national Medicare records publicly accessible for the first time. The data reveals that the fee for a given procedure varies widely across the country and between hospitals. And one issue stands out: the difference between the initial bill an uninsured patient pays in full [orange] and the far lower amount hospitals collect when someone has Medicare [gray]—a gap the Affordable Care Act is designed to close. 15% Approximate portion of the U.S. population insured by Medicare…

In the next few years, the stale, thick heat produced by the London underground will no longer drift uselessly into the atmosphere. Instead, some of it will warm 1,400 nearby homes, cutting heating bills by about 10 percent. Recycling heat is quite common in Europe. Denmark gets roughly half of its electricity from recycled heat, followed by Finland at 39 percent, and Russia at 31 percent. In the U.S., it's just 12 percent. According to a report by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy, the U.S. wastes more than half of the total energy we produce—mostly as heat, but also as gas, biomass, and methane. Using that waste could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 17 percent. “It's free energy, essentially,” says Brendan Owens, vice president of LEED…

If you're getting to bed on time and staying there for the recommended seven to eight hours, but still are routinely fatigued, you may have a sleep disorder. If you answer yes to any of the following, talk to your doctor: Men are 35% more likely to report regularly snoring than women. Despite years of research, dreams are a mystery. Popular hypotheses: 1—The sleeping brain builds narratives to make sense of daily life. 2—Dreams regulate emotions and incorporate them into long-term memory. 3—Violent dreams prepared our ancestors for real-life dangers. But these explanations are piecemeal. “We want one theory that could elegantly account for everything we see in dream life,” says Patrick McNamara, a dream specialist at Boston University and Northcentral University based in Prescott Valley, Arizona. “Whether or not…

Chris Stimac was a typical high school freshman: athletic, friendly, into science. He loved football and hoped to play it in college. But in the winter of 2003, he got a flu-like illness, which left him somehow changed. Stimac descended into a dark, foul mood, and he couldn't shake exhaustion. When he wasn't sleeping, he'd sit in his room in a confused daze, emerging only to use the bathroom or eat insatiably. He could devour entire pizzas at once. And if he didn't get exactly what he wanted, he would scream obscenities uncontrollably. The episode lasted only a couple of weeks but the symptoms returned about a year later. After that, the spells recurred several times a year. Between episodes, Stimac labored through catch-up work and avoided dating. Doctors ran…

These are the six most important things anyone can do for improved shuteye, says Bernie Miller, supervisor at the sleep Disorders Center at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. Knowing what to do is totally different from actually doing it. Tessa Miller at the how-to site Lifehacker suggests these cheats for changing ingrained bad behaviors. As far as we know, it's impossible to live without sleep. But there may be a way to squeeze more rest from short nights. California-based Advanced Brain Monitoring (ABM) created a heated facemask called Somneo that contains noise dampers, an EEG device to track sleep phases, and a blue light that automatically brightens while sleep is lightest for an optimal wake-up. DARPA—interested in maximizing soldiers' performance—funded the first prototype, and ABM is seeking military support for the…

In December 2001, American environmental activist Jim Puckett traveled to the town of Guiyu in southeast China to look for old computers. He'd learned that electronic waste from the West was finding its way to Guiyu, and the place apparently wasn't what it used to be. For centuries, residents of Guiyu's four villages had scratched out a living farming rice along the Lianjiang River. When Puckett arrived, one of the first things he saw was a man riding a bicycle stacked 15-feet high with computer keyboards. Puckett followed him to a village and, like Alice tailing the white rabbit through Wonderland, he discovered an upside-down world almost cartoonish in its horrors. Towering piles of monitors, printers, and fax machines lined streets and occupied front yards. In a neighboring village, women…

For more than a century, air cars have remained a quixotic quest of engineers—an idealistic exercise with Little Long-term likelihood of entering mass production. As fuels go, air has obvious upsides: It's ubiquitous, dean, and, best of all, free. But air requires energy to store energy because it must be compressed, limiting the utility of an all-air car. Two engineers from French automaker PSA Peugeot Citroën thought they could overcome that problem by pairing two tried-and-true technologies: a gasoline engine and hydraulics. To test the concept, they formed the Hybrid Air Program in 2010 and connected the engine of a subcompact car to a commercial airplane's hydraulic system. “We were trying to push the project against a lot of people who didn't trust the fact that we would succeed,” says…

WARNING: Lead-acid batteries can ignite, explode, and cause chemical burns if used improperly. Copper wire ties modern civilization together, but it is fragile thread. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy bathed miles of the electrical conductor in saltwater, severing my Brooklyn neighborhood from the grid. Lower Manhattan—a dense concentration of wealth, power, and wiring—fell into darkness for days. Events like Sandy used to be called 100-year storms. By the end of this century, East Coasters may call them “autumn.” To prepare for the next disaster, I built a simple, robust generator able to power essentials like a refrigerator, chargers, and lights indefinitely. Gas and diesel generators are common backup sources of electricity, but disasters can easily disrupt fuel distribution networks, as Sandy did. I decided that the best power source would be…

In a warehouse on the edge of Hoboken, N.J., Andy Fundinger teaches students of all ages a fundamental lesson: how to call home. It's one of several guided workshops at MakerBar, the hackerspace where Fundinger works, and part of the “Raspberry Python” instructional series. Pupils learn to build projects with a Raspberry Pi minicomputer and Python, a versatile programming language that powers apps, videogames, and more. Popular Science recently took a seat at MakerBar, pulled out a laptop and Raspberry Pi and started tinkering with Fundinger. Have to skip class? Study our notes. WARNING: Unplug a Raspberry Pi before attaching anything to its pins. You could fry its circuitry if you're not careful! MakerBar provides tools and parts, help with coding, and a well-equipped workspace. For its call-Mom-button class, students…

Short answer Sort of. A Laboratory studies of “animal hypnosis” were fairly common in the 1970s and the 1980s. One paper defined its subject as “a state of prolonged, reversible immobility which is brought about by different types of sensory stimulation and is characterized by passivity and lack of responsiveness.” The researchers go on to give an easy method for producing this phenomenon: Just hold the animal, in a fixed position on its back or on its side until it stops moving. When you release your grip, the animal will persist in a trancelike state, unresponsive to other stimuli and somewhat impervious to pain. This is not so much a case of animals being hypnotized as playing possum. Going limp while under threat makes predators lose interest and move on…

When reporting this month's cover story, “Sleep. How To Do It Right.” on page 40, Brooke Borel mounted her own sleep study. She wore four different activity-tracking devices at once—all day and night for a week. The result: “They kind of stressed me out,” Borel says. But she did learn she didn't sleep as well as she thought. That, and wearing four gadgets on her arm is a surefire way to get strange looks at the gym. For “The Garbage Man” on page 58, Cody Pickens photographed plastics-recycling pioneer Mike Biddle in a familiar environment: a recycling center. During the course of the shoot, Biddle's recycled-plastic chips became the backdrop for our story's opening photo. “We were just messing around,” Pickens says. “I said, ‘What's it look like if you…

Range 300 miles Top speed 100 mph Lease terms $500/ month; $3,000 down When it comes to alternate energy sources, most automakers think simply—battery power or bust. That's what makes the Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell an outlier. The SUV will be the first mass-produced hydrogen car in the U.S. when it debuts this spring. Because hydrogen fuel infrastructure is more or Less nonexistent, Hyundai's rollout will be small The car will be available at select dealers in Southern California, all within range of the company's sources of hydrogen, which include a nearby waste water treatment plant. Local drivers will be able to “gas” up for free at any of seven distribution stations. A fill-up takes Less than 10 minutes and Lasts for up to 300 miles. The company claims that…

Google Glass might not have done much to move fashion forward, but it has inspired a bevy of copycats—many of which will be on the market before Glass. Some of them are subtle, some futuristic, and some seem plucked straight from 1950s B-movies. The common thread: All of them will transform how we interact with our surroundings. How we'll look wearing them is another story entirely. Smart glasses come with sacrifices, such as looking awkward. So we ranked the current models on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being the least awkward. As a baseline, Glass rates a 3. The M-100 doesn't require a user to wear actual glasses (though they do ship with a pair). Because of its similarity to Bluetooth headsets, the M-100's “monocular” style may help it…

The common screw may not have been screaming for a makeover, but consider its shortcomings: stripped heads, tedious pilot holes, endless bit swapping. The company Outlaw has developed a new fastening system that cures all those headaches and could unseat the Phillips head as the bench standard. Three tiers of hexagonal recesses in the screw head provide 18 points of contact with the Outlaw bit. (A standard Phillips head has only four.) More contact means better grip, which makes the bit less likely to slip and strip the fastener. Shorter Outlaw screws have two recesses (12 contact points) but the same hexagonal shape. As you drive a screw, small ridges on the underside of the head helps cut a shallow groove into the work surface. The extra space allows the…

In October, Motorola unveiled Project Ara, a development initiative aimed at creating modular smartphones that snap together as easily as LEGOs. Users will mix and match the modules they want—screens, batteries, cameras, keyboards—and connect them to a standard phone skeleton. Developers will have first crack at the system to design their own modules before Ara makes it into consumers' hands. It's an exciting, and entirely feasible, proposition that could completely transform our relationship to phones. But there's a problem: It could also spell doom for manufacturers. Ara's open-source ethos, the idea that you'll get the best product by allowing universal access to a product's architecture, is borrowed from software. Google (which now owns Motorola's hardware division) built its Android operating system on an open-source foundation. Anyone who wanted to create…

This spring, Baltimore's Inner Harbor will become home to the first permanent waterwheel-powered trash interceptor. With energy from the Jones Falls River current and solar panels, the floating device sweeps Litter up a conveyor bell and straight into a Dumpster for easy disposal. Source: John Kellett of Clearwater Mills, LLC and Ziger/Snead Architects Booms direct trash onto the conveyor Rake system breaks up the intertwined debris Conveyor belt lifts the trash out of the water Dumpster collects the waste for later disposal Waterwheel turns the conveyor belt Solar panel array provides supplemental power…

He's the legendary astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. This month, Tyson begins hosting a new TV series, Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey. We used it as an excuse to chat with him about nearly everything in the universe. Popular Science: Would you rather have a jetpack or flying car? Neil deGrasse Tyson: What I would rather have is a transportation system that requires neither: a wormhole. PS: What incredible thing will we see in our lifetime? NDT: I think that we will know whether or not there's life on planets other than Earth. And I think the best location would be on Mars or on Jupiter's moon Europa. PS: When we find life on other planets, is it going to come and…

Sleep is a far more active process than once thought. While you're off in the Land of Nod, your brain and body are hard at work. Here's what we know so far. Last fall, a study from the University of Rochester showed that while mice sleep, cerebrospinal fluid flushes toxins out of the brain, including proteins linked to Alzheimer's disease. The findings suggest that one of the functions of sleep is to help cleanse cellular waste that naturally builds in the brain during the day. Stage 1 Transition The brain drifts into sleep. Images flicker in the mind and the body sometimes jerks, giving sleepers the impression of tripping or falling. Most muscle activity slows. Brain activity decreases, and the eyes barely move. Stage 2 Light Sleep The eyes stop…

So you want to keep bingeing on Netflix, but you need to wake up early tomorrow. What's the worst that could happen? Researchers had thought that mental illness caused insomnia, but the relationship may flow both ways. In 2008, a pilot evaluation by Stanford University showed that patients with depression who had talk therapy for insomnia in addition to antidepressants were nearly twice as likely to go into remission. Preliminary work from the University of Oxford shows that fixing sleep in people with schizophrenia helps ease paranoid delusions.…

Many of the latest fitness trackers also claim to monitor sleep, so I decided to test a few. I strapped four of them to my arm 24/7 for a week of seli-designed experiments. Some nights, I curbed caffeine, exercised early, and got to bed on time. Other nights, I suffered from jet lag, stayed up way too late watching Homeland, or experienced the ill effects of too much bourbon. The results were mixed. EASIEST TO use How it works: An acceler-ometer that measures motion tracks both activity and rest (including sleep). An algorithm uses its data to calculate calories burned based on the user's sex, weight, height, and age. My take: The app breaks down sleep into light and deep phases, supposedly based on small differences in body movement. Yet…

On a cloudy day in early October, the architect Andrew Waugh circles the base of a nondescript apartment tower in Shoreditch, a neighborhood in East London. Shoreditch suffered heavily during the blitz of World War II—“urban renewal, compliments of the Luftwaffe,” Waugh says—and then spent decades in neglected decay. Recently, though, the neighborhood has come roaring back. Nightclubs and tech start-ups arrived first on the promise of cheap rent, and residents followed. Along with them came architects, urban planners, and engineers, many of whom make a pilgrimage to the same tower that Waugh now circumambulates. From the outside, there is nothing particularly flashy about the nine-story building, called Stadthaus, that Waugh designed with his partner, Anthony Thistleton. Its gray and white facade blends almost seamlessly into the overcast London skies.…

The details of MBA Polymers's closed-loop recycling process are secret, but the broad strokes are pretty widely known. The goal is to separate undifferentiated garbage into five high-grade plastics that can be sold back to manufacturers. After shredding the raw materials, Biddle employs dozens of separation techniques, in a particular order. Here are some of the techniques he might use. This device consists of a strong magnet with a conveyor belt moving around it. Suspended above and perpendicular to the conveyor belt that carries mixed materials, it plucks ferrous metals from the stream and drops them in a separate chute. An electromagnet inside a rotating drum creates a force field at the end of a conveyor belt. Nonferrous items, like aluminum and copper, leap off the belt and into a…

16,777,216 Number of colors that a 24-bit RGB LED can produce. Human eyes can see about 10 million. Sources: Willamette University; Rochester Institute of Technology After bright lights fade in the dark, our eyes can still see them as streaks, smears, and dots. Engineer Phillip Burgess drew inspiration from this “bug” of human vision to build the NeoPixel Painter: a meter-long strip of multicolor LEDs controlled by a palm-size computer. When swept across a camera's view during a long exposure, the device rapidly blinks out an image, one column of pixels at a time, to create art in midair. So far Burgess has painted twisted rainbows, flying dragons, a map of Earth, and other complex digital graffiti using a customized bicycle. Inside: Build a running belt that shows your speed.…

WARNING: This project may make runners more visible, but it won't eliminate distracted drivers. Please be aware of your surroundings. Dusk and dawn are great times to go for a run. Trouble is, dim light and glare on the horizon make it hard for motorists to see. If you want to increase your visibility—and make nerdy joggers envious—build this light-weight speed belt. A vibration sensor detects your pace, which an Arduino microcontroller converts into miles per hour and displays on a matrix of bright LEDs. Soldering iron, computer 3 HRS. Approximate time to build this project Cost: Less than $30 Difficulty: 8-by-8 LED matrix kit Arduino Pro Mini Arduino programmer board (six pin-to-micro USB) Six right-angle break-away male headers Piezo vibration sensor Coin cell battery holder (with on/ off switch)…

Short answer Because it crashed into the Sagittarius Dwarf. A The shape of our galaxy is nothing special. Among the other clusters of stars that can be easily observed from our corner of the universe, a few are blobby and egg-shaped, but more than two-thirds are so-called “disc galaxies,” or ones whose stars have settled into flat orbits, as if traveling along the surface of a giant vinyl record. Almost every disc galaxy looks at least a bit like ours, with stars that group together into spiral arms. What causes the spirals? “A galaxy is constantly bombarded by satellite galaxies,” says Chris Purcell of West Virginia University. When one galaxy passes by or through another, the resulting forces can send a shockwave throughout its structure, bunching stars together in spindly…

In 1903, aircraft propellers first took flight. Soon after, they began showing up on other vehicles. In May 1937, Popular Science featured an early air-powered car with a propeller at the front. The car concept was designed to ride on its hind wheels and be steered by a rudder. Propeller cars might not have become commonplace, but automakers haven't given up on the dream of a vehicle fueled by air. More than 70 years later, PSA Peugeot Citroën is working on a hybrid air car that will go on sale in Europe in 2016. To learn how it works (hint: birds will be safe), turn to page 68. A fleet of air-powered vehicles from the Popular Science archives JAN. 1924 The air-driven boat could travel at 70 mph in as…

Is there a risk of “predators” mistaking microdrones for prey? Would insectivores such as birds and chipmunks be at risk? And if there is a danger, what is the potential of making them so they are digestible and easily eliminated? Dearborn, Mich. Response from microroboticist Rob Wood: Right now the materials are optimized for function. If robots like RoboBees were ever to be produced and deployed in large enough numbers, we could seek biocompatible or biodegradable alternatives. This would be a nontrivial exercise given the challenges we have had just finding material combinations that work at all, but not out of the question.…

Michelin is exploring organic replacements—wood, straw, and sugar beets—for the petroleum-based ingredient butadiene used in rubber. The company hopes a switch will help it keep up with growing demand. Sketches of a radical new engine designed by John DeLorean in the 1980s recently surfaced. The powertrain, which DeLorean hoped would get 100 mpg, would have featured a laser ignition and regenerative braking. A driver in Newport Beach, California, purchased a Tesla Model S with cash he converted from bitcoin. The driver exchanged 91.4 bitcoins, which at the time were worth more than $100,000. Next month, Audi will begin selling the new A3, the first car with built-in 4G LTE. The high-speed cellular connection will give drivers (and passengers) lag-free streaming capabilities from music services like Pandora and Rdio—and maybe some…

eBay may not be considering delivery drones like Amazon, but it is getting serious about local orders. The new eBay Now service, which launched in 2012 in San Francisco and later expanded to New York, sends a valet to Home Depot, Best Buy, Target, or any of a dozen or so other retail partners to shop for you. The service works through either a smartphone or Web app; items typically arrive in about an hour. eBay used its own logistics system for the initial rollout, but in October, the company acquired U.K.-based start-up Shutl to help expand the service. Shutl's system adds a network of independent couriers, which expands the overall fleet, making the entire process more efficient than eBay's own methods. With Shutl behind deliveries, eBay expects to expand…

If you think the MiP Looks a lot like a miniature Segway, you'd be right. Like a Segway, the toy adjusts its center of gravity to stay upright with the help of a gyroscope, accelerometer, and motors. Unlike a Segway, it's adorabLe. MiP—the first WowWee toy built in collaboration with the robotics lab at the University of California, San Diego—is gesture- or app-controlled. It can zip around sharp turns, carry its own body weight, and, like any good robot, dance. 50 Number of gesture commands the MiP can remember and execute in sequence…

“IN SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES, THE JETS CAN AFFECT THE EVOLUTION OF THE GALAXY ITSELF.”—JAMES MILLER-JONES, ASTROPHYSICIST AT THE INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR RADIO ASTRONOMY RESEARCH HOW A BLACK HOLE EJECTS MATTER, INSTEAD OF EATING IT Black holes have a bad rap. They're known for sucking in everything around them, but matter can actually break away from their grasp, in the form of jets. Although astronomers have been aware of this for half a century, they didn't know what exactly the jets were made of until last fall. After observing a black hole in the Milky Way estimated to be 10 times the mass of our sun, an international team of astrophysicists discovered that the jets are composed primarily of electrons and atomic nuclei, including those from heavy metals, such as iron…

Once abundant in Iowa's grasslands, prairie chickens now number roughly 50 statewide. To bolster the population, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources introduced 74 out-of-state birds last spring. Jennifer Vogel from Iowa State University attached tracking devices to 10 of them, but in the end, only Bird 112 produced data [left]. The data, though, was impressive: In two months, Bird 112 roamed more than 1,180 miles, wandering in large circles possibly because it was disoriented by the relocation. In April, Vogel will track more prairie chickens to help find future resettlement sites in Iowa.…

0.001% The Solara 50 drone could accomplish the same tasks as a geostationary satellite—at one-thousandth the cost. If a drone never had to land, it could track hurricanes, spot pirates and smugglers, follow animal migrations, and even act as an auxiliary GPS. In essence, it would be a geostationary satellite without the expense of going to space. Later this year, the company Titan Aerospace will test a drone that could do just that. The Solara 50, named for its 50-meter wingspan, will fly at 65,000 feet—above most other aircraft and above weather that could disturb its flight and block the sun, its source of power. Titan will market it as an “atmospheric satellite. In 2012 and 2013, Solara 10, a ⅕-scale prototype with a 10-meter-wingspan, completed successful trial flights.…

The body's clock runs on a roughly 24-hour cycle, known as circadian rhythm. It's influenced by the amount of light entering the eyes, which triggers cells in the brain to produce more or less of the hormone melatonin (which causes drowsiness). Clock genes are found in nearly every cell type in the body. In 2009, researchers at Harvard University demonstrated that a 12-hour circadian shift common in nighttime workers may boost blood sugar, alter hormones related to appetite, and increase blood pressure.…

1986 The world's worst nuclear disaster happened at 1:23 a.m. after employees postponed a safety test and then left it to the night crew to finish. Night shift workers are always at odds with their circadian rhythm, which puts them at risk of fatigue. 1989 Just after midnight, the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled 11 million gallons of oil in Alaska's Prince William Sound. The single crew-member on the bridge during the wreck had reportedly been at work for 18 hours. 1999 At ten to midnight, a plane with 139 passengers overshot the runway at Little Rock National Airport, killing 10 and injuring more than a hundred. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the flight crew's fatigue contributed to the accident.…

The occasional sweaty bad dream is just a bother, but five percent of adults have frequent nightmares, which can disrupt sleep enough to interfere with waking life too. And for the 7.7 million American adults with PTSD, the proportion climbs to 71 percent. The American Academy of sleep Medicine recently came out with two official recommendations for how to chase away bad dreams. Both are commonly used in veterans' hospitals. Prazosin, a blood-pressure drug, also alleviates recurring nightmares. While the underlying mechanisms are unknown, the medication may work by blocking the neurotransmitter noradrenaline, a chemical involved in the fight-or-flight response. Imagery-rehearsal therapy is a cognitive-behavioral technique. During the day, patients rehearse the nightmare in detail but give it a happier ending. Over time, the dream becomes less frequent and less…

Looking back, Google's emergence as a robotics powerhouse seems obvious—and inevitable. First came the scattered hires of roboticists and the release of self-driving cars into Bay Area traffic. Then, the search giant reportedly bought two humanoid HUBO robots from South Korean university KAIST. But it wasn't until December's revelation that Google had acquired eight robotics companies—including Boston Dynamics, maker of BigDog, WildCat and a stable of other astonishing Pentagon-funded bots—that it became clear: Google means to build robots. Although the prospect of merging Google's insatiable appetite for data with sprinting, leaping hardware has inspired an unsurprising battery of Skynet jokes, the response among roboticists has been overwhelmingly positive. “Of course it's part of our business to tell everyone how great we think robotics is, at every opportunity,” says Matt Mason,…

In the U.S. most used plastics are never collected for recycling. Of the roughly 10 percent that is, easily sortable items like bottles tend to be recycled domestically, while most everything else gets exported, typically to countries that can sort it cheaply by hand. About 30 percent of the electronic waste exported by the U.S. is plastic, making used electronic equipment an important part of the plastics-recovery puzzle. Mixed plastics, except bottles to Hebei and Fujian Plastic bags, film, and wrap to Shandong and Fujian Bottles to Jiangsu and Zhejiang Electronics to Guangdong…

Springtime means the return of wildlife and greenery—and annoying chores. Here are a few unconventional devices that nip the season's nuisances in the bud with military efficiency. ONE Electrical engineer Luis Medina wanted to trim grassy lawns that no ordinary lawnmower could touch. So he and some friends built the TREX (Terrestrial Robotic Explorer): a remote-controlled, industrial-strength mower with tank-like treads to grip the steepest of slopes. The TREX, now sold by their company, Evatech, weighs 540 pounds and costs about $15,000 to make. It uses electrical motors instead of hydraulic fluid, and it's waterproofed to mount amphibious assaults on marshy plots. 60° Maximum slope the TREX can mow without tipping over. Most robotic mowers won't operate safely above 30 degrees of slope. TWO When inventor Per Cromwell fires his…

20 Minimum number of steps required to zip a zipper in the 2014 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, being held this April. Brett Doar tried architecture, drove buses, and edited films before carving out a career designing absurdly intricate Rube Goldberg machines. His latest project: a kinetic sculpture made of toys and household objects to advertise GoldieBlox, a construction set for girls. Here's how Doar orchestrated his unique living. How did you start out? I was always building little toys. One was a spring-powered gun that launched sharpened coat-hanger pieces. I sent that to someone as a thank-you after a job interview, and he said, ‘You need to think of this as art.’ That was the moment I started to take it seriously. What was your big break? The band OK…

Short answer Voltage triggers a circuit. A Before a computer can load its operating system and locate drivers for its components, it must recognize that it has been turned on at all. This task falls to a relatively simple device known as the power-on reset circuit. “In its very basic form, it's simply a little capacitor and a resistor and a little inverter, something like that,” says David Blaauw, a professor in the Michigan Integrated Circuits Laboratory at the University of Michigan. The power-on reset circuit is hardwired to recognize a minimum voltage level. When voltage crosses that threshold, the circuit signals the processor to execute a set of commands that allow for the loading up of the system. This “instruction zero” could be hardwired, says Blaauw, but it's generally…