what ’s new
THE goods 12 must-have products
SCREEN SAVER The Eco Monitor is the first LCD that draws zero watts, as opposed to as many as six, while in “sleep” mode. Instead of using an energy-consuming processor to decide when to wake the display, Fujitsu-Siemens created a circuit that automatically turns on when zapped by an electrical pulse from the keyboard. Fujitsu-Siemens
ScenicView Eco Monitor $620; fujitsu-siemens.com
SPRINGBOARD With a large fiberglass spring beneath its deck, the only two-tiered skateboard smoothes your ride. The suspension absorbs shocks to keep you stable over bumps, steps or other obstacles.
SoulArc Board $260; soularcboards.com
MOBILE MOUSE The i907 replaces a trackball or scroll wheel with the same sensor used in optical mice. An LED illuminates your finger as it slides over the button, and a camera detects the motion to control the cursor onscreen.
EUROPE ONLY
Samsung i907 Price not set; samsung.com
FLOSS WITH TEETH
COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES This 65-inch rear-projection set uses lasers to display twice the range of colors of other TVs. Software enhances items that need extra color, like a red sportscar, without making people look psychedelic. Mitsubishi LaserTV L65-A90 $7,000;
mitsubishi.comhi-tv.com
nth o em h t f o
POPS
Reach Ultraclean Floss $4; reachbrand.com
CI pi ck
This floss has 22 microscopic ridges running its length, letting it grab more plaque than an ordinary flat thread. But it slips easily between teeth: The stretchy material thins out to fit in tight spaces.
VIDEO CAMERA The first digital SLR to shoot video saves five minutes of highdefinition footage, or 20 minutes of standard-def, using any Nikon lens. Or shoot 12-megapixel stills at around four per second. [See a full review at popsci.com/d90.] Nikon D90 $1,000; nikonusa.com 18 popular science NOVEMBER 2008
POPSCI.COM popular science 18
HE ADLINES
shrinkage
The quest to make really tiny stuff
ROBO HOP Mechanical grasshoppers, leaping to a forest near you
hop to it Inspired by the grasshopper, this minuscule robot can bound eight feet.
We’re not sure which is scarier, getting lost in the woods or being rescued by a swarm of mini robotic grasshoppers. But it’s searchand-rescue situations that a Swiss robotics lab had in mind when they built the world’s smallest hopping robot. Small robots have a tough time traversing rocky terrain, so engineers Dario Floreano and Mirko Kovac of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in Lausanne looked to nature for a solution. Grasshoppers and locusts, they noticed, can quickly cover up to three feet of uneven ground in a single hop, much quicker than they could by walking (or, as is the case for most robots, rolling). So the researchers built a batch of microbots that can propel themselves eight feet into the air—
10 times as high as other ’bots their size—using two spring-loaded feet powered by the same type of motor that vibrates your cellphone. And although it’s just two inches tall and seven grams, the robot can carry half its weight in sensors and cameras. Yet it still has trouble sticking its landings. That’s where the world’s lightest flying robot, a 1.5-gram glider that Floreano and Kovac built last year, comes in. In the next year, the duo may attach similar wings to the jumping robot so that it can coast to a safe landing, just as grasshoppers do. In addition to finding lost people, the researchers say, the ’bots could be useful for environmental monitoring or launching robograsshopper invasions to survey other planets.—Stuart Fox
THE equation
Fill your car with eco-friendly bacteria excrement
+ bacteria
= sugarcane
E. coli has earned a nasty reputation for upsetting stomachs and killing people. But now scientists at LS9, a start-up in South San Francisco, are putting the bad bug to good use, genetically engineering it to excrete biodiesel. The fuel “burns just like diesel,” says Greg Pal, the senior director at LS9 [see “Breeding the Oil Bug,” April, about the rise of microbial biofuels]. In September, LS9 made headlines with the launch of a pilot plant in its hometown that turns out hundreds of gallons of the biodiesel a week. The plant mixes modified E. coli with sugarcane in large vats of water. The microbes metabolize the sugars and excrete fatty acids that have the same hydrocarbon configuration
38 popular science November 2008
diesel
as petroleum. Unlike other biodiesel setups, LS9’s fuel is easy to collect—it floats to the top of the water and is skimmed off like cream from milk—and can go straight into your gas tank. Making fuel from sugarcane uses fewer resources than corn, and biodiesel doesn’t require the major infrastructure upgrades that ethanol and natural gas call for. A gallon of fuel from sugarcane-fed bacteria could cost $50 a barrel, Pal estimates, compared with the current $200 price tag for a barrel of conventional diesel. And LS9 says it can further drop costs by feeding the bacteria wood chips and other biowaste. Pal expects a large-scale plant to be up and running by 2011.—Corey Binns
Popsci.com
clockwise from top: Alain Herzog/EPFL; Don Mason/Corbis; Getty Images; Hybrid Medical Animation/Photo Researchers
The Gas Bug
the brilliant 10 Biomechanics
THE JELLYFISH ENGINEER It’s just after sunset in Long Beach, California, and John Dabiri stands on the end of a wooden dock, peering down at the water. In his white sneakers and striped polo shirt, Dabiri might be just another boater checking out a wellknown local spectacle: a pulsing mass of hundreds of softball-size moon jellyfish that regularly gather here. It’s the green laser lighting up the water that gives him away. Just beneath the surface, one of his graduate students records the motion of a single jellyfish with a custom-built, high-definition video camera and a water-particle-illuminating laser. Every so often, she hands it up to the biomechanics professor for an adjustment, then sinks down again to record the pumping of another jelly. The measurements will be fed into software programs that reveal the intricacies of how jellyfish push off their own wake— a doughnut-shaped whirl of water known as a vortex ring—and thus use less MOON BEAM The moon jellyfish pushes off its own wake, a trick that John Dabiri is learning to utilize.
energy to propel themselves forward. Already, Dabiri’s findings are inspiring design improvements in datacollecting buoys, military submarines, even onshore windmills. Which isn’t to say that the Navy’s next fleet of deep-sea vehicles will be soft and bulbous. “What we’re trying to do is not just mimic what we see in nature but to extract the relevant design features—like the vortex rings,” Dabiri explains. “In nature you have evolution, with its own set of constraints. We don’t have those constraints as engineers. We can start with something like a jellyfish and take advantage of the fact that we have propellers and steel to build things that look nothing like it but perform as well or even better.” It was only 11 years ago that Dabiri boarded a bus from Toledo, Ohio, bound for his first semester at Princeton. The son of Nigerian immigrants—his father is a math teacher, his mother a software developer—Dabiri always imagined he would
go into the auto industry. But by his junior year, he’d developed a fascination with fluid mechanics and was offered a prestigious summer fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. Dabiri had already lined up an internship at Ford Motor Company, but at the urging of a professor he backed out and got on a flight (his first ever) to California, where he was soon camped out in front of an aquarium tank, studying the boneless, brainless jellyfish. It wasn’t what Dabiri had pictured. He hadn’t taken a biology class since 10th grade and never had much interest in marine life. Growing up in Toledo, he never even learned how to swim. But the summer project—which evolved into a co-authored paper on how lessons from jellyfish movement can help cardiologists track blood flow in the heart’s left ventricle to predict future problems— captivated his interest in the growing field of biomechanics. The next year, Dabiri returned to Caltech as a graduate student. He completed his Ph.D. in four years and was offered a professorship there after preemptive offers by Princeton and Illinois. He was 24. Since then, Dabiri has taken his research from the lab to the open ocean. Together with his graduate students, he developed technology, like the laserimaging system, to make real-world observations possible. (The next step is a camera that films the jellies in 3-D.) And he’s become convinced that many of our next mechanical innovations will have their roots in the natural world. “We’re just starting to see connections between biology and engineering and technology,” he says. “When you suspend reality for a second and think about animals as machines, you realize that your equations don’t care whether you’re looking at a 747 or a jellyfish.”—Kalee Thompson
“In nature you have evolution, with its own set of constraints. We don’t have those constraints as engineers.” 62 popular science november 2008
JOHN B. CARNETT
He finds inspiration for tomorrow’s underwater vehicles in the planet’s first swimmer
sci tech politics 2008 ENERGY
american power
It may be the most important question the country faces: What will we do about energy?
the new energy landscape The U.S. is rich in the natural resources that will power the alternative-energy age. Our map of the continental U.S. [below] shows that wind, biomass, geothermal and solar sources together cover most of the country. But to tap that power, Congress must create long-term certainty in the renewable-power market [right].
dead calm When Congress allows tax credits for wind producers to expire, capacity plummets. The credits will lapse again on January 1. Expired tax credit Tax credit
5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0
’99 ’00 ’01 ’02 ’03 ’04 ’05 ’06 ’07
WIND Stiff breezes blow across the Great Plains and the Northeast. One major challenge is developing an infrastructure that can carry power from rural wind farms to urban centers.
Biomass Prime growing areas stretch from the Midwest to the Southeast. Yet the truly effective “second-generation” biofuels made from grasses and wood waste are still a few years away.
the next four years The preeminent question is what to do about carbon. Will the U.S. put a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions, either directly or by a cap-and-trade system? Even then, details matter. Will the government auction carbon permits or give them away to certain industries (thus inexorably picking “winners” in the process)? And how much support will the government give to high-tech start-ups? It’s not just tax credits: The government could guarantee rapid solar-power development, for example, by promising to buy all excess solar capacity for the next 10 years (as the Defense Department did with microchips in the 1960s).
Geothermal Hot rocks underground can produce heat and electric power in the chilly Rockies and the Northwest. Unlike wind and solar power, the Earth’s heat is always available.
Solar The sun’s radiant power is strongest in the desert Southwest, where the greatest energy demand—hot-afternoon air conditioning—coincides with peak power supply.
Sources: National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Emerging Energy Research, Energy Information Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Swiss Re
76 popular science november 2008
©2008 XPLANATiONS® by XPLANE®
Will we continue to pay overseas suppliers for increasingly scarce crude? Will we continue to burn mountains of coal and hope the effects aren’t catastrophic? Or will we encourage new technologies, new domestic sources that we control (and export), new energy industries that create jobs and boost the economy? Below, we explore the data points that must inform how the U.S. moves forward. Our lifeblood depends on it.
Megawatts installed
Energy is the blood that runs through our economy: the highway miles paved with crude, the kilowatts of coal, those tentative first heartbeats of large-scale wind and solar. America famously uses more energy than any other country—measured either per capita or in total—and conservation measures aside, our rising standard of living will mean that we will consume even more in the future. The question is: From where?
Where it comes from and where it goes Here, a snapshot of energy in America today. On top, the four main consumers: electric power plants, transportation,
industry, and the boilers in individual homes and businesses. On the bottom, the sources. Fossil fuels make up more than
RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES
80 percent of the total, and a closer look at renewables shows that most of that comes from damming rivers and burning wood.
ENERGY CONSUMPTION BY SOURCE COAL NATURAL GAS PETROLEUM
HYDROELECTRIC POWER 36% AL
STRI
INDU
WOOD
32%
TIAL L DEN A RESIMMERCI & CO
21.1%
TRIC ELEC ER POW
10.4%
ON TATI
SPOR
40%
TRAN
RENEWABLE ENERGY NUCLEAR
28.5%
RAL
BIOFUELS
BLE
EWA REN GY ENER
15%
WASTE
6%
GEOTHERMAL
5%
WIND
5%
SOLAR
1%
NATU GAS
6.7%
INDUSTRIAL TRANSPORTATION RESidential & cOMMercial ELECTRIC Power
23.3%
COAL
22.4%
LEAR NUC TRIC ELECER POW
M
OLEU
PETR
39.3%
8.3%
ENERGY SOURCES BY CONSUMPTION
the many prices of petroleum THE WEALTH OF NATIONS
160 140
15
10
5
0 1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
WORLDWIDE NATURAL DISASTERS
Crude Price U.S. GDP TOTAL RUSSIA, IRAN, VENEZUELA GDP
120
2008 = $100
100 80 60 40 20 0 1970
1980
American oil consumption continues to rise, even though domestic production peaked in the early 1970s. The imports that make up the difference come at an increasingly high price and are projected
1990
2000
1,600
1900–2000
1,400 1,200
NUMBER OF EVENTS
180
Consumption Production Net Imports
GDP AND CRUDE PRICE
MILLION BARRELS PER DAY
OIL IN THE U.S.
2010
2020
1,000 800 600 400 200
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
0 1990s
to lead to wealth transfer from the U.S. to increasingly hostile nations. In addition, the resulting carbon emissions have led to ever more erratic weather and thus more natural disasters.
research by michael moyer and amanda schupak
popsci.com popular science 77