PopSci Sept 08

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contents t h is month ’ s g uide to i nnovat ion a nd di sc overy

september ’08

volume 273 #3

FEATURES PopSci U

PopSci U

P.55

BIG IDEAS

SMARTEST SCHOOLS

56 Student Radicals

64 A Geek’s Guide to Colleges

A wearable motorcycle, a green village, a moon habitat—see these and six more concepts from the next crop of brilliant designers. By Annemarie Conte and Esther Haynes

A map of the schools where homework means building clones, videogames or robot SUVs. By Eric Mika ESSENTIAL GEAR

66 Grade-A Gadgets Top tech that even starving college students can afford. By Darren Murph hijinks

on the cover: nick kaloterakis; this page, clockwise from top left: dave helfrey; brian klutch; graham murdoch; medi-mation; brian klutch

68 Extreme Engineering 101 We tag along as University of British Columbia engineers execute the latest in a long tradition of pranks: hanging a VW off a 200-foot bridge. By Bob Parks

64

66 THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURE

Medical Mysteries: Blast Trauma

41 Farming in the Sky

48 Shock to the System

Put away the tractor. Tomorrow’s vegetables (and lab-raised meat) will grow in robot-tended 30-story urban skyscrapers capable of feeding 50,000 people. By Cliff Kuang

popsci.com

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Body armor keeps more soldiers alive, but scores of veterans are coming home with serious brain trauma. Are blast waves to blame? By Eric Hagerman

september 2008 popular science 03


contents THE

FUTURE EVERY DAY

p op s ci on the web

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REGULARS MEGAPIXELS 10 The Must-See Photos of the Month Volcanology from space; the 490-foot Ferris wheel.

WHAT’S NEW 15 RECREATION

The Moog guitar that can imitate other instruments.

16 THE GOODS

An RC car that climbs walls; a headset you (almost) can’t lose.

18 COMPUTING

Desktop PCs that eat up less power and space.

24 GADGETS

A thinner screen that fits on more devices.

HEADLINES 27 Citizen Science

A national project turns idle laptops into quake detectors.

28 Space

Inflatable surveillance balls designed for Mars.

30 bendier, hotter, faster

Flexible circuits, sun-bound spacecraft, and supersonic jets.

“A” FOR EFFORT The best pranks require skill, patience and an engineering degree.

Great college Pranks The dangling of a VW Beetle, profiled on page 68, is extreme engineering at its best, but that student prank wasn’t the first. Undergrads have pulled off hundreds of stunts like these over the years. See a gallery of famous collegiate capers at popsci.com/pranks.

See It Slowwwwly What’s more fun than playing with fire? Watching someone else play with fire—and molten metal—in mind-bending slow motion, at popsci.com/slomo.

FROM THE BLOGS

36 Medicine

Total Sickos

HOW 2.0

Grab your face mask and hand sanitizer. Our experts place odds on the next global pandemic, at popsci.com/disease.

Can a common antibiotic treat anxiety?

75 YOU BUILT WHAT?!

A giant walking steel spider shakes the ground.

76 CHEAP TRICKS

Make an inexpensive flashlight burn brighter and last for years.

77 GRAY MATTER

Make shotgun ammo by pouring lead off a tower.

82 use it better

Program your GPS with your ultimate road trip.

FYI

83 How long does it take to walk a light-year?

Is it possible that Transformers-like robot aliens exist?

OTHER STUFF 6 From the Editor 8 The Inbox 104 PPX: The PopSci Predictions Exchange 04 popular science september 2008

MARS REVEALED Thanks to new high-resolution cameras, scientists are able to look at the Martian landscape more closely than ever before. See the Red Planet’s avalanches, mountains and deserts at popsci.com/mars.

One Explosive Podcast What invisible wounds could plague Army veterans and other survivors after they’ve escaped a deadly blast? PopSci editors discuss new research on explosives and brain trauma, at popsci.com/podcast.

left, from top: courtesy intel; luis bruno (2); right, from bottom: john b. carnett; courtesy NASA, HiRISE/JPL/University of Arizona; mike walker

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NASA, HiRISE/JPL/University of Arizona

w w w . p o ps c i . c o m


megapixels

high flyer

The world’s tallest Ferris wheel Spinning 580 feet above the city, the Singapore Flyer is the world’s largest observation wheel. Like its older sibling, the 443-foot-diameter London Eye, the 490-foot Flyer has a stiff rim supported by long cable spokes (the extra 90 feet of height comes from the Flyer’s base). Unlike the Eye, the Flyer’s rim is nearly invisible—a feat achieved by rearranging the cable spokes into triangles, which pull in diagonally from the inner and outer sides of the rim. Because of space constraints on-site, the Flyer had to be constructed upright. Engineers put up the rim in sections supported by temporary struts until they had a full circle and then pulled the cables taut.

ROOM WITH A VIEW Each capsule holds up to 35 passengers at a time.

AP Photo

BY MOLIKA ASHFORD PHOTOGRAPH BY Wong Maye-E

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p opsci ON THE WEB

See more amazing photos at popsci.com/gallery.

RIDING HIGH A turn on the Flyer— in one of 28 separate windowed capsules—lasts 37 minutes.

POPSCI.COM popular science 13


POPSCI U BACK TO SCHOOL

Generation

Next

According to the popular stereotype, college is a phase of life spent drinking beer and generally postponing adulthood as long as possible. But in our annual survey of campus life, we found that plenty of today’s students are already doing work that professionals would envy— designing radical machines like the exoskeleton motorcycle on the cover of this issue and contributing to breakthroughs in fields ranging from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering. True, some devote incredible amounts of energy to pulling attention-getting pranks [see page 68]. But even the stunts have a purpose. Just like the wild inventions and original research, they send a message: Do not underestimate the 21st-century college student.

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student radicals

Nine brilliant concepts emerging from campus labs

A Geek’s Guide to Colleges The best programs for the PopSci-minded

64 66

Essential Gadgets

The latest in affordable, high-tech dorm-room gear

extreme engineering 101

68

The highly illegal secret life of student engineers

POPSCI.COM

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HOW 2.0

bright idea Turn a regular into a CHEAP  flashlight powerful LED TRICKS torch that will run for years purchasing a flashlight: The really bright and long-lasting LED models are pretty expensive, and the heavy, cheap traditional ones always seem to be dead just when you need them the most. Good thing it’s possible to build your own superbright, reliable and inexpensive hybrid light. With a bit of creative circuitry work—you’ll need to add a small circuit called a charge pump to increase the voltage—you can replace the bulb in any cheap lantern-style flashlight with several bright white LEDs. All you need to power your DIY version are three small AA batteries instead of that huge, heavy six-volt. Plus, LEDs will last far longer than regular flashlight bulbs, so you’ll never be left in the dark.—Dave Prochnow

create a powerful led flashlight $29.79

2 hours For more details, go to popsci.com/flashlight.

1

Assemble the Freeduino kit [A]. This is a microcontroller that controls the charge-pump circuit [B], which amplifies the flashlight’s [C] 4.5-volt input to nearly 30 volts—enough to keep the LEDs [D] shining brightly for hours, even when the batteries get low.

4

2 3

5

Remove the flashlight’s bulb, bulb holder and reflector.

Cut two pieces of breadboard [E]: a circular piece that holds the LEDs and fits inside the reflector, and a small rectangular piece on which you’ll solder the parts for the charge-pump circuit.

76 popular science september 2008

Download code at popsci.com /flashlight and load it onto the Freeduino so it can control the charge-pump circuit. Connect the Freeduino to the charge-pump circuit, connect the charge pump to the ring of LEDs, and attach the LEDs to the flashlight reflector. Attach the bulb holder (the one you removed in step 2) to the reflector. Solder the battery holder [F] to the back of the bulb holder.

6

Install batteries, and slide the parts into the flashlight case. Turn it on. In five or 10 seconds, you’ll see the light.

Easy

hard

This page: illustration: Paul Wootton; photographs: LUIS BRUNO; facing page: mike walker; inset, right: john b. carnett

There’s an inherent dilemma in


fyi

s o m e t i m e s

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Can mirrors reflect laser blasts?

y o u

j u s t

n e e d

t o

k n o w

from top: Walt Disney Co./Everett Collection; Paramount/Everett Collection; nasa

ASK An astrobiological philosopher

Could robot aliens exist? The existence of a race of sentient alien robots might be not just possible, but inevitable. In fact, we might be living in a “postbiological universe” right now, in which intelligent extraterrestrials somewhere have exchanged organic brains for artificial ones. The driving factor is a pragmatic desire to improve mental capacity. Alien beings may have already reached a point in their evolution where, having exhausted the potential of their biological brains, they have taken the next logical step and opted for robotic brains equipped with artificial intelligence. This brain swap may not be as far off for humans as one might think. In only a few decades, the computer revolution

here on Earth has produced supercomputers capable of performing more than a quadrillion calculations per second. (According to research by Hans Moravec, an artificial-intelligence expert at Carnegie Mellon University, that rate trumps the human brain’s estimated top speed of 100 trillion calculations per second.) Some scientists speculate that in a few decades, an event called the technological singularity will occur, and machines armed with computer brains will become sentient and surpass human intelligence. Civilizations equipped with technology light-years ahead of our own could have already experienced the singularity thousands, or even millions, of years ago. How likely is it that such a robotic

race exists? Given the limitations of biology as we know it, the force of cultural evolution, and the imperative to improve intelligence, I’d say the chances are greater than 50/50. That said, if postbiological beings do exist, they might not be interested in us at all. The gulf between their minds and ours might be so great that communication is impossible, or they might consider meatheads like us too primitive to warrant their attention. (As told to Ker Than) Steven Dick is NASA’s chief historian and an astrophysicist specializing in astrobiology and the postbiological universe.

popsci.com popular science 83


Place your bets on the market that predicts the future the popsci predictions exchange

enter at ppx.popsci.com [TOYOTAPHEV]

NEW stoc ks ON THE

[NOSEEUM] By December 31, will scientists develop a metamaterial that absorbs all visible light?

How black can a man-made material be? None more black than this: scientists from Duke University and Boston University created a substance that absorbs all microwave light that touches it. The invention is a major step toward developing a so-called metamaterial with a negative index of refraction—that is, one that’s essentially invisible. Will the fabled invisibility cloak soon become reality?

Will Toyota release a lithium-ionpowered plug-in hybrid by 2010?

The Prius established Toyota as a leader in green-car technology, but until recently, the Japanese automaker was hesitant to move toward plug-in hybrids—hybrid cars whose batteries can be charged overnight by simply plugging them into a wall socket. In June, however, Toyota announced that it would have a plug-in hybrid running on lithium-ion batteries in the market by 2010. Is it just hype?

what is the ppx?

[GROID] Will the first cellphone equipped with Google’s new opensource operating system, Android, go on sale by September 21? Last fall, in an attempt to get a foothold in the mobile-computing market, Google released its open-source operating system for mobile phones,

Android. Cheap, customizable, GPS-enabled Android phones have the potential to steal some of the iPhone’s glory—when they finally arrive.

the popsci predictions exchange (PPX) is where you can bet on the future of science and technology. Visit ppx .popsci.com to get an account with $250,000 in PopSci dollars. Buy propositions you think will happen, and compete against other players for prizes and bragging rights. The market is set up so that the price of each proposition reflects the probability that the proposition will come true.

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 273, No. 3 (ISSN 0161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published monthly by Bonnier Corp., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Copyright ©2008 by Bonnier Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole or part is forbidden except by permission of Bonnier Corp. Mailing lists: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you would prefer that we not include your name, please write to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Subscription Rates: $19.95 for 1 year. Please add $10 per year for Canadian addresses and $30 per year for all other international addresses. GST #R-122988066. Canada Post Publications agreement #40612608. Canada Return Mail: BCI, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2. Printed in the USA. 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. 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 POPULAR SCIENCE, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. For domestic requests (article reprints only), write, call, or e-mail PARS International Corp., 102 W. 38th St., New York, NY 10018; 212-221-9595 x105; greg@parsintl.com. 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.

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popsci.com

clockwise from top left: Shizuo Kambayashi/ap photo; Toyota Motor North America; courtesy google

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