Popular Science (March 2005)

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THE TOP TECH CITIES IN AMERICA: HOW DOES YOUR TOWN RATE? WHAT’S NEW HOT ➤

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PRODUCTS p.13

A VEGAS MOGUL HAS GRAND PLANS FOR YOUR NEXT BIG VACATION

SPACE HOTEL

2010

+

GEEKS ON THE RED CARPET WE GO TO THE OSCARS!

IS THERE A HOT ZONE NEAR YOU?

THE IFFY BIODEFENSE BOOM

US $3.99 CAN $4.99

MARCH 2005

POPSCI.COM

VOLUME 266 #3

CONTENTS

MARCH 2005

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As the beefy guards wearing desert fatigues and .45s check your ID, maybe you’ll notice their black shoulder patches, which feature a classically oval-eyed alien face outlined in silver and gold.

FOUNDED IN 1872

THE FIVE-BILLION-STAR HOTEL, p. 50

tech 13 | What’s New

Volvo’s ultra-efficient boat engine. VoIP phones go cordless. Flight of the FanWing. Carbon-fiber laptops. Soupedup cars hit the showroom. 73 | How 2.0

GEEK GUIDE Disaster-proof your data. DIY Build a portable game console. GRAY MATTER See subatomic particles. TECH SUPPORT Eavesdrop on your engine.

news and views 27 | Headlines

SPACE NASA’s new prize patrol. ARCHITECTURE The eco-friendly skyscraper. CHEMISTRY Slob-proof clothing. DIY ASTRONOMY Make your own nebulae.

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36 | Soapbox

When ISPs secretly sort your e-mail, nobody wins. By Cory Doctorow SCIENCE FRICTION Popular culture lauds the wrong Einstein. By Gregory Mone O N T H E C O V E R : K E N N B R O W N ; I N S E T: H O L LY L I N D E M ; T H I S PA G E , C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : J O H N B . C A R N E T T ( 2 ) ; J O H N L AW T O N ; C O U RT E S Y N A S A ; B R E N T H U M P H R E Y S

PLUGGED IN

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stories 41 | Technopolis Found POPSCI identi-

fies the most high-tech U.S. cities. How does yours rate? By Matthew Power 50 | The Five-Billion-Star Hotel

An exclusive first glimpse at Las Vegas developer Robert Bigelow’s $500-million inflatable orbital retreat. By Michael Belfiore

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58 | “And Finally, I’d Like to Thank My High School Physics Teacher. . .”

An insider’s view of the movie technologies nominated for this year’s SciTech Academy Awards. By James Vlahos 64 | Biological Warfare The U.S. is

spending $22 billion on germ research and high-security bioterror labs. But will these efforts make us safer? By Jeffrey Rothfeder

depts. 6 From the Editor 7 Contributors 10 Letters

80 FYI 104 Looking Back

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FROM THE EDITOR Editorial Director Scott Mowbray

THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW IS AN OVERWHELMING EXPERIENCE

for every one of the 140,000 engineers, marketers, buyers, journalists and other tech-obsessed individuals who throng the Las Vegas Convention Center in early January—but the editor of POPULAR SCIENCE experiences a different brand of overwhelm. Not for me the standard overload brought on by prowling 1.5 million square feet of exhibit space occupied by 2,550 companies unveiling thousands of new products and technologies. No, in my case, CES is mostly an extended opportunity to bounce from booth to booth handing out prizes to the richly deserving winners of our annual Best of What’s New awards. When making my rounds, I relish the chance to chat with the engineers who created the technology, because they really get it—these innovators are continually telling their marketing people that this is the award that truly matters. As you might expect, hearing that sort of thing a dozen times or more a day is a mighty fine way to spend a trade show. But my happy bubble was burst one night when, riding in a taxi, I heard this bit of devil’s advocacy from one of my cabmates: “Has anyone here seen a single thing at this show that is really going to change the world for the better?” This was just after the Indian Ocean tsunami took well over 150,000 lives, a great many of whom might have been saved if early-warning technology were better distributed. In the context of the moment, my companion’s remark seems a reasonable provocation. My retort was something to the effect that he was at the wrong trade show. No one, after all, is making grand claims of social relevance for remote-access TiVo or the latest flat-panel television. However eyepopping and awe-inspiring, this stuff represents just a slice of the spectrum of what technology can and should do, and it ought to be judged accordingly. In this issue, we attempt to illuminate that area of the social/tech spectrum that falls somewhere between the lifesaving innovations and the tech candy— specifically, that territory defined by the question, “What does it mean for a city to be high-tech?” Our tech-city rankings do take into account the extent to which a population embraces technology. But we’ve gone much further by quantifying the extent to which a city’s policymakers and private sector use technology to improve quality of life—from innovative traffic systems to pioneering medical care to energy-efficient building codes. When we crunched all the data, our top technopolis turned out to be . . . well, turn to page 41 to find out. As for me, I’m just happy that I get to deliver another award. MARK JANNOT [email protected]

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POPULAR SCIENCE PROPERTIES Publisher Gregg R. Hano Advertising Director John Tebeau General Manager Robert Novick Executive Assistant Chandra Dwhaj Northeast Advertising Office: Manager Howard S. Mittman (212) 779-5112, Jill Schiffman (212) 779-5007, Mike Schoenbrun (212) 779-5148, Missy Dye Radin (212) 779-5030 Ad Assistant Christopher Graves Midwest Advertising Office: Manager John Marquardt (312) 832-0626, Megan Williams (312) 832-0624 Ad Assistant Sindy Sonshine Los Angeles Advertising Office: Manager Dana Hess (310) 268-7484, Ad Assistant Mary Infantino Detroit Advertising Office: Manager Donna Christensen (248) 988-7723, Ad Assistant Diane Pahl San Francisco Advertising Office: Manager Amy Cacciatore (415) 434-5276, Ad Assistant Carly Petrone Southern Regional Advertising Office: Manager Dave Hady (404) 364-4090, Ad Assistant Christy Chapman Classified Advertising Sales Joan Orth (212) 779-5555 Direct Response Sales Marie Isabelle (800) 280-2069 Business Manager Jacqueline L. Pappas Director of Brand & Business Development L. Dennett Robertson Sales Development Managers Mike Saperstein, Daniel Vaughan Senior Manager, Events and Promotions Christy Chapin Ellinger Creative Services Designer Mary McGann Marketing Coordinator Eshonda Caraway Advertising Coordinator Evelyn Negron Consumer Marketing Director Barbara Venturelli Senior Planning Manager Margerita Catwell Consumer Marketing Managers Adam Feifer, Kristen Shue Senior Production Director Laurel Kurnides Production Assistant Shawn Glenn Prepress Director Robyn Koeppel Prepress Manager José Medina Publicity Manager Hallie Deaktor

President Mark P. Ford Senior Vice Presidents James F. Else, Victor M. Sauerhoff, Steven Shure Editorial Director Scott Mowbray Director, Corporate Communications Samara Farber Mormar CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTIONS For 24/7 service, please use our Web site: popsci.com/ customerservice You can also call: 800-289-9399 or write to: Popular Science P.O. Box 62456 Tampa, FL 33662-4568

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Taxicab Confessions

Editor Mark Jannot 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 Jenny Everett, Mike Haney, Martha Harbison Assistant Editor Rena Marie Pacella Assistant Editor, Best of What’s New Joe Brown Designer April Bell Photo Editor Kristine LaManna Staff Photographer John B.Carnett Editorial Assistant Barbara Caraher Web Producer Peter Noah 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 Sarah Goforth Art Intern Dana Stratton

CONTRIBUTORS

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M I C H A E L B E L F I O R E P H O T O G R A P H E D B Y J O H N B . C A R N E T T; 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 E D B Y D O U G S T E R N

If hotelier Robert Bigelow has his way, well-heeled adventurers will be able to see the world in comfort—and from a distance. He wants to rocket them up to a $1-million-a-night, Earthorbiting space hotel. Writer MICHAEL BELFIORE [left] was one of the first journalists to visit the top-secret Bigelow Aerospace hangar in Las Vegas, which houses the inflatable space modules that are to become Bigelow’s otherworldly resort. A space junkie, Belfiore has written a children’s book about life on the International Space Station, wire stories for Reuters about last fall’s Ansari X Prize flights, and a one-man play about alien abductions. Whereas Belfiore traces his extraterrestrial enthusiasms to the science fiction he read as a kid, artist KRIS HOLLAND [right] got his start in science-related illustration when, as a university student majoring in physics and geology, he entered a computer-modeling contest and won third place. Holland’s science background helps him create realistic images like the one on page 55 that shows how a rocket will get tourists to habitations situated in lowEarth orbit. “I know what a launch profile is supposed to look like,” he explains. We sent photographer BRENT HUMPHREYS to Galveston, Texas, to capture the essence of daily work in a new high-security BioSafety Level 4 laboratory, where the most lethal and intractable diseases, such as Ebola, can be studied in safety [page 64]. “The suits were the most difficult element to deal with, hot and cumbersome,” says Humphreys, adding, “I tried to convey the isolation of the researchers while they were wearing them.” To experience the glories of the city anointed by POPSCI as the most high-tech in the U.S., writer MATTHEW POWER packed his bags and traveled to . . . What, you think we’re going to give it away here? [See page 41.] Power was impressed by the city in question’s embrace of environmentally sustainable technologies and its “intellectual ferment.” Not to mention the multilingual ticket machines. Power’s work has also appeared in Harper’s and Discover. Contributing editor JAMES VLAHOS traveled to L.A. to get the lowdown on the special Academy Awards given to recognize technical achievement [page 58]. While investigating the digital cloning used to render vampires in Blade: Trinity, he had his own face scanned. Innocuous, but the research scarred him in other ways: He has become an effects pedant, scrutinizing CG hair and skin for realism. “I’ve become annoying to go to the movies with,” he acknowledges. Longtime POPSCI contributor STEPHEN ROUNTREE is a film buff, so he was happy to create images of the Oscar statuette in various poses for Vlahos’s story on the Sci-Tech Oscars. As an illustrator who renders objects in 3-D, is he envious of the guys who work with the latest CG effects? “I wish I had their equipment,” he says. “But I don’t have the animation chops to do what they do.” Rountree is the graphics director at U.S. News and World Report.

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

[email protected]

Editor’s Note:

When we titled our January cover story “The Daring Visionaries of Crackpot Aviation,” we in no way meant to suggest that any of the five innovators we profiled are crackpots themselves. By calling them daring visionaries in the headline and “audacious” on the cover, we intended to convey the spirit of invention that has characterized aviation pioneers since before the Wright brothers. Ever since, much scorn has been heaped upon aviation visionaries, and we didn’t intend to pile on—just the opposite. In keeping with the long tradition of this magazine, we were singling out and celebrating those envelope-pushing folks on the fringe who, fueled by personal passion and engineering expertise, are doing the most interesting work today on the personal aircraft of tomorrow. The word choice generated some negative impressions, though, so we’d like to set the record straight.—Mark Jannot

With the exception of a most unfortunate choice of title, Jeff Wise’s aviation piece does a reasonable job of presenting some interesting projects, including my own Facetmobile. There is, however, a deeper significance to the story. We are on the verge of a historic opportunity to revolutionize personal flight. Advances in avionics and navigation technology will soon afford individual pilots a level of safety comparable to that of major airlines. Advances in materials, computer-aided design and computer-controlled manufacturing can dramatically reduce aircraft cost. The Federal Aviation Administration’s new “Light-Sport” regulations allow new aircraft concepts to enter service more affordably than Wainfan’s Facetmobile in the past. All of these in flight CORRECTION

• We incorrectly credited the photograph of the CarterCopter in the January story “The Daring Visionaries of Crackpot Aviation“ to Jay Carter. It was taken by Jason Bynum.

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things are essential, but they will not crystallize into something truly revolutionary without an injection of unconventional thinking about the aircraft themselves. Individual innovators provide what large corporations and government entities, who must answer to shareholders and the public, likely will not: revolutionary concepts that are at odds with conventional thinking. My own work has demonstrated an airframe configuration that is simpler and safer than the conventional wingbody-tail. The Facetmobile flew 130 hours of testing, demonstrating performance equal to or better than conventional airplanes. It combines stall and spin resistance and safe, docile flying qualities with a structural configuration well-suited to low-cost, highly automated manufacturing. We recently performed a study for the NASA Personal Air Vehicle Exploration program that showed that this concept could cut the cost of a two-seat personal airplane almost in half, to a price comparable to a luxury car rather than a house. We are currently starting work on a NASA contract to develop and test the structural and manufacturing technology needed to bring this about.

Inventors like those profiled in your article follow personal visions that drive them to persist where large organizations give up. It takes a deep, almost illogical level of optimism to keep pushing forward in the face of skepticism and the technical and financial obstacles inherent in advancing the state of the art. Many fail, but those who succeed enrich us all. Barnaby Wainfan Long Beach, Calif. POPULAR SCIENCE ONLINE

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C O U R T E S Y E A A P H O T O D E PA R T M E N T

A Revolution on the Runway

WHAT’SNEW INSIDE

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INTERNET PHONES GET REAL 14 • SOUPED-UP CARS STRAIGHT FROM THE SHOWROOM 16 • REINVENTING AIR HOCKEY 25

Reverse Engineering A radical new propeller pulls rather than pushes boats through the water

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DROP THE SAILOR’S CAP and put on some racing goggles. With its new Inboard Performance System (IPS), Volvo Penta (volvo.com/volvopenta) is boosting the comfort and white-knuckle fun of yachting. Volvo engineers built forward-facing propellers—like those in prop-driven airplanes—and stacked them side-by-side directly beneath the engines. Instead of pushing on water that’s already been chopped up by the engine, the blades pull on undisturbed drink, increasing efficiency and thrust. The IPS should be able to squeeze out 30 percent more horsepower; in tests, Volvo reported, it’s 20 percent faster. But it’s not all about speed. The entire propulsion system can turn like a rudder, so parking your 45-footer in a slinky slip won’t be nerve-wracking. Progressive electronic steering—a first in boating— will make it easy to turn the wheel at low speed, hard at high speed. And boaters will have a more civilized ride, thanks to vibration-dampening seals swaddling the drive unit, and submerged exhaust outlets that reduce rumbling. The good life just got better.—GREGORY MONE

C O U R T E S Y V O LV O P E N TA

Propeller

Diesel engine

Exhaust

PULLING IT OFF The Volvo IPS can be installed on any new boat. For now, it’s available on models from Cruisers Yachts, Four Winns, Regal and Tiara.

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WHAT’S NEW | GADGETS

Sounds Like Inevitability The first wave of full-featured Internet phones sends Ma Bell packing

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NIMBLE VR MOBILE VOIP SPEAKERPHONE About the size of a coaster, this speakerphone attaches to your computer with a USB cable to provide high-quality VoIP conference calling—great for road warriors. Requires a separate service plan. $80 » nimblemicro.com

VTECH IP8100 The VTech ip8100 5.8GHz base station powers up to four VoIP handsets (with speakerphone), so you can plant them in various rooms. Includes two handsets; extras are $50. Only available with a Vonage service plan. $150 » vtech.com

UTSTARCOM F-1000 WI-FI PHONE Whether you’re at home or a Starbucks in Tokyo, UTStarcom’s F-1000 uses any Wi-Fi network to place your VoIP call. On the road, input new hotspots with the phone’s keypad. Available this summer with a Vonage service plan. Price not set. » utstarcom.com

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LEADTEK BVP8882 VIDEOPHONE A swiveling five-inch LCD with a built-in camera is handy for videoconferencing. Using its USB port, you can plug in a wireless adapter and chat from any room, record videocalls on a storage key, or text message from a keyboard. Requires a separate service plan. $600 » leadtek.com

LINKSYS PHONE ADAPTER PAP2 Love your traditional phone? Pair it with this VoIP adapter, and you can keep using it. The device plugs into your broadband router or modem and has two standard telephone jacks for connecting a phone or fax machine. Requires a separate service plan. $60 » linksys.com

GE 5.1 BASSSHAKER HEADSET One headset, multiple uses. The BassShaker’s built-in subwoofer and eight speaker drivers deliver 5.1 channels of audiophile sound. When you’re ready to call, plug in the headset’s microphone and dial with your computer. Requires a separate service plan. $80 » jascoproducts.com

C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : J O H N L AW T O N ( 3 ) ; C O U RT E S Y J A S C O P R O D U C T S ; J O H N B . C A R N E T T; J O H N L AW T O N

THEY DON’T EVEN call it Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) anymore—it’s just broadband phone service. And although the dirt-cheap all-you-can-gab plans made possible by routing calls over the Internet are a financial no-brainer, a raft of new phones makes VoIP truly practical. Now broadband callers can choose models with the functionality we take for granted on land lines, like cordless handsets. —SUZANNE KANTRA

WHAT’S NEW | AUTOMOTIVE TECH

Tricks Come Standard Drop the wrench and back away from the vehicle. Driving a highway hotdog is as easy as stepping onto the showroom floor

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DRIVERS LOOKING TO DISTINGUISH THEMSELVES on the road cough up $30 billion a year for superchargers, spoilers, chrome tailpipes and other aftermarket goodies. Recognizing this trend, automakers are building seriously souped-up editions of base-model vehicles across a spectrum broader than we’ve ever seen. These so-called factory tuners feature macho permutations of powertrain, chassis and looks seamlessly executed on the assembly line; they’re sold and serviced by dealers; and they’re covered under warranty. Rolling out this year, these three steroidal iterations of subtler siblings represent the range of prices and options. Turns out you don’t need MTV to pimp your ride.—MATTHEW PHENIX

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POWER SURGE

BMW M5 Yes, the M-series has been around for 20-odd years, but the 2005 M5’s F1-inspired engine—25 percent more powerful than its predecessor—makes it BMW’s most outrageous factory tuner yet. It has a 5.0liter V10 with a heady 8,250-rpm redline, a trait it owes to its shortstroke engine (the cylinders have little distance to travel, allowing rpm to climb quickly). Turn the key and the big 10 blasts to life with 400 horsepower and 384 pound-feet of torque. Hit the “M” on the steering wheel, and the computer jacks up horsepower to 500. The engine is matched to BMW’s paddle-operated Sequential Manual Gearbox with seven—yes, seven—forward gears and six shift speeds. It’ll be easy to spot this fall with its 19-inch alloy wheels, quad exhaust and low-slung stance. $85,000 (estimated) » bmwusa.com

How factory tuners stack up against their base models

SPECS

BMW 525i

BMW M5

BASE PRICE

$42,000

$85,000 (EST.)

POWER

184 HP

500 HP

TORQUE

175 LB.-FT.

384 LB.-FT.

0 – 60 MPH

7.8 SEC.

4.5 SEC.

TOP SPEED

146 MPH*

155 MPH* *

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Electronically limited

C O U RT E S Y B M W; FA C I N G PA G E , C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : C O U RT E S Y M A Z D A ; C O U RT E S Y M I C H E L I N ; C O U RT E S Y C H E V R O L E T

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PIPE LINE Concepts, ideas and emerging technology coming to your future

Mazdaspeed6 Derived from the acclaimed 6 sedan, the all-wheel-drive Mazdaspeed6 eclipses even the flagship RX-8 as the company’s most fearsome offering. Its 2.3-liter turbocharged direct-injection system is a miracle of mechanical micromanagement. Direct injection, which fires gas straight into the combustion chamber instead of mixing it with air beforehand, allows the engine’s computer to precisely tune the air/fuel ratio. The result is efficient speed: 280 pound-feet of torque from 2,000 to 6,000 rpm and 274 horsepower at 5,500 rpm. That’s a staggering 119 hp/liter. Call it a family car with a mean streak, evident in the gapemouthed front fascia, 18-inch alloy wheels, and fat dual pipes. It’s coming this summer, though only about 6,000 will be imported from Japan. $28,000 » mazdausa.com

3 Chevrolet Cobalt SS Supercharged The Cobalt line is a successor to the sad old Cavalier. Onto its two-liter, four-cylinder engine, Chevy strapped a supercharger, a belt-driven pump that boosts power by force-feeding air into the cylinders. Pair this compact power plant with a four-wheel independent suspension developed on Germany’s legendary Nürburgring circuit, and you’re looking at a machine that can put down 205 horsepower through a five-speed manual transmission. The performance package offers a limited-slip differential that maximizes speed by transferring power from a wheel that’s losing its grip to one that is in full contact with the road. (The Cobalt is front-wheel drive.) Rounding out the super ’tude: 17-inch aluminum five-spoke wheels, Corvette-inspired round taillights and an enormous—not to say obnoxious—rear wing. Available this spring. $22,000 » chevrolet.com

**

MAZDA 6i

MAZDASPEED6

CHEVROLET COBALT

CHEVROLET COBALT SS

$19,500

$28,000

$14,200

$22,000

160 HP

274 HP

145 HP

205 HP

155 LB.-FT.

280 LB.-FT.

155 LB.-FT.

200 LB.-FT.

N/A**

6.5 SEC.

N/A**

6.1 SEC.

N/A**

150 MPH*

N/A**

142 MPH

GM’s fuel-cell-powered » SUV-cum-minivan concept, the Sequel, has three carbon-fiber tanks that carry eight kilograms of hydrogen at 10,000 psi. This makes for an unprecedented 300-mile range. GM could offer a fuel-cell vehicle by 2010. No, the paint on the new » Benzes at the Detroit Auto Show was not wet. Called Alu-Beam, its pigments are between 100 and 300 nanometers in diameter and so tightly packed that the paint looks like molten metal even when dry. It’s about two years away from your driveway.

Michelin says no more to » pneumatics. Its new airless tire, called the Tweel, gets its bounce from polyurethane spokes and a glass-reinforced wheel. The Tweel will be available for light-duty applications this spring, though it won’t show up on cars for least 10 years. Why the wait? It’s noisy when loaded down.

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British engineer Glynne Bowsher will attempt to break the U.S. land-speed record for a steam-powered car at Bonneville this summer. His Steam Car Challenge team’s 300hp, steamturbine-driven vehicle should top 200 mph but is not viable for passenger cars, as it has only two speeds: on and off.—JOE BROWN

Manufacturer testing not performed

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WHAT’S NEW | AVIATION

Flight of Fancy

It looks more arts-and-crafts than aircraft, but could it be the future of commuting?

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HOW IT WORKS The fan pulls air in at the front, compresses it, and accelerates it over the trailing edge of the wing to produce both lift and thrust. The key is the large volume of air the fan can move because the blades are exposed.

Slow Rotor The fans on each wing spin slowly—less than 1,000 rpm—permitting lightweight blade construction and low-horsepower engines.

High Tail The rear tail assembly is mounted high to keep it out of the path of turbulent air generated by the fan.

Wing Lift The fan pushes air faster over the top of the wing than the airflow beneath it, lowering pressure above the wing and thus generating lift. Control Flaps on the leading edge of the wing direct airflow into the fan. Altering the angle of the flaps steers the aircraft.

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C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P : C O U RT E S Y D A N I E L P E E B L E S ; C O U RT E S Y J O N L I N N E Y, O P E N U N I V E R S I T Y, K M I U K ; J A S O N L E E

AERONAUTICAL ENGINEERS LIVE BY THE CREDO “If it looks right, it flies right.” Luckily, Patrick Peebles is no engineer. He’s a former ice-cream-machine repairman who has built what he calls the FanWing— a conspicuously odd bird whose genealogy lies somewhere between a helicopter and an airplane. It eschews rotor and propeller for a cylinder of horizontal blades that generates exceptionally high lift and safe low-speed performance. It’s the first horizontal-rotor aircraft to sustain controlled flight, which Peebles demonstrated with a radio-controlled prototype last summer at the Farnborough International Airshow in England. Other designs channeled air through ducts and internal fans, which couldn’t generate lift. Peebles’s exposed-fan design requires less power than a helicopter or airplane to achieve similar lift and flight (respectively), and it operates more quietly. Its ability to take off vertically is especially promising, but Peebles still has hurdles to clear. “We’re faced with every aircraft’s challenges: ice, foreign-object damage—including birds—and what happens if the engine shuts down,” he explains. U.S. and U.K. governments are studying the FanWing (fanwing.com) as a possible unmanned aerial vehicle for surveillance and reconnaissance. A manned version, which would cost about $8 million, could be tested in three years.—ERIC ADAMS

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WHAT’S NEW | COMPUTING

Two Words: Forget Plastic Carbon fiber makes a bold case for laptop lust IT’S WHAT’S OUTSIDE that counts, at least when it comes to Voodoo’s 12-inch Envy m:50 laptop. The 3.4-pound wafer can attribute a chunk of its premium performance to its chassis. While most manufacturers opt for inexpensive, easyto-manufacture plastic or metal skins, Voodoo (voodoopc.com) chose pricey carbon fiber—typically restricted to aerospace, automotive and recreational applications—for its unique strength-to-weight ratio. Were the m:50 made of plastic, it would weigh nearly a pound and a half more, and it wouldn’t be as sturdy. But benefits go beyond athleticism. Less material between the wireless antenna and Wi-Fi source speeds downloads by up to 20 percent, and because carbon fiber isn’t as conductive as plastic or metal, this laptop’s fan is small and quiet. Although it’s rumored that Apple might release a carbon-fiber Powerbook, manufacturing the material is still too expensive for it to become ubiquitous. The 40GB Voodoo base model, with 256 megabytes of memory and a Pentium M 1.6-gigahertz processor, costs $1,865.—JOHN BIGGS

The Periodic Table of Laptop Elements A sampling of notable notebook materials from manufacturers’ palettes

$1,400

Pl

$2,240

Ru 17 in.|7.5 lbs.

15 in.|6.5 lbs. $2,100

$2,800

Al

Mg

17 in.|6.9 lbs.

12.1 in.|2.8 lbs.

$1,500

Ti

Wo*

12.1 in.|3.2 lbs.

Plastic

Aluminum

Wood

Magnesium

Rubber

Titanium

M.O.|Long-lasting looks Unlike textured metals, the Actius AL27’s smooth plastic surface accepts a glossy stain-resistant finish. » sharpusa.com

M.O.|Strong resistance to corrosion Aluminum’s oxide skin protects the Powerbook G4 from chemicals and nasty weather. » apple.com

M.O.|Luxury appeal Next winter, manufacturers will add wood to laptops using technology developed by Inclosia Solutions. » inclosia.com * Price and weight not set

M.O.|Laid-back temperament The easy-tomanufacture, ductile magnesium encasing the Toughbook W2 is one of the lightest metals. » panasonic.com

M.O.|Strength and resiliency Grippy rubber swatches on Alienware’s Area-51m 7700 keep sweaty palms from fumbling it. » alienware.com

M.O.|Featherweight beauty Brute titanium in the Thinkpad X40’s chassis has the best strength-to-weight ratio among the metals. » ibm.com

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T O P : J O H N L AW T O N ; B O T T O M , F R O M L E F T: C O U RT E S Y S H A R P S Y S T E M S O F A M E R I C A ; C O U RT E S Y A P P L E ; C O U RT E S Y I N C L O S I A ; C O U RT E S Y PA N A S O N I C ; C O U RT E S Y I B M ; C O U RT E S Y A L I E N WA R E

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WHAT’S NEW

THE GOODS [

20 SERIOUSLY HOT PRODUCTS THAT (ALMOST) SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

Impressive Display

Ovideon AVIAh » Watch digital videos on the16million-color OLED (organic LED) display—a first for portable players—or, thanks to its built-in TV and cable tuners, rip a show directly to its fivegig hard drive. Plays MP3 and WMA audio. $600 » aviah.com

Freeze Frame

Eastman Outfitters Tundra Tuff » At 18 pounds, it’s the lightest two-man ice-fishing shanty. It folds up into a backpack, sheds wind and water, and absorbs sunlight to increase the inside temperature. $150 » eastmanoutdoors.com

Split-Second Decision

Power Blocker 2 » Surge protectors convert excess electricity into heat— great for spikes, but they wear out with sustained overages. This one also has a circuit breaker that turns it off before it fries. $130 » newpoint.com

Cardio Caddy

Mio Elite Golf » Why make a golfscore-keeping watch with integrated heartrate monitor? Because the pros keep tabs on their ticker during play to distinguish between feeling calm and being calm, to regulate consistency. $200 » miowatch.com

Juice Concentrate

Straight from the Silicon Boot

Oncinema Teatro D1 » A media-center PC free from the monitor’s tether, this Italian job lets you control movies, music and pictures from its 1,280x620-pixel touchscreen. 3.2 gigahertz. $6,540 » oncinema.it

Long-Distance Relationship

Cobra PR 4700 » To give this GMRS radio its 12-mile range, Cobra spent six months refining the electrical path between the antenna and transceiver. $80 a pair » cobra.com

Sakar Supersonic Charger » By chemically altering the nickel-metal hydride inside its rechargeable AA cells, Sakar made batteries that can withstand 8.5 amps of current, so they charge in 8.5 minutes. $60 » sakar.com

The Disc Drives

Estone Ripper 510 » Put a CD into this in-dash car stereo, and rip it to the 20-gig hard drive at 8x, or pop the drive out and copy your MP3s from your PC via USB 2.0. $650 » estone-tech.com

Sound Swapper

Tivoli Music System » By taking information from one audio channel and moving it to the other, Tivoli simulates true stereo sound (physically impossible from speakers less than six feet apart) in a 14-inchwide system. Operates on 12 or 120 volts. $500 » tivoliaudio.com

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MARCH 2005

Drown Out Thy Neighbor

Yamaha YSP-1 » Using 40 1.5-inch speakers, each with a two-watt digital amplifier, and two 43/8 -inch woofers driven by 20-watt amps, this one speaker delivers five channels of Dolby surround. Sound, focused into beams, is bounced off the walls to perfect the illusion. $1,500 » yamaha.com

Cellular Symbiote

PocketSurfer » Pair this candy-bar-size keyboard and screen with your Bluetooth phone, and actually use your mobile Internet connection. The VGA-width screen displays the entire Web page, and the Qwerty keyboard speeds typing. $200 » datawind.com

Cinema Shades

eMagin z800 » The visor’s twin 0.59-inch 800x600line OLED screens simulate the view you’d get watching a 105-inch display from 12 feet back. OLEDs’ rapid refresh rate means no flicker. USB-powered, weighs eight ounces. $900 » emagin.com

Online Grapevine

eSommelier » This Internet-enabled wine manager lets you log-in new bottles, check tasting notes, scan in labels, and see what’s ready to drink. Reviews added monthly. $5,000 » esommelier.net

Phone Dome

BMW Motorrad System 5 Helmet » The first motorcycle helmet with built-in Bluetooth can link to your mobile phone or a sibling helmet. Speakers and mics are in the lining, and a mic on the outside feeds data to a noisecanceling processor. $1,000 » bmw-motorrad.de

Pucker Up

ChemistryClass Coffee

OnTech Self-Heating Can » A compartment in the bottom segregates calcium oxide and water. Break the seal, and the reaction heats Wolfgang Puck’s coffee to 145°F in six minutes flat. $2.25 » ontech.com

DMI Sports GoalFlex Hockey » Air hockey with no slots. Rows of light sensors at the ends of the eight-foot table detect when the puck scores. Adjust the width and location of the goals to up the challenge, or make them moving targets. $1,000 » dmisports.com

Straight to Video

Sony DCR-DVD7 » Slightly bigger than a portable CD player, this camcorder writes directly to a blank DVD in its native format, MPEG-2.10x optical zoom. Takes VGA stills. Works with DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW discs. $700 » sonystyle.com

Soft White

Fox Fury Signature Pro » This LED headlamp minimizes eyestrain by emitting photo-optic light, which matches the spectrum the human eye can detect. Water resistant. $120 » foxfury.com

Desktop Photo Shop

Epson Stylus Photo RX620 » Scans photos in 2,400 x 4,800 dpi—the highest resolution available on a combination printer/scanner—and prints pics up to 8 x10 inches. Mac- and PC-compatible, although the seven-in-one card reader makes a computer unnecessary. $300 » epson.com

Handy Upgrade

Rotozip Jigsaw Handle » This attachment turns a Rotozip into a new kind of jigsaw. Except, unlike its flatbladed cousin, a Rotozip’s cylindrical blade lets you turn as sharply as you want. $40 » rotozip.com

POPULAR SCIENCE

MARCH 2005

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HEADLINES

DISCOVERIES, ADVANCES & DEBATES IN SCIENCE AND THE WORLD

INSIDE

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THE GREENEST SKYSCRAPER 28 • WILL BROADBAND AIRSHIPS FLY? 30 • NEVER-WASH CLOTHES! 32 • THE 3-D FAX MACHINE 34 HELP WANTED As part of its new Centennial Challenges Program, NASA could offer up to $50 million in prize money to the first privately funded team to develop a moon lander, as depicted in these illustrations.

[SPACE POLICY]

Game On

Upstaged by private inventors such as Burt Rutan, NASA hopes its cash-award contests will spur innovation

C O U RT E S Y N A S A

I

N 1999, THE 12-PERSON HOLLYWOOD FIRM GLOBAL EFFECTS, WHICH CRAFTS

replica space suits for movies and plans to make a real one for the private aerospace industry this year, sent a replica of NASA’s Advanced Crew Escape Suit helmet to the agency. Its perfect likeness fooled many of the technicians who saw it. Even the reflective tape on the back was arranged perfectly—a feat the space agency had never achieved, a NASA manager told Global Effects president Chris Gilman. “NASA can out-organize me to the nth degree,” Gilman says, “but when it came to something simple like coming up with a pattern to lay tape out on the back of a helmet, it just never occurred to them.” This is a perfect example of the practical ingenuity NASA is hoping to tap with its new Centennial Challenges program, which will hand out Ansari X Prize–style jackpots for achievements in a range of yet-to-be-defined categories. A new lunar rover might fetch $5 million. A reentry vehicle for bringing back small payloads from the International Space Station could earn $50 million. By rewarding results,

not proposals, the Centennial Challenges signal a paradigm shift in NASA’s approach to commercial contracting, which could slash costs while letting upstart tech firms find their niche alongside aerospace behemoths like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The timing of the program—announced last year as Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, the X Prize winner, was preparing to endear the world to low-cost private spaceflight—seems less like a coincidence and more like a mea culpa. NASA, after all, spent $23.4 million on a single space-shuttle toilet. (SpaceShipOne cost an estimated $20 million.) Aside from some brainstorming sessions, not much has happened, in large part because

TICKER /// 12.15.04 BOTCHED DEFENSE AN INTERCEPTOR MISSILE FAILS TO LAUNCH FROM THE RONALD REAGAN TEST SITE AT KWAJALEIN ATOLL IN THE WEST CENTRAL PACIFIC POPULAR SCIENCE MARCH 2005

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HEADLINES

a commercial market there,” says Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a leading nonprofit space advocacy group. “The government is going to be the biggest customer for a long time.” Not necessarily, as long as contests are limited to practical technologies that the private sector might pay to own, contends Edward Wright, president of X-Rocket, a Bothell, Washington, company that plans to conduct suborbital flights for tourists and might compete in the Challenges should an applicable category arise. If the technology is useful only to NASA, then the prize has to be big enough to pay for R&D costs but not so big that deep-pocket contractors will muscle in and grab it. For a new low-cost space suit like the one Global Effects is planning, $500,000 would motivate the right entrepreneurs, Wright says. Half a million surely will inspire Gilman, whose suits will sell for less than $100,000. “I’ve been described as the Burt Rutan of space suits,” he says. Just the type NASA is banking on.—JOSHUA TOMPKINS

New York City is hatching the world’s greenest skyscraper. Recycling has never looked so swank

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WITH MANDATORY COMPOSTING, recycled rainwater, and abundant fresh air, it sounds like a hippie commune, not a sleek New York high-rise. But when it’s completed in 2008, the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park, on the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, should be the most environmentally friendly skyscraper in the world. By combining new technologies—verticalaxis wind turbine, waterless urinals, LED lighting—with old tricks such as composting, ice-based air conditioning, and rainwater collection, the building’s designers expect it to be the largest structure to earn a top-level “platinum” rating for efficiency from the U.S. Green Building Council, the nation’s foremost coalition to promote environmentally sustainable architecture and construction. To make One Bryant Park a model of extreme energy-efficiency, the $1-billion structure is being built with as many recycled materials as possible. Some 45 percent of its concrete, for instance, will consist of blast-furnace slag—leftover waste generated from iron processing—which means cement manufacturers won’t have to make new aggregate, avoiding the release of more than 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And an estimated 75 percent of the tower’s construction debris will be recycled. Although the eco-features will boost construction costs by about 6.5 percent, the building will save its occupants about $3 million a year in energy costs, and increase productivity by $7 million annually, according to Cook+Fox, the architectural firm designing the skyscraper. If that’s the case, the green features will have paid for themselves just seven years after the building opens.—PATRICK DI JUSTO

1

LET IT RAIN New York City receives an average of 49 inches of rain a year. Over the building’s two-acre footprint, that adds up to 2.6 million gallons of free water. Collectors on the building’s rooftops will pipe rainwater into four storage tanks, where it will be treated and used to flush toilets, irrigate green space, and cool the air.

HOW GROUNDWATER WILL COOL THE BUILDING IN SUMMER

Graywater tank

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3

HOME-GROWN JUICE An on-site 5.1-megawatt electrical generator— the largest ever installed in a New York City office building—will provide for all of the building’s base electrical needs (lights, elevators, pumps). Only office equipment will be powered by the city’s electrical grid. The generator can also output power to the city’s grid if needed.

GROUNDWATER The city’s groundwater, buried in bedrock, maintains a near-constant temperature of 53°F. A heat exchanger in the basement pulls this residual heat out of the ground in winter and uses it to warm the building. In summer, it pumps excess building heat into the bedrock.

Groundwater Geothermal heat pump

Bedrock

OCEAN DURING THE FIRST FULL TEST OF THE U.S. BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM /// 12.26.04 THE UNFATHOMABLE A 9.0 EARTHQUAKE IN THE INDIAN OCEAN KICKS UP ONE OF

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POPULAR SCIENCE MARCH 2005

J O H N M A C N E I L L ; P H O T O G R A P H : C O U RT E S Y D B O X S T U D I O F O R C O O K + F O X A R C H I T E C T S

The Challenges could slash costs while letting upstart firms find their niche alongside aerospace behemoths.

The 54-Story Air Filter

Rainwater

NASA is stuck waiting for congressional approval of its fiscal 2005 budget, which so far includes $20 million for the Challenges. Meanwhile, many contest rules remain unannounced. Will competitors have to maintain the same strict bookkeeping demanded of traditional NASA contractors? How will safety and quality issues be overseen? And who will judge the entries? Perhaps the biggest challenge of the Challenges will be finding contestants rich enough to participate. No money is paid up front, and in many cases (as with SpaceShipOne), the project’s development cost would exceed the prize amount. Historically, the only successful private sector of space tech has been communications satellites. “There’s a lot of talk about space tourism, but I’m very skeptical that there’s

[ARCHITECTURE]

To toilets

CONTINUED

Warming fluid

[SPACE POLICY]

Cooling fluid

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THE ECO-FRIENDLY SKYSCRAPER

Wind turbine Rainwater collector

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SKY-HIGH TURBINE An estimated 50 percent of the building’s electrical power may be purchased from green sources, such as wind farms in upstate New York. In addition, the building’s smaller spire may house a vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) to generate auxiliary power. (The Freedom Tower, to be built on the site of the World Trade Center, is also expected to make use of a VAWT.)

One Bryant Park ventilation system

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DREAM CUBICLES Unlike many office towers, which recirculate air so that one person’s exhale is another’s inhale (giving rise to so-called sick-building syndrome), One Bryant Park’s ventilation system sucks in outside air through vents at the eighth floor. This air is filtered to remove particulates, circulated throughout the building, refiltered, and then released outside cleaner than when it came in.

Visible light only

A BETTER JOHN Each of the building’s 200 waterless urinals saves an estimated 40,000 gallons of water a year. Urine flows through a funnelshaped cartridge installed just above the drain. A fluid sealant inside the cartridge traps odors, leaving a fresh-smelling latrine. No flushing necessary.

Conventional ventilation system

Reflected UV light

Water tank Sunlight ECO-WINDOW

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A SMARTER VIEW An all-glass skyscraper can quickly turn into a vertical greenhouse during a steamy New York summer. One Bryant Park will be faced with 20,825 square feet of double-insulated glass that reflects 100 percent of ultraviolet rays but lets in 73 percent of visible light. This design keeps the interior cooler in summer and reduces heat loss in winter.

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TRASH DIGESTION Every day, two tons of waste, including shredded paper and food scraps from the building’s cafeteria, will be dumped into a 1,000gallon vat of organic waste seeded with bacteria. The bacteria will digest the slurry and turn it into methane or biodiesel fuel. This is then fed to a turbine, which produces an additional 75 kilowatts—enough to power the on-site Bank of America branch.

8th-floor air vents Rainwater collector One-acre green roof

Electrical generator

Composting vat Water storage Bedrock (Manhattan schist)

Groundwatercapture system

Ice storage

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CLIMATE CONTROL Human bodies and office equipment can quickly make a well-insulated building uncomfortably warm. To cool the building, fresh air is passed through tanks of ice made by the building’s electrical generator each night and then gently blown throughout the building during the day. The air emerges through floor vents, which can be individually controlled at each office cubicle. A conventional A/C draws most of its power during peak daytime hours.

Water table

TICKER ///MOST 1.10.03 VIRAL ANNIVERSARY COMPUTER VIRUS CELEBRATES 20-YEAR ANNIVERSARY; FORMER UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GRAD STUDENTTHE FRED HISTORY’S DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMIS,THE DEVASTATING COASTLINES AND ITS KILLING MORE THAN 150,000 PEOPLE IN 13 COUNTRIES /// 01.03.05 STILL TRUCKING MARS POPULAR SCIENCE MARCH 2005

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HEADLINES

[COMMUNICATIONS]

Blue Skies for Broadband Airships parked near the edge of space could turn your entire town into a wireless hotspot. Will they float?

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BY WINTER’S END, A LITTLE-KNOWN telecom company called Sanswire Networks plans to launch a 90-foot-long prototype communications airship from the Edwards Air Force base near Los Angeles and float it to the stratosphere, more than 50,000 feet above Earth—a feat never done before. If the launch proves successful, the company plans to follow up with a commercial version, the size of a football field and nine stories high, by the end of the year. The helium-filled airship, or “stratellite,” would hover 12 miles (65,000 feet) above Earth for as long as two years at a time, beaming broadband Internet and phone service to subscribers in an area 400 miles across, says Timothy Huff, CEO of Sanswire’s parent company, GlobeTel Communications. The concept of a communications airship is nothing new. Several companies, including 21st Century Airships and Worldwide Aeros, along with the U.S. military, are racing to bring it to reality. Closer to Earth than a satellite, a stratellite could beam line-of-sight signals directly to an antenna attached to a subscriber’s home or business, circumventing cellphone towers and pricey cable infrastructures. For the consumer, that means better signal coverage

than with patchy Wi-Fi hotspots (no more mysterious dead zones) and cheaper, faster broadband service than with cable or DSL. Unlike a satellite, an airship is reusable and relatively cheap; Huff estimates that the stratellite will cost $5 to $10 million—less than a tenth the price of most satellites. Still, major technical issues remain, and many in the industry doubt that Sanswire has resolved them. “For a company to come from nowhere and make an airship—well, I’d give them a onein-a-million chance,” says Hokan Colting, CEO of 21st Century Airships, which plans to launch a prototype craft of its own in 2006. One of the thorniest problems is power. An airship must be light enough to sail into the stratosphere yet powerful enough to tote and operate several thousand pounds of equipment for months on end without refueling. Sanswire’s solution is a giant blanket of solar panels that it says will generate around 400,000 kilowatts an hour— enough energy to power 200 homes—and will draw power from stars and moonlight at night. Fanciful claim? Probably, says Colin Murchie, a spokesperson for the Solar Energy Industries Association: “You just can’t get a usable amount of energy from moonbeams.”—MIKE FADEN

87 FEET

245 FEET

[ FOUR RUDDERS ]

[ 54,000 SQUARE FEET OF SOLAR PANELS ]

[ TWO FAN MOTORS ]

[ GONDOLA HOUSES SOLAR-POWERED ELECTRICAL MOTORS, COMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT AND ANTENNAS ]

[ 18-WHEELER ] 12 FEET

[ LIGHT-WEIGHT SPECTRA SHELL HOLDS 1.3 MILLION CUBIC FEET OF HELIUM ]

70 FEET

ROVER SPIRIT CELEBRATES ITS ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY ON THE RED PLANET /// 02.16.05 POLLUTION POLICE

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POPULAR SCIENCE MARCH 2005

C O U RT E S Y S A N S W I R E N E T W O R K S

THE SANSWIRE STRATELLITE

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[THE POPSCI POLL] BASED ON 3,962 VOTES POSTED TO POPSCI.COM

Nature’s weapon of mass destruction Just how brutal was the tsunami? A-bombs would have hit with less force

2.5 2 600 28,500 4.4 4 95 300

Energy, in exajoules (exa=1018), released by Indonesia’s December 26 earthquake, in four minutes Energy, in exajoules, consumed by the U.S. in one week Megatons of TNT needed to generate the energy equivalent of the Indonesian earthquake Number of 20-kiloton atomic bombs needed to generate the energy equivalent of the Indonesian earthquake Estimated impact force, in tons, on a person of average height and weight hit by the tsunami Estimated impact force, in tons, on a driver of average height and weight crashing into a tree at 40 mph Number of 20-kiloton atomic bombs needed to generate the energy equivalent of the tsunami Years’ worth of tectonic-plate shifting that occurred during the four-minute quake

SOURCES: Steven N. Ward, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California at Santa Cruz; U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program; U.S. Department of Energy; European Commission Joint Research Center

[THE EQUATION]

[ ][ ][ ] +

[ LOTUS FLOWER ]

=

[ DIRT, GUNK, GRIME ]

[ CLEAN CLOTHES ]

A BACHELOR’S DREAM COME TRUE Bedeviled by laundry? Chemists have a solution: self-cleaning duds

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THE WHITE LOTUS grows in muddy swamps across Asia, yet its leaves stay squeaky clean. Now a Clemson University research team is attempting to mimic the plant’s dirt-resistant powers to keep your clothes spot-free. The secret to the lotus plant’s superior hygiene is the billions of microscopic moguls dotting its waxy surface, says Clemson textile chemist Phil Brown. These bumps reduce the contact area on the leaf and thus prevent anything from clinging to its surface. “Water and dirt just fly off,” Brown says. To mimic this effect in the lab, Brown and his team mixed a liquid polymer with silver particles 100 nanometers in diameter—about the size of a small virus. When applied to a cotton swatch, the

mixture bonded to the test fabric, forming an invisible coating with lotus-like repellant properties. Best of all, your clothes will still feel like clothes, not like a vinyl-covered sofa, notes Brown. North Carolina-based Nano-Tex already sells a slob-proof treatment that’s showing up on brandname labels, such as Dockers, L.L.Bean, Gap and Old Navy. But Clemson’s coating could do more than just repel dirt. Silver, notes Brown, has antibacterial properties, so their treatment could also ward off body odor. “Wouldn’t it be great to just shower your jacket with a little water and know it’s clean?” he muses. But don’t toss the detergent just yet. Brown says the invention won’t go commercial for another four years.—MICHAEL STROH

LAST MONTH’S

QUESTION: NUCLEAR FUSION REACTORS WILL POWER HOMES WITHIN:

4 0

50 YEARS

3 2

100 YEARS

%

%

2 8

NEVER

% THIS MONTH’S

QUESTION: WOULD YOU FAVOR EFFORTS TO REDUCE GREENHOUSEGAS EMISSIONS EVEN IF THEY COULD HURT THE ECONOMY? • YES

NO

VOTE AT POPSCI.COM

SEVEN YEARS AFTER ITS INITIAL NEGOTIATION, THE KYOTO PROTOCOL BECOMES A LEGALLY BINDING TREATY, COMMITTING 55 INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS TO CUTTING

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F R O M L E F T: C O R B I S ; G E T T Y I M A G E S ( 3 )

STATISTICALLY SPEAKING. . .

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HEADLINES [DIY ASTRONOMY]

How to Photoshop the Universe New software gives amateur stargazers a chance to shine THIS COMPOSITE PANORAMA OF THE Tarantula nebula, an interstellar kaleidoscope of gas and dust, is one of the most beautiful and detailed images ever produced by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Tarantula cobweb lies more than 170,000 light-years away in the Milky Way’s satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and is arguably the largest known star factory in the universe. The artist is amateur astronomer Danny LaCrue, a 23-year-old graphic-design student at Cuyamaca College near San Diego. Last fall, LaCrue scrutinized hundreds of images from Hubble’s online archive and spent more than 60 hours stitching together 15 shots using his two-gigahertz PC. The result: a dramatic 200megabyte mosaic. The key to LaCrue’s pro-quality beauty shot is a free software plug-in from the European Space Agency’s Hubble Information Center that converts bulky professional files to a userfriendly format. Now anyone with a desktop computer, a broadband connection and Adobe Photoshop can turn raw Hubble data into a digital masterpiece. To download software, visit spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator. —ANDREW FAZEKAS

HEADLINE FROM THE FUTURE

SETH COPEN GOLDSTEIN

2029 THE 3-D FAX MACHINE BRINGS BACK THE HOUSE CALL A new communication medium known as programmable matter or “claytronics” is enabling doctors to visit patients without ever having to leave their offices. An assembly of millions of catoms— micron-size mobile computers—form a 3-D facsimile of a doctor in a patient’s home and a patient in the exam room. As the doctor interacts with the claytronic patient in his office, the claytronic doctor mimics the real doctor’s movements, performing a checkup on the real patient. Each catom is loaded with sensors that relay information on the patient’s pulse, temperature, reflexes and other vital signs. It’s small-town medicine with a high-tech twist. Associate professor of computer science Seth Copen Goldstein heads claytronics research with Todd Mowry at Carnegie Mellon University. They’re now experimenting with 2-D prototypes.

GREENHOUSE EMISSIONS BY 2012 /// 03.01.05 SPACE SAILING COSMOS 1, THE FIRST SOLAR-SAIL SPACECRAFT, IS SLATED TO LAUNCH FROM A SUBMARINE IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN ■

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P H O T O G R A P H : E S A / N A S A , E S O A N D D A N N Y L A C R U E ; I L L U S T R AT I O N : R O B K E L LY

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SOAPBOX

PLUGGED IN

THE INSIDE STORY ON THE FORCES THAT RULE PERSONAL TECH BY CORY DOCTOROW

Kill Spam Locally

When Internet service providers secretly sort your e-mail behind the scenes, you’ll never know what you’re missing

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T’S NOT OFTEN THAT I TAKE A HOLIDAY FROM E-MAIL. AN OVERNIGHT FLIGHT OR A DAY

in a connectivity-free hotel is about the extent of my fasts. Good thing, too: I get around 20,000 messages every day—about 19,500 of them spam—and if I don’t download and delete all that junk regularly, it can take days to sort it out. But I just got back from two and a half weeks with only three e-mail stops, and the deluge was insane. Part of the reason is that I refuse to have my mail filtered upstream, at the server level. This “feature” is offered by many Internet service providers, some36

POPULAR SCIENCE MARCH 2005

times without your even asking for it. Suspicious messages are not just shuffled into a Junk folder, but deleted before you ever see them, leaving in your mailbox only legit messages and the few spams that slip through. While the result sounds appealing, I don’t like the idea of my mail being sorted by someone else’s algorithm, especially when I don’t know what it is. I get lots of paper junk mail too, but that doesn’t mean I want my mailman deciding what should be thrown away. Yet that’s exactly what several major ISPs, including AOL and Earthlink, are doing. They tout their spam-filtering but refuse to say how those filters work. Why all the secrecy? ISPs fear that revealing the criteria used to identify spam will give spammers a road map for bypassing the filters. Likewise, they’re loath to notify recipients that a message has been blocked. What’s the point of deleting the spam if doing so generates another e-mail you have to deal with? Sending discard, or “bounce” notices back to the spammers sounds like a good idea, but it opens the door to a dirty trick known as a “joe job”: A spammer hijacks your e-mail address and uses it as the return address on a few million spams, then sits back and laughs while your mail server, instead of his, drowns under bounce notices. (The name comes from the first victim, Joe Doll. In 1996 he ran a Web-hosting service and deleted the page of a known spammer, who retaliated by inventing this attack. I still get joe-jobbed a couple times a month, and the subsequent flood is truly terrifying.) On these grounds, secret spam filtering seems defensible. But although it does stop much spam and many viruses, the Orwellian consequence is that e-mail is divided into the deliverable and the nondeliverable, and not always correctly. Individuals and organizations frequently find themselves on the wrong side of the spam-filter black hole, with no help in sight. If the rules for filtering spam are kept secret, how does a political organization know if its urgent campaign e-mail is bouncing because of a hyperactive spam filter, or because someone at the ISP disagrees with the group and has intentionally flagged it, or

C O L U M N I S T I L L U S T R AT I O N : R O B K E L LY; C O L U M N I S T P H O T O G R A P H : J O N AT H A N W O RT H ; P H O T O I L L U S T R AT I O N : D AV I D P L U N K E RT

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just because the recipient is too lazy to unsubscribe and has marked it as spam? “You don’t,” says John Gilmore, founder of The Little Garden, one of the first dialup ISPs. “I put a notice at the top of my Web page [warning of the practice], but people don’t believe me. They say, ‘How could my e-mail be censored? I’m getting it all, even the spam.’ ” It sounds like conspiracy theory, but these are real-world problems. MoveOn.org regularly found its electionrelated fundraising and call-to-action e-mails blocked. Even where it could detect this action, getting off the blacklist often took precious days while the issues referenced in its messages cooled to irrelevance. The same thing undoubtedly occurred to Republican groups, and regularly happens to all manner of e-mail lists, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s weekly EFFector. Misclassification is getting so rampant that several ISPs are realizing that this isn’t a sustainable way to fight spam. “It’s more expensive for them to handle a customer-support call from someone whose mail isn’t getting through than to pay the bandwidth and storage to deliver it all,” says Vipul Ved Prakash, founder of Cloudmark, which provides anti-spam software to thousands of network operators, including PayPal. Is there a better way? I think so. First, all filtering has to take place on your desktop or in your Web mail account so that you see everything. Second, we need filters that learn, and apply what they learn to the mail they’ve already classified. When you reply to an e-mail from me, it should realize that I’m not a spammer and then dig through your junk box for all my previously discarded messages. This is going to take a lot of storage, but storage is cheap. And without this learning, we’ll just keep putting ever smaller needles of misclassified e-mail into evergrowing haystacks of auto-filtered spam. I don’t want to come home to a couple hundred thousand e-mails again. But I’m still not willing to turn my mail sorting over to some opaque process, and neither should you. If your ISP filters upstream, ask it to stop and instead use a desktoplevel tool, such as SafetyBar ($40 a year; cloudmark.com). Next month we’ll look at ways to shut down spammers for good and to guard your inbox from viruses. ■ 38

POPULAR SCIENCE MARCH 2005

SCIENCE FRICTION THE MARKETING AND MANGLING OF SCIENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE

BY GREGORY MONE

The Two Faces of Einstein In the centennial year of his breakthrough work, amid all the kitschy paraphernalia, which Albert do we celebrate?

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WISH I HAD BEEN THERE ON THAT DAY IN 1951 SO THAT I COULD HAVE GRABBED

the camera, ripped out the film, and kept that silly picture of the 20th century’s greatest scientist, tongue out, from ornamenting so many posters, T-shirts and coffee mugs. Then again, it probably wouldn’t have done much good. That, after all, is only the most famous of the oft-marketed photographs of the elderly, white-haired Albert Einstein. The inescapable fact is that since his death in 1955,

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 P E R E Z ; P H O T O G R A P H : I M A G E A R C H I V E E T H - B I B L I O T H E K , Z U R I C H ; FA C I N G PA G E , C L O C K W I S E F R O M L E F T: B E T T M A N / C O R B I S ; C A S E Y H A L L / e M A R K E T G R O U P ; A R C H I E M c P H E E / A C C O U T R E M E N T S ; T H E B A B Y E I N S T E I N C O M PA N Y

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Einstein has moved past intellectual eminence to something even more culturally transcendent: He is a brand, his face every bit as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or the Coca-Cola cursive. As a result, he’s used to hawk every-

anti-consumerist crank, let me be clear: My problem isn’t that Albert ended up on a pair of underpants, but that it’s the wrong Albert on those underpants. There’s a big difference between the white-haired sage and the unknown the-

stronger emotional attachment to the lovable absent-minded professor than the 26-year-old working 24 hours a day,” says Stephen Root, a marketing consultant at Sterling Brands in San Francisco. Even so, for the sake of scientific revo-

My problem isn’t that Albert ended up on a pair of underpants, but that it’s the wrong Albert on those underpants.

SENIOR MOMENT Images of the older, irreverent Einstein don’t convey the outwardly proper, quietly daring thinker who pioneered relativity.

thing from self-help books to the Baby Einstein line of parental-guilt-soothing, infant-brain-boosting DVDs, a $170million-a-year business. I’ve got an eightinch toy version of him, chalk in hand, on my desk. Worldwide, 14 law firms police his image, ensuring that its application is consistent with the wishes of his estate’s executor, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. That means no tobacco, no feminine-hygiene products—a stipulation that surely needs little monitoring—and no alcoholic beverages. Still, violators occasionally slip through. A bar in Katy, Texas, called EinStein’s Pub sports on its Web site an image of the old man in a sailor’s cap. (Thankfully, there are no Wormhole Wings or Bose-Einstein Burgers on the menu.) And as part of its “Smarty Pants” line, a Vancouver clothing manufacturer recently sold boxers bearing his picture. If you think that’s an ignominious fate, imagine how fast René Descartes’s corpse must be spinning: His likeness appears on a male G-string. Lest I be branded an

orist who, in a six-month span in 1905, published four papers that changed scientific thought forever. The sage was an international celebrity. He had tenure. The Einstein we’re commemorating this year, on the 100th anniversary of those four great papers, had no such luxury. He had to make a living, dress appropriately, and trim his moustache. On the outside he must have seemed fairly normal. The difference between him and his contemporaries was that, although he couldn’t even secure a Ph.D., he believed he could understand the workings of the universe. The Albert that emerges in his letters to Mileva Mari´c, his first wife, is a supremely focused young man who can scarcely write more than a paragraph without mentioning science. He comes across as a worker, not a natural genius. He flips quickly from professions of love —calling Mileva his kitten, rascal, witch, street urchin and, in what is either a mistranslation or a very odd pet name, his veranda—to summaries of James Clerk Maxwell’s study of electrodynamics. Surprisingly, he even has a sense of style: In one letter, he critiques the decor of his friend Michele Besso’s home. A detail like this is so antithetical to the pop culture version of Einstein that it makes me wonder if the whole eccentricprofessor guise is a ruse, a clever marketing ploy devised to enrich his estate. Maybe he really went over to Gödel’s place at Princeton and, in between small talk about grand-unification theories, pestered Kurt about his curtains. Interior decorating aside, if we have this young, romantic rebel to thank for relativity and E=mc2, why the preference for the septuagenarian? “People have a

Get on your own soapbox! Write to [email protected] or [email protected].

lutions, we ought for once to celebrate the monomaniacal, coffee-swilling rebel who dressed and looked like everyone else while his thoughts raced alongside light beams. In the process, we might even inspire a few new radicals. It may seem impossible that there could be another Einstein out there, slaving away at night while earning his keep by day, but it probably seemed impossible in 1905, too. It’s been almost half a century since his death, and quantum mechanics and relativity still aren’t on speaking terms. We’re due for another Einstein. ■

CASHING IN ON ALBERT The Roger Richman agency in L.A. is gatekeeper to the Einstein industry INSPIRATION Einstein is endlessly quotable. Richman ensures that reprints of his pithy sayings use only his exact words. COLLECTIBLES Accoutrements makes this action figure. It sells better than Freud and Shakespeare, but Jesus tops all three. ADVERTISING The Einstein name helps sell children’s enrichment products. Richman regularly rejects beauty salons hoping to lure the unkempt with the wild-haired icon.

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TECHNOPOLIS FOUND

WE WEIGHED DOZENS OF VARIABLES, FROM THE NUMBER OF HOMES WITH WIRELESS INTERNET TO THE NUMBER OF ROBOTIC SURGERIES PERFORMED AT LOCAL HOSPITALS, TO RANK U.S. CITIES BY TECH QUOTIENT. AND THE WINNERS ARE . . .

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9 4 6

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3 8 2

5 10

MINNEAPOLIS, MN ATLANTA, GA WASHINGTON, DC BOSTON , MA SAN DIEGO, CA CHICAGO, IL COLUMBUS, OH RALEIGH, NC SEATTLE, WA HOUSTON, TX

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

What makes a place high-tech? When POPULAR SCIENCE set out to determine America’s top cities for technology, that was naturally the first question we had to answer. We surveyed experts—academics, scientists, government officials, think-tank intelligentsia, market researchers—to determine the key indicators of a tech-embracing metropolis. We polled our own staff, pondering what we value most about the ways in which technology and innovation affect our daily lives. Then we gathered information from such sources as the Census Bureau, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Transportation, private foundations and medical institutes, collecting thousands of data points in six broad categories. In our first category, we looked at the way city residents experience technology, considering such markers as use of cellphones, HDTVs, computers and satellite cable. We called

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TOP ➤TECH➤CITIES this category “connected citizenry” and weighted it as the single most important one. We also considered transportation innovation (including the efficient use of mass transit and the prevalence of alternative fueling stations); the number of hightech job opportunities per capita; and the use of technology in education (including R&D spending by local universities and the number of students using computers in school). We looked at the smart use of energy and, finally, at hospitals and in emergency response, including the number of clinical trials and the use of GPS by emergency-medical personnel. Then we crunched the numbers. The results were at times obvious (Boston ranked highest in education), at times surprising (San Diego was the medical champ). But all the cities that rose to the top of our list share a broad-based embrace of technology. The winner: unassuming yet consistently innovative Minneapolis. Read on for a high-tech tour.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN BY MATTHEW POWER

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➤

AS A KID GROWING UP SEVERAL

hundred miles from the nearest metropolis, I used to draw fantastical visions of the great cities of the future. There would be moving sidewalks on every surface. (“Walking” was over.) Hover-taxis, hover-skateboards, hover-buses. (Hovering was a central element of my urban planning.) Also, sleek monorails conducted by robots, zipping noiselessly between glittering towers that vanished into cloudbanks and reappeared above them, miles in the sky. People would dress in jumpsuits like Mork, and there would be a vast dome over the city, which would have its own computercontrolled weather. (Domes were easy to draw.) The Jetsonian future was clear. In the real world, of course, where urban centers are composed of layers of development and decay, constructing the city of the future is not so simple. What makes a city cutting-edge? And which American metropolis can rightly claim the title of top tech city? More than a year ago, a crack team of editors and researchers here at POPULAR SCIENCE launched an exhaustive effort to find out. We input reams of data from dozens of private and government sources, tabulated our results, and came up with . . . Minneapolis. 42

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We restarted the computer, and it still said Minneapolis. And so it was that I was told to pack my bags for a mission: I was to “test drive” the city, to immerse myself in this technopolis, to divine firsthand the ways in which our winner expresses its technological preeminence. Now, obviously there is something rather artificial about such an assignment. The technological accomplishments that define Minneapolis provide benefits designed primarily for the city’s residents, not tourists. I’d be in the city for less than a week. But such limitations only made my quest to understand this place that much more delectable: I would visit its most visionary structures, meet its most plugged-in citizens, experience the very cream of its technological offerings. Living in New York, my associations with Minneapolis quite frankly amounted to an ignorant pop-cultural stew of Coen brothers movies, prowrestler politicians, Wobegon lakes, and artists now and again known as Prince. This, my editors assured me, provided me with the advantage of an unprejudiced mind. Still, I needed to ground myself in the city’s bona fides. What made Minneapolis our hightech champ? It ranked first among U.S. cities in innovative transportation solutions, fourth in energy technology. The city fell above the 50th percentile in every category measured, a broad-based showing of tech savvy that set it apart from the competition. With everything averaged together, there is no city in

America where a culture of high technology has a more pervasive presence. I knew I should keep my hopes in check, but as I set off for the airport, I couldn’t help wondering: Would Minneapolis be the city of the future I’d fantasized about since childhood? THE FIRST VOICE I HEAR UPON ARRIVING IS

computerized. The stop announcements on the airport monorail have a British accent, as though the pilotless shuttle has been commandeered by a Bond girl. (They’re big on computerized voices in

SPEED OF LIGHTS Sensors at Minneapolis intersections measure traffic density and automatically adjust trafficlight timing to compensate.

Minneapolis. Later, walking by a parking garage, I am warned in robot monotone “Caution. Vehicle. Exiting.”) My taxi driver from the airport is a very friendly Somali with an advanced degree in computer programming. I pay for the ride with a credit card, a rarity in New York’s yellow cabs and one of many small ways in which I’ll find my city to be behind the times. The cabbie thinks my surprise at card-reading taxis is hilariously yokelish. If I had been nervous about giving out my card number, I could have asked to see his counterfeit-proof Minnesota PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN B. CARNETT

THE NUMBERS A SAMPLING OF THE STATS THAT ADD UP TO #1 ➤ NUMBER OF HIGHTECH COMPANIES: 3,939 (national average: 1,260)

➤ PERCENT DEPLOYMENT ➤ ANNUAL NUMBER OF OF “INTELLIGENT CLINICAL MEDICAL TRANSPORTATION TRIALS: 333 (national SOLUTIONS”: 61 average: 206) (national average: 34) ➤ PERCENT OF WORK➤ ANNUAL UNIVERSITY FORCE WITH ADVANCED ➤ PERCENT OF TRANSIT R&D EXPENDITURES: DEGREES: 10 SYSTEM ACCEPTING $462 million (national (national average: 9) ELECTRONIC FARE average: $200 million) PAYMENT: 100 ➤ NUMBER OF WI-FI (national average: 44) ➤ EPA-LAUDED ENERGYHOTSPOTS: 110 STAR BUILDINGS: 8 (national average: 61) (national average: 4)

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TOP ➤TECH➤CITIES HIGH-TECH

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THE SUPERMARKET CHARLOTTE, NC At Food Lion’s new pilot store, Bloom, shoppers get an RFID scanner along with their cart and total up their groceries on the go. Changed your mind about the frozen pizza? Just press “delete” and your tally will automatically adjust. Can’t find your favorite marinade? Stop at one of Bloom’s eight information stations and get a map pinpointing your item’s location. Paying at the self-service checkout takes about 60 seconds.—R.M.P.—R.P.

driver’s license, featuring a 3-D hologram of a loon (the state bird) that appears to float above and below the card when it’s tilted. The novel design was invented by locally-based 3M. Traffic is pretty heavy moving into the center of the city. The U.S. Department of Transportation gives Minneapolis top scores for its use of such “intelligent transportation solutions” as closed-loop traffic control, in which sensors placed below the pavement at intersections collect traffic-density data on given roadways and adjust the timing of traffic lights to compensate. This belies the fact that traffic congestion in Minneapolis is increasing at a rate surpassed by only eight other cities in the country, a side

effect of suburban sprawl. To ease the gridlock, the city has spent $715 million to construct a light-rail line that connects the downtown with outposts including the airport and the Mall of America. The rail is time-coordinated with the bus system, which has another advance on New York: The bus stops are kept toasty with electric heaters. My hotel is downtown, in the forest of glass-and-steel skyscrapers that makes up the dense center of Minneapolis. The streets are clean enough to eat off, and seem curiously devoid of pedestrians—a ghost-town ambience that can be attributed to the Minneapolis Skyway system running overhead. Back in 1962, city planners gave up trying to deal with the northern winters, where temperatures have bottomed out at 34 below, and began turning the entire center of the city into a giant human Habitrail. The Skyway is a series of sealed bridges above street level that winds for mile after disorienting mile through arcades of shops and plazas, opening on vast atriums with indoor waterfalls and trees to remind the tunnel-dwellers of the outside world. It’s not a dome over the entire city, but it strikes me as being admirably close. I enter, and all sense of time and direction are quickly lost. It could be cold enough on the street to hammer a nail with a banana, but I wander for hours in my shirtsleeves, hounded by Muzak, grabbing stray Wi-Fi signals, and drinking lattes, as hermetically sealed as an astronaut. I have to return to the freezing street and a coffee shop to regain my perspective. Dunn Bros. has free Wi-Fi and a

SAN DIEGO

IN THE HOT SEAT The simple genius of heated bus stops was an early clue to Minneapolis’s pervasive techiness.

very nice fair-trade organic, and the proprietor takes time from his roasting to opine that for all its futuristic climatecontrolled benefits, the Skyway is missing the vibrant life of a real city. And what does he make of his city’s top tech ranking? “I would have guessed Silicon Valley,” he says. “But I guess I’m not that surprised. Minneapolis is a progressive place, always looking at what’s next. It’s just not in our nature to brag about it.” MINNEAPOLITANS MAY BE KNOWN FOR THEIR

humility, but they are seriously proud of their city. If you come to town to find out what’s so high-tech about the place, the mayor will pick you up in his gas-electric hybrid car and personally drive you around. (Well, he did it for me, anyway.) R.T. Rybak, the hyperkinetic,

YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK, you don’t want to do it while surfing ➤off aIFremote beach with no road access. “My chances of survival were 1,000 to 1,” says

Steven Ludwig. So how was it that by dinnertime that day last August, Ludwig, 53, was watching an account of his own rescue on the six o’clock news? The answer: Ludwig was in San Diego, whose medical-tech innovations include making defibrillators as 1 MEDICAL & EMERGENCY TECH common as fire extinguishers; a nearby rescue boat had just been equipped with one. In San Diego, 911 calls enter a GPSequipped system that can immediately 2. SPOKANE, WA mobilize any of the city’s 125 fire engines, 3. OKLAHOMA CITY, OK ambulances, rescue boats and helicopters. 4. KANSAS CITY, MO And because rescue vehicles carry Wi-Fi5. CHICAGO, IL enabled laptops and PDAs, medics docu6. BURLINGTON, VT menting patient vitals and any procedures administered beam the data 7. DES MOINES, IA straight to the hospital, where doctors seamlessly pick up the case. At many local hospitals, patient charts, includ8. SEATTLE, WA ing data from heart-rate and oxygen monitors, are also electronic. The newscast of Ludwig’s rescue showed a 9. LANSING, MI brave paramedic lowered from a helicopter to whisk him away. But behind the scenes, a carefully orchestrated 10. INDIANAPOLIS, IN system of protocols and technologies—and people aided by them—were the unseen heroes.—RENA MARIE PACELLA THE NUMBERS ➤ OVERALL RANK: 5 [NUMBER OF HOSPITALS AND HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS WITH ADVANCED INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: 14] [PERCENT OF EMERGENCY VEHICLES UNDER COMPUTER-AIDED DISPATCH:100] [PERCENT OF EMERGENCY VEHICLES THAT ARE GPS-EQUIPPED: 46]

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VIP TOUR GUIDE Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak with his hybrid Prius

triathalon-running, cross-country-skiing, 49-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, drives his city-owned Toyota Prius, points out landmarks, and simultaneously gives me a historic overview. The car is no self-righteous prop. Even as traffic congestion has increased during Rybak’s tenure, Minneapolis has become one of the first cities in the nation to bring emissions down below the levels prescribed by the Kyoto Protocol. Vehicle emissions are still increasing, but greenhouse-gas emissions from other sources have been reduced 15 percent in the past decade, by making buildings, factories and streetlights more energy-efficient and by increasing recycling. Rybak is also encouraging more, and greener, mass transit. The city’s transit commission is testing hybrid buses that will cut emissions even further. The mayor isn’t surprised that Minneapolis ranks so high in tech, just that someone finally noticed. “The city has undergone a series of rebirths,” he tells me as the car sits silently at a traffic light. Built next to the only waterfall on the Mississippi River, Minneapolis has been a center of industry and tech-

HIGH-TECH JOBS 1

SAN JOSE ➤ IN SAN JOSE, THE UNOFFICIAL CAPITAL of Silicon Valley,

technology companies employ more than 300,000 people—practically a third of the populace. The city generates 30 percent more patents than its closest competitor (Boise, Idaho, home to Micron) and receives more than a third of the nation’s venture capital: $5 billion. Headquartered in Silicon Valley are Google, eBay and Cisco Systems; the world’s leading biotech company, Genentech, is up the road. The area also boasts five top research centers, including SRI International and Stanford University—institutions that spawn high-tech start-ups almost reflexively. Google began as a Stanford spin-off. Indeed, Stanford researchers have founded more than 1,200 tech companies to date, including117 biomedical companies (23 of them launched just last year). Long known for semiconductors and software, San Jose is quickly shifting to biotech, thanks in part to the state’s Proposition 71, which grants $3 billion to stem-cell research. The average San Jose salary, $62,400, is 60 percent higher than the national average. But to earn it, people work really, really hard. Employee productivity—the value a company derives from each worker—is at $180,000 in the valley; the national average is $87,000. “When your average 2. ORANGE, CA co-worker is probably in the top 5 percent of the most 3. GAINESVILLE, FL intelligent people in the nation,” says molecular geneticist 4. BOULDER, CO Wendy Mahler, a local biotech consultant, “it definitely 5. MADISON, WI makes you kick it up a notch.”—R.M.P. 6. OAKLAND, CA

7. WASHINGTON, DC 8. NASHUA, NH 9. RALEIGH, NC 10. SANTA FE, NM

THE NUMBERS ➤ OVERALL RANK: 17 [NUMBER OF HIGH-TECH COMPANIES: 7,300] [PERCENT OF WORKERS IN HIGH-TECH FIELDS: 33] [PERCENT WITH ADVANCED DEGREES: 17]

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nological innovation from its inception. General Mills was a milling company; 3M was in mining. Today 3M is a giant, one of the most diverse technology and materials-science innovators around. Rybak tells me that when the mills declined in the early 1900s, the city was forced to adapt to a service-based economy, leaving it in much better shape than industrial centers like Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit, which had to reinvent themselves in the 1980s. Minneapolis adapted to postindustrialism early, becoming a brain trust of the region. A 2004 University of Wisconsin study found Minneapolis to be America’s most literate city, and I find out later that its list of contributions to various branches of technology is rich: 3M introduced magnetic tape, Scotch tape and the Post-it note. The airplane black box, the Nerf football and even the proprietary controlled-foam-extrusion process for creating “marbits”—the pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, blue diamonds and purple horseshoes found in Lucky Charms cereal—were developed here. Medtronic, now the world’s largest medical technology company, was started in a Minneapolis garage in 1949. The company’s founder, Earl Bakken, went on to invent the first transistorized cardiac pacemaker in 1957. Indeed, some of the city’s most prominent advances are in life sciences and medicine. The formerly run-down Philips neighborhood, whose high crime rate had helped get the city dubbed “Murderapolis” during the crack epidemic of the 1990s, is being HIGH-TECH

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THE PLANETARIUM NEW YORK, NY The five-story-tall Space Theater at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium has the most technologically advanced projector in the world. It simulates 9,100 stars—the number visible in both hemispheres, with binoculars, on a clear night. A shield with 9,100 tiny holes is located between the light source and the lens of the Zeiss Mark IX projector. Rather than beaming light to the entire inner surface of the projector, glass fibers conduct a concentrated beam to each perforation. The result is a white light with 10 times the intensity of the conventional 4,000-watt projectors used in most planetariums—and sharper, more realistic stars.—R.M.P.

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WHERE THE GRASS IS GREENER Michael Krause’s Green Institute develops and tests environmental technologies that can be used in homes.

recast as a center of medical research and innovation. The neighborhood was cleaned up with a program of computerized crime-fighting. The location and type of every crime was statistically analyzed, with trouble spots identified and targeted for police attention. Today local residents are given training and employment opportunities in the new medical facilities. “The paradigm in the 1980s and ’90s was the Edge City,” Rybak says—“the faceless office parks built far out in the suburbs. That was overbuilt and unsustainable. We’re trying to pull it back, recognize the value in density, in a dynamic urban setting. Everything we need is right here.” As he sees it, returning to a compact core, with research labs, hospitals and uni-

C O U R T E S Y A M E R I C A N M U S E U M O F N AT U R A L H I S T O R Y; FA C I N G PA G E : I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y STEPHEN ROUNTREE; PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM TOP: COURTESY CORRIE ZOLL/GREEN INSTITUTE; C O U R T E S Y T H E S E AT T L E P U B L I C L I B R A R Y

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THE GREEN MACHINE The Philips Eco-Enterprise Center was built by Minneapolis’s Green Institute as a testing ground for energy-saving and eco-friendly designs. It is furnished with no-emission paints, recycled-glass tiles and the world’s first 100 percent recyclable carpet. It’s lit with sun-tracking mirrors that deflect up to 10 times more sunlight through skylights and into the building.

THE LIVING ROOF A roof planted with natural grasses saves on heating and cooling bills, and manages rainwater.

[ GRASS [ GROWING MEDIUM [ FILTER FABRIC [ DRAINAGE LAYER [ INSULATION [ ROOT BARRIER [ ROOF MEMBRANE

[ ROOF ACCESS [ WALKWAY

PATHWAY ] DRAIN ]

[ ROOF DECK

40° F

SUN SEEKER Solar-tracking panels deflect extra light through skylights.

versities in close proximity, provides fertile ground for high-tech innovation. In a 1.5-mile corridor stretching from downtown, there are 19 medical institutions, 61 research and clinical labs, and 2,300 physicians. A government-funded small-business “incubator” promotes medical technology start-ups, uniting inventors and venture capital, while hospitals provide patients for clinical trials, and huge companies like Medtronic pro-

HOT HOUSE The Eco-Center doesn’t have a furnace. Instead, a closed loop of water and antifreeze cycles from the building through the ground, extracting heat from the soil. The fluid returns to the building and transfers the energy to heat pumps.

vide R&D. Minnesota has more than 500 med-tech companies, many of which are small and prize independent thinking. I later visit a group of physical therapists at Abbott Northwestern Hospital who since 1995 have run a program called Advanced Rehabilitative Technologies (ART) that makes use of virtual reality in patient rehabilitation. Sensors attached to patients’ muscles detect the tiniest movements and feed the data

into a computer. This allows the patient to use biofeedback, in which, say, a stroke victim improves strength and coordination by using muscle movement to play a game on a video monitor. I play computer pinball with sensors attached to my forearms: When I flex, the paddles bat the ball around on the screen. In another exercise, I stand in front of a blue screen trying to manipulate myself as a little soccer goalie on a

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THE LIBRARY SEATTLE, WA The catalog in Seattle’s Central Library is more Mapquest than Dewey Decimal. Plug in the name of a book, and you get a diagram of its exact location. Returned books travel by conveyor belt to a machine that scans their RFID tags and groups them. A vacuum-powered rotator faces the books in a single direction, and another machine puts them on carts for manual stacking. Librarians wear wireless transmitters so that they can communicate from anywhere in the building, which is made of a material never before used in the U.S.: aluminum mesh sandwiched between layers of coated glass, which lets light through but minimizes heat and glare. And while visitors are recharging their mental batteries, their electric cars can do the same in the library’s garage.—R.M.P.

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TOP ➤TECH➤CITIES

SPRY IN THE SKY The city’s pervasive Skyway system allows workers and shoppers to dodge both traffic and bad weather.

RAIL RIDERS Minneapolis recently invested over $700 million in a state-of-the-art light rail line.

monitor. These therapeutic solutions keep patients entertained as they perform the often-monotonous exercises involved in their recovery. At the same time, the sensors allow doctors to collect reams of data on their subjects’ response times, changes in muscle strength, and overall progress. It is one of the only such programs in the country. The therapists are also pioneering what they call teleclinics: Internet videoconferencing rehab sessions conducted with patients as far away as Samoa. 48

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AFTER SHOWING ME THE 19TH-CENTURY MILLS

by the river, now being retrofitted as luxury condos and pricey offices for tech companies, Mayor Rybak drops me off at the Green Institute, a nonprofit that promotes environmental technology and sustainable energy use— another area in which Minneapolis scored high points, with its eight EPArated EnergyStar buildings. The institute’s building is a textbook on green technologies. It has no furnace but is kept at a constant temperature by a non-

toxic antifreeze (so green you could actually drink it) circulating through a series of geothermal wells dug into the bedrock below. Mirrors above skylights follow the sun to reflect it inside, and sensors lower all electric light correspondingly, hibernating when people leave the room. Reused steel forms the bulk of the support beams, and the building has an insulating living roof planted with Minnesota prairie species. The electrical system, run partly from an array of solar panels on the roof, kicks power back to the grid when it overproduces. Shelving consists of pressure-treated boards of soy and newspaper that look just like shiny black marble. Michael Krause, the institute’s director, tells me that they’ve incorporated more than 200 green-technology elements into the construction. The idea is for the building to serve as an example and proving ground for green tech on a larger, more complex scale. Rybak says that the city hopes to build a new baseball stadium for the Twins, with a “biomass” heating system—an energyefficient trash incinerator. I take the slick new light rail back downtown (its automated ticket machine speaks Spanish, Hmong and Somali, in addition to English), but I’m flummoxed by the routes of the bus system. So I take a cab (the drivers all listen to National Public Radio) out to the University of Minnesota to meet with mathematician Andrew Odlyzko, head of the school’s Digital Technology Center. In what is emerging as a theme of the city’s innovative mindset, he holds forth on the value of interdisciplinary research and cooperation: between industry and the university and between engineering and computer science. The clustering of disciplines encourages interesting avenues of exploration. Odlyzko is researching the history of railroads’ psychological effects in the 19th century, teasing out the parallels with the spread of the Internet, our own century’s “disruptive technology.” The university is home to quite a roster of innovative thinkers, which has earned it a reputation as an invention factory and a ranking as one of the top three public research universities in the country. Seymour Cray, father of the supercomputer, and several of the Nobelwinning creators of the transistor (arguably the most important invention of the 20th century) studied here. Today, in the same library where Cray crammed as an undergraduate, an astrophysicist uses

the spare processing time of hundreds of networked computers in the student PC lab to construct two-terabyte 3-D animations of the internal combustion of stars. The Center for Distributed Robotics has developed a soda-can-size spy robot that can be shot from a grenade launcher, which could have practical applications in urban warfare. And the university recently won a contract from the Department of Homeland Security to design a smart video-monitoring system that would call attention to suspicious situations, such as abandoned packages left on railway platforms. In another lab, I stumble around in a virtual-reality helmet, running into real walls as I navigate a digitized room. As my bruised shins attest, the era of the functional Holodeck has not yet arrived. A “Web usability lab” has a computer station at which the patterns of a user’s Web navigation are monitored through a oneway mirror; the data collected will be used to facilitate more efficient Web page

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THE GARAGE HOBOKEN, NJ

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At the Garden Street Garage, there are no attendants, and parking takes less than a minute. Drivers don’t even enter the building. They simply pull into a docking bay, turn off their engines, swipe their credit cards, and walk away. The 324-car garage does the rest. Vehicles are lifted by an automated elevator and hoisted onto steel pallets by an electromechanically driven carrier system. Custom software works in conjunction with Cimplicity, the automation program used by many General Motors manufacturing plants and NASA facilities. Because the garage does not have to provide circular ramps or space for drivers to maneuver, it fits three times as many vehicles as conventional garages. An added plus: The absence of ramps saves thousands of gallons of gas every year.—R.M.P.

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BOSTON

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL invented the ➤ telephone here. Bill Gates studied here

(before dropping out). The sewing machine, vulcanized rubber, the Polaroid camera, the microwave oven, artificial limbs, synthetic 1 HIGH-TECH EDUCATION penicillin, the first computers, Arpanet, e-mail, inertial guidance systems—all are products of Boston ingenuity. Not so surprising when you consider that the city boasts more than 60 colleges and universities. Ten Nobel laureates currently teach at MIT, 39 at Harvard; Boston’s universities spend $2.3 billion annually on R&D, almost twice as much as the next biggest spender, Baltimore. This abundance of talent and resources trickles down to the city’s public schools. Boston University and Northeastern professors coach high school teams competing in an international robotics competition, and MIT engineering students mentor kids interested in tech careers. When Boston opened a technology-based high school, Harvard, MIT and the University of Massachusetts, along with companies including Dell, IBM and Microsoft, donated expertise, manpower and more than a million dollars’ worth of high-tech equipment. Every student at TechBoston Academy is given a wireless laptop, and every classroom has an interactive 2. HOUSTON, TX Smart Board, a touch-sensitive display linked to the teacher’s 3. RALEIGH, NC computer. In 1998, Boston became the first major school 4. PHILADELPHIA, PA district to connect all its schools to the Internet. 5. WASHINGTON, DC Meanwhile, the legacy of invention continues. B.U. grad 6. ATLANTA, GA student Matt Heverly helped design the robotic arms for Mars 7. BALTIMORE, MD rovers Spirit and Opportunity and is now working on technology 8. NEW YORK, NY to enable image-guided fetal heart surgery. And a low-cost rocket-powered surveillance system that MIT grad Andrew Heafitz 9. CHICAGO, IL originally created for a science fair at Boston-area Newton South 10. SAN DIEGO, CA High School is now in development with the U.S. Air Force.—R.M.P. THE NUMBERS ➤ OVERALL RANK: 4 [PERCENT OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS WITH INTERNET ACCESS: 100] [ANNUAL UNIVERSITY R&D EXPENDITURES: $2.3 BILLION] [PERCENT OF STUDENTS EQUIPPED WITH A COMPUTER AT SCHOOL: 80] [NUMBER OF SCIENCE MUSEUMS: 3]

SEATTLE CONNECTED CITIZENRY 1 IN SEATTLE, IT SEEMS, ➤ citizens have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of connectivity. The most wired (and wireless) city in the nation, Seattle has 57 Wi-Fi hotspots per 100,000 people; the national average is more like 18. A full 83 percent of Seattle homes have at least one computer, and almost all those homes are online, surpassing the national average by 21 percent. Seattle’s tech-centeredness has been attributed to the “Microsoft effect,” the software behemoth’s influence on its host city’s economy, culture and lifestyle. Microsoft is the second-largest employer in Seattle (after Boeing), providing work for more than 20,000 people. And since the company’s founding in 1975, it has created at least 8,000 tech-savvy millionaires, most of whom still live in the area. Microsoft chief Bill Gates’s foundation has given nearly $12 million to state tech charities, including local communitytechnology centers and programs that provide computer training for Seattle’s poor and disabled youths. Seattle resident Matt Westervelt, 33, has worked for Microsoft, twice, but he’s currently an avid blogger who runs his own computer company. Nearly five years ago he created the Seattle Wireless Network, which links apartment buildings, businesses, coffeehouses, schools and parks throughout the city. An all-volunteer effort, the network not only provides free wireless access, it enables people to send e-mail and data files without ever logging on to the Internet. “You can do things like video conferencing between coffee shops at speeds faster than broadband,” says member Joe Towner.—R.M.P.

2. OLYMPIA, WA 3. AUSTIN, TX 4. SAN FRANCISCO, CA 5. ORLANDO, FL 6. DANBURY, CT 7. HONOLULU, HI 8. WASHINGTON, DC 9. GAINESVILLE, FL 10. BOISE, ID

THE NUMBERS ➤ OVERALL RANK:11 [NUMBER OF WI-FI HOTSPOTS: 319] [PERCENT OF HOMES WITH INTERNET ACCESS: 76] [PERCENT WITH CABLE/SATELLITE SERVICE: 86]

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★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ NEED TO GET AWAY FROM IT ALL? POPULAR SCIENCE PRESENTS AN EXCLUSIVE TOUR OF CSS SKYWALKER, AN ORBITAL RESORT THAT’S A LOT CLOSER TO REALITY THAN YOU MIGHT THINK

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THE FIVE-BILLION-STAR HOTEL ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ BY MICHAEL BELFIORE PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN B. CARNETT

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STARLIGHT INN Former NASA engineer William Schneider [left] designed the modules that Las Vegas mogul Robert Bigelow hopes will constitute the world’s first orbital hotel.

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ON THE LAS VEGAS STRIP, HOME OF THE BIGGEST AND MOST

extravagant hotels in the world, shell-shocked tourists file past one stunningly ostentatious display after another. In the desert city, water says wealth like nothing else, and there’s a lake of it in front of the Bellagio, with fountains blasting 240 feet in the air in time to Broadway show tunes. Just up the street, the Mirage demonstrates that it has money to burn with a fiery volcano erupting from the top of a 119,000-gallon waterfall. Tucked away on the service roads behind the Strip, the humble Budget Suites of America hotels are, in contrast, nearly invisible to tourists. Catering not to revelers but to the hordes of migrants looking for quick work in America’s tourism epicenter, Budget Suites eschews flashy displays of any sort, flaunting instead affordable weekly rates and the homely comforts of laundry rooms and kitchenettes. Still, when it comes to grand ambition, the impresarios of the Strip are mere pikers next to Budget Suites owner Robert Bigelow. For his next hotel enterprise, Bigelow is looking beyond the bright lights of Las Vegas—beyond Earth’s atmosphere, in fact. He is actively engaged in an effort to build the planet’s first orbiting space hotel. Bargain-basement room rate: $1 million a night. For its water show, this hotel will have all of Earth’s blue oceans flying past its windows at 17,500 miles an hour. Guests on board the 330-cubic-meter station (about the size of a threebedroom house) will learn weightless acrobatics, marvel at the ever-changing face of the home planet, and, for half of every 90-minute orbit, gaze deep into a galaxy ablaze with stars. The public has seen this vision for decades—another hopeless dreamer’s space fantasy. But here there’s a difference: Bigelow is betting $500 million of his personal fortune that he can make it come true. He has hired veteran space-travel engineers to perfect the technology, he has produced nearly launchready hardware for testing, and he’s floating a $50-million prize to entice other companies to create a safe, reliable orbital space vehicle to transport guests to the front door—or rather, the airlock. Even five years ago, this plot would have seemed utterly implausible. But with Burt Rutan’s recent Ansari X Prize triumph—his company, Scaled Composites, won a $10-million competition for the successful, repeated launch of a manned suborbital space vehicle—and the subsequent creation of Virgin Galactic to capitalize on Rutan’s technology for tourist 52

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spaceflights, Bigelow’s project provides an intriguing new twist in the development of a commercial spaceflight industry. Robert Bigelow is a trim 60 years old with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a matching mustache. He shepherds visitors through his 50-acre, three-building, 56-employee R&D facility, Bigelow Aerospace, on the outskirts of Las Vegas with the quiet confidence of a man who knows exactly what he is doing. “It’s a gamble,” he says of his project, the world’s first private space station. “It’s a huge gamble.” He smiles faintly as he says it, as though he enjoys the sheer outrageousness of his own project. Then, too, he’s no stranger to high-stakes gambling; he was raised in Las Vegas, after all, surrounded by

SPACE LOBBY Fiberglass panels will cover the fabric webbing, visually dividing the module’s living areas. Open passages will connect the levels.

the city’s kitschy, instant-gratification, money-fixated culture. Yet he’s also insatiably curious about spirituality and the nature of the universe, and he possesses an unearthly patience. Las Vegas may be an unlikely incubator for these qualities, but that’s exactly what it was for Bigelow as he grew up. In the 1950s, nuclear explosions at the nearby Nevada Test Site lit his street at night with artificial daylight—casting light on his mortality, as well. In later years, rumors circulated of a secret government program to study a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship and its occupants. And although he never saw anything himself, Bigelow knew people who swore that they had had unexplainable encounters with possible extraterrestrials; his own

grandparents even had a UFO experience. He couldn’t guess what it all meant, but he developed a burning desire to find out. What was our place in the universe? Were we alone in it? Bigelow was just 15 years old when he vowed to devote his life to helping establish a permanent human presence in space. It would take money, he knew—lots of it. And so he began to build a very practical foundation for his fantastic idea: He followed his father into real estate, studying that and banking at Arizona State University. After graduating in 1967, he launched his career first as a broker, and soon began buying small rental properties. His first construction project, in 1970, was a 40-unit apartment house. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s he built POPULAR SCIENCE MARCH 2005

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HIGH-WIRE ACT Above the glow of Las Vegas, Robert Bigelow shrouds his work in secrecy and security.

dozens of apartment buildings and motels in and around Las Vegas, and in 1988 he founded Budget Suites of America. At about the same time, he began pouring millions of dollars into UFO and paranormal research, eventually creating his National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) in 1995. None of this activity was a secret, but he did keep mum about his ultimate goal, the driving motivation behind his expanding empire—telling no one until the time came to set the plan in motion. “I didn’t even tell my wife,” he says. “She never knew. Because it’s possible that that kind of dream would never happen.” The ideal moment arrived in 1999 when Bigelow, now sitting on a fortune, got wind of a NASA program for a radical new space station. LIKE THE HOTELS ON THE STRIP, BIGELOW AEROSPACE IS WRAPPED

in layers of illusion. Viewed from West Brooks Avenue in North Las Vegas, it resembles most other industrial complexes in the neighborhood, down to the beer distributor right across the street. Such similarity ends, however, as you drive past a reassuringly corporate Bigelow logo and through the gate. Over-

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looking the Strip 10 miles away, the small parking lot is bounded by chain-link fencing wrapped with razor wire. As the beefy guards wearing desert fatigues and .45s check your ID, maybe you’ll notice their black shoulder patches, which feature a classically oval-eyed alien face outlined in silver and gold. Bigelow—who generally shuns media attention and rarely grants interviews—kept his spacefaring efforts largely under wraps for five years after founding Bigelow Aerospace. But he began showing his work last fall, after announcing his $50-million orbital-vehicle prize amid the positive press surrounding Rutan’s SpaceShipOne. The top-secret, Skunk Works–style aura persists, and visitors are only slowly being admitted to Building B, the semipublic face of Bigelow Aerospace. Built last year, the windowless, 80,000-square-foot facility houses full-scale mock-ups of Bigelow’s baby: the Nautilus space-station module. Two 45-foot-long, 22-foot-diameter modules, brilliant white and draped with the American flag, loom out of the darkness at the back of the building. A stairway invites visitors to climb on board to see for themselves what it might be like to live in the biggest space-station modules ever built. Their large volume is the result of an unusual design feature—they are inflatable. Developed at NASA as part of a project called TransHab, inflatable space-station modules have some important advantages over their tin-can counterparts. They weigh significantly less, and they launch in a compressed state, with their fabric hulls wrapped tightly around their rigid cores like a roll of paper towels. This allows them to use less-powerful launch vehicles and makes for roomier space stations. After a rocket fires a Nautilus into space, explosive bolts will release the girdle securing the compressed hull, and then the station’s life support

ORBITAL HOLIDAYS THAT START WITH A BANG

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LAUNCHING TOURISTS INTO ORBIT SAFELY WILL REQUIRE LOTS OF CASH, LOTS OF SPEED, AND LOTS OF SMARTS

IT’S GOING TO TAKE A LOT MORE THAN A Ford Econoline to deliver guests to the door of a space hotel. That’s why Robert Bigelow has established America’s Space Prize. Like the Ansari X Prize that Burt Rutan’s suborbital SpaceShipOne claimed last October, the Space Prize has simple rules. The craft must reach a 250-mile orbit twice in 60 days and demonstrate its ability to dock with a Bigelow module, and the second flight must carry five crew and passengers. No government funding is permitted, and only U.S. companies may enter. The deadline is January 10, 2010. The prize is $50 million in cash. The rules may be simple, but winning will be hard. Achieving orbital altitudes and speeds is what makes spaceflight expensive. It starts with making a five-person vehicle move more than six times as fast as SpaceShipOne, which demands exponentially more energy and fuel: Rutan’s entire combo weighed less than 10 tons at takeoff, but Russia’s three-person Soyuz spacecraft requires a 300-ton rocket to loft it into orbit. What comes up must come down, and Newton insists that it must come down with the same amount of energy it took to get it up there. The spacecraft must decelerate in the atmosphere, and its kinetic energy turns into steel-melting superheated air. Safe re-entry is a huge challenge; so far it has been done only with a glider like the space shuttle—which is expensive—or a parachute-recovered capsule.

Rutan is typically cagey about his work on an orbital craft, beyond saying that it might be a “small, cheap and cramped transfer van.” He has suggested that his White Knight carrier airplane could be scaled up to bigger-than-747 size to launch future rockets and that SpaceShipOne’s unique “feather” design might play a role. The most detailed plan comes from SpaceDev, which built SpaceShipOne’s rocket engine. The design for SpaceDev’s Dream Chaser combines enhanced versions of that craft’s hybrid rocket motors—burning rubber and nitrous oxide—with a winged rocketplane based on the X-34 that was designed by Orbital Sciences and NASA. SpaceDev likes the X-34 because NASA already has a huge database on its aerodynamic performance; for NASA, it could be a chance to fly a useful research vehicle using SpaceDev’s proprietary rocket engines. CEO Jim Benson says the vehicle would be strapped to three million-pound hybrid boosters to go all the way to orbit. The key to this five-year, $150million project, he says, is that hybrid rockets are “almost embarrassingly cheap” when produced in quantity. Benson hasn’t committed to a try for Bigelow’s prize, however, and actually might not do so. He doesn’t think the private sector will fully fund an orbital project, which is why he’s working with NASA. “Who cares who pays for it,” he asks, “as long as we get a safe, affordable vehicle?”—BILL SWEETMAN

HOTEL SHUTTLE SpaceDev’s orbital vehicle will be a scaled-up version of NASA’s X-34. It will take off vertically, reaching 17,500 mph on its way to orbit, and then land on a runway.

LIFTOFF Inexpensive hybrid boosters will be expendable.

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★★★★★ ★★★★★ system, housed in the core, will inflate the structure with breathable air, expanding it from 15 feet in diameter to 22 feet. Power comes from solar panels that unfold from the rigid bulkheads at each end of the module. Each bulkhead also houses an airlock and a docking adaptor. Astronauts arriving later enter a shirtsleeve environment in which they can go to work unpacking removable panels, equipment and supplies from the core to create three levels of living and working space. A docked rocket engine called a multi-directional propulsion bus (MDPB) will eventually allow the station—the first one is tentatively called CSS [Commercial Space Station] Skywalker—to maneuver within Earth’s orbit or even leave it, for, say, a trip to the moon. This basic architecture was created by NASA senior engineer William Schneider, in an effort that began in 1997. The design won numerous converts at NASA, with then-

building and launching the actual modules into space, have yet to be made. But here again, he plans to spend carefully, hiring rides on relatively low-cost commercial SpaceX and Russian Dneper launch vehicles, and sourcing off-the-shelf components from reasonably priced vendors whenever possible. It’s this careful approach to spending, honed on countless construction projects, that Bigelow feels sets him apart from NASA, which relies on high-priced defense contractors. After TransHab was cancelled, Bigelow bought the exclusive development rights from NASA and entered into a Space Act Agreement with the agency to allow him to work with former TransHab engineers still employed there. And he tracked down Schneider, by then retired from NASA and teaching at Texas A&M University. Schneider was surprised when he got the call, but he agreed to see for himself what Bigelow was up to. The

BIG PLANS Bigelow Aerospace’s unprepossessingly corporate identity camouflages the bold undertakings within [far left]. The elusive Robert Bigelow pursues his childhood vision with unmistakably grown-up determination [left].

administrator Daniel Goldin calling it a major breakthrough. For a while, it was seriously considered as an alternative to the International Space Station (ISS) Habitation Module under development at the time by Boeing. But TransHab was cancelled without explanation in 2000, before it could produce flight-ready hardware. Its demise is an example of what Bigelow sees as NASA’s monumental inefficiency. Here was a perfectly good program to develop a technology that was less expensive and tougher than conventional designs, but, as far

modules Bigelow has on display, though empty except for floors and structural elements, had their intended effect on Schneider. “And god,” he recalls now, “when I walked in here, boom! It was mind-boggling, because this is the vision that I really wanted. Here’s these things, all sitting there, and of course some of them are mock-ups, but the rest were inflatable, and I said, ‘Man, he’s serious. He’s not playing around.’ ”These days Schneider and his former TransHab colleagues visit the plant every few weeks to provide guidance to Bigelow’s engineers. For Schneider, it’s a

BIGELOW SAYS HE STANDS A BETTER-THANEVEN CHANCE OF LOSING A BIG CHUNK OF HIS FORTUNE ON THIS $500-MILLION GAMBLE. as Bigelow could tell, it got axed for purely political reasons. Bigelow thinks he can do better with a traditional business model. “I’ve put together many, many projects involving a lot of money and a lot of people,” he says, and unlike NASA,“I’m used to doing things pretty darn well on budget and pretty darn well on time.” Although he’s circumspect about just how he will spend his $500-million commitment, it is clear that he budgets carefully. His expenditures so far run only into the tens of millions, mostly for building the Bigelow Aerospace physical plant, for patents obtained from NASA, and for building and testing prototypes of space station modules. His biggest outlays, for 56

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chance to follow through on some unfinished business. “It’s kind of like you want to see your child grow up to maturity,” he says, “not be stopped in its adolescence.” THE REAL WORK AT BIGELOW AEROSPACE GOES ON IN BUILDING A,

with its expansive shop floor. Here machinists and technicians turn out aluminum parts on state-of-the art computer-driven milling machines and assemble them into test modules. On a recent day, a welding torch flared in the darkness of a full-scale mock-up being converted into a vacuum chamber for testing the inflation of modules under reduced atmospheric pressure.

Bigelow patrols the shop floor, wearing his customary colorful shirt and spotless white sneakers. Even to many of his longtime employees he is known as Mr. Bigelow, yet he’s often greeted with smiles and good-natured ribbing. He’s involved in every aspect of the operation, keeping a close eye on the work of the machinists and signing off on all of his engineers’ designs. He has to feel with his own hands the heft of each precision part, to hear the satisfying click of them fitting together. His reluctance to deal in intangibles extends to other areas as well. He has never sent an e-mail. “E-mail,” he says, “is a very sloppy medium. It’s not pristine at all.” Instead he prefers phone calls or the physical contact of faxes and letters. Last summer, rather than endure abstract discussion in a meeting on whether to use the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for vibration tests, he abruptly took the entire meeting to the air-

FREE-FALL AMENITIES YOUR GUIDE TO ROBERT BIGELOW’S INFLATABLE SPACE HOTEL 1

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When launched and inflated, the 22-by-45-foot hotel module [left] can be easily arranged in many configurations. Here, the top level (1) is reserved for lounging. The middle level (2) will hold sleeping areas and perhaps a work space. The bottom level (3) holds bathrooms and water recycling equipment. Airlocks (4) permit vehicle docking or access to other modules. The hull has three key layers [right]: a membrane to keep air in, a woven restraint layer to protect the membrane, and an 18-inchthick shield of alternating woven graphite composite and foam to protect against orbital debris.

port and put the flabbergasted team on his private jet. They flew to Pasadena to evaluate the facility firsthand, had lunch, and flew back to North Las Vegas to continue the meeting. And then there was the case of the clevis fittings. During one design meeting, engineers Edwin Lardizabal and Jay Ingham and project manager Brian Aiken found themselves arguing with Schneider and a visiting NASA engineer about the size of the fittings holding the restraint-layer straps. The restraint layer is perhaps the most crucial part of the three layers of fabric that make up the Nautilus’s hull. The hull’s innermost layer, a plastic film called the air bladder, keeps the internal atmosphere from escaping into space, but it’s up to the restraint layer to ensure that the air bladder keeps its shape and doesn’t burst. It consists of a web of interwoven straps made of high-strength fiber. The straps attach to the bulkheads at either end of the module by means of clevis fittings and rollers. Lardizabal, Schneider and the others couldn’t agree on whether to keep the 1/8-inch diameter rollers they had already decided on, or up the size to 3/16 for added safety. Finally Bigelow had had enough. As Franklin E. Gibbs, Bigelow’s patent attorney, recalled later: “We’ve got a room full of engineers, and everybody is worried about figuring it to the nth degree, and Robert just says, ‘Wait. Build it. Let’s see what it does.’ ” Bigelow called the manufacturing manager up from the shop floor and told him to get to work: “Build both of them. I want a dozen of these ready after lunch.” By the time the meeting reconvened, a dozen shiny rollers of each type

IMPACT SHIELD RESTRAINT LAYER

AIR BLADDER

the straps must be woven through and around the aluminum frames of the windows. This presents a particular challenge on the third-scale test module that will be launched on a SpaceX rocket this November. On the third-scale module, there will be no room for the window, so the window installation procedure is one of the areas on which Lardizabal and his colleagues seek the advice of the former TransHab engineers. The matter of how the MicroMeteoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD) shield will fold for launch and then deploy in space is another. Composed of five layers of graphite-fiber composites separated by foam spacers, the MMOD is the outermost section of Nautilus’s hull. Schneider’s crew’s original TransHab design had more stopping power than did aluminum three inches thick. Ground-testing of Bigelow’s MMOD has shown that it can stop impacts by 5/8-inch-diameter aluminum pellets fired at it at 6.4 kilometers a second, several times as fast as a rifle bullet. No rigid spacecraft design can match this performance, and it’s one of the reasons Nautilus has an expected life span of at least 15 years. But getting the MMOD to fold properly for launch is a major engineering headache. “It’s challenging because it is such a robust and thick material,” Lardizabal says. Lardizabal admits that he and his colleagues may not be able to overcome these and other formidable obstacles that will arise before Bigelow’s $500-million commitment runs out in 2015. He puts the project’s chances for success at 60 percent. “This will be the first time,” he explains. “That’s the problem. You can’t foresee everything. Just like when we (CONTINUED ON PAGE 87)

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awaited evaluation. The verdict? Go with the safer 3/16-inchers. On this day, Bigelow checks up on Lardizabal and two of his assistants working in the assembly area of the shop floor, installing the straps in question. Lardizabal, a talkative Filipino who was laid off from Boeing after 9/11, grins at Bigelow’s approach: “It’s the boss!” Bigelow joins him beside an inflated quarter-scale module whose crisscrossing restraint-layer straps lie exposed like the musculature of a flayed horse. He watches intently as Lardizabal picks up a pair of loose straps dangling from their clevis fittings at one end of the module and lays them across the module’s side. This is how the outer layer of straps will go on now, he explains to Bigelow. A couple inches apart, instead of the previous, wider configuration. It seems like a small detail, but the minutiae of how the straps of the restraint layer will fit together is critical. Especially since

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AND FINALLY, I’D LIKE TO THANK MY HIGH SCHOOL PHYSICS TEACHER . . . THE SCI-TECH OSCAR WINNERS WON’T BE GETTING TEARY-EYED ON PRIME TIME. BUT FOR SPECIALEFFECTS LOVERS, THESE TECHIE BRAINIACS ARE HOLLYWOOD’S LITTLE-HERALDED HEROES

BY JAMES VLAHOS | PHOTOGRAPH BY HOLLY LINDEM

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F R O M T O P : C O U RT E S Y A L A N K A P L E R ; C O U RT E S Y T W E N T I E T H C E N T U RY F O X

Each February at a modest, Joan Rivers–free ceremony in Los Angeles, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestows a cherished set of honors: the Scientific and Technical Awards. These aren’t the Oscars of Tom, Brad, Charlize and Nicole, and that’s OK—let the jocks ride the homecoming float while the whiz kids play Dungeons & Dragons in the basement. Who needs superficial red-carpet glory when you’re leading nothing less than a revolution in filmmaking? Call it Revenge of the Nerds V: Brainiacs Take Hollywood. In the past decade, the effects budget for a typical blockbuster has ballooned from $5 million to $50 million. As digital effects (DFX) have become more complex and accessible, the barriers between fanciful computer-animated films and ostensibly realistic ones have crumbled. DFX now allow filmmakers to not only manipulate reality, but to build it from scratch. “If film directors are painters, the awards are for the people who supply the brushes,” says Richard Edlund, chair of the Sci-Tech committee. An invention must be novel to win. Depending on how substantial its influence, it can be awarded a certificate, a plaque or, most glorious of all, an Oscar statuette. The Academy honors technologies rather than specific films and doesn’t favor the latest innovations but instead the ones that have proved themselves in the industry. Historically, the awards have gone to mechanical breakthroughs (lenses, films, set lights), but since 2002, digital technology has held the edge. The Academy has no fixed number of honors to allot, no specific categories like Costume Design or Best Picture. They may pass out one Sci-Tech Oscar or five, laud three computer-animation programs or none. Here, we focus on five key technologies from the 2004 contestants. A couple won awards, the others didn’t [see page 62], but together they tell the story of filmmaking’s latest evolution. So join the Academy in a Sally Field–style salute: We like you, Sci-Tech stars. We really like you. ILLUSTRATIONS BY STEPHEN ROUNTREE

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CUE THE CLIMATE CONTROL! TECHNOLOGY: Volumetric Effects NOMINEE: Alan Kapler | Digital Domain Storm CREDITS: The Day after Tomorrow, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, XXX

The Day after Tomorrow

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descending in days?—but the climatic havoc is sublime. Grapefruits of hail bombard Tokyo. Floods ravage New York. Out-twistering Twister and out-storming The Perfect Storm, the movie wowed audiences as it established a new benchmark for disaster on film. The Zeus behind much of the mayhem was Sci-Tech Award winner Alan Kapler. As a technical director at Venice, California–based special-effects house Digital Domain, he invented Storm, software that aids designers in generating some of the trickiest visual effects in the business: volumetrics. “Things with hard and defined surfaces, like monsters, are fairly easy to represent in a computer using geometry,” Kapler says. “But wispier things like clouds, mist and water are incredibly difficult.” Storm excels at rendering these ethereal forms with high-resolution depth, shadowing and lighting. The program also helps to simulate natural events such as avalanches—like the one in the 2002 Vin Diesel action fest XXX—with a real-world mix of control and chaos. The result is bigger thrills for moviegoers, and fewer ulcers for effects gurus. “Everything I do in computer graphics tends to be nature-based,” Kapler says. For fun, he creates programs to generate seashells, snowflakes and leaves; between movies, he sets off in his van for northwestern Canada or Alaska to hike and fish. In The Day after Tomorrow, his passion for natural phenomena paid off. To produce the flood sequences, the Digital Domain crew shot 40,000 photographs of Manhattan streets and buildings, assembled them digitally, and then used the company’s hydrodynamic simulation program to bombard the city with the electronic equivalent of Noah’s flood. And that, in some ways, was the easy part. The key to making the big flow believable, Kapler says, was the little details—whitewater surging forward, tendrils of liquid exploding skyward, thousands of droplets of spray and mist. To sketch out this aquatic action, the effects team ran “particle” simulations, generating flows of dots that moved semi-randomly, with parameters to govern water current and velocity and to mimic the effects of wind and gravity. The results were then plugged into Storm, which POPULAR SCIENCE MARCH 2005

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SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED TECHNOLOGY: Compositing Software NOMINEE: David Simons| Adobe After Effects CREDITS: The Aviator, The Incredibles, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Photoshop, but for moving imagery. Before After Effects, the compositing process was handled on supercomputers that cost $200,000-plus. Priced at around $1,000, After Effects democratized the business. Soon after the program’s release, CoSA was snapped up by Aldus, which then merged with Adobe Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Systems. Over the next decade, the power of desktop machines NNALS OF LIVING-ROOM INGENUITY, PART ONE— exploded, and today supercom1990: Providence, Rhode Island. Four recent Brown puter compositors are in decline. University graduates establish CoSA, a multimedia For Sky Captain, After Effects company, in their apartment. Subsisting largely on doughnuts helped Conran pull off cinematic and Vietnamese takeout, they work around the clock and, in thrift-store chic: a pieced-together 1993, release After Effects. The revolutionary software helps look inspired by Technicolor serito bring “compositing”—the ability to marry separately als of the 1930s and ’40s, film created live-action and computer-generated visual elements— noir, comic books and vintage within the grasp of desktop-computer users. sci-fi. Early on, Sky Captain (Jude Annals of Living-Room Ingenuity, Part Two—1995: SherLaw) flies down a Manhattan man Oaks, California. Fledgling filmmaker Kerry Conran, skyscraper canyon dodging ’bots inspired by After Effects, blacks out his windows with alugone bad. The close-ups were minum foil, jury-rigs a bluescreen studio, and films a short shot on a giant bluescreenabout New York under serious robot attack. Eight scripts and backed soundstage, with Law in nine years later, Paramount Pictures releases Conran’s Sky a model of a P-40 fighter. The Captain and the World of Tomorrow, produced with the help robots were computer-animated, of the Sci-Tech Award–nominated program. the street-level details 3-D digital When you’re watching an effects-intensive movie, what models, and the background a you’re seeing at any given moment is a patchwork quilt of 2-D collage of modern and archiindividually produced visuals. A single frame may have been val photography. The entire movie built from up to 500 distinct components, from filmed sets and was produced this way—no performances to CG characters and landscapes. Compositing locations, no sets, minimal props. software is the tool for assembling all the pieces; it’s like After Effects assembles and also manipulates: stretching, shrinking, and cloning elements; causing objects to glow, disappear, or morph; and simulat1 2 ing explosions and lightning. It is an artistic tool as much as it is a mechanical one. Using the program, says Sky Captain compositing 3 4 supervisor Stephen Lawes, “was akin to A CG streetscape (1), photographic 2-D background (2) and bluescreened oil painting.” actor (3) are combined to create a final scene (4).

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F R O M T O P : C O U R T E S Y R E B E C C A S I M O N S ; C O U R T E S Y PA R A M O U N T ( 5 ) ; C O U R T E S Y D I G I TA L D O M A I N

Storm software uses 3-D pixels called voxels to create the billowing, edgeless forms found in nature.

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transformed each particle into a cluster of larger 3-D pixels called voxels. This alchemy is the software’s essential breakthrough. Computers can handle only a few hundred thousand particles before overloading; Storm’s voxels conjure an image with billions of apparent particles. Kapler didn’t invent voxels, but he devised the memorysaving compression routines that first allowed them to be used on the scale necessary for big-screen effects. He also made Storm userfriendly. After the artist feeds a few rough instructions into the computer, it uses Kapler’s algorithms to create a seeming infinity of interconnected droplets, each with its own color, shape and internal movement. And he made Storm intelligent, capable of determining where each voxel of water stands in relation to the light source and which other voxels stand in the way. In The Day after Tomorrow floods, water in the main channel appears dark, churning whitewater semiopaque, and airborne mist virtually transparent. Manually making such lighting and shadowing determinations for each water speck would be like relocating the Sahara with tweezers. All of this illustrates the irony of visual effects—that some of the simplest things in nature are some of the most complex to synthesize. “We’ve spent our whole lives exposed to water, snow, smoke and dust,” Kapler says. “If they aren’t shaped right, don’t move right, or the shadows aren’t correct, your brain sends you a subconscious message: bad special effect.”

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Blade: Trinity

ATTACK OF THE 3-D CLONES

FROM TOP: COURTESY NEW LINE PRODUCTIONS; COURTESY MM STUDIOS (2); COURTESY NEW LINE PRODUCTIONS (3)

TECHNOLOGY: 3-D Scanning NOMINEE: Dirk Callaerts [left], Mark Proesman| Eyetronics Shapeware CREDITS: Blade: Trinity, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life

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ITY THE EVIL VAMPIRES OF

the horror flick Blade: Trinity. In the film, released late last year and starring Wesley Snipes, their skin boils, they are shot and stabbed, they turn into skeletons and explode into ashes. Blade’s vampires were living actors, with computeranimated clones substituted in for the many gory death sequences. For the movie’s computer artists to design the film’s 50-odd vampires from scratch, and to make each of them match an individual actor precisely, would have been practically impossible. Instead, Joe Conmy, Blade: Trinity’s visual-effects producer, made 3-D scans of all the actors using technology from Sci-Tech Award nominee Eyetronics. The resulting “digital doubles” still needed to be computer-animated before they were able to move onscreen, but Conmy estimates that the head start provided by the 3-D scans

saved the team thousands of hours of design work. Scanning allows you to quickly transport something from the real world to the digital one; the process is similar to using a flatbed scanner to make digital dupes of photographs or slides, but it works for 3-D objects. Ubiquitous in modern film production, the technique is used to decorate digital sets with realisticlooking art and furniture, to create CG characters based on handcrafted models, and even to construct virtual terrain derived from realworld landscapes. First-generation 3-D scanners are large and cumbersome. Actors have to be brought into a scanning facility (not easy to coordinate when working with Alist stars), or the equipment has to be built onto a semi and transported to the set. The Eyetronics system is handheld and portable. It consists of an off-the-shelf

digital camera—a 6.4-megapixel Canon EOS 10D— mounted to one end of a metal frame. On the other end is a flash, which projects a fine grid of light. Holding the frame, the operator directs the lens and the flash toward the scanning subject. Beamed onto a wall, the grid would be flat, but around a face or object, the lines contour. You take a picture, recording the warped mesh, which the Eyetronics software translates into a set of x, y and z coordinates. (Rigged with a video camera instead of a still one, the system can also be used for facialperformance capture.) After a dozen shots have been taken from multiple angles, Eyetronics assembles the data to create a single 3-D model or, in the case of Blade: Trinity, 55 3-D models that could be dressed, manipulated, made to perform fantastical feats—and to die horrible deaths—at will.

Computerized stunt doubles created with 3-D scanning technology allowed Blade: Trinity’s vampires to burn and disintegrate seamlessly. POPULAR SCIENCE MARCH 2005

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THE DOT MATRIX

ON FEBRUARY 12, THE ACADEMY HONORED A DOZEN SCI-TECH BREAKTHROUGHS

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TECHNOLOGY: Motion Capture NOMINEE: Julian Morris | Vicon Motion Systems CREDITS: The Polar Express, Spider-Man 2, Titanic

OSCARS Horst Burbella, inventor of the Technocrane telescoping camera crane

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Jean-Marie Lavalou, David Samuelson and Alain Masseron for the remotely operated Louma Camera Crane

PLAQUES Lindsay Arnold, Guy Griffiths, David Hodson, Charlie Lawrence and David Mann for the Cineon Digital Film compositing workstation

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Gyula Mester and Keith Edwards for their design contributions to the Technocrane

CERTIFICATES Greg Cannom and Wesley Wofford for a silicone material used to create fake flesh Jerry Cotts and Anthony Seaman for the ultra-compact Satellight-X HMI Softlight Steven E. Boze for the DNF 001 multi-band digital audio noise suppressor Christopher Hicks and Dave Betts for the Cedar DNS 1000 multi-band digitalnoise suppressor Nelson Tyler for the Gyroplatform stabilizing camera mount for boats Julian Morris, Michael Birch, Paul Smyth and Paul Tate for Vicon motion capture John Greaves, Ned Phipps, Antonie van den Bogert and William Hayes for motioncapture cameras Nels Madsen, Vaughn Cato, Matthew Madden and Bill Lorton for biometric motioncapture software Alan Kapler for Storm volumetrics software

A hall of fame of past Sci-Tech Oscar winners is at popsci.com/oscars04.

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The Polar Express

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O MAKE THE MOVIE VERSION OF CHRIS VAN ALLSBURG’S

best-selling book The Polar Express, director Robert Zemeckis knew that standard computer animation wouldn’t cut it. Too cartoonish. Neither would live-action filming. Too restricted by reality. To tell the story of a boy’s Christmas Eve train ride to the North Pole, Zemeckis envisioned wild action set against a backdrop of “moving paintings”—the book’s lush illustrations brought to life. And so he decided to make a CG film based entirely on the performances of human actors, a movie starring realistic humans who were CG from head to toe. He wanted digital flesh and blood. Zemeckis and digital-effects supervisor Alberto Menache turned to Vicon Motion Systems, whose pioneering achievements with “motion capture” have won a Sci-Tech Award. Zemeckis wanted a setup with the unprecedented ability to capture entire actors (faces and bodies simultaneously) as they moved around a stage. The technology wouldn’t be used just as a special-effects enhancement in a particular scene but as the basis for an entire movie. “We were risking a lot on this idea, and we weren’t sure if it was going to work,” Menache says. “Vicon said, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ ” The company’s technology, which dates back to the early 1980s, was initially used to analyze the gait of cerebral palsy patients. Vicon released the film industry’s first motioncapture system in the mid-1990s, and since then it has been used to help generate CG-human stunt shots in many movies, including Titanic and Spider-Man 2, and to generate monsters like those in the recent films The Hulk and The Mummy. For The Polar Express, Tom Hanks and other actors donned uni-

More than 200 reflective markers were used to record Hanks’s movements for later animation.

F R O M T O P : C O U R T E S Y W I L L W E N Z E L ; C O U R T E S Y WA R N E R B R O S . E N T. ( 3 )

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THE ENVELOPE

tards fitted with 80 reflective markers; an additional 152 markers were glued to their faces. Performances for the entire film were captured on a 10-foot-by-10-foot stage flanked by 72 Vicon cameras, more than twice as many as in any previous system. Rings around each of the lenses beamed infrared light, and as the actors performed, the reflections from their markers were recorded at 120 frames per second and fed into a computer network. Vicon then assembled 3-D data sets of moving points, providing a detailed framework for subsequent computer animation. To enable natural interplay, Zemeckis wanted as many as four actors to perform at once. This meant that the reflections of up to 926 markers would have to be captured, each with an accuracy of about one millimeter. Vicon’s iQ software was trained to discern discrete bodies from an overlapping flood of points, like spotting constellations in a sky full of stars. The finished motioncapture data sets were then handed off to artists, who ran the information through a series of simulators and animated it to create muscle movements, skin, clothing and hair until, voilà, they had computer-generated Hanks as, among other characters, a little boy, a train conductor and Santa Claus. The finished movie had the storybook look and breathtaking action that Zemeckis had sought, and at times, the characters were unnervingly real. At other moments, though, their faces looked gray and lifeless. “The results were very good, but we had a lot of volume,” Menache explains. “If we had one character to work on, it would be absolutely perfect, but we had 28. We will definitely be trying this again.”

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STEADY SHOOTER TECHNOLOGY: Camera Stabilization NOMINEE: David Grober | Perfect Horizon CREDITS: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Step into Liquid, Blue Crush, Die Another Day

Step into Liquid

F R O M T O P : C O U R T E S Y A . FA R B E R ; R O B E R T B R O W N ; C O U R T E S Y S T E V E WAT E R F O R D

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OR THE 2003 SURF DOCUMENTARY STEP INTO LIQUID, Director Dana Brown set out to record the best footage ever of big-wave surfing at Cortez Bank, 100 miles off the shore of California. The results were arresting: Witness the likes of Ken “Skindog” Collins ripping down the faces of 65-foot giants. Actionsports eye candy? Sure. But it was filmed with an elegance approaching that of poetry—no mean feat, considering that the camera boat was riding the same swells. Capturing steady shots required fistfuls of Dramamine and an innovative, Sci-Tech Award–nominated camera mount known as Perfect Horizon. Even in filmmaking’s digital age, many problems must still be solved mechanically, with gears, grease, bolts, cables, and years of an obscure inventor’s passion. Need to show racehorses charging into the camera? Use the Sci-Tech Oscar-winning Technocrane, which swivels, swoops, and extends 50 feet. Need a shot from a motorcycle at 150 mph? Try nominee Doggicam System’s Sparrow Head, an ultra-steady, wirelessly operated remote camera head. Perfect Horizon is the brainchild of David Grober, a veteran marine-production coordinator for films and the founder of a company called Motion Picture Marine. “Throughout the years, I saw that it would have been really helpful to have a small, easily transportable camera-stabilization system,” he says. Some earlier devices employed gyros to counteract aquatic motion but also tended to fight intentional movements by the camera operator, and systems powered by hydraulics were heavy and messy. In 1999, after years of tinkering, Grober released his own invention. His key breakthroughs: electronic sensors to detect motion and a computer to calculate the appropriate stabilizing reactions. The core of the unit is a gimbal that swivels nimbly from side to side and forward and backward so that no matter what happens

below it, the camera platform remains level with the horizon. Finessing the twin electric motors that power the mount’s correctional movements was Grober’s biggest challenge. “If you have any sort of backlash, you’ll see it onscreen,” he says. Perfect Horizon has evolved substantially since its debut. The latest version is waterproof, housed in carbon fiber and aluminum, and lightweight (30 pounds, versus the 130 of the original). It can be perched atop a tripod with the camera mounted directly above, or be suspended beneath a crane; the camera is controlled as it would normally be, with full pan and tilt abilities. Perfect Horizon’s sea legs have also proved effective on land. It has been deployed on cars (Seabiscuit) and golf carts (Spanglish)—as well as on boats (Die Another Day) and jet skis (the upcoming Hitch). Perhaps the most imaginative use was for a scene in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in

Perfect Horizon lets filmmakers get smooth footage, even when shooting the world’s biggest waves.

which Harry takes a manic journey on board a triple-decker bus. For shots of the interior havoc—sliding beds, a swinging chandelier—filmmakers built a full-scale model of the bus and positioned it on top of a swaying platform. Inside, the camera was placed on a Perfect Horizon mount. With the visual perspective level, audiences were able to grasp that the bus was tipping back and forth. “That was the only way they could do that shot,” Grober says.

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A post-9/11, post-anthrax funding boom has made the nation’s “hot zones” a the hottest research areas around. Is this a a a good thing?

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By Jeffrey Rothfeder Photographs by Brent Humphreys

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FOG OF WAR Ramon Flick, director of the Biosafety Level 4 lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch, suits up for a date with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.

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EFORE ENTERING HIS LAB, RAMON FLICK

puts on a 10-pound plastic space suit with a bubble helmet, a double pair of rubber gloves sealed to the suit at the wrists, and boots. The 35-year-old director of the Biosafety Level 4 lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston walks past a chemical shower and into the lab space, a 2,000square-foot sterilized white room. An airtight door slams shut behind him. Underneath the floor of this room, in contrast to the stillness of the lab above, is a mosaic of pipes that noisily suck out air through doubled-up HEPA filters engineered to trap microorganisms as small as any yet discovered. Next to the pipes are a series of drains that monitor and sterilize each drop of wastewater leaving the lab before channeling it to sewers. The lab is negatively pressurized; even if there was a leak in the door seal when contamination occurred inside the room, air would rush into the room, not out from polluted areas. Flick attaches an air tube to his suit. It blows up and stabilizes at about 70°F. Under the biosafety hood, Flick chemically freezes cells infected with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus and examines the deadly bugs through an electron microscope. The virus, which breeds in livestock and is carried by ticks, kills hundreds of people a year, mostly slaughter-yard

But that’s not what Flick told the National Institutes of Health when he received the grant to fund his research, because that’s not what U.S. agencies want to hear. “They ask for specific goals in the direction of biodefense,” he says. “So I, of course, said that my aim was to be sure we’re prepared for Crimean-Congo terror. I am interested in developing the vaccine that they want, just perhaps for a different anticipated purpose. “I’m fortunate—that’s probably not the best word—that my life’s work has coincided with what the policymakers believe is a mortal threat.” VIEWED BROADLY, THE ACTIVITIES AT UTMB’S CONTAINMENT LAB

are perhaps the most vivid illustration of the lockstep relationship between the nation’s infectious-disease scientists and the current U.S. bioweapons effort. In 2001, biodefenserelated research consumed 2 percent of the budget of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the nation’s primary support arm for infectious-disease research. By 2005, that figure jumped to 40 percent. The agency will dispense $1.65 billion this year in research grants to study those germs that the agency contends are most likely to be used in a bioattack—deadly, exotic bugs such as Lassa fever, Ebola and Crimean-Congo. That’s an eye-opening amount of money, outdistancing the funds the agency has set aside for HIV research ($1.5 billion) and influenza ($58 million). The perceived threat of bioterrorism has provided justifi-

“ONE DISGRUNTLED OR MALICIOUS EMPLOYEE AMONG THE THOUSANDS BEING HIRED, AND THE U.S. COULD SUFFER IN WAYS IT HASN’T SEEN BEFORE.” workers and shepherds in the Middle East, central Asia, Africa, Turkey and Greece. The first symptoms—high fever, headache, vomiting, and pain throughout the lower torso— are followed three to five days later by internal bleeding from multiple organs and hemorrhages in the hands and feet. Thirty percent of those infected will die. “Of course you’re nervous at the beginning,” Flick says. “But as you work with the viruses, it gets routine, concentrating on the experiment takes over, and the only limiting factor is not your nerves but how soon you’ll need to use the bathroom.” Flick’s experiments and those of his Galveston colleagues— including C.J. Peters, the veteran virus hunter who inspired the book The Hot Zone—target a breed of germs with a particularly intractable reproduction mechanism. CrimeanCongo, Ebola, Marburg virus and their ilk are composed solely of RNA, the chemical that converts the genetic information in DNA into instructions to make proteins. To design an antidote to Crimean-Congo, Flick must first create a DNA copy of the RNA virus, alter the germ to make it less virulent, and then restore the virus to its RNA form. The trick is to change the virus enough to render it harmless, but not enough to kill the virus entirely. Flick must incapacitate Crimean-Congo to create a vaccine, not destroy it. Because this borderline is thin and poorly understood, a vaccine is still a distant hope. Flick’s motivation, though, is uncomplicated: He wants to eradicate a disease that kills hundreds of people a year worldwide, particularly in communities that get no publicity for their plight. 66

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cation for the Manhattan Project–like urgency and cost of the biodefense program, but NIAID director Anthony Fauci argues that the effort could ultimately generate significant secondary benefits as well. As he told a congressional committee in 2002, the program could lead to the development of a series of broad-spectrum antibiotics—drugs that are effective against many bacteria, including those that are more common in North America. The research will also almost certainly engender a greater understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms of the immune system, findings that will help in treating and diagnosing cancers, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and certain neurological diseases, Fauci added. But as the program expands, so does the controversy surrounding it. A growing number of scientists and biodefense policy analysts charge that the plan dangerously skews the nation’s research priorities, myopically emphasizing experimentation on microbes that can potentially be made into bioweapons at the expense of other, perhaps more troublesome disease threats. “If it’s not bioweapons,” Peters says, “it’s not on the table.” Moreover, the expansion of bioterror research has occurred so quickly that it may grow hard to police, providing opportunities for the very terrorists we’re defending ourselves against. And perhaps worst of all, the aggressiveness of some of the research may veer uncomfortably close to violating international bioweapons covenants, possibly encouraging other countries to do the same. “In the rush to protect ourselves, we’re putting ourselves in more danger,” warns Mark Wheelis, a bioweapons policy specialist at the University of California at Davis.

Point taken. Within months of the first letter, dated September 18, the administration hurriedly lobbied for new funds for a comprehensive bioterror plan that included a building spree to erect the equivalent of about six football fields in additional biosafety laboratories, medical research grants to study the deadliest foreign bugs, and special incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines for such germs as botulism, plague and Ebola. In May 2002, Congress approved the first expenditures: $4.6 billion, divvied up among more than a dozen federal agencies. In all, five times that amount has been allocated since then, according to a study by the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. NIAID’s budget for biodefense research is now 40 times what it was in 2001. Few experts deny that a bioterror threat exists. In a 1987 study, former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Louis Giuffrida estimated that it would take eight grams of anthrax spores to inflict the same number of casualties as a 5,000-gram nuclear device or 800,000 grams of nerve gas. Biological agents are tiny; microbes can be smuggled into the country by overnight mail. What’s more, the know-how to weaponize bioagents is widely available, with upward of 200 scientists from the former Soviet Union’s bioweapons program unaccounted for. “Biological warfare is too good a weapon system to ignore,” says Bill Patrick, who was chief of product development for the pre-1969 American bioweapons program and is now a government biodefense consultant. “Bioweapons are easier to get and hide than nuclear or chemical PEER PURVIEW “I don’t have [weapons] and potentially more concerns about us having a secret offensive biological-warfare prodisruptive in small, targeted hits.” gram,” says veteran virus hunter Yet although it may be possible C.J. Peters. “I’m concerned that for terrorists to obtain anthrax, everybody else thinks we do.” plague or Ebola through microbe banks or rogue nations, weaponizing germs is a delicate process that requires access to proprietary thousands of people at once—by depositing the anthrax into equipment. “It’s not that easy to release biological agents so that air vents at multiple sites, for instance, instead of announcing they are infective,” says Dean Wilkening, director of the science its presence in crude envelopes dripping white powder—the program at Stanford University’s Center for International Secuauthorities weren’t prepared to stop him. The consensus rity and Cooperation. Thus far, only sophisticated government among policymakers is that the anthrax killer, most likely an research efforts with thousands of scientists, like the now insider in the nation’s then relatively small biodefense pro- defunct programs in the U.S. and the Soviet Union, have gram, was using the incident as a warning to the government succeeded in consistently developing bioweapons in large that it had better get serious about bioterror. enough amounts to be used in an attack. IT ALL BEGAN WITH THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS IN 2001. THE

aerosolized strain of the microbe used in the incidents was even more toxic and concentrated than the public has yet been told, according to government and private-sector experts closely connected with the FBI investigation, and its sheer potency sent shock waves throughout the Bush administration. It became obvious that had the terrorist chosen to assault

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FORM A DEADLY BIOTERROR LINEUP

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CRIMEAN-CONGO HEMORRHAGIC FEVER | Nairovirus Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever most often infects goats and sheep, but people can contract the virus from ticks or the bodily fluids of infected animals. The fever is marked by the quick onset of gruesome symptoms, beginning with nausea and headache, and followed by bleeding within internal organs and underneath the skin as the virus attacks the body’s tissues.

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ANTHRAX | Bacillus anthracis The anthrax bacterium has had a long and relatively successful history as a tool of bioterrorism. In World War I, German agents in the U.S. reportedly infected American battleground-bound horses with it. In 2001, a series of contaminated letters killed five people in the U.S. and paralyzed the postal service. Anthrax spores are hardy, surviving for long periods in almost any environment.

BOTULISM | Clostridium botulinum Botulinum toxin, produced by common soildwelling bacteria, is one of the most poisonous known substances—as little as 100 nanograms can kill an adult by disrupting nerve impulses. The U.S. sees sporadic outbreaks of foodborne botulism, usually caused by eating improperly canned foods, but terrorists could intentionally contaminate the food supply with the toxin. GLANDERS | Burkholderia mallei In a single year in the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s bioweapons program reportedly produced more than 2,000 tons of the bacteria. Ordinarily, glanders resides in horses and rarely infects people. But if dispersed as an aerosol, it is a dangerous weapon. Even with antibiotic treatment, glanders has a 50 percent mortality rate; only a few bacteria are needed to trigger a deadly respiratory infection.

EBOLA | Filoviridae ebolavirus Thanks in part to sensationalist Hollywood fare such as Outbreak, but no doubt also because of the disease’s incredible near-80 percent mortality rate, Ebola is one of the best known and most feared bioterrorism threats. Since it first appeared in 1976, it has caused epidemics across Africa. Ebola effects a total meltdown of the victim’s internal organs. There is no vaccine.

SMALLPOX | Variola major One of the deadliest infectious diseases, smallpox killed some 500 million people in the 20th century alone before it was eradicated by a worldwide vaccination campaign. Today only frozen samples of the virus exist. If smallpox were ever to get out into the human population again, victims would experience a suffocating rash of pus-filled lesions, and as many as half of them would die.

TYPHOID FEVER | Salmonella typhi In the early 1900s, New York cook Typhoid Mary sickened at least 51 people by refusing to wash her hands before handling food. Since then, antibiotics and hygiene have largely eradicated the disease in the U.S. But typhoid fever remains common in the developing world, causing 16 million illnesses and 600,000 deaths every year. The bacterium is now resistant to most drugs.—SARAH GOFORTH

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pledge to make bioterror a priority, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a two-day meeting at which scientists from academia as well as the public and private sectors were asked to identify the most important research initiatives for NIAID’s new biodefense agenda. By the end of the meeting, the scientists had created three categories of potential bioterrorism agents—A, B and C—and had sorted microbes into the categories based on the level of bioterror threat they posed. The “A” list of germs was deemed to deserve the most attention as potential bioweapons and, in turn, would receive the lion’s share of research funding. In this “smoke-filled room,” as C.J. Peters jokingly calls it, six microbes made the cut: anthrax, smallpox, plague, botulism, tularemia and viral hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola and Marburg virus. “We came up with a list that we thought was absolutely rock-solid,” Peters says. “Every one of these agents has been weaponized by the U.S. or the Soviets or both. Each one of them is known to have been aerosolized, and each has a high morbidity rate and mortality rate.” But some researchers are surprised by the speed with which the CDC essentially set its docket for the next decade— especially since some of the bugs don’t seem to deserve the urgency given to them. For example, tularemia is indeed lethal, but the bacterium has infected few humans and responds well to antibiotics. “A two-day meeting two years ago has refocused the entire research community,” says a leading physician in infectious-disease research (who asked not to be identified). “Ninety percent of the projects we proposed got eliminated in that session.” That sentiment raises the question of whether the diseases on the CDC’s list should automatically be first in line for federal research funding. The flu, for instance, would make a poor bioweapon and thus is not a priority. Yet it kills 36,000 people a year in the U.S. and hospitalizes more than 200,000 others. More distressing, a particularly deadly strain of avian influenza is currently running unfettered through poultry farms in southeast Asia. It occasionally jumps to humans— last year it infected 45 people, killing 32 of them. In November, Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization’s director of the Western Pacific region, warned that a human pandemic based on the avian flu was “highly likely, unless intensified international efforts are made to take control of the situation.” Estimates for the death toll from such a pandemic begin at two million and reach, in the most extreme scenarios, well over 50 million. “We have no answer for the avian flu, and not enough money to find the answer,” says Robert Lamb, a professor of molecular biology at Northwestern University. “If it spreads to humans and kills people at the rate at which it is killing birds—80 percent—that, indeed, will be true bioterror.” MOST RESEARCHERS AGREE THAT THE U.S. HAS SUFFERED THROUGH

a shortage of Biosafety Level 4 laboratories, the highest-security research sites where scientists study the most lethal bugs— those that are contagious, fatal and untreatable. Only five such labs exist in the U.S. today, employing around 100 researchers (the precise number is classified). Yet the combination of the 300,000 additional square feet of BSL-4 facilities and the anticipated 20-fold increase in employees working there will offer access to germ warfare knowledge, recipes and agents to a hazardously large group of individuals. Although the FBI requires

F R O M T O P : L O N D O N S C H O O L O F H Y G I E N E & T R O P I C A L M E D I C I N E / P H O T O R E S E A R C H E R S ; A L F R E D PA S I E K A / P H O T O R E S E A R C H E R S ; D R . G A RY G A U G L E R / P H O T O R E S E A R C H E R S ; D E N N I S K U N K E L M I C R O S C O P Y; B S I P / P H O T O R E S E A R C H E R S ; E Y E O F S C I E N C E / P H O T O R E S E A R C H E R S ; P R . C O U RT I E U / P H O T O R E S E A R C H E R S

USUAL SUSPECTS THESE SEVEN BACTERIAL AND VIRAL AGENTS

IN FEBRUARY 2002, IN RESPONSE TO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S

BIOTERROR BOOM Flick at work in Galveston. Though it’s only a year old, by 2008 this BSL-4 lab will be joined by a $167-million facility the size of two football fields.

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“IF IT SPREADS TO HUMANS AND KILLS AT THE RATE IT’S BEEN KILLING BIRDS—THAT WILL BE TRUE BIOTERROR.”

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an extensive background methods and the possible check for any researcher means to steal something working at a BSL-4 facility, out of the labs,” says U.C. Richard Ebright, a professor Davis’s Wheelis. “One wellof biochemistry at Rutgers placed graduate student with University, asserts that “the connections to Al Qaeda or CDC, or any government who defects to Syria, one agency, is not in a position disgruntled or malicious emto manage such an explosion of activity.” ployee among the thousands of new people being hired, and With multiple federal agencies handling such a vast net- the U.S. could suffer in ways it hasn’t seen before.” work of labs and deadly bioagents, it’s inevitable that some sloppiness will pollute the system. In late 2002, the General THERE IS NO CLEAR ROAD MAP DESCRIBING HOW TO CREATE A Accounting Office chastised the CDC for “significant man- vaccine or antidote for a deadly microbe. The work is trial and agement weaknesses” in overseeing shipments of “select error. In Ramon Flick’s case, once he has created a copy of agents”—the 42 most lethal microbes and toxins, many of Crimean-Congo in DNA form, he modifies sections of its genetic which are included in the biodefense code in ways that he suspects may renagenda. According to the GAO, the der the virus impotent. He must change CDC’s databases lost track of certain the gene to cripple the virus. agents as they were distributed Unfortunately, not all mutations throughout the country, and the GAO make a germ benign. Researchers may charged the agency with doing a poor alter the genetic code of a pathogen in job of inspecting and approving biothe hopes of creating a vaccine, only to lab facilities for safety and security find that they have inadvertently controls. The CDC agreed with these designed a fresh germ, a more potent findings and said it was taking steps and deadly microbe. Does this constito improve its oversight. tute bioweapons development? The implications of such shortThat question is at the heart of a comings were illustrated last June recent NIH-backed experiment by Mark when researchers at Children’s HosBuller, a professor of molecular micropital & Research Center in Oakland, biology and immunology at St. Louis California, were exposed to anthrax University, that led to the creation of an DEVIL INSIDE C.J. Peters’s lab after a shipping error led them to ultravirulent strain of mousepox virus. in Galveston believe that they were working with Buller’s experiment had its roots in an dead rather than live bacteria. The Australian study published in February mix-up was discovered only when 2001, in which scientists spliced a formice, which the scientists were using in their experiments to eign gene into a mild mousepox virus in an attempt to produce develop an anthrax vaccine for children, began to die. The a sterilization treatment for mice. They picked the wrong gene: researchers were immediately given the antibiotic Cipro as a The pathogen the Australians created was so lethal that it killed precaution; none showed signs of infection. Officials from even those mice immunized against the virus. the CDC and the supplier of the bacterium said they were perBecause mousepox is a close relative of smallpox, the Ausplexed as to how this confusion occurred. tralian experiment raised the possibility that terrorists might But the deeper worry is that one of the new Level 4 labs will use its findings to engineer a super-smallpox bug that was unwittingly employ someone who intends harm. “In the rush unaffected by current vaccines. As a result, Buller and his team to protect ourselves, we’re creating a large population of peo- re-created the killer mousepox—in fact, they made a strain of ple who have expertise about microbes and dissemination mousepox that is probably twice as (CONTINUED ON PAGE 88)

➤ KLUDGING A KILLER AT THE HEIGHT OF WORLD WAR I, NATURE unleashed the most effective bioweapon ever known. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed more than 20 million people. Then it disappeared, leaving behind corpses and lingering anxieties. Why was this particular flu so severe? Would it recur? Could we stop it if it did? Last year, virologists from the University of Wisconsin investigated some of those questions. The 1918 strain’s genetic blueprint had been gleaned from RNA in the preserved lung tissues of American soldiers who had died of the disease. In the confines of a Canadian Biosafety

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HOW SCIENTISTS RE-CREATED ULTRA-LETHAL INFLUENZA

Level 4 lab, Yoshihiro Kawaoka and his team isolated two of the genes that they thought might be responsible for the 1918 flu’s deadliness. They inserted each gene into a relatively benign strain of flu, then exposed mice to these new viruses. The two genes they chose each code for a different protein on the surface of the flu virus. When mice were exposed to one of these lab-created überbugs, they contracted the massive lung infections and hemorrhages typical of the 1918 flu. The lethal ingredient turned out to be hemagglutinin, a protein that helps the virus attach to cells during infection. Some scientists

hailed the discovery, which they said will make it easier to identify early signs of an emerging superbug and prevent its return. Other, less sanguine scientists point out that the 1918 strain might never reappear and that re-creating it has put humanity at risk. Although most influenza strains are unlikely bioweapons, this extra-lethal one might be turned to that purpose. It now resides in a high-security lab in Madison, Wisconsin. One accident, or one lab worker bent on sabotage, and we could have another epidemic —sparked this time not by nature but by our desire to outsmart it.—GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

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PERMANENT CONTACTS 73 • HOMEMADE PORTABLE GAMES 76 • CLOUD CHAMBERS 77 • TIVO FOR RADIO 78 • ENGINE SECRETS 78

5 THINGS... TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GET IMPLANTABLE CONTACT LENSES

DEPT: GEEK GUIDE

INVESTIGATOR: NIGEL POWELL

Archive Your Drive

HARRY CAMPBELL

PCs crash and viruses happen. But such data-destroying events needn’t be a nightmare if you saved a spare copy

TECH: Backup software and hardware COST: $30 and up TIME: 15 minutes BETA

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YOU NEVER HAVE TO TAKE THEM OUT This new alternative to laser surgery (LASIK) uses tiny incisions on the eye to implant a plastic lens about a third the size of a normal contact lens between the cornea and the iris, giving most patients 20/40 or better vision. The lenses are designed to stay in forever but can be surgically removed with no damage done.

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IT’S NOT CHEAP The surgery costs $3,000 to $4,000 per eye, on average, and is elective, so don’t look for insurance to foot the bill. Laser surgery is often half that, but people too nearsighted to get LASIK can get ICLs. (Find an ICL surgeon at verisyse.com.)

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IT’S NOT FOR EVERYONE Right now the surgery is FDAapproved only for people with pretty bad nearsightedness: –5 to –20 diopters. But if you’re farsighted or have an astigmatism, hang tight—clinical trials of ICLs for you are in progress.

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YOU HAVE TO BE PATIENT Surgeons generally do one eye at a time, with about a month between eyes, because it takes a bit longer than with laser surgery for your vision to clear up—a few days to a few weeks. But the healing process isn’t uncomfortable, so you can be back at work the next day.

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IT’S NOT A MAGIC BULLET Although you can achieve 20/20 vision or better with the implant, you may still need bifocals later on. (Your eyes’ lenses harden as you age, weakening your reading vision.) In development: an implantable contact lens that can be adjusted by shining an ultraviolet light on it while it’s still in your eye.—KATE ASHFORD

FINAL

Come on, own up. When was the last time you backed up the files on your PC? If it’s within the past 24 hours, give yourself a gold star. The rest of you should hang your heads and consider that, according to a Pepperdine University study, every year computer users experience around five million incidents of significant data loss through equipment breakdown, viruses, and random acts of God and nature. In other words, someday your files are going to go bye-bye. Yet even with the plummeting price of storage, most of us back up like we visit the dentist—infrequently and reluctantly. But protecting your digital life against permanent erasure doesn’t have to feel like a root canal if you follow some simple tips. First, decide whether you want to back up your whole drive (often called imaging or mirroring) or just a few personal files. The former saves you the trouble of reinstalling your operating system and all your applications but requires more space. Second, archive your most vital documents to more than one type of media, and keep them in multiple locations—say, an online storage site and a CD stashed at work. (And since many programs compress data into a proprietary format, make a second copy of oft-used files manually so you can recover them quickly without the backup software.) Finally, automate as much as you can. Most software offers set-and-forget routines as well as incremental archiving, which saves only those files that have changed since last backup. Turn the page to find the tools that best fit your needs, and rest easy knowing that even if your hard drive dies, your data will live on. >>

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Diary of a Tech Tech Resister’s Resister’s Temptation Temptation

BACKING UP THE WHOLE DRIVE The simplest backup system is just dragging files to an external hard drive. But that’s a tedious way to keep track of several gigs of music, video or documents. A step above is a drive with built-in archiving capability, such as the Maxtor OneTouch II (maxtor.com; from $300 for 250 gigabytes). Press the button

on the front to launch a backup anytime, or use the included Dantz Retrospect Express software to schedule future sessions. You can’t boot your computer directly from the drive, however, so if you have a catastrophic meltdown, you’ll have to reinstall your operating system before you can restore your data—no quick task. A more sophisticated and reliable alternative is to pair any USB, Firewire or networked hard drive with a dedicated backup program. My favorite is True Image (acronis.com; $50). In addition to saving individual files and folders, it stores a complete snapshot of your hard disk and allows you to create a special bootable recovery CD. If Windows goes kaplooey on

your PC, just insert the emergency CD, follow the prompts, and watch amazed as your system returns to life as good as new in a matter of minutes. A close second is Handy Backup (handybackup.com; $30), which gives you a simple step-by-step wizard to set up your automatic archiving routines. Options include 128-bit encryption and password protection on your saved files, zipped or as-is archiving, and the ability to upload data to a server using FTP. You can also schedule multiple sessions, so files that change often, such as Quicken data, can be copied to a flash drive every few hours, while your digital photo collection can be updated on an external drive once a week.

ARCHIVING A FEW VITAL FILES If you’ve only got a handful of files you’d hate to lose, such as a novel-in-progress or a list of contacts, a large hard drive and complex software may be

overkill. Instead try Windows XP’s built-in program Backup Utility (or Backup for Mac OSX users) with an inexpensive micro hard drive, such as the palm-size USB Monstor Drive (usmodular. com; around $100 for two gigabytes), or a USB flash drive, which, with no moving parts, is more durable. Simpletech’s Bonzai drives (simpletech.com; around $22 for 128 megabytes) include backup software. As an added safeguard against lost or broken hardware, check out the online backup service CapSure.com, which offers excellent compres-

sion, automatic scheduling and intelligent incremental archiving from $10 a month for 200 megabytes of space. For e-mail-specific backup, I love the program Express Assist (ajsystems.com; $30). It creates compressed and searchable archives of your Outlook Express messages, address books and a host of other personal settings at scheduled times. You can even recover individual e-mails without doing a full restore. If you use a client other than Outlook, try the equally capable Backup E-mail (backup-email.com; $25).

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EPISODE 9, PART II MEDIA CENTER PC TUESDAY 1 PM I attempt to transfer some photos and home movies from my PC. The HP doesn’t recognize the movie file format. So much for that. WEDNESDAY 9 AM I can’t get the screen resolution right to read text on my decade-old TV. Manage to enlarge it; that helps a little.

HP z545-b DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT CENTER $1,900; hp.com BARRIER TO ENTRY:

Freezes often; hard to read text on a TV THE LUDDITE LIKES:

Keep it in the background. A common mistake: scheduling automatic backups for the middle of the night and then forgetting to leave the PC turned on. Instead look for software that runs in the background with minimal CPU usage, and set it to archive when you know the machine will be on and the necessary drives will be connected. Check yourself. There’s nothing more sickening than a system crash, followed by the realization that your backup software hasn’t been working for the past two months. Open your archives every few weeks to make sure everything you expect to be there is there.

[ Backup Tips ]

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[ Archival Life ] These are estimated life spans of standard storage media. To be safe, transfer your data to new media every few years. CD/DVD+/-R: 2–15 years CD/DVD+/-RW: 25–30 years HARD DRIVES: 3–6 years FLASH DRIVES: 10 years

WEDNESDAY 3 PM The included keyboard takes up half the coffee table, but its built-in mouse is easier to use than the remote. THURSDAY 7 PM Photo slideshows look amazing full-screen. Sample pics are better than mine, and great for showing off to friends: “Ah, yes, that’s the time I ran with the lions in Africa.” FRIDAY 8 AM Still amused by the fact that there’s a real PC in there, though I rarely use regular Windows programs. My couch is too far from the TV to read Web pages or Word docs. SATURDAY 9 AM Antenna for FM seems superfluous with Internet radio. One problem: The music stops when I switch programs. SUNDAY 9 PM The TV feed freezes, again. This happens often when I pause a program, and it’s really, really frustrating. Now I have to figure out how to disconnect this beast.—GREGORY MONE

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Slideshows, TV recording VERDICT: Nice idea, but for me, it’s a glorified TiVo

HOW2.0 | DIY | GRAY MATTER

DEPT: DIY

INVESTIGATOR: MIKE HANEY

Handcrafted Handhelds

Benjamin Heckendorn turns old-school game consoles into custom-designed portable units. Now you can too

TECH: Hand-built portable games COST: $150–$400 TIME: 18 hours PRACTICAL

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Dimensions: 8.25" x 5.6" x 1.25" Weight: 14 ounces

PEERING INTO THE SNES PORTABLE A. Power on/off slide switch B. Directional pad and buttons, from original NES controller C. Front plate of unit, cut from 1 /16-inch textured gray engraving plastic and hand-painted D. Stereo speakers taken from a PlayStation One console E. Custom-built circuit boards with push-button tact switches under the controls F. Five-inch screen from the PS One console modified to be illuminated with three white LEDs G. Motherboard from the smallstyle Super Nintendo (circa 1997) H. Rear plate of unit, also cut from engraving plastic I. Game cartridge slot J. Battery compartment cut from block of balsa wood K. Six AA nickel-metal hydride rechargeable batteries, good for about three hours of playing time

Like any good hacker, Benjamin Heckendorn knows that the best way to pay homage to a beloved piece of gear—say, a classic Atari 2600—is to rip it apart and transform it into something else, preferably something portable, with wood grain. So when the sign shop he was working at got a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) milling machine—an industrial device that cuts three-dimensional parts from solid blocks of metal or plastic—he used it to craft a custom-designed handheld case from two oneinch-thick slabs of acrylic. Then he stuffed in a 2.5-inch screen from a portable TV and the guts of an Atari 2600, which he’d chopped up and resoldered to make more compact. Powered by three AAs and a nine-volt, that first portable system came complete with a brightness switch, speakers, buttons from an old Nintendo controller, and the signature faux-wood-grain trim. Heckendorn, a part-time filmmaker and graphic artist, has since created several more portable Ataris, including one with a solid oak case, as well as portable PlayStations and Nintendos. Most of the newer systems run on rechargeable batteries and are more energy-efficient, thanks to active-matrix screens modified to be lit by white LEDs. As soon as Heckendorn finishes a system, he puts it up for sale on his site, benheck.com, to pay rent and fund his films. But why buy when you can build? Heckendorn has just written a how-to book, Hacking Video Game Consoles (Wiley, $30), with detailed instructions for eight different portables. And because few people have milling machines in their basements, half of the projects use hand-cut engraving plastic for the body, including the SNES system illustrated at left. Find the complete chapter on creating this portable at popsci.com/h20, and preview all the systems in the book at Heckendorn’s site.

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THE THORIUM FOIL triggers condensation from convection currents and from alpha particles radiating out in all directions. Cloud chambers are usually viewed from above, but this side angle allows you to see the threedimensional nature of the trails.

DEPT: GRAY MATTER

INVESTIGATOR: THEODORE GRAY

Seeing the Subatomic With a cloud chamber, you can actually watch the subatomic radioactive particles all around you Sometimes, in an alcoholic fog, I can see individual subatomic particles zipping by in front of my eyes. It takes pretty strong stuff to make this happen—pure 200-proof grain alcohol, denatured alcohol from the hardware store, or 100 percent isopropyl. Rum and vodka are too watered-down. Before someone stages an intervention, I should mention that the alcohol is not in me, it’s in a sealed case called a cloud chamber,

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Thorium 90

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MELTING POINT: 1,750°C DISCOVERED: 1829 NAMED FOR: Thor, the Scandinavian god of thunder USES: Lantern mantles, welding rods, heating the interior of the Earth

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1. The cloud chamber being placed on a bed of dry ice, showing the positioning of the light source, which is critical for seeing any tracks. 2. Alpha-particle trails and a single background track photographed as they appear from directly above, illuminated from the side by a slide projector.

ELEMENT: Thorium PROJECT: Cloud chambers COST: $100 TIME: 3–30 hours DABBLER

MASTER

which allows you to see, in plain sight, products of radioactive decay—the paths of zooming subatomic particles—in a dense fog of alcohol. Cloud chambers work by creating a layer of supersaturated vapor: a space where gaseous alcohol has been cooled below the point where it should condense back into liquid but hasn’t, because nothing has triggered the condensation. In this environment, a highspeed alpha particle (helium nucleus), beta particle (electron), or gamma ray can agitate the vapor enough to trigger condensation along its path. The result is a spectacular amplification of the tiny disturbance into a trace easily visible to the naked eye. In these pictures, single alpha particles have created trails of bubbles about 1038 times their volume.

Building one of these miracle chambers is simple in principle but finicky in practice. The idea is to make a well-sealed box that is room temperature at the top and very cold at the bottom. Felt soaked with alcohol is placed inside to supply the vapor. Balancing the apparatus on a block of dry ice cools the bottom. (Watch out: Many kinds of glass and some kinds of plastic will shatter when placed in contact with dry ice; I made mine from Plexiglas glued together with silicone.) After a while—could be minutes, could be never—the inside of the case will settle into a pattern in which warm alcohol vapor slowly cools and sinks toward the cold bottom. A fraction of an inch above the bottom, the supersaturated condition will be created . . . or not. It took me days and the help of Jonathan Sweedler and Bernard Dick of the University of Illinois to get mine to work. Even with no radioactive source in place, you’ll see occasional tracks going in random directions. This is the result of cosmic rays, radon gas and the various other radioactive substances that occur naturally. To boost the action, we placed a bit of thorium foil in the chamber, which greatly increased the visible alpha particles. You could get the same effect with common radioactive sources, such as the americium found in smoke detectors or the polonium in antistatic brushes. For all the materials needed to build your own, including the radioactive substance, you can buy a cloud chamber kit from one of the sources at theodore gray.com/cloudchambers.

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TECH SUPPORT

ATTENTION H2.0 READERS: This is your page, full of the feedback we get from you at [email protected] and through the forums at popsci.com/h20. ASK A GEEK is your chance to pick the brains of the Geek Chorus, H2.0’s panel of advisers and tech wizards. THE TIP SHEET is a sampling of your best tips, tricks and hacks. YOUR GEAR features the gadgets you can’t live without. And THIS IS BROKEN gives you a preview of one of our favorite sites, thisisbroken.com.

ASK A GEEK

JOE BROWN

YOUR GEAR Pipe hot and cold running radio (of the AM/FM variety) into your Mac or PC through the Griffin RadioShark, the sleek and sexy complement to any geek desktop. Jack it into your USB port and tune in your local airwaves. More impressive, the RadioShark can pause and record live broadcasts or schedule recordings (griffintech nology.com; $70).—Rael Dornfest, chief technology officer of O’Reilly Media and editor of the blog mobilewhack.com

Q: Is there a way for me to see what my “check engine” light means before I go to a mechanic?

A:

You bet. Your new car is constantly talking to itself. And with the right tools, you can listen in just like the guys at the shop do. A modern car contains dozens of sensors, measuring everything from engine temperature to the chemical composition of your exhaust. These continuously report back to the engine control unit (ECU), which uses the information to adjust system settings—air/fuel ratio, engine timing, and so on—or to warn you if something is wrong. Unfortunately, the warning is far less sophisticated than the data. Although some higher-end cars indicate specific problems, most just flash the “check engine” light, which could mean that you need an oil change or that your engine temperature is way too high and total failure is imminent. Your mechanic deciphers this data by plugging a handheld computer into the OBDII port (standard on all post-1995 cars). But you can also access your car’s hidden info using a device called a code puller. If your car won’t start, plug the PocketScan Code Reader (actron.com; $70) into your OBDII port, and look up the displayed code in the accompanying book to find out if it’s an ignition problem or a fuel injection issue. The Pocket OBD Professional (autologicco.com; $295) works with your Pocket PC and interprets the code onscreen and provides suggested fixes. JOE BROWN, a certified auto mechanic and self-confessed car geek, is POPSCI’s Best of What’s New assistant editor.

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WHY PAY FOR PHOTOSHOP? Picasa (picasa.com) is a

SORRY, I’M AWAY FROM THE PC RIGHT NOW . . .

free photo-editing program with killer features such as Fill Light, which brightens a backlit or dark photo while preserving the details in lighter areas of the picture. Another great freebie: IrfanView (irfanview.com), which offers batch processing and a dozen filter effects.—Sree Sreenivasan, whose new blog is sreetips.com/new

A must-have for PC Skype users, the free Skype Answering Machine (free webs.com/skypeanswering machine) is currently in beta, built by a hobbyist programmer accepting donations. It saves messages as .wav files and lists who called and when, and how long the message is. You can even record your own greeting.—H2.0 Staff

T THIS IS BROKEN

THE LATEST IRRESISTIBLE RENEWAL OFFER FROM POPSCI

See more examples of things broken at thisisbroken.com.

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FACTS, ANSWERS, ODDITIES & ENTERTAINMENTS FOR A MONTH OF SCIENCE

TUNEFUL TITAN Four songs on board the Huygens probe bring Earth music to Saturn.

[MUSIC OF THE SPHERES]

THERE ARE STOWAWAYS ON BOARD

the Huygens probe. Along with the spectrometers and cameras and shielding for the 13,000-mile-an-hour descent into the atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon, the spacecraft that arrived at Titan in January held a curious guest within its aluminum-and-silica-clad exterior: a CD with four rock songs from French musicians Julien Civange and Louis Haéri. Why, one might reasonably ask, was pop music occupying valuable storage space on an interplanetary mission? If you trudge past all the mystical rhetoric on the project’s Web site about “the will to embellish Earth and space with revolutionary art projects,” you’ll find that the project is pure public relations by the European Space Agency, builders of the Huygens probe, an effort to sell European youth on the grand project of interplanetary exploration and the 80

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search for life beyond Earth. A noble goal, to be sure. But if it takes French pop to engage the public in a mission that has flown 2.5 billion miles to reach a nitrogen-covered world that may resemble a young Earth, then the space program has a serious p.r. problem indeed. Judge the music’s inspirational value yourself at music2titan.com. (Editors’ note: This issue went to press before Huygens’s scheduled arrival at Titan on January 14.) While the European Space Agency is sending music to the outer planets, Don Gurnett is bringing it back. Gurnett, a professor of physics at the University of Iowa, has flown plasma-wave detectors on 22 space missions. The instruments act like giant microphones, picking up the tremblings of the thin, electrically charged gas called plasma. Gurnett’s work, which has led to the discovery of

N I K S C H U L Z / L - D O PA

Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music

FYI lightning on Jupiter, has inspired a modern classical music composition. Sun Rings, written by Terry Riley and performed by the Kronos Quartet, integrates an ethereal landscape of space sounds from Gurnett’s old recordings, including the “whistlers” caused by faroff lightning and the “chorus” that arises from synchronized emissions of electrons in the Van Allen Belt. Performances of the piece are sporadically given around the world, and a DVD is planned for release later this year. For more information, see kronosquartet.org or www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/spaceaudio.—MICHAEL MOYER

[THE LITERARY TOURIST] 20,000 Leagues to the Party THIS MARCH 24 MARKS THE 100TH

anniversary of the death of Jules Verne, the father of science fiction and creator of such works as Around the World in Eighty Days and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Throughout this year, the French cities of Nantes (Verne’s childhood home, and host to the Jules Verne

Museum) and Amiens (where he spent his later years) are co-hosting a Jules Verne festival of epic proportions. The revelry includes specially commissioned elaborate street theater by Royal de Luxe (May 19–22, Nantes; June 16–19, Amiens), expositions on space exploration and Verne (April–December, Museum of Natural History, Nantes), a comparison of modern comic books to themes in Verne’s books (September, Nantes), films about Verne (March 21, Nantes; March 24, Amiens). See cijv.fr/index_eng.php or, in French, www. nantes.fr/detente/culture/art_564.asp. Hardcore Verne-ophiles will converge on the Jules Verne World Event—a mixed French/English-language conference sponsored by the Centre International Jules Verne. The seven-day conclave features symposia, sightseeing, a visit to the “Imaginaire Jules Verne” exhibition, and viewing the writer’s original works at the Jules Verne House. The Jules Verne World Event will take place in Amiens and Nantes March 20 through 26 (cijv.fr/mondial_eng.html). —MARTHA HARBISON

[BIRD WATCH] And Then There Were Two THE CHANCES OF SURVIVAL JUST GOT

a lot slimmer for the shy Hawaiian forest bird called the po’ouli, which was first discovered in 1973. One of the three known po’ouli—and the only one in captivity—recently died, casting a decided pall over the hopes that scientists might be able to save the entire species from extinction. The bird, a male, had been captured in September and transferred to the Maui Bird Conservation Center, a facility that breeds rare birds. The deceased wasn’t the halest of fellows. At more than seven

REST IN PEACE, PO’OULI The demise of the captured po’ouli reduces their number to two.

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years old, he was elderly for a po’ouli; he was missing an eye, had a tumor, and was beset by organ failure. It’s hard to say if the remaining two po’ouli—believed to be a male and a female—are faring any better: They are both nearing the end of their reproductive age and haven’t been spotted in some months. Ornithologist Eric VanderWerf of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service remains cautiously optimistic, though. “They’ve gone missing for months before,” he explains. In the past, the female po’ouli has been seen tending a nest of fledglings of a related bird, the Maui parrotbill. “I think the po’ouli is going through something of a species identity crisis,” VanderWerf says. But even if the worst comes to pass, and the efforts of scientists can’t save the po’ouli while it is still alive, perhaps they can do so once the bird is extinct. The Maui center saved tissue samples of the bird that died in captivity, and when the science of genetic engineering matures, perhaps the po’ouli will enjoy a renaissance.—MARTHA HARBISON

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rolled out the 747 the first time.” Schneider, though, has no doubt that Nautilus will be in orbit by 2010, as planned—in large part because Bigelow is in charge. He compares Bigelow with another wildly successful Las Vegas real-estate mogul who had aerospace interests: “Bob is like Howard Hughes reincarnated. He’s not just a financial person; he’s in the middle of everything that we do.” It could be argued that Bigelow’s space station is on the way to becoming his own Spruce Goose, the monumentally ambitious Hughes aircraft that could barely get airborne. But whereas the freewheeling Hughes inherited a fortune with which to make a bigger fortune, Bigelow is a self-made man, and therein lies a key difference. Beginning with his first apartment house, Bigelow has developed a clear-headed and methodical approach to all his projects: Hire the best engineers and tradespeople, source the best materials, and stay on time and on budget. “They’re taking a very down-to-earth approach to what they’re doing in terms of building and testing,” Taber MacCallum says of Bigelow Aerospace. Starting in 1991, MacCallum lived for two years with seven other people in a sealed, selfcontained environment as part of the Biosphere 2 research project. He now heads Paragon Space Development, a NASA contractor. “They’re very much along the same philosophical lines as Burt Rutan and his SpaceShipOne,” he says, “and we all know how successful that’s been.” Bigelow’s approach, he adds, is aggressive, but “he’s very safetyconscious, much like Rutan.” Another convert to the Bigelow cause, John M. Logsdon, cites the company’s close relationship with NASA as a winning factor. “I have little doubt that the basic technology is likely to work,” says Logsdon, who directs George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “The issue is whether there’s a transportation system that can get people or things, or both, up there.” BEFORE COLUMBIA WAS LOST IN 2003

and the remaining space shuttles grounded, Bigelow was in talks with the Russians to supply his stations with three-person Soyuz capsules. After the

Columbia accident, though, Bigelow found himself in competition with NASA for rides on the Soyuz—a distinctly untenable position. The success of the X Prize pointed the way toward a potential solution: Bigelow decided to launch his own competition. America’s Space Prize will award $50 million for the first privately funded spacecraft that can send five people into orbit and dock with a Bigelow Aerospace habitat [see page 55]. The deadline is January 10, 2010, the date Bigelow wants his hotel to open. The prospects for orbital tourism look good. Already two tourists have paid $20 million each for weeklong vacations on the ISS. At $7.9 million, Bigelow’s tickets will be a relative bargain. At that price, says Eric Anderson, whose company, Space Adventures, brokered the $20-million flights, Bigelow could see 20 to 30 customers a year. But Bigelow says he’ll offer his station to any commercial enterprise that’s interested. He hopes to find a market among drug companies and other manufacturers who want to take advantage of the increased efficiencies afforded by microgravity, as well as researchers and Hollywood producers eager to shoot movies, TV shows and commercials in space. Still, Bigelow says he stands a betterthan-even chance of losing a big chunk of his fortune on this $500-million gamble. “But you know,” he says, “the faint of heart never won a fair maiden, never won wars.” Besides, “I think what we’re doing has some national value, win or lose.” That notion is a powerful motivation for Bigelow, says Gibbs, his patent attorney: “He feels like the United States should be taking the lead in this and that we really need to get more private industry involved if we’re going to jump forward with any real spectacular moves.” “Where’s the inspiration in America?” Bigelow asks. “If you asked 50 people or 500 people, ‘What is America’s inspiration today?’ what would they say? To win the war in Iraq? That doesn’t create a dream in some kid’s mind. An inspiration has to be something you carry with you 24/7.” ■ Michael Belfiore is a freelance writer based in Woodstock, New York.

Preview Bigelow’s moon cruiser and corporate space yacht at popsci.com/bigelow.

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strong as the Australian version—in order to develop a way to destroy it. This knowledge, Buller says, could be critical if a similarly supercharged smallpox virus was used in a bioattack. “My interest is pathogenesis: How does a virus cause disease?” Buller says. “So every experiment that I do can be seen as dual-use,” producing either genetically altered germs that could be considered bioweapons or a means to devise a deterrent. “To design a defense against an exotic germ, you have to have the virus that you are trying to defend against.” Buller and his colleagues have developed a highly specific antidote to their mousepox virus, which they plan to publish this fall. “I’m only publishing because I have a therapeutic option,” he explains. “Disclosure when we have a mitigating treatment to an altered virus is important. This way, if terrorists were thinking about weaponizing the virus, they would think twice.” Critics are concerned, however, that this type of research may be interpreted not as bioweapons defense but development, which is strictly prohibited by the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. This pact, which has been ratified by 144 countries, bars nations from developing or stockpiling bioweapons and allows scientists to produce bioagents only in small quantities to investigate defensive measures against bioterror. Other than a few small, embarrassing incidents, the U.S. has remained faithful to its Biological Weapons Convention commitment. But lately, it has softened on some of its support for the accord. In 2001 the Bush administration surprised biowarfare negotiators in Geneva by rejecting an enforcement plan, backed by the European Union and most other nations, that would require “no-knock” inspections of a country’s biosafety facilities if there was widespread suspicion that bioweapons development was taking place. The U.S. maintained that other nations would use this codicil to openly spy on American sites. C.J. Peters thinks this stance was a mistake. Peters has tackled infectious diseases for more than 30 years—first

for the U.S. Army, then at the CDC— and gained fame in a 1989 incident when he destroyed hundreds of imported Ebola-stricken monkeys in a Reston, Virginia, quarantine center. By repudiating inspections, he says, the U.S. is placing suspicion on unclassified Level 4 facilities around the country. It makes them appear as though they conduct illicit research and encourages the possibility that, in reaction, other countries will become just as shrouded about their biodefense operations. “That could lead to an arms race based on secrecy. Smaller, anti-U.S. countries might create bioweapons to protect themselves against us because they believe we’re doing the same thing,” Peters says. “Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t have concerns about us having a secret offensive biologicalwarfare program. I’m concerned that everybody else thinks we do.” The government’s nebulous description of planned activities at the new National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center in Fort Detrick, Maryland, the centerpiece of the biodefense effort, does not help to allay any fears that the U.S. may violate the Biological Weapons Convention. When completed in 2008, the center will house new, top-secret Level 4 labs (the Department of Homeland Security will not confirm how many). According to a DHS document, lab researchers at the site will characterize “genetically engineered pathogens for their biothreat agent potential” and analyze how easily those germs could be spread by air or other delivery mechanisms. They will also use computer models to see whether specific germs could be produced in great enough quantity to be weaponized. “Creating new agents and new ways to disperse them may constitute development in the guise of threat assessment,” says Milton Leitenberg, a senior research scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. Homeland Security officials defend the biodefense program, saying that it will be as open as possible and will not breach the biowarfare agreement. But they concede that biodefense today, by necessity, requires stretching research boundaries beyond what would have

Deadly bugs infect books and films. See highlights at popsci.com/bioterror.

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been acceptable before the anthrax attacks. “If you have a bad guy who is trying to hurt you with a bioweapon, you have to understand how much material it will take to do harm, what kinds of packages he’ll use to keep it stable, how he might deliver it, and how effective it will be,” says Maureen McCarthy, director of the Office of Research and Development in the Homeland Security department’s science and technology division. “Those are hard questions. You can’t answer them in a vacuum.” IN THE NINE MONTHS SINCE I FIRST

visited him in Galveston, Ramon Flick’s work on Crimean-Congo has begun to bear some fruit. He separated out mini genomes—small subsegments of genetic material—from the virus when it was in DNA form. After altering fragments of these mini genomes, Flick transcribed the individual segments from DNA back into RNA. So far, though, he has failed to convert this RNA back to an altered virus. As a result, he has not yet reconstituted a working Crimean-Congo virus in RNA form to test whether his attenuation strategies could produce a vaccine. That effort could take a few years, but as long as the government’s biodefense agenda remains aggressive, Flick will probably have more than enough backing to see his project through. Some researchers, seeing the opportunities on the bioterror side of the budget, would love to get in on the action. Doris Bucher is an example. Bucher, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at New York Medical College, has made some strides toward designing a more effective flu vaccine. Knowing the government’s proclivities toward bioterror research, she applied for NIAID funding using a ploy that she admits was probably too transparent. “I tried to get a grant by portraying influenza as a potential bioweapon, using the scary language and loaded scenarios that they like to hear, but it didn’t work,” Bucher says. “They just laughed at me.” Here’s hoping that the nation’s very serious bet on biodefense doesn’t turn out to be the much costlier joke. ■ Jeffrey Rothfeder is a POPULAR SCIENCE contributing editor. His sixth book is due out in early 2006.

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designs. Odlyzko appreciates the synergy he’s witnessing (such as the recent biotech-focused research partnership between the university and the Mayo Clinic in nearby Rochester) but still feels that venture capital for tech start-ups is disproportionately allocated to Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Boston. Minneapolis, out in a sea of corn and soybeans, has not yet been given its proper recognition as a tech capital. THE CITY’S HIGH-TECH PERSONA IS STARTING

to take shape for me, but there is one last place I want to see before I leave. If Minneapolis and St. Paul are the Twin Cities, the Mall of America is their mutant conjoined triplet, a self-contained city on their periphery. It is the largest mall in the country, with 520 stores, 86 places to eat and 12,550 parking spaces. The mall’s 2:1 ratio of electronics stores to book-

stores seems to be a fair indicator of Minneapolitans’ technophilia. One of the truisms about good hightech design is knowing when low-tech will suffice. There is no heating system in the 4.2-million-square-foot building; the entire place is heated by the lighting system and the body heat of tens of thousands of bustling shoppers. It is a biosphere of consumers. The 400 trees in the mall’s vast atrium are kept pest-free by tens of thousands of ladybugs. There is a 1.2-million-gallon aquarium and a whole amusement park under a roof big enough to dock the Hindenburg. (This may be the only place on Earth one could feasibly pick up Wi-Fi on a roller coaster.) The completed light rail slithers from the Skyway in downtown Minneapolis straight into the belly of the beast. My first thought is that the Mall of America is like the Death Star—that is, if Storm Troopers shopped at places like

For more on our methods, and to see how your city stacks up, visit popsci.com/techcities.

the Piercing Pagoda, Wallet World and the Smoothie Authority. But then it hits me: It’s this mall that most truly replicates the domed City of the Future I had sketched as a kid. It’s got the insularity, the utterly synthesized environment— although I certainly wouldn’t have characterized it this way back when I was dreaming up these visions, it is the final triumph of techno-kitsch. The mall, like my childhood drawing, I realize, is an artificial city. But a truly great tech city—messy, organic, evolving—is defined by its people and by its ideas, not by its neat containment beneath futuristic domes. And so, after spending a couple hours in my childhood City of the Future, I walk back out through the vast atrium, board the light rail, and head back downtown, to the city that far more legitimately deserves that crown. ■ Matthew Power has lived in the megametropolises of New York City and New Delhi, India.

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LOOKINGBACK

FROM THE POPULAR SCIENCE ARCHIVES

APRIL1926

OTHER NEWS FROM THE APRIL 1926 ISSUE

Terror behind the Lens!

Sure, stunt doubles have their share of scrapes and danger, but the real daredevils of early cinema were the cameramen The mid-1920s were exhilarating years in film—Valentino made the ladies swoon, films like The Lost World featured the latest in special effects, such as stop-motion animation, and the era of “talkies” was launched with the debut of Movietone, the first commercially successful sound-on-film process. In 1926 POPSCI commended the death-defying existence of the movie cameraman. “Think of the sort of stunts that make the rest of us say, ‘Not me! Not for a million dollars!’—roll them all into one, and you have the cameraman’s job,” we wrote. “Stunt flying? Submarine diving? Old-time routine stuff for the crank-grinders!” These days, technology has eased the physical danger of being a “crank-grinder.” Many of the nail-biting shots seen in modern films are crafted inside a computer or shot on a relatively placid soundstage fitted with a bluescreen. Read about this year’s Academy Award–nominated movie tech on page 58.—MARTHA HARBISON

FPO

22 MILES AN HOUR ON ROLLER-SKATES One engineer’s tinkering with midget motors yielded these unlikely commuter aids: motorized roller-skates. The water-cooled motor used acetylene gas as fuel and was capable of speeds of 18 to 22 mph.

CONVICT SAVES OIL INDUSTRY MILLIONS While incarcerated at California’s San Quentin prison, oilman C.L. Skinner invented a new kind of rotary drill for use in oil-well drilling. Skinner’s invention ran a cable to the drill bit, so the tool wouldn’t be lost in the bore shaft, saving oil companies an estimated $10 million a year.

AND NOW, THE SAXOPHONE-FIDDLE! “The jazz craze is responsible for some queer melodies,” we lamented. “If that were not bad enough, now a new jazz instrument has been invented.” We remarked that the instrument looked “like an opium pipe” and noted that a musician would play its single string with a violin bow. It never caught on. Photocopy Permission: Permission is granted by POPULAR SCIENCE® for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy articles in this issue for the flat fee of $1 per copy of each article or any part of an article. Send correspondence and payment to CCC (21 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970); specify CCC code 0161-7370/85/$1.00—0.00. Copying done for other than personal or reference use without the written permission of POPULAR SCIENCE® is prohibited. Address requests for permission on bulk orders to Time4 Media, Inc., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. For domestic requests, write or call Reprint Management Services, 1811 Olde Homestead Lane, Lancaster, PA 17601; 717-399-1900, ext. 109; www.reprintbuyer.com (FOR ARTICLE REPRINTS ONLY). POPULAR SCIENCE® is a registered trademark of Time4 Media, Inc. Occasionally we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 51286, Boulder, CO 80322-1286. POPULAR SCIENCE Business and Executive Offices: 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Editorial Offices: Address contributions to POPULAR SCIENCE, Editorial Dept., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. We are not responsible for loss of unsolicited materials; they will not be returned unless accompanied by return postage. Microfilm editions are available from Xerox University Microfilms Serial Bid Coordinator, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Subscription Inquiries: Send new or renewal subscriptions or changes of address (send both new and old addresses) to POPULAR SCIENCE, Box 62456, Tampa, FL 33662-4568. Allow six to eight weeks for change of address. If you have a subscription problem, please write to the above address. Subscriptions: U.S. and its possessions, 1 year $19.95; 2 years, $26.95; 3 years, $32.95. For Canada, add $10 per year (includes GST). For foreign destinations, add $30 per year. Subscriptions processed electronically. Subscribers: If the post office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Postmaster: Send change-of-address notices to POPULAR SCIENCE, Box 60001, Tampa, FL 33660-0001. POPULAR SCIENCE entered as periodical postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. POPULAR SCIENCE new Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40110178. Return undeliverable Canada addresses to Postal Stn. A, P.O. Box 4015, Toronto, ON, M5W 2T2 GST # R-122988066. POPULAR SCIENCE (ISSN 0161-7370) is published monthly by Time4 Media, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Printed in U.S.A. © 2005 Time4 Media, Inc.

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