Popular Science (July 2005)
yep this is it! these magazines hold so much they are like time capsules! hope there are more around in good shape
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BONUS FOLDOUT: A BOLD NEW PLAN TO SAVE THE TITANIC
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WHAT’S NEW
51 HOT PRODUCTS p.13
Robot warplane TeA THE UNMANNED FUTURE OF AIR COMBAT (p. 42)
Back to Mars! The Next Orbiter Readies for Launch
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Digitally signed by TeAM YYePG DN: cn=TeAM YYePG, c=US, o=TeAM YYePG, ou=TeAM YYePG, email=yyepg@msn. com Reason: I attest to the accuracy and integrity of this document Date: 2005.06.17 03:18:57 +08'00'
Forget Fireworks Tr y a 15-Foot Rocket Stuffed with 50 Pounds of Explosives One Man + 80 Helium Balloons = Liftoff!
Pilotless Prototype Northrop Grumman’s X-47B unmanned combat air vehicle US $3.99 CAN $4.99
JULY 2005
POPSCI.COM
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VOLUME 267 #1
CONTENTS
JULY 2005
“If you were a fanatical risk analyst, you’d probably end up staying in bed all day.” That, sadly, wouldn’t be a good idea. Every year, around 400 people unintentionally suffocate or strangle themselves in bed. CAR CRASHES . . . CRIMINALS . . .
FOUNDED IN 1872
tech
CANCER . . . BLACK SWANS? AAAAAIIIEEEH!, p.56
13 | What’s New
PHOTOGRAPHY A tiny hi-def camcorder. GADGETS Your cellphone, circa 2013. AUTO Saab’s 184hp booze-powered ride.
75 | How 2.0
YOU BUILT WHAT?! Flying a pack of balloons. MAXED OUT Blow $7,000 on gaming. GRAY MATTER Forging a real silver bullet. TECH LESSON DIY animated flicks.
news and views O N T H E C O V E R : 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 : H U G H K R E T S C H M E R ; L U I S B R U N O ; J O H N B . C A R N E T T; J O H N L AW T O N ; D E A N A . E K D A H L
29 | Headlines
BIOTECH Subterranean drug pharming. SPACE An übercamera goes to Mars. COMPUTERS The Darwinian police sketch. MEDICAL TECH A supersonic vaccine gun.
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36 | Soapbox
SCIENCE FRICTION When mortals gain superpowers, science gets silly. By Gregory Mone MEDIASCOPE Despite what you may have heard, obesity kills. By Rebecca Skloot
stories
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42 | Is This the Future of Air Combat?
The arrival of unmanned combat air vehicles throws the fate of the fighter jet into question. By Bill Sweetman 49 | Welcome to Museum Titanic
Two miles below the Atlantic, a fight is brewing over the destiny of the world’s most famous shipwreck. By Mark Schrope
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56 | Car Crashes . . . Criminals . . . Cancer . . . Black Swans? AAAAAIIIEEEH! How the science of
risk analysis can help you to judge better and fear smarter. By James Vlahos 66 | The Biggest Bang At the Large Dangerous Rocket Ship launch, even (explosive) failure is fun. By Joseph Hooper
depts. 4 From the Editor 6 Contributors 8 Letters
86 FYI 108 Looking Back
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FROM THE EDITOR Editorial Director Scott Mowbray
Editor Mark Jannot
Fear Factor IT’S SUMMERTIME, WHICH MEANS
that sharks are engaged in their annual feeding frenzy—or at least that’s the impression the hype masters of the evening news will be pitching us. In fact, in an average year only about 33 swimmers get chomped in the U.S. (with fewer than one fatality) out of about two billion beach visits, but you’d be forgiven for thinking the threat is far more dire. I was working at a different magazine a few years ago during a summer in which this triumph of perception over probability was particularly egregious, and, gleeful skeptic that I am, I proposed publishing an article puncturing the shark-bite hysteria. My then-boss, though, was implacably squeamish about the idea. He just couldn’t let the numbers wrest him from the horrific mental image of a shark mauling one of his own daughters. So he turned it on me: Would I really let my young son splash around in possibly shark-infested waters? “Sure!” I snapped back, blithely feeding my boy to the theoretical sharks in order to make a point. We never did run that article. But in this issue I get my vindication, in the form of contributing editor James Vlahos’s exploration [page 56] of what the science of risk analysis has to say about why most of us are so bad at gauging the perils, real and imagined, that we face each day. One of the insights Vlahos delivers involves how our brains are wired to respond to fear. “The thalamus usually dominates, reacting quickly and powerfully to potential threats by triggering behavioral, autonomic and endocrine responses,” he writes. “The cortex, responsible for the thoughtful consideration of danger, steps in later. We fear first and think second.” This will come as no surprise to the marketers, news directors, politicians and advocacy groups who prey on our fears to sell us their products and positions. (We at POPULAR SCIENCE are not entirely innocent, as our May “Earth Attacks!” cover demonstrates.) I anticipate that this nexus of fear and flackery will be fertile ground for Rebecca Skloot, whose new Soapbox column, Mediascope, examines the coverage of big science stories. Of course, sometimes it’s our irrational exuberance, not fear, that the stories play to, as with the “fat is good” mania Skloot deconstructs on page 38. But if fear has a natural enemy, it’s information. And with Skloot and Vlahos on the case, I believe we’re in good hands.
MARK JANNOT [email protected]
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 Intern Matthew Olson POPULAR SCIENCE PROPERTIES
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BEN BAKER/REDUX; GROOMING BY MICHELLE CEGLIA FOR iGROUP; STYLING BY NAILA RUECHEL FOR STOCKLAND MARTEL
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CONTRIBUTORS +
YOUR GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S POPSCI
From “accidents, fatal” to “zealous minority”
ACCIDENTS, FATAL
A gigantic picnic and incendiary devices—sounds like the perfect Fourth of July, right? In fact, writer JOSEPH HOOPER [left] and photographer TOM TAVEE had a much more rockin’ Fourth of July than many people can boast [“The Biggest Bang,” page 66]. They joined a few hundred high-powered-rocketry enthusiasts in a field outside Rochester, New York, and—kaboom!—enjoyed some real fireworks: 15-foot homebuilt rockets searing the air—or blowing up in flight, depending on luck and the skill of the rocket builder. Despite the occasional launchpad burn-up or midair explosion, injuries to bystanders were nonexistent, as far as Hooper could tell. “I didn’t see anyone missing any fingers,” he says. Adds Tavee, who travels widely for his work as a documentary photographer, “The rocketeer culture is one of the coolest I’ve encountered. You just can’t believe that somebody makes these rockets in their garage!”
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As millions of dollars’ worth of movie and museum receipts have shown, the public remains fascinated by the story of the Titanic. On page 49, Florida-based oceanographer-turned-writer MARK SCHROPE examines a bold plan to make the ship into a virtual museum—a notion that he says has generated animosity between those who want to bring as much of the Titanic as possible to the surface and those who want to leave it be. In Headlines [page 29], JOSHUA TOMPKINS explains how pharming—growing pharmaceuticals in plants like corn and tobacco—is going underground. In response to concerns that bioengineered plants could contaminate food crops, companies are cultivating the pharm plants in abandoned mines. “They don’t use a fluorescent grow light, like you see on college campuses,” Tompkins says. “The power bills must be huge.” Photographer LUIS BRUNO, who often shoots images for What’s New, is something of a technophile. “I’m pretty impulsive when it comes to tech,” he says, “but I always call [POPSCI staff photographer and resident early-adopter] John Carnett first to see what’s new.” This month he took the picture accompanying our biopharming story. Those colorful Advil and Sudafed pills didn’t go to waste after the shoot. “I actually use them,” Bruno says. Illustrator ALEX NABAUM drew a computer with writerly ambitions for our FYI story about software that generates research papers convincing enough to fool academic-conference organizers [page 86]. Nabaum credits persistence as the key to his work; he eliminates any elements in an image that distract from what he’s trying to convey. “For every good idea,” he says, “I have 20 bad ones. And the first idea I come up with is almost always bad.”
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AFFLECK, BEN
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ANIMATION AUTEUR
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BIG FREAKIN’ ROCKET
68
CATASTROPHIC AT TAKEOFF
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CHAMPAGNE, BOTTLES OF
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CLUSTER BALLOONING
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CONTEXT CAMERA
31
DEATH BY VENDING MACHINE
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DR. OTTO OCTAVIUS
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EAR-SHATTERING ROAR
108
ELLAGIC ACID
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ETHANOL-POWERED TURBO
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F/A-22 RAPTOR
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FALLING COCONUTS
94
FLAMING PYRAMID OF DEATH
70
GET FAT, LIVE LONGER!
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HEALTH NUTS
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HI-DEF CAMCORDER, SMALLEST
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HORSE TRAMPLING IS SO 1850
95
I ♥ GAS GUZZLERS
35
ICEBERG, COLLISION
51
INTERSECTION OF DEATH
63
JOSHUA TREE FORESTS
44
KEY-RING REAL ESTATE
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LOAD-BEARING CARABINER
76
MOONED THE BEASTS
76
NO SMOKE, NO JOY
69
RMS TITANIC
49
ROCKET GODS ARE NOT HAPPY
92
RUSTICLES
53
SCIENTIFIC MAD LIBS
86
STYGIAN DEPTHS
30
TANK-BUSTING MUSTANG
108
THIRD-WORLD ARMS BAZAAR
68
TIME TRAVELER CONVENTION
88
UNBALANCED LIFTOFF
68
UNDERGROUND DRUG FARM
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WEREWOLF INFESTATIONS
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WORM GUILLOTINES
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X-45A UCAV
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YES, I AM A ROCKET SCIENTIST!
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ZEALOUS MINORITY
92
LUIS BRUNO PHOTOGRAPHED BY JOHN B. CARNETT
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
[email protected]
Is It Safe? I take issue with the accusations made against the safety of the space shuttle [“NASA’s Fixer-Upper Flies Again,” May]. NASA has had 113 space-shuttle launches; there has been one launch failure and one landing failure. In a business as risky as space exploration, that is an incredibly good record. Also, saying that one more failure will doom man’s exploration of space is very shortsighted. Man’s curiosity will always drive him to explore. NASA does need to upgrade, but it does not need to toss out the reliable. I keep an old pickup truck not for vacations, but for picking up and delivering supplies. Mike McKinzie Bayfield, Colo. Apparently, NASA still doesn’t get it when it comes to safety. Of the five people I see in the large picture shown of Discovery’s engines being installed, none of them are wearing safety head- gear of any kind. Dale Intolubbe Hayden, Idaho
Defending Fear I was surprised that a purportedly science-based magazine allowed an obvious nonscientist to critique Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear [“Tempers Rising,” Science Friction, Soapbox, May]. When columnist Gregory Mone states: “There isn't a single well-informed character who supports the theory [of global warming],” he proves that he is not informed on the topic. The book is fiction. The graphs and references are not. Crichton’s opinions are shared by many of us scientists. As a professional geologist who has for the CORRECTION
• In our May story “When Earth Attacks!” we incorrectly identified Naragansett Bay as being in the state of Connecticut. In fact, it is in Rhode Island.
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past 50-plus years studied the Earth and the processes that act upon it, I have to go with the historical facts about climate change. Climate models are very poor estimation tools and contain many significant but ignored variables. Global warming as Mone understands it is absolutely not a “given.” Climate changes occur over such broad timescales that knowledge of only a few hundred years cannot be reliably fit into an overall understanding of the mechanisms that bring about global temperature fluctuations. Mone should review Crichton’s research references next time, before he so casually accepts what he reads in the newspapers and then offers his slant on matters he is unfamiliar with. Jim Classen Boise, Idaho
Gregory Mone responds: For the record, climate scientists whose work Crichton cites to back his arguments, including the physicists Gregory Benford and Martin Hoffert, have publicly refuted Crichton’s interpretations of their published research. Footnotes and graphs do not in themselves raise a work of fiction into the realm of fact.
Simian Suckers I was interested to read that male monkeys will give up some of their fruit juice for a chance to look at a picture of a female monkey’s bottom [“Primate Pay-Per-View,” FYI, May]. This is conclusive proof of human intellectual superiority: Every man knows you can get porn for free on the Internet. David Gochfeld New York City POPULAR SCIENCE ONLINE
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JULY 2005
[TWWW.POPSCI.COM ] YOUR GUIDE TO POPULAR SCIENCE ONLINE
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THIS MONTH’S FEATURES
1 NO PILOT?
See the U.S. Air Force’s first unmanned combat air vehicle take flight from the Mojave Desert.
THE EVOLUTION OF BANG!
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TRACE THE EXPLOSIVE HISTORY OF ROCKETEERING, FROM CHINESE “FIRE ARROWS” IN THE 13TH CENTURY TO THE RECORD-SETTING 72-MILE-HIGH FLIGHT OF GO FAST.
WHAT’S NEW HEADLINES HOW 2.0
Get a glimpse into ethanol’s dark past—the story behind the alt fuel.
Take off! Watch the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter soar into martian orbit.
Make your own animated movies with machinima. Get resources and tools.
WHAT’S YOUR
RISK IQ? Where are you most likely to suffer a disabling injury? What animal kills the most Americans each year? It took two weeks for our writer to determine his risk smarts. Test yours in two minutes in our online quiz.
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A TITANIC EFFORT READ OUR IN-DEPTH Q&A WITH THE MAN WHO WOULD TURN THE WRECK INTO A VIRTUAL MUSEUM.
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F R O M T O P : J O H N B . C A R N E T T; N A D I N E K I N N E Y / P H O T O S B Y N A D I N E ; H U G H K R E T S C H M E R
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WHAT’SNEW INSIDE
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POPULAR
scıence
THE CELLPHONE OF THE FUTURE 18 • ETHANOL’S BIG BREAKTHROUGH 22 • WORLD’S FIRST ROBOTIC FOOSBALL TABLE 26
PHOTOGRAPHY
High Def in Hand A gutsy makeover proves that professional power doesn’t require industrial-size bulk
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WEIGHING IN AT AROUND 1.5 pounds and measuring about the size of a beer stein, the bantam Sony HDR-HC1 is the world’s smallest and lightest camcorder capable of capturing your life in brilliant high definition—1,080 lines of resolution. How did Sony (sony.com) trim the size and weight of its previous model, HDR-FX1, by half? More-efficient chips on better-laid-out circuit boards account for 60 percent of the miniaturization. Other factors are a new lens assembly and the camera’s single complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor. By using just one sensor, Sony was able to use a lens assembly that’s 90 millimeters smaller than the FX1’s while maintaining nearly as much magnification (10x versus the FX1’s 12x). CMOS sensors are significantly more power-efficient than CCDs, so the HC1 can use an 8.5-watt-hour lithium-ion battery good for about 80 minutes of recording; the FX1 requires a fat 15.8-watt-hour battery for 125 minutes of operation. The no-compromise diet also makes the HC1 less expensive: At an estimated $2,000, it will cost about half that of any other high-def model. Pay it off when your documentary rocks Sundance. —SUZANNE KANTRA KIRSCHNER
STILL CAMERA FEATURES Snaps 1.2-megapixel stills while taking video; PictBridge allows for direct connection to printers
LCD DISPLAY 2.7-inch widescreen touch panel
J O H N L AW T O N
OUTPUT Composite jacks can output standard-definition video even when the recording is in high def
3.5''
LENS 10x optical zoom enhanced with image stabilization
POPULAR SCIENCE
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WHAT’S NEW | GADGETS
Lords of the Ringdical
w propeller pullsPlease. ratherGet than pushes boats through the A bottle opener? some water real key-chain gadgetryne
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OVER THE YEARS, your key chain has become a custodial clump of assorted accessories and unidentified house, locker and car keys. Time to free up some ringside real estate and make room for the latest key-chain gadgets. Careful, though—losing your keys has never been quite so expensive.—MICHAEL MYSER
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IMATION MICRO HARD DRIVE ($190)
New this summer, Imation’s sub-one-inch, four-gigabyte hard drive has double the capacity of similar-size flash drives. It’s secured with 128-bit encryption and plugs directly into a USB port, like a good thumb drive should. It’s also Windows- and Maccompatible and automatically backs up files for quick recovery after a computer crash. imation.com
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POPULAR SCIENCE
TRANSCORE SMARTWATCH SECUREPASS (N/A)
You probably don’t need this biometric fob, now in use at U.S. military sites, but be glad others have it. As a driver approaches a security gate, he places his finger on the fob. This triggers external readers at the checkpoint to scan an RFID tag on his windshield and send his personal data to the guard’s computer for rapid confirmation. transcore.com
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MANDYLION LABS PASSWORD MANAGEMENT TOKEN ($270) EATON HOME HEARTBEAT ($150)
MICROBEAM TIRE GAUGE ($30)
Install sensors to monitor appliances, windows and doors, and a wireless base station will beam alerts to the fob’s LCD if, say, you left the iron on. When you’re out of the base station’s 90-foot range, it text-messages your cellphone if something’s awry. The fob shows the status of the house as you left it. homeheartbeat.com
Properly pressurized tires can increase your gas mileage by about 3.3 percent. With oil prices at more than $50 a barrel, consider this: an LED flashlight and tire gauge in one. Touch a button to activate the light and gauge, and then place it over the tire valve to get PSI readings on the backlit digital LCD. brookstone.com
Replace the Post-its on your monitor with this password keeper. The token’s processor can store and manage up to 50 logins, each up to 14 characters in length. It also uses algorithms to generate impossible-to-guess passwords. The unfortunate irony is that you have to recall and punch in a secret combination of the device’s five buttons to retrieve your passwords. mandylionlabs.com
MICHAEL KRAUS
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WHAT’S NEW | GADGETS
The Future Is Calling
WHAT’S NEXT
THE GUTS
A lot of people wonder what the cellphone of tomorrow will look like. We decided to design it
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WE ALL EXPECT THE CELLPHONE to get smaller while packing in an ever broadening array of functions. The real question is what it’ll look like—inside and out— in several years. To find the answer, we investigated dozens of on-the-brink technologies, picking the brains of cellphone product engineers, industry analysts and lab researchers. They told us of cameras that zoom, screens that play Star Wars, and micro fuel cells that deliver days of continuous operation. Some of these breakthroughs are showing up à la carte in today’s mobiles, but to picture how they’ll fit together in one slick device, we enlisted the help of Ecco Design (eccoid.com), an industrial design firm that develops consumer electronics for the likes of Apple, LG, Motorola, Sharp and Siemens. Here’s what we came up with and how it will work.—MICHAEL MYSER
PHONEMODE HIGH-CONTRAST, ULTRA-RESPONSIVE OLED SCREEN
TOUCHSENSITIVE SCROLL PAD
COMMUNICATION Within five years, phones with multiple miniature antennas will seamlessly roam all networks: cellular, Wi-Fi, ultra wideband and whatever’s yet to come. An Intel prototype selects the best option based on network speed and your application. Another approach would use a software-defined radio, which would reconfigure itself to tune in multiple frequencies with a single antenna, dramatically lowering the cost and bulk of a multiband phone.
STORAGE By 2008 we’ll be storing eight gigabytes on our cellphone’s 0.85inch hard drive. The key: Toshiba’s magnetic recording technology, which aligns magnets from top to bottom rather than end-to-end, saving space. With storage on track to increase 30 to 40 percent each year, expect to be filling 60 gigs with high-def movies, thousands of songs and 10-megapixel pics within eight years.
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ALUMINUM STYLUS WITH RUBBER FINISH
POWER
1.8 BY 3.4 BY 0.5 INCHES
Manufacturers are looking to fuel cells, which would provide about five times the talk time per cycle of today’s lithium-ion batteries. Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu are working on methanol-based versions for chargers and PDAs by next year. And Nippon Telegraph and Telephone is developing an even more powerful hydrogen fuel cell. Expect it in three years if—and it’s a huge if—they can devise a small, safe way to store pressurized hydrogen.
TOUCH-SENSITIVE, LED-BACKED KEYPAD
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POPULAR SCIENCE
The do-everything cellphone needs a do-everything chip. Texas Instruments and Qualcomm will have single chips running basic cellphones in 2006. By 2010, singlechip phones will surpass today’s most advanced multi-chip models, adding WiMax and TV tuners.
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I L L U S T R AT I O N S : E C C O D E S I G N ; I N S E T: C O U RT E S Y L U C A S F I L M , D I G I TA L W O R K I L M
PROCESSING
CAMERAMODE
VIDEOMODE
A tiny liquid lens with 3x optical zoom and autofocus will give handsets true digital-camera functionality. An oil-and-water solution between two glass plates changes shape and thus focal length when electric current is applied. Varioptic has shown a version of this lens that can focus on objects as close as five centimeters. The autofocus component will be in Samsung phones this year.
Tune in a local TV broadcast with the phone’s radio anywhere you travel, or stream pay-per-view movies from the Web. This year Nokia begins trials on Crown Castle’s terrestrial TV network, which broadcasts a Digital Video Broadcast–Handheld (DVB-H) signal for cellphones equipped with a 1,670-megahertz receiver and DVB-H tuner. Streaming TV-quality video over cellphone networks is a few years out, as carriers finish building out their high-speed data networks and application developers iron out content deals.
TEXT-MESSAGINGMODE
Holding the phone horizontally, the user pulls a tab to reveal a 3-by1.5-inch metal frame with no physical screen.
OLED screen also serves as a rockerstyle navigation pad.
A thin layer of nonturbulent water vapor (a by-product of the hydrogen fuel cell) is captured inside the phone and then shot out in a continuous stream to fill the frame. A small projector inside the handset shines the image onto the thin layer of vapor. The idea isn’t as farfetched as it sounds: FogScreen (fogscreen.com) currently sells projection screens made of water and ultrasonic waves for large-scale displays at trade shows and events.
Transparent digitizer circuitry for handwriting recognition
LED backlit display reveals numbers or letters, depending on the application that’s running. The solid-state keys are heatand touch-sensitive, so there’s no need for a keylock function.
POPULAR SCIENCE
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WHAT’S NEW | AUTO TECH
Liquor Does It Quicker Saab’s BioPower engine gives ethanol a kick in the pants WITH ALL THE BUZZ ABOUT HYBRIDS, it’s easy to ignore our homegrown alternative fuel: ethanol. Clean-burning and infinitely renewable—we’re talking grain alcohol— ethanol is dear to environmentalists and economists alike. The standard 85/15-percent ethanol/gasoline blend (E85) is widely used in Sweden, but there are only 313 E85 fueling stations in the U.S. And motorheads aren’t clamoring for more, because E85 typically delivers inferior fuel economy; it has about 75 percent of the potential energy of gasoline, so it takes up to 20 percent more hooch to keep horsepower on par. But E85 also has a high octane rating (around 110), and Saab realized that a turbocharger could harness it. Turbos push extra air into the cylinder, and higher octane allows a fuel to better endure the increased pressure. So Saab cranked up its fans and created the BioPower engine, the first commercially available ethanol turbo. A computer samples the fuel mixture and adjusts boost pressure—from 5.8 psi for pure gasoline to 13.8 psi for E85. Running straight gasoline, the engine produces 148 horsepower, but E85 jacks it up to 184, with no penalty in fuel economy.—MATTHEW PHENIX
2AUDI SPECS
A3 3.2 GASOLINE
STATS THE NUMBERS THAT COUNT
zero
HOW MUCH MORE YOU’LL HAVE TO PAY FOR A FLEXIBLE-FUEL VEHICLE
NUMBER OF E85 REFUELING STATIONS, BY STATE*
Minn. 119 Ill. 51 Iowa 21 S.D. 20
148 hp
184 hp
TORQUE
177 lb.-ft.
207 lb.-ft.
MAX. BOOST
5.8 psi
13.8 psi
0–62 MPH
9.8 sec.
8.5 sec.
TOP SPEED
134 mph
140 mph
PRICE*
$35,000
$35,000
*based on exchange rates at press time
42.5% Animal feed
Neb. 16
BIODIESEL
Wis. 11
DIESEL
Colo. 10 S.C. 9 *as of 5/12/05
[ TP
OPSCI
NATURAL GAS
$2.11 $1.86 $1.47
*as of 3/21/05
-51.0 +18.4
$2.27
ETHANOL
N.D. 9
53% Ethanol
EFFECT OF FEDERAL TAXES ON GAS, IN CENTS PER GALLON
$2.24
GASOLINE
[
EFFECT OF FEDERAL TAXES ON ETHANOL, IN CENTS PER GALLON
CORN USED FOR FUEL PRODUCES ABOUT:
AVERAGE PRICE PER GALLON IN THE U.S.*
Mo. 17
E85
POWER
IMPORTED SPIRITS, SIR? Saab’s first BioPower model, the 9-5, is already available in Sweden. It could hit these shores next year.
[ Other 30
SAAB 9-5 2.0T BIOPOWER SEDAN
4.5% Corn oil
Based on information from: National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition; U.S. Department of Energy; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; Internal Revenue Service
ON THE WEB What does Honest Abe have to do with ethanol? Read about this alternative fuel’s history at popsci.com/biopower.
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J U LY 2 0 0 5
[
I L L U S T R AT I O N : L A U R A K O N R A D ; P H O T O G R A P H : C O U RT E S Y S A A B
»
WHAT’S NEW | HOME TECH
Mow-by-Wire
INSIDE THE ENGINE Turning the engine on cranks the starter to open the fuel valve and activates the electronic control unit (ECU) (A), which closes the choke (B) before igniting the engine. When the engine warms up, a temperature sensor (C) tells the ECU to open the choke. The ECU receives an electric signal from the power coil (D) located behind the flywheel (E) to calculate revolutions per minute and monitors the angle of the throttle opening (F) to determine the engine’s workload. It maintains rpm at a preset level, keeping power constant by adjusting the throttle and spark-plug (G) timing.
Adding computer brains to power–equipment brawn
»
CAR ENGINES HAVE BEEN GOVERNED by computers for years, but Honda’s iGX440 (honda.com) is the first power-equipment engine with a microchip. The electronically regulated iGX440—which will show up in lawn mowers, water pumps and pressure washers later this year—runs at a constant engine speed even under changing loads. Thick grass usually causes mower engines to slow, bogging down whomever’s pushing the machine, but the iGX440 maintains speed, and thus power, by giving the engine more gas and manipulating ignition timing. In pumps, a water-level sensor automatically starts the engine when water levels are too high; in power washers, squeezing the trigger handle automatically starts and stops operation. Here’s how the Detroit–inspired power plant works. —SUZANNE KANTRA KIRSCHNER
( ( 1
TALL FESCUE GRASS
G A B F
C
(
D 2
BARCLAY GRASS
E
Smart Grass
Genetic engineering yields a cure for bald spots Stolon Original seed
New sprout Rhizome Original seed
24
POPULAR SCIENCE
J U LY 2 0 0 5
New sprout
»
THE GRASS SEED you pick up at your local garden shop usually sprouts one grass plant per seed—or at least that was the case until the scientists at Vigoro (vigoro.com) started tinkering with grass genetics. The result: the first hybrid plants that self-replicate. Vigoro’s modified Tall Fescue ($2 per pound), used across the U.S., sends out underground runners called rhizomes. The company’s hybrid Perennial Ryegrass “Barclay” ($2.50 per pound), best suited for cooler climates, shoots out aboveground tendrils called stolons. The rhizomes and stolons sprout filler grass plants between seeds. Tell your envious balding neighbor that, unfortunately, there are no human applications.—S.K.K.
I L L U S T R AT I O N S : J A S O N L E E ; P H O T O G R A P H : C O U RT E S Y H O N D A
T
T
WHAT’S NEW
THE GOODS [
20 HOT PRODUCTS THAT (ALMOST) SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES BY JOE BROWN
Keys as You Please
Port City
Sunbeamtech 20 In 1 Superior Panel » Mount this in your Mac or PC’s extra CD drive bay to gain an eight-in-one card reader, two USB 2.0 jacks, a FireWire port, stereo miniplug in/out and more. Also displays CPU temperature and allows you to adjust fan speed. $35 » sunbeamtech.com
Ambi-Desktop RadTech BT-510 » Lefties and righties who share a computer will appreciate this Bluetooth mouse. Hold down the scroll wheel for three seconds to turn the right button into the left and vice versa. $60 » radtech.us
So Long, Dirt Bag HydraPak AS Trail » The nonporous, 0.0001-inchthick fluoropolymer liner inside the hydration pack’s tube prevents bacteria from sticking. To clean, remove the bladder, turn it inside out, and throw it in the dishwasher. $60 » hydrapak.com
Ergodex DX1 » This configurable auxiliary keyboard comes with 25 buttonlike keys, each of which can be assigned a series of commands. The reusable, longstrand polymer adhesive lets you arrange them on the base pad however you like. PC only. $150 » ergodex.com
CD Surgeon
Disc-Go-Pod Plus » DVD-rental stores’ disc repair system is now available to consumers. Using two microfiber pads and a 99 percent aluminum oxide solution, it removes just enough material (five to 10 micrometers) to buff out scratches. $495 » discgotech.com
You Can’t Win
Gauselmann StarKick » Go ahead and try to beat this robot foosball table. Using infrared cameras and optical sensors, it checks the status of the ball and your foos-guys 50 times a second. Play it in European arcades. » gauselmann.de
Plug ’n’ Protect
Kensington Personal Firewall » Plug this USB key into your Window’s XP notebook, and it’ll instantly erect a firewall—good for protecting your personal information when you log onto public computers and networks. $50 » kensington.com
Portable Paparazzo
Nokia N90 » The first camera phone with Carl Zeiss optics, this two-megapixel GSM shutterbug is no joke: macro mode, PictBridge for easy printing, and RS-MMC memory. 352x416-pixel screen. Price set by carrier » nokia.com
Headset, Jacked
Izon Bluetooth MP3 HeadPhone » This Flash-memory music player’s Bluetooth capabilities let it function as a hands-free cellphone device or as wireless headphones. FM tuner, SD memory (128-meg card included). $220 » globalat.com
Micro Machine
Toshiba Libretto U100 » It’s the size of a DVD case, and its widescreen is the first notebook display with LED backlighting, netting 220 nits of brightness—about 50 percent brighter than usual— while reducing power consumption. 1.2GHz. $2,000 » toshiba.com
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POPULAR SCIENCE
J U LY 2 0 0 5
Featherweight Tough Guy
Orvis Zero Gravity Fly Rod » Bolstering the graphite rod shaft with a carbon-fiber mesh skeleton instead of the standard fiberglass makes this four-piece, fiveweight rod 15 percent stronger and 10 percent lighter than its predecessor. $655 » orvis.com
SIM Card Computer Sony Vaio T350 » The first consumer notebook with an integrated cellphone transceiver, this laptop will let you access Cingular’s EDGE network for high-speed Web access wherever the service is supported. 1.2GHz Pentium M processor. $2,200 » sonystyle.com
Doubly Green
John Deere CS36LE » By delaying the introduction of fuel into the cylinder, this chainsaw’s two-stroke engine improves fuel economy by about 25 percent and meets EPA emissions standards without a catalytic converter. $250 » deere.com
Vinyl Fantasy
An Entertaining Tour Guide
Dual XNAV 3500P » It’s a nav system and portable entertainment center in one. The included one-gig SD card is filled with maps of the entire U.S., but swap the card, and the system plays audio and video. 16.7-million-color QVGA touchscreen. $1,000 » dualav.com
ELP Laser Turntable » Five lasers read the grooves of the record, which the player translates into sound. The lasers don’t physically touch the record, so they won’t wear it down. $15,000 » audioturntable.com
The Wandering Grill
Body Buzz
Coleman RoadTrip LXE » Here’s a grill that collapses into its own dolly. Lift a handle and tow your propane cooker like rolling luggage. It’ll connect to a portable canister or a 20-pound tank. $160 » coleman.com
Soloflex WBV Floor Platform » For years, professional athletes have stood on vibrating platforms to increase circulation, maximizing their workouts. When Soloflex found that 26 hertz is the optimum vibration frequency, it designed its motor to produce exactly that, keeping the price of its unit down (others cost thousands of dollars). $395 » soloflex.com
Password Protected
Staples WordLock » Memorize a word instead of a five-digit code, because this lock uses letters instead of numbers. Choose from more than 1,000 words for your combination. $6 » staples.com
Divide and Conquer
Samsung Four-Door Convertible Refrigerator » Each of four doors opens to a separately temperaturecontrolled compartment. Deep-freeze that venison, but keep your ice cream soft; chill your beer, cool your veggies. $3,000 » samsung.com
Quiet or Riot
Bosendorfer VC7 Loudspeakers » Most speakers use electronic crossovers to designate which frequencies the woofers produce. This one employs a series of baffles to mechanically limit the woofers’ movements, increasing lowvolume sound quality and power handling. $25,000 » bosendorfernyc.com
POPULAR SCIENCE
J U LY 2 0 0 5
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HEADLINES
DISCOVERIES, ADVANCES & DEBATES IN SCIENCE AND THE WORLD
INSIDE
POPULAR
T
scıence
JULY 2005
RECON MISSION TO MARS 30 • CRIME-FIGHTING SOFTWARE 32 • SUPERSONIC VACCINES 35 • SIZING UP VOLCANO RISK 35
[BIOTECHNOLOGY]
Pharming Underground
Can subterranean laboratories ease safety woes over crops that sprout medicine?
L U I S B R U N O ; I N S E T: C O U RT E S Y T O M C A M P B E L L / P U R D U E A G R I C U LT U R A L C O M M U N I C AT I O N P H O T O
D
ON’T TELL ANYONE, BUT DOUG
Ausenbaugh has built an underground drug farm—in bucolic southern Indiana, no less. It’s cleverly cached in an old limestone mine near the hamlet of Marengo. There, carefully cultivated stalks flourish under the glare of artificial lights and the rainlike spatter of drip irrigation. The facility, run by Ausenbaugh’s biotech startup firm, Controlled Pharming Ventures, in cooperation with researchers from Purdue University, is intended for growing pharmaceutical crops—corn, tomatoes, tobacco and other plants whose DNA has been altered to produce a vaccine or medicinal compound. Drug companies have hailed this new field, known as biopharming, as a low-cost alternative to traditional manufacturing. But environmentalists, food-industry officials and other critics have decried pharma crops—which aren’t meant to be eaten and in some cases are toxic to humans—because of the danger of contaminating food supplies.
PSSST, WHERE’S THE CORN? Researcher Doug
Ausenbaugh [right] built the first underground growth chamber for genetically modified plants inside this abandoned mine in Marengo, Indiana. TICKER 04.18.05 SAFER BUG BITES? THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES BEGINS TESTING AN EXPERIMENTAL WEST NILE VIRUS VACCINE /// P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 5
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HEADLINES [BIOTECHNOLOGY]
SPACE]] [[SPACE
CONTINUED
The fears aren’t based on mere conjecture. In 2000, evidence of a genetically modified corn intended only for animal consumption showed up in Taco Bell taco shells. Aventis CropScience, the corn’s grower, quickly abandoned the product and was forced to pay $2.4 million to people who said they had suffered allergic reactions to it. Two years later, federal officials fined the biotech company ProdiGene $3 million for allowing pharma corn carrying an experimental pig vaccine to contaminate soybeans in Iowa and Nebraska. Regulations have since been tightened, and the young industry suffered a huge blow when biotech behemoth Monsanto abandoned its biopharming research in 2003.
Drugmakers could very well find themselves venturing into the stygian depths. Although several plant-produced biopharmaceuticals are still under clinical evaluation, none have reached the market yet. Going underground, Ausenbaugh says, will resolve many of the sector’s problems. The 60-acre mine in Indiana provides a formidable barrier between the grow room and the rest of the world, easing the burden of containment in several ways. It makes pesticides unnecessary (the space is free of bugs), and it reduces the threat of vandalism (the entrance is policed by armed guards). What’s more, the constant 51°F air temperature in the cavern serves as a natural cooling system for the hot grow lights. And there’s no danger of a Midwestern storm unhinging Ausenbaugh’s creation and strewing hazardous materials for miles. (A tornado flattened Marengo just last spring.) All things considered, a properly run underground facility “would probably be an order of magnitude safer” than a surface operation for a typical crop such as corn, says geneticist Norman Ellstrand of the University of California at Riverside. As a result, it would let growers sidestep some of the regulatory rigmarole to which biopharming is usually subjected by the
Mars in Focus
A flying camera bound for the Red Planet may turn up water—and a lost spacecraft or two THE NASA’S SEARCH REVAMPED FOR WATER APPROACH ON MARS TO SPACE WILL INTENSIFY EXPLORATION NEXT MONTH largest, spacecraft when puts two the Mars tasks Reconnaissance atop its to-do list:Orbiter Return, the to the moonmost and powerful save ever sentAto90-mile-long the planet, launches from Cape Canaveral. This marks the first money. solar-powered tether spinning around mission to Mars the twincheck rovers Opportunity beamed home Earth could helpsince the agency offSpirit bothand items. Twirling like hard evidence of once-flowing The MROgrab will hold orbitof thea planet 12 times a baton, the bottom tip would water. autonomously amanned day, investigating whether signs oforbit water are more widespread than just crew capsule in low-Earth and catapult it to the the approximately two square kilometers examinedwithout by the rovers. “If I investimoon, flinging astronauts toward their destination gated Los thousands Angeles and Yellowstone, would to understand what the guzzling of pounds of rocket fuelI be onable the way. entire is like here Earth?” asks James Graf, the MRO’s project manTheplanet system, called theonMomentum-Exchange Electrodyager at Reboost the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. namic Tether, or MXER for short, is more than just a Afterphysics its arrival in 2006, orbiter willinspend twofrom years scrutinizing Mars quirky project. Withthe $1.5 million funding with six engineers scientific instruments, the most powerful camera ever NASA, at Tennesseeincluding Technological University, along launched to another planet, a radarinsystem to image ice buried with scientists at Tethers Unlimited Bothell,designed Washington, 1 /10-scalecamera underground, and aa weather to the analyze thecapture atmosphere. The craft’s successfully tested model of tether’s high-resolution will also run recon, tracking prime landing spots for mechanism in acamera laboratory last March. next-generation roversmoonward and possibly turning up clues to the disapTossing astronauts is the long-term goal, butmysterious at pearance of Britain’s Mars lander 2. With any luck, the MRO will also first the system would be used to Beagle lift satellites back into higher confirm new evidence indicating that NASA’s Mars Lander orbits. According to Tethers Unlimited president RobPolar Hoyt, this , missing since 1999, to the ground after its thrusters MICHAEL MOYER wouldcrashed save $500 million in rocket fuel over 10malfunctioned.— years for a 4,400-pound payload. Hoyt hopes to have the MXER spinning in space by 2018.—GREGORY MONE
SEARCH FOR LOST SPACECRAFT Britain’s Beagle Tether 2 lander went silent shortly after entering Mars’s atmosphere in late 2003. A yearlong independent investigation couldn’t uncover a clear cause of the failure. Scientists plan to search for the remains of Beagle 2 as well as NASA’s Catch failed Mars Polar Lander using the mechanism MRO’s Hi-RISE camera. They hope images of the craft will reveal what doomed the spacecraft. Yet any search would steal time from science operations. “We can detect [Beagle 2] • if we know where to look,” says Alfred McEwen, director of the Planetary Image Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona and the Boom principal investigator on the• Hi-RISE camera. “But this could be a good way to burn a lot of data on a wild goose chase, so I’m a little bit leery of this whole business.” • Crew capsule
MAR TKTK
• • Beagle 2 wreckage?
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.
y
(CONTINUED ON PAGE 32)
04.28.05 BRING IN THE DRILLS IN AN EFFORT TO EASE U.S. DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL, CONGRESS APPROVES AN ENERGY BUDGET WITH A PROVISION THAT PERMITS OIL
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BOB SAULS
T
Communications antenna
•
4 Solar panels
High-resolution camera
THE CLEAREST EYES Orbiting 255 to 320 kilometers above Mars’s surface, three cameras will work together to image the planet’s terrain. In addition to the weather camera, the Context camera will image 30-kilometer-wide swaths of the surface FLING at low resolution, targeting the most intriguing spots for further study. The When the capsule is at the Hi-RISE camera, on the other hand, will snap images detailed enough to spot top of the tether’s arc— a pizza box. Although it will be able to cover only one tenth of 1 percent of and farthest from Earth— the surface in its highest-resolution mode, its 1.5-meter telescopic lens will the tether lets it go. give the MRO more than five times the resolution of its predecessors.
•
Solar panels
•
5
•
DROP After transferring its momentum to the UNDERGROUNDmoon-bound INVESTIGATIONS capsule, The Mars Odyssey spacecraft justaa the tetherfound dropsice into few inches underground. the lowerRoger orbit Phillips, and uses team co-leader of the SHARAD radar experiEarth’s magnetic field to if that ice is literally ment on the MRO, wonders boost itself back into a the tip of a great iceberg. The SHARAD radar higher orbit [see inset].
RS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER KTKTKTKTKT DIGITAL PIPELINE TO EARTH The instruments on the MRO will send back about 6,500 CDs’ worth of data—more than three times the amount returned by the combined missions of Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Magellan, Deep Space 1 and Central Cassini. The MRO will power also serve as an orbiting node relay station, beaming to Earth data from the Phoenix lander, scheduled to arrive in 2008, and the Mars Science Laboratory in 2009. CATCH
Low-resolution camera
•
Radar
3
SPIN The tether continues its rotation, swinging the capsule along at 3,600 mph, into ever higher orbits.
beam will penetrate up to one kilometer beneath the surface. As it passes through, any change in the ground composition—say, a boundary between rock and ice—will reflect part of the beam back to the spacecraft. A map of these reflections will reveal not just where the top of the ice layer is, but the bottom as well, allowing researchers to calculate the total volume of water now trapped inside Mars.
2
•
Phoenix Mars lander, scheduled to touch down in May 2008
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. Imaging radar • Magnetosphere
Tether reboost
1 km
•
Mars rover Spirit
JASON LEE
Ice deposits Payload pickup
TICKER ///ON 1.10.03 VIRAL ANNIVERSARY THE COMPUTER VIRUS CELEBRATES ITSNATIONAL 20-YEAR ANNIVERSARY; FORMER UNIVERSITY OFTHAN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GRADSPECIES STUDENT FRED DRILLING THE COASTAL PLAIN OF ALASKA’S 19-MILLION-ACRE ARCTIC WILDLIFE REFUGE, HOME TO MORE 230 NATIVE ANIMAL /// P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 5
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HEADLINES [
BIOTECHNOLOGY]
CONTINUED
U.S. Department of Agriculture—one of at least three federal agencies that scrutinize the various aspects of production, along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. “We probably wouldn’t have regulatory authority inside a contained facility such as a mine,” says John Turner, director of policy coordination in the USDA’s Biotechnology Regulatory Services branch.
BOUNTIFUL HARVEST Modified tobacco plants are an efficient way to produce therapeutic proteins.
Best of all, the underground yield can be surprisingly bountiful. Scientists at the Marengo facility recently harvested their first test crop (a modified but edible variety of corn, not an actual pharma product), and the output was prodigious—the equivalent of 337 bushels per acre, more than twice the typical amount for field corn. Each plant was grown separately from a container full of a claylike artificial soil designed for the underground conditions and irrigated with fertilized water. A computer maintains the room’s environmental conditions, including temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide level. Considering the vast number of unused mines and other cavernous spaces in many parts of the country, Ausenbaugh sees potential for more facilities like his. He’s built a second grow room and will spend the next few months working with tomatoes, tobacco and other pharma crop candidates to see whether they fare as well as the corn. If the crops flourish, drugmakers could very well find themselves venturing into the stygian depths. Although no deals have been struck, Ausenbaugh is hopeful that his idea will help put the biopharming industry back on track, while keeping the meds out of your cornflakes.—JOSHUA TOMPKINS
[COMPUTERS]
The Darwinian Police Sketch With crime-fighting software inspired by evolution, a picture is worth a thousand . . . other pictures
»
AS OFTEN HAPPENS DURING A CRIME, a victim gets only a brief glance at the assailant. Later, when police ask him for a description of the perpetrator, he has trouble recalling details. But now, with new identification software developed by two researchers in Scotland, victims no longer have to worry about describing their assailants. A computer does it for them. The software, called EvoFIT, exploits the fact that the human brain is much better at recognizing a face than describing it. Unlike current identification systems, which require a witness to choose from a menu of features—say, a crooked mouth or a pointy nose—EvoFIT simply offers up a gallery of faces on a computer screen and then, based on witness choices, “evolves” a face that resembles the perp. “It’s just selective breeding,” says University of Stirling psychologist Peter Hancock, who developed the software with his colleague Charlie Frowd. “You select the best faces and continually move toward your target.” The program works like this: Detectives show the victim a series of 70 faces selected for sex and race on a computer screen. Of these, the victim chooses the six that most resemble the suspect. Using more than 80 variables that relate to either facial shape or texture, the program merges, or “breeds,” the selected images and almost instantly comes up with 70 A diver variations of the original six. The victim picks another six faces, and so on. After four films or five rounds, EvoFIT produces a portrait the victim recognizes. Then cops hit the streets.Cousteau disguised as So far, the new software has been used in just one actual police case, but Hancock and a shark. Frowd have teamed up with ABM, an identification-software firm in Nottingham, England, to market EvoFIT to police in the U.S. and Europe. Purse snatchers take heed.—DAVID KOHN
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GUY? It’s Ben Affleck, envisioned by crime-fighting software called EvoFIT. The developers used his famous mug to demonstrate how their facial-recognition program works.
RR 1 A volunteer was shown 70 faces on a computer and then asked to choose the six that most resembled Ben. This image is one of them.
RR 2
3
EvoFIT merged the six faces, combining about 80 variables to generate another 70 headshots. The volunteer again selected six portraits.
The selection process continued until the software evolved a composite bearing an acceptable likeness to Ben. It took two hours.
06.30.05 RELATIVITY TURNS 100 A CENTURY AGO TODAY, ALBERT EINSTEIN SUBMITTED HIS SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY, LEADING TO HIS FAMOUS EQUATION E = MC2 ///
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P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 5
F R O M T O P L E F T: C O U RT E S Y C O N T R O L L E D P H A R M I N G V E N T U R E S ; C O U RT E S Y E v o F I T / U N I V E R S I T Y O F S T I R L I N G
T
HEADLINES
SHRINKAGE DEPT. Research updates on the quest to make really tiny things Stealth Tags That Foil Counterfeiters KNOCKOFFS ARE BIG BUSINESS. Last year consumers spent an estimated $500 billion on counterfeit goods worldwide, according to the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition. Top-selling fakes included everything from Viagra and cellphone batteries to designer kicks and baby formula. But making such phonies is about to get a lot tougher, thanks to new microscopic tags from Adhesives Research in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania. At about 50 microns in diameter—about half the width of a human hair—the tags are invisible to the naked eye. “You can’t copy what you can’t see,” says Jeff Robertson, a general manager at Adhesives Research. Once the tag is affixed to a product, finding it requires a handheld scanner, and that’s just the first hurdle to forging it. Unlike holograms, bar codes and other visible authentication tags, the marker is virtually impossible to replicate, Robertson says. Each one is custom-designed for individual businesses and can be crafted from any of dozens of materials. Heat-resistant plastic is well suited to airplane parts, special polyester markers can be woven into clothing, and tags made of edible cellulose can even be sprayed onto foods, enabling officials to trace tainted beef, for example, back to its source. To produce the markers, Adhesives Research employs a complex extrusion process that works like a fancy Play-Doh machine. A device squeezes melted material through a mold to yield microscopic ropes in shapes unique to a specific product. Knives then
A covert tag affixed to a business card and magnified 1,500 times
slice the ropes like loaves of bread to make individual tags. When a manufacturer scans a tagged item with the reader, it snaps a digital image of the marker, and software matches the shape to a data file. The markers will probably make a big, albeit silent, splash in the pharmaceutical and electronics worlds this year. Not that Robertson will name specific customers. “If I told you,” he says, “then it wouldn’t be covert.”—NICOLE DYER
C O U RT E S Y R I C F E LT E N / S M A RT E C H
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[THE POPSCI POLL] BASED ON 3,921 VOTES POSTED TO POPSCI.COM
LAST MONTH’S
QUESTION:
Volcanoes Need Better Chaperones
The U.S. is home to 169 potentially deadly volcanoes. A sobering risk-assessment report calls for a nationwide early-warning system
169 Active volcanoes in the U.S.
R
RR
WOULD YOU WOULD YOU WANT MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY TO KEEP YOU ALIVE IF YOU HAD LOST THE ABILITY TO INTERACT WITH OTHER PEOPLE?
[STATISTICALLY SPEAKING]
YES 29%
F R O M L E F T: C O U RT E S Y T O Y O TA ; D AV I D B U T O W / C O R B I S ; C H R I S C O L L I N S / C O R B I S ; C O U RT E S Y P O W D E R M E D
NO 71% THIS MONTH’S
QUESTION: HYBRID VEHICLES: ALREADY HAVE ONE MIGHT BUY ONE I ♥ GAS GUZZLERS
VOTE AT POPSCI.COM
55
61 Estimated number of people killed by volcanoes in recorded U.S. history
(26)
300,000 Estimated number of people killed worldwide since 1500
400,000
U.S. VOLCANOES WITH LIMITED OR NO REAL-TIME MONITORING
NUMBER OF PEOPLE LIVING NEAR THOSE VOLCANOES
AND THE GOOD NEWS…
[1] NUMBER OF DEADLY VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS IN U.S. HISTORY
00:05:00 05:00:00
Number considered a high or very high threat to nearby populations
MINUTES Time it took scientists to notify authorities of the March 8 eruption of Mount St. Helens, one of the most monitored volcanoes
HOURS Time it took to notify authorities of a 2003 eruption of the Anatahan volcano in the North Pacific
compiled by Mike Haney; sources: U.S. Geological Survey
[THE EQUATION]
[ ][ ][ ] +
[ HANDGUN ]
=
[ VACCINES ]
[SUPERSONIC DRUG GUN]
Just Shoot Me
A supersonic gun takes the ouch out of vaccine drug delivery
»
TAKE YOUR MEDICATION with a gun made by PowderMed in Oxford, England, and the drugs will blast into your skin at 1,500 miles per hour. “You hear the sound, so you know it’s gone off,” explains Mark Kendall, a mechanical engineer at the University of Oxford and coinventor of the flashlight-shaped disposable device. “But there’s absolutely no pain.” The gun, called the PMED (for DNA particle mediated epidermal delivery device), fires microscopic drug particles just a hair’s width beneath the skin’s surface—too
shallow to strike nerve endings. Designed for the administration of vaccines, the PMED has several advantages over traditional needle injections. It forces powdered DNA directly into immune cells, so patients require as little as one thousandth the dose used in needle injections. What’s more, the gun eliminates needle sticks, and the vaccine doesn’t require refrigeration, a major contributor to the high cost of distributing drugs in the developing world. Trials for influenza and HIV are now under way; next up is hepatitis B.—KALEE THOMPSON
07.03.05 WRECKING DAY FOR A COMET A NASA CRAFT DUBBED DEEP IMPACT IS SLATED TO CRASH INTO COMET TEMPEL 1 IN AN EFFORT TO EXPOSE ITS INTERIOR ■ P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 5
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POPULAR
scıence
SOAPBOX
THE UNDERWATER LAB • MELTING NUKE WASTE • WILLIE NELSON, OILMAN? • DARPA ROBOT RACE PREVIEW
SCIENCE FRICTION THE MARKETING AND MANGLING OF SCIENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE BY GREGORY MONE
the science. The original comics kept it simple, chalking up heroes’ powers to radiation or alien origins, but the recent batch of remakes can’t seem to resist tossing in some novel, or at least complex-sounding, science. This doesn’t make the story more plausible—it makes it funnier. Maybe I need to get out more, but I get bigger laughs from the pseudoscientific gibberish spouted in these films than I do from the tired oneliners of standard summer comedies. It’s a new genre, a kind of geek comedy. Take last year’s Spider-Man 2. Spidey’s webslinging is impressive, but my favorite part is when Dr. Otto Octavius, a nuclear physicist who
We may not know more science, but we expect fancier terminology.
It’s the Nanomeds, Stupid
THE ISSUE: The new comic-book movies take pains to update
science-speak. The lingo is nonsense, but it sure is a hoot
F
IRST OFF, LET ME JUST SAY THAT I’LL ENJOY WATCHING THE THING, A 600-POUND
creature made of orange rock, stop an oncoming 18-wheeler with his shoulder every bit as much as the next guy. But it’s not the action scenes that get me excited about a movie like The Fantastic Four, which premieres on July 8. Whenever a new comic-book movie debuts, I get a kick out of seeing how the filmmakers finesse
turns evil after one of his experiments goes awry, explains that he needs giant, artificially intelligent mechanical arms fused to his spine with nanowires and held in check by an inhibitor chip to control the elements of his homebuilt fusion reactor. Right. A close second: a scene in The Hulk in which mild-mannered Bruce Banner, who has recently absorbed a lethal dose of gamma radiation, sits up in his hospital bed and explains to a colleague why he isn’t dead. Why, it’s the nanomeds. “I mean, I don’t know,” Bruce says. “They must have, like . . . fixed me.” And what are nanomeds? I mean, I don’t know, but they must be like . . . scientific. The reason for all this science-speak? These days, biotech breakthroughs make headlines, theory-of-everything books lead best-seller lists, and robots
WHERE SCIENCE AND POP CULTURE COLLIDE THIS MONTH
➤ THE ISLAND A guy named Lincoln Six-
Echo learns he’s a clone whose body will be harvested for parts. D‘oh! Opens July 22.
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➤ STEALTH A lightning bolt rewires the “brain”
of a robotic fighter plane; old-fashioned human pilots come to the rescue. Opens July 29.
➤ MASTER BLASTERS Premiering July 27 on the Sci-Fi Channel: Burt Rutan meets Jackass. Amateurs launch La-Z-Boys and other oddities.
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 : H E N RY M A R C P E R E Z ; P H O T O G R A P H : J O H N B . C A R N E T T
INSIDE
T
SOAPBOX |SCIENCE FRICTION clean our rugs. We may not know more science than we used to, but we certainly expect fancier terminology. The Fantastic Four filmmakers’ motto: If you’re going to butcher the science, do it with flair. In one early scene in the screenplay I read, the group’s leader, Reed Richards, wonders if he’ll be able to use his immersive visualization technology in combination with submolecular string theory to more precisely fix the time and place of the big bang. (Why didn’t you think of that, Hawking?)
MEDIASCOPE EXAMINING THE SCIENCE BEHIND SCIENCE NEWS COVERAGE BY REBECCA SKLOOT
ZAP! The Fantastic Four (with Jessica Alba as the Invisible Woman) are empowered by cosmic rays.
Reed’s big ideas are what got the gang into trouble in the first place. To test one of his theories, he leads his ex-girlfriend, Sue Storm, her younger brother, Johnny, and an astronaut named Ben Grimm into space, where they’re bombarded by cosmic rays—charged particles careening through space at nearlight speeds. Back home, Reed finds he can stretch his arm around a city block, Sue can turn invisible, Ben is the aforementioned Thing, and Johnny morphs into a human flame when he gets upset. NASA is concerned about how cosmic rays will affect astronauts—prolonged exposure could lead to a weakened immune response, even cancer. But if there were a remote possibility that the rays could turn people into superheroes, by now surely some unscrupulous baseball-team owner would have sent a few players to the International Space Station for a little pre-spring training. Perhaps Dr. Doom, the Fantastic Four’s archrival, put it best. “A little scientific double-talk can fool almost anyone,” he says in a 1963 issue. Mind you, I’m not complaining. My plan is to sit back, eat my popcorn, and enjoy what looks to be an action-packed romp. And if I chortle at what others in the theater consider inappropriate moments, so be it. Maybe you’ll be laughing along with me. ■ 38
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Flabby Coverage
THE ISSUE: Get fat, live longer! That’s the euphoric reaction
to the media hyping of a CDC study. But put down that pie
A
FEW WEEKS AGO, I WAS EATING IN A RESTAURANT IN WEST VIRGINIA
(the second fattest state in the country), staring blankly at a television and thinking, I really should join a gym; this sitting-on-my-butt-all-dayoccupation is showing. Suddenly the newscaster said, “Before you start that next diet, you won’t want to miss this one! A new study suggests that those few extra pounds may actually help you live longer.” To say there was a collective sigh of relief in the restaurant—in the entire country—would be an understatement. I found myself surrounded by strangers gaping at each other as if the newscaster had just announced the end of a military occupation: Did you hear that? We’re free! They joked about ordering more pie, and I half expected everyone to start
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 , F R O M L E F T: L U I S B R U N O ; T M A N D © M A R V E L C H A R A C T E R S / C O U RT E S Y N E A L P E T E R S C O L L E C T I O N
T
T
SOAPBOX |MEDIASCOPE toasting one another with French fries. The headlines read like a dream: “Gov’t Overstated Danger of Obesity,” “Fat May Be Good.” Two New York Times columnists said that the fight against obesity had “lost the scientific high ground.” They taunted “people who work out, eat responsibly,” those “saladmunching health nuts” who, they gloated, would die young because, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, “overweight people actually live longer than normal-weight people.” But wait: Only a month earlier, the Washington Post had reported a highprofile University of Illinois study showing that skyrocketing obesity rates are shortening life spans “[more] than the impact of car accidents, homicides and suicides combined.” And major news outlets said studies revealed that “obesity triples the risk of dementia” and causes
@
Get on your own soapbox! Write to [email protected] or [email protected].
breathing problems. So what’s the deal? The deal is that the media didn’t push to analyze the CDC report—they just jumped on good headlines. The study is titled “Excess Deaths Associated with Underweight, Overweight, and Obesity.” How anyone could read that and reduce it to “Studies Show: Being Fat Is Not So Bad” is beyond me. These results corroborated an overwhelming body of research: Obesity is linked to deadly diseases. The CDC did find that fewer
lying disease. “Many diseases and medications cause people to gain or lose weight,” notes Tobias Kurth, a Harvard University obesity researcher. “If you don’t control for these and just look at who’s dying and how big they are, you can get a skewed view of the world. Using this study to say being overweight is protective is simply overstating the scientific data.” There’s also the well-known “obesity paradox,” that being slightly overweight can offer pro-
The fast-food-industry-funded ads declaring that obesity is “hype” make me want to scream. people died in 2000 from obesity-related causes (111,909) than had been previously estimated (365,000). But estimating obesity deaths, as the study points out, “raises complex methodologic issues,” and its own methodology “has important limitations.” One of these is controlling for under-
tection for the elderly, though the truly obese are less likely to grow old enough to see any such benefit. The study’s most obvious limitation is its use of the unreliable “body mass index” (BMI)—a number determined by a person’s height and weight—to define “normal” and “overweight.” A BMI of
between 18.5 and 24.9 is “normal,” between 25 and 29.9 “overweight,” and 30 or more “obese.” But BMI doesn’t take into account many important factors: physical activity, fat versus muscle, gender, diet. This means George W. Bush— a nearly-six-foot-tall 200-pound guy who eats well and works out regularly—has the same BMI as a six-foot-tall 200pound guy who sits on the couch all day eating junk. With a BMI of 27.1, they’re both “overweight.” But President Bush is in great cardiovascular health. I’d like to see the same study use some kind of body fat index. Bush’s percentage of
2
body fat is 18.3, which is considered excellent for his age. Not the case for that out-of-shape guy on the couch. Major-media coverage didn’t raise these questions. Instead it tended to compound the problem with fuzzy math, often reporting that 25,814 Americans died from obesity, though the actual number was 111,909. Because the CDC study documented fewer deaths in the “overweight” category than in the “normal” category, the media subtracted the number of overweight people who didn’t die from the number of obese people who did—as if deaths that don’t hap-
OTHER RECENT HEADLINES THAT MAY HAVE MISLED YOU
➤
➤ “ANTIOXIDANTS A KEY TO LONG LIFE” Well, maybe. This study wasn’t about
antioxidants you buy at a store. It looked at mice that were genetically engineered to produce antioxidants. Interesting, sure, but don’t gorge on supplements—they’re toxic at high doses.
➤ “WHISKEY HELPS FIGHT CANCER” We wish. The truth: Whiskey contains ellagic
acid, a plant-based antioxidant that’s been found to help decrease cancer risk. (It’s also in red wine.) But it’s present in much higher quantities in soft fruits. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of research connecting booze to various kinds of cancer.
pen somehow cancel out deaths that do. A companion study did find that overweight and obese people have lower cholesterol levels and blood pressure than they did in the past. It didn’t show that obesity is inherently less dangerous; it showed that medicine has gotten better at treating some of its effects. Obese people may be living longer, but those extra years are full of heavy medication, diabetes, sleep apnea, stroke, asthma, blood clots, heart disease and cancer. And obesity is still one of the top causes of preventable death, which is why the CDC cautioned that people shouldn’t use this study as an excuse to be overweight. It’s good news that people can live longer with obesity, but that’s no excuse to blow off exercise and order more pie—precisely what the coverage has encouraged. And don’t get me started on those huge fast-food-industry-funded ads declaring that obesity is officially “hype.” They make me want to scream. There is no science saying that obesity is OK. That’s not hype. It’s scientific fact. ■
{
}
Is this the future of air combat?
AIR TIME Air Force pilot Capt. Jonathan Gration prepares to take one of the first operational F/A-22s out for testing and training at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
{
Or is this?
}
A revolution is under way in aerial combat. Tomorrow’s fighter pilots may be ceding the skies to robots By Bill Sweetman Photographs by John B. Carnett
SHOW TIME In Palmdale, California, Northrop Grumman program director Scott Winship shows off a mock-up of the company’s newest unmanned combat air vehicle, the X-47B. P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 5
43
f
or 65 years, the Mojave Desert has spawned the fastest,
highest-flying and most agile airplanes in the world. This vast expanse of scrub and Joshua tree forests encompasses the U.S. Air Force’s deadly-secret Area 51 in Nevada, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, and, at Mojave airfield itself, Burt Rutan’s sci-fi enclave, Scaled Composites. At the heart of it all is the flight-test center at Edwards Air Force Base—and here is where a very nontraditional confrontation over the future of air combat is beginning to play out. In one corner of the base resides the USAF’s current star project, the Lockheed Martin F/A-22 Raptor. The Raptor is fast, cruising at speeds other fighters can attain only in short sprints. It’s also agile, heavily armed, and stealthy. In tests last year, the pilots of older F-15s that engaged the Raptors in simulated combat never saw the airplane that “hit” them. But this competition is not with those aging F-15s, nor even with any new enemy fighters being developed by the Chinese or the Russians. No, the adversary that the mighty Raptor is staring down today takes the form of a tiny airplane, with no
Future UCAVs could ignite sweeping changes in air combat tactics. cockpit, that stands barely higher than the F/A-22’s belly. Stingray 1 and 2, the Boeing X-45A prototypes, are slow, not particularly maneuverable, and pack just one small bomb apiece. But they’re first drafts, primitive unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs), future versions of which could ignite sweeping changes in air combat tactics. They could fly many of the missions flown by manned vehicles—as well as some their piloted counterparts can’t—for longer durations and at substantially lower cost. A number of experts believe that it’s these airplanes, and not the Raptor, that represent the future of air warfare—a shocking potential shift for a military discipline that’s been dominated by fighter pilots since bombs and guns were first mounted on airplanes in World War I. At Edwards, a sprawling, sun-blasted base with a sevenmile-long runway etched onto a bone-dry lakebed, the Raptor roars off into the mountains for supersonic tests, and the X-45A prototypes snap smartly onto the runway centerline after attacks on simulated mobile missile launchers. Although the two programs are not yet competing for dollars, they are certainly jockeying for position as military planners grapple with the ever changing nature of armed conflict. If recent wars in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan—all bombing-intensive campaigns that saw minimal air combat—are any indication of what the future holds, then powerhouses like the F/A-22 will see little of the type of action they excel at, their highly trained pilots never engaging in tricky close-range combat. Rather, less expensive vehicles that can loiter above battlefields for hours, armed with a menu of instantly deployable bombs, will serve commanders much more effectively. On the other hand, if future adversaries include the likes of China or some remnant of the former Soviet Union—coun44
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tries with potential access to modern fighter jets—the UCAVs will have to prove their effectiveness against these sophisticated weapons. Robotic fighters still have a long way to go. After all, designers have only a few years’ experience with their more basic predecessors, unmanned aerial vehicles such as the remotely controlled Predator and the fully autonomous Global Hawk, which focus on the far simpler tasks of surveillance and reconnaissance. Still, autonomous robots such as the Stingrays are beginning to proliferate worldwide, like so many tiny furry mammals scampering among the clawed feet of the dinosaurs. At Laage Air Base, just south of Germany’s chilly Baltic coast, the
country’s first squadron of very F/A-22-like Eurofighter Typhoon jets is gearing up. This is the former East Germany,
UCAV COUSINS Northrop Grumman’s X-47B, shown with its bomb doors open and aircraft carrier tailhook deployed. At left in hangar, the fully autonomous Global Hawk reconnaissance vehicle.
and the rows of bunkers that once housed its MiGs and Sukhois sit empty, their doors scabbed with rust, a vivid reminder that the airplanes the Raptor and Typhoon were designed to shoot down vanished years ago. Most of our current adversaries haven’t invested in fighters at all. Instead, they’ve bought surface-to-air missiles. And therein lies the biggest challenge to face next-gen fighter jets in their quest to secure their future. Late last year, civilians in the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld leaked a plan to slash Raptor production to 179 airplanes from 381—already a step down from the 750 the Air Force originally wanted. The problem, aside from the unexpectedly high cost of each aircraft and significant program delays, is that the Raptor, like Europe’s Typhoon, was conceived and designed back in the 1980s to defeat the thousands of missile-
bristling supersonic fighters that the Soviet Union and its satellites held on hair-triggers. The program’s opponents argue that such a threat no longer exists, as the empty bunkers at Laage demonstrate. USAF chief of staff Gen. John Jumper, leading efforts to save the airplane from more cuts, flew the F/A-22 in January and sings its praises: “The F/A-22, some say, is built to dogfight old Soviet-era airplanes,” the combative commander has said. “Well, yeah, it does that with one hand tied behind its back, but it also does a whole lot of other things.” No one doubts that the Raptor would be utterly dominant in combat. The operational testing conducted last year included a series of mock combats with F-15s. “We never got close to them,” Lt. Col. Craig Fisher of the 64th Aggressor Squadron said in a videotaped interview. “It was very much P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 5
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TWO PATHS TO AIR SUPERIORITY
U.S. AND EUROPEAN PLANNERS HAVE PARALLEL VISIONS FOR FUTURE AIR COMBAT. THE QUESTION IS WHICH WILL DOMINATE Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, due to enter service in 2012, will serve more allies and cost much less than the F/A-22.
Wmanned
U.S. xunmanned
Wmanned
The Eurofighter Typhoon isn’t as stealthy as the Raptor, but it’s nearly as quick—and nearly as over-budget and behind schedule, too. Also like the Raptor, it is being positioned—amid threats to its budget—as both a bomber and a fighter.
EUROPE xunmanned
Boeing’s X-45As were the first UCAVs to fly. The two that were built have conducted 50 missions and demonstrated that unmanned aircraft can locate and attack targets autonomously.
an unfair fight.” That, of course, was the idea. Stealth makes the Raptor hard to find, and the F/A-22 “sees” better than any predecessor. Its smoothly contoured nose contains “active, electronically scanned array” (AESA) radar: The radar beam is steered electronically, rather than by a moving antenna, so it shifts instantaneously from target to target—identifying the type of each aircraft along the way. A data link connects all the Raptors in a flight, so every airplane can see what every other airplane sees. A Raptor pilot can have missiles launched before the opposing pilot has a clue what is happening. But even in air-to-air combat, technological and tactical changes may have already made the tremendous acceleration and agility of the F/A-22 and the Typhoon less important. The nature of air war has changed, and close-range visual combat might never happen again. The proliferation of new, incredibly agile short-range missiles now makes visual-range combat extremely dangerous, and long-range air-to-air missiles have improved significantly, allowing slower fighters to more easily shoot down opponents. As a result of these factors, fighters in recent conflicts have mostly dropped bombs in support 46
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of forces on the ground. This is why the F/A-22’s cousin, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which specializes in ground-target attack, sailed through Rumsfeld’s review. But the F-35 won’t be much of a pilot’s airplane. It doesn’t fly as fast or as high as the F/A-22. Like most stealth airplanes, it has a smaller radar image from the nose and tail than it does from the side, which makes it crucial to steer the airplane so that it presents its least visible aspects to hostile radars. This is done by computer, so for almost all of the time the airplane is over hostile territory, it will be on autopilot. Yet despite the F-35’s supposedly costing half as much as the Raptor, it is a year and a half late and $7.5 billion over budget, raising concerns that it will be just another capable but expensive manned fighter. Meanwhile, Jumper and other Air Force leaders have pushed the Raptor not only as a fighter but as an invulnerable precision bomber that could knock out missile sites, “kicking the door down” for slower B-2 bombers and F-35s. But although Jumper “shot down” a lot of junior officers in F-15s, nobody knows whether even he can win this fight. The bottom line is that the F/A-22 was designed for air combat, and
C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P R I G H T: C O U R T E S Y L O C K H E E D M A R T I N ; C O U R T E S Y J I M R O S S / N A S A ; COURTESY SAAB AEROSYSTEMS; COURTESY EUROFIGHTER
The Dassault Neuron is intended to supplement the air fleet in the absence of any other future manned fighter programs after the Typhoon.
there are less expensive airplanes that can drop bombs. And soon there will be planes that can do it automatically. For now, the UCAVs have yet to perform some very basic tasks,
such as plugging into a fueling tanker in flight, sharing airspace with other military and civilian airplanes, or landing on an aircraft carrier. Until they do, the big money in the U.S. and elsewhere will remain budgeted for manned fighters, and there’s no doubt that thousands more will be built. But it may not be long before UCAVs overcome their limitations. In early February, the Boeing pair took off from Edwards, circled over the Mojave Desert, automatically attacked a simulated missile site, and returned to their orbits. Minutes later a second missile site, unknown to the UCAVs’ computers, advertised its presence by sending simulated radar signals, and the UCAVs attacked it, too. The groundbased operator’s only job was to OK the release of weapons. Much more testing is needed—testing that will involve half a dozen much larger prototypes, due to start flying in early 2007. Next up are three Boeing X-45Cs and Northrop Grumman’s X-47B prototypes, all being developed as part of a $4-billion program launched last year by the Defense
in the same way. In action, the UCAVs would rarely operate alone but as a wolfpack of four or more aircraft, collaborating to locate targets. Only one airplane in the group would use its radar at any time, making their signals very hard to track. The aircraft would defend one another with jamming and weapons. Winship suggests that one of the airplanes would carry a battery of air-to-air missiles and engage any fighter as soon as it got off the ground. (There may well be more than one type of UCAV. Winship sees everything from a 20-ton Naval version, the size of the X-47B, to a RoboBomber as big as a B-2 bomber, capable of flying 100-hour missions. To save money, they’d use common weapons, computers and radar.) Ultimately, the answer to the UCAV-versus-fighter debate is that
we don’t know the answer yet—partly because the promise of the UCAV technology has yet to be realized, and partly because it’s impossible to know how internal Air Force politics will play out. The same Rumsfeld memo that cut back the Raptor program also threw a major glitch into the UCAV: It will be taken from DARPA and given to the Air Force, where many suspect that the ruling elite of fighter pilots will throttle it, or at least suppress it until the Air Force has secured its
The nature of air war has changed, and close-range visual combat might never happen again. Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The X-45C and X-47B are much bigger, to accommodate more fuel and weapons, than the four-ton X-45A. This is because DARPA program manager Michael Francis and other researchers believe that they have identified both an important advantage of the UCAV—its endurance isn’t limited by the pilot—and a mission that it can perform better than any current fighter. Northrop Grumman’s UCAV manager, Scott Winship, calls it “the supergap”: the ability to loiter for hours inside enemy territory and attack moving targets, such as missile launchers. “They can get in close and hit anything, up to 1,000 miles deep,” Winship says. “It’s something we can’t go after today.” But if the UCAV is going to unleash deadly force, will it do so automatically? That’s an idea that makes people uneasy, especially when civilians are at risk. If it needs to “ask” a human operator for permission to launch a weapon, however, the response may come too late—a fast-moving fighter jet can vanish in seconds. And Jumper has raised concerns that the UCAV might not be able to survive in combat because, as currently conceived, it has no way to detect a fighter attack and won’t be agile or fast enough to evade it. One UCAV proponent inside the industry, who prefers not to be identified, interprets this position as a way for the Air Force to justify more F-22s, as top cover for the vulnerable UCAVs. UCAV visionaries see these issues not as deal breakers but as challenges for the next few years. One of Francis’s goals is to create software that allows a group of UCAVs to intelligently, collectively attack a target or a threat—but never twice
fleet of F-35s and Raptors. “The fighter mafia that runs the Air Force has made several runs at the program to kill it,” says our unidentified source, who is close to the UCAV project. Air Force leaders state in public that they support the UCAV, but in a form that doesn’t directly threaten the fighter. Says Jumper: “People ask me all the time, ‘Do you guys feel your job is threatened?’ No. Because the things this is going to do are going to be things you can’t do in a conventional airplane.” Jumper and former Air Force Secretary James Roche raised the idea of a “flying Coke machine” UCAV that would orbit high above the battlefield with a variety of bombs and release them on command from ground observers. Backers of autonomous combat aircraft are, for the time being, willing to position the unmanned aircraft as a longrange, heavy-payload complement to a fighter, rather than an alternative—but privately they don’t expect to hold that position forever. “We don’t want to get in a fight with anybody,” our source says. “But when we get flying, someone will say: ‘For crying out loud, this does 90 percent of the mission at half the cost.’” ■ Bill Sweetman is a contributing editor to POPULAR SCIENCE.
[
POPSCI T ON THE WEB
View the first flights of the Air Force’s autonomous unmanned combat aircraft at popsci.com/ucav.
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] 47
From the astounding tragedy of its maiden voyage, to the technological triumphs of locating, visiting, and filming a wreck that lies more than two miles deep in the frigid North Atlantic, the story of the Titanic is endlessly captivating. To date, about 100 people have descended to the site in submersibles. Recent forays have revealed signs of disintegration—most natural, others possibly caused by human contact. What’s the best way to save the wreckage? Some argue for recovery: raising as much of it as possible to be preserved and put on public view. But Robert Ballard, the man who discovered the wreck in 1985, has a different plan . . .
WELCOME TO MUSEUM
TITANIC (PLEASE DON’T TOUCH)
BY MARK SCHROPE
| ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN
M AC NEILL
SEE THE TITANIC FROM YOUR LIVING ROOM!
The most famous shipwreck of all time could be equipped for virtual, real-time visitation AS LEADER OF THE TEAM THAT FOUND THE Titanic two decades ago and a repeat visitor to the 12,600-foot-deep site, Robert Ballard has long been the public face of the famed wreck. He now has a plan to make the Titanic itself even more public: wiring the ship for virtual visits. A system of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) that follow a fixed route around the bow would be installed on the ocean floor. They would be equipped with video cameras and powered by a moored buoy that would transmit broadband video from the ROVs via satellite to Internet2 (the next-generation Internet). The first audience for this live video would be museumgoers. But eventually, once Internet2 became widespread, Ballard expects that individual families would book virtual vacations to the Titanic, controlling the routes and camera angles of the ROVs from their home theaters. The plan builds on efforts under way at several national marine sanctuaries. Monterey Bay, in California, is equipped with a small ROV that feeds video across the country to the Institute for Exploration, founded by Ballard, at the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. But that setup is near shore. Equipping the Titanic site is a far more ambitious undertaking—one that will cost about $10 million and take at least a decade, by Ballard’s estimate. Detractors call his vision nice but unrealistic because of the cost and difficulty of setting up complex electronics two miles beneath the surface. Some also find the idea unseemly. “It would be sort of like making Titanic into a videogame. I think it should be treated with a little more respect than that,” argues Arnie Geller, who, as president of RMS Titanic, Inc., the company that has salvage rights to the ship, has been criticized by Ballard, an outspoken opponent of salvage operations. Ballard says he would like to see the ship treated like Monticello and the Acropolis and actively protected by cleaning and painting, perhaps with techniques now used on offshore oil platforms. “People just have to get over the problem that it’s underwater,” he says, and start managing the Titanic like any other significant historical site.
LONG-TERM DOCKING When not in use, the ROVs would park in small metal “garages” that might be equipped with brushes to clean the rovers’ video lenses. The pitchblack waters at the site make corrosion and plant growth on the ROVs minimal. The craft could operate for years at a time without being cleaned.
•
Southern limit of sea ice, 1912
• Collision site
Southampton, England
• New York
North Atlantic Ocean
FOR THOSE WHO’VE JOINED US LATE . . . On April 14, 1912, midway through its maiden voyage, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank 375 miles southeast of Newfoundland. There were not enough lifeboats for everyone, and two thirds of the more than 2,220 people on board drowned.
TITANIC TOUR GUIDES Several titanium-framed ROVs, perhaps four feet wide by three feet high, would enable virtual visitors to tour both sides of the bow section lengthwise and possibly even venture a short distance inside the wreck.
EXHIBITION LIGHTING The wreck would be illuminated by powerful LED lights anchored to the seafloor. The lights would be timed to theatrically highlight specific sections as the ROVs passed.
•
DEEP VISION Each ROV would be equipped with a small, high-definition camera placed in a tough housing made of titanium and capable of withstanding the 6,000 pounds per square inch of pressure that exists at 12,600 feet. The video from the ROVs would be sent to the surface buoy via fiber-optic cable.
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•
BEST BUOY The system’s buoy would be 60 feet high and 15 feet wide, with a tough steel double hull like those now required on oil tankers. More than 10 tons of lead in the keel would stabilize the buoy against violent seas, while a conical shroud would deflect waves. In addition to transmitting data, the buoy would serve as the virtual museum’s power source. A fuelcell-powered generator would run both the Titanic’s lights and ROVs via a cable connecting the buoy to the seafloor array.
1 Video from the ROVs would travel by fiber-optic cable to the surface buoy, which has a 25-ton anchor (attached via steel cable) capable of withstanding 150,000 pounds of force.
3
2
2
Radio-frequency signals would be sent through a Kevlar-like dome to a geosynchronous satellite 23,000 miles above Earth.
3
1
The satellite would bounce the video to a land station, where it would be routed onto Internet2, which would have the bandwidth to pump high-resolution video to computers in real time.
LINE OF SIGHT The ROVs would mainly travel a fixed cable path. They would be propelled by electric thrusters in housings filled with oil—which is nearly incompressible—to combat the pressure at depth.
I L L U S T R AT I O N : J O H N M A C N E I L L ; P H O T O G R A P H S , C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P R I G H T: C O U RT E S Y © R M S T I TA N I C ; C O U RT E S Y I N S T I T U T E F O R E X P L O R AT I O N / I N S T I T U T E F O R A R C H A E O L O G I C A L O C E A N O G R A P H Y; J O N AT H A N B L A I R / N G S
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RUST OF AGES Hundreds of tons of “rusticles” give the Titanic its Daliesque dripping-metal appearance. The living layers are formed by microorganisms that grow and multiply over time, scavenging iron from the wreck to build their homes. The growths are greatest at points where stress and cracks have made the metal more accessible. Ballard says he would ultimately like to see technology now used to paint underwater oil platforms applied to repainting the Titanic after it’s had a good scrubbing, a laborintensive idea that elicits more skepticism than any he has yet proposed.
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DOOMED DECK Natural rusticle-driven deterioration will probably cause the top deck of the Titanic to collapse by 2028, according to microbiologist Roy Cullimore, who has been studying the wreck’s disintegration since 1996. Within 100 to 150 years, the whole ship will have essentially imploded, save for the thick outer shell of the hull.
THE TOURIST BUS
Aboard MIR, a deep trip for a steep price Only a handful of submersibles in the world can take people to sites as deep as the Titanic. Since 1998, the twin Russian MIR vessels have been available for hire through Deep Ocean Expeditions, which has carried about 70 adventure tourists on 10-hour, $36,650 dives aboard the three-man subs—a New York couple even got married at the bow. (The MIRs were also used to film footage for the 1997 Oscar winner Titanic and the 2002 IMAX film Ghosts of the Abyss.) Ballard claims that tourist trips, in which subs often land on the ship’s deck, are damaging the site—a charge that those accused insist is unfounded. He has lobbied for legislation that would outlaw the practice.
THE RECOVERY PLAN
More than 5,000 artifacts are now on view International admiralty law typically grants salvage rights to the first group to appear in court with a piece of a wreck. Although Ballard was the first to identify and visit the Titanic, he opted not to take anything from the site. As a result, the Atlanta-based company RMS Titanic, which first visited and recovered objects from the wreckage The arm of a submersible retrieves a leather bag.
Tourists travel two miles deep in a Russian-made MIR.
in 1987, was later named by the courts exclusive salvor-in-possession. To date, RMS Titanic has recovered more than 5,000 artifacts—everything from suitcases and champagne bottles to a cherub from the grand staircase and the bell from the crow’s nest—which are now on display as part of seven for-profit traveling exhibits. “I think our job is to continue doing what we’ve been doing and rescue as many important objects from Titanic as possible before it collapses on itself,” says company president Arnie Geller, who calls the concept of raising the entire wreck “the most fantastic thing ever.” Technological and legal hurdles make that all but impossible, although RMS Titanic intends to raise a 100-ton section of the ship using cables and inflatable lift bags, as it did in 1998 with the 15-ton “Big Piece,” currently on display in Las Vegas. Geller says that more than 15 million exhibit visitors are testament to the public’s unquenched thirst for all things Titanic and to the desire to see as much of it as possible in person rather than through photos or video.
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SUB SCAFFOLDING An 80-foot-tall steel scaffolding system anchored to the ocean floor would support the ROV cables.
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POPSCI Read our Q&A with T ON THE WEB museum mastermind
Robert Ballard at popsci.com/titanic.
]
Sometimes our biggest fear is not knowing what to fear most. Fortunately, it took our writer just two weeks of selfexperimentation for the weird science of risk analysis to teach him to judge better, fear smarter— and always keep the shower curtain clean BY JAMES VLAHOS | PHOTOGRAPHS BY HUGH KRETSCHMER
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December 27, 2004, while the world was focused on the Indian Ocean tsunami,
a few astronomers were contemplating the possibility of an even deadlier disaster: that of a massive asteroid striking Earth. A fifth of a mile wide—heftier than the space rock that leveled a vast swath of Siberian forest in 1908—NearEarth Asteroid 2004 MN4 had grabbed the attention of NASA scientists just before Christmas. They put the chance of an April 13, 2029, collision at 1 in 2,700 and two days later upped the odds to 1 in 165. On the morning of the 27th the astronomers elevated their assessment again, this time to an alarming 1 in 38. On the Torino scale, which measures the likelihood and potential severity1 of an asteroid impact, they gave the asteroid a 4, the highest alert ever issued.
Like most people, I was oblivious to this maybe menace. These days, it can be hard to keep your hazards straight. There are the usual suspects—car crashes, crime, cancer—and a seemingly endless parade of new threats. Breakneck global warming, bioengineered smallpox, gray goo? Sometimes my worst fear is not knowing what I should fear most. Assessing and avoiding risk is a Darwinian imperative; mitigating risks that can’t be dodged is ancient as well.2 With current science, medicine and technology, we know more and can do more about risk than ever before, and in the past century, American life expectancy has jumped from 47 to 77 years. Somehow, though, the good news hasn’t gotten out. A recent study showed that nearly 80 percent of us think the world is more dangerous than it used to be, not less. Earlier this year, I launched a risk-research study with a subject pool of one: me. First I kept a diary, recording and ranking every hazard I encountered for two weeks. Then I submerged myself in accident, mortality, epidemiological and toxicological data; purchased a small library of scholarly books; and interviewed the country’s foremost risk experts. I sent them a copy of my diary for review. The key questions: How accurate was I at rating risks, and how could I do better? Sure, I’ll never live risk-free, but maybe I could learn to live risk-smart. Did I? Let’s take a look.
Biking the Urban Snowstorm Yesterday, New York was slammed by one of the worst January blizzards in a century, a frigid nor’easter that dumped a foot and a half of snow. After such an onslaught, there’s really only one sensible activity: sledding. Friends of mine are meeting in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and I’m running late. I decide to bike. “I’ll wear my helmet,” I promise my girlfriend, Anne, as I rush out the door. In my diary, I record biking as being highly risky. But riding very carefully, I reason, offsets the danger. When the risk experts review my journal, however, they cry foul at this rationalization.3 “Sometimes we decide how we want to live our lives and then invent reasons why certain things do or don’t worry us,” says George Gray, executive director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. It seems that I’ve fallen prey to a couple common perceptual traps. Canadian psychologist Gerald Wilde might see my actions as an example of the risk-balancing process he calls homeostasis—the helmet makes me feel safe, so I engage in a more dangerous behavior than I would have otherwise.4 Other researchers have demonstrated that feeling in control—as you
1. Imagine, for instance, that New York’s Central Park was in the crosshairs. The asteroid strike would release the force of a 1,660-megaton bomb, triggering a magnitude-6.8 earthquake, blasting a two-and-a-half-milewide crater and hurling trailer-size
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rocks deep into Long Island and New Jersey. The tri-state area would be toast. 2. The world’s first known insurance policies were issued 5,000 years ago to Mesopotamian caravan operators. 3. “You dumbass!” was the assess-
do at the handlebars of a bike—provides a false sense of security. In a 1989 study, Hofstra University psychologist William Sanderson had panic-prone patients breathe air that was 5.5 percent carbon dioxide, which is known to provoke panic attacks. Half of them were informed that they could lower the carbon dioxide concentration by twisting a dial, and this group reported fewer and milder attacks—even though the dial was a dummy. Flatbush Avenue, my primary route to the park, is only partially plowed. I ride over slush, a foot or two from buses and cars, with slipping tires. The good news: I’m not drunk. A recent Johns Hopkins University study found that one in three fatal bicycle accidents in Maryland was linked to alcohol; a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 or higher was found to increase the risk of serious or fatal injury by 2,000 percent. The bad news: I’m a man. Of the 800 bicyclists killed in accidents with cars each year, 90 percent are male; 80 percent of the 500,000 injured are men. Male cyclists do slightly outnumber female ones, and men tend to bike more often, but these factors alone don’t account for the elevated death and injury rates. Men, it seems, simply take more risks. For anyone, though, bikes can be dangerous: Traveling a mile by bike is almost 14 times as likely to be fatal as a mile by car.5 In the park, it’s a full Norman Rockwell scene, with kids in mittens and
ment of Harvard’s David Ropeik. 4. One example of risk homeostasis cited by Wilde is that of a German taxi fleet that was upgraded with antilock brakes. Afterward, drivers felt safer and drove more aggressively, and the rate of accidents went up, not down.
5. This is the rate for Great Britain, where the government tracks deaths per billion passengerkilometers. Data from 1991–2000 showed the following rates: airplane, 0.02; boat, 0.4; bus, 0.4; rail, 0.49; car, 3.1; bicycle, 42; foot, 59; and motorcycle, 106.
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P R O P A N D S E T S T Y L I S T: C H R I S T I N A K R E T S C H M E R ; F O O D S T Y L I S T: S U S A N O T TAV I A N O
scarves towing sleds across sparkling snow. I meet my friends, and we head to a crowded bunny slope. Some 33,000 Americans a year are injured while sledding, but the sport registered little concern in my diary. This time, the facts are with me—after all, millions of people go sledding every winter and don’t get hurt. Risk assessors rip their hair out at the general public’s innumeracy; many people jump to conclusions based only on absolute numbers and don’t consider ratios as well. For example, the average number of people killed each year in hot-air balloon accidents is 2.6, while the number killed in hunting accidents is 600. But there are two million hunters in the U.S. and just 3,000 hot-air balloonists, which makes ballooning’s death rate 30 times as high as that of hunting.
Last year researchers at San Diego State University and the University of Colorado, targeting a forgotten front in homeland security, decided to study soap scum. “Over time, vinyl shower curtains accumulate . . . lush microbial biofilms,” they reported. The films contain Sphingomonas spp. and Methylobacterium spp., opportunistic
As a risk-pro-in-training, though, I’m learning to pause for consideration before becoming alarmed about anything. The U.S. population numbers nearly 300 million, so the chance of any one of these accidents happening to me is remote. What’s more, home hazards aren’t equal-opportunity. Fatal falls, for instance, are 70 times as likely when you’re 75 or older as when you’re 44 or younger. Still, domestic risk isn’t insignificant. In 2003, one in 37 people was disabled for a day or more by an injury at home; according to Injury Facts, disabling injuries are more numerous in the home than in the workplace and in car crashes combined. The headlines in the paper are grim,
pathogens that can lead to serious blood and urinary-tract infections. Although the scum is thought to threaten only people with weakened immune systems, biologist Scott Kelley nonetheless advises caution. “I clean my shower curtain more frequently now and change it much more regularly,” he told the San Diego Union-Tribune. Finishing my shower, I step carefully around the dripping vinyl. In my journal, I ranked being at home as the safest part of my life, but David Ropeik, the director of risk communication at the Center for Risk Analysis, disagrees. “Home isn’t as sweet as we think,” he tells me. Consider my morning routine by the numbers. An estimated 280,190 toilet, shower and bathtub accidents sent victims to the emergency room in 2002, according to Injury Facts, a gripping statistical compendium published annually by the National Safety Council. (This article cites the latest available U.S. data unless otherwise indicated.) I shave with a razor (an implement linked to 33,532 injuries) with hot water (involved in 42,077 injuries) at the sink (23,283 injuries). For breakfast, I slice a grapefruit with a knife (441,250 injuries) and pour juice into a glass (86,909 injuries). Before sitting down to eat, I jog down two flights of stairs to fetch the newspaper. Easy, champ. Falls are a significant danger, causing about 28 percent of the 30,000 accidental home deaths6 each year (poisoning and fires are the other top killers). Depressing stuff. “If you were a fanatical risk analyst and started to work through all of the risks you’re facing, you’d be immobilized,” says Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. “You’d probably end up staying in bed all day.” That, sadly, wouldn’t be a good idea either. Every year, around 400 people unintentionally suffocate or strangle themselves in bed.
and I take a deep breath and sigh. Oops, bad idea. In later risk research, I learn that exposure to air pollution is estimated to be 10 to 50 times as high indoors as it is outdoors 7; most of us spend the majority of our time inside, where poor ventilation allows pollutants to accumulate. A partial list of the toxins that might be in my lungs this morning: carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and gases from household products; mold, mites, mildew and dander; traces of lead, asbestos, pesticides, arsenic, flame retardant and product packaging. Yuck. The danger posed by some pollutants is well understood. For example, radon gas—invisible, odorless and radioactive, seeping up naturally from the ground into homes—has been identified as the number-two cause of lung cancer in the U.S.8 For many other pollutants, though, scientists simply aren’t sure of the health effects. More than 75,000 chemicals are
Home, Sweet Home?
6. As a supplement to total-death figures, some experts employ the bleak measure of life-years lost. For example, the drowning death of a three-year-old results in 74 life-years lost (current U.S. life expectancy is 77), making that
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fatality worse than the cancer death of a 75-year-old, which results in only two life-years lost. The top five killers in the U.S. are heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease and accidents. Ranked by life-
years lost, though, accidents (including car crashes, which account for 43 percent of the total) are number one. 7. In 1997 the Presidential/ Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk
Management named indoor air pollution as a substantial national health threat. 8. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, radon probably causes 20,000 deaths a year, primarily among smokers.
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employed in U.S. industry and agriculture. So far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Biomonitoring Program has tested peoples’ bodies for the presence of just 157 of them. An emerging area of concern is synthetically produced nanoparticles, which some scientists theorize might be dangerous because of their ability to accumulate in the body and penetrate cell membranes. Last year, Eva Oberdörster, a researcher at Southern Methodist University, placed buckyballs—a type of carbon nanoparticle being studied for use in drugs, computers and fuel cells—in a fish tank at a concentration of 0.5 part per million. (One of the first consumer products to use buckyballs is, of all things, a crack- and chip-resistant bowling ball.) Though preliminary, Oberdörster’s results were troubling: Within two days, the nine largemouth bass in the tank had all developed brain damage. It’s far too early to draw any conclusions about a human health hazard, however, so what to make of nanoparticles? My risk-educated attitude is to place uncertain dangers like this one on a mental watch list. I’m not going to lose any sleep over buckyballs—not yet—but I will stay alert for more hard science.
Where the Streets Are Insane It’s midday, and, feeling sluggish in my home office, I step out to pick up a soda. The nearest deli is just down the street, across the X-shaped intersection of Lafayette and Fulton. This is a loathsome spot, crowded with some of the world’s worst drivers. Speeding minivans run red lights. Lincoln Town Cars make unsignaled rights, oblivious to pedestrians. Buses blaze past, inches from the curb. Ever since our first week in the neighborhood, Anne and I have called this the Intersection of Death. In 2003, an estimated 80,000 pedestrians were injured and 5,600 were killed by cars. For men in my 25-to-34-year-old age bracket (I’m 34), the annual death rate is 5.5 per 100,000 people, which doesn’t seem too high. (By comparison, car accidents, the leading cause of death for men my age, kill at a rate of 26 per 100,000.) The risk experts later advise me, however, that statistical averages only hint at my personal danger level. Consider that New York streets are far busier than average and that New Yorkers spend more time walking than typical Americans do. Also, I’m an incorrigible jaywalker. You can get your soda faster if you beeline across the Intersection of Death.9 In the diary, I rate jaywalking as I did snow-biking—as a significant but manageable danger. Again I’m guilty of making a common perceptual error: Studies show that people significantly underrate everyday risks and overrate new ones. When the first cases of mad cow disease appeared in Germany, 85 percent of people polled thought the disease was a serious threat. Mad cow was a much bigger problem in the U.K., but it had been around awhile; in polls conducted there at the same time, only 40 percent of the public indicated serious concern. Anne never jaywalks across the Intersection of Death.10 Studies have consistently concluded that women, on average, are considerably more apprehensive about risk than men are. The theories as to why this is so run along predictable sociobiological lines: Women bear and nurture children and are therefore instinctively protective of life, etc. It turns out, though, that risk-assessment differences aren’t just a man-woman thing. In a 1994 study, James Flynn of Decision Research in Eugene, Oregon, found that the gender difference in risk ranking was attributable to roughly 30 percent of his subject pool’s white males, who ranked all risks as being very low. Members of this
9. Buying a soda, meanwhile, is not without its own risks. By one estimate, half of all bills and coins carry infectious germs; more than
10,000 people a year go to the emergency room for money-related injuries. Five people a year are killed by falling vending machines.
subgroup tended to be better-educated, wealthier and more politically conservative than the rest of the pool. Inoculated by success in life, they were less pervious to worry and expressed optimism about their own—and society’s—ability to deal with danger.
Natural-Grown Killers I’m hungry. I’m in a hurry. I know that a high-fat diet can lead to heart disease, the number-one killer in America, and I don’t care. I’m going to eat a Quarter Pounder at McDonald’s, along with fries, a Coke and cookies. The meal is delicious. And in one sense at least, it’s healthier than a charbroiled burger I’d gobble at a backyard BBQ. This month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services added chemical compounds found in grilled meat—some of which are also found in cigarette smoke—to its official list of probable cancer-causing agents.11 I finish lunch feeling satisfied—and vaguely queasy. In any given year, one in four Americans suffers from food poisoning. Although most cases are relatively mild, 325,000 result in hospitalization and 5,000 in death. I logged no food
poisoning concern in my diary, and my unperturbed reaction is typical. “People are more concerned about risks that are catastrophic and rare than those which involve fewer fatalities but are more frequent,” write Richard Wilson and Edmund Crouch in Risk-Benefit Analysis. Crossing the street from McDonald’s I enter the Union Square farmers’ market. There are tables of apples—Empire, Gala, Winesap, Macoun—and vendors selling cider and whole-grain bread. I’m drawn to a booth with an intriguing sign: HAWTHORNE VALLEY FARM—DEMETER-
10. Darn Y chromosome. Men between the ages of 25 and 34 are more than three times as likely as women to die in accidents, accord-
ing to the National Safety Council. 11. Cookout char was joined by a chemical used in moth repellant and toilet bowl deodorant.
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CERTIFIED, BIODYNAMIC. Inside, a bearded man tells me that the farm’s crops are grown without the use of artificial fertilizers or pesticides; even the Hawthorne cows eat organic feed. This eases the impact on the environment, but does it make the food safer than the meal I just scarfed? “I’d say it’s at least 200 times safer,” he says. I plop down $20 for a skimpy T-bone steak. Afterward, I wonder: Is an artificial-pesticide-free farmers’-market offering— an apple, for instance—significantly safer than a standard grocery-store one? Before my risk education I would have said “yes”; now I’m less certain. The Food and Drug Administration (in 1999) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (in 2000) each tested close to 10,000 food samples from grocery stores around the country. They concluded that fewer than 2 percent of the samples had pesticide residues above allowable limits and that even then, most were well below the amount thought to be unhealthy.
Research in the 1990s by Bruce Ames, a molecular biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, indicated that 99.9 percent of the pesticides eaten by Americans are natural. You can give lab rats cancer with substances found in cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and bananas. “I’m not saying that we should be avoiding broccoli,” Ames says. Consuming plenty of fruits and vegetables lowers your cancer risk. But his work illuminates two common risk-perception errors. First, artificial risks are automatically assumed to be worse than natural ones. People fret about the radiation from their cellphones giving them cancer, then go to the beach without sunscreen. Second, people’s judgments are inappropriately polarized; they fail to recognize that most things in the world present a mix of risks and benefits.
Urban Myths and Menaces
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High Stakes Today I’m flying to Montana to begin a weeklong skiing and driving vacation in the Rockies. Because the atmosphere is thinner at 37,000 feet, my exposure to ionizing radiation is 100 to 300 times as great as it would be at sea level. A study in Great Britain found that flight-crew members are exposed to significantly more ionizing radiation per year than workers at nuclear power plants are. Other studies have noted slightly elevated cancer rates among crew members, but the health danger is negligible for less-frequent fliers like me. Dear Diary: not worried. Suddenly, though, the plane jolts with turbulence, seeming to drop 150 feet before catching itself. Dear Diary: freaked out. I know this is senseless, and subsequent research supports me. Flying is the safest form of transportation around, with an infinitesimal average annual fatality rate of 0.03 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles. The rate for driving is almost 30 times as high. Irrational fear isn’t my fault, though—I’m just wired that way. Joseph LeDoux, a neurobiologist at New York University, uses functional MRI and (CONTINUED ON PAGE 94)
y
The off-off-Broadway show that I’m watching—The Top Ten People of the Millennium Sing Their Favorite Schubert Lieder—has its moments. In slower stretches, though, I find myself glancing around the cramped theater: at tangles of cable snaking between stage lights; at peeling black paint on the walls; at the nearest exit. Ever since that Rhode Island nightclub fire that killed 100 people two years ago, clubs and theaters have made me nervous. After the show, I walk carefully on the sidewalk. Last year, a woman in the East Village was killed after stepping on a metal plate that had become electrified with what the papers disturbingly referred to as “stray voltage.”Waiting for the subway home, I step behind a pillar when the train rushes into the station. Everyone knows how people get pushed onto the tracks by deranged criminals. I will later place these urban fears midway up my risk list, but statistically speaking, even these rankings are unwarranted. The annual U.S. death rate from fires is a little higher than one person per 100,000. The rates for sidewalk zapping and platform pushing are far lower—in recent New York history, there have been one known electrocution and a handful of pushing incidents in a city of eight million people who walk and ride trains daily. It seems that I’m the victim of several closely related cognitive pranks: availability, which means that familiar, easily imagined risk scenarios are feared more than long-term, abstract threats; dread, the idea that rare but acutely horrible fates (deadly spider, snake and shark attacks) are dwelt upon more than humdrum ones (heart attacks); and disproportionate visibility, which causes people to believe that if something is highly publicized, it must also be highly probable. Relaxing on the subway, I shift into iPod mode; I continue listening while walking a couple blocks to my apartment. It’s nearly midnight, and I keep an eye out
for anyone suspicious. I’ll rank crime as only a moderate danger in my diary—the city is the safest it has been for decades, right? Right. The number of murders, for instance, which hit an all-time high of 2,245 in 1990, plunged 75 percent to 575 in 2004. New York is one of the safest large cities in the country. Plus, as a relatively young man, I must rank pretty low on the potential victim list, right? Wrong. Andrew Karmen, a professor at John Jay College who is one of the city’s most respected criminologists, corrects this faulty assumption. Many women, he tells me, take anti-crime precautions such as traveling in groups; older people generally aren’t out late; and married people usually travel together. Who is most likely to be out at night, alone and distracted, thus presenting himself as an easy target? An overconfident guy like me, strolling down the street at midnight, listening to his iPod.
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POPSCI Don’t have two weeks? T ON THE WEB Test your own risk IQ in two minutes at popsci.com/risk.
OH NO, IT’S A CATO! The “catastrophic at takeoff” event is a rocketeer’s worst fear— unless it happens to somebody else.
big the ge st
us gero even n a ge D ere e Lar nch, wh h t o t u ome ip la Welc ocket Sh the ough R , if ’s big en n u f ion re is failu explos HOOPER SEPH BY JO
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T
he visitor who pulls up to this
upstate New York hayfield on a sunny July Saturday afternoon might well wonder whether he’s stumbled upon a 4-H Club event or a third-world arms bazaar. There’s a country-fair atmosphere—the fast-talking voice over the PA system, kids eating ice cream and hot dogs—but instead of leading prize heifers to the judges’ table, participants are lugging huge replicas of military missiles (U.S., Russian, Chinese, take your pick) over to the range-safety officer to get final clearance to launch. The owners of the most massive rockets have cleared their projects in advance with the event’s BFR (that would be Big Freakin’ Rocket) committee. “Bring ’em up and we’ll burn ’em up,” the announcer says. For six days over this extended July 4th weekend, this field on the outskirts of the college town of Geneseo is the setting for the Large Dangerous Rocket Ship launch. The event has been held annually (each year at a different site) since the late 1980s, when significant numbers of amateurs began building projectiles of such size and muscularity that the term “model rocket” no longer applied. This is “high-powered” rocketry. At East Coast launch sites like this one, which tend to be situated close to
roars, leaping from their pads and splitting the sky like arrows shot by a god, leaving trails of smoke and flames. “We’ve got all sizes of rockets here,” says Lloyd Wood, an investment adviser by trade who, as the president (or “prefect”) of the hosting Buffalo, New York, rocketry club, is the weekend’s launch director. When Wood hasn’t parked his ample frame on a folding chair under the organizers’ tent, he is buzzing around the grounds in a canvas hat astride a four-wheeled ATV, the 21st-century version of a British colonial administrator inspecting the territories. His job is making sure the 1,700 or so launches planned for the weekend don’t backfire, thus intruding on the high spirits and personal safety of the perhaps 500 spectators milling about. As a breed, the ex rockets in play on the last two days are prone to dramatic failure; Lloyd and his team have to be ready to put out fires. Literally. “If you had nothing but successful launches, it wouldn’t be any fun,” he says. On Saturday afternoon, the buzz is all about an upcoming
launch by Florida engineer Rick Boyette. He has assembled an exquisitely detailed 1:17-scale model of the Chinese Long March 2E that shot satellites into space in the early 1990s. Authentic Chinese lettering, lovingly reproduced, runs down the fiberglass body. “It says ‘China into Space,’ ” Boyette explains. “That’s what somebody THE FAITHFUL told me.” The propulsion comes
REPRODUCTION
MANY HERE RECALL A TRIANGULAR ROCKET FROM LDRS 19THAT IS NOW AFFECTIONATELY KNOWN AS ”THE FLAMING PYRAMID OF DEATH.” flight paths and population centers, participants are granted temporary waivers that allow them to fly as high as 12,000 feet. But at desert launch sites in the West, the sky’s the limit. In Black Rock, Nevada, last May, former Hollywood stuntman Ky Michaelson made history, launching a 21-foot, 700pound rocket called Go Fast that climbed some 70 miles into the outer regions of Earth’s atmosphere—more than 20 miles higher than the previous unofficial amateur record. At this, the 23rd annual Large Dangerous Rocket Ship event (LDRS 23), Thursday through Sunday will be one big explosive picnic. Kids and families will fly comparatively modest kit-built rockets alongside passionate, not to say obsessive, adult hobbyists who have installed large commercially available motors inside massive balsa-wood or cardboard contraptions that can stand 15 feet tall, weigh a couple hundred pounds, and take months to build. On Monday and Tuesday, the kids and the summer-picnic feel will evaporate, and the field will be turned over to experimental, or “ex,” craft flying on high-powered propellant that the rocketeers have mixed and cured themselves. To the uninitiated, even the first, relatively mellow days are unsettling, like being dropped into the middle of a mini Cape Canaveral gone haywire, with rockets firing off all around you every minute. The little ones are zippy, energized darts; the big ones, powerful enough to make you jump back if you’re not ready. They take off with throaty 68
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ROCKET Long March 2E ROCKETEER Florida engineer Rick Boyette DESIGN Meticulous reconstruction of Chinese rocket INVESTMENT 100 hours, $2,180
LAUNCH It explodes midfrom four strap-on booster moair: a rocket piñata. tors surrounding a larger central one. Called a cluster configuration, this can be notoriously difficult to pull off. Unless the boosters fire simultaneously and with identical force, the rocket won’t go straight; an unbalanced liftoff can rip an airframe apart. Boyette is known in rocketry circles for beautiful, ambitious projects that sometimes suffer from lack of attention to technical detail. I catch up with Boyette as he and his team scurry around attending to last-minute prelaunch routines. “You guys wouldn’t happen to have some duct tape, would you?” somebody asks. The two onboard parachutes have to be properly folded and stowed inside, and connected to the rocket frame with Kevlar cord. If the Long March launches as planned, two parachutes, set off by a time-delay charge or an altimeter, will deploy when the rocket reaches its apogee. To prevent the heavy nose cone from damaging the rest of the body during landing, a small drogue parachute will inflate to lower it; a larger chute will deliver the rest of the craft gently to the ground. Ideally, the rocket will return undinged, ready to be outfitted with a new motor and launched all over again. Of course, Boyette has already flown, crashed, and rebuilt the Long March three times. Forty-five minutes pass before Boyette announces, “It’s armed.” We all retreat 1,000 feet, as per regulations, to the
PA G E 6 6 : N A D I N E K I N N E Y / P H O T O S B Y N A D I N E ; T H I S PA G E : T O M TAV E E
vicinity of a few bales of hay. “Five, four, three, two, one . . .” —and nothing. “No smoke, no joy,” as the phrase goes. An inspection reveals that the problem is not Boyette’s: The ignition box provided by the event organizers has malfunctioned. A few quick repairs, and Boyette is ready for a second try. This time the launch sequence goes without a hitch, and the Long March, all its motors burning brightly and noisily
ery, wherein the rocket returns to Earth in pieces, to be pored over for forensic clues, then deposited in the nearest dumpster. It is but one of the many varieties of failed launch that will take place over the course of the festival. Sometimes a rocket fails to ignite; it sits on the pad refusing to budge, like a disobedient dog. Or, on successful ignition, hot gases burst through the motor’s combustion chamber,
in sync, lifts into the sky—for a few seconds. It rises 1,000 feet or so, then blows apart, a rocket piñata, casing, tubing and parachutes raining down like party favors. Boyette looks strangely calm; it’s as if he expected that something would go wrong. “I have no idea what happened,” he says. “I was watching it go up and thinking, ‘I’m home free, I’m home free,’ and then . . . Maybe it was just too much force.” This is what’s known in the trade as a garbage-bag recov-
escaping into the relatively delicate airframe, and the rocket blows on the pad, leaving what is sometimes described as “rocket confetti.” (This is a CATO, or “catastrophic at takeoff,” event.) Or the rocket hurtles happily skyward but the forces generated are too much for the frame to withstand and, like Boyette’s Long March, it breaks apart in midair. But most rockets that come to grief do so on the return trip. You’ll hear the announcer say something like, “It’s coming P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 5
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down hot” when the main chute or, worse, both chutes fail to deploy. Rockets that hit the ground at 100 to 300 miles an hour are known as “lawn darts” or “worm guillotines.” From the human spectator’s point of view, though, the most worrisome kind of rocket is an unstable one—one that’s flying under full power in any direction other than straight up. If a set of faulty calculations slips by the launch-safety officer, a homemade rocket may pinwheel out of control after takeoff. As it burns fuel, its center of gravity may shift, causing it to stabilize in a horizontal position and do a fair, if short-lived, approxiHIGH-DRAG mation of a cruise WHIMSY missile. “People can see it coming,” says ROCKET The Mother Ship Duane Wilkey, a ROCKETEER Edward Miller, middle-school scia chocolate-machine operaence teacher who is tor from Pennsylvania one of this year’s DESIGN Hershey’s Kiss– launch organizers. like; 2.5 feet, 50 pounds “So there’s enough INVESTMENT 60 hours, time for them to get $1,230 out of the way.” LAUNCH Flawless Many here recall the triangular rocket that flew, briefly, at LDRS 19 and that is affectionately remembered as “the Flaming Pyramid of Death.” held in a Rochester hotel, I describe Boyette’s launch to a bunch of rocketeers who didn’t bother to wait around for it. “It was great,” I say, and then, catching myself, “well, not great for Rick or the rocket . . .” A rocketeer puts me at ease: “You don’t have to explain it to us. That’s why we’re all here. We love to watch rockets blow up—and it’s even better when it’s someone else’s.” Moments later, the man of the moment, a dazed-looking Boyette, appears. “I had a failure of the tube coupler joint on my numbertwo booster,” he says. “Either I didn’t put enough glue [on it] when I was rebuilding it or . . . But I will rebuild it again.” I ponder the $2,000 and 100 hours that Boyette has sunk into this 72-pound, 10-foot-long, essentially useless object. Earlier in the day, Stephen Boy, to my knowledge the only rocketeer in attendance who is also a clinical psychologist, had given me his version of Zen and the Art of HighPowered Rocketry: “You’ve got to be able to let go. You build something, you put in the time and money and dedication, but you also have to be willing to have things not work out.” To a spectator, one successful launch looks much like an-
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other, and after a few dozen, enthusiasm can wane. But for the rocketeer, each launch is a thrill that might be likened to sex: The arduousness of the preparation and the predictability and brevity of the climax diminish the intensity of the experience not a bit. The phallic implications of this overwhelmingly male sport don’t escape anyone. “My wife, who is a clinical social worker, says it’s just about a bunch of guys comparing
THIS YEAR’S EVENT, LDRS 24, WILL BE HELD JULY 14–19 IN LETHBRIDGE,
F R O M T O P : T O M TAV E E ; N A D I N E K I N N E Y / P H O T O S B Y N A D I N E ( 3 ) ; FA C I N G PA G E : F R O M T O P : T O M TAV E E ; C O U R T E S Y PAT E A S T E R ; T O M TAV E E
Later that evening at the event’s banquet,
the size of their rockets,” says Boy—who, it must be noted, brought one of the largest, the 16.5-foot, 180-pound O’ Boy. The banquet is a chance for the rocketeers to let their hair down, have a few drinks, talk shop. Underneath the bonhomie, it’s clear that distinct groups are mingling. There are the guys like Boyette who build meticulous replicas of real-life rockets. Then there are the guys who like to build outlandish, bulky, un-aerodynamic rockets. A few examples this year: a flying-saucer-shaped rocket, a rocketized industrial spool, and a series of rockets meant to launch bowling balls into space. (Admittedly, none of the conceptual rockets is creating the stir that Ky Michaelson, of Go Fast fame, did when he sent up Our Stinkin’ Rocket, an honest-to-god port-a-potty, at LDRS 22.) This variety of rocketeer is having fun with the relatively low FAA-imposed East Coast altitude ceiling while getting in touch with the machine-shop artist within, an impulse familiar to anyone who watches American Chopper or Monster Garage. At the banquet, I chat with Rich Kroboth, a computer programmer from New Jersey who was in a valedictory mood after his bowling ball, ingeniously perched atop a single fin, turned in a solid, if not quite record-breaking, performance. “It took three months to build,” he says. “I owe my wife a lot.” The third kind of rocketeer is the sort of person who might be seen around the launch grounds wearing a button that reads “Yes, I am a rocket scientist!” These are the guys, usually drawn from the technical professions, who get off on tinkering with propellant chemistry. Some are bona fide aeronauti-
WHEN ROCKETS CRASH AT 100 TO 300 MPH, THEY’RE KNOWN AS “WORM GUILLOTINES.” cal engineers on busman’s holiday, others just fanatics drawn to high-wire chemistry projects. Representative of this group are Alan Whitmore, an immunologist, and his co-conspirator Jim Livingston, a retired medical-products manufacturing executive. The two North Carolina rocketeers make an intriguing odd couple, Livingston the avid golfer with a country-club loosey-goosiness about him, Whitmore, techno-nerd author of the self-published paper “Performance Evaluation of Experimental Rocket Propellant.” The two joined forces after discovering that Whitmore was building a breathtakingly large motor and that Livingston had a rocket wide enough for it. This is the biggest motor either of them has ever flown, and they are feeling heady and slightly apprehensive. “I’m not just risking my motor but also wrecking Jim’s rocket,” Whitmore says. “And you don’t like to mess up your friend’s rocket.” Another pair of experimentalists I run into are Dave Weber and Bob Utley, buddies from the Maryland chapter of Tripoli, the national association of high-powered rocketry. These guys aren’t sweating it. Each is flying a motor of a size they’ve flown scores of times before. Weber, a civil engineer, has been into rockets since he was a kid in the ’60s. “I saw a model-rockets advertisement in Boy’s Life magazine,” he ALBERTA. FOR MORE INFORMATION GO TO LDRS24.ORG.
A DROGUE’S GALLERY OTHER CONTENDERS AND HOW THEY FARED
PUMPED-UP MODEL ROCKET The Mosquito ROCKETEER Woody Hoburg, a student at MIT DESIGN A scaled-up version (10 feet tall, 120 pounds) of a model rocket Hoburg flew as a kid. It has two large motors for liftoff and two small ones meant to ignite in midair. INVESTMENT 300 hours, $1,200 LAUNCH The nose cone pops open, the drogue chute shreds, and the rocket lands “hot” between two parked cars.
HYBRID HOTSHOT ROCKET GemiNOS ROCKETEER Martin Dorociak, an engineer from Ohio DESIGN The 7.5-foot, 24pound rocket sports not one but two hybrid motors. These finicky devices are powered by nitrous oxide and solid plastic. INVESTMENT 150 hours, $1,190 LAUNCH The two motors fail to light simultaneously, and one overheats, breaking off in midair. Still, the rocket reaches 2,932 feet.
BOWLING-BALL LAUNCH ROCKET Unnamed ROCKETEER Computer programmer Rich Kroboth of New Jersey DESIGN An eight-pound bowling ball perched on a “ring fin” INVESTMENT 300 hours, $800 LAUNCH The first launch flops [see charred remains at right in photo] when the ball fails to eject. The second reaches 1,754 feet—4,746 short of the bowling-ball record but an impressive showing for a previously untested design. P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 5
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recalls, “and I fell in love.” The rocketry career of Utley, a computer technician, follows a more typical trajectory. He dabbled as a boy, then “got back into it when my kid was 11 and expressed an interest,” he says. “Like with just about every ‘born-again’ rocketeer I know, my kid dropped it and I stayed with it.” Both Weber’s and Utley’s rockets will be powered by a batch of propellant that the two whipped up together. The only wild card: Cooking rocket propellant is not unlike baking cookies—no two batches come out exactly the same. Until the late ’80s, the size of model rockets was limited by the standard propellant—black powder, better known as gunpowder. Brittle and highly flammable, the stuff is cumbersome and dangerous to fabricate into large motors; manufacturers never considered it worth the trouble. That restraint went out the window when a handful of engineertinkerers figured out how to fly model rockets with the same solid composite fuel that NASA uses in its boosters. Solid pro-
SINCE 9/11, ANYTHING THAT SMACKS OF DIY PYROTECHNICS IS VIEWED WITH SUSPICION. whether it’s because I’m exerting myself so much or I’m just excited being around this much propellant.” Before he slides the sleeve of propellant packets into an aluminum casing that will slip into place inside the rocket body just above the fins, he permits himself a final deep whiff. “Oh, yeah!” he exclaims. “This is one of the most beautiful smells in the world.” A rocket is basically fuel ignited in a contained space with only one way out. The rapidly expanding gases and flaming particulate matter push against the walls of the combustion chamber and are forced through a narrow nozzle that concentrates their energy as forward thrust. Rocket guru Wernher von Braun once likened the process to continuously fir-
HOMEMADE MOTOR #1 ROCKET The Viper ROCKETEER Retired executive Jim Livingston of North Carolina [at left, with partner Alan Whitmore] DESIGN 14 feet, 100 pounds INVESTMENT 100 hours, $500
pellant is a two-part proposition: oxidant and fuel. Ammonium perchlorate, the oxidant, releases oxygen when ignited, which feeds the burn of the synthetic rubber, a hydrocarbon fuel that’s enhanced with finely ground, highly combustible aluminum particles. The brew is three times as powerful, gram for gram, as black powder, and far safer. Jim Livingston happens to have a summer cottage on Lake
Conesus, N.Y., a stone’s throw from this year’s launch site, and it is here that he and Whitmore prepare the motor for Livingston’s 14-foot-tall Viper rocket. On this sultry summer afternoon, Whitmore is inspecting his high-test home brew. “When I’m sweating like this,” he tells me, “I don’t know
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Read about notorious moments in rocket history, from ancient China to Ariane 5, at popsci.com/rocketeers.
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ing a machine gun off the stern of a rowboat, pushing the boat forward with the force of the recoil. The simplicity of the mechanism, and the lack of moving parts in the finished product, go a long way toward explaining how it is possible to assemble a sizable rocket motor in a summer cottage. Whitmore prepares to secure his motor inside the rocket booster stage. He fits a steel compression, or snap, ring into two retention bolts, so that at liftoff the motor won’t push through the forward bulkhead or shoot out the nozzle underneath. “When you see me begin to compress the snap ring,” he says, “step slightly this way or that. If these things slip off the groove, you have a bullet in the house.” Obeying the first law of high-powered rocketry—“Big is good”—Whitmore has built a motor that, in the nomenclature of the hobby, is N class, meaning that over the course of its burn it will put out between 10,240 and 20,480 Newtonseconds of thrust, the so-called “total impulse.” (A Newton-
F R O M L E F T: T O M TAV E E ; N A D I N E K I N N E Y / P H O T O S B Y N A D I N E ; FA C I N G PA G E : I L L U S T R AT I O N : S T E P H E N R O U N T R E E ; P H O T O G R A P H S : N A D I N E K I N N E Y / P H O T O S B Y N A D I N E
LAUNCH Successful, but return is a bit troubled: The main chute only halfopens, and Viper smacks down hard.
second is the force applied over one second that would accelerate one kilogram of mass an additional meter per second.) Every time you go up a letter, you double the total impulse, so this N motor has twice the power of Whitmore’s recent M motor projects—M being the standard attention-grabbing muscle motor at an LDRS event—and 8,192 times the power of the A motors that drive the small model kits. “Working with these big motors really gets your heart rate up,” he says. The other thing that agitates rocketeers: regulations.
To get permission to launch his record-setting Go Fast, Michaelson underwent an epic two-and-a-half-year bureaucratic struggle with an obscure federal entity, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation. The civil servant who held up the launch for a year reportedly told him,“We’re not happy unless you’re unhappy.” To which Michaelson replied (to the enduring satisfaction of high-powered-rocketry enthusiasts the world round), “We’re not happy unless you’re a little bit
worried.” And the feds are worried. In the fall of 2001, two agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives paid a call to the Whitmore residence to examine his propellant-storage facilities. Since 9/11, anything that smacks of do-it-yourself pyrotechnics is viewed with suspicion. Officials have suggested that a homemade rocket could be used by terrorists. Rocketeers retort that any terrorist who attempted to deliver a deadly payload with a rocket, which doesn’t have a guidance system, instead of a Stinger shoulder-to-air missile (or a rental truck or suicide vest) would be a terrorist in the wrong line of work. Still, officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives maintain that they have the authority to regulate rocket motors because the oxidant used in solid propellant, ammonium perchlorate, has been on the official explosives list since the 1970s. The government requires that high-powered rocketeers get burdensome explosives permits. Rocketeers are disgusted. “No one’s ever built a bomb with this stuff,” says attorney Joe Egan, who represents Tripoli and the National Association of Rocketry, “but hundreds of bombs a year are made from gun-
HOMEMADE MOTOR #2 ROCKET Super Tuber ROCKETEER Dave Weber, a civil engineer from Maryland DESIGN 13.5 feet, 70 pounds INVESTMENT 180 hours, $1,500 LAUNCH Disastrous. Too much aluminum mixed in the homemade propellant creates excess pressure; the rocket blows at takeoff.
SOLID-FUEL ROCKET
ROCKET PLAN Oxidizer Valve Fuel
Igniter Fuel/oxidizer mixture
HYBRID ROCKET
An electric igniter in solid-fuel rockets sparks the unstoppable burning of a fuel and oxidizer mix. Hybrid rockets keep their oxidizer and fuel—typically nitrous oxide and PVC pipe—in separate tanks. An igniter heats the combustion chamber, burning off the valve that holds back the oxidizer. Flowing nitrous and hot PVC combust to make thrust.
y
powder, which is easy to obtain.” Seconds Doug Pratt, a rocketeer and hobby-industry consultant, “We’re offended by the suggestion that we’re doing something unpatriotic.” At the otherwise jolly LDRS banquet, there are “council of war” moments, with a passing of the hat for the legal defense fund. The feds’ attack on solid fuel has led some rocketeers to try hybrid motors, which burn rubber or plastic using a liquid oxidizer. Hybrids are nothing new, but until now they were a solution in search of a problem. Post-9/11, they became a way to legally sidestep federal oversight, since nothing in them can be remotely considered an explosive. (Ironically, while one arm of the government harasses rocketeers, another solicits them. NASA has purchased two launch systems—for its educational programs—from Doug Pratt, who makes them in his basement and sells them over the Internet in his spare time.) Hybrids have a crucial safety edge, which derives from their combustion of two components—an oxidizer, usually nitrous oxide, and a fuel source, usually a machined chunk of PVC plastic (although most any- (CONTINUED ON PAGE 92) P O P U L A R S C I E N C E J U LY 2 0 0 5
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5 THINGS ... YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD TRACK WITH RSS To learn more about RSS, see popsci.com/h20.
DEPT: YOU BUILT WHAT?!
INVESTIGATOR: JEFF WISE
Getting High on Helium
DEAN A. EKDAHL
John Ninomiya regularly takes flight using a rig so simple it’s scary: a bunch of helium balloons
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PACKAGE DELIVERIES New to RSS? Get a free account with Web-based RSS reader Bloglines (bloglines.com). In addition to tracking headlines from your favorite sites, you can now receive an RSS feed on packages from UPS, FedEx or the USPS—just enter the tracking number, and the feed will update at each stage of the delivery.
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LIBRARY BOOKS Avoid late fees and fruitless trips to the library with ELF (libraryelf.com), which generates a feed to inform you when books you’ve requested are available at your local branch (including a link to operating hours) and when your checkedout books are almost due.
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LOCAL WEATHER RSSWeather (rssweather.com) sends updates on current and forecasted weather conditions for your city. You can even customize the feed to notify you only when certain changes occur (temperature, forecast, etc.).
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TV LISTINGS Need to know when you can next catch Deadwood on HBO? Bootleg RSS (ktyp.com/rss/tv ) provides channel-specific feeds (by time zone) with the day’s programming for dozens of cable networks, including CNN, the Discovery Channel and ESPN.
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YOURSELF Find out when your company, favorite sports team or even your name is mentioned just about anywhere on the Web with PubSub (pubsub.com). The site trawls more than nine million news and blog sites and lets you create an RSS feed that alerts you when your specified keywords appear.—MERLIN MANN
TECH: Cluster ballooning COST: $2,000 per flight TIME: 2 hours of prep for a two-hour flight PRACTICAL
POPCORN
Anyone who’s ever been eight years old has wondered the same thing: How many balloons would it take to carry me up into the sky? John Ninomiya knows the answer. He’s logged 32 flights—and ascended as high as 21,400 feet—dangling beneath clusters of between 40 and 120 helium balloons. An avid hot-air balloonist, Ninomiya first attempted his boyhood dream in 1997, when he teamed with ballooning pioneer Don Piccard to fly a cluster of seven custom-built Mylar helium balloons. The rig worked, but it suffered from buoyancy-control problems. Later, Ninomiya switched to smaller balloons made of latex, which were not only lighter and easier to pop, but also biodegradable and less expensive. Ranging in size from four to seven feet in diameter, each balloon can lift as much as 10 pounds. Ninomiya varies the mix depending on the needs of each flight. Larger balloons are easier to fill, but the only way he can descend is by selectively popping balloons, so using a larger number of smaller ones gives him more control. He flies eight to 10 times a year; each flight lasts around two hours and costs about $2,000. As simple as it seems, you definitely shouldn’t try this at home. Ninomiya has little directional control of his rig—he pops balloons or lets out ballast to change altitude in hopes of catching an air current moving in the direction he wants to go. He also wears a parachute, although he expects never to use it. “Most of the things that can kill you happen at landing,” he says. Learn more at Ninomiya’s site, clusterballoon.org, and turn the page to see how he assembles an airworthy cluster. >>
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[ ] DUBIOUS CLAIMS
HOW 2.0| YOU BUILT WHAT?!
»
A total of 8,000 cubic feet of helium in 40 to 120 balloons is required to lift the 180-pound Ninomiya plus 180 pounds of ballast and 120 pounds of gear into the sky. It takes a team of 15 to 20 volunteers two hours to inflate and rig the balloons.
BUILDING A BUOYANT CLUSTER
»
We Test Gadgets That Use Science to Sell
Claim: “Your best protection against deadly animal related accidents . . . wave variance tuning combines reverberation . . . off the road surface, creating a virtual sonic echo effect.”
The neck of each balloon is wrapped in masking tape, doubled over to form a loop, and sealed with cable ties. Braided #36 nylon twine from Home Depot is tied to the loop with a bowline knot.
Ninomiya wears a stan» dard paragliding harness and an emergency parachute.
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For ballast, eight or more 16-pound CamelBak-type water bladders attach to heavy webbing straps connected to two main load-bearing carabiners. To rise, Ninomiya lets water run out. More ballast allows greater maneuverability, but more balloons are needed to lift him. To prevent tangling, he ties » balloons in sets of four to a cara-
» Ninomiya is attempting to fly a cluster of balloons in each of the
50 states over the next 10 to 15 years—an ongoing project he calls States of Enlightenment. Here’s where you can see him soar this summer: JULY 1: Ashland BalloonFest, Ashland, Ohio JULY 23: Fun Fest Balloon Rally, Kingsport, Tenn. AUG. 5–6: North American Balloon Association Nationals, Baton Rouge, La. AUG. 12–14: Summerfest Hot-Air Balloon Extravaganza, Pontiac, Ill. AUG. 19: Ogden Valley Balloon Festival, Eden, Utah AUG. 26: Flag City Balloon Fest, Findlay, Ohio
biner, which in turn is fastened to a webbing strap connected to the harness. Clusters are organized in three tiers, with the topmost four connected to 15-foot risers, the middle four to shorter risers, and the remaining clusters directly to the harness.
[ Procurement: PropertyRoom.com ] well, a steal at propertyroom.com, an auction site Buying police-recovered stolen goods can be,
that lists everything from socks to real estate to gadgets from police departments all over the country. Unlike eBay, auctions keep going until bidding stops, so the best stuff usually reaches prices similar to those at Amazon.com and eBay. But there are bargains for those looking to buy in bulk or for spare parts. The “Items Under $5” page recently listed “four VCRs, for parts only” at $1. These miscellaneous collections are sold untested and nonreturnable. But hey, in a 25-pound box of cellphones and pagers (final price: $352 plus shipping), at least a few have to work, right? —AMANDA MACMILLAN 76
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HORNET V-120 xp3hornet.com TECH: Electronic deeravoidance device RESULT: Deer didn’t notice Reality: New York’s Hudson Highlands are infested with deer. My wife recently did her part, thinning the herd by one in her Porsche, but it cost us nearly $5,000 in bodywork. So I fell for the Hornet V-120: $60 of brackets, plugs, and a “sonic generator” that mounts under the car and reflects a high-pitched sound that should scare away “highly skittish” deer. Within 10 minutes of installing my new weapon, I found some deer grazing at the roadside and eased to within 20 feet. “Take this, Bambi,” I thought as I hit the Hornet’s switch. Nothing. Not a raised head, not a twitched tail, not even a perked ear. I might as well have mooned the beasts for all the distraction the Hornet created. Lesson: Listen to what all the experts—veterinarians, body shop guys, highway patrolmen—told me: Skittish though it may be, nothing will stop a deer from running into your car’s path.—STEPHAN WILKINSON
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HOW2.0| MAXED OUT DEPT: MAXED OUT
INVESTIGATOR: BEN ZACKHEIM
The Deadliest Gaming Rig PC gamers demand top-end performance from their machine and its accessories. Here’s the best of the best Neo’s recliner in The Matrix is my ideal gaming rig: Sit back, jack in, and “whoah!”—total mind-game integration. But until the machines take over, the absolute best a gamer can do is the $5,858 Alienware Area-51 ALX SLI (alienware.com) [below], which sports an ultrafast Intel Xeon 3.4-gigahertz processor, one gigabyte of RAM, a 148-gigabyte 10,000rpm hard drive, silent liquid cooling and a 7.1channel soundcard. The neon-glowing rig even employs a technology called Scalable Link Interface, or SLI, in which two 256-megabyte
TECH: PC gaming BASE COST: $5,858 TOTAL COST: $7,693
STEAL
SPLURGE
NVIDIA GeForce videocards share the graphics duties, giving you the most detailed scenes possible (short of plugging directly into your skull). Although today’s games are designed to take advantage of such monstrous power, you don’t need to spend six grand on a PC to play. Any computer with a 256-megabyte graphics card, one gigabyte of RAM and a two-gigahertz CPU will keep you in the deathmatch. The key to kicking butt is often in the accessories—superresponsive controls, rich surround sound and a fast monitor are all essentials for victory. ALIENWARE AREA-51 ALX SLI
B
The 19-inch NEC Multisync GX LCD [A] ($550; nec.com) has an eightmillisecond response time, which virtually eliminates “ghosting”—the distracting trails often left behind fastmoving objects on the screen. Clip on an Eclipse Computer Light [B] ($30; onetech.net )—its concave reflector and 10,000-hour bulb cast a soft, even glow to minimize eyestrain during allnight World of Warcraft sessions. The Logitech Premium USB Headset 300 [C] ($50; logitech.com) lets you speak clearly to the opponent you’re about to frag. For big sound, the Logitech Z-5500 speaker set [D] ($400; logitech.com) boasts five dualdriver satellites and a 10-inch woofer. The D-Link DGL-4300 108G Wireless Gaming Router [E] ($170; dlink.com) prioritizes your network traffic for online gaming, so you can keep your firewall and virus scanner running without worrying about “death by lag.”
C F A
The X-Arcade Joystick [F] ($150; x-arcade.com) replicates the old coinop controllers of your youth. For a more modern stick, the Logitech Freedom Cordless Joystick [G] ($70; logitech.com) uses a high-frequency 2.4-gigahertz signal for fast wireless communication and customizable buttons and triggers for, say, the warplane fighters in Battlefield 1942.
E
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The Belkin Nostromo SpeedPad n52 [H] ($50; belkin.com)—with its programmable keys, scroll wheel and thumbpad—gives one-hand access to controls that usually take two hands.
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The Logitech MX1000 mouse [I] ($80; logitech.com) uses a laser that is 20 times more sensitive than a traditional optical beam. Use it on a smooth, solid surface, such as the Flexiglow xRaider Mouse Pad [J] ($20; flexiglow.com) for the most precise aiming in Doom 3. Or just use the Monster Gecko Pistol Mouse [K] ($40; monstergecko.com)— a gun-shaped optical mouse with an 800-dpi scan rate and a trigger that acts as a fire button.
JOHN B. CARNETT
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HOW2.0| GRAY MATTER DEPT: GRAY MATTER
INVESTIGATOR: THEODORE GRAY
Calling Van Helsing A hands-on investigation into the myth and reality of the original anti-werewolf weapon: silver bullets
ELEMENT: Silver PROJECT: Making silver bullets COST: $50 (materials only) TIME: 5 hours DABBLER
MASTER
Like darning socks, making bullets is a dying art. Used to be just about everyone with a need for ammo poured their own, using iron or even wooden molds. These days only a few diehard hobbyists still do it, and they use aluminum molds. But even fewer people still make silver bullets. Actually, not many people ever made silver bullets. It’s a difficult process, and their effiTHE PARTS: [left to right] Bullion bars and rounds, the cheapest source of pure silver; the bullet mold, opened after casting a bullet; the profile bit used to machine the mold; silver bullets as-cast, with the excess cut off, and polished to a mirror finish.
cacy against werewolves has never been scientifically proven. I suppose their renown came from the perception that silver was a distinguished metal, often spoken of in connection with its higher-class cousin, gold. But today silver is far more common, and it tarnishes over time, primarily because of sulfur pollution from power plants. (By and large, it didn’t tarnish before the Industrial Age.) I couldn’t find any references describing real historical silverbullet-crafting techniques. At 1,764°F, molten silver would ruin traditional and modern bullet molds. They could have been fashioned using jewelers’ methods, but that would require a new plaster mold for every bullet. Frankly, I think people spent a lot more time talking about silver bullets than they did turning them out. I don’t like legends that are all talk, so I decided to see
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what it takes to produce a real silver bullet: not plated, not sterling—pure silver. To create the mold, I first had to construct a bit. I used a lathe to turn a steel rod into a bulletlike shape, then used a milling machine to cut away a quartercircle wedge of the rod, leaving a sharp cutting edge. Basically I had built a router bit shaped like a bullet. (I’ve fabricated bits like this freehand with a file; which works fine, it just takes longer. Much longer.) After using the bit to machine the graphite bullet mold, I used an electrically heated graphite crucible to pour in 0.999 fine liquid silver at about 2,000°F, which is 230°F above its melting point. The mold must be
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1. TURNING THE BIT A lathe forms the bullet shape, including its sprue and pouring funnel. The rounded tip is smoothed with a file and sandpaper after rough cutting. 2. POURING THE AMMO Four steel index pins and a clamp hold the two halves of the graphite mold together as silver is poured from an electric crucible.
preheated with a blowtorch to keep the silver from solidifying before it fills the whole cavity. One of the benefits of using graphite is that it keeps the silver from oxidizing, so bullets come out bright and shiny.
MELTING POINT: 1,764°F KNOWN SINCE: At least 3000 B.C. USES: Jewelry, electrical contacts, alloying in solder NOTABLE QUALITIES: Has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of all metals at room temperature
Would a silver bullet really fire? Probably. (Though, not being an experienced gunsmith, I would never be foolish enough to try my bullets in a real gun.) Bullets need to be fairly soft so that they can take on the shape of spiral grooves in the gun’s barrel, and pure silver is moderately soft. It’s also similar in density to lead, so it should have similar aerodynamics and muzzle velocity.
I’d guess silver would make a very nice nontoxic substitute for lead in bullets. Too bad about the cost: These oneounce, large-caliber rifle bullets use about $7 worth of silver per shot—best reserved for only the most severe werewolf infestations. Read more about Gray’s scientific pursuits at periodictabletable.com.
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HOW2.0| TECH LESSON DEPT: TECH LESSON
INVESTIGATOR: ETHAN TODRAS-WHITEHILL
Move Over, Pixar With machinima, anyone can be an amateur animation auteur. Just play (and record) videogames
THE LUDDITE
TECH: Machinima moviemaking COST: Free TIME: 1 hour and up DABBLER
Diary of a Tech Resister’s Temptation
MASTER
To every moviegoer who leaves the theater saying, “The camera angle in the final scene was all wrong,” it’s time to put your PC where your mouth is. You don’t need Disney dough to make an animated flick these days, not with machinima, an emerging cinematic medium that uses videogames to shoot short films in the computer-animated style of Toy Story and Shrek. The key word is “shoot.” Unlike traditional animation—done frame by painstaking frame—machinima is recorded in real time with the game’s players serving as actors and cameras (you see the game world from your character’s point of view). Use software to capture the scene, then edit the shots and dub in dialogue later. Machinima first appeared in 1997, when someone added witty subtitles to his Quake speed runs (recorded demos where gamers show how fast they can complete levels of the game). Now the art form is gaining serious indie-film cred: The 2005 Sundance Film Festival included a demonstration of machinima-making techniques. See the films yourself at machinima.com, and stay tuned for the fourth annual Machinima Film Festival (machinima.org), coming later this year.
EPISODE 11: VIDEO MESSAGING TUESDAY 5 PM Webcam and Messenger 7.0 setup is shockingly easy. Prepare for a drop in productivity.
MSN MESSENGER 7.0 Free; msn.com
LOGITECH WEBCAM $100; logitech.com LUDDITE LIKES: Ease of use, free conversations BARRIER TO ENTRY:
Positioning, time suckage VERDICT: Distracting, but nice to see far-off friends
THE NEXT SIMPSONS? The Strangerhood is a five-minute sitcom made using The Sims, about eight archetypes living together. Machinima can be made with a variety of games (Half-Life 2, How to » Unreal Tournament, The Sims 2 ), but machinima.com provides a Machinima Production Kit (MPK) that includes a version of Quake II. The kit is still in alpha stage and a little buggy, but it’s good for a first movie.
ASSORTED ANIMATION Anna [top] is an art film. Red vs. Blue [bottom] is an action-comedy Halo series.
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1. Open the version of Quake II included with the MPK and start a multiplayer networked session. Have your virtual cast join the game—you’ll need a player for each character in the scene, plus one for the camera. 2. Record the action using Quake’s built-in demo recorder. Shoot as many times as you like from as many angles as you’d like; save a different demo for each shot. 3. Using film-editing software Keygrip II (included in the MPK), delete unnecessary frames and tweak the camerawork. 4. Record your demos to an .avi file with CaptureBatch (included). Add sound and splice scenes using the MPK’s open-source A/V editing software. 5. For the dedicated filmmaker, the MPK includes texture and map editors to customize scenery, props, characters, even facial expressions. Next stop: the Oscars!
Find detailed instructions and a host of machinima resources at popsci.com/h20.
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5:32 PM I can’t seem to get the webcam positioned correctly. Picture quality is good, but I keep looking at the screen, not the webcam, so it’s all askew. WEDNESDAY 8 AM Aha! I was using the wrong stand. There’s a clip for laptops that lets the webcam sit just above your line of sight. 8:16 AM That doesn’t work either. Maybe I have the wrong build for this. THURSDAY 10 PM My friend Matt in Los Angeles has installed a twin camera, but he can’t get his positioned right either, so we’re creepily looking past each other. Also, the mics aren’t working, so we’re mute. FRIDAY 10:52 PM Finally, sound. There’s a Jetsons feel to the conversation. “It’s like one of us should be on Mars!” Matt says. SATURDAY 11 PM After another video chat, I recall my gripe with IM: I don’t like talking this much. Somebody’s always online, and now they can see me. —GREGORY MONE
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 R O O S T E R T E E T H P R O D U C T I O N S ; C O U R T E S Y F O U N TA I N H E A D E N T E R TA I N M E N T; C O U R T E S Y R O O S T E R T E E T H P R O D U C T I O N S ; P H O T O G R A P H : J O H N B . C A R N E T T
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suggestions, and questions for the Geek Chorus to [email protected].
THE TIP SHEET RESURRECT YOUR PDA A broken screen no longer means your PDA is junk. PDAparts.com sells replacement screens for dozens of models, including the Treo 600 and most Cliés and iPaqs (from $25 to $200), and offers how-to videos and guides for the surprisingly easy DIY operation.—H2.0 staff
FIND LOST GADGETS We intentionally “lost” an MP3 player at a bookstore and an hour later got an e-mail saying it had been found. The trick: It had a sticker on it from trackitback.com ($10) asking the finder to go online and enter its ID number. The site then notified us and arranged return shipping.—Joe Brown
See more examples of things broken at thisisbroken.com.
YOUR GEAR The iTalk from Griffin ($40; griffintechnology.com) is a voice recorder that attaches to the top of your iPod and records memos as .wav files directly to the iPod’s hard drive. That’s not revolutionary, but because iPods are so ubiquitous and unobtrusive, what people are doing with them is. For instance, I use it to record talks at conferences and later post the talks online (with the presenters’ permission). I even have friends in college who use the iTalk to record lectures and then make them available on the campus network through iTunes’s sharing function. —Matt Haughey, creative director at Creative Commons and creator of PVRblog.com and a.wholelottanothing.org
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PAPER EX MACHINA A scientific treatise, written entirely by a computer, was accepted to a professional conference.
[DEPARTMENT OF SCIENTIFIC HOAXES] E-MAIL SPAM OFFERING LOWER MORT-
gage rates and prescription-free Cialis regularly clogs up our inboxes, but scientists and graduate students also receive e-solicitation of a different kind: calls for paper submissions to research conferences. One conference’s constant entreaties for papers—and the registration fees required to submit them— led three grad students to suspect that the hard-sell approach of the conference organizers would result in relaxed academic standards. To test their theory, they submitted two fake research papers. But the students didn’t fake the papers themselves—they designed software to do it for them. In early February, Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Max Krohn, all students in the computer-science Ph.D. program at MIT, constructed a papergenerating computer program that they dubbed SCIgen. For two weeks, they 86
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scribbled hundreds of sentences, any of which could independently appear in a scientific journal article. The group then excised nouns, verbs and adjectives from those sentences before entering the truncated phrases into their computer program. SCIgen not only arbitrarily assigns scientific (or scientific-sounding) words from a database to the blank spaces, it also assembles every sentence in a random order. The result is nothing so brilliant and amusing as an incoherently structured but readable paper generated in less than 10 seconds. The students submitted two SCIgenspawned papers and the registration fee to the ninth annual Florida-based World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI). They targeted WMSCI specifically because the conference’s incessant e-mails addressing them as “Dear Doctor” appeared to be essentially business
ALEX NABAUM
Nerdy Mad Libs Fool the Experts
solicitations, in which one paid an obligatory fee to help get a research paper published. For each SCIgen paper accepted to the conference, the students would be out $390. And because WMSCI asks for submissions in topics covering everything under the sun—and accepted 2,904 papers in 2004—the students had a hunch that their 390 bucks would be but a small drop in an ocean of lucre. When WMSCI accepted the paper —dubbed “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy”—the trio announced its success online and posted a PDF of the paper. The introduction begins: Many scholars would agree that, had it not been for active networks, the simulation of Lamport clocks might never have occurred. The notion that endusers synchronize with the investigation of Markov models is rarely outdated. A theoretical grand challenge in theory is the important unification of virtual machines and real-time theory. The report continues through five more sections of text accompanied by inexplicable diagrams and charts. In response to the posting, the students received hundreds of e-mails from people around the world. Some commended their efforts to expose the conference’s relaxed standards, but most just commented on “how hard they laughed,” Jeremy Stribling recalls. The pranksters quickly lobbied the Web community to help them attend the conference, eventually accumulating more than $2,400. They planned to improvise a speech—more of a rant—and incorporate never-beforeseen diagrams projected behind them. “We would have gone up there and just winged it,” Stribling says. As word spread, the joke publicly exposed the profit-generating intentions of WMSCI, reigniting a debate on academic integrity. When WMSCI got wind of the prank, however, the
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students received notification of the paper’s rejection, along with a refund. Although Stribling is disappointed that “Rooter” was ousted from the conference, he says it’s time for him to get back to his real research—making more efficient information-sharing networks. The students will probably return the the donation money. But with WMSCI’s big shindig later this month, Stribling, Krohn and Aguayo wonder if a bit of conference-crashing in the Sunshine State may be in order after all.—MATTHEW OLSON
[FOR THE ARCHIVES]
A Note to Future Time Travelers THE FIRST AND ONLY TIME TRAVELER
Convention (because, of course, you need only one) was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W— coordinates were supplied in case such quaint notions as “Boston” and “MIT” don’t exist 2,000 years from now), on May 7, 2005, at 10 p.m. EDT. “Unfortunately,” the organizers report, “we had no confirmed time travelers visit us. We did, however, have a great series of lectures, awesome bands, and even a DeLorean." If you currently have access to a working time machine, please consider stopping by and saying hello. We hear the party was fab. And don’t forget to tell organizers when you came from. See web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler. —MICHAEL MOYER
[THE FINE PRINT]
Suborbital Flight! (If You’re Lucky) EARLIER THIS YEAR AT THE NEW
York International Auto Show, Doug Ramsburg of Northglenn, Colorado, was awarded a trip into suborbit on a Virgin Galactic spaceship—jovially presented by a space-suit beclad Richard Branson—courtesy of Volvo Cars of North America. (Ramsburg also won a Volvo XC90 V8 for his terrestrial transportation needs.) 88
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Intrigued, we read the fine print—the rules, regulations and restrictions that govern how Ramsburg can claim his prize. Considering that commercial suborbital flights don’t yet exist, we suspected that the legalese would be even more exacting than usual. We were not disappointed. For example, in the event that Virgin Galactic’s spaceflight program doesn’t exist by 2009, Volvo and Virgin Galactic will recompense Ramsburg to the sweet tune of $100,000—the price for a ticket to suborbit today. Read on for excerpts from the contest’s official rules.—MARTHA HARBISON
RICHARD DREW/AP PHOTO
VOLVO/VIRGIN GALACTIC SWEEPSTAKES OFFICIAL RULES POTENTIAL GRAND PRIZE UNAVAILABILITY: By participating in this Sweep-
stakes, entrants and Grand Prize Winner understand and agree that (a) Virgin Galactic is a company that is in development and suborbital flights on the Virgin Galactic spacecraft are in the planning stages at the time of this
Sweepstakes; and (b) neither Sponsor, Virgin Galactic, nor any of their respective parents, subsidiaries or affiliates, nor any of the officers, directors, employees, agents or representatives of any of the foregoing provide any kind of guarantees or warranties that any Virgin Galactic spacecraft will be built nor that any space flights of any Virgin Galactic spacecraft will take place in the future. ASSUMPTION OF RISKS OF SPACE FLIGHT: By accepting Grand Prize,
Grand Prize Winner accepts the inherently dangerous nature and risk in traveling into Space, including the risk of personal injury, disfigurement and/or death, acknowledges that his/her participation in the trip to space is voluntary, acknowledges and [sic] that there are natural and manmade factors and occurrences which may impact on or affect the safety of the activities he/she is participating in, and Grand Prize Winner assumes the risk of such factors and occurrences
O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN Richard Branson, dolled up for the sweepstakes award ceremony
and agrees that Sponsor and all Related Entities shall not be in any way responsible for any resulting injury, disfigurement and/or death. Grand Prize Winner will be required to complete and sign a Dangerous Activity Release or the Grand Prize will be forfeited.
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thing, including a hard salami, has been used)—both of which are chemically inert at less than superhigh temperatures. Within the high-powered-rocketry community, a zealous minority sees hybrids as the wave of the future, while an as-yet-unpersuaded majority is unconvinced because of the hybrids’ finicky resistance to ignition and their hollow, flatulent sound (it’s hard to let go of the solids’ manly roar). The experimental days begin with a
whimper. Both the Whitmore-Livingston and Weber-Utley teams have expected to launch Monday, but the wind whips up, and the rest of the day is scrapped. Tuesday dawns cloudy, but as the morning progresses, a blue hole opens that you could shoot a fleet of rockets through. “Morning, LDRS 23, this is Dave Weber,” comes the impromptu announcer’s voice over the PA. “This will be the eighth flight of a rocket called Super Tuber. Motor manufactured by Bozo Motorworks out of the Maryland-Delaware Rocketry Association. We expect 3,600 feet. The range is clear, the sky is clear, and launching in five, four, three, two, one . . .” The rocket gods are not happy. Super Tuber lifts about a foot off the pad and pauses. “As soon as you see that hesitation,” Weber says, “you know something bad is going to happen.” It’s a CATO, all right. The motor’s combustion chamber can’t contain the pressure, and Romancandle flames pour from the bulkhead and the nozzle, sending Weber and launch organizers sprinting to the scene with buckets of water to douse the charred remains. Weber’s pal Utley now finds himself between a rocket and a hard place. He’s got a slim new craft on the pad, modeled from a news photograph of a Russian SAM missile captured in the Iraq war. Utley’s rocket is packed with propellant from the same batch that went into the ill-fated Super Tuber. If Super Tuber’s problem was mechanical, something to do with improperly fastened snap rings, say, then Utley’s craft should soar. But if the propellant was at fault— if, for instance, bubbles formed in the curing process, a common misstep that increases surface area and speeds up the burn—then for Utley, launching is tantamount to rocket suicide. “I could have taken the motor and 92
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[test]-fired it,” he tells me. “But I can’t do that to my buddy. He lost his rocket, so I had to push the button on mine.” The explosion—“deflagration” is the preferred term of art—when it comes, is fabulous. Utley, big, relaxed guy that he is, merely says, “I pretty much knew what was going to happen.” It turns out that the top half of his rocket is salvageable, so he’ll rebuild it with the burn marks intact, a badge of honor. Whitmore and Livingston’s launch has a bittersweet tinge, for a fundamental reason: Whitmore isn’t here. Two days earlier, his wife, Sallie, was taken to the hospital for emergency abdominal surgery, and he has rushed back to Chapel Hill to be with her. The N motor is mothballed, and Livingston installs his own M motor, held in reserve, in the Viper. With the drama uncomfortably prolonged, he’s feeling antsy. One way or another, let it be done. The countdown goes without a hitch, and the liftoff is textbook—the motor roar, the piercing straight shot. There’s a moment of suspense when a slightly malfunctioning parachute threatens to land the Viper in the middle of a nearby field of classic WWII planes, but through sheer luck, disaster is averted. LDRS 23 concludes soon afterward, and for most rocketeers it’s time to start plotting next year’s event. But for Livingston and Whitmore, there’s one more chapter. Once Sallie Whitmore has recovered and the Viper has been touched up, the two decide to send their mighty N motor up once and for all. Rockets, Whitmore tells me over the phone, were the last thing on his mind during his wife’s illness. “But by August, I started to get my head around my hobby,” he says. The Whitmore intensity was returning. I remember something he told me when we first met: “Rocketry contains four essential elements of littleboy fun: smoke and fire, loud noise, speed and flight. You wish you could go along every time the rocket goes up.” And so on a mild, sunny afternoon last October, he and Livingston launched their rocket from their home field off the North Carolina coast. “It was special to put it up together,” Livingston says. “An altitude of 5,825 feet, 478 miles per hour.” The moment, Whitmore says,“was everything we wanted. A terrific noise.” ■ Joseph Hooper is a POPULAR SCIENCE contributing editor.
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other brain-imaging studies to look at how the brain processes fear. One of his conclusions is that the thalamus usually dominates, reacting quickly and powerfully to potential threats by triggering behavioral, autonomic and endocrine responses. The cortex, responsible for the thoughtful consideration of danger, steps in later. We fear first and think second. This may help to explain why it is that if a risk evokes powerful emotions, your fear level will be mostly unaffected by the actual odds. This cognitive error, known as probability neglect, has been well documented. In one study, people indicated that they were willing to pay roughly the same insurance premiums whether a catastrophic risk’s odds were 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 10,000,000. In another, participants were asked to imagine that they might be given a “short, painful, but not dangerous electric shock” and asked how much they would fork over to avoid it. On average, people were willing to pay $10 to avoid a 99 percent chance of receiving a shock, and nearly as much— $7—to avoid a 1 percent chance. The outcome was sufficiently bad that the odds didn’t really matter.
Driving to Distractions I’m headed north on Highway 191 toward the Tetons, with a view of the jagged range that gets more mesmerizing each minute. I crack the windows and crank the stereo but avoid the country stations—because I feel like listening to rock, not because of the alleged hazard to mental health. For “The Effect of Country Music on Suicide,” published in 1992 in the journal Social Forces, researchers Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach analyzed the music played in 49 metropolitan areas and found that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the higher the suicide rate. “Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with . . . marital discord, alcohol abuse and alienation from work,” the authors wrote. I’m learning to interpret research like this cautiously. The study established a statistical correlation, not definite causation, and noted that the effect, if real, would only be on people already at risk of committing suicide. Cruising along at 65 mph, I pull out my digital camera and snap a few pic-
tures through the windshield. The cellphone rings. It’s one of my editors, back in New York, and we talk for 10 minutes about an upcoming story. In my journal, I correctly rank driving as the riskiest thing I do—car crashes are the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 4 and 34. I didn’t, however, appreciate how significantly distractions increase the danger. Talking12 while driving can cause inattentional blindness, a perceptual phenomenon vividly illustrated in a 1999 study by Harvard psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. Their experiment concluded that when you concentrate on one thing (the study’s subjects counted basketball passes), you can miss something completely obvious (many of them didn’t see a person walking by in a gorilla suit). In a study last year of inattentional blindness that employed a driving simulator, University of Utah psychologist David Strayer found that drivers took 18 percent longer to hit the brakes when they were talking on the phone. Previously, he’d shown that cellphone users drive worse than people who are legally drunk.
Extreme Behavior I challenge myself while skiing; it’s the only sport that I’m even remotely good at. The runs at Grand Targhee in Wyoming are pretty easy, so I go beyond the resort’s boundaries to a bowl topped by a semicircle of low cliffs. I get ready to ski down. I view resort skiing as pretty safe, and for the most part, I’m right. During the winter of 2003-2004, 41 people were killed and 37 seriously injured at U.S. ski resorts; overall, a person’s chance of dying on any given visit is less than one in a million. As a result of improved binding technology, the rate of broken legs has declined by 90 percent since the 1970s. Exposure, however, determines risk. New Yorkers don’t fear getting smacked by falling coconuts, whereas if you live in Papua New Guinea, the problem is considerable.13 Similarly, avalanches are a non-issue for most Americans, but they’re a big deal for anyone who ventures outside the safety-regulated confines of a resort—as I’ve done today. In the past five years, an average of seven backcountry skiers a year have been 94
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12. Or listening, for that matter. A functional MRI study done at Carnegie Mellon University indicated that when you listen to a sentence, visual-processing activity in your brain declines by 29 percent. “Engaging in a demanding conversation could jeopardize judgment and reac-
killed in avalanches, making it a sizable risk considering that there are fewer than 300,000 enthusiasts in the U.S. I know that backcountry skiing is among the most dangerous things I do, but today I feel pretty safe. Maybe I suffer from what’s known as optimistic bias. Most of us do. Surveys have revealed, for instance, that the majority of people think that they’re better than average at driving, a mathematical impossibility. For the sake of argument, though, let’s say that I am better than average at skiing. Does that make me safer? The short answer is “no,” for the reason that experts at skiing and other risky endeavors take bigger chances.14 Researcher Ian McCammon analyzed information on 598 U.S. avalanches between 1972 and 2001 and found that people with avalanche-assessment abilities severely undercut their skills by taking risk-assessment shortcuts. The accident victims relied on social proof—they witnessed other people skiing where they were going to ski and assumed that meant the slope was safe. (Think: monkey see, monkey do.) They were trapped by commitment—the need to stick to a decision, even a bad one, in order to appear consistent and decisive to peers. And they fell prey to a form of familiarity—the belief that if you’ve done something in the past and gotten away with it, you can do it again with guaranteed safety. Skiing down, I choose my line carefully.
You Never Know What Could Hit You I’ve reached 10.8 mph on the treadmill, a new personal record for (stationary) land speed, and am experiencing runner’s high tinged with anxiety. Underfoot, the rubber belt is damp and slippery, and I don’t need to know the annual number of exercise equipment injuries (nearly 40,000, as it happens) to fear a nasty fall. Back in Brooklyn, I like to jog in the park, and things can be dicey there, too. On a run last fall, I sud-
tion time if an atypical or unusual driving situation arose,” the researchers stated. 13. A four-year review of admissions to the Provincial Hospital in Papua New Guinea, published in 1984 in the Journal of Trauma, showed that 2.5 percent of all head, back and
denly heard a desperate “Watch out!” from behind me. Jumping aside, I narrowly missed being trampled by a galloping horse, the man atop it pulling helplessly at the reins. Horse trampling is so 1850. Who knew to worry about the danger in contemporary New York? Risk pros have a name for a hazard like this: “A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations,” wrote Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of Fooled by Randomness, in a 2004 op-ed piece for the New York Times. A black swan is particularly troubling, he argued, because “its very unexpectedness helps create the conditions for it to occur.” Hoping to avoid nasty surprises, credible scientists speculate considerably about black swans. The most far-out of these risks are, as Wilson and Crouch put it,“predictable by very well verified phys-
shoulder injuries were from falling coconuts, which can strike with a force of more than a ton and cause death. 14. The death rate for experienced whitewater paddlers, for instance, is nearly four times as high as it is for inexperienced ones.
ical theories but involve events which have never been observed and probably never will be observed.” For example, on Long Island, the Brookhaven National Laboratory operates a particle accelerator with the potential to seriously screw up my afternoon run. In theory, it could generate quarks that would reassemble themselves into a “strangelet,” which would in turn absorb matter until the entire planet was transformed into a hyperdense sphere 100 meters across. It sounds like sci-fi. Nevertheless, Brookhaven’s director took the threat seriously enough to have physicists study the scenario before allowing the accelerator to begin operating in 2000. The strange-matter event and a host of other doomsday scenarios—greatly accelerated global warming; the engulfing of the world by self-replicating nanobots (the so-called gray-goo
problem); the engulfing of the world by self-replicating nano-organisms (green goo); severe bioterrorism—are detailed in Richard Posner’s Catastrophe: Risk and Response. Posner, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge and a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, argues that we should think more about these low-probability, high-consequence risks. “The probable costs of the catastrophic risks, when compared with the probable costs of efforts to minimize them, indicate that we are not doing enough,” he writes.
So what about 2004 MN4, that hunk of rock hell-bent for Earth? Don’t worry about it. After reviewing earlier observations, scientists determined that the asteroid will swing 22,000 miles wide of Earth. Which doesn’t mean that society is completely safe. There are an estimated 1,100 major near-Earth asteroids, 30 percent of which haven’t been identified yet; any one of
them would impact with a force greater than all of the world’s nuclear arsenals detonated at the same time.15 There’s nothing I can personally do about the asteroid menace, so I’m glad NASA is on the case. But exposure to most other hazards is at least partially dictated by my lifestyle and decisions— and ability to assess danger. At the end of the diary project, I tallied the box score to compare my risk ratings to those of the experts and found—to my surprise— that I belong to a small subgroup of the population that chronically underestimates risks. I made cognitive blunders, and my logic was overpowered by emotion. But now I know enough to do bet-
15. In 2000 the [U.K.] Task Force on Potentially Hazardous Near Earth Objects released an evaluation of the average interval between strikes, ranging from once every 1,000
ter in the future. “Overall I’d give you a Bminus,” Ropeik says charitably. I call Slovic for a wrap-up interview, and he attempts to cheer me up about the failures of my risk rankings.16 It’s easy to document faulty perception, he says, and the serious behavioral mistakes that result in injury and death. More difficult is demonstrating the positive side of our judgment—we make dozens, if not hundreds, of correct risk decisions daily. “You must have done something right in the two weeks,” he says. “After all, you survived.” ■ Contributing editor James Vlahos reported on the Sci-Tech Oscars in March.
years for a 75-meterdiameter asteroid that could take out a city, to once every 10 million years for a seven-kilometer rock that would probably lead to mass extinction.
16. At least I think he does. Risk experts, not surprisingly, have a somewhat morbid sense of humor. “The ultimate risk is life,” their joke goes, “which has a 100 percent chance of leading to death.”
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FROM THE POPULAR SCIENCE ARCHIVES
JANUARY1943
OTHER NEWS FROM THE JANUARY 1943 ISSUE
The Fight for Our Fleet
When a former Russian major attacked the combat utility of America’s aircraft, POPSCI’s radar homed in on the debate In a heated wartime editorial, POPSCI rebutted highly publicized claims that U.S. planes were inferior in speed, range and armament to enemy fighters—claims made by Major Alexander de Seversky, a WWI Russian pilot turned U.S. aircraft manufacturer. “It would be an insult to the dictionary to designate as ‘military’ craft so deficient in the basic qualities necessary for combat,” he wrote in his 1942 book Victory through Air Power. We argued that each plane in the U.S. fleet—from the tank-busting Mustang [below] to the boat-sinking Mitchell—was designed for a specific task. With the Air Force’s standard-issue Warhawks boasting three enemy kills for each loss, fighter planes emerged as a dominant force in warfare, a trend that has continued in every subsequent war. But the arrival of unmanned combat aircraft may bring the age of the fighters to an end [see page 42].—MATTHEW OLSON
THE BEAUTY-SAVING MASK This shield, we wrote, protected the eyes, throat and lungs from factory hazards and could act as a “safeguard against disfigurement” for the increased female workforce during World War II.
DUCK AND COVER YOUR EARS Louder than a modern jet, the car-size ChryslerBell Victory Siren used a new air-pressurized sound system with a 140hp engine to signal air raids. The “ear-shattering roar” could alert residents within 50 miles of New York City.
THE QUICKER PICKER-UPPER The first reusable paper towel could clean up spill after spill without ripping, thanks to a “secret chemical” (what it was, we didn’t say) that tightly fused individual pulp fibers. The paper was widely used in hospitals to free up cloth and burlap bags needed for the war.
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