Popular Science (June 2005)
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VOLUME 266 #6
CONTENTS
JUNE 2005
There are cynics in the crowd who are not entirely convinced that Fossett can handle the tricky bird at its maximum weight. They’re sure he’ll just plow it into the runway and die a mile into his takeoff roll.
FOUNDED IN 1872
tech
ROUND TRIP, p. 66
19 | What’s New
GADGETS MP3-enabled phones arrive. AUTOMOTIVE Audi’s ultrafast gearbox. HOME TECH The supercomfy desk chair.
87 | How 2.0
GEEK GUIDE Do more with the Mac Mini. GRAY MATTER How to gild anything. TECH LESSON Drawing with GPS. TECH SUPPORT Build a better Wi-Fi antenna.
news and views 37 | Headlines
TRAVEL TECH Air taxis prepare for takeoff. SPACE Catapulting astronauts to the moon. SHRINKAGE Better lube for micromachines. INVENTION Cousteau’s robotic shark suit.
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48 | Soapbox
MEDIASCOPE Quit with the sensationalist,
O N T H E C O V E R : I L L U S T R AT I O N S : J O H N M A C N E I L L ; P H O T O G R A P H : J O H N B . C A R N E T T; T H I S PA G E , C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : J O H N B . C A R N E T T; J O H N M A C N E I L L ( 2 ) ; G R E G O R H A L E N D A ; J O H N M A C N E I L L
fear-mongering headlines. By Rebecca Skloot PLUGGED IN New international copyright laws to save the Web. By Cory Doctorow
stories 55 | Best of What’s Next Tech that will change your life: holographic TVs, spray-on space suits, bionic eyes, plastic buildings and interactive roller coasters.
➤ 55
66 | Round Trip The inside story on Steve
Fossett’s record-setting round-the-world trip in a flying fuel tank. By Eric Adams
72 |
Master of the Universe A century ago, Albert Einstein changed the world. What will as-yet-undiscovered “Einsteins” bring in the next 100 years? 82 | Ringed Victory The Cassini-
Huygens mission to Saturn discovers methane rain, a gigantic mountain ridge, a wayward atmosphere, and other oddities. By Michael Moyer 8 From the Editor 12 Contributors 14 Letters
98 FYI 128 Looking Back
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POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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FROM THE EDITOR Editorial Director Scott Mowbray
Editor Mark Jannot
How 2.0 Win FOR MUCH OF OUR l33-YEAR HISTORY,
P OPULAR S CIENCE offered readers a steady diet of hands-on homeworkshop-type projects: everything from building decks to making rudimentary computers. The intensity of that do-it-yourself focus waned over the past decade or so, and about a year and a half ago we decided that we needed to tap more consistently into that classic POPSCI spirit. In the meantime, though, consumer technologies had become complex and solid-state—circuits in place of gears—and the challenge of how-to and home-project stories in the post-monkey-wrench age required a total reinvention of approach. And so, after a harrowingly short gestation period, we launched the How 2.0 section in March of last year to address the passion of readers who still want to get their hands dirty, even if it means dirty with code. The underlying message: Take control of your technology and improve it. Build a digital photo frame. Assemble a cheap home theater. Hack your TiVo. Well, our reinvention seems to have struck a chord. I’m thrilled to announce that the American Society of Magazine Editors has deemed How 2.0 the best magazine section in the country, honoring it with this year’s coveted National Magazine Award in that category. Such recognition is particularly astounding considering that How 2.0 was a brand-new section competing against more than 130 better-established sections from other magazines. The lion’s share of the credit for this triumph belongs to editor Mike Haney, who dazzles me (and you) every month with a section that the NMA judges declared is “meticulously conceived, often witty and always fun to navigate.” Come to think of it, that description could be applied to each one of our sections, which are the heart and soul of POPSCI, the places you know you can turn to for your monthly hit of what you look forward to in the magazine, whether it’s cutting-edge consumer-tech intel in What’s New or sprung-from-the-labs discoveries in Headlines or FYI’s irreverent compendium of science news and notes. So please indulge me while I take this opportunity to also recognize and thank the rest of our talented cohort of section editors: Eric Hagerman and Jenny Everett on What’s New, Nicole Dyer on Headlines, Martha Harbison on FYI, and senior technology editor Suzanne Kantra Kirschner, whose tech omniscience infuses authority into every page of both What’s New and How 2.0. Bravo, one and all! MARK JANNOT [email protected]
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Art Director Nathalie Kirsheh Executive Editor, Features Emily Laber-Warren Science Editor Dawn Stover Senior Technology Editor Suzanne Kantra Kirschner Senior Editor, What’s New Eric Hagerman Aviation & Automotive Editor Eric Adams Senior Editors Michael Moyer, Kalee Thompson Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer Senior Associate Editor Nicole Dyer Copy Chief Rina Bander Associate Editors Joe Brown, Jenny Everett, Mike Haney, Martha Harbison Assistant Editor Rena Marie Pacella Deputy Art Director Christopher Chew Designer Laura Konrad Photo Editor Kristine LaManna Art/Photo Intern Jamie Beck Staff Photographer John B.Carnett Editorial Assistant Barbara Caraher Web Producer Leslie Wong Contributing Design Editor Chee Pearlman Contributing Automotive Editor Stephan Wilkinson Contributing Editors Cory Doctorow, Theodore Gray, Joseph Hooper, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Jeffrey Rothfeder, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Bill Sweetman, Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos, Charles Wardell, William Speed Weed Contributing Troubadour Jonathan Coulton Contributing Futurist Andrew Zolli Contributing Artists Mika Grondahl, Jason Lee, John MacNeill, Garry Marshall, Stephen Rountree, Bob Sauls Editorial Interns Amanda MacMillan, Matthew Olson POPULAR SCIENCE PROPERTIES
Publisher Gregg R. Hano Advertising Director John Tebeau General Manager Robert Novick Executive Assistant Chandra Dwhaj Northeast Advertising Office: Manager Howard S. Mittman (212) 779-5112, Jill Schiffman (212) 779-5007, Mike Schoenbrun (212) 779-5148, Michael Saperstein (212) 779-5030 Ad Assistant Christopher Graves Midwest Advertising Office: Manager John Marquardt (312) 832-0626, Megan Williams (312) 832-0624 Ad Assistant Nikki Schneider Los Angeles Advertising Office: Manager Dana Hess (310) 268-7484, Ad Assistant Mary Infantino Detroit Advertising Office: Manager Edward A. Bartley (248) 988-7723, Ad Assistant Diane Pahl San Francisco Advertising Office: Manager Amy Cacciatore (415) 434-5276, Ad Assistant Carly Petrone Southern Regional Advertising Office: Manager Dave Hady (404) 364-4090, Ad Assistant Christy Chapman Classified Advertising Sales Joan Orth (212) 779-5555 Direct Response Sales Marie Isabelle (800) 280-2069 Business Manager Jacqueline L. Pappas Director of Brand & Business Development L. Dennett Robertson Sales Development Managers Daniel Vaughan Senior Manager, Events and Promotions Christy Chapin Ellinger Creative Services Designer Mary McGann Marketing Coordinator Eshonda Caraway Advertising Coordinator Evelyn Negron Consumer Marketing Director Barbara Venturelli Senior Planning Manager Margerita Catwell Consumer Marketing Managers Adam Feifer, Kristen Shue Senior Production Director Laurel Kurnides Manufacturing Business Mananger John Conboy Production Assistant Shawn Glenn Prepress Director Robyn Koeppel Prepress Manager José Medina Publicity Manager Hallie Deaktor
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CONTRIBUTORS
BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT
2005 5
For our second annual Best of What’s Next, we enticed five writers to examine the most exciting new technologies coming down the pike: a Saranwrapped building, an individually programmable roller coaster, a 3-D holographic TV, a spray-on space suit for orbital tourists, and a real-life bionic eye [page 55]. Writer JILL DAVIS [1] can’t wait to test the roller coaster; an admitted coaster fiend, she loves Coney Island’s Cyclone, a 78-year-old wooden contraption known for leaving riders black and blue. JONATHON KEATS [2] believes that the holographic TV would be put to good use by director John Waters, given his pioneering work in Odorama, the scratch-and-sniff component of his film Polyester. “Were he to bring holography into the picture,” Keats observes, “he might finally accomplish the sensory overload that seems to motivate his cinematic aesthetic.” On the subject of bionic eyes, MICHAEL STROH [3] says, “As the proud former owner of a Six Million Dollar Man action figure, I’ve kept a close eye on retinalimplant research during the past couple years. Wouldn’t it be ironic if someday blind people could not only see, but see better than people with healthy eyes?” Space tourism is a little cramped for PATRICK DI JUSTO [4]: “No way. I’m a bit claustrophobic, and I wouldn’t like to have that space suit so close to my body.” JESSIE SCANLON’s [5] passion for architecture and design informed her investigation of the “building wrap” concept. Creating visual avatars of the items was POPSCI contributing artist (and space enthusiast) JOHN MACNEILL [6], who says that of all this year’s Best of What’s Next objects, he’d really love to test out that new spray-on space suit—in orbit, of course.
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[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
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OLIVER WOLFSON likes his images hyperrealistic—but with a twist. “I try to incorporate a visual pun into my illustrations,” he says: “objects that look real at first glance but really don’t exist.” For a story detailing the myriad uses of the Mac Mini [page 87], Wolfson crafted a Swiss Army version of the computer. He also makes short animated films, such as the award-winning Bowlin’ Fer Souls, a 10-pin-themed tear through hell. A follow-up film should be completed in 2006.
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Before he began his gouache paintings for our coverage of all things Einstein [page 72], artist RYAN HESHKA downloaded a dozen images of the physicist to familiarize himself with Einstein’s physique. Many of these characteristics are visible in Heshka’s depictions. Fluffy white hair? Check. Push-broom mustache? Check. Potbelly? Potbelly? “Einstein was a little bit slouchy,” Heshka explains. “You don’t really want to make fun of him, but you need to inject some humor.”
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
[email protected]
Half a Century of Inspiration. That’s No Simulation
I have been a regular reader of POPULAR SCIENCE for more than 50 years and must tell you how your magazine has inspired me. It’s amazing how POPSCI has guided and predicted the paths mechanical and technological progress have taken. I especially enjoyed the virtual-vs.-reality article “Race against Reality” [April]; it was very enlightening to see how you guys put simulation to the test. I have designed a full-motion joystick cockpit for simulated flying. My clients, many of whom are pilots, tell me it’s just like being there. Thanks again for half a century of inspiration.
“Doc” Holloway Penticton, British Columbia
Paul Houser Cedar Rapids, Iowa CLARIFICATION
• The Porsche Carrera GT featured on our April cover was loaned to us by Preston Henn, founder of the Swap Shop in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
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Building Blocks Your story “The Low-Risk High-Rise” [April] neglected to suggest a better solution for the load-bearing structures: titanium. Chromium-molybdenum steel alloys can add 100° to 200°C in heat resistance, but titanium can add 300°C to the melting point, and even more to the point at which it begins to weaken —enough to keep its integrity beyond temperatures that something like burning aviation fuel can attain. If titanium girders and, perhaps more important, bolts, had been used in the World Trade Center towers, they would still be standing. Even titanium cladding of steel girders would do a lot to increase their fire- and corrosion-resistance. At the moment, titanium is more expensive, but with new formation methods and new ore discoveries in Australia, volume production of girders could bring down the cost substantially and would do more than almost any other factor toward making the building resistant to a terrorist attack. Its greater strength and lower density would also make possible a more flexible design for the building as a whole. Jon Roland Austin, Texas
Your plan for a terrorist-proof skyscraper does much to improve safety and escape features but little to improve the structure that must be able to withstand the impact of a bomb, airplane, etc. A weak outer shell incapable of resisting significant horizontal forces was exactly the reason the World Trade Center buildings fell down; the fact that they fell vertically was a miracle preventing even greater destruction.
y
When I saw your April cover, I thought, “Finally—an article about the realism of virtual games.” Instead I picked up a six-page advertisement for Microsoft’s new game. Graphical and sensory realism in videogames has increased dramatically in the past few years. Some games soon to come have almost photorealistic screenshots, and I expected that an article with a cover picture comparing a real to a virtual Porsche would have a slightly broader base of analysis. And am I supposed to be impressed that some videogame nerd comes close to professional lap times? This isn’t an article about science or technology; it’s a promotion for Forza with a side examination of the differences/similarities of real and virtual racecar drivers. The content of the article is very impressive, but it’s not objective enough for the cover story of your magazine.
(CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE)
POPULAR SCIENCE ONLINE
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (CONTINUED) The only way to build a terroristproof skyscraper is to make the outer shell sufficiently resistant to horizontal loads such that they cannot penetrate the outer shell more than several feet. This requires substantial reinforcedconcrete or structural-steel floors, not weak joist-supported floors that offer little if any resistance to horizontal forces. These materials are more expensive, yes; significantly so, no. Buildings of the old generation (e.g., the Empire State Building) would have been able to resist such forces without falling down. Lawrence Fischer Sarasota, Fla.
Flying Fish The A380 may be a big airplane on the outside [“Birth of a Titan,” April], but I bet your readers would be more interested in the size of the seats and the amount of seating space between rows. This thing could be nothing more than the largest flying sardine can ever built. John Bannister Sarasota, Fla.
The Spam Solution Columnist Cory Doctorow is correct to advise everyone to switch to lessvulnerable operating systems, browsers and mail clients to combat the phalanx of wankers we face each day as we traverse the world through the Internet [“Spam and Punishment,” Plugged In, Soapbox, April]. The only thing is that most users are barely sentient when it comes to using computers, and the burden for the fix shouldn’t be on the users anyway. I have two ideas that I think are better and put the responsibility to fix the problem where it belongs, which is with the Internet service providers, hosting companies and software providers that have created and perpetuated the mess. First, the governing bodies of the Internet should require the vendors and users of mail-server software to sell and use only software that effectively deals with security issues such as spoofing and unauthorized users. Second, require service-hosting companies to respond to spammers and the Web sites they promote and to users of unsecured mail servers by pulling their access, or 16
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
else the hosting companies would face having their block of addresses pulled. We vigilante geeks would then only need to identify the abusers to the keepers of the gates. Any users having their network-address ranges blocked or Web and mail servers taken down would need to prove that they had brought their software into compliance and would face even harsher penalties for not properly responding to fix any problems in the future. No ineffective laws or taxpayers’ dollars would be needed in this system. I predict that the problem would disappear in a year.
[email protected]
YOUR GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S POPSCI
From “americium 241” to “z coordinates”
AMERICIUM 241
PAGE 75
ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE
81
ANTI-PIRACY GOUGING
52
ATLAS MOUNTAINS
70
BEETLE, SINGLE-TESTICLED
105
BROKEN-HEART SYNDROME
48
BROWNIAN MOTION
74
BUBONIC PLAGUE, RETURN OF
48
Barry Williams Marietta, Ga.
CAR-PUTER
87
CENSORSHIP
52
Hurricane Virus?
CROP-CIRCLE MAKERS
94
DRAGON STORM
83
DUAL-CLUTCH GEARBOX
30
E=MC2
74
EMERGENCY BAILOUT
105
ENCELADUS
84
FUEL LOSS, MYSTERIOUS
70
GILDING INDIANA
91
GPS 3-D COCKPIT DISPLAY
38
HOLOGRAPHIC TV
60
IAPETUS
85
ICE VOLCANOES
82
INTERGALACTIC SPAM
101
J. EDGAR HOOVER
128
MAGNETOSPHERE COLLISION
39
METHANE OCEAN
84
MUSIC-READY PHONES
19
“A Must-Have Magazine”_
ON-DEMAND AIR TAXIS
37
I should really try to get a job at POPULAR SCIENCE. I push this magazine on people as if it were the Bible or something. My dad has had a subscription since the early ’70s; I can remember it from when I was a wee little shortie. I always used to grab it from the mailbox and read it before giving it to him. The What’s New section of this magazine is what makes it. Gadget central. And who doesn’t like gadgets? In recent years, they have added another section called How 2.0, which comes a very close second. Check it out and tell me they don’t have some cool little projects. Tell me! posted by Dave Wolf, Eclectic Ramblings davewolf.net
PARIS HILTON’S GRANDFATHER
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PRINGLE-CAN ANTENNA
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RADIOACTIVE TOOTHPASTE
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SATURN’S E RING
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SCARY CRACKING NOISES
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SPACE CATAPULT
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STEVE AUSTIN
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TOPSY-TURVY SENSATIONS
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TROJAN SHARK
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UPCHUCK FACTOR
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VELVET ELVIS
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Z COORDINATES
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I found your article “Biological Warfare” [March] very interesting and very scary. It would be great if the research would lead to curing some diseases. But, as stated in the article, by expanding the research facilities, you become vulnerable to disgruntled employees or transportation problems. One thing concerned me even more: natural disasters. How are these facilities protected from hurricanes (the Galveston, Texas, facility in particular) or tornados or fire? Couldn’t a hurricane lift the roof off a facility and quickly spread a deadly virus? Brian Ashcraft Overland Park, Kan.
_FROM THE BLOGS Last month, more than 650 Web logs linked to popsci.com. A sample:
JUNE 2005
[TWWW.POPSCI.COM]
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YOUR GUIDE TO POPULAR SCIENCE ONLINE
WE PODCAST FROM
E3
JOHN B. CARNETT
Get the latest buzz from the world’s biggest gaming conference as POPULAR SCIENCE files daily podcasts from the show floor. Hear interviews with game designers, commentary from gamers and original songs!
MAY 17–19 NEW EPISODES EVERY DAY!
DIY
GLOBALFLYER
While Steve Fossett was circling the globe nonstop, we had Brad Amstutz do the same—in a simulator. It went fine, until the hallucinations began.
!
MORE FROM CASSINI
YOU, ON TITAN: FOOTAGE FROM NASA’S SATURN PROBE
» » »
WHAT’S NEW HEADLINES HOW 2.0
Watch real people being flipped and spun like rag dolls on a heinous roller coaster! It’s a prototype of a customizable virtual-reality thrill ride.
BESTOF WHAT’S NEXT
THE EINSTEIN FILES MEET SCIENTISTS WHO MATCHED HIS PRODUCTIVITY
How to build the ultimate robot—and grasp the tech behind it
Fling me to the moon: Watch NASA’s proposed space catapult in action
Sick of the blue screen of death? Gear for PC users moving to a Mac
WHAT’SNEW INSIDE
POPULAR
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PIPING SUNLIGHT INDOORS 28 AUDI’S FIRST-EVER DUAL-CLUTCH GEARBOX 30 WIELD YOUR VERY OWN LIGHT SABER 34
GADGETS
Finally, Cellphones That Rock A new breed of mobiles gets serious about playing your digital music
L U I S B R U N O ; I N S E T: C O U R T E S Y M O T O R O L A
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THE NEXT TIME someone asks who’s on the line, you can say it’s Bono, because 2005 is shaping up to be the year of the music phone. Previously, phones that played music had limited storage, and queuing up a song was cumbersome. But as carriers roll out MP3friendly high-speed cellphone networks, phone manufacturers have been inspired to boost memory and design phones with dedicated PLAY buttons, built-in speakers, FM transmitters and graphic equalizers. In other words, they’re functional MP3 players. Before too long, you’ll be able to download songs directly to your phone, wherever you are, in less than a minute. Motorola announced that it will release a phone that works with iTunes this year, and a slew of competing services are expected to follow. By year’s end, every major handset manufacturer will offer tune-centric models, including Sony Ericsson’s Walkman W800 and Nokia’s N91—which will have a whopping four gigabytes on board—along with the ones on this page. Here are a few of the best you’ll soon be able to get your hands, and ears, on. —SUZANNE KANTRA KIRSCHNER
MOTOROLA E725
CARRIER: Not set NETWORKS: CDMA, EV-DO BATTERY: 4 hours talk, 7 days standby MEMORY: 41MB internal; MiniSD FM Transmitter
Music jog dial
SAMSUNG P777
CARRIER: Cingular NETWORKS: GSM, EDGE BATTERY: 5 hours talk, 8 days standby MEMORY: 100MB internal
Graphic equalizer
MP3 instant-on button Stereo speakers
LG 8100
CARRIER: Verizon NETWORKS: CDMA, EV-DO BATTERY: 3 hours talk, 9 days standby MEMORY: 512MB internal; MiniSD
Dedicated music buttons
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WHAT’S NEW | PHOTOGRAPHY
Gutsy Shooters
Casio Exilim Pro EX-P505
Satisfy your inner Avedon and Scorsese with this elite corps of hybrid digital cameras
CAMCORDER KUDOS: When using Past Movie mode you can record the five seconds before you press the shutter button. Or opt for Short Movie mode, which takes eight-second video snippets with one click. Audio is captured in stereo. MPEG-4 video » f3.3–3.6, 5x optical zoom » $500 » exilim.casio.com
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YOUR CAMERA-CAMCORDER combo may deliver 30 frames per second at VGA resolution—sounds great, right?—but in reality, the result is only as good as the file’s density. Your camera doesn’t have the processing power to compress video files without losing rich detail. These four new pocket shooters are among the first armed with the guts (specifically, the latest chipsets) to compress your movies into true TV-quality files. Motion JPEG, AVI, QuickTime and MPEG-4 all bang out at least an hour’s worth of TV-quality video on a one-gig card. MPEG-4 is at the top of the compression food chain because it gathers, squishes, and transports video data while preserving richness. Result: sharper video but with a much lighter toll on the battery and memory—both of which are at a premium in the ever shrinking world of digital imaging. The five-megapixel cameras we’ve chosen here offer the best mix of camcorder features and video brawn.—JACKSON LYNCH
Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z5 CAMCORDER KUDOS: To counterbalance camera movement, the Z5 shifts the CCD micrometers in the opposite direction. In low-light shooting, the camera amplifies the image sensor’s sensitivity to collect more light, and if you need an extreme close-up, there’s Super Macro mode, which can focus at as close as four tenths of an inch. Motion JPEG video » f2.8–4.5, 12x optical zoom » $500 » kmpi.konicaminolta.us
Canon S2 IS CAMCORDER KUDOS: The S2 IS is the first to snap full five-megapixel still images while video recording, so you never have to choose between the two modes again. What’s more, the camera features optical image stabilization, CD-quality stereo sound capture, and a wind screen to reduce ambient noise. AVI video » f2.7–3.5, 12x optical zoom » $500 » usa.canon.com
Sony DSC-M1 CAMCORDER KUDOS: The M1 is about the size of a deck of cards and, in true camcorder style, is held vertically in movie mode. Its 2.5-inch LCD swivels up to reveal the navigation and menu controls. It takes five-megapixel stills, and when you snap a shot in the “hybrid” function, it also captures eight seconds of video (the five seconds before and three seconds after the shot). MPEG-4 video » f3.5–4.4, 3x optical zoom » $500 » sonystyle.com
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POPSCI
Visit popsci.com/cameras for a full list
ON THE WEB of cameras that take TV-quality video.
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C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : L U I S B R U N O ( 2 ) ; C O U RT E S Y C A N O N ; L U I S B R U N O ; I N S E T: C R A I G L O V E L L / C O R B I S
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WHAT’S NEW | GENERAL INNOVATION
Do the Robot!
Got a screwdriver handy? ’Botbuilding’s going mainstream
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IF YOU’VE EVER THOUGHT it’d be cool to make your own robot but didn’t because your options were Legos (ho-hum) or fabricating one from scratch (who’s got the time?), listen up: RadioShack’s new Vex Robotics Design System (www.vexrobotics.com) is the ultimate compromise. The $300 kit contains more than 500 parts, including steel plates, motors, radio receivers and a six-channel remote. What to build? That’s up to you. The manual, created at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, is more engineering primer than instruction book, providing tasks, not plans for preconceived designs. We’re working on one that can open bottles.—JOE BROWN
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POPSCI Tell us what you’d build T ON THE WEB for a chance to win a kit. Details are at popsci.com/vex.
]
GREGOR HALENDA; STYLING BY STEPHANIE BASRELIAN
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WHAT’S NEW | HOME TECH
Sweet Seat Relief
Sitting on hundreds of little springs has never felt so good
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AT AGE 12, Jerome Caruso won a GM design competition with a car he carved from a block of wood. Since then he’s racked up more than 70 patents by designing everything from freezers to furniture, including the chair President Jimmy Carter sat in during his inauguration and, now, this Herman Miller Cella office chair (hermanmiller.com). Four years in the works, the Cella’s seat and back are made up of 1,578 circular polypropylene pads, each half an inch in diameter. Six curved arms splay from each pad and connect to its neighbors, about a quarter of an inch away. The shape of each arc determines how stiff each pad feels. By varying the arms’ curvature, Caruso was able to design the chair’s topography so that it would offer more support in specific areas of the upper and lower back and, most important, under the two sit bones, which carry the brunt of our seated weight. Cost of having a smarter seat than your boss: $450 to $650.—JENNY EVERETT SITTING PRETTY A web of circular pads makes up the unique suspension system in the Cella office chair, available this summer.
CELLA’S PERFECT PRESSURE MAP The chair offers the most support under your sit bones [red], which have a stronger structure and more cushioning than your legs.
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C O U RT E S Y H E R M A N M I L L E R
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WHAT’S NEW | HOME TECH
Moving on to Greener Fixtures
Parabolic mirror 1
A clever system that pipes sunlight into homes is set to ease your energy-bill woes
T LIGH SUN
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NATURAL LIGHT has a positive effect on human health. But skylights—our go-to source for delivering sunlight indoors—transmit heat, taxing your A/C system. Sunlight Direct (sunlight-direct.com) is testing a smarter approach: hybrid solar lighting (HSL). HSL captures direct sunlight while excluding heat-saturated infrared rays and uses optical fibers to channel it to indoor fixtures. On a sunny day, this system can transmit 50,000 lumens, enough to illuminate 1,000 square feet. Beta installations began in May at the American Museum of Science and Energy in Tennessee. Coming to a ceiling near you, for $8,000, by 2007.—PATRICK DI JUSTO
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A four-foot parabolic aluminum mirror tracks the sun using GPS and reflects full-spectrum sunlight to a nine-inch secondary mirror.
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A thin coating on the secondary mirror reflects visible light but not heat-carrying infrared light.
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Visible light is concentrated into a single 1.5-inch-diameter bundle of 127 plastic fiber-optic cables, each three millimeters in diameter.
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Light snakes through up to 30 feet of cable to enter the house. Approximately 50 percent of the light makes it to the ceiling fixtures. (Until fiber optics become more efficient and less expensive, HSL will be installed only in the top story.)
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Bundles of 15 fibers plug into each glass diffusion tube in the fixture. Hundreds of angled grooves etched into the surface of each tube spray sunlight evenly throughout the room.
INSIDE THE FIXTURE
Fluorescent tubes
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mirror
Fiber-optic 3 bundle
T LIGH SUN
Fiber-optic cable
Fixture
4
5
THE SUM OF SUN’S BENEFITS
Diffusion tubes Sensor
2 Secondary
A sensor continually measures lumen output and sends a signal to dimmable fluorescent tubes to raise electric light levels when it’s cloudy. JUNE 2005
NUMBER OF SUNNY DAYS PER YEAR
KWH SAVED PER YEAR
SAVINGS PER YEAR*
JUNEAU, AK
110
2,904
$232.30
SEATTLE, WA
172
4,541
$363.30
ST. LOUIS, MO
208
5,491
$439.30
NEW YORK, NY
212
5,597
$447.75
MIAMI, FL
256
6,758
$540.65
PHOENIX, AZ
310
8,184
CITY
Sources: National Climatic Data Center, U.S. Department of Energy
$654.70 *based on national average of $.08 per kWh
I L L U S T R AT I O N S : K R I S H O L L A N D , M A F I C S T U D I O S , I N C
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WHAT’S NEW | AUTO TECH
Transmission Transition Two clutches, no waiting; a revolutionary gearbox charms street racers and Sunday drivers alike
»
AUTOMATICS ARE EASY, but everyone knows manual transmissions have more fun. And so-called performance manu-matics, the halfhearted compromise, don’t deliver the brisk response you get from a stick shift. Until now. Audi’s parent company, Volkswagen Group, has developed a new transmission dubbed Direct-Shift Gearbox (DSG) that is a manual at heart but can also do the shifting for you—fast. Whether you finesse the Formula One–style paddle shifters or select the auto mode, DSG changes gears in just two tenths of a second, certainly faster than any automatic, not to mention faster than it’s humanly possible to shift a conventional manual. Notably, its twin clutches let this happen without interrupting torque during acceleration. Look for DSG in the 2006 Audi A3, arriving late this year—and, we imagine, leaving the lot in a hurry.—MATTHEW PHENIX
2006 2006 AUDI AUDI A3 A3 3.2 3.2 QUATTRO QUATTRO PRICE: $30,000 (EST.) ENGINE: 3.2-LITER V6 POWER: 250 HP, 236 LB.-FT. TORQUE 0–60: 6.3 SEC. TOP SPEED: LIMITED TO 130 MPH
» BOX OF TRICKS
A traditional manual gearbox has one input shaft (to bring the engine’s power into the transmission), one clutch (to disconnect the engine and transmission during shifting) and one output shaft (to drive the wheels). DSG has two of each. The input shafts (A, B)— one nestled inside the other— are flanked by the two output shafts (C, D). Each input shaft operates three of the six forward gears. This configuration allows two gears to be engaged simultaneously—one active and one on deck. When it’s time to shift, DSG opens one clutch (F) the instant the other (E) closes, eliminating the typical interruption of power to the wheels. A central controller [not shown] gathers information from a dozen sensors that measure engine speed, throttle position, braking, and so on, to anticipate the next gear and preselect it.
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C
D
[ OUTPUT SHAFTS ] A
B
[ INPUT SHAFTS ]
E
F
[TO ENGINE ]
[ CLUTCHES ]
AUDI’S NEW GEARBOX SHIFTS FOUR TIMES AS FAST AS THE AVERAGE HUMAN HEART BEATS.
POPULAR SCIENCE
JUNE 2005
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THE GOODS [ Bass-Boosted Bud
Brew for Two
Shure E4c » Airflow creates bass in earphones but also lets in noise. Shure encloses its new buds’ speakers in a vented box within the casing, bumping up bass while buffering the inner ear from outside racket. $300 » shure.com
Krups KP1010 » The first podbrewing coffee maker with two separate spouts, it’ll do two different kinds of coffee at the same time. It’s also the only pod brewer with a filter. $190 » www.krups.com
Power Pedal
Ratchet Job
Snap-On SGDMRCE4 » The gears of ordinary ratcheting screwdrivers use the same teeth to limit motion in either direction. This pivoting model uses separate teeth on opposing sides of a central cog, resulting in twice the load-bearing ability of Snap-On’s previous model. $25 » snapon.com
A Better Batterer Chef’s Choice 840 » This waffle iron is hinged to keep the top griddle parallel to the bottom at all times, so your Belgian beauties come out uniformly thick. $70 » chefschoice.com
Flexible Phone System
Motorola SD4504 » Add up to eight peripherals to this land-line base station—like a VGA camera ($80—use the handset as a baby monitor) or a cellphone dock ($100). Available in July. $80 » motorola.com
Designated Hitter QMotions-Baseball » Clamp the sleeve around your own bat, and swing for real in Xbox or PC baseball games. Four optical sensors in the plate track your swing’s arc and speed. $60 » qmotions.com
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Phone Drone
Sony Ericsson ROB-1 » This 4.5-inch spybot gets its orders from your Java-enabled Bluetooth phone. Its VGA camera can beam pics or stream video from up to 165 feet away, and its lens tilts. $250 » sonyericsson.com
Formula-One Vacuum
Dyson DC15 The Ball » In their new vac, Dyson replaced wheels with one large ball and linked the brush head to the handle so that when you twist the grip, the vacuum turns. It’ll take a 90degree corner without lifting off the floor. $600 » dyson.com
Freeplay Freecharge » Working the foot pump will generate up to 480 amps of 12volt electricity— enough to revive your dead car battery, or any gadget that has a 12V cigarette-lighter plug. $200 » freeplay.net
20 HOT PRODUCTS THAT (ALMOST) SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES BY JOE BROWN
In-the-Know Navigation
TomTom GO 700 » Pair it via Bluetooth with your GSM cell to download live traffic and weather info, or use it as a hands-free for your mobile; 2.5-gig hard drive. $900 » tomtom.com
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WHAT’S NEW Cord-Managing Medusa
Bluetooth-er
Motorola DC800 » This device can broadcast or receive a Bluetooth stream. Plug your home stereo into the standard headphone jack to play music from your Bluetooth MP3 player— or vice versa. $60 » motorola.com
Power Sentry PowerSquid » It’s a power strip minus the strip: Each of the five female sockets is attached to its own cord, so bulky plugs won’t block other outlets. $15 » powersentry.com
Power Plans
Plantronics Tahiti » To charge this Bluetooth headset, you can use your Nokia, Motorola, Siemens or Sony Ericsson charger or the included AAA-powered charging holster; 25 hours of talk time; weighs in at less than nine grams. $200 » plantronics.com
Radio-Friendly Music
JamPlug FM » Plug this FM transmitter directly into your guitar, and turn any radio into an amp. Six channels to choose from; lithium-ion battery lasts two to four hours. $50 » jamplug.com
Caddy Shack Bag Boy NXO Series Deluxe Cart Bag » It’s the only golf bag to employ rubber grippers inside the 14 sleeves to keep your clubs from falling out. Stash a 12-pack in the insulated pocket. $175 » bagboycompany.com
Storage Included PalmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager » The first PDA with a hard drive, Palm’s new flagship model has four gigs of disk space, 802.11b Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and native support for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Acrobat files; 320x480 screen. $500 » palmone.com
Cool Shoes
Brooks Trance 5 » Strands of silver woven into the insole, heel and tongue of Brooks’s new running shoes channel heat from your feet out vents in the back. $135 » brooksrunning.com
Future Fuel Fireplace Jedi Toy Trick
Master Replicas Lightsaber » Two motion sensors in the hilt trigger Lucaslicensed Star Wars Episode III sound effects as you duel; 64 LEDs, wired in series, move light up or down the blade when you power it on or off. $120 » masterreplicas.com
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Pumped-Up PC Expansion Solutions Empire Series » Media Center PCs play movies and music, but you need an amplifier to hear the sound. This one has a 1,000-watt, 7.1-channel amp built in; 3GHz Pentium 4 processor; up to four gigs of ram. $3,000 » www.expansionsolutions.com
Hearth & Home Aqueon » The world’s first consumer hydrogenburning fireplace electrolyzes water to harvest its H2. The combustion’s byproduct is oxygen, so you don’t need to install a chimney. $50,000 » hearthnhome.com
HEADLINES
DISCOVERIES, ADVANCES & DEBATES IN SCIENCE AND THE WORLD
INSIDE
POPULAR
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A SPACE-BASED CATAPULT 38 • HOLOGRAPHIC EYES 40 • ARE HIGH-TECH PASSPORTS SECURE? 43 • OUR WANING LIFE SPAN 45
I L L U S T R AT I O N : K R I S H O L L A N D , M A F I C S T U D I O S , I N C . ; P H O T O G R A P H : C O U RT E S Y J O E Y P O N T H I E U X / N A S A L A N G L E Y R E S E A R C H C E N T E R
WHERE TO? If NASA has its way, futuristic air-taxi jets like this one will someday ferry passengers to rural locales.
Head-up display
• Virtual terrain
[TRANSPORTATION]
Cab It to the Hinterlands!
This month NASA and friends show off the air-taxi system they hope will breathe new life into small-town airports
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HE TEXAS CATTLE-COUNTRY TOWN OF GRANBURY (POP.: 5,718) IS AN IDEAL
spot for weekend getaways. Located about 65 miles southwest of Dallas, it boasts a stone opera house built in 1886, a double-decker riverboat, a wellworn Jesse James legend—everything except regular airline service. But if an air-taxi demonstration in Danville, Virginia, this month goes as planned, tourists could soon be zipping in and out of Granbury as though it were Dallas. The demonstration will showcase the latest technologies underpinning the Small Aircraft Transportation System, a point-to-point travel scheme devised by NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the aircraft industry. The aim is simple: to enable hundreds of thousands of travelers to sidestep the nation’s overtaxed hub-and-spoke airports by kick-starting on-demand air-taxi service at the 5,400 or so tiny airstrips around the U.S. [see “Taxi! Taxi!” October 2002]. SATS could relieve congestion at major hubs by as much as 10 percent by 2010, says Shahid Siddiqi, an aeronautical engineer with the National Consor-
•
SHOW ME THE WAY Synthetic Vision, one of several new cockpit tools for air-taxi jets, generates a photoreal image of oncoming terrain so that pilots can fly safely in harsh weather.
tium for Aviation Mobility, which represents the manufacturers, universities and airport officials that have teamed with NASA to develop the necessary technologies. Less a single revolutionary system than a broad, high-tech initiative for change over the coming years, SATS could make small airports just as accessible as big ones—rain or shine. Today when visibility is low, the FAA permits only one aircraft at a time to
TICKER 03.15.05 STEM-CELL FACTORY OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS DEVISE A WAY TO MASS-PRODUCE EMBRYONIC-STEM-CELL LINES NOW IN SHORT SUPPLY /// POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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HEADLINES [TRANSPORTATION]
CONTINUED
approach or depart from any airport without a control tower or radar. The result is often lengthy holding patterns, ground delays or no service at all. With new technologies, such as a GPSbased 3-D cockpit display that shows the positions of nearby aircraft, several planes can be routed safely through the soup. This collision-avoidance device, several versions of which will be available for lightweight planes next year, can coordinate with similarly-equipped planes to guide pilots toward the best traffic sequence. It can also communicate with a virtual air-traffic controller on the ground, sparing cash-strapped communities the seven-figure expense of installing a tower.
Air taxis could ease traffic at major hubs by 10 percent five years from now. Other tools that will make flying air taxis easier include head-up displays that project instrument panels onto the windshield and forward-looking radar that generates images of oncoming terrain. All of these technologies will be featured at the Danville demo, where six planes, including a Cirrus SR22 single-engine prop and an Adam Aircraft A700 jet, will be on display, and several will take off and land under the supervision of a virtual controller. Meanwhile, a few air-taxi firms are already gearing up for business. POGO Jet in Bridgeport, Connecticut, run by Peoples Express founder Donald Burr and former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall, has ordered 75 of the $2.1-million A700s. And DayJet in Delray Beach, Florida, plans to buy several hundred of the new sub-$1million six-seat Eclipse business jets. Yet full deployment of SATS could take 20 years or more as puddle-jumpers and unequipped aircraft are upgraded with the new technologies. “This is a paradigm shift,” says Peter McHugh, the SATS program manager at the FAA. “Five years ago the FAA was not talking about small airports as part of the transportation system. There was no national strategy. Today there is.”—JOSHUA TOMPKINS
[SPACE]
Spun and Flung
Engineers test a radical way to travel to the moon: by catapult NASA’S REVAMPED APPROACH TO SPACE EXPLORATION puts two tasks atop its to-do list: Return to the moon and save money. A 90-mile-long solar-powered tether spinning around Earth could help the agency check off both items. Twirling like a baton, the bottom tip would autonomously grab hold of a manned crew capsule in low-Earth orbit and catapult it to the moon, flinging astronauts toward their destination without guzzling thousands of pounds of rocket fuel on the way. The system, called the Momentum-Exchange Electrodynamic Reboost Tether, or MXER for short, is more than just a quirky physics project. With $1.5 million in funding from NASA, engineers at Tennessee Technological University, along with scientists at Tethers Unlimited in Bothell, Washington, successfully tested a 1/10-scale model of the tether’s capture mechanism in a laboratory last March. Tossing astronauts moonward is the long-term goal, but at first the system would be used to lift satellites back into higher orbits. According to Tethers Unlimited president Rob Hoyt, this would save $500 million in rocket fuel over 10 years for a 4,400-pound payload. Hoyt hopes to have the MXER spinning in space by 2018.—GREGORY MONE
Tether
•
Catch mechanism
•
Boom
Crew capsule
•
•
1
PREPARE Spooled into a capsule, the tether is launched into orbit, where it unfurls to its full 90mile length. To start spinning, a power node at the center of the tether distributes electrical charge along its length. Masses on each end of the tether pivot around the node and keep the tether taut.
03.17.05 IS THE DAMAGE DONE? EVEN IF WE REDUCED GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS TO ZERO TODAY, GLOBAL TEMPERATURES WOULD STILL CLIMB BY ONE DEGREE FAHRENHEIT
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POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
4
FLING When the capsule is at the top of the tether’s arc— and farthest from Earth— the tether lets it go.
Solar panels
5
DROP After transferring its momentum to the moon-bound capsule, the tether drops into a lower orbit and uses Earth’s magnetic field to boost itself back into a higher orbit [see inset]. •
3 •
Central power node
SPIN The tether continues its rotation, swinging the capsule along at 3,600 mph, into ever higher orbits.
2
JASON LEE
CATCH The tether speeds along its orbital path at 21,000 mph, so the crew capsule is programmed to be in the right place at the right time. The 550-pound catch mechanism looks like a square lasso. When the capsule comes within range, sensors trigger the lasso to cinch tight around the target’s 200-foot-long boom in a fraction of a second.
A MAGNETIC PUSH FROM BEHIND After flinging its payload, the tether loses speed, and its orbit shrinks. To climb back up for the next job, it takes advantage of Earth’s electrically charged magnetosphere. Using energy collected by its solar panels and an onboard avionics system, the tether ejects electrons from its base that collide with the magnetosphere. The resulting force pushes the tether farther from Earth. Magnetosphere
Tether reboost
Payload pickup
TICKER /// 1.10.03 VIRALRISE ANNIVERSARY THEBY COMPUTER VIRUS CELEBRATES ITS 20-YEAR FORMER OF RESEARCH SOUTHERN IN CALIFORNIA STUDENT FRED AND SEA LEVELS WOULD FOUR INCHES 2100, ACCORDING TO A STUDY BY THE ANNIVERSARY; NATIONAL CENTER FOR UNIVERSITY ATMOSPHERIC BOULDER,GRAD COLORADO /// POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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HEADLINES [INVENTIONS]
[MEDICAL TECH]
I Was a Trojan Shark
The Eyes Tell All
Tucked inside a robotic great white, filmmaker Fabien Cousteau captures rare footage of the deep-sea world
»
AT 1,200 POUNDS AND 14 FEET long, “Troy” is chunkier than the average great white shark. He might smell kind of funny too. But do the pods of sharp-toothed predators he swam among last winter know that, inside, there’s just a man? Or that it was Fabien Cousteau, grandson of pioneering undersea explorer Jacques, surreptitiously recording their every movement? “My hope,” Cousteau quips, “is that they think, ‘Hey, that looks strangely like my retarded cousin from Australia!’ ” Cousteau spent more than 100
hours in the $100,000 submarine, custombuilt by engineers at E.P. Industries in El Segundo, California, shooting video footage for a documentary film on shark cognition that’s due out by the end of the summer. Using a camouflage device, he believes, allows scientists to capture animal behavior in a purer way (most great-white footage is shot by divers inside a cage). To wit: Cousteau, posing as Troy, is the only person to ever capture on film a female shark attacking another female.—KALEE THOMPSON
A holographic contact lens sees trouble brewing inside the body
Infrared light images a holographic lens.
»
A diver films Cousteau disguised as a shark.
The head flips open like a can lid, allowing the diver to enter and exit the sub underwater.
A closed-circuit rebreather with four air tanks allows Cousteau to swim for up to six hours without resurfacing.
An infrared video camera is hidden inside a rubber suckerfish attached to Troy’s back.
Cousteau uses a joystick to control Troy’s pneumatic propulsion system. Pistons drive pressurized air into cylinders, and cables flap the tail, mimicking the movement of a real shark.
For a realistic look, Troy’s shell is made of Skinflex, a soft, flexible material often used for prosthetics.
The two-inchthick hollow ribs are made of stainless steel. Superstrong plastic forms a double spine.
KALEIDOSCOPIC HOLOGRAMS like the ones stamped on your credit cards could soon wind up in the eyes of diabetics. Researchers at Smart Holograms in Cambridge, England, have devised a contact lens that changes shape in response to glucose found in tears—a direct indicator of blood sugar. To find out whether it’s time for an insulin shot, the wearer would simply snap a picture of his eye with a handheld infrared camera that would then analyze changes in the hologram and display the results. Since nearly half of all diabetics wear contacts, the hologram lens—set to enter clinical trials next year—could be a convenient, painless alternative to traditional finger-prick tests. Early results show that it’s at least 50 percent more accurate. The lens contains your basic hologram: a clear, 10-micron-thick polymer film imprinted with a layer of dots that reflect light. What gives the hologram its sensitivity, and sets it apart from typical holograms, is a coat of synthetic receptors that bind to sugar molecules. The reaction causes the hologram to absorb water and swell (imperceptibly to the wearer), changing the length of the light waves reflected off the patterned film. Also in the works is a portable iPodshaped device that uses shape-shifting holograms to detect microbes such as anthrax and smallpox.—RENA MARIE PACELLA
04.12.05 SAFE CALL A STUDY BY THE DANISH CANCER SOCIETY FINDS NO LINK BETWEEN CELLPHONE USE AND THE RISK OF BRAIN TUMORS IN 1,249 SUBJECTS ///
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I L L U S T R AT I O N : J A S O N L E E ; P H O T O G R A P H S , F R O M T O P : C O U RT E S Y S M A RT H O L O G R A M S ; C O U RT E S Y M I K E H O O V E R
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HEADLINES
SHRINKAGE DEPT. Research updates on
the quest to make really tiny things
Your car will survive if a dry spot in the transmission shaves off a few microns of metal from first gear. Not so in a machine that’s just a few millionths of a meter long. At that size, one micron could be the motor. “Friction is a big consideration when building any machine, but microscopic ones are posing new challenges,” says Michael Dugger, a materials scientist at Sandia National Laboratories who studies friction on the microscopic scale. Thanks to sophisticated new building methods, ever tinier machines are finding their way into all manner of electronics, from rearprojection TVs to airbag sensors. Trouble is, the oil-based lubricants that keep many of them running smoothly degrade quickly under extreme heat. So Dugger and his colleagues have devised a tougher alternative: a lubricant made of nonstick tungsten disulfide (WS2) that can withstand temperatures up to 600°F. How do you apply it? One atomic layer at a time, by injecting a gaseous mix of tungsten and sulfur into an airtight chamber. The particles bind to the machine’s surface and to one another, creating a fine layer of WS2—and perhaps the most meticulous lube job on the planet.—JOE BROWN
05.25.05 FLYING METEOROLOGIST THE
I L L U S T R AT I O N : L - D O PA ; P H O T O G R A P H : C O U RT E S Y O F F I C E O F PA S S P O RT S E R V I C E S , U . S . D E PA RT M E N T O F S TAT E
LUBING UP THE MICROMACHINES
[SECURITY]
Meet Your 64Kb Passport New identity papers are harder to fake—and easier to spy on
»
RENEWING YOUR PASSPORT SOON? You may want to craft a tinfoil sleeve to store it in. That’s because the next generation of U.S. passports, set to hit travelers’ hands by September, will come with a radio transponder and a 64-kilobyte computer chip embedded in their back covers. The chip will store the same information that’s printed in your passport, and the transponder will broadcast it to a reader synced up to an inspector’s computer. It’s part of a cover-to-cover passport overhaul to make the document harder to counterfeit. Why the tinfoil? The transponders, also known as radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, can theoretically send their contents to readers as far as 15 feet away unless they’re shielded by metal. Privacy advocates worry that thieves could use their own readers to secretly swipe your data. But Frank Moss,
deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services, says the new passport’s cover will act as a shield, protecting the chip when the book is closed. Even when it’s open, Moss says, the chips will have a broadcast range of only about 10 centimeters and the data will be guarded by an encrypted digital signature. The U.S. State Department has spent an estimated $15 million developing the new chips, which are seen as the first step to biometric inspections. Initially, an officer will simply compare your face with the digital mug stored on the chip, but the government hopes to implement an on-the-spot face-recognition scan as early as 2007. “Eventually we’d like to compare the traveler’s image with a watch list,” Moss says. “We also have room on the chip to introduce iris or fingerprint scanning.” Tinfoil case sold separately.—MIKE HANEY
The RFID-equipped chip is only one of the new passport’s securityenhancing features. Here are some of the others:
RR RR RR •
RR
INTRICATE GRAPHICS Patriotic images with subtle details, such as fading color, can be easily checked by inspectors. PROPRIETARY PAPER Interior paper is custom manufactured exclusively for the passports, so it’s harder to fake. SPECIAL INKS Graphics are printed with invisible or optically variable inks; the latter change color based on how light strikes the page. ENHANCED HEAD SHOT Photos, now scanned and printed, are superimposed with graphics such as the eagle and wavy lines seen here.
WORLD’S MOST ADVANCED WEATHER SATELLITE, GOES N, IS SLATED TO LAUNCH FROM CAPE CANAVERAL ///
POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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T HEADLINES
[THE POPSCI POLL] RESULTS BASED ON 3,478 RESPONSES POSTED TO POPSCI.COM
IF IT WERE AFFORDABLE, WOULD YOU USE AN IRIS-SCAN SYSTEM TO LOCK YOUR HOME?
YES 79%
STATISTICALLY SPEAKING. . .
Good News for Social Security?
The U.S. leads in medical technology but not in longevity. Scientists now predict that the average U.S. life span may decrease over the next 50 years
77 AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY FOR PEOPLE BORN IN THE U.S. TODAY
4—9
Months by which obesity reduces today’s average U.S. life expectancy
2—5
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VOTE ON NEXT MONTH’S POLL AT POPSCI.COM
82
AVERAGE LIFE expectancy for people born in Japan today
30.5
»
NO 21%
AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY FOR PEOPLE BORN IN THE U.S. IN 1900
Percent of U.S. adults who are obese
34
AVERAGE LIFE expectancy for people born in Sierra Leone today
Years by which obesity is expected to reduce average U.S. life expectancy in 2055
[45] NUMBER OF COUNTRIES WITH LONGER LIFE EXPECTANCIES THAN THE U.S.
Compiled by Dawn Stover Sources: CIA World Factbook, National Center for Health Statistics, New England Journal of Medicine, United Nations
TO SEE NEXTMONTH’S POLL VISIT POPSCI.COM
HEADLINES [COMPUTERS]
Monster Mainframes Battle for Bragging Rights The world’s fastest supercomputer is about to get even faster. Can anyone outdo Blue Gene/L?
»
THE QUEST TO BUILD THE WORLD’S most potent supercomputer is like a never-ending Olympic event, with the pride of entire nations at stake. This summer, the U.S. will tighten its grip on the gold when engineers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory boost the speed of IBM’s reigning champion Blue Gene/L to an anticipated 270 teraflops—a floor-shaking 270 trillion calculations per second. That mark, which will make Blue Gene/L five times as fast as the competition, should hold for at least the next couple rounds of
➤
testing, says University of Tennessee computerscience professor Jack Dongarra, who twice a year helps rank the top 500 supercomputers. After all, neither the second- nor third-place machines—NASA’s 52-teraflop Columbia (named for the destroyed space shuttle) or the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology’s 36-teraflop Earth Simulator—is slated for a major upgrade anytime soon. Yet their designers have cause for backslapping, too: Collectively, the world’s best supercomputers are about 1,000 times as powerful as their predecessors of a decade
THE COMPUTER BLUE GENE/L IBM and Dept. of Energy Speed: 135.3 teraflops Processors: 65,536 OS: Linux
+
Runs simulations to assess the safety of the nation’s aging nuclear-weapons stockpile, easing the burden on the DOE’s other, slower supercomputer
➤
+
Conducts atmospheric and oceanic simulation, solidearth modeling, and atomic-energy research
HEADLINE FROM THE FUTURE
HOW IT WORKS
➤
Uses IBM’s system-on-achip technology to reduce cost and power needs. Each chip includes two processors, network hardware and memory
+
Supports space exploration projects such as designing flexible fabrics for new space suits and conducting fracture assessment on the International Space Station
COLUMBIA NASA Speed: 51.9 teraflops Processors: 10,240 OS: Linux
EARTH SIMULATOR Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology Speed: 35.9 teraflops Processors: 5,120 OS: Unix
WHAT IT DOES
➤
ago, thanks to the same trend of ever faster, ever cheaper processors that propels the personal-computer market. String enough of those processors together—Blue Gene/L, using the PowerPC architecture found in many PCs and other devices, will have 131,000 when finished—and you’ll get the kind of cyber-brawn necessary to do atmospheric modeling, crash simulation, and other huge tasks fraught with millions of interdependent variables too daunting for humans. Here, a look at how the world’s fastest data-crunchers stack up.—JOSHUA TOMPKINS
+
BEST CRUNCH SO FAR Modeling an incredible 16 million atoms, simulated the rapid resolidification of liquid tantalum to help test how metals react under extreme pressure Demonstrated its ability to predict the consequences of damage to an orbiting space shuttle in 24 hours (previous computers took three months)
Processors are teamed in groups of 512 (versus the the much smaller groups in other supercomputers) to streamline data pathways and facilitate huge jobs
+
+ Uses vector processors, each of which can crunch an array of numbers simultaneously; processors inside most supercomputers can handle only one calculation at a time
Simulated the phenomenon by which the Earth’s solid-iron inner core and liquid-iron outer core interact to generate the planet’s magnetic field
EVAN SNYDER
2025 CURED IN THE WOMB From a standard genetic test, doctors discover that a pregnant woman’s two-month-old fetus carries a gene that leads to fatal nerve damage, the symptoms of which won’t appear until age 40. What once was cause for alarm is now corrected in a routine prenatal microsurgery. Using tissue from the hospital’s stem-cell bank, surgeons implant healthy neural stem cells into the baby’s brain, where the new cells intermix with, and eventually displace, the diseased ones. Prenatal stem-cell implants are used to treat dozens of formerly incurable conditions, including diabetes and heart disease. —AS TOLD TO DAVID KOHN Evan Snyder is the director of stem-cell research at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He was a leading force behind the California Stem Cell Initiative, which will provide $3 billion for research over the next 10 years. Snyder is currently investigating the regenerative properties of stem cells for organ repair.
06.05.05 GREEN DAY MAYORS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE CONVENE IN SAN FRANCISCO TO SIGN “GREEN CITY” ACCORDS IN HONOR OF WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY ■
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I L L U S T R AT I O N : R O B K E L LY; P H O T O G R A P H S , F R O M T O P : R O S S R O B E RT S / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; N A S A ; G E T T Y I M A G E S
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SOAPBOX
THE UNDERWATER LAB • MELTING NUKE WASTE • WILLIE NELSON, OILMAN? • DARPA ROBOT RACE PREVIEW
MEDIASCOPE EXAMINING THE SCIENCE BEHIND SCIENCE NEWS COVERAGE BY REBECCA SKLOOT
I decided to write an article about the science behind health-media freak-outs. Every epidemiologist I talked to—even those whose research depended on West Nile being a threat—said the coverage was hype. The same was true for most of the stories I investigated: The Impending Mad Cow Disease Epidemic, Hanta Virus Wiping Out the West, The Return of Bubonic Plague—none were completely true to the science. And nothing has changed. I bet few people in America went online or looked at a TV or newspaper in mid-February without encountering some variation of this: “In a study published just in time
Anyone could lose a loved one. Are we all at risk of dropping dead from this?
Hype That Breaks Your Heart
THE ISSUE: Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the news hit that a breakup or a surprise party could kill us. Well, not quite
W
HEN MOSQUITOES BROUGHT WEST NILE VIRUS TO NEW YORK, ALL THE PAPERS
said it was going to be the next big deadly epidemic (which, of course, it wasn’t). The day the news came out, I was in my garden in Pittsburgh, and a mosquito landed on my arm. I smacked it, then immediately thought, “Oh my god! West Nile virus!” So I ran inside and did something I hadn’t done since grade-school summer camp: I doused myself with insect repellant. Then I got a whiff of the fumes and remembered I just read an article saying insecticides cause Parkinson’s disease! I’m only slightly ashamed to say I screamed, ran like a girl, and jumped in the shower. Then I came to my senses. I was a trained scientist who knew better than to fall for every this-is-going-to-kill-you headline; if those articles flipped me out, what were they doing to the general public?
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for Valentine’s Day . . . doctors reported how a tragic or shocking event can stun the heart.” Deadly Broken Heart syndrome made headlines from Boston to Bombay. It was on the front page of the New York Times. The Internet buzzed. TV news ran images of people being rushed from ambulances, heart monitors flatlining. Responding to press releases from Johns Hopkins University, the media reported that sudden stress—from, say, the shock of a surprise party or the death of a loved one—can cause a surge of adrenaline that can, essentially, poison the heart muscle and cause something that resembles a heart attack. According to ABC’s World News Tonight, “there is no way to predict who is most likely to suffer Broken Heart syndrome” and it “may be more common than most doctors realize.” Scary stuff—anyone can lose a loved one or walk into a room full of people yelling “Surprise!” Are we all at risk of dropping dead from this? Well, no. The media was reporting on research that didn’t prove anything.
C O L U M N I S T I L L U S T R AT I O N : R O B K E L LY; C O L U M N I S T P H O T O G R A P H : J O H N Z I B E L L ; P H O T O G R A P H S : J O H N B . C A R N E T T
INSIDE
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SOAPBOX There was no broken-heart study. There was a “small observational case series,” which is basically a group of scientists saying, Here’s something we noticed that warrants investigation. Of the thousands of people in Baltimore who experienced sudden stress in three years, this report looked at just 19 people. The Times reported that the syndrome seems to affect more women than men—which might have something to do with the fact that there was only one man in the sample for it to affect. What the research found was a potential connection between sudden stress and a reversible heart syndrome (which no one actually died from). But connection does not mean cause, and cause can’t be determined without a large, carefully controlled study. When I spoke with Redford Williams, director of the Behavioral Medicine Research Center at Duke University, who has been studying the effects of stress on the heart since 1965, he was downright furious about the coverage of Broken Heart syndrome: “[It’s] about as common as getting struck by lightning, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it, aside from avoiding sudden stress, which is impossible.” This kind of hype distracts from real problems, he says, such as chronic stress—caused by high-pressure jobs, traffic jams, domestic problems and the like. “Chronic stress is far more common and costly in terms of the public health impact, lives lost and human suffering. And it is preventable.” Last year, a bona fide study of 50,000 people worldwide found that chronic stress is as much of a risk factor for deadly heart disease as high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity are. Shame that didn’t get nearly the press Broken Heart syndrome did. ■
@
Get on your own soapbox! Write to [email protected] or [email protected].
➤
3 OTHER RECENT HEADLINES THAT MAY HAVE MISLED YOU
➤ “NEW AIDS SUPERBUG” News broke ➤ worldwide of an AIDS “superstrain.” “Unimaginably aggressive,” resistant to drugs, kills in months—all based on one guy whose infection progressed fast. Cause for further study? Absolutely. For hysteria? No way.
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PLUGGED IN YOUR PERSONAL-TECH ADVOCATE
BY CORY DOCTOROW
Rewriting the Web’s Rules THE ISSUE: A new global treaty could reform the insane
copyright rules that govern the Web today
A
DECADE AGO, THE PERPETUALLY PARANOID HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS TRIED TO
get Congress to de-fund the Internet. They failed, so they took their case to the United Nations and suckered the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the UN agency that draws up copyright treaties, into giving them a new set of global laws for copyright on the Internet. And WIPO got it completely wrong. It treated the Internet as a problem to be solved, a system that made copies too easily with too little control. Yet in the ensuing years, it has utterly failed to stop infringement. Instead we’ve seen only a series of showarrests of scientists, thousands of indiscriminate lawsuits against file-sharers, and laws that make it easy to censor political opponents and harass competitors. Now there’s a chance to rewrite these old wrongs. Activists at WIPO are drafting a new treaty called Access to Knowledge (A2K) that will celebrate the Internet’s
“VIAGRA NOW MENDING HEARTS” Researchers showed that Viagra may prevent heart enlargement or repair damage in enlarged hearts. Interesting research, but it was done in mice. There’s no indication that it works in humans.
➤ “STUDY BOLSTERS CANCER–RED
MEAT LINK” Well, sort of, but many of the study’s numbers weren’t statistically significant. The reality: There was about a 40 percent increased risk of cancer but only in 1 percent of people who consumed large amounts of meat.
C O L U M N I S T I L L U S T R AT I O N : R O B K E L LY; C O L U M N I S T P H O T O G R A P H : J O N AT H A N W O RT H ; I L L U S T R AT I O N : O L I V E R W O L F S O N
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SOAPBOX |PLUGGED IN
ability to enable opportunities for education, cross-border cooperation and the disabled, while getting rid of the crazy stifling laws of the past. One of the worst of these laws is “anti-circumvention,” which makes it illegal just to tell someone how to break a software lock. In 2001 the FBI imprisoned Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov the day after he gave a presentation at the Def Con hacker conference demonstrating the incompetence of Adobe’s e-book protection. Charges were eventually dropped, but on Sklyarov’s return to Russia, the Russian government issued a warning
infringement to get documents censored—an accusation is sufficient. Before the 2004 elections, internal memos from Diebold leaked onto the Web detailing the company’s illegal responses to the failures of its voting machines. Diebold didn’t deny the memos; instead it targeted the ISPs of the activists who republished them, claiming that the notes were copyrighted works and demanding that they be taken offline immediately. Censorship and control is what’s in the treaties, but worse is what’s missing. The Internet enables informal collaboration among strangers to make
Dumb treaties have undermined due process and cooperation without solving infringement. to its scientists to steer clear of American conferences, as we’d turned into the kind of nation that threw people in jail for talking about math. Another awful WIPO rule is “notice and takedown.” This lets Internet service providers off the hook for their customers’ infringement so long as the ISP promptly disappears any documents that attract copyright complaints. You don’t need to prove
3 MORE THINGS TICKING CORY OFF THIS MONTH
1
➤ ANTI-PIRACY GOUGING Makers of anti-piracy software for cellphones want to charge carriers $1 per handset to use it, or more money than carriers made by actually selling digital media last year.
2
➤ SECURITY SCAMMING A Canadian ISP cites bogus “security risks” to justify charging customers an extra $50 to open the ports that allow people to run their own e-mail server.
3
➤ SONY FAILS MATH A Sony music exec says that Americans won’t mind copy restrictions on CDs, even though in an independent survey, nearly 70 percent said they would.
➤ Full stories at popsci.com/soapbox. 52
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good stuff happen. But copyright treaties only guarantee authors and performers the same rights from country to country—the public’s rights are different in every nation. A new treaty could finally harmonize those rules. For example, thousands of strangers have taken the time to scan or retype books for a free online repository called Project Gutenberg, but an Australian who sends her scanned copy of 1984 to a friend in New York runs afoul of the law: Orwell is in the public domain in Australia but not here. Likewise, an American who makes a blind-friendly edition of the latest Harry Potter novel is covered under U.S. law, but when he sends it to a blind friend in Johannesburg, the South African becomes a criminal. And on and on. Organizations that would otherwise facilitate these activities are scared off by the specter of lawsuits. A2K is the answer. Librarians, disabled-rights advocates, academics and interested parties of every stripe are batting about proposals, using a mailing list that you can follow at lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/a2k. It’s about time. For a decade, dumb treaties have undermined due process, privacy and cooperation, without denting the problem of infringement. The next century deserves laws that love the Internet for what it is, and if we keep fighting, we just might get them. ■
THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, THEN BELIEVE THEM PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER JOHN MACNEILL COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE There are plenty of great ideas for the future out there. Predicting whichPAGE ones will ROLLER COASTER, 56 become • THE more than ideas, which technologies will come storming life58 and• flip BIONIC into EYE,your PAGE THEit upside HOLOdown—that’s dangerous business. But it sure is a rush. And it’s exactly what we’ve done in the pages that in on GRAPHIC TV,follow: PAGE We 60 •homed THE SMART the most jaw-dropping research projects happening in five core realms and extrapolated just how—and when—they’ll come to exist. HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S We’ll turn you on to holographic television and a robotic roller coaster that would be a blast even if you couldn’t program SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE it yourself, which you can (in 2008). We’ll show you the space suit galactic tourists will wear and the infinitely customizable ROLLER COASTER, PAGE • THE electronic-walled homes the rest of us will live in. Oh, yeah: And we’ll explain what it’ll take to make the blind see. We may 56 or may BIONIC PAGEout58what’s • THEnext. HOLOnot be spot-on with the dates, but rest assured that with all these marvels, it’s a question of when, not if. EYE, So check GRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC THE EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE BIONIC EYE, • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S PAGE 58 • THE SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE TOURIST’S SPACE SUIT, PAGE 64 • THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER, PAGE 56 • THE BIONIC EYE, PAGE 58 • THE HOLOGRAPHIC TV, PAGE 60 • THE SMART HOME, PAGE 62 • THE
THE FUTURE STARTS HERE TAKE A LOOK AT FIVE UNBELIEVABLE TECHNOLOGIES TRUCKING TOWARD REALITY.
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HELL ON WHEELS The RoboCoaster replaces the passenger car of a traditional roller coaster with an industrial robotic arm. The four-jointed arm swings riders out into a virtual-reality universe, up to 22 feet away from The transcran magnetic track, as it zooms along. stimulation (TMS)the helmet
TKTK YOUR BRAIN
[1] is equipped with movable magnets [2]. Microsecond energy pulses induce electrical activity in neurons within the pulses’ magnetic fields. Experts envision cognitive-training clinics where a person’s neural circuitry will first be evaluated. A mental trainer would then prescribe a regimen of brain exercises in combination with drugs designed to “reorganize the brain’s circuitry into a better functional state,” says Tim Tully, a professor at
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PHOTO CREDIT TK
The 5,000-pound articulating arm creates extreme torsional loads. To handle them, the rails of the track use reinforced high-strength steel and are set wide apart for stability.
RECREATION
BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT
The Ultimate Roller Coaster
1
2008
Hang On for Your Life! (Forget Your Lunch) You are dangling like bait at the end of a 22-foot-long CROSS A ROBOT WITH VIRTUAL REALITY, robotic arm, and it looks and feels exactly like you’re zooming AND WHAT DO YOU GET? A THRILL RIDE through space. It’s tempting to gaze at distant planets, except GUARANTEED TO BLOW YOUR MIND
THE ROAD TO THRILLS
[1873]
Some 35,000 tourists pay $1 each to ride the Mauch Chunk Switchback Gravity Railroad in Pennsylvania. America’s first mechanical roller coaster was built to transport coal. [1919]
THE BIG PICTURE The RoboCoaster will snake through a building made up of a series of domed theaters.
John Miller patents “underfriction wheels,” which grip coaster rails from the bottom, side and top, thus preventing cars from derailing. Now designers are free to create hairpin turns and steep drops while keeping the cars on the track. [1959]
Arrow Development engineers the first tubular-steel coaster track—Disneyland’s Matterhorn—which becomes the basis for all modern steel coasters. Steel proves more versatile than wood, clearing the way for loops. [2004]
PHOTO CREDIT TK
INSIDE THE RIDE By creating multiple ride profiles, programmers can design journeys that appeal to guests of every taste—a boon for theme parks. Visitors can choose any experience from an extreme space battle to a gentle tour of the solar system. Eventually, riders will interact with their environment as in a videogame.
[T
POPSCI
AMEC Dynamic Structures and KUKA Robotics demonstrate a prototype track-based RoboCoaster in Orlando, Florida. [2008]
RoboCoaster opens its first 3-D track-based ride.
See the stationary version of the Robo-
ON THE WEB Coaster in action at popsci.com/thrill.
]
that an asteroid as big as a house is hurtling toward you. Just before impact, you blast it with a phaser cannon while executing a series of buttery barrel rolls to avoid the debris. The asteroid bits pelt your ship, rattling you to the marrow. Then, without warning, you’re sucked through the blackness of a wormhole—back into reality. This is the future of the roller coaster, as told by a jolly 46-year-old Brit named Gino De-Gol, founder of an unusual company called RoboCoaster. What fuels his ambitious vision is a belief that the allAmerican icon of thrill, circa 2005, is fundamentally a one-trick pony. “You are stuck on a track, you know exactly where you are going, and the ride is always the same,” De-Gol says in mock exasperation. What he has in mind is a hybrid ride, one that combines the high G-forces of today’s coasters, the computer-generated trickery of virtual-reality simulators and, eventually, the interactivity of videogames. Propelled through a snaking series of domed theaters, riders will swing far out into a computer-generated universe to come face-to-face with aliens, navigate a pulmonary artery or, if they’re so inclined, chase butterflies through the forest. In 2002, two years after quitting his engineering job at KUKA Robotics, Europe’s largest industrial-robot manufacturer, De-Gol wowed the amusement industry when he installed the world’s first passenger-certified robot at Legoland in Denmark. His innovation? He attached a double-seated chair to the end of a KR 500—a 5,000pound aluminum robotic arm more commonly found lifting MercedesBenz engines so they can be spot-welded. The arm’s six joints allow it to move any which way imaginable. Using a touchscreen, riders built their own thrills, choosing among barrel rolls, corkscrews and inversions. But with the robot bolted to the floor, De-Gol says, his first RoboCoaster was “more like a really wild bull ride.” Now he wants to mount KR 500s to a track and speed them along one after another. Propel a rider on a twisting, undulating trip while shaking him like a cat would a rat, and you greatly compound the physical stimulation. Which brings us to the project’s highest hurdle: the upchuck factor. If your inner ear and your eyes send conflicting messages to your brain about your body’s position—say, an alien lands on your ship, but the ride jerks a tenth of a second later—the illusion is shattered, and your body could revolt. Paul Evans, a mechanical designer at the engineering firm AMEC Dynamic Structures, which is partnering with RoboCoaster, is programming a series of KR 500 maneuvers to match, frame-byframe, a 3-D film of a roller coaster ride, in large part to determine which moves are too . . . sick. “We don’t exactly know what the human body will tolerate when we combine extreme movements with 3-D imagery,” he says. The amusement-park industry doesn’t keep tabs on nausea, though, so how will De-Gol ensure that his ride is thrilling and enjoyable? “Guest satisfaction cards will tell us a lot,” he enthuses. “The beauty is that we can simply go in and reprogram it.”—JILL DAVIS POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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TKTK YOUR BRAIN
SCLERA
The transcran magnetic stimulation (TMS) helmet [1] is equipped with movable magnets [2]. Microsecond energy pulses induce electrical activity in neurons within the pulses’ magnetic fields. Experts envision cognitive-training clinics where a person’s neural circuitry will first be evaluated. A mental trainer would then prescribe a regimen of brain exercises in combination with drugs designed to “reorganize the brain’s circuitry into a better functional state,” says Tim Tully, a professor at
RETINA
ELECTRODE ARRAY ANTENNA CAMERA
SEE IT? BELIEVE IT A seven-by-four-millimeter camera with a light sensor, implanted in the eye, wirelessly beams an image to a small digital image processor outside the body. Once processed, the image is transmitted back to the internal antenna and fed via cable to an electrode array mounted on the retina, stimulating the nerves to produce sight.
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PERSONAL HEALTH
BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT
The Bionic Eye
2
2010
We See the Future Better Than 20/20 Steve Austin had that enviable telescopic squint. Star Trek RESEARCHERS HAVE ALREADY RESTORED chief engineer Geordi La Forge saw darkness as daylight with SOME SIGHT TO THE BLIND. WHY his 24th-century ocular implants. And now it looks like a generaNOT GIVE THEM SUPER VISION?
THE ROAD TO ARTIFICIAL VISION
[1929]
German neurologist Otfrid Foerster electrically stimulates the visual cortex of a human volunteer’s brain, causing his subject to “see” small points of light. [1968]
DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSOR An external microprocessor encodes images from the interocular camera into a form suitable for the electrode array. Leaving heat-generating electronics outside the body prevents damage to sensitive nerves and vessels.
Giles S. Brindley of the University of Cambridge implants 80 electrodes under the scalp of a 52year-old woman who had gone blind. When he applies electricity, the woman sees spots of light. [2004]
Armand Tanguay and his colleague Noelle Stiles conduct the first experiment to implant a digital camera in an eye, replacing a dog’s natural lens with a glass lens and a sensor. [2010] Electrodes Tack
ELECTRODE ARRAY The electrode array is fixed to the retina with a single tack through the sclera, the eye’s tough white rind. Each platinum electrode stimulates nearby nerve cells to produce a localized sensation of light. Simulations show that this 256electrode array could allow blind subjects to see large objects.
USC researchers conduct the first human trial of an implantable digital camera connected to a 256electrode retinal implant. [2014]
The introduction of a 1,000-electrode implant allows blind volunteers to recognize faces and read half-inch type for the first time.
tion of very real people who have lost their sight are next in line for such seemingly sci-fi vision. “I’m hesitant to use the word ‘superpower,’ ” says Armand R. Tanguay, Jr., an electrical-engineering professor at the University of Southern California who is building the world’s first implantable camera for the blind. But if the device works, he says, “a blind person will have abilities you and I don’t.” Tanguay’s intraocular camera is part of a multimillion-dollar USC effort backed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to develop an artificial retina to restore sight to people whose light-sensitive cells have burned out as a result of decay or disease. That’s 10 million people. The project is paying off: Six blind volunteers now have an electrode-studded sliver of silicone tacked to one of their retinas. A digital camera mounted to sunglasses feeds images wirelessly to this implant, whose 16 electrodes zap retinal nerves to produce impressions of light in the brain. Although the resolution is crude next to the 100-million-pixel resolution of a healthy eye, the volunteers can distinguish cup from plate, light from dark, and they can tell when someone strolls past on the sidewalk. “And we can do better,” says USC ophthalmology professor Mark Humayun, the surgeon who pioneered retinal implants and now directs the university project. He intends to implant a 60-electrode sensor with nearly four times the resolution of the original by early 2006 and a 256-electrode chip a few years later. His ultimate goal is 1,000 electrodes. “That should allow people to recognize a face and read,” Humayun says. He’s giving himself less than a decade to do it. It’s no slam-dunk. “Imagine throwing your TV set in the ocean and making it work,” says Robert Greenberg, CEO of Second Sight, the California firm that builds the retinal implants. The eye is filled with saltwater that can corrode electrodes. And then there’s the fact that humming electronics can sear nerves and blood vessels. This is why Tanguay’s plan to put the camera inside the eye is so bold. The aspirin-size device he’s building consists of an aspherical glass lens and a CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) sensor—which produces less heat than a conventional CCD (chargecoupled device)—packed in a watertight tube. The camera would sit just behind the pupil, in the small pouch where the eye’s crystalline lens normally is. For people with artificial sight, not only would an implantable camera mean no more goofy spy-cam sunglasses, they wouldn’t have to sweep their heads constantly to scan their surroundings—that’s what the eye does, naturally. Tanguay says his camera’s three-millimeter focal length will make objects appear crisp no matter how far or close they are, something even the eye can’t manage. And he could use a sensor tuned to infrared light, the basis for night-vision scopes, so blind people could see in the dark. One of his colleagues, biomedical engineer James Weiland, prefers the Bionic Man archetype. “You could hook our system up to an electron microscope and give someone super vision,” he says. He’s only half joking.—MICHAEL STROH POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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HOME ENTERTAINMENT
The Holographic Television
Think Reality TV Isn’t Realistic? Watch This Even if you had free run of any skybox in Madison THE ULTIMATE 3-D TV CAN’T HANG Square Garden, you still wouldn’t see half the action that ON YOUR WALL, BUT YOU’LL you will in your own living room, one day soon, on a largeBE TOO ENGROSSED TO NOTICE screen holographic television. Without ever leaving your chair, you’ll be poised to watch each play unfold from whatever perTHE ROAD TO 3-D TV spective you choose, gazing into the depths of your TV. The only thing lacking will be the soggy cheese fries. Although this scenario is a decade away, a small-scale version Object beam exists today in the Dallas laboratory of Harold Garner, a tireless 51-year-old medical doctor, plasma physicist and biochemist at the [1947] While working for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The prototype he Thomson-Houston Electric built is the first machine ever to generate holographic movies—true Company in Rugby, 3-D without special glasses or nausea. England, Hungarian physiHow did a guy who works in a medical center discover the key to cist Dennis Gabor invents depicting holographic objects in motion? Garner’s chair in developthe hologram, for which mental biology at UT is endowed in part by the founders of Texas he is awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971. Instruments, and the company gave him early access to a digital Reference beam micromirror device (DMD) that is now used in high-end video projectors. It is made up of nearly a million reflective panels, each of which [1987] can be angled by a computer several thousand times per second to TI engineer Larry Hornreflect or deflect beams of light, producing moving pictures. Garner’s HOW TO RECORD A HOLOGRAM beck invents the digital Shine a laser at an apple through big idea was to blast the DMD with a laser rather than with a typical micromirror device, an a partially transparent mirror that optical semiconductor used projection bulb. He programmed the DMD to reflect a sequence of splits the light into an object beam in video projectors and TVs 2-D interference patterns (called interferograms) that disrupt the laser and a reference beam. The object starting in 1996. light in such a way that it reflects a 3-D hologram. beam scatters when it hits the Garner’s biggest challenge has been to find a suitable screen. To apple and then recombines with unfold the 2-D interference patterns into true 3-D images, the projecthe undisturbed reference beam. [2003] This creates an interference pattion surface must have volume. A column of mist will work, as will a University of Texas Southtern that is recorded on a piece of tub of Jell-O, but both diffuse the projected image, marring sharpness. western Medical Center film. Illuminate the film with a refresearcher Harold Garner So Garner is working with a display composed of layers of microthin erence beam, and it reproduces demonstrates the first LCD panels, each of which can, when electrically charged, be made multiple 2-D images that look like holographic videoclear or opaque. When the panels flash on and off in quick succesone three-dimensional image. projection system, screension to assemble the hologram, the speed is more than sufficient to ing hazy red images of a convince the eye that it’s seeing a solid object. helicopter circling a jet. Such displays exist today, but they work without the benefit of holography; instead they have to slice up a 3-D image and send it [2008] sliver by sliver to the LCD screens. The picture is almost the same as The U.S. Air Force installs Garner’s would be, but this method requires far greater processing holographic head-up dispower, because you need the x, y and z coordinates for every plays in fighter jets, bringslice. This is why Garner’s approach is the most viable solution for ing aviators 3-D images 3-D TV. “We’re sending the 3-D images as a 2-D interferogram,” of battlespace positions. Garner says, pointing out that this doesn’t require any more band5 4 3 width than today’s television signals, “so we can use the current [2015] broadcast infrastructure.” As for creating holographic content, it Holographic TV goes would have to be recorded with a series of cameras shooting from live with a pay-per-view different viewpoints. satellite broadcast of The first application of Garner’s technology may be in the holothe heavyweight boxing graphic imaging of MRIs or in head-up displays for the military (he’s championship. 2 1 had discussions with the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin), so it’ll be a while before this TV makes it to Circuit City. Still, it may well happen before the Knicks win the NBA title again.—JONATHON KEATS 60
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TV GETS DEEP The holographic TV is a box with a deep screen onto which the three-dimensional moving picture is projected. The screen comprises 100 ultrathin transparent LCDs; each one can be made clear or white by running electric current through it. The plates are switched on and off in rapid succession, faster than the eye can see, showing slices of the hologram projected from behind. Taken together, the thin sections give the illusion of a 3-D picture.
The top and sides of the set [shown here in cutaway] will be opaque. The perspective you’ll see from the front of the screen will change if you shift your viewing angle even slightly.
THE HOLOGRAM PROJECTOR TV A digital micromirror device is programmed with an interference pattern that mimics holographic film. In this 3-D TV, a laser [1] shines through a magnifying lens [2] onto the DMD [3], which turns the beam into a holographic projection. That image bounces through a second magnifying lens [4] onto the screen [5], which is made up of a series of microthin LCDs. This process happens more than 30 times a second, creating full-motion video. A full-color TV would use three DMDs and three lasers—red, green and blue.
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HOME TECH
The Smart Home
Little Plastic Houses for You and Me The next time you close your eyes and imagine your THESE WALLS CAN TALK. AND DISPLAY VIDEO, house of the future, picture a bunch of soda bottles. That’s HEAT YOUR HOME, LIGHT THE INTERIOR, essentially what Philadelphia architects Stephen Kieran and AND UTTERLY REMODEL ARCHITECTURE James Timberlake have been working with in their quest to identify materials, technologies and mass-manufacturing techTHE ROAD TO SELF-SUSTAINING HOMES niques that they expect will reinvent their profession. Their research has led to several design awards and, most recently, to an innovation they call SmartWrap. SMARTWRAP CROSS SECTION Designed as an exterior skin that would be stretched taut over Airspace/ OLED an aluminum frame, like nylon over tent poles, SmartWrap consists Aerogel [1941] of two layers of a polyester film called PET—the same clear plastic British chemists of the Calico Printers’ Associused in soda bottles. The idea is to use the thin, flexible film as a ation patent polyethylene substrate onto which micro-components for lighting, heating, terephthalate (PET). Almost energy storage and even information display can be printed, like paper-thin, PET is tougher PCM ink on paper. The result will be electronic walls that are inexpenand stiffer than other lowPolyester film sive and infinitely customizable both at the manufacturing stage cost plastics. and at home, so that you could, for instance, program one side of the living room to be a built-in movie screen or turn an entire side ORGANIC LIGHT[1973] of the house into a window at the flick of a switch. EMITTING DIODE (OLED) The Institute of Energy SmartWrap is structured as a PET sandwich with a two-inchAn OLED sandwiches Conversion builds Solar thick space between the layers. The inside layer of PET will be electroluminescent One, the first solar house, quilted with pillows of aerogel, a highly porous silica (it’s 99.8 materials between two at the University of percent air) that was developed by NASA as insulation for the conductive layers. Delaware. Roof arrays When electricity is Mars Pathfinder Sojourner rover. The two-inch barrier has the generate electricity from applied, the positive sunlight, and batteries same insulation factor as a 17-inch-thick concrete-and-brick wall and negative particles store surplus power. filled with polystyrene insulation (the pink fluffy stuff). The PET is pair up and cause the coated with a clear resin containing micro-capsules of phasematerials to glow. change materials, which absorb ambient heat during the day [2003] and release it when the temperature drops at night, turning the The architectural firm PHASE-CHANGE walls themselves into a heating element (although you’ll still need KieranTimberlake debuts MATERIAL (PCM) SmartWrap prototype at a heating and cooling system). The tiny plastic New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Organic photovoltaic solar cells, or OPVs, would be printed on capsules in this museum. Organic photoexterior sun-facing surfaces to harvest energy and to power the layer of resin contain voltaics, OLED screens and wax that releases OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays and lighting patterns thin batteries are attached heat when it solidifies on the inside. These solar cells work on roughly the same princito panels silk-screened with and absorbs heat ple as the silicon solar cells you’re familiar with, but they’re far conductive ink. when it melts, less expensive. Instead of being manufactured at 572°F in a clean to regulate indoor room, organic photovoltaics are made with less-expensive carbonclimate. [2008] based compounds and can be deposited onto a thin, flexible plasResearchers boost the tic substrate at room temperature using a process similar to newsefficiency of OPVs to 10 ORGANIC PHOTOpaper printing. One major stumbling block is their efficiency: percent, making VOLTAIC (OPV) CELL They convert at most 6 percent of available light into electricity SmartWrap viable. Photons from versus about 18 percent for silicon. sunlight strike Kieran says they’ll need a minimum of 10 percent efficiency the cell, exciting [2015] for SmartWrap to fly. Scientists point out that organic photoelectrons on the Rolls of SmartWrap begin voltaics are a newer field and that it’s only a matter of time surface and to appear in hometriggering them before they work through the infinite combinations of polymers improvement and buildingto flow freely. That to find the most efficient one. “There are still stumbling blocks on supply stores. current is siphoned the science side,” Kieran says. “And we will see digital newspaoff as electricity. pers and wallpaper before we have an electronic building facade. But we’ll get there.”—JESSIE SCANLON 62
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OPV cells
A SQUARE WITH FLAIR
PHOTO CREDIT TK
The SmartWrap house is infinitely customizable. Micro-components for lighting, climate control, and power generation can be printed onto the clear polymer walls as easily as ink on paper. Because the process is computer-controlled, architects could program the components in any pattern, making an entire wall a projection surface or leaving a space blank to create a window.
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TKTK YOUR BRAIN The transcran magnetic stimulation (TMS) helmet [1] is equipped with movable magnets [2]. In the orbital Microsecond energyhotel of the space suit will pulsesfuture, induceyour electrical on-site. activitybeincustom-made neurons within After magnetic creating a 3-D laser the pulses’ of your body in fields.scan Experts envision microgravity,clinics a robot will cognitive-training on a protective where“spray” a person’s neural layer composites circuitry willoffirst be eval- over an layer. The uated.insulating A mentalbase trainer called electrospinwouldprocess, then prescribe a ning, polymers regimen of liquefies brain exerinto microfibers that concises in combination tract as they cure—applywith drugs designed to ing the the mechanical “reorganize brain’s counterpressure to keep circuitry into a necessary better you alive in space. functional state,” says The helmet aattaches to aatpolymer Tim Tully, professor torso shell that contains life-support systems.
HEY, NICE THREADS!
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BESTOFWHAT’SNEXT
SPACE
The Tourist’s Space Suit
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2020
Get Slinky at the Space Hotel As Ansari X Prize champs Burt Rutan and Paul Allen and YOU CAN KEEP THE ROBE, BUT their band of multimillionaire brothers—Virgin Galactic’s PLEASE RETURN THE KEVLAR SUIT AND THE GECKO SLIPPERS Richard Branson and hotelier Robert Bigelow—close in on devel-
THE ROAD TO SPACE TOURISM GECKO FABRIC Millions of nanometer-size synthetic setae— stalklike hairs with spatula-like structures on their ends—are fabricated out of a polymer substance such as silicone. The spatulas grip nearly any surface through a weak intermolecular attraction not unlike static cling [see inset].
[1935]
Aviator Wiley Post sets altitude record of 50,000 feet. He wears the first practical pressurized suit, similar to a deep-sea diving suit, made of cloth lined with rubber. [1965]
For the Gemini program, David Clark coats a rubber and neoprene bladder with nylon mesh and a fireresistant outer layer. An internal cable-and-pulley system helps astronauts move their limbs when the suit is pressurized. [1983]
Shuttle astronauts use suits with detachable arm and leg units that accommodate various body types. [2005]
Dava Newman proves the feasibility of Bio-Suit fabrication by creating a prototype Kevlar sleeve that properly pressurizes one leg.
NANO-BIOSENSORS Nano-bioreceptors sheathed with a one-molecule layer of a reagent are implanted under the skin. They turn brighter when they react with increased levels of substances such as glucose or stress hormones. A scanner shines near-infrared rays through the skin to measure the sensors’ brightness.
[2020]
Tourists visiting the new, orbiting SkyHotel don their Bio-Suits, the same getup used for NASA's human exploration mission to Mars.
oping the launch vehicles and orbital habitats that will open space travel to the well-heeled tourist, one big question remains: What are you going to do up there? If MIT aerospace-engineering professor Dava Newman has her way, you’ll eventually be able to scout out infinite freezing darkness in a custom-made space suit that performs far better than the ones astronauts have been using for decades. Newman is developing the materials and the design for a space suit that astronauts could use to explore Mars or the moon. But if you’ve got the cash, you could sport one, too. As a space tourist, your suit would be fabricated right on-site. First, robotic arms pirouette around you, creating a 3-D laser scan of your body. Guided by that image, the arms extrude a liquid composite of Kevlar, spandex and nylon (over an insulating undergarment), which tightens as it cures, sort of like shrink-wrap. Materials integrated into the weave will actively control thermal regulation. Most of the suit’s materials will be recycled when you are finished using it. A polymer torso shell serves as a docking point for your helmet and a frame for your oxygen tank—and maybe a holster for your digital camera. Newman’s innovation is to use mechanical counterpressure to constrain your body’s tissues, rather than a bulky layer of gas to pressurize the suit. By orienting the threads along something called the body’s lines of non-extension, she can make the suit extremely tight yet highly flexible. Thus far, Newman has been able to create a sleeve around one leg that applies the appropriate mechanical counterpressure. The best footwear inside and out of your zero-gravity hotel will be a pair of Velcro-like gecko slippers, based on the research of electrical-engineering professor Ron Fearing of the University of California at Berkeley. Gecko feet are covered with nanometer-size hairs called setae. What makes them grip is similar to static cling: Electrons at the end of the setae and on the surface interact to keep the two stuck together. Fearing has produced gecko fabric with a holding force of about seven pounds per square inch, but he’ll need to crowd more polyurethane setae into that space to match the gecko’s holding power—150 pounds per square inch. Unfortunately for any spacewalker, weightlessness disturbs our physiology. To make sure everything’s OK, you might be monitored by nano-biosensors developed by University of Illinois biomolecular engineer Michael Strano, a leading researcher in nanomechanics. He discovered last year that a thin coating of potassium ferricyanide on a carbon nanotube changes brightness based on the amount of glucose in a solution. By implanting these nanotubes beneath the skin and shining near-infrared light onto them, a modified bar-code scanner could read their intensity through the skin to calculate blood glucose levels—without ever drawing blood. Today, Strano is simply trying to create a quick and painless diagnostic test for diabetics, but he’s working on reagents for cholesterol, electrolytes and stress hormones, which would be applicable to space tourists. After all, who wants to be stressed out while on vacation?—PATRICK DI JUSTO POPULAR SCIENCE JUNE 2005
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ROUND
TRIP A mysterious fuel loss, a GPS snafu, dehydration, crushing fatigue— it’s all here in our inside story of Steve Fossett’s recordbreaking solo flight around the world BY ERIC ADAMS PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN B. CARNETT
AIRBORNE With only minutes of daylight left, Steve Fossett lifts off from Salina, Kansas, in Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. His next stop: Salina, Kansas— and the record book, for a solo, nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world.
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6 P.M., SUNDAY: T-MINUS 24 HOURS It’s easy to cop an attitude about Steve Fossett. The 60-year-old
multimillionaire investor-turned-adventurer has circumnavigated the world solo in a balloon, he has set 24 extreme-sailing records, he’s swum the English Channel, competed in the Iditarod and the 24 Hours of Le Mans auto race, run 100 miles through a desert in Colorado—heck, he’s even set the world speed record in a blimp (69.4 mph)—and now he intends to pilot a flying fuel tank around the world nonstop . . . but frankly, he just doesn’t have the look. He has never possessed,
Atlantic GlobalFlyer out for its long-awaited extended spin, when a reporter asks him about motivation. Fossett lets loose some boilerplate about the technical challenges, the personalendurance challenges, and the pure accomplishment that comes with being the fastest, first, only or best—and then he adds, quite simply, that “it’s good for my self-esteem.” Again, not your usual pilot-speak, but let’s give the guy a break. He may be painfully taciturn and oddly unheroic in demeanor, but when he does speak, he’s genuine. Still, as the hours and minutes tick down toward the moment of truth for Fossett and GlobalFlyer, there are
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DREAM TEAM Scaled Composites engineer Jon Karkow [left, in GlobalFlyer cockpit] oversaw the design and construction of the aircraft, based on boss Burt Rutan’s conceived configuration. Karkow was also the program’s chief test pilot, an unusual dual role in the aerospace industry. Fossett [above] patiently waits for his mission controllers to green-light his flight. The team from Scaled Composites signed the inside of the nose gear door [right]—echoing a similar gesture made by the builders of Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic-crossing Spirit of St. Louis.
say, the charisma of Charles Lindbergh, the quiet confidence of Chuck Yeager or the steely determination of his most recent predecessor, Dick Rutan, the combat-hardened test pilot who in 1986 flew the twin-engine, piston-powered Voyager around the world nonstop in a grueling nine-day ordeal, with co-pilot Jeana Yeager (no relation to Chuck) mostly managing fuel. So Fossett doesn’t quite fit the mold of the hard-boiled, Ray Ban–sporting jet jocks. It probably doesn’t help that most of the aviation records he has set in airplanes were won at the controls of his Cessna Citation X, a cushy $20-million business jet. And to make matters worse, here he is answering questions at a press conference, killing time waiting for conditions to align so that he can take his specially commissioned Virgin 68
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cynics in the crowd who are not entirely convinced that Fossett can handle the tricky bird at its maximum weight, a feat never before attempted during testing. After all, he isn’t an actual test pilot with vast experience in unorthodox aircraft; he has flown GlobalFlyer only eight times. They’re sure he’ll just plow it into the runway and die a mile into his takeoff roll.
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1:30 P.M., MONDAY: T-MINUS 4.5 HOURS
Fossett and his team have been in Salina, Kansas, for nearly two months preparing for the flight, which could last nearly 70 hours. They’ve spent most of the past four weeks waiting for a break in the weather. Everything must be right, from runway winds to the jet streams along his intended route to the timing
of the day and night phases—ideally, takeoff and landing will happen in daylight because it’s safer and allows the chase plane to more easily detect problems. The variables seem to be coming together. The ground crew moves GlobalFlyer out to the end of the runway for fueling. In order to minimize taxi time when fully loaded, Fossett will simply start the engine and take off.
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3 P.M., MONDAY: T-MINUS 4 HOURS
not be rescheduled.) At a table not far from Karkow, Fossett chats up famed test pilot Bob Hoover and hotel heir and aviation buff Barron Hilton. A clutch of British photographers rushes past, the savviest one enlightening the rest: “It’s Paris Hilton’s grandfather!”
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4:15 P.M., MONDAY: T-MINUS 2.5 HOURS
The sun is perilously close to the horizon when Fossett gets the thumbs-up and heads to the runway, with all the journalists and VIPs scrambling onto shuttle buses. There, Fossett, now in his flight suit, says his good-byes to his friends, crew members and his wife, Peggy, and climbs cheerfully into the cockpit.
HOT SEATS Fossett and Virgin founder Richard Branson face the press prior to liftoff [below left]. Project manager Paul Moore gauges Fossett’s mood during the fuel crisis [below].
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6:47 P.M., MONDAY: TAKEOFF
Last-minute ground-crew preparations in the cold 38°F sunset—including trouble with three different portable engine starters—continue to delay the takeoff. Finally, with helicopters hovering close by, emergency crews positioned near the end of the runway, and a few hundred spectators lining the fences along the taxiways, Fossett gets clearance from the control tower and pushes the throttle of the lone Williams FJ44 jet engine to 100 percent. The exotic insect-
GLOBE-TROTTER AROUND THE WORLD IN 67 HOURS -60
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1 Depart Salina, Kansas 2 GPS trouble over Canada 3 Early arrival at 45,000 feet 4 Sightseeing over Atlas Mts. 5 Halfway point, near Calcutta 6 Fuel shortage revealed 7 Decision to “go for it” 8 Cross Santa Catalina, Calif. 9 Arrive Salina, Kansas
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Persistent winds continue to keep everyone guessing throughout the day. Journalists linger in the media center. Fossett’s longtime friend and co-adventurer, Virgin founder Richard Branson, talks business on his cellphone. Flight planners in red GlobalFlyer fleece vests stare at weather maps on computer monitors in the elaborate mission-control center built by Virgin specially for this mission. GlobalFlyer lead engineer and chief test pilot Jon Karkow pensively sits sipping fruit juice in a nearby cafeteria. (Karkow’s boss, Burt Rutan—the man who designed Voyager 25 years ago and is more recently famous for creating the world’s first private space vehicle, SpaceShipOne—is notably absent. Something about important meetings that could
Like Lindbergh in his Spirit of St. Louis, Fossett has no direct forward view, just a tiny bubble canopy—and even that is useful (most crucially during takeoff and landing) only if he shifts his seat fully upright and squeezes a few extra cushions under himself. The rest of the flight he’ll recline, face-to-face with the instrument panel’s multiple electronic displays and autopilot controls and the myriad switches used to manage the complex fuel system for optimal aircraft balance. Also arrayed within reach: navigational maps, Slim-Fast shakes (his chosen, and sole, nourishment for the duration), water stored in CamelBak hydration packs, and an oxygen mask in case his cabin pressurization fails. He’s catheterized, the urine to be ejected from the aircraft; consuming nothing but liquids will prevent the need for solid-waste disposal.
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like GlobalFlyer rolls forward. At 8,000 feet of the 12,300-foot runway, Fossett pulls back slowly on the stick and coaxes the heavy plane off the ground. The black sky swallows him up.
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10 P.M., MONDAY: T-PLUS 3 HOURS
His first success under his belt, Fossett aims for Canada, on a route that will take him across the Atlantic to Morocco, Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and then on to India, China and Japan before crossing the Pacific back to the U.S. Midway into his first night, though, the GPS system suddenly stops receiving satellite signals—a potential showstopper. “We experienced the failure as I was leaving the U.S. toward Canada,” Fossett later tells reporters from the aircraft. “This really was a big worry, since we are unable to fly without GPS, especially when out of radio range—we couldn’t even be directed by air-traffic control.”
vious evening that GlobalFlyer’s absolute ceiling early in the flight would be about 39,000 feet. It wasn’t supposed to reach 45,000 feet until, having burned off much of its fuel, it became lighter, around Saudi Arabia. Karkow attributes the discrepancy to “better-than-expected performance.” All in all, Fossett seems to be enjoying himself. “I’m seeing some beautiful scenery,” he says via satellite telephone. “Madeira; the coast of Morocco. Crossing the Atlas Mountains was just magnificent.” Then, “The Virgin chase plane just met up with me, and it was nice to see them.” These occasional peeks out the window and contacts with the chase plane (actually Fossett’s Citation, being flown by three Virgin Atlantic pilots) are rare diversions from the visual monotony of the cockpit. Fossett’s minute-by-minute existence is dominated by the instrument panel and the steady drone of the jet engine just a few feet from his head. It’s
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME From left: GlobalFlyer glides above Kansas farmland. Fossett’s kneeboard, showing his landing procedures. Richard Branson congratulates the triumphant pilot soon after touchdown. Two ways to fly Virgin: solo, or with 400 others on board a 747.
As Fossett flies over Canada, he, Karkow and chief mission controller Kevin Stass—as well as Branson, who chimes in, buddy-to-buddy, to encourage Fossett—discuss strategies for continuing the flight, including receiving steering controls from the chase plane and mission control.
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1 A.M., TUESDAY: T-PLUS 6 HOURS
The GPS reengages. Karkow determines that the device was
looking for a type of satellite signal, WAAS, that is available only in the U.S. Outside the United States it uses standard GPS signals, but at the borders, it looks for WAAS signals even when they’re weak.
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8 A.M., TUESDAY: T-PLUS 13 HOURS
Fossett reaches an altitude of 45,000 feet, just west of Africa. This is surprising, considering that Karkow had said the pre-
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almost always dark—the fact that he’s flying east, against the rotation of the Earth and in winter ensures that 80 percent of his flight will take place at night. “It’s now my second night, and I’m a little bit tired,” Fossett says late in the day. “But I’ve done this before. I’ve downed three of these milkshakes—not my preferred meal, but they’ll do the trick.”
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8 A.M., WEDNESDAY: T-PLUS 37 HOURS
As a press conference is about to begin, a buzz has gone around that there was a problem overnight. Some speculate that Fossett had to divert from his filed flight plan because of weather or aircraft trouble. (Such a diversion would be a nono to officials from the Swiss-based world air-sports governing body, Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, which requires record-setters to stick to their filed flight plans, the way billiards players must call their shots.) The reality turns out to be a mysterious fuel loss. An estimated 2,600 pounds of
the original 18,194 pounds of JP4 military jet fuel have vanished. Mission control began noticing discrepancies between sensors in the gas tanks and their projected fuel-consumption rates early on Tuesday— “I think we didn’t want to believe there was actually a problem,” Karkow laments—but couldn’t confirm it until Fossett was able to perform in-flight tests to estimate GlobalFlyer’s weight.
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WHAT HAPPENED TO FOSSETT’S FUEL?
GlobalFlyer engineer Jon Karkow says that 3,100 pounds—not the 2,600 originally thought— escaped from GlobalFlyer in the flight’s first three hours. Inadequate venting in the two main boom tanks caused expanding air to push fuel into the wing tanks and out of their vents. Engineers didn’t discover the problem earlier because they never attempted risky full-fuel takeoffs. Had Fossett taken off during daylight, the chase planes might have noticed the leaking fuel, and if so, they would have certainly ended the flight—unnecessarily, we now know, because the absent fuel lightened GlobalFlyer, making it significantly more efficient and able to complete the flight with fuel to spare.
1 P.M., WEDNESDAY: T-PLUS 42 HOURS
Given the fuel loss, Fossett needs a tailwind of 58 knots on average to make it back to Salina, and forecasts are unclear about
says. They know it leaked out of multiple vent lines, which help equalize pressure inside the tanks, but what caused it to vent so dramatically is unknown. The loss does, however, explain why Fossett got to 45,000 feet so much sooner than expected: GlobalFlyer was substantially lighter than it should have been at that stage of the flight. The mood in the mission-control center is grim; the team seems almost convinced that Fossett won’t make it.
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10 P.M., WEDNESDAY: T-PLUS 51 HOURS
The winds have held true, and spirits are beginning to lift. “We’re really pleased with the tailwind,” project manager Paul
whether he’ll have it. If he doesn’t, he’ll be forced to land early, most likely in Hawaii. Mission control brings Fossett in on the satellite phone. “This is a huge setback, to think that we might not have the fuel to make it,” he says. “We’ll make our decision based on wind forecasts, but I don’t have a high level of confidence right now.” His face— frozen on the poky video feed overhead—is a picture of fatigue and miserable dejection. (It may also be betraying the misery of severe headaches, which Fossett is experiencing at the same time. Mission controllers conclude that it’s dehydration and order him to drink more water and go on oxygen. He reveals after the flight, though, that he accidentally depleted his entire emergency oxygen supply when he placed something on top of the low-mounted oxygen toggle switch, triggering it.) The alarming loss of fuel is a complete mystery, Karkow
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8 A.M., THURSDAY: T-PLUS 61 HOURS
Thursday’s weather in Salina is a season removed from Monday’s—sunshine and nearly 70°F. Fossett crosses the California coast at Santa Catalina Island. In Kansas, 20,000 spectators gather for his homecoming.
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1 P.M., THURSDAY: T-PLUS 66 HOURS
Silence descends on Salina as the crowds scan the sky for GlobalFlyer. Fossett’s arrival time (CONTINUED ON PAGE 108)
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Virtual GlobalFlyer When Fossett took off in GlobalFlyer, 24-year-old flight instructor Brad Amstutz did too—flying a digital model of the airplane in an exclusive POPULAR SCIENCE simulation. Read about the startling similarities between the two flights at popsci.com/globalflyer.
POPSCI T ON THE WEB
Moore says. “It’s been averaging 100 knots or more. But it still hangs in the balance. Fuel alone will not take him all the way to Kansas, and the tailwind estimates for after Hawaii are less than 40 knots.” On the phone, Fossett tempers his own enthusiasm: “‘Confident’ isn’t the right word here. I’m hopeful.” Later that night, 51 hours into his flight and 400 miles north of Hawaii, he’s all smiles. “I hit the jet stream very well, which has put us in a better fuel position,” he says with customary restraint. “I have every hope of making it to Salina tomorrow.”
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100 YEARS OF EINSTEIN
A N INSTEID PHYSICS E T R E NIZE S O ALB OK, S REVOLUTIO. WHAT HA TELY? A L O RY AG OR US CENTU HE DONE F
r e t e s h a t m oef rse v i n u opus. 1905 to the you’ll te u , s ib tr page g e pay w in would w g the e follo at the world ved, cidatin le- In th h r li lu w e e e v c y e b r mo d had n perien atoms stymie of wate nded ex e if Einstein r e nce of r io te a v a e k s h r, p li ld e e u a e b k ie b f te 5. In instein d thin ndom hich s 190 h, Ein- ra s. In June, E on of absolu arn w f an inspire ersonal a le w r his ea noti arc n p cule ck o The y tonian d in M on that , with at for la t your ow e New onstrating bmitte s oti at th u th n te s , h t y ” e r it d t. e , th v n m n g a ap tie de or m ned relati enyin n . H e p in quo time, ave f ou’re ver tur r y of no d “Einste l theo wer when y stein o ok only w must also d ru ’s o ia e t c o r a e g e p th to s t to slo Th rdd a at it s tick ship. A light ost ha in ha called ting th second ding rocket ight have Einste me of the m onstra y bundles, se and r m n e e e a m iv e o d u n s q in a sp other man joyed his in tin nailed crets of the u le of the led to ter travel This insight ro se int, an uld la ial nd en o . w grasp braced the Ever yone ta d n , po d back a ing on spec n y a a a u s q M m . ic e e y n In k d it at a n il r . d ic h th e e u e b k c y b th le la me But lated el Priz isout ce who p t at tum mmer. instein postu simple a Nob roved the ex u s im u gadab e Einstein h o is .H earn ity, E ngue tise p s th theenergy relativ the k his to know nd trea frozen 2 became the b. n, stuc d lamented in a seco is li s io s v a m m c n o te the s a b m , = in ic E a tom on the E mer equati asis of the a later, the ca ut what of scure s b r o a b e e l B th . f oretica hundred y bomb r ted it all, urse o ta the co revOne in o h who s r clerk w oduced fou g n u o y r pr le yea a sing eas? id y r a olution
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100 YEARS OF EINSTEIN
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WHAT IF EINSTEIN HAD BEEN A BETTER VIOLINIST? Just how different would life be today if the world’s most famous scientist had made a different career choice? By Gregory Mone
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T’S EARLY 1905 IN BERN, SWITZERLAND, AND 25-
year-old Albert Einstein is walking home after another day at the patent office. He’s tired of working, exhausted from thinking too much. He takes a different route, avoiding the clock tower and train station that have been prompting so many odd thoughts about the nature of time and motion. That’s it, he says to himself, I give up. Let all those physicists who won’t let me into their infernal club figure out the universe. I’m going to be a clerk, a father, a regular guy. I’m going to be a violinist. A hundred years later, in Peoria, Illinois, Einstein’s great-great-great-grandson, Brad, a struggling musician, wakes up late. The blinds are drawn, and he has to squint to read the time on his alarm clock, because the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) common to today’s clocks don’t exist.1 He doesn’t go online to check his e-mail or the weather, because the Internet is still in its infancy.2 After staring into his empty fridge, he decides to head to his sister’s house for lunch. Traffic is bad; Brad takes a shortcut and ends up lost. He’s in no position to afford the sort of luxury car that’s equipped with GPS navigation, but even if he were, he’d be out of luck. There is no GPS in a world in which Albert turned to music.3 Finally arriving at his sister’s place, he’s dawdling on the
Einstein’s Ideas Take Shape
FROM THOSE 1905 INSIGHTS, SO MUCH TECH
Bar-code scanners The lasers that read product codes are narrow beams of photons; in 1917 Einstein described one way to generate the photons.
Solar panels Photons in sunlight free electrons from atoms in embedded semiconductors; electric fields in the panels channel the electrons, creating current.
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lawn with his six-year-old nephew when the inquisitive tyke suddenly asks, “What’s the sun made of?” Brad isn’t sure, but his know-it-all sister answers, “Iron, dear.” And as far as anyone knows, she’s right; without E=mc2 as a guide, the English astronomer Cecilia Payne was not inspired in 1925 to reexamine the notion that the sun consists mostly of iron and not hydrogen. Back in the kitchen, Brad’s sister laments that she recently missed out on making a bundle—worried about risk, she declined to follow a friend’s stock tip. In our world, she might have hedged against major losses by buying options to sell the stock at a fixed amount higher than the purchase price. But the equations that banks use to derive the value of options grew out of Einstein’s 1905 work on Brownian motion.4 Brad heads home. After stepping onto the porch for a cigarette—he stopped smoking indoors a few years ago5—he scans his video collection. He puts on Star Wars, pressing STOP after the scene in which Luke runs out of bullets fighting the storm troopers.6 Bored, he crouches in front of the television and flips through the channels.7 Finding nothing on, Brad picks up a current issue of POPULAR SCIENCE. The magazine, which first reported the possible existence of beaver-like creatures on Mars in its May 1930 issue,8 has another article on the subject. Much of our knowledge of the Red Planet’s surface comes from robotic probes like the recent Mars rovers, which are powered by photovoltaic panels.9 The lack of solar panels has meant much less Mars data, rendering the beaver theory difficult for scientists to refute. What really catches Brad’s
THE FUTURE
Digital cameras Charge-coupled devices convert incoming photons into electrons, then create digital images based on the pixels’ charge.
Pharmaceuticals Einstein’s work on the random motion of molecules helps chemists control molecular interactions to create new compounds.
Options pricing Einstein’s equations underlie the BlackScholes model, which helps traders predict future fluctuations in financial markets.
Brownian sieves These microscopic devices would act like molecular change sorters, separating, say, viruses from other blood components by size.
BROWNIAN MOTION ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER STEMMLER
THE BACKSTORY 1. Einstein showed that light travels in bundles called quanta, which are at the heart of the light-emitting diode. When electrons in a semiconductorbased diode move from one side to another, they shift to a less excited state, releasing energy in the form of photons. Channel these, and you get a bright, long-lasting light source. 2. In 1917 Einstein demonstrated that when a photon comes into contact with an atom, it can trigger a chain-reaction release of additional photons from local atoms. This phenomenon provided the theoretical basis for the laser. Without lasers, the data in Web pages would trudge along copper telephone lines instead of sprinting through fiber optics. 3. Einstein’s special theory of relativity shows that seconds tick by slower for satellites because they’re moving so much faster than ground receivers. Meanwhile, the general theory of relativity, which Einstein finalized in 1916, says that the decrease in gravitational pull at altitude speeds the flow of time for satellites. To keep GPS accurate, engineers adjust the satellites’ internal clocks. 4. The unexpected financier showed that water molecules bouncing around like pinballs caused the seemingly random motion of pollen in water. Derivations of those equations also describe the fluctuations of a stock’s price. 5. A common kind of smoke detector contains the radioactive element americium 241, which decays according to E=mc2. Radiation from the breakdown ionizes air molecules to create a smokesensitive electric field. In a world without smoke detectors, musicians constantly pass out drunk, drop lit cigarettes, and set their homes ablaze. 6. Devoid of even the cinematic notion of the laser, George Lucas must arm the characters in his epic films with guns. THE FUTURE
GPS GPS satellites must adjust for relativistic effects: The satellites’ velocity slows time relative to receivers on the ground, but at the satellites’ altitude, gravity speeds time up.
Spintronics Relativity could speed computing by enabling data storage in an electron’s orientation, which can take many values, rather than its charge, which can be only positive or negative.
S P E C I A L R E L AT I V I T Y
Atomic bomb Others split the atom, but Einstein’s famous equation revealed the potential: Multiplying even a tiny bit of matter by 90 quadrillion (the c2) packs a serious punch.
PET scanners Radioactive atoms injected into patients decay in the brain, resulting in gamma rays. By tracking those rays, the scanner shows which parts of the brain are in use.—G.M.
7. Yes, Einstein has touched the lives of even couch potatoes. Remote controls rely on infrared LEDs. 8. Apparent canals observed on Mars led imaginations to run wild: water, life . . . beavers. 9. Sunlight kicks electrons in photovoltaic panels out of their orbits; channeling the electrons generates power.
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100 YEARS OF EINSTEIN eye, though, is an article on the possible existence of tiny particles called “atoms” . . . OK, that’s a step too far. Although it’s startling to recognize just how wide-ranging Einstein’s influence was, you’d have to have a tremendous lack of faith in humanity to believe that if he hadn’t made his seminal contributions to theoretical physics in 1905, no one else would have come up with them. Historians of science agree that in Einstein’s absence, other thinkers would have formulated the theoretical underpinnings of digital alarm clocks, broadband Internet access, GPS, DVDs and the chargecoupled devices in digital cameras [see “Einstein’s Ideas Take Shape,” page 74]. Someone else would have figured out that the sun is mostly hydrogen. This magazine would still be reporting on NASA-controlled rovers, not resilient beavers roaming Mars. But don’t go ripping down your Einstein posters just yet. There’s one big idea that would have had a very different fate if Einstein had turned to
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either. Poincaré was also taking steps toward E=mc2. But no need to trash Einstein’s legacy just yet. Let’s return to the general theory of relativity. General relativity describes how gravity distorts the shape of space. It demands an active cosmos, one that’s expanding or contracting, not the stationary universe that was favored preEinstein. The big bang theory, black holes, gravity waves— all grew out of general relativity. It is “superhuman,” says Galison’s colleague Gerald Holton, “and unlikely to have been achieved by someone else.” There were no clues, no experimental results to puzzle over. But Einstein wanted physics to be simpler, and to that end, he couldn’t let relativity stand as it was in 1905. At that point, the theory applied only to stationary or uniformly moving reference frames. It didn’t account for acceleration. When Einstein realized, in a stroke of insight in 1907, that gravity and acceleration were equivalent—that a freely falling person wouldn’t feel his own weight, that he would be free from gravity’s pull—he forged the first links in the chain of ideas
Developing the theory of relativity
“took Einstein eight years and nearly killed him.” the violin: the general theory of relativity, published in 1916. More on that in a moment. For now, let’s return to the 1905 breakthroughs. In some cases, Einstein was only a few years ahead of the curve. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré was close to developing equations for the special theory of relativity, which says that nature’s laws are the same whether you’re moving at a constant speed or standing still. Einstein himself said he believed that the scientist Paul Langevin would have gotten there before long. So our GPS satellites wouldn’t be hopelessly inaccurate. Another paper from 1905, on the behavior of atoms, known as Brownian motion, was an inevitable theoretical step; Einstein just got there first: “[He] confirmed a picture many already believed to be true—that matter was made up of atoms, and heat was the motion of these atoms,” says physicist Michael Fowler of the University of Virginia. Einstein’s work on the nature of light—the notion that light comes in particles, not just waves—would also have emerged with time, according to John Rigden, a physicist at Washington University in St. Louis—although confirmation might have been delayed until 1923, when Arthur Compton’s x-ray experiments provided undeniable evidence. And what of the world’s most famous equation, E=mc2, which describes the equivalence of matter and energy and gave rise to the atomic age? Surely Einstein owns that? Actually, according to Peter Galison, a Harvard University science historian, that’s not necessarily true
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that would enable him to apply relativity to the cosmos. The next steps didn’t come easily. He had to learn an entirely new kind of mathematics, for starters (Riemann geometry). Developing the theory of relativity “took Einstein eight years and nearly killed him,” says Clifford Will, an astrophysicist at Washington University. When Einstein did recover, his greatest contributions to science were behind him. But he still had a few things left to give the world. (And I’m not talking about witty, sharp, deep, inspirational or confusing statements, although there are plenty: See “Test Your EQ,” page 78.) Experimental results proved the validity of general relativity in 1919, and by the 1920s Einstein had become a superstar. Initially he was a reluctant celebrity, but as the years passed and his fame grew, he embraced the role, becoming an important voice in the peace and human rights movements. He was even asked to be the second president of Israel. Cultural historians have attempted to trace Einstein’s influence on poetry and literature, but they’re missing the point. Einstein’s work is itself a form of art. When physicists speak of his papers, they use words like “elegance.” Of Einstein’s paper on special relativity, Rigden says, “The world would be no different [without it] in the same way that the world would be no different if we did not have The Magic Flute of Mozart or the paintings of Monet.” What Einstein accomplished 100 years ago remains a landmark in human thought—proof of the potential of the mind. Over a period of six months, one individual, equipped with only pencil and paper, solved some of the most pressing mysteries of nature—all in his spare time.
100 YEARS OF EINSTEIN
TEST YOUR EQ e
(EINSTEIN QUOTIENT)
PHYSICIST, PACIFIST, PHILOSOPHER. FATHER, HUSBAND, CITIZEN. OUR EINSTEIN QUIZ IS DESIGNED TO SEPARATE THE MAN FROM HIS MYTHS
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Place these items in ascending order, from 0 to 3: A » Number of countries of which Einstein was a citizen B » Number of Nobel Prizes he won C » Number of U.S. presidents he met D » Number of wives he had
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True or false [one point each]. Did Einstein . . . A » Fail mathematics in school? B » Not wear socks? C » Have mistresses? D » Never learn to drive? E » Have his brain removed after his death? F » Father two children who became physicists?
? Which of the following does not exist? A » The Einstein Ring B » Einsteinium C » The Einstein Tower D » The Prince Einstein piercing
Match the theory to the object or concept that is most closely associated with it [one point each]: A » Photoelectric effect i » Tensor B » Special relativity ii » Photon C » General relativity iii » Atom D » Brownian motion iv » Time To what did Einstein attribute his unruly shock of hair? A » Romantic troubles B » Dense gray matter C » His mother D » World Wars I and II
How long was the interval between Einstein’s conception of the idea and his publication of the paper describing . . . [one point each] A » The special theory of relativity (E=mc2) B » The general theory of relativity (gravity) i » 1–2 months ii » 6 months–1 year iii » 1–3 years iv » 5–10 years Which of Einstein’s inventions found the most commercial success? A » Compass for submarines B » Hunchbacked airplane wing C » Silent refrigerator D » Automatic camera
1–4 POINTS
Einstein’s aphorisms are almost as famous—and diverse—as his equations. Each of the following pairs of quotes includes one by Einstein and one by a prominent contemporary. See if you can recognize Einstein’s words.
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Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi A » “There is only one road to true human greatness: the road through suffering.” B » “It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”
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Einstein and Pablo Picasso A » “We should take care not to make intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.” B » “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”
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Einstein and James Joyce A » “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” B » “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
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Einstein and Bertrand Russell A » “Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.” B » “The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful, and then only for a short while.”
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13–16 POINTS
17–20 POINTS
CHECK YOUR ANSWERS: PAGE 111. TALLY YOUR SCORE AND RATE YOURSELF ON OUR EINSTEIN SCALE.
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ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER STEMMLER
100 YEARS OF EINSTEIN
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: WANTED THE NEXT EINSTEIN Energetic, original thinker needed immediately for long-term project. Unique opportunity. Salary: modest, with chance of $1-million Nobel Prize supplement By JR Minkel
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Every branch of science has at some point been confronted by a daunting question that stumps progress for years, even decades. How did the continents form? What causes fever? Is there intelligent life beyond Earth? Solutions may accrue incrementally or arrive in a flash of inspiration. Sometimes it seems they are destined never to come at all. Here are four disciplines in need of a modern-day Einstein.
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» COSMOLOGY
WHERE WE ARE NOW In 1998 astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding ever faster over time, driven by a mysterious force they dubbed dark energy. Is dark energy the result of countless virtual particles being created and destroyed in empty space? Will it eventually rip spacetime apart, or might it wither away? Physicists have no clue. Calculations show that empty space should bubble with virtual particles, theoretical objects that produce so much energy that they should have blown the universe apart
holds that different parts of the universe each have dark energy of a particular strength and that we just happen to live in, and hence observe, a part of the universe with a low level of dark energy. If that sounds like a copout to you, you’re not alone. The anthropic principle makes no predictions, Krauss says, and thus goes against the grain of four centuries of physics, during which theories have ultimately won out or lost based on how their predictions matched the world. To build support for the anthropic principle, physicists must show that dark energy could take on different values and then calculate the odds that it would have the value that astronomers measure.
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GENOMICS
WHERE WE ARE NOW Experts have
long ago. Since this hasn’t happened, theorists had figured that the energy of some of those particles must perfectly cancel the energy of the rest, leaving space as calm as flat soda. Yet observations, based on the brightness of distant exploding stars, show levels of dark energy that are tiny but not zero. If the virtual particles thought to inhabit space are truly the source of dark energy, it’s a conundrum: They should produce either huge amounts of dark energy or none at all. “We really, totally are in the dark,” says theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University.
TASK FOR THE NEXT EINSTEIN Explain what dark energy is.
MOST PROMISING APPROACH The so-called anthropic principle
identified most of the genes in the strands of DNA curled inside our cells, but between those genes are long, apparently nonsensical stretches known as “junk DNA.” This wilderness makes up as much as 98.5 percent of the human genome. But recently, as the intricacies of gene functioning have become clear, geneticists have begun to wonder whether junk DNA might have some subtle purpose, such as influencing when genes are turned on and off. Last May a team at the University of California at Santa Cruz found that humans and rodents share nearly 500 identical sequences of junk DNA. If that DNA were truly useless, it should have become garbled by random mutations over evolutionary time. Many of the conserved sequences cluster near genes that are crucial for embryonic development, and others may be causing nearby genes to ramp up protein production. A few hundred sequences are just a drop in the junk-DNA bucket, though. “It’s frustrating because there’s so much of it, and there seems to be at least some that’s fairly tightly conserved between species,” says
Alan Guttmacher, deputy director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. “It’s an attractive target to try and understand.”
TASK FOR THE NEXT EINSTEIN Find out what junk DNA does, or ascertain that it is useless. MOST PROMISING APPROACH The National Human Genome Research Institute’s new project, Encode, will probe junk DNA’s possible functions—in part by comparing the genomes of various mammals to reconstruct their evolutionary history.
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CLIMATOLOGY
WHERE WE ARE NOW Current simulations of the global climate break the world into a grid and ask how the temperature, wind and moisture of each square on the grid affects its neighbors. These simulations ably predict the activity of big atmospheric features, such as jet streams, but they fumble when it comes to finer details, such as the formation and behavior of clouds. That’s an important omission, because clouds both reflect light and trap heat, so they could add to or diminish global warming. The updrafts of air that form clouds are only hundreds of meters across, whereas the smallest units of climate models are some 200 kilometers wide. Calculating interactions among smaller units requires more power than today’s computers possess. Climate experts expect to have the computer power to solve the cloud problem in a few decades, but they want answers now. “It’s the single largest uncertainty in predicting climate change,” says Chris Bretherton of the University of Washington. TASK FOR THE NEXT EINSTEIN Model clouds more accurately.
MOST PROMISING APPROACH Though as yet untested, simulations of life-size clouds dotting an Earth that’s one tenth its true dimensions promise to yield
realistic climate data. Such models require one thousandth the computing power of a fullscale model of global cloud cover, says Bretherton, who took part in the research. “That brings the cost down to something we can do with a powerful university computer.”
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NEUROSCIENCE
WHERE WE ARE NOW Scientists know how memories form: When something noteworthy happens, certain brain cells branch out and connect to one another. If the event is intense and long-lasting enough, the connections, called synapses, become durable. If not, the memory is lost (which explains why an inopportune interruption will keep you from memorizing a phone number). From there, though, things get more mysterious. Recent work by neuroscientist Karel Svoboda of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York reveals that 40 percent of the synapses in a mouse’s brain change over the course of a few weeks. Still, the mouse retains earlier memories—but scientists don’t know how. Perhaps memories migrate to new groups of brain cells or become stored in some more efficient way. “How can we have a memory that lasts for years when the underlying synapses are no longer there?” ponders Karim Nader, a neurobiologist at McGill University. “I’ve got no clue.”
TASK FOR THE NEXT EINSTEIN Learn how memories are stored.
MOST PROMISING APPROACH Observe brain cells’ changing connections in living animals. One new technique is to manipulate a mouse’s genes so that its brain cells produce a green fluorescent protein when they’re active. Peering through a microscope, investigators will then be able to track changes in brain cells and synapses as the animal uses its memory, simply by following the green signal. ■
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SCIENTISTS ARE TRIUMPHANT OVER EXTRAORDINARY NEW IMAGES FROM SATURN AND ITS MOONS—RIVERS OF METHANE, ICE VOLCANOES, FEROCIOUS STORMS AND MORE BY MICHAEL MOYER
Cassini
THE PENETROMETER WAS THE FIRST THING TO HIT.
The stick-like probe on the bottom of the Huygens lander punched aside a hard pebble made of water ice on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and sliced down through five inches of soft, muddy material. Scientists watching from Earth were ecstatic—the probe was not expected to survive the landHuygens ing—but at the same time puzzled: If Titan really was, as they suspected, much like a young Earth, where were the liquid oceans predicted to cover the surface? Where was the methane rain that served as analogue to Earth’s H2O? Suddenly, minutes after landing, the first clue emerged, as the craft began to sink into the soil as if perched on quicksand. Huygens’s landing on Titan and what it revealed about that unknown world is the most dramatic success of the Cassini-Huygens mission, now finishing 82
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CASSINI AND HUYGENS, THE PIGGYBACK PROBE For seven years and two billion miles, the Cassini spacecraft carried the Huygens lander up to Saturn. Last December, six months after Cassini began its four-year study of Saturn, it released Huygens—a probe the size of a Volkswagen Beetle— on a trajectory toward Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. When Huygens entered Titan’s atmosphere 21 days later, it relayed pictures and data back to Earth through Cassini.
SATURN IN HI-DEF This natural-color image is the most detailed ever made of Saturn. Scientists tiled together 126 separate images taken through red, green and blue filters to create this single view.
STORMS AND WAVES It has enchanted astronomers for centuries, but Saturn close-up looks wholly new
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BETTER THAN EVIAN In this UV image of the rings, blue regions are water ice; red, empty space. Scientists can’t explain how the ice stays 99 percent pure though bombarded by meteorites.
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DRAGON STORM Scientists think that this storm [upper right], which flares up and recedes every few months, creates electrical eruptions that may cause powerful radio bursts.
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SMOKING GUN As the moon Pan orbits around Saturn, its gravitational pull creates waves in Saturn’s rings. This image provided the first confirmation of the effect, seen at left.
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SHADOW PLANET Saturn is seen here in the shadow cast by its rings. Blue streaks appear where the rings are thin and absorb only red light. The moon Mimas floats at right.
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FLY ME TO 34 MOONS
One was a comet, another makes rings. But every moon is strange
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• Cassini has also found surprises on several of Saturn’s other moons (four of which the spacecraft discovered). Images of icy Iapetus show a moon composed of materials that are among the brightest and darkest in the solar system. The bright regions are highly reflective water ice, but researchers don’t know what covers the areas that are, as Spilker describes them, “as dark as Xerox toner.” And nothing on Iapetus is so puzzling as the thin, sharp mountain ridge dividing the moon in two. This “belly band” juts almost 12 miles above the moon’s darkened plains and runs for 500 miles along its equator. If Iapetus were scaled to Earth size, aircraft would not be able to fly over the ridge, which would stand more than 110 miles tall. A March flyby of Enceladus, another icy moon, revealed a thin atmosphere—strange for a moon that’s less than a quarter the diameter of Earth’s moon and thus without enough gravity to hold an atmosphere in place. Scientists theorize that Enceladus’s atmosphere steadily drifts away but is continually replenished by ice volcanoes or geysers. Cassini will scrutinize these and other moons, follow the changing of the seasons, and watch the rings from high above the planet’s poles. If the spacecraft holds together, its mission may be extended to 2010 or beyond. Until then, you can get updates at saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. ■
P R E C E D I N G PA G E S , C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : C O U R T E S Y N A S A / J P L / S PA C E S C I E N C E I N S T I T U T E ( 4 ) ; C O U R T E S Y N A S A / J P L / U N I V E R S I T Y O F C O L O R A D O ; C O U R T E S Y S T E V E H O B B S / N A S A ; T H I S PA G E : C O U R T E S Y E S A / N A S A / J P L / U N I V E R S I T Y O F A R I Z O N A
its first year of touring Saturn and its 34 known moons. But surprises like this have been the norm, not the exception. In its travels, the Cassini spacecraft has discovered an atmosphere blanketing a moon that shouldn’t be able to hold one, mountain ridges that dwarf the Himalayas, and evidence for short-lived rivers of methane on Titan. For every mystery Cassini solves, it finds 10 more puzzles for scientists to explore. No one could be sure, for instance, what Huygens— a lander built by the European Space Agency and ferried to Titan by NASA’s much larger Cassini—would land on. Titan’s thick, nitrogen-based atmosphere is opaque, impermeable to all but radar and infrared light. It is also saturated with methane, the principal component of natural gas. Scientists believe that the methane on Titan plays the role that water does on Earth: raining out of clouds; creating rivers, lakes and oceans; then evaporating to form more clouds. The concentration of methane in the atmosphere is so high that many scientists expected there to be enormous seas covering the moon’s surface. Although Huygens’s first radar images of Titan showed what appeared to be dark rivers flowing into a sea, images from the moon’s surface showed the “sea” to be more like a barren desert, empty and dry save for the occasional ice pebble. But when the craft started to sink, scientists realized that the surface is actually marshlike—suffused with liquid methane that has been absorbed by the soil. The heat of Huygens’s batteries boiled off some of the liquid methane beneath the spacecraft. Yet the methane absorbed into the surface isn’t enough to account for all the rain that has poured down onto Titan’s surface over millions of years. Where did the rest of the methane go? “That, perhaps, is one of the biggest puzzles,” says Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist for the Cassini mission. Maybe, she ventures, the amount of methane on Titan isn’t constant—something is pumping additional methane into the atmosphere.
Michael Moyer is a senior editor at POPULAR SCIENCE.
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TEN MINUTES TO TITAN How does a wet moon turn arid between descent and landing?
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VIEW FROM THE TOP During its descent, Huygens shot this radar mosaic of Titan’s surface. The dark areas look like rivers emptying into a sea [at the bottom of the picture; the bright object is a cloud of ammonia]. The image seemed to confirm that Titan is a moon covered with flowing liquid methane.
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TOUCHDOWN ON TITAN Once Huygens landed, though, it didn’t spot any liquid methane. Instead it found chunks of water ice. Scientists speculate that the ice forms during the eruption of “ice volcanoes,” geyser-like fissures shooting water into the -290°F atmosphere. One ongoing challenge is to locate the missing methane.
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YIN-YANG MOON Iapetus is one of the oddest objects in the solar system. The moon is made of ice, its white surface visible in the top half of this image and ringing many of the craters. One hemisphere of the moon, though, is covered with a fluffy, porous, almost black material that scientists can’t identify. Because it occurs on only one side of the moon, the material was probably deposited there from elsewhere in space, but no one knows by what. A huge mountain ridge encircles the planet, making it look like a giant walnut.
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CRATER-FREE CRUST When Voyager flew by Enceladus 25 years ago, the paucity of craters on this moon led scientists to believe that it might not have any surface features at all. But Cassini ’s closer look reveals a network of fissures crisscrossing the surface. These faults imply that the surface is shaped by tectonic forces, such as volcanoes or geysers. They also might produce the gases that give petite Enceladus an atmosphere and that create Saturn’s E ring.
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THE RING-STEALER Tiny Prometheus occasionally passes close enough to Saturn’s multistranded F ring to steal some of its icy material— creating gaps or kinks in the strands. Near the top of this image, you can see traces of Prometheus’s last pass.
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LOST COMET Cassini first flew by Phoebe, Saturn’s most distant moon, last June. Researchers think that Phoebe’s strange orbit (it rotates in the opposite direction of Saturn’s other moons) suggests that it could be a comet captured by Saturn’s gravity many millions of years ago.
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DIONE AND THE STORMS This true-color image shows the moon Dione with Saturn in the background. Look closely and you can see several oval-shaped storms in Saturn’s atmosphere.
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POPSCI T ON THE WEB
Touch down on Titan with this short movie of images taken during the descent of Huygens: popsci.com/cassini.
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HOW 2.0
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BEAT L.A. TRAFFIC 88 • COVER EVERYTHING IN GOLD 90 • DRAW WITH GPS 94 • TRACK YOUR SLEEP 94 • BUILD A WI-FI ANTENNA 96
5 THINGS ... YOU CAN DO WITH GOOGLE’S GMAIL THAT MAKE IT THE BEST FREE E-MAIL SERVICE
DEPT: GEEK GUIDE
INVESTIGATOR: MIKE HANEY
Mac of All Trades
OLIVER WOLFSON
Want a Mac in your living room? How about your car? Apple’s tiny and affordable Mini does it all
TECH: Mac Mini projects COST: $500 and up TIME: One hour and up
DABBLER
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JOIN AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB Gmail is still in beta, so you’ll need an invitation from a member to open an account. Don’t know one? Visit the Gmail Invite Spooler (isnoop.net/gmail) to score one of the spare invites donated by current Gmailers.
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USE IT FOR STORAGE With your account’s massive two gigabytes of space, you can mail yourself file attachments up to 10 megabytes each, or just download the Gmail Drive shell extension (viksoe.dk) to mount your account like a hard drive and drag files into it.
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LABEL EVERYTHING While most e-mail services force you to file everything in folders, Gmail gives you labels. The difference: A message can have multiple labels (for example, “joke” and “mom”). You can even set up filters to automatically assign labels upon arrival.
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SEARCH, DON’T DESTROY No surprise: Gmail has superior search ability baked right in. So it encourages you to throw all your e-mail into one big pile and search by sender, subject, date or content to pull up the messages you want. You can even use complex search strings that combine categories, such as “from:Jon label:family in:anywhere before:2005/5/21.”
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GIVE IT A NEW LOOK Finding Gmail’s design aesthetic a bit austere? Use Firefox and “skin” the site however you please with a custom style sheet. Download new styles from persistent.info/archives/ 2004/10/05/gmail-skinning, or learn CSS (style sheets for Web pages) and tweak the site’s appearance any way you like. —MERLIN MANN
MASTER
The most amazing thing about Apple’s new Mac Mini isn’t its diminutive size, although you can’t help but be surprised at how small it is when you see it in person (about the size of a stack of five CDs). Nor is it the price, although it is the first Mac to break the $500 barrier (provided you supply your own display, keyboard and mouse). The most amazing thing is how an entry-level computer aimed at grandparents and switchers (PC users migrating to the Mac) has ignited the geek community into thinking outside the 6.5-square-inch box. Within hours of the Mini’s announcement—weeks before it started shipping—the Web was abuzz with riffs on all the things one could do with such a small and cheap Mac, and Minidedicated Web sites such as 123macmini.com and modmini.com began popping up soon thereafter. One of the most popular ideas to emerge was using it as a living-room computer for recording TV and storing and playing back movies, music and photos. It even inspired an ad hoc group of programmers to begin working feverishly on a Mac equivalent to the Media Center Edition of Windows XP. Called CenterStage, the customizable, open-source app will provide a 10-foot interface to navigate your media with a remote control. (Follow the group’s progress at centerstageproject.com.) Meanwhile, car tuners noticed that the Mini fit nicely in a glove box, kicking off a flurry of sleek “car-puter” installations. Sound like fun? On the next page you’ll find details on what you need for these two projects and a couple others, as well as instructions for cracking open the Mini for home upgrades. >>
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HOW 2.0| GEEK GUIDE
THE LIVING-ROOM MAC Why: To have a stable and virus-immune machine for storing, recording and playing TV, DVDs, MP3s and digital photos.
Parts and labor: For simple playback, you can plug the Mini into your TV using a DVI cable and into your stereo using a 1/8inch-jack-to-RCA cable. To add DVR functionality, you’ll need an external TV tuner such as the EyeTV ($330; elgato.com) or EvolutionTV ($280; miglia.com). (You can also send video to your Mac from your Series 1 TiVo— find details at popsci.com/h20.) Until CenterStage goes public,
your only option for a 10-foot interface is to add another box called the EyeHome ($200; elgato.com), which comes with its own remote control. If you don’t care about the interface, pick up a Digital Media Remote ($30; keyspan.com) or set up Virtual Network Computer, and control your Mini from any Palm, PocketPC or Java-enabled cellphone. Directions are at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNC.
THE IN-CAR MINI Why: To have full computing power on the go. Stash the Mini in the glove box and attach it to
a touchscreen LCD in the dash to play DVDs and MP3s, edit Word docs, or surf the Web outside your local Wi-Fi hotspot. Parts and labor: In-dash touchscreen LCDs run $275 and up; the two most popular makers are Xenarc (xenarc.com) and Lilliput (lilliputweb.net). You can power the Mini straight from your cigarette lighter, but a better option is the Carnetix P1900
dual-output 140-watt regulator ($100; carnetix.com)—it can supply juice to both the Mini and your monitor straight from the car’s battery. Finally, control it all with software called i3 ($25; i3team.com), a customizable interface designed specifically for easy navigation on small touchscreens. Be inspired by other people’s installations and learn more at macvroom.com.
TWO MORE COOL MINI PROJECTS Web Host: Instead of paying a monthly fee to a hosting service, host your Web site on your Mini using pre-loaded tools such as FreeBSD and Apache Web Server. Excellent tutorial at mundy.org/blog. Phone Switchbox: With an open-source tool called Asterisk, your Mini can be a call center for both VoIP and traditional phone lines with dozens of features, including an automated attendant, voice-response menus and your own hold music. Download it at asterisk.org.
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Unlike larger Macs, the Mini isn’t designed for easy home upgrades. Fortunately, Apple’s prices for point-of-purchase upgrades are pretty reasonable. For instance, you can double your hard-drive size from 40 gigabytes to 80 for only $50, add internal Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for $100, and swap in a DVD-burning SuperDrive for another $100. Installing these parts yourself requires major surgery for very little cost savings. Beefing up the Mini’s paltry 256 megabytes of RAM, however, is an ideal DIY job. It’s easy, it doesn’t void the warranty, and you can save about $200 buying a one-gigabyte stick from a third-party vendor (check dealram.com).
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1. Set the Mini upsidedown on a soft surface. Insert thin putty knives between the metal and the plastic on each side. Pry the knives outward harder than you think you should. After some scary cracking noises, the tabs holding on the case will release and the bottom will pop up. 2. To replace the RAM, pull the tabs on each side away from the RAM stick until it pops up. Carefully place the new one in the slot, and push down hard until the tabs lock in place.
Are you a switcher? Find the best products for new Mac users at popsci.com/h20.
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[ ] H2.0 ON THE ROAD
Tech for the Traveling Life
Driving home during rush hour in Los Angeles is like wading blindfolded and earplugged through a pool of piranhas: You know there will be problems, you just don’t know how bad the bites will be.
TRAFFICGAUGE
$80 + $7/month; trafficgauge.com TECH: Traffic-info device ROADWORTHY: Definitely
For less than $100, the TrafficGauge solves that. The PDA-like device shows a fixed map of a regional freeway system. Currently it only works in L.A./ Orange County and Seattle, but 20 more cities are planned. When traffic is light, paths on the display look clear. As conditions worsen, they fill with lines that are either solid (slow) or blinking (stopand-go). Data is updated every four minutes during peak times, beamed from regional transit authorities by radio signals, so there are no dead zones. Football, baseball or basketball icons pop up when a game is nearby. The simple map doesn’t scroll, you can’t zoom for details, and only freeways are covered. The upside? Nothing to mess with while driving. The sole button turns on a dim yet functional backlight. TrafficGauge doesn’t make the congestion disappear, but it helps me outsmart the worst of it. And that’s a start.—XENI JARDIN
I L L U S T R AT I O N S : O L I V E R W O L F S O N ; P H O T O G R A P H S : J O H N B . C A R N E T T
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HOW2.0| GRAY MATTER DEPT: GRAY MATTER
INVESTIGATOR: THEODORE GRAY
Make Everything Golden Using sheets so thin they’re measured in atoms, you can cover anything with a lasting coat of pure gold
ELEMENT: Gold PROJECT: Gilding COST: $60 TIME: One hour DABBLER
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Malleable things can be hammered thinner without breaking; ductile things can be stretched thinner without snapping. Every material has its limit, but with gold, that limit is just a few hundred atoms thick. Gold is the most malleable and the most ductile of all metals. A cube of it about 21/2 inches on edge could be beaten out to cover an entire football field (at a cost of LEFT: Progressively thicker forms of gold [clockwise from the gilded home-run baseball]: twomillionths-of-an-inch gold leaf; one-thousandth-of-an-inch foil; a one-gram slice; a 10-gram ingot; a one-ounce ingot; and a nugget, chain and bar.
roughly $68,000, plus beating fees). Gold this thin is called gold leaf, and the ancient art of applying it for decoration is called gilding. How thin is gold leaf? Using my steel rolling mill, I can make gold foil about one thousandth of an inch thick, similar to aluminum foil. Thin, sure, but gold leaf is nearly 500 times as thin as that. Only then does it become affordable enough and flexible enough to be used almost like paint to cover finely detailed carvings or anything else you want to be shiny for years to come. To make gold leaf, start with gold foil, interleave a few dozen squares of it with layers of special vellum (so the foil sheets don’t stick to one another), and beat the heck out of the stack with a 16-pound hammer for many hours, turning the squares into larger squares of thinner foil.
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1. Mini rolling mill squeezes one gram of gold into foil, which is still about 500 times as thick as gold leaf. 2. Gold leaf held to a squirrelhair brush by static electricity, ready to be applied.
Then cut the sheets in quarters, restack them, and pound them out again. The malleability of gold is what allows the sheets to just keep getting thinner and thinner without splitting. (OK, I admit, I tried and failed at this. Just haven’t got the arm for it.
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Or the proper vellum, or the family secrets handed down over generations. Making gold leaf is, like other ancient arts, not quite the garage project it might seem.) Gilding, on the other hand, is not a particularly difficult
MELTING POINT: 1,948°F BOILING POINT: 5,173°F KNOWN SINCE: Antiquity USES: Jewelry, electrical contacts, currency TOTAL AMOUNT MINED THROUGHOUT HISTORY: Enough to make a cube 60 foot on edge, or enough to gild Indiana
skill. To gild a home-run baseball, I used commercially prepared gold leaf from an artsupply store. The process is simple: Paint the object with a sticky liquid called gold size, lay the sheets of gold leaf on, and rub them in. The catch is the part where you try to pick up the leaf. Don’t even think about using your fingers—this stuff is more like a soap bubble than a sheet of metal and will start wrapping around your fin-
gers and then tear the instant you try to unwrap it. Brushes known as gilders’ tips, made of red-squirrel hair (none of that gray-squirrel crap, mind you) are used to pick up the sheets by static electricity. It takes a delicate touch, but at $2 per four-inch-by-four-inch sheet, you’re motivated to learn fast. Gold leaf instantly welds to itself. Overlapping layers fuse together invisibly when rubbed in, so even if you’re sloppy, the end result will look smooth. It’s OK to touch it with your fingers at this point because the gold size will hold it in place. Gilded objects survive from 5,000 years ago (think King Tut’s mask), proving that gold is impervious to air, water, alkalis and most acids, no matter how thin it is. Read more about Gray’s scientific pursuits at periodictabletable.com.
HOW2.0| TECH LESSON DEPT: TECH LESSON
INVESTIGATOR: PHILLIP TORRONE
Tracing Your Steps By overlaying GPS data on a satellite map, you can make massive drawings all over the land
TECH: GPS drawing TOOLS: GPS receiver, free software COST: $100 and up DABBLER
MASTER
Like crop-circle makers and Christo before them, Jeremy Wood and Hugh Pryor are artists who use the landscape as their canvas, tracing miles-long drawings around the British countryside on foot or by car. Their paintbrush is a portable GPS receiver that records their coordinates every few seconds, creating a huge connect-the-dots pattern. Later they export that data to a PC, where custom-designed software called GPSograph reveals the shape of the path they traveled. Sometimes the patterns are naturally occurring—the pair’s first GPS drawing was of a fish they noticed on a map of central England. Others are planned in advance, including the eight-mile-high dollar sign Wood and his brother drew in Las Vegas [inset below] and the game of tic-tac-toe they played in Hollywood. Wood and Pryor didn’t invent GPS-based art—it’s been around since at least the mid-1990s, when the receivers went portable—but they have inspired others to follow in their footsteps. Their site, gpsdrawing.com, displays contributions from fellow GPS artists all over the world. Follow the instructions below to tromp out your own masterpiece, then send it to [email protected] and we’ll post it to a special gallery at popsci.com/h20.
EXHAUSTING ART: It took Torrone five tries and 12 hours to draw this “H20” in Seattle. INSET: An eightmile-high dollar sign on the streets of Las Vegas ONE
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I used a wrist-worn GPS receiver from Garmin, the Forerunner 201, to draw the large “H20” in Seattle [above], but any GPS receiver that lets you dump data to a PC should work. The software that comes with this unit is called Logbook, so that’s what I’ll refer to in the steps [right]; most programs will have similar options.
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Install USAPhotoMaps (free at jdmcox.com), which downloads the aerial maps from a free Microsoft service. Look at a map, plan your route, and run, drive, or cycle with your GPS receiver in tow. When you get home, import the GPS data to Logbook. Choose Data Preview to see the path you took and how well it approximates the shape you were aiming for. If you’re satisfied, export the data as an .xml file (File > Export to XML). Open USAPhotoMaps and import the data (File > Import > Forerunner Logbook), and save it as a .csv file. In the USAPhotoMaps menu, go to GPS > Tracks > Display, and select the .csv file you just saved. You should see the aerial map with your path overlayed.
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At the Intersection of Technology and the Body
As promises go, Sleeptracker’s is a pretty big one: While you slumber, a motion sensor in the watch detects the increased body movement that accompanies lighter sleep. You set a window of time (say, half
SLEEPTRACKER $150; sleeptracker.com TECH: Sleep monitor DOES IT WORK? Maybe, but not for me an hour) during which you’d like to wake up, and the alarm will go off when you’re closest to wakefulness, reducing the foggy feeling that comes from clawing your way out of deep REM sleep. If it fails to sense lighter sleep within the window, the alarm sounds at the end of it. The Sleeptracker is based on real sleep science, and on paper, it seems revolutionary. My results over a month of wearing it, however, were not. Most of the time, I snoozed until the alarm sounded at the end of the window. Frequently I slept right through its alert, which was too quiet (and often buried under a pillow). The few times it did wake me “correctly,” I still felt groggy. Perhaps my sleep patterns aren’t rhythmic enough, disturbed as they are by travel, kids and deadline stress. With a 30day money-back guarantee, I’d say it’s worth trying. But I wouldn’t toss my coffee machine.—STEVE CASIMIRO
P H O T O G R A P H : J O H N B . C A R N E T T; P H O T O I L L U S T R AT I O N S , F R O M T O P : C O U R T E S Y P H I L L I P T O R R O N E ; C O U R T E S Y J E R E M Y W O O D
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TECH SUPPORT HEY, READERS: Contribute to this page by sending your favorite tips, gear suggestions, and questions for the Geek Chorus to [email protected].
ASK A GEEK
SCOTT FULLAM
YOUR GEAR Although it sports only an infrared or serial connection (no modern Bluetooth or USB stuff), my paperback-size, batteryoperated SiPix A6 Pocket Printer goes everywhere I go. I plop it down next to my laptop (it can also print from a PDA) to print anything I need in an instant—schedules, boarding passes, maps and directions, coupons—at 400dpi resolution. SiPix doesn’t even sell the thing anymore, but you can get one on eBay for less than $20. —Mike Masnick, editor of the blog techdirt.com
THE TIP SHEET
Q: What’s the best DIY antenna for extending my Wi-Fi network?
A:
You’ve probably heard of the Wi-Fi antennas made from old Pringles cans, but those are tricky to build and often require special connectors and soldering. A much easier option is a parabolic reflector antenna. You can whip one together using an old shoe box, tape and some aluminum foil in about 30 minutes, and it will double or triple the range (in a single direction) of just about any wireless access point with an external stick antenna. It works by simply creating a large surface area that the antenna uses to receive and transmit signals. First, cut two parabolic curves from cardboard, and cut a hole at the focal point of each just big enough to fit over your access point’s antenna. (Download a template at popsci.com/h20.) These curves keep the reflector in its proper shape. Next, cut a piece of cardboard roughly nine inches square, and cover one side with aluminum foil. Shape the square sheet over the two curved pieces, foil facing in, and tape everything together. Try to get the reflector to fit to the parabolic curve closely, as deviations of even a quarter of an inch can reduce its effectiveness. Finally, slide the completed apparatus over your access point’s stick antenna. SCOTT FULLAM, a former Apple engineer and toy designer (he once made Barbie speak), is the author of Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks ($30; O’Reilly).
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CUSTOMIZE THE WEB Greasemonkey is an amazing plug-in for the Firefox browser that lets you use scripts to alter the way Web pages are displayed. For instance, you can remove ads from gizmodo.com or automatically add a “play” button to every MP3 link on a page. Learn more at greasemonkey.mozdev.org.—H2.0 staff
YOUR OWN HANDWRITTEN FONT Put that personal touch back in your Word docs and e-mail with a font made from your own handwriting. Just print the template at www.fontifier.com, and write each letter, number and symbol. Then scan and upload the page, and the site will generate your font. Preview it before purchasing ($9).—Nigel Powell
T THIS IS BROKEN IT ALSO PREVENTS HUMAN REGISTRATIONS
See more examples of things broken at thisisbroken.com.
I L L U S T R AT I O N : A L E X N A B A U M ; P H O T O G R A P H S , F R O M T O P : J O H N B . C A R N E T T; C O U R T E S Y S C O T T F U L L A M
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FACTS, ANSWERS, ODDITIES & ENTERTAINMENTS FOR A MONTH OF SCIENCE IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE? Two companies offer to send your voice, image and text messages to awaiting ETs.
[INTERGALACTIC COMMUNICATIONS] CONVINCED THAT NO ONE ON EARTH
will buy your musty old futon? Feeling alone in the universe? Why not try hitting up an alien civilization to assuage your Earthly woes! Two privately owned satellite companies—Deep Space Communications Network (DSCN) in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and TalkToAliens.com in central Connecticut—are spearheading the civilian data race into space. The inaugural transmission involved beaming reams of Craigslist.com’s want ads to the awaiting heavens. To test the market for its technology, DSCN held an eBay auction in February for its first satellite transmission into deep space. Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster placed the winning bid of $1,225, then handed the reins to the global Craigslist community. The free online message board, which hosts more than five million postings a month, provides a forum for roommate 98
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searches, dating ads and, yes, a place to flog your old couch. For several months, a check box on the posting forms allowed users to indicate whether they wanted their message sent into space. Although Buckmaster’s bid secured airtime for only 75 words and five pictures or five minutes of video, Craigslist negotiated for a higher volume after the site received more than 10,000 spacebound postings within the first 24 hours. By early March, Craigslist had more than 24 million words and pictures flagged for transmission. On March 11, broadcasting at a frequency of 5.945 gigahertz, DSCN sent a 23-minute transmission into space. More than 138,000 postings were sent during this session; the second and final transmission was scheduled for mid-May, to correspond with NASA’s launch of the space shuttle Discovery. With Craigslist footing the bill
ALEX NABAUM
Tele-spamming Our Alien Brethren
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FYI through May, faithful message posters could scour the cosmos for everything from green alien girlfriends to Cubs– White Sox tickets to undiscovered worlds up for grabs (“I claim your planet in the name of Earth. Surrender or die,” wrote one jokester). Visitors to Slashdot.com suggested other creative postings, begging for “a ride off this rock” (“Ecosystem failing . . . pick up at Long. 118.20193, Lat 33.85908, Earth”) and parodying dubious real-estate postings: “For sale: **Diamond in the rough.** Third planet from Sun . . . Good starter planet for young, carbonbased species . . . Small hole in ozone layer. Aboriginal biped humanoid species infestation can easily be removed with genetically engineered plague or runaway nanotech ‘accident.’ ” If you missed out on this collaborative message in a bottle, private ventures are now providing the service to individuals as well. DSCN will soon accept text, with either five pictures or five-minute video messages for $99 and will include a certificate confirming broadcast specifics such as to where and at what time the transmission went out. And TalkToAliens.com, a service founded by members of the Civilian Space eXploration Team— a group that, last May, sent the first civilian amateur rocket into space— currently sends e-mails ($20) and realtime phone transmissions ($4 per minute) into deep space. The company is developing ways to send videos, pictures and instant messages. TalkToAliens.com messages are broadcast at 2.43211 gigahertz, a similar frequency to that used by cordless phones and wireless networks. “It is commonly used on Earth, so if any intergalactic entity is already listening in, they should be aware of this portion of the spectrum,” says company president Eric Knight. But unlike your cellphone, which broadcasts at low power and in all directions, TalkToAliens.com beams messages in a tightly focused beam directly to the core of the Milky Way. Focusing the beam greatly enhances the distance it can travel and still maintain a decent signal strength, increasing the chances that a faraway civilization might be able to pick it up.
Despite the jokes and criticism— some fear that the radio pollution and intergalactic spam might anger other, possibly belligerent, civilizations—both Knight of TalkToAliens.com and DSCN president Jim Lewis say they believe there is a possibility of reaching other planets populated with intelligent life. “If you consider all the organizations we have on Earth monitoring 24 hours
a day for other life-forms,” Lewis says, naming the SETI Institute in California, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, “isn’t it logical that other intelligent life-forms are doing the same?” Feeling garrulous or have a velvet Elvis you simply must sell? Check out talktoaliens.com or deepspacecom.net. —AMANDA MACMILLAN
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Nuclear Science Before the Bomb BEFORE THE FALLOUT: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima by Diana Preston; Walker & Company; 416 pages; $27
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE FIRST ATOMIC
detonation, in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, Enrico Fermi calmly took bets from his Manhattan Project colleagues on whether the explosion would ignite the atmosphere. Although nothing so dramatic happened—casualties were limited to several thousand luckless frogs—the Trinity test marks the point at which science and politics fused into a single global uncertainty.
As historian Diana Preston shows in Before the Fallout, this decisive moment could scarcely have been imagined 50 years before. Her deeply researched story begins with Marie Curie, whose finding that a uranium ore called pitchblende was more radioactive than pure uranium led her to discover radium. Curie did her work in a leaky wooden shed, treating 10 tons of ore to extract the tenth of a gram needed to prove that radium was an element. In the process, she determined that the energy released by radium was atomic. But the public, unconcerned with such subtleties, was impressed mostly by the crystal’s eerie blue glow. Soon radium was lauded as a miracle drug, used to treat cancer and birthmarks alike. There was even a radioactive toothpaste, for a radiant smile. In the midst of this mania, serious research continued, often with resources more sparse than those available to poor Mme. Curie. Finding himself stranded in a German internment camp during World War I, English
physicist James Chadwick ran experiments on beta particles using radium toothpaste as his radioactive source. World War II changed everything in a flash. Concerned that the Nazis might make an atomic bomb, the U.S. government dumped $2 billion into the biggest research program in history. “[J]oy in pure scientific discovery,” Preston writes with characteristic insight, “created a beautiful science which was suddenly transmuted into a wartime sprint for the ultimate weapon.” Within that beautiful science was the core of the bomb, bound to explode given proper conditions. It was the ultimate gruesome experiment. And in August 1945 in Japan, the world first saw the terrible implications of the atomic age.—JONATHON KEATS
[ASTRONAUT ANTICS]
Risky Business ASTRONAUTS HAVE A CERTAIN AURA
of derring-do—tough risk-takers defying nature and death to explore the
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COURTESY WILL KIPLING, UC BERKELEY
FYI realms beyond Earth’s atmosphere. But for the last eight months before a spaceflight, those astronauts are more coddled than children are by an overprotective mother. You see, NASA wants to safeguard the training, time and money invested in each person headed to space, and that means expressly forbidding astronauts from engaging in any high-risk activities for almost a year before their scheduled takeoffs. Astronauts are given a list of taboos. Airplane, motorboat and motorcycle racing, snowboarding, skiing and skydiving are all verboten. Kent Rominger, chief of the astronaut corps at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, warns that the policy is open-ended and that new restrictions can be instated at any time. It may seem strange that NASA would consider these earthly pastimes too dangerous for men and women whose day jobs entail orbiting Earth at 17,500 mph. But for NASA, the consequences of losing an astronaut to injury are severe. “It’s pretty easy to say how much
money has been invested in the training of an astronaut,” says David Ropeik of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. “But there are other costs: a substitute astronaut, his training, delays in the launch, and countless other factors we could figure in.” NASA has never postponed a flight because of injury, but there have been some close calls. “I’ve got guys that have climbed Denali, guys who race dirt bikes, who ski and fly private airplanes,” Rominger says. The current shuttle crew is no different. Commander Eileen Collins’s vehicle of choice is a motorcycle, while Mission Specialist Andy Thomas prefers mountain biking. And although these activities aren’t so much more dangerous than the tasks involved in the training itself—scuba and underwater exercises, 300mph landing practice in modified jets, emergency-bailout scenarios—the training “returns a benefit,” Ropeik says, “and so they are risks worth taking. As are the flights themselves.” —AMANDA MACMILLAN
[SMILE-INDUCING SCIENCE]
Press Release of the Month FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
at Berkeley: “Researchers find three major beetle groups coming up one testicle short.” Really curious to read more about the monorchid (one-testicled) beetles? See www.berkeley.edu/news/media/ releases/2005/03/03_beetles.shtml.
DROPPING THE BALL Some beetles, like this Onypterigia tricolor, have only one testicle.
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comes and goes, but there is no sign of him. About 20 miles away, he is actually flying in circles, struggling with one final problem: a stuck nose landing gear. The fluid in a small hydraulic actuator froze during its three days’ exposure to high altitudes, and it takes a few minutes of flying in warmer air to nudge it down and lock it in place. That done, he heads for Salina.
Fossett has been at the controls for more than 66 hours. Can he manage the now-featherweight craft on his critical, concentration-demanding final approach? Surging adrenaline is his ally, but fatigue and disorientation may take away his edge if split-second reactions to trouble are required. At last, GlobalFlyer’s wide yet extremely thin profile materializes low on the horizon to the north. He lines up on Runway 17, with one of his two
drag chutes deployed to slow the aircraft down. His engine has been at idle for nearly 300 miles—GlobalFlyer has been gliding since Colorado. With a distinctive whine-whoosh, generated by both the idling engine and the airplane’s elegant aerodynamics, Fossett streaks past the media viewing stand beside the runway and touches down at 1:50 p.m., after a flight of 67 hours, 1 minute and 46 seconds. He’s flown 19,880 miles, only 17 miles more than was needed for the record. GlobalFlyer weighs 5,326 pounds, 1,515 pounds of which is the remaining fuel— enough for another 2,990 miles. Fossett taxis GlobalFlyer to the hangar, where Karkow and Branson stand waving giant checkered flags. Fans cheer, and the national and international media scramble for position. Fossett climbs out, waving. Addressing the crowd by loudspeaker, he is typically minimalist in his manner: “I’m a really lucky guy—I got to achieve my ambition,” he says before thanking his team and supporters. When handed an enormous bottle of champagne, he gingerly pops it open and takes a swig. Branson swipes the bottle from Fossett, shakes it up, and chases him around in big circles, with the triumphant pilot grinning earto-ear as he finally succumbs to the dousing. Several minutes later, when Fossett comes over to speak with journalists, he runs his hands through his champagne-soaked hair and scratches at his three-day beard. His face is gaunt, weary, and he looks, somehow, transformed. He has a rugged edge to him, and the confidence of a man who just flew a jet airplane all the way around the world, alone, and is now blithely telling the tale. At the press conference the next day, he tackles again the persistent question of why. “Maybe a person has to be another pilot to appreciate this, but a pilot loves to fly,” says Fossett, who claims that he could have flown another 24 hours at the controls. “Long distances, crossing oceans and continents—it was an epic adventure: flying all day long, all night long, and doing all the flying myself.” ■ Eric Adams is POPULAR SCIENCE’s aviation and automotive editor. 108
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HOW EINSTEIN ARE YOU? ANSWER KEY TO THE QUIZ ON PAGE 78
1] (1 point) C, B, D, A Although Einstein was a citizen of three countries (Germany, Switzerland and the U.S.), married 1–4 POINTS twice, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics, he never met a U.S. president. 2] (1 point) D The Einstein Ring is a gravitational lens in which the image of the 5–8 POINTS distant object forms a complete circle around the closer object. Einsteinium is a synthetic element discovered in 1952. The Einstein Tower is an observatory in Potsdam, Germany. 9–12 POINTS 3] (4 possible points) A, ii; B, iv; C, i; D, iii General relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, made heavy use of then longforgotten mathematical objects called tensors. 13–16 POINTS 4] (1 point) C He said he inherited from his mother his temper and his hair, both of which were difficult to control. 5] (2 possible points) Special theory: i; General theory: iv 17–20 POINTS 6] (1 point) A Although the refrigeration pump Einstein invented with Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard found modest success when applied to nuclear power plants, the gyroscopic compass he developed in the 1920s with German engineer Hermann Anschütz-Kaempfe was quickly adopted by virtually every navy in the world. Einstein used his proceeds from that device to help colleagues escape the Nazis. 7] (6 possible points) A: False Einstein was a gifted child; math, science and music were his best subjects. B: True He was excluded from Swiss military service for (among other things) “excessive foot perspiration.” C: True He had multiple affairs. D: True. E: True His brain was removed after his death and before he was cremated. It was sliced into about 240 pieces, and over the years it has been studied by various researchers. F: False None of his five children followed his career path. 8] (1 point) A 10] (1 point) B 9] (1 point) A 11] (1 point) B
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LOOKINGBACK
FROM THE POPULAR SCIENCE ARCHIVES
MAY1934
OTHER NEWS FROM THE MAY 1934 ISSUE
Getting Loopy
Airplane-inspired amusement-park rides of the 1930s spawned some of today’s theme-park favorites Devalued stocks, raging unemployment and weakened national pride plagued the 1930s, but POPSCI escaped the Great Depression with a focus on fun inventions. A ride that “gives thrill seekers topsy-turvy sensations, comparable to those of looping the loop in a plane” graced our May 1934 cover, half a century after the roller coaster first appeared in American amusement parks. A giant steel arm swung this four-passenger car like a pendulum until momentum took over, hurling riders around a full loop. A year later, experimental-aircraft designer Lee Eyerly secured a patent for a similar design made from his surplus of airplane parts—materials that were in low demand during the Depression. Spin-offs of his wildly popular “Loop-o-Plane,” which later grew another arm and swung two cars, still delight riders at theme parks today. [For a look at tomorrow’s rides, see page 56.]—AMANDA MACMILLAN
NEW MASKS KEEP BULLS CALM Thanks to cattle blinders being tested in England, “vicious bulls may no longer be a menace to passers-by,” we wrote. The masks blocked the animals’ sight so that they would remain docile around people.
NICOTINE GIVES CIGARETTES THEIR KICK Smoking is enjoyable because nicotine stimulates adrenal glands and releases sugar in the body, Yale University scientists found in 1934. It would take another 54 years for the U.S. surgeon general to acknowledge the drug’s addictive power.
HOOVER LEADS TEAM OF EARLY CSI AGENTS Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover embraced forensic advances in wiretapping, fingerprinting and chemical analysis to solve a rash of kidnappings and murders in the 1930s. One technology used wax and sulfuric acid to detect gunpowder on a suspect’s trigger finger. Photocopy Permission: Permission is granted by POPULAR SCIENCE® for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy articles in this issue for the flat fee of $1 per copy of each article or any part of an article. Send correspondence and payment to CCC (21 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970); specify CCC code 0161-7370/85/$1.00—0.00. Copying done for otherthan personal or reference use without the written permission of POPULAR SCIENCE® is prohibited. Address requests for permission on bulk orders to Time4 Media, Inc., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. For domestic requests (article reprints only); write, call or email PARS International Corp. 102 West 38th Street, New York, NY 10018; 212-221-9595 x105; [email protected]. POPULAR SCIENCE® is a registered trademark of Time4 Media, Inc. Occasionally we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 51286, Boulder, CO 80322-1286. POPULAR SCIENCE Business and Executive Offices: 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Editorial Offices: Address contributions to POPULAR SCIENCE, Editorial Dept., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. We are not responsible for loss of unsolicited materials; they will not be returned unless accompanied by return postage. Microfilm editions are available from Xerox University Microfilms Serial Bid Coordinator, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Subscription Inquiries: Send new or renewal subscriptions or changes of address (send both new and old addresses) to POPULAR SCIENCE, Box 62456, Tampa, FL 33662-4568. Allow six to eight weeks for change of address. If you have a subscription problem, please write to the above address. Subscriptions: U.S. and its possessions, 1 year $19.95; 2 years, $26.95; 3 years, $32.95. For Canada, add $10 per year (includes GST). For foreign destinations, add $30 per year. Subscriptions processed electronically. Subscribers: If the post office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Postmaster: Send change-of-address notices to POPULAR SCIENCE, Box 60001, Tampa, FL 33660-0001. POPULAR SCIENCE entered as periodical postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. POPULAR SCIENCE new Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40110178. Return undeliverable Canada addresses to Postal Stn. A, P.O. Box 4015, Toronto, ON, M5W 2T2 GST # R-122988066. POPULAR SCIENCE (ISSN 0161-7370) is published monthly by Time4 Media, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Printed in U.S.A. © 2005 Time4 Media, Inc.
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