Table of contents for February 2013 in Popular Science

44 The Genius of Erik Demaine Could the secret of breakthrough science be as simple as having fun? By Daniel Engber 30 How to Build a Hero Engineers are making robots that go where humans shouldn't—into disaster. By Erik Sofge 38 Staying Power Severe storms stress the U.S. grid to its breaking point. Here's how to fix it. By Kalee Thompson 50 Derailed Why do American railroads still use 19th-century technology? By Dan Baum 04 From the Editor 05 Peer Review 06 Megapixels: An airbag for cyclists 66 FYI: What's the worst pollutant? 76 The Future then What's New 09 The most accurate digital fitness coach 10 The Goods: A quieter vacuum, and more 12 The first steer-by-wire car 14 Wireless lighting controlled by phone 15 Snow cleanup without the…

Every January, millions of people resolve to get more exercise. Health-club memberships spike as does interest in fitness trackers, which use accelerometers to record activity. The trouble with those devices, though, is that they rely on binary tracking algorithms—moving or not—so they generally can't tell the difference between a steady jog and vacuuming the living room. The Amiigo is the first tracker that can discriminate between exercises, tally reps, and accurately tabulate calories burned. The device consists of a shoe clip and a Bluetooth-enabled bracelet, each with a three-axis accelerometer, microcontroller, battery, and enough flash memory to store up to five days' worth of data; the band also contains an infrared blood-oxygen and pulse sensor. When the wearer opens the Amiigo smartphone app, it prompts the bracelet to transmit its…

Smart lighting systems allow homeowners to control any bulb in their house, set timers, and dim lights—all from a single control panel. The systems aren't perfect: They're pricey, and setup often requires wiring fixtures, which also means professional installation. Philips's Hue LED bulbs do away with physical networks. Each one has its own radio chip, allowing the bulbs to create a wireless network in mere minutes. The system consists of up to 50 bulbs, a networking hub, and a smartphone app. After screwing in the bulbs, users connect the hub to their router via an Ethernet cable. The hub communicates with the bulbs through the ZigBee wireless transmission standard and with the owner's phone over Wi-Fi. The hub sends signals from the app to turn lights on and off, set…

John McHale considered himself a respectable shot until he tried hitting a gazelle from 300 yards on a safari in Tanzania, a tough kill even for a more seasoned marksman. Conventional long-range rifles and scopes, like the one McHale was using, leave the hunter to account for the angle of the gun, the temperature and air pressure, and the curvature of the Earth. McHale, an engineer who developed DSL technology in the late '90s, knew a computer could correct for all of those factors. This spring, his start-up, TrackingPoint, will release the XactSystem, a line of hunting rifles and scopes that employ the computer vision of military drones to make any hunter accurate at distances of more than 1,000 yards. BATTERY LIFE 3 hours RANGE Up to 1,200 yards PRICE…

From the outside, Daddy's Girl Rose Etta II looks like an ordinary Beechcraft 1900 plane. But commercial aircraft don't come equipped with 14 pilot lights that engulf them in flames on command. Named after a World War II B-17 bomber, Daddy's Girl Rose Etta II became the first FAA-approved mobile aircraft-fire simulator in 1996 when the Michigan Department of Transportation and Kellogg Community College commissioned it. Since then, more than 17,000 firefighters in 20 states have practiced on the craft. An eight-hour training day with the $500,000, 19-passenger simulator burns through 800 gallons of propane. Firefighters tame 30-foot-high flames on the tarmac, extinguish engine fires, and storm the plane to rescue dummies from 300°F temperatures. (For added realism, the dummies plead, “Help me, help me! I'm on fire!”) An instructor…

The striped meat-eating Tasmanian tiger was a marsupial the size of a large dog. Though experts largely agree the last one died in a zoo in 1936, some people hold out hope. This heavily hunted ungulate may be extinct, but up to 50 might survive on the western tip of Java. Scientists estimate that between a few dozen and a few hundred of this deerlike animal live in the remote Annamite mountains of Vietnam and Laos. Despite its name, this primate weighs only five pounds. Researchers suspect that some 100 to 160 live in disappearing bamboo forests in Madagascar. Scientists believe that this rabbit (and its reddish rump) might be hiding in the same areas as the saola.…

RESCUE BOT In the DARPA Robotics Challenge, robots will compete in a variety of tasks, including the use of tools to cut through a wall. THOR, a humanoid bot built by a Virginia Tech-led team, has especially powerful legs. It should prove adept at maneuvering over terrain and past obstacles. BY THE END of next year, robots will walk into a disaster zone. They won't roll in on wheels or rumble in on treads. They will walk, striding across rubble, most of them balancing on two legs. Compared with human first responders, the machines will move slowly and halt frequently. But what they lack in speed, they make up for in resilience and disposability. Chemical fires can't sear a robot's lungs, and a lifespan cut short by gamma rays is…

Smart meters can help homeowners track their electricity use. But real innovation will arrive when third-party companies can access the data, says Pecan Street's Brewster McCracken. “Imagine you're the parents of high-school-age kids and you go away for the weekend,” he says. “On Saturday night, you get a message on your phone from the My Home Utility App that in the last hour your toilet has flushed 45 times.” You call your kids—and tell them to end the party. Here are six other apps of the future. AC filter needs replacing. Click to order from Amazon. Playroom TV has been in use for five hours since Monday. Upgrading your refrigerator would save $10 a month. Click to alert the utility. An unknown person has entered the house. Nana hasn't opened…

Urban “choke points” are chronic danger zones. On July 18, 2001, a CSX train derailed in Baltimore's Howard Street Tunnel, igniting a chemical fire that burned for days. Nine years later, another CSX train (carrying hazmat) derailed inside the same tunnel. A notorious choke point, Chicago handles 40 percent of the nation's rail traffic. Trains can take as long as four days to move through the city. Accidents are not uncommon; an average of 13 freight derailments happen here each year. Most major U.S. chlorine plants are located along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana and connected to the rest of the country by rail; 85 percent of the chlorine produced in the U.S., which is used nationwide at water-treatment plants, travels by rail. The Washington, D.C., city council…

639 miles Average distance that a new U.K. mom pushes a baby stroller during her child's first year TIME 4 Weeks COST $750 The stroller's four-stroke, 125-cubic-centimeter engine was meant for a motorbike. But Furze planned to stand, not sit, so he couldn't use the built-in pedals. Instead, he positioned the controls within reach of his hands. Two motorbike levers beneath the stroller's handlebar manipulate the brake and accelerator. Four buttons on a crossbar, meanwhile, allow Furze to quickly shift gears and turn the engine off and on. He can make minor steering adjustments, although not full turns, by twisting a handlebar linked to two bicycle brake cables. Each cable runs through the carriage's frame and tugs at one side of the pram's single front wheel. Furze welded a quarter-inch-thick…

LED Video Wall When the electronica band Starf--ker needed a portable video display, it turned to Hans Lindauer and Alex Norman, two members of a Portland, Oregon-based hacking community called DorkbotPDX. The duo designed an 80-pound, 8-by-13-foot LED wall that displays the band's trippy-looking videos from an iPod. Lindauer built translucent scaffolding out of plastic greenhouse panels and tucked strings of red-green-blue LEDs inside; Norman wrote software to translate incoming video signals for the collapsible wall. Built in three months for $8,000, the wall performed flawlessly during a pretour stage performance at Musicfest NW in Portland, where Lindauer and Norman set it up in 20 minutes and tore it down in three. 9,000 SQUARE YARDS Area of the Beijing Skyscreen, the world's largest LED screen. A football field is 6,400…

SHORT ANSWER Find some snow that's not too dry and not too wet. LONG ANSWER Anyone who's tried to make a snowball understands the need for snow of just the right consistency. Start with powdery snow and a ball will fall apart. Start with slushy snow and it will turn into a hunk of ice. The key, then, to a killer snowball is to find snow that's in the perfect sticky state. According to Jordy Hendrikx, director of the Snow and Avalanche Laboratory at Montana State University, snow at subfreezing temperatures contains no liquid water. When the grains of ice begin to melt, each one forms a wet meniscus. The menisci work as snowball glue, he says, mingling and then refreezing. Scott Sandford, a senior astrochemist for NASA, points out…

IN 2010, I had the pleasure of writing our cover story about CHARLI-L, the first bipedal, self-contained robot built in the United States. It was rickety, cheap, and extraordinary. Engineering such a thing is incredibly hard. Dennis Hong and his team at Virginia Tech were working from the premise that the best way to adapt a robot to a human environment is to mimic the human form. That way it can reach our cabinets and move fluidly through our homes. Now Hong and his team are trying to make something far more complex. This December, as you'll read in our cover story, CHARLI-L's descendant, a bulked-up, ruggedized prototype called THOR, will attempt the eight disaster-response tasks that make up the DARPA Robotics Challenge. No humanoid has managed these tasks before.…

When full-size foosball is hard to find, players can snap an iPad into the Classic Match Foosball table and boot up a game. Each of the eight rods has an optical sensor that relays direction and spin info through the iPad's connector. New Potato Technologies Classic Match Foosball $100 The minibru is a coffeepot and mug in one. A user adds coarse ground coffee and hot water to the 12-ounce French press and then inserts a filter that pushes particles to the bottom. The filter, which doesn't have the usual plunger, doubles as the mug's lining. ThinkGeek minibru $25 The Alize is the most efficient and quietest vacuum of its size. A sensor in the head detects the type of surface, so the 12-pound vacuum can tailor suction strength to…

Traditional clickers send signals with infrared light, which means they require a direct line of sight to work. A new generation of remotes, which includes this Texas Instruments development kit [shown], will replace infrared with ZigBee radio. Because ZigBee uses radio waves, signals can pass through cabinets to reach hidden cable boxes and stereo components. And the signals require less energy to generate than infrared, so owners won't need to swap out batteries nearly as often.…

grid cell | grid sel | noun: Neurons found in the brains of humans, rats, and other animals that establish the location of the body on a mental map Mental maps are becoming a thing of the past. GPS devices and smartphones have taught millions of travelers to expect turn-by-turn directions anywhere they go—and with good reason. Mapping services plot accurate courses nearly everywhere, with one glaring exception: They're pretty much useless indoors. Given current mapmaking methods, such as the Google Street View car, they will remain that way. A person, though, is not limited to streets and highways. And a vast group of people (i.e., smartphone users) could provide enough information to map the great indoors. Broader cell connectivity has prompted a big change in mapping methodology. Early on,…

Samuel Ellis, a biologist from the University of York, will tag 1,000 hairy wood ants with radio receivers to find out how they communicate and travel. The multiyear project, which begins this summer in Derbyshire, U.K., will be one of the largest radio-tagging experiments of insects in the wild. Is it difficult to catch a hairy wood ant? No, says Ellis. The one-centimeter-long ants are easy to spot—they move on self-cleared roads—and are not very fast. He picks up an ant by the legs with his bare fingers. “They're quite obliging,” he says. “They grab on with their teeth.” How does he get a radio tag onto a squirming ant? First, he dabs glue onto the ant's back with a matchstick. He then uses a second matchstick to maneuver the…

To build and supply a lunar base, astronauts will need heavy-duty space trucks for transporting gear. There's just one problem: no roads. That's why NASA engineers designed the rover they call ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer)—to handle any terrain, whether dusty, rocky, or crater-y. The key is the rover's six bendable spider legs and wheeled feet. On smooth surfaces, it rolls on those wheels; when it runs into an obstacle it can't clear, it simply steps over it. ATHLETE can also split into a pair of robots that together pick up and haul specially designed shipping containers. (A lander would bring a container to the surface separately.) So far, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have demonstrated that their $2 million half-size prototype—which consists of two semi-autonomous, three-legged robots—can move…

THE EXPLOSION lit up the Manhattan skyline. A sudden boom, a one-two punch of yellow light—then everything went black. After Hurricane Sandy shoved water into Con Edison's 14th Street substation in October, causing electricity to arc between capacitors, about a quarter million customers were left in the dark. Video of the high-voltage spectacle quickly went viral: It became an early, brilliant symbol of the massive storm system's most pervasive and inescapable affront—a total and lingering loss of power. Across the U.S., as far west as Indiana and from Maine to North Carolina, Sandy caused hundreds of other mass outages. A tree blown down, wires ravaged by wind, a flooded power facility—each event had rippled out to affect homes far from the point of failure. The blackouts continued for weeks afterward,…

Just before he was old enough to vote but after he'd begun a doctorate in computer science, Erik Demaine arrived in New York City for the annual OrigamiUSA convention. He'd recently taken an interest in the hobby because he thought the math behind it might make for a compelling dissertation topic. Walking the aisles of the convention, Demaine saw the usual paper artistry—delicate insects, puffed-up bunnies—but he also learned of more elaborate forms, such as a three-car model locomotive crafted from a single sheet of paper. That train, like many intricate works of origami, sprang from a basic folding pattern called the box pleat. Developed in the mid-1960s, the box pleat is a grid of vertical and horizontal creases combined with some well-placed diagonals. A Swiss physicist named Emmanuel Mooser…

Positive train control is a system of GPS satellites, wayside receivers, and control centers that monitor and, if necessary, slow or stop trains. Suppose a crossing gate is broken, allowing car traffic to cross active train tracks. With positive train control, that crossing gate would wirelessly relay its status to train engineers and central controllers. The central controllers would track all trains in the area via GPS; they would issue stop and go signals accordingly. And if the engineer in charge of a train failed to comply with a stop signal, the central controllers could stop the off ending train remotely.…

Last September, a New York City gold dealer spent $72,000 on his worst nightmare: fake gold bars. The four 10-ounce counterfeits came with all the features of authentic ingots, including serial numbers. That's pretty scary when you consider how many people own gold—or think they do. I've been a fake-gold fan ever since author Damien Lewis wrote me into his 2007 spy thriller, Cobra Gold. My supposed experience making fake gold was pure fiction, yet I'm still treated as a source on the matter. I decided it's time to call my own bluff and make some real bogus bullion. Instead of a 10-ounce ingot, I cast a two-kilogram (4.4-pound) fake the size of a Twinkie cake. A Twinkie heavier than four pounds? Yes, gold is dense, much denser even than…

When moving terabytes of data from one computer to another, cut out the external drive—an expensive, sluggish middle man—by cutting up an Ethernet cable. Rearranging the small internal wires on one end allows near-instant data transfer between computers via their network cards. Here's how to do it. 1 Cut off one end of an Ethernet cable, strip an inch of its outer sheath, and untwist the four pairs of colored wires inside. TIME 10 minutes COST About $10 2 Rearrange the wires in this order: green-striped/green, orange-striped/blue, blue-striped/orange, brown-striped/brown (This links one computer's outputs to the other computer's inputs, and vice-versa.) 3 Evenly insert the wires into a new cable head (clip facing down) and secure them in place with an RJ45 crimp tool. Connect two computers with your new…

When this “mechanical man” appeared in Popular Science's December 1953 issue, the U.S. military was experimenting with humanoid machines that could help teach first aid and test oxygen masks and flying suits. Harvey Chapman, an engineer in Los Angeles, envisioned an android with a civilian purpose: He spent 90 days in his garage turning discarded airplane parts into Garco, a robot that could hammer, saw, mix chemicals, solder, and stack boxes. Chapman directed Garco using a panel of buttons, a two-way radio, and an electromechanical control arm. He hoped that in the future robots like Garco could work in extreme barometric pressures, handle radioactive material, and mix explosives. Engineers today are still working on robots that can operate in dangerous situations. Turn to page 30 to read about tomorrow's emergency…

In the United States, only 1 percent of trips are made by bicycle. In the Netherlands, which has only 1/18 of the U.S.'s population, that number is close to 26 percent. With so many bikes on the road, Dutch company TNO is working on a car airbag that deploys outside the vehicle to reduce bicyclist injuries. Upon impact, the airbag, housed under the hood, inflates to cover parts of the windshield and cushion a biker. In tests last November, engineers drove a track-guided car into a dummy on a bike at 25 mph, the average speed of a crash. Accelerometers in the dummy's head and neck and pressure sensors embedded in its limbs indicated brain damage and broken bones. Dummies in collisions with the air-bag had fewer and less severe…

VASTLY OVERSIMPLIFIED FLY-BY-WIRE EXPLAINER For decades, aircraft engineers have used electronic fly-by-wire systems rather than mechanical connectors and hydraulics to link the pilot's joystick to the wings. This year, Infiniti becomes the first carmaker to deploy the automotive equivalent—steer-by-wire. Infiniti's system, expected to debut on the 2014 G sedan, uses an electronic actuator to measure the movement of the steering wheel. Electronic control modules then relay instructions to another set of actuators, which pivot the steering rack (and, thus, turn the wheels). The computer-controlled system can instantly vary steering ratio and power-steering assist for low-speed maneuvers or high-speed stability. And with no mechanical connection, the system can filter out steering-wheel-tugging “noise” such as rough-road vibration and impacts. Steer-by-wire also improves Infiniti's current lane-departure system. Today, when the windshield-mounted camera senses…

11,500 Annual ER visits related to snow shoveling Strains, sprains, fractures 54% Other 4.4% Cardiac 6.7% Hit by shovel 15% Slips, falls 20% The SnoBoss gives shovelers more lever-age to dig under heavy drifts. Grabbing both of the shovel's vertical steel handles, users push the scooper ahead of them like a plow. The shovel's 26-inch high-density polyethylene head supports more than 30 pounds of snow. Ames True Temper SnoBoss $35 The Blizzerator makes clearing snow or ice off cars easier and more comfortable. The scraper's designer, a chiropractor, angled both the brush and the scraper head to 15 degrees, so that users don't have to stretch across curved windshields or reach overhead to clean roofs. Blizzerator $20–$25 The Compact Track 24 can clear a driveway faster than any other snowblower…

THE ANIMAL facility on the bottom floor of a drab building at Duke University is uncomfortably warm and smells a bit like raw seafood. That's not surprising given what's down there. The space holds a few thousand plastic fish tanks, each home to dozens of zebrafish: one-inch-long, big-eyed vertebrates that are becoming go-to research subjects for many scientists. Nico Katsanis, a Duke geneticist who hunts down the causes of rare illnesses, is one of a growing number of researchers choosing to work with zebrafish instead of rodents. Since scientists learned to selectively mutate zebrafish DNA in 1988—giving them the ability to turn the species into models of human diseases—the number of biomedical zebra-fish papers has skyrocketed, from 26 to 2,100 last year. The nonprofit Zebrafish International Resource Center, which sells…

18 INCHES Length of the longest bloodsucking leech, the Giant Amazon Leech (Haementeria ghilianii) Many animals are still almost complete mysteries to science. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, researchers don't know enough about 15 percent of mammals to even determine whether they're threatened by extinction. Researchers try to track them using footprints, dung, and motion-sensitive cameras, but it's difficult work, particularly in dense rainforests. Take the saola, nicknamed the Asian unicorn, a deerlike animal with two straight horns. Researchers first saw its horns in hunters' homes in 1992; since then, they've found remains in the forest, but no scientist has spotted one in the wild. Tom Gilbert, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, has found that leeches are a great way to track down rare…

VIRTUALIZATION IS a powerful tool for improving the real world. When we translate material things, from genes to jet planes, into numbers, we can analyze and manipulate them far more easily. But two recent reports suggest that virtualization can also have disastrous real-world consequences, especially when it comes to food. Fred Kaufman begins his new book, Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, by identifying a troubling paradox of modern food production. In 2008, “farmers produced more grain than ever, enough to feed twice as many people as were on Earth. In the same year, for the first time in history, a billion people went hungry.” How could we produce more food and more hunger? The answer, Kaufman writes, is that food became virtualized, or in this case “financialized.”…

1 Generate Power Home solar systems can save money and reduce demand on power plants. But if they can't automatically disconnect from the grid during a blackout, they must shut down. Researchers at the University of Arkansas have built a device that will allow homeowners to produce and store backup power. 2 Get a Backup Drive With technology that auto manufacturers are now developing, electric cars can act as backup power sources during a blackout. A fully charged vehicle might power a home for a day or two. 3 Install Smart Meters Forty million houses now have smart meters, digital devices that can provide homeowners with detailed information about their energy use. Over time that's led to a 5 percent reduction in consumption. During a storm, they enable the utility…

The evening of January 5, 2005, was dry and cool in Graniteville, South Carolina. At 6:10, a 12-car Norfolk Southern freight train pulled up to the Avondale Mills textile plant, and Jim Thornton, a conductor with 18 years' experience, climbed down from the locomotive to open a switch and let the train roll onto a siding. It was getting close to the hour by which, according to law, the crew had to quit for the day and rest. After the workers had shut down the train, Thornton called a taxi to take him, the engineer, and the brakeman to a nearby motel. It never occurred to him that, for the frst time in his life, he'd failed to check the position of a switch that he'd opened. All he thought,…

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. NEWS OF IMPENDING fatherhood affects men in different ways. Some guys pump their fists. Others light cigars. A few flee. When 33-year-old Colin Furze learned that his girlfriend was pregnant, he channeled his paternal excitement into building the world's fastest baby stroller. The twin-exhaust, 10-horse-power, gasoline-fueled pram can accelerate to speeds nearly fast enough for the highway in less than 30 seconds. Furze, a plumber in Stamford, England, rode BMX bikes as a kid and missed the adrenaline rush as an adult. So in his twenties, he sought new thrills. “For some reason, I thought building a nice big fire was…

1 BILLION Number of people, worldwide, expected to own one smartphone or tablet computer in 2016 The mother of invention may be necessity, but French telecom engineer Clément Storck learned his father can play that role too. To remind his forgetful dad to close the garage door, Storck rigged it with a switch that triggers an iPhone alert—a home-automation hack that joined his repertoire of self-closing shutters and a tweeting cat door (see @PepitoTheCat). But Storck's greatest hack yet is a webcam that e-mails a photo of anyone who rings the doorbell. Follow these steps to build your own—and end speculation over whether it's UPS at the door or a prankster with a flaming paper bag. TIME 1 hour COST $100 OR LESS DIFFICULTY Aim a webcam at the welcome…

SHORT ANSWER Lead. LONG ANSWER That really depends on how you define pollutant. For the purposes of this column, let's put aside greenhouse gases and the eventual effects of climate change and focus on more tangible pollutants, starting with the ones that make their way from industry into communities nearby. A nonprofit group called the Blacksmith Institute reports on these at the end of every year. The group's most recent study examined key pollutants at toxic sites in 49 countries and concluded that lead pollution from mining, smelting, and recycling (the latter often done from car batteries) accounted for the most pervasive risk to human health in 2012. The group estimates that lead affects at least 16 million people around the world. Excessive lead exposure can lead to kidney problems,…