A ROBOT IS COMING TO SAVE YOUR LIFE
PG. 30
BUILDING A CITY THAT STORMS CAN’T BREAK PG. 38
THE GENIUS WHO
PLAYS FOR A LIVING PG. 44
How to Prevent America’s Next
TRAIN
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FEBRUARY 2013 Volume 282 No. 2
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FEATURES
contents
The Genius of Erik Demaine Could the secret of breakthrough science be as simple as having fun? By Daniel Engber
30
How to Build a Hero Engineers are making robots that go where humans shouldn’t— into disaster. By Erik Sofge
38
Staying Power Severe storms stress the U.S. grid to its breaking point. Here’s how to fix it. By Kalee Thompson
50 JJ SULIN; ON THE COVER: NICK KALOTERAKIS
Derailed Why do American railroads still use 19th-century technology? By Dan Baum
DEPARTM EN TS
04 From the Editor 05 Peer Review 06 Megapixels: An airbag for cyclists 66 FYI: What’s the worst pollutant? 76 The Future Then WHAT’S NEW 09 The most accurate digital fitness coach
10 The Goods: A quieter vacuum, and more 12 The first steer-by-wire car 14 Wireless lighting controlled by phone 15 Snow cleanup without the backache 18 How anyone can be a sharpshooter 19 The future of indoor navigation HEADLINES 20 Meet lab rat 2.0, the humble zebrafish 22 A plane designed to go up in flames
24 How leeches help track rare animals 26 Trucking on the moon 28 Why is world hunger on the rise? HOW 2.0 59 The world’s fastest baby carriage 62 Gray Matter: Forge a fake bar of gold 63 Turn a doorbell into a remote spy camera 64 A giant DIY video wall fit for a rock band 65 The superfast $10 file-transfer hack
FEBRUARY 2013
POPULAR SCIENCE
03
FROM THE EDI TOR THE FUTURE NOW
Editor-in-Chief Jacob Ward Creative Director Sam Syed Executive Editor Cliff Ransom Managing Editor Jill C. Shomer EDITORIAL
Articles Editor Jennifer Bogo Senior Editors Seth Fletcher, Martha Harbison Projects Editor Dave Mosher Senior Associate Editor Corinne Iozzio Associate Editor Susannah F. Locke Assistant Editor Amber Williams Editorial Assistant Rose Pastore Editorial Production Manager Felicia Pardo Copy Editor Joe Mejia Proofreader Chris Simpson Ideas Editor Luke Mitchell Contributing Editors Lauren Aaronson, Eric Adams, Brooke Borel, Tom Clynes, Daniel Engber, Theodore Gray, Mike Haney, Joseph Hooper, Preston Lerner, Gregory Mone, Steve Morgenstern, Rena Marie Pacella, Catherine Price, Dave Prochnow, Jessica Snyder Sachs, Rebecca Skloot, Dawn Stover, Elizabeth Svoboda, Kalee Thompson, Phillip Torrone, James Vlahos Editorial Interns Miriam Kramer, Taylor Kubota, Colleen Park
I
N 2010, I had the pleasure of writing our cover story about CHARLI-L, the first bipedal, selfcontained robot built in the United States. It was rickety, cheap, and extraordinary. Engineering such a thing is incredibly hard. Dennis Hong and his team at Virginia Tech were working from the premise that the best way to adapt a robot to a human environment is to mimic the human form. That way it can reach our cabinets and move fluidly through our homes. Now Hong and his team are trying to make something far more complex. This December, as you’ll read in our cover story, CHARLI-L’s descendant, a bulked-up, ruggedized prototype called THOR, will attempt the eight disaster-response tasks that make up the DARPA Robotics Challenge. No humanoid has managed these tasks before. Few can even wobble around a flat, stable surface. The idea that a robot is going to wield a saw or drive a truck next year is, well, audacious. For me, the idea of a humanoid rescuer raises several questions. Why is it that when gusts of fire are curling off our roof, the devices we want to send in to rescue our families are ones that look like us? I have a friend who was leaving his apartment near the Twin Towers when they collapsed in 2001. He and his wife, blinded by the dust, had to literally crawl to the edge of Manhattan, where they managed to catch a ride on a fleeing pleasure boat. Yet he feels he wasn’t close enough to 9/11 to understand it.
Why is it that when gusts of fi re are curling off our roof, the device we want to send in is one that looks like us? Is that what this humanoid thing is? Are we so dissatisfied by our relationship to danger that the only solution is to build a hardier version of ourselves that can get closer to it? And another thing: If I’m lying there with a burning ceiling beam across my broken leg, will I be relieved when a humanoid robot reaches through the smoke for me, or will it drive me into shock? Stanford’s Clifford Nass, who received NSF funding to study this very thing, says that he and Robin Murphy of Texas A&M are weighing, for instance, whether it’s more comforting when the robot is a proxy for a human rescuer (“Hello, I’m controlling this robot from a block away”) or whether the robot should be itself (“Hello, I’m THOR!”). But hey. Whatever form the winner of the DARPA challenge takes, I’m just glad that someone’s building a robot that goes where human rescuers can’t. When I need to be carried out of the inferno, I bet I won’t care what shape the arms are.
JACO B WA R D jacob.ward@popsci.com | @_jacobward_
ART Art Director Todd Detwiler Photo Editor Thomas Payne Designer, Information Graphics Katie Peek Designer, Motion Graphics Michael Moreno Digital Producer Griffin Plonchak Digital Art Director David Quaranta Digital Imaging Hiroki Tada POPULARSCIENCE.COM Online Content Director Suzanne LaBarre Senior Editor Paul Adams Associate Editor Dan Nosowitz Video Producer Dan Bracaglia Web Intern Krislyn Placide Contributing Writers Rebecca Boyle, Clay Dillow, Emily Elert, Colin Lecher
Executive Vice President, Men’s Group Eric Zinczenko BONNIER TECHNOLOGY GROUP
Vice President/Group Publisher Steven B. Grune Associate Publisher Anthony Ruotolo Executive Assistant Christopher Graves Associate Publisher, Marketing Mike Gallic Financial Director Tara Bisciello Eastern Sales Director Jeff Timm Northeast Advertising Office David Ginsberg, Caitlyn Welch, Margaret Kalaher Photo Manager Sara Schiano Ad Assistant Amanda Smyth Midwest Managers John Marquardt, Doug Leipprandt Ad Assistants Katy Marinaro, Kelsie Phillippo West Coast Account Managers Rob Hoeck, Sara Laird O’Shaughnessy, Stacey Lakind Ad Assistant Janice Nagel, Sam Miller-Christiansen Detroit Manager Ed Bartley, Jeff Roberge Ad Assistant Diane Pahl Classified Advertising Sales Ross Cunningham, Shawn Lindeman, Frank McCaffrey, Chip Parham Advertising Coordinator Irene Reyes Coles Advertising Director, Digital Alexis Costa Digital Operations Manager Rochelle Rodriguez Digital Manager Anna Armienti Digital Project Coordinators Elizabeth Besada, Alexandra Wynn Digital Promotions Director Linda Gomez Group Sales Development Director Alex Garcia Senior Sales Development Manager Kat Collins Sales Development Managers Kate Gregory, Perkins Lyne, Kelly Martin Group Director, Creative Services Mike Iadanza Marketing Design Directors Jonathan Berger, Ingrid Reslmaier Marketing Designer Lori Christiansen Online Producer Steve Gianaca Group Events & Promotion Director Beth Hetrick Director of Events Michelle Cast Special Events Manager Erica Johnson Events & Promotions Manager Laura Nealon Events & Promotions Coordinator Lynsey White Promotions Manager Eshonda Caraway-Evans Consumer Marketing Director Bob Cohn Single-Copy Sales Director Vicki Weston Publicity Manager Caroline Andoscia Caroline@andoscia.com Human Resources Director Kim Putman Production Manager Erika Hernandez Group Production Director Laurel Kurnides
Chairman Jonas Bonnier Chief Executive Offi cer Terry Snow Chief Financial Offi cer Randall Koubek Vice President, Corporate Sales John Driscoll Chief Brand Development Offi cer Sean Holzman Vice President, Consumer Marketing Bruce Miller Vice President, Production Lisa Earlywine Vice President, Information Technology Shawn Larson Vice President, Corporate Communications Dean Turcol Publishing Consultant Martin S. Walker General Counsel Jeremy Thompson For reprints e-mail: reprints@bonniercorp.com
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FEBRUARY 2013
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Hal Bopp Bakersfield, Calif. Your letter from the editor said that “our lives bear almost no resemblance, in hardship, pain, or danger, to the lives of our grandparents.” Our grandparents did not have thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert over their heads. We also face nuclear-power accidents, and environmental disasters that are worsening from climate change. Today’s threats are different, but they are more overwhelming. Sidney J. Goodman Mahwah, N.J.
T W E E T OF T HE MON T H
Elon Musk @elonmusk / 27 NOV “Can’t put my finger on it, but for some reason the newsstand is looking particularly good right now.” Musk is co-founder of Tesla Motors. The all-electric Tesla Model S was the automotive grand-award winner for our 25th annual Best of What’s New.
Matt Lanz of Hot Springs, S.D., created this life-size, bronze sculpture of his son Leaf, 13, for the Rapid City Regional Airport. Sioux-per Boy carries the April 2012 issue of POPULAR SCIENCE in his back pocket.
This product is from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources.
Unappetizing Things We Consumed This Month Deodorant-replacing candy It smelled like roses. We did not. Canned Scotch If you’re too cheap for the bottled kind and like to drink it all at once. Cricket lollipop Orange-flavored. Gross. Still better than the Scotch.
F ROM FAC E B O OK
POPULAR SCIENCE Would you swallow a pill that doubles as a radio to help you—and your doctor—monitor your medication? Murray Hill I would want to know what information the device was sending, how that data transfer was encrypted, and how the information was protected from misuse. Dajanaye Rollins If you are sick and need constant care, this may even give you a bit of freedom. You don’t always have to have someone hovering over your shoulder. Becky Salibrici Is it blue or red?
FEBRUARY 2013
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E P A / P I R O S C H K A VA N D E W O U W
M E GA P I X E L S
Cushion the Blow
sT oRY B Y Miriam Kramer
In the United States, only 1 percent of trips are made by bicycle. In the Netherlands, which has only 1∕18 of the U.S.’s population, that number is close to 26 percent. With so many bikes on the road, Dutch company TNO is working on a car airbag that deploys outside the vehicle to reduce bicyclist injuries. Upon impact, the airbag, housed under the hood, inflates to cover parts of the windshield and cushion a biker. In tests last November, engineers drove a track-guided car into a dummy on a bike at 25 mph, the average speed of a crash. Accelerometers in the dummy’s head and neck and pressure sensors embedded in its limbs indicated brain damage and broken bones. Dummies in collisions with the airbag had fewer and less severe injuries up to 45 percent of the time.
FEBRUARY 2013
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EDITED B Y Corinne Iozzio wHAT sNEw@PoPscI.coM
Amiigo BATTERY LIFE
Up to 2 days PRICE $119 (est.) AVAILABLE Spring
Physical Education
s To R Y BY Corinne Iozzio PH o To GR APH BY Sam Kaplan
The most accurate fitness tracker
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y N I C K J A C Q U E S
E
very January, millions of people resolve to get more exercise. Health-club memberships spike as does interest in fitness trackers, which use accelerometers to record activity. The trouble with those devices, though, is that they rely on binary tracking algorithms—moving or not—so they generally can’t tell the difference between a steady jog and vacuuming the living room. The Amiigo is the first tracker that can discriminate between exercises, tally reps, and accurately tabulate calories burned. The device consists of a shoe clip and a Bluetooth-enabled bracelet, each with a three-axis accelerometer, microcontroller, battery, and enough flash memory to store up to five days’ worth of data; the band also contains an infrared blood-oxygen and pulse sensor. When the wearer opens the Amiigo smartphone app, it prompts the bracelet to transmit its data. Algorithms process that data to determine what kind of exercises the wearer has done (barbell curls versus hammer curls, for example) and how much of each one. The Amiigo recognizes more than 100 exercises, but the company plans to release app updates to include more—from sit-ups to bat swings to Frisbee tosses.
FEBRUARY 2013
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wn
WHAT ’ S NEW
A dozen great ideas in gear E D I T E D B Y Amber Williams
The IDAPT S2 is the first speaker that can play music and charge any three devices at once. Two charging docks with interchangeable connectors power virtually any smartphone or MP3 player, while music streams to the speaker via Bluetooth. There’s also a USB cord for larger devices. IDAPT S2+ Docking Universal Speaker $350 (available spring)
When full-size foosball is hard to find, players can snap an iPad into the Classic Match Foosball table and boot up a game. Each of the eight rods has an optical sensor that relays direction and spin info through the iPad’s connector. New Potato Technologies Classic Match Foosball $100
It takes only 12 seconds per tire to install Easy Fit Snow Chains. Rather than driving onto a precisely aligned chain system, a user slips a set over a tire and then depresses a pedal on a central aluminum bar to tighten the chains all together. Thule Easy Fit Snow Chains $450
The Alize is the most efficient and quietest vacuum of its size. A sensor in the head detects the type of surface, so the 12-pound vacuum can tailor suction strength to texture. Rubber shock absorbers on the wheels’ axles and a cloth-insulated motor reduce noise. Miele S8 Alize $770
The minibru is a coffeepot and mug in one. A user adds coarse ground coffee and hot water to the 12-ounce French press and then inserts a filter that pushes particles to the bottom. The filter, which doesn’t have the usual plunger, doubles as the mug’s lining. ThinkGeek minibru $25
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY IDAPT; COURTESY SNOLO; SAM KAPLAN (3); COURTESY DARBEEVISION; COURTESY APPLE; COURTESY EXPECT LABS; COURTESY KOHLER; C O U R T E S Y T H U L E ; C O U R T E S Y M I E L E ; C O U R T E S Y T H I N K G E E K ; C O U R T E S Y N E W P O TAT O
The Snolo is a sled for adults. A rider steers the nine-pound carbon-fiber sled using foot pegs attached to a central ski. He can lean onto its side rails to take tight corners while traveling at 40 mph. Snolo Sleds Stealth-X $3,000
With the NetCam, a user can watch what’s happening in his living room, anytime, anywhere. In low light, the Wi-Fi camera activates infrared night vision and can stream video or photos triggered by motion to any iOS or Android device. Belkin NetCam $130
11
Drivers won’t miss a cyclist with a Taz bike light. At its highest setting—1,200 lumens— it’s brighter than some car headlights. The 7.6-ounce lamp has three LED bulbs and attaches to the handlebars with rubber straps. Light and Motion Taz 1200 $300
12
The Atem is the safest motorcycle jacket available. The company subjected every component—including foam chest, shoulder, and elbow pads; Kevlar cuffs; and a 1.33millimeter leather shell—to stress tests that more accurately mimic crashes. Alpinestars Atem Leather Jacket $700
8
Singing in the shower is easier with the Moxie showerhead and speaker. Held in place with a magnet, the detachable speaker sits in the middle of the 60-nozzled head. A user can sync it to any Bluetoothenabled device up to 32 feet away. Kohler Moxie $200
9
The iPad MindMeld app anticipates what information a video chatter would like to have on hand. The app listens to the conversation, analyzes the language, and automatically pulls up relevant information from the Web, including videos, maps, and weather. Expect Labs MindMeld $0.99
A D D I T I o NA L R E P o R T I NG B Y Berne Broudy and Taylor Kubota
10
With the Darblet image-processing box, a user can upgrade his picture quality without buying a new TV. The three-ounce device plugs into a TV’s HDMI source and its display; Darbee-developed algorithms then enhance a streaming image so it looks sharper even without more pixels. DarbeeVision Darblet $350
FEB RUA RY 2013
POPU L AR S C I E N C E
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Actuators
Control Stick VASTLY OVERSIMPLIFIED FLY-BY-WIRE EXPLAINER
WHAT’ S NE W
Wires
COM ING S O ON
Hot-Wired
Infiniti Direct Response Steering
Infiniti unveils a system that could make voice-guided cars reality—steer-by-wire
St Ac eeri tua ng tor An g
le
utc h
Cl
St Ac eeri tua ng tor Fo rce
IL L Us TR ATIo N BY Paul Wootton
El Co ectr nt on ro ic lU nit s
sT o R Y B Y Lawrence Ulrich
WHAT IT IS: The auto industry’s first electronic steer-by-wire system AVAILABLE: Late this year
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Steer-by-wire could eliminate the steering wheel entirely: A joystick or voice commands would work just fine.
vibration and impacts. Steer-by-wire also improves Infiniti’s current lane-departure system. Today, when the windshield-mounted camera senses that the car is drifting off course, a computer applies the front brakes to crudely adjust the car’s attitude. With steer-by-wire, a processor connected to the camera will instruct the system to keep the car centered. Carmakers have been slow to adopt steerby-wire because eliminating a car’s mechanical steering components strikes some regulators and drivers as dangerous. To ensure that the system is safe, Infiniti installed three control modules—two backups in case the primary controller fails. But at least for this generation, the carmaker decided to keep the
conventional steering column in place too; if a catastrophic power loss knocks out steerby-wire and all of its redundant systems, a clutch engages to restore mechanical control to the driver. But if all goes well and drivers and regulators become comfortable with steer-by-wire, engineers could remove the mechanical steering column entirely, saving weight and preventing friction losses. Eventually, steerby-wire could even eliminate the steering wheel entirely: A joystick or voice commands would work just fine.
COURTESY NISSAN
F
or decades, aircraft engineers have used electronic fly-by-wire systems rather than mechanical connectors and hydraulics to link the pilot’s joystick to the wings. This year, Infiniti becomes the first carmaker to deploy the automotive equivalent—steer-by-wire. Infiniti’s system, expected to debut on the 2014 G sedan, uses an electronic actuator to measure the movement of the steering wheel. Electronic control modules then relay instructions to another set of actuators, which pivot the steering rack (and, thus, turn the wheels). The computer-controlled system can instantly vary steering ratio and powersteering assist for low-speed maneuvers or high-speed stability. And with no mechanical connection, the system can filter out steering-wheel-tugging “noise” such as rough-road
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or call your local GEICO agent AU TO • H O M E • R E N T E R S • M O TO R C YC L E • RV • B OAT • P WC GEICO App for the Android Market is available for mobile phones only at this time. Some discounts, coverages, payment plans and features are not available in all states or all GEICO companies. Motorcycle coverage is underwritten by GEICO Indemnity Company. Homeowners, renters, boat and PWC coverages are written through non-affiliated insurance companies and are secured through the GEICO Insurance Agency, Inc. GEICO is a registered service mark of Government Employees Insurance Company, Washington, D.C. 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. GEICO Gecko image © 1999-2012. © 2012 GEICO
ANNUAL COST OF RUNNING 50 BULBS $50 LED $240 60-watt incandescent
WHAT ’ S NEW LONG AWAIT ED
Philips Hue MAX LUMENS 600 INCANDESCENT EQUIVALENT 50 watts PRICE $199 (three bulbs and hub); $59 (additional bulbs)
MOOD LIGHTING The Hue app can copy a color from any picture and assign it to a bulb.
Network Effects
Smart lighting that’s as easy as screwing in a bulb PH o To GRAPH BY Sam Kaplan
S
mart lighting systems allow homeowners to control any bulb in their house, set timers, and dim lights—all from a single control panel. The systems aren’t perfect: They’re pricey, and setup often requires wiring fixtures, which also means professional installation. Philips’s Hue LED bulbs do away with physical networks. Each one has its own radio chip, allowing the bulbs to create a wireless network in mere minutes. The system consists of up to 50 bulbs, a networking hub, and a smartphone app. After screwing in the bulbs, users connect the hub to their router via an Ethernet cable. The hub communicates with the bulbs through the ZigBee wireless transmission standard and with the owner’s phone over Wi-Fi. The hub sends signals from the app to turn lights on and off, set timers, and control brightness and 14
POPULAR SCIENCE
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color. The bulbs can also relay signals to one another, which extends the hub’s initial 200foot range to cover an entire home. Philips plans to release the Hue’s code to developers, who could program the system to automate even further. For example, the app could adjust lighting to sync with the mood of a user’s music or to send e-mail alerts when the lights have been left on. One update already set for release: The app will monitor an owner’s location though his phone’s GPS, so the lights will turn on when he gets home. COM ING S O ON
REMOTE REVOLUTION Traditional clickers send signals with infrared light, which means they require a direct line of sight to work. A new generation of remotes, which includes this Texas Instruments development kit [shown], will replace infrared with ZigBee radio. Because ZigBee uses radio waves, signals can pass through cabinets to reach hidden cable boxes and stereo components. And the signals require less energy to generate than infrared, so owners won’t need to swap out batteries nearly as often.
COURTESY TEXAS INSTRUMENTS
sToRY BY Brian Clark Howard
11,500 Annual ER visits related to snow shoveling
Other 4.4% Cardiac 6.7% Hit by shovel 15% Slips, falls 20%
Strains, sprains, fractures 54%
W H AT’S NEW T H E SET U P
3
4
Simpler Snow Removal
Snowblower The Compact Track 24 can clear a driveway faster than any other snowblower of its size. Engineers modified the 208-cc engine so that it propels the 200-pound thrower forward 18 percent faster than prior models. Tanklike treads make it easier for users to push the blower over steep or gravelly terrain. Ariens Compact Track 24 Sno-Thro $1,299
Cleaner driveways, cars, and sidewalksÑwithout the backache
s To R Y BY Michael Myser
Rock Salt When melted snow runs into porous cement and freezes, the water expands, cracking driveways and sidewalks. Morton’s Safe-TPlus rock salt locks out moisture. The mixture includes a small amount of hydroxyl ethyl cellulose powder, which forms a nonslip, water-blocking gel on the ground when wet. Morton Safe-T-Plus $8 (12-pound jug)
P HoToG RAP H B Y Sam Kaplan
1
Shovel The SnoBoss gives shovelers more leverage to dig under heavy drifts. Grabbing both of the shovel’s vertical steel handles, users push the scooper ahead of them like a plow. The shovel’s 26-inch high-density polyethylene head supports more than 30 pounds of snow. Ames True Temper SnoBoss $35
3
1 2 4
2
Ice Scraper The Blizzerator makes clearing snow or ice off cars easier and more comfortable. The scraper’s designer, a chiropractor, angled both the brush and the scraper head to 15 degrees, so that users don’t have to stretch across curved windshields or reach overhead to clean roofs. Blizzerator $20–$25 FEB RUA RY 2013
POPU L AR S C I E N C E
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1.54 MILES The longest successful sniper shot in history. The bullet was airborne for nearly 3 seconds before hitting its target.
WHAT ’ S NEW TECH REBORN
The Long Shot Drone vision turns the ordinary hunter into a sharpshooter s T o R Y B Y Nicole Dyer
1
J
ohn McHale considered himself a respectable shot until he tried hitting a gazelle from 300 yards on a safari in Tanzania, a tough kill even for a more seasoned marksman. Conventional long-range rifles and scopes, like the one McHale was using, leave the hunter to account for the angle of the gun, the temperature and air pressure, and the curvature of the Earth. McHale, an engineer who developed DSL technology in the late ’90s, knew a computer could correct for all of those factors. This spring, his start-up, TrackingPoint, will release the XactSystem, a line of hunting rifles and scopes that employ the computer vision of military drones to make any hunter accurate at distances of more than 1,000 yards. The XactSystem’s scope augments the hunter’s aim with calculations from a ballistics computer. A hunter presses a button inside the trigger guard to mark a target with a red dot on the scope’s display. The ballistics computer then takes over. It gathers data from a laser range finder, three gyroscopes and accelerometers, and environmental sensors and then displays a blue X where the shot is most likely to land. As the target 18
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3
TrackingPoint XactSystem Series BATTERY LIFE 3 hours RANGE Up to 1,200 yards PRICE From $15,000 (includes 200 rounds, 3 batteries)
moves, a 14-megapixel camera feeds 54 frames per second to an image processor, which continually tracks the target relative to the background. The hunter adjusts his aim to overlap the blue X over the red dot and then squeezes the trigger. When both marks are perfectly aligned, the gun fires. The Wi-Fi-enabled system also streams video to a smartphone or tablet, so hunters can prove their marksmanship to skeptics.
ELECTRONIC AIM 1 The hunter marks his prey. 2 The ballistics computer determines where the shot will land in current conditions. 3 The hunter corrects his aim and fires.
GE A R R E V I SION
BETTER BLENDER Outdoor-apparel makers are adopting the Army’s newest camo pattern, MultiCam. The Army replaced some of its Universal Camouflage [left] with MultiCam [right], whose green, brown, and beige tones suit both deserts and woods.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY TRACKINGPOINT (2); COURTESY CRYE PRECISION; COURTESY PEO SOLDIER
2
grid cell | grid sel | noun:
wn
Neurons found in the brains of humans, rats, and other animals that establish the location of the body on a mental map
W h at ’s neW O UT LO OK
You Are Here How crowdsourcing will bring mapping inside
M
ental maps are becoming a thing of the past. GPS devices and smartphones have taught millions of travelers to expect turn-by-turn directions anywhere they go—and with good reason. Mapping services plot accurate courses nearly everywhere, with one glaring exception: They’re pretty much useless indoors. Given current mapmaking methods, such as the Google Street View car, they will remain that way. A person, though, is not limited to streets and highways. And a vast group of people (i.e., smartphone users) could provide enough information to map the great indoors. Broader cell connectivity has prompted a big change in mapping methodology. Early on, GPS companies relied heavily on government-provided maps, which they supplemented with road data from fleets of survey cars. As mobile networks grew, companies began gathering data from GPS units and smartphones to monitor traffic and congestion points. In 2006, Tele Atlas, which provides maps to GPS manufacturer TomTom, began allowing users to flag areas where the map was inaccurate so that the company could investigate places that require revision. Apple Maps has a similar feature. Several small organizations have gone a step further and proved that users can collaborate to create reliable maps from scratch and refine them over time. OpenStreetMap, a nonprofit, currently has more than 900,000 map contributors who have plotted 1.5 billion map points. California-based Waze has a network of 100,000 map editors, monitored by a team of volunteer managers.
s to ry by Corinne Iozzio
illustration b y Paul Lachine
To reach within high-rises, malls, and airports, mapmakers need crowdsourcing. To reach within high-rises, malls, and airports, mapmakers will need to fully embrace this kind of crowdsourcing. In late 2011, Google began allowing building and business owners to upload floor plans to Google Maps; so far, the service has collected more than 10,000 maps of airports, museums, shopping centers, and other venues. Microsoft’s Bing Maps has about 3,000. IndoorAtlas, a start-up, is also building a database of user-generated floor plans. Still, a map is useless to someone who can’t find himself on it, so companies are now developing methods to locate users
indoors, where GPS signals can’t reach. The In-Location Alliance, a new industry consortium, proposes establishing locations based on Bluetooth signals and Wi-Fi hotspots. IndoorAtlas uses readings from a phone’s compass to locate a person through variations in the building’s magnetic field. The method is accurate within about a yard—even more precise than most GPSs. Services could then pair that data with a crowdsourced map and route a traveler to whatever store, gate, or office he’s searching for. Getting lost indoors—or out—could soon be as much of a relic as a paper map.
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A plane designed to go up in flames page 22
HEADLINEs@ P oP sc I.coM
Will This Fish Transform Medicine? Why the tiny zebrafish is becoming many researchers’ favorite animal
s To R Y BY Virginia Hughes
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HE ANIMAL facility on the bottom floor of a drab building at Duke University is uncomfortably warm and smells a bit like raw seafood. That’s not surprising given what’s down there. The space holds a few thousand plastic fish tanks, each home to dozens of zebrafish: one-inch-long, big-eyed vertebrates that are becoming go-to research subjects for many scientists.
THE NEW LAB RAT Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are one-inch-long freshwater animals that originate in south and southeast Asia.
Nico Katsanis, a Duke geneticist who hunts down the causes of rare illnesses, is one of a growing number of researchers choosing to work with zebrafish instead of rodents. Since scientists learned to selectively mutate zebrafish DNA in 1988—giving them the ability to turn the species into models of human diseases—the number of biomedical zebrafish papers has skyrocketed, from 26 to 2,100 last year. The nonprofit Zebrafish International Resource Center, which sells 2,608 different genetically modified strains to researchers, lists 921 academic labs and companies that use the fish.
N AT U R E I M A G E S / U I G / G E T T Y I M A G E S
E DITE D BY Susannah F. Locke
PLUS: Trucking on the moon page 26
2004 GloFish, a fluorescent zebrafish, becomes the first genetically modified animal sold as a pet in the U.S.
H EADLI N ES THE TR END
FPO SOMETHING FISHY Researchers stained part of a three-day-old zebrafish embryo brain to study the genes needed for proper neuron growth and development.
C B 2 / Z O B / W E N N / N E W S C O M ; M A P : C O U R T E S Y P. A L P E R T , O . S H V A I N S H T E I N , A N D P. K I S H C H A
Because larval zebrafish are transparent, researchers can literally watch their organs grow. “The field is on fire,” says Leonard Zon of Harvard Medical School. Zon’s lab, for example, has used fish models to study skin cancer, blood diseases, and stem cells. Others have created fish with DNA mutations linked to narcolepsy, muscle disorders, and the large head size associated with autism. To be sure, rodents still outnumber zebrafish in medical research labs. In 2010, biomedical research papers that used mice or rats were 10 times as common as those that used any other lab animal, and some biological processes— complex brain disorders, say, or anything involving lungs—are best studied in mammals rather than fish. But for most other experiments, from watching tumors develop to screening for new drugs, zebrafish are gaining ground. Zebrafish offer three major advantages over rodents. First, they quickly make more zebrafish. A female spawns hundreds of embryos three days after fertilization; mice take three weeks to produce just 10 pups. They are also inexpensive to maintain—about 6.5 cents a day for a tank of a few dozen fish, compared with 90 cents for five mice in a cage. Finally, because larval fish are transparent, researchers can literally watch their organs grow, which makes them especially good for studying problems with organ development. At Duke, Katsanis and his colleagues use zebrafish to more accurately diagnose babies with mysterious health problems, with the goal of eventually finding treatments for them. Although lab rats
and mice can be great for common diseases, this kind of research—which looks at exceptionally rare illnesses— would be prohibitively expensive and slow in rodents. The researchers recruit infants with suspected genetic problems from the nearby community. After a team clinician evaluates an infant, the researchers ship a tube of its blood to the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine. There, machines sequence the child’s DNA. If there are mutations (and there almost always are), Katsanis’s team can, in a couple of hours, insert the same genetic glitches into a larval zebrafish, making a model of the patient. Then, the researchers use microscopes to observe the fish for about five days, watching for any anatomical defects that develop. Since 2010, the Duke team has made zebrafish models for 20 children. It has found “stone-cold causal or very strong leads” for their problems, Katsanis says.
For example, they worked with a baby girl who was born with her heart on the wrong side of her body. The researchers replicated the six genetic mutations they suspected were responsible for her syndrome in thousands of zebrafish embryos. Then they screened those fish for a displaced heart. They’re not yet finished, but they’ve already determined that one of the mutations is linked to her condition. Within the next five years, researchers will be using zebrafish to find treatments for these rare diseases, Katsanis says. Fish are great for screening many molecules to identify promising drugs for further testing in mammals. Researchers simply put the compound in the water, and the fish absorb it through their skin. Zon’s Harvard lab was the first in the world to develop a new drug initially discovered with zebrafish. The researchers tried some 2,500 different molecules on the fish in just four months, one of which dramatically increased the animals’ blood-stem-cell counts. After testing the drug in mouse cells, they performed a clinical trial in 2009 with 12 leukemia patients whose blood cells had been wiped out from chemotherapy. The drug quickly boosted blood counts in 10 of them. Since then, Zon has used the zebrafish-screening method to find a potential melanoma drug, which he has so far tested in two people. This should be only the beginning of a rush of treatments coming down the zebrafish pipeline. “More labs are building aquariums,” Katsanis says. “The number that use zebrafish is going up hyper–exponentially.”
VI S UA L DATA
Smog Log
Decrease >10%
Decrease 5–10%
Decrease 0–5%
Increase >10%
Increase 5–10%
Increase 0–5%
Using NASA satellite data from 2002 to 2010, Israeli scientists mapped aerosol pollution over cities with more than two million people. Red circles mark increases; blue are decreases.
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THE RISK OF DEATH from the average plane flight is the same as that from driving 12 minutes at 55 mph
HEADL I NE S TOOL KIT
FLAME ON! The NASA Ames Fire Department practiced with Kellogg Community College’s training plane last fall.
FAQ
ANT TRACKER Samuel Ellis, a biologist from the University of York, will tag 1,000 hairy wood ants with radio receivers to find out how they communicate and travel. The multiyear project, which begins this summer in Derbyshire, U.K., will be one of the largest radio-tagging experiments of insects in the wild. Is it difficult to catch a hairy wood ant? No, says Ellis. The one-centimeterlong ants are easy to spot—they move on self-cleared roads—and are not very fast. He picks up an ant by the legs with his bare fingers. “They’re quite obliging,” he says. “They grab on with their teeth.”
F
rom the outside, Daddy’s Girl Rose Etta II looks like an ordinary Beechcraft 1900 plane. But commercial aircraft don’t come equipped with 14 pilot lights that engulf them in flames on command. Named after a World War II B-17 bomber, Daddy’s Girl Rose Etta II became the first FAA-approved mobile aircraft-fire simulator in 1996 when the Michigan Department of Transportation and Kellogg Community College commissioned it. Since then, more than 17,000 firefighters in 20 states have practiced on the craft.
An eight-hour training day with the $500,000, 19-passenger simulator burns through 800 gallons of propane. Firefighters tame 30-foot-high flames on the tarmac, extinguish engine fires, and storm the plane to rescue dummies from 300°F temperatures. (For added realism, the dummies plead, “Help me, help me! I’m on fire!”) An instructor stationed nearby controls the flow of propane. Because propane is less flammable than jet fuel, cutting off the supply can kill the fire in a few seconds. At the end of the day, workers fold the plane down to one sixth its original width so that it fits onto a truck bed for its next destination. — T A Y L O R K U B O T A
Does the tag weigh the ant down? No. The receivers are lightweight and only one millimeter by one millimeter. Considering that ants can carry up to twice their body weight without any notable change in behavior, there’s not much cause for concern here. How will he find the tagged ants later on? He’ll wave a handheld radio scanner over the ant trails and nests to locate, and then map, the ants’ whereabouts. —A M B E R W I L L I A M S
LO S T & F OUN D
LOST: New satellite Last October, while a SpaceX rocket was making the second commercial spaceflight to the International Space Station, one of its engines shut down because of high pressure. To save fuel, it automatically ditched a communications satellite insured for $10 million at an altitude of about 200 miles. The satellite fell into Earth’s atmosphere five days later and burned up on reentry.
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FOUND: Planet with four suns Citizen scientists sifting through starlight patterns collected by NASA’s Kepler satellite discovered the first planet with four suns. The gaseous, Neptune-size planet, named PH1, is only 5,000 lightyears from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus. Researchers say they’re not sure how the unusual system formed. — A M B E R W I L L I A M S
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY NASA; ISTOCKPHOTO.COM (35); COURTESY NASA; ROBERTO GONZALEZ/GETTY IMAGES
Fire Flight
How does he get a radio tag onto a squirming ant? First, he dabs glue onto the ant’s back with a matchstick. He then uses a second matchstick to maneuver the receiver into place. He puts each ant into solitary confinement in a plastic box for about an hour until the glue dries.
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18 INCHES Length of the longest bloodsucking leech, the Giant Amazon Leech (Haementeria ghilianii)
HEADL I NE S THE BIG FI X
The Leech Detective Many animals are still almost complete mysteries to science. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, researchers don’t know enough about 15 percent of mammals to even determine whether they’re threatened by extinction. Researchers try to track them using footprints, dung, and motion-sensitive cameras, but it’s difficult work, particularly in dense rainforests. Take the saola, nicknamed the Asian unicorn, a deerlike animal with two straight horns. Researchers first saw its horns in hunters’ homes in 1992; since then, they’ve found remains in the forest, but no scientist has spotted one in the wild.
CAUGHT ON FILM The Asian unicorn has horns up to 20 inches long.
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Zoology’s Most Wanted
THYLACINE The striped meat-eating Tasmanian tiger was a marsupial the size of a large dog. Though experts largely agree the last one died in a zoo in 1936, some people hold out hope. s To RY BY Stephanie Warren
How bloodsuckers help find the world’s rarest animals THE PROBLEM
T HE L I S T
THE SOLUTION Tom Gilbert, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, has found that leeches are a great way to track down rare creatures. He was inspired after a colleague monitoring rare tapirs in Malaysia was bitten by a terrestrial leech (a common annoyance in tropical rainforests) and wondered whether the blood inside it could be used for DNA analysis. Gilbert tested the idea by feeding 40 leeches goat blood. After he ground them into a paste, he found that every one contained goat DNA, even four months after its last meal. In 2010, Gilbert tried the method on 25 leeches that had been collected in Vietnam. “We kind of hit the jackpot,” he says. Twenty-one leeches contained DNA from mammals, two of which were extremely rare. Although there was no evidence of the saola, Gilbert did find DNA from the Annamite striped rabbit. (Scientists first discovered the animal in a Laotian food market in 1995 but have hardly seen it since.) Gilbert is now analyzing the recent meals of leeches collected in countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Madagascar.
JAVAN RHINO This heavily hunted ungulate may be extinct, but up to 50 might survive on the western tip of Java.
SAOLA Scientists estimate that between a few dozen and a few hundred of this deerlike animal live in the remote Annamite mountains of Vietnam and Laos.
GREATER BAMBOO LEMUR Despite its name, this primate weighs only five pounds. Researchers suspect that some 100 to 160 live in disappearing bamboo forests in Madagascar.
ANNAMITE STRIPED RABBIT Scientists believe that this rabbit (and its reddish rump) might be hiding in the same areas as the saola.
C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T : S I M O N M A H O O D / W W F ; T O P I C A L P R E S S A G E N C Y / H U LT O N A R C H I V E / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; G A R Y O M B L E R / D K / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; A P P H O T O / W W F
BLOOD BANK Leeches can store blood while taking months off between meals.
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HEADL I NE S THE ANNOTATED M ACHINE
The ATHLETE moon rover has 48 stereo cameras, which stream 3-D video from its limbs, frame, and wheels to human operators on Earth or the moon, allowing them to look for hazards and maneuver tools. ATHLETE will have more cameras than any previous rover. (Curiosity has 17.)
The rover can refill its hydrogen fuel cells at a solar-powered station that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen (for astronauts to breathe).
Moon Walker
ATHLETE’s wheeled limbs let it walk, drive, or climb, depending on the environment. Each has seven motorized joints that bend and twist. ATHLETE controls each leg separately so that it can keep cargo level even while climbing uneven terrain.
Haulin’ freight on the moon
T
o build and supply a lunar base, astronauts will need heavy-duty space trucks for transporting gear. There’s just one problem: no roads. That’s why NASA engineers designed the rover they call ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer)—to handle any terrain, whether dusty, rocky, or crater-y. The key is the rover’s six bendable spider legs and wheeled feet. On smooth surfaces, it rolls on those wheels; when it runs into an obstacle it can’t clear, it simply steps over it. ATHLETE can also split into a pair of robots that together pick up and haul specially designed shipping containers. (A lander would bring a container to the surface separately.) So far, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have demonstrated that their $2 million half-size prototype—which consists of two semiautonomous, three-legged robots—can move cargo, walk on inclines, and use tools. The researchers say the actual, 26-foot-tall rover could be ready to start working in space by 2017. sT o R Y B Y Rose Pastore I L L U s T R AT I o N B Y Kevin Hand
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Drills, scoops, and grippers collect rock and soil samples for analysis. One set of motors operates both the wheels and tools, which saves weight and makes the rover cheaper to launch into space.
Clamps on the wheels hold interchangeable tools.
FIVE ROVERS are currently abandoned on the moon
HOW IT HAULS
1
1 DRIVE People in mission control (on Earth or on the moon) tell the ATHLETE rover to drive to a lander that has just touched down, carrying
a cargo pallet. Incoming supplies must land far from the astronauts’ base to prevent jagged moondust from damaging equipment. 2 SPLIT ATHLETE divides into two identical, three-legged rovers, called Tri-ATHLETEs, by lifting motorized hooks that latch across its center.
2
3
3 STRETCH The rovers straighten their legs until they’re 27 feet tall—high enough to reach above the lander to the cargo pallet—and use their motorized hooks to grab pins on either side of the cargo. 4 WALK If the rovers travel over rocky terrain too uneven for driving, they can walk while keeping the cargo level. 5 DELIVER The rovers crouch down until the pallet is on the ground and then release it.
4
5
A tool belt stores gear when not in use.
Airless tires can’t burst or go flat.
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“Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.”—Richard Manning, Harper’s Magazine, February, 2004
HEADL I NE S F=M A
Data Diet We’re producing more food than ever. So why is hunger on the rise?
V
IRTUALIZATION IS a powerful tool for improving the real world. When we translate material things, from genes to jet planes, into numbers, we can analyze and manipulate them far more easily. But two recent reports suggest that virtualization can also have disastrous realworld consequences, especially when it comes to food. Fred Kaufman begins his new book, Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, by identifying a troubling paradox of modern food production. In 2008, “farmers produced more grain than ever, enough to feed twice as many people as were on Earth. In the same year, for the first time in history, a billion people went hungry.” How could we produce more food and more hunger? The answer, Kaufman writes, is that food became virtualized, or in this case “financialized.” Instead of using data systems to find sensible ways to distribute real food, we have increasingly used them to trade virtual food as a speculative object, much like the complicated financial products that helped pump up the housing bubble. The result: Prices skyrocket, real food goes to the wrong places or sits uselessly, people starve. Creating virtual demand is especially dangerous now, because real demand is still growing, and—as the investment strategist Jeremy Grantham reported last fall in the journal Nature—farmers are struggling to keep up. “Growth in the productivity of grains has fallen to 28
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s To R Y BY Luke Mitchell
ILLUsTRATIoN B Y Ryan Snook
We have increasingly used data systems to trade virtual food as a speculative object. 1.2 percent a year,” Grantham reports, “which is exactly equal to the global population growth rate. There is now no safety margin.” Usually when the margins are thin, more data is the solution, and yet—paradox within paradox—it is the commodities markets themselves that historically have been our best source of information about the food supply. I asked Kaufman, a close friend and a contributor to the magazine, how we could resolve this conundrum. It’s not
hard, he said. All we have to do is apply the technology of commodity markets to coordination, not competition. The United Nations is already showing the way. Its recently introduced Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) provides the same useful global market data—How much do we have? How much did we use last year? How much is left over? Are we running surpluses or deficits?—without the useless speculation. “Commodity markets are extraordinary technological feats of price discovery and management,” Kaufman said. “The fight, as always, is to keep technology in line with human needs.” Luke Mitchell (luke.mitchell@popsci.com) covers constraint and creativity each issue.
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HOW TO
BUILD A HERO
H UMA NS R E G UL A R LY LOSE THEIR L IV ES R USHING INTO DI S A STE R ZONES . NOW ENGIN EER S AR E R ACING TO BU IL D R OBOTS TH AT CAN TAKE THEIR PL ACE.
STOR Y BY eRIK SOFGe
C A PA B I L I T I E S REQUIRED
● Drive a utility vehicle to the disaster site ● Travel dismounted across rubble ● Remove debris blocking an entryway ● Open a door and enter a building ● Climb an industrial ladder and traverse NICK KALOTERAKIS
an industrial walkway
RESCUE BOT In the DARPA Robotics Challenge, robots will compete in a variety of tasks, including the use of tools to cut through a wall. THOR, a humanoid bot built by a Virginia Tech–led team, has especially powerful legs. It should prove adept at maneuvering over terrain and past obstacles.
● Use a power tool to break through concrete ● Locate and close a valve near a leaking pipe
● Extract and replace components such as a cooling pump
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y the end of next year, robots will walk into a disaster zone. They won’t roll in on wheels or rumble in on treads. They will walk, striding across rubble, most of them balancing on two legs. Compared with human first responders, the machines will move slowly and halt frequently. But what they lack in speed, they make up for in resilience and disposability. Chemical fires can’t sear a robot’s lungs, and a lifespan cut short by gamma rays is a logistical snag rather than a tragedy. They’ll have the mobility to do what robots couldn’t at Fukushima, navigating a crisis that unfolds in an environment lousy with doors, stairs, shattered infrastructure, and countless other obstacles. Where previous humanoid bots could barely trundle over the lip of a carpet, these systems will have to climb ladders and slide into vehicles that they themselves drive. And while the ability to turn a doorknob is now cause for celebration even in top-tier robotics labs, these bots will open what doors they can and use power tools to hammer or saw through the ones they can’t. Because disasters tend to degrade or knock out communication, the surrogates will have a surprising amount of responsibility. Very few, if any, will be tele-operated systems, driven remotely by people using a joystick or wearing sensor gloves. The humanoids will take orders from distant humans, but they’ll use their own algorithms to determine how to properly grip a Sawzall, where to start cutting, and for how long. The catastrophe the robots will be walking into is, in fact, an obstacle course, built for the two-year-long DARPA Robotics Challenge, which launched last October. At stake is a $2-million prize, awarded to the team whose machine not only scores well in a head-to-head competition this Guardian Raytheon The defense contractor plans to leverage the concept of its XOS exoskeleton—which boosts the strength of soldiers—for the Guardian, adding technologies to expand the range of motion and increase power efficiency.
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he robot walking toward me certainly looks impressive. Its face is a black, featureless plane, like a riot helmet flipped shut. The rest of its 26.5-pound, five-foot-tall body is white plastic or exposed alloy. If it were standing still, the robot might actually be a bit imposing. But CHARLI-2 is moving—and clumsily. It shuffles across the green felt and white tape of a miniature soccer field, its entire body quivering with each short step. It waves as it walks, playing the part of affable celebrity. When the robot runs out of space on the elevated field, it fake scratches its head with a white, fingerless stump of an arm. Thankfully, CHARLI-2 doesn’t teeter off the edge. Unable to bend at the waist, it lacks the flexibility to fight its way back to a standing position. This is the testing area for the Robotics and Mechanics Laboratory (RoMeLa), which occupies a handful of windowless, basement-level rooms at Virginia Tech. All of RoMeLa’s bots—or the ones with legs—take their first steps on this roughly 30-by-30-foot platform, which doubles as a practice field for the yearly RoboCup
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December, but prevails at a second one in 2014. Bots will have to perform eight different tasks, demonstrating both mobility and manipulation skills, that might be required of human first responders. “What we’ve seen in disaster after disaster, from Hurricane Katrina to Fukushima and now to Superstorm Sandy, is that there are often clear limitations to what humans can accomplish in the early stages of a disaster,” says Gill Pratt, program manager for the challenge. “DARPA believes that robots can substitute for humans where and when situations are too dangerous.” The competition rules don’t explicitly call for a humanoid design, but the tasks and environment make one a logical choice. From the height of doorknobs to the placement of brake pedals, nearly everything will be positioned and proportioned for creatures that walk upright. The places we care about most in a disaster are where humans live and work—a robot made in our own image is a natural fit. Completing just a few of the competition’s tasks would be a remarkable achievement. Nailing all eight of them would be something more. It could mean the birth of the viable humanoid, a machine that’s both competent and robust. Such robots could go where mankind has gone before but shouldn’t again, striding toward the toxic plume or the reactor in meltdown, into the fresh ruins of the built world. These robots could be heroes.
competition. CHARLI-2 won its division in the robotic soccer tournament in 2012, demonstrating world-class autonomy, agility, and speed for a humanoid. Yet its gait tops out at around half a meter per second— two to three times slower than the average human walking pace. The makers of bipedal robots are a lot like new parents, marveling at their creations’ basic ambulation, shaking off each stumble or fall, and framing every setback or success against the most managed of expectations. In this respect, CHARLI-2 is like a proud toddler. But its days are already numbered. Its successor stands nearby, waiting to be tested. This other robot is not toddlerlike. A work in progress, it’s a pair of hulking aluminum legs and a lower torso, the upper body, arms, and head nowhere to be seen. The existing parts, however, radiate strength. Long, bicycle-pumplike actuators run along its legs and fan across what constitutes its lower back. This prototype is the foundation of a machine that will eventually be called THOR, or Tactical Hazardous Operations Robot. “CHARLI-2 is old technology,” says Dennis Hong, direc-
tor of RoMeLa. He then points at the unfinished robot. “This is the future, but with a big if—if successful. It does walk,” he says, “but will it really be able to do all of the things that DARPA requires?” Team THOR comprises researchers from RoMeLa, the University of Pennsylvania, and two commercial robotics firms, with Hong acting as team leader. Though the first trial in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) isn’t until December, the team has already won one of the competition’s most coveted prizes—it is among the seven teams accepted into Track A and therefore eligible for up to $4 million for the development of both hardware and software. But it’s not this achievement that makes Team THOR one of the front-runners. Nor is it RoMeLa’s past successes: CHARLI-2 and the lab’s smaller humanoid, DARwIn, which also won its size class at RoboCup. Hong’s secret weapon is this partial humanoid, which his lab started working on close to a year before the robotics challenge was announced. It’s also the prototype for an equally impossible-sounding humanoid project—SAFFiR, or Shipboard Autonomous Fire Fighting Robot. SAFFiR is part of a contract from the Office of Naval Research to create a rugged, ultra-capable firefighting robot. Its job is similar to the one proposed by DARPA: It will have to walk into harm’s way, navigate where visibility is poor, and maintain its balance in an unstable environment—in this case, the halls and decks of a ship at sea. But SAFFiR’s job differs from THOR’s too—it must follow the spoken and gestured commands of a human and either toss fire-suppression canisters into a blaze or hose it down, point-blank, with a backpack-mounted system. SAFFiR provides Hong’s team with a clear head start. Because the two programs have overlapping goals, research that has gone into SAFFiR will apply to THOR and vice versa. The same basic
unnamed robot SCHAFT Inc. While the DRC’s most straightforward mobility task—traveling dismounted across rubble—presents a high risk for some of the more fragile entries, the SCHAFT Inc. robot should be able to handle it adeptly. The Japan-based team, whose members are mostly from the University of Tokyo, have designed some of the strongest, most stable legs in robotics, powered by capacitors and able to withstand kicks.
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CHimP Carnegie Mellon University Before robots can respond to the simulated disaster, they’ll have to reach it. If Carnegie Mellon can apply the aggressive driving algorithms that helped it win DARPA’s robotic car race in 2007, its CHIMP robot could dominate this task. The bot’s primateinspired mobility—it alternates between two- and four-limbed movement—could mean the difference between exiting the vehicle and tumbling out of it.
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RoMeLa’s new robot, by comparison, incorporates force control. It is far more biological in design and function. “The main difference is linear series elastic actuators,” Hong says. “Ours is inspired by human anatomy. Our actuators extend and contract like a human muscle.” Long and cylindrical, the actuators are placed roughly where muscles would go; they act like them too, with titanium springs that provide shock absorption for each step and the elasticity to bounce from one stride to the next. These qualities enable the robot to also use force control: It can turn up the speed of its actuation, working those simulated muscles harder and overriding the algorithmic panic that sets in when position-control software can’t perfectly predict each footfall. As a result, it also has more opportunities to recover its balance. Where CHARLI-2 might instantly topple over on stiff legs, this design might try to turn a stumble into a squat. By balancing force and position control, the robot can move with something closer to the loose, improvisational—ultimately more efficient and powerful—manner of a person. The benefits of musclelike actuators and a more adapt-
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engineering, specialized with different tools and capabilities, could wind up doing both jobs. That’s the advantage, in theory, of a humanoid: the ability to adapt and accomplish a wide range of tasks, whether it’s stepping over the high “knee-knocker” doorsills found on vessels or crawling across shifting rubble at a disaster site on shore. Up to this point, Team THOR has focused almost entirely on mobility. Manipulation—the ability to hold steering wheels and power tools and ladder rungs—will be important down the line, but getting around quickly, and with stability, is the most pressing problem. After all, if a humanoid can’t reliably reach its mission, who cares how well it handles an air hammer? Bipedal movement has always been the great promise and peril of humanoid robotics. It would allow machines to better maneuver through a range of environments, particularly those built for people. But it’s damn hard. It’s also damn risky—nearly any fall can be catastrophic. That’s why bots like CHARLI-2 take such tentative steps, carefully modulating the exact location of each foot, using a system generally referred to as position control. A robot such as CHARLI-2 or Honda’s Asimo—a humanoid “helper” that walks, hops, and dances around its own show at Disneyland’s Tomorrowland—typically has actuators embedded in its joints that can rotate to bend or straighten each leg. As its walking pace increases, those motors spin faster, but the robot hits a functional speed limit; it can’t allow momentum to take over, the way humans do as we break into a run. Their joints are too stiff, and their algorithms require a constant reckoning of the limbs’ whereabouts. They don’t move like people, with our momentto-moment oscillation between imbalance and recovery. Robots that use only position control have to know the exact geometry of the terrain beneath them.
able control scheme should be greater speed and stability and an end to the old guard of timid bipedal bots. This robot will take long, terrain-devouring strides, with a literal spring in each step. It will move boldly—because it needs to.
“Robots don’t have to be restrained by our evolution. If we need a camera in some particular place, we put it there.”
hen he first read DARPA’s broad agency announcement for the DRC, Nicolaus Radford balked. As the deputy project manager for NASA’s Robonaut, a humanoid currently being tested on the International Space Station, he was familiar with what humanoids can and can’t do. “It sounded like a six-year-old wrote it,” he says. “And then we’ll have it drive a car, and then we’ll have it climb a ladder and then operate a pump!” The DRC is hyperbolic by design, easily the hardest robotics competition in history. That audacity has proved irresistible to engineers. With the glaring exception of Honda—and Asimo could still show up in the unfunded Track D, which has later deadlines—the DRC has attracted the best humanoid robotics labs on the planet. Along with Team THOR, Track A includes two teams from NASA, one from Carnegie Mellon University (the institution that won DARPA’s last robotic challenge, a self-driving car race), a company spun out of the University of Tokyo, and a wildcard entry from defense contractor Raytheon. Teams in Tracks B and C design only software, but they’ll be competing to use robots built by Boston Dynamics (best known for the four-legged BigDog system). This government-provided bot, which Boston Dynamics has based on its PETMAN and Atlas prototypes, is shaping up to be one of the most capable humanoids to date; powerful hydraulic actuators allow it to leap across gaps. The 2014 finals will feature eight robots reflecting the highest overall scores from all tracks, so a showdown between the Boston Dynamics robot and the best of Track A is practically inevitable. What’s less certain is whether any of the robots in the final competition can physically complete all eight tasks. First, there are mobility challenges: Robots must travel over debris and through industrial settings. But no humanoid robot has demonstrated the ability to navigate uneven terrain for an extended period, and insect-inspired hexapods, while more stable, move at an achingly slow pace across rocks and rubble. Team THOR sees its actuators as a major advantage here. The Tokyo-based SCHAFT Inc. team has also previously demonstrated
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an extremely robust humanoid lower body, the HRP3. That robot’s rock-solid balance and powerful, liquid-cooled motor drivers could be a huge asset. Both THOR and SCHAFT Inc.’s robot will be well suited to ladder climbing, a task that, according to Hong, can be handled almost entirely by powerful legs, with hands that simply close around the rungs to keep the bot from toppling. The manipulation-based tasks, which include opening doors and closing a leaking valve, aren’t as risky: A fumbled screwdriver is much less likely than a face-plant to knock a robot out of competition. But for now, none of the entrants has a clear advantage. Radford’s team at Johnson Space Center (JSC) is fielding a robot whose core technology is derived in part from Robonaut, which has extremely dexterous five-fingered hands. Robonaut can already handle tools and interfaces used by astronauts during spacewalks, either autonomously or through tele-operation. If JSC’s unnamed entry is as nimble as Robonaut and if the team adds a lower body capable of reaching the various destinations in the course, it might perform brilliantly at such tasks as replacing a component and using power tools. There’s also the possibility that, despite the humancentric challenges, the most versatile robot takes another form entirely. There is a good reason humanoid robots haven’t yet walked into our lives: Replicating our own triumphant, two-legged, two-armed physiology with steel and lithium-ion batteries is difficult to do. “Humans are 15 times more energy-efficient at walking than the best humanoid robots,” says Radford, “and human fat stores energy at 30 times the density of batteries. That’s a significant disadvantage for those systems, right out of the box.” Carnegie Mellon University’s Track A entry, the primate-inspired CHIMP, will shift freely from two- to four-limbed movement to better scramble over obstacles. NASA’s other Track A team, from unnamed robot NASA Johnson Space Center JSC’s top-secret entry will likely display the agility of Robonaut 2, a bot already performing tasks in the space station. The team also plans to draw from the X1 exoskeleton for astronauts.
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How to buIl d a H ero
roboSimian NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory By designing RoboSimian with four general-purpose limbs, JPL hopes to prove a first-responder bot should focus on operational efficiency and passive stability rather than aping humans.
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First, they’ll save lives. Later, they can save the weekend from chores. every Track A team. But in JPL he sees an existential threat. “Will nonhumanoid forms actually be able to do all those things?” says Hong. “If they can, it’s going to completely kill my whole philosophy of why we need humanoids”—to maneuver in a human environment. “But if they can’t, it’s a good thing for us,” he says. “It could prove me completely wrong or prove me completely right.” n the same testing field that CHARLI-2 just crossed, the precursor to both THOR and SAFFiR takes its first steps of the day. There’s real menace in this thing: Its actuators whine with each movement, and the blue indicator lights at the apex of its truncated torso are just the right amount of ominous. It walks while tethered to a wheeled carbon-fiber and aluminum gantry (to catch it should it fall) with an amber warning light and bright-red emergency-stop buttons. The arms, which are still being built, will have roughly the same strength as an adult man. But the legs are superhuman. According to the team members from RoMeLa, the legs unexpectedly sheared through aluminum alloy that they placed as a buffer between the heels and ankles. This robot is already more powerful than the team predicted, able to whip its legs forward faster than the eye can track. But its movement isn’t exactly the stuff of sci-fi nightmares. For all its power and musculature, the prototype is slow. Of course, this is only its third day of walking, and the algorithm it’s using is borrowed from CHARLI-2. So while its footstep is longer and its actuators are faster, I’m seeing only a fraction of its eventual speed. RoMeLa hopes to prove that bipedal robots can use energy more economically too; if the linear series elastic actuators perform as expected, they could cut into the efficiency gap between the living and the robotic. A humanoid that burns only five times more energy while walking than a human would be a significant engineering breakthrough. Power is always a cause for concern in robotics, but it’s particularly problematic during today’s test walks. One of the advantages of this humanoid’s design is that the actuators can recover a small amount of energy during each step, similar to regenerative braking in a hybrid-electric vehicle. But the right knee is acting up. It’s recovering too much energy, so the elec-
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its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), plans to field a version of its four-limbed RoboSimian, a pastiche of biomechatronic diversity whose design and movements resemble sea creatures as much as they do a monkey. “While some of the robots in the DARPA Robotics Challenge will be humanoid in form, we know that others will not,” says DARPA’s Pratt. “It is compatibility with humans that we are after.” Victory for CHIMP or RoboSimian could not only torpedo the other team’s chances at the $2-million prize, but also fundamentally alter the entire field of humanoid robotics—shifting them to jobs where it’s more important to look like a human than to move like one. Why pursue a two-legged hero when a four-legged robot is more competent? JPL cherry-picked traits and approaches from a wide swath of nature to build RoboSimian; its tentacled, nearradial symmetry mimics that of a starfish. “Humans have these very derivative structures,” says Brett Kennedy, supervisor of the Robotic Vehicles and Manipulators Group at JPL. “Our heads and necks and the way some of the rest of our bodies are laid out, it’s about putting specific functions, like sight, where we need them to be. But robots don’t have to be restrained by our evolution. If we need a camera in some particular place, we put it there.” RoboSimian doesn’t have a front, rear, or sides. And that ruthlessly efficient design could make it a formidable competitor in ways that won’t be obvious until December. Where other robots might range from hilariously awkward to perilously off-balance while getting in and out of a utility vehicle—humanoids would have to pivot and reorient themselves—RoboSimian should be able to simply crab walk into the driver’s seat. And having deployed a trio of competent Mars rovers, JPL has learned how to push its robots to perform through harsh, unpredictable environments with limited energy reserves and communication lines. Those systems respond to commands, but with an eight-minute radio lag between Earth and Mars, they must carry out nearly all of them autonomously. For Kennedy and his team, the DRC could be simply another day at the office. Hong, who worked with Kennedy years ago on one of the predecessors to RoboSimian, expects stiff competition from
tricity spikes and triggers an automatic shutdown, which causes the robot to tip over. That’s the hypothesis, at least. Later, as the robot stands still, actively balancing itself, Hong boosts himself onto the machine. Its 66-pound frame takes his entire body weight without buckling or suffering a crippling power spike. The knee can’t be stressed into failing. Its power surges seem to be happening at random. The RoMeLa team records the data and moves on. There are months, maybe years of troubleshooting ahead. Some of the solutions will be specific to the tasks at hand. But others will apply to the larger enterprise of bots that function in a human world. “The greatest example of a high-risk, high-payoff project is a humanoid,” Hong says. “If it can fight a fire, then you can use it for mopping the deck, cooking the food, delivering stuff to you. That’s why I call it the Swiss Army knife of robots. If you succeed, you can use it for most everything.” That’s the long-term promise of THOR, SAFFiR, and other humanoid prototypes: that they will lead to initial generations of restricted, million-dollar systems, and as complex components get field-tested and mass-production
kicks in, everything will become cheaper. Robots for military and medical missions will have paved the way for consumer models, the ones that assist the aged and disabled, weed gardens, and do laundry. First, they’ll save lives. Later, they can save the weekend from chores. The initial public test of RoMeLa’s engineering will occur this November, when SAFFiR is scheduled to step aboard the U.S.S. Shadwell, a decommissioned World War II–era ship currently docked in Mobile, Alabama. It probably won’t spray any hoses or lob any canisters, but rather walk around and get its proverbial sea legs. A month later, THOR will compete in the first of its tasks. Other trials will follow, including a Navy pallet fire and DRC’s simulated disaster, both slated for 2014. Whatever the results of the DARPA Robotics Challenge—even if it points toward a hybrid robot made up of the best-performing limbs, postures, and control schemes—the real question isn’t whether robots will ever be ready for active, meaningful deployment. Just as DARPA’s Grand and Urban Challenges accelerated the development of robotic cars and ultimately led to Google’s self-driving Priuses, the Robotics Challenge will drive progress toward a truly capable robot. After the competition, it will be only a matter of when they enter society and how. It could take a decade or two for the robots to appear in hospitals, helping patients in and out of beds, or at construction sites in the coldest winter months, working the all-robot graveyard shift. But before then, you could see humanlike machines march into a disaster. Perhaps they’ll show up online, glimpsed in shaky cameraphone footage. Or maybe you’ll see one in person, looming forward through the smoke, its hand reaching for yours. Erik Sofge wrote about future space-suit technology for the November 2012 issue.
drC-Hubo Drexel University The competition’s manipulation-related tasks, which could include attaching a fire hose and closing a valve, will be difficult for bots with only three digits. Drexel’s HUBO prototype, which will be further developed by a 10-school coalition, has dexterous five-fingered hands. It has already demonstrated the ability to grip a wide range of objects— from balls and bottles to power tools.
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Staying Power
E x tr Em E sto r ms su ch a s hu r r ican E s andy hav E pushEd thE u.s. El Ectr ical gr id to its br E aking p o int. thE tEchno lo gy E xists to kEEp thE l ights o n —wE just n EEd to im pl EmEnt it.
I wa n B a a n / R e p o R ta g e B y g e t t y I m a g e s
stor y by K alee Thompson
T DarK nighT when hurricane sandy hit new york city on october 29, 2012, most of lower manhattan lost power.
he explosion lit up the Manhattan skyline. A sudden boom, a one-two punch of yellow light—then everything went black. After Hurricane Sandy shoved water into Con Edison’s 14th Street substation in October, causing electricity to arc between capacitors, about a quarter million customers were left in the dark. Video of the high-voltage spectacle quickly went viral: It became an early, brilliant symbol of the massive storm system’s most pervasive and inescapable affront—a total and lingering loss of power. Across the U.S., as far west as Indiana and from Maine to North Carolina, Sandy caused hundreds of other mass outages. A tree blown down, wires ravaged by wind, a flooded power facility—each event had rippled out to affect homes far from the point of failure. The blackouts continued for weeks afterward, thwarting the region’s recovery. While the duration of Sandy’s outages was unusual, their breadth—more than eight million homes in 21 states ultimately lost power—has become disturbingly common. In
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2011, Hurricane Irene cut electricity to about 5.5 million homes. Tornadoes, ice storms, wildfires, and drought now routinely overwhelm the nation’s aging electrical infrastructure, inflicting sweeping blackouts. In the early 1990s, the U.S. experienced about 20 mass outages a year; today it’s well over 100. A 2012 Congressional Research Service report attributes much of the rise to an increase in extreme weather events. It also states that storm-related power failures cost the U.S. economy between $20 billion and $55 billion annually. A century ago, when the foundation of today’s power distribution system was laid, electric appliances were just beginning to enter homes. Over time, the nation’s power use has skyrocketed, and so has the population. Demand is now rising at 1 percent a year, pushing more electricity through lines that were never intended to handle such high loads. “We sometimes joke that if Alexander Graham Bell woke up tomorrow and saw my phone, he’d be astounded,” says David Manning, executive director of the New York State Smart Grid Consortium. “If Thomas Edison woke up tomorrow and saw the grid, he could not only recognize it, he could probably fix it.” A modern grid, capable of creating and delivering efficient, reliable power even in the midst of disaster, is long overdue. Such infrastructure would be more resilient to both storms and terrorist attacks, which the National Research Council warned in November could cripple entire regions of the country for months. Many of the necessary upgrades already exist: They’ve been developed in labs and demonstrated in smart-grid projects across the country. Other steps just require common sense.
STOP CASCADING FAILURES
The existing U.S. electric grid has a linear structure. Large power plants, typically located far from the customers they serve, produce most of the electricity. Transformers at the plants increase the voltage so it can be moved more efficiently to local substations, which reduce the voltage and send it out to neighborhoods and individual homes. When a fault current, or surge, occurs anywhere along the line, automatic circuit breakers open to halt it. That’s why a single felled tree can cut power to thousands of customers. And that’s how overgrown trees brushing high-voltage lines in Ohio could black out 50 million people along the East Coast in 2003. One way to reduce the impact of any individual failure is to replace the linear structure with a looped one. Imagine a power line studded with five smart switches that connects back to a substation on both ends. A tree hits the line. In the old, linear system, all the customers beyond the fault point would lose power; the utility would send out a work crew to search for the cause. In the new system, switches on both sides of the fault could isolate
A SINGLE TREE FELLED BY A STORM LIKE SANDY CAN CUT OFF POWER TO THOUSANDS.
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How to Create a More Resilient Grid HOME 1
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Generate Power Home solar systems can save money and reduce demand on power plants. But if they can’t automatically disconnect from the grid during a blackout, they must shut down. Researchers at the University of Arkansas have built a device that will allow homeowners to produce and store backup power.
Get a Backup Drive With technology that auto manufacturers are now developing, electric cars can act as backup power sources during a blackout. A fully charged vehicle might power a home for a day or two.
Install Smart Meters Forty million houses now have smart meters, digital devices that can provide homeowners with detailed information about their energy use. Over time that’s led to a 5 percent reduction in consumption. During a storm, they enable the utility to recognize a power outage immediately.
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Bury the Lines Because bad weather is the most common cause of blackouts, burying power lines can get them out of harm’s way. Subterranean systems often cost 4 to 10 times more to install, but they’ve been shown to reduce outages by about 70 percent. Added incentive: aesthetics. They often raise property values.
Share Some Juice Community batteries installed next to neighborhood transformers could be used to provide emergency backup power during an outage. One battery would serve a handful of homes for a couple hours.
Maintain Services Small, local power plants can keep the lights and heat on at critical facilities, such as hospitals. Most systems rely on the local natural-gas supply, but solar and wind can also provide a valuable backup—plus, excess power can sometimes be sold back to the utility.
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Control Surges The scale of many power failures could be reduced by fault-current limiters, devices that absorb and control the surges in current that normally trip circuit breakers and lead to mass outages.
Follow the Flow To find a power outage today, utility workers often resort to driving around, searching for an offending tree. Sensors on transmission lines can save time and money by automatically providing utilities with real-time information on the condition of lines and the level of power flow.
Build Diversity Adding more clean, renewable energy sources to the grid helps spread power generation throughout the day, especially during peak hours. Diversity also reduces the impact of any one plant going down.
3 1 CURRENT SYSTEM Most electricity today follows a linear and unidirectional path from power plants, usually located far from homes, to their customers. When a failure occurs along the line, everything downstream from that point loses power.
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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY WAS AN ISLAND OF POWER IN A DARKENED NEIGHBORHOOD.
the problem and only customers between the two switches would go dark. Then, “those switches communicate and say, ‘It’s right here, come and fix me,’ ” says John Kelly, executive director of the nonprofit Perfect Power Institute. Communities such as Naperville, Illinois, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, which are among the most advanced in the U.S. when it comes to smartgrid adaptations, have already installed looped systems and demonstrated their advantages. “You’re looking at 50 to 80 percent improvements in reliability,” Kelly says. Also, “you’ve limited the problems. You know right where to go, so now you can get those few customers back up quicker.” Another way to stop failures from cascading is to install a fault-current limiter, or what University of Arkansas engineer Alan Mantooth calls a “shock absorber for the grid.” He’s developing the refrigerator-size device at the university’s National Center for Reliable Electric Power Transmission. “As bad things happen, circuit breakers just start opening and the lights go out,” Mantooth says. Rather than simply stopping the electrical surge altogether, his machine can absorb the excess current and send a regulated amount down the line. Utilities have been slow to adopt looped systems, even though smart switches were developed in the 1990s. Florida Power and Light, whose customers experienced multiple hurricanes in the early 2000s, was among the first to do so. “Most utilities are very averse to change,” Kelly says. “And part of it is the monopoly structure that impedes innovation and improvement.” When large-scale change does come, it will likely arrive in high-demand areas first. “In urban centers like New York City and Los Angeles, their fault currents are getting so high that they’re having to start replacing all of their circuit breakers,” Mantooth says. A fault-current limiter would be a practical solution. “We would insert this guy into the grid,” he says, “leave
the existing circuit breaker, and limit the current so that the breaker is not overwhelmed.” The new equipment helps the old equipment remain in service for longer, a much more cost-effective approach than replacing all the breakers.
PLAN BETTER BACKUP
On the evening Hurricane Sandy struck, John Bradley was in his office on Broadway when the building suddenly lost power. Bradley is the associate vice president for sustainability, energy, and technical services at New York University, and he was on the phone with the local utility, Con Edison, at the time. “They were telling me they were systematically shutting down low-lying areas because they knew the storm surge and the full-moon high tide were going to hit around 9 p.m.,” he says. It was 8:30. “I looked out my window, and all the lights were out,” Bradley recalls. “They said, ‘We’ve got some issues,’ and they got off the phone.” Nearly all of Lower Manhattan had lost power—except for much of the NYU campus. In 2010, the university completed a project to replace its 1970s-era boilers with natural-gas-powered turbines, subterranean engines that generate 11 megawatts of electricity. Waste heat from the engines creates steam to produce an additional 2.4 megawatts and hot water, a process known as co-generation. Natural disasters were not at the top of the university’s list of concerns when the administration approved the project. “Number one was cost-effective production of electricity,” Bradley says. “Number two was reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions.” (The system, which powers 22 buildings and heats 37, is saving the university millions of dollars each year; it’s also helped reduce the campus’s carbon footprint by 20 percent.) When Sandy knocked out that ConEdison substation, a third benefit of NYU’s self-sufficiency became clear. “My equipment sensed that loss of voltage, and the breakers opened up, isolating the NYU grid from the larger utility grid,” Bradley says. For the next week, NYU was an island of power in a darkened neighborhood. Staff set up power strips on long tables in the library and unlocked outdoor outlets for anyone to use. “You
The Truly Smart Meter smart meters can help homeowners track their electricity use. but real innovation will arrive when third-party companies can access the data, says pecan street’s brewster mccracken. “imagine you’re the parents of high-school-age kids and you go away for the weekend,” he says. “on saturday night, you get a message on your phone from the my home utility app that in the last hour your toilet has flushed 45 times.” you call your kids—and tell them to end the party. here are six other apps of the future.
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ineFFiCienCY alerT ac filter needs replacing. click to order from amazon.
February 2013
maX sCreen Time playroom tv has been in use for five hours since monday.
smarT BUY upgrading your refrigerator would save $10 a month.
WaTer leaK DeTeCTeD! click to alert the utility.
home-seCUriTY CheCK an unknown person has entered the house.
grannY WaTCh nana hasn’t opened the refrigerator yet today.
F A C I N g PA g E : PA U L L A C h I N E ( 6 ) ; T h I S PA g E : C O U R T E S y P E C A N S T R E E T I N C .
SMARTeR SolAR although most solar panels face south for maximum exposure, the pecan street smart-grid project found that west-facing panels generate more power when demand is highest. houses could be almost off-grid during peak hours.
saw people from the community plugging in their laptops, iPads, and phones all over campus,” Bradley says. Natural-gas systems also kept much of the Princeton University campus and a sprawling Bronx apartment complex known as Co-op City up and running. Critical services such as hospitals, hotels, and fire stations should all have self-sufficient power generation, says Kelly. And relying on natural gas makes sense, he says, because it already flows through underground pipelines. Diesel must be trucked in to keep generators online and, during storms like Sandy, such fuel can be scarce. Buildings can also rely on renewable-energy systems during a blackout. Solar panels on the Midtown Community School in Bayonne, New Jersey, helped power it as an evacuation center during Hurricane Sandy. But if such systems can’t automatically disconnect from the grid, utilities require them to shut down. Workers attempting to repair lines could be killed by electricity flowing back into the grid. “It’s like they’ve been on one-way streets all their life, and now all of a sudden there’s a car headed toward them,” Mantooth says. A special inverter connected to a battery can enable buildings to island, or isolate themselves from the grid, as they continue to produce and store power. But existing technology is costprohibitive for homeowners. Mantooth’s lab is developing an affordable alternative: a microwave-size “green power node” that could be mounted on a garage wall. He hopes to find a manufacturer who could sell it at home stores for about $500.
INVEST IN EFFICIENCY
The more power coursing through an aging infrastructure, the more vulnerable the grid will be to disruption—even without a natural disaster. Over the last three decades, U.S. household electricity usage tripled, from 30.3 million BTU per home in 1980 to 89.6 million BTU in 2009. Transformers, meanwhile, are now more than 40 years old on average, and 70 percent of transmission lines are at least 25 years old. To be resilient, the grid—and those who rely on it—must also be more efficient. Many utilities have already begun to replace one ubiquitous and outmoded device: the electricity meter, generally a spinning
dial mounted near a thorn bush at the back of the house and read, in person, once a month. About 40 million U.S. homes now have smart meters, devices that digitally monitor and communicate home power use as often as several times an hour. The information allows utilities to track and bill more precisely—and recognize power outages instantly. In Austin, Texas, volunteers in a smart-grid project are testing tools that will help the grid work more like the Internet, with two-way energy and information flow. So far, engineers have equipped 480 houses with advanced energy-monitoring systems. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin analyze the data with supercomputers. “We carry out the nation’s deepest-ever research on how people use electricity and natural gas on literally a second-to-second basis,” says Brewster McCracken, president of Pecan Street, the consortium that runs the project. Companies such as Intel, Best Buy, and LG have also partnered with Pecan Street to test and develop products in a realworld setting. For example, Sony has installed a home energy -management system that measures the power consumption of various appliances from a single outlet and can be managed through a television set-top box. Homeowners can use the realtime data to minimize their load on the grid, shifting such activities as electric-vehicle charging to periods of surplus power. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 devoted $16 billion to installing new transmission lines and implementing smart-grid projects such as Pecan Street. It’s a modest start. Truly modernizing the U.S. grid will require an investment of $673 billion, according to a recent study by the American Society of Civil Engineers. In the meantime, the costs of inaction continue to add up: Hurricane Sandy caused $69.7 billion worth of damage to New York and New Jersey. Just weeks after the storm, Governor Andrew Cuomo requested federal funding to help New York install the technology for a smarter grid. “It will be a significant investment,” New York State Smart Grid Consortium’s Manning says. “But Sandy has rewritten the opportunity to make the case.” Kalee Thompson is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. She plans to add solar panels to her home after she can island it.
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The dazzling, SomeTimeS abSurd, alwayS playful genius of eriK demaine Co u l d the seCr e t to br e ak thr o u gh sCienCe be a s sim pl e a s hav ing f u n?
stor y by daniel engber
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ust before he was old enough to vote but afer he’d begun a doctorate in computer science, Erik Demaine arrived in New York City for the annual OrigamiUSA convention. He’d recently taken an interest in the hobby because he thought the math behind it might make for a compelling dissertation topic. Walking the aisles of the convention, Demaine saw the usual paper artistry—delicate insects, pufed-up bunnies—but he also learned of more elaborate forms, such as a three-car model locomotive crafed from a single sheet of paper. That train, like many intricate works of origami, sprang from a basic folding pattern called the box pleat. Developed in the mid-1960s, the box pleat is a grid of vertical and horizontal creases combined with some well-placed diagonals. A Swiss physicist named Emmanuel Mooser popularized the pattern when he used it to create what’s now known as Mooser’s Train, one of the great achievements in origami. At the convention, Demaine began to wonder whether the box pleat could be 44
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photogr aphs by JJ Sulin
used to make even bigger, more complex designs. Could it fold into a Mooser’s Passenger Jet, a Mooser’s Rocket Ship, or a Mooser’s Full-Size Nuclear Submarine? In 2001, at the age of 20, Demaine joined the faculty of MIT, as a professor of computer science. He was the youngest professor ever hired by the university. In 2003, he won a MacArthur genius grant. By then, he’d set aside the box pleat in favor of other work on folding. But a few years later Mooser’s Train came rumbling back into his mind. He’d begun collaborating with another MacArthur fellow, the roboticist and computer scientist Daniela Rus, to design “programmable matter.” They wanted to create a sheet made from interlocking panels that could turn into any object, from a sofa bed to a computer, with the push of a button. To do so, they would need a simple folding template that was versatile enough to handle many diferent forms. Demaine started with the box pleat. Working with a pair of students and his father, Marty, a technical instructor and artist-in-residence at MIT, Demaine proved
PUZZLE MASTER As a computer scientist, Erik Demaine uses math to model physical systems, particularly ones that fold. His work has informed biology, robotics, and design, but it all stems from the same impulse: having fun.
mathematically that the box pleat had no limits. A single sheet of paper, were it big enough, could fold into more than a model train. It could become pretty much anything in the universe. Building on that work, Demaine, Rus, and a collaborator at Harvard applied the pattern to a set of panels made of glass fber and polymer resin and made a robot that could fold from a boat shape into a plane shape. If this technology could be scaled, a similar design with smaller panels could one day morph into an e-book reader or a smartphone or any other design downloaded from the Web. For many scientists, the work in programmable materials could become the centerpiece for a long and fascinating career, but for Demaine it occupies only a small part of his research portfolio. His folding math has informed how auto manufacturers design safety airbags. He’s sketched out how a Star Trek–style replicator might work using bits of DNA and RNA, collaborated with archaeologists to decipher a coded Incan language, and made paper sculptures with his father that now are part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in New York. His latest project could be described as computational glassblowing. By modeling how glass behaves under various conditions, he could help glassblowers refne their techniques and develop new designs. At 31, Demaine has published nearly 300 papers and won 46
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numerous honors, including a Popular Science Brilliant Ten award in 2003. It would be easy to attribute his success to the mere fact of genius, but that would overlook the most important aspect of his work. Instead of concerning himself with applications or even defning a specialized area of research, Demaine chooses projects based purely on his curiosity, regardless of where they may lead. Where others seek answers, Demaine looks for questions. “I collect problems,” he says. “The problems are the key to everything.” demaine’S office iS on The SixTh floor of MIT’s Building 32, the Frank Gehry–designed home of the Computer Science and Artifcial Intelligence Laboratory. The day I arrive, Demaine is seated at his desk in a T-shirt and black jeans. We haven’t chatted for 15 minutes when a somewhat shorter, older version of him walks in and joins the conversation. Erik’s father, Marty, wears the same uniform: a T-shirt and black jeans. Like his son, he sports a ponytail, a pair of oval-framed glasses, and a
T he Ge n i u s oF e r i k De m a i n e
demaine chooSeS projecTS baSed purely on hiS curioSiTy, regardleSS of where They may lead.
COURtESy ERIk DEmAINE AND mARtIN DEmAINE
ParTnerS aT PlaY erik and his father, marty, collaborate on science and art interchangeably. at the mit glass lab, they work to better understand the dynamics of glass to create new, intricately folded designs. the sculpture above is the same piece the pair is making at left.
modest growth of facial hair. Whether intended or not, their matching appearance speaks to a lifetime spent in close collaboration. Afer Marty and his wife split up, he took Erik, then just seven, on a fouryear road trip from their home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, across North America, homeschooling him along the way. When Erik entered college (administrators at Dalhousie University bent the rules in order to accept a 12-year-old), his father attended classes right beside him. Then Marty followed his son to the University of Waterloo in Ontario, where Erik completed his doctorate, and then on to MIT. Son and father work together daily. When not on campus, they ofen travel as a team to scientifc meetings, giving joint lectures and demonstrations. (In one, Marty posed as an angry heckler, only to remove his wig and reveal the prank midway through.) They’ve performed side-by-side in improv shows, and they still live together too. Of all the work that Erik does, the projects with his father tend to be the most contagious, in the sense that they feed back into his other interests. Erik and Marty ofen say they’re working on “recreational algorithms,” which is, Erik says, “sort of a catchall for anything that we do for fun.” In recent years, Erik and Marty have written papers on the Rubik’s Cube, brainteasers involving dice, and tricky schemes for hanging picture frames. Even Erik’s more serious work, such as modeling the dynamics of protein folding or developing algorithms to enhance computer efciency, follows from the same impulse: “It’s got to be cool,” he says. “Ultimately, everything I do I kind of view as recreational, in that I do it because I enjoy it.” The bookshelves in his ofce are flled with toys and tchotchkes and paper foldings that he’s made with Marty. “I feel like a connoisseur of games,” he says sitting beside a 52-inch TV cabled to a Nintendo Wii. “I try to play almost every game for at least a little while, just to get a sense for the diferent genres.” Lately, some of the projects he and Marty are undertaking seem less like games
and more like studies of the absurd. For one, they’ve been leaving breadcrumbs in a circle in the park to see how birds respond. For another, they will study the geometry of pasta shapes. They also plan to lock a pigeon in a cage of bread so it can peck its way to freedom. The projects may seem pointless now, but then it’s hard to say where play might lead. The coincidence of The brillianT and the playful mind has a long history in science. Among its most famous exemplars was the 19th-century Scottish physicist and child prodigy James Clerk Maxwell. At 14 years old, Maxwell wrote his frst scientifc paper, on a method he’d devised for tracing curves using pins and thread. In his early twenties, as a fellow at Trinity College, he became interested in spinning tops. He attached colored paper to the tops of the toys and spun them around like whirling pie charts. He would record how the colors appeared to merge in motion. Maxwell found that red and green and blue could mix to make any color, a discovery that eventually led him to invent the color photograph. “The only way you can do breakthrough research is constantly to play with phenomena,” says Robert Root-Bernstein, a physiologist and winner of his own MacArthur grant. Root-Bernstein and his wife, Michele, a historian and adjunct professor at Michigan State University, have studied creativity and how scientifc genius manifests. (They wrote a book on the creative process called Sparks of Genius.) “If you don’t have that playfulness,” Root-Bernstein says, “you’re never going to have the breadth of experiences necessary to run into something, in a sense, by accident.” Maxwell’s case is just one example of how play has fostered scientifc discovery. Alexander Fleming’s identifcation of penicillin may have been inspired by his passion for painting agar plates with brightly colored microbes. (The fungus Penicillium happens to be an intense blue-green.) The quantum theoretician Richard Feynman began his work on the precession of electron orbits afer watching a tossed plate wobble through the air in the Cornell cafeteria. “That’s what play does for you,” Root-Bernstein says. “You learn all the rules of the game, and then you know when something unexpected or interesting has occurred.” At Temple University, psychologist Kathy Hirsh-Pasek has tested the connection between play and creativity in children. In one experiment, she gave groups of four- to six-year-olds a pipe cleaner, a paper clip, and some aluminum foil. She told one group to play freely; she told another to think about what uses the objects might have; and she told a third group to use the objects to build specifc tools, such as a bridge or a ladder. She then challenged the children to fgure out ways to get a bear across a river. Hirsh-Pasek found that the second group—the ones engaged in what she calls guided play—came up with the most creative solutions. The same
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ye ar Th e G en i n ius s CienCe oF er ik Dema in e CuriOuS CaSe in his office at mit, demaine keeps dozens of different puzzles, brainteasers, and videogames. he has published several scientific studies on them.
idea applies to scientists, she says: They do their best work when they’re free to play around with a known set of problems. Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, sees an explicit connection between toddlers and scientists. She’s done studies that show that children run their own experiments by playing with the world around them. “One of the things that we always say is that it’s not that children are little scientists—it’s that scientists are big children,” she told one interviewer. “Scientists actually are the few people who as adults get to have this protected time when they can just explore, play, fgure out what the world is like.” on ThurSday nighTS, Erik’s class meets to work on unsolved problems in the feld of geometric folding. As the grad students fle in, he writes a set of questions on the blackboard. One involves a box of business cards that he’s lef out on a desk. Can the students fgure out a way to turn them into interlocking octahedrons? Another involves a square piece of paper. What’s the largest regular tetrahedron they can fold from it? It doesn’t take long for the students to pop up from their seats and start scrawling on the board. Soon they’ve broken up into groups, sketching out ideas or punching thoughts into a laptop. Each team has its own approach. Some use rulers and Scotch tape; others draw things by hand. Erik stands by with his stylus, jotting notes onto a tablet, doling out advice and cracking jokes. These freewheeling sessions ofen lead to published papers, and the tetrahedron problem might even have some useful applications: It could teach manufacturers how to use a sheet of metal more efciently. As usual, Erik’s father Marty is also in the room, drawing his ideas on a scrap of paper. At one point, he shows the students what he’s doing, and they crowd around to see. He’s come up with a quirky way of folding a set of triangles—the four faces of the tetrahedron—from a bunch of smaller shapes. It’s a plan the others hadn’t thought of, but Erik shakes his head as he surveys the sketch. He and Marty can at times seem more like brothers than a father and a son. “Well, it’s another approach to play with,” Marty says. “It’s very conceptual, but I think it has possibilities.” Later he’ll try to build a working model in his studio, and Erik will go and take a look. When Marty’s not around, Erik might even make some changes of his own—it’s all part of their process. “We know each other so well that it makes for a really efective combination,” Erik says. “He’s always trying to reinject some 48
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“iT’S noT ThaT children are liTTle ScienTiSTS—iT'S ThaT ScienTiSTS are big children.” playfulness into my serious work. It lets us do things that neither of us could do.” It also lets them do things that other academics would never try. Among their many big ideas, the notion that play is fundamental to science may be the most profound. It could also form the basis for Erik’s greatest contribution to his feld. As the students fle out of the classroom, having spent two hours doodling and folding, doing math and generally enjoying themselves, he wipes the blackboard clean. When I ask him later why he chooses to teach the way he does, he answers simply, “I think this is a cool way of working, and more people should work this way. Sadly, not everyone does, so I try to pass it on.” Daniel Engber is a contributing editor and writes the monthly FYI column.
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A BIG ONE When a Norfolk Southern train hauling chlorine through Graniteville, South Carolina, derailed in 2005, toxic gas poured into the town.
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ES TO D A R G P DUE U R E COULD V O M E G T S LON AIL SY R S ’ TRAIN A C G I I R B E T AM E NEX H T T N Y ARE E H V E W R O P PHE. S TANT O C R U T L S E R CATA DS SO A O R L AI THE R ? THEM E K A TO M Y BY STO R AU M B DAN
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he evening of January 5, 2005, was dry and cool in Graniteville, South Carolina. At 6:10, a 12-car Norfolk Southern freight train pulled up to the Avondale Mills textile plant, and Jim Thornton, a conductor with 18 years’ experience, climbed down from the locomotive to open a switch and let the train roll onto a siding. It was getting close to the hour by which, according to law, the crew had to quit for the day and rest. Afer the workers had shut down the train, Thornton called a taxi to take him, the engineer, and the brakeman to a nearby motel. It never occurred to him that, for the frst time in his life, he’d failed to check the position of a switch that he’d opened. All he thought, as the crew piled into the taxi was, “Lord, mission accomplished.” Seven hours later, a second Norfolk Southern freight train— two locomotives, 25 loaded cars, and 17 empties—approached Graniteville at 49 miles an hour. The engineer expected to pass through at full speed. Instead, the open switch shot him onto the siding. He saw the parked train and tried to stop, but it was hopeless. Both locomotives and the frst 16 cars of his train derailed; the engineer was killed. Three of the cars contained chlorine, a common industrial chemical; one of them sheared open. A dense white cloud of chlorine gas billowed through Graniteville. At 2:40 in the morning, police rousted 5,400 people from their beds and evacuated them. Eight more died; 72 sickened. The disaster helped push the Avondale Mills plant, which had been making cloth in Graniteville for 161 years, out of business. Four thousand people, some of them ffh-generation Avondale employees, lost their jobs. Seven years afer the wreck, people in Graniteville are still sick. Trains carry 40 percent of America’s freight as well as 650 million passengers a year, and in general, their safety record is good and getting better. Most of the 2,000 accidents a year are 52
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minor. But when trains collide or derail, the results can be spectacularly ugly. Last June, two Union Pacifc trains somehow ended up on the same Oklahoma track and collided head-on with such force that the locomotives almost fused. Three crewmembers died. Three weeks later, 17 cars of a 98-car Norfolk Southern train went of the rails in Columbus, Ohio, busting open three cars of denatured alcohol and igniting a fre that forced the evacuation of about 100 people. A CSX coal train jumped the track in Ellicott City, Maryland, in August; six of its 21 cars tumbled into a parking lot, killing two young women bystanders. In November, a Union Pacifc train plowed into a Veterans Day parade foat in Midland, Texas, killing four. Later that month, a CSX train derailed on a bridge near Philadelphia International Airport, tearing open a tanker flled with 25,000 gallons of vinyl chloride and sending 71 people to the hospital. Most worrisome are the 75,000 carloads of breathable poisons that trundle around the nation’s tracks every year at speeds of up to 50 miles an hour. The two most common are chlorine—the Graniteville chemical—and anhydrous ammonia, both of which can kill in particularly grisly ways if inhaled. Graniteville was the country’s worst rail accident involving breathable toxins, but there have been two others in the frst decade of the 21st century: Minot, North Dakota, in 2002 ALTHOUGH (anhydrous ammonia; one dead), THE RAILROAD and Macdona, Texas, in 2004 KEEPS OUR (chlorine; three dead). At Minot, 21ST-CENTURY the problem was poorly inspected ECONOMY rails and inadequate tank-car RUNNING, IT’S construction, but at Macdona, the ESSENTIALLY A cause was as simple as at Granite19TH-CENTURY ville: The engineer failed to notice TECHNOLOGY. a slow-down signal and blew past. Could happen to anybody. As bad as these accidents were, they could someday be remembered the way we recall the 1993
O P E N I N g PA g E : A P P h O t O / A I k E N C O U N t y ( S . C . ) S h E R I f f ’ S D E PA R t m E N t ; t h I S PA g E : A P P h O t O / E PA ; f A C I N g PA g E , t O P t O B O t t O m : A P P h O t O / E N v I R O N m E N tA L P R O t E C t I O N A g E N C y ; PA U L W O O t t O N
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tHE AFtErMAtH The chlorine released in the Graniteville crash killed nine people, sickened 72, and demonstrated the lethal potential of human error in the rail system.
World Trade Center bombing—as a harbinger of worse to come. Imagine a railcar full of chlorine bursting on the CSX tracks less than a mile away from a big public event on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C.—an inauguration, say, or a concert. The resulting cloud could kill 100,000 people. Al Qaeda might do it, but it’s more likely that a $55,000-a-year engineer, in the 10th hour of his shif, would simply nod of at the controls. Human factors cause more than a third of all rail accidents.
Although the railroad keeps our 21st-century economy running, it’s essentially a 19th-century technology. Rail operators have known for decades that technological fxes could prevent rail disasters caused by the kind of human errors committed at Macdona and Graniteville, but they have been dragging their feet because those fxes are expensive and complicated. Congress is now making them get it done. But the railroads could also cheaply and humanely achieve big safety leaps simply by improving the
POiN TS Of fail ur e
Kinks in the u.S. rail System
North American Class I Rail Lines
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BALtIMOrE Urban “choke points” are chronic danger zones. On July 18, 2001, a CSX train derailed in Baltimore’s Howard Street Tunnel, igniting a chemical fire that burned for days. Nine years later, another CSX train (carrying hazmat) derailed inside the same tunnel.
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CHICAGO A notorious choke point, Chicago handles 40 percent of the nation’s rail traffic. Trains can take as long as four days to move through the city. Accidents are not uncommon; an average of 13 freight derailments happen here each year. 3
GuLF COASt CHLOrINE pLANtS Most major U.S. chlorine plants are located along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana and connected to the rest of the country by rail; 85 percent of the chlorine produced in the U.S., which is used nationwide at water-treatment plants, travels by rail.
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WASHINGtON, D.C.’S CSX LINE The Washington, D.C., city council tried to ban hazmat shipments from a rail line that passes within a mile of the Capitol, the White House, and the Pentagon. One expert estimated that a chlorine release there could kill 100,000 people. CSX fought the ban and won.
BNSF CN/GTW CP/SOO CSX FXE KCS/KCSM NS UP
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DOWNtOWN LAS VEGAS Plans to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain are on hold in part because the Union Pacific line that would carry radioactive waste to the site runs through the middle of Las Vegas; 95,000 people live within a half mile.
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as a passenger-rail engineer, Robert Sanchez was, quite literally, a train wreck waiting to happen. Clinically obese, with high blood pressure, enlarged heart valves, diabetes, and HIV, he may also have had sleep apnea, which can leave suferers perpetually sleep-deprived. To make matters worse, his work schedule at Metrolink, the commuter rail service for the Los Angeles basin, seemed designed to leave a man exhausted. Sanchez started at six in the morning, drove trains until 9:30 in the morning, then started again at two in the afernoon and worked until nine at night—a 15-hour split shif. 54
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RAILROADS HAVE ONLY A VERY ROUGH IDEA, AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT, OF WHERE THEIR 18,000TON FREIGHT TRAINS ARE AND WHAT THEY’RE DOING.
A turNING pOINt? On September 12, 2008, a Metrolink commuter train collided with a Union Pacific freight train in Chatsworth, California, killing 24 people and injuring 101. The disaster prompted the federal government to require railroads to install positive train control systems—which could have prevented the crash—on 70,000 miles of track nationwide.
Yet the issue on September 12, 2008, was neither his health nor his exhaustion. As he drove his three-car train loaded with passengers west from Chatsworth, Sanchez was busy swapping text messages with a teenage train buf about the supercool world of locomotives—a huge violation of company policy. Four days before, he’d had this text exchange with the teenager, whom the NTSB calls “Person A”: Sanchez: Yea....but I’m REALLY looking forward to getting you in the cab and showing you how to run a locomotive. Person A: Omg dude me too. Running a locomotive. Having all of that in the palms of my hands. Its a great feeling. And ill do it so good from all my practice on the simulator. Sanchez: I’m gonna do all the radio talkin’...ur gonna run the locomotive & I’m gonna tell u how to do it. Later texts suggest that Sanchez had indeed illegally let the teenager operate the train—two days before the accident—with passengers aboard. On the afernoon of September 12, in the last 69 minutes of his life, Sanchez exchanged 35 text messages with the teenager. Focused on his smartphone, he missed a red signal that should have held him back from a single track shared by freight lines. At 4:22 p.m., the engineer of a westbound Union Pacifc train looked up and saw Sanchez’s train coming at him at a combined speed of 80 miles an hour. The engineer hit his air brakes. Sanchez, texting until 22 seconds before impact, never touched his. The collision drove Sanchez’s locomotive 52 feet into the frst passenger rail car, killing Sanchez and all 22 people in the car. Two more passengers also died; 101 were injured. On the freight train,
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working conditions of engineers—something they’re even less enthusiastic about doing. Forty years ago, the National Transportation Safety Board began urging railroads to design a way for a train to stop itself if the engineer “loses situational awareness”—that is, has a heart attack, falls asleep, gets distracted, or makes an all-too-human mistake. It wasn’t like NTSB was asking railroads to fnd a cure for cancer. As early as the 1920s, the Santa Fe rail line between Kinsley and Dodge City, Kansas, used a rudimentary system to stop a train if it passed a red signal. In the mid-1980s, in the Minnesota iron range, Burlington Northern successfully operated the frst GPSbased system to stop a train automatically if the engineer made a mistake; it dropped it within the decade, to save money. Railroaders call such technology—systems that slow or stop a train without human intervention when the engineer makes a dangerous mistake—positive train control (PTC). The modern version requires the train to be “aware” both of what it is doing and what is happening on the tracks ahead, using a combination of data radios, GPS, and cellular networks. If a discrepancy arises—a switch is open that shouldn’t be or the locomotive is passing a red signal—and the engineer doesn’t respond, the system takes control of the train, applying the air-brakes and shutting down the locomotive. In 1990, the NTSB put positive train control on its list of most-wanted transportation-safety improvements. The NTSB, though, has no regulatory authority, so the fve U.S. Class I freight railroads—Burlington-Northern Santa Fe, CSX, Union Pacifc, Norfolk Southern, and Kansas City Southern, all of which have annual operating revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars— simply ignored the agency. Only Amtrak responded, installing a type of positive train control on its Northeast Corridor trains in 2000 and a diferent version on some of its trains in the Midwest a year later. The Federal Railroad Administration, the railroads’ regulator, had the power to make the Class I’s fall in line behind Amtrak, but instead, the agency agreed with the Class I’s: Positive train control was too expensive. In 2007, Congress fnally got involved, passing a law mandating positive train control, but President George W. Bush refused to sign it. Then came Chatsworth.
the engineer, conductor, and brakeman somehow all survived. Television crews arrived fast, and the Chatsworth crash became, for the issue of rail safety, what 9/11 was to aviation security. It escaped nobody’s attention that had positive train control been in place at Chatsworth, Sanchez never would have reached the freight track; the system would have stopped his train at the red signal. Congress hastily revived the 2007 mandate and folded it into the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which few through Congress in just 34 days. The president signed it late at night with no ceremony. The nation’s railroads were given until 2015 to install positive train control on the 70,000 miles of track on which passengers or toxic-by-inhalation chemicals moved. In the emotional afermath of Chatsworth, neither the railroads nor the Federal Railroad Administration objected. That came later. if i lose my iphone, Apple’s Find My iPhone feature will pinpoint its location anywhere in the world within a few feet. Railroads, though, have only a very rough idea, at any given moment, of where their 18,000-ton freight trains are and what they’re doing. Although each railroad operates vast control rooms that look like they belong on the set of Dr. Strangelove—with enormous electronic schematics of their tracks displayed across the walls— the information that controllers receive is amazingly crude. First, about half the nation’s trackage is “dark territory,” devoid of signals and invisible to controllers. Out there, it’s 1850. Conductors operate by written instructions and their watches, stopping their trains and climbing down to open and close
switches by throwing big iron bars. While it’s true that the vast majority of freight trafc and all passenger trafc travels on tracks with signals, even there, controllers can’t see their trains the way I can “see” my lost iPhone. They know only when a train has passed a given point—a switch or a signal that is wired into the grid. Those points are anywhere from one and a half to three miles apart, creating “blocks” of track. Controllers know when a train’s locomotive has entered or lef a block, but not how fast it’s moving. They can talk to engineers by radio, but if they notice that a train has passed a red signal, all they can do is shout into the radio, and ofen they’re too late even for that. Positive train control, as conceived today, is intended not to replace control rooms and signals but to supplement them. The railroad farthest along in post-Chatsworth implementation is, not surprisingly, Metrolink, which lost 24 passengers and an engineer on September 12, 2008. At six o’clock one recent morning, Darrell Maxey, who’s in charge of building Metrolink’s PTC system, picked me up at my hotel at the far eastern end of the L.A. basin and drove immediately to a doughnut shop. In his mid-ffies, with a bristle-gray moustache and glasses, Maxey exudes a Midwestern-style bemusement at the breathtaking convolutions of his job. He’s an old railroader, a systems engineer by training, but installing positive train control at Metrolink is making him an IT guy as well. “This is the most complicated project I’ve ever worked on,” he said. “Two, three hundred pages of documents at a time! For a guy who’s made his career piecing railroad systems together, this is heaven.” We drove to Metrolink’s maintenance yard, a sprawling, sun-
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the way forward Metrolink is on schedule to beat the 2015 deadline for installing positive train control. Now the question is: Will the Class I freight railroads follow along?
stepped of, and Maxey pointed to the new adornments on the locomotive’s roof. Up where a light and maybe a radio antenna used to sit, a forest of aerials sprouted: two 220MHz antennas for the data radios, two cellular antennas for redundancy, a GPS antenna, and the Wi-Fi antenna through which the train downloads its instructions prior to departure. “What all this is for, basically, is to make it impossible for you to speed or run a red light,” Maxey said. It sounded simple. To disabuse me of that notion, Maxey drove us to a wayside signal being outftted for positive train control. Until now, such signals were nothing but big trafc lights—red, yellow, green—on steel posts. “Dumb” is the technical term; all they could do was change color. Maxey took a key from his pocket and unlocked the steel door on a small, windowless concrete shed that stood beside the signal. “Each of these has its own IP address now,” he said. “As the train goes along, it pings each signal, and if it doesn’t get a response, it shuts down the train because the unresponsive signal might be red.” He opened the shed door to a blast of cold air. “Got to be air-conditioned,” he said. “Some little switch houses are 170 degrees inside.” The shed was as stufed with electronic gear as the nose of the train. “This all has to stand up to vibration, dirt, and rain,” Maxey said, and in case the air-conditioning fails, “it’s got to spec to 70 degrees Celsius, which is 158 Fahrenheit.” Metrolink has 217 such wayside signals; modifying each one will cost $50,000. “The Class I’s have as many as 38,000 of these,” Maxey said, “which helps explain their lack of enthusiasm.” Metrolink used to be an organization of railroaders—men accustomed to mechanical challenges wrought in iron. But with the move to positive train control, the railroad is acquiring a corps of IT types; they fll one of the biggest buildings I’ve ever seen. It’s an old General Dynamics cruise-missile factory a quarter-mile long that Metrolink slicked up with a big glass atrium, potted trees, and interior foor-to-ceiling windows. As Maxey walked me through, he kept buttonholing people and asking them to describe their résumés. I met electrical engineers, systems engineers, IT specialists, sofware developers. “See?” Maxey said. “See who we are here? This is the new face of railroading. Building the system is not the only challenge; it’s maintaining it for years to come. We’re just incredibly excited.” By “we,” MAxey MeAnt Metrolink. Maxey and his colleagues are convinced that positive train control will put an end to the kind of engineer-caused disasters that occurred at Graniteville and Chatsworth. The major freight railroads, though, sound like
t h I S PA g E : C I R O C E S A R / L A O P I N I O N / N E w S C O m ; f A C I N g PA g E : t R E V O R J O h N S t O N
blasted expanse of concrete where Maxey issued me a hard hat and refective vest, hoisted himself aboard one of Metrolink’s test trains’ passenger cars, and ushered me up afer him. Slumped on every seat and scattered across the foor were hefy sandbags, simulating the weight of a full load of passengers. We walked forward, and Maxey opened a door to the back of the locomotive. We threaded our way through the length of its interior, which felt like the engine room of a U-boat: hot, noisy, and diesel-pungent. We emerged into the sunlit engineer’s cab, and Maxey motioned me into the engineer’s seat. Transforming railroads from a 19th- to a 21st-century mode of transportation means making the train itself responsible for its actions. Were I this train’s engineer, I’d start my day by downloading into the train’s onboard computer a program about that day’s run: the weight and length of the train, as well as everything the system needs to know about the upcoming length of track, such as speed restrictions, grade, curves, signals, switches, and stops. If I were using track owned by other railroads, I’d download a separate program for each, because every railroad has its own way of signaling and communicating. Another download would alert me to temporary issues, such as workmen on the tracks. I could watch these downloads on an LCD screen mounted on the engine’s dash; afer that, I wouldn’t have to look at the screen again, and, in fact, Metrolink is hoping I won’t. It wants my eyes straight ahead. As I start down the track, the onboard computer is constantly comparing the train’s progress to the downloaded programs. Doing this means communicating wirelessly with every switch and signal along the way. If I fail to slow when I should or if the computer thinks I’m about to run a red signal, the system warns me. If I don’t respond, it applies the air brakes and shuts down the train. It is designed never to let my locomotive pass a red signal, so it is constantly looking six miles—three signals—ahead. It measures the speed and weight of the train along with the steepness of the grade. A heavy train going downhill will get an earlier warning than a light train going uphill, but as a rule of thumb, it takes about a mile, or 90 seconds, to stop a three-car Metrolink train. The onboard electronics that make positive train control work on Metrolink’s test train are stufed into a tiny compartment down in the nose of the locomotive, where, were this a freight train, the engineer’s toilet might be. I FOR AN peered in at an incomprehensible INDUSTRY THAT tangle of wires surrounding a rank OPERATES IN of plastic and aluminum boxes: a MUCH OF THE cellular modem, data radios that COUNTRY AS communicate with signals and the IF IT’S IN A control room, a train management WESTERN, THIS computer containing the downLOOKED LIKE loads, and a big orange “black box” A JUMP TO that the NTSB looks for afer a PROMETHEUS. crash. It goes by the polite euphemism “event recorder.” For an industry that operates in much of the country as though it’s in a western, this looked like a jump to Prometheus. We made our way back through the locomotive and
2 4
GPS towers relay signals to trains, stop signals, switches, and work crews.
Control facility
3
a POS SI bl e S OluT ION
GPS satellites monitor train traffic.
Workers at the central control facility issue stop signals to trains headed toward the crossing. If necessary, they can take over the trains remotely. 1
PTC network detects a broken crossing signal.
How Positive Train Control Works Positive train control is a system of GPS satellites, wayside receivers, and control centers that monitor and, if necessary, slow or stop trains. Suppose a crossing gate is broken, allowing car traffic to cross active train tracks. With positive train control, that crossing gate would wirelessly relay its status to train engineers and central controllers. The central controllers would track all trains in the area via GPS; they would issue stop and go signals accordingly. And if the engineer in charge of a train failed to comply with a stop signal, the central controllers could stop the offending train remotely.
15-year-old boys being asked to mow the lawn. The Class I’s knew better than to object when Congress was passing the law mandating positive train control in the wake of the Chatsworth wreck. Bellyaching at such an emotional moment would have looked insensitive. Not a single interest group took a position on the law as it was being debated in 2008. Three years later, though, when four Republican senators introduced a bill to delay the 2015 deadline for implementing positive train control, railroads suddenly became interested in congressional politics; they gave a total of almost $3.6 million to all but four members of the Senate, including $16,500 to Diane Feinstein and $47,800 to Barbara Boxer, two of the biggest proponents of positive train control when the original law was passed in 2008. Despite the shower of money, the bill to extend the deadline died without a vote, but that doesn’t mean the railroads have given up the fght. They’ll tell anybody who will listen that positive train control will cost too much, isn’t worth the money, places an undue burden on railroads and their customers, will make rail shipping less, instead of more, efcient, and is being forced upon them too quickly. The Federal Railroad Administration says that building positive train control could end up costing $10 billion. Even at a time when the Class I’s are doing well—proft margins ran from 17 to 45 percent last year—$10 billion is a lot of money, roughly equal to everything the railroad industry spent on buildings and equipment in 2010. Maintaining the intricate system will cost the
industry an additional $850 million a year. For that, the railroads will get a system that would have prevented the marquee Chatsworth, Red Oak, and Graniteville wrecks but would do nothing to prevent 98 percent of train accidents, including the types that cause the most deaths: knuckleheads walking on tracks or trying to zip across road crossings ahead of speeding trains. And even that 2 percent of collisions will be prevented only if the system works well. The GPS used in positive train control doesn’t work in tunnels or urban canyons. And the cellular backup will have to have a reliability rate of one failure in every hundred million tries. “Compare that to dropped cellphone calls,” says George Bibel, author of Train Wreck: The Forensics of Rail Disasters. The industry is going to have to acquire 58,000 digital radios of a type never built before, and because trains travel on other railroads’ tracks, each radio must be able to communicate with those of every other railroad. Several railroads, particularly in big cities, are having trouble getting enough bandwidth in the crowded radio spectrum to launch the system. Ask a railroader to describe the technical challenges of implementing positive train control, and you can expect to listen for a while. In 1977, Mother Jones magazine broke the story that the Ford Motor Company had concluded, when its Pinto was blowing up with frightening regularity, that it was cheaper to pay the widows C O N t I N U E d O N PA g E 6 8
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HOW2.0 Tips, Tricks, Hacks, and Do-It-Yourself Projects
WarnIng We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.
edited b y Dave Mosher
H2 0@ p op sc i.co m
Stunt addict Colin Furze built his recordbreaking baby stroller around a four-stroke, 125-cubic-centimeter motorbike engine.
yo u b u i lt Wh at? !
World’s Fastest Baby Carriage A motorized stroller that accelerates to 53 mph s t o r y b y Gregory Mone | ph o to gr aph s by Dom romney
News of impeNdiNg fatherhood affects men in different ways. Some guys pump their fists. Others light cigars. A few flee. When 33-year-old Colin Furze learned that his girlfriend was pregnant, he channeled his paternal excitement into building the world’s fastest baby stroller. The twin-exhaust, 10-horsepower, gasoline-fueled pram can accelerate to speeds nearly fast enough for the
february 2013
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H2.0 highway in less than 30 seconds. Furze, a plumber in Stamford, England, rode BMX bikes as a kid and missed the adrenaline rush as an adult. So in his twenties, he sought new thrills. “For some reason, I thought building a nice big fire was the answer,” he says of his first project. Furze’s 50,000-square-foot inferno, which he lit by launching a rocket into a mountain of wood, earned him a spot in the 2006 Guinness World Records book. Once Furze saw his name in print, he was addicted. Every two years he strives for a new mark. He holds the record for the fastest mobility scooter and, until recently, the world’s longest bike. 2012 became the year of the stroller. The build began with a baby carriage that Furze and his girlfriend, Charlotte, bought. He carefully measured every piece to construct a motorized look-alike. Thanks to a previous experiment, Furze had a steel roll cage lying around, which he cut and welded into the new stroller’s skeleton. Accelerating and braking via foot pedals could send Furze off course on rough roads, so he set all controls into a handlebar (see “How It Works,” right) and built a stable platform for the driver to stand on. His first test-drive melted a set of skateboard wheels he’d attached to the platform. “It was quite pathetic,” Furze says. A few days later, he tried again with plastic caster wheels; that time, road vibration rattled his feet numb. Furze eventually achieved a cushy ride with thick tires from an old mobility scooter. His son, Jake, was born in September 2012, and a month later Furze cleared 50 mph while riding his stroller on a nearby drag strip—the first world record of its kind. He’s quick to note that he has no intention of putting Jake in the speeding carriage. But that hasn’t stopped him from spooking onlookers with a convincing stand-in: a baby doll wrapped patriotically in a Union Jack. 60
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639 miles
Average distance that a new U.K. mom pushes a baby stroller during her child’s first year
Mad Max Stroller Time 4 Weeks CosT $750
1
How it workS
2
1 CONTROLS The stroller’s four-stroke, 125-cubic-centimeter engine was meant for a motorbike. But Furze planned to stand, not sit, so he couldn’t use the built-in pedals. Instead, he positioned the controls within reach of his hands. Two motorbike levers beneath the stroller’s handlebar manipulate the brake and accelerator. Four buttons on a crossbar, meanwhile, allow Furze to quickly shift gears and turn the engine off and on.
2 STEERING He can make minor steering adjustments, although not full turns, by twisting a handlebar linked to two bicycle brake cables. Each cable runs through the carriage’s frame and tugs at one side of the pram’s single front wheel.
3
3 HANDLING Furze welded a quarter-inch-thick steel plate to the frame’s base to give his stroller a lower center of gravity and more stability at high speeds. Yet he won’t be using the pram to commute to plumbing jobs around town. “A little [stretch of] bumpy road, and it would throw you off,” he says.
4
4 AESTHETICS Furze cut and bent several aluminum panels into the shape of a stroller canopy. He planned to drape cloth around them in a play for realism, but in the end he stuck with rough, unadorned metal. “It looks a bit more Mad Max,” he says.
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H2.0 G RAY M AT T E R
REAL OR FAKE? Lead bars coated in imitation gold leaf [top left, top right] seem like knockoffs next to real bullion [cylindrical, flat bars] and a fake covered in genuine gold leaf [center].
Bogus Bullion How to make cheap fake gold
Last September, a New York City gold dealer spent $72,000 on his worst nightmare: fake gold bars. The four 10-ounce counterfeits came with all the features of authentic ingots, including serial numbers. That’s pretty scary when you consider how many people own gold—or think they do. I’ve been a fake-gold fan ever since author Damien Lewis wrote me into his 2007 spy thriller, Cobra Gold. My supposed experience making fake gold was pure fiction, yet I’m still treated as a source on the matter. I decided it’s time to call my own bluff and make some real bogus bullion. Instead of a 10-ounce ingot, I cast a two-kilogram (4.4-pound) fake the size of a Twinkie cake. A Twinkie heavier than four pounds? Yes, gold is dense, much denser even than lead. Good forgeries must have the right weight, and there is only one element as dense as gold that’s neither radioactive nor expensive. That’s tungsten, which can cost less than $50 a pound.
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1 Molten lead-antimony alloy is poured around a tungsten core inside a graphite mold.
2 A rod (later removed) suspends the tungsten core to ensure a full coating of lead-antimony.
To fabricate a convincing fake, crooks could pour molten gold around a tungsten core. The bar would have a near-perfect weight, and drilling shallow holes would reveal nothing but real gold. A two-kilogram bar made this way would cost about $15,000 and be “worth” about sTo RY BY $110,000. Since I have Theodore Gray to work within POPSCI’s modest budget, and I’m PH o To G RAPH s B Y not a criminal, I settled Mike Walker
3 Covering the bar with gold leaf—about 4 millionths of an inch thick—lends it the correct color.
for a fake costing about $200 in materials. I encased a tungsten core in a leadantimony alloy, which is roughly as hard as gold. That way it feels and sounds right if touched and knocked. I then covered the alloy with genuine gold leaf to give my bar its signature color and luster. My fake wouldn’t fool anyone for very long (a fingernail can scratch off the gold leaf), but it looks and feels remarkable, even next to my real 3.5-ounce solid-gold ingot. Or at least I think that one’s real.
1 BILLION Number of people, worldwide, expected to own one smartphone or tablet computer in 2016
H2.0 BU ILD IT
TIME 1 hour COST $100 OR LESS DIFFICULTY ▯▯●●●
SET UP A WEBCAM Aim a webcam at the welcome mat (wireless models are the easiest to install). Configure the camera to constantly refresh an image to a dedicated Web host.
1
2
3
Doorbell Spy Cam
CREATE WEB NOTIFICATIONS Navigate to My Scenarios on PushingBox.com, click Add a Scenario, and configure the entry to e-mail yourself photos. Be sure to include the webcam’s URL, click Test to verify the configuration, and copy the 16-character DeviceID.
4
A simple surveillance rig that e-mails photos of visitors The mother of invention may be necessity, but French telecom engineer Clément Storck learned his father can play that role too. To remind his forgetful dad to close the garage door, Storck rigged it with a switch that triggers an iPhone alert—a home-automation hack that joined his repertoire of self-closing shutters and a tweeting cat door (see @PepitoTheCat). But Storck’s greatest hack yet is a webcam that e-mails a photo of anyone who rings the doorbell. Follow these steps to build your own—and end speculation over whether it’s UPS at the door or a prankster with a flaming paper bag.
GIVE THE BELL A BRAIN To imbue your doorbell with artificial intelligence, set up an Ethernet-enabled Arduino microcontroller nearby. Then grab the source code from pushingbox.com/api (Storck and two friends made the service specifically for this and other home-to-Web hacks).
PROGRAM THE ARDUINO Paste the DeviceID into the downloaded Arduino code in the quotation marks after the line “char DEVID1[]=” and upload the code to the microcontroller.
5 HACK YOUR DOORBELL Dismantle the doorbell and solder a piece of wire to each of two terminals behind the button. Attach one wire to the 5-volt pin and the other to the input connector pin on the Arduino. Add a 10K resistor between the ground pin and input pin to reduce electrical noise. s To R Y BY Amanda Schupak
6
TEST YOUR SPY CAM Every push of the doorbell completes an electrical circuit, which tells the Arduino to download the latest webcam image and send it to your chosen e-mail address. Your doorstep self-portrait should arrive in a few seconds.
IL L Us TRATIo N BY Brianna Sienkiewicz
For detailed instructions, visit popsci.com/doorbellspycam.
FEBRUARY 2013
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9,000 square Yards Area of the Beijing Skyscreen, the world’s largest LED screen. A football field is 6,400 square yards.
H2.0 DI Y E vol u t Ion
Bright Ideas
Two projects reveal dazzling progress in portable DIY performance enhancement When the electronica band Starf--ker needed a portable video display, it turned to Hans Lindauer and Alex Norman, two members of a Portland, Oregon–based hacking community called DorkbotPDX. The duo designed an 80-pound, 8-by-13-foot LED wall that displays the band’s trippy-looking videos from an iPod.
Lindauer built translucent scaffolding out of plastic greenhouse panels and tucked strings of red-green-blue LEDs inside; Norman wrote software to story b y translate incoming video Colleen Park
signals for the collapsible wall. Built in three months for $8,000, the wall performed flawlessly during a pretour stage performance at Musicfest NW in Portland, where Lindauer and Norman set it up in 20 minutes and tore it down in three.
Courtesy Julian BaJsel
Now LED Video Wall
H2.0 C hEaP trIC ks
left to right:
PoPular sCienCe arChives; greg Maxson (3)
Rewire Your File-Transfer Routine Shuffle data at twice the speed for one tenth the cost TheN suitcase stage Lights
in 1937, PopSci published instructions to build a lightweight stage-lighting kit. The plans included a $10 ($161 today) switchboard-in-asuitcase, a tin-can spotlight, compact footlights, and a dimmer made from running electricity through a bucket of saltwater. Some kit builders lived to share their glowing reviews: ÒThe switchboard has been used very successfully by Wesley Players, an amateur dramatics society conducted by students at the universities of Wisconsin and Purdue.Ó
When moving terabytes of data from one computer to another, cut out the external driveÑ an expensive, sluggish middle manÑby cutting up an Ethernet cable. Rearranging the small internal wires on one end allows near-instant data transfer between computers via their network cards. HereÕs how to do it. — J a C k d o n o va n
1 Cut off one end of an Ethernet cable, strip an inch of its outer sheath, and untwist the four pairs of colored wires inside. TimE 10 minutes CosT About $10
2 Rearrange the wires in this order: green-striped/green, orange-striped/blue, blue-striped/orange, brown-striped/brown. (This links one computerÕs outputs to the other computerÕs inputs, and vice-versa.)
For full instructions, visit popsci.com/crossovercable.
3 Evenly insert the wires into a new cable head (clip facing down) and secure them in place with an RJ45 crimp tool. Connect two computers with your new crossover cable, square away your sharing permissions, and start moving mountains of data.
Q: What’s the worst
pollutant in the world? SHort anSWEr
F o r Y o u r I n F o r m at I o n
Lead.
That really depends on how you define pollutant. For the purposes of this column, let’s put aside greenhouse gases and the eventual effects of climate change and focus on more tangible pollutants, starting with the ones that make their way from industry into communities nearby. A nonprofit group called the Blacksmith Institute reports on these at the end of every year. The group’s most recent study examined key pollutants at toxic sites in 49 countries and concluded that lead pollution from mining, smelting, and recycling (the latter often done from car batteries) accounted for the most pervasive risk to human health in 2012. The group estimates that lead affects at least 16 million people around the world. Excessive lead exposure can lead to kidney problems, reduced IQ or learning disabilities, growth impairments, and nerve
Have a burning science question? E-mail it to fyi@popsci.com, or tweet @popsci hashtag #PopSciFYI.
answers b y Daniel Engber
Rudi SebaStian/Getty imaGeS
LonG anSWEr
V i n ta G e i m a G e S / G e t t y i m a G e S
disorders. Acute poisoning may result in seizures and death. The only upside of environmental lead is that unlike, say, emissions of CO2, it may be on the wane. Many countries have already phased out leaded gasoline, and others are soon to follow. Old cathode ray tubes were full of lead, but we’re moving away from those as well. Other old technologies continue to be a problem. The World Health Organization has found that almost two million people perish every year from the effects of indoor smoke—from burning coal or wood or dung inside the home. And Rick Hind, legislative director at Greenpeace, wonders whether the greatest risks might be those we don’t yet understand. There are 60,000 or 70,000 chemicals in commercial use, he explains, yet only about 200 have been thoroughly assessed by the EPA. “A very small percentage of the chemicals that we’re swimming in—in our air, our water, and our food—have been tested for all the things that they can do to us,” he says. That means the worst pollutant in the world may not yet be known.
Q: How do you make the
perfect snowball? SHort anSWEr
Find some snow that’s not too dry and not too wet. Anyone who’s tried to make a snowball understands the need for snow of just the right consistency. Start with powdery snow and a ball will fall apart. Start with slushy snow and it will turn into a hunk of ice. The key, then, to a killer snowball is to find snow that’s in the perfect sticky state. According to Jordy Hendrikx, director of the Snow and Avalanche Laboratory at Montana State University, snow at subfreezing temperatures contains no liquid water. When the grains LonG anSWEr
of ice begin to melt, each one forms a wet meniscus. The menisci work as snowball glue, he says, mingling and then refreezing. Scott Sandford, a senior astrochemist for NASA, points out that extreme pressure could also play a part in making snowballs. “If you squeeze water ice hard enough, it will melt,” he explains. Packing snow into a ball could force some of it across that pressure threshold, making it liquefy and then refreeze. To get that kind of pressure, though, you’d need to be in space or a lab. In a casual snowball fight, surface moisture is still the most important factor. So what about the old theory that bare hands make the best snowballs? “It doesn’t make any difference,” Sandford says. “You’re better off with gloves, so your hands don’t get cold and numb.”
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and orphans than it was to recall the cars and fx the problem. That cold-blooded cost-beneft analysis caused a scandal. Yet for the past three decades, since President Ronald Reagan ordered cabinet departments and independent agencies to conduct cost-beneft analyses before issuing new regulations, such computations have been national policy. In the case of positive train control, the Federal Railroad Administration needed to weigh the benefts of avoiding the tiny category of accidents that the system would prevent against the projected costs. Totaling up the cost of wrecked equipment was fairly easy—and so, it turns out, was computing the value of the human lives that positive train control would save. The Federal Railroad Administration’s parent agency, the Department of Transportation, had already done the math, concluding in 2008 that “the best present estimate of the economic value of preventing a human fatality is $5.8 million.” When the Federal Railroad Administration counted the average seven annual deaths and 22 injuries positive train control would prevent in a year and added the cost of the property damage and evacuations that positive train control would obviate, it concluded that positive train control would save the industry just $90 million a year. That’s just a tenth of the system’s annual maintenance costs, and a wretched cost-beneft prospect—unless you or somebody you love is one of the seven people saved. Every freight railroad to which I spoke, as well as the industry group the Association of American Railroads, inveighed against being forced to implement positive train control, especially by the end of 2015. Some even claim it will make their lines less safe. In an e-mail, Kansas City Southern warned me darkly: “The infexibility of the statutory mandate and its deadline is likely to result in previously unforeseen operating consequences if not modifed”; Union Pacifc told me it would rather spend the money on “proven safety alternatives”; and Luther Diggs of Philadelphia’s commuter line SEPTA told the local Inquirer, “We won’t have one bridge or substation or station until we get this paid for. It just means we don’t do a lot of other things.” In other words, if a train rolls of a poorly maintained track, blame Congress for rushing the railroads to 68
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implement positive train control. But it’s hard to sympathize with the railroads. The 2 percent of accidents that PTC could prevent includes the most catastrophic possibilities—the black-swan big ones, like tankers of chlorine bursting open within a mile of the National Mall. Call it the tyranny of technology in a litigious age: If a technological fx that may save lives is available, you’re pretty well obliged to apply it. OF COUrse, there also exists a very cheap way to help prevent train crashes: Let engineers sleep. The Federal Railroad Administration sets limits on how many consecutive hours an engineer can work but nonetheless lets railroads treat freight engineers, in the words of one, “like plug-in fashlights.” Engineers never know exactly when they’re going to be called to work, so they never know when they should sleep. A 56-year-old Midwestern engineer for a Class I, who asked me to withhold his name because he would be fred for talking to a reporter, described a typical, Catch-22 dialogue with his employer: “‘When do you want me to work?’ ‘I don’t know; I’ll call you.’ ‘Okay, should I go to bed now or stay up and watch TV?’ ‘That’s up to you; but I want you to be rested.’ ” “You never know when you’re going to get a day of,” he told me. “There’s no lunch break. You have to eat at the controls. If you have to go to the bathroom, you wait until you’re going up a long hill and you know the train isn’t going to run away, and you open the back door and you pee of the walkway. You’re in a mode where you’re at 20 percent of your abilities. I’ve been dreaming at the switch.” He and his union—the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers—have mixed feelings about positive train control, though, because they worry that it could make it easier for Class I freight lines to further reduce the size of a train’s crew. “In 1974, we had fve guys on a crew: freman, head brakeman, an engineer in the cab, and, in the caboose, a conductor and a rear brakeman,” he said. “Now we have two”: an engineer and a conductor in the cab. What positive train control will do, he fears, is “eliminate the conductor. If we have this PTC, there’s no reason we can’t run a train with one man.” Much as they revile the 2015 deadline
de ra I l e d
for implementing positive train control, neither the individual railroads, the Association of American Railroads, nor the Federal Railroad Administration want to discuss adjusting working conditions as a means of improving safety. “You’re going down a whole path that is about labor negotiations and not about PTC,” said Union Pacifc’s Jef Young. “That’s not what I’m here to talk about.” In general, companies would much rather buy equipment than meddle with their employees’ working conditions. Capital investment is deductible, predictable, and fnite. Start making concessions to employees, and it can go anywhere—and the company will be living with the changes forever. For its part, Congress would much rather order companies to buy stuf than to poke its nose into employee relations. Every dollar the railroads spend on positive train control boosts the economy. The Association sidestepped the issue of unpredictable sleep schedules in a written response, saying only that positive train control “was never intended to solve the problem of a locomotive engineer falling asleep,” an odd comment, as that is a big part of what it is intended to do. “The individual employee is responsible for managing their personal sleep and rest habits within the federally mandated rest periods.” In other words, if engineers are sleepy, blame them.
The Federal Railroad Administration says it lacks the authority to order railroads to give engineers regular hours (the way things are done, say, in Britain). Only Congress can do that, the FRA’s communication director Kevin Thompson told me. What the agency does in the meantime, Thompson said, is ofer engineers “a website with techniques and tips to better manage their sleep issues.” Now that they’ve tried and failed to get Congress to push back the 2015 deadline, the railroads are grudgingly committing to it. “You can argue it so long,” said Patti Reilly of the Association of American Railroads. “At a certain point, we want to do it, we want to do it well, and we want to do it so it doesn’t negatively afect our operation.” But by now they’ve spent so long fghting the 2015 deadline that it’s hard to see how they’ll meet it. Beyond 2015? Between the railroads’ institutional resistance and the technical challenges they face, don’t hold your breath. On the other hand, given the lethality of the chemicals trundling around the nation’s rail lines 24/7 and the exhausted state of the engineers hauling them, maybe you should. Dan Baum’s book Gun Guys: A Road Trip comes out in March. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.
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WITH MINIMUM PURCHASE OF $9.99
Item 47737 shown
1" x 25 FT. TAPE MEASURE ITEM 47737/69080/ 69030/69031
REG. PRICE $5.99 LIMIT 1 - Only available with qualifying minimum purchase (excludes gift value). Coupon good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount, coupon or prior purchase. Offer good while supplies last. Shipping & Handling charges may apply if not picked up in-store. Original coupon must be presented. Non-transferable. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
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5
$ 29 REG. PRICE $12.99 LIMIT 9 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
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9
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6" DIGITAL CALIPER LOT NO. 47257
9
R ! PE ON U P S U CO
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Item 69465 shown
Requires two AAA batteries (sold separately).
80 PIECE ROTARY TOOL SET
$
24
99
59
REG. 99$119.99 PRICE
Item 68053 shown
R ! PE ON U P S U CO
OFF
27 LBS.
LIMIT 4 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
17 PIECE AIR TOOL ACCESSORY KIT LOT NO. 68236
SAVE 50%
4
$ 99
LIMIT 6 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
LOT NO. 67421 LOT NO. 68053/ 69252/ 60569
6
$ 99
SAVE $150
30", 11 DRAWER ROLLER CABINET INCLUDES: • 6 Drawer Top Chest • 2 Drawer Middle Section • 3 Drawer Roller Cabinet
$
149
REG. 99$299PRICE .99
LIMIT 3 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
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12" RATCHET BAR CLAMP/SPREADER LOT NO. 46807/ 68975/69221/ 69222 Item 46807 shown
1
REG. $ 99 PRICE $5.49
SAVE 63%
LIMIT 8 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
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800 RATED WATTS/ 900 MAX. WATTS PORTABLE GENERATOR LOT OT NO. 66619/6 /60338/ 669381 ™
$
Item 69381 shown
NEW!
89
REG. 99$179.99 PRICE
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R ! PE ON U P S U CO
LOT NO. 91616/ 60379/69087 Item 91616 shown
3 PIECE TITANIUM NITRIDE COATED HIGH SPEED STEEL STEP DRILLS
SAVE 60%
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REG. PRICE $9.99
R ! PE ON U P S U CO
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LIMIT 8 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
REG. PRICE $59.99
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$
R ! PE ON U P S U CO
Item 69451 shown
LIMIT 9 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
SAVE $60
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Includes two 1.5V button cell batteries.
REG. $ 99 $29PRICE .99
8
$ 99
ON ALL HAND TOOLS!
REG. PRICE $14.99
LIMIT 6 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
R ! PE ON SU UP CO
Item 46163 shown
R ! PE ON U P S U CO
LIFETIME WARRANTY
7
REG. $ 99 $19PRICE .99
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R ! PE ON U P S U CO
LOT NO. 46319
300 LB. CAPACITY
$
SAVE 33%
PNEUMATIC ADJUSTABLE ROLLER SEAT
1999
REG. PRICE $29.99
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R ! PE ON U P S U CO
DIGITAL INSPECTION CAMERA WITH 2.4" COLOR LCD MONITOR
Requires four AA batteries (included).
SAVE $50 $
LOT NO. 67979
6999
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LOT NO. 66418
LOT NO. 93888/60497
CO
SAVE 61%
Item 93888 shown
SAVE 46%
4
$ 99 REG. PRICE $12.99
MOVER'S DOLLY
7
REG. $ 99$14.99 PRICE
LIMIT 8 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
R ! PE ON 10" SLIDING U S UP COMPOUND CO
R ! PE ON U S UP CO
MITER SAW
$
79
Item 67847 shown
99
$
REG. PRICE $149.99
149
99
2
REG. PRICE $6.99
9
$ 99
53%
LIMIT 6 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
WIRELESS
LOT NO. 239
SAVE DRIVEWAY 60% ALERT SYSTEM
LOT NO. 93068/69590
LOT NO. 66783/ 60581/60653
Item 66783 shown
1/2" DRIVE
REG. PRICE $34.99
LOT NO. 877/69137/ 69249/69129/69121
$ 79
10/2/55 AMP, 6/12 VOLT ER N! BATTERY CHARGER/ SUP PO ENGINE STARTER COU
LOT NO. 807
YOUR CHOICE!
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REG. PRICE $219.99
R ! PE ON U S UP CO SAVE
3/8" DRIVE
$
Requires one 9 volt and three C batteries (sold separately). Item 93068 shown
2799
1199
$
REG. PRICE $59.99
LIMIT 8 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
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60'' WORKBENCH ER N! WITH FOUR DRAWERS SUP PO OU LOT NO. 93454/ 69054
Item 68751 shown
C
LOT NO. 68751/90599
SAVE $90
13999
$
$
REG. PRICE $229.99
LIMIT 3 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
R ! PE ON U P S U CO
SAVE 58%
2
REG. $ 49 PRICE $5.99 LIMIT 9 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
$
8999
REG. PRICE $149.99
LIMIT 4 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
7" VARIABLE SPEED ER N! POLISHER/SANDER SUP PO MIG-FLUX U WELDING CART CO LOT NO. 92623/ 69474/60626
Requires three AAA batteries (included).
Item 67227 shown
LOT NO. 68887
C
SAVE 99 $60
REG. PRICE $229.99
Item 92623 shown
90 AMP FLUX WIRE WELDER NO GAS REQUIRED!
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27 LED PORTABLE ER ! WORKLIGHT/ SUP PON FLASHLIGHT COU LOT NO. 67227/ 69567/60566
139
REG. PRICE $29.99
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45 WATT SOLAR ER N! PANEL KIT SUPUPO O
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Item 93454 shown
1599
LIMIT 5 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
LOT NO. 67847/69091
R ! PE ON U S UP CO
LOT NO. 2696
$
Item 877 shown
LIMIT 5 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
SAVE 71%
LOT NO. 68239/69651
REG. PRICE $29.99
60%
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TORQUE WRENCHES ACCURACY WITHIN Âą4% 1/4" DRIVE
18 VOLT CORDLESS 3/8" DRILL/DRIVER WITH KEYLESS CHUCK
SAVE 46%
R ! PE ON U S UP CO SAVE
SAVE $70
2.5 HP, 21 GALLON, 125 PSI VERTICAL AIR COMPRESSOR
LOT NO. 98199
Includes one 18V NiCd battery and charger.
Item 68239 shown
1000 LB. CAPACITY
LIMIT 7 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
SAVE $70
R ! PE ON U P S U CO
SAVE 50%
$
29
Item 69340 shown
99 $
REG. PRICE $59.99
LIMIT 4 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
GRAND OPENINGS
Welder and accessories sold separately.
34
LOT NO. 69340/90305
SAVE 41%
REG. 99 $59PRICE .99
LIMIT 5 - Good at our stores or website or by phone. Cannot be used with other discount or coupon or prior purchases after 30 days from original purchase with original receipt. Offer good while supplies last. Nontransferable. Original coupon must be presented. Valid through 5/15/13. Limit one coupon per customer per day.
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popsci.com PoPular Science 75
From The archiv es
december 1953
Robot Workman st o r y b y Taylor Kubota
When this “mechanical man” appeared in Popular Science’s December 1953 issue, the U.S. military was experimenting with humanoid machines that could help teach first aid and test oxygen masks and flying suits. Harvey Chapman, an engineer in Los Angeles, envisioned an android with a civilian purpose: He spent 90 days in his garage turning discarded airplane parts into Garco, a robot that could hammer, saw, mix chemicals, solder, and stack boxes. Chapman directed Garco using a panel of buttons, a two-way radio, and an electromechanical control arm. He hoped that in the future robots like Garco could work in extreme barometric pressures, handle radioactive material, and mix explosives. Engineers today are still working on robots that can operate in dangerous situations. Turn to page 30 to read about tomorrow’s emergency first responders.
E
HANDS
BRAIN
VOICE
ARMS
FACE
LEGS
Garco’s rubber-tipped fingers used vacuum suction to pick up light objects.
Parts from six aircraftcontrol systems made up the robot’s brain, and 1,200 feet of wire cable formed its nervous system.
Garco “talked” when Chapman spoke into a two-way radio transmitter.
Chapman used a 22-button panel to direct the left arm and a fivejointed electromechanical control arm and handgrip to manipulate the right arm and hand.
Signals from the control panel directed the movements of its jaw and lips and even made its plastic eyes roll.
The robot’s legs could extend to increase its height by six inches.
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POPULAR SCIENCE
February 2013
POPULAR SCIENCE ARChIvE
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